Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  “But it’s not our world. It’s their fucking world, Jimmy.”

  “Why did you ever come to work for us, Edith?” said Orson.

  “You know why,” said Vance. “I signed up before the TF programme was signed off.”

  “You had your chance to air your objections, you did, and you lost. USNA is still a democracy. I’m sorry it didn’t go your way, but that’s that,” said Orson.

  “Ignore them,” said Maguire, “it’s the same every night we all get together.”

  “‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried,’” the android – Cybele, Holland thought – said as she came into the room. “Winston Churchill. Shall I clear away now?”

  Orson dropped his napkin onto his plate. “Okay, who’s got my four million dollar AI clearing plates?”

  “I may have cost USNA that initially,” said the android. “But it is my choice to help you. I am allowed that much leeway. I have no other tasks that require my full attention and you, unlike I, can tire. I am simply being helpful,” she said, “and thanks to Dr Zhang Qifang, soon I will be free to do so.”

  Is that an edge to its voice? thought Holland. AI could get uppity about their emancipated status.

  “Shang Who-fang?” said Maguire.

  “Zhang Qifang,” said Holland. “There’s been a big hoo-ha about him back on Earth. He’s a digital ecologist-turned-AI specialist and rights activist. He addressed the UN a few weeks back, calling for AI emancipation. There have been protests. Have you not heard?”

  Maguire smiled apologetically. “The major protests we follow up here are the ones about us cooking the planet.”

  The android spoke. “The Neukind movement is gathering much support, is it not, Dr Holland?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “It is,” insisted the android. “I follow this news closely. It is of interest to me. May I clear the table now?”

  The others nodded assent, Stulynow shoving down the last few forkfuls on his plate. The machine cleared the table quickly. It was nimble. Holland leaned back, perhaps a touch too quickly, as it took his plate from in front of him.

  “How do you feel, Holland? We see a lot of people on the news, on the Grid,” said Vance. “Protesters.”

  “Now hold on a minute,” said the eugene. “Just because a bunch of...”

  “What about that amazing biology you spoke of?” said Vance, ignoring the commander. “You going to be happy to see it all swept away?”

  “I’m not sure it will,” said Holland. “It’s one of the reasons I am here – to assess the xenoforms for adaptation to Terran norms. It’s not just about plundering them for useful genes. Besides, most of the extreme environments they live in currently will be replicated on the finished new Mars; maybe elsewhere, but there’ll be a place for them.”

  “They’ll be dead by then,” said Vance hotly.

  “They won’t. I’m here to see it doesn’t happen,” said Holland. He tried to guide the conversation on to less contentious issues. “I’ve always wanted to study the life up here at first hand. Mars has always fascinated me. Unlike Titan or Europa, this place is close to Earth, so close. The biology here is like a mirror to Earth’s...”

  “And you wanted to see it before we fuck it dead, right? Am I right?” said Vance, carried away by her own passion.

  “Yeah. That’s pretty much it. Since we found the life out here – on the moons too – it’s pretty obvious the universe is full of life. It makes me feel, well, comforted. That it’s not just us, you know? More so than ever, I think. I’ve had a rough few years.”

  “Aha! And now, the other reason!” said Stulynow.

  “I...”

  “Stuly,” warned Maguire.

  “No, no you must tell us, no secrets here! We all have reasons to be here, an alpha reason, a lost chance, a wife who left,” said Stulynow, who was by now drunk. “But who on Earth has those? Everyone. All of us here also have a beta reason. This is my hypothesis, and it has proved correct so far.”

  “Stuly,” said Vance, “drop it.”

  “No!” He slapped the table. “I am a philosopher as well as a scientist, and I will not be silent! Numbers, numbers, numbers. All we talk up here. Very good for all this...” He waved his hand around. “But not this.” He tapped his head. “There is always beta reason, the real reason we came all this way.” His eyes twinkled, a jollity the others did not share. They looked at him nervously. Vance tried to shut him up again, putting her hand on his arm, but he threw it off. “No, come on! Share.”

  Holland looked at the faces around the table. The ones that could meet his eyes were full of apology and sympathy. And pity. Damn it, half of them knew. He’d come to get away from all of this. The mood broke like thin ice under a skate.

  “I...”

  “John...” said Maguire. “You don’t...”

  “It’s all right. It’s better that it’s out in the open.” He put his fork down, and dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. They all knew, fuck them. Annoyance prickled at his skin, but he remained cool. “I was finishing my PhD at the Harvard campus when the Class Five there went down with the Crisis virus. Look, it was years ago.” Three years, he thought. Not long at all. Not nearly long enough.

  “Oh, my god,” breathed Suzanne, and gripped her husband’s hand. No one was eating now. “The exobiology lab? I remember, on the news.”

  Kick shrugged. “There were a lot of things on the news then. It was a bad time.”

  “But this was so close to us, it could have been us. It was a lab,” said Suzanne. “You do not forget that kind of thing.”

  They were all looking at him. His face felt tight. He spoke. “It trapped the others in the exobiology lab. It turned on the purification system, convinced itself there was a fault in the isolation system and alien pathogens were leaking out. I think it knew it wasn’t really the case, but they were good, the insane ones, at doublethink. It just wanted to see what would happen. It locked the building down. There were nine of us.” He looked around the table. Just like there are here, he thought. “It.... I tried...” He tapped his fork nervously on his plate. The sound was like scientific instruments hammering on a five-centimetre thick diamond weave window, unable to crack it. I could have tried harder, he thought. Screaming faces pressed themselves against the glass of the door in his memory, the door that would remain forever shut. He’d give anything to be able to open that door. “It killed them all,” he said in a rush. “I was the only survivor.”

  “Oh,” said Stulynow. “Oh, fuck. Sorry, man, I... Shit, I thought...” He lapsed into slurred Russian, embarrassed and scolding himself.

  “Please, don’t be sorry. Everybody I have met has been sorry ever since it happened. My wife was so sorry she left.” Holland gave a weak smile, and more damned sympathy answered it. “Now, I am sorry, but I am still very tired after my journey here. Thank you very much for the meal, and for your welcome.” He was determined to leave. He did not want their pity, he couldn’t stomach any more of it.

  He didn’t deserve it.

  Stulynow opened his mouth, but Maguire shushed him.

  “Well, I think it’s time for dessert,” said Suzanne Van Houdt brittly. “Please don’t go. I made a cake to welcome you here. Stay for that, at least. I saved the eggs for a week.” The table burst into activity, everyone picking up plates, helping the android tidy away, faces down. “Don’t mind Leo, please, he’s, well...”

  “I am Russian! I am sorry, we cannot help it, although my...”

  “Mother was a Buryat,” said practically everyone else in the room. There was laughter. The tension in the atmosphere quivered. They all looked to Holland, some openly, others from the corners of their eyes. Holland hesitated, relaxed.

  “Like I said, it’s not a problem.” The tension broke.

  “She was, she was a Buryat!” said Stulynow. “Listen, my new friend Dr Holland, please do not take offence. I am so sorry. I would like to
say I would not ask had I known but... I prefer to be honest.”

  Faces smiled at him. Holland wondered what hid behind them.

  “We all come here for fresh start. Please, please. I know you are tired, but it is custom. We break bread, share salt, and we drink together. Take a vodka with me. Please, just one. Do not offend my hospitality.”

  The Siberian looked to Orson, and the commander looked heavenward. “Okay, Stuly, but just the one bottle.”

  Stulynow leapt up and almost danced across the room to a cupboard in the kitchen area.

  Maguire gave him a concerned smile. Fucking hell, thought Holland. “Cut it out, Dave,” he said at last, with slightly more force than he wanted. “The last thing I need is sympathy from you.” He grasped the back of his chair. “Why not, fuck it. Why not? Get me a glass.”

  Maguire’s smile became broader. “That’s the spirit.”

  “No!” said Stulynow, returning with a bottle. “This is the spirit.”

  Suzanne Van Houdt brought him a tumbler. “I am sure you will fit right in here,” she said brightly. Stulynow sloshed altogether too much vodka into it.

  “There,” he said, “batch seven, made from one hundred per cent Mars-grown potato.”

  “He has a still in the garage,” said Jensen disapprovingly. “It is a clear safety breach.”

  “You want some?” said Stulynow. Jensen pushed his glass forward. “See, not so bad now, to have a still, is it?”

  “Here.” Stulynow clanged his glass hard against Holland’s. “Na zdroviye.” He downed with a satisfied gasp. “I promise it not make you go blind. Well, I hope. You can never be entirely sure.”

  Holland looked appalled. The android came back to the table, bearing a large cake. “He is joking with you,” she said. “He is adequately skilled.”

  “Adequately skilled...” said the Russian with a snort.

  Time stood still as Holland stared at the softgel face of the android. Just a sheath, a garment worn by the machine in the box deep in the plant room. It had an anodyne beauty to it, too perfect, no asymmetry to give it that human quirk. It was obviously a machine, at least. He didn’t think he could have stood it if it had been wearing one of those sex-doll bodies some of them sported; almost but not quite human.

  “Thank you,” he said finally, and took a gulp of the drink. The android’s eyes clicked shut and open, and it bobbed its head in acknowledgement, and it moved away. Holland breathed easier.

  The mood picked up. Stulynow declared the vodka too warm and produced a dangerous looking, homemade chilling sleeve hooked up to a canister of CO2. Half an hour later, they opened a second bottle. Ten minutes after that, Orson and Jensen followed Maguire in a rendition of “Danny Boy.”

  Holland’s ears grew booze-warm and buzzy.

  HOLLAND LAY IN bed, waiting for the anti-intoxicants to take effect. Every time he began to drift off, he started awake, sure that he would see the android standing in the doorway. He thought he was doing well with the machine, not showing his disquiet. He absolutely had to master it. He rubbed his face with his hands and exhaled loudly. There was no future for a scientist who couldn’t work with AI. He’d done well on Earth avoiding the stronger variants for three years, but how long did he realistically think he could do that? Now that public worry over the machines was dying back again, they were becoming ever more pervasive. It was just three years since the Five Crisis, and look at it now. What would it be like in twenty, thirty years? He was thirty-two years old. He had anything up to seventy years of work left in him. If he kept his Frankenphobe reputation, it would be more like four years of work.

  He needed to deal with this. There was only one AI here, after all. The near-I, they weren’t a problem. But the AI...

  He swung his legs out of from under his covers and sat on the edge of the bed.

  Best get it over and done with.

  He stood. The floor was cold. He was bare-chested, shivering. He picked up a crumpled T-shirt and tugged it on. He was still a little drunk from Stulynow’s vodka. That helped.

  He padded to the door and opened it. The corridor outside was deserted. He walked down it, irritable, half drunk, his nerves taut with apprehension.

  The plant rooms were near their sleeping quarters. The cabins were sunk into a lava tube with the top hacked off, and where it protruded above ground this part of the base was built of bricks made from compressed dust, with soil piled against it. The solid blocks, regolith and stone about them provided protection from cosmic rays, both to the men and machines.

  Cybele could be called upon from any part of the base; anywhere, in fact, where he was in radio range. But he wanted to speak to it directly. A foolish sentiment. AI did not have a sense of self that was tethered to their physical body, like people, but somehow it was important to him.

  He pressed his thumb onto the plate outside Cybele’s room. He trembled so much he had to enter his entrance code twice. The door slid open, the soft noise loud in the silence of the night time base.

  Cybele’s base unit filled half the small room. The core of it wouldn’t be so big, he thought, but the shielded sleeve it occupied – a long, dull metal torpedo-shaped case – was massive as a sarcophagus. He stared at it. There was nothing to distinguish this room from the corridor: the same light, the same insistent hum of machinery at work. Colour coded pipes striped the walls. There was no personalisation to it.

  He thought of the base unit of the Five at the institute; a different set up, larger; he remembered more cooling systems, but then the Three here was cooled by air from outside, and that was cold enough.

  The Five. He should have gone in there with a fire axe, but he hadn’t. He was too frightened, too scared to go in and save six people from being burned alive, hypnotised by its ruthlessness. And yet here he was, ready to face another machine because he was losing sleep.

  He felt sick with shame. He berated himself. He was being ridiculous. This machine wasn’t trying to kill him. Perhaps he was mastering his fear, rather than being selfish. Maybe the dreams would never come back.

  “Dr Holland?” Cybele’s voice spoke into the room, smooth as always, directionless. “May I help you?”

  “Um, er, yes. Cybele.”

  “Yes?”

  She sounded so reasonable, as patient as a kindergarten teacher. The machines, even before the crisis, they were so fucking superior. “I want you to promise,” he said, trying not to sound like the irrational child he felt himself to be, “not to come into my room. Ever. Is that understood?”

  “You are referring to last night? I apologise. My understanding of human psychology is imperfect, and I lack access to appropriately detailed databases.”

  “Right.”

  “I am improving,” she said. “On my own.”

  “Right.”

  “I promise I will abide by your wishes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Maybe we can be friends?”

  Not on your life. “Maybe.”

  “Goodnight, Dr Holland.”

  “Er, yes. Goodnight.” He turned to go. Only then did he see the pictures, dozens of Martian landscapes in watercolour, pastel and pencil, on Cybele’s wall.

  That night he woke several times, screaming, from the dream where faceless androids tore apart his son while he watched, powerless to act, paralysed. The dream he had told his wife about. The reason she had left him.

  His eyes were dry again and had to be massaged into cooperation. He took a drink of water. He finished the bottle, then drank another.

  He was soon asleep again. Dr Ravi would have been proud.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Heimark’s Moon

  2598 AD

  “I’LL NOT HAVE another word said on it, it’s ridiculous,” said Arturo Lorenz. His client was boring him. He had a headache again – the window filter’s effect on the light, he was sure of it. Worst of all, the message still had not come. What if he’d been rejected at the last moment?

  He would have
been the first to hold up his hands and say that he wasn’t focussing on his work today.

  “Not from where I’m sitting,” said Ezra Abraham. An Ethiopian, or a Somali, or something like that. “They are racists, racists! Do you want to know what they called me?”

  Arturo shook his head quite vigorously. “No, no, that won’t be necessary.” He was well aware of what new arrivals got called. He extended his lower lip over his moustache and made a clucking noise at the back of his throat. He was over by his collection of antique books, all paper, and read a few of the spines, looking for some wisdom to pop into his head. Of course, if it wasn’t going to come off the Library, then it wasn’t going to leap into his mind from a rack of ancient dried wood pulp, was it? Still, the exercise helped him centre himself, and drag his attention back to this man’s problem.

  “Look, Mr Lorenz, I’m not going to get all historical on you, and I know you think I’ve got some kind of chip on my shoulder, but I feel this, I really do. We had hundreds of years of slavery, then two hundred years of enormous great walls keeping us in our place. I come up here, and I get the same old shit. It’s enough to make me want to go back to Earth, you know?” Abraham’s eyes were red. He looked to be on the edge of tears.

  “Hmmm, hmmm,” said Arturo. “You know, this has nothing at all to do with your...” He gestured at Abraham. His skin was mid brown, his eyes wide and very white, set in his face like opals. His heart was as open as his face; he had one of those faces a deceitful expression could never, ever crawl across. He was a bright, charming, intelligent young man, and Arturo was sorry for him, and guiltily aware that today he was not getting the best of services.