Reentry

by Peter Cawdron

I nod.

  “Contempt of Congress is a federal crime punishable by a prison sentence; do you understand?”

  “I do.” I didn’t, but it’s pretty damn obvious now. A knot forms in my throat. My palms feel clammy, almost sweaty despite the air conditioning.

  “If you need anything during these proceedings, the marshal is able to assist.”

  My escort takes his leave and stands to one side, over by the wooden panels.

  “Thank you.” I’m shaking like a leaf. I take a sip of water to steady my nerves, but I’m careful not to drink too much. I get the feeling that glass has to last a long time. Besides, I’m not sure what the policy is on bathroom breaks.

  Although there are lights set around the room, it seems there’s a spotlight glaring down on me, catching my eyes. I’m sitting under an air-conditioning vent. Great. Goosebumps appear on my exposed arms and I’m regretting wearing short sleeves. It’s all I can do not to shiver, even though the air is cool but not cold. Nerves.

  Each of the senators has a plaque in front of them, announcing their name and constituency.

  The elderly representative for Colorado begins.

  “You’ve been called before this committee to provide testimony regarding the attack by the artificial intelligence on the Endeavour colony. After devastating Earth, the intelligence sought to flee the planet and find refuge on Mars. You were involved in the fight against it, were you not?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  That question was too easy. Why do I feel as though a hangman is sizing up the rope for a noose?

  “In your capacity as a research scientist, were you in a leadership role within the colony?”

  “No.”

  “But you took it on yourself to assume a leadership role.”

  “No.”

  The senator peers at his notes. “But you took it on yourself to negotiate with the other modules during the attack? Speaking with the Chinese and the Russians?”

  “We didn’t know we were under attack.” I feel decidedly uncomfortable with where this line of reasoning is leading.

  “But you acted against the wishes of the U.S. commander and opened dialogue with representatives from other nations, even though those nations were harboring the intelligence here on Earth?”

  I hope my eyes are speaking louder than my words. I’m sure they’re as wide as saucers. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about in regards to what those nations did during the war.”

  An aide hands a sheet of paper to the senator.

  “You conspired with the Russians and the Chinese to take a Mars rover off-site, did you not?”

  I nod, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. The senators look to me for a verbal response before continuing.

  “Yes.”

  “And what was the purpose of your journey beyond the colony?”

  “We thought Connor was lying about the arrival of a Prospect resupply ship.”

  “Why would he lie?” the senator asks.

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “So, you assumed he was lying.”

  I nod, hoping to get away with a nonverbal response.

  He peers over his reading glasses. “Was he lying?”

  “No. He didn’t know the craft had landed several miles off course. None of us knew.”

  The senator looks angry. “Did it occur to you that your loyalty should have been to the American contingent and not the Chinese or the Russians? That you were, in effect, assisting a foreign power acting against a U.S. government installation?”

  A lump forms in my chest.

  “By venturing out of the colony during a time of crisis, you put your own life at risk, along with the lives of those sent to rescue you. You lost a rover worth . . .” He looks down at a sheet of paper. “Eighty-seven million dollars.”

  “I—We . . .” I choke up, unable to speak.

  “No, go on.” The senator patronizes me. “We’re all here to hear from you. We want to understand your reasoning.” And the noose tightens around my neck, restricting my breathing. I’m painfully aware that anything I say will sound like justification after the fact, and that it’s impossible for them to appreciate the sense of isolation and loss we felt.

  “Ah . . .” is all I manage. My gaze drifts around the room, wanting to settle on anything other than dozens of hostile eyes watching my every movement. They’re looking to interpret even the subtlest aspects of my body language as signs of a lie. “It was after midnight when we learned of the attack on Earth.”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you?”

  The hangman adjusts my stance, making sure I’m positioned over the trapdoor. He lays the knotted noose on my shoulder, ensuring there’s enough slack to snap my neck with a single, sudden fall. I may be sitting on a plush leather chair in front of a beautiful polished mahogany desk, with all eyes on me, but I feel as though I’ve been led into an execution chamber.

  “The Chinese module.”

  “You were having an affair with one of the Chinese astronauts; is that correct?”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Not an affair . . . We were in love . . . In a relationship.”

  “Would you concede that your relationship with a foreign national may have unduly influenced your subsequent actions?”

  I purse my lips, close my eyes for a moment, and breathe deeply, inhaling and exhaling through my nostrils as I try to calm myself. I’m not sure how many people there are in the room, perhaps hundreds. There’s at least twelve senators, each with two or three support staff nestled in behind them, but the room is quiet. It’s as though it’s just me and this senator.

  “Yes.”

  The senator nods, but before he can say anything else, I add, “But whether that is for good or ill is debatable. We were part of an international mission. We had a responsibility to each other regardless of nationality. When the war broke out, the immediate reaction was to withdraw. I felt that was wrong—a mistake. I felt we needed each other more than ever.”

  The senator doesn’t look impressed. He holds his glasses as he speaks, pointing at me with them.

  “The Russians and the Chinese shared false and misleading information with you, information you should have conveyed to your commander, but instead, you blindly followed their direction and proceeded out onto the surface to look for a supply craft that landed some ten miles outside the search area. Is that a fair summary of what happened next?”

  My lips tighten. As much as I don’t want to admit it, and as much as I want to argue that the situation was far more fluid and complex than that, I realize I need to keep my answers simple and look for a genuine opening to appeal to reason. Fight the battles you can win, Liz. I lean forward, speaking a single word into the microphone.

  “Yes.”

  “Had you shared this information with Commander James Connor, what would have happened?”

  My lips are dry. I’m not sure if that’s because of the air conditioning or my nerves.

  “We did show him.”

  “We?” the senator asks.

  “Vlad. Wen. Me.”

  “When did you show him? Before or after your surface run?”

  “After.”

  “After the damage had already been done to the atmospheric reclamation unit in the engineering plant.”

  My eyes go wide. This is the first I’ve heard of what led to the death of Jianyu and the majority of the Eurasians. Su-shun speculated that it may have been due to a ruptured pipe, but we didn’t know if that was correct or how that could have led to the catastrophic failure that poisoned the atmosphere within the hub. Once the hub was destroyed, there was no way to know for sure.

  “You didn’t know? Imagery captured by the closed-circuit fire suppression system showed one of the robotic units tampering with the water recycling machinery to make it appear like an accident—an equipment malfunction.”

  “No. I didn’t know.” My hands are shaking so I h
ide them under the desk.

  “If you had gone directly to your superior officer, the forged images would have been exposed sooner. Commander Connor would have been forewarned. Lives would have been spared.”

  A solitary tear runs down my cheek. The senator’s point isn’t a question, but I feel it demands an answer nonetheless.

  “Yes.”

  My lips quiver. I don’t want to be here. Dark lenses stare at me. Camera shutters click softly in rapid succession. I wipe the tear away, raising my head and staring at the senator, trying to match his intensity. He’s unmoved by my emotion.

  “We were in shock. All of us. Connor. Harrison. The Chinese. The Russians. We did what we thought was right. We were reeling from the loss on Earth and the ramifications of being abandoned on Mars.”

  “You weren’t thinking straight.”

  “No. I wasn’t thinking straight. I—I was confused. Hurt. I reached out to the other modules. I wanted them to understand that we were all in this together.”

  “And the A.I. played you.”

  I hesitate, but a single word slips from my mouth.

  “Yes.”

  I bite my lip. The bitter realization of the part I played in this tragedy feels like it’s squeezing the breath out of me.

  “The A.I. set the various modules against each other, and you played right into that narrative, didn’t you?”

  An overwhelming sense of guilt washes over me like waves crashing on a beach. “Yes.”

  Another senator says, “I’d like to talk to you about the destruction of the base.” Jacinta Bettesworth is younger than the other members of Congress present. Flecks of gray are visible in her dark black hair, but her skin is smooth, youthful in appearance. She’s probably in her mid-fifties. She’s wearing a dark dress with a high collar. No makeup. No pretenses.

  I swallow the lump in my throat.

  “You were the one who gave the command to blow the dome over the hub, is that correct?”

  “I—No . . . I mean, when I was down there fighting the A.I.—yes. But it’s not that simple. It wasn’t an order or a command.”

  The senator reads from an electronic pad as she speaks. “By this time, Commander Connor was dead. Engineer Jonathan Harrison was effectively in command of the U.S. crew, but he was missing in the fighting and, according to the testimony of Commander Wen, assumed dead. That would have had the leadership of the U.S. contingent pass to senior ranking, surviving members such as James McCallum, Michelle Gonzales, Philip Johnson, and yourself. Is that correct?”

  I hadn’t thought about it in that context. “Yes.”

  “And three of the four of you convened a leadership quorum in the outpost L2, where, along with Commander Wen, you authorized the destruction of the hub. Is that correct?”

  My head sags. “Yes.” I breathe deeply. “But it wasn’t like that.”

  “What was it like?”

  Senator Bettesworth leans forward on her elbows, awaiting my reply.

  “We had to do something. We had to strike back.”

  The senator doesn’t look impressed. “And striking back necessitated the destruction of a multi-trillion-dollar research facility?”

  “We were on the run.” I’m frantic, manic, feeling as though I’ve been thrust back onto the surface of Mars again, forced to relive that moment, only there’s no opportunity to change anything. I’m condemned to repeat the exact same steps on those rough stones and shifting sands. “We’d just been attacked on the surface. An automaton came at us disguised as a survivor, wielding a knife, trying to rupture our suits. It tried to kill Wen. James had his suit torn open. He almost died out there. Once we got inside L2, we felt we had to strike back. We had no idea what capabilities the A.I. actually had. We had to do something other than run.”

  “Listen to yourself.” The senator ignores my recollection, focusing only on one passing comment. “By your own admission, you had no idea what capability the A.I. actually had. Isn’t it possible you over­estimated the threat posed by the A.I.? After all, didn’t you walk unopposed into the basement just a few hours later?”

  “But I didn’t know that. Not then.”

  “No, and yet you decided to destroy the base, crippling the colony for decades to come and killing a dozen colonists, including Engineer Harrison.”

  “I didn’t have the luxury of hindsight.” I’m frustrated. I feel I’m being harassed by the committee. “I felt the urgency of the moment. I worried we were losing any possibility of defeating this thing. We had to take the initiative while we still could.”

  The senator is cold in her assessment of my actions. “And you did. You were able to sever the cables within the data center, effectively trapping the A.I. Is it fair to say that could have been accomplished without the destruction of the hub and the loss of an additional twelve lives?”

  I’m shaking.

  “I was attacked down there—twice. There was no guarantee of success. Sitting here on Earth, it’s easy to think destroying the dome was excessive, but we felt we had to stop the A.I. We feared what would happen if it fled with a high-fidelity 3-D printer. That would have given it autonomy, the ability to produce its own parts.”

  The senator sounds incredulous. “You thought it could again threaten life on Earth?”

  “With good reason.” My blood boils at the insinuation my judgment was in error. Perhaps my approach was too heavy-handed, but playing armchair quarterback to score cheap points after the game has already finished isn’t going to change anything. Destroying the dome was the right decision. I’m sure of it. I try to explain my reasoning.

  “We feared an outbreak. Like—like something along the lines of an Ebola outbreak but in an electronic form. We were afraid of what would happen if the A.I. wasn’t contained.

  “In 1918, the Spanish flu broke out in Europe and killed fifty million people—that’s more people than died in all of World War I. Do you know where the flu originated, Senator? That particular lethal strain? Where it came from?”

  Senator Bettesworth doesn’t look particularly impressed at being forced to answer a question that seems off-topic. She raises her hands slightly, signaling some exasperation. “I don’t know. Spain?”

  “China, Senator.”

  Her lips tighten and her gaze narrows, but she listens.

  “From China, it spread to Canada, and from there to France before becoming a full-blown epidemic in Spain, killing tens of millions of people, but all you’ll ever hear about is Spain. Why? Because by the time it hit Spain it was unstoppable.”

  The senator says, “And, to extend your analogy about the Spanish flu, you felt you were acting in either China or Canada? You were trying to cut it off while you still could?”

  I nod. “Yes. We couldn’t give the A.I. a chance to spread again. We knew it was vulnerable. We felt we would never have another opportunity to contain it. We worried about what would happen next.”

  Bettesworth nods, which is the first indication I’ve had from any of the senators that they’re willing to consider any other perspective.

  Another senator gets my attention, leaning forward and speaking into the microphone. “After the war, you resurrected the A.I. Why?”

  “Su-shun salvaged a number of hard drives.” I gesture to the solitary bundle sitting inert beside me. “He wanted to run analytics on the data stream.”

  “And you let him.”

  I laugh—not as though I’m responding to a joke, but because they think anyone was listening to me on Mars. Since the war, there’s been little thought given to command structures within the colony. We lost three of our four commanders, and there’s been an unspoken agreement that Wen assumed overall command, but that was never tested or questioned. Now that she’s returned to Earth, I’m not sure who’s in charge. No doubt NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, and CNSA have their primary contacts, but I doubt anyone up there is paying too much attention. It’s a scientific research station, not a military base. The priority is survival.

&n
bsp; “Originally, Su-shun only wanted to probe the drives, looking for clues. There was no thought given to allowing them to boot up on their own code base.”

  “But?” The senator for Washington State encourages me to continue.

  “But he was curious.”

  A murmur ripples through the crowd behind me.

  “He cut the physical lines to the L2 module, removed all radio transmitters and wireless components, and ran the module on solar, ensuring it was completely isolated.”

  “Then he restarted the machine?”

  “Yes.” I know what’s coming next.

  “What did you find?”

  “We found . . . Jianyu.” I can’t help myself. I have to look at the hard drives beside me. What does that say about me and the level of emotional attachment I have to these slabs of metal and silicon?

  “The Chinese doctor—the one that was murdered by the A.I.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your companion?”

  “Yes.”

  Companion is a step up from the accusation of having an affair, so I’ll take it. We weren’t married or even engaged, but he was my partner.

  “And you’re sure it was him?”

  I have to be honest. “I don’t know. Some days, I’m convinced. Some days, it’s a definite yes. Others, I find myself skeptical.” I pause. “You’ve read the transcripts, Senator?”

  “Yes, we have been briefed on your discussions with the artificial intelligence.”

  I take a deep breath. “It’s him. It’s subjective, I know. But if I put my misgivings aside, there’s nothing he’s said or done that’s inconsistent with the man I knew.”

  The senator for Colorado speaks with somber authority: “There are a lot of people who would say you’re too close to this to see clearly.”

  “Yes, but what else do we have in life? None of us have any certainty about reality. It’s a philosophical point, I know, but none of us have any guarantee the world around us isn’t fabricated.”

  “Do you dream, Dr. Anderson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you participate in your dreams?”

  “I guess so. Yes.”

  “Do you ever meet people you know in your dreams?”

  “Yes.”