by Brian Smith
For decades now, the U.S. and its citizens have resisted every call to unite the nations of Earth under one banner. The arguments are rooted in differences of culture, worries over freedom, and the notion that the government that governs least, and most locally, governs best. According to our own arguments, the notion of a “one size fits all” global government is unacceptable. Where, then, do we derive the argument that Mars can be governed best from Earth? This is not meant to sound apologist in the wake of attacks against our people and, by extension, our nation, nor is it meant to excuse the perfidy of the MIM. But it is a valid question; it must be asked. And in answering it we need to decide whether fighting against our own national principles is worth destroying our nation, our planet, and our species. Later today, the government of this nation will come together in righteous rage and declare war on Mars—and on our own future. The rest of the world will willingly follow except for the Chinese, who have already taken the lead in retaliation. Let this be a call for pause—for sanity. Let cooler heads prevail! We are better than this as a species—enough have died already. I call on my own government and the governments of Earth: stop this madness before it spirals out of control!
December 2093 (Terran Calendar)
Nuevo Rio Habitat
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
“Hey, there, Diane. How are you feeling?” Ayers asked her friend late the next morning.
“I hurt pretty much everywhere. Other than that, I guess I’m in one piece. Who’s that?” she added, gesturing to the figure standing in the doorway of her room, Colin Harper. She noticed the eyepatch and frowned slightly. “I know you,” she added, almost accusingly.
Harper shook his head. “I don’t think so—”
“Yeah. Lucky’s, the day of that big brawl a while back.”
“You were there?” Harper asked.
“I was the deputy marshal who screeched the whole joint,” she grinned. “I guess I can see why you might not remember me, but, well, sorry—the eyepatch makes you stand out.”
Harper forced a tight smile. “You have the advantage, then. Colin Harper,” he added. “Security Division Chief for Aberdeen Astronautics.”
“Diane Hutton,” she replied, nodding cordially and leaning back with a slight grimace. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“He and some of his people helped pull us out of the rolligon after the crash,” Ayers said. “We’re lucky he did, too, because it’s all turning into the biggest break on the MIM that we’ve had yet.”
“I don’t remember anything after gunning it to get away from that drone, but obviously we did or this conversation wouldn’t be happening. You’ll have to fill me in.” Hutton glanced around the room, her eyes going slightly feral. “Where’s my gun?”
“It’s secure,” Ayers assured her. She held up Hutton’s snoopers and asked her to put them on. “First things first: you’re going to have to see this to believe it. Go ahead and put these on, and tie in to the Marsnet.”
Hutton nodded and did as she was asked.
“Okay,” Ayers continued. “Do me a favor—look up anything you can find on a company called Omni Systems or its primary product: Omni Systems synthetics.”
“What exactly am I looking for?” Hutton asked.
Ayers grinned. “Anything you can find. An advertisement, a stock listing, a patent, whatever. Any reference at all that would reveal to you, the average consumer and a government employee, the existence of this company or its products.” Ayers’s grin grew wider as Hutton spent a few minutes in a fruitless cloud search.
“I’ve got nothing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“According to my research, there’s no such company or product.”
“Okay. I could have Colin do this, but I want to see if it works from me to you the same as it did from him to me. An experiment. Wait one sec,” Ayers added, light appearing across her oculars as she accessed the Marsnet herself. “Okay, take a look at this,” she said, making a sweep of her hand and flicking the data over to Hutton. “Voilà.”
“Oh!” Hutton said. “There it all is! Omni Systems!” She frowned. “But why—?”
“Shut down your snoopers,” Ayers ordered her. Hutton did so, intrigued. Ayers produced a second pair of snoopers. These were med-center loaners. “Put these on, log in as a guest—not yourself—and run the same search again,” she instructed.
Hutton did so, and after a few frustrated moments she was openly scowling. “Nothing. Why can’t I access the information you sent me? Yours was tagged like a regular search. I don’t get it.”
“You will in a minute. Now ditch the hospital set and go back to your own. Reactivate them and run the search again.”
Hutton did so and nodded. “Okay, it worked that time. It’s all here: Omni Systems, a company history, their mission statement, the CEO, and a complete product-line catalog for Omnisynths.” She paused a moment, still reading. “Jeez, those are realistic looking! Are they for real? How could they be, and we’ve never heard of them before?”
Harper chuckled grimly. “That’s what I wanted to know when Cheryl here said she never heard of Omnisynths. I thought they were mainstream—that everyone was using them! It turns out that’s probably not the case.”
“It’s definitely not the case,” Ayers corrected him, serious. She smiled slightly at Hutton. “Do you get it yet?” she asked.
Hutton sighed. “I’m lost, and my whole body hurts.”
“Information warfare. Altered perception on a mass scale. It goes right back to what we were talking about yesterday, before all hell broke loose—remember when I was talking about chasing ghosts, altered records, and—”
“—the idea that ‘perception is reality,’” Hutton finished. “Are you saying that to some people Omni Systems exists and to others it doesn’t?”
“It’s even more complicated than that,” Ayers explained. “Omni Systems and its new-model synths were obviously designed by someone for a purpose other than mass-market consumption, or everyone would know about them and be buying them. However, you don’t invent something like that, mass produce it, and then use it without a whole lot of people knowing about it, right? But what if the people who are using the synths don’t know their existence is being kept a general secret? Harper here is a case in point—according to him, these Omnisynths were in use throughout his company and he had no idea the rest of the world knew nothing about Omni Systems or its remarkable new synths. In his perception, his real-world life if you prefer, they were mainstream. I, on the other hand, had never heard of them until last night, and you learned about them just now, when your perception collided with ours. When that finally happened, here in this room, the Marsnet instantly made you privy to the secret, thereby making the discovery seem like a search-engine glitch rather than hidden information. You were made a part of this altered perception almost seamlessly. Your reaction just a minute ago—‘Oh, it’s working now’—that’s the natural human reaction. You’d never normally assume that the Marsnet itself was trying to hide the existence of a commercial product from you, because that’s totally contrary to how commerce works. It’s like . . . well, like weaponizing the concept of Occam’s razor.”
“The same way all your cyberhunting of Gabriel Rogan and the MIM led to a trail of dead ends every time? Like the Marsnet itself was monitoring you and throwing up road blocks in real time?”
“Exactly,” Ayers replied. “A virtual maze built on the foundation of subtly altered perceptions, and our cyber teams have been the rats wandering it, not realizing that the maze itself is constantly changing around us as we go, keeping us running in circles and never letting us find a crumb of cheese.”
Hutton shook her head. “That’s an impossible cyber problem. Nobody could pull off something like that and make it work,” she said flatly. “It would take a whole city full of hackers dedicated to nothing else, and they’d have to have total control of the entire Marsnet.”
“Maybe. I believ
e that what you just experienced is the work of a very high-level, self-monitoring, self-replicating AI algorithm. It starts out by tracking who is ‘in the know,’ so to speak, and who they interact with. As soon as the subject of Omni Systems came up between you and me in the form of the data transfer between snoopers, the algorithm detected it and brought you into the knowledge loop as to Omni Systems. With almost no delay it all, Omni Systems thereby becomes mainstream reality for you as well. I think, right now, if I placed an order for an Omni Systems synth, I could get one delivered. Once they come off some fictionalized back-order delay, I’d expect,” she added wryly. “You and I will never actually see one, of course.”
“Unless it’s aiming a weapon at you,” Harper amended humorlessly. He’d already told Ayers everything he knew about the attack on Aberdeen Astronautics, including the Omnisynth hack resulting in the death of his company’s human workforce on Phobos.
“What about 5111 Omega?” Ayers hinted at Hutton. “Do you think it’s possible we fought a pair of these things there? You were in the thick of it. I wasn’t.”
“Couldn’t begin to say, right now. Whatever those things were at 5111 Omega, they burned down to almost nothing after they were hit. It’s worth looking into, though. But going back to this algorithm you’re talking about: it just sounds ridiculous. Could you program something like that?”
“Not in a century,” Ayers said flatly. “I’d like to meet the person who could, though, if it was even a person at all. This smells more like the sort of thing you’d need an AI to program for you—an AI developing an autonomous task-specific AI subroutine to run in the background of the cloud. What I don’t get is the speed factor—it doesn’t seem possible to me that an AI bot lurking in the cloud could react fast enough—be fast enough—to make this work in real time the way you just saw. The logic, information, and decision chains involved are very complex if your primary interest is maintaining secrecy rather than just letting the knowledge about Omni Systems gradually propagate out into the world. In order to effectively ‘stay ahead of the game’ beyond the surface of Mars, it seems to me that the algorithm would need to be able to send information packets back and forth faster than the speed of light. It would be interesting to test this somewhere else, like the Vestanet or on Earth, and see if the algorithm is present and works the same way.”
“It’s just an engineering problem,” Harper quipped.
“I’m sorry—what?”
“Nothing, just something the brainiacs around my company used to say. Point being, anything is theoretically possible. Someone just has to work it out . . . do the engineering . . . figure the math . . . whatever. Sorry,” he added when he realized the two women thought he was being flip, although he hadn’t been. “Look, Chief Warrant Ayers,” Harper said, “I know there’s more you need to fill Ms. Hutton in on, but I wanted to check out the state of Federov Propulsion’s industrial park and then get back to my own people. There’s something more I need to discuss with you, and I’d like to do it away from here. The walls have ears, right? Care to take a walk with me?”
“Go ahead,” Hutton told Ayers. “You can tell me the rest later. I need to check in with the office,” she added. “The whole place must be a wreck after last night, and they probably think you and I are dead.”
“Okay,” Ayers replied. “Don’t tell them anything about what we just discussed, though, okay? Both of you listen, because this is important: the MIM, or whoever is responsible for all this, has near-total control over the Marsnet. Remember, from this point forward you can’t assume that a single piece of data you pull from the cloud is necessarily legit, and you must assume that everything you say or do through the cloud—meaning the Marsnet—is being monitored. That explains why the MIM hasn’t jammed the shit out of it in the flagged settlements or knocked it offline. Got it?”
“Do you think it’s the MIM?” Hutton asked.
“I don’t see who else it can be, but not all of this adds up. We’re still missing data.”
“Spoken like the cyber-warfare expert she is,” Hutton retorted. “I’ll be careful,” she added. “You two go on. I’m going to call the doc and see about getting the hell out of here. Catch up with you shortly.”
***
“Wow, someone did a number on this place,” Ayers remarked less than an hour later.
She and Harper were walking through the charred ruins of the small corporate-park complex that had been Federov Propulsion Associates. Unlike the drone swarm used against Aberdeen Astronautics, thermal bombs had been set off within the Federov facilities, resulting in the death of everyone present, along with the destruction of the laboratories and the computer data banks. Harper was certain the company’s data files were backed up remotely, but given Ayers’s recent revelations and suspicions, that might not be the case any longer.
The methodology of the attack was somewhat surprising, considering the environment. A fire under a habitat dome was a significant threat to life and property: it potentially endangered those who set it as much as it did the target. Domed habitats on Mars offered the illusion of being outdoors when one wasn’t inside a building or an underground tunnel, but they were very much self-contained, carefully managed artificial biospheres. The emergency response to the conflagrations had been fast and impressive, but only in that the damage had been confined to the Federov Propulsion industrial complex. The thermal bombs employed by the attacker were designed to maximize damage in a short time span—they fell just short of qualifying as high-order explosives. When they ignited, they burned hot enough to vaporize flesh and turn hardware into melted slag.
Although they hadn’t been present at the time, Dmitri Federov, Sam Hyman, and Chiang Tsong were all dead, along with the remainder of the company’s senior leadership. Just like Aberdeen’s leadership, they’d been caught and killed in different ways and by various means either in their homes or wherever in the city they were at the time. Under normal circumstances the entire region would be in an uproar over something like this. In the aftermath of the previous day’s events, though, dealing with it just wasn’t the priority it should have been.
After speaking to Ashburn the night before, Harper had decided to check up on the state of Federov Propulsion, and now he could confirm that the companies owned by the Crandall Foundation board members were being deliberately targeted.
“Interesting,” Ayers murmured to herself. “Quite different from the attack on your company. The only reason I can think of for the tactics used here is that the attackers wanted to destroy the data on any research being done. What sort of work was being done here, anyway?”
“Power-plant and propulsion design for torchships,” Harper replied. “Nothing that a few dozen other companies don’t do.”
“But those other companies weren’t run by a member of the Crandall Foundation board, were they?” Ayers replied thoughtfully. After a long, mostly sleepless night and a busy morning, she was up to speed on everything Harper knew about the rather inexplicable assault on the Crandall Foundation and anything related to it. Given what she’d learned about the mass manipulation of the Marsnet and the existence of Omni Systems, she had mentally put herself back on her TAD assignment. That decision was helped along by the fact that her latest attempt to check in with the navy establishment at the south complex had come up empty.
The morning’s top rumor was that MIM forces held that facility and were preparing to push north in order to take the entire spaceport complex and then maybe move on the Nuevo Rio dome itself. The maglev trains heading northeast “up the line” toward Lone Star and New Arizona were jammed full, and the rolligon traffic heading away from Nuevo Rio both northeasterly, paralleling the maglev line, and southerly, toward Burton and Cobres habitats, was so heavy that many travelers were abandoning the paved roads entirely. In contrast, the southbound trains “along the line” were running almost empty. This movement hadn’t turned into a rout or a panic yet, but the tension in the air was thick enough to cut with
a knife. In any case, CW3 Ayers was once again in the unenviable position of having her chain of command cut out from above her, leaving her a veritable lone wolf.
“Well, this was what I needed to see,” Harper said after a cursory examination of the site. “Look, I need to get back to my people. If the MIM are getting ready to head our way, I need to be there to lead them—either into harm’s way or out of it.”
“What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“The buried data cores I told you about last night,” Harper said. “Campbell’s standing orders to me were to get them to someone who could use what’s on them in the event something like this ever happened. Right now that seems to me like one or more of Earth’s governments. I was planning to turn them over to Mike Ashburn, the torchship captain I spoke to last night—”
“The one from Barsoom Traders?” Ayers interrupted. “Was he the one you said might know more about whatever it was your boss was up to?”
“He’s the one.”
“I’d like to meet him, definitely. I’d also like to see those data cores. Do you have the decryption keys for them?”
“They’re with the cores themselves. I know, that’s not normally a smart thing to do,” he added quickly when he saw her stern glare, “but the cores are worthless without them and there was never any guarantee I’d be the one to recover them. Plus, they’re buried in the middle of bloody nowhere. Given the fact that I’m potentially compromised and under the gun as Aberdeen’s senior surviving company officer, I was thinking it might be better and safer if you led the recovery effort on them. Besides, I’m tied down with my people right now—I can’t just bugger off and leave them.”
“Do you know what sort of data is on them?”
“I’ve got no bloody idea, but, knowing Campbell, it’s going to be technical stuff.”