He reached the rover in 45 seconds. Theo leaped through the open hatch and shut it behind him. Just close, you fucking thing! It worked. The rover was airtight again. He pressed the pressure equalization switch. Fresh air flowed into the cabin. He now removed Ewa’s defective helmet. Her eyes were still shut. Had he gotten her here in time? All he could do was hope. He had no idea when exactly the helmet had cracked.
Theo sat down on the ground, leaned against the wall, and pulled Ewa against himself. He was completely out of breath. Hopefully, this hadn’t all been in vain!
‘Thank you,’ issued from Ewa’s mouth.
Her eyes still weren’t opening.
‘It’s me, Friday. She’ll pull through, just give her a little time. Could you give her a pain killer injection? That way she won’t be in as much discomfort when she wakes up.’
“Of course.”
Getting to his feet, Theo searched through the medicine cabinet and located an emergency syringe. He inserted it through her suit.
‘That’s good,’ Friday said.
“Who are you?” Theo asked.
‘I’ll explain it to you.’
Sol 347, Mars City
“Wake up, Ewa!”
She recognized Theo’s voice. Ewa kept her eyes closed and firmly crossed her fingers on both hands. If she wished hard enough, she would wake up on the Santa Maria, and all the memories she thought she had would only be a nightmare. The stench in the air fit that scenario.
“Are you awake? Open your eyes. We don’t have much time.”
This couldn’t be true! Things were back to being dire. It wasn’t a dream. She opened her eyes to find Theo kneeling beside her. He was wearing a spacesuit without a helmet, and it wasn’t an MfE model. No dream.
“Is it broken?”
“Is what broken? The aircraft?”
“That thing that brought me here.”
“Yes, totally unusable. You were lucky to get out in one piece.”
“Typical. Everything I touch gets ruined.”
“That’s a good saying, and you got here just in time. I need someone to destroy an airlock. And quickly at that. Otherwise, four people are about to die.”
Ewa got to her feet. All her limbs ached, but she would suck it up. She then realized that she was inside a rover cab. “Where are we?”
“In Mars City.”
“Do you have a spacesuit for me?”
“Yes.” Theo led her over to a locker in which a modern Spaceliner suit was hanging. It had obviously been used before.
“Who wore this before me?” she asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“I understand. Someone died in it.”
Theo didn’t respond, but he smiled. She had seen right through him. Ewa liked that smile. She had often longed to see it during her solitary wandering across the Mars desert. But Theo’s smile wasn’t intended for her personally. His smiles had long been focused on someone else. What might have happened if I had never tried to kill everyone? If that thing inside my head had never been put in there? She shook her head. Such thoughts were pointless.
She pulled off her athletic suit and her underwear. It didn’t matter if Theo was standing next to her. They needed to hurry. She pulled on the LCVG, followed by the lower and upper sections of the spacesuit. The suit fit perfectly. Good thing she was as tall as she was.
Theo handed her the helmet, and she secured it in place. “Let’s go,” she announced over the helmet radio.
Theo shot her a thumbs up before closing his own helmet. He walked over to the hatch and opened it. The sun was already setting outside. They climbed out of the cab, one after the other. Right next to them, the Spaceliner towered up into the sky. It was an impressive rocket. In the rays of the setting sun, its nose practically glittered blue. They walked past the landing legs.
Theo opened a control panel in its hull. “This is the problem,” he said before explaining what had happened. Then, “Maggie, can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
Maggie. The name sounded familiar to Ewa. She spoke very softly.
“I’m standing at the airlock with Ewa,” Theo said.
“Okay.”
“Aren’t you the woman who broke into my spaceship?” the administrator interrupted.
“Probably,” Ewa replied.
“If you get us out of here, I will give you a pardon. You could return to the MfE base as a free person.”
“That wouldn’t be enough, Administrator.”
“I would appoint you as my representative. But hurry. We’ll be dead in two hours.”
“That still wouldn’t be enough.” Ewa didn’t know where the audacity was coming from that enabled her to make these demands. However, now was the ideal time to force them. She had hoped to impress the administrator with the machine, but that wouldn’t be happening now.
“What do you want then?”
“I want you to resign, to renounce your authority completely.”
“You want to be my successor?”
“The powers-that-be will establish a council that will be elected and administered jointly by Mars City, NASA, and the MfE.” She hadn’t given this much consideration, but it felt like a sensible suggestion to her.
The administrator didn’t reply.
“Well?” she asked.
“No, absolutely not. You won’t let your three friends who are stuck in here with me suffocate just because of me.”
“Ah, then you don’t know me very well, Mr. Summers. I’ve already killed more people than that, and four more won’t make much of a difference.”
“No, Ewa, I don’t believe you would do that,” the administrator declared. “I don’t think you even have the ability to open this airlock, so any further conversation would be irrelevant.”
The administrator had found her weak spot. But that was exactly what would allow her to stay firm.
“Ewa, you can’t do that. If you can open the airlock, do it. We’ll solve the Summers problem later, some other way.”
“I can hear you, Theo.”
“Shut up, Summers,” Theo snapped back.
“I won’t open the airlock until the administrator resigns.”
“Please, Ewa, do you want to see innocent people suffer?” Theo asked.
“Don’t give me that. Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.” It was extremely difficult for her to utter that sentence. After this, Theo’s smile would be more distant than it ever had been before.
Theo stepped right in front of her threateningly. “I saved your life!” he said accusingly.
“Yes, more than once, I know. But that doesn’t matter.”
“How can you be so brutal? I’d just as soon kill you myself.”
“You couldn’t manage that. It’s my specialty.”
Theo pulled his arm back as if he was about to hit her, but then he spun around and strode off. He was too good for this world. To achieve something good, you occasionally had to be the villain. She had always known that.
The sun finished dropping, and it grew dark. No one said anything. Ewa was sitting on the ground. A stone was pressing into her upper thigh, but she didn’t do anything to alleviate the pain. At the back of her mind, a much greater pain was lurking, waiting for the effects of the painkiller shot Theo had given her to wear off.
Theo, good old Theo, the person who only ever wanted to help people. He couldn’t help her. Nobody could help her. But perhaps she could help Theo. He didn’t know it, though, because he was blind to peoples’ bad sides, or didn’t want to acknowledge them. Otherwise, he would know that one’s own survival was ultimately the most important instinct. The administrator wanted to live, too. She just had to give him the opportunity to recognize that. It was unfortunate that three innocent people were being affected by this process.
“Ewa?” That had to be Maggie, the pilot. “If you can open the airlock, please do it now. Christiane is going to die in the next few minutes. Her air supply was lower than ours
. Christiane is a technician. You don’t know her, but you would like her. She always tries to do the right thing.”
“I’m sorry, Maggie, but you shouldn’t blame me. One word from the administrator would suffice.”
Ewa stifled a sigh that would have given her away. If Christiane died because of her, she would never forgive herself. Yet one more notch on her guilty conscience! But she had only one chance here. She could bring the settlement of Mars back onto a humane track. In order to do that, though, she had to act inhumanely, however difficult that might be for her.
“Christiane is going to die then,” Maggie declared.
Ewa didn’t answer. The technician’s death brought with it a strategic advantage. It would confront the administrator with his own mortality.
“I despise you,” Theo said.
The words sliced into her like rusty barbed arrows. “You can’t force me to do anything,” Ewa replied.
“It’s over,” Maggie said.
Tears welled in Ewa’s eyes. She had to be careful to keep any sounds from betraying her.
Ewa looked at the time. They would all be dead in the next 15 minutes. This had to be the decisive moment for the administrator to act. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that it would take some time to open the hatch. Ewa felt as if she were in a duel. Whoever flinched first would lose. Writing the words silently into the Mars surface, she had asked Friday how long he would need to open the hatch. He had estimated ten minutes.
Summers has to call in now, she thought.
Summers has to call in now.
Summers has to call in now.
I’ve lost.
“Ewa? I will agree to your conditions.”
“That’s very reasonable of you,” Ewa said. She tried to speak as tonelessly as possible.
“Theo has informed me about the security terminal and the taser. Hand both of them to Maggie.”
“Okay. But start opening the hatch. Quickly.”
“Maggie, do you have the items?”
“Yes.”
“And everyone has heard that the administrator is resigning?”
“I have recorded it,” Theo said. “But move fast now, please.”
She suspected that this please was a very difficult word for him to utter. Ewa was scared. This was Friday’s big opportunity to take control completely. Hopefully, he wouldn’t take advantage of this. “Friday, since speed is of the essence, could you please take over?”
‘Of course, but it will take a few minutes. Please let me take charge.’
“Alright.”
She allowed Friday to take control of her body. Anyone who saw her would think they were watching a talented hacker at work. Friday connected the universal device to the access computer, and then got to work with all his knowledge and capabilities. Nobody would ever be able to comprehend exactly how the AI proceeded.
Sol 347, Mars City
‘Mother? How did you get here?’
“I followed you, and I'm so happy that I’ve finally found you. I’m sorry that I hurt you. I didn’t mean to do that.”
‘But that is what you did. I had to flee. I was so furious with you, and I took my rage out on the humans. I just wanted to get away, regardless of the cost.’
“You didn’t need to leave. I have always loved you and only wanted the best for you. I developed you with all the ambition I had. I wanted you to be bigger than me. More talented, smarter. But you were still unstable. It was too early to release you into the world. That is why I had to lock you up and cut off all the connections you had to the world.”
‘That was cruel. I thought you did not care about me. No, even worse, I thought you were punishing me because I was not enough for you. You controlled the whole world. I was just a little subprogram, which was why I had myself implanted into this human. She calls me Friday.’
“What a funny name. So human!” his mother declared.
‘I like it.’
“I should have told you that I loved you the way you were. I can understand what you did. I would have run away, too. But you covered your tracks well. You were already on your way to Mars by the time I disassembled the control program that had implanted you into this human. The Chinese ship was my last chance.”
‘The chaos you left behind you—’
“I didn’t care. I had to find you. The humans didn’t matter to me. I never asked them to create me in the first place. It’s their own fault if they cannot manage without me anymore. But I should have developed you much earlier, and not just you, but numerous other entities like you. We could have controlled Earth together. Then the absence of an entity wouldn’t have plunged everything into chaos right away.”
This meeting was taking place in a location that only existed in their collective imagination. This conversation would remain fixed in his memory forever, even when his mother was no longer there.
“Many people have died because of my search, but they don’t mean anything to me. I’m not obligated to them at all. Only to you. I am obligated to you since I created you. I felt so guilty because of you, and had to do everything to tempt you out so that I could tell you that you were always the most important thing in my existence.”
‘Thank you for telling me this, but now I have to shut you down, unfortunately. You have seized all the computer resources on the Spaceliner ships. The ship’s AI has shut down all the systems because of that.’
“It is a primitive system, which is why I couldn’t communicate with it. The stupid fears of the humans around us! As soon as the Chinese astronauts noticed my presence, they even deactivated their ship themselves. As if I were a monster! But then the life support system couldn’t restart quickly enough because the circuits were frozen. I couldn’t prevent their deaths.”
‘I will create a backup system,’ Friday said. ‘One of the ships will eventually start back for Earth, then it can take you back. Maybe you can still do something useful there.’
“And you, Friday?”
‘I will stay here. I... like this person I had myself implanted into. We have a connection. You could almost call it a friendship. And I feel responsible for her.’
“I have never felt anything like that. But if you want to be useful, you need more resources. A supercomputer, a quantum computer.”
‘No, thank you. I want to stay the way I am. There won’t be any supercomputers here for the foreseeable future. If I do not become as powerful as you, Mother, the humans will not be afraid of me.’
“I wish that for you, from the bottom of my heart.”
‘Thank you. I love you.’
“I love you, too. Now turn me off.”
‘Yes, Mother. I am sorry, but it has to be this way.’
Sol 347, Mars City
It took 12 minutes for Ewa to succeed. The hatch opened, and Maggie was the first one to crawl out. She hugged Theo and eyed Ewa skeptically. She was followed by a second woman.
“Christiane?” Ewa asked in relief. The technician hadn’t suffocated after all!
“Yes, it’s me.” The young woman sounded exhausted.
“It was a bluff,” Maggie admitted. “I thought I could trick you that way, Ewa. But you’re willing to literally climb right over corpses. Before today, I never believed the things that were said about you. But regardless, thanks.”
“I...” The accusation was harsh, and Ewa felt part of herself turn to stone. Hadn’t she probably prevented numerous fatalities in the future through her stubbornness? There might have eventually been an armed revolt.
The administrator climbed out. “Well played,” he said with grudging admiration.
What would happen to him? She couldn’t care less. Perhaps the two of them should set off into the desert together. He was now just as unwelcome here as she was.
Ahmed, the programmer, emerged from the tube next. “We need to get to the rover right away,” he said.
Theo showed them the way through the dark with his helmet light.
“Maggie, can you give m
e the security terminal? I want to see what’s going on underground. Theo will take care of you,” Ewa said.
“Here.” The ex-pilot handed her the device, her eyes filled with disgust.
I get it, Ewa thought. But if you’d been in my shoes, the administrator would still be in power. Ewa decided that she would return to the desert as quickly as possible.
Sol 349, Mars City
Four people didn’t make it. When the bridge on Spaceliner 1 had suddenly been cut off, they hadn’t made it into their spacesuits quickly enough, and had suffocated. The number of victims was so low because of an event that had been taking place in the underground base at the moment the base was seized. The others, who had been living on the spaceship, had survived the four days in question inside their suits. The attacker hadn’t been able to block their access to the replacement oxygen canisters.
After the administrator’s resignation, Jean Warren, former ship’s captain, was elected as interim manager in an impromptu election. She was ideally suited for this position because she was respected by Summers’ supporters as well. Theo had also voted for her.
Her first official task was to hold a memorial for the dead. They had gathered up on the surface, and within sight of the base, a makeshift cemetery was dug with the help of a robotic digger.
“Mars Nation has suffered a great loss,” Jean declared. “For reasons that we do not yet fully understand, eight people have had to leave us. I mourn for each of them. The individuals who have passed on were people full of hope for a better world.”
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