Darian smiled as the two NASA technicians behind her walked into the room and started to power up their computer pads. “Thanks, Mrs. Rossum. I’m so sorry for bothering you on such short notice, but we traced one of the malware worms from Mars making its way over to this location.”
Emma betrayed no emotion. “No problem. Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“That would be wonderful, thank you,” Darian said.
Emma walked back out towards the kitchen area. “Follow me.”
Darian accompanied her back into the central area of the house and stood behind the counter. Emma looked to be in her late fifties, with buxom thighs and arms beneath the simple dress she wore. Her graying hair was cut in layers that seemed to make the strands stand up along the sides of her head. The crow’s feet at the side of her eyes were somewhat masked by the thick makeup she wore. Emma placed three spoonfuls of aromatic ground coffee into the espresso machine and activated it. The room was soon filled with the sharp, roasted spice of Blue Mountain and Maragaturra beans.
“I drink mine as an espresso,” Emma said while she placed a small cup in front of the machine. “Ever since that trip to Italy, Karl and I vowed to only drink this type of coffee from then on, since we found out that the locals never drink cappuccinos in the afternoon. I can add milk to yours to make a cappuccino or a latte if you’d like.”
Darian shook her head slightly. “An espresso is fine. No sugar for me, please.”
Emma placed the small, shot-sized cup on the counter. “You’re just like my husband. He always liked his coffee black and bitter.”
“I wanted to ask you, Mrs. Rossum,” Darian said softly. “Even though your husband disappeared from the face of the Earth more than two years ago, you’ve never filed a missing persons report with the police. Why is that?”
Emma looked away while holding her own cup. “The police were already here to ask me some questions, so let’s not bring this up again. I’m cooperating with you now, aren’t I?”
“That’s not what I asked, ma’am,” Darian said. “The only reason why you didn’t report him as missing is because you know where he is, don’t you?”
Emma looked at her for a full minute before shaking her head. “No, I don’t know where he is.”
“Aren’t you concerned about his well being?”
Emma sighed. “Karl can do whatever he wants. We stopped sleeping together about fifteen years ago, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Darian noticed a set of pictures on a nearby wall. She walked over and stared at them. The first photograph showed the whole family: Emma, Karl and their three children standing together while posing in the backyard of their house. Joseph was their eldest, and he was the one who joined up with Mars First, only to die in the final year of the colony’s existence, his body buried somewhere in the Red Planet. Jill was the second, and she was the one who filed the missing person report on her father. The youngest in the picture was a young boy of about seven or so, grinning wildly at the camera.
Emma stood beside Darian and pointed at the young boy in the framed photograph. “That’s Joshua. Our youngest.”
Darian looked at her. Her smartglass revealed the time stamp on the picture, and it was more than fifteen years ago. “Did the police talk to Joshua about his father’s disappearance? I don’t recall reading a file about him at all.”
Emma exhaled slowly before she responded. “Joshua died a few months after that picture was taken. Highly aggressive form of Leukemia. We tried everything, but there was nothing the doctors could do.”
Darian looked down. “I’m sorry.”
Emma pointed to another picture on the wall. It showed Karl and Errol making faces at the camera. “After Joshua died, Karl just plunged into work and stopped talking to us. The only time he ever gave anyone any attention after that was with Errol. They were both great friends, and they trusted each other implicitly. So when I had found out that Karl entrusted all of his shares in RUR to Errol in case something ever happened to him, it didn’t surprise me. My daughter wanted to fight it in court, but I told her that Errol was a friend of the family, and we would be well taken care of. In the end I was right, Errol came over to visit and made sure we were financially secure.”
Darian looked at the picture. “I’ve never met Errol Flux. I’ve seen him on TV a lot, and he strikes me as the outgoing type.”
“He is,” Emma said. “Errol was the visionary, and Karl was the tinker. My husband preferred to just sit in his workshop and work on the hardware and software for the quantum computer he wanted to build. Errol wanted to go out and explore the galaxy. They had opposite personalities, but they got along better than I ever did. Errol allowed him to work from home, and I had to force Karl to eat and take baths many times over the years. If I hadn't, he would have starved to death from just working on his programs. Karl loved working with math and computers, he would tell me that equations would be the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe.”
“So they made a formidable team,” Darian said while sipping the last of her espresso.
Emma nodded. “Oh yeah. They were better than their competitors. Errol was a risk taker, but he always made calculated gambles when it came to pushing out a product. He knew that even though my husband rarely gave him any updates on what he was working on, they would always hit the deadline of a particular project, often at the last minute. Errol had complete faith in Karl, and he provided the seed funding when my husband wanted to create his own company that produced robots. Karl was never good with people, but Errol was and still is.”
“Do you know what the reason could be as to why your husband decided to sell his ownership of RUR Industries to Errol and then disappear? I would think that if he truly liked working on quantum AIs that he would just stick with it.” Darian said.
“I think he might have felt guilty about what happened to Joe, my firstborn son,” Emma said wistfully.
“Could you give me your take on it?”
“Like I said, after Joshua died my husband started ignoring us,” Emma said. “Joe took it hard, and Jilly moved out and never bothered to even invite her father over to her wedding. When Mars First became popular, Joe was one of the first to sign up for it. He had an automated allowance from Karl, and he saved up every penny and donated it to the cause. The only time I ever saw Karl raise any emotion after that was when the news of Joe’s death on Mars broke on the news. That’s when my husband truly lost it. He was screaming and crying for days. I wanted to call the paramedics because I was afraid he might hurt himself. Then he just stopped and retreated back into his shell again. After that he didn’t even bother with his own company anymore, and Errol had to stand in for him during board meetings. Then things got darker. He started working on a project so secret, he would shut everything down the moment I came into the workshop to bring him something to eat.”
Darian’s eyes narrowed. “Any idea on what the project was about?”
Emma shook her head. “No idea. I used to help him a lot during the early days, but then he started working by himself, with no input even from his own colleagues. He would just deliver the files to them, ready to go, and they would install it into the robots. There would be a few bugs every now and then, but Karl always tinkered with his programs, so patches and fixes were just around the corner. The one time I was able to get a glimpse of his work was when I came into the room, and he was so engrossed with an equation that he didn’t notice me for about a minute before he turned the monitor off.”
“Do you have any clue as to what kind of equation it was?”
“It looked like a quantum algorithm of some kind,” Emma said. “Just looking at the notes in the workshop after he disappeared, it seems like he was working on a self-aware AI suite. When I logged in after he was gone it must have triggered a self-destruct process, since his files started to wipe themselves from all of his servers after that. The name of the file disturbed me.”
“What was the name on the file
?”
“Joshua,” Emma said. “Maybe it’s just me but I think he’s trying to bring our boy back from the dead. The last thing he told me was that he wanted to create artificial life so that people would never have to die. When Karl built robots that could interact with humans, he didn’t even bother to talk to people anymore. My guess is that he wanted to create an AI that could act as a substitute for our youngest child.”
One of the technicians walked into the room. “Ma’am, I think you’d better take a look at this.”
They both followed him into the workshop. Karl Rossum’s studio occupied a full wing of the house, and it had several long tables with all sorts of hardware and computer workstations. Every nook and cranny was filled with spare parts for robots and computers. Darian was reminded of those mad scientist labs in the movies. Boxes of wiring, robotic frames and interface networks were strewn about haphazardly all over the place. A small bed lay near the door. The main computer console stood in the center of the room, and one of the technicians had managed to activate the server. A stream of codes and equations floated around in the 3D monitor screen.
Darian stood beside the second technician while she cycled through the files displayed on her smartglass. “Okay, what are we looking at here?”
The first technician was busy interfacing with the main console. “It looks like the worm did come into the network and corrupted a number of encrypted files. The damned malware is hard to detect because it constantly changes its signature. I don’t think those are retrievable now. But then again, since the files were encrypted with a quantum algorithm, we’ve no clue as to what they contained in the first place.”
Emma turned to look at Darian. “So the rumors on the net about a malware worm coming from Mars are true then?”
Darian nodded. “Yes. We’ve implemented a protocol upload limit on all incoming data from Mars. The worm disrupted a number of important databases, including the FBI’s national fingerprint identification system. Plenty of personnel records have been affected. Please keep this information to yourself for the time being.”
“I haven’t talked to the media in years,” Emma said. “They tried to get a comment from me on the recent acquisition of my husband’s company by ACE Corp, and I didn’t tell them anything. Were my husband’s records affected?”
“Yes,” Darian said. “His on file fingerprints, pictures, and other means of identification have been wiped clean or corrupted. Even the backups were affected, and we still don’t know how. It’s as if he’s trying to cover his trail.”
Emma placed her hands on her hips. “My husband wouldn’t have done that. It’s not his way to ever disrupt the net just to conceal himself.”
“Does your husband have any enemies?”
“No,” Emma said. “Not unless you care to count Silas Balsamic- my husband publicly called him out as a scam artist and cult leader, but then again he’s been dead a long time.”
“Perhaps a friend of Silas, then? Would anyone from Mars First know anything about your husband on a personal level?”
Emma paused while deep in thought. “There could be one person who might shed some light on this. Her name is Jennifer Till, she was close to Joe. I think she was his girlfriend in the Mars First Colony. My son always talked about her when he sent emails to me from the Red Planet.”
Darian ran a check on Jennifer using her smartglass. “Okay, she’s in a skilled nursing facility in Maine. I’ll go check on her after this.”
The technician working on the console threw his hands up. “That’s it. The worm shut itself down, but it wiped pretty much everything.”
Darian grimaced. Just another dead end. “There’s nothing left on his files that indicates what he was up to?”
“All I’ve got are snippets of corrupted files,” the technician said as he sorted through the virtual inventory. “Wait, I’ve got fragments of an audio only file- it’s still accessible. Trace routing says it was downloaded from the Mars relay two years ago. It’s mostly corrupted, but I think I can run a small portion of it.”
“Play it,” Darian said. Karl had gone missing right around at that time.
The audio was scratchy, with plenty of resonating feedback. The voice was faint and the volume would modulate every few seconds. “Dad, it’s me … I know … we’ve had our differences. Please help me, I’m still here … on Mars. Don’t tell anyone … please. Come get me …. You’re the only one who can.”
Emma’s eyes opened wide. The voice was Joe’s, her first born son. She started to scream.
The Gorham Advanced Care Facility was located in the southern part of Maine. Partially funded by the government, it housed a number of survivors from the disastrous Mars First Colony. Equipped with pressure chambers and special indoor swimming pools, the structure also contained a unique wing reserved for the Martians, the sickly children born on the Red Planet before their final evacuation more than a decade ago. Months after the public uproar, new laws were put in place strictly prohibiting pregnancies and childbirths on Mars. A number of individuals and corporations had taken these new treaty laws to the courts, but so far the prohibitions were upheld in the UN.
Darian sat by the round plastic table, her palms pressed firmly on its cool surface. The recreational hall had a high ceiling, and one could see the manicured grounds from the glass windows. Within a few minutes, a medical orderly came into view, pushing an old-fashioned manual wheelchair in front of him. The woman who was sitting on it looked pathetic in her loose hospital gown. Jennifer Till wore a bandana over her bald head, her spindly arms were crossed upwards over her sagging chest, and her skeletal legs were hunched to one pedal at the base of the wheelchair. She was barely thirty years old, yet she looked like someone living in the final years of her life. Mars First didn’t have a whole lot of money when they started sending their people to the Red Planet, so they took the cheapest, one-way rocket flights to get to Mars, and many of them paid for it with either their health, if not with their lives.
The orderly parked her chair beside the table. His nametag had the name of Julius on it. “You’ve got half an hour,” he said, just before he turned around and walked over to the far end of the room.
Jennifer gave Darian a toothy smile. Her gums had receded, making her exposed molars look like beaver teeth. “And who might you be? I don’t get a lot of visitors, just usually the press, but I don’t like ‘em, you know. They always gave us a bad rap.”
Darian leaned back on the plastic chair that she sat on. “I’m Special Agent Darian Arante from NASA. I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”
Jennifer’s eyes gleamed with interest. “NASA? Wow, does this mean I can go back to Mars now?”
Darian cycled through her medical records using the smartglass she wore. Jennifer had lied about her age when she joined up with Mars First in order to get to the colony. She was just sixteen when she was launched into a three-month journey across space. Her muscles and bones had atrophied considerably when she returned, making her too weak to move around in Earth’s gravity. She also had lung and liver cancer, no doubt caused by the lack of radiation shielding in the substandard colony habitats that Mars First used. Jennifer had been also exposed to cosmic rays during transit, and the transport ship that carried her crashed during the landing phase, damaging her spine. Nevertheless she carried on, becoming the poster child for determination, and her ordeals were broadcast live back to Earth in order to generate donations.
“I wanted to talk to you about Joseph Rossum,” Darian said. “I understand that you two were close during your time on the Red Planet.”
Jennifer’s right eye had a milky white pupil, there was no doubt it had a cataract. “Joe, he was so pure. He loved me and I loved him. We we’re gonna have a child, you know? We were gonna have our own little Martian baby.”
Darian bit her lip. Jennifer was in constant pain, so they obviously doped her up. This was going to make her questioning that much harder. “Yes, you clearly loved Joe. Did h
e treat you well?”
“Joe was the nicest, kindest person I ever met,” Jennifer said softly. “Even when I got hurt, he always took care of me. When I was sick in bed he always stayed by my side till I fell asleep.”
“That’s good to know,” Darian said. “Did he ever tell you about his father? Karl Rossum?”
“Oh yeah, he always talked about him,” Jennifer said. “Joe only talked about his daddy and Silas. Those were the only things he ever talked about. Joe said he loved his dad, but his daddy didn’t love him back.”
“Did Joe ever talk about his dad with the others? Did Joe ever talk to Silas about him?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Silas would talk to him for hours about his dad, and how Joe’s daddy never truly loved him, only Silas did. And that was true … Silas loved all of us. Silas said he loved us, and that was why he chose us to live with him on Mars forever. It was such a cool time when we we’re there. I wish we could go back there. Yeah.”
“Did Silas ever make any sort of threats to Joe’s dad?”
“Silas never made threats, he wasn’t that kind of person,” Jennifer said. “He would just look at you, and you’d know it.”
“Know what?”
Jennifer scowled. “He gave you that kind of look, and you could tell that he just wanted to kill you, yeah. Silas was special, because we would do anything for him, you know. If Silas wanted you for the night, then you’d do it. Doesn’t matter if you were somebody else’s girlfriend or wife, or daughter, you know. If Silas wanted you, he’d have you.”
“Did Silas ever say anything about Joe’s daddy to the others?”
“Silas always treated Joe well,” Jennifer said. “He knew that Joe’s daddy was famous and all that, yeah. Only Robert Tsuda hated Joe, because he was jealous of him, I think. Tsuda tried to have Joe pushed out of the airlock, but Silas protected him. Joe was in awe of Silas too, yeah, until the final days.”
Darian leaned forward. “What happened in those final days?”
The Piranha Solution: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 1) Page 6