Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  He said, “A fair proportion of sediment turns out to be diatoms. The pattern in those is scary.”

  Li rubbed her eyes. “Will you get to the point? Start with whatever a diatom is.”

  “A microscopic fossil. Some types of algae secrete silicate shells, and you can infer a great deal about climate trends from changes over the ages in the microfossils.” He babbled on about isotope ratios and salinity clues, before finally concluding, “The data aren’t good.”

  All parroting Antonio, of course. It proved nothing.

  “Just how do you have this data? Have you already linked them to Marvin?”

  Carlos shook his head. “No, but that is why Antonio brought me into the loop. He wants access to the data about cores collected before the settlement…split. And the use of some of my lab instruments, the better to analyze his new cores. And he wants access to the compute power of Marvin’s servers.”

  Li stiffened. “How can you even consider—”

  “Yell at me later,” Carlos said. “This is serious. You know the recent Darwin Sea flooding that had Rikki worried? Antonio is coming to believe the tsunamis were global in extent.”

  “Damn it! You are such a gullible”—drunken—“fool. They’ve concocted a fable. Let them net in and I guarantee you they’ll make the attempt to subvert Marvin.”

  “Suppose I went with them to collect new cores, picked the landing spots myself. I could vouch for the authenticity of the new samples.”

  Volunteering himself as a hostage! Oh, how she wished she could pitch him out—but if she did, who would synth meds and tweak nanites when she needed them? And if Marvin detected a hacking attack on itself, who could respond? With jaws clenched, she stared at him.

  Carlos said, “What if Antonio didn’t fake it? Suppose, just for a moment, that he’s discovered something important. Suppose there is a danger of flooding.”

  Li laughed. “Do you imagine for a moment that if you share your toys all will be forgiven?”

  “You really believe the others would make this up?”

  “You really believe that they wouldn’t?” she shot back.

  “Okay,” Carlos finally conceded, standing. “I’ll tell Antonio, no.”

  *

  Li stared at the re-summoned data caterpillar. It stared back at her. She retrieved a recent image of 6/32/m/Todd. Rosy cheeks and big freckles. Twinkling eyes. Crooked smile with a couple of baby teeth missing. All in all, a mischievous little heretic. Back on Mars, he would doubtless have been the bane of his kindergarten teacher.

  To hell with the little brat!

  Li was on her feet, seething. At Carlos, for his credulity. At Antonio, for his transparent scheming. At outmoded bourgeois notions of family that had made it necessary for her to take charge. For the peasants’ tiresome disapproval since she had.

  A few more years, and nothing would shake the children’s conditioning. A few more years and the oldest children could take on all the farming chores. A few more years, and she would have no need for any of the adults.

  But that would be then. Her rage was now.

  Storming into the yard, Li grabbed Todd by an arm. A deathly hush came over the playground. Children stared, round-eyed. Todd shook, his lower lip trembling.

  “I understand you question your duty to God’s plan,” Li said.

  “I…I don’t understand,” the boy said.

  “Five days ago, did you not ask your friends why you should take shifts watching the little ones and changing diapers?”

  His mouth fell open. The children had no idea that Marvin could eavesdrop across most of the compound.

  “I didn’t mean to—”

  “And did you not question why you are not allowed outside the fence?”

  “I ju-just asked—”

  “And you make jokes. You mock rules.” Li began dragging the brat toward the fence. “You belittle. Such behavior is not acceptable. Perhaps you should see the nature of life without God’s grace.”

  “I’m s-so sorry.” Todd began to sob, great tears rolling down his cheeks, mucus bubbling over his lips and down his chin. Though he dug his heels into the outdoor carpet, he had to yield to her adult strength. “I w-won’t ask anything.”

  A few at first, then more and more, children on the playground burst into tears. Slowly, fearfully, keeping their distance, they trailed after Li and the boy.

  Let this be a lesson for all of you.

  Carlos burst from his lab. He whispered urgently into Li’s ear, “He’s just a kid.”

  She ignored him.

  She ignored the boy, too, until she had dragged him almost to the snow fence. “I have no use for troublemakers,” Li said. “Marvin, open the gate.”

  “What are you doing?” Carlos hissed.

  Through eyes narrowed to slits she stared him down.

  As the gate swung open, Todd pissed his pants.

  “Go.” She shoved the boy forward. His abject terror had slaked her rage, but she would not be seen backing down.

  “Li!” Carlos shouted. “The mines.”

  “Very well.” Li took the controller from her pocket and switched off the minefield. She gave the boy a shove. “Go, now. Live among the bad people. Live among your own evil kind.”

  He stood stock-still, paralyzed with fear.

  Li unholstered her handgun and fired a round into the air. Children scattered, screaming. “Marvin, shut the gate.” As the gate slowed, then reversed its swing, she pointed her weapon at Todd. “If you are still inside when the gate closes…”

  The boy ran.

  Eve pressed through the children toward Li. “I question the teachings. I must leave, too.”

  Li shoved the girl at Carlos. “You have duties here.”

  40

  “Did you hear that?” Beth asked.

  Over the squawking of the chickens. Antonio might have heard…something. Not the haphazard chattering and shrieking of the children, of course; he had learned to listen past that. A popping sound? Maybe, but thunder and snow showers tended not to mix. A sonic boom, then. “I think your parents”—and Dana—“are coming home…early.”

  The question was: why?

  The three were away in Endeavour, ostensibly to collect ice-core samples. The big glacier was far to the south, sufficiently remote to cover for another delivery of emergency supplies. More of the undeclared surplus from this year’s harvest. Spare tools and clothing. Additional ethanol for the emergency generator. Meds. Extra water filters. Way too much stuff to have already offloaded and hauled into the caves.

  “Maybe we can play in the snow,” Beth said. “Before it all melts.”

  “Maybe.” Antonio emptied his bucket and returned to the feed bin for more pellets. “Before we play, we need to finish our chores.”

  They fed and cleaned up after the chickens, gathered eggs, and moved on to the barn to feed the cows. Squawking and clucking gave way to lowing. No one came looking for them, nor did any messages come into his datasheet. After a while, Antonio said, “I guess that…noise we heard wasn’t the…ship.”

  Beth stomped a foot. “Then just you and I will play.”

  “When we’re done.” In his pocket, the datasheet trilled. “Wait. Maybe they will be back soon.”

  The message, relayed through observatory gamma on Aeschylus, was from Carlos!

  Don’t bother trying to answer, because Li vetoed giving you access. She’s certain you’re lying. By the time you read this I’ll have removed the tunnel through the firewall.

  Did you make up a story for me? Then it won’t matter that I analyzed both the old cores in the archives and the data I accessed on your servers. Laugh if you want.

  And if your data are real? Then I hope to hell you can make sense of this.

  The annotated globe holo attached to the message stopped Antonio cold.

  And when he and Beth finally completed their chores and left the barn, the wailing, sticky-faced child—thumb in his mouth, seated amid the snowmelt puddle
s in the center of Main Street—was an even bigger surprise.

  *

  “Come to bed,” Dana called.

  Aristophanes hung overhead, at almost full phase, mocking Antonio. “In a minute.”

  Dana came out of the house to stand with him. “I know all about your minutes.”

  He smiled. At, not near her. Not to the side of her. Not at her slippers. That he could—without effort, even—said something about them both. “And yet you joined me?”

  “Sigh.” And she did. “What’s so interesting out here tonight?”

  “The wind in the trees? The Broadway marquees?”

  She laughed. “Okay. So there aren’t many options. What is it about Aristophanes, besides that it’s not an asteroid?”

  “All three of them.”

  “All three moons?”

  “Right. And though they’re not asteroids, they still perplex me.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Astronomical puzzles went above and beyond spousal duty. Even on a normal day, and today had been far from that. “It’s on the esoteric side.”

  Dana hugged herself against the cold. “If it will get you inside faster, tell me.”

  “You silver-tongued smoothie,” he said. And proceeded to dump on her everything that had been driving him crazy.

  Beginning with that none of Dark’s moons was tidally locked to Dark. The Moon showed one face to Earth. Phobos and Deimos were locked in the same manner to Mars. Eight inner moons of Jupiter were tidally locked. Fifteen of Saturn’s. Five of Uranus’s—

  “What of the other planets in this system?” she interrupted his inventory. “Are their moons tidally locked?”

  “Most of them are locked. As they should be.” He tipped back his head, staring in frustration at the world overhead. “Why not these?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Finally noticing that Dana was in pajamas and a thin robe, he removed his sweater and slipped it around her shoulders. Her attention kept wandering across the street to where Rikki and Blake still tried, and failed, to calm that poor, terrified little boy.

  With a shiver, Dana turned back toward Antonio. “Sorry. That’s hard to listen to. About the moons, though. Could this be a young planetary system? Maybe it’s too early for everything to have tidally locked.”

  “There’s no single time for locking to happen. It depends on the orbit and the original rate of rotation. But that said, we’re talking at most a few million…years.”

  “Dark can’t be that young, can it?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve radiometrically dated rock samples from asteroids. The oldest rocks go back four billion years. So this solar system is that old.”

  Across the street, the uneven, heartrending weeping became a loud wail.

  Dana looked ready to cry. She shook it off. “This system is that old? Then I don’t get it.”

  “If you think that’s strange, here is another. The coastal-erosion rates in the geological record changed within the last millennium. Until then, the erosion was way too little for the tides we observe.”

  “Changing when? About the time of the floods?”

  “I think so.”

  “I give up,” Dana said. “I can’t imagine any explanation.”

  “I can.” But the answer he had found had left him stunned. “I believe that Dark’s three moons are…new. I think it was their arrival that triggered the tsunamis worldwide.”

  *

  Blake stopped pacing his living room long enough to ask, “You’re serious?”

  Eyes kept shifting from Antonio to the wall common with Beth’s bedroom. He found that odd. Usually he was the one to look away from people.

  “Maybe one of us should sit with them,” Rikki said, perching on the edge of the sofa. She had yet to examine the datasheet spread across the low table in front of her.

  “We all must be in on this discussion,” Antonio insisted. “The kids will call if they need anything.” Except that Todd wouldn’t. Apart for Beth, everyone outside the fence terrified him. “I can’t explain why, but I don’t believe this can wait.”

  “So,” Blake said. “New moons. Rocks four hundred or so klicks across. Seriously?”

  From the other room: the synthesized tones of music played on a datasheet. Rikki relaxed a bit without leaning back.

  Simple, direct sentences. “It’s surprising. I know.”

  “One such would be surprising,” Blake said. “But three? Do you know how implausible that sounds?”

  “Nevertheless.” Because, of course, he would never work with numbers. “It would explain a lot. Moons shifting orbits could tip Dark’s axis, could alter the Milankovitch cycles.”

  “Uh-huh,” Blake said. “And do you have any idea how much energy tipping the planet takes?”

  Rikki had finally taken notice of the annotated globe—and she shuddered.

  “What?” Blake asked.

  Rikki said, “If Carlos’s reconstruction is right, these waves were huge. Now ask yourself this. If the moons did this once, however that happened, what’s to say it can’t happen again?”

  *

  “I must have access to Marvin,” Antonio insisted, as Rikki vigorously nodded. “I can’t model the situation with just data sheets. And we’ll need to see Carlos’s full analysis, see what that tells us.”

  Dana and Blake exchanged a long-suffering look. Or maybe it was a he’ll-never-get-it look. Blake said, “We can bring the matter up with Li, tell her what we think we found, but you know she’ll never go along. Carlos’s message has already told you as much.”

  “But I wouldn’t know…how to invent such complex data…sets. Not in a way that hangs together.”

  Rikki smiled sadly. “Convincing someone that you don’t know something will be hard.”

  “With Marvin’s help, and…Carlos’s, maybe I…could. But without?”

  Dana patted his knee. “We’ll have to find another way.”

  What other way was there? Antonio tried to think deviously. “Carlos went behind Li’s back to contact me. I think I can get through the firewall and threaten to expose him. Threaten to tell Li what he did if he doesn’t help us.”

  Blake and Dana exchanged another look—this time, incredulous.

  “An assertion you can’t prove and that Carlos will deny,” Dana said. “How about you cut out the middleman? If you can do it, hack directly into Marvin.”

  41

  “Fool!” The word erupted before Carlos could stop himself.

  Antonio or Blake? Either knew enough to try hacking into the settlement’s network. Neither was half the programmer Carlos was.

  And so: giant crimson letters— Intrusion Alert—pulsed over his open datasheet, even as an audible alarm echoed and reechoed in his lab.

  After Li’s meltdown the day before with Todd, Carlos hated to imagine how she would react. “Alert acknowledged,” he called out, and the electronic wail faded. “Marvin, I’ll review the security logs. Don’t interrupt Li until we know if that was a false alarm.”

  “She has already been informed,” Marvin said.

  Then she would be here any minute. Carlos had scarcely fortified himself with Scotch from the flask in his desk when Li arrived, letting in a blast of cold night air. Her fists were clenched and her face livid. It was hard to remember that he had once found her attractive. Beautiful enough, in fact, to have ruined his life—to have ruined many lives—over.

  Some lives more even than Todd’s. If he adjusted, Todd would be better off outside. He had made it past the fence in one piece. Unlike little Zoltán, the summer before, guilty only of being a rambunctious five-year-old. Minefields were unforgiving.

  Li’s opinion be damned, Carlos downed another long swig. He had allowed himself to be conditioned like some kind of lab rat. Why not lose himself in booze?

  Because at the margins, on occasion, he could sometimes alleviate bits of the mess he had made possible. He set down his flask.

  “
Whenever you’re ready,” Li said. “I imagine you know why I’m here.”

  Never, in the years since Li’s coup, had the four outside attempted to penetrate the net—till now. Scarcely a day after he had surreptitiously passed along his own analysis. Antonio’s floods must be real.

  Carlos said, “Let me check it out.” Give me a few minutes to erase the evidence, and get word to Antonio and Blake not ever to try that again. “If this is anything more than a glitch, I’ll let you know.”

  “Marvin, was there an intrusion?”

  “Yes, Li,” the AI said.

  “What do you know about it?”

  “The probing originates from a datasheet beyond the perimeter. I have triangulated the origin to the residence occupied by Antonio and Dana.”

  “Damn them!” Li shouted. “They won’t get away with this. I’ll teach them.”

  “They feed us,” Carlos reminded her.

  “Indeed.” Li smiled wickedly. “Then let them huddle for warmth with the cows in the barn, like the peasants that they are.”

  *

  As Rikki brushed Beth’s hair for the night, the child’s bedroom went dark. No, the house went dark. Only glimmers of moonlight penetrated the heavy curtain.

  In the bathroom, Todd screamed.

  “Todd! Stay where you are!” Rikki shouted back.

  She pulled aside the curtain, then made her way by memory and moonlight across Beth’s room and down the hallway to the closed bathroom door. “It’s all right. Something went wrong with the lights. Blake will look into it.”

  Only the problem wasn’t limited to the lights. She wouldn’t have heard the house fan over the boy’s screaming, but the fan, too, must have stopped working. Not even the slightest breeze came from the wall register.

  “Todd!” she shouted again. “Stay in the tub. I’ll be right back with a flashlight.”

  Blake showed up first with his own flashlight. He had been at Antonio’s. How had he known?

  “Coming in,” Blake called. He lifted the hysterical child from the tub and wrapped him in a towel. He rocked the boy until the screaming stopped.

  By then, Beth had found a flashlight.