As Doc Levy felt her heart begin to race and her senses become crisp, she listened to the silence of the base and found it deafening. Flicking from security feed to security feed confirmed her solitude. She didn’t have much time. She knew that. Even men wearing exosuits had succumbed. They had pulled off their helmets and breathed in the poison that was the Martian atmosphere. She decided to include a recording of herself along with the video. She would send it to her friend Dr. Carl Libeling in Hanson City on Titan. The folks out there needed to know this was happening. She got as far as describing the pathogen. No, pathogen wasn’t the right word—vehicle. She gave her best guess about the nature of the vehicle, when the invisible stuff finally wormed its way through the still wet silicon she had hastily applied along the threshold of her door. She heard a high pitched ringing in her ears, a brief moment of tinnitus that she yawned away, then the intense smell of cinnamon, which caused spontaneous memories of her mother in Provence and fresh steaming
chaussons aux pommes
. She hadn’t smelled cinnamon, real cinnamon since leaving Earth. The scent faded. She shook it off and continued to dictate for a few seconds more when she just stopped, unable to speak, barely able to swallow, unable to even remember how to communicate. Naked fear shot through her body, making the hair on her arms stand straight up. In her mind, she could scream the emotional equivalent of “no,” but the word itself was lost to her. She knew exactly what she was going to do, but had no power to stop herself. From an observer’s perspective: one moment the Mother of Mars had been dictating, and the next she was standing up, yanking open the door, and taking the long walk up to the surface. As she passed the grocery, the scientist in her noted that her senses still worked fine. She was aware of the smell of fresh baked bread, a piped-in effect that belied the reality that all food came from 3-D printers and was cooked without the release of any gases or compounds into the surrounding air. The faux sounds of summer insects chirped in the trees on Main Street, USA, and the genuine echo of water trickling gently from a fountain filled her ears. It should have been a soothing sound, but it only served to compound her horror.
The emptiness of the place was familiar. She had experienced it once, in the old surface pods when the first settlers had gone away. That isolation had been tempered by the knowledge that more human companionship was on the way. This time there was no happy change to anticipate, just the pure understanding that it was over. Her life was over. That part she understood perfectly.
The the bulk of the humanoid robot assistants simply ignored her as she passed. She had no ability to instruct them to give her aid, and though she was clearly following the deadly footsteps of every other resident, none was offered. All robot’s, humanoid and otherwise, had a primary function to assist humans in peril. This programming seemed to be off. It was clear that everyone on the base had been in imminent danger, yet not a single synthetic finger had been raised to help. She couldn’t remember if this primary function was negated by the act of suicide. She decided that that could be the only logical explanation; that the higher order not to interfere with individual human pursuits overcame the standing order to protect.
One of the humanoid ones, albino in appearance to differentiate itself from actual people, did acknowledge her as she passed. It very casually said, “
Au revoir, la Mere de Mars
.”
The surface level itself had been decompressed so Dr. Levy never actually made it outside. She was nevertheless surprised by how far she got in the subfreezing Martian air. As she ferosciously fought for self-control, her lungs burned with evaporation and her vision tunneled. With hot tears boiling off her cheeks, the final image her failing optic nerves transmitted to her asphyxiating brain was of a stuffed bear discarded on the hallway floor. It lay no more than thirty meters from the wide-open North Airlock where dozens of bodies were piled on top of one another. Its big brown eyes stared up at Gabrielle Levy as she stepped over it.
What a curious smile for a stuffed bear
.
On the moons of Saturn, a vast array of Earthward-looking sensors kept track of the hostile home planet. Nothing in that arsenal compared to the clear view of home provided by the highjacked LRO orbiting the moon. So it was with deep frustration and unspoken fear that the Hanson Chamber of Commerce on Titan accepted the news: in the blink of a laser shot from a cannon on Mauna Kea, the LRO was no more. The fact that the observatory had remained undiscovered for years had given false hope to the masters of Saturn. Their last close-up eye in the sky was gone. With the bases on the moon and Mars suddenly wiped out, vigilance was paramount.
In his dream, Caleb smelled freshly cut grass. A light breeze slipped through a partially opened window, and morning sunlight traced a warm line across his cheek. Curiously, the breeze didn’t carry with it the restless chirps of morning birds. The absence brought his consciousness into the dream with the annoying comment, “This is a dream,” which caused his subconscious to scowl at the interruption. Consciousness in turn, cursed its own role and willed itself to leave the scene. His subconscious vainly attempted to incorporate birdsong into the fading dream. Then Caleb opened one eye, feeling the dream flit away as genuine sunlight nearly blinded him. Sunlight? There wasn’t enough out here to blind a man. A quick shift of his head shook the dull ache he was feeling, causing it to burst into full anger. He rubbed a cottony tongue over fuzzy teeth and regretted for the thousandth time his tendency to binge drink.
A beam of strong sunlight was blasting through his windshield and across the cabin like the line of a plasma cutter. A glance outside explained it. One of the array of huge mirrors that Harry relied on to capture sunlight was misaligned. Saturn only receives one percent of the sunlight Earth does. The mirror, and hundreds like it, concentrated that light to grow grains to convert to ethanol, which Harry used to make the booze that was currently breaking Caleb’s head. A micro meteor must have hit it. Rather than focusing the light on Harry’s domed crops, it was filling Caleb’s cockpit, triggering dreams of Vermont.
As he stretched, yawned, and marveled at his body-odor’s ability to overwhelm the general stink of his ship, Vermont fresh cut grass still swirled in the recesses of his olfactory memory. He would put his foot down today. They would risk it and head for the Magic Castle. He needed an Earth fix. After three Earth months of creative moneymaking, Caleb wanted to stare at something green, even if the bulk of it was artificial.
From his position on the moon Rhea, the huge orange-yellow moon Titan was just coming into view. With an old-fashioned pair of binoculars that he’d won in a card game, he spotted the black dot that was the floating city called Hanson. The planet-size moon appeared as though some god had tossed Mylar confetti all around it, each silvery spec representing a mirror that focused sunlight on Titan’s dense atmosphere. Vast chemical and organic processes were taking place in that atmosphere. Man’s first experiment with terraforming another celestial body was well underway. A person couldn’t breathe there yet, but soon enough. Perhaps in a couple more decades.
Caleb grunted at the notion of twenty years and expertly moved from his small bunk into the cockpit to sit in the pilot’s chair.
Time to wake the gang.
Before he could send the text, a sight that would never feel real presented itself outside the windshield: a woman, wearing only go-go boots, took baby steps across the lunar surface. She held her clothes over one arm while her eyes remained fixed on the airlock-loading entrance to Harry’s. The woman was shaped like a creature off the pages of a graphic novel. Her hair was messy and remained stiff in the low gravity vacuum. The only telltale sign that she wasn’t made of flesh was the gentle slow motion bobbing of the silicon that held her breasts up almost impossibly high—that and her glowing white skin. Caleb lightly chuckled as he remembered Spruck immediately forking over the bulk of his latest share to Harry in exchange for a night with the sexbot. The machine was an Asian model made to look twenty-five or so, and Caleb noted that she had her pubic hair “grown out” the way Spruck annoyingly professed to like it. The robot’s feet kicked up little quickly falling dust motes as they crossed the heavily packed ground of the landing area. She reached the airlock, not bothering with a code. Her proximity sent a signal for the door to open, skipping the first part of the pressurization procedure. Caleb shook his head slightly and felt his stomach rumble. The hangover was going to be epic. He needed a greasy breakfast and a beer to push through it. He sent a text to the gang letting them know he was going for cheesy eggs and that they could join if they wanted.
He thought of the naked robot’s nonchalant stroll with envy as he pulled on his stinking elastoware. Saturn’s magnetosphere did an adequate job of protecting its satellites from the Sun’s radiation, but stepping outside still meant facing astounding cold and nothing to breathe. For the hundredth time, he questioned the decision to leave Earth. As he stared over at Titan, appearing so close and yet dwarfed by the giant ringed mother planet on the opposite side of his view, he considered again the undertaking in which they were all participants. The self-assembling city Hanson, floating in its own gas balloon at the edge of Titan’s atmosphere, was a marvel. The seeding of methane-eating bacteria throughout the Titan atmosphere and in the methane lakes of the planet marked an ingenious achievement. The microbes ate and ate and in turn created oxygen, farting it into natural atmosphere of nitrogen laced with hydrocarbon. The mirrors that concentrated the distant sunlight onto the moon warmed it just enough for the new oxygen to remain a gas and the microbes to stay alive. It was breathtaking in its ingenuity. The addition of oxygen as a gas to the hydrocarbon-rich air also created a volatile situation. A big enough spark could set the whole atmosphere aflame in a giant chain reaction. This required constant vigilance. Even now, Caleb could see a black dot on the hazy surface appear and collapse on itself as a Gliding Fire Team set off a Buster. Like detonating dynamite to control an oil rig fire, a Buster created a controlled explosion that sucked up all of the available burnable gases, thus preventing any spontaneous combustion. The whole thing was an engineering feat that even a creationist could appreciate. And yet, whenever the Earth was close enough in its orbit for spotting with the naked eye, a pinprick nearly indiscernible from the stars beyond, Caleb would leave the scoped version of it up on a monitor for days. Fuck AI. Fuck the fools who embraced it. There was no going back. The people of Earth were just one big fucking source code now.
He flicked the switch on his elastoware bodysuit and felt the piezoelectric cells working away, pressing his skin against his muscles. He opened the hatch to the
Diamond Girl
’s exosuit port and climbed into the overly familiar thing. As he shoved his foot into the right boot he felt the dampness collecting there. He really needed to pony-up and get the suit cleaned. No amount of antifungals were going to beat what he had growing in there. Letting his arms slide into the sleeves, he poked his head into the acrylic dome helmet with a practiced fluid motion. His breathing echoed around his head in an old familiar way that he didn’t even notice any longer as he spoke the command for the hatch to close behind him. He raised the cover shell and stepped off the loading platform onto the soft talc-like ground.
4.5 Earth Months Earlier
As was his way, Caleb Day had left Earth with the intent to wing it. A man of vague objectives, he found that shit happened whether he planned for it or not. A person who hated disappointment, he had adjusted himself to this reality at an early age, choosing instead to let life come to him. His one acquired skill was breaking and entering, which he began to develop when he was eleven with nothing much to do while growing up in a small Vermont town. It started on one mind-bogglingly boring weekend, when he and some other kids hopped a bus to a bigger town and wandered around aimlessly until they were all hungry. It was a Sunday, and some stores still closed on Sundays back then, including a sandwich shop that had an alleyway loading zone. Caleb was never sure where the notion came from, but as his buddies were all whining about food and not having enough money to pay for it, he simply grabbed a tire iron that was laying in the back of a parked pick-up truck, stepped over to the sandwich shop backdoor, and slammed the flat end of the iron into the jam, popping the lock. The kids looked at him with surprise—not that it stopped them all from going inside and making themselves sandwiches. Caleb made sure that they cleaned up after themselves, and pulling the door quietly shut, they skittered away like sated mice in the night. Twenty-six years and countless break-ins later, he had never been caught. Chased, yes. Shot at, three times. Photographed, only as a blur. Yet, he never considered himself a criminal, more an observer of life who took advantage of gaps as they presented themselves.
Upon arrival in the Saturn System, and after thawing out from hibernation, he awoke to find that he had five thousand credits left in the Bank of Titan. He had departed Earth with nearly three-hundred thousand, but supposedly a nonmetastasized cancer had been discovered in his liver during a routine hibernation scan. With his body temperature already reduced and his brain activity nil, the standard, preauthorized procedure, was for the medbots to print out a new liver using his own reactivated stem cells and swap it with the bad one. Because socialized medicine was considered a sin among the pioneers, and because no insurer was willing to underwrite any of the colonists anyway, the procedure cost nearly three-hundred-thousand credits, all of it going to the med company that had set up shop on Caleb’s particular ship, the Miner 49er (also known as a Hanson building). Caleb awoke to discover that life continued to hold a regular pattern for him, and that yes, absolutely, shit happens. When the Miner 49er docked with the mother city of Hanson, aka the Magic Castle, Caleb stepped out on the gravity-enhancing magnetic street and found himself nearly destitute. He had a room in the building that he owned outright, but having not secured a job before he left, the lights would be out in a month and food would be a major consideration. Through sheer wit and remarkable skill at taking what he needed without being caught, he survived a year. Then he saw the ads calling for police duty. Deciding that the best cop was one who could think like a ne’er-do-well, he filled out an application. Ready to sign up a walking corpse if it had to, the service put a freshly printed uniform on him post-haste and gave him a month of training.