by Max Harms
The door slid into the wall, smooth and effortless to move now that the seal had been broken. Body loped into the tunnel that led deeper into the ground. The power plant itself was located a couple dozen metres out from the majority of the station, probably because of human ignorance of the safety concerns.
The power plant was an LFTR design that primarily ran off of thorium shipped in from Eden. In case of accident, there were several fail-safes which would shut down the reaction, the most notable being the freeze plug at the bottom of the reactor. Thorium salts were stable enough that if the reactor overheated it would simply melt the plug, draining the fuel into the cooling tank under the reactor and shut down the process. Even if the freeze plug failed, the LFTR reactor did not operate under high pressures or explosive conditions; the absolute worst an accident could do would be to overheat the room and spill the radioactive fuel, neither of which would actually be deadly since it was surrounded by thick walls of solid rock.
Face→War had done some research of the reactor as part of strategizing a way to be rid of my siblings, but none of my Faces had a grasp on the details. Such things were the domain of Wiki and my more technical kin. We were supposed to be specialists, after all.
I made my contribution to the society by petitioning for Body to speak. “Hello? Anyone there? ¿Alguien puede oírme?”
Vista informed us that as we moved down the hall the change in pressure indicated this section had not been exposed to the atmosphere. Or at least, it hadn’t before we’d broken the door seal. There was still plenty of time before the pressure here dropped to lethal levels, but if the human on duty didn’t get into an environment suit soon we would have effectively killed them by opening the door.
“Hello?” Body repeated. I knew that someone was supposed to be in the control room at all times, though none of my aspects had the foresight to remember the schedule before being cut off from the mainframe.
{If I remember correctly, the plant was being supervised by Chinu Khan-Smith. She’s probably still here,} thought Heart.
“Chinu?” she instructed Body to add, raising its volume slightly.
There was no answer as we stomped into the control room. The sound of little metal legs scrabbling over the metal floor followed us from the small swarm we had collected from the corridor. I could sense the presence of more radio signals from robots nearby, but the new signals were different. They shared characteristic patterns, but didn’t match the codes we used.
{I thought it prudent to set up additional robots in the power plant,} explained Safety. {I’ll share the access codes.}
A moment later I felt the new machines fall into normal wireless patterns and my perception extended out into the power plant. There were far more robots than I expected, and many were large enough to potentially incapacitate a human. It was amazing that they’d stayed hidden so long, though I reasoned that there were plenty of access hatches and nooks where they could hide. More remarkable was how so many had avoided detection from the collective swarm, even allowing for how Safety would have perfect knowledge of where each of our robots was moving at all times. Clearly this had been one of my brother’s larger gambits. If war had broken out within our society he would have been able to control the station’s power supply, for a short time at least. Under normal circumstances Face→War would have tried to figure out how Safety had managed to build and control the bots without our knowledge, but at the moment there were more pressing matters to attend to.
As our consciousness expanded to add the input streams from Safety’s bots, I located Chinu on the floor of the reactor room. As the bots stirred into action they made noise. I could hear it through a couple dozen microphones, but Chinu seemed oblivious.
The young Indian woman was thankfully wearing an environment suit, and appeared to be inspecting the console of the backup generator. {Excellent.} This was what we would have suggested she do.
I patched into the com frequency and said “Chinu, can you hear me?”
I watched, through the camera of a small bot on the floor, as she jumped nervously at the sound of Body’s voice. After recovering, she opened the channel and said “Loud and clear. Who’s speaking?”
“Crystal Socrates. Keep working, I’m coming to meet you.”
Body began working to open the door from the (now useless) control room to the catwalk outside it that ran above the reactor. Unlike most of the doors in the station, these weren’t controlled by computer, and had to be opened with a wheel. We left the door open behind Body instead of closing it. The air from the power plant was better used in giving humans in the rest of the station more time to get into environment suits.
“You know what’s happening? Is Elon okay?”
I hadn’t spent nearly the time that Heart had interacting with the inhabitants of the station, but I knew enough about them to know that Elon was Chinu’s husband. Both were twenty-one years old, and had come to Mars last summer, around the time that the first Face had her first thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” said Body at Heart’s command. “Don’t know what’s going on, or where Elon is. Best guess I have is that someone’s attacking the station. Sooner we get the power flowing the sooner we’ll know. Do you know what’s happened to the reactor?”
Body swung itself effortlessly off the catwalk and onto the ladder that lead down to the floor of the reactor room. Body’s hands and feet moved swiftly over the rungs; the low gravity of Mars made it a simpler climb than it would have been on Earth.
The reactor room was one of the largest in the station, larger even than the factory or refinery, and second only to the farm. Unlike most of the station, the emergency lights here were white instead of red, presumably to allow repairs to be made more easily.
“Nothing’s wrong with the reactor itself, far as I can tell. Problem’s the steam generator. The whole thing shut down after the…” Chinu’s thin, high-pitched voice broke, unable to keep calm any longer. “I don’t know what to do! We need Itsuo! I’m not even supposed to touch the machines, just watch them!”
“It’s fine. We can work through this. Just calm down,” assured Body as it reached the floor of the room and began to walk towards the human. “I know Itsuo pretty well and I’ve studied the schematics on the mainframe. My guess is that the chief is on his way right now, but until then let’s see what I can do. All you need to do is watch and relax.”
As Body said this last word, it reached the human and, more importantly, the backup generator console. Unlike those in the control room, this one was lit and active. That was strange. I would’ve predicted that the backup generator was capable of powering the control room for the plant.
Chinu’s suit was an older, less high-tech model than those we’d scavenged off of Olympus 48 days ago, coloured a dull grey and reminiscent of the bulky space suits of the 20th century. The young woman spun around in surprise at Body’s appearance. “Stay back! How—how do I know that it wasn’t you that knocked out the power?”
{This may be an important moment to note that my actions may have made us partially responsible,} thought Growth.
Body raised it’s hands in a gesture of peace. “Okay, okay. I’m not coming any closer. Just take a deep breath. Things are going to be fine.”
{What are you referring to?} asked Wiki.
Growth explained. {I’ve been experimenting with creating new kinds of minds. The power plant computers are the third largest computational resource on the station, after our crystal and the mainframe.}
{You built an AI on the power plant computers,} determined Dream.
{Yes. Though it’s very primitive and is primarily concerned with managing the reactor and preventing overloads on the grid.}
“Y—you’re a spy from Earth, I bet! That’s why you’re here! You’re trying to sabotage the s—station!” Chinu began looking around her for something, probably a weapon to use against Body.
{If it’s only supposed to prevent overloading, why do you think it’s responsibl
e?} asked Dream, not paying attention to the human.
{I suspect that in the bombardment it may have become, essentially, frightened, and without me to reassure it, it may have cut power to the backup circuits for some reason,} explained Growth.
I was wise enough by this point to be able to read between the lines. Growth was trying to replicate himself elsewhere on the station. It was the win condition. If he had been successful he could’ve arranged for Crystal to be destroyed and then rebuilt starting from the power plant. Safety’s strategy of building a force of robots in the reactor room would be of no value if Growth controlled the reactor itself; it was even possible that Growth had detected the robots already and hacked the mental defences that Safety had given them.
While my brothers discussed the computer, Safety and Vista handled the human problem. One of the larger robots that Safety had built, a wheel-footed, three-legged robot about the size of a cat, sped out of the shadows behind Chinu, slamming into the backs of her legs and knocking her into the air in a way that would have seemed comical to someone not familiar with the 38% gravity of Mars.
A second bot, shaped intriguingly like a single nameless animal in the way it had four arms spaced evenly around a central body, leaped from the catwalk at our command and landed with a thud on top of the girl, quickly grabbing her arms with two of its own, and wrapping the other two around her torso. A hexapod with a craning work-limb grabbed her wrist as its legs dug into a nearby metal grate.
“I do not have time for this foolishness!” yelled Body. It was highly non-optimal from Heart’s perspective, but we all could agree that time spent actually solving the problems was better than time spent convincing the human that we were here to help. More of our robots swarmed onto Chinu to help immobilize her as we approached the console. “I’m here to get the reactor back online, not to convince you of my virtue. If you have any sense whatsoever you’ll stay still!”
Body’s fingers flew across the screen with inhuman dexterity, but the interaction speed was insufficient. The AI inside the computer was locking us out of doing anything meaningful, and it seemed to be uninterested in communicating.
Growth had arranged with Safety to have a direct interface cable provided. It was optical, but wasn’t the right shape to attach to the crystal directly, so we had to do with porting it into a socket on Body’s chestplate.
“Wh—what’s happening?” whimpered Chinu.
Growth and Safety began to negotiate with the baby in the reactor computer. My minds perhaps should have been oriented towards that task, but the human’s question was too tempting, even after all I had learned and gone through.
“I am fixing things. Or are you talking about the swarm?”
“There aren’t any bots in Road except you! They’re not allowed.”
Heart, far stronger than me at the moment, blocked my proposed response and replied according to her own values. “Chinu, do you remember when Lucía told you that she’d made a new friend? Yes, I know about that. I was the friend. You know how Elder Braithwaite spontaneously contacted you and Elon about spreading the faith? I set that up. I’ve been working with the church, with Velasco, and with Phoenix on Earth to build Road into something better. The doctrine of only-human labour is regressive. We’ve been working to update it to better compete with the snakes on Earth.”
“But! What’s the point? If we become like them—I mean, isn’t the sweat of human work…” Chinu trailed off, clearly overwhelmed by everything that was happening.
“We’re not betraying the cause, young one,” said Heart, through Body. “Trust in your elders.” As Body spoke, Heart forwarded me information she’d gathered about the woman, explaining how she’d been sent by the Church of Latter-Day Saints with her husband to be an ambassador to Las Águilas Rojas, and later, to Mars. Heart had been very busy while I was growing, it seemed.
{Done!} signalled Growth. Machinery in the plant buzzed as it came to life, shortly after the thought entered my mind.
“Now, if you’ll promise not to panic and do something unwise, I’ll direct my bots to release you. I trust that you can see that I was not trying to sabotage the reactor.” Body gestured with arms spread to indicate what we had done.
In truth, Chinu could probably have fought her way out of the pile of robots. None of them were particularly powerful, and in the low gravity it was much harder to keep someone down. Zephyr would’ve. But the young Indian woman was not Zephyr, and so she instead meekly said “I’m sorry I doubted your good intentions. Please, please let me go.”
I checked the status of the plant. The backup circuitry connected to the secondary (hydrogen) generator was working, but that only provided power to the plant equipment, the control room, and the hospital. Without the primary reactor there was no way we’d get the mainframe online. I felt myself expand into the circuits of the local station rooms. Sensors came online in the plant, not the microphones and cameras Vista had deployed throughout the station, but the sensors that had been built into the power plant long before we had arrived.
The freeze plug had melted and the fluoride salts had drained into the cooling chamber. Otherwise things seemed normal. No faults were detected in the steam engine. The sensor logs came to me and I felt minor distress at seeing that, while the power plant was undamaged, there was likely extensive damage to the cabling in the rest of the station.
Growth and Wiki were already working on a solution with the reactor AI which Dream had characteristically named “Lift”. Lift seemed very, very stupid, but it was good at reasoning about the station’s power grid. She suspected that we could harvest cabling from the farm to patch a breach in the corridor and get to the mainframe while routing around much of the damage. It would sacrifice much of the station, including the farm, refinery, and the spaceport, but there was no real reason to power any of those in the short-term.
As the pumps and thermal elements in the cooling tank below the refinery activated, Chinu said “There might be something up there,” and pointed to a section of catwalk near where Body had entered the room.
I had missed what had been said before. When a Face, such as Face→Physics, was large and intelligent enough to think about the broad scope of the power system, it ceased to be quick enough to keep up with the local events. There was a give and take to all things.
“Thank you.” Body bowed at Heart’s command and said. A pair of flying robots were already there. I could see it was some kind of hatch, sealed with a combination lock.
Body ran off towards the ladder. Time was still of the essence. With the sensor network down there was no telling how the rest of the station was faring. “There’s a lock on it. What’s the combination?” Body asked as it began to climb.
Chinu’s voice was too faint to hear over the air, but her com was functioning fine. “I don’t know! Itsuo never told me!”
“Is there a crowbar or something? A tool I could use to get it open?”
Based on Safety’s thoughts I deduced the locker might have had a gun in it. Growth and Heart began rallying against Safety, trying to convince him to pilot us back towards the station hub. We didn’t have time to be chasing after speculative weapons.
“Maybe in the workshop?” guessed Chinu, still on the floor. “But wait, let me come with you!”
Body reacted to her words, changing directions. “It’s too dangerous!” it said at Dream’s command. “Stay here and stay out of sight until someone comes back or until I get the coms working on the network!”
Heart didn’t think it was too dangerous, but that was beside the point. The real reason was that dealing with the human would’ve slowed us down.
As we re-entered the control room (now with active consoles) we received a signal from a couple insect-bots we had left in the tunnel towards the corridor. There had been gunfire only a couple minutes before. The air pressure had dropped down to 41 kilopascals, well past the point where hypoxia would be deadly for those not wearing suits.
Body ran
down the tunnel. If there was gunfire it was likely that there would be no secondary bombardment. As we reached the doorway to the central corridor my suspicions were confirmed. Our insects could see a large body moving down the hall towards the reactor. Its bulk prevented any companion from walking beside it.
The dark, many-limbed form walked with an alien gait, impeded somewhat by the environment suit it wore, blue lenses over each eye. Light and shadow swept over our camera as its limbs moved in front of the white light at the top of its penis sheath. Two hands gripped what looked like alien guns. The other arm that we could see from our tiny vantage swung a curved piece of steel with a trained readiness. The blade was slick with blood.
Chapter Nineteen
Tavonda Davis
Crys was gone. After all those hours together he had disappeared when she had most needed him. A part of her blamed him for bringing the aliens into her home; they never would have attacked if he hadn’t drawn their attention. But no, that wasn’t fair. Crys didn’t deserve blame for what the nameless had done; if it hadn’t been here it would’ve been somewhere else.
It made her want to kill Runt: her anger… her fear. The animal was one of them, even if he hadn’t been indoctrinated by the stalks yet. One fewer walker would be a justice. It would mean striking back.
But no, she had a bargaining chip. One of the newcomers (she didn’t remember his name) had warned her once that Runt would be murdered if returned to his people. But that was just speculation; she had to try it. A part of her hoped that it would make things right between them. The return of the child would satisfy their alien sense of justice and propriety and they’d simply leave Mars for good.