by Jason Bourn
“Well,” she started speaking as she appeared on the vid screen, “how are things going? How many candidates have you rescued and started training on?”
“Sixty-eight,” Calaes replied. It would actually be seventy-three, but sadly five of them were not able to fully break out of VR.
“That is good. I would expect that you will find the pace picking up for the next several months before starting to taper off. You called this meeting, so what can I do for you?”
Calaes had been wondering how to bring up the possibility of someone being outside. He felt ridiculous and he never would have done it had not Harold also said the same thing. Lacking any better way to approach it, he jumped right in. “Several people have indicated that they might have seen someone walking around as they were walking to the building to meet with me.” Calaes was not quite willing to say that he was one of the “several.”
Samantha quickly looked up then nodded and said after a slight pause, “Yes, it has been reported many times that there is a transition period after long term use of VR where the eyes play tricks on them. I don’t think there is anything to worry about. We can get them medical or psychiatric care if the effects linger or there is a problem.”
This was not the avenue that he wanted explored, so Calaes quickly backtracked. “No, that is not necessary. These were just a couple of cases where they couldn’t be sure. I was just trying to follow up.” Wanting to change the subject he asked, “So how is the Mars settlement infrastructure coming along? I was hoping that it would be ready soon so we could start transferring some people there. Training here is going well.”
She replied, “We are still several months away. Some areas are moving faster than others. Unfortunately, we have to wait for everything, so the slowest area always drives the schedule.”
There was a long pause where Calaes tried desperately to think of something to ask or say about the possible people sightings, but finally gave up and said “Thank you for your help. Until the next meeting then, good-bye.”
Samantha said good-bye and logged off.
Calaes was no closer to solving the problem than he was when he had started. He was even more frustrated. He decided that the only way he was going to get any satisfaction was to go out and look for himself. He hadn’t been outside much at all. His routine consisted of leaving the training building, getting in the vehicle that was always waiting for him, flying to whatever destination where he would exit the vehicle and go directly into the meeting building. He was outside for all of thirty seconds maximum. He vowed to start walking around a bit before he met with the candidate in whatever town he was in. His next candidate meeting was later that day, so he planned on arriving a bit early.
After an interminable amount of waiting: first for the vehicle to arrive and then have it take him to the candidate’s city, finally Calaes was ready to walk around the city. He exited the vehicle and instead of going directly into the lobby, he set out towards where the candidate would be coming from. Since he hadn’t been outside really at all since his long walk from his own virtual room building, Calaes walked slowly and tried to observe everything. The streets were always clean since there were no people to drop trash or otherwise deface it and since the automated street cleaners were still regularly deployed. Also, it always smelled good, like fresh grass and flowers. This, he knew, was mainly due to the additional open spaces created when old buildings were torn down and the lack of heavy industrialization. There was not much need for the abundance of either buildings or heavy industry since the people were all in the virtual rooms and there was not much need to build things any more – no need for cars, for houses, for house furnishings, for clothes – actually there was not much need for anything except to support the virtual rooms.
Turning the first corner, Calaes looked carefully both left and right. The human eye was trained from its evolutionary beginnings to recognize and home in on motion. However, the only motion that he could spot was of the lower animal type – birds, squirrels and the odd dog or cat. Was it possible that what Calaes and Harold thought they had seen were one of these creatures? It had been so long ago that Calaes could not be one hundred percent sure anymore about what exactly he had seen.
Calaes turned the second corner, then the third. Still no signs of anything human. His focus was really near the meeting building, but with still some time before he needed to get back, and nothing even remotely like success to be had, he decided to expand his route.
Now he was in an area of the city with older, abandoned buildings. This reminded him of old “B” movies that he had seen when growing up, with some virus or zombie plague where all the buildings were abandoned and there was a threat lurking behind every shuttered window or barred door. Luckily there was no threat to be seen. Unfortunately, there were no people to be seen either. Well, what had he expected, to see someone on his first excursion? Or maybe more likely that he would never see anyone, because they didn’t really exist.
Discouraged, he walked back to the meeting building and had his candidate interview. While it went well, when it was over, he felt tired, sore and depressed. He had tried to think outside the box, but it hadn’t yielded any positive results.
He tried walking outside prior to the next candidate interview, and the next and the next. Nothing! Finally, he just made it part of his exercise routine and stopped thinking that it would bear any fruit. It either would or it wouldn’t, but there was nothing else he could think of to do about it.
As Samantha had predicted the number of candidates spiked with sometimes two, three or even four coming available on the same day, so many times he didn’t have the time to go out exploring. If the cities were close, he could get up to four candidate interviews in a day, but it was exhausting. It seemed like this process was going on forever. He was working all the time either training or interviewing the candidates. The only saving grace was that he was able to get into a routine, so he didn’t have to do planning for each candidate individually. The candidates had fallen into fairly repeatable patterns.
The only incident out of the normal pattern occurred when he was questioning one female candidate named Lori Stills. She seemed quite nice, but somewhat quiet. She answered all the questions normally until he got to the question “It says here that prior to getting the virtual suit you never had any electronics embedded into your body. Why is that?”
She flushed and said “You know I have never told anybody this, but I actually had an audio/visual enhancer embedded into my brain. It preprocessed the audio/visual signals and let me hear and see things that no one else could. It was like taking all the data in raw form – your brain is trained to recognize patterns, but only patterns that made sense to a hunter/gatherer. So, you could spot any motion, of course, but your brain was also wired to find a lion or tiger in the grass amid the clutter – there was an evolutionary advantage to that. But your brain was never built to recognize and decrypt an encrypted picture or pick out a threatening conversation in a foreign language in a crowded train station with hundreds of conversations going on in the background simultaneously. This is what the audio/visual enhancer could do – and way more. Anyway, when I decided that I was going to go into VR I had it removed without letting anyone know. My uncle was a doctor at the time and he put it in and later took it out for free, without any records being kept. Before we both went into VR, we decided it was best to take it out so any scans would not show it.”
Calaes was stunned. He had never heard of this happening. He wasn’t exactly sure what the proper protocol was, but he thought the right thing to do was to call Samantha. He asked Lori to wait and went into the adjoining meeting room and placed a vid call to Samantha. She answered promptly and listened attentively as he explained the issue. Curiously, she nodded and said “I knew this was going to happen. We are normally able to prescreen everyone so you don’t have to deal with them, but every once in a while, a case like this crops up. We have a special program for these candidates. Don’t w
orry about Lori, we will send somebody to take over for you. Please let her know that they will be there within two hours. For confidentiality purposes, please remove her from all of your databases and please exit the premises immediately and do not try to contact her again. Thank you very much for helping out on this and please honor the confidentiality of everyone involved.”
Calaes was very curious about everything related to this event, but he didn’t want to intrude on anyone’s privacy so he told Lori what was going on and left. That was the last he heard about her or anyone like her who had embedded tech.
PART 4 – OTHERS
CHAPTER 15
The day when everything changed started off like any other day.
Calaes only had one candidate to see. This was much better than what it had been recently. But come to think of it, the number of interviews had been shrinking. He could remember when three was common and two was low. Now two was common and three interviews in one day was rare. It must be finally happening, the long-anticipated tapering off – the end of the bell curve.
Well, it was about time. Calaes was exhausted. It was all he could do to keep up with the candidates and oversee training. As the number of candidates housed at the training campus increased, so did the amount of training and planning associated with it. He had long ago given up the day-to-day running of the training program. He had offloaded all the specific training to the most promising candidates – these were the de facto team-leads. He had also given the generic training assignment to the training team-lead. His role now was mostly to greet the new candidates and to ensure that any problems the team-leads had were successfully resolved.
As the number of candidates at the training center increased, this, combined with the seemingly never-ending candidate interviews, was really wearing him down. Those candidates that had been at the training campus the longest had been feeling the same level of frustration. Most of these long-timers were heading up the training, but they were approaching the end of their ropes as well – everyone just wanted to get to the settlement. “To Mars or bust” was the latest catch phrase. And Calaes didn’t blame them. He just wanted to finish up and get there as well.
Since he only had one candidate interview, Calaes had extra time and thought he would treat himself to a walk around the city – this one in the Midwest of the United States. It was starting to become quite cool outside, so he had to bundle up even though it was the middle of the day.
He walked out the lobby and braced himself against the stiff, cold wind. The vast prairies left the blowing wind without obstruction outside the city and the buildings in the city funneled it so that the wind almost knocked Calaes off his feet. Leaning into the almost gale-force winds, he pressed forward squinting and keeping his head lowered. He started to regret his decision to take this walk, but since he had started, he felt like he might as well continue. The sidewalks hugged the outlines of the buildings, so the visibility was limited and the wind ran unimpeded through the building gaps. As he turned another corner, the wind abated somewhat, being blocked by the nearest building. He stayed close to the building and braced himself for the wind he knew was coming at the end of the building. He had expected the wind. What he did not expect to see absolutely startled him – standing in an alcove a half-block away was an older man, attempting to stay warm.
Calaes blinked several times, expecting the image to disappear. He could not believe it. He had actually seen someone. After looking for so long, he wondered if this were a figment of his imagination. Maybe, he thought, it was a lamppost or a wooden Indian for a cigar shop. Looking again, the man was staring right at Calaes. As near as he could figure the old man was real. And cold.
Not knowing what else to do, Calaes walked the half-block up to him. They assessed each other for almost a minute, without either saying anything. Finally, the old man grinned and said, “About time we met.”
Open mouthed, not knowing what else to say, Calaes finally stuttered, “Who are you?”
“My name is Randy. We’ve been keeping an eye on you and your group of ‘settlers.’ ” He grinned when he said “settlers.” The way he said it made Calaes pause. Randy went on, “I’m sure you’re in a hurry, to meet your latest candidate and all. I have some information that you might be interested in. You see the World Government has not been telling you everything. We know that they are not doing what they say they are supposed to be doing. My advice to you is to dig deeper and see for yourself. If you need a hint, look at the detailed Mars supply manifests. And be very careful in covering your tracks! Well, got to go.” With that, Randy shuffled off. He walked with a pronounced limp. Even with that, he was surprisingly fast. He turned the corner and was gone.
While it was true that Calaes did need to get to the interview, he stood there for several minutes trying to absorb what had just taken place. He had thought about the possibility of spotting someone, but had never taken that thought to the logical conclusion of what it would mean. He hadn’t considered that they might have a message for him. And certainly not that there was something wrong with the project that he was working on. Calaes had poured his heart and soul into this endeavor – he needed something that was bigger and better than VR. Not only that – Calaes now had hundreds of candidates that had equally bought into this vision, and the pool of candidates would soon be running out. He had to prove that this Randy character was wrong. There was far too much riding on this, not only for himself and his fellow candidates, but also for the entire human race.
Calaes realized that he had been standing in the cold wind for far too long. His body was starting to shake – although he had to admit it was as much from the cold as it was from the shock of receiving this information and what it possibly meant. He quickly walked back to the meeting building, making it back with only minutes to spare. He was still breathing hard when the candidate appeared in the meeting room next door. This was one of the few times where he made the candidate wait for several minutes while he caught his breath.
The interview went well, but Calaes could not keep his mind focused on what was being discussed. Several times he had let his mind wander and he had to make a conscious effort to keep his focus. The interview and the subsequent flight back to the training campus seemed to stretch on forever, with Calaes’ mind constantly attempting to determine the best course of action and what was the best thing to do first. When he finally arrived at the training campus, he was exhausted and he still didn’t know how to proceed.
He was conflicted – he wanted to start his search of the supply manifests as soon as possible, but he didn’t want to advertise that he was doing a search. He finally decided to generate a summary of where they were in training and then he could logically do an analogous search on generating a summary of where they were with the Mars Settlement infrastructure.
Doing some quick searches, he found that there were 458 candidates at the training campus, spread out over four buildings – they had grown beyond the capacity of Calaes’ building long ago. Their team consisted of the best candidates that had completed both Mars Settlement and Flight Simulator sims. These candidates encompassed every field, including specialists and generalists. The one thing they all had in common was their desire for something better than VR. Calaes quickly put together a summary with the specialties, their work grades and experience levels, their training numbers and other pertinent information. When he felt good about the summary, he paused. Now he had to figure out how to delve into the Mars infrastructure without raising any red flags. He decided the best way was to obfuscate. He would have his team-leads perform searches on the Mars infrastructure and he would be the only one with all the information to be able to put it all together. He sent out a message asking each team-lead to collect the settlement supply information in their various areas. This would include maintenance, logistics, admin, health care, engineering, training, construction, legal, etc.
While he waited for the information to come in, he thought he could risk some gener
al searches. To start, he searched for the budget for the training campus. He had never queried this before and he was astounded at the cost of the complex. They had not spared any expense. It was no wonder that the beds and the showers were top notch. Not that he would change it now, at least not in his room, since he had become used to the luxury and wouldn’t willfully give that up. He whistled slowly under his breath when he saw the cost of the art and sculptures. While Samantha had said that these masterpieces were available, they still had not come cheap. In fact, they were still worth a not-so-small fortune. How had they received approval for this in the budget? Normally, Calaes knew, a government project was run by the accountants. It was difficult to get infrastructure upgrades even when they made sense. Normally it was the lowest cost contractor that won – and it normally looked like it as well. Not here though.
As the reports on the Mars infrastructure came in, Calaes started seeing a pattern. The government had spent a fortune on the highest quality materials and equipment. To some extent this was reasonable, since a lot of it had to do with exotic materials required for non-Earth environments. But everything was of the best quality, the finest styles, they paid huge premiums for outrageously good reliability and they often paid premiums for features and capabilities that they didn’t even need – the bottom line was it was all outrageously expensive.
Well, this was extremely interesting. Completely unexpected. The most obvious question was: “Why?” quickly followed by “How?” Calaes had no idea for the “Why?” Just because they could with the declining government costs due to everyone going into VR – why would they spend such vast sums on such luxuries? As for the “How?” Any oversight at all would have flagged this and put an end to it long ago if this was a normal government project. That meant that this was not normal and that normal checks and balances were not there. The question was – what did that mean? And more to the point, what did Randy’s warning mean? He needed to delve down in more detail.