by Emma Newman
The easel is buried underneath the other canvases. It must have come loose from the packing straps during transit; I would never pack it like this. I push away the thought that someone went through my stuff before it was brought to my room.
It can’t be proven. I must not get paranoid. More paranoid than I already am, at least.
I was twelve when I first learned what the word really meant. It stopped being an empty adjective, used with the casual ease of a child who had never really felt it, when Dad’s behavior changed.
Looking back, it seems like it happened overnight, but I know it didn’t thanks to the recordings made by my memory bear. It stayed in my room, in a box, to be taken out only when I wanted to talk to it or for special occasions. My parents had grown up in a world where animated toys were sophisticated but didn’t have AI, making them mistrustful. They had a friend do something to the bear’s innards to cut it off from the Internet. It limited its function horribly, but it was the only way they would accept it in the house. The friend—whom I never met; could that be the one connected to Travis?—had the bear sync with a home memory hub, also detached from the Internet. That meant it could still record things I wanted it to, and could still get to know me and give what help it could with its limited internal dictionary and encyclopedia. It also meant that, critically, when the time came to get my chip, I had a load of data ready to feed it, so the transition was easier. That data gathered over my childhood acted as a shortcut, enabling my Artificial Personal Assistant settings to be tailored more accurately right from the start. Not that I had one of those superadvanced ones you could talk to like a real person; we could afford only a fairly basic model that was compatible with the regular upgrades needed for the first ten years.
As it happens, Bear was out and recording Mum’s fortieth birthday party when Dad first started behaving strangely. Dad had been quiet all day, but I had thought it was because he was tired. We’d been up late the night before, decorating the communal hall for the party and doing the cake decorating. I’d felt so important, being just old enough to be genuinely useful, and rubbed in the fact that I got to stay up late to make Geena pout. With her sulking, and the pressure of giving Mum a special day, I’d thought Dad was simply preoccupied.
I’ve watched the footage of that afternoon many times in therapy. I haven’t seen it for more than fifteen years now though. I got so sick of the opening shot of my twelve-year-old face looking down at Bear and saying, “Hi! Are you awake? There’s a birthday party today and you’re invited!”
“Oh! Wonderful,” my bear said, and that would always be where the playback was paused first. Questions about how I felt about my bear having to stay in the box when other children took theirs everywhere. Questions about whether I loved my bear, whether it made me sad to put him away afterward, whether I was angry at my parents for their attitudes toward it. It was so tedious. The first few times I’d point out that it had nothing to do with the problems I’d been having. Then I learned that there was no point telling a therapist that something is irrelevant. It’s all relevant to those bastards; every single sigh, every gesture, every insistence that they were barking up the wrong tree. I soon learned to stop resisting the direction they wanted to take. Better that than get frustrated with the fact that there was no way for them to ever be wrong. I much preferred comments about how guarded I was.
Ten minutes more into that recording—ten minutes, thirty-five seconds to be exact—is the next time it was always paused. That was when I wandered into the kitchen, Bear cuddled tight against my chest, eyes out so he could see too. Dad was rummaging in a drawer, looking pale and biting his lip. I’d seen him do that only when he was trying to fix something difficult, so I asked what he was doing, still eager to help.
“Looking for the sealer,” he said.
“But I already covered the food. It’s all laid out already.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Is it for the leftovers? I was going to give them to the piggies. And the chickens will like the—”
When he found it he headed straight out, ignoring me. I trailed after him all the way to the communal hall.
Inside we’d decorated it with homemade bunting and paper chains, the former brought out for all parties, having been made by everyone in the commune, the latter made by Geena and me over the past week. I showed my bear the different triangles and told him who had made each one and why they’d picked those colors. That’s the part always fast-forwarded through until the moment I spotted Dad doing something with the wiring on the far side of the hall.
“What are you doing, Daddy?” How I hate the sound of my reedy childhood voice now.
“I’m protecting us,” he said.
“What from?”
“Monsters.”
“Daddy, I’m twelve now. I know there’s no such thing. What are you really doing?”
“What I said, protecting us.” He was using the handheld sealer dispenser to attach something to the wires leading from the hall’s hub to the screen where we planned to have pictures of Mum displayed during the party. At the time, I thought he was doing something to make sure the electricity didn’t short. It was only in my twenties that I learned he was attaching a device of his own making, something he believed would stop the voices he’d started to hear from being sent through the connection. It actually did nothing; it was an old-fashioned circuit board with some ancient RAM jammed into it and a few diodes soldered on in a pattern.
That was what paranoia really was. And when Mum learned about it, a few days after the party thanks to a throwaway comment from me, she actually asked him, “Why are you being so paranoid?”
And that was the first time he hit her.
I push away the memories, reminding myself that it was a long time ago and he can no longer hurt her and that I am literally on another planet now, safe. I focus on the canvas now resting on the easel, waiting to be filled. I both love and hate this moment. The emptiness of the canvas excites me with the purest sense of potential, and yet at the same time, it paralyzes me. I have a sense in my mind of what I want to paint, and in this moment, just before I mix the first color, it is perfect. There is a quiet dread of the first daub, the instant that emptiness disappears and it has to be finished, has to get to a point where it will fail or succeed. Between now and that final touch of brush against canvas will be a constant negotiation between my ability and that perfect image in my mind. It will evolve, it always does, but the final piece will never be exactly what I want.
Mum says it’s the same with her pots. She told me that the only way to be happy as an artist is to make peace with perfectionism. To accept that the final result will never match what you might have had in mind at the start and that’s okay. “Sometimes it turns out better than you thought,” she said to me in a message that I’ve played so many times over the years. “And sometimes, you sit down and think, ‘Ah, there’s nothing in me today,’ but that might be the day you do your best work. And sometimes you don’t even think. You just do the work and the art follows. And those days are rare and precious. The only thing you must be strict with yourself about is showing up to do the work, no matter what mood you’re in.”
Today I am actually in the mood to paint, despite my trepidation. I haven’t painted for months. Have I forgotten how to?
After a few moments of staring at the canvas, I open a sketchbook, dig out a pencil and call up the stills I saved from the mersive to display on my wall. Soon I am absorbed in describing the shape of the rocks with a few light strokes of the pencil, tweaking the composition, arguing silently with myself about whether to keep it accurate. The alignment of Elysium Mons in the far background with the shapes of the boulders could be better with just a slight adjustment. In the distance, I spot the tip of a tall, thin metal structure, some kind of communications mast, I think, that I hadn’t really paid attention to before. I put it in the sketch and decide the picture would probably be bet
ter without it, leaving the pure majesty of the Martian surface without any sign of humankind.
I check my contract, making sure that there isn’t any stipulation about what exactly I paint. It details that it must be of the Martian surface, that all pictures must be recognizably of Mars and preferably give the viewer a sense of being there. I’m not allowed to include any scientific equipment, including sensor arrays and weather stations. I’d forgotten about that. Strange that it be banned, when the tech being used up here isn’t that different from what is used on Earth. But then, corporations always get twitchy over this sort of thing, and a blanket ban is far easier than dozens of subclauses trying to pin down the exact parameters of acceptable artistic expression.
I’ll have to leave that mast out, meaning total accuracy isn’t possible anyway. That’s a relief. I’ll move Elysium Mons, then, and make it a little bit bigger too. And just to be on the safe side, I’ll make a record of the changes I’m making.
I call up a map of all the artificial structures in the Elysium Planitia region, and then seeing that it includes even the landing site of every scientific exploration vehicle sent to Mars in the last century, I apply a filter. There’s no way that mast can be part of one of those abandoned vehicles; it’s too tall. Dozens of little dots disappear from the map, leaving about a dozen atmospheric stations that have masts farther away and, closer to Principia, communications boosters used to strengthen comms with the rovers and also provide fail-safes should the primary comms go down.
But none of the remaining dots correspond with the location of the mast I can see in the shot on my wall.
I zoom in with a simple hand gesture. The image of the mast gets briefly crisper, and then when I zoom in again, it disappears.
“What the fuck?” I mutter, zooming back out again. It doesn’t reappear.
“Principia? Have you edited this image data?”
“No, Dr. Kubrin. Would you like me to show you the editing—”
“No. I want you to reload this image, using the original data from my save.” I point at the wall, so it knows which one I’m referring to.
When it reloads the mast tip is still missing. “Can I help you with anything else, Dr. Kubrin?”
“No.” I sit back, looking from the wall to my sketch and back again. Did I imagine that mast? Why would I do that? But if I didn’t imagine it, that means Principia has not only edited it out on the fly, without any request to do so; it’s also lied about its actions.
Lying AIs are nothing new; the truth is only as pure as your relative pay grade after all, but I still find it disturbing that this keeps on happening.
If Principia is deliberately hiding this mast, it could be part of what Travis wants me to find. I need to work out how far away it is. On Earth, I’d be able to do it relatively easily, having a program set up to help me work out perspectives for landscapes. I can easily adapt that for Mars though. And even better, it’s such a simple program, I don’t even need to use Principia to do it; it’s housed within my chip.
I’m used to using it immersively, so I look up the exact dimensions of Mars, save the figures to my temporary memory cache and lie down on the bed.
It isn’t long before I’m standing in a featureless gray room. A tiny purple sphere is hovering in the air in front of me, waiting for me to start.
I love this program. It was designed to help children learn basic mathematical concepts but is used by artists, architects, game designers and all manner of other professionals. I tap the sphere and a simple dialog box floats next to it into which I can input the dimensions I want the sphere to be, the scale and which shape I’d like it to be. I keep the sphere, make it the same dimensions as Mars and alter the scale to one-hundredth. The program asks me if I want to be inside the sphere or on the surface. I select the latter.
The sphere expands, making everything below me purple. It’s far too big, so I adjust the sphere until it’s the size of a large house, just big enough for me to move on top of the surface.
I chuck in some features—the crater and its dimensions, Elysium Mons—using aerial maps of Mars to get the distances right. The program scales automatically once relative distances and dimensions are given. I even put in the boulders, importing a wire frame of them extrapolated from the mersive data. Once it’s all in place, I change it to visualization mode, where the really fun stuff can be done. I check that everything looks the same—albeit massively simplified and almost cartoonish—and then I make a little copy of the mast, the exact length that I sketched it. It’s simply a matter of selecting a symbol from the floating menu and then pinching the thumb and forefinger of each hand, touching them against each other and then pulling apart until I have the length I want. Then I put the little stick-like shape in the correct location on the horizon.
As a tool for playing with composition, it’s very basic. Where its strength comes in is during the next phase. The same calculations that are used to keep everything in perspective and the correct scale if they are moved closer or farther away can also be used to calculate distances between points. This way, a town designer can chuck in all the proposed buildings in a really simplified form and literally move them about until the skyline looks good. Then the user can work back from that perfect skyline to calculate exactly where the different buildings would need to be placed in relation to one another. It’s easier and faster to manipulate than complex modeling mersives, which can be overwhelming in their detail, and is also the same reason this is used to help kids. They can’t get distracted by textures and details. It’s pure geometry.
I tell the program that I want to calculate how high the mast is and how far away it is from the boulders. It’s sophisticated enough to take the curvature of the sphere into its perspective calculations, and with Mars being just over half of the size of Earth, it makes a difference.
Of course, my sketch didn’t use exact measurements, but I have a good eye for this sort of thing. I mentally give it a margin of error of plus or minus two meters for the height, based on the other masts on Mars, and feed that into the program too, so it can give me the range of possible distances.
In moments, that’s exactly what I have. It’s about five kilometers past the crater edge, just on the edge of the area covered by the missing cam drone data and potentially slightly taller than the other masts. When I do a bit of digging, it turns out that the masts that are on the official map vary in height too, depending on their primary function.
I confirm that there really is no mast in that potential area on the official map. For the first time, I have something tangible to go on.
If I didn’t imagine it. I can’t shake that concern, but if I start questioning every single discrepancy between what I see and what Principia decides to show me, then I’ll drive myself crazy. As soon as this fictional dust storm has been allowed to pass, I’ll go straight out there, get the visual data to feed the program to disguise my location and then see if it’s what Travis hopes I would find.
If there is a mast, one of the crew could be gathering additional data and piping it back to Earth secretly. I can’t imagine what that would be; perhaps they are measuring the impact of something highly experimental or illegal. I’m not even sure there’s been any international agreement on what would be illegal out in the Martian wilderness. We are all bound by Noropean law and any subsets that are GaborCorp specific, because we are all contracted to that organization and are living in a GaborCorp facility. While GaborCorp has exclusive rights to access Mars and exploit its resources, it doesn’t own the planet. No one does. Yet.
Of course, there are some things that would be so illegal there would be no point doing them on Mars. Making androids with fully simulated human likeness would be one of them, but what would be the point of making robots that could pass off as people up here on Mars? They would be so expensive to ship back to Earth.
Perhaps one of Principia’s drones foun
d something that demanded more investigation. My heart dearly wants it to be the remains of an ancient alien civilization, or that elusive definitive proof of life. It’s unlikely to be either of them. I just don’t believe in scientific fairy tales.
I save the distance and bearing so I can find the mast easily from the boulders and then close the program. The first thing I do when I’m fully back in my own body is rub out the mast from my sketch. I omit it from the list of differences between the proposed painting and the actual view on the planet, and just as I’m deciding where to start the painting, there’s a ping from Dr. Arnolfi.
Reluctantly I take the call. “Dr. Kubrin. I’m sorry to disturb your work, but there is a team meeting that you must attend immediately.”
She doesn’t even give me a chance to reply. The stress in her voice has somehow leeched into the muscles of my back. I run my hands through my hair a couple of times, check that I don’t smell too bad and then head straight there, arriving to find everyone else taking places around the table.
Dr. Arnolfi looks positively haggard. Everyone else is silent, having noticed the same. I take a seat next to Elvan, certain that some bad news is about to be delivered.
“Thank you for coming, everyone. I thought it best that we all learn this at the same time. I’m afraid we’ve lost communication with Earth.”
14
I’VE GOT TO hand it to Arnolfi; she plays a good game. She looks concerned, genuinely so, but I know she’s behind all this. The timing is just too coincidental. Principia knows I was viewing data gathered from the cams, so it’s reasonable to assume that Arnolfi knows that too. She has the access privileges and the right to examine my activities here under the umbrella of being a mental health care professional. She must have realized I was zeroing in on whatever Principia has been trying to hide from the cam data. Principia must have told her that it had to remove the mast from the image I was sketching and she’s called this meeting to announce the drop in comms as a distraction. There’s a chance Principia has dug about in my chip, without my knowledge or consent, and found the files that Travis put there. She must have cooked this up with Principia; the dust storm can’t be faked indefinitely, and to stop me from using the dead drop they’ve had to invent this comms cut. It’s extreme, and faintly ridiculous, but it underlines how far they’re willing to go to stop me from uncovering their lies.