Human Phase

by J. S. Morin

  Alan whirled on Ned. The question must have been plain on his face because Ned answered without Alan having to say the words.

  “Yeah,” Ned said casually. “We figured we’d see what you’re made of. Got a robot here who’s not seeing the next Martian sunrise. Figured we’d allow you the privilege of getting a little revenge for all the wrongs robots have done you.”

  Alan backed toward the airlock door. “I… I…”

  On the table, the robot sounded desperate. “I know Charlie7.”

  “So does every last one of you,” Les snapped. “Can it, or I’ll start drilling holes until I find the power supply to that voice modulator of yours.”

  “What did he do?” Alan asked in a tremulous voice.

  “It’s not so much what he did, it’s what he’s complicit in,” Gregor explained. “Culpability is a shared commodity. Surely, James98 is a minor offender compared to some, but he is guilty of supporting the repressive regime on Earth.”

  Guilt. Complicity. Regime. This wasn’t a committee meeting. This wasn’t even a Human Era courtroom. This was a lynching for the robot era.

  “This is murder,” Alan protested.

  “It’s not a person,” Ned assured him with a pat on the shoulder. “Must be hard, growing up on Earth. But you need to understand, it’s just a machine programmed to think like one. They stole minds and mushed them together into a working model of a human brain. But it hasn’t got real feelings. It hasn’t got a soul. You a religious fellow, Alan?”

  Alan nodded mutely. He wasn’t the scientist that Kaylee was, but neither of them had the first inkling of how the known cosmos came to be. Consciousness was an inexplicable phenomenon, replicable by roboticists but never understood fully. Alan had to believe that there was some greater force in the universe that had gifted it to mankind and through them, to robots.

  And there was a consciousness trapped in that metallic skull. The limp chassis, helpless on the table, wouldn’t respond to its owner’s commands. James98 had been forbidden to speak on pain of involuntary modification. Robots didn’t feel pain as such, but they could receive dire error messages, and they could certainly experience terror.

  Alan could imagine nothing so horrifying as being trapped in his own mind, able—no, compelled—to listen in as a cabal of murderers spoke glibly of the reasons to annihilate his consciousness.

  Ned pressed a device into Alan’s hand. “Go on, then. Do it. If you don’t, one of us will. There’s no saving this one.”

  Looking down, Alan saw a magnetic device, some sort of alignment tool or calibrator. Kaylee would know its proper function. All Alan saw, however, was a murder weapon.

  “Just hold it to the skull—mind your fingers, of course—and hit the button on the side,” Les explained, pointing to a spot on the side of James98’s cranium. “Clickity-clack. No more robot.”

  “Don’t worry,” Wil said. “If you’re worried about getting caught, don’t be. We’ve blanked transorbital crew before. A little repair work and it’ll look just like a suicide. Every few trips, one of those ships comes back with a blank chassis or two.”

  “They send ‘em back on autopilot,” Calvin added. “Don’t sweat it. We’ll do the heavy lifting dragging this one back.”

  “Please,” James98 moaned.

  “Aww, forget it,” Les snapped testily. “This one’s got no ‘sterone.” He snatched the magnetic device from Alan’s hand and applied it to James98’s head.

  “No!” Alan shouted and lunged for the device.

  Ned caught him by the arms and held him back. There was a clack and a thunk. Ned released Alan then, but it was already too late.

  “Why?” Alan pleaded. The time for playing along had expired. So had Alan’s chances of escape. Ned was between him and the airlock, and even his most optimistic assessment informed him that he’d never get past the solidly built terraformer.

  Les shook his head in disappointment. “It’s them or us, kid. But you don’t get it. Or if you do, you don’t have the stomach to do anything about it.”

  “Either way, you’ve become a liability,” Ned said.

  Alan’s bladder clenched. He’d never pissed himself before, but his nether regions were giving the matter hasty consideration. “You can’t. They’ll look for me. They’ll investigate. Kaylee’s got connections!” A note of panic crept in as his would-be captors remained impassive.

  “See?” Wil said to Ned. “The Earthlings always go crony when it gets tough. Can’t just admit they’re on their own on the red planet.”

  “You’ll never get away with this!” Alan promised, backing against the wall of the break room.

  “Us?” Ned asked incredulously. “Why would we get away with anything?”

  They came at him as a group. Hands grabbed. Bodies pressed. Alan thrashed, but his efforts were ineffectual. Ned and his cronies dragged him over to the deceased James98. Someone pulled his arm outstretched. Alan couldn’t see what they were doing. They forced his fingers spread.

  Fire.

  Pain.

  Burning.

  Just a cut, but a ragged one, he saw as they released him.

  “You’re the one who killed this poor, defenseless robot,” Ned said. With a hand, he showed Alan how they’d cut his finger on a ragged edge where they’d severed James98’s spine. “You might want to get that tended to quietly. Looks mighty suspicious.”

  The terraformers didn’t allow him time to staunch the bleeding. As he kept it covered by the sleeve of his shirt, they forced on his filtration mask and goggles. Dragging him out the airlock with them, the five of them piled into the rover with the inert robot wrapped in a tarp.

  His mind a maelstrom of emotions, Alan tried to board the vehicle along with them. His only thoughts consisted of getting back home and tending to his injured hand. Surely, they weren’t going to let him die out there.

  But the rover door closed. Alan circled to the opposite side, but Les gave him a shove that sent him sprawling to the red rock planetary surface.

  As he watched the rover depart, Alan knew that he was in trouble. Even if they had left the base unlocked, going back in would no doubt play into their hands. They had to have put a contingency together for that.

  Tucking his maimed hand under his arm, he fiddled with his goggles until he found the retractable data cable. Plugging the end into a port on his breather, a display popped up in the corner of his field of vision.

  He had fifty-eight minutes of oxygen left.

  There was no time for math. He set a course for the Airlock-4 and prayed that Ned hadn’t locked him out there too.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Kaylee rolled over and shut off her alarm. She rolled the other way to give Alan a kiss before starting her day. She often headed off to work before he even roused himself from bed, so it wasn’t unusual for her to—

  He was gone.

  The apartment was quiet.

  Kaylee wracked her brain. Something was missing, more than just her husband. A memory tickled, half-formed, at the back of her brain. He’d gone off in the middle of the night. She’d dismissed it as a dream. Now, as she checked the kitchen, living room, and bathroom of the tiny apartment, evidence was mounting that it hadn’t been.

  She checked her portable for messages. Nothing from Alan. The only text that had come in was from Ned, telling her to report to Site-2 that morning. He’d gotten an inside scoop that Earth was pulling strings and might manage to divert enough steel their way to resume construction.

  Kaylee wasn’t going anywhere until she found Alan.

  Her first step was the obvious. She texted him a quick, “Miss you. Where are you?” Nothing alarmist. Nothing incriminating. He probably had told her where he was heading in the dead of night, and she’d just forgotten. The last thing she needed was to ask about his secret assignment while a bunch of Chain Breakers were standing around to see over his shoulder.

  Still, how long had he been gone? Alan wasn’t good in social situations
to begin with. He got sweaty-palmed and antsy at birthday parties if they dragged on too long. How could he bear the company of those Neanderthal freaks and their bigoted jokes?

  She waited by the portable, leaving it on the kitchen table open to the chat program. Mind elsewhere, she sleepwalked through the process of making an oatmeal breakfast.

  The apartment door opened.

  Alan stumbled inside with a grunt of relief. One arm was tucked against his chest, his hand wedged beneath his other arm.

  “Alan!” Kaylee shouted, not caring whether the neighbors heard through the walls. “What happened to you?”

  Rushing to his side, she wanted to wrap her arms around him but thought better of it. Instead, she took him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes.

  “I’m fine,” he said, but there was no life in his voice. He shuffled past Kaylee, not quite pushing her out of his way but not waiting for her to clear a path either.

  Kaylee trailed him toward the bathroom. “Where have you been? What did you get mixed up in?”

  “Later,” Alan said. “Just… give me a minute.”

  The door closed, separating them. The sink ran. Clothes fell to the floor. Alan grunted and groaned softly. A crinkling sounded like a med kit’s contents.

  “If I don’t get answers, I’m coming in there to inspect you myself,” Kaylee threatened through the door.

  “Long night. Need shower.” True to his word, the shower started seconds later. The rushing waterfall of droplets pelting the shower floor cut off as Alan stepped in to block the flow with his body.

  Kaylee had taken this long enough.

  The bathroom door was locked, but it was a residential model. The lock was privacy only. Kaylee punched in the emergency responders’ code and let herself inside.

  “Hey!” Alan yelped. It was the most animated he’d been since arriving back from his mystery errand.

  Alan’s clothes were caked in red-tinged dust. A self-sealing bandage lay discarded at the edge of the sink, smeared with blood. There was a tinge of blood at the edges of the sink as well, where the puddle of water filled as the spout and drain reached equilibrium.

  “Get out,” Alan groused. “I’ll explain when I get out.”

  That wasn’t good enough. Kaylee was only wearing her nightgown. She untied the drawstring and let it fall beside Alan’s planet-stained attire. With a quick tug of the curtain, she joined him in the shower.

  “You’re going to tell me what’s going on. Now,” Kaylee insisted. She took him by the wrist and raised Alan’s freshly bandaged hand. “Starting with this.”

  Alan turned, letting the water from the showerhead splatter down his back and matte his hair against his head. “They’re going to try to frame me. I don’t know what to do yet. All I know is that I’ve got to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the school by 9:00 sharp and have an explanation for this hand injury that’ll stand up to the inquiries of a bunch of conniving teenagers.”

  “What did happen to your hand?” Kaylee asked, pleading for details that Alan was shying from like the edge of a cliff.

  “They killed a robot, Kay,” Alan said. The look in his eyes as he shook his head in disbelief was haunted. “James98. Did you know him?”

  Kaylee shook her head.

  “He was on the transorbital that docked yesterday, dropping off ice for the melting fields. They ambushed him, cut his spine. I don’t know how they got the jump on him. But they wanted me to blank him. I had the EMP right in my hand.”

  “You didn’t…”

  Alan shook his head, wincing in a sure sign of a headache. “Of course, not! You know me. But that was it for my ruse of fitting in. They suspected me. It was a test. I failed.”

  “So they did this to your hand?” Kaylee asked, trying to make sense of it all. The punishment seemed ill fit to the crime, from the Chain Breakers’ perspective. Alan was still a witness, and the hand injury didn’t look too severe. Was it supposed to be a preview of injuries to come if he turned them in?

  “Worse,” Alan said. “They made it look like I’d cut it on James98’s chassis. Not only do I now look like a murderer once the chassis is discovered, I look like a clumsy one.”

  “Turn them in!” Kaylee insisted, blinking away the droplets that splashed in her eyes. “This is a win.”

  “They’ve had an hour’s head start on me,” Alan said. “They’ll have dummied up the evidence. It’ll be five against one. They know the colony’s security and systems. My only chance is to go along with the cover-up.”

  Kaylee shook her head. “No. We can’t let them win.”

  “It’s a war. We lost a battle tonight,” Alan said. “This is more than a single event. Even if Ned and the others get caught, if Earth punishes them for the crime, it’ll just sow more discontent. We need to pull the Chain Breakers up by the roots.”

  “It’s not fair,” Kaylee said, slumping against Alan’s bare, wet chest. “You got them. You caught them red-handed.”

  Alan pulled her against him, shielding her from the hot water that steamed the air enclosed with them. She could feel the slick smoothness of the bandage on his injured hand, a reminder that their safety was a tenuous blessing. “Don’t go to work today.”

  In the tight quarters, Kaylee could only shake her head a twitch. “I have to. We’re restarting work on Site-2, banking on the committees wrangling us some materials to get construction moving. I have to be there. Ned will be suspicious. You didn’t tell him I knew, did you?”

  “No,” Alan said, “but that doesn’t mean he won’t assume. It’s too risky.”

  “We came here to make a home,” Kaylee reminded him. “Ned might be a bad apple, but the project is still a key to Mars as a living planet. I don’t want to live under a dome the rest of my life.”

  “Just today…” Alan pleaded.

  Kaylee put a finger to his lips. “Especially today. We can’t let them bully us into a life of fear. Besides, they need me. Without me, Site-1 was a Sisyphean nightmare of false starts and rebuilds. It’s either keep me around or let robots onto the project.”

  Alan pulled the rest of her hand to his lips and kissed it. “We both know they need you. But I need you more.”

  Kaylee stared deep into her husband’s eyes. There was a difference between following a wife on her Martian adventure and joining a political movement. He’d endangered himself to safeguard her dream for an idyllic colonial life. It was seeing that fire, a hot ember that couldn’t be doused by even the prospect of being framed for murder. Her lips covered his. Her tongue pushed past.

  As she reached down and pulled Alan’s hips against hers, he suddenly pulled back. “Temperature, 10 degrees.”

  Kaylee gasped at the shock of cold water suddenly drenching them both. She pressed against Alan’s body not with the passionate urgency of a moment earlier. Now, it was for simple warmth.

  “Shut it off! Shut it off!” But Alan had started the shower. It was keyed to his voice for the duration—ironically, a safeguard against just the sort of prank he had just played.

  “Temperature, 40 degrees,” Alan said.

  The shower water resumed its soothing warmth.

  “What was that for?” Kaylee demanded disappointedly. These last days since joining up with the Unity Keepers had rekindled a desire for Alan that she’d rarely felt since their honeymoon. She pillowed her head on his shoulder.

  “We both have work today. We don’t have time.”

  “Plenty of time,” Kaylee muttered, giving her husband a playful slap on the backside as she exited the shower in search of a towel. She missed her cyclonic drying chamber from their Paris home. She left her words purposefully muddy as she added in an undertone just loud enough to hear, “high opinion of himself.”

  She and Alan got dressed side by side. Neither of them had properly cleaned under the water, but Alan had been right. Both of them needed to get moving, or they’d be late.

  When they parted ways at the door after a kiss, Alan waved
a goodbye. The sight of the bandage on his hand scraped aside the veneer of normalcy their daily routine had tried to paint over the dangers they faced.

  But Alan was going to school. Kaylee was the one headed for Airlock 4 to join Ned’s prep team at Site-2.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Kaylee needed a painstaking, technical, exacting installation, alignment, or calibration to keep her mind too busy to worry what Ned and his thugs had done to Alan last night—and what they might have in store next. A day with an engrossing task could pass in the blink of an eye. She desperately needed that today.

  Instead, of course, Kaylee was assigned a micro-scrubber and sent off to clean oxidized deposits from the intake manifolds of the Site-2 atmospheric purifier. It was drone work—or would have been on Earth. Mars was short both the drones and drone programmers needed to be using them on minor, one-off tasks like site prep. The majority of the colony’s drones would be working on unloading the transorbital’s payload and dragging ice chunks ranging in side from a thumbnail to a skyro out into the melting fields. It was all automated. None of the drones would question where James98 had gone or why he hadn’t been back. His own crew mates probably hadn’t even noticed. Robots mining that far out were notoriously antisocial. They’d let the drones do their job and head right back out to the belt for more.

  Bloody Earthlings and their monopoly on drone production, she caught herself thinking. If only Mars had a Kanto-style factory. Even on a vastly smaller scale, it could help them automate manual labor across the colonies.

  Listen to yourself. Already siding with the enemy.

  Whatever Ned and his Chain Breaker cronies’ political views were, they crossed the line into zealotry the minute they devolved into violence. Robots used the nice, sterile term “self-termination” for suicide, but murder was still murder whether it was James98 or a human victim.

  Bundled against the outdoor chill and wearing goggles and oxygen supplies, she and her coworkers looked like walking parkas with data-screen eyes. They could have been robots beneath all that layered cloth, except that an actual robot wouldn’t have minded the cold or needed breathing assistance.