The Girl Who Wasn't There

by G Scott Huggins

  “We are not voyeurs,” said Mrs. Wardhey, her voice sharpening.

  “I know, love,” said Gavin. “There’s no other way to keep people safe when we live in a place as deadly as the Moon. But it’s not a pleasant trade-off.”

  “No, it isn’t,” their mother agreed. “So they use our Secutors as a mobile security force. But they rely only on their programming to detect anomalies.”

  “What’s the problem with that?” asked Paul.

  “The problem with that,” said Jael, who had spent more time with their father, “is that a computer’s programming is never as good as a human brain at figuring out what’s ‘just not right.’ When a computer looks at something as complicated as building an entire ship, it can’t send out an alert every time something doesn’t fit a completely rigid pattern. Mom would be getting alerts literally every minute, just because…because a chem welder broke down and a maintenance robot had to fix it. Or because a part rolled off a conveyor belt. Those things aren’t scheduled, so the computer would think it was wrong. So to avoid false alarms, the security programs work on a “flag” system. Everything that goes wrong raises a programmed “red flag” in the system. If you get enough of them, the shipyard’s security system alerts Mom.”

  “Very good, Jael,” said Mr. Wardhey.

  “Back in the days of true AI, the whole security system would just be able to think its way around the problem,” Jael said.

  “Yes, and then figure out that it could solve the whole security problem perfectly by coming to kill us in our sleep,” said Paul. “No thanks.”

  “I was just mentioning it,” said Jael, rolling her eyes. “Not advocating it.”

  “So, you’ve been getting red flags, Mom?” asked Paul.

  “Some. Just enough to worry people. In single Secutors. Normally, of course, I’d just get in the MARTINet and take over the Secutor in question.”

  “But they won’t let you do that while it’s in the shipyard,” said Paul.

  “Exactly. And twice now, when I’ve waited to take control until after it’s left, the Secutor has locked up entirely, and gone directly into Maintenance Mode, chugging right back to the garage for repairs. And that’s why I want to send you out to look over all of the Secutors that aren’t in the shipyard right now.”

  “And,” said their father handing Paul the box, “I have these override transceivers I want you to install. Can you see how they work, or should I explain?”

  Paul opened the box and took out one of the tightly-wound antennas. It was about the size of a fat battery, with standard leads. “I would hope so. Otherwise, I got an A in physics last semester for nothing.”

  Their mother shook her head. “I wish I’d gone to your school. Gavin, did you get courses like they do?”

  Their father snorted. “I wish. All my schoolwork was trying to solve problems any calculator could do just to prove that I could. There was no funding for doing actual work, and all the teachers were too busy keeping kids like this Denariis you describe—or worse—under control to do more than give us the assignments anyway.”

  “But why a backup transceiver?” asked Paul.

  His father sighed. “Well, the kind of malfunction we’re seeing really shouldn’t be possible. When a Secutor needs urgent maintenance, it is supposed to go directly to the garage for repairs. What it isn’t supposed to do is shut out the MARTINet from taking control. Whatever’s a problem with one of them might be a problem with all of them.”

  “Shouldn’t you be able to examine the ones having the problem and diagnose it?”

  “I should,” said Mr. Wardhey. “But unfortunately, the Secutors in question got all the way to the garage and underwent maintenance diagnostics before I could look at them. So whatever was wrong probably isn’t even there to find anymore. Honestly, it’s probably a software bug, but I’ve been trying to run it down for two days without success. This is a brute-force solution. This hardwires a remote control right into the things. After all, these Secutors are armed. We can’t afford to be unable to override them right away if we really need to.”

  “Just in case they get hacked by the Villainous Secret Moon Nazis and kill us all in our sleep,” Jael deadpanned.

  Their parents rolled their eyes at the old Moon joke, which was practically as old as the first Western colonists. The mythical Secret Nazi Moon Base was as much a part of lunar lore as Neil Armstrong’s landing.

  Paul nodded. “Yeah, Dad. We’d better get on this right away.”

  “I’ll come too,” said Jael, hoisting herself to her feet.

  “Really?” said Paul.

  “Yeah, it was kind of my fault you got into this,” she shot a glance over at their mother. Besides, I owe you for getting me un-grounded for school today, and it beats hanging around the apartment with the Momstable didn’t need to be said.

  Their mother nodded. “A good attitude. Go ahead.”

  “I’ll have dinner ready when you get back,” their father said. “Fresh strawberries in the spinach salad.”

  “Awesome, dad!” said Paul. Jael’s stomach growled. It wouldn’t likely be much, but any fresh fruit was a luxury in Thunderhead. Strawberries at least had the advantage of growing like weeds in the artificial summer of the gardens.

  Outside in the corridor, they moved as quickly as they could. Jael spared a thought for how awkward she had been in her first days on the Moon, used to having to hold up six times her present weight with every step. But now it was easy to hit her stride, a swinging tripod gait that came as close to running as she’d ever been.

  Her brother was still consulting his convirscer, looking up the current position of the Secutors through his deputy’s app.

  “Okay, the first one is about half a kilometer ahead of us. We should meet it outside the garden. Hey,” he said, as he lengthened his stride to match hers. “Thanks for coming along.”

  “Well, I did owe you,” Jael said. They walked in silence for a few minutes more. And then, because she felt as if she would burst if she didn’t say it, she asked, “Do you ever wish I hadn’t made us come here?”

  Paul gave her a quizzical look. “What do you mean? You didn’t make that decision; Mom and Dad did.”

  “Oh, don’t play stupid,” Jael said, bouncing to a halt. “You know they did it because of my CP. Because it’s easier for me to get around up here!”

  “Okay,” said Paul. “Yeah, that was part of the reason. But it was only part of it.”

  “That’s a load of crap.”

  “It’s a load of truth,” said Paul. “Mom was never going to be head of anything on Earth, and Dad was going to be just one more engineer. Up here, they’re respected and prominent citizens. Even though the war solved the unemployment problems on Earth—sort of, in its gruesome way—it didn’t change the fact that everything on Earth is owned by someone, settled by someone. Do you know the last thing Jamario said to me, that last day we got to spend with our friends before we blasted off for here?”

  “No, what?” said Jael, guilt tightening in her gut. They were never going to see their friends on Earth again. Not unless they settled up here, too.

  “He said, ‘I wish I was you.’ Up here we can be miners who own our own mines, engineers with our own companies…maybe even pioneers when the shipyard starts churning out more of those things it’s building.”

  “Get serious,” said Jael, starting off again. “You want to spend your life fighting claustrophobia in a steel box staring out at the endless blackness?”

  They rounded the corner and reached the antechamber leading to Garden Dome, and the universe hit Jael in the face.

  Earth hung huge in the sky above the garden, and the filter-glass that spread the raw sunlight gently over the plants forced the huge dome on the ground to recapitulate the emerald-sapphire globe of the planet hanging above. It glowed on the lunar surface like a fairy kingdom nestled in glassite and steel.

  “Sure you don’t mean agoraphobia?” whispered Paul.

&n
bsp; Jael made a noise. The mother world hung over their heads like a gibbous hammer in the star-stained sky.

  “I want to see what Saturn looks like from one of its moons,” said Paul. “And we’re going to get the first shot at it when it opens up.”

  “Yeah,” said Jael. She tried to make it come out sarcastically, but sometimes, the Moon just hit you with its stark majesty. She swallowed. Blinked. Broke the reverie. “Come on, let’s get this thing serviced,” she said, pointing at the Secutor standing silent guard outside.

  Paul nodded. “There couldn’t have been more than one of these on the way to the garage,” he grumbled good-naturedly. He unsealed the access panels one at a time with the charge key from his belt pouch. The molecularly-sealed surfaces split apart, and the guts of the Secutor stood revealed.

  “Wait, is this the one that failed?” asked Jael.

  “No, that one’s in the garage. We’ll see it and the rest of them that are offline there.”

  The Secutor was as tall as a short human, armored in graphene-laminate plates. Its chest contained the bulk of its workings and was only slightly larger than a man’s torso. Paul put his convirscer into VR mode and set it to show electron flow. Jael did the same; she might as well learn.

  The power core and the central processing unit came alive with glowing traceries of flow, which limned the Secutor’s chest in a cage of fire. More filaments sprouted up into the secondary processor that nestled in the dark ovoid skull. With her VR set to this mode, the ovoid was as transparent to Jael as it was to the sensors within it, and she could see the lenses, radar, antennae, infrared, radiation and acoustic detectors that served as its sensor suite. Below the torso, the electron traceries lost their subtle branchings and carried raw motive power through the elongated “thighs” that sprouted from the thick, multijointed “pelvis” and into the treads that gave the Secutor the appearance of a kneeling man. Folded back along the upper surfaces of the treads were the clawed “feet” that could extend and allow the Secutor to stand and walk if it encountered terrain too difficult for its treads.

  “What’s that, there?” she asked, pointing to a flickering of current near the Secutor’s pelvis that looked odd to her.

  Paul nodded. “Well spotted, sister mine. That is indeed a problem. That chip is failing. But can you see what it controls?”

  “It looks like it’s the small motor about a centimeter up from the bottom of the casing.”

  “Right. That’s the boost motor. It doesn’t come into play unless the main motor is inadequate, and then only for short bursts of activity. It can also be used in an auxiliary mode if the main motor fails. This one may or may not fail if it’s used. I’ll log it in the maintenance computer, but it’s not an issue that would cause what Mom’s been seeing. Let’s run diagnostics.”

  Paul removed his convirscer from his face and hooked it into the Secutor’s systems. “And while we wait for that to run,” he said, opening Father’s box, “let’s get this installed.” He removed one of the antennas, which looked like a fat battery sprouting a forest of flat plates, and hooked it into a slot in the robot’s open head.

  “Done.” Paul looked down at his convirscer. “Nothing, as I suspected. One down, forty-four to go.” He sighed, disconnected it, and resealed the Secutor’s sleek, black armor.

  Paul and Jael were just entering the Main Concourse when Paul spotted her.

  The vast corridor was long enough to vanish in the distance when you were at one end, and Paul and Jael had the whole thing to traverse. The cross corridor from hydroponics had dumped them right in front of the terminal. From there, the passenger and cargo airlocks gave access to the landing field, and from there connected Thunderhead to the rest of the Moon, and even to Earth itself.

  Jael had been paying little attention to her brother; she’d been too busy looking at the people. Of course, even the main concourse wasn’t crowded by Earth standards, but there were always a few people in it.

  “Hey!” said Paul. “It’s her!”

  Jael turned, twisting around in the air as she arrested her forward progress with a bounce. Paul pointed at her: a slender girl in a conservatively cut, glossy black and red outsuit. Her skin was pale, and her hair cropped short in what Jael’s mother always called a pixie cut, and Jael just thought of as “not a stupid billowing mass of hair to have to tie back and stuff into a helmet.” Her eyes had a touch of an epicanthic fold, although it was hard to tell because she was staring back at Paul as if he were about to tear her throat out. Her legs shifted as if to flee.

  Paul realized the depth of his rudeness just as Jael opened her mouth to call him on it.

  “Sorry,” he said, holding his hands up. “It’s just…you…” his mouth opened and closed, twice. “I saw you outside our classroom after school,” he said quickly. “I wondered if you’d meant to join us. Or hadn’t had time because you just got in on the last shuttle from Earth. You did come here on that shuttle, yes? I’m Paul. Paul Wardhey.” He extended his hand.

  The girl looked at it as though Paul held a loaded magcoil gun. For a long second, she just stared at him. Long enough that Jael considered saying something like, Don’t mind my brother, he panics when he sees pretty girls. Because she was pretty, or could be, if her face wasn’t a mask of terror. What was she so frightened of, anyway?

  Slowly, as though nerving herself to touch an unlicensed insect, the girl extended a gloved hand. Paul, apparently cluing in on her emotions at last, took it briefly.

  “Hello,” she said softly. Her voice held an indefinable accent, but then, so did a lot of other people on the Moon when they spoke English. “I am called Cynthia. I have come here. On the last shuttle, yes.”

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” Paul said. “It’s just…well there’s not many of us who are growing up on the Moon, yet.” He quirked a smile. “We have to stick together. Oh, yeah, this is my sister, Jael.”

  Cynthia’s eyes locked on Jael and looked her up and down in the kind of fascinated stare that Jael had only seen before in movies. Specifically, horror movies where the scientists were looking at the new specimen of alien life, right before someone uttered the immortal line, “What is it?”

  Yeah, take a 3-D file for your home printer; you can have a statue made for your coffee table that will last forever, Jael thought

  Cynthia cautiously extended her hand. “I…I am pleased to meet you.” Jael took it and shook it roughly. Cynthia almost recoiled.

  Ignoring their byplay, Paul asked, “So, do you know anyone here yet? Did you come here with your family? Or were they already here?” It wasn’t uncommon for families to come up “on the blink” one member at a time, paying off the laserocket launch costs as fast as they made the money.

  “With…with family, yes,” she said. “I do not come here often. We are minesteaders. I was only here for…for training, yes. Orientation.”

  “Looks like you hardly need it,” said Paul. “You don’t walk like a bouncer.”

  “A bouncer?” Her confusion was apparent.

  “Yeah. Someone who just arrived from Earth. They often bounce all over the place until they get used to the low gravity.”

  Cynthia looked at Jael. “And are you also recently arrived from Earth? Is that why you have…auxiliary legs?”

  Jael’s mouth dropped half-open. She’d grown resigned to answering people’s prying questions, but she’d never met anyone who didn’t know what crutches were.

  “No,” she finally said, as silence threatened. “I’ve always used crutches to get around. I have cerebral palsy.” The blank stare didn’t go away. “It affects my legs. They don’t move very well.”

  “Oh,” said Cynthia. Her eyes snapped back to Paul as if someone had thrown a switch. “Are you detaining me, officer?”

  “What?” said Paul, horrified. Jael repressed an involuntary giggle as her brother looked down at the insignia on his outsuit that marked him as an on-duty deputy. He’d forgotten he was wearing it. “Oh, crap, no!
I was just trying to be friendly, honest. We don’t just stop people for questioning on the Moon.”

  “But you did,” Cynthia said, looking puzzled.

  “No, no,” said Paul. Jael bit her lip. “Really, I was just trying to be friendly, like I said. Look, let me make it up to you. Would you like to join our class? Of students, I mean. We usually go out and do something fun afterward. Everyone’s there, and it’s a great way to meet people.”

  Cynthia looked so frightened at this that it surprised Jael when she said “Yes,” in a small voice. “I would like that.”

  “Great,” Paul said. He fumbled with his convirscer, and it spat out a flashcard. “This has the schedule for next week on it. You can come to Mr. H’s class. That’s Mr. Hybels. World History.”

  “I can…just come?”

  “Well,” Paul said, “Eventually, you’ll have to formally ask the teachers to join the classes, but Old Man Hybels won’t mind a visitor, especially if it means you’re more likely to join the class later on. It’s good business for them.”

  “It costs money?” said Cynthia, eyes dark with worry.

  “Well, yeah,” said Paul. “Thunderhead’s not big enough for a full public school system. I mean you can join it virtually, but you miss out on a lot that way. Look, Mr. H is a good guy. I’ll tell him you’re coming, and he won’t charge you. If he does, I’ll pay it myself.”

  “Okay,” Cynthia said, slipping the flashcard into a suit pouch. She blinked. “I must go. I will be late.”

  “Sure,” said Paul. “It was good to meet you.”

  “Yes,” said Cynthia. She stopped. “I mean, you, too.” She turned and hurried off. Paul watched the terminal doors close behind her.

  “Well, deputy,” said Jael, “I just don’t see any other option but to report you to the Momstable for police brutality. Terrorizing that poor girl like that and questioning her.”

  “I didn’t think that she’d…” he started to say.

  “‘Am I being detained?’ You monster. You really should have gotten your baton out and waved it around to emphasize how friendly you are.”