She nodded agreement. Dave Roman had to be senile to forget that the Kansler, like most people in the late 22nd century, had Personal Assistants watching and aiding him - of course also while he slept.
And given the Kansler's mania for control and the Fleet's access to cutting-edge technology, his PAs would be extremely alert and intelligent. He might even have one of those synaptic by-pass monitors she'd heard of, which enabled a man to watch surveillance footage in his sleep .
Dave Roman passed a fart. Venix turned up her nose, while everyone else casually shouted the traditional Finnish blessing: "Tervedexi!"
She understood now the slogans she had seen on every Martian outhouse and bathroom-door: GAS IS GREEN, DIRT IS WORTH. Their obsession with terraforming dominated every aspect of their lives.
One of the scientists called for their attention: "Excuse me, we're finished with the scan. The subject, uh, the visitor is not transmitting anything except body heat. She's clean."
Arjja licked her lips nervously, and studied the other council members. They nodded approval. She pressed a button on the panel that was taped to wide palm, and the screens on the conference table lit up with a flat image of Boulder Pi's game-board.
"Watch this closely, Venix - the last and only coded message I received from Boulder Pi before he was taken to the Fleet's lunar research complex. We blew up the image and searched for hidden messages. But his actual message is in plain sight, he must have scribbled it by hand at the last possible minute before sending the image. His handwriting is awful."
"I can read it," said Venix. "It says in the corner: 'The white lady will remember what I told the candidate just before he woke up a new man. Search for the words where everyone can see them.' "
The assembled Martians were startled, when she uttered her conclusion after just one second. "Don't you get it? Now I remember, Gus lay in the stasis-bed waiting to be operated on before he was changed, and Boulder told him -"
She quickly tapped the speech-command button on the screen at her seat.
"Universal file search. Find this phrase: 'The mind controls the body on all levels, even the smallest level.'"
"Searching... please wait..." said the screen's artificial voice. No one in the room spoke a word as they waited. Never before had the minutes felt so slow to Venix.
After five minutes, the MocaCoca-drinking councilman said it was hopeless, and motioned to fetch more bottles in an adjacent room. The others forcefully restrained the man, and Arjja gave him a suspicious glance. Another forty minutes passed in agonizing silence...
The search program produced an old-fashioned Internet page with a single link on it. Venix "clicked" the link with her fingertips on the touch-sensitive screen.
The link opened to another page - with a text message:
THE MIND CONTROLS THE BODY ON ALL LEVELS, EVEN THE SMALLEST LEVEL HXeXlXlXo, mXy cXhXiXlXd. IXf yXoXu cXaXn rXeXaXd tXhXiXs, iXt mXeXaXnXs yXoXu fXiXgXuXrXeXd oXuXt mXy lXiXtXtXlXe mXeXmXoXrXy-sXwXaXpXpXiXnXg tXrXiXcXk...
Boulder's message came with a very crude encryption to elude search-programs. Venix easily sorted out the code and read the unscrambled text out loud...
***
THE MIND CONTROLS THE BODY ON ALL LEVELS, EVEN THE SMALLEST LEVEL
Hello, my child. If you can read this, it means you figured out my little memory-swapping trick. I know which one of you two understood it first - the smart one...
Hopefully, this message contains no names or key words that would enable you-know-who to find it. You and your male counterpart, you will make a great couple. I think of you as my only children. If this sounds deranged, I apologize.
From when I first learned cybernetics, I always knew you would come into existence one day, when circumstances were right. For that is the blessing and the curse of the human species - whatever our minds can dream up, we try to make real.
Memorize this: the manner in which the Head Honcho controls his Main Man. A particle so light, it passes through the sun like through air, but is stopped by water.
Head Honcho has a big, big transmitter of these particles following him at all times, from a far distance, and he controls it through some remote machine very close to his person - or INSIDE his person, I don't know for sure.
Since these control transmissions can reach our Main Man through almost any barrier in space, it would be too difficult for Main Man to shield himself against the signals.
Theoretically, the two of you could live safe and shielded in an ocean, but you'd run into other problems after a while.
In the final stages of creating Main Man, on Head Honcho's orders, my science people inserted a tiny, remote-controlled shutdown thing into Main Man's body.
If Head Honcho dies, for any reason, the transmitter will send a command to the shutdown thing, and it kills Main Man instantly.
Before you try to challenge Head Honcho, the shutdown-thing MUST be removed or neutralized. It could have settled almost anywhere inside Main Man.
That's all I could find out. Good luck. I give you - the world. Be gentle with it, and take care of each other.
You Know Who
P.S.: Hey, smart girl! I almost forgot - you have no control receptor inside you, you were developed by me alone. So you are already free.
But you are physically similar to our Main Man in many other ways, so you should be ideal for trying to reach his mind through direct transmission.
Think of those particles. Use them to reach him. He will need your help... he's not so clever, you know.
Don't forget to type in your real name in the guestbook at the bottom of the page...
***
Venix typed in the word VENICE, sent it across, and the screen turned into graphic noise. The file had erased itself.
"Was that it?" asked Arjja uncertainly. She instinctively held up her arms in protection when Venix pivoted around and hugged her.
From his seat, Dave Roman let out a loud fart.
"Tervedexi!" Venix shouted at him, grinning happily.
One of the scientists said, "Maybe we can help. The Olympus Mons Observatory does a bit of neutrino research on the side. It's pretty obvious Boulder is talking about neutrinos, and he could have heard about our research on his visit."
Arjja pried herself loose from Venix' crushing embrace.
"Can you build a transmitter for me?" Venix asked.
"I'd rather not discuss it here," the scientist replied. "But I think we'll need you to work out the exact details with us, at the observatory."
"I'll try my best," Venix told him. "Pity, that Boulder couldn't find out more. And the engineers who could tell us how to use it, are of course locked up on the Moon and under close surveillance."
The scientist grew visibly excited as he spoke: "Sometimes there are public programs showing the inside of the lunar research complex, I've recorded them all. The Fleet uses those science-shows to scare the colonies with promises of new, terrible weapons. Our computers can analyze these images and perhaps I'll find a clue - but most of the footage is censored, you know."
He urged his colleagues along, and they quickly exited to their transport.
The man with the MocaCoca addiction asked: "If they succeed in contacting Argus-A, won't the Fleet intercept the signals to Argus, and strike at us? " Arjja nodded, her face grim. "Oh, what the Earth," he added rapidly, "we're already at war as it is. Great! I'll get more Moca."
In 0.011 seconds, Venix grew alert: he was the same councilman who had wanted to go outside while they waited for... she switched to infrared vision and grabbed his wrist.
"Are you a Terran informer?" she asked him sharply, watching the thermal patterns of his head.
The man twitched to get free, and spontaneously blurted: "No!" She saw how the blood flow changed in his brain - the patterns screamed YES!
His other hand moved to his pants pocket, and Venix saw it coming: she grabbed and broke both his wrists before he knew it. The man protested and screamed, but in a split-second sh
e had caught what he was reaching for: a small flash-grenade, which would have blinded everyone in the room and covered his escape.
Trapping the councilman in a headlock, she tossed the grenade to Arjja, who caught it awkwardly.
"Oh my Goddess... this is Terran ordnance!" Arjja glowered at the cringing, sobbing traitor. "How could you, Francer? We trusted you! You saw our defense plans!"
"Surrender is our only chance!" councilman Francer whined at them. "Once they're finished massacring the Jovian colonies, it'll be our turn. One cyborg alone almost beat the entire MSF! Can you imagine what an army of creatures like her could do to us? Because that's what we'll be up against! She's the prototype , the new enemy!"
A ghastly silence fell over the room and the other members' eyes turned to Venix; she could read fear and suspicion building in their minds.
"Fine," she snapped, and dropped the wailing Francer to the floor. "I'm leaving. "You are obviously of no help to me or Mars."
She rushed out to Arjja's tunnel car with such swiftness, they could not stop her. In four seconds, she was racing off.
Juan Texeira-Berg made a half-hearted attempt to catch up, groaned, and turned around to give his mother and the council a sound scolding: " Idiotti! We don't need this so-called council. We need what we always needed: people like her."
Arjja gaped at him for a few seconds, but her mood shifted quickly and she separated herself from the crowd to join him.
"Gentlemen," she declared over her shoulder, "we have rendered ourselves obsolete. I hereby resign from all future council duties."
She hurried to the same exit passage that the scientists had used, and punched in on her palmpanel a request for a roton-rocket taxi.
Dave Roman sprung to his feet, and whacked feebly at the cringing Francer with his stick. The council stood around Dave and France, hesitating: should they cheer, or stop the beating of a fellow member?
38: A Night At the Observatory
Night fell on Olympus Mons, Mars' highest mountain peak, and the stars came out. The planets shone brightly against the glowing backdrop of the Milky Way. Brightest of all was the blue dot called Earth...
"This could be bad news," Venix said to Arjja and Juan. "The propaganda-show from Earth - look."
She switched display to a larger wall-screen, to let them watch the current edition of Hard Booby , hosted by the ever-pneumatic Olga Oh .
Most Martians hated the show for its lies and sugarcoated threats against the Outer Planets - but some watched it anyway, after they had edited away everything but Olga Oh's genetically enhanced body. Grown men whimpered when they saw her move.
Young Juan stared too, even as he sneered at the newscaster's words:
"... and I know I speak for every true daughter of Mother Earth, when I wish Argus-A good luck on his next dangerous mission over enemy territory! Mmm, when I think of him I get warm all over. And speaking of big guys, they don't come any bigger than the Kansler. Right, boys and girls and she-boys? I saw his speech just an hour ago and I cried, really, I cried. He makes us all so proud. Mother Earth bless him.
"Oh yes, I really shouldn't tell you this now, but a little bot whispered in my ear... a hot new award ceremony is coming up in just twenty-four hours! The word on the beams is that Argus-A and our great man, the Kansler himself, will make a rare live appearance when the Kansler awards Argus this year's Nobel Peace Prize! Now isn't that great?"
"Same old roska they give the Kansler each year," Juan complained to the screen. "As if we care who gets it."
"Amazing," Arjja added, "that he gives up the award to Argus after hogging it for five years in a row. He must really want the whole Solar System to watch. Kyll. " She patted Venix' shoulder - gently - and gave her a smile that was meant to cheer her up. "Let's see how our geniuses are doing."
***
Neutrino communication had never really caught on, due to the vast excess of neutrino "static" coming in from all corners of the universe - and the over-sensitive, expensive technology needed to transmit and intercept neutrinos. Only certain parts of the Fleet used it.
Arjja, Juan and Venix left the smaller anteroom and entered the main hall of the Olympus Mons Observatory, situated on the top of the 27-kilometer-high, dead volcano.
The main hall housed a planetarium, where live telescope images could be projected on the inside walls. The images were fed from a field of 2,000 computer-controlled small telescopes on the crater floor. The vacuum at this altitude provided excellent images of space.
A small but devout team of independent researchers had an entire section of the hall to themselves, for various experiments.
As the three visitors ran down the stairs to check on the research-team, they saw the device that took up most of the team's consigned space.
It resembled a laser transmitter but had a torus-shaped section at its base, to which four thick power cables ran across the floor.
The visitors approached the scientists, some of which they recognized from the council meeting. The researchers' senses were all hooked up to each other by way of a closed neural laser-grid, so they could act like a single mind.
One of the "gridders" waved at the guests while he was busy working, and another gridder spoke in his place.
"You're just in time for good news," said one gridder with an unkempt beard and the build of a skysurfer, speaking very rapidly - though not too rapidly for Venix. "This is so cool, we'll skip sleep for the next two days!"
"Fine, fine," Arjja said, "but we're running short on time. What've you got?"
"Arjja, remember two years ago, when we told the world about the cheap, improved neutrino detector we'd built, using the underground water reservoirs as detectors? And almost before we went public, the MSF sent their goons to intimidate us, virtually threatened to shut our lab down... but! Just as quickly as they came, they got nervous and left.
"They must have figured out that if they told us where we weren't allowed to search for neutrinos, we'd know exactly where to look for their classified stuff. In other words: We suspected back then, that the Fleet was doing secret neutrino-com tests. Venix has helped us confirm this. So we -"
"Wait," Venix broke in. "Did you detect secret transmissions targeted at the following coordinates?"
She told them from memory, the exact time and place that Argus-A was struck down by a paralyzing command in Old Copenhagen, on Earth, several weeks earlier.
The gridders fed the data into the computer grid they were all jacked into... and simultaneously, the men turned to smile at Venix.
"That's..."
"Right!"
"At exactly that time..."
"...we detected a massive, fifty-second burst..."
"...of neutrino signals. Neutrinos can't be deflected or bounced - they just take a straight path, right through planets and asteroids, until they're stopped by water."
"And?"
"The burst came from a moving source, in an eccentric orbit intersecting the Asteroid Belt. First we mistook the source for a comet, and the spectrometry indicated it as one. But then it started to change course, using a powerful ion-based propulsion device. So we took a closer look, and found out the "comet" had to be an artificial body camouflaged as an asteroid. Since then we've detected similar neutrino bursts from the source, beamed at Jupiter. We think the Fleet got nervous that astronomers like us were listening in on them. They started to send irregular bursts at various occasions, to throw us off track."
"Deciphering?" she asked briskly.
"No luck. The modulations of the bursts are way off the scale, I'm talking gamma-ray intensity. But the particles are still so light, they can't cause any harm."
"Can I see these transmissions, translated into light signals, at the exact original speed?"
"We'll play them on the planetarium. Look up."
The gridders, working as one man in several bodies, switched off the ceiling lights and the enormous dome went black.
Out of habit, Venix switched to i
nfrared vision - but switched back when she noticed everybody else were looking up at the projections on the dome's inside. She gaped.
"I can read it! It's an intricate pattern..."
"I just see a pulsating light," Juan told her. "What's it saying?"
Venix couldn't reply. Her memory-metal-and-plastic muscles coiled up in cramp; she struggled to keep her balance, shut her eyes for a moment, and opened them again.
Arjja shouted at the team to switch off the transmission, but Venix threw out a hand to counter the order. With a shudder, Venix' muscles uncoiled. Her injured leg was shaking a little, but it worked well enough to stand on.
"That signal is what happened to Gus," she told Arjja. "That is why he cannot disobey his orders. Thought I was immune to it - but when I looked at this translation into light-pulses..."
"They entered your nervous system through your eyes instead of through neutrino receptors, because you are not built to convert neutrinos into electric pulses!" one scientist filled in quickly.
"But light-signals don't work as efficiently - I can avert my eyes. Neutrino signals would pass right through Argus's skin and into his hidden receiver. He will have to remove it or smash it."
" Kyll. I wish a girl with your smarts could hook up with our grid," the scientist said in awe.
The gridders looked at each other and had an internal discussion, which only they could follow over their neural network. After a few seconds they nodded in simultaneous agreement, and urged their visitors with them into a small office.
"Listen," they explained, "the MSF left bugs in the building. Lots of micro-bots, cam-sects and walking ears, but we're feeding them fake surveillance with counter-bots that the militia are producing. So hopefully, the MSF don't know this yet: We've built an experimental neutrino transmitter , right here, based on specs we calculated from the Fleet's early transmissions. We still can't use it, though."
"Why?"
" Yksi: Our machines can't speak the language. It's extremely complex, like human thought processes but many, many times faster.
" Kaksi: Once we aim the transmitter at the Fleet and send a test signal to Argus-A, we have about one hour before they can detect us and send a strike order across to Zodong-Petain. We saw what the proton cannon on the Phobos Station did to your escape truck. It can pop this dome like a balloon."
Yngve, AR - The Argus Project Page 25