Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Juan shook his head in you-can’t-teach-people-anything disgust. Pickover went on. “But, see, whoever it was typed even more.”

  I looked at the glowing string of letters. In full it said: Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen them dine at half past eight, enjoying seven courses.

  “It’s too much?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” said Pickover, nodding. “My passphrase ends with the word ‘Forsytes.’”

  Juan was stroking his receding chin. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The files would unlock the moment the phrase was complete; the rest would just be discarded—systems that principally work with spoken commands don’t require you to press the enter key.”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Pickover. “But the rest of it isn’t what Galsworthy wrote. It’s not even close. The Man of Property is my favorite book; I know it well. The full opening line is ‘Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage.’ Nothing about the time they ate, or how many courses they had.”

  Juan pointed at the text on screen as if it had to be the correct version. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course!” replied Pickover. “Do a search and see for yourself.”

  I frowned. “No one but you knows your passphrase, right?”

  Pickover nodded vigorously. “I live alone, and I don’t have many friends; I’m a quiet sort. There’s no one I’ve ever told, and no one who could have ever overheard me saying it, or seen me typing it in.”

  “Somebody found it out,” said Juan.

  Pickover looked at me, then down at Juan. “I think . . .” he said, beginning slowly, giving me a chance to stop him, I guess, before he said too much. But I let him go on. “I think that the information was extracted from a scan of my mind made by NewYou.”

  Juan crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Impossible.”

  “What?” said Pickover, and “Why?” said I.

  “Can’t be done,” said Juan. “We know how to copy the vast array of interconnections that make up a human mind, and we know how to reinstantiate those connections on an artificial substrate. But we don’t know how to decode them; nobody does. There’s simply no way to sift through a digital copy of a mind and extract specific data.”

  Damn! If Juan was right—and he always was in computing matters—then all this business with Pickover was a red herring. There probably was no bootleg scan of his mind; despite his protestations of being careful, someone likely had just overheard his passphrase and decided to go hunting through his files. While I was wasting time on this, Joshua Wilkins was doubtless slipping further out of my grasp.

  Still, it was worth continuing this line of investigation for a few minutes more. “Any sign of where the access attempt was made?” I asked Juan.

  He shook his head. “No. Whoever did it knew what they were doing; they covered their tracks well. The attempt came over an outside line—that’s all I can tell for sure.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Juan. Appreciate your help.”

  He got up. “My pleasure. Now, how ’bout that drink?”

  I opened my mouth to say yes, but then it hit me—what Wilkins must be doing. “Umm, later, okay? I’ve got some more things to take care of here.”

  Juan frowned; he’d clearly hoped to collect his booze immediately. But I started maneuvering him toward the door. “Thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.”

  “Um, sure, Alex,” he said. He was obviously aware he was being given the bum’s rush, but he wasn’t fighting it too much. “Anytime.”

  “Yes, thank you awfully, Mr. Santos,” said Pickover.

  “No problem. If—”

  “See you later, Juan,” I said, opening the door for him. “Thanks so much.” I tipped my nonexistent hat at him.

  Juan shrugged, clearly aware that something was up but not motivated sufficiently to find out what. He went through the door, and I hit the button that caused it to slide shut behind him. As soon as it was closed, I put an arm around Pickover’s shoulders and propelled him back to the computer. I pointed at the line Juan had highlighted on the screen and read the ending of it aloud: “‘ . . . dine at half past eight, enjoying seven courses.’”

  Pickover nodded. “Yes. So?”

  “Numbers are often coded info,” I said. “‘Half past eight; seven courses.’ What’s that mean to you?”

  “To me? Nothing. Back when I ate, I liked to do it much earlier than that, and I never had more than one course.”

  “But it could be a message.”

  “From whom?”

  There was no easy way to tell him this. “From you to you.”

  He drew his artificial eyebrows together. “What?”

  “Look,” I said, motioning for him to sit down in front of the computer, “Juan is doubtless right. You can’t sift a digital scan of a human mind for information.”

  “But that must be what Wilkins is doing.”

  I shook my head. “No. The only way to find out what’s in a mind is to ask it interactively.”

  “But . . . but no one’s asked me my passphrase.”

  “No one has asked this you. But Joshua Wilkins must have transferred the extra copy of your mind into a body, so that he could deal with it directly. And that extra copy must have revealed your passphrase to him.”

  “You mean . . . you mean there’s another me? Another conscious me?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “But . . . no, no. That’s . . . why, that’s illegal. Bootleg copies of human beings—my God, Lomax, it’s obscene!”

  “I’m going to go see if I can find him,” I said.

  “It,” said Pickover forcefully.

  “What?”

  “It. Not him. I’m the only ‘him’—the only real Rory Pickover.” He shuddered. “My God, Lomax, I feel so . . . so violated! A stolen, active copy of my mind! It’s the ultimate invasion of privacy . . .”

  “That may be,” I said. “But the bootleg is trying to tell you something. He—it—gave Wilkins the passphrase and then tacked some extra words onto it, in order to get a message to you.”

  “But I don’t recognize those extra words,” said Pickover, sounding exasperated.

  “Do they mean anything to you? Do they suggest anything?”

  Pickover re-read the text on the screen. “I can’t imagine what,” he said, “unless . . . no, no, I’d never think up a code like that.”

  “You obviously just did think of it. What’s the code?”

  Pickover was quiet for a moment, as if deciding if the thought was worth giving voice. Then: “Well, New Klondike is circular in layout, right? And it consists of concentric rings of buildings. Half past eight—that would be between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, no? And seven courses—in the Seventh Circle out from the center? Maybe the damned bootleg is trying to draw our attention to a location, a specific place here in town.”

  “The Seventh Circle, off Eighth Avenue,” I said. “That’s a rough area. I go to a gym near there.”

  “The shipyard,” said Pickover. “Isn’t it there, too?”

  “Yeah.” Dry-dock work was so much easier in a shirtsleeve environment, and, in the early days, repairing and servicing spaceships had been a major business under the dome. I started walking toward the door. “I’m going to investigate.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Pickover.

  I shook my head. He would doubtless be more hindrance than help. “It’s too dangerous. I should go alone.”

  Pickover looked for a moment like he was going to protest, but then he nodded. “All right. But if you find another me . . .”

  “Yes?” I said. “What would you like me to do?”

  Pickover gazed at me with pleading eyes. “Erase it. Destroy it.” He shuddered again. “I never want to see the damned thing.”

  EIGHT

  Ihad to get some sleep—damn, but sometimes I d
o wish I were a transfer—so I took the hovertram out to my apartment. My place was on Fifth Avenue, which was a great address in New York but a lousy one in New Klondike, especially out near the rim; it was mostly home to people who had tried and failed at fossil hunting, hence its nickname “Sad Sacks Fifth Avenue.”

  I let myself have six hours—Mars hours, admittedly, which were slightly longer than Earth ones—then I headed out to the old shipyard. The sun was just coming up as I arrived there. The sky through the dome was pink in the east and purple in the west.

  Some active maintenance and repair work was still done on spaceships here, but most of these hulks were no longer spaceworthy and had been abandoned. Any one of them would make a good hideout, I thought; spaceships were shielded against radiation, making it hard to scan through their hulls to see what was going on inside.

  The shipyard was a large field holding vessels of various sizes and shapes. Most were streamlined—even Mars’s tenuous atmosphere required that. Some were squatting on tail fins; some were lying on their bellies; some were supported by articulated legs. I tried every hatch I could see on these craft, but, so far, they all had their airlocks sealed tightly shut.

  Finally, I came to a monstrous abandoned spaceliner—a great hull, some three hundred meters long, fifty meters wide, and a dozen meters high. The name Skookum Jim was still visible in chipped paint near the bow, which is the part I came across first, and the slogan “Mars or Bust!” had been splashed across the metal surface in a paint that had survived the elements better than the liner’s name. I walked a little farther alongside the hull, looking for a hatch, until—

  Yes! I finally understood what a fossil hunter felt when he at last turned up a perfectly preserved rhizomorph. There was an outer airlock door and it was open. The other door, inside, was open, too. I stepped through the chamber, entering the ship proper. There were stands for holding space suits but the suits themselves were long gone.

  I walked to the far end of the room and found another door—one of those submarine-style ones with a locking wheel in the center. This one was closed; I figured it would probably have been sealed shut at some point, but I tried the wheel anyway, and damned if it didn’t spin freely, disengaging the locking bolts. I pulled the door open, then took the flashlight off my belt and aimed it into the interior. It looked safe, so I stepped through. The door was on spring-loaded hinges; as soon as I let go of it, it closed behind me.

  The air was dry and had a faint odor of decay to it. I headed down the corridor, the pool of illumination from my flashlight going in front of me, and—

  A squealing noise. I swung around, and the beam from my flashlight caught the source before it scurried away: a large brown rat, its eyes two tiny red coals in the light. People had been trying to get rid of the rats—and cockroaches and silverfish and other vermin that had somehow made it here from Earth—for mears.

  I turned back around and headed deeper into the ship. The floor wasn’t quite level: it dipped a bit to—to starboard, they’d call it—and I also felt that I was gaining elevation as I walked along. The ship’s floor had no carpeting; it was just bare, smooth metal. Oily water pooled along the starboard side; a pipe must have ruptured at some point. Another rat scurried by up ahead; I wondered what they ate here, aboard the dead hulk of the ship.

  I thought I should check in with Pickover—let him know where I was. I activated my phone, but the display said it was unable to connect. Of course: the radiation shielding in the spaceship’s hull kept signals from getting out.

  It was growing awfully cold. I held my flashlight straight up in front of my face and saw that my breath was now coming out in visible clouds. I paused and listened. There was a steady dripping sound: condensation, or another leak. I continued along, sweeping the flashlight beam left and right in good detective fashion as I did so.

  There were doors at intervals along the corridor—the automatic sliding kind you usually find aboard spaceships. Most ships used hibernation for bringing people to Mars, but this was an old-fashioned spaceliner with cabins; the passengers and crew would have been awake for the whole eight months or more of the journey out.

  Most of the door panels had been pried open, and I shined my flashlight into each of the revealed rooms. Some were tiny passenger quarters, some were storage, one was a medical facility—all the equipment had been removed, but the examining beds betrayed the room’s function. They were welded down firmly—not worth the effort for scavengers to salvage, I guess.

  I checked yet another set of quarters, then came to a closed door, the first one I’d seen along this hallway.

  I pushed the open button but nothing happened; the ship’s electrical system was dead. There was an emergency handle recessed into the door’s thickness. I could have used three hands just then: one to hold my flashlight, one to hold my revolver, and one to pull on the handle. I tucked the flashlight into my right armpit, held my gun with my right hand, and yanked on the recessed handle with my left.

  The door hardly budged. I tried again, pulling harder—and almost popped my arm out of its socket. Could the door’s tension control have been adjusted to require a transfer’s strength to open it? Perhaps.

  I tried another pull and, to my astonishment, light began to spill out from the room. I’d hoped to just whip the door open, taking advantage of the element of surprise, but the damned thing was only moving a small increment with each pull of the handle. If there was someone on the other side and he or she had a gun, it was no doubt now leveled directly at the door.

  I stopped for a second, shoved the flashlight into my pocket, and—damn, I hated having to do this—holstered my revolver so that I could free up my other hand to help me pull the door open. With both hands now gripping the recessed handle, I tugged with all my strength, letting out a grunt as I did so. The light from within stung my eyes; they’d grown accustomed to the darkness. Another pull, and the door panel had now slid far enough into the wall for me to slip into the room by turning sideways. I took out my gun and let myself in.

  A voice, harsh and mechanical, but no less pitiful for that: “Please . . .”

  My eyes swung to the source of the sound. There was a worktable with a black top attached to the far wall. And strapped to that table—

  Strapped to that table was a transfer’s synthetic body. But this wasn’t like the fancy, almost perfect simulacrum that my client Cassandra inhabited. This was a crude, simple humanoid form with a boxy torso and limbs made up of cylindrical metal segments. And the face—

  The face was devoid of any sort of artificial skin. The eyes, blue in color and looking startlingly human, were wide, and the teeth looked like dentures loose in the head. The rest of the face was a mess of pulleys and fiber optics, of metal and plastic.

  “Please . . .” said the voice again. I looked around the rest of the room. There was an excimer battery, about the size of a softball, with several cables snaking out of it, including some that led to portable lights. There was also a closet with a simple door. I pulled it open—this one slid easily—to make sure no one else had hidden in there while I was coming in. An emaciated rat that had been trapped inside at some point scooted out of the closet and through the still-partially-open corridor door.

  I turned my attention to the transfer. The body was clothed in simple black denim pants and a beige T-shirt.

  “Are you okay?” I said, looking at the skinless face.

  The metal skull moved slightly left and right. The plastic lids for the glass eyeballs retracted, making the non-face into a caricature of imploring. “Please . . .” he said for a third time.

  I looked at the restraints holding the artificial body in place: thin nylon bands attached to the tabletop, pulled taut. I couldn’t see any release mechanism. “Who are you?” I asked.

  I was half prepared for his answer: “Rory Pickover.” But it didn’t sound anything like the Rory Pickover I’d met: the cultured British accent was absent, and this synthesized voice was much
higher pitched.

  Still, I shouldn’t take this sad thing’s statement at face value—especially since it had hardly any face. “Prove it,” I said. “Prove you’re Rory Pickover.”

  The glass eyes looked away. Perhaps the transfer was thinking of how to satisfy my demand—or perhaps he was just avoiding my eyes. “My citizenship number is AG-394-56-432.”

  I shook my head. “No good,” I said. “It’s got to be something only Rory Pickover would know.”

  The eyes looked back at me, the plastic lids lowered, perhaps in suspicion. “It doesn’t matter who I am,” he said. “Just get me out of here.”

  That sounded reasonable on the surface of it, but if this was another Rory Pickover . . .

  “Not until you prove your identity to me,” I said. “Tell me where the Alpha Deposit is.”

  “Damn you,” said the transfer. “The other way didn’t work, so now you’re trying this.” The mechanical head looked away. “But this won’t work, either.”

  “Tell me where the Alpha Deposit is,” I said, “and I’ll free you.”

  “I’d rather die,” he said. And then, a moment later, he added wistfully, “Except . . .”

  I finished the thought for him. “Except you can’t.”

  He looked away again. It was hard to feel for something that appeared so robotic; that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. “Tell me where O’Reilly and Weingarten were digging. Your secret is safe with me.”

  He said nothing, but my mind was racing and my heart was pounding—those fabulous specimens the other Rory had shown me, the thought of so many more of them out there to be collected, the incalculable wealth they represented. I was startled to discover that my gun was now aimed at the robotic head, and the words “Tell me!” hissed from my lips. “Tell me before—”