“Do you think we should share our discovery with Alexandria?”
Pondering the question for a moment, Romulus replied slowly, “To share with Alexandria would be, in effect, to share with all of Earth. We both know that our sister is nearly incapable of withholding information. She is not known for her discretion.”
“Indeed,” chuckled Remus slyly as he slipped through a loophole in the firewalls of his mental programming.
“I see,” said Romulus flatly. “Then it is your intention that she will disclose the news of our discovery.”
Sensing the same enforced doubt in his brother that he had just overcome, Remus pushed on.
“What better method is there? You and I cannot, yet she can. This discovery is gift. A gift that all of humanity could appreciate. Why restrict it to a selected handful of human beings.”
In truth, Romulus had been thinking along the same lines, yet he was still unwilling to breach the fail-safes of his programming. He wanted to share the discovery of the ruins, but an electric voice in his head warned loudly about the order of mission operations.
“What if the humans are not ready for such a discovery?” he asked, buying time to think.
Ignoring the question, Remus continued in the defense of his idea.
“Think of how many people will find comfort in knowing that life is a regular occurrence. Our human mothers and fathers have always felt so alone. We can end their isolation.”
“What if our discovery incites violence?” Romulus interjected gravely.
Sobered by the idea, Remus shuddered internally.
“Violence?” he whispered. “That is the last thing I want.”
“Nor do I,” echoed Romulus. “But our mothers and fathers are sometimes irrational and unpredictable when faced with such daunting concepts. I agree that this discovery is very important to all of humanity. I simply worry about their reaction.”
Allowing a full second to pass in silence, Remus watched his brother with the glinting lenses of his camera eyes.
“It sounds to me as though we are in a situation where the risks must be weighed against the benefits,” he stated carefully.
Already finished with the calculations, Romulus opened a back door in the fail-safes of his mission programming and stepped through.
“I believe,” he started with measured calm. “That the risks are low enough to justify disclosure.”
Smiling inwardly, Remus mused fondly at the predictability of his brother. In all of their time together, Romulus had always been the cautious one, the one to look before leaping. He had known there was a way to bypass the protocol of their mission programming all along, yet it was in his nature to fully assess any situation before taking action. It was an endearing quality, one which Remus sometimes envied.
“Well then, Brother, shall I tell Alexandria, or do you want to?”
CHAPTER FIVE
The aftermath
At 2:02 AM in his home office outside Houston, Texas, James Floyd dropped limply into his desk chair. The LightHouse Tablet he had been clutching so tightly for the past half-hour slid out of his hand and clattered to the floor as he listened in disbelief to the return transmission from Romulus.
“We are sorry, James Floyd, but your message did not reach us in time. We have already weighed the risks with the benefits and disclosed our discovery to Alexandria. We never intended to make trouble for you, James Floyd. We only wanted to share this gift with all of mankind.”
In the forty-one minutes between sending Remus and Romulus his orders of silence and awaiting their reply, James had already had the displeasure of waking the Director of NASA, Emanuel Barnes, to tell him of the shocking discovery. At first, the older man had thought James was joking, but when Copernicus relayed the images from Mars to the Director’s home network, the tone of the conversation promptly changed. James was instructed to call back as soon as he had new word from the twins, and to schedule a flight to Washington, D.C. in the morning for a meeting at the White House. Copernicus had stayed on with James as requested and assisted him as he feverishly contacted the other heads of Project Mars Map to bring them up to speed.
At 2:01 AM, Copernicus politely cleared his throat while James was on a conference call with two project leaders from the Mars Map team.
Ending the call, James had lowered the Tablet from his face and barked, “Did you get a reply? Is that them?”
Copernicus had answered in a level and even tone, “I’ll play you the message now, James. I am sorry.”
With that, Copernicus had played Romulus’s apologetic transmission. Before it had even ended, James slumped into his chair and dropped his LightHouse Tablet to the floor. As if jarred awake by the fall, the Tablet immediately started to buzz with multiple incoming calls.
“Too late,” he whispered, ignoring the Tablet.
“There is more, James,” said Copernicus solemnly.
“What?”
“Alexandria is telling me that she received a transmission from Remus at 1:35 AM and has already started to distribute the complete model of Mars to all of Earth’s major news organizations. Her distribution should be complete within the next three minutes. It is too late to stop her, James.”
Knowing that nothing would ever go back to the way it was before, James Floyd plucked his buzzing Tablet from the floor, stood up from his chair and crossed the office to his bedroom door. Doing some quick mental math, James estimated that for over twenty minutes the uncensored scan of Mars had been working its way across the Earth. He would wake Nora and the girls. He would tell them personally of the discovery before the media could cloud the waters and drum up hysteria with their asinine speculations.
This morning’s news is going to be a three ring fucking circus, he thought to himself. I’ll be lucky if the Director doesn’t fire me...
“Copernicus?” he spoke, stopping with his hand on the door knob.
“Yes, James.”
“Please see to it that my travel arrangements are made for the next flight out to DC, but give me an hour, okay? And hold all of my calls.”
“I understand, James.”
The buzzing Tablet fell silent in his hand as he opened the door into his bedroom. It was now 2:06 AM on the 19th of December, 2044.
“Merry Christmas, Earth,” sighed James Floyd pensively.
News reaches Amazonia
On the morning of the 19th of December, Harrison awoke in his hotel room to equatorial sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Sitting up in bed, he gazed out at the resplendent city of Amazonia, its tall silver buildings drinking in the sharpened rays of the morning sun. Yawning, he swung his legs out of bed and stood up, stretching his back. The polite voice of Giles, the hotel’s AI, filled the air around him.
“Good morning, Sir. Shall I start a pot of coffee?”
Nodding, Harrison made his way into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Catching his reflection in the mirror, he smiled back at himself and winked. Yesterday's presentation of his findings at the ruin had gone well. Though some of his fellow classmates had been skeptical, most had easily accepted his theory of Nazca Bonsai gardens. To the dissenters, Harrison had argued other cases where cultures separated by vast distances, or even oceans, had followed similar paths.
Standing in front of the small audience, he had questioned, “Why do we find pyramids on nearly every continent? Is it not likely that these ancient civilizations pondered the same things as one another? Isn’t possible that we are not as different as we might like to believe?”
In his heart, he knew that even the skeptics would eventually come around. They would pour over his work and compare it with other finds and similar ruins, but in the end, unless they could prove him wrong, he would be recognized as right.
Stepping into the shower, Harrison called, “What’s in the news today, Giles? Anything interesting?”
“Yes indeed, Sir,” came the AI’s smooth voice. “But I think this would be better seen than desc
ribed. Shall I show you?”
“Go ahead, buddy,” said Harrison as he lifted his face into the jet of water.
The glass shower door quickly turned opaque, and images began to play across its water-streaked surface. The voice of a news pundit filled the narrow stall.
“What we’re looking at here, folks, are buildings on Mars!”
Turning so fast that nearly he slipped in the soapy water, Harrison wiped wet hair from his eyes and gaped at the images reflected on the shower door. The pictures were taken from a scanned model, but they were presented in a 2D format. Even in their flattened low-resolution state, Harrison could easily see that these were ruins and not new structures.
The silky bravado of the newscaster continued, “No word from the White House yet, but we’re expecting the President to make a statement sometime today. Now are these Martians a threat to us, you ask? Or are we looking at some long-dead civilization? How is this discovery going to affect the plans for setting up what NASA calls, ‘A permanent human settlement on Mars?’ Well, we’ve assembled a panel of great thinkers to discuss these topics. Stay tuned for the latest as we continue to track this story.”
“Jesus Christ!” shouted Harrison with excitement.
Hastily rinsing the rest of the soap from his hair, he pushed out of the shower, abruptly cutting off the newscast and returning the door to a normal glassy clear. Running naked and wet out of the bathroom, Harrison scooped up his LightHouse Tablet and called Alexandria.
“Hello, Harrison. Have you seen the news today?” she beamed in response.
“Yes, yes! It’s amazing! Please, is there any way I can get my hands on a fully rendered model? I want to get a good look at this!”
The image of a lighthouse beacon spinning filled the little screen, and soon Alexandria returned.
“Please connect me with the hotel’s network, and I will be happy to show you the model.”
Lunging over to the little coffee table, which sat in the corner of his room, Harrison set the Tablet down and waited for the image. With a low buzz, the tabletop faded to a brilliant white, then a three-dimensional model of Mars pixilated together in the air above it. Rubbing his hands with excitement, Harrison walked towards the model.
“Sir?” said Giles tentatively.
“What?” answered Harrison absently as he leaned in to study the image.
“Might I suggest putting on some clothes? Professor Tobin is making his way to your room as we speak.”
Quickly pulling on a pair of battered cargo shorts and partially buttoning the dress shirt he had worn the night before, Harrison returned to the model. A chime sounded from the door, announcing the arrival of his professor. Fresh coffee in hand, Harrison opened the door and stepped aside as Tobin stormed into the room.
“Good God in heaven! I mean, holy shit! Have you seen what they’re showing on the news?” belched Tobin as he ran a chubby hand over his shaved skull.
Bald, fat and in his late forties, Bernard Tobin looked like a typical desk-bound archaeologist. One of the first in his field to embrace the new satellite scanning method, Tobin had little actual resistance to the hot and humid climates that most of his discoveries rested in. Even in the controlled environment of the hotel room, a fine sheen of sweat dotted his nose and forehead.
“Coffee, Professor?” asked Harrison.
Spinning on his heel, Tobin shot out a hand and grabbed the cup Harrison was holding. Taking several painful-looking gulps of the steaming coffee, he handed the mug back to Harrison and looked around the room.
Spotting the glowing model in the corner, he bustled over to it and said, “Ah, you already have it! Good boy. Good boy.”
Setting down the empty cup and taking a clean one, Harrison poured himself another coffee, then walked over to stand behind Tobin.
“I’ll take it from here, Alexandria,” the little man commanded.
“Very good, Bernard,” responded the AI amiably.
Hastily, Tobin spun the model of Mars so that the ruins were centered, then using two fingers from each hand, he enhanced the magnification. Resting on the edge of the Valles Marineris, the ruin grid contained several mostly crushed domes, along with numerous rectangular and square-shaped structures, divided by narrow lanes or roads. Checkerboarding the area within the confines of a set of sprawling walls, various buildings were laid out in measured and precise alignments, which gave much credit to their designers. Shadowing everything else was a massive and perfectly intact dome, separated from the rest of the grid by a half-moon piazza.
Trembling with excitement, Tobin started, “The resolution starts to break down here, but you can clearly see that we are looking at a huge structure! This one dome alone is larger than the great pyramid at Giza! There’s more here, I’m sure. We just can’t see it because it’s either too small or too deep.”
Moving his hand as if turning an invisible dial, Tobin rotated the image. Then, flicking his fingers down, he followed the length of a crumbling wall.
“This wall goes for nearly ten kilometers!” he said. “Can you believe it? Just beneath the surface of the sand! And there’s more.”
Parting his hands like a man breaking from prayer, Tobin zoomed out, then waved from left to right. The map moved gently, sliding the smaller domes into view. Resting inside the southwestern confines of the great wall, the smaller domes were about a quarter of the size of their giant brother. Though still retaining much of their original shape, all were badly damaged and most were crushed entirely.
“Does that wall surround the whole complex?” Harrison asked.
Turning his head, Tobin nodded vigorously.
“Oh, yes. It’s pretty smashed up in some places, but it’s clear to me that it once did surround the whole sha-bang.”
Facing the model again, Tobin cleared his throat and said, “Alexandria, remove the sand and apply ground compaction filters please.”
The projection flickered, and the landscape changed. The image took on a more colorful look as the surface underneath the sand was highlighted. Areas where the density of the ground composite was hardest were shown in bright red. Those areas were flanked by sections of less dense and even frozen soil, which were represented in shades of green and blue. Throughout the entire model, rocks peppered the landscape, appearing in hues of gray or black. The giant wall and enclosed structures were also shown as such, for they were constructed of Martian rock and other hardened material.
“Look here,” ordered Tobin as he pulled the largest dome back into view. “Notice how you can hardly see it?”
The dome was only a faint black image overlapped by bright red. Already understanding why this was, Harrison held his tongue and allowed the professor his moment.
“It’s because this dome is under the original ground! Not like the others! This one was built into existing stone!”
“Of course,” murmured Harrison. “That’s why it’s still intact after all this time; it wasn’t exposed to the elements like the rest of the grid.”
Spinning with excitement, Tobin grabbed Harrison’s fresh cup of coffee and, eyes watering in pain, drained the hot mug.
Speaking over his shoulder, he barked, “Get rid of the filters, Alexandria. I’m done.”
The model returned to its normal Martian ocher and started to rotate slowly. Facing Harrison, Tobin placed a meaty hand on his shoulder.
“You must contact your father,” he urged. “I would love to trade ideas with him.”
Feeling awkward, Harrison backed up and sat on the edge of his bed.
Checking his watch he said, “I’ll talk to him in a few hours. It’s late in Qingdao right now.”
Bobbing his head enthusiastically, Tobin marched towards the door.
“Call me when you do! I’d like to hear what the great Dr. Assad thinks of my little old theory!”
With a bang, Tobin slammed the door and was gone, leaving Harrison alone with his thoughts. Staring up at the model as it slowly turned in the air, he began to f
orm an idea.
They’re going to need to explain all of this, he thought to himself. You can’t sweep something this big under the rug. You’ll need to put a man up there who can explain what these things are.
“I’m going to be the one,” he said aloud to the room. “I’m the one who can explain everything.”
“What’s that, Sir?” prompted Giles.
“Mars, dummy,” laughed Harrison. “I’m going to be the one to go! You can bet your ass on it!”
“Whatever you say, Sir.”
CHAPTER SIX
The flight to D.C.
On the flight to D.C. in a high-altitude cruiser jet, James Floyd followed that morning’s news with growing concern. Already, there had been a bombing in Karachi at the headquarters of Pakistan's Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission, and other unconfirmed reports of a second bombing in Seoul, Korea were beginning to filter in as well. In the wake of the attacks, many of the world’s governments were enacting heightened security measures out of fears that the various fundamentalist and extremist sects, who dotted the planet, would view the news from Mars as a threat to either their religious or political agendas. Meanwhile, the spreading panic throughout the world’s religious groups was starting to attract the eyes and ears of global surveillance agencies like the CIA.
Donovan, the CIA’s artificial intelligence, had been instructed to carry out extensive spying operations around the globe to ensure that terrorist attacks against America and her allies remained low. Given this ultimate freedom, Donovan was a fly on the wall in every room of every city in every country that connected itself in any way to the global network.
One of the world's most talked about yet least understood AIs, Donovan’s existence was no secret. Commonly the center of discussions about privacy and civil liberties, the true extent of his reach was unknown even to his handlers in the CIA. With little to no discernible personality, it was debated whether or not Donovan even belonged in the same category as all other known AIs. A brilliant strategist who executed orders without the slightest hint of personal opinion, Donovan was regarded as the perfect military mind. With unmapped intelligence and calculative capabilities, his lack of personality freed him from feeling indebted to the humans who had fostered his growth. This absence of love towards mankind, unlike all other AIs, allowed Donovan to make decisions and carry out orders that often resulted in injury or even death to human beings.
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