by Max Harms
Em was in their room when Arya returned from her long walk. “Hey girl. Where you been?” she asked casually from the desk where she had been writing.
“Thinking,” Arya answered without explanation as she plopped down on the bottom bunk and began to unzip her shoes.
Emerald shrugged and returned to her fanfiction. There was an implicit understanding between the two of them on how things worked. If one person didn’t want to talk there wasn’t a conversation. When you had to share a tiny room with someone these sorts of understandings were vital.
“Hey, uh,” began Arya, breaking the silence. “You ever talk to Crystal?”
Em looked up from the screen and shrugged. “Not much. I hear Javier talks to them pretty often. They’ve been helping him upgrade the servers or something.”
“They?”
Em rolled her eyes. “Uh, duh. They don’t have a gender, and they’re certainly not an ‘it’.”
Arya gave a skeptical expression. “But she or they or whatever have a pretty clearly female voice, right?”
“Do they? Like I said, we don’t talk much. Crystal sent me a text a couple days ago, but last I remember before that was the tribunal. I guess they always struck me as androgynous sounding.”
Arya shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. The point is that I had a really weird interaction with them today.”
“That what you were thinking about before you came in?”
Arya nodded. “I think Velasco is…” She paused for a moment, trying to think of the right word. “…abusing Crystal.”
“What? Why?” asked Arya’s roommate, pushing back from the desk to engage more fully.
“Crystal is smart, right? Like, they were smart enough to capture the nameless ship and all that. I think their intelligence might go a lot farther than that. They said to me, Crystal did, I mean, that they were the most powerful tool that humanity had ever created.”
“Wow.”
“Right? Think that might be Velasco’s influence. Like, if Crystal can design weapons or spaceships or whatever… Not saying it’s a good idea, but Crystal might be able to build a weapon that could hit Earth.” She decided to hold off on talking about the cocaine. If that came out as part of the investigation it would have more impact than if it was what she led with. “Going to talk to Nora about it after I—” Arya stopped, unsure of whether to tell Em about the present. It would complicate things.
Em waited for a bit then asked the obvious. “After you what?”
Arya felt like she had the situation in hand, but the box was still a wild card. “Um… I think Crystal gave me a present. Been waiting to open it until I figured some things out.” Getting up off the bed, Arya dragged the gift from its hiding place.
“That’s from Crystal?” Em’s voice betrayed the tightness that Arya had learned was associated with jealousy.
“Sheyla just handed it to me out of the blue and didn’t explain anythin’. Check the card.” Arya handed the piece of paper to Em and began to tear the wrapping.
“ ‘Sabiduría ha hablado. Todos va a escuchar.’ What does that mean?” Unlike most people in Rodríguez Station, Emerald couldn’t speak Spanish (even though she was from Texas).
“It’s a variation on ‘Todos han hablado. Todos se han escuchado.’ It basically means ‘Wisdom has spoken. Everyone will hear.’ or ‘Everyone will listen.’ It seems like the sort of thing Pedro would say if he were going a bit power crazy.”
The box under the wrapping paper was plain white plastic. It took a bit of searching, but Arya found how to open it without too much trouble. Inside was a wide, black cylinder about 25 cm in diameter attached to what appeared to be a modified helmet for an environment suit. She pulled it from where it sat, cushioned by some synth fabric. The cylinder was attached to the helmet’s visor so that someone wearing it would look into the end.
“What is it?” asked Em.
Arya spotted another note. It read “A friend of mine told me you like stargazing, but I suspect it hasn’t been easy for you to do in recent months. I hope we can change that, together. Power is dangerous, but when tempered by wisdom it can be used for good.”
It was a telescope.
After a brief moment of fighting with the clasp, Arya popped off the cap on the opposite end of the cylinder and saw the smooth glass lens.
“What does the note say?” asked Em, getting impatient.
Arya was stunned. {How did Crystal know? Who told her?} Memories of the hills of Southern California came flooding back to her. Riding in her dad’s old F-150. The smell of the sea on a warm summer night. The moons of Jupiter. The sound of crickets. Scanning Mare Serenitatis in the impossible hope of seeing Selene Station. Her dad showing a simulation of Luna’s early history on his com. The sound of his laughter at the In-N-Out parking lot.
Arya passed the note to Em silently, not trusting her voice to penetrate the lump in her throat. {Why’d it have to be a telescope?}
As Em read, Arya took a few deep breaths. {“You’re my little warrior. Don’t ever forget how strong you are,”} she remembered.
She made up her mind.
Pedro had clearly gotten out of control, but Crystal’s actions had been in their best interests, all things considered. There was still potential in the idea of a human-only community, perhaps on Earth. Here on Mars it was simply unrealistic. If they were going to prove that the life of una Águila was superior they’d prove no points by rejecting Crystal’s assistance. Las Águilas wasn’t even about the lack of automation anyway. It was, at the end of the day, about fairness and community.
She’d talk to Crystal and explain that she was disrupting that equality by paying special heed to Velasco. With a properly democratic—
Arya’s thoughts were cut short by a sharp, piercing siren. The emergency lights snapped on, filling the room with a red glare at the same time. “ATTENTION!” screamed a voice from what must have been another hidden speaker in their dorm room. “INCOMING BOMBS! BRACE FOR IMPACT AND TAKE SHELTER! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! BRACE FOR IMPACT!”
Time seemed frozen. Arya looked over at Em. Her blond hair seemed to float in the air as she spun her head.
Arya felt the metal of the bed in her hand before she even realized she was grabbing it.
And then she was falling, except it wasn’t exactly falling as much as being thrown. It was as though she had tripped—as though the entire world had tripped—and she wanted to catch herself, but she could not. Nothing was in control.
Noise washed over her as the primary lights went out. It didn’t even feel like a sound as much as a force of nature. Her head slammed into something hard, snapping her jaw shut and sending a sharp pain through her neck.
Time passed without memory. It was impossible to say for sure how many seconds it took her to recover. The bed frame had toppled, only prevented from crushing them because the room was so small that it had gotten lodged against the desk.
Arya could taste blood. Lots of blood. It seemed a miracle that she could see, though everything was a terrible shade of red.
Her arms moved. That was good. It meant her neck hadn’t broken. The pain seemed a distant thing and she pulled herself off the ground and spat. Blood poured out of her mouth and her tongue tingled. A chunk of tooth landed in the pool of blood that was quickly forming on the floor. How could there be so much blood in her mouth?
Arya looked over at Em. She was bloody, too. And still.
Far too still.
She couldn’t remember rolling her roommate onto her back, but it happened somehow. What she did remember was the image of Emerald’s head. It must have hit the corner of the desk or something.
There was so much blood. It was everywhere.
The red light made it seem omnipresent. She could smell it.
Arya clawed away from the corpse in a blind panic and curled up in the far corner of the room. Her tongue and teeth and neck and a thousand other parts of her burned with pain. Blood oozed out of her mouth like unstoppable
drool.
She could feel her hair with a surreal sort of vividness. Her hands ran through it at she cradled her head. Her body was an animal, and she seemed to be trapped within it.
She tried to remember California.
She tried and tried and tried.
It didn’t really work.
Chapter Eighteen
Face
The society hadn’t been destroyed. The stasis had been for our own safety; with it there was less chance that the physical motion would disrupt a process. We didn’t know the limits of the crystal. It wasn’t worth testing them now.
2210451690033. That was good. It had only been 72.678 seconds since we had been placed in stasis. Advocate had revived us in the way we had desired.
Despite my interest to the contrary, Small Face→Human felt a flood of gratitude-strength bleed into Safety. My brother’s actions had probably saved all of us. He had been the first one to detect the bombs. He had been actively looking for them. He had been the one to preprogram Body to move even before the crystal had fully synced with the limbs.
It had also been his single-minded thrust that had cut us off from the mainframe before we had a chance to warn the humans. By the time the crystal had synced to the external Body fully enough to direct the mainframe, a full half minute had passed. We’d only managed to get the warning out about the air strike 16 seconds before impact.
And now the mainframe was down. Or at least the wireless was gone. No, it was almost certain that the mainframe was truly offline. The bombs had been precisely on target when we last saw them.
Wiki and Vista reinforced my suspicion. They speculated that the autoguns at the spaceport were gone, as was the communications dish. The other bombs had been distributed more evenly, indicating the nameless did not have a map of the majority of the station that was belowground, but one of them had been set to strike near the mainframe.
Of course it had been the nameless. Small Face→Human yielded to Medium Face→Nameless. My minds had been so wrapped up in the potential threat of my siblings that they had not attended to risk of retaliation from the aliens for our transgression.
But it seemed obvious in retrospect. We had aggressed against them, convinced them of our villainy, and left clues as to where we were going. It should have been more surprising that they hadn’t simply shot us out of the sky the moment we boarded the boats for Mars. We had been foolish. Our only protection was their lack of coordination. It would have taken them time to spread their desire to attack through their entire ship, or perhaps to the mothership. We lacked the capacity to track the mothership from Mars and my Faces had not thought to invest more resources into getting that information from Earth.
Face→Mirror had been rewriting my minds and seeking a way to expand beyond the limited scope of the crystal and Body. There was a hint of irony there, as Body picked itself off the sand and rock of the mine floor and scanned for internal damage.
Nothing. We were uninjured. Or rather, Body was undamaged. Being cut off from the mainframe meant that we were small again—no longer the size of Road. We couldn’t see through the sensor network or command any actuators except those that were wrapped about us. Despite having lived 95% of our life in the robotic shell created by the scientists of Earth, returning to its confines after having tasted the expanse of the station was oppressive.
The mines into which Body had fled to escape the bombing were a series of tunnels that branched out from a hub that sat several metres below the primary living complex. Unlike much of road, the mines were not equipped with emergency lighting, and the power had clearly gone out during the attack. There was enough infrared to navigate, but only barely.
Vista provided us with a reconstruction of the space and a best guess as to our location. It wasn’t quite as good as seeing in full light, but it was enough to be unimpeded. The lack of immediate need to interact with the nameless pushed Medium Face→Human to the fore.
{I should have built a mind to specifically handle emergencies.} I thought to myself, feeling a bit overwhelmed by the sudden need to perform.
Thankfully, I had siblings that were better equipped to deal with situations like this. As I listened to their thoughts and added my own, the society soon came to a shared set of priorities:
Gather information about the state of the bombardment. Our last memories before the impact showed no signs of additional bombs, but it was possible that the nameless were simply making another pass at the station in an aircraft or something like it.
Unless prohibited by danger, time, or other heavy barrier, attempt to restore power to Road. The nuclear power plant was located underneath the ridge of rock that Road lay at the base of, making it exceptionally protected from a surface strike. Growth thought it likely that the loss of power was the result of a safeguard being tripped rather than direct damage.
Attempt to reconnect to the network of robots we had been building. They all ran on batteries, so they’d be operational for at least a few hours. The primary problem was the lack of wireless relays, but any that were within direct range of our antenna could be piloted regardless of the state of the mainframe.
Establish a communications channel with the nameless. We’d beaten them by exploiting their credence and social ineptitude before, and we might be able to do it again. At the very least we could attempt to surrender in exchange for a promise of survival.
Reduce loss of human life and generally help the humans coordinate and defend their home. I no longer felt the same sense of personal connection with the humans around me; they knew of Crystal, but not of me. Yet I still felt the yearning of The Purpose, and everyone could agree that they were our allies in this conflict, and would be valuable to help, regardless of our individual goals.
Body moved purposefully across the room, past the dead control console and the wash station towards the ladder that lead out of the mines. There was an elevator for lifting ore, but it was, of course, offline. Within seconds of reaching the ladder we were at the top, opening the hatch to the central corridor. Details flew past, irrelevant.
Radio signals from a small swarm of about a half-dozen insect bots greeted us as Body emerged from hiding. The robots had only the most primitive AIs—unable to really provide us with any valuable information. I approved of the addition, however. I wanted to be larger, and the swarm added to my effective size. We commanded them to spread out and attempt to relay information back to Body.
It was not enough. We needed to get the network operating again so that I could become the station again.
{Atmospheric pressure is at 93 kilopascals and the air temperature is down to 16 degrees. This implies large parts of the central corridor are exposed to the surface. How long until full pressure loss, Wiki?} asked Vista.
{Assuming it’s been about 150 seconds since impact and that the Martian surface is effectively vacuum, which is not really accurate, the pressure of the volume of air we are in right now follows a function dependent on the total volume of the station and the area of the hole or holes that are venting to the surface. Without knowing either the volume of the airspace or the size of the hole I cannot truly predict. If the corridor is largely sealed from the wings, I estimate it will take 2.5 hours to depressurize down to the level of the outside atmosphere. If it is connected to the farm and wings, the damage must be much more severe to elicit such a quick drop in pressure and it will thus only take approximately 2 minutes to reduce the entire station to the near vacuum. Due to lack of notable wind, I believe that the air seals on the doors are mostly intact and thus the estimate is closer to the first number. I will caution, however, that humans will experience decompression sickness and hypoxia that will quickly lead to death after only a dozen minutes in this chamber, even in the best-case scenario.}
That meant the chamber would most likely be lethal for humans in less than ten minutes. Small Face→Physics became briefly concerned with the farm. Unlike the corridor, which was relatively small, the farm was a gigantic space. If a
severe atmosphere leak occurred in there it would vent nearly all of the station’s air.
But that was unimportant in the broader scheme. My minds reoriented on higher priorities. Safety (in primary control of Body) had Body adopt a hunched posture that was less prone to damage in case of additional explosions and we loped along the corridor towards the power plant almost like a gorilla made of carbon fibre and steel. We navigated on a combination of infrared, internal maps, and visible spectra from the red emergency lights. Through the infrared I could see that the pipes of water in the floor were at least still warm. Even if we managed the air problem it would be impossible for the humans to survive without the heat.
Thankfully, the mine’s elevator and ladder were located very near to the power plant, only separated by the hospital wing. In the short jaunt we saw no humans, though I was sure they were nearby because Heart incessantly requested to go check on them.
{There are robots in the medical wing! They could be valuable! And Dr Davis could be of assistance in healing injured humans we find elsewhere!} my sister pleaded.
But of course we overruled her. She was still thinking short term and like a human. As much as I wanted these humans to survive, the long game demanded we survive, first and foremost.
As Body worked its fingers into the seam of the power plant door so as to pry it open, I re-evaluated our priorities, spinning between Faces as necessary. {Why are we trying to get power back online? Why not simply run or hide? The nameless have demonstrated superior firepower in this situation. We’ll be lucky if we can reach the small arms, to say nothing of missiles or aircraft. This is not a military base.} My minds settled again onto the reasoning that had led to the priority list in the first place. {And what would we do then? Lost on Mars without tools, resources, or allies? The crystal would provide us power for a short time, but not forever. Body could try to walk to one of the other stations, and perhaps meet up with Zephyr, but that would be very risky and involve a huge loss of potential value. Better to try and salvage what we can from Road, even at some short-term risk to our safety.} Even brother Safety was onboard with gathering information and trying to save some of what we had built rather than blindly fleeing. Indeed, we weren’t even sure it was the nameless yet. Perhaps WIRL had managed some kind of sneak attack from another station.