Ball Machine

Chapter Seven - The Earth Moves

Arizona, October 2014

It had to happen sooner or later. Friday morning, and management had been doing an audit. They wanted to know where all the money had been going, why all this equipment had been ordered.

Rosa sat on a bench outside the canteen, staring at miles of flat sand and dust-dry mountains in the distance. The boys had warned her the bosses were asking questions. Now she’d have to come up with some answers. Could she tell them the truth? A working android wasn’t such a waste of time and money. But she knew what they were like. Everything had to be done just so. If you wanted to start a new project, you had to go through the channels, get approvals, authorise funding. 

“Damn,” she said. They were close, she could feel it. The android had looked into her eyes, and she couldn’t explain why, but she had sensed something there. So close. 

She could be on to something huge. A real breakthrough. But how to keep it secret, until the time was right to go public? 

She heard the door open behind her. She was alone, sitting in the shade, but still the midday temperatures were enough to keep everyone else inside with the air conditioning. She turned to look, and saw Tony standing awkwardly in the doorway, his mouth a grimace, stroking the side of his face with his fingers. It was serious. She feared the worst. But it was worse than that. 

“You should come,” he said. “There’s something on the TV.”

The earthquake hit on Friday morning. Children were already in school, people at work. The fishing boats were out at sea. 

The remote Caribbean island of Javier and St Amaro bore the brunt of the quake. There was no television station on the island, and the airport was closed, so the outside world had little idea what was happening. Satellite phones were working, though, and government types were being interviewed on the television news. They talked of devastation and tragedy. 

Rosa stood in the doorway of the canteen, unable to move, her hands at her mouth, her mind whirling. She had to call home, check they were all right. She should go. She should rush back to help. 

Regeledo, the capital city, home to 20,000 souls, had been the worst hit. Roads had been ripped up, buildings torn down, the hospital, the only one on the island, was closed. Rosa knew the place well. She’d worked there as a schoolgirl, cleaning at weekends and evenings. When she turned sixteen, she worked as a trainee nurse while still at school. When she went to St Kitts, and later Venezuela to study medicine, she would return home every holiday and work in the hospital alongside the doctors, learning how to deal with human tragedy and hope and pain and joy and life and death. 

No news, yet, of the rest of the island. Her father and brothers lived forty miles outside Regeledo, close to Inigo, the second biggest centre of population. It barely counted as a town to the rest of the world, and couldn’t be found on most maps. The news made no mention of it. 

Her elder brother Jose was a policeman. He’d be in the thick of it, helping people, taking risks. 

She fumbled in her pocket for her phone and called every number back home she knew or could find tucked away in her address book but not one of them was working. The news moved on, promising updates, threatening death tolls, but gliding into sports coverage and ad breaks. 

Rosa stumbled into a chair and used her tablet to check the social media sites. No updates from Javier. 

She felt Professor Jacobsen standing behind her. He asked if there was anything he could do, if she needed time off or help getting home. 

What should she do? She had to get there. She wasn’t a practicing medical doctor, but her knowledge and experience would help. At least she knew how to bandage wounds and set broken limbs. Her research here seemed futile. What did it matter about synthetic hearts and limbs, when only the wealthiest in the richest of nations could ever afford them? The people of Javier and St Amaro would never benefit. They needed basic care, clean water, food and shelter.