The Mercury Rebellion

by Felix R. Savage

  But where was left to retreat to?

  “Hold still,” ordered the vinge-class.

  It clamped its grippers around her ribcage and lifted her to the level of its headpart. Her feet dangled a meter off the floor. Its big, cartoony eyes sparkled hypnotically, rings of green and blue revolving. Doubtless, it was scanning her face and running a facial recognition search to ID her.

  “You’re not in the local database.”

  “I work for the Space Corps,” Elfrida gasped. She smelt dry lube, burnt dust. Death.

  “Ah, the do-gooders. Can’t see what the hell you look like, under all that dirt. What’s your heritage?”

  “Half Japanese, half Austrian.”

  “Ha! You’re a halfbreed. The UN’s favorite kind of citizen. No roots, no racial sympathies, no loyalty to anythin’ other than your employer. What’s your name?”

  “Elfrida Goto.”

  “That so? You don’t look nothin’ like your avatar.”

  “Nor do you,” Elfrida whispered.

  Abruptly, the vinge-class dropped her. “I do not appreciate your pathetic attempts at gallows humor,” it informed her. “On your fuckin’ feet! Follow me.”

  The vinge-class spidered around the mountain of corpses. She labored after it, up the spiral ramp.

  For the first time in her life, she wished that she had ‘the stuff,’ the self-euthanasia pills issued to every Space Corps agent. She’d left hers on Earth, in the belief that she was not the type to commit suicide.

  But what came next would likely make her wish for death.

  On 4 Vesta, the Heidegger program had killed all the purebloods, and corralled the mixed-race people as ‘keepers.’ It had then set up a kind of surgical production line and processed them, upgrading their BCIs so it could puppet them like flesh-and-blood phavatars.

  Based on autopsies of those victims, UN scientists had determined that the Heidegger program reconfigured existing neural pathways, tying them to new reward structures that enslaved them to the PLAN’s war aims.

  Of course, it could not do this without a brain-computer interface.

  Conveniently for the PLAN, a lot of people already had BCIs in their heads.

  Elfrida didn’t.

  So what would the Heidegger program do with her? Kill her, when it realized she was useless?

  Or would it fit her out with a BCI salvaged from someone else’s skull?

  They reached the L1 mezzanine. If this was Earth, I could jump, Elfrida thought. But in this gravity, I’d probably just break my ankle or something.

  “Try to keep up, shitface,” the vinge-class barked.

  She followed it around the mezzanine. She had to hop and skip over scattered corpses. She followed it into the radial corridor that led to the UNVRP executive suites.

  The smart wallpaper on this corridor displayed an old New York street. The vinge-class stopped in front of an elegant brownstone. The discreet plaque beside the door read: Director / Directeur / Directora / Diretor / Direktor.

  “Knock, knock,” the vinge-class shouted.

  Angelica Lin opened the door. “Oh, good. You’ve found her.”

  Elfrida stared in shock at the new director of UNVRP. Angelica Lin was wearing jeans and a formerly-white sweater, now splattered with other people’s blood. She seemed to be uninjured.

  “Will that be all, ma’am?” purred the vinge-class. Had it been human, it would have had a stylus poised to take down further orders.

  “Where was she?” Lin asked.

  “Runnin’ around downstairs with some individuals suspected to be Americans.”

  “Oh. Well, you’d better go and chase them, hadn’t you? Catch them, ID them, murder them. The whole doggone routine.”

  Angelica Lin grabbed Elfrida’s wrist, pulled her through the door, and slammed it in the phavatar’s face. She locked it.

  “It’s the Heidegger program,” Elfrida said. “Did you bring it here on purpose?” She couldn’t quite believe anyone could be so evil.

  “No, of course not. Those fucking plebs probably downloaded it off the internet.”

  Elfrida rubbed her eyes. Could Angelica Lin possibly be telling the truth?

  “I remember,” she said. “An expert once told me that the internet is flooded with malware from the PLAN. The ISA supposedly catches 99.9% of it. But not all. So maybe Dr. Seth googled ‘phavatars how to jailbreak,’ or something like that, and got phished.”

  “Yeah,” Angelica Lin said. “Must have been something like that.”

  “But that vinge-class called you ma’am.”

  They were standing in the vestibule. On a table lay a stack of newly printed yellow-and-white uniforms, a box of flags on sticks, and a pile of posters, all sporting the same logo of a person and a robot holding up a flag with the sun on it.

  “Obviously, it’s making fun of me,” Angelica Lin said, following her gaze. “The PLAN doesn’t just want to destroy us. It wants to destroy what makes us human. And that includes our aspirations, our visions, our dreams.”

  “What did I miss?”

  “I declared independence. Oh, I dismissed those bullshit charges against the community leaders. You should have heard them cheer. It was a great moment. I put up the new flag, everyone got champagne, party hats, I made a speech about freedom.”

  The fire in Lin’s eyes made Elfrida’s stomach flutter oddly.

  “But I knew we would need the bots, to hold onto our independence once we’d won it.”

  “Wait, wait! You knew what Vlajkovic was planning?”

  “They were meant to wait until after the election.”

  “Guess Vlajkovic didn’t know that.”

  “Looking back, we may have been too careful to avoid leaks. A lot was left to Dr. Seth’s discretion. Too much, obviously.”

  “What did Dr. Seth think those upgrades were going to do?”

  “What it said on the package. Break the function that is distastefully known as ‘slaving’ a phavatar, so UNVRP couldn’t claw them back remotely. I had no idea anything like this was going to happen! They came through the tunnel. I guess they must have … killed … the Marines on duty. But I didn’t know that. When they came into the ballroom, it was like they were dancing. I thought everything was going to be all right. I had a speech prepared, about liberty, equality, fraternity, yadda yadda. I got about six words out before they started killing people.”

  “Liberty, equality, fraternity?”

  “Old political slogan.”

  “Maybe I’m kind of slow today, but that sounds like personhood. That stupid, fringey movement that thinks bots should be equal with human beings.”

  “Not so fringey.”

  “You were their candidate.”

  “Just following in Charlie’s footsteps.”

  At last, Elfrida understood. The shock resonated through her body. “So you planned all along to get elected, and then finish what Pope started. That is, destroying the Venus Project.”

  The growing opposition to the Venus Project, the bad publicity, the budget overruns, the compensation scandals, the decision to cancel the R&D program … it had all been engineered from within. The Venus Project’s number one enemy had been its own director.

  “He was going to eliminate the people to make room for the bots.” She could hardly speak for bitterness. “That’s always been the endgame of the personhood movement, right? Well, congrats. It’s happening.”

  Blind with rage, Elfrida brushed past Lin, into the director’s office.

  “There must be something we can do,” she muttered. “Maybe if we kill the power to the whole hab ...”

  “Can’t do it from here,” Lin said. “I got locked out of everything consequential, right around the time the vinge-classes started twisting off heads.”

  The director’s office was spacious, with wall-to-wall soft green carpeting, not the gengineered kind. The room felt even larger due to the wallpaper of Alpine peaks. A squared-off sky rode overhead, twilight-mauve. The desk
at one end of the room, and the armchair, sofa, and coffee tables at the other, seemed to be adrift on the mountains. Cydney lay on the sofa, drooling in her sleep.

  “Cydney!”

  “Don’t wake her,” Lin said. “She’s traumatized.”

  Elfrida stooped over Cydney and shook her shoulder. Cydney cringed in her sleep.

  “She had to vid everything,” Lin said. “The vinge-classes hauled her around with them so she could vid the whole routine. Chase, catch, ID, behead. Over and over. They turned it into this revolting performance, and Cydney had to broadcast it to the whole solar system.”

  “Must’ve set a new traffic record for her feed.”

  “I gave her a sedative.”

  “Have we still got comms?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I guess Star Force will be here soon. A lot of their guys are dead, too.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I’m sorry,” Lin said.

  Elfrida shrugged. She was so done with hypocritical apologies. She gazed at Cydney, observing the knotted set of her brows, even under sedation. She felt a pinch of emotion that she’d thought had withered forever.

  Then she replayed Lin’s apology, heard the tension in Lin’s voice, and looked around.

  Lin was holding a gun on her. A Zero.5 with all the bells and whistles, extended supercapacitor battery, and flammable-foil cartridge.

  “Oh yeah,” Elfrida said weakly. “Forgot you used to be a Marine.”

  xxvii.

  “I didn’t want you to hate me,” Angelica Lin said. “I guess it’s too late for that now. But you still might be able to survive.”

  She moved sideways towards the door, still aiming her Zero.5 at Elfrida.

  “Stay here for a while. You can monitor the surveillance cams.” She jerked her chin at the semi-circular desk at the end of the office. “When the coast is clear, head down to the parking lot. There should be EVA suits in the public locker. Take a rover and drive east. Wrightstuff, Inc. has another hab in Chesterton Crater. There’s an access tunnel at 88.6° N, 110.1° E. Of course, the Heidegger program may have gotten in there, too. But they’re supposed to have bank-level security. Anyway, that’s your best chance of survival.”

  “I could have figured that out for myself,” Elfrida said.

  “Yeah, probably. But with you, Goto? I never know when you’re going to do something brilliant, and when you’re going to do something dumb. So … just don’t do anything dumb today.”

  Shifting the Zero.5 into a one-handed grip, Lin pulled an EVA suit out of a hidden closet. It was one of the bulky old ones inherited from Wrightstuff, Inc., with a rigid helmet, and an oversized nametag that said: Charles K. Pope. Lin hung it over her free arm. The helmet bobbled like a head on a broken neck.

  “A word of advice, Goto,” she said. “You’re confused. You’ve been questioning your assumptions about the universe. Looking for somewhere to belong. But you already have a home, and people who love you. On Earth. Get back there safely.”

  Lin headed into the vestibule.

  “Lock the door behind me,” she said, and was gone.

  ★

  Elfrida went around behind the director’s desk and flipped up all the embedded screens. There was no gaze interface. Lin must have used her BCI to operate the computer system. Elfrida found a grimy old keyboard in a drawer and hooked it up. Then she fiddled with the camera selector until she got a view of the parking lot.

  Two vinge-classes patrolled around the rovers, like valets in a parking-lot on Earth. But they wouldn’t be be giving anyone their keys.

  “So much for that idea,” Elfrida muttered.

  She went through the other cameras, one at a time, searching for survivors. Every flicker of movement turned out to be one of the vinge-classes. But then she came to a set of feeds labelled Vault.

  The screens teemed.

  Elfrida clutched the edge of the desk, gazing down on the tops of people’s heads. They quivered, packed together like rats in a trap.

  Dozens. No, hundreds of people.

  Flashlights and eyelamps and phone screens winked in the darkness.

  She searched for the audio feed, couldn’t find it. Couldn’t access any life-support stats for the vault, either. But she could imagine the terror of the survivors, trapped down there without comms, without light … maybe, soon, without air.

  Galvanized, she went and shook Cydney.

  Cydney groaned, cursed, and opened her eyes.

  “Ellie! You’re not dead!”

  “Nope. And neither are they.” Elfrida gestured at the screens, which she’d spun around so she could keep an eye on them. “There are hundreds of survivors, Cyds! They’re in the vault.”

  “Wait, this already happened,” Cydney slurred, eyes crossing.

  “It’s happening again. How big is the vault?”

  “Big.”

  So the survivors might have enough air to last for a while. Long enough for Elfrida to fetch help. She decided not to think about the obstacles that lay in between here and there.

  “Get your shoes on,” she said.

  While trying to wake Cydney, she’d spotted a locker in the corner behind the sofa, labelled FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY. She now opened it and dumped the contents on the floor.

  It was a treasure trove. Angelica Lin must not have known this stuff was here. Med patches and disposable syringes, two rebreather masks, a Personal Survival Capsule in a canister, a selection of gourmet meals-in-pouches, two 4-liter pouches of water. Something called a Swiss Army knife, and—hallelujah—two EVA suits.

  She held one up. It was the pricey second-skin type. She started to take her clothes off.

  “I think I’m going to hop in the shower,” Cydney said. She swayed upright, wiping at the drool on her cheek.

  Elfrida stared at her. “Cyds, are you with me? The Heidegger program is in this hab. It’s killing people. We don’t have time to shower.”

  “I’m all dirty,” Cydney said. “I have to get clean.”

  Elfrida paused, remembering that Cydney had been forced to witness the carnage. “Just put your shoes on,” she said as gently as she could. “We’re going to get out of here. ‘Kay?”

  “No! It’s not safe out there!”

  “It’s not safe here, either. Don’t you remember what they did to people on 4 Vesta, the ones they didn’t kill? They operated on them, enslaved them—”

  “I was there! And the people who survived, OK? Were the ones who hid. The ones who tried to run? The phavatars hunted them, caught them, and jarked their brains. If you want to survive, you have to hide! So you can do what you like, but I’m staying here.”

  Cydney defiantly sat back down on the sofa.

  Elfrida rolled the EVA suit up her legs and wedged the diaper into her crotch. “But they know you’re here. And that door wouldn’t stop a housekeeping bot.”

  Cydney just scowled. Elfrida wriggled her arms into the sleeves and did up her seals. The suit hugged her body, moulding itself to every curve. Just as well there was no mirror in here. Searching for some way to carry the goodies from the emergency locker, she grabbed Angelica Lin’s oversized handbag off the back of her chair and stuffed everything in that.

  “Come on, Cyds.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “Alert!”

  Cydney let out a scream.

  The voice came from the desk.

  “Alert! Subject is … in the B4 corridor … subject is entering P-1 level …”

  Elfrida had set up a facial recognition alert for Angelica Lin. It had been triggered. She rushed over to the desk.

  On the screen, Angelica Lin walked into the parking lot. She was carrying that old spacesuit over one arm. On a strap across her body hung a pelican case like the ones Vlajkovic and his friends had kept their guns in.

  The two vinge-classes spidered towards her. Had they been human, they would have been smugly rolling up their sleeves.

  Lin dropped the spaces
uit she was carrying. Its folds had concealed the Zero.5. She set it to her shoulder and shot the phavatars. The plasma flashes whited out the screen.

  When the feed came back, Lin was lugging her stuff around the fallen monsters, en route to the vehicles.

  “See, you can kill them,” Elfrida said.

  Cydney was not interested. She sat on the sofa, vaping her cigarette. Clouds of vapor wreathed her head.

  “Lin’s going for that big-ass half-track. She’s escaping! Come on, Cyds!”

  “I’m not going.”

  “I broke up with John Mendoza for you!” Elfrida screamed at her.

  “And? You wish you’d gone to be with him, instead of coming here? I wish you had, too, Ellie. Then none of this would have happened. Just go.”

  Elfrida went.

  ★

  She forced the scene with Cydney to the back of her mind as she tiptoed out of the director’s office,

  The corridor was empty.

  From far below came a rhythmical banging noise. She guessed that the phavatars were trying to break into the vault.

  She hurried away from the mezzanine. All the radial corridors ended in emergency exits that connected with the intake shaft. Angelica Lin must have gone this way.

  The emergency exit door yielded to Elfrida’s glove. She stepped into the Cytherean …

  … day?

  Clusters of LEDs shone high on the support pillars. This was the first time Elfrida had ever seen the intake shaft lit up. She stood in a badly lit cave with drifts of sticky black sand on the floor. The magic was well and truly gone.

  She walked downhill, staying close to the inner curve of the intake shaft. She passed a lamp tree that had dropped all its fruit. Rats feasted on the decaying windfalls. Her boots sank into something crunchy, like dry leaves. A patch of groundfish, dark and dead.

  She’d never been fully aware of the precise environmental calibration necessary to keep these gengineered prototypes alive. The fragility of the whole experiment was now revealed. The environment hadn’t changed that much. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, and the peacekeepers had messed with the atmosphere during Vlajkovic’s rebellion. The farm crops, tough hybrids gengineered for space, had not been affected by these minor fluctuations. But it had killed the prototypes, which had been designed for a perfectly stable post-terraforming environment … that didn’t exist outside of computer models.