Lakes of Mars

by Merritt Graves

  “Before we plunge in, though, let’s take a few minutes to refresh the simple narrative that’s escaped the cutting room floor.”

  Professor Richter walked from the window to the front of the class. “What happened on 8/28/2074, that set everything into motion?”

  “The terraforming of Mars,” someone said.

  “The terraforming of Mars. And what a job they did, too. The twisting lakes. The redwood forests. The greenhouse effect to make it just warm enough so that the summers felt like summer. It was quite the feat, taking a planet without a magnetosphere, with an atmospheric makeup of ninety-six percent carbon dioxide and just under two percent each argon and nitrogen, and transforming it into something more like Earth than what Earth now is. The number of variables, the precision of calculation required—not to mention the logistical nightmare getting all the methane from Titan—all made this seem like it was a multi-century task. But what happened to change that?”

  “Athens,” said a staggered chorus of Blues.

  “Athens,” Professor Richter repeated. “Athens, Mars’ famed artificial superintelligence. It calculated the exact number of thermonuclear devices we’d need to melt the ice caps, the exact cubic tonnage of methane, and the exact quantity and makeup of cyanobacteria. Incredible, really. Some said too incredible. They argued that just the fact that an AI like that existed threatened humanity’s existence since it was already evolving new goals and interpreting existing ones different than its designers had intended. This, combined with the growing number of rights and boundary disputes, made tensions high even before Mars was set to commence the terraforming of Jupiter’s moon Europa. What happened on April fifteenth, 2096, Mr. Pratt?”

  “Earth issued a warning saying that any additional terraforming by Mars would be interpreted as an act of aggression and sent a fleet to blockade Europa.”

  “And what did Mars do?”

  “Ignored it. Sent part of their fleet to accompany the terraforming ships to Europa and the rest of it to Earth, carrying thermonuclear payloads.”

  “Mars had gotten quite skilled at making thermonuclear devices during their terraforming, didn’t they?” asked Professor Richter, sitting down on top of his desk. “Science builds. It layers. It cross applies. And it never forgets. But of course Earth had plenty of nukes of their own stockpiled from arms races. And what did they do with them?”

  “Equipped them on ships to Mars,” said someone in the front row.

  “Because they felt boxed in: Massive warming. Dying oceans. Depleted topsoil. Making the prospect of their rival having two neighboring habitable masses unpalatable.” He stopped to cough and take a few sips of water from a Mason jar. “So we had a three-theatered standoff, which, with the exception of the Saturn orbital stations and the nascent GZ colonies, would have threatened the entirety of humanity. And then when Telnet went down in a meteor shower, there was a twelve-month communications blackout where there were seventeen incidents that nearly resulted in a nuclear exchange. The Breathless Year, as it’s now called.

  “So what happened next . . . Mr. Sheridan, you’re from Mars. You should know this as well as anyone.”

  “Athens recommended that Mars back down,” I said.

  “And?”

  “And that Athens . . . er, that itself should be shutdown.”

  “Because it was too powerful. It was improving its own design. And it didn’t know how long it would be before an emergent property appeared that might be at odds with its current programming. But also because as long as it existed, Earth wouldn’t feel safe—which mattered more than ever since there were rumors that it, too, was just months away from its own Athens, dubbed Socrates.”

  Professor Richter got up off his desk. “And given that Athens had calculated the terraforming so precisely and now was forecasting a ninety-nine point three eight five percent chance that humanity would be destroyed by either itself, Socrates, or the existing thermonuclear arsenal, Mars’ Senate listened. As a result, a de-tech agreement with Earth known as the Athena Carta was reached, stipulating that both Athens and Socrates were to be disassembled. Both stockpiles destroyed. And to ensure that they would never be rebuilt, everyone was given the chip invented by Hans Mylan, cutting off and relaying their synapse firing patterns back to the Fleet whenever they were associated with sufficiently inventive or abstract thoughts.”

  He tapped the heads of some of the cadets as he walked down an aisle. “Which we still have today.”

  “Our handicapping ourselves is sure working out nice for the Verex, isn’t it?” someone behind me blurted.

  “We’ll win anyway,” the kid sitting next to me said.

  “Tell that to the six million already dead.”

  Professor Richter held up his hand, pausing for a while by the door, before resuming. “Not everyone was happy about it, obviously, just like not everyone’s happy about it now. But there’s this idea that competing corporate or political entities will always create a destructive arms race dynamic in science, prioritizing speed and efficiency over safety and sustainability, leading to showdowns like the Breathless Year. So, instead of allowing for further competition, Mars and Earth created the Confederation, and all military units were put under the command of a shared fleet, with shared leadership.

  “However, in a faint nod to autonomy, Earth, Mars, the Saturn stations, and the rest of the colonies got to keep their training academies, as long as they were open to all and fed into the Fleet. That’s why I’m in a red uniform right now.”

  Professor Richter sighed and rubbed his face.

  “But it was only a nod. Sometimes it’s the things that we give up that keep us from living up to our potential. Even though we’ve become quite good at protecting ourselves from ourselves, like Duncan just mentioned, we’re hardly alone in the universe anymore.”

  Chapter 32

  The clouds dissolved against my wing tips and auburn-hued droplets melted into the sunrise. They were bigger than the ones on Mars, globules that made you feel like you’d shrunk, yet subtle enough that many forgot to make adjustments, throwing off their maneuvers by centimeters without their ever knowing why.

  “It’s all environment,” Dad used to say. “Before you draw up a flight plan, you want to know everything, and I do mean everything, about the space you’ll be traversing. People are serial extrapolators, but that only works when conditions stay the same, and with all the mining and terraforming, Aaron, conditions never stay the same. Wind speed, barometric pressure, gravitational pull, debris trajectories, on and on and on—and given CSpace’s forty-seven-territory footprint, that’s a lot of places that they’re never staying the same in.”

  “Athens used to make all those adjustments, right?” I asked.

  “Among other things.” He grunted. “In a way, it makes our lives a lot more complicated, but in another it makes them a lot simpler. A matter of perspective, I suppose.”

  “And what’s yours?” I asked.

  “It changes, too.”

  There was a chain of explosions on the horizon as, one after another, my missiles found their targets, the ring of floating antiaircraft batteries making their last exhalations as I passed through the mist of debris. My secondary objective was to drop incendiaries on a town that had defected, but I veered off course slightly and dropped them on a neighboring rock outcropping instead, before strafing the citadel and knocking out the settlement’s main antiaircraft gun.

  A voice broke over the commline. “One of these days the incendiary drop is going to be the primary objective. What are you going to do then?”

  That was odd; there wasn’t anyone else in the Box with me save the AI units I was managing and I was out of comm range of the carrier group that birthed me. “Who is this?”

  “Who do you want it to be?” came the reply. It was a strange male voice. Foreign, yet with a familiar accent. Dark, but not deep; textured enough that I couldn’t quite nail down where I’d heard it before.

  I spoke loudly
. “This band is reserved for mission-specific communication only.”

  “How convenient.”

  “Who is this?” I repeated.

  “An interested party.”

  The rain got heavier, harder, drops smattering against the cockpit like fat bugs, causing the controls to jerk in my hand and us to drift off course two centimeters. Three centimeters. Antiaircraft fire from the settlement’s smaller batteries made ribbons around me, perpetually behind my twists and somersaults, which needed to be sparse enough to keep me from getting bogged down in a crossfire, yet dramatic enough to keep the twenty-millimeters’ stereoscopic range-finders from dialing in with their puffs of flak.

  “So what about the objective?” I said finally. “It’s just a score.”

  “Not planning on graduating then, I take it?” asked the voice, crackling midsentence.

  “Not for a while.”

  “Even with that blue uniform already? You’re not very good at not trying.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe if you listened more you would. Maybe you wouldn’t be so lost around here. The future’s like the fighter in front of you—starting and stopping. Stopping and starting. And you never know when you’re going to smack right into it.”

  I turned off the commline and took a deep breath. It had to be someone fucking with me—maybe a Red or someone on the ground trying to throw me off. That seemed like the kind of thing they’d do, but I was catching on to how things worked now and I wasn’t going to let them get to me. I had enough to worry about.

  Instead, I focused back on the sky, watching the droplets on the canopy vanish as I rose higher. Farther out, the flak and the tracers, having reached the limit of their range underneath me, turned the clouds into volcanoes, rupturing red, yellow, and orange in the ashen sunlight. I hit a button and the navigational panel craned into place to my right, the high-value targets flashing and the emergency regroup coordinates lighting up a solid blue. Calculating vectors and weighing odds, I toggled through to the fuel resupply freighter making its way through the thermosphere, unescorted, and pulled up the targeting computer.

  “Green, blue, black, and red, what’s a dragon without a head? When they mix they turn to brown, but when apart the ship goes down.”

  The commline was back on somehow, even though I hadn’t touched the single manual switch.

  It crackled again and the voice repeated, “Green, blue, black, and red, what’s a dragon without a head? When they mix they turn to brown, but when apart the ship goes down.”

  “What are you trying to say?” I asked, beginning to feel sick.

  Silence.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What everyone else isn’t,” the voice replied. “The elephant in the room.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Something different to everyone. The truth that you’re not ready to admit. Green, blue, black, and red, what’s a dragon without a head? When they mix they turn to brown, but when apart the ship goes down.”

  I flipped the commline switch off again and then cut power to communications on the systems panel. My ears were pricked, but one silent minute passed and then two as the freighter loomed larger and larger. I was out of missiles, so I waited until I was in pulse range to open fire, easily maneuvering around its slow-moving aft turret to the bay where I figured its fuel was stored, and got my remaining power transferred to the lightwall just in time to be knocked a hundred meters back by the explosion.

  “Another clean kill,” said the voice. “But will they stay that way?”

  “How the hell?” I muttered, staring at the comm panel. My heart rate rose. Panic bled into my cool flying persona.

  “White’s the purest color, but quickest to stain,” said the voice, through a series of choppy, electrical hisses.

  A red light flashed and I realized that I was still descending, shield-less, into the planet’s atmosphere. After a few seconds of grasping, I got my helmet back on and my flight suit sealed just in time to divert the remaining life support power to thrusters.

  “Quick thinking. Coordinated. Works well under pressure. Competent multitasker. Quite the file here, Aaron. Maybe if you played better with others you’d be a Black already.”

  “Who are you?” I screamed.

  “Who do you want me to be?” responded the voice. “Green, blue, black, and red, what’s a dragon without a head? When they mix they turn to brown, but when apart the ship goes down.”

  I woke up sweating and panting. As soon as I realized it had all been a dream, I started looking around to see if anyone had noticed, but everyone’s chests were rising and falling rhythmically. When I was satisfied no one had heard me, I tiptoed over to the hydration unit and filled my bottle, concentrating on solid sensations: my feet touching the cold floor, the stainless steel in my hand. It had just been a dream. Of course it was just a dream.

  I took a few sips of water. Then, after looking around again first, I cracked open the door to the refrigeration panel. Firewater. Old food. Stims in bright green, candy-like gels. Fingers’ red vat of whatever it was. And Brandon’s vat of purple Zeroes. I looked up at Brandon, lying in the highest, nicest hammock, his limbs outstretched, and then back at the Zeroes again, before shutting the door.

  The corridors were dimly lit in the after-hours and hardly any water was flowing through the clear pipes snaking across the ceiling above. Every once in a while, a little stream would jet by when a toilet flushed somewhere, but it wasn’t much; the station was sleeping. I was so tired and wanted to be asleep too, but that was impossible after the dream. My heart wouldn’t slow down. Worse, it felt like it was speeding up and pumping jagged, thin lines of pain throughout my body.

  The sensation made me wonder what having an actual heart attack was like; my uncle had had one in his early fifties and he’d said it felt as if something heavy had fallen on him and he couldn’t move—a phantom metal beam grinding into his upper arms and chest. Skin prickly. Nauseated. Sweating. I felt prickly and nauseated and sweaty, too, but instead of something pressing down, I felt like something was trying to push its way out of my chest. And that voice still echoed in my ears. What had it said?

  Green, blue, black, and red, what’s a dragon without a head? When they mix they turn to brown, but when apart the ship goes down.

  What did that mean?

  I ordered a glass of warm “milk” at the Launch Bar in the Great Room and sat down in a corner, wiping the sweat off my palms every thirty seconds or so. Everyone seemed to be keeping their voices low, but I couldn’t get over how busy it was at this time of night, given the kind of stuff we had to do during the day. When I’d been at summer camp at Lake Aries four or five years ago, I’d spent the days swimming and hiking and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow at night. Who knows how late we would’ve stayed up if there had been stims, though. When you’re a kid, you try to take things as far as they’ll go since you’ve never seen the limits reached before.

  “Hey,” said a voice behind me.

  An iciness replaced the pain and I snapped my head around.

  “Whoa, a little jumpy tonight, aren’t we?”

  It was Simon.

  “No . . . yeah, I suppose so.”

  “I’d normally say try to calm down and take it easy, but that’d make me sound a little out of touch, don’t you think?”

  I tried to smile.

  “Nightmare?” he asked solemnly.

  I shrugged.

  “A lot of people get them here.”

  “Do you?” I asked, remembering what Daries had said.

  “Not as much now as when I was a Green.” He tried to manage a smile of his own. “But that still doesn’t keep me from not sleeping.”

  “Stims?”

  “Not even. I can not-sleep all by myself, I’m afraid. Hey, do you want to go and not-sleep in the Ship Room? It’s better there.”

  “I thought the Ship Room was only f
or officers,” I said.

  Simon pointed to the black stripe on his collar. “What do you think this is, pal? A sergeant stripe, which means a guest and I can use it during nonpeak hours.” He checked his U-dev. “And this is about as nonpeak as it gets.”

  I followed him across the length of the room, along a couple of dimly lit hallways, and down a few steps to a door he opened with a wave of his Student Access Permit. Inside it was even darker than the corridor; the only lighting came from the deck lights of rows and rows of model ships spaced like lamps along the walls. There were A, B, and C cruisers—Zs and Ls. Harbinger Frigates. New ones, old ones. Even going as far back as the galleons and men-of-war they used on Earth almost a millennium ago.

  “Pretty, aren’t they?” said Simon. “Little toy ships for a bunch of soon-to-be Fleet officers. The promise of adventure in deep space. A childhood dream that’s . . .” His hand brushed against a replica of Admiral Nelson’s flagship, the HMS Victory. “Close enough to touch.”

  “Is that your dream?” I asked.

  “Isn’t it yours?” he countered as we sat down at a table.

  “It changes,” I said.

  There was silence after that, and he closed his eyes. Even in the weak light I could see that his uniform was spotless, pressed and unfaded, with none of the typical gashes and tears. His nails were trimmed. His sandy brown hair was perfectly parted and smart looking. Given what we were put through, the amount of effort to keep himself looking like that must’ve been taxing—minutes each day of already scarce, compressed time. According to the handbook, everyone was supposed to present themselves as such, of course, but it was one of the rules the Reds selectively didn’t enforce.

  “She likes you, you know,” said Simon. “It might not seem like much, but not-much is everything with her. She spends every—waking—second that’s not tied up in class working on a cure to her brother’s disease, so if you can get even five percent of her attention, you’re like Jesus freaking Christ to her.” He gave a hollow laugh.