Sincerely, Jennifer x

Personal Log – Commander Quinn Carter

Entry One

I’ve been so busy that I’ve barely had time for one of these since I got here. All my official logs are done, but here is where I can actually get honest about this whole mess.

They went back and forth about it on the news for years, and in the house of commons, but eventually, it was decided that Camp Ascension would be opened. The plan had been called “impossibly expensive” but the government pressed on anyway, because they wanted to hide all of their problems away where the voting public couldn’t see them.

The Celestia project was a big success, with no issues reported from the government’s insane little space prison, so I suppose that they thought they may as well try out this old chestnut and see what they could make of it. My sister Mia is serving on HMP Celestia, actually. We haven’t heard from her for a while, but it’s busy work, so I’m not surprised.

Camp Ascension was the government’s recycled, rehashed and microwaved answer to the “small boats crisis”. They were obsessed with it. People in full time work were using food banks, previously middle class people were struggling to get by, and the government responded by sending prisoners to the moon and building a very expensive camp on a volcanic island to house the survivors who made it across from France on small boats.

Insane.

It really would have been less expensive and more productive to just introduce safe and legal routes, but you know what the government is like.

Anyway, I couldn’t complain, because Camp Ascension offered me a promotion. I was to be in command across the whole camp, and I couldn’t exactly look a gift horse in the mouth, because like everybody else, I needed the money, even if getting the money required moving to a remote island for a few years.

It was exactly as I expected.

We weren’t given the resources we needed to really help and support the vulnerable people being passed into our care, because supporting them wasn’t the point. Our real job was to just hold them here, out of sight of the voters, until the government could find their country of origin and arrange for them to be returned there.

I didn’t feel good about it. A lot of the people that I met had seen the worst things imaginable. War, famine, terror, and I was supposed to treat them with suspicion.

I did my job, but I tried to do it with compassion. I instructed all the officers under my command to do the same. It was the least that we could do.

They weren’t any trouble. Just people trying to find somewhere safe, and so we tried to make the place as comfortable as we could, within the ridiculously small budget the government gave us.

The island was beautiful, but the prefabs we built up in the hills to house everyone were hideous. We were ordered to build as far away from the towns and villages as possible, again, so that the people would stay hidden, and we had no choice but to obey.

Still, everyone did their best. The camp was just past the NASA tracking station, hidden behind trees on a hill. We had enough supplies to last us a few years, but it wasn’t of the best quality, unsurprisingly. Still, we did what we could, and once everything was built and everyone was settled, I thought it would be quite easy work.

For the most part, it has been. We had a bit of a kerfuffle a few days ago, because one of our maintenance crew got lost in Devil’s Ashpit. It’s just a name, but it’s still kind of freaky, you know. It’s a hill with a big chasm, just by the NASA station. I’m still not sure what she was doing up there, to be honest, but she was too distressed to really answer questions.

Her name is Laurie. She’s a great kid, sweet to all of our residents and hard working.

She had been sent to check on some plumbing issues, but she never arrived to meet her co-worker. After a while, the alarm was raised, and I sent everyone I could spare out to look for her.

There’s no real danger from our guests, or from any animals, but the island can be difficult to navigate, and the hills, sharp and treacherous, especially in the dark, so I wanted her found as soon as possible.

I was searching down by Devil’s Ashpit with a few junior officers, just in case she had lost her way and stumbled down there, and as I walked along the path, a hand shot up from the chasm. I fell back in shock, scrambling back from the edge and pushing the juniors behind me.

Another hand joined it, scratched up and covered in blood, and a moment later, Laurie began trying to pull herself up over the chasm. We rushed to her, yanking her up over the edge and onto the ground. She was covered in scratches and… well… bite marks. It was awful. She didn’t stop crying until Doctor Williams sedated her.

Laurie hasn’t really been right since then. I’ve had Doctor Ryan sign her off of duty for the rest of the week, but I’m not sure if she’ll be ready to get back into it next week. She won’t talk about what happened. She just sits in her room, staring out of the window with wide, worried eyes.