“Just a moment,” Maggie replied. They weren’t all that far from Earth yet, so the response should only take a few seconds. “No. Mission Control definitely did not contact us at that time.”
Sol 69, Mars surface
Onward, onward, onward. Ewa was only capable of taking baby steps now. Her inner thighs felt like raw meat. She had no desire to take a look at them, even if she did happen to step out of her spacesuit again. Today she would reach zero hour.
Before setting off this morning, her finger had written a request in the sand. She should make an adjustment to her position localization at precisely twelve o’clock noon if at all possible.
“Why?” she had asked aloud.
‘So you can reach your destination,’ had been the answer.
“How will I recognize it?”
‘You’ll see a transport ship. It is tall enough that you’ll be able to see it from far away.’
This explanation didn’t mean anything. It could still be a fiction generated by her subconscious. Everyone knew that the company that wanted to colonize Mars had sent provisions ahead of its mission. The colonists were supposed to get to work as quickly as possible, but the corporation hadn’t exactly stuck a big sign on its exact landing spot. Mars didn’t belong to anyone. Anybody could settle here wherever they happened to find a place. And there was definitely enough space—the surface of Mars was more extensive than Earth’s landmass.
Ewa glanced at her watch. It was almost noon. She had already been walking for seven hours and had covered only twenty-five kilometers, ten fewer than she had planned. She wasn't making progress as quickly thanks to her baby steps. A glance at the sky confirmed that she was in luck. It wasn’t just relatively clear. The sun and both moons just happened to be visible right now. She entered their approximate positions in the sky into her universal device and calculated her location from that.
Her leg suddenly jerked. Ewa suspected that her subconscious was about to make itself felt. She sat down on a rock and waited for what was coming. This time she wasn’t startled when her finger sank into the sand. However, this time it didn’t write anything, but drew a long arrow instead. The direction in which the arrow was pointing was a little off from her current route.
Apparently she had to make one final adjustment. She wouldn’t argue against it. Ewa stood up and silently followed the line of the arrow.
The sun stood right above the horizon. Ewa could no longer say she was trudging, she was doggedly dragging herself along. This torture had to end soon, and it would end soon, one way or the other. Her skull was pounding—an intense headache. She wished she could take her head in her hands and squeeze it like a baked potato until she found release. At least her bewildered mind promised that result. Fortunately, her helmet kept her from doing that.
Ewa’s eyes were fixed on the red sand. It looked almost black now, shortly before sunset. Even the smallest of stones cast long shadows. Would it possibly help if she gave herself more oxygen? She increased the concentration through her universal device and increased the speed of her ventilator by a third. A cool wind blew across her face. Magnificent! Even the ever-present stench of blood and sweat grew weaker. She checked her supply gauge. If she continued at this rate, she had five hours of oxygen left. That was enough, and if it wasn’t enough, that was all right with her.
The sun was about to go down. Ewa looked westward. This might be the last sunset of her lifetime. They said you should make a wish whenever the sun slipped behind the horizon. But she didn’t reach that point, because only a few degrees away from the sun an oddly shaped hill rose up from the plain. The only reason she caught sight of it was because of the few sunbeams that were being reflected in her direction.
Ewa knew instantly what it was. The shape of the hill was unnatural. She had just found the transport dream ship that her subconscious had promised her. No, it had to be that alien object inside her head. Ewa was tempted to start running. This was her salvation. She would find supplies—oxygen, water, nourishment, perhaps even a vehicle over there.
But it was too early. She had one last thing to take care of before then. It was impossible for her to imagine a future in which she didn’t control her own life. Ewa searched for a large rock and sat down. She set her backpack down next to her and pulled out her journal and pen.
“You were right. It really is a transport dream ship,” she said.
She then opened the journal. Come on, she thought. Nothing happened. Her right hand eventually picked up the pen and began to write. ‘You’ve done it. The supplies are waiting there, just for you.’
“No,” she said. “I will sit here and die.”
‘Don’t you want to live?’ the pen asked on the paper.
“I want to live, but not like this,” she replied out loud.
‘What does that mean?’ her hand wrote.
“I want to control my own mind,” Ewa said.
‘I will only intervene if I have no choice.’
“That’s not enough. I want to be completely in control again.”
‘That isn’t technically possible. You would have to have another brain surgery, and you don’t have the technology needed for that up here.’
Ewa read the two sentences once more. There wasn’t any way to answer that. “If that’s true, I’ll kill myself, and that’ll be the end of you, too.”
She reached for the tube connected to her oxygen tank. Her hand grew slower the closer it got to the ventilator. She focused on it with all her strength. Her hand suddenly yielded. She closed her fingers around the ventilator and unscrewed it. The air started to escape from the suit. In three minutes, she would be dead.
Her fingers reached for the pen. New words appeared on the paper. ‘Wait, there’s another way.’
“Is this a trick?” she asked.
‘No. Please close the ventilator.’
Ewa screwed the ventilator back shut. “What kind of way is that?”
‘The BCI that I use to access your brain works electronically. You can disrupt it with an electromagnetic impulse—you might even be able to destroy it that way.’
“And fry my brain at the same time?”
‘No, your nerve cells would withstand the necessary field strength.’
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked.
‘Because I don’t want to die.’
“Are you saying you’re alive?”
‘I don’t know,’ the pen wrote. ‘I can’t live without a host, though.’
“That’s what people call a parasite,” she said.
‘I know.’
“What do I need to pull off the trick you’re talking about?”
‘One of the weapons you’re going to find in the transport ship.’
“But you would keep me from killing you?”
‘If I noticed it, of course. I want to live.’
“If you noticed it? Can’t you read my thoughts?”
‘No. Your thoughts are closed to me. I can only tap into and influence potential actions. I can tell when you’re about to do something, even when you’re about to speak, though only a few milliseconds before you actually do it. Sometimes I can manage to prevent your action.’
“Sometimes?”
‘My energy resources are limited. It depends on which part of your body is required for the action. Making your finger write something is easier than getting your entire body to do something.’
“How did you manage to get me to kill my own people?”
‘It’s easier for me when your consciousness is asleep. All I have to do in that situation is to induce the right action potential. Your defenses are down when you’re sleeping.’
“So I can’t ever go to sleep again?”
‘You could calibrate the impulse weapon to fire if you ever suddenly stand up in your sleep.’
“I don’t know how to do that.”
‘I’ll help you.’
“Why would you do that?”
‘Because I don’
t want to die. I know that you’ll die if you don’t regain control over yourself. I saw the action potential when you reached for your ventilator. It was high.’
“But if I unintentionally start to sleepwalk, the weapon will kill you.”
‘I could wake you up before then. I never sleep.’
“I could just use the weapon to get rid of you,” Ewa said. “Then I’d at least be safe from you.”
‘That wouldn’t be very smart of you. You want to survive just as much as I do. And I can help you do that.’
“I’d manage on my own. I’ll survive many years on the provisions in that ship.”
‘I have information you could use.’
“For instance?”
‘The code you’ll need to get inside the transport ship.’
“Then I’ll kill you as soon as the coast is clear,” Ewa said maliciously.
‘You’re too clever to do that. At some point, the owner of the provisions will show up, and he won’t have much sympathy for thieves. You will need a secret weapon, like me. Just imagine, someday you could make all these supplies available to MfE. They would welcome you back with open arms.’
“No, they won’t. I killed five of their friends.”
‘These supplies will outweigh that.’
“You don’t understand humans well. No fortune in this world could ever make up for that.”
‘Then all I ask,’ the pen wrote, ‘is that you don’t kill me, either.’
That hit home. She couldn’t let on, though, otherwise the thing would have her back under its control. Ewa would never kill anyone again—even if it was an external consciousness inside her mind that had caused her to commit multiple murders.
“Who are you actually?” she asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ appeared on the paper.
“What do you know about yourself?”
‘I only know my mission.’
“And what does that consist of?”
‘I’m supposed to watch over all of you and cause your mission to fail.’
“You almost got your wish. Who gave you that order and why?”
‘I can’t tell you that.’
“You can’t or you won’t?”
‘I’m not sure.’
“All right then,” Ewa said. “I’m going to call you Friday. Do you know the story of Robinson Crusoe?”
‘No.’
“It doesn’t matter. You’ll still be named Friday. Now let’s get going.”
From up close, the ship was quite impressive, almost extraterrestrial. In comparison, the Santa Maria on which they had reached Mars was a canoe and NASA’s Endeavour was a rowboat. Here in front of her was an ocean liner ready to plow through the never-ending depths of space. It must have cost an unbelievable fortune! Before they left Earth, there had been rumors about the vast billions spent on this project. Critics had insisted that this sum could have fixed some of humanity’s most significant problems on Earth. Yet compared to the annual defense budgets of the world’s largest nations, this had been a modest sum.
The ground around the spaceship was unusually hard and covered by only a thin layer of dust. The heat the engines had generated as they slowed the ship down to land had to be the cause of that. Ewa walked around the rocket, whose rear-mounted fin conveyed a sense of elegance despite its large size. The entire, multi-ton ship was sitting on a metal landing pad, which looked surprisingly fragile despite bearing the entire weight of the spacecraft. Ewa saw the outline of hatches in the rocket’s hull, but she had no idea how to open them. One probably had to communicate by radio with the ship’s computer system.
Ewa leaned against a leg of the landing skid and put her backpack on the ground. She pulled out her journal and pen again. This was the first time she realized how tired she really was.
“Now what?” she asked.
‘We could communicate more easily,’ the pen noted.
“How?”
‘You could talk to me and not fight when I answer through your mouth.’
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
‘You weren’t ready.’
Ewa closed her journal. “I’m ready now,” she said aloud.
Nonetheless, she was startled when her mouth opened all on its own. She automatically lifted her hand to her mouth, but her helmet was in the way.
‘See?’ she said—her mouth said. Ewa took a deep breath. This felt like the exact opposite of what she wanted—to regain control. Now she really was talking to herself!
“I understand,” she said. “It really is strange.”
‘It would be best,’ her own voice replied, ‘for you to imagine that someone else is speaking. Maybe your sister.’
“You’re Friday,” Ewa said. “I’ll tell myself that Friday is talking to me. But if anyone happens to be listening, you can’t say anything.”
‘No problem,’ Friday replied. ‘I know right away when you resist me.’
“Good. Now, how do we get inside this ship?”
Ewa felt like scratching her head. It occurred to her that she had been talking the majority of the time. She had to be careful not to establish a relationship with the thing in her head. She would eventually have to delete Friday.
‘You have a radio,’ Friday said.
“Yes.” Ewa recalled how Theo had given her one as she left their base. She had responded with deliberate snarkiness to make it as easy as possible for him to tell her goodbye.
‘It would be easier if you could let me take charge. All you need to do is step back and let me do my thing.’
“No way,” Ewa replied. “My body belongs to me. You will explain what I need to do, and I will make it happen.”
Friday sighed. ‘Just don’t complain if something goes wrong,’ he said. ‘I thought you were in a hurry.’
“I’ll never be in such a hurry that I’ll let you take the wheel,” Ewa said. “Every time you’ve taken control of me, I’ve tried to kill someone.”
‘It’s on you then. We need the commander’s authorization to open the airlock from the outside, but we don’t have that,’ Friday explained.
“Great. Didn’t you tell me that you had the access code?”
‘That was a lie. I wanted to survive. What else was I supposed to do?’
“Die. That would’ve been fair,” Ewa said.
‘Slow down. There’s always an emergency mode that can help us get inside the ship.’
“And you have the data for that?”
‘Yes. Every company employee has it.’
“That doesn’t sound very secure,” Ewa said.
‘The emergency mode won’t give us access to the bridge,’ her voice replied.
“But we can reach the supplies?”
‘We can reach everything else.’
“That’s good news. What do I have to do?”
‘You are going to call the ship on a certain frequency and demand emergency authorization.’
“That’s all it’ll take?”
‘I hope so.’
“What does that mean?”
‘This is the information that was publicly available at the time that the Santa Maria launched. I haven’t been able to update since then. I’m no longer connected with Earth.’
The thing in her head was obviously not omnipotent. This made Ewa feel calmer. It was just as much on its own as the rest of them.
“All that’s left is to try it out.”
‘You need to set the frequency to 155.23 megahertz.’
“All right.” Ewa pulled the radio out of her backpack and adjusted the frequency. She was about to push the speaker button, but then she remembered that she didn’t have a plan for what to say. “What should I say?” she asked.
‘Leave the words to me. I’ll take care of it,’ Friday replied.
“No way,” she said. She held the radio in front of her body. She hoped the battery still had enough juice! Theo had charged it, right? She forced herself to push the button. “Emergency mode,”
she said into the microphone. “I need urgent help, emergency mode.”
She heard a rustling sound, but then a computer voice responded. “This is the ship’s comp for Spaceliner 0. You have activated the emergency mode. Identify yourself.”
Ewa considered briefly. The transport ship in front of her had to have launched at least six months before the passenger ship. At that point, there couldn’t have been any passenger lists. “My name is Ewa Kowalska. I’m from Spaceliner 1, and I urgently need access to oxygen.”
“Just a moment, Ewa Kowalska, I need to verify your access authorization,” the ship replied.
“How?” she asked.
“I will contact Spaceliner 1.”
If the comp followed through on its threat, her cover would be blown. She had to prevent this! The ship was still at least fifteen light minutes away, so a query would take half an hour.
“My oxygen reserves will only last another seventeen minutes. I desperately need fresh air.”
If the software had been correctly programmed, it should offer immediate assistance in the face of a direct threat to any human’s body or life. Had the corporation’s programmers adhered to the UN’s stipulations? Ewa could only hope.
“Activating emergency status,” the comp said.
It worked! Ewa watched the tower above her head. The surface behind which a door seemed to be concealed moved slightly outward from the wall as a ladder dropped down to the ground.
“Do you need help getting inside?” the comp asked. “I could send the emergency robot out to you.”
“Thank you, but I can manage the ladder,” Ewa replied.
She pulled her backpack back on and began to climb the ladder with her last remnants of strength. These would be the longest seven meters of her life. When she reached the top, she saw an airlock. She dragged herself inside. A large, flashing red button was located on the wall beside the lock. Ewa laughed. The airlock interiors always looked the same. She pulled herself upright against the wall until she could reach the button, then pushed it. The airlock door slid shut. Fresh air filled the chamber. Ewa watched the air pressure rise on her universal device. There was now enough for her to breathe. She yanked the helmet off her head, inhaling enthusiastic, deep, lung-filling breaths of ozone-tinged air.
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