Killing Time On Mars

by Alec Taylor

  He was wiping his hands of me. It sounded like ‘good riddance’.

  And then he was gone. I tipped my head back onto the pillow and closed my eyes.

  “Chris,” I said. “Do you know how it got into my system?”

  “No. I don’t know, Mike,” she replied, coming back over to talk to me. “There was psilocybin in your system, that’s for sure, but I don’t know where it came from.”

  32. REASSIGNMENT

  June and Tony dropped in later that morning. Tony’s face was uncharacteristically serious and worried, and I really didn’t like it. June took my hand.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked Tony.

  “Well, let’s see,” he replied. “My roommate had an overdose yesterday, and somebody framed him by placing a bag of drugs in his drawer.”

  “He’s a big boy, your roommate. He’ll get over it,” I said. “Do you know—”

  “How they got into your drawer?” Tony interrupted. “No clue. I told Pete they were mine, but he didn’t buy it. So then I told him somebody must have put them there to set you up, but he’s not listening to anyone right now.”

  June looked worried. “I’m all right,” I said to her.

  “You look pretty bad,” she replied, “and I don’t like what happened.”

  “You can thank Jan for saving his life,” said Chris from behind me.

  “What?” said Tony loudly, and church bells hammered inside my head. I had to close my eyes momentarily.

  “How?” asked Tony.

  “Heart massage,” she replied. “Jan kept the oxygen pumping to his brain. It’s the reason he’s alive right now.”

  “Wow,” said Tony. “Didn’t know he had it in him.”

  “I still can’t believe it,” I said, opening my eyes.

  “You’re being reassigned,” said June, still looking worried.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “That’s all right, too. I don’t mind working somewhere else for a while. Or forever if I have to.”

  “It’s going to make it hard to…” June trailed off and looked up at Chris.

  “I know,” I said, assuming she was alluding to the Imani investigation. “Probably not a bad idea to pause anyway. Let the dust settle, buy us some time.”

  “Do you have any idea how it happened?” asked Tony.

  “Not really,” I replied. “Maybe it was in the water I drank with breakfast, but there’s no way anyone could have targeted me that way—and why wasn’t anyone else affected?”

  “Where are they reassigning you?” asked Tony.

  “Metals,” I replied. “Honestly, I don’t mind. Maybe learning a new skill is exactly what I need right now. I’ve had enough of Security, anyway.”

  Tony and June glanced at each other, looking skeptical.

  “Listen, Mike,” said June. “The rumour mill is in overdrive. People…are going to think things, and maybe say some nasty things.”

  “That’s okay as long as I’ve got you guys.”

  “Vivian is on your side, too. She knows you were framed,” said Tony.

  “And Vivian, then,” I said.

  “Let him rest now,” said Chris. “I might discharge him this afternoon.”

  “I’ve always been a fast healer,” I said.

  “A farse eeler—what’s that?” asked Tony.

  “And…welcome back, Tony,” I said, relieved.

  Chris discharged me in the afternoon and I went straight to the dining room to eat. My appetite had returned with a vengeance. Tony sat with me and glared at anyone who stared or whispered.

  “Gonna be cold and dry in their rooms tonight,” he growled as a couple of colonists whispered and pointed as they walked past.

  “Are you going to sabotage their ventilation?” I asked. “It’s enough that you’re sitting here watching me eat this enormous gelatinous mass.”

  “You’re an animal,” he said.

  “I’m as hungry as a bear,” I said.

  “Stop getting high all the time, then.”

  I stopped eating, looked at him, “Too soon.”

  “No way,” he replied.

  The next day, I reported for duty at Metal Production, outside in one of the old hangars. The small Metals team mainly produced spare parts for the vehicles and ‘bands’ for the new greenhouses. The hangar had a series of customised presses, each designed to convert strips of steel into useful shapes.

  On my first day I met the team supervisor, a familiar-looking guy named Aaron, and his only helper, a quiet woman named Rachel. Aaron had come down in the second year of the colony and loved his job.

  “I really don’t care how you ended up with this transfer, Mike,” he said. “Frankly, I’m just glad to get the extra hands. We’ve got a fairly big backlog of parts. Have you ever worked with steel before?”

  I told him that my experience was very limited, but I was keen to learn and liked using my hands.

  “Well, I gather you were in the hospital yesterday, so we’ll start small today and build you up to the big stuff through the week.”

  His enthusiasm was infectious. It was partly pride in the quality of his work and partly pleasure in the process of creation. Little steel sculptures, created from scraps and off-cuts, were littered around the hangar. Aaron was not just good at producing useful steel parts; he was also a budding artist. I recalled seeing one of his little animals in Imani’s room.

  My first day was enlightening but a little disheartening. Bending metal properly was not as easy as Aaron made it look, even with the best tools that Earth could provide. I was wearing one of the heavy suits—the kind that we had worn outside to fix the power plants in the storm—and it was hard to work with precision with the heavy material crumpling under my arms.

  Aaron was able to recover or reuse everything that I produced, but I didn’t get anything perfectly right on that first day. I hoped it was because I was still wasted from the overdose.

  By mid-afternoon, I could barely lift my arms, so Aaron sent me home. On the way back to my room, I dropped in on Chris in the infirmary. She was alone.

  “Oh, hello,” she said. “How are you feeling? Are you okay?”

  “Yes, thanks. Just tired now. And still hungry. Metalwork is hard, but I think it will be good eventually.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “Chris, I’ve been thinking about the morning of the overdose. Going over it again and again, trying to remember what I did, what I ate.”

  “You’ve got to stop. You’re going to drive yourself crazy.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. But you’ve known me a while now, Chris, and you know that I didn’t eat any mushrooms that morning. I don’t like being falsely accused of anything or punished for something I didn’t do. So I’ve been thinking about how that stuff could have entered my system. I was wondering how the meds are loaded into the dispenser?”

  “I see where you’re going with this, Mike, and I don’t think it’s going to help.”

  “Humour me, please.”

  “We check them and refill them at the end of the day.”

  “And the dispenser looks at your palm and your face to determine who you are,” I said, “and then produces customised pills.”

  “Yes, that’s right. It recognises who you are, looks up your recommended dosage, which is calibrated from your latest physical and biometric readouts, and then presses the required dose into a pill.”

  “How many ingredients can the machine take?”

  “Twenty. But what you’re suggesting isn’t plausible. You’re saying somebody tampered with the machine, added the psilocybin to one of the receptacles, and revised your meds program to poison you.”

  “It doesn’t sound that hard to me,” I said, “if you know what you’re doing. Do you know who loaded the machine the night before my overdose?”

  “I’m not going to get into that. I refuse to believe that anyone could have done what you’re suggesting.”

  “Chris, could you have believed that someone
would strangle Imani? You know that someone slipped the drugs to me somehow, don’t you? You don’t really think I took that enormous amount of psilocybin?”

  “Well, no…”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t in the cup I used to get some water and it couldn’t have been in the water because other people would have been affected as well. You didn’t find any non-standard food in my stomach. Did you find my meds pill?”

  “No, it had dissolved by the time I pumped your stomach.”

  “Chris,” I said, looking into her eyes. “I know you didn’t load the dispenser. Who did?”

  She paused, looked at me intently, and then in a flat voice said, “It was our new team member, Amber.”

  I stepped back, surprised. Amber, the redheaded American who had accosted me in the lounge room the night before the overdose. She had been chatty and flirty, but her behaviour took on a whole new perspective in the light of Chris’ revelation.

  “But I don’t think she was involved,” said Chris. “There’s no evidence of anything like that.”

  “You’re right,” I said, “but perhaps you could prove it, one way or the other. If you swabbed the receptacles and tested them for psilocybin, you could see if the dispenser was the source.”

  “The machine automatically cleans itself, and we replace the receptacles daily. I’m sorry, Mike. If you had asked me on the morning of your overdose, I could have tried, but it’s all been cleaned since then. I can’t help you.”

  “Well,” I said, “if you think of a way of testing it, please let me know. But you’re right about evidence. Right now it’s just a theory and we both need to assume that it wasn’t Amber, so please don’t let her know about this conversation.”

  “You’re not in Security anymore, Mike, but I won’t anyway. I don’t need that kind of unnecessary tension in my team.”

  “Thanks, Chris,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you what, though,” she said. “I will personally fill the dispenser myself for a while.”

  *

  It was the most tiring week of my life. Bending metal was a lot harder than I had anticipated, and almost every muscle in my body was getting a workout.

  I kept a low profile in the colony and everyone quickly forgot about the incident. June and Tony were quite influential and I think they quietly and consistently defended me. In fact, it seemed that I was more popular than I had been when I was policing the ’shroom ban.

  I never thought that my move to Metals was going to be permanent—I would be back in Security at some point. I tried to clear it from my head for a while, but one thing that bothered me was the drug itself: where had it come from? I wondered if someone was still growing mushrooms somewhere, or if it was being synthesised in the Organic Manufacturing lab.

  On Friday night, I had an early dinner and was about to go to sleep when Liu knocked on the door of my room. Tony was out. I nearly asked Liu to come back another time, but I was pleased to have a visitor.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Tired,” I replied. “Thanks for asking.”

  “Yeah. Feel up to a private chat?”

  “Sure,” I said, though I was fighting to keep my eyes open.

  “Transmitters off?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Listen, Mike. Pete told me to stay away from you, but I don’t give a fuck about any of them anymore. They need me and even if they manage to replace me, they can do what they like. Discredit me, kill me, whatever. This is no way to live.”

  “Say that after your heart stops and you spend a week bending metal,” I replied lightly.

  “Well, whatever. I don’t care.”

  “They could send you home,” I said.

  “No, they couldn’t, and they know it. My bone density has fallen too far; my legs would break stepping off the shuttle. Anyway, they can send me home for all I care. I’m doing what I want from now on.”

  “What’s happened, Liu?” His sudden and profound change in attitude surprised me.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “Tony told me they planted ’shrooms in your room. And I’m tired of the bullshit here, the rubbish that comes from JOSEV. Can’t you feel it in the colony? Ever since Glen went postal and the therapy and all that garbage. We’re all just…over it. I’m over it.”

  “Just don’t do anything silly, okay? You’re freaking me out,” I said.

  “Ha! You’re such a Boy Scout. If you mean don’t do anything to hurt my friends or the colony, then okay. If you mean don’t do anything that means ignoring stupid orders from JOSEV, then sorry.”

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

  “Well, I’m not sure yet. That’s why I’m here. I presume you’ve gone over the old evidence from Imani’s case and haven’t made any progress, am I right?”

  “I suppose. I have nothing new, really. It seems like a long time ago now, but I was thinking about suits with transmitters that are off the grid—that were never on the grid. It occurred to me that maybe the killer didn’t just turn off the transmitter on his or her suit; maybe the suit never had one. A surprising number of suits have been decommissioned. Some of them were recycled for other uses, but it would be very easy to find an old suit and patch it up. And June said that very early in the colony, people would grab spare suits in emergencies.”

  “I don’t know if I can help with that,” said Liu.

  “I don’t know, either,” I said. “I was thinking of performing a big audit of suits through Security, but they kicked me out. Oh, you know that I didn’t—”

  “Yeah, I know it’s rubbish. Don’t worry; I know you didn’t take any drugs. Not that I’d care either way, but I know it’s rubbish. That’s just not you. I don’t think I can help you with an audit, though. We don’t have any surveillance in the rooms.”

  “Yeah, sorry. It looks like that avenue closed when they booted me out.”

  “What other avenues are there?”

  “I don’t know, Liu. I looked at calls, cameras, all the data I could find.”

  “There must be more,” said Liu.

  “There’s always more. Listen, why don’t we pick this up tomorrow or on Sunday?”

  “Okay, sure. No, wait. Come to Systems next time you get a chance.”

  “You’re not supposed to fraternise with me, remember?”

  “I don’t care. We’ll cover it with more video game stuff. We need heavy access to the system. I’m pretty sure I can block any prying eyes, anyway.”

  “Okay. I’ll come visit,” I said, happier and more energised than I had been all week.

  33. LIU

  That night, I had the dream again, except this time I was cycling with Liu. He was riding beside me; I looked over and could see him smiling serenely as he calmly peddled. We passed the waterfall and sped up. I started falling forward, helpless, about to fall into the abyss, but Liu was leaning back, his hands squeezing the brakes. He looked determined, not panicked at all. He reached out and grabbed my arm, pulling me back and I woke up.

  That was when I decided to focus on Imani and not my overdose. Maybe it was the dream, or maybe I realised that Imani was the big-picture problem—if I solved her case, I might also address my own. Besides, I had already enlisted Liu’s help with Imani.

  I was up early for the first time since the overdose. I had a long shower and went to the dining room for breakfast. The medicine dispenser sat on the serving table like an ordinary machine, not the agent of death that I suspected it might be. I put my hand under the spout and, a moment later, two pills dropped into my palm. Chris prepared this, I thought, and swallowed them. Not taking my medication would be slow suicide.

  Then I noticed Aaron sitting nearby, and I realised that I had seen him many times at breakfast but never properly met him before starting in Metals. He was watching the news feed from Earth projected onto the wall.

  “Morning,” I said as I sat down opposite him.

  He looked down from the projection and said, “Morning.�
��

  “Any news?” I asked.

  “No, just more of the same. It’s like a three-way game of chess. Moves and countermoves.”

  “The JOSEV investors?”

  “Yep. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll actually blow each other up one day. If they weren’t working together in the joint venture, I’d say it feels like they’re edging toward a war.”

  “Surely not?”

  “No, I guess not,” said Aaron, but he didn’t sound convinced. “I wonder what a war with Tobler engines would look like.”

  “They’re not supposed to have Tobler weapons, though.”

  “You trust them not to make Tobler weapons?” he asked. “Anyway, a war with conventional weapons could be just as bad—maybe worse, if they use weapons of mass destruction.”

  I glanced back up at the projection and decided I needed to change the subject.

  “Are you usually up around this time?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “I knew you looked familiar. I’m normally up around this time, or a little later if I go to the gym, but this week I’ve been sleeping in.”

  “You’ve worked hard and done well, for a complete novice.”

  “Er, thanks. I think.” I smiled at him.

  “You’re welcome. On Saturday, we normally just do admin in the morning and split early in the afternoon, so you’ll be able to rest later.”

  “Great. Thanks—I need it.”

  We went to work out in the hangar and started to reconcile the week’s production. Rachel wandered in a little while later. It was a relief to let my arms rest. Aaron told us both not to bother coming back after lunch and I was grateful. I grabbed a quick bite to eat, pulled the plug on my suit transmitter, and went to the Systems Office.

  “That was quick,” said Liu.

  “Aaron gave me the afternoon off,” I said, “and I thought I’d come to talk about video games.”

  “Cool,” said Liu. “Just let me finish something off.”

  “No hurry.”

  He took a couple of minutes, then opened a few random files of programming code and video games on the side screens.