Mars Plus

by Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas

  The screen changed to: PLEASE ENTER YOUR FULL NAME OR CITIZEN CODE, AND THUMBPRINT in six different languages. The top line, she noted, was in Diplomatic English.

  She typed in her name and laid her thumb on the pad.

  “Welcome to Mars, Ms. Coghlan,” the cyber said in colloquial Texahoman English—but pitched to the high squeak of a human voice on helium. Meanwhile the screen displayed tourist stills of the Martian landscape and tunnel habitat that vaguely matched the ensuing monologue. “Your visa is approved for a four-week residency. Accommodations for your use have been reserved at the Golden Lotus, Level Four, Tunnel Twenty-One, Bays Seven through Eighteen. Please regard this as your home away from…Austin, Texas.

  “An account with credit in the amount of forty thousand Neumarks has been established in your name with Marsbank Pty. Limited. Statements will be sent on a six-month delay at the then-current exchange rate to your home bank…the Double Eagle Bank N.A. of Austin.

  “While your tourist visa includes no travel restrictions among Mars’s various complexes, please be aware that many communities enforce multicultural sensitivity awareness. Also, you may not engage in any form of employment for either salary or wages, actual or deferred, while you are a registered guest of Mars.

  “Mars quarantine laws require you submit to examination by a registered medical practitioner to ensure against the spread of communicable diseases. An appointment for this purpose has been made in your name with Dr. Wally Shin, Level Two, Tunnel Nine, Bay Six, at fourteen hundred hours today. Please be prompt and do limit your contact with others until after this examination.

  “Thank you and have a good day,” the voice concluded.

  “Excuse me, but—”

  The screen flashed its original message, in six languages.

  Demeter checked her chrono. “Hey, Sugar! What’s local time?”

  “Thirteen hours, forty-seven minutes, Dem.”

  “Yikes, I’m going to be late to this Dr. Shin’s!”

  Coghlan gathered her two bags and headed down to the end of the corridor—the only end that seemed to make connection with the rest of the complex. She hoped to find, real soon, some tunnel numbers and maybe a static wall map with a big you-are-here sticker. Going back and asking directions of the computer grid sounded like a jackass idea, and Sugar’s inertial compass was getting too easily turned around in this maze.

  Demeter had made about seven left turns, all the time moving into wider and more crowded corridors as she went. Around her the air was filled with the treble whistlings of people in casual conversation.

  Most of the tunnels in the Tharsis Montes complex were raw rock cut in smoothly arched tubes between tiny, hexagonal chambers. Side entrances from these little foyers led into the residential or commercial suites that made up the community. The rock surface, gray with red and sometimes black streaks, was sealed off inside with clear epoxy. The residents could never forget they were living underground—and under strange ground, too—instead of wandering through sterile internal corridors of white or beige tile.

  As Demeter passed from one hexcube to the next, someone came up fast behind her and caught at her elbow.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  She turned. A young man, curly brown hair and an Oriental cast to his eyes, was wearing a determined frown. He didn’t let go of her elbow. She noticed he had a blue armband stamped with CITIZEN’S MILITIA in white letters, both in English and in some kanji characters.

  “Yes?” Despite the rough handling, she tried to keep her voice level in John Law’s presence.

  He leaned in close to her ear and took a hearty sniff of her trademark perfume, Odalisque.

  “Like it?” Demeter asked as coldly as possible.

  “I’m going to have to cite you for a scent violation, ma’am. Mars’s privacy code is very strict when it comes to infringing the sensory space of other citizens,” He handed her a pink card with exposed gold contact pins across one end.

  “What do I do with this?”

  “You redeem it for the amount of the fine within five days’ time. Any local terminal will handle the transaction for you.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then the card will emit an RF alert that locks you out of your place of residence, forfeits your transport rights, and forestalls any commercial transactions—such as food purchases—until you pay up.”

  “I see. And suppose I just throw the card away?”

  “It’s now keyed to your body temperature, ma’am. The minute you discard it, the circuits will emit a siren that usually draws an immediate—and armed—response…You’ll notice the surface already has your fingerprints?”

  Demeter looked at the citation more closely. Where her fingers had first touched it, her whorls were now outlined in purple and green. They didn’t fade when she held the card by its edges.

  “I suggest you pay the fine quickly,” the militiaman said pleasantly. “Have a nice day…and, ma’am? Please wash off that stink as soon as you can.”

  Coghlan nodded blankly and hurried off down the corridor, clutching the card between the knuckles of the hand that held the shoulder straps from her bags. An arrow in the wall directed her to a broad ramp for Level 2. She walked down it, tripping occasionally in the weak gravity.

  In a few more minutes Demeter found Tunnel 9 and Bay 6, but no Dr. Shin. There was a doctor’s office on the right-hand side of the hexcube, but it belonged to a Dr. Wa. The scrolling light sign—in three languages, only one of which used the Roman alphabet—proclaimed: DR. WA LIXIN, MD, PSYD, DDS…INTERNIST AND GENERAL PRACTICE FOR ALL FAMILY AILMENTS…PSYCHOTHERAPY, DEEP REGRESSION, AND LAYERED SYNDROME COUNSELING…HERBALIST AND ACUPUNCTURIST, SPECIALIZING IN THE HARMONIOUS WAH…

  Surely, that last word was a typo. “Way,” Demeter corrected to herself.

  TEETH EXTRACTED WHILE YOU WAIT. The sign flickered and went through its loop again.

  “And a humorist, too,” Coghlan said. Well, if nothing else, this Dr. Wa could give her directions to the absent Dr. Shin. Probably a screwup in the physician’s directory, or the Chamber of Commerce’s referral service, or something.

  Demeter pressed the button next to the door.

  Tharsis Montes, Commercial Unit 2/9/6, June 7

  Dr. Wa Lixin was playing go against his desktop medical diagnostic computer—and winning. That bothered him because Dr. Lee, as everyone in the colony knew him, was simply a terrible strategist. So, when the grid let him win, he could only conclude it was buttering him up for something.

  Everyone understood that the Autochthonous Grid—both the network here on Mars and the parent system back on Earth—was full of bugs and prone to error. Sometimes the cyber you were working on crashed its system through no traceable fault in the coding. Sometimes the system worked but your application crashed. Sometimes the application worked flawlessly but skewed your data with obvious—and unreproducible—results. Sometimes a Tenth Dan-level program dribbled away its stones in nonstrategic ataris and lost to a go-playing fool.

  Some people said this was because the grid was infected with the mother of all viruses. If so, it was one so insidious that nobody had ever seen it, so rabbit-fast at replication that nobody had ever cornered it, and so mean that nobody would ever kill it. To actually kill the virus, they said, humankind everywhere in the Solar System that shared grid resources and datastreams—the wide nodes all over Earth, the local networks dug in on the Moon and Mars, the new nexus under Europan ice, and the freeloading terminals of the L-point colonies—every one of them would have to shut down their connected cybers simultaneously. Then they would all have to follow a prescribed set of debugging procedures and start up again using fresh-out-of-the-box system software and applications. Oh, and with all new data, preferably entered by hand from a penpoint or keyboard, or voice-op with a fresh sound-bit package.

  And that just was not going to happen, folks.

  Hard facts about what was actually wrong with the grid were difficult to
come by, but Dr. Lee had heard plenty of rumors. The subject was the focus of a popular culture all its own.

  One theory held that the grid was alive, that the virus infecting it was simple sentience. These people took it as an article of faith that a naturally occurring heuristic algorithm arose anytime you linked up a billion or so cyber units; each one acted like the node on a gigantic neural net. This argument made sense when you considered that most of those independent cybers were already operating in the teraflop range and could, with the proper programming, compose Elizabethan sonnets while beating any three geniuses at chess, checkers, and double acrostics. What the argument lacked was any scientifically verifiable underpinnings. Its adherents, however, had only to point to the grid itself and say, “Ecce logo!”

  Some people maintained that the grid was God, pure and simple. This was the Gaea Principle written in silicon: any system that grew big enough and complex enough would begin casting random errors that looked like a sensible pattern. They said that God—or gods, or “the old ones,” or some species of elves, sprites, or leprechauns—had once lived in rocks and trees, in the local babbling brook, or in a skin-covered ark somewhere. And now He or She or They lived in the sightlines and dwelt in the House of Number.

  Still others said that the government had transmuted the grid as a means of spying on and controlling its citizens. In this scenario, every cyber malfunction or error was actually a fingerprint of the universal computing conspiracy. The grid itself wasn’t watching you and hexing your data; some faceless bureaucrat was at the other end of the fiberoptic, manipulating it for his or her own purposes. How this belief system squared with the fact that no single government, on Earth or anywhere else, was big enough to encompass the grid and all its multiplex activities, these conspiracy theorists did not bother to explain.

  Yet another group insisted that the grid was actually the Devil, the Christians’ fallen Lucifer, Archfiend and Destroyer. They insisted that many people—not they themselves, of course, but a “friend of a friend”—had already sold their souls to the machine. All you had to do, they said, was walk up to a common terminal connected anywhere into the grid and type in the command “MFSTO:”. Then, depending on your identity and billing code, your background and status in society, and what the grid thought you had to offer, you might get an interesting response. The demon, popularly called “Mephisto,” would propose to make a deal for something you wanted. Were you manifestly flunking a course at school? Mephisto could change your test scores and grade. Would you benefit from the futures price of kilowatt-hours or whole-kernel corn going up or down next September? Mephisto could arrange it. And what you had to give in return, that would depend…but it usually involved anything a human being could do or know or influence, and a machine could not. The Devil had a lot of resources, these believers said, because he controlled so very many willing hands and minds.

  So, while everyone knew the grid was spooked, no two people could agree on just how it was done. They only knew that the problems were unpredictable, irreproducible, and bigger than any one human being and his or her personal concerns. The scale of error was probably also unimportant. Once the grid and its cybers had crunched your numbers, you tended to accept them. The data might have defects and shadings—but so what? The answers the grid gave were still a thousand times more reliable than if you took off your shoes and tried to do the long division on your toes. And, after all, the results just might be accurate. You paid your buck and you took your chance, the same as with anything else in life.

  Dr. Wa Lixin placed a black stone on the nineteen-by-nineteen lattice that the screen displayed. The computer responded by placing one of its white stones at random, then filling up the board with black stones and conceding the game with profuse compliments on Dr. Lee’s skill.

  Then again, maybe the machine was just broken…

  “You have a patient, Doctor,” the screen announced. “Shall I open?”

  “Go ahead,” he said, turning toward the entrance to the waiting room. The door beyond, into the corridor, slid back on a plump young woman in a purple jumpsuit, her shoulders weighted down with luggage.

  Dr. Lee perceived at once that she was more interesting to look at than the go board. She was high-breasted and narrow-waisted, with generous hips that promised good carriage and easy delivery. She had long, wavy brown hair, pulled back from her ears in a loose braid. Her jade-green eyes were eerily clear and far-seeing; they looked like nothing so much as openings into another physical dimension. The coloring went well with her pale skin, which was dusted with the pigment splotches that the Caucasians dismissed as “freckles” and everyone else knew as a benign melanin irregularity. She was decidedly cute—if you liked Round Eyes.

  “Yes? Can I help you?” he called.

  “I’m looking for a Dr. Shin?” the woman said with a rising inflection. “The computer grid told me I had an appointment—”

  “Are you Demeter Coghlan?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then I’m your assigned doctor, Wa Lixin. Everyone calls me Lee, though.”

  “Oh…Wah-Lee-Shin. I get it.” She slid the bags off her shoulders onto the banquette beside the door and came through into the examination room. Her right hand still clutched something—a pink card, a fine from the local militia.

  “You can put that down with your things,” Dr. Lee said.

  “But it’ll go off, the patrolman said. And then the Marines or something—”

  “Oh, piffle! They only mean to scare you, being a foreigner and all.” He sniffed. “Odalisque? Nice scent, but a bit pervasive. We usually cut that brand here with three-eighths isopropyl alcohol. That’ll get you past the gas sensors.”

  “Okay, thanks.”

  “Give me the card.”

  She hesitated. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll pay it out from my terminal. Then you don’t have to worry about fending off the Marines.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “And tack it onto your bill, of course.” He checked the card’s denomination. “It’s only for ten Neumarks. Your money all comes from the same account, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess…Say, do you really have that much surveillance here? I mean, just coming down from the fountain, I’ve seen swivel lenses, motion sensors, and earjacks in every corridor. Now you’re telling me about gas sniffers, too. I didn’t expect—”

  “Expect what? Civilization? Modern technology?” Dr. Lee grinned. “Our grid gives us an interconnect level about equal to any medium-size Earth city. This isn’t the frontier, you know. We don’t have drunken cowboys and cattle rustlers—or whatever you were expecting.”

  “But I thought Mars would be a bit less…supervised.”

  “If you’re looking for wide-open spaces, Miss Coghlan, go on to Europa. They’re still chipping out the first public dome up there. But here on Mars we’ve got hot water already, plus a five-star hotel, a sushi bar—though I’d stay away from the fungus under glass—and a whole library of virtual-interactive entertainments. We even, sometimes, have the rule of law.”

  “I get you,” she said with an answering grin. “I just thought maybe I’d for once gotten away from the more oppressive aspects of society.”

  “Not likely. Not with three thousand people crammed into less than twenty thousand cubic meters of holding pressure. That’s only in Tharsis Montes, of course. Some of the outlying tunnel complexes are even more crowded…So, are you here on business?”

  “No, just playing the tourist.”

  “This is a long way to come for a vacation.”

  “It was an early graduation present from my grand-father.”

  “I see. Well, hop up on the table.” Dr. Lee tapped the lightly padded surface.

  The woman hesitated again. “Do you want me to take my clothes off?”

  “My, you really do think we hunt buffaloes out here. No, just lie back and center your head, hands, and feet along the yellow lines.” Dr.
Lee helped adjust her arms. “This will only take a minute or two.”

  As she sank into the table s depressions, he reached into the lower cabinet and took out the transdermal air gun. He chafed her right forearm and then shot her with a full spectrum of telemites. While the diagnostic terminal probed her bones and soft tissues with ultrasonics, the beads would spread out in her bloodstream to examine her body chemistry, inventory her antibodies, and report on a dozen other organic functions. Each bead contained an array of technologies for medical analysis: gas chromatography and barometry, carbohydrate reagency, ion streaming, DNA combing—along with the telemetry to broadcast their findings back to the table’s receptors. Each of these nanomachines was inscribed on a friable silicon wafer held together by a soluble substrate. Twenty-four hours after Dr. Lee had finished examining Miss Coghlan, her kidneys would sweep up and dispose of the shards of his most sophisticated diagnostic equipment, which he bought by the thousand from an off-planet catalog service.

  “Ow!” she said, rubbing her arm.

  “Too late.” He grinned. “Now, just lie still for one more minute.” He studied the terminals screen as it built up the template display of a small female skeleton in three-dimensional outlines, coded beige. The bones enclosed various pulsing, squirming sacks—her organs and connective tissues—that were shown in standardized colors, mostly in the pastel range. The small gold ring on her third finger right hand, the silver bracelet with the communications charm on her left wrist, the metal snaps down the front of her garment—all came up as hard, white gleams on the screen, as would any other foreign objects or prostheses about or within her person.

  “I don’t see why you-all have to put me through this,” Coghlan declared, her jaw and throat muscles blurring on the screen as she spoke.

  “You must hold still,” he chided. Then Dr. Lee quickly brought his cursors up to the routine query points.

  “But I’ve been in the equivalent of quarantine on that transport ship, for months and months,” she said. “Surely any bug in my body would have died out by now.”