by S. J. Morden
He reached the post. It was just that, a metal post in the ground, at the corner of two concrete paths, but it marked his beginning and end points. He knew better than to slow down for it. He slapped his hand on it as he passed—that did nothing, he just did it because he could—and then eased off. He felt a deep and abiding weariness steal over him as he stopped, and he wondered how long he could keep it up for. Long enough to get to Mars, for certain. There wasn’t an alternative.
The beeps ended, and a voice spoke. He had no idea if it was a computer-generated voice, or someone with such precise diction that it sounded like a computer. Either way, it never seemed to respond to his replies. “Report to Building Six, Room Two-zero-five. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged,” said Frank. That was mostly all he ever said. It was mostly all he was required to say. Brack needed more, but encounters with him were usually only once every few days, which was more than enough.
Frank wiped his face with his top again, pressing the cloth against his skin, drawing it roughly down to his neck and letting go. Building Six was that one, over there. He wasn’t expected to run, but he wasn’t to dawdle, either. The staff used carts to get around, but they were print-activated too, and he didn’t have the authorization.
He’d named things, in the absence of being told their official names. He was currently stood in the Valley. The decaying, mine-ridden mountain was the Mountain. There was also the Wire, which confined him, and the Bunker, where he slept in Building Three. The medical center was officially Building Two, but he called it the Blood Bank, on account of what they did to him there.
He walked up the ramp to Building Six, pressed his finger to the glass plaque and waited for the door. There were people walking backwards and forwards inside the foyer, but he knew better than to engage with them, or tap on the frame to get them to let him in. It wasn’t going to happen.
The door’s lock clicked. He pushed against it, went through, and waited for it to shut behind him. He’d get a ticket if he didn’t. If he collected too many tickets? He didn’t know: he couldn’t ask anyone to find out. Not the medics. Not the other staff. Especially not Brack. But he could guess.
Room Two-zero-five was on the second floor. He pressed his finger against the lock, waited for it to cycle, and went in. He’d been expecting another training video—but not a roomful of cons as well.
That was what they all were, clearly. They’d arranged themselves in the room in a way that was instantly familiar to anyone from prison: the stronger, more confident ones asserting themselves by taking space, the weaker going to the corners. Six of them. They looked at him, stained with sweat, out of breath. The older, gray-haired woman with the cheekbones and the eyebrows, who’d taken center-stage on one side of the boardroom-length table, wrinkled her nose at him. The thin black kid and the curly-headed white boy—and he was just a boy—were down the far end. Opposite Grandma was another woman, coffee skin and spiral hair. A moon-faced man was right by the door, and the last member was … vast.
Huge arms, huge legs, neck like a tire. Blond stubble on his scalp. And the tattoos. It took a moment for Frank to scan them all. 1488 on his forehead. HATE on the knuckles of the one visible hand. Swastika on his neck. Aryan Brotherhood.
Frank looked a little too long, and the man caught his stare. He gave a slight nod—I see you—then returned his attention to the short wall at the end of the room, which was one big screen.
“They made me run up the Mountain,” said Frank. “Sorry I’m late. And a bit funky.”
The moon-faced man kicked out a chair next to him at the same moment that Frank’s earpiece told him he needed to sit down. They were all wearing earpieces. They were all wearing identical uniforms. Frank realized with a start that this was his team, his crew of seven.
He slid into the proffered chair, and the moment his backside hit the plastic, the screen flickered and lit up. A commentary started to play in Frank’s ear, and judging by the expression of everyone else, in theirs, too. “This is a Xenosystems Operations training video. You will find the following orientation information vital for the successful outcome of your mission. Please pay close attention throughout.”
They all started like that.
“Congratulations. You have been selected as trainee crew for Mars Base One, mankind’s first permanent presence on the Martian surface. This prestigious project will be built and staffed by Xenosystems Operations on behalf of NASA, for the good of our nation, and all mankind. You have been recruited to help XO to fulfill that contract. You will leave Earth in six months’ time—”
Six months. Among those who realized just how short a time that was, there was a murmur of consternation.
“—and travel to Mars. You will be placed in suspended animation for the duration of the journey, which will take in the region of eight calendar months—”
More murmurings.
“—and on arrival, Phase one will begin immediately with assembly of the prefabricated module units. Establishing early self-sufficiency of the base is an absolute priority. Synthesizing enough oxygen and water to provide yourself with life support, growing your own food, and generating your own electricity will be critical milestones on this path. Your complete co-operation is needed in order to complete the base within the time allotted.
“NASA astronauts will already be in flight on your arrival. There is no facility to allow for, nor is there expectation of, a delay in the base’s readiness. After the base has been constructed, you will spend time rigorously testing the structure and infrastructure, and then enter Phase two, a maintenance mode which requires you to maintain your particular aspect of the base’s systems. If necessary, the delivery of extra materials to extend and re-equip the base will require you to resume your original Phase one functions.
“Visiting scientist astronauts and other NASA staff will have priority over your time. You will treat them with the utmost respect and assist them when and where required, remembering that you will remain serving prisoners and subject to the Californian penal code for the whole length of your sentences.”
The graphics playing on the screen showed the landing ship touching gently down on a brick-red plain, already scattered with supply canisters. People—it could only be Frank and the others—emerged and went to the nearest canister and constructed a towing vehicle. While that drove off and corralled the other supplies, the rest of the white-spacesuited crew set to and built the first module. In a slightly improbable time, they connected it to a second, and pressurized it.
Almost as if by magic, solar panels appeared, and a satellite dish. More modules popped up, with parts coming from the recovered and neatly laid-out rows of canisters. The landing craft was off to one side, and nearby there were three parallel lines of modules nestled together on the Martian surface.
Frank turned his head sideways. The base was bigger than he’d thought. Fifteen separate sections, with another couple of independent units close by. Big set of panels, dish, antennae. Other machinery he didn’t yet know the function of.
Six months to learn how to do all that? They needed to all train on how to fit the airlocks, and the structural flooring of the modules. There’d be more specialized work inside: bedrooms and a sick bay and maintenance bays and the greenhouse, and they needed power and water and air before they could grow so much as a single potato.
He glanced at the others. The black woman opposite was staring at the screen, one eyebrow arched and the muscles at the side of her jaw flexing. Down his end of the table, they all appeared to be either stunned or frowning. Being exposed to the enormity of the task had put their meager training so far into grim perspective. Frank had been there since … when? The end of February? It was, was—Did he even know? April? May? Three months, tops. They’d told him pretty much jack, and he guessed that went for the others too.
The graphics continued. Once the base was mostly complete, another ship arrived in the vicinity. Buggies went out—though Frank couldn’t see wher
e the additional buggy had come from—and collected the crew.
The film finished. That was it. That was all they were going to get for now. Frank leaned back in his seat so far that it creaked.
“Well, that was a crock of shit,” said the gray-haired woman.
“Six months?”
“A year asleep in a spaceship? Is that even legal?”
“We can’t learn to do all that. The regular astronauts are like, trained for years.”
Frank tilted his head until he was staring up at the ceiling. “We’ve got a choice,” he said. “We can either do it, or we spend the rest of our lives in the Hole.”
“The way I’m looking at it,” said the moon-faced man next to him, “that might be more certain.”
“How many teams do you think they got doing this?” Frank slowly winched his body back until he could rest his elbows on the tabletop. “How many other groups like us do you think they have?”
“What do you mean?” asked the thin black kid, and Gray-hair rolled her eyes.
“God’s sake, it’s obvious what he means. You think we’re the only ones? You think that if we get our panties in a bunch here, it’ll have any impact on them at all? They’ll pick another team of people who might actually want to go.”
“You all heard what I’ve just heard: selected as trainee crew. Trainee. We can still flunk this,” said Frank. “But let me tell you now: every one of us in this room is going to Mars. It doesn’t matter if none of us likes anyone else. If the only way I get to Mars is by you getting to Mars, that’s how it’s going to happen. Works both ways: you’re relying on me to get you there, too. That’s pretty much the bottom line.”
“So you,” and Gray-hair gestured at Moon-face, “whatever your name is: I’m not going in the Hole for you, and neither is anyone else. You get your shit together right now.”
“Or what, lady?”
“Or Adolf over there will rip your head off and stick your tongue up your ass.”
Everyone looked at the neo-Nazi man-mountain. He shrugged. “I don’t do that any more. But neither do I want the Hole.”
Moon-face tapped his fingers on the table. “You got a potty mouth, lady.”
“Doctor, or Alice.”
“You don’t even know my name.”
“But you’ll remember mine.” She stared around the table. “No one craps out. Everyone got that?”
“Who said anything about crapping out?” said the black kid. “I’m going to goddamn Mars.”
“We’ve got six months to get this right,” said Adolf. “I’m not going to let anyone down.”
“Yeah. I guess so.” The black woman held up her hands. “It’s not like we’ve anything left to lose, right?”
The white boy squirmed in his seat when he realized people were looking at him. “It’s, it’s, it’s … fine, it’s fine. OK. It’ll be fine.”
Moon-face nodded slowly. “OK. If that’s what everyone wants. Just don’t blame me when you hate it up there.”
Frank steepled his fingers. “We’ve been bought and sold. Xenosystems owns Panopticon. Panopticon owns us. But we all said yes when they asked us to go to Mars. It’s going to be as good as we want to make it. It’s going to be our home from now on. You want to shit the bed? You know where the airlock is.”
“That,” said Doctor Alice, “sounds like a threat.”
“No. Just the truth. It goes for me as much as it does everyone else. We do our jobs, we take care of ourselves, respect each other as human beings. You wanted more out of life than that? Maybe we should have all thought just a little bit harder about our life choices.”
“He’s not wrong,” said Adolf, into the silence that followed. His voice was like a truck passing too close. “Now, I got the little voice in my ear telling me I got to be somewhere else. Play nice.”
He slowly got to his feet, seemingly filling the room as he did so, and then ducked out of the room with one more word: “Acknowledged.”
The black woman pushed herself away from the table. “Me too. Acknowledged.”
Then the kid. “I’m going to fucking Mars. Don’t forget that now.” Followed by, “Acknowledged, already. Acknowledged.”
One by one, they left, until it was just Frank and Alice. He waited for the door to close before speaking. “I remember you,” he said. “I know what you did.”
“No one else seems to,” she said. She looked at Frank, held his gaze. “We can keep it that way if you want.”
“Sure. Maybe they didn’t read the same news sites I did.”
“You can read? That sets you apart from the rest of the lumber they’ve swept up.” Her stare, her contempt, was unflinching.
“Filed my own taxes too. Didn’t need some fancy-ass accountant to do it for me.”
“I’ve got some cookies you can have as a reward.”
“You don’t have any cookies. None that I’d dare eat, anyway.”
“We all have a past. We all have a future.”
“Report to Building Four, Room Seventeen. Acknowledge.”
“Acknowledged,” he said, his eyes still on the doctor. “I’m Frank, by the way. And you’re still dangerous, Dr Alice Shepherd.”
“I’m glad you think so, Frank. Perhaps a little bit of danger will make this trip of ours more exciting.”
He left, and walked down the corridor to the stairs. He’d finally put it together at the very end of the presentation, looking past her at the screen and seeing her catch a loose hair out of her tightly wound bun. Then she’d turned her head and in that freeze-frame, he’d recognized her. The State allowed assisted suicide, but not for a doctor to take matters into their own hands. She’d had something like thirty counts of undocumented and unregistered mercy killings against her, and the reports he’d seen alleged many more.
Should he warn the others? That was a difficult choice. It wasn’t his business who Xenosystems chose. He had no influence over that. Presumably, she was going to be their doctor, and be treating the crew, so Xenosystems had decided that she wasn’t going to euthanize them against their will. So why was he worried?
Maybe he should just keep quiet, and not get sick any time soon.
4
[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 11/26/2038, transcribed from paper-only copy]
If I hear of yet another robot failure, I swear to God I am going to send the engineers in their place.
Frank had been out on another run. It had hurt, and he was determined to show that it hadn’t. In the shower, he’d cramped, and he’d struggled not to cry out in pain, in fear, in desperation. He’d bitten down on the fleshy lump on the back of his hand between thumb and forefinger, and he’d left marks.
And he’d barely turned off the flow of tepid water before he’d got his next instructions. He showered with his earpiece, he ate with his earpiece, he pissed with his earpiece. He was ragged, and felt every one of his fifty-one years. Apart from that one time at the training video, he was as isolated as he’d always been. Brack’s intermittent appearances—and really, fuck that shit—didn’t count. He could turn from someone who was disdainful and condescending into a mean, vicious weasel in a second. Perhaps he thought it was motivating.
Instead, Frank felt like throwing in the towel. He could just call it quits and make it stop. He could break up his crew, and maybe throw them all in the Hole too.
Maybe he couldn’t. He was still on the program. If Alice Shepherd could stay the course, then maybe so could he.
As told, he went to the room they watched their training videos in. And there was another person there—the black woman.
She was seated at one end—the far end, below the screen—of a long table, in the shadow cast by the dark-tinted windows dialed to almost opaque. Her hands, previously resting on the tabletop, withdrew like the tide and retreated to her lap.
Frank, with deliberate slowness, walked around the far side, and, with the windows at his back, sat down near—but not next—to her, on the diagonal. H
e made a fist, and held it out, thumb-side up. She looked at it, and him, then at his fist again. She curled her own right hand and lightly tapped it on Frank’s.
“Hey,” she said.
“Frank.”
“Marcy.”
“Everything’s being recorded, right?”
“Yeah.”
“OK.” Frank leaned heavily on the desk. He blinked and realized that there was a bottle of water on the desk in front of him. He’d missed it in the gloom. He reached over and snagged it, twisted the top off, and offered it to Marcy first.
“Knock yourself out,” she said.
He drank it all, the plastic bottle flexing and snapping as he sucked the last from its neck.
“I seem to be permanently thirsty these days.” He hoped it wasn’t a sign of some underlying medical problem that was going to get him canned.
“Dry air, I guess. Coming off the flats.”
“Sure. That’ll be it.”
They risked a glance at each other.
“You doing OK?” asked Frank.
“Well enough. Enough to avoid the Hole for now.”
“Me too.”
“Son of a bitch never told me that when I signed,” she said.
“Yeah. That. So let’s not crap out.”
“Why are we here? You and me. This room. Is this another test?”
Frank wiped his lips with his thumb. “Got to talk to each other sometime, right? And of course it’s another test. If we show we can work together, then we’re more likely to get on that ship.”
“Guess so. What did you do outside?”
“Build shit. You?”
“Drive shit.”
“OK. They need people on Mars who can build and can drive.”
“But do they need us?”
Frank shrugged. “We’re here. We just need to make them think it’s easier to take us than can us.”
“Like they’ve left us a choice.”
He pushed the empty water bottle away from him, to stop himself from playing with it. “So what do we do now?”