The World Above Us

Chapter 4

Elizabeth

Elizabeth arrived on the colony just as the sun was starting to dip in the Martian sky. She checked her holo on her wrist and smiled. The FBI would show up at her house on Earth any moment now, only to find that she was long gone.

The government would track her all over planet Earth only to come up empty-handed. They would search until there was no place left to look. Then they would be forced to accept the inevitable truth. There was no catching Elizabeth Mitchell.

Elizabeth smiled in satisfaction as she slipped on her sunglasses and walked through the Dome on the way to her habitat. She smiled at all the other astronauts and whoever else was stuck up here.

She tilted her nose up in disdain at the view of the Martian desert out the space-grade windows of the Dome. Alas, life on this miserable planet was better than no life at all.

If she had stayed on Earth, she would be dead the minute the FBI caught her.

She tapped a few buttons on her holo to open the door to her habitat. The round, dome-like structure was nothing like the extravagant apartments where she had lived on Earth, but it was better than a dirt hole somewhere.

"Welcome, Sandra Gilbert," the holo's automated voice said, greeting her. Elizabeth felt a smile stretch across her face as she entered the habitat. It was plain with a blow-up bed made from some rubber-like foam material, and sparse furniture made up of the same space-grade plastic as the sad structure. All of it was either bleak white, grey, or a hideous orange.

Novae Terrae was stocked with geniuses. Couldn't they have picked a better color combo for their habitats? Elizabeth wondered to herself as she glanced around.

She dumped her few possessions in the corner. Not much-traveled well in space, thus forcing her to leave most of her clothes and shoes back at her mansion in France.

She reclined on one of the couches. It wasn't comfortable. The plastic dug into her back and made her knees ache slightly.

Elizabeth Mitchell hadn't always lived a life of crime. She had been a teenager once. An innocent, but those years had long been stripped away from her. Then she and her family had the audacity of inventing something the government wanted. At first, she'd assumed they wanted to give her credit for her work when they'd summoned her to the Pentagon when she was 20. It was then that she'd found out the truth. Then she ran like hell, taking her invention with her.

The FBI had their revenge. They killed every single member of her family because of the Invention.

Elizabeth reached into her pocket and pulled out her invention. It was small and square. It was made almost entirely of shiny black obsidian and various metals blended together. She could see her reflection on the surface of the device.

To anyone else, it was unassuming. A trinket. But Elizabeth knew better. Inside was one of the most powerful supercomputers on the planet. Her family had spent years building this device. It had the power to give the United States the most powerful military in the world, thus why the FBI had come after them as soon as they learned of its existence.

They had been searching for this technology for years. They had researched and built countless models, but all of them had failed.

How a family of civilians had managed to get their hands on the technology before the government baffled Elizabeth. I guess they're not such geniuses, after all, she thought to herself as she flipped open the device.

The screen was shiny black just like the outside of the device. She pressed the button on the bottom of the screen and turned it on. Instantly, a holo popped up. She saw an aerial map of her mansion. Sure enough, several red dots had amassed in front of it.

Elizabeth had used the Invention to forge countless identities for herself over the years. She hacked every government database she could until she found what she was looking for. Then she would hack the banks and take all the money she needed. All this time, she had pinned her criminal activity on the Mafia.

However, no technology was perfect, and the FBI had caught onto her games in the end. Thus, why she was forced to flee to Mars for the rest of her life.

Elizabeth stared into the mirror in the bathroom. It was made of some plastic-like substance that she didn't particularly care to identify. She saw the same thing she always saw. Long, white-blonde hair and cold blue eyes. She had an angular chin and a small, round nose. Her pale skin looked washed out in the harsh lighting of the habitat.

She had managed to hack the Novae Terrae database and found a woman who could be her twin. In a haste, she had swapped their photos and broke into the dormitories where the future space-travelers were staying. She had duped one of her allies into thinking Sandra was her, thus leaving the poor woman to suffer the wrath of the U.S government.

Better she dies than I, Elizabeth thought to herself. She glanced down at the supercomputer in her hands. Now the FBI would never get their hands on the life's work of her family.

She stared out the windows of her habitat. She had at least managed to get herself one of the nicer ones.