Mars Plus

by Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas

  “Well, they repaired me.”

  “How?”

  “In the usual way, I guess. They grafted in a lattice of bio-interface chips that supplemented normal functioning and trained my cortex in new pathways.”

  Ellen whirled on Dr. Lee. “But you said she was clean!”

  “She is!” the doctor asserted. “I did a full-body scan, which showed nothing. The site of that trauma displayed as—” He paused, obviously thinking before he went on. “—as a smooth insert surrounded by bone scarring. No sign of intrusion into cortical tissue. No active prosthetics at all.”

  Sorbel walked over to the table, picked up a handheld electronic device—it was a multimeter shaped like a wand—and punched a control sequence into its tiny keypad. As she brought the device back over to where Demeter was standing, Coghlan could see its digital display on one face and a one-centimeter-square speaker grille. Ellen raised the wand, brought it up against the side of Demeter’s head.

  The unit started warbling as it passed her shoulder, shrieked as it neared her temple.

  “Let me see that.” Dr. Lee stripped off his surgical gloves, stepped around the table bearing Jory’s body, and reached for the meter. He examined the numbers on the display.

  “What—?” Demeter started to ask.

  “Electromagnetic field strength,” Sorbel explained shortly.

  “That’s much more involved than anything I saw with my office scanner,” the doctor said.

  “Your office system is tied into the grid, isn’t it?” Ellen asked.

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” Lole groaned. He reached over, touched Coghlan’s shoulder gently, and dropped his hand. “Demeter, you’re wetware!”

  She recoiled from him. “What do you mean?”

  “They’ve wired up your head,” Ellen told her coldly. “Everything you’ve done has been under their compulsion.”

  “‘They’? Who are you talking about?” Demeter was becoming truly frightened now.

  “The machines. The grid.”

  “I’m not one of them!”

  “Of course you are. You’re their pawn. Nothing else fits.”

  Back by the operating table, Dr. Lee picked up a hypodermic and began metering a dose of something—Demeter didn’t know what but was sure it wouldn’t do her any good. They would all be afraid of the grid’s retaliation now; Lole had explained about that. And the first thing they would do is neutralize the machines’ supposed spy. Neutralize her.

  Jory’s spreadeagled body hovered at the edge of her awareness. Sorbel and Mitsuno had killed the Creole only because he had pestered Demeter about this secret place of theirs. If they now thought she was an active danger to them—this “wetware” thing—then she was next.

  Demeter bolted.

  She grabbed Ellen by the shoulders and threw her into Lole. The two of them staggered backward, clawing for their own balance.

  Dr. Lee looked up from his preparations, face a dull-white blank.

  Coghlan spun on the balls of her feet and came nose to nose with Jeff Te Jing. He already had his arms spread, hands out, trying to block her. Which left him wide open…

  The training she’d received in Dallas was good to the point of being a conditioned reflex. Demeter’s left knee came up automatically; her shin pumped out; her toes stiffened like a ballerina’s—and the arch of her instep caught the man squarely between the legs. Before he could react, that foot snapped back and stamped down, planting itself against the rock floor; she swung her hips in a tight half-circle, cocking her pelvis to the right; her free leg raised in a jackknife that sent her foot’s outside edge upward in a smooth, shallow curve—and her heel lodged among the small bones and cartilage in his throat. Before he could grab her extended limb, Demeter finished the combination with a flailing, high-stepping one-two, like a can-can dancer’s finale, and smashed the balls of her left foot, right foot against his forehead. The force of those blows, weak as they were, being third and fourth in the set, united with the involuntary thrusts of his own body as Jeff doubled over in the gathering pain.

  On the last one, Demeter heard a crack like a rock splitting dry wood.

  Without bothering to see if he could follow, she slid around the man and vanished down the connecting tunnel.

  Chapter 18

  Animals in a Trap

  Harmonia Mundi, June 20

  “Roger…” The vision of Dorrie appeared before him, in shorts and halter, with her dark hair blowing long streamers against the prevailing direction of the ever-present wind. It was nighttime in the bowl of sand, but that made no difference to his first wife’s image. She glowed with unseen sunlight, a little bubble of silver and gold that cloaked her torso and flowed like St. Elmo’s fire out along the arm that she pointed toward the horizon.

  “What do you want?” he asked tiredly. These visions of her had been coming more often lately. Originally devised by Alexander Bradley and Don Kayman, they were supposed to push buttons of recognition and desire that he no longer had. If Roger could reprogram her out of the backpack computer, he would. But Dorrie’s face and voice were ingrained in his survival mechanisms at the deepest levels. He would probably make himself blind and deaf if he tried to eradicate her now.

  “Go to Tharsis Montes,” she ordered in that same sweet voice.

  “Why?”

  “Go to Tharsis Montes.”

  “I do need a reason, Dorrie. After all, you’re not real.”

  “Go, Roger.”

  “Is something wrong with my—?”

  “Run, Roger.”

  Before he could frame any more questions, his feet had stopped plodding across the uneven surface. They were poised for flight, his knees bent. What the hell was going on? He felt his body turning, aligning with an internal radio-imaging compass that had already picked out Tharsis Montes. It lay over the horizon, at the end of Dorrie’s arm.

  “Run, Roger!”

  And before he could stop himself, his feet were churning, his legs scissoring, his body hurdling over the valley’s scattered rocks, his toes touching the ground only at ten-meter intervals, and then leaving only the shallowest of pockmarks in the sand. His mechanical legs and body were moving of their own accord. Dorrie had vanished. And Roger Torraway, a mere wisp of program operating within a program, was suddenly very much alone.

  Outside Airlock Control, June 20

  Demeter ran through the tunnels of Tharsis Montes, knowing secretly that she had nowhere to go. If she went down, going deeper into the complex, then eventually she would come to dead ends and cul-de-sacs, dark places where she could be cornered, captured, and killed. While, if she went up, climbing toward the domes and airlocks on the surface, her only choices were to surrender or don a pressure suit and escape to the planet’s surface outside. That would merely be a delaying tactic, she knew, circumscribed by the air supply in the suit’s tanks. In the end, she would have to surrender or suffocate.

  But as Demeter ran, these thoughts formed only a background patina, a web of possible futures, to a brain that coiled and snared itself on blossoming waves of understanding about the past. Demeter was reliving the last two years in a kaleidoscope of new interpretations.

  Fiction: Demeter had decided to visit Mars for a change of scene, in order to recuperate from a bizarre accident in the beauty parlor.

  Fact: It was never any kind of accident. The grid’s nexus on Earth had arranged for those scissors to slip as surely—she understood it all now!—as the grid had jimmied those early computer projections calling for the Cyborg program that had created Roger Torraway.

  And since her “accident,” with the introduction of a bunch of neurochips and biologicals into her skull, how many of Demeter’s personal decisions had been made for her? Certainly she had never in the past two years been conscious of a wee, small voice whispering “Eat your vegetables,” “Study covert diplomacy,” “Learn martial arts,” and finally “Go to Mars.” But that didn’t mean a chip-sized ar
tificial intelligence hadn’t been monitoring her speech and visual inputs, hitting this neuron or that with near-random jolts of electricity, creating its own little compulsions.

  The scenario suddenly explained why she so consistently used the hotel’s terminal in interrogation mode—and why she so often fell asleep doing it. Of course, the machine could sieve her memories for anything she had seen and heard during the day; whatever the implanted intelligence hadn’t understood, she herself would articulate for the grid’s waiting ear.

  Fiction: The Texahoma Martian Development Corporation, learning about her planned vacation, had recruited her for a little on-site survey work, a spy mission against the North Zealanders, because she was Alvin Bertrand Coghlan’s granddaughter and therefore politically reliable.

  Fact: The North Zealanders weren’t pursuing any development on Mars that couldn’t be studied better from Earth. So why would the TMDC have paid to send her up here in the first place? Because a computer had told them the trip was necessary, of course. And after the name of Demeter Coghlan—whose brains were all nicely fixed up and ready to roll—popped out of the corporation’s strategic projections, somebody had remembered that she was Alvin Bertrand’s nearest and dearest. That didn’t hurt matters in the slightest, of course. And Demeter had always evaluated well in computerized aptitude tests, of course.

  But then, since the North Zealanders weren’t doing anything really worth observing up here, why had they sent an entire delegation to negotiate with a putative Martian government about it? The answer to that one was easy, too: Harry Orthis, the N-ZED chief counselor, had suffered a scuba-lung accident in order to have his own brains fixed. He was the grid’s backup for Demeter. Sun Il Suk, with his electronic hormone pump, was another standby in case she failed.

  Failed at what, though?

  Well, wasn’t it obvious?

  Fiction: Demeter had met Lole Mitsuno and Ellen Sorbel by accident, because they just happened to be friends of Jory’s.

  Fact: Jory was another of the grid’s tools, under some kind of direct telepathic control. Anyone could figure that out, and apparently Ellen and Lole already had.

  The computer network had been using Jory to get close to them because it suspected whatever they were doing in that secret room would harm the grid and its long-range plans. When Jory struck out—because the rebel group would naturally suspect a Creole and put buffers around him—the computers had created a totally plausible person to meet and fall in with the rebel leaders. She would be an Earth casual, a socially acceptable rich girl, a junior-grade spy who was already launched at a false target, the Valles development. Maybe, the grid must have thought, Ellen and Lole could be lulled into showing her what they were doing.

  Demeter’s proof for this scenario was in the way she had met Jory. She had asked for—or been under compulsion to seek?—a guide to the Valles Marineris workings, and the grid had sent her that particular Creole.

  A second proof was in the way the machines had covered for her at Wa Lixin’s office, during her mandatory physical examination on arrival. The grid knew the rebels were already suspicious of anyone with biomechanical aids, so it had created a phony image of her head on the examining table.

  Oh, it was so neat!

  The deviousness of the plan took Demeter’s breath away. With two whole worlds, their entire human populations, and every voice-and-data channel to play with, the grid could write almost any script it wanted. It might have a hundred, a thousand, a million human puppets simultaneously in development, to fit every conceivable consequence of its past and future actions. The Earth nexus probably didn’t actually monkey with the cyber in the Travis County Clerk’s office that had matched her mother’s genotype against her father’s during the state-required blood tests, but it must certainly have picked up a few ideas from the exchange. Then the rest of Demeter’s life could have easily been redirected through a sequence of file adjustments and crossed wires in various data transfers. Like that course in conversational Russian she took in the eighth grade, because of a computer glitch…

  And damn it! Demeter Coghlan, who didn’t like to even talk about sex in front of the machines, had been maneuvered into bed—not once, but twice—by them. Or had the distrust she felt for cybers also been preprogrammed into her brain? That would make sense, of course: it was the ultimate cover for a supposedly clean operative.

  Suddenly, nothing she did or said or thought was her own.

  Everything was potentially a whisper from the wires in her head.

  Demeter understood, finally, that she needed help. She had to find someone who was independent of all this, who stood outside the grid and its skewed information sources, who could make his own decisions…Roger Torraway.

  Or was his name, coming into her mind right then, just another electronic compulsion?

  No way to tell.

  When instinct won’t work, try intellect.

  The Cyborg and all his kind might be the product of decades-old computer projections, but they had been roaming the deserts of Mars at will ever since. It was well known, among Cyborg watchers, that older models like Torraway could withhold radio communication with the grid—from their end. And he was, in the exchange’s very words, “not a token holder on this network.” All of this implied he was clean of interference. And he would have an economic interest in joining her side in any war against the machines: she had put him on retainer.

  But how could Demeter get in touch with Torraway?

  At the moment, she was passing one of the ubiquitous public terminals set into the corridor wall. Was it that simple? Just call him?

  But then the grid would know where she was.

  It did anyway, tracking the electromagnetic noise coming from the circuits inside her skull. She had no secrets anymore, did she?

  Demeter studied and rejected the menu of options. “Terminal, patch me through to Roger Torraway, wherever he is, whatever he’s doing. We have to talk.”

  “Right away, Miz Coghlan.”

  That readiness was odd now, wasn’t it? Before, when she’d asked…

  “Demeter?” The voice was flat and mechanical, with no accent on any syllable. A Cyborg voice, for sure. The screen, however, never did resolve into an image of her interlocutor, not even from stock pixels. Nothing in the archive to display, and no lens on site this time to take any kind of image. Instead, the menu flicked off after a few seconds and displayed a revolving moiré pattern. It was almost hypnotic.

  “Colonel Torraway? I’m in trouble. I need your help.”

  “What has happened?”

  “I’ve been mixed up with a group of people who are…Well, they’re convinced the grid has dropped a digit and is plotting against humanity. Now they think I’m some kind of spy for the machines—”

  “Why would they believe that?”

  “Because of some chips inside my head, medical prosthetics, that they think have got me under computer control.”

  “And are you?” He sounded curious. “Under computer control?”

  “Christ, I don’t know!” Demeter wailed. “I mean, how could I?”

  “Too true.”

  “You’re the only person I know who can mediate between them and the machines. The humans respect you, and the cybers can’t touch you…not really.”

  Silence on his end.

  That was disquieting.

  “And you’re strong, Colonel. You can protect me, physically, from whatever it is they have planned for me.”

  “The humans, you mean.”

  “Yes. They’ve already killed one supposed spy—the Creole, Jory den Ostreicher.”

  “Killed him? How?”

  “They cut his head open and took out parts of his brain—the electronic parts. I’m afraid they want to do the same thing to me, with my prosthetics. I’m scared, Colonel Torraway.”

  “I don’t know…” Cold winds seemed to whistle through the transmitted voice. “None of this appears to be Cyborg business.”

&
nbsp; “You’re human, too, at least in part,” she pleaded. “Don’t ever forget that.”

  “Over the years,” he continued, “the colonists have grown to resent any intrusion in their affairs from the company of Cyborgs. Why, the last time we—”

  Suddenly, Demeter was growing tired and angry with all his dithering. “We have a deal, Colonel!” she snapped. “Your help, in return for funds drawn on the Double Eagle Bank of Austin, Texas. Name your price, convertible into any currency. I’ll pay it.”

  More silence.

  “Very well, Demeter,” he said at last. “It has been years since I visited the tunnels, and I can’t guarantee my presence will have any effect on this generation of humans.”

  “Just help me, Colonel. Where are you now?”

  “Actually, within a few hundred yards of Tharsis Montes. Near the main airlock facility.”

  “Great! Now—uh—can you let yourself in?”

  A hard, ratcheting sound came through the terminal. It might have been a cynical chuckle. “Do you have socket wrenches in your fingertips?”

  “Okay, but don’t start a leak or something. I’m right outside there.”

  “Understood. Torraway out.”

  The terminal’s moiré pattern folded in on itself, showing the menu display again. Demeter turned away from the wall unit.

  “Demeter!”

  Lole Mitsuno was charging up the ramp toward her.

  She looked around for someplace to run, but his legs were a lot longer than hers.

  Airlock Control. June 20

  Lole caught sight of Demeter as he was coming up the ramp near the main airlock. Mitsuno was moderately proud of himself, having figured it out as the only logical destination she could make for, even in her present disturbed state of mind. There she could steal a walker and travel overland to one of the other Martian tunnel communities. Any other course would be foolish, leading her to almost immediate capture.

  “Demeter!” he called and picked up his pace.

  She turned, as if to run, then paused.

  In a moment he was standing in front of her, pinning her against the rock wall, bracketing her upper arms in either hand to block another escape, and keeping mindful of where his groin was in relation to her knees.