The Mercury Rebellion

by Felix R. Savage

  She remembered how she’d bought into the UNVRP propaganda about sustainable terraforming. The Venus Project had claimed it could create a Cytherean biosphere that did not need active management.

  She laughed aloud, bitterly. The wreckage around her demonstrated the fatuity of UNVRP’s claims. The Venus Project had been a multi-decade, trillion-spider venture based on computer models.

  It hadn’t accounted for the Heidegger program.

  Then again, no one had.

  Severed heads adorned the outskirts of the R&D village, impaled on sticks. Another WWIII touch. Elfrida could feel the Heidegger program’s malevolence, its smirky sense of irony, like a rash on her skin.

  Instinct urged her to go around the village. But she felt strongly that she owed the dead one last visit.

  Her bag of survival goods jingled on her back. The wind had been turned off, and the stillness was creepy, overpowering. Nothing moved except the rats. They frisked freely in and out of the sandcastles. Headless corpses littered the alleys. Bitter saliva welled in Elfrida’s mouth. She was determined not to throw up again.

  A severed head wedged into a window caught her eye, seeming for a moment to be alive, making her jump and scream.

  The Heidegger program’s killing spree seemed to have peaked in the village square. Cairns of body parts and trashed scientific equipment blocked the steps of the R&D lab. Baby carpets twitched pathetically on the sand, an entire production run of palm-sized porcupines, dyed blue with Elfrida’s gift of food coloring.

  She headed for her own sandcastle, understanding now that this was why she’d come into the village. She limply pressed her finger to the reader. Stumbled in. Sat down on her sofa-bed.

  I’ll just stay here. With everyone. At home.

  There was a severed head sitting on her desk.

  A child’s head. The head of Lena, the nine-year-old who’d wanted to open a restaurant when she grew up.

  Elfrida lurched out of the sandcastle. In the street, she puked until nothing came up except bile.

  But Lena wasn’t a pureblood … was she?

  She poked her head back into the sandcastle. Made herself look. Lena had had flesh-tone brown skin and slightly frizzy hair. Her mouth hung open, revealing a missing baby tooth. What had happened to her body, God only knew.

  “I am going to kill Angelica Lin,” Elfrida said aloud. She rinsed her mouth out with water from her suit’s rehydration nipple and stumbled away. “I am going to kill her with my own hands.”

  Saying it made her feel stronger, as if she hadn’t totally failed Lena and the other children, as if there were still something she could do.

  As she neared the bottom end of the intake shaft, the banging noise grew louder. It was definitely coming from the bottom level of the hab. But she had to go this way, there was no choice. She slipped out into the corridor. The light that escaped through the double swing doors cast her shadow ahead of her. She hurried into the darkness, and stopped to listen.

  Yup. The noise was coming from the vault. The phavatars were trying to break in and get at the survivors.

  Elfrida tiptoed out to the atrium and edged around the farm, barely noticing the mountain of corpses this time. The noise of banging and drilling went on, punctuated by silences that froze her in place. When she reached the parking-lot access corridor, she ran.

  The lights were still on in the parking-lot, and wonder of wonders, it did not seem to be guarded.

  The two vinge-classes that Angelica Lin had shot lay on the floor, looking pretty damn defunct.

  The armored half-track was gone.

  Two rovers lay overturned. Lin must’ve hit them with the half-track, pulling out.

  Elfrida ran towards the rovers. Her bag banged against her hip. Her breath sobbed.

  “Hi.”

  Elfrida screamed.

  Spinning, she saw a vinge-class prance out of the access corridor.

  It had followed her.

  She sprinted for the nearest rover. Frantically, she worked the rear-opening airlock.

  “Don’t take that one,” the vinge-class advised. “It’s almost out of juice.”

  It sashayed closer, and pointed with one skeletal foreleg.

  “That one over there’s a good bet.”

  That one over there was parked in by the overturned rovers. But it was further from the phavatar, so she ran to it. While she waited for the hatch to open, the vinge-class started to move the rovers that would block her exit. It picked them up and tossed them aside like toys, casually demonstrating its strength.

  “Why are you helping me?” Elfrida screamed.

  “Angelica Lin got away. If I go after her, she’ll just frag me. But you, bein’ an old friend of hers, might could get close enough to frag her.”

  “I haven’t got a weapon,” Elfrida said.

  It waved a gripper prong at her. “Ho, ho. Nice try.”

  The hatch squelched open. Elfrida threw her bag into the circular opening and jumped in after it.

  “Lin’s heading for the spaceport,” the phavatar informed her, as the hatch began to iris shut.

  “How do you know?”

  “Quickest way to get off-planet. She told you something else? Tryin’ to throw you off her tail.”

  The hatch sealed. Elfrida slid into the driver’s seat, in the rover’s convex windshield bubble. Outside, the phavatar stood in its bowlegged, four-square stance. She lowered her gaze to the dashboard and ran the pre-EVA systems checks. Everything seemed OK. The rover’s battery had recently been recharged, giving her 120 hours of driving time.

  She put the rover into drive and accelerated straight at the phavatar.

  It stepped out of the way.

  But as she sped past, it broke into a gallop, keeping pace with the rover. Its four legs gave it a turn of speed equal to the little rover’s acceleration.

  The vehicle airlock at the far end of the parking lot was closed. Elfrida braked. The phavatar raised a gripper and clicked its prongs. The airlock opened.

  “I don’t want company,” Elfrida screamed.

  The radio fizzed. “You got a problem?”

  “Yes! I have a problem with you!”

  “No, I meant like, psychological. Your file says you were in therapy.”

  “I have a problem with being on the same planet as you.” She couldn’t believe she was talking to the Heidegger program. Having a conversation with it.

  “Der Begriff ‘Sein’ ist undefinierbar. Dies schloß man aus seiner höchsten Allgemeinheit,” the radio said, coolly, and Elfrida fell silent. No, this was not a conversation. She couldn’t let herself fall—even unwillingly—into that trap.

  The airlock’s massive flanges opened.

  Elfrida gunned the rover into the chamber.

  The Heidegger program’s mocking laughter stayed with her until she killed the radio.

  ★

  Elfrida had not been outside Tolkien Crater since she arrived on Mercury. Now she drove through a stygian world of dark chasms and spear-like ejecta. Amid this ancient debris, Wrightstuff, Inc. had laid a road. It snaked like an Olympic skateboard course, conforming to the wayward terrain. There was no possibility of getting lost. This was the only road on Mercury.

  All the same, it scared her not to know where she was. With no satellite navigation, she had no way of putting names to the features acquired by the rover’s radar. The radar built up a picture of the terrain as she drove—she seemed to be threading between two humongous mountains, which should be the rims of Tolkien and Chesterton craters—but her exhausted brain struggled to reconcile the picture on the dashboard plot with the cubist hell in the headlights.

  “I don’t even know if I’m driving north or south! I need a map,” she cried, and blinked her contacts on.

  NO NETWORK ACCESS.

  “I know that! Enable knowledge guide. Have I got a map?”

  “A map?” said her unicorn in sparkly text. “Of where?”

  “The north pole of Mercury.”<
br />
  “How’s this?”

  A map unfolded on her contacts, overlaid on the road ahead. It was a polar projection. Call-out tags marked every feature. Animated graphics indicated four spaceports. In reality, Mercury only had two, Goethe and Yoshikawa.

  “Oh my God! I know what this is! It’s from Dr. Hasselblatter’s sim.”

  “That’s right! ‘Amazing Mercury: Visit The Future With Abdullah Hasselblatter.’ You downloaded it, remember?”

  Yes, now she remembered. In comparison to her old contacts, these ones had a bottomless data storage capacity. All those gigabytes were just begging to be used, so she’d downloaded the freebie sim created to promote Dr. Hasselblatter’s campaign.

  “This is great. It is based on the real map of Mercury, right?”

  “Yes! Up-to-date satellite data! And it’s got lots of fun features!”

  “You can’t show my location on here, can you?”

  “Sorry! No location data available.”

  “That’s OK.” She zoomed in on Tolkien Crater. The map’s resolution went as high as 1:100. The road was clearly marked. Just as she had thought, she’d driven between Tolkien and Chesterton craters. But using the rover’s odometer, she calculated that she’d driven a lot further than 50 kilometers. She must have missed the turn-off for Wrightstuff, Inc.’s Chesterton hab.

  “Crap! I need to go back!”

  But she didn’t touch the steering yoke.

  She chewed a knuckle. Thought about what she might find in Chesterton Crater.

  A trap.

  If the Heidegger program was besieging Mt. Gotham, why wouldn’t it also have attacked Wrightstuff, Inc’s other habs?

  Other considerations aside, she’d be an idiot to do anything that Angelica Lin said.

  While she pondered, she drove on.

  The dashboard radar plot caught her eye. A red dot blinked on the edge of the grid, highly visible amid the altitude-coded greens of the terrain. The rover’s computer was decidedly dumb, but even it could tell the difference between a rock and a …

  … moving vehicle.

  Had to be.

  She’d caught up with Angelica Lin.

  The half-track had looked old. It was obviously slow, too. Elfrida had already eliminated Lin’s head start.

  She started to accelerate, then changed her mind. She locked the radar onto the trundling half-track.

  “Tell you what,” she murmured, “I’ll just hang back here, and you lead the way. ‘Kay, bitch?”

  Ironically, she was now doing what the Heidegger program had said.

  Follow Lin to the spaceport.

  … and frag her.

  Who said a homicidal AI couldn’t have a good idea from time to time?

  xxviii.

  Doug #2—as Grumpy Doug was technically called—lay on his back on the floor of the vault. His great-great-granddaddy had built this place, sealing off the lowest level of the mine that would eventually become Hotel Mercury. The climate-control system was entirely separate. No one upstairs could mess with it.

  Doug gave thanks for Founder Doug’s paranoia.

  And also for his acquisitive streak.

  Digging his heels into the regocrete, he scooted his head and shoulders beneath the showpiece of Wrightstuff, Inc.’s vintage auto collection.

  A jellied tangle of pipes and pans stared down at him. He found the electronic lock on the fuel line, and cut it in half with his pocket cutter laser, a mechanic’s tool.

  This vehicle was a Tesla Family FOB, an American icon during the last years of the republic. A Forward Operating Base for your family, geddit? Popular with suburban moms, it mounted a roof cannon that fired exploding 60mm rounds. The driver also commanded a drum-fed machine-gun, gaze-controllable via Intuitouch™ targeting goggles.

  Doug rolled out from under the chassis. A knot of UNVRP engineers goggled nervously at him.

  “You’re up, guys,” he said.

  “This is an internal combustion engine!”

  “This technology is medieval!”

  “We don’t even know how it works!”

  “Figure it out,” Doug snapped.

  The circle of watchers parted. Matt, Doug’s only surviving companion, trotted through the crowd, holding his helmet like a bowl. Straw-colored liquid sloshed over the brim. “Fuel. I found it in the tank of the vintage Caddy over there. Plenty more where that came from.”

  It smelled toxic, but Doug took that as a sign that it was the real thing. “We got fuel. We’re set,” he told the engineers. “All you gotta do is tell me which buttons to push.”

  The engineers rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

  They were just regular folk. So were all the other 400-odd civilians trapped down here.

  Doug figured the Marines had stood their ground, and died. He admired them for that.

  He and Matt had barely made it into the vault. They’d left Elfrida Goto in the farm—good kid, courageous as hell. Left her to die.

  Jen—left her gutted on the floor.

  Mark, Rob, Jim, Anne—left them fighting the vinge-classes that ambushed them in the corridor to the vault.

  Doug had left them all, and run.

  Because he was the only one who could open the vault.

  The lock was programmed to recognize his irises and fingerprints, which were identical to Founder Doug’s.

  If the vinge-classes had caught him, they could’ve used his severed head and hands to unlock the doors and get at everyone inside.

  Funny thing was, when he and Matt got here, they’d found the door of the vault standing open.

  He’d fixed that.

  Locked it from the inside.

  A while after that, the phavatars had started whaling on the door. So far, it was holding.

  Talking to the survivors, he’d learned that the vinge-classes had herded them in here for safe-keeping. These were the mixed-bloods, the genetically fortunate. Or not so fortunate, recalling the Heidegger program’s activities on 4 Vesta. These people were its keep pile.

  Well, now there was a locked door in the way. And just maybe, Great-Great-Granddaddy’s blastproof steel would buy them enough time to hit back.

  Listening, Doug realized the noise had stopped. Uh oh. He left Matt to keep the engineers on the job, and headed back through Fine Art.

  He’d turned the vault lights off to save power. In the darkness, backlights from tablets and phones illuminated strained, terrified faces. Eyes followed him as if he were their savior.

  In the Natural Bounty hall, he bumped into the surviving UNVRP executives, a handful of middle-aged men and women still clad in their yellow-and-blue uniforms. They were heading for the doors, too. He fell into step with them. “What’s going on, guys?”

  “Just admiring the collection,” said the senior VP for Accounting & Finance.

  The Natural Bounty collection actually was impressive. Life-sized foam-core cutouts of animals and birds dotted the room. Some were extinct, some not. All were native to the former United States. A safe in the middle of the room held their genetic material. President Doug had been planning to resurrect them all, starting with the smaller animals, when his paraterraforming project got off the ground.

  One of the officials was using a tablet to light their way. It suddenly said, “You have a new text message!”

  “Hey!” Doug said. “You got comms?”

  The official twitched the tablet away.

  “Lemme see that.”

  “It’s just a—a game.”

  “Lemme see it, all the same.”

  “No. It’s private.”

  “My family owns this place.”

  “Privacy. Human rights.”

  Doug picked up a foam-core cutout of Alligator mississipiensis. It weighed nothing, but its base was a chunk of regocrete. Holding it by the base, he swung it at the officials, a taunt rather than a threat. The people watching from the shadows would probably take the side of the officials, if it came to a brawl. After all, thes
e were their bosses.

  But the senior VP for Accounting & Finance panicked. He broke into a run, tripped on the base of Canis lupus, and went sprawling. The tablet flew out of his hands, and Doug grabbed it.

  A text conversation.

  The latest text read: Knew you’d make the sensible decision. Now that’s the kind of thinking that will shape humanity’s future!

  Doug lowered the tablet and stared at the executives. “‘The sensible decision.’ Now, what decision would that be?”

  None of the executives answered. Doug flipped back through the older texts.

  I know you got some purebloods in there, he read. They sneaked in. Some of your employees helped them hide. Send ‘em out, and we’ll let the rest of y’all live. You can’t say fairer than that.

  Doug looked up. A crowd had formed around them. The senior VP for Public Relations said, “It’s the only way any of us are going to survive.”

  “Yeah? And how’s that going to work?”

  The senior VP looked at his colleagues. No one helped him out. “They only want the purebloods,” he said. “It’s basic math. If we try to protect them, we’ll all die.”

  Doug took a beat, looking around. People stood on the climate-controlled bookcases in Literature. To his left, the oddments of Liberty & Civil Rights lined the aisle leading to the door.

  A group of about twenty people stood in front of the door, guarded by the surviving UNVRP peacekeepers.

  “You’ve already rounded the poor bastards up,” Doug said in disgust.

  The executives said nothing.

  “How can you even tell which ones are purebloods, in this light?”

  “We all know each other here.”

  Doug quickstepped between the displays devoted to George Washington and Martin Luther King. The executives and their flash mob followed, narrowing the distance.

  As Doug got closer to the door, he saw that the surviving purebloods were all children. His disgust intensified. The survivors must have protected them, motivated by the natural human desire to protect the young. But now they were ready to sacrifice them for an illusory promise of safety.