by Mel Odom
I remained quiet and still while she worked.
“What did you want to know about Thomas Haas?”
“Anything you might recall.”
“You’ve seen him?”
“I have.”
“Then you know how handsome he is.”
Thomas Haas hadn’t left an impression on me that way, but I knew that several nosies specializing in social media referred to him in that manner. I answered anyway to keep her talking. “Yes.”
“Being rich doesn’t hurt his attractiveness either.” She carried on for a time about the things she had seen and done while in a relationship with Thomas Haas.
“Starry-eyed bliss. Attracted to anything bright and shiny and wealthy.” Arms crossed over her chest, looking unimpressed, Shelly leaned against the bulkhead behind Whitney. “I won’t say she had it coming, but any woman that lets herself get so lost in somebody like Thomas Haas is just opening herself up to a world of hurt.”
I wondered how Shelly knew that, and wondered how this conversation came up with her “ghost.” I knew we had not ever talked about this in so few words. Miranda had thought that the Shelly I was currently seeing was a construct my problem-solving programming found useful, but that didn’t always line up with the conversations I sometimes had with this Shelly.
Or perhaps it was an aberration that had surfaced through the other programming Mara Blake had layered in when she’d set me up to be her salvation in the event of kidnapping. Again I wondered how she’d been so certain she was going to be taken. During my search for her, I had found no indication of such a person or corporation that would be so inclined. The other detectives assigned to her case, as well as the nosies, hadn’t turned up anything either.
How had Mara known? What had she known?
It was all puzzling and I couldn’t help but pick at the conundrum. So far, though, the effort remained fruitless. I felt certain the investigation would evolve once I reached Mars. Everything was leading back that way.
Back to where it had begun for Mara and Simon, and—to an extent—MirrorMorph, Inc., her company.
“There is one area where Thomas Haas is vulnerable,” Whitney said, pulling my full attention back to the conversation. “His mother.” She shook her head. “When it comes to the two of them, they’re like oil and water.”
I’d heard that before from other sources. Generally, it was thought that Thomas Haas was an unchecked dilettante and his mother too permissive. Some suggested the fractured relationship stemmed from Thomas’s father, who had disappeared for all practical purposes immediately after conception.
Haas had been the brains behind Haas-Bioroid. She had come up with the initial designs, and the credits necessary to open the doors. After that, she had chosen well, picking some software/hardware developers to buy, others to go into business with or negotiate design licenses from, and still more to acquire through a hostile takeover.
Mara Blake had licensed the new neural channeling techniques she had developed to Haas-Bioroid while at the same time keeping MirrorMorph, Inc. as a separate entity.
“Want to take a look at the finished results?” Whitney pressed a button on a personal holo projector and focused it on me.
I studied my image as it floated in front of my face. Whitney’s repairs were much more than I’d anticipated. The synthskin appeared smooth and unblemished, the damage completely gone.
“I did some reshaping on the other side as well,” Whitney said, “to even out the repairs so they wouldn’t be noticeable. I also added more of a tan to give you a multi-cultural appearance. Since you want to blend in—wherever it is you’re headed—this might help.”
“It will.” I touched my face with my fingertips. I felt the contact, but it was distant, like layers of cotton lay in between.
“Feels slightly numb, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
I wouldn’t have anyway.
“Give the repairs a couple days to fully integrate and you’ll have the same neural feedback that you had before the damage. It takes a little time for the patching to get programmed back in.”
“Thank you.”
Whitney studied the holo projection, then looked back at me with interest. “You look different than you did. I didn’t realize what I was doing.”
I had noticed that.
“I was just following the natural contours of your face. You would think you were moving your facial structure as I worked. You didn’t do that, did you?”
“I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Supposedly, it’s not, but there have been whispers—here and there—about assassins who have had their faces rebuilt through nanotechnology to change their features.”
I’d heard that too. “I’ve never seen anyone like that.”
“You aren’t supposed to.” Whitney laughed.
“I suppose not.”
Then Whitney frowned. “Was this the face you were trying to hide?”
“No.” As Drake, I had looked different than the bioroid I saw in the holo.
“Good.” Whitney started putting her equipment away.
I touched my face again, not convinced that things were good. I looked more like Simon Blake than ever.
Chapter Six
Khloe, you are cleared for landing. You may begin your final approach.”
Captain Angstrom occupied his command chair but sat tensely. I knew he had more on his mind than simply landing. Since I was hiding my real identity, he didn’t know how much trouble I would bring him once we docked. I was sure that the fact they could all be in handcuffs within a short while crossed his mind. Secrets often turned deadly out in the Martian colonies.
In fact, I knew there was a good chance that Angstrom had started wondering if getting chosen by the space jumpers had been my fault. Regrettably, I had not considered the same thing at the time. Had I done so, I would have handled things differently.
“Police work isn’t about getting there ahead of the bad guys,” Shelly said. “It’s about picking up the pieces and working with what you decipher as you go along. We don’t usually get to prevent a murder. That’s not the job, unfortunately. By the time we figure out someone is planning to kill another person, it’s usually after the fact. But we can prevent a murderer from killing again.”
She sat beside me in the cargo hold as Khloe shuddered and shook through the descent into the thin Martian atmosphere. I held onto the cargo netting to secure myself. She sat undisturbed. Other bots and bioroids sat quietly in their assigned spaces. All of them were low-level manual labor units and didn’t communicate other than to take orders or inform someone about problems.
“You have the images of the two people in the last shuttle,” Shelly continued. “When you get planetside, run them and see if you get any hits.”
“If I discover they are more involved than I believe, it is too late to do anything about it. I let them go. Whoever was behind the interception will remain one step ahead of me.”
“You think someone staged the space jump?”
I paused only briefly. “It is a supposition that carries merit.”
“Seriously?” Shelly looked surprised. “Are you getting paranoid on me, Drake?”
Bioroids weren’t programmed for paranoia, but they were scripted for close attention to anomalous events. Sometimes one bordered on the other.
“No. I’m choosing to err on the side of being overly redundant.”
Shelly laughed. “Maybe you’ve learned more from me than you’d thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I would be paranoid right now as well with everything that’s going on. Someone pinned Jonas Salter’s murder on you when it would have been easier to kill you.”
That was true. The Earth and Moon media still tracked the story of Salter’s murder, but the matter had fallen to the back pages of the newsrags because the NAPD hadn’t been able to find me or any more evid
ence that I had committed the murder. They hadn’t even figured out why Salter had changed his name and his features and then hidden in plain sight.
“Efforts have been made to kill me.” I reflected on those incidents. “Many times.”
“Because of Mara Blake.”
I was uncertain if that was a question or an accusation. I chose to be oblique as well. “That must be the answer.”
As I looked at Shelly beside me, knowing she was some kind of construct presented by my logic programs—even though that seemed to be an oxymoron at the moment—I wished that I had the real Shelly with me. I missed her input, her keen intuition, and the certain knowledge that she would validate everything I thought I knew, as well as point me in new directions.
Then I realized that her family, her husband and her children, missed her far more than I did. I felt slightly unsettled and wrong about my own wants and needs, though I knew I was not programmed for selfishness. That was a human quality that was outside my operating parameters.
The Shelly beside me couldn’t guess at my thoughts. She stared at the opposite bulkhead with an expression I found disturbingly familiar and considered things for a time. Then she spoke. “With everything that’s going on, with Mara Blake in the wind and you being—at least partially—Simon Blake, I don’t blame you for overthinking this. Especially since Simon Blake was taken out by his own people.”
I was relieved to be onto another topic. That proved I wasn’t stuck in my problem solving. “They were not my people. They were a splinter group of the mercenary unit.”
“Noted.”
“Most likely, they were people who were known to Simon Blake.”
“Meaning that if you run into any of Simon Blake’s old friends on Mars, you’ll have to be worried about them sticking a slug-thrower to the back of your head and evacuating your brainpan.”
“My brainpan is not in my head.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I have logged that possibility.”
“Keep it near the top of the list.”
“Yes.”
Khloe’s automated warning came over the ship’s channel. “Brace for landing. Ten minutes.”
I settled in and hung onto the restraining straps. I accessed the ship’s external sensors and tracked the landing.
From far outside Mars’s gravitational well, the planet looked large and red, paler in some areas where the lighter silicate sand created vast deserts. As Khloe closed on Mars, the colonies became visible. They were large plascrete bubbles that looked vulnerable against the expanse of the planet.
Inside many of the bubbles outside the main hubs, looking like topiary constructs against the barrenness that covered Mars’s natural landscape, farm laborers and agriculture equipment worked to keep the fields productive. Nearly all of the food the colonists needed for life was grown in the ag-bubbles, but Earth still maintained a brisk business supplying spices and red meat.
Several of the ag-bubbles contained hydroponics fields containing catfish, cod, and crabs. Since water had to be mined from the polar regions on Mars and trucked into the colonies at the equator, the fish and crabs were made part of the water reclamation cycle. People fed on the fish and crabs, which in turn fed on human waste, helping cleanse the water before it was purified and once more put into the system.
I had thought the process showed innovation and had been intrigued. I’d discovered the procedure during an investigation of a marine biologist that had lately returned from Mars who had been involved in introducing another arctic whitefish to the system.
When I had brought up the matter, Shelly had voiced disgust at the idea of making fish part of the sewage reclamation process, then eating them. I’d pointed out that the fish had been spliced to be resilient and succulent, as well as a greater provider of Omega 3 and protein. She had told me that didn’t matter.
I made it a point never to tell her about the rice and soy she enjoyed so much and the “night soil” that was used to fertilize those food products.
Gullivar colony was named after a character in an early 20th century novel by Edwin Arnold. In the book, Gullivar of Mars, United States seaman Gullivar Jones reached the red planet by means of a magic carpet. I had read the novel while en route to Mars but discovered that the present day Mars was in no way like the one Gullivar encountered.
I studied Gullivar colony’s main hub. The city under the glass dome was nowhere near as large as a megalopolis back on Earth, and not even as large as the Moon cities.
“It’s still big enough to hide anyone who wants to kill you,” Shelly said.
I nodded and continued my cursory examination of the city, matching it up with the maps I had downloaded to memory. All around the dome, massive wheels that ran on solar energy twirled and glinted in the gathering clouds of red Martian dust and powered the huge generators that in turn powered the city. Thick cables snaked in from power farms farther away from the city.
Despite the distance from the sun, the solar radiation was strong and provided plenty of power to meet the colony’s needs. Building additional domes to meet the growing population wasn’t a problem either, though some of the older colony cities had built the solar farms too close to easily expand close to home. Large batteries stored power from the day and provided for a robust nightlife.
Sunlight glinted from the dome and from the solar wheels that cycled endlessly. Hoppers flew from tall building to tall building, and the whole city looked like a micro version of New Angeles or any other megapolis.
Outside the dome, the barren wasteland stood in sharp contrast. Although the wind was too thin for humans to thrive on, it moved restlessly, whipping up large clouds of red sand that shifted and changed shape as it flew across the countryside. Environmental suits, or envirosuits, for anyone working outside a domed area were outfitted with special filters to keep the sand from getting inside. Machinery and equipment had to be protected in the same way.
One particular sandstorm caught my eye as we closed on the starport. I telescoped my vision so I could better see it. One of the Martian trains ran along mag-lev rails toward Gullivar colony. According to the file I had tucked away in my memory, most of the pulling engines were built along the same lines: seven meters tall by ten meters long by three meters wide. The command module inside the pulling engine was filled with equipment that operated the unit, controlled the container cars over umbilicals, and monitored the terrain and weather.
When the first pulling engines had been built, Poseidon Equipment, Inc., named after the Greek god of the oceans and also the supposed inventor of the first chariot, fashioned them to look like giant sea creatures. Cast in bronze-colored metal mined from Martian mines, this pulling engine looked like a beluga whale. A fluked tail flipped up over the first container car.
Khloe’s engines powered up again as we sank toward the docking pads and I lost sight of the train. Starport Authority was a rectangular area that was one kilometer wide and three kilometers long in the open, enclosed by walls on all sides to block out some of the wind and dust storms. Fourteen cargo ships presently sat on the plascrete tarmac. From the comm frequency I’d hacked into through my onboard PAD, I knew that three other cargo ships were en route and that Starport Authority wanted a word with Captain Angstrom after he’d landed.
The PAD I was currently equipped with wasn’t nearly as sophisticated as the one I’d had as an NAPD detective, but I knew my way around hardware and software enough to get access to the starport communications. I needed to know what they knew—especially if I was a point of focus for the authorities. One of the first things I hoped to do once I got planetside was arrange a PAD upgrade.
So far, there was no mention of Frank 5DE7CE on any level. Drake 3GI2RC was another matter. The killing of a human by a bioroid—thought impossible by most people—was huge news. On Mars, where bioroids and clones were in even more use because of the terraforming and mining operations where it was not economically feasible to put flesh and blood l
abor under an atmosphere, the idea of a murderous bioroid was tantamount to a nightmare.
“On Earth, a rampaging bioroid might kill even several humans before being brought down, but on Mars such a creature could destroy environmental controls on a colony and doom millions to a slow death.” That was in one of the local media sheets I tapped into once I got within range of Gullivar.
The comment had started a flame war between readers. Several commenters had told the nosie that “giving a golem an idea like that was stupid.” That had spurred other observations that a bioroid “clever enough to kill a human could think of sabotaging environmental stations well enough on its own.”
Human First had weighed in heavily, again pressing the need to ship all bioroids or clones off-planet—or “destroy them on sight.” There wasn’t much latitude with the Human First group.
“They should have called themselves Humans Only,” Shelly said.
That had crossed my thoughts as well, then I realized the fact that Shelly had said that was redundant. She was just my programming underscoring the observation.
From there, the media piece devolved into arguments for and against bioroids and clones, then further devolved into commentaries on the strained relationship between Earth and Mars. Corporate spin doctors got involved in the meltdown at that point, jumping in on the side of Earth, trying to illustrate the inability of the Martian colonies to survive independently.
I had stopped reading because the rants were endless, being appended even as I had scanned the contents.
With a final bump, Khloe settled to the landing pad she’d been assigned. The creak of her hull and the whine of her servos vibrated through the bulkhead at my back.
* * *
As I had promised Captain Angstrom, I helped with the cargo. The landing pad wasn’t protected by the dome, so I got my first exposure to the Martian climate. At the equator where we were, the temperature averaged -81 degrees Fahrenheit. Those temperatures got much colder at the polar caps.
