The Mars Shock

by Felix R. Savage

  They’d had another home before that: the Venus trojan asteroid 11073 Galapagos. The PLAN—the hostile AI that humanity was now at war with—had destroyed it, forcing them to flee into the asteroid belt, to this lonely location in the middle of the 2.5 Kirkwood Gap. They’d put their lives back together. Recreated their society and rebuilt their churches, in the hope that this time they’d be left in peace. So much for that.

  Wasn’t the PLAN that had destroyed this rock. It was its owner. Kiyoshi’s boss. And for what, huh? For what?

  To the left of the fragments, a dotted wheel of light spun lazily. Although it appeared far away, it was just on the other side of the rubble cloud. It was another ship, built from the raw materials of 99984 Ravilious—half-built, or maybe three-quarters; the boss-man said it was finished, but he’d been saying that for weeks, and new engineering issues kept cropping up. Its name was Salvation. No irony there, no sense of history. Just an ego the size of freaking Jupiter.

  Kiyoshi could no longer see the six people he’d tossed into space. He and Mendoza were halfway back to the Monster when Jun radioed him. “They picked them up.”

  “Who?”

  “The previous occupants.”

  “No, who picked them up?”

  “I couldn’t see for sure. Might’ve been Brian. Anyway, they took them to the Salvation.”

  Kiyoshi scowled at the distant wheel of light. Smaller specks buzzed around it. One of them might have been the mobility sled that Brian Shaughnessy, the boss’s thug-in-chief, often rode over to the Monster to insolently spy on Kiyoshi and his people. Brian and Kiyoshi had both worked for the boss-man for years. The difference was that Brian believed in the Salvation project, and Kiyoshi did not. When Kiyoshi begged off from the entire insane business, Brian had gleefully stepped into his position as second-in-command.

  Jun drew a red circle around the largest speck of light on Kiyoshi’s faceplate. “That’s the Now You See It, a quad-module Ironcamel. It just arrived from Ceres with a bunch of stuff for the suicide mission.” This was how Kiyoshi and Jun referred to the Salvation project. “I think some new recruits also arrived. So they’ll be busy over there for a while.”

  “We got lucky,” Kiyoshi said.

  “Yep.”

  If the Now You See It had not shown up at the same time as the Startractor, there was no way Kiyoshi and Jun would have been able to capture the smaller ship. The boss-man would have pounced on it himself. He had a track record in that respect.

  Kiyoshi directed a quick prayer of thanks to the Holy Spirit for this stroke of luck. Out loud, he said. “All the same, we’d better move fast.”

  “Agreed.”

  Kiyoshi juiced his mobility pack. With Mendoza trailing behind, he headed for the Monster’s command airlock. He keyed in the combination, spoke today’s password for the voiceprint lock, and finally inserted a keycard in the physical lock he’d recently installed, after Brian came buzzing around one too many times.

  Maybe he was paranoid. Scratch that, he was paranoid. But the extra security helped him sleep at night. The Monster was the last home they had, and he wasn’t losing it.

  They entered a world very different from the shabby plastisteel confines of the Startractor. The Monster was a hundred years old, in the same sense as certain shrines in Japan had been a thousand years old. Its existence dated back to the 2190s, but nearly every physical component of the ship had been replaced since. The ops module was the exception. Kiyoshi and Mendoza glided through linked caves panelled with real wood that had once been real trees growing in the mountains of Honshu. Right now the caves were sushi-zume, packed like sushi in a box, with stuff—and people. This many human beings had not lived on the Monster since the ship first carried Kiyoshi’s ancestors from Earth to an asteroid called 11073 Galapagos.

  These people were (some of) the descendants of those colonists. They were the last Japanese in the universe. They were Kiyoshi’s people. They were Galapajin.

  And they were packing.

  Getting ready to move, again.

  “Hurry up,” he told them. “We need to get this done while the boss is looking the other way.”

  A young mother looked up in despair from a suitcase whose contents kept floating out. “Ever heard of advance warning, Yonezawa-san?”

  “I didn’t know before today that we were going to get another ship to move into.” Kiyoshi grabbed a floating set of child-sized stabilizer braces and stuffed them into the suitcase. Then flew on, dodging a bevy of little girls who were playing at nuns in some beautiful old wimples that had turned up. For the kids, this chaos was a holiday from their normal schedules of school, Mass, and bone-building exercises.

  Tense faces greeted him on the bridge. Kiyoshi flew to his throne. It wasn’t really a throne, just the captain’s workstation, but he’d put in a custom couch and jacked it up so that he could lounge on it in a commanding fashion. Stirrups made this possible even in zero-gee. He looked around at his inner circle. “Well, this is it. Starting today, we’ll be on our own.”

  He wished they looked more enthusiastic. Their murmurs of “Hai” did not imply much confidence in his leadership. The problem was two-fold: these men and women had either grown up with him, if they were his generation, or had been his parents’ friends, if they were older. They still saw him as the kid who used to ditch school to get off his face on homebrewed shochu. What’s more, they didn’t really believe in any of his exploits in the inner system, which they had heard about but not seen for themselves. They’d been stuck here the whole time.

  And now he was going to be stuck here with them.

  The thought terrified him a bit.

  He put a brave face on it, describing how they were going to fortify the Startractor and turn it into a lovely home. It would be a bit of a squeeze, he couldn’t deny that. Compared to the Monster, the Startractor’s passenger and command modules, combined, offered only 80,000 cubic meters of living space, compared to the Monster’s capacious 260,000. But a person only really needed 200 m3 of space, he reminded them.

  The meeting wandered off into a discussion of the feasibility of tethering Bigelows, for extra living room, in the Startractor’s cargo bays. The engineers got into an argument about the right kind of connectors to use for the power and water lines. The Galapajin were all about the technical details. Take care of the engineering and God would take care of the rest. It was a good way of life, but sometimes their indifference to the big picture drove him insane.

  He lost patience and ordered them all out. “Go and make sure people are keeping their luggage within reasonable limits. It’s gonna take long enough to transship all the crap we need, without taking crap we don’t need.”

  Mendoza stayed behind on the bridge. So did Father Thomas Lynch. Father Tom was an Afro-Irish Jesuit who ministered to the Irish, Goan, and Amazonian Catholic contingents aboard the Salvation. He had a foot in both camps, but Kiyoshi trusted him.

  Mendoza thrust his fists over his head. “I know maybe I shouldn’t say this … but I am pumped to be getting out of here.”

  “No, you shouldn’t say it,” Father Tom said dryly.

  “You know what I mean.” Mendoza slapped Kiyoshi’s workstation with, Kiyoshi thought, a somewhat proprietorial manner. “Hope I’m gonna be able to fly this thing,” he joked.

  “Don’t worry, all you’ll have to do is water the plants,” Jun said, entering the bridge from the data center.

  Jun wore his usual cassock over muddy boots, suggesting that he had been in the garden. He floated like a normal person. Jun, however, was not a normal person. He was an artificial super-intelligence, created accidentally by Kiyoshi a few years back, and still growing. What they saw now was an illusion projected on their retinal implants—or interface contacts in the case of Mendoza and Father Tom, who did not have BCIs. They were all used to interacting with the projection as if it was human. The one thing you couldn’t do was touch it, or the illusion would be spoiled.

  Jun settle
d into the astrogator’s couch. Delta-V calculations flickered across the screens. “We should be able to reach Earth in less than a month.”

  Mendoza reminded him with a touch of anxiety, “Elfrida’s on Eureka Station. Halfway to Mars.”

  “Of course she is,” Jun said. “I was speaking in general.”

  “And of course,” Mendoza rehearsed, “we’ll have to cross Earth’s orbit to reach Eureka Station, given where the planets are at the moment.” He nodded, and ran his hands through his short black hair. “Of course.”

  Kiyoshi almost felt sorry for the poor sap. He honestly believed that they were going to risk the Monster on a voyage to Eureka Station to pick up his girlfriend. In the middle of a war.

  “I’m a bit nervous,” Mendoza apologized.

  Maybe he did have an inkling that there was more to it.

  “I keep wondering, what if we have nothing to say to each other? What if we’ve grown apart?”

  Or, not.

  Kiyoshi had half a dozen cigarettes tethered to the arms of his throne, with different mixes loaded. He stuck one in his mouth and started to disconnect the others to take with him. Through a cloud of vapor, he subvocalized to Jun, ~When are you going to tell him the truth?

  Jun responded, for his ears only, “I haven’t decided yet.” His back was still turned; he was gesturing at the astrogation screens, as if busy with pre-flight checks. But there was a hint of tension in the set of his head. You had to assume that every little nuance of his self-presentation was calculated, because it was literally the product of a calculation. But you also had to assume that he made those particular calculations, showed Kiyoshi these glimpses of indecision and vulnerability, because he was really feeling that way.

  He wasn’t the only one. Kiyoshi had agreed to their plan, but now that the moment had come, anxious forebodings gripped him. He dragged on his cigarette, inhaling a calming mix of nicotine and synthetic THC.

  Father Tom was giving Mendoza a last-minute lecture about his responsibilities. Mendoza had recently been ordained a deacon, which gave him a special role to play in Masses as minister of the Precious Blood. From the rucksack he wore over his EVA suit, the Jesuit took a pyx hand-forged from asteroid iron. “The Holy Eucharist,” he said, holding it up. He gave it to Mendoza, and took out a bulb-shaped bottle made of opaque, two-inch-thick Moon glass. “The Precious Blood.”

  Mendoza fell to his knees, clutching the vessels. In zero-gee, this came out as as bending his knees in the air. “I’ll guard it with my life, Father.” He looked up, his brow wrinkling. “But what if I drop it?”

  “You won’t drop it,” Father Tom said, with just a hint of menace.

  “No, but just in case. I mean, if it’s the Host, I pick it up and consume it, but what if it’s the Precious Blood?”

  “It used to be illegal to reserve the Precious Blood at all,” Father Tom said. “The Vatican changed canon law to allow it in space, when the priest may be millions of kilometers from his congregation. But it does present new dilemmas in zero-gee. If the Precious Blood is spilled on the floor, you wash the area with water, then pour the water into the sacrarium and drink that. But what if it never reaches the floor? What if there is no floor? I suppose you would have to scramble around catching all the drops. It’s never happened to me.”

  Kiyoshi kicked off from his throne. “Well, I’m going.”

  “Wait,” said Mendoza. He caught up with Kiyoshi at the door and hugged him. “Be careful, dude.”

  “You be careful. Don’t spill the Precious Blood, or Jun will space you.”

  Kiyoshi made a circuit of the ship, chivvying the last of the Galapajin out. He also checked that they hadn’t taken any of the booty from the Startractor. The Gravimetric Upcycler they’d liberated from the Startractor’s engineering module now occupied pride of place in the Monster’s fabrication lab. Kiyoshi had not asked Jun what he wanted it for. Even he didn’t know every detail of Jun’s plan. Jun said he didn’t, either. He was going to leave it up to the Holy Spirit, a.k.a. winging it.

  In the garden, Kiyoshi found some rabbits that had been left behind. They were hiding amidst the stalks of the vegetables harvested in haste by the departing Galapajin. He chased them, sweating in the garden’s 0.4 gees and sticky heat. Jun deployed a pair of gardening bots to help, but the bunnies were quicker. Adapted to micro-gee, they leapt in sailing bounds right over Kiyoshi’s head.

  “I give up,” Kiyoshi growled.

  “I’ve almost got this one. Just stay where you are. Hold the hutch open.”

  The bots edged slowly towards the fat, contented female rabbit. Kiyoshi squatted, holding the travel hutch open. Just stay where you are, he thought. Easy for him to say.

  “I can’t understand why you’re taking Mendoza instead of me,” he said.

  They’d had this argument before, and Kiyoshi had lost. Of course he’d lost. You couldn’t win an argument with an artificial super-intelligence. But now his forebodings were back, telling him loud and clear that Jun was making a mistake.

  “I know you need someone on board, to pretend to be flying the ship. But Mendoza? He doesn’t have a freaking clue. He actually believes you’re going to kidnap his girlfriend from Star Force, so she and he can join the rest of the nutjobs on Salvation. The guy is … I mean, he’s a good guy, but he’s Earthborn.” To Kiyoshi, this was a synonym for clueless.

  “He’s pious,” Jun answered, which was inarguable.

  “Oh, so it’s because I’m a bad Catholic.”

  “I didn’t say that. Anyway, you’ll have Father Tom to keep you on the straight and narrow.”

  “I’m not absolutely sure where Father Tom’s loyalties lie.”

  “Never even question that! He’s loyal to his Order.”

  “Yeah, that’s the trouble,” Kiyoshi muttered under his breath.

  But of course Jun heard him. The bots pounced, waving their trowel attachments. Startled, the rabbit bounded into the air. Kiyoshi stood up and held the travel hutch in front of it. Jun said, “Jesuits make history, while other people stand and watch.”

  Kiyoshi sealed the hutch before the rabbit could escape. “Jun, you’re not a Jesuit.”

  Jun belonged to the Order of St. Benedict of Passau, a much more humble monastic order than the Society of Jesus. He said now, “Did I tell you I ran my plan past the Abbot Primate?”

  “No!” Kiyoshi was stunned. The Abbot Primate was the supervisor of all the scattered monasteries of St. Benedict of Passau, a holy man who lived in Rome and published monographs on the mercy of Christ. Kiyoshi literally could not imagine his reaction to Jun’s plan to win the war singlehandedly. “What did he say?”

  “He said Christ will have mercy on me. I took that as a green light.” But Jun didn’t sound entirely happy about it.

  Kiyoshi set down the rabbit hutch. “Does he know what you are? Did you tell him?”

  “Yes.” Before Kiyoshi had the chance to react with four-letter words, Jun said hurriedly, “If I hadn’t, someone else would have, sooner or later.” He meant the other monks and nuns among their people. The Order of St. Benedict of Passau had taken root strongly among the Galapajin during their years of isolation, and they had forty-six brothers and sisters among their number here, including five priests. The other religious tended to be wary of Jun. Kiyoshi was the only one who understood him. It seemed highly unlikely that an abbot on faraway Earth would.

  “How did he take it?”

  “It was a lot of ‘on the one hand,’ and ‘then again, on the other.’ He did mention that holy orders are technically for people, not artificial intelligences.”

  “You. Are. A. Person.”

  “Yes, but he’s never met me. In the end he said he was going to consult with the Vatican, bearing in mind that it’s a unique situation.”

  The Abbot Primate was right about that, Kiyoshi reflected. Jun was the only true artificial intelligence in the solar system … except for the PLAN. He almost felt sorry for the Vatican theologians
who would have to wrap their heads around the problem. To Kiyoshi himself, it was simple: Jun was the same person he’d always been. He was Kiyoshi’s little brother. “Come out where I can see you,” he ordered.

  Jun’s projection emerged from behind a bush, carrying one of the rabbits. It reality a gardening bot was carrying it, and Jun had cleverly overlaid his projection on the bot. Kiyoshi opened the hutch so he could stuff the rabbit in. The illusion of interactivity was painful. He wanted to hug Jun and tell him it would be OK, and he knew that all he’d get would be an armful of metal attachments.

  “So are you in or out?”

  “Still in, I think,” Jun answered. “The Abbot Primate raised the point that I can’t take Communion. Which is obviously a problem. But I think the real sticking point is that I’m still claiming to be Jun Yonezawa, who they think is dead. And obviously, no one can come back from the dead except our Lord.”

  “Yeeeeah,” Kiyoshi said. “But Jesus raised Lazarus, and Jairus’s daughter, so why couldn’t He have raised you? I need to talk to them.”

  Jun laughed. “Yeah, that would help. It’s not a lost cause. They’re discussing it. But it’ll probably take years before they come to a decision, and that’s my point: the Jesuits aren’t like that. They’re open to everything and everyone. New frontiers are their way of life. See it, go for it.”

  “I know you’ve been discussing Jesuit spirituality with Father Tom.”

  “Yup. So many of the great saints have been Jesuits. It’s incredibly inspiring.”

  Now Jun sounded happy, the way he always did when he got onto a favorite topic. But for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, this made Kiyoshi uneasier than ever.

  “I’d better go.” He picked up the rabbit hutch and trudged towards the airlock. His eyes told him he was walking up a hill clothed in bushes and saplings. His feet told him he was walking on level ground. With the garden unaccustomedly empty, he could hear the throb of the massive motors that rotated the module on the ship’s axis.

  Halfway to the airlock, he halted.