“Colonel. Please.” Rios. Right behind me.
Earthside will absolve him. Probably give him a fucking medal. I can’t let that happen.
“You can’t, sir,” Rios pleads gently, like he’s reading my mind.
“Take him!” Burns is screaming, found his voice again. “Take him down! Don’t let him…!!”
I hack MAI. Kill all the lights. Send a signal that fries their heat and night vision. Then in the darkness I can see perfectly well in, I move through them, move close. I want him to feel my breath on him, smell him sweating. But instead of what I want to do, I tell him clearly:
“If you can’t hurt me, you can’t hurt Chang. I’m the only hope you’ve got. And you owe me your fucking worthless life, nothing less. Be grateful I still care about these people.”
I turn and take my rage out of there, weaving smoothly through the blinded troopers. To the nearest airlock. Hack it. Let myself out into the cold desert.
Chapter 3: Stages of Grieving
The sun’s gone down. It’s below freezing, but I don’t feel it. I realize I left my rebreather behind. I don’t care. I don’t breathe. And I don’t need a disguise anymore, I don’t need to pretend I’m still human. I’m not.
I climb back to the ridge, reclaim my weapons, unfold and put on the ugly fucking helmet, stand in the cemetery and look back over the base. Just a few lights in the dark. Dark as far as the eye can see.
More light as two of the pads go live, open, push up a pair of AAVs, heating up for fast launch in billows of steam exhaust.
Burns is looking for me.
I don’t go anywhere. I watch the ships spin up, lift off, circle. They stream spots onto the barren ground, begin sweeping.
But I don’t want to hurt these men. (Just Burns.) So when their spots sweep the ridge, I look down at myself in the bright white light and see my armor and cloak has turned into a perfect simulation of Martian terrain. The lights pass over me, move on, urgent.
I’m still hacked into MAI enough to know I’m not showing up on perimeter sentries. No heat, no motion. I remember many decades ago, when I was “intimate” with the tactical AI running UNACT operations: the machine would hack the myriad tracking tools of that wired world and let me move invisibly, because we were trying to take down a conspiracy high up in our own leadership. I remember how free that felt. How superior, satisfying. I was a ghost. An avenging ghost. And I set the world right. (Or at least I ended that particular batch of villains.)
Now here I am, hiding from my own people in plain sight again.
But this time, I’ve lost too much.
Lisa is dead. MAI tells me so. Ryder tried to save her, bring her back, but her wounds were too severe.
I killed her. I should never have come back. I should have hid up here and hacked in to get the intel I needed and been gone like a thief. I knew what would happen. I knew they’d find me out if I stayed.
I’ve lost the two people closest to me, the two people who came here because of me. I let them both die senseless deaths.
I don’t deserve to be human anymore.
I pick a direction away from here—east, into Coprates—and I start walking.
It’s a combination of exhaustion and a low oxygen warning that makes me find a place to sit down and rest. I don’t know how far I’ve gone in the dark. I’m somewhere up in the mountains that run just south and east of the base. Climbing. Sliding. Stumbling. My armor is sparkling with frost under the faint light of the larger moon.
I look at the moon, the irregular blob in the night sky. Up there—on Phobos—we had a base before the Discs killed it. Doc Ryder’s husband died up there with hundreds of others, probably exposed to vacuum when the habitats were holed. Now Richards is leading a mission to restore that base, and our orbital docks, to create a foothold for more humans and machines to come here.
I can almost embrace Chang’s mission, assuming he really does intend to preserve any of this planet for those that live here. But I still can’t accept his methods, not even now in my blinding rage: his willingness to wipe out thousands of lives, to get the world he wants. In that sense, he’s as bad as this new Earthside/UNMAC/UNCORT agenda. And Earthside is as bad as Chang.
If the survivor factions don’t comply with mandatory disarmament and relocation, Earthside will use force, and a lot more people will die. Maybe all of them in some cases, rather than leave.
Sitting in the rocks, pulling my cloak over me like a mini-shelter to ride out the frozen night, my body hardens, conserves energy, starts to distill more oxygen out of the thin air as I take slow, careful breaths. I even absorb the sparse condensation. My new body is a miracle of survival engineering. I almost wonder if I could survive—or maybe the better word is “function”—outside of the terraformed valleys, in the planet’s original near vacuum.
But that’s assuming I want to run away.
Not yet. I can still help these people. That’s why Star saved me.
Yet here I am, hell-and-gone from human habitation, having a camp-out in an environment that could kill a human being without survival gear in minutes.
I’m dreaming again of the other world, the other time other me.
I was useless. I’d given up. Built myself a retreat on a lake in the Pacific Northwest, spent my days staring at the water, the trees, the neighbors as they did the same thing. The trees weren’t real anymore, of course. They were nano-grown organic replacements, something to look nice and keep the O2 levels up after we poisoned and burned and clear-cut and over-developed.
Lucky for us, we could “landscape” on a county scale, cosmetically restore nature (except for the wildlife—we even killed off the bugs). Always green, immune to disease and fire, but way too perfect close up, like a cheap movie set, or a massive theme park. You could even do simulated hunting and fishing if you were that kind of old-school boring. (All the fun people had gravitated to the sprawling metros. Plugged in or colliding with each other in flesh-space. Fucking and destroying. Mostly destroying. And nobody gets hurt, not even if they want to be.)
The preserve dome filtered out the crappy air, kept the skies blue and the weather monotonously mild. The lake water was even temperature-controlled.
I think I snapped in there somewhere. Slipped under the water one day, but couldn’t drown—my mods could separate oxygen from the water. So I just sat there for days. Until I couldn’t take the silence, the numb. Until I fought my way back to the surface and started making noise, trying to tell anyone “We have the power to do anything. Why don’t we do the things we used to think were important?” But most people just wanted their entertainment, or they’d stop caring entirely.
Lisa was there. She’d stopped talking to me a long time ago. She didn’t think I meant what I said. I think she was still pissed about Matthew. And the Kali thing—that was me being stupid because I’d stopped caring.
But Star came back. I hadn’t seen Star since a few years after I was modded. And she wanted to help me. She’d met someone, through Dee—good old Dee, still clicking away (and what he must have thought about this world we humans had made). She said things were about to change. If enough people wanted it. She wanted me to want it. I already did. Or at least I wanted something else.
“Good morning, sexy.”
It takes me a moment to realize I’m awake.
She’s standing on the ridge in front of me, taking in the sunrise. Only she’s not wearing her “Ra” costume anymore. Pure white dress with a golden armored collar, belt, arm bands and leg guards, all very ornate. Goddess-like. It suits her. (Her codename—Astarte—is a love goddess, after all.) Her blonde hair has grown out long. It’s blowing in the wind. Only in the wrong direction. And the way the light hits her is also all wrong.
I pick up a small rock and throw it at her. It passes through her.
“No, I’m not really here. I’m afraid I can’t be. But one of my mods lets me plug in so you can see me.”
I don’t have anything worth saying. I keep my cloak
wrapped around me.
“At least take off the ugly helmet,” she asks, turning to look at me, visibly pouting that I’m not ecstatic to see her. But I take off the helmet, fold it.
“Much better. But I’m still not sure I’m crazy about the hair,” she criticizes. I have to tie the mop back up to keep it out of my eyes in the wind.
“I’m not,” I finally say something. “But it keeps growing back.”
“Still, it’s good to see you. Pretty again. And not bleeding to death.”
“You left,” I confront, probably sounding like a sulking child. “In the cave. I woke up and you were gone.”
“You took a really long time to reconstitute, even with all the extra resources I fed you… You’d prioritized all of your peripheral and tactical mods over your bioframe and neural net—you and your damn toys. And I had obligations. A job to do.”
“Which is?” I’m almost curious.
“Classified. Just be a dear and keep to the cover story: Ra rescued you. Ra healed you. Ra’s leading the lame-ass resistance.”
“Why the dress-up?”
“Chang won’t see Ra as a threat. And meanwhile, I’m doing what I do best: seducing my way in. Hot blonde. Makes people forget I’m actually dangerous. Or they don’t care, because they’re too intent on fucking me. Let’s just say I’m undercover. So when you see me flesh-wise, do your best to act surprised.”
More bullshit answers. I spend the next long seconds glaring at her.
“I take it the homecoming sucked?” she pries.
“Lisa’s dead,” I almost spit at her, grinding my jaw. That seems to shake her.
“Colonel Ava?” she confirms. I remember she was never too crazy about Lisa, in either life. Residual jealousy for the ex-girlfriend, especially since Lisa stayed in my life. Lives. “I’m sorry…”
“Why am I saving this world again?”
“Because you can’t not. It’s what you do. Once you stop wallowing.” She stops herself, takes a breath. “I am sorry about Colonel Ava. I know you two had history, the kind you just don’t let go of. I was there for the aftermath, remember? For you.”
“Why are you here now?” I don’t want to talk about Lisa.
“Because I did leave you in that cave. And I didn’t know how you’d turn out. But you look like you did when I last saw you, in my timeline. And it looks like you’ve still got your this-world set of memories. What about the world I come from, where you’re all classic long-haired sword-and-sorcery style?”
“Fuzzy. And depressing.”
“Sounds like you remember it perfectly.” She doesn’t sound like she’s joking.
All the bizarre parallel world bullshit is giving me a headache. Apparently I still get headaches.
“Figured out all the upgrades, yet?” she tries to cheer me up, or at least distract.
“Getting there.”
“Well, at least your formerly geriatric self should get a kick out of them. You were sixty, and I wasn’t far behind, when we took the first treatments. Being thirty again, being totally perfectly healthy, I think that was the biggest thing for me. For you, too. The super powers and the gadgets were icing. And after a while, the new mods got almost silly. But I’ll never forget waking up young. And knowing I could always be.”
“You realize I’m on the run from my own people?” I let her know whatever moment she thought I’d have is well-ruined.
“We saw the patrols, picked up on the chatter. Your new leaders are in an amusing panic about you. And they haven’t seen anything yet.”
“’We’?” I pick up.
“Back to my job. Speaking of: I’m out of time again. TTFN. And Chang also has his eye on Tranquility. Thankfully, the UNMAC agenda gives you a reason to be there, so he won’t get suspicious when you show up. Love you. Still.”
And she’s gone.
She still hasn’t told me what the fucking plan is. Did we just get dropped back through time to wing it, with the fate of reality on the line?
Stop Chang.
It doesn’t even make sense.
If I buy any of this, Chang’s plan was to use a sub-atomic “splice” to back before the corporate boom to create self-producing nanotech programmed to wreck the research, keep the human race mortal for awhile longer. He sent seeds to make his Discs, which he called simple self-managing drones. But he also sent the tech to remake himself, so a version of himself could oversee it, ensure it happened. (The rules of the paradox should have forced that to fail.) And he apparently also seeded the tech to make other things, or he’s got the skills to adapt what he’s made out of and apply it to making ships, weapons, hybridizing Bly and Nina Harper into monstrosities.
But somebody dragged me—and Star—into some bizarre plan to stop him, somehow inserting us into Chang’s seeding program (supposedly because they couldn’t just stop him from doing it), so we could be here to resist him.
And too many things about that are eating at me.
If whoever sent us could add that much into Chang’s program, then why couldn’t they just sabotage it, change it so it wouldn’t replicate anything?
Unless that would reveal them, and they were vulnerable to Chang (and whoever might have been with him). Or they simply assumed Chang would just try again (after ensuring they were shut out), or do something worse.
But sending us… Chang sent drones. They replicated a lot sooner than our complex bodies, and got to work (doing far more damage than Chang intended, if I believe him). Sending us would be too little, too late—Chang would already have changed the past. Even if they didn’t believe he could succeed—that sending us was just a failsafe on the outside chance he managed the impossible—the plan was doomed to fail in design.
Or maybe by design?
If we had no real hope of stopping Chang before he did his damage to the timeline, how exactly are we stopping him?
Running this through my head again—maybe because my rage is making me go especially into darkness—I think I know: If Chang could defeat the paradox, maybe that was to be our weapon as well.
Stop Chang.
I think I’ve seen this movie: We find an earlier version of him and kill him. None of this happens. Time resets mostly the way it was.
But that doesn’t work (and my headache is raging). Chang’s already changed time. If there’s a younger Chang somewhere in this time, it’s not the one who grows up to do this, not anymore.
Unless we were just too late.
But Chang’s already overwritten all of us in that time, including the original him that started this. That’s the unbeatable paradox: As soon as the timeline changed, none of us—the way we were—would exist anymore in that future, so none of us should still exist to be here now (including Chang), since we came from versions of ourselves that are now undone. So—by extension—killing Chang early wouldn’t erase the one that’s already here doing damage. However the paradox got broken, it’s done.
So what the hell are we doing here? The best we can do is limit the damage. We can’t undo what he’s done. (Unless Chang’s still got the time-splice tech, and we can take it from him and jump further back, ahead of his arrival, then kill young Chang, and… owww…)
Every way I run it, I collide with the broken paradox. And make my headache worse.
The only thing I can do that makes any sense is track the fucker down and hurt him. End him. And that makes sense because that’s exactly what I’m good at, what Star is good at.
Pointless justice.
A pair of the new light AAVs fly over my head, heading east, possibly for a look at Tranquility, possibly looking for Chang. They ignore me—a quick hack of their Link feed confirms they didn’t even see me, despite how low they’re flying. (And I get a flash of wishing they did, just so my rage can prove that Burns can’t hurt me, can’t stop me if I ever decide to collect for Lisa.)
I really don’t know what to do. But I apparently know where Chang will be, thanks to Star. (Assuming I trust her. Assuming that is
Star. It could be a convincing fake. So could Chang. Maybe some unknown is doing this to play me, to play everybody.)
(But I need to play to find out.)
Tranquility is still a good two day’s walk from here. Last time we tried visiting, we lost two men, got two more hurt bad. All we did was show up, try to tell the locals we came in peace, wanted to help them. Now Burns is going to do the same thing, just with a lot more guns. But no matter how many guns he brings, he won’t be able to take the place without major bloodshed, and the locals certainly won’t go quietly just because a supposedly superior force says so. At least I could walk in without much fear of getting hurt, and, if I’m lucky, not hurt anybody else. But what good would it do? How are they going to receive a freak like me? (Maybe better than a freak like Chang. But at least Chang has something to offer. What am I selling?)
What would Lisa want me to do?
No. That falls apart as soon as I remember the look of absolute horror on her face at the sight of me. I realize: she must have woken up, rolled over, saw this long-haired child that barely looks like the young me she fell for, and managed not to scream while she snuck out of my quarters and called for the cavalry.
Lisa would have wanted me not to be what I am.
The backlash of anger I get at that thought—angry at Lisa for being so terrified of me—just shows I’m lashing out about her death (even at her for dying, or for calling in the troopers—Burns—that led to her dying). But I also consider the words I’m beginning to use, even to myself:
What I am.
This is what I am. And not just what I am now. This is what I’ve been, at least in that other time. And in that other time, this is what I chose to be.
I remember the me from this timeline, not long ago, in an idle conversation with Paul, hypothetically coveting the gifts that the ETE have: Immortality, healing, resilience, strength, speed, interface. And tools that can manipulate the binding forces of matter. Godlike power. The Nomads call them Jinn. And what could I do with such power, hypothetically, if the ETE would ever give it? Would I dare take it? Would I do good with it? Save the world? Or make it worse?
The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are Page 6