“Won’t your wife be the focus of attention there?” Alex asked.
Bill shook his head. “We are not as judgmental as humans.”
“Really, ‘cause that sounded kind of judgy to me,” Alex said.
“A guilty conscience is its own judge,” Emma said. “Maybe you’re not as accepting of us as you think?”
Alexander frowned, but said nothing to that. An awkward silence descended.
“Thank you for the invitation,” Bill said. “Maybe we can visit you another time.”
“That would be nice,” Catalina added, breezing through the awkwardness. “Let me show you out.”
“Thank you,” Emma replied.
Bill smiled graciously. To Alexander, he said, “Have a nice afternoon.”
“You, too,” Alex replied.
When Catalina returned from seeing them out, Ed was back on the terrace, tending the grill. “The freaks left?” he asked as Catalina joined them.
“Because of you actually.”
“Wow, I’m honored,” he grinned.
“What’s so bad about androids?” Alexander asked.
“What’s not so bad about them? They’re all filthy rich, thinkin’ they’re so smart and superior…”
“You’re filthy rich,” Alexander pointed out.
“No, I used to be. These days it’s nearly impossible to compete with bots, so we get all the joe jobs. Look at you guys—your butler is a human. Back in the day that was the kind of work we reserved for bots, but they’re all androids now. The system’s rigged, and they’re the ones who rigged it. Why do you think we’ve got thousands of people leaving the Alliance every day? This ain’t the same world you left. It’s a fuckin’ mess.”
“Language,” Alexander said.
“Now you sound like one of them,” Ed replied.
Catalina shook her head. “I didn’t know people were leaving.”
Ed took a swig of beer and shook his head. “Not something Benevolence would have included in his orientation speech. He likes to gloss over the negative.”
“Where can they go?”
“The SR.”
“The SR?”
“The Solarian Republic,” Alexander guessed.
“Ding ding ding ding! You got it!” Ed said. “I have half a mind to go there myself. Only thing stopping me is knowing that if war ever breaks out, the Alliance is going to turn them into space dust.”
“Why are people so unhappy here?” Catalina asked. “Benevolence really did make life better for everyone. There’s no more poverty, barely any crime, no government debt, no environmental crisis… our standard of living has never been higher.”
“You sure about that? Back when recreational mindscaping was still legal I was a king, and in the real world I was pretty damn close. Had almost a hundred thousand bots working in my company. But once I had to start paying them wages… I couldn’t turn a profit anymore. I had to sell my shares for pennies on the sol before I lost everything. Now some wealthy bot is running the empire that I built. I lost billions to those fuckers, and I’m not the only one. Almost every single business in the Alliance went down the same way. Somehow only the bots knew how to restructure things so that they could still turn a profit.
“Now I have a dwindling fortune of just over ten million sols. Not exactly a kingly sum anymore. Oh, and the cherry on top is that I’m not allowed to drown my sorrows in the Mindscape, so I can’t be a virtual king anymore, either.”
“Why don’t you start a new company?” Catalina replied.
“No thanks.” Ed took a long swig of his beer. “I’m not going to waste my time building sandcastles with the tide coming in. I’m selling the house and shipping out with the Liberty.”
“The what?” Alexander asked.
“You haven’t heard? Man! I’ve heard of people going into the Mindscape and comin’ out in a strange new land, but you two are something special,” he said, shaking his head. “The Liberty is the ship the Solarians are sending to colonize the stars. They’re going to find another Earth and start over.”
“I thought we tried that years ago with the Intrepid,” Alexander said.
“No, the Intrepid was government-funded, and it was an exploratory mission to Wolf 1061. Why they decided to skip over so many other closer systems is a mystery. The crew spent thirty years on that ship. Probably why they went insane. Anyway, the Liberty, is a colony ship, privately-funded. Five million sols will buy anyone a one-way ticket, just so long as they’re human. First habitable planet we find, we’re puttin’ down roots. Of course—the metal heads decided to send their own mission when they found out about ours. Bots only. So much for their so-called tolerance. I think deep down they hate our guts just as much as we hate theirs.”
Ed went on ranting about androids—which he insisted on calling bots—and Catalina tuned him out. “Excuse me,” she said after a moment, and went to go join some of the women down by the pool.
Later that night, when the party was over, she lay on a reclining couch by the pool with Alexander, drinking cocktails, and watching the moon rise over the lake while their butler cleaned up the mess.
“What do you think about what Ed was saying today?” Alexander asked.
“I think he’s an idiot,” Catalina said.
“Well, obviously, but some of what he said got me thinking…”
“About?”
“The future. If he’s so upset with how things turned out, I’ll bet there are others like him.”
“So what if there are?”
“People are leaving the Alliance by the thousands every day…” Alexander shook his head. “I don’t know if there’s enough room in the world for both androids and humans. They seem to be squeezing us out.”
“They’re not forcing people to leave.”
“They don’t have to. Whatever our reasons for leaving, the fact that we are is the problem. We don’t feel welcome on our own planet anymore, and something tells me that’s only going to get worse.”
Catalina turned to him. His face was half-lit, half-shadowed by the standing lamps and colored spotlights around the pool. “What are you saying, Alex?”
“I’m saying that maybe we should join the Liberty, too.”
“What? Are you crazy?”
“Hear me out. They’re headed for Proxima Centauri. That’s only going to take ten years to reach.”
“Only ten years.”
“It’s a big ship. Almost four kilometers long. There’ll be plenty to do on board.”
“That’s not the point. What if we don’t find a habitable planet when we arrive?”
“Then we check out Alpha Centauri. It’s just a stone’s throw away from Proxima.”
“And if we don’t find any habitable planets there?”
“We head for the next nearest star and keep looking.”
“So we could end up spending a lot longer than ten years on board.”
“We’re immortals, Caty. We just spent a century in the Mindscape. Time doesn’t mean what it used to.”
“We just bought this house!”
“I know, but the mission doesn’t leave for another year. We’ll have time to sell.”
“Things are better than ever here,” Catalina insisted. “And Benevolence won’t let Earth devolve into chaos. People might be leaving, but eventually things will reach a point where everyone who wanted out has already left.”
“And what if that point comes when only a small fraction of the population is still human?”
“I’m not prejudiced.”
“Doesn’t matter if you are. When all the humans are living in the SR, and all the androids are living on Earth, anti-bot sentiments will be at an all time high. Eventually people are going to realize that bots—”
“Androids,” Catalina corrected. “Bot is a derogatory term.”
“Fine, androids can live anywhere, Caty. They don’t need food, or water, or air to breathe, but we do, so why do they get to keep the Earth and we’re
relegated to living on lifeless rocks? Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
“If Benevolence had come to power in the SR, it would be the other way around. What are you getting at, Alex?”
“Somehow, someday, there’s going to be a war between Earth and the SR.”
“Benevolence could have conquered the Solarians by now if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t. He’s peace-loving, Alex, which is more than I can say for us.”
“Exactly! He might not start a war, but my bet is he’s going to finish it.”
“Why would we start a war that we know we can’t win?”
“Maybe we’ll find a way to even the odds. All I know is you were right. The Human League was right. It’s us or them, and sooner or later everyone is going to realize it.”
“No, we were wrong. They didn’t try to exterminate us like we thought they would. You’re saying that the problem is us, that we’re going to try to exterminate them.”
“Yeah. Same difference.”
“Let’s assume you’re right. Why would things be any different away from Earth?”
“Because we’re not taking any bots with us.”
“Ed said the Alliance is sending its own mission. What if we end up back on the same planet together? Or at least in the same solar system?”
“They’re going to Wolf 1061, same as the Intrepid did before. The Liberty is going to Proxima. We’ll have more than a few light years between us, which is a whole lot better than we have now.”
“Assuming we settle in Proxima.” Catalina shook her head. “Ed said you need five million Sols to buy a ticket for just one person to board the Liberty.”
“If we sell everything, we could afford it.”
“With no money left over!” Catalina added.
“Whatever currency people come up with in the new world, or on board the Liberty, it won’t be sols, so it’s not like saving them is going to help us.”
Catalina frowned and took refuge in the remainder of her margarita cocktail.
“So?” Alexander prompted after a momentary silence. “What do you think?”
“I think it sounds dangerous,” she said.
“You mean exciting.”
“Same thing.” Catalina drained her margarita and set it aside. Turning back to her husband, she laid her head one his chest and said, “Let’s stop worrying about the future and enjoy what we have now.”
“Just tell me you’ll think about it.”
“All right… I’ll think about it.”
Alexander lifted her chin and kissed her. “That’s all I needed to hear,” he said as he withdrew.
But she already had thought about it, and she knew that she didn’t want to leave Earth.
He’ll come around, she decided.
Epilogue
—One Year Later—
Catalina took the window seat while Alexander finished packing their carry-on luggage into the shuttle’s overhead compartments. As soon as he finished, he squeezed into the seat beside hers.
“Nervous?” he asked.
She shook her head, not looking away from the window of the shuttle. Mars looked just as dreary as ever. A red desert, red sky, and blowing red sand as far as the eye could see. Lights from the domes that made up the city of New Moscow winked at her between gusts of sand.
Overhead speakers crackled to life, “Ladies and Gentlemen, my name is Ana Urikov, and I’ll be your chief flight attendant for today. On behalf of Captain Lieberman and the entire crew, welcome aboard Solarian Shuttles flight 77. Our estimated time to reach the Liberty will be just over twenty minutes. At this time please make sure that your seat-belts are securely fastened, and that your ARC lenses and comm bands are turned off for the duration of the flight to avoid distraction in case of an emergency. Thank you, and we hope that you enjoy your flight!”
Alexander placed a firm hand on her knee, and Catalina realized she’d been bouncing it up and down like a jackhammer.
“Everything is going to be fine,” he said.
She turned to search his brown eyes for an answer to the question burning inside of her. “What if we’re making a mistake?”
He shook his head and grabbed her hand, lacing his fingers through hers. “We’re not. Nothing’s changed. We want to have kids, and we can’t do that on Earth with population controls being what they are.”
“We could have kids here…” Caty said, her gaze slipping back out the window of the shuttle to the desolate Martian desert. But even as she said that, she questioned the wisdom of having children on Mars. After centuries of terraforming it was still a wasteland, and that wasn’t likely to change anytime soon.
“We could,” Alexander admitted. “But that won’t get us away from the other problems in the Sol System. Sooner or later Benevolence is going to realize that the only way to prevent a war with humanity is to come to Mars and install himself as the absolute ruler of the Solarian Republic, too. No, we need a fresh start, and this is it.”
Catalina nodded along with that, wondering if they weren’t trading one set of problems for another. Even if they found a habitable world at Proxima Centauri, the challenges they’d face there were completely unknown—possibly even worse than the ones on Mars or Earth. For one thing, the planet in Proxima’s goldilocks zone—an orbit where liquid water might exist—was predicted to be tidally-locked around the sun, which meant that one side was always facing the sun, the other side always facing away.
Goldilocks planets were meant to be just right—not too hot, and not too cold, but with the tidally-locked version that was not the case. One side would be far too hot, and the other would be far too cold. The only theoretically habitable region on a world like that was a thin temperate band between the overly hot and overly cold sides of the planet where liquid water might actually exist. The winds crossing that band due to the temperature differential would probably be terrible, but that was a subject of some debate, and windbreaks had been proposed as a possible solution if the atmosphere was breathable—another unlikely event. Regardless, if the planet had liquid water and a temperate region to colonize, then they’d probably settle there. If not, they’d push on for the binary star system of Alpha Centauri, where they’d start the search all over again. For Catalina it was just one too many variables—too many ifs and buts to make her feel safe.
The intercom crackled once more, this time with a message from the captain. “Cabin crew, please prepare for launch.” A moment later he added, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are at T-minus thirty seconds to launch.”
Even as the captain said that, Catalina heard a deep, thrumming noise of hydraulic pistons, and she felt the floor of the shuttle tilting away under her as the landing platform raised them into a vertical launch position. She glanced out the window once more to find that she was now sitting—lying down, actually—high above the Martian landscape.
An automated countdown began at ten seconds and the shuttle’s thrusters came rumbling to life. The shuttle shuddered and shook, and Catalina squeezed Alexander’s hand until her knuckles hurt. She squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth.
Alexander’s voice reached her ears in calm, measured tones. “Focus on your breathing. Long, slow, deep breaths.”
Catalina cracked an eye open to glare at him. “You’re used to this. I’m not.”
“Actually, I’m used to riding the space elevators back on Earth,” he said.
“You know what I mean.”
The automated countdown reached one, and then the rumbling of the shuttle’s engines exploded in a violent roar. In the next instant, Catalina felt herself being pushed into her seat, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. It felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. Panic set in, and she tried to send Alexander an urgent look, but even moving her head was difficult.
He smiled reassuringly back, and mouthed, I love you.
Somehow that broke through the panic and calmed her down. She could still breathe; it was just a lot harder than she was used to. He
r mind cast back to riding roller coasters back on Earth on the few occasions that Alex had convinced her to join him. That’s all this is— she thought, gritting her teeth against the nauseating sensation of extreme acceleration. —a roller coaster.
When she’d finally calmed down enough to glance out her window once more, Catalina saw Mars speeding away below them in a blur of red sand and rocky outcroppings. Cities dotted the landscape like strange, alien growths—each one a little piece of Earth with clusters of brightly-illuminated domes concealing lush green gardens and farms with deep blue reservoirs of water that might have passed for lakes.
This was the last she was going to see of civilization for a long time.
Gradually, the sickening tug of acceleration eased until she felt the reverse—a nauseating weightlessness. Catalina focused on the view to still her roiling stomach. The thin Martian atmosphere gave way to stars and the black velvet of space. Seeing the controls below the shuttle window, Catalina realized it was a configurable holo display. She set it from looking out the side of the craft to show a view from the bow. Now space sprawled endlessly, and stars pricked the darkness full of myriad holes. Sitting amidst those bright points of light she saw a silvery speck, growing nearer and larger as they approached.
“You can zoom in like this,” Alex said, leaning over her to press a button on the control panel below the window.
Suddenly that silver speck became a massive starship glittering bright with the light of thousands of real viewports. Blue-tinted glass on some of those viewports made a pattern of letters emerge—
LIBERTY
The ship was shaped like a fat cylinder, broken in places to reveal another thinner cylinder in the middle—the ship’s stationary drive core. They were going to spend six months living in that central part while the ship accelerated up to its cruising speed of half the speed of light. After that, they’d spend the next eight years in the outer, rotating hull. There they would grow their own food and spend time learning the various trades that they would need to survive on another planet.
From this distance it was hard to grasp a sense of scale, but the thousands of pinprick-sized viewports in the rotating outer hull gave her some idea. This was an entire city floating in space.
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