by Guy Haley
Holland stared at the earbuds. He appreciated their simplicity. He supposed they also cut out the noise of the rover, which the suit speakers, his helmet off, did not. Common sense, and he’d expected that, anticipated it. He’d come here because it was a place where men relied on men. The machines on Mars were set only to the task of making a second Earth.
Except the android. That could never be a slave, not a thinking machine of that level. He knew they had one out there, he just hadn’t expected to be sharing his ride with one. He couldn’t escape them, no matter what he did, and that angered him.
The machine continued to stare at him.
Perhaps it wasn’t enough to get away. Perhaps he’d made a mistake. Perhaps Dr Ravi had been right and he shouldn’t have come. He should have stayed on Earth and tried to work through his phobia, just like everyone else who’d suffered in the Five Crisis. Time hadn’t lessened its immediacy, and distance was doing as poorly.
“Can’t you turn it off, or at least make it close its eyes?” he said.
“She is off,” said Stulynow, shrugging again. “As off as she gets, anyhow. This sheath is in its inactive state, asleep. More or less, she’s not really here at all. This is just a shell; she’ll be doing something back at base. We only take the remote carriage in case something goes wrong. The sheath’s eyelids get stuck on open whenever she’s asleep. I haven’t been able to get it fixed. Sorry.”
Holland snorted derisively.
Stulynow frowned. “Do not do that. She always has a line into the sheath. She can still hear you. You will hurt her feelings.”
Holland looked away. “It’s a machine. They don’t have feelings.”
Stulynow looked at the android, strapped tightly into its seat on the long couch next to him. “Maybe not, but she does a good job emulating them. Her mind has full adaptive heuristics. She’s a top range Class Three self-evolving AI; not many of those anywhere in the Solar System.”
The Fives have that capability, thought Holland bitterly.
“Reliable model. I have worked with her for several months. She might not be human, but you can’t tell, much better than other Threes. And if she doesn’t feel, only appears to, what’s the difference? My experience of what goes on in your head is as deep as my experience of hers. It’s all the same. There is no difference, not subjectively.”
“You’re wrong,” said Holland.
Stulynow politely waited for him to say something more, but Holland fixed his eyes on the door leading to the driver’s cabin. The Siberian shrugged again. His shoulders were in perpetual motion with weary indifference. He keyed his music back on.
They spent the rest of the journey to Ascraeus Base in silence.
“HOLLAND. DR HOLLAND?” Someone was shaking him awake. Holland blinked his eyes and looked around him in confusion. The rover had stopped. The silence was disconcerting. The cabin rocked gently, buffeted by the spring winds.
“You were sleeping,” said Stulynow.
“I was dreaming,” said Holland. He grasped his suit gauntlet and twisted it off so he could rub his eyes. “Of the ocean.”
Stulynow smiled. “We all do that; or of the forest. It’s this place. Dr Miyazaki says it’s the planet, reaching out to us to tell us to make it live again.”
“What do you say?”
“Bullshit,” said Stulynow with a broad grin. “It’s seeing red and brown all the time, makes you want to look at some other colour. Come on, we’re here. Suit up.” He pulled Holland’s helmet from an overhead bin and handed it to him. “It’s a short walk over to the main entrance. The ground’s too unstable to take the weight of the rover, and the drones will be busy.”
“Do I get to see the tube today?”
“You are one eager son of a bitch! No. Well...” – the Russian scratched his head – “the entrance, maybe. Tomorrow. Ask Maguire when we get in; he wrote your itinerary.” He turned to the android, flipped down a panel, and depressed a large button designed to accommodate gloved fingers. “You too. Wake up, lady, we are needing you now. Beauty sleep is over.”
The machine’s face quivered as it came online, a rapid succession of expressions flickering over the softgel.
“See?” said Stulynow. “She dreams too.”
“I do not dream,” said the machine. “I was assisting Dr Vance in the medical laboratory. She is annoyed at the interruption.”
“Then tell her she can carry your sheath back up to the base herself, if you’re too precious to spare for five minutes so you can walk.”
“I will walk.” The android stood. She gave Holland a long look.
“Watch out for him, he’s a Frankenphobe,” Stulynow said to the machine. The android appraised Holland a moment longer and stalked off down the long passenger cabin, feet clicking like those of a beetle expanded to nightmare proportions. The machine took up station beside the door.
“I am sorry for being rude before. It is the Russian in me,” said Stulynow. “We are an emotional people, always up and down. Riding the rover makes me down. At least today, it was only we three. You should try it with twenty dirty construction grunts; then you will know discomfort.”
“I think I preferred you dour.”
“Wait a while, and you will get your wish.”
“Are you ready, Dr Stulynow?” asked the android.
Stulynow helped Holland put his helmet on and checked the seals on the gorget, then donned his own and gave a thumbs up. Fans roared to life, sucking the air from the cabin; the rover lacked a discrete airlock. The fans ceased, the air pressure brought close to Martian norms, less than one per cent of that at sea level on Earth. That was at Mars’ mean planetary elevation, and they were much higher here. The android reached out a slender carbon plastic finger and touched a wall panel, which flashed from red to amber to green. The door popped out and slid away along the exterior of the vehicle. A faint outrush of air carried a cloud of flash-frozen water vapour with it.
They stepped out onto a hard standing. A thirty-metre comms mast towered over one corner, by a couple of equipment bunkers built of sintered soil bricks, uplinking them to the Red Planet’s nascent ring of commsats.
Outside, it was bitterly cold, so cold Holland wished he had a full vacuum suit on rather than the lighter Martian environmental gear. They were only halfway up the northern flank of Ascraeus Mons, nine kilometres above the mean. Up here the temperature hovered around minus forty degrees celsius, even as the plains below warmed to near freezing in the spring sunlight. The sky was caramel with dust blown up on spring winds, visibility was middling. The shallow slopes of the volcano marched relentlessly upwards, making a vast bulge in the crust that distorted the horizon, its curve blending with the dusty sky.
“Impressive, isn’t it? As monstrous and beautiful as Aphrodite’s left tit,” said Stulynow. “Even though it is ball-breakingly cold,” he sniffed. “That will be a problem for you, I think. For it me, it is only as cold as home in winter, nothing more.”
Holland searched the deceptively level mountainside. Black holes gaped where lava tubes and chambers had collapsed into themselves.
“Where’s the base?”
Stulynow pointed to a place half a kilometre or so uphill, where a cluster of a dozen bubble tents blistered the mountainside. The largest of the domes was a good forty metres across. A short-range relay array stood in the middle, communicating with the radio mast at the buggy park, and through that, with the rest of the planet. More brick buildings surrounded it. Had Stulynow not pointed the camp out, Holland doubted he would have found it; the domes carried a thick coat of dust, turning the NASA, ESA and Marsform badges into colourless blotches. The parts of the base made of brick were practically invisible.
“What about my bags?”
“Open tops.” Three small, six-wheeled drone trucks sat on the hard standing of the rover parking bay by their garage. They came to life, and trundled in single file to the rear of the rover. The cargo hatch folded up, and a conveyor and arm deployed
and started to load crates onto the trucks, the Marsform logo on every one. “If there weren’t so many supplies in the rover today, we could ride them up, but we will have to walk.”
They walked up a track where the rocks had been cleared. Mesh had been laid down to prevent the road rutting, lights and positional beacons delimiting its edges. The android moved effortlessly, Stulynov bounded along efficiently if inelegantly. Holland lumbered hopelessly behind. Every step he took seemed to wrongfoot him, each one seemed to threaten a fall and a smashed faceplate. He had yet to adjust to the gravity, thirty-eight per cent of Earth’s. He felt insubstantial, as if he’d blow away in the wind, and he sweated because of it.
At the camp, they stopped by one of the larger domes’ porches, a long, flexible tunnel extending out some way from the dome wall. Stulynov produced a stiff brush from a box on the outside. They took it in turns to swipe the worst of the dust off each other and keyed the door open.
“At least this is not so bad as the dust on the Moon, eh?” said Stulynow.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Holland.
“Lunar regolith is much finer, it fouls pretty much everything up within minutes, gives a nasty rash if it touches the skin. I was there for a while at the pole. Martian dust is less of a problem. Here is like returning home from the beach, is annoying, but not too much danger.” He paused. “Although some of the subtypes are very fine, and in others the oxidants react violently with water. That’s more an issue in the lowlands, not up here.”
They passed into the airlock. A brisk blast of air blew more of the dust away. From a locker in the wall, Stulynow brought out a couple of vacuum cleaners. They used them on each other and passed into a suiting room lined with lockers – Holland noticed one with his name on it, the sticky label clean and adhered fully to the plastic, unlike the others.
Great, he thought, more evidence of my shiny newbie status.
They discarded their environment suits, and the android stowed them with rigid efficiency while Stulynow explained how to get all the bulky apparatus into the locker properly. Only then could they proceed into the tent.
The dome was full of racks of equipment, crates of parts and a small, scrupulously maintained fabricator, a pallet of feedstocks standing by it. One wall was flattened, filled by a large window looking on to what Holland figured was Mission Control. A couple of people in there glanced up at them and waved. Three further concertina tunnels led off from the rear of the dome, spaced at irregular intervals. Signs marked them off as ‘Quarters,’ ‘Science’ and ‘Cavern Access.’ From the middle tunnel came a man in pale grey-blue Marsform overalls. Pretty much all the colonists wore them. Like Stulynow and Holland, his name was embroidered on his left breast: Maguire.
Maguire emanated energy bordering on the irritating, a trait Holland remembered well, and he was practically buzzing with it now, his excitement at seeing his old friend plastered across his face in the form of a huge smile. “Hey! Holly! Great to see you,” he said, his Irish accent as strong as ever. He took Holland’s hand and pumped, grasping his forearm as he did so. “You well?”
“I’m fine, fine, Dave, it’s good to see you too.”
“You look tired. The journey take it out of you? It can take a while to adjust. Still, you’ll soon be over it, very soon! I’m glad you decided to join us at last, we’ve got new guys coming in all the time, but wow, I’ve been reading your work from back home and I just know you’re going to be a real asset here. I hope our big Russian here has been good to you, so he has.”
“My mother was a Buryat,” said Stulynow dourly.
“You have, haven’t you Stuly?” said Maguire.
Stulynow scowled. His heavy face was particularly suited to it. “I try my best. He doesn’t like the android much. You should have told me he was a Frankenphobe.”
“Oh Stuly, no need to be like that! Don’t tease him, he’s new here.”
Stulynow did not look like he was teasing.
“Give him a chance to settle in!” Maguire’s smile remained, but his eyes radiated concern. “I’ll tell you what, Stuly, why don’t you get on, I’ll show Holly here to his room. We’ve got plenty of catching up to do.”
“Sure,” said Stulynow. “See you tomorrow.”
“We saved you some dinner!” called Maguire after the Russian.
Together they gathered Holland’s bags from the cargo drones. The android kept a discreet distance. When Stulynow had gone, Maguire turned to Holland.
“I am so sorry, I should’ve thought to have the android stay here, Holly.” He looked mortified. “She requested we send her sheath out, I think she gets bored.”
“Stulynow told me it was standard practice,” said Holland.
“Yes, well, not usually on the cargo runs, only on long-range scouting missions. Stulynow is not above the odd little white lie. He prefers the simple explanations to longer ones. You’ll get to know that about him; hell, you’ll get to know everyone very well. One of the advantages – or is it a drawback? I can never quite decide – of working on such a small team.”
There we go. He’s calling it ‘her,’ too, thought Holland. The old Maguire would never have done so. Still, he couldn’t blame him. It was hard not to impart humanity to the machines. Holland had seen the other side of them; he never would.
“What was I thinking? Too much on, I suppose. Look Holly, I am sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dave, I work with AIs all the time, it’s unavoidable. I don’t feel comfortable round them after... well. But I can and do work with them. Marsform would never let me up here if I had a full-blown aversion to them.”
Maguire shook his head. “I’m not surprised. It’s an unforgivable lapse on my part. She asked to go, I said yes, I wasn’t thinking. I think she wanted to meet you. Honestly, she’s a doll. Might do you some good to work with her.”
“Seriously, forget it,” Holland paused. “Dave... No one else knows, do they? Only I like to know what I’m getting into, and Marsform have been pretty good about keeping it confidential...”
“Worried I might let something slip?” Maguire’s good humour returned. “I haven’t said a word. I might be an Irish gobshite, but I’m not totally insensitive.”
Holland blew out his cheeks and looked around. His eyes felt scratchy, like he was about to cry, probably the journey. Arrivals were always something of an anticlimax, and he felt off balance. “Thanks. The last thing I want is a load of sympathy, you can take only so much. I came up here to get away from it, the little looks and words behind my back. Kindness can drive you crazy.”
“I’ll keep it to myself.”
“Thanks. It’s hard enough to fit in. The gravity, the canned air, this –” he gestured to his neck interface, the gateway to his company cranial augmentation. He still hadn’t signed the soul capture release form, he remembered. It was the one thing he wasn’t happy about. Allowing them to pattern his mind, in order to digitally resurrect him should he die, seemed wrong. He didn’t want to be turned, to all intents and purposes, into an AI should he expire, but Marsform insisted on the capture just in case. The form sat in his mem-mail inbox, redly impatient. At least they hadn’t forced a full mentaug on him; he should be thankful for that.
“You’re not thinking you made a mistake, are you, Holly?” Maguire’s grin broadened. It was infectious; Holland found himself returning it.
Maguire pointed at him. “Ha! I knew it. Holland, everybody thinks they made a mistake when they get here. You’ll get over it, we all do. Now come on.” He hefted one of Holland’s bags onto his shoulder. “I’ll show you your room, you’re in delta four. Not much, but I promise you won’t be spending much time in it; we’re busy here. I’ve saved you some food. You missed group dinner. We insist on that here, so that we don’t descend into barbarism. After you’ve eaten, let’s go have a little post-dinner drinky in my office.” He gave a conspiratorial wink. “There are some advantages to being the station personnel manager.”
HOL
LAND’S ACCOMMODATION WAS a more of a cell than a room, small and austere. The LEDs on his workstation flooded it with sharp green light. He’d wished he’d followed Maguire’s advice and taped over them. He resolved to do it tomorrow, but for the moment he lay trapped in his bunk by exhaustion.
He lay there for what felt like hours, his head fuzzy from the whisky, until he sank into the spaces in between waking and sleep where the subconscious mind briefly reveals itself.
He found himself at the bottom of a deep, electric-green sea, with a bed of red sand and olive rock. He threshed against it, struggling to breathe. The water held little resistance; he overbalanced, falling painfully slowly. The sand sucked at him, and he began to sink. Holland panicked and struggled, but he could not break free. He held his breath, but as the sand reached his eyes he was forced to release it. The exhaled air went rushing upwards in silvery bubbles through an ocean of red dust. He tried to scream, but the ocean was cold and thin and froze his lungs. His chest erupted with a pain that expanded to fill the dark above him.
Sand clogged his eyes and his mouth. Something tickled in the hole they’d made in his neck, the pathway to his nervous system. As he began to black out, he felt his mind rush toward the interface port like water circling a plughole.
Holland awoke with a jolt, clutching at his chest. He was dehydrated and cold, sweating in spite of it, his bedclothes a tangled heap on the floor. He blinked, his eyes sore with a grittiness he hadn’t been able to shake since he’d arrived on the planet. One eyelid stuck painfully to his eye, tears flooding it. He blinked rapidly. Something was wrong.
The door was open, the harsh yellow light a dagger-slash across the room.
In the frame, its plastic limbs highlighted in delicate arcs of yellow and green, stood the android. Holland stared at it mutely.
To his shame he froze, stopped dead, just like he did the last time.
The robot’s hand rose. Gripped between rubber fingertips was his photograph. Him and the boy, and his wife. It ran through its five seconds of footage, the three of them, laughing and happy. The thing’s fingers obscured his boy’s face as he ran toward the camera.