The Mars Shock

by Felix R. Savage

  Kristiansen again felt, acutely, the awkwardness of being encased in an EVA suit, with a faceplate between him and the Martians. “I assume you know why we’re here, madam.” Gnädige Frau. It came out without calculation. It just seemed the least he could do was to be polite. “We want to help you. The United Nations stands ready to offer you refuge. But we must hurry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my colleague has been exposed to the Naniten. You seem to know a great deal about medicine. Is there any way to help him?”

  The woman laughed. “Knowledgeable? Me?” She waved at the stacks of printouts sliding off the desks. “I know only as much as I’ve been able to absorb from my backups. It’s in no kind of order. Imagine an encyclopedia in the form of a jigsaw puzzle, in a foreign language. That’s what this is. I’ve been putting the pieces together for months. I only just got to G, for glycolysis. That’s when I figured out why our freedom has come at such a cost. It’s all to do with intracellular CO2 uptake.”

  Kristiansen’s confusion receded somewhat. He nodded, on familiar ground now. Human or Martian, biology was biology. The born-agains’ physical weakness and their muscle spasms, which he had taken for nervous fidgeting, were symptoms of metabolic alkalosis.

  Kristiansen had no medical credentials, but he’d picked up a lot during his career with Medecins Sans Frontieres. “We need to be careful because of your altered physiology, but normally I would say you need ACE inhibitors, carbonic anhydrase inhibitors and extra fluids. Longer-term, you’ll need supplementation to fix your bone salts. Have you seen any cases of vomiting or renal failure?”

  “V? R? I haven’t got that far yet,” the woman answered.

  “Your increased CO2 expulsion must be engineered at the DNA level. The nanites would have worked with that, regulating your blood CO2 levels,” Kristiansen said, thinking aloud. “That would mean your bodies are now overcompensating, blowing off too much CO2. Have there been any deaths?”

  “A lot of us died in the early days, but I don’t need an encyclopedia to call that by its name. They offed themselves. Completely unable to deal with freedom.” She twirled a hand, dismissing their memory. “Sitzpinklers.”

  Stephen One, who was leafing through printouts, said, “Their own limbic systems killed them.” He stuck his tongue out at the woman. “I started with L.”

  “L for laser,” the woman said, fondly. She shooed him away. “Go, go check the fax and the cameras. I can’t get up those stairs.” She watched him go, followed by the others. “My favorite son,” she confided to Kristiansen in a low voice. “I was happy he survived. That was the first taste I ever had of happiness. True happiness; it’s so different from dreaming. After that, I knew I had to survive, too.”

  Kristiansen took on board that this woman was Stephen One’s mother—if it was true, she must have given birth in her early teens—and decided not to inquire further. “Frau Doktor, I would be honored to talk with you at greater length, but this is urgent. I have to ask again. Is there any way to help my colleague? Couldn’t we infect him with the St. Stephen virus, as an antidote to the Naniten?”

  “The St. Stephen virus.” She unexpectedly sang a snatch of Latin. She had a lovely voice. “It came out of the sky, disguised as a distress call from one of the god’s stealth fighters. I remember that.”

  “It came from China,” Kristiansen said. “But we don’t have the source code, and we need it.” Murray would be proud of him. But he wasn’t interested in giving the UN a leg up on the Chinese. He was interested in saving Murray’s life—and the lives of the born-again Martians—in that order. He formulated these priorities coldly. He needed to switch off his emotions to keep functioning. “Do you have it?”

  “I’m not sure. I could sing it to you, if that would help. But it probably wouldn’t. The music file is just a dropper. It drops a bash script that executes a wiper, which presumably erases the virus itself along with everything else.”

  Kristiansen’s patience snapped. She was stonewalling him, just like Admiral McLean back on Eureka Station, holding back information that could save people. Information that could save Murray. Without whom none of them would get out of here alive.

  He slammed a gloved fist on the edge of a desk. Sheaves of paper cascaded to the floor. “ ‘Presumably’! ‘Probably’! ‘I’m not sure’! Do you HAVE the source code, or NOT?”

  The woman stared at him for a second. Then she effortfully bent over sideways and tried to pick up the papers. Feeling ashamed of himself, Kristiansen gathered them up for her.

  “It’s all in here,” she said, sitting with a sheaf of papers on her lap. She didn’t have much of a lap. “The source code might be here, too. We’ve found some strings that don’t look like our stuff. I know that’s not much help.”

  Kristiansen frowned, getting control of his temper. He glanced at the papers he held. Long strings of letters and numbers bracketed English phrases related to gamma globins, gluconeogenesis, and glycolysis—all the Gs. He was no computer expert, but this looked like the raw content of a medical database. Could the secrets Murray sought be hidden in here? Kristiansen started, “When the PLAN cut you off from the network—”

  “We were components in the god’s network, and we’d failed. That’s what you do with failed components. You remove them.”

  And then you recycle them, Kristiansen thought with a shiver. After disconnecting the staff of Archive 394, the PLAN had sicced its muppets—the untermenschen, as Stephen One put it—on them. It was reductive to think of the born-agains as mere failed components. Their freedom threatened the PLAN’s very existence, regardless of what information they did or did not possess.

  “It was indescribably frightening, and uplifting. But my first experience of freedom was followed by a terrible realization. I couldn’t remember anything.”

  “I don’t understand,” Kristiansen had to confess.

  “It’s all in here!” The woman slapped the side of her head. “Let me put it in the simplest possible terms. We were a Beowulf cluster. Our memory was stored in the server node. When the nanites broke, we lost our processing capacity. And what use is memory if you can’t read it?”

  Her ‘simplest possible terms’ were not simple to Kristiansen. He didn’t know the term ‘Beowulf cluster.’ Still, he grasped what she was saying. It dovetailed with Murray’s hypothesis about the St. Stephen virus—that it had crashed the Martians’ neuroware. His understanding of the born-agains underwent a wrenching realignment. So that was why Stephen One had kept saying ‘I don’t remember.’

  They’d literally lost their memories.

  Clearly, not all their memories. Emotionally charged items, stored in regions not directly governed by the neuroware, would remain. The brain was a complex organ, even based on Kristiansen’s limited knowledge of neuroscience. It found workarounds. But certain categories of information and abstract knowledge would be irretrievably locked away. He couldn’t imagine what that felt like.

  “I’m sorry.” The words felt inadequate, and yet he understood that a human saying sorry to a Martian was crossing a boundary, for better or for worse. “Are your memories in here?” he asked, indicating the stacks of print-outs. Perhaps they could be recompiled …

  The woman shook her head. She was regal in her heaviness and stillness. “I was the server. When you broke the nanites, you broke me. It’s all in here, but I can’t read it.” Again she touched her temple, a gesture as helpless as trying to reach across the void of space.

  “I’m sorry. … Then these hard copies are …?”

  “Pfuh.” She made a noise of impatient distaste. “The god is obsessed with self-tracking. Some of the legacy data is useful: the encyclopedias, the technical manuals. All the rest is the equivalent of logging one’s weight and blood pressure on an hourly basis.”

  “It’s ironic. We blitzed the valuable information, leaving the junk,” Kristiansen said. Once again, the reckless violence of humanity amazed him.

  “That�
�s one way of putting it.”

  “So there’s no way to help my friend?”

  “Friend?” the Server said, puzzled. “What’s that?”

  Stephen One came through a door at the far end of the silo, followed by his two companions. The Martian waved gladly at Kristiansen, as if relieved to see that he was still here.

  “That,” Kristiansen said. “Stephen One is my friend. So is Murray. I won’t abandon either of them.”

  People were still coming out of the door. They were small people. They were, Kristiansen realized, children.

  “Will you abandon them?” the Server asked quietly. “They’re too young to know anything.”

  “How … how many …”

  “Oh, they’re not all mine. There were six other Servers in this cluster. They all died. But I feel responsible for their immature client nodes.”

  As the small Martians continued to stream into the computer room, Kristiansen doubled his estimate of the bunker’s surviving population. “I’ll get all of you to safety,” he promised. “Somehow.” But he knew his promise would be empty without Murray’s help.

  ★

  Murray returned from the surface. His face was gray, like a t-shirt that was ready for the recycler. Brushing past Kristiansen, he knelt by the edge of the lake and plunged his head into the steaming water.

  Kristiansen stared for an instant. Then he seized Murray and dragged him back from the lake’s edge.

  “I’m all right!” Murray said, his hair plastered over his face. “It comes and goes. The water helps.” He made a move towards the lake. Kristiansen held him back.

  “You’re delirious! Snap out of it!”

  “Don’t be daft. I feel fine.”

  Kristiansen cast a desperate glance at the born-agains. They watched with folded arms. They’d seen so many of their own people die, he couldn’t expect them to be moved by Murray’s decline.

  “I just want to go for a swim,” Murray gritted. He jerked against Kristiansen’s grip, and then suddenly stopped struggling. “Jesus, it’s cold. All right, Kristiansen. Listen. I set up the beacons, turned them on. No idea if anyone will detect them. It’s a mess out there. They took me out the back door—it’s hidden under a silo. There was a PLAN town up there. This’ll blow your mind: this lake is a reservoir, held back by a restraining wall. There are pipes sticking out of the outside of the wall. The water circulates through the subzero atmosphere, gets cooled down, then it gets piped back underground—”

  “The dam,” Kristiansen nodded.

  Murray gave him an irritated glance. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

  He really did seem to be all right now. It comes and goes, Kristiansen remembered. “No, go on.”

  “The wall’s leaking. It must have been damaged in the quakes. There’s water trickling down around the outside of the pipes. These little fuckers may be ace at nanobiotechnology, but they don’t know crap about infrastructure maintenance.”

  “They’ve forgotten everything,” Kristiansen said. He explained to Murray that the born-agains had lost their memories.

  “Figures, with our luck.” Murray wrung water out of his hair. “What the hell?”

  Kristiansen followed his glance. Several of the Martians’ clumsy rowboats had just sculled out of the mist, loaded with children.

  “I was coming to that,” Kristiansen said. “They’re the Stephens’ little brothers and sisters. The woman I met on the island said they were a Beowulf processing cluster.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Lots of parallel processing nodes, a few server nodes. The PLAN probably used them for scatter-gather processing, in addition to making them store its crap. I get it. I get it. Try and stay focused, Kristiansen,” Murray said, although he was the one losing focus, his attention jumping all over the place. “I don’t have much time left.”

  “We’re going to fix you up,” Kristiansen said in the impassive, soothing voice he used when advising patients long-distance in the asteroid belt. It helped him to ignore his own terror. “We need the source code for the St. Stephen virus. Our best bet is to get it from the Chinese.”

  “Without comms, in the next thirty minutes? Might be less. Kristiansen, I can feel the nanites moving shit around in there. One time when I was in college, I did E on top of half a bottle of vodka, then simmed a full-immersion documentary about Weimar Berlin, in zero gee. This is like that, with extra chainsaws.” Murray’s mouth was going a mile a minute, but his eyes were staring pits of horror.

  “You’re not going to die. The nanites don’t want to kill you. They want to interface with the PLAN.”

  “Same difference.”

  “No, it isn’t. The neuroware can be destroyed. These guys are living proof of that.” He pointed at the watching born-agains. “We’ll get the St. Stephen virus and download it into your BCI—”

  “I don’t have a BCI.”

  “You don’t what?”

  “I do not have a brain-computer interface. Or EEG signalling crystals. Or even a flipping ID chip. There was a panic a few years ago: an ISA agent got infected with the Heidegger program. It was when the shit hit the fan on 4 Vesta. Remember that? You probably didn’t hear the story behind the story. Her name was Shoshanna Doyle. She managed to do a lot of damage before an armed bystander took her out. And I’m talking severe, long-lasting, organizational damage. The PLAN grabbed all the information on her BCI. Details of undercover missions, the names and numbers of deniable personnel, encryption protocols and passwords, all kinds of classified shit. It was a security nightmare. So the word came down from on high: We are never letting that happen again. And what that meant for yours truly—I was in training at the time—was I had to get my BCI removed.”

  “I’d never have known,” Kristiansen said in amazement. He meant that Murray had so much information at his fingertips, he’d never have guessed he was relying on his own memory, rather than a memory crystal implanted in his skull.

  “You learn to get along without it.” Murray shrugged. Then he grinned strangely, and vomited.

  Kristiansen held Murray’s shoulders. Stephen One got out of his rowboat and splashed over to them.

  Kristiansen said, “What’ll happen if his Naniten can’t talk to the PLAN? I mean, the god.”

  “They have to talk to the god. That’s what they’re for.”

  “You know, you need to learn a new word to express yourself. Here it is: Duh.”

  “Duh.”

  “Yes, like that. Now just suppose that oh, maybe he doesn’t have any comms. What will happen?”

  “He’ll try to get comms. Duh.”

  Kristiansen snorted. “Yeah. But what if he can’t?”

  “The Sitzpinklers killed themselves. But maybe he has strength of character, like me.”

  So maybe he’ll be fine, Kristiansen thought for a delusional moment. Murray was clearly not fine. He was on his knees, gripping his head in both hands, digging his fingernails into his temples, drawing blood. His teeth ground audibly. His brain was being rearranged by molecular chainsaws.

  “He’s a dead man,” Stephen One said dispassionately.

  “… Not yet,” Murray coughed. “Where’s your medibot?”

  The Medimaster 5500! Kristiansen had forgotten all about it. He let go of Murray and dodged between the bamboo processing machines. It was where he had left it.

  When he returned, lugging the heavy machine, Murray’s spasm had passed. The born-agains held him by his arms and legs. He squinted at Kristiansen’s burden. “Is it still working?”

  Kristiansen pulled off what was left of the medibot’s packaging and set it up. Thankfully, it was made to be operated by a person in a spacesuit, so he had no trouble working the controls with his gloved fingers. “Yes.” Warm relief spread through him as the console lit up. “We’ll put you in the Evac-U-Tent. You’ll be safe in there.” And we’ll be safe from you, he thought. “You’ll have a better supply of air and water than I do. Ha, ha. We just need to keep you alive until we get
the source code for the St. Stephen virus.”

  “Oh, forget about the virus. The Chinks are never gonna give it up.”

  “It’s the only chance you’ve got!”

  “I don’t matter! The mission matters. Winning this war matters.” Murray’s eyes burned. “If I can interface with the PLAN, I’ll find out everything these guys have forgotten. I’ll learn all its secrets. I’ll be able to tell you everything.”

  Kristiansen sat back on his heels. The Evac-U-Tent inflated in front of him. It ballooned to a silver bubble the size of a family car, attached to the side of the medibot. The ‘trunk’ of the car was a flexible airlock. The medibot extended its instruments into the tent.

  “Can this bot install BCIs?” Murray demanded.

  “Yes,” Kristiansen said. “It was designed to serve all the medical needs of a remote colony. It has the ability to perform neurosurgery, including BCI installation and removal. But this is a really stupid idea. I’m not doing it.”

  “We need answers!” Murray’s voice was an agonized shout. Kristiansen understood that Murray’s quest for answers was the only thing giving him hope. If he were balked in that, he’d have no choice but to resign himself to a death as cruel as it was futile. The horror of futility struck a chord with Kristiansen. He, too, had always wanted to believe his life had meaning. Failing that, that his death could have meaning …

  He shook his head, but with less certainty now. “What if it doesn’t work? What if the PLAN simply uses the BCI to control you?”

  “Won’t happen,” Murray said with a dreadful grin. “One of the things we found out from the disaster on 4 Vesta. A BCI on its own isn’t enough. You also need a drugstore implant. Some kind of neural stimulation mechanism. The PLAN controls its victims by monopolizing the dopamine pathways.” He spread his hands. “Without that, it’ll just tear me apart. But I’ll be quite talkative during the process. You’ll have to stand by to record everything.”

  Kristiansen couldn’t believe he was doing this. “All right.” He moved towards the Evac-U-Tent.