The air is freezing cold and thin. I see my O2 levels jump very slightly, but when I try to exhale, something stops me, and I get a “pressure warning”. I hold my breath again. Effortlessly.
What the hell am I?
I’m standing in the rut I was laying in. It is me-shaped, like I’d lain down in deep mud or wet concrete which has since hardened, but the rock is old. The rut looks dissolved into it. And I see veins—dark root-like things that radiate out into the rock, bore through it, like I’d become a kind of plant growing out of its pot. But there’s nothing there now but the empty cuts and bore-holes.
What the hell happened to me?
Armored from neck to toes, I can’t see my skin, can’t see if I still have skin. Which is when I realize I have hair. Lots of hair. I’d been shaving my head for decades, and now the stuff is falling in my eyes, piling around my shoulders, dark and thick and wavy with no visible gray. Rock star hair. Like I had when I was in high school.
“Uugg…”
I really never missed having hair, once I chopped it all off for military service. I thought I would—and dreaded losing it—but I came to love being buzzed, then bald. Now I’ve got a mop of it as I run my gloved fingers back through it, pulling it away from my face. My first instinct is to shave it off.
Which is when I realize I’m armed.
There’s a pistol on my right thigh, a largish knife in the small of my back, and a sword on my left hip.
Bly broke my sword. Before he killed me.
But it’s back: Japanese katana. Black wrapping over white ray skin. Black iron fixtures. Black lacquered scabbard. I need to draw the blade to prove it’s as intact as I know it is. But it’s better: Finer than even the gift the Shinkyo had given me. Perfectly balanced, beautifully polished, flawless, gorgeous temper-line, and…
Moving.
I look close, and my eyes zoom in like mechanical lenses, enhancing.
The grain of the metal swirls like quicksilver. Alive.
I snap my vision away, refocus.
I heft the blade—it feels like a normal sword. And I cut.
It screams in the air. I’m fast, really fast, and really strong. Then I do something I would never think of doing with one of my old swords: I try it against the only target handy: stone. The blade cuts the rock of the cave like soft wood. And the edge is still perfect, the finish unmarred. It should be chipped to hell, mangled. But it cut rock.
I knew it would. Like I somehow know the blade is an adaptive morphic nanomaterial that can change its characteristics, self-edge to cut on a molecular level. I know this from my bad-movie life.
Just like I know about the gun.
I put the sword away, managing to perfectly re-sheath it without looking—better than I ever could with all my years of anachronistic training—and draw the pistol.
Big thing. Shimmering stainless. Vent-rib barrel. It looks something like my antique automag—what Matthew always called my “Big Stupid Gun”—but it isn’t. And the action works without me racking it. Opens. Let’s me see the golden rounds inside. Then locks shut, ready. I wonder where it came from, where the bullets came from, but my other life knows:
It grew out of me, just like my armor, just like the sword. And the magazine cases at my hip will replenish the ammo, customizing it to my needs. All I need are the raw materials to process…
The “roots” in the rock: I can draw raw materials from my environment. I made everything I’m wearing and carrying, automatically, when I was out of it. (Except the helmet. Star gave me the helmet. But technically I made that in my other life.)
The big knife is the same swimming metal as the sword, but it more significantly changes its shape as I consider uses for a knife: tool, weapon, culinary instrument…
I make the blade flat and wide like a Bowie. Use the surface as a mirror to get a look at my face.
Oh shit.
Young. I’m young.
But not the young soldier, meaty from PT and enhancers. And not the skinny twig of a kid that came before him. Both and neither. Almost feminine. Late twenties. Picture of health. And the scars are all gone. (I miss the scars. I feel sad looking at this pristine man-boy pretty face.)
My eyes…
No longer hazel. Metalic. Irises like hematite.
I can’t look anymore.
Nor can I sit put.
Others were here. I wasn’t alone when I died (or whatever it was I did to get replaced with this).
Ra brought me here: theatrical fake god that came out of nowhere and saved my dying ass and threw me on some kind of flying thing and brought me here. Told me the same story that Chang did about the future (the same story as my bad-movie life). Tried to put the ugly helmet on me. Told me I had to become what I was, the me from that other time, if I still wanted to save this world, save my friends. Then showed me she was Star. I loved Star, a long time ago. (But there she is in my movie life, still around as the world goes wrong, wanting to help me fix it.)
And Sakina. She came, wouldn’t let Star take me, wouldn’t leave my side. I felt her holding my head while the world went black, went away. She was here. Right here.
Now there’s no sign anyone’s been here in a long time (except me, growing into the rock, turning weird and pretty and able to breathe without breathing). Just old footprints in the dirt, dulled by wind. Other patterns I can’t make sense of, maybe made when Ra—Star—was trying to keep me alive, when she put the helmet on me.
How long have I been here?
I get tired of lugging the ugly helmet around and it seems to get that and it folds up into a flat piece of metal like a magic trick. I can stick it inside my surcoat—there’s a handy pocket just the right size.
My strange new body walks me out to the cave mouth, out into daylight. I shouldn’t be so exposed in daylight, but more handy hallucinatory gauges insist that the UV and cosmic radiation is well within tolerable limits (I fully expect I could just put the silly helmet back on if that changes). This semi-intuitive communication with whatever I’ve got running inside of me also lets me know that my skin has apparently “hardened” against the low atmospheric pressure and temperature (possibly accounting for the reduced sensation).
From the view, I am somewhere up on the Northeast Melas Rim, in the cliffs just above the talus slopes that drop down into the shell-shaped valley, hundreds of kilometers of rolling desert. It’s midday, the sky ruddy pink ochre overhead. The steam-clouds of the ETE Stations sprout around the rim, billowing up until they hit the EM Atmosphere Net and flatten out. (Somehow I can see relatively clearly all the way across the valley, just like I can see microscope-close.)
The Melas valley looks peaceful enough, a serene expanse. There is certainly no sign of battle, or even visible traffic, air or ground. The place could be as uninhabited as it was before the Land Rush, when Harker’s expedition first set boots here.
Standing here, in this moment, not knowing what day it is or how long I’ve been gone, it begins to crush me just what has been done to my body, my mind, everything that I am. I know the “bad movie” isn’t a fiction. Those were my memories, from a me from a time that now doesn’t exist and never will, erased by what Chang did.
Star brought me here to change me, to put me the way she knew me in the other time. She said the helmet held the nanotech that was programmed to recreate that me, the same nanotech that made me what I was then.
A god. Chang said I was a god. He knew the other me. He was surprised (and idly amused) to meet this me—well, the old this me—here in this world.
And that was part of the bad movie: We actually started thinking we were gods, or at least the next best thing. Immortal. Indestructible. Powerful. (And petty and thoughtless and destructive.) We were even trying to create life…
I know that’s why Chang came, why he would be so desperate to stop us, all of us. The path we were on… But it doesn’t give him the right to kill so many people. And to erase so many many more.
I look down
at this new body, feel what’s been done to it, to my brain—my brain—and I realize: I chose this. I decided to become this, in that other world. Why would I do that? Am I that proud, that vain, to think I needed to live forever? For what?
And I realize: I think I chose it again.
Star said I needed to give her permission to change me. The “seed” in the helmet could have made the other me, memories and all, out of any dead meat raw materials, just like I apparently made this armor and these weapons out of the cave and what I was wearing. But she needed me alive. She said something about a “failsafe”, that my existing memories—me—wouldn’t be overwritten, that I’d be both: One who knew this world, cared about the people in it. The other who knew this body, and the other world, what was lost (and maybe should have been lost).
I’m not feeling any other “me” in here. Just the memories, ghosts of what I apparently lived through. But then, maybe that’s all there is to anyone: Conscious awareness, personality, ingrained behaviors, and memory to give it a back story, an identity.
Am I only a vessel for two sets of data?
Did I tell Star “yes”? Or did she make the decision for me?
Would I have said “yes”?
I am alive (whatever I am). That means I’m still in the fight, I can still do something. Maybe more than I could do before. Maybe enough to beat Chang. Save the world. Or at least the people I care about, if they’re still alive.
Yes. I think I would have said “yes”.
I wonder what else I can do.
I need to get back to the fight.
I remember Paul telling me he got around the valley on his little unauthorized explorations by walking, that he found it soothing. I’m not sure how much of his dry humor was in that statement, considering the trip from his Blue Station to our Melas Two base was about a hundred and sixty klicks, the first dozen on a severe down-slope. I wonder how many days it took him (or weeks, considering the ETE never seem to be in a hurry about anything).
My curiosity is more urgent than his, and thankfully I have maybe only a hundred and twenty klicks to hike (with a lot less downhill).
Remembering an old Chinese adage about a thousand mile journey, I find a convenient cord in a pocket inside my surcoat, tie back my still-annoying hair, and step to the edge of the cliff cave.
The Zodangans were big on fortification. The rim foothill slopes are a good hundred meters below me down a sheer wall. This place would only be accessible to their airships or to patient, skilful climbers with O2 reserves to spare.
Me, I seem to have no fear of jumping. So I enjoy the view across the valley for another long moment, and do just that.
The fall feels gracefully slow in Mars’ 0.38 gravity, but I know it’s still more than enough to break bones. Alarms go off in my head (I hope I haven’t just done something remarkably stupid), and I feel something shift in my skeleton. And then the talus comes up at me much too fast, and I hit. And sink. Like someone dropped a car into a sand dune.
It’s stunning and ungraceful and I’m on my armored knees in a fresh hole almost as deep as I am tall, and the talus slope is threatening to give and send me further by way of avalanche, but it settles. And I seem to be none the worse for wear, though I ache deeply—a sensation I find I’m actually grateful for. I can be hurt. I can feel.
Continuing my gracelessness, I crawl out of the divot I’ve made, slipping, and the loose rock keeps sliding out from under me. There are gouges in the plates on my legs, but they fade as I watch, and I feel my left ankle popping back into place.
I get back up onto the slide slope, and start the awkward skipping dance downhill.
Not godlike at all.
I make the lower foothills in a few more hours. The sun has moved west over Tithonium and Ius. The winds begin their tidal shift back eastward, putting them at my back.
I’ve been daydreaming all this time, filling in the details of my other life. I remember that we did nothing good with our gifts. We stopped caring about the planet as we stopped caring about ourselves. Art and literature dumbed-down to childlike crap, easily produced and more easily dismissed as our attention spans decayed (and one would think an immortal would have a long attention span). Everything was about distraction and entertainment. More than half of the population simply disappeared into virtual worlds, their now-perfect bodies in eternal stasis, while the rest did a garish job of making their fantasies into reality. The world became a collection of absurd amusement parks dedicated to every imaginable extreme behavior. There were, after all, no physical consequences.
Even crime became a pointless issue: No one could be hurt by assault, no one could be murdered. In fact, the experience of victimhood was actually sought by some, just to have any thrill at all. (And unpleasant memories, unwanted traumas, could simply be erased.) Property crimes were equally meaningless when anyone could make anything they wanted at will. So what was once a social plague became another form of entertainment. (I remember when early video games about committing violent crimes were the subject of controversy. Now it was a consensual reality: Hurt me. Kill me. Rape me.)
Our bodies had become valueless in their eternity, and everything else followed.
I try to remember how long it took. Only a few years, I think. Maybe a decade. My sense of time was another casualty of our “evolution”.
I look down at my plain black armor, remember I had no taste for gaudy excess, and maybe that was my saving grace: I appreciated the simple things. Even the experience of this long walk through a monochrome desert.
I realize none of the Martian dust is sticking to me.
I also eventually realize I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since before that battle that killed me. More gauges in my head appear to report varying levels of depletion in “energy”, “oxygenation” and “hydration”, but my “bioframe” is “nominal”.
I wonder if I can even be considered to be alive anymore.
Answering a more practical question, my eyes do their HUD trick again and pick out what I know is a tapsite on an ETE feedline in the distance, not far off my course. I change my direction of travel accordingly.
I reach the tapsite by sunset. I still have not seen sign of any activity on the surface, but I know how skilled the Nomads are at hiding, digging in to the terrain. And I expect I make a disturbing sight: Black armor and no mask, taking a leisurely stroll across the open waste.
My internal gauges tell me it’s already dipping below freezing, which also registers as an increased power drain. My new eyes have no problem with the fading light, and I find the tap easily enough.
The ground around it is well-trodden, and there are items left behind, both trash and gestures of Nomad hospitality mandates. In the latter category I find a few usable O2 and water cylinders, and a survival blanket. Amongst the trash I find a broken “rebreather” unit—one of the portable air recyclers favored by the Knights—looking like it’s seen multiple repair attempts. Not discarded in the sand, it’s been left hanging near the taps, perhaps for more skillful hands to try restoring.
I use one of the canteens to draw fresh water from the corresponding line. It’s already near ice-cold, and tastes of metals, but provides soothing refreshment (and my hydration levels start rising back toward green). I take the time to fill an O2 cylinder, only to find a slow leak. But then, holding the cylinder and thinking about it, I watch the seals repair.
Testing the phenomenon, I try the rebreather. I realize I have no knowledge of its mechanics, but somehow they seem intuitive, simple. I embrace the mechanism like a precious treasure, and feel it begin to fix itself.
After it’s done, I fill its tanks and test the unit. It seems to work well enough, though not as-new. I use my eyes to look close, trying to find some sign of active nanotech (as if I’ve “infected” the thing) but the materials appear inert. I test my growing hypothesis by breaking a seal and setting it down on a rock, stepping back. It does not self-repair. Not until I pick it up again.
“Huh…”
I perform a similar trick with a discarded heater unit, charge it with hydrogen and oxygen from the tap, and find I now have three of the necessities of survival (even though I don’t really seem to need them at all).
As there is no food (the most precious commodity on the planet, even above ammunition, and therefore unlikely to be left for wandering charity), I consider making small shelter out of the blanket, but find my surcoat provides a hood and robe-like “sleeves” on demand. I settle in front of my “fire”, sip water and oxygen from my cylinders, and let myself drift.
I try to stay in the memories of what I consider my “real” life, my life as a soldier and an officer, a life I hope had at least some meaning, some good service. But I can’t shut out the other life…
At least I tried to do something about it, tried to get people to do something meaningful and worth immortality, however hopeless. I remember thinking that maybe one day we would wake up, find better direction, hopefully before we had done irreparable harm. But I also remember losing faith as the years passed.
I realize I almost understand Chang, why he would want to undo what we had become, even if it killed most of us. And how meaningful were most of our lives by that time? In our self-absorbed selfishness, we’d even stopped having children.
There were still a few isolated holdout colonies of “bio-normals” living fragile mortal lives—our only remaining “crime” was harassing them, a cruelty too many found idly tempting (and giving a few of us “purpose” as “Normal Police” to stand as protector, but challenging them became just another cartoonish game). Perhaps they would re-inherit what was left of the Earth after the rest of us died without our precious mods.
Apparently I do still sleep.
It’s light. The eastern sky is purpling with dawn. I assume I’ve only been out for the one night (my heater is still running). And I’m not alone.
The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are Page 2