by G M Steenrod
Trago still fumed over the idea.
“I put a stop to that. Fortunately, I had full directorial control.” Trago smiled. It had not been effortless. Trago had been an outsider. Even with a string of “victories,” he had difficulty with people accepting his authority on the project. It took several firings for him to establish that authority.
Cassie now knew the basic why of her mother's trip. The puzzle was alluring. Even Cassie, who was not a technician, found it intriguing. As a visual expert, she could see, within her mind, the implication of the Great's behavior radiating outward through the delicate social fabric of human society. Complications and unpredictable outcomes. All very delicate. Trago, and the rest of the team, had been right to keep it under wraps.
Trago leaned closely to Ada.
“I'm sorry about your mother, Baby Girl.” It was a momentary burst of empathy and guilt. Trago and Ada had ended their relationship before Trago had departed for Mars. They were from the generation that had seen the screens arise, and didn't have a belief that the screens could substitute for presence in a relationship. Both had left the possibility of resuming their relationship at a later date. Trago had looked forward to seeing Ada at a deep level. There were moments, sitting by himself and looking at the course of his life, when he felt responsible for compelling Ada to go to Mars.
Trago pulled a cigarillo from an antique, silver holder, and lit it up with a silver lighter. Colonization of Mars had boosted the genetic engineering of crops to new heights of skill in order to deal with the very limited, enclosed Martian settlements. A tobacco company, long since forced into other oral stimulants, saw a hidden opportunity in fundamentally redesigning tobacco using the genetic tech. The result was a patented tobacco, Spacer Blend, that produced minimal smoke, burned at very low heat, and had no appreciable tar. In enclosed space, no one was going to tolerate someone else's smoking normally. Spacer Blend did not significantly increase the risk of lung disease, and did very little to irritate the air ways of others. Others didn't find it reprehensible. While the stigma of smoking was still significant, Spacer Blend was firmly entrenched among about 25% the Martian population.
Trago was a shareholder, and had been a shareholder since he had picked up a cigarillo on Mars, very early in the tobacco's development.
Cassie saw it as a nervous gesture.
“Trago,” she said placing her hand on his knee, “You didn't make my mom do anything. Let me ask you...Is there any situation where Mom would not have gone to Mars, after she found out the Great was altering the data stream?”
Trago leaned back. He puffed and puffed. The scant smoke swirled about him and settled slowly down around his shoulders. He hadn't thought about it that way. “No,” he answered.
“I think, you wouldn't have been able to stop her if you had tried?”
It was true. Ada determined her own direction. He had asked her to assist him with Big Red originally. He may have also asked her to come to Mars, but she had been hinting at it. The trip, when set, had seemed inevitable and natural.
Trago nodded at Cassie's line of thought. “No. No I couldn't have stopped her.” Ada was financially able to do as she pleased, and was highly fit. That was all that space travel required. In the mythology surrounding the Black Corp, and Patrido, Patrido had single-handedly freed space. Even had she been poor and unfit, Ada had the friends to get to Mars based on her partner's sacrifice alone.
“No, there had been no stopping her,” Trago repeated again in almost a mumble. He could feel himself freed by the acknowledgment. Little Cassie had somewhere acquired a measure of surprising wisdom.
The two sat silently for a moment, enjoying the wine and the pleasure of one another's company.
“Cassie, did I help you? To find what you are looking for?” asked Trago.
Cassie wasn't sure. Ada's motivations had been another part of the puzzle. It wasn't clear how anyone would benefit from stopping her trip to Mars. All that it had done was delay the diagnosis of the Great. Trago had obviously developed a work-around to the problem it was having, as no one suspected the problem existed outside of the team working on it. All that Ada could have contributed was a deeper understanding of the problem, and maybe more processing power reclaimed from the solution.
It was possible that her space voyage was simply an opportunity for her to be killed without a trackable evidence trail. The immensity of space led to unsolved disappearances. The number of disappearances, as hobbyist ownership of space vessels grew, was steadily increasing. Killing her in space presented an anonymous, safe opportunity to eliminate her.
Cassie weighed her words, carefully.
“I think my Mom was murdered.” Trago's face flushed at that thought.
“Baby Girl, I've thought that more than once.” Trago had truthfully done so many times. It hadn't added up. The math of her death was wrong. Ada had privately hired an executive transport ship. It was unusual that she had taken that step, considering that on Earth she commonly used public transportation. The executive ships had expert pilots, and were well-maintained, high redundancy ships. They were designed to provide a high certainty of safe transport. To reinforce the value of that design, a ticket came with a guarantee of successful transit. The statistical likelihood of a failure using an executive ship was lower than that of military craft.
“My Mom thought she was murdered too.”
“She left you an Easter Egg?” Trago said, raising an eyebrow. Trago intuited that some form of messaging system had been concealed for Cassie.
Cassie nodded. “She believed it to be somehow linked to a project that she was working years prior to her death.”
“Why, though? Why would they kill her for a project she had just worked on? Had she started it back up?”
“No. Not that I know of. There was nothing in her notes that suggested she had returned to the project.”
“Wait! Baby Girl, are you working on the same thing?” asked Trago, the alarm palpable in his voice. He looked at her with great concern.
Cassie weighed her options. She was at a point where confiding in someone was necessary. She had come to see Trago in part to remove him from the list of those that had an interest in her mother's death. She had no reason to suspect Trago, but it was a necessary step. Cassie needed to see and experience Trago to comfortably remove him from suspicion.
“Yes, I am. I was moving in that direction before Mom's Easter Egg.”
Trago shifted nervously.
“It's alright. Mom put in a security protocol. It shuts down any form of digital probing. Mom's work was tapped long before those protections came online. It was the tapping that lead her to create the protections. I've also brought in a security firm to look for threats and intrusions.”
Cassie was able to bring on a security firm without raising any suspicion. The high monetary value of her projects had warranted it for years. When Kumar had suggested it, she had resisted. She didn't want to deal with the extra complication.
“So,” she continued, “no one but you knows that I'm moving ahead with Mom's work.”
Trago drummed a finger on the edge of his glass.
“I would like to know the details of what you are working on. Maybe there is some clue there. But...I don't think you should tell me. No, definitely don't tell me.”
Cassie sighed subtly. She reached out and affectionately grabbed the hand of her old friend. Not everyone had her mother's fire and boldness. Most dreamed a more timid life. Cassie had dreamed a more timid life until very recently. The gesture absolved him.
Trago grasped Cassie's hand in his own. “Come and spend a few days at the house with your Auntie. Let me cook for you and we'll talk about old times.”
Trago cooked an excellent fusion of Spanish and Mediterranean dishes.
“I would love that,” she replied.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Music for Earth
Earth had changed. Kumar stood in a small, domed screen room. Around him were views
of 15 different sites on Earth. They were a mix of outdoor scenes, a few theaters, a converted parking garage, and some sub-basements.
Like any Mars citizen (the term “martian” being considered a colonial slur), he would now and then pull up the vast network of public screens on Earth and “go touring.” The landscape of Mars was remarkably bland in comparison to that of Earth. Something deep in a human being craved the shores, skies, forests, and open cites of Earth. It was a dissatisfaction, an itch, honed by the millennium of evolution on Earth and encoded into the genes. Even children born on Mars, having never seen the lush vistas of the home planet, showed a fascination with the screens of it.
Earth's population had continued to shrink from the time of the Troubles. Kumar's generation, the most likely child-bearing generation, was responsible for the dramatic bursts of depopulation that were now occurring across Earth. The prior generations, his father's and his grandfather's, were passing key life expectancy thresh holds. With each thresh hold crossed, there was a sudden statistical spike in depopulation.
The result? Since people of the same generation lived together, and the screens and robotics had removed the younger generations need to be in the same physical proximity as family members, blocks of a city could go silent in a period of a few months. In medieval times, it would have been thought a plague. People of the same generation, with similar backgrounds, were all subject to the same merciless math of statistics. They would pass within a few months of one another, leaving only genetic outliers to walk among the ghosts of the buildings.
Kumar, looking at the screens around him, could see venues that had been a throng of human activity a decade ago now were sparsely populated. In some areas, the buildings showed a hint of shabbiness. Simple robots kept the abandoned areas in decent repair, so even a bit of shabbiness indicated substantial disuse.
He was looking through his old venue list. The screens had the 15 most promising of his list of 112. They were not very promising. His man, Fillmore, had been dispatched months ago on a short route—an optimal transit window between mars and Earth. He did the inevitable leg work that would be needed for Kumar to re-enter the concert scene. Fillmore was scouring for high promise opportunities.
The thought of returning to his music management beginnings had been fermenting in Kumar for months. It started as a whisper in the ventilated breeze, a remembrance of his time in the industry. Gradually, the thought had grown.
His management of screen talent proved to be far more lucrative than music ever had. It was that disparity of income that had originally led him to abandon music promotion. He was now a far more skilled manager and promoter than he had been in his youth. He was betting that his increase in skill would have an associated increase in income.
Music management was a huge suction of time and resources. Of glory and reputation too. If he fell flat, he knew his competitors would broadcast it relentlessly. It could lead them to secure more business, but it would be more about damping down Kumar's bright star. He had been burning a little to brightly for anyone’s comfort.
It was a lot of risk with not much promise of reward. Kumar justified adding music management by viewing it as a needed diversification of his portfolio. One of the lessons of the technological revolutions of the past decades was that technological revolutions could occur, and at a pace that was completely unexpected. Screens could become obsolete. There could be a conflict between Mars and Earth. Something could even happen to the Great Quantums. The Greats had transformed modern society and had catapulted the growth of Mars. But, their development had been fraught with problems. They couldn't be easily replaced if they failed.
Music had been around since the emergence of human society.
That was his justification. He would not admit it openly, but he liked the look of being a music manager. If he was successful this time around, he would be a star to the stars.
Kumar tugged on the bell shaped end of his sleeves absent-mindedly. They fluoresced under contact.
“Geppetto, pull up the population overlay again.” A picture of the Earth came up with 15 small stars. Over the top, a set of colored clouds emerged. The clouds indicated population density and traffic flows.
“Put up Fillmore's data.” Kumar had to settle for data transmitted securely through the Ether. He'd prefer it be delivered manually but the transit between Earth and Mars made that unreasonable.
4 new stars emerged on the overlay, and a new cloud. The new cloud indicated concentrations of night life activity in the immediate areas surrounding the 4 areas. Most of it was foot traffic or scoots, a type of motorized, wheeled shoe that was very popular on Earth. Fillmore had placed sensors in each region. The sensors were about one centimeter in size and looked like a dark pebble. Each could track and count human numbers and surreptitiously transmit the information to a personal screen.
Fillmore's data was illegal. Privacy laws enacted after the Troubles prohibited the direct tracking of individual humans due to major over steps by corporations and governments. Overall vehicle traffic was considered public data, however. Without Fillmore, that would be the only data that was available to Kumar.
Fillmore's instincts about these places seemed correct. They had enormous foot traffic. The local populations had a tradition of being out and attending events in public. In many ways, these were the most Mars-like areas. As screen technology had progressed, many Earth communities had declined simply because people were choosing to meet by screen. The screen let a person refine and control their image. In person was sloppier. Businesses that relied on in person patronage declined in such regions, crimping the underlying economics of the area.
“These are all hot spots, Fillmore.” Kumar was speaking aloud to himself. He would record a conversation for Fillmore later. ”You've proven that you are worth every credit.”
While people would travel by vehicle to attend a concert, the farther the distance, the more likely that they would use the screens. Heavy foot traffic from the target demographic made a big, in person event more likely. Big events meant big ticket prices. Even the screen fees would rise, because people wanted to be around the energy of a big crowd.
“Yes, I like this. I like it a lot.” Kumar subconsciously stroked his abs through the taught fabric of his jacket.
“Message to Fillmore. Please add locating two more sites to your task list. I'll make sure you are suitably compensated for the additional work.”
Kumar turned to point at one of Fillmore's four suggested sites. Of course, with screen technology he had no need to turn. A simple hand gesture would be enough to pull the site into focus.
“I want more sites like this one in particular. It seems to be the exact type of nexus that I am looking for. Send message.”
Geppetto would code the message, and split it among channels in the Ether. Fillmore's wrist unit would assemble and decode it. Comms between Earth and Mars run through the Ether were normally instantaneous. Some even joked that messages traveled faster than they could be created in the Ether. With the security in place, however, it would take 30 minutes for the message to reach Fillmore. It was a grade of security normally reserved for government level espionage.
“Geppetto, contact Leera.” Kumar had rented the domed screen center for the day. He might as well get all the use out of it he could. Leera had already seen his office. A peek of the dome would help to reinforce that he was spending money on Leera's promotion. Management and promotion was a profession that many people felt they could step into at any time. It wasn't true, but the belief on the part of talent could provide a bothersome resistance to Kumar's decisions. The right gesture at the right time helped prevent that from occurring.
Notes on Leera pulled up on the screen for Kumar's review. The dialog coaching software suggested greetings and topics of conversation to build bonds. He waited.
Leera answered, looking into her wrist unit.
“Hi, hi, Kumar!” Leera was a young, red-headed woman, borne on Mars. Mars
music normally didn't do all that well on Earth, since it reflected the specific experience of living on Mars. It was also synthesizer heavy—still an oddity on Earth.
The need to ship natural resources like wood, or the bulky shipping requirements of Earth built instruments had made transporting them to Mars exorbitantly expensive during early colonization. Scientists proved to be a musical lot, and while screen tech filled many recreation needs, the tactile experience of producing music could not be filled with the screens. Limit of materials and power caused music to shift toward manual synthesizers that required very large and very aggressive physical maneuvers to play. The physicality was reinforced by the need for constant exercise in the low G Martian environment.
Kumar had sent Leera and her band to Earth slightly after Fillmore, and out of the ideal transit window. The group was struggling to adjust to the much higher gravity of Earth, and they would need all the physicality of their performance to be there.
