Martian Dictator

by Øyvind Harding

  “Who is this? What are you talking about?” She leaned forward and picked up the phone, already regretting giving in and answering it in the first place.

  “You heard me. Goodbye, Dr. Stokes.”

  The caller hung up the phone.

  Anna leaned back in her chair, picked up her pen and carefully placed the phone back in its home on her desk. And promptly moved it a quarter of an inch to the left without looking at it. If you drew a line from one end of the desk to the other, you would find that the three pens, Erasmus and the phone were sitting perfectly on that line. Also on that line were the edge of a 3D-holo projector sunk in the middle of the desk, currently turned off, with a stack of blank papers on the left side and an in/out tray on the right. The in tray was empty, its previous occupant placed squarely in front of her, and the out tray held the previous reports she had been working on before she was interrupted. In her normal, scheduled world, her assistant would enter her office in exactly fourteen minutes, deposit another load in the in tray and remove the contents of the out tray. This would happen every hour, on the hour, on all days which were set aside for paperwork. Most days were.

  She picked up the pen again and tried to focus on the report. It detailed how radiation poisoning had affected the performance of a troop of gibbons and how her team had been able to halt, and in some cases cure, the resulting cancer. A white line cut through a diagram halfway through the first page, and her eyes were drawn to it. The tip of her pen crossed the line. At an angle. Like her car.

  She threw down the pen in disgust, pushed back her chair and stalked to the door. Halfway there she stopped, seemed to struggle for a moment, then briskly turned around and walked back to her desk. She picked up the pen from where it had landed and carefully placed it parallel with the others before hurrying to the door, fetching her jacket from its place on the wall as she went. As she reached the door, she unlocked and locked the door three times and pushed the handle down another three times before finally exiting.

  ◆◆◆

  I was enjoying myself immensely. Again. This entire venture was proving to be filled with enjoyable moments, more so than anything I’d done in a long while. Moving Dr. Stokes’s car had been simply a matter of obtaining a cloned key and fooling the car into thinking I was the correct size and weight. It now stood precisely on top of the white line separating her parking space from her neighbor’s, and as I had stated on the phone, the front wheel sat at an angle. I smiled in anticipation and continued clapping my snowball into an even more aerodynamic form. Snow was rare this time of year, and I had scraped together enough from the lawn separating the various parking lanes that I could make a decent snowball. You had to take the little gifts as they came.

  Soon I could see the front door of the university opening, and a small form making its way over to me and my misaligned car. I bounced my snowball up in the air a couple of times before I turned around and threw it as hard as I could towards the interstate some 100 yards away. It fell woefully short and impacted the roof of a blue sedan that was just making its way out of the parking lot. The driver slowed down for a few seconds before deciding that it was better to just keep on driving rather than brave the elements on a November morning in northern Canada. The wind was biting, and the sky promised more snow in the near future. One who was not dissuaded by the elements, however, was stalking up to me with a determined expression.

  “Who are you, and what have you done with my car?” She was angry, and rightfully so. You don’t mess with a car you don’t own, not unless you’re planning for a forceful reaction. I was planning for that reaction.

  “I moved it.”

  She eyed the car, the painted lines on the asphalt, and me, still watching the retreating sedan with a happy smile. With a snort she turned her back on me, pulled out her keypad and pressed her finger on it to open the car. It did not open. I could almost hear her teeth grinding as she stood with her back to me and tried (and failed) to ignore the tires and the white line. Anna Stokes was pushing forty, was small of frame and stature, but possessed an energy that was almost palpable. She also had a cold temper that she kept in an iron grip, and a mental disorder that had her the other way around.

  “All right! You win. Move it back, I’ll be waiting in the cafeteria. I will give you ten minutes of my time before I call security.” She stalked off in the direction of the campus cafeteria without turning around.

  “I’ll only need five!” I don’t know if she heard my shout above the moaning of the constant wind, but her pace quickened, and she was soon lost around the nearest corner. I chuckled, keyed the car open and moved it back to its starting position: evenly parked in the middle of her personal spot, and perfectly parallel with the white lines. I walked off and went to meet the woman who could bring all of the pieces of my personal jigsaw puzzle together.

  ◆◆◆

  The stranger entered the cafeteria and looked around for a few seconds before making his way over to her table. He was tall, but slightly hunched over as if he were trying to hide his height. Not particularly muscular, but you could see that he very clearly knew his way around a gym of some sort. As he approached her table and made to sit down, she got a feeling that he was trying to suppress some form of behavior, as if he was forcing himself to be on the defensive. It was in the way he moved, how he had scanned the interior of the cafeteria before entering, and right now as he settled down and waited for her to open the hostilities. He was good, but he was not used to appearing smaller than he was. She was very good at reading people, better than most suspected, and she did not like this man. He practically oozed recklessness and unpredictability, two of the foremost things she despised, disorder being number one. She refused to take his bait, pointedly checked her watch and leaned back in her chair. He would have to open the negotiations, she would not play his game for a second longer than necessary. She was annoyed, and she was itching to go and check on her car. Thoughts of the tires and the white line were dancing across her brain, and she had to fight the urge to bounce up and leave the cafeteria. As soon as she settled back in her chair, he placed his hands flat on the table and spoke.

  “You know I moved your car so that I could force you to talk to me. You know I changed the coding for the key. You know that I know about your obsessive-compulsive disorder. You also know that these things combined make me much more than your average prankster. Which leads to you knowing that I would probably not just go away. From what I’ve been led to believe, you do not take kindly to people calling you during work hours. In fact, you do not even own a private phone nor do you have a working personal email address. And so, I had to force you into a face-to-face meeting. Which I did as gently as I could, and I hope you will forgive my methods. You gave me ten minutes of your time because you also know that to do and know all of these things, I would have to be pretty smart myself. Let me assure you, I am not wasting your time.”

  “At the moment, you are wasting your own time. Nine minutes remaining.” She did in fact know all of these things; another thing she was very good at was deduction. What she had not accounted for was that he knew about her knowing as well. This could prove to be quite the interesting encounter. She was fond of verbal duels, and it was a rare thing indeed when she found somebody who could match her quick thinking combined with the ability to anticipate what an opponent would say next. He smiled and settled back in his chair, imitating her stance.

  “Your current project is in its fourth year. It details how primates are affected by radiation and how to counteract those effects using modern medicine. You are funded by Small Eggs, Incorporated, a company with its production facilities situated in the lowlands of northern India. The company initiated the project just after the India-Pakistan nuclear conflict, mostly because they were afraid to get sued by their workers since they refused to move the production facilities out of the predicted fallout zones for radiation. Incidentally, they are now being sued by a large portion of their customers, after it was proven
that their eggs had a higher level of becquerels than accepted by international standards. The revenues of Small Eggs, Incorporated are dropping like Humpty Dumpty and no investor will touch the stocks until the lawsuit is resolved. Your funding is about to be cancelled, Anna.”

  “You are not telling me anything that I did not already know or suspect. Eight minutes remaining.”

  “You have an MD. You have a PhD in radiobiology. You suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder and as such are obsessive about organizing, sorting, and detailing every aspect of your personal and professional life. I’m in need of all of those qualities, and you are about to lose your job.”

  “My work is nearly done, and my OCD is no secret, neither are my academic achievements. Your personal needs ought to be nobody’s business but your own. Seven minutes.”

  “I need all of your skills, including your OCD. Perhaps without the obsessiveness with door handles, locks, and your fear of information not physically printed on paper, but the rest is useful in the extreme as to what I have in mind.”

  “I have unresolved issues with locks, that much is true. Door handles, on the other hand, are just plain evil and deserves whatever is done to them. But now we have arrived at the crux. Why you moved my car to force a face-to-face meeting, and why we are now sitting at an empty table in a university cafeteria. If this was a date I’d say things were not progressing as they should, and even though you’ve managed to get me to first base, second base is another game altogether. Third base is so far beyond you that I won’t even waste your time leading you on. Six minutes.”

  “This is indeed a date. I’m wooing for your attention and your time, and as you are well aware, I am also building anticipation and waiting for my moment. The funny thing is that even though you are intellectually aware of what I’m doing, it’s still working. You cannot beat your internal programming any more than I can force you into wanting to join up with me. I will get to third base eventually, by sheer tenacity if by nothing else.”

  This time she did not respond, but kept her eyes fixed on her clock. After about ten seconds of silence she announced, “Thirty seconds until your self-proclaimed time limit of five minutes.”

  He smiled and tapped the table to get her attention, looked her in the eye and leaned slightly forward in his seat. Involuntarily, she leaned equally away from him. In spite of her control of the situation, she felt intimidated by him.

  “I am designing, building, and outfitting a spaceship and I intend to go to Mars. I need somebody to organize every detail, from the smallest package of raisins to how much water we need to bring with us. I need somebody to monitor the 140 would-be Martians and spaceship crew for radiation damage and to be ready to counteract any side effects during the voyage. I need somebody who will obsess over every detail and leave nothing to chance. In short, I need you.”

  She did not respond immediately, instead fixing him with a scrutinizing glare of her own.

  “You want me to abandon my work, abandon my colleagues, my friends, my family, and my fish, and you want me to travel to Mars. You want me to risk everything I have worked for, everything I have achieved for the wet dream of some rich science fiction kid who somehow has the money to make his wildest dreams come true.”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” She tilted her head back and tapped her chin with her index finger while humming softly to herself. “No.” She snapped her head back to the horizontal again, pushed back her chair and stood. “You have wasted both my time and your own. I do not expect to hear from you again.” She walked out of the cafeteria and into the embrace of the loving snow that had just started to fall with renewed vigor.

  ◆◆◆

  I hummed a little as I sat at the empty table, and tried in vain to remember what song she had unintentionally put in my head. All things considered, I was in a pretty good mood; the meeting had gone as well as I could have hoped for. I got to put the idea in her head, I had presented her with a challenge and I had hinted that she might actually need my help in getting another job. In fact, she soon would be. I pulled out my tablet and punched in a series of commands that I had set up a couple of weeks ago. The first would prompt a pair of lawyers to go ahead with their lawsuit against Small Eggs, Incorporated on behalf of a group of enraged egg lovers. The second was to the CEO of the very target of the lawsuit to go ahead and initiate a shutdown of all nonessential projects, including one run by one Dr. Anna Stokes. The third was to buy the remaining stock in the company, because why not? It was a good company with a nice business model, and it would be a shame to bankrupt it only because I couldn’t be bothered to take care of my investments. After all, I already owned a large percentage of the shares, and it was not likely that I could sell it off before I had my fake consumer group cancel their made-up lawsuit.

  The fourth message was to have 950 pages of printed text detailing every aspect of the Mars project delivered to the office of Dr. Stokes in two days, barely enough time for her to be informed that her entire project was now cancelled. The pages included a few subtle, but important, errors in the estimate for how much water was needed on the voyage. I had no doubt that she would find the errors, if she bothered to open the document. I also had no doubt that her mental illness would compel her to read the entire brick I sent her, and upon finding the errors her mind would itch and itch until she had corrected them.

  The fifth and final message was to the editor of one of the largest medical papers currently in print, detailing how Dr. Anna Stokes had faked her research data over the past three years to make her meagre findings appear groundbreaking. I actually felt a little bad about that last one, her research was immaculate and her results were more than merely solid: they were, in fact, groundbreaking. But, needs must when the devil drives. I needed her on my team, and the faked evidence I had provided to support my claims (given under a pseudonym of course) would soon enough be repudiated and her career would have only a small dent. Small, but hopefully large enough that she would take a challenging and well-paid job as chief organizer of my entire project.

  “In Your Dreams.” I looked up at the waitress standing at my table.

  “Sorry?”

  “The tune you are humming, I love that song. In Your Dreams, by Stevie Nicks.” She started to hum along as she tapped her tablet with a blue fingernail. “Can I get you anything? Sorry about your date leaving you stranded.” She smiled at me.

  “Sorry, no, I think I’m all done here.” I gave her my signature smile and hummed my way out into the Canadian blizzard.

  7. The Flare

  The Northern Lights, or Aurora Borealis, are colorful displays that are mostly seen in the high latitudes of the northern and southern hemispheres. They are caused by cosmic rays, solar winds, and magnetospheric plasma interacting with the upper atmosphere, and the resulting light show can be spectacular in its brilliance and intensity. Lilac, green, blue, and white are the most common colors, and the lights can appear to dance across the sky in the blink of an eye. The rapidly moving aurora has been called “the dance of death,” and children in northern Scandinavia are taught that if you wave a white cloth at the dancing lights, they will reach down and carry you away to your death.

  Halfway through our journey, death danced across the skies of Earth.

  We had been travelling for five months when the mother of all solar flares hit. Nothing like it in recorded history, nothing like it since. And I highly doubted there would be a recorded history after this. As to the Earth: they had no warning. Solar activity was a field of study in its own right, and its researchers were adamant in trying to inform the public about their prophecies. “Solar winds heavy this season, wear sunscreen!” “Solar flares not to be connected with power failures in northern Connecticut.” “Low solar flare activity not a factor in global warming.” And so on and so forth. Funding needed to be secured, elections had to be rigged, and the media needed something to put on the front page when they tired of the latest political lies and escapades
.

  There would be no doubt that this flare was connected with power failures in northern Connecticut, or any other part of the world for that matter.

  The Icarus failed. Spectacularly. It was hit dead-on by a massive burst of radiation, every circuit on board was fried into oblivion, and a major power failure was inevitable. One by one the million panes overloaded and failed to properly export their piece of the charge. Circuits popped like popcorn, and the Icarus died. It had reached for the sun and got burned for its audacity.

  And thus, across the globe, the lights went out. By now, the Icarus was providing about eighty-five percent of the total energy requirements of the world, and the effects of merely a massive power outage would be catastrophic on their own.

  But the planet itself was not spared destruction. Aurora Borealis danced around the globe at every longitude, the planet lit up with the fireworks of the sun. Every electrical apparatus with a microchip in it was fried, and every washing machine, every TV set, every mobile phone, personal computer, pacemaker, refrigerator, toaster, air conditioner, and automobile died. And that was just the private sector. Since nearly all of these applications ran on power derived from the Icarus, they not only fried out, but they also lacked the power to reboot according to specs. They fried, they crashed, and they burned.

  Earth burned. Fires raged uncontrollably in every major city, all the planes that were up in the air as the flare hit fell to the ground, huge cargo ships that were fully automated crashed on every shore and spilled their cargo and their oil, and every civil service failed to function. Hundreds of millions died that first day, and even more followed in the coming months. Mankind had grown complacent in his wealth, and now the price had to be paid. It would be a long time before society dug its way out of the hole it suddenly found itself in, and there would be no easy access to power for even longer.