But the bearded man never came. Ewa had to pick herself up, which she did with no trouble. Her body felt like new.
“Friday?”
There was no answer. Friday didn’t seem to be here. Hopefully he hadn’t been destroyed. Had they possibly mixed up the connectors on the biosensor? Ewa did a few deep knee bends. Then it hit her that she wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. After the initial shock, she calmed down. If there weren’t any breathable air here, she would be long dead by now.
Then it occurred to her to look around. She was in the great hall she had just been observing from above. Did the Martians possess some kind of beaming technology that had just deposited her here? She’d always thought that beaming a living being was impossible due to the uncertainty principle.
To her right she saw a set of the cubes that they had identified previously as the computer. It seemed intact. Ewa hadn’t needed to feel bad about it after all. She walked over to it to take a closer look. As she did, she reached out her hand to touch the material—and her hand went right through with no resistance, which meant she hadn’t been beamed anywhere. Rather, this was more of a projection, even though everything felt very real.
Ewa shaded her eyes with her hand against her forehead and glanced up. Up above her, she saw something about two meters long and somewhat less than a meter wide. It was a human in a spacesuit. It was her body, lying up there. Ewa tried to steady herself on the computer, but again her hand went right through it.
“Friday?”
She tried again, but her live-in companion didn’t seem to have been duplicated. She was alone, and it was getting dark. Ewa took a deep breath. None of this was real. Friday had hacked her biosensor early that afternoon. It couldn’t be getting dark already, but what she saw was obvious. Night was falling. The sky was black. The roof was so clear that she could even make out some stars.
However, the night only lasted for two minutes, then the sun came up again. The sky was brighter than yesterday, with less dust in the air. None of this is real, she told herself. If an entire day had passed, she would feel ravenous, and her bladder would be full. But then the new day also quickly ended. The sun was already hanging low on the horizon. But something wasn’t right.
Then she remembered. The sun was setting in the east. She needed a few minutes to draw the right conclusions. In the meantime, the day turned to night and back to day again three more times. And the sun kept moving from west to east. What she saw was not reality, that was crystal clear. But it was also not a projection of the present. Someone was replaying the past. Time was moving backward. Whoever was showing this film was speeding up the reel. Day and night were no longer alternating every few minutes, but now by seconds, until finally the sky turned to a reddish-gray—the mean chromatic mix of day and night.
The images changed so rapidly that no distinguishable structure could be seen. Only the ceiling window, the hall, and she herself were constant fixtures. And the roughly 200-by-80-centimeter-long body lying at the edge of that window. It comforted Ewa immensely. She knew without anyone needing to tell her that she could go back at any time. She didn’t know exactly how, but it would surely reveal itself to her if she only wanted it badly enough, of that much she was certain.
How far along was the film now? The speed at which it was being rewound was impossible to judge. Beyond a rate of about 20 images, or days, per second, the human eye couldn’t register the flickering. All the same, she didn’t think this was a timeframe of years or centuries. If this had any purpose, the projection could only have one goal, and that was to show her the past of billions of years ago, as the early inhabitants must have fought a losing battle for their homeland. The computers in the great hall must have recognized that communication was futile, that they wouldn’t be able to find a common language.
Ewa stared in anticipation at the ceiling. The back of her neck should have been screaming in pain, but that was one of the advantages of not having a real body. She turned her head to the side just to see how far she could look over her right shoulder. Just a little bit more, she thought. She expected some resistance, but there wasn’t any. Now she could see what was behind her. Ewa laughed out loud. For the first time in her life, she could see behind her own back! Slowly, she turned her head further until she could see her left shoulder. This was crazy. And now she could see forward again. She had just succeeded in turning her head a full 360 degrees! If nothing else, this experiment was worth it purely for that.
A stroboscopic flashing began. She looked at the ceiling again. The days and nights were changing more slowly. One instantly recognizable difference was that the days were much brighter than in the present. The sky was sometimes gray, sometimes blue. Then Ewa noticed that the gray color was coming from the clouds as they passed over the blue sky. It was not the same blue as on Earth—it was much paler—but it was also not the same yellowish gray-brown of the Martian sky. How far into the past had she been taken? Human scientists estimated that there had been water, as well as a dense atmosphere, on Mars about three and a half to four billion years ago. Evolution hadn’t had much time to fill this world with life.
She heard a rustling noise. It was coming from all around her. Ewa looked to her feet. Coming out of invisible jets in the floor she saw clear water. She was standing up to her ankles in it. The cold water was probably around ten degrees Celsius, but it wasn’t unpleasant, and her feet weren’t getting wet. The water ran at a downward slope. It was now clear to her why the computer was set into a recess. The depression was a basin. She was inside a giant swimming pool. All that was missing was the smell of chlorine. And she wasn’t alone. In the pool were large animals that resembled manatees, up to two meters in length.
No, she corrected herself, they weren’t animals. Some of the creatures were focusing intensely on the computers in the middle of the basin. They had flipped out levers from the machines, which looked something like the manual buttons on an organ. They manipulated these with their front extremities. Ewa also observed the opening and closing of round orifices on one part of their bodies, presumably the head. They were probably communicating with one another. She couldn’t hear anything, so it must have been through infrasound or ultrasound, which her human ear couldn’t detect.
Ewa felt drawn to the creatures. She would have liked to touch or hug them. On Earth, she had once seen a manatee stranded on the beach. There, it had been clumsy and slow. But here, these creatures glided elegantly through the water. One of them came up to her, raised its right extremity as if in greeting and then turned away again.
Another one pulled itself onto the dry floor a little way away from her. It lay on its back and pulled what looked like a miniature version of itself out of its stomach pouch. Ewa took it to be its baby. It held its wriggling offspring up to its face so that their mouths touched. Then it looked the baby deep in the eyes before shooting something out of its mouth and into the baby’s. Food—what else?
But Ewa needed to be careful. It was much too easy to interpret something falsely. These creatures were not manatees. They had a completely different backstory. Their stomachs could have been located in their heads, and their brains might have spread out over their bodies like skin. The notion that evolution had coincidentally taken the same course here as on Earth was implausible, unless these beings had somehow influenced development on Earth. But that was probably beyond their abilities. They obviously hadn’t managed to save their own planet either.
And how could they have influenced evolution on Earth? During the Archean Age, approximately 3.5 billion years ago, Earth’s surface had still been barren. All the life that existed was exclusively in the oceans. The atmosphere contained barely any oxygen. Not until a billion years later, once Mars was already dry and dead, did the great oxidation event of the Proterozoic Age lead to the formation of ideal conditions to support modern life. At the same time, most of the organisms that had developed prior to that point went extinct.
Another of the manatees approa
ched her. The creature, like the one before it, raised its right extremity and make a waving motion. It had four fingers that were connected by a sort of webbed skin at their base. Ewa waited, and the creature continued to wave. Was that really meant for her? She turned her head to look behind her, but there was no one else around. So she interpreted the gesture as an invitation. The creature splashed its rear legs on the water’s surface, turned around, and moved along the edge of the basin through the hall.
She followed it. The water here reached her hips. The other creatures seemed to not see her. They were busy with the devices they were working on, which Ewa assumed were computers. They all seemed to have screens. Ewa thought she recognized a map of Mars on one of them. Numerous bodies of water, especially in the southern hemisphere, were highlighted on it. Now and again, her guide turned around to check that she was still there. Then it continued on its way.
They reached the end of the hall where the basin also ended. Her leader briefly disappeared under the water but reappeared a minute later, this time wearing a mask on its head and a sort of case on its back. The case was made of a soft material. It had two hoses extending from it that were attached to a helmet that the creature was also wearing.
Through the transparent visor, Ewa could see that water was flowing through the hoses and it kept the lower part of the creature’s head wet. She presumed it was breathing by filtering its respiratory gas out of the water. It was hard to guess whether the gas was oxygen or something else. And the fact that she was able to breathe here also provided no information, since she was a mere projection of herself.
The creature climbed out of the basin. Its movements on the dry ground were awkward, but also very efficient. They came to a circular structure containing a likewise-circular door that seemed to have been opened by some unknown hand. The creature hobbled through the opening. Ewa had to crouch down since the chamber inside was so low. Her gut told her that they were going to move upwards. They quickly reached their destination, and the door before them opened as well. The creature crawled out first, and Ewa followed. They found themselves on the mountain.
But it was not the mountain she knew. She was standing on the roof of an enormous, intimidating construction made of pitch-black material that extended far across the area. To the south, she could see a broad river flowing. The water reflected the sun, now at its zenith. A few small gray clouds floated by.
The slopes of the shores looked as though they were very recently dug out. The machine was standing at precisely the spot where the river ended. That couldn’t be a coincidence. They had falsely interpreted the machine’s function! Yes, it did turn over Mars’s surface in its path, but it wasn’t intended to release carbon dioxide. That was simply a byproduct of the present day, because there was by now a large amount of carbon dioxide in the soil. In reality, the machine’s true purpose must have been to increase the living space for Mars’s inhabitants by creating a landscape of canals across their home planet.
However, even from the beginning, Mars had possessed fewer water resources than Earth. A greater surface-mass of water meant more living area for the Mars inhabitants, who had seemingly adapted to the shallow bodies of water. This process must have also increased the rate of evaporation. As increasing amounts of water were absorbed into the atmosphere, it was an easy target for the solar wind due to the lack of a magnetic field.
The manatee-like creatures had apparently accelerated Mars’s evolution into a hostile desert through their own actions. Could they have already been aware of this at the time? Ewa observed the giant machine. Whoever controlled such technology must certainly have foreseen what was in store for the planet. But that didn’t seem to have prevented each subsequent generation from striving for a better life for themselves.
Ewa sighed. Why was this all so familiar to her? The creature that had led her up here was quietly observing the landscape. It was just as much a part of the simulation as she was. She couldn’t ask it anything since she wasn’t even able to hear the sounds it made. Ewa took a few steps. The dark material gave slightly underneath her as she walked, or was that just her imagination? Something lay at the edge of the platform. She immediately recognized its shape. It was the thing that connected her to reality. She still had a problem to solve. Exploring the secrets of a long-extinct culture was definitely exciting, but it would not help her friends. Her disappointment manifested itself through a tightening in her chest.
It was time to head back. The manatee that had led her here now ignored her. Perhaps the communication between her and the AI that would be protecting this machine for all eternity only went this far and no farther. It had given her, its visitor, a glimpse into the past. That was what visitors from the future were interested in. It couldn’t have had any knowledge of Ewa’s current problems, and Ewa also couldn’t think of any way to have explained anything to it.
How would she return to her body? She looked around, but there was no one there who could help her. She approached the manatee with the breathing apparatus. The creature was holding what looked like a ball in its hand, its outer surface glowing like a computer screen. With its delicate fingers, it touched the display, and the perspective changed each time it did so. What she saw was a miniature version of Mars. The oceans disappeared and were replaced by thin lines that ran outward from the South Pole. Lines of communications, or even streets?
The image transformed into green and red surfaces. Ewa could not interpret what they meant. The northern hemisphere was more red than green, and in the southern hemisphere, it was just the opposite. Ewa tried to take the sphere from the creature. Perhaps something would happen then, but her hand reached right through the manatee. Nothing here was real.
What could help her? Maybe she could return to her body if she went outside the projector’s range and thus became invisible. It was worth a try at least, and nothing would happen anyway as she was merely a projection—and a projection couldn’t die. She stepped closer to the edge of the roof. It was a deep drop, more than a hundred meters down.
She was scared, but she jumped anyway.
Sol 325, NASA Base
“I just can’t believe it,” said Sharon. “She can’t have been that crazy.”
Sarah shook her head. “You know her. When she gets an idea in her head...”
Sharon smoothed out the paper with the message. “Which is why tomorrow I will take the rover and move closer to the South Pole,” she read aloud from Ewa’s note.
“That was yesterday,” said Sarah. “She’s long gone.”
“Perhaps it was just a ploy,” said Sharon. “She doesn’t want the administrator to find her.”
“But her message came to us.”
“Maybe she thinks that one of us is working for the administrator,” said Sharon.
Sarah could only laugh. It was a relaxed laugh. Sharon had to be joking. No one was so cowardly as to join forces with the administrator.
“Do you think we should see how she’s doing?” asked Sharon. “Maybe she was hoping one of us will beg her to come back.”
“Ewa doesn’t think like that.”
“I wouldn’t put it past her,” said Sharon.
“Good, then I know your thinking, for future reference.”
“You mean, you don’t think we should check on her?”
“No I don’t. Let’s leave her in peace,” said Sarah.
Sharon sighed.
Sol 326, Mars City
Lance entered the fitness room and flipped his towel over the handlebar of the bike. He was here just to work out, nothing more. He needed to be sure that anyone watching would think that as well. It wasn’t going to be easy for him. He had never been a fan of secrecy, lying, or deception.
He got on the bike and started pedaling. It was set to a high gear, but he left it there. He wanted to get his heart rate up and break a sweat. In the left corner, a guy was lifting weights. The man was about 1.9 meters tall and had the stature of a boxer. He looked like someone you woul
dn’t want to cross, but he had a friendly face and smiled at Lance.
The door to the fitness room squeaked shut from the outside. Lance gave a start. Was this a trap?
“Relax. I told you it would be okay,” the other guy said.
“Was that a friend?”
“Yeah, there’s someone outside keeping watch so we can be undisturbed. The lock on the door needs to be fixed.”
“How practical,” said Lance.
“I’m Terran, Terran Carter.”
“Pleased to meet you, Terran.”
The would-be boxer put down the free weights and came over to him. They shook hands while Lance remained on the bike. “I’m sorry for what Summers did to all of you,” said Terran.
“How do you know about that?”
“Things like that get around. Not everyone who was part of the expedition agrees with what he did.”
“I’m glad to hear it. Does that mean you have formed a sort of secret alliance?”
“If you want to call it that. Actually, it’s only a few of us who discuss how we can eventually replace him with a new administrator.”
“Are there any concrete ideas yet?”
“You have probably already noticed, Lance, but there are a number of people here who are totally content with the status quo. Everything is advancing, and for them, that’s all that matters. They’d do themselves a disservice by going against the administrator.”
“That’s how people are.”
“You, too? I would understand it if you were. If you don’t want to be involved, you’ll never hear from us again. None of us will blame you or say anything. If the administrator finds out that you aren’t on his side, and he’s quite good at that, it’ll be the end of your career.”
“Career. That’s a good one! We’re only here for him to use us as pawns against each other.”
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