Human Phase

by J. S. Morin

  There wasn’t even a clock in view as Kaylee worked.

  All the other supervisors and managers were out there as well, toiling away with their practiced and highly skilled hands at work best suited to burly day-laborers, if not robots. Kaylee wasn’t the only one whose talents were being wasted; she had no right to complain. If nothing else, the isolation as everyone huddled in their own personal refuge of warm clothing prevented just the sort of awkward interaction she’d so desperately wished to avoid today.

  As she scrubbed, she watched them.

  It was hard to pick out one coworker from the next. Their mass-fabbed parkas were identical. Their protective environmental gear was all from the same design, manufactured over at the Discovery colony a few hundred kilometers to the east. At best, she could judge by mannerisms. A distinctive walk, a limp, a rounded shoulder were her clues.

  Ned she picked out early and kept close track of.

  Alan, I hope your day is going better than mine, she pleaded silently.

  Kaylee kept her portable handy in her pocket. If one of the workers looked ready to sabotage the manifold or any other part of the terraforming equipment, she’d be ready to capture it on video.

  But none of them were so sloppy as to get caught on her watch.

  When she’d first worried about saboteurs, she’d dismissed the idea as fanciful and paranoid. Ned wanted Mars to breathe Martian air instead of recycled. He wanted to stick it to Earth worse than anyone she’d ever known. Hurting that goal would be the last thing on his mind.

  Until she thought deeper on the subject.

  Yes, Ned might delay the work on a single site by having someone sabotage it. But if he could connect the damage back to Earth sympathizers, or better—from his viewpoint—a robot, then he could use that persecution to strong-arm his way past committee roadblocks with sympathy as his bludgeon. Anyone who stood in his way then would be complicit with the saboteurs.

  Knowing what she now knew thanks to Alan’s predicament, Kaylee was convinced that Ned had the deviousness to think that far ahead and delay his own immediate gratification for a longer-term win.

  Alan… poor Alan. He meant so well, but he stumbled right into that trap. If she’d been awake enough to talk sense into him, he might not be lined up in the crosshairs of a frame job. Kaylee prayed that James98 had been the depressive sort so that no one would look too deeply into his apparent self-termination. Knowing that Ned could plunk Alan into the witness chair at a committee inquest on a whim was going to cost her many a sleepless night, she knew.

  “Kaylee, c’mon in,” Ned’s voice grated in her earpiece. “Lunch break.”

  Kaylee felt the knot of hunger in her stomach, exacerbated by skipping breakfast in her haste to make up for a slapdash morning. “I’m good,” she radioed back. She watched as her coworkers filed into the break room airlock. “Had a big breakfast, knowing we had real work to do for a change.”

  “Suit yourself,” came the gruff reply.

  As soon as the last of the terraforming team was inside, Kaylee pulled out her portable. With a glove off her right hand to operate the touch screen, she felt the crisp bite of the thin atmosphere. She and Alan had spent a week in Mexico City to acclimate to the low pressure, but it still hadn’t compared to being on the Martian surface.

  She tapped out a message with a hand shaking from the cold.

  “What did you get him into?” Kaylee sent the message off to Andy. It was nice and generic. No names. No specific events. She wondered what he could feel safe replying.

  NO NEWS. COME BACK AFTER WORK.

  Kaylee seethed a frustrated breath that made her next breath humid inside the mask. Alan hadn’t reported in. Andy was blind to what was going on. One of them had to get him a briefing.

  She resolved to head over to the theater after work, but in the meantime, she tapped out another message.

  “Alan was accosted by the Chain Breakers last night. If I’m not around to deliver this message, it’s because one of them got to me. James98 was murdered by Ned Lund and his associates. They cut Alan’s hand on the chassis in order to frame him. Don’t let them sweep this under the rug.”

  She set the delivery to tomorrow afternoon, then buried the outgoing message in an archival directory. A real data wrangler would find it with no trouble, sent or not, but a casual inspection from the likes of Ned and his gang wouldn’t find anything.

  Slipping her glove back on, Kaylee returned to her task.

  Post lunch, the terraforming crew resumed reconditioning machinery left idle and unattended for months longer than expected. Kaylee finished up on her section of the intake manifold and moved on to the waste pumps. Despite the layer of rust, they were still cleaner than they’d ever be once operation got under way.

  By the end of the shift, Kaylee felt like she’d been at the job site for a year, not a mere ten hours.

  The crew rode back to Airlock 4 in a convoy of rovers and parted ways once they were back inside the dome.

  Mask dangling around her neck, Kaylee headed straight for Arthur Miller Theater.

  “There you are!” Andy said accusingly. He towed her from the common area where several other Unity Keepers were idling after work and down an adjacent hall lined with dressing rooms. An old-fashioned swinging door slammed shut behind them. “What the blazes is going on? Back channel, I heard the Breakers took Alan out for some kind of initiation last night.”

  “You tell me,” Kaylee said. “This is your secret agent act that got his cover blown. They know he was a plant.”

  “Oh, God!” Andy said, covering his mouth. He dove for his portable. “I need to—”

  Kaylee caught him by the wrist. “He’s fine. Alan went to class this morning, same as usual.”

  Andy had a haunted look in his eyes. “We haven’t had anyone outed before. This is bad.”

  “No kidding,” Kaylee said. “We need a plan.”

  “I need the details. Are you sure Alan is OK?”

  “I checked with the school on the way over. He’s busy with after-school tutoring. Safest place in the colony, if you ask me. Nobody wants to be the one to endanger kids.”

  At Andy’s urging, Kaylee recounted Alan’s tale as best she could remember it. Andy listened attentively without interruption.

  “Who else have you told?” Andy asked.

  “No one,” Kaylee replied. “You’re the first besides Alan, and I don’t think he was inclined to spread the word.”

  “No… no, that wouldn’t make sense,” Andy said as he began to pace, not even looking in Kaylee’s direction. “Not in such a precarious predicament. One wrong word in the wrong ear…”

  “I did compose a message to go out tomorrow in case I didn’t make it here,” Kaylee said, taking out her portable and waggling it.

  “To whom?” Andy asked.

  “You, mainly.”

  “And…?” he prompted.

  Kaylee was horrible at lies and secrets. She couldn’t have left it at just Andy. “Possibly my mom, a couple aunts, Dr. Toby, my mother-in-law, and maybe my great-grandmother.”

  “You were going to alert half of Earth’s most prominent humans and an original thirty-three robot about a suspicious murder that implicates your husband?”

  Kaylee sighed. “And Charlie7.”

  Andy looked aghast.

  “He’s an old family friend. I trust him.”

  Kaylee wondered if this was what it was like for the people in those old Mafia movies, totally innocent of the greater family business but still aware that certain problems could go away by dropping the right word of complaint at Thanksgiving dinner.

  “Delete it,” Andy ordered sternly, the first thing he’d seemed certain of since her arrival.

  “We need to put a stop to whatever they’re doing to Alan,” Kaylee said. “Even if that means covering up the death of James98 until we can prove it was them.”

  The door to the dressing room burst open, splinters flew where the doorjamb gave way und
er the force of a booted foot. Wil from the terraforming team backed out of the doorway to allow Ned Lund inside.

  “About time we found out where you rats were hiding,” Ned said to Andy. He looked the theater director up and down. “Never imagined it would be a wet noodle like you playing rebel.”

  “Just like I said,” Gregor Zimmerman said calmly. “Let her go. She’ll lead us right to them. Who needs the teacher?”

  “What’s this about, Ned?” Kaylee demanded. “You just go barging into a dressing room. What if I’d been—”

  “Cut the crap,” Ned barked. His cronies filed in, greater in numbers than Kaylee had imagined. “We know who you people are and what you’ve been trying to do. You’ve been enemies of Mars for too long. It’s about time we put you to work on our side.”

  Kaylee and Andy were hauled out of the dressing room, feet not even touching the floor. In the main backstage area, the rest of the Unity Keepers who’d been present had already been rounded up and penned in by armed Chain Breakers.

  “What are those collars for?” Andy asked.

  Kaylee saw what he was referring to. The others had all been fitted with makeshift collars fashioned from piping meant for use as electrical conduit. Each had a small indicator panel with a glowing red light at the center.

  She struggled as two of Ned’s goons forced one around her own neck with an ominous click. Ned held up a remote. “Those are insurance. They’ll blow your head right off if you get more than a few meters away or I press this button.

  “Now sit down, shut up, and don’t cause any trouble. I’ve got a broadcast to make.”

  Before forcing Kaylee to the floor, the Chain Breakers confiscated Kaylee’s portable. Even with an exploding collar freshly locked at her throat, all she could think about was the emergency message contained on it. What would they do to her if they discovered she was sending distress calls to the primary villains of their conspiracy theories?

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Alan sat in the office behind his classroom, trying to appear relaxed in the Earth-made wooden chair he’d brought with him from Oxford. His portable was on silent mode, tucked away in a drawer.

  He’d spent the past half hour trying to explain why the fall of the Roman Empire at the hands of Germanic tribes was not the end of civilization for the next eight hundred years until the Renaissance.

  Alan gestured with his hand to emphasize his point. “There was a local decline in the standard of living, yes, but—”

  “They didn’t reinvent concrete for another fifteen hundred years,” Tina Lobson argued. “It’s just one example, but the average Roman citizen lived better than a twelfth-century king.”

  “Debatable,” Alan allowed. “But you’re still overlooking the wider world. During that same time, the Chinese Dynasties carried on as if nothing had happened—for them, nothing of consequence had. Movable type, the compass, and the mechanical clock all came from China during the European Dark Ages.”

  “Gutenberg invented movable type,” Tina argued smugly.

  Alan forced his jaw to unclench before replying. “He invented a mechanical press. A man named Bi Sheng invented movable block type during the Song Dynasty four hundred years before that.”

  Tina scowled at him.

  “Look it up on the Solarwide when you get home. I want you to write up a five-page research paper on advancements during the Dark Ages that took place in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.”

  Tina got up and collected her school bag. “Stupid Earth history,” he heard her mutter on the way out the door.

  Alan didn’t care about the slight just then. Tina had been the last of his after-school appointments. He slouched in his chair and dug through his desk drawer to pull out his portable.

  No one had asked about his hand. The antiseptic and anesthetic properties of the self-adhesive bandage had kept the wound from bothering him beyond a simple reduction in mobility. He’d made it to the end of the day relatively unscathed.

  Pressing a thumb against the screen to unlock the device, he swiped through his message box. He’d arranged so that anything from Kaylee or Andy would get swamped in a morass of idle chatter from old colleagues on Earth, emancipation classmates he’d kept in touch with over the years, and committee summaries he got automatically delivered from topics of interest. He didn’t want any message previews to be seen by young, curious eyes.

  WHERE ARE YOU?

  EVERYTHING OK?

  MEET FOR LUNCH?

  CATCH YOU AFTER WORK?

  CALLED THE SCHOOL. KNOW YOU’RE TUTORING. TEXT AND I’LL START DINNER. SEE YOU AT HOME.

  All from Kaylee. Sent at intervals throughout the day. A pang of guilt stabbed him in the gut with the worry he’d obviously caused her. He tapped out a quick message back in reply to the final missive.

  “Be home soon. Love you.”

  Alan packed up and closed the office door behind him. The vacant classroom was peaceful and silent, a hermit crab’s shell waiting for students to come back and inhabit it.

  A chime rang from his portable as he closed up the classroom. “What the—I’ve had that off all day.”

  This message had an override. Emergency broadcast, civic-wide for the Curiosity colony.

  “Breaking news. Hostage standoff at Arthur Miller Theater. Masked individuals are holding eight human hostages. Details are still coming in. Colony Mayor Dana Platt warns citizens to keep clear of the area while emergency response personnel negotiate for the safe release of the—Wait… we have a video clip released by the hostage takers. You are receiving this broadcast live as it is released.”

  Alan walked in a daze, eyes fixed on his portable.

  The man in the goggles and breather mask was Ned—there was no mistaking him, and his identity wouldn’t remain secret long. Dread sank in as Ned read off a list of demands. But the words dripped out Alan’s ears unheard.

  In the background of the video, he saw her. Kaylee. Wearing some kind of collar. Oh, God, Alan had gotten Kaylee taken as a hostage! He should never have agreed to spy for that rotten bastard, Andy. Kaylee would have been safe if Alan hadn’t tried to play the hero and gotten cold feet when it came to murdering an already-doomed robot. He might not have been a murderer, but Ned Lund most certainly was. There was no time to lose.

  Alan blundered into a doorway in his haste to exit the school, dropping his portable and not pausing to retrieve it. Pelting down the streets of Curiosity, heedless of the colonists wandering in the direction of the spectacle, Alan discarded his school rucksack in his haste to get to Arthur Miller Theater.

  Curiosity colony wasn’t huge. In five minutes, he’d made his way to the humble, four-story structure. A drone was planting parade-route markers as an interim cordon to designate the official exclusion zone. A handful of city officials gathered in a knot, huddled in conversation just behind the plastic ribbon strung between weighted posts.

  As Alan dashed for the cordon, one of the officials perked up. “Sir, you can’t go—”

  “My wife is in there!” Alan shouted back. He tried to vault the ribbon but caught a foot and crashed to the concrete pavement, knocking over two of the support posts. As the drone circled back to right them, Alan scrambled to his feet and continued into the building before anyone could stop him.

  He burst through the front door. “Kaylee! Where are—?”

  A heavy blow caught Alan on the side of the head before he even saw who was on the other side of the main door. He was out cold before he hit the floor.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Charlie7 kept an informal record ranking his good and bad days. Over his lifespan of more than eleven hundred years, it was an impressive list. It scaled from zero to one hundred, calibrated with the day he discovered the last human had died in the alien invasion as a rank of zero and the day he launched an interplanetary projectile to (presumably) destroy their homeworld as a rank of one hundred.

  The day he’d discovered Eve14, the first healthy, mentally co
mpetent human of the new era, had rated ninety-nine. Finding out that political dissidents on Mars had taken hostages had pegged today for an eight. Discovering that Eve’s great granddaughter and Dr. Toby’s youngest son were among the hostages dropped it to a four with room to drop should things get worse.

  Charlie7 stormed into the meeting chamber of the Human Welfare Committee ready to receive word of a military action to retrieve the victims.

  Instead, he found the committee in session, debating the merits of incarceration versus exile for the hostage takers.

  “I don’t see how social isolation benefits us or them, long term,” Ruby Barton said. “This is all an educational failure. All violent ends are a result of communication breakdowns, and in this case, it appears to have been allowed to fester uncorrected for far too long. First a riot targeting a robot. Now, emboldened by our inaction, they’ve taken human hostages.”

  Another of the committee members rose to speak, but Eve tapped a finger on the glossy surface of the table. Speakers in the room projected the sound of a gavel banging with each tap.

  “The chair recognizes Charlie7, come to give us the latest on the tactical situation,” Eve said deliberately.

  Charlie7 marched up to the spot where guest speakers normally addressed the committee and kept on walking. He didn’t stop until he was looming over the head of poor Nathan Spence, right at the voting members’ table. “It’s grim. The hostages are all wearing collars of homemade design. Ned Lund is acting as spokesman for the hostage takers, and he claims they’re rigged with explosives. If we try to free the hostages or attack any of the hostage takers, they’ll—”

  Jennifer81 raised a hand to forestall gory details. “We can fill in the blanks.”

  “The devices are primitive. We can’t hack our way in to disarm them,” Charlie7 continued. “It may even be possible that they’re entirely analog.”