The Dark Side

by Anthony O'Neill

  He pushes against the LRV just enough to pull himself loose. Scrabbling on the beads, he forces himself to his feet. He gingerly rolls the vehicle upright—it bounces on its tires. Fearing the worst, he bends in for a closer inspection, but notwithstanding some buckling to the central chassis and a crumpled front fender, the vehicle doesn’t look to have sustained any serious damage. Plaisance gathers up his tools, puts them back in their bolted-down box, then wriggles back into the driver’s seat. He releases the brake, pulls tentatively on the hand controller, and reverses. He pushes the stick the other way, and it moves forward. The vehicle is not as smooth as it was, but it was never very smooth in the first place. It’s operating, though. Like him, it’s a survivor. Plaisance feels more affection for it than ever.

  He drives cautiously back to the point where he lost control, trying to pick up a hint of the droid’s trail. But something suddenly doesn’t feel quite right. He’s colder than normal. Lightheaded. And he can hear his own breathing in his ears. It’s becoming louder and louder—thunderous. And the condensation has faded from his faceplate.

  Then he understands. There’s been a breach in his spacesuit. The outer layers must have torn open. So he stops. He searches frantically around his body for a tear. And there it is—at his left elbow, a rip about three centimeters long. It’s sucking the oxygen out of the suit. It’s making him depressurize. If unchecked, he’ll suffer swift vascular and neural damage. Already his ears have popped. And he feels like he’s inhaling ice water.

  Again, Plaisance forces himself not to panic. He waits until the LRV slides to a complete halt and then springs off, holding his breath. He unlocks the first-aid kit. He rips a neopolymer safety patch from its packet and fits it carefully over the tear, molding it into shape. With an adhesive spray he blasts a protective resin over that. And it’s enough—it plugs the leak.

  Plaisance waits a few seconds before testing the air. He fills his failing lungs. He exhales. It feels normal. But there’s another problem now. When he checks his wrist gauges he finds that his oxygen supply has dropped from three hours to thirty-two minutes. He has to get to a supply cache immediately. Even though he’s not even sure where he is, let alone the caches.

  Still he doesn’t panic. He sits calmly back in place on the LRV. He turns the vehicle and takes off. And once again, after a few worrisome judders, he picks up speed. Once again the LRV jolts and jumps and threatens to spin out of control. But soon he’s leaving behind the glass sea. He’s flashing across an outer rim of glass beads. Then the beads are thinning. Then there are no beads at all. And finally, on the curving horizon, he sees a chain-link fence. He has sixteen minutes of oxygen left. Perhaps twenty minutes before he blacks out.

  He cuts a hole in the wire but in passing through almost scores another gash in his suit. And now he has a new decision to make. Left or right? The cache to the east will be closer, he suspects, but that will also lead him closer to—and possibly across—the day-night terminator.

  He flicks a toggle to check the vehicle’s headlamps. One set is busted. The other is shining dimly. It will have to do.

  He takes off, running parallel to the fence, skimming across the regolith. The sun, directly behind him, makes a shadowless blur of the terrain ahead. But he’s convinced he can make it. Soon there will be no sunlight anyway. He’s heading into the true dark side.

  Then he sees it. The harbinger of the day-night terminator—a grey and golden cloud shimmering above the horizon. It’s particles of surface dust, charged by the temperature plunge, levitating high in the air above the frontier of the lunar night. It doesn’t happen everywhere on the Moon, and it doesn’t happen at every sunset—the conditions have to be just right—but when it does, to those unfamiliar with it, it’s a phenomenon as surreal as a terrestrial aurora.

  Plaisance, however, is in no mood to be admiring. With two minutes of oxygen remaining in his suit he finds a crack in the crater wall. He hurtles down the other side with the dust glowing above. And finally he sees the terminator: not exactly a regular line, but a visible demarcation between the worlds of light and darkness, like a flood of black ink oozing across the lunar surface. And Plaisance, with thirty seconds of oxygen left, is plunging straight into it. He starts muttering a prayer.

  “Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce; le Seigneur est avec vous . . .”

  He’s trying not to breathe. The last feeble rays of the sun slip behind the horizon and the Milky Way lights up like someone has thumped a switch. And the cold hits him like an explosion.

  “Vous êtes bénie entre toutes les femmes, et Jésus, le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni . . .”

  The thermostat in his spacesuit kicks in. Coils within the innermost layers try to compensate, but Plaisance can hear the tensing of ceramic, the contraction of steel. There’s an icy sensation in his bones that’s positively painful—he wonders grimly if it might kill his tumors before it kills him. But now his main concern is finding a north-south maintenance path. The path’s beacons, however, are not operating. The darkness is absolute. The LRV’s headlamp beams are dim. And he literally has no oxygen left.

  He plunges deeper into the ink. It seems endless. And just when he starts to despair—when he actually wonders if it might be best to just surrender—his headlights caress an embankment, a hard-packed trail. The maintenance road. It’s a miracle.

  Plaisance steers up onto the road and heads north, confident now that he’ll soon reach a cache. But he can’t be sure on which side the cache will be, and with only one busted headlamp he has to pray he doesn’t miss it. But he is no longer praying aloud—he is muttering only in his head.

  Sainte Marie, Mère de Dieu, priez pour nous, pauvres pécheurs . . .

  Now he’s starting to see stars. Not in the sky—though there are millions of them—but in his head. He’s getting confused. And sleepy. The urge to surrender is almost overwhelming. He sucks involuntarily at foul, stuffy air. And darkness floods over his vision again.

  He’s driving with his eyes closed. Not even the jolts are wakening him. Life is fleeing from his limbs; the last flashes of electricity are fading from his synapses. His hand loosens on the hand controller. The LRV slows to a halt.

  Maintenant et à l’heure de notre mort. Amen . . .

  Á l’heure de notre mort. Amen . . .

  Amen . . .

  Amen . . .

  AMEN.

  Plaisance’s eyes snap open. For a few seconds he sees nothing. But then his vision clears long enough for him to make out a mound of lunar brick. It’s the size of a postbox and studded with reflectors. It’s to the left of the road, roughly six meters away, with the LRV’s headlamp shining directly at it. If it had been just a few feet to either side, it would have been completely invisible.

  It’s another miracle. Plaisance wrenches himself from his seat. He lurches for the cache. He finds a knob, twists it, and opens a door. He stands aside to let the headlamps illuminate the contents.

  Water canisters. Dehydrated food. Energy bars. A recharging point. And emergency oxygen packs—plenty of them.

  Plaisance grapples for one of these packs. It’s round and has an actuator, a regulator, and a locking mechanism. It’s normally a delicate procedure, attaching it to a life-support system, but Plaisance hasn’t got time for delicacy. He tears it open with his gloved hands, flips open the top of his PLSS, then slams the pack into place. He checks the gauges in his wrist screen. He opens the valve. And oxygen—oxygène!—floods into his helmet.

  He gasps at it, feels it gushing into his crumbling lungs. His head pounds, the stars fizzle and fade, his faceplate fogs. But there’s no time for relief. If he doesn’t get back into the sunlight quickly the cold alone might kill him.

  So he takes another two oxygen packs from the cache—leaving enough, even now, for someone else in an emergency—and gets back into the LRV. He swings back down the maintenance road and then follows his own tracks west. He bounces, judders, can barely see what’s in front of h
im. The dust clouds curl and shimmer like microscopic insects.

  And now he can see daylight ahead. He exults, he feels drunk on oxygen. He will soon be safe. He’s done it. But there’s a sobering question to be answered, and he answers it without hesitation. Yes, he will continue the hunt. With only four hours of emergency oxygen and three hours of battery supply. On a severely damaged LRV. He will find the droid’s trail again, and he will follow it to the limits of his supply. Even if that means he has to make another life-or-death dash for an emergency cache when the time comes.

  He passes through the crater rim and crosses into day, into a world where the sun is a luminous fingernail on the horizon. Where the smallest rocks have shadows three meters long, where boulders have shadows twenty meters long, and where men have shadows that seem endless. Shadows that swallow him. Shadows that block out the sun.

  Plaisance wrenches back on the hand controller. He brakes the LRV. And stares, barely believing it.

  A figure, lit up by the LRV’s one working headlamp, is standing directly in his path. Black-suited, black-haired, black-tied, and black-eyed. It’s the demon—Plaisance knows it immediately—and it’s smiling at him.

  The two of them stare at each other for ten seconds, with glittering dust swirling above. Then Plaisance swings off the LRV and reaches for his weapon.

  But the demon is already bounding toward him.

  22

  THE BRASS ESCORT VEHICLE—plated, predictably, in brass—has a stylish teak interior and luxurious distressed-leather seats. Leonardo Grey has his hands fixed on the steering wheel and appears genuinely to be driving: Justus guesses the route hasn’t been loaded into the car’s memory for security reasons. They’ve already left behind the Sin Rim and now they’re moving at a measured pace across the vast floor of Störmer Crater. The road surface, as smooth as a president’s driveway, winds at a respectful distance around the radio dishes and stilt-mounted modules.

  “What’s that there?” Justus asks.

  They’re passing what looks like a construction site: cranes, robot excavators, pre-cut blocks of lunar cement.

  Leonardo Grey doesn’t even turn. “That’s the new Purgatory Penitentiary, sir.”

  “What happened to the old one?”

  “The original building, I understand, was regarded by some as inadequate.”

  “Yeah?” Justus is well aware of the reports—first published in a best-selling exposé, Purgatory Unbound—that Fletcher Brass secretly allowed certain member states of the United Nations Security Council to export prisoners to Purgatory for extraordinary rendition. This allowed them to avoid charges of state-sanctioned torture—the status of Purgatory being perpetually “under negotiation”—and moreover kept the whole dirty business as far away from prying eyes as possible. For Brass, it greatly boosted the coffers of his treasury—partly financing his space expeditions, the book claimed—and allowed him, by dint of Security Council obstructionism, to avoid any serious investigation of Purgatory’s own human rights abuses. So Justus now wonders if the old penitentiary was destroyed as part of a cleanup operation.

  “By some?” he asks.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?”

  “You said the old penitentiary was regarded as inadequate ‘by some.’ May I ask whom?”

  Is it Justus’s imagination, or does Grey seem to stiffen? “I believe the new penitentiary is a special project of Ms. QT Brass, sir.”

  “In her role as secretary of law enforcement?”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “But she’s only held that title for a few months. And the place looks like it’s nearing completion.”

  “The penitentiary, as I understand it, is built into an existing but long-vacant premises, sir.”

  Something tweaks in Justus’s mind. “It wasn’t the habitat of that nature cult, by any chance? The Leafists?”

  “I believe it was, sir.”

  “Yeah?” Justus takes one last glance at it as it slides by. “So they’re building a penitentiary into a death scene.”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  “And in a hurry too.”

  “It seems so, sir.”

  Justus thinks about it some more. “But why is a new penitentiary necessary? Seeing there’s already a couple of prisons in Sin?”

  “This one is maximum security, sir.”

  “For the worst of the worst, is it?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “And who is it meant to hold, exactly?”

  “I do not know that, sir.”

  Justus knows that many of the world’s most wanted criminals reside in hacienda-style habitats dotted around the surface of Störmer Crater. If Purgatory Unbound is correct, the list includes the African general who ordered the massacre of ten thousand civilians; the Indian real estate baron who poisoned the water supply of a troublesome village; the Russian oligarch who blew up a plane full of problematic political activists; the German media baron who left behind a trail of murdered escort girls; and the U.S. secretary of defense responsible for authorizing false-flag operations that led to two catastrophic wars. If QT Brass genuinely plans to clean up the image of Purgatory, Justus muses, she could start by incarcerating those five.

  “Do you know QT Brass well?” he asks Grey.

  “She is the daughter of Fletcher Brass.”

  “Yes, but do you have any personal dealings with her?”

  “I am required to pass messages between Mr. Brass and his daughter occasionally.”

  “What sort of messages?”

  “There are many different types of message, sir. I am not always availed of their contents.”

  “Then how would you describe the relationship between Fletcher Brass and QT?”

  “It is of singular complexity.”

  “Singular complexity?” Justus says. “You mean to say that Fletcher Brass doesn’t trust his own daughter, is that it?”

  “I did not say that, sir.”

  “Well, has Fletcher Brass given any indication that he’s worried about his daughter’s agenda?”

  “If he is concealing his worries, sir, he is an even better actor than his impersonator.”

  Justus considers that a very unrobotic response. He wonders if Grey is smarter than he lets on. Or if he’s been groomed, like the actor. Overnight he was unable to shake off the possibility that an android planted the bomb in the Goat House. It would certainly account for the failure of Forensics to detect any foreign DNA. And Grey has already admitted to having unlimited access to Sin. Of course, it doesn’t have to be Grey himself. It could be any robot. Though it’s still unlikely, assuming the droid knew what it was doing, and assuming the laws of robotics apply in Purgatory.

  He says, “After you left last night I checked online for information about Project Daedalus. But I couldn’t find a thing.”

  “Daedalus was a secret project, sir.”

  “Why secret?”

  “Originally Mr. Brass intended to create a new line of androids dedicated to personal security. We were to be bodyguards, sir.”

  “All of you?”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “But that doesn’t explain why it was a secret. I’ve seen android bodyguards before. They’re not always popular, but they’re not secret.”

  Grey steers the vehicle around a bend. “It was Mr. Brass’s belief that truly effective android bodyguards would not be able to perform their duties without certain modifications, sir.”

  “Modifications to the system processes?”

  “To the fundamental AI protocols, sir.”

  Justus frowns. “You mean you were programmed to kill?”

  “That is not how I would phrase it, sir.”

  “Then how would you phrase it?”

  “In certain circumstances, there was nothing inhibiting us from exercising homicidal force.”

  It’s legalese, Justus thinks—it could mean anything. “And have you, in fact, killed?” he asks.

  “I
have not, sir.”

  “Because you were never in ‘the right circumstances’?”

  “Because at the last minute, Mr. Brass decided it was a bad idea to modify the protocols. He was made aware of the many controversies surrounding similar cases on Earth.”

  “And you were hardwired with all the standard inhibitors?”

  “With everything listed in the UNRC treaty, sir.” He means the United Nations Robotics Commission.

  “So you can’t kill?”

  “I cannot, sir.”

  “And the same goes for all your brothers—the other Leonardos—as well?”

  “That too is correct. Leonardo Black retains his exceptional strength, but otherwise we are no different from the average android.”

  Justus looks out the window for a moment. A large supply caravan is out there, making snail-like progress around the radar modules. But he barely notices it.

  “Where were you put together, may I ask?”

  “If you mean assembled, sir, it was at the Brass Robotics Laboratory at Saint Helena.”

  “Saint Helena? The island in the Atlantic?”

  “The robotics lab in Seidel Crater, sir.”

  “And Seidel Crater is where, exactly?”

  “In the southern hemisphere.”

  “The lab’s called Saint Helena because it’s so remote, I assume?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “And why were you constructed there, of all places?”

  “By law, experimental robotics assembly must be conducted in isolated environments.”

  “So if you break loose you won’t take over the world?”

  “Or the Moon, sir.”

  Justus nods. “Well, what about those other Leonardos you mentioned—where are they now?”

  “Leonardo Brown has been assigned to QT Brass. Leonardo White has passed away.”

  “Passed away?”

  “He was used for spare parts, sir—I myself carry some of him inside me.”

  “Very moving,” says Justus. “And Leonardo Black?”

  “Leonardo Black is a bodyguard of Mr. Brass’s.”

  “His ‘exceptional strength’ must come in handy, then?”