Mars Prime

by William C. Dietz

  "Tell him what happened."

  Corvan activated his implant, framed the guard in a medium shot, and did an extremely slow zoom.

  The guard shrugged. "Dr. Wu failed to show up for work. No one thought anything of it until an entire day had passed. They called his office but no one answered. An assistant came here, tried the door, and found that it was locked. He called security. I responded, found that the door was locked from the inside, and used tools to force it open."

  The guard gestured toward the door and Corvan saw that it had been forced open then closed again. Metal had been bent along the door frame and the lock mechanism was clearly damaged. A pry bar and some other tools lay near the guard's feet.

  "Okay," Scheeler said, "open it up. Let's take a look."

  The guard nodded and touched the entry plate. Something made a grating sound as the door slid open. Scheeler entered first with Corvan right behind. They were able to smell Wu before they actually saw him.

  The body was in a corner directly under the blood-spattered ceiling and walls. The scientist had been small to begin with and seemed even smaller now. The blood-stained lab coat billowed up around him like a funeral shroud. Corvan zoomed in to get a better look at the wounds. It was obvious where the doctor's head had come into violent contact with the walls and ceiling.

  The reop looked up. A security camera looked back. He pointed at it.

  "How 'bout the camera?"

  “Fried by forces unknown.”

  "Great."

  "Yeah."

  "Well? Does this look familiar?"

  The smell of fecal matter filled the air. Corvan tried to breath through his nose. "Yeah, same M.O. as Ochoa."

  "Exactly. So go ahead."

  "Go ahead and what?"

  "Go ahead and say, 'I told you so.' "

  "I told you so."

  Scheeler gave a sigh of relief. "Thanks. You can't imagine how good it feels to have that out of the way."

  "So what now?"

  "So we find the murderer."

  "We?"

  "Sure. Why not? Find him and the drinks are on me.

  Corvan nodded and looked around the room. "It should be easy. All we have to do is find someone who's strong, has the ability to walk through solid walls, and likes to kill people."

  "That about sums it up," Scheeler agreed.

  "Terrific."

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kim floated above the abyss, secure in the arms of the interface, struggling to control her impatience. Never mind the fact that he was surplus, never mind the fact that his ship had been turned into scrap, Big Dan was used to command and wanted to do everything by the book. His thought-voice reverberated through their electronic universe.

  "This is silly. SIS was programmed for this sort of thing. Let her take care of it."

  “You're missing the point,'' Martin responded equably. "SIS is working on the murders, and doing a damned fine job, too. She nailed Paxton, after all. Kim asked us to assist her, not replace her. By focusing additional computing power on the situation, and pursuing some of the seemingly low probability leads, we might find something."

  "Yeah," MOMS put in, "why not? It beats the heck out of doing nothing at all."

  "It isn't right," the command and control computer said stubbornly. "Each intelligence has been assigned a role in keeping with its capabilities. The smooth functioning of the ship requires that those roles be adhered to."

  "Except that you aren't on a ship," Kim said impatiently, "and unless you turn your attitude around and get with the program, you won't be on this team either."

  There was silence as the Big Guy thought it over, followed by grudging acquiescence. "All right, as long as the command structure approves."

  "Scheeler gave Rex permission to do some investigative reporting," Kim replied.

  Which isn't the same thing as turning a whole bunch of A.I. 's loose on the colony, Kim thought to herself, but it's close enough for government work.

  "Now, let's divide the work load. Martin, you cover the admin section. Look for anything that doesn't fit. That could include file tampering, manipulation of data, or unusual patterns of activity. And remember, your piece may not make much sense until it comes together with what someone else has found, so don't hesitate to include things that seem unrelated.

  "MOMS, I know the colony already has an A.I. running the maintenance operation, but offer to lend a hand. Poll the robots. See what you can find. Some of them have memories. Who knows what they might have seen or heard.

  "Dan, you’ve got some special skills, let's put them to use. Nose around the shuttles, take a few hops, see what the vacuum jockeys are up to.

  "Okay, any questions?"

  "Nope."

  "Not at the moment."

  "I guess not," Dan said grudgingly. "But I refuse to download myself onto a shuttle without the onboard computer's permission."

  "Fine," Kim replied irritably. "So get permission. Let's go to work—we'll meet here one rotation from now."

  The electronic entities agreed and left the interface one at a time until Kim was alone. It felt good to drift.

  Kim felt someone else enter the interface. Waves of darkness rolled by.

  "Kim?"

  She welcomed her husband with both body and mind. Her thought echoed away. "Yes? . . . Yes? . . . Yes?"

  "I love you."

  They came together and Kim decided to stay for a while.

  Martin knew better than to try and sidestep Mars Central. Though a good deal more personable than Big Dan, Mars Central, or Mac as he liked to be called, was no pushover. He ran the programs that coordinated all of the colony's lesser functions and did it extremely well. Any attempt to circumvent his authority and prerogatives would be noticed and dealt with.

  No, it was better to be direct where Mac was concerned. Waltz in, say what was on his mind, and ask for the super-computer's cooperation.

  Martin slipped into a backup line, routed an extension of himself to Mac's main processing unit, and signaled his presence.

  A part of the more powerful A.I., no more than a millionth of his total processing capability, answered the summons, assessed the situation, and recommended a more substantial response.

  It took Mac less than a nanosecond to pull a substantial part of himself away from a routine systems check and greet his visitor.

  "Martin! Nice of you to drop by. Not more of that political nonsense, I hope. You know how I feel about that."

  Martin did know how Mac felt since he'd done his best to recruit the other A.I. and failed. Though sympathetic to the cause, the work stoppage had run contrary to Mac's programming and had taken place in spite of his objections.

  Still, both entities had respect for each other and had managed to maintain cordial relations.

  "No," Martin replied, "I know better than to tackle that one."

  "Good," Mac responded. "So what's up?"

  "You're aware of the murder investigation?"

  "Sure. SIS keeps me apprised of her progress."

  "Then you know there hasn't been much progress."

  Another entity might have been offended, but not Mac. He called a glitch a "glitch," and liked others to do likewise. "Yeah, that's about the size of it, I'm afraid."

  "Well, Kim Corvan has asked a few of us redundant types to poke around and see if we can find a new lead."

  "Define 'poking around.' "

  "Looking into anomalies that SIS doesn't have time to follow up on, checking for signs of skulduggery, searching for unusual activity."

  Mac gave it a full second's worth of thought. "Okay, take your best shot. But only in the areas where SIS isn't active, and only in the full access files. If I find that you and your half-programmed friends have been skimming some of the secured stuff, there will be hell to pay. If you find something that leads in that direction tell me. We'll figure it out together. Agreed?"

  "Agreed. You've been more than fair."

  "Damned right I have," Mac
said cheerfully. "Now haul your electronic butt outta here. I have work to do."

  So Martin hauled. A quick trip through a high-capacity fiber-optic cable carried him into the junction from which he could access a variety of data banks. There were all sorts of choices including supplies, budget, medical, scientific, personnel, and some so secret that they had numbers instead of names. The A.I. had promised to stay away from those and had every intention of doing so.

  Given the nature of what Martin was looking for, "personnel" seemed like the obvious choice. He chose a path, patched himself through, and skimmed the contents. Given the habitat's rather short history, the personnel data bank reminded him of a large but relatively shallow lake. The shoreline stretched for many miles but the water wasn't very deep. All the better to troll in, he decided, simultaneously wondering what fishing actually felt like, and why President Hawkins had been so fond of it.

  Martin decided to review the list of individuals that had died on Mars. There weren't that many. Only fifty-nine people had died on the red planet since the first landing.

  Of those, forty-two had died in accidents, three had died of disease, six had been murdered, three had committed suicide, and five were missing and presumed to be dead.

  Ochoa and Wu accounted for two of the murders. The rest had been killed in fights of one sort or another.

  It all seemed pretty straightforward except for one little thing. A closer examination of the colonists listed as "missing and presumed dead" showed that two of them had disappeared during the last few weeks. This during the same time span in which Ochoa and Wu had been murdered. Coincidence? Or something more? There was no way to tell.

  There was something else as well. All of the disappearances had taken place outside of and away from Mars Prime. A fact that seemed rather obvious at first, until the A.I. gave it some additional thought and realized that it wasn't necessarily so.

  Just because Mars Prime qualified as home didn't mean someone couldn't disappear while inside it. A determined murderer could butcher a body and feed it into a recycler, smuggle it out with some supplies, or. . . The possibilities were endless.

  And, if it was possible for people inside the habitat to disappear, than it stood to reason that people outside Mars Prime could be murdered as well. More than that, it should be assumed that such deaths could and eventually would take place. The only reason he hadn't thought of it before was because all of the deaths external to the dome had been classified as accidents. What if some of them weren't? What if the last two, the ones that had occurred during the same period as the Ochoa and Wu murders, were homicides?

  The thesis was weak, highly speculative, and mostly unsupported. Just the sort of thing Kim said they should look for. Good. He'd accomplished that much at least.

  Martin felt a presence over-around-behind him as if someone, an electronic entity of some sort, were looking over his shoulder. Mac? Come to check on him? No, the super-computer would simply barge in, announce his presence, and ask how things were going.

  This was something more subtle, a disturbance of the field that surrounded him, a someone or something that hoped to escape detection. Martin's first reaction was to turn, to challenge it head on, to demand that the entity reveal itself. But that would be stupid. No, this situation called for a cool processor. The A.I. would ignore the presence, lead it on, and look for a way to trap it.

  Martin turned away from the personnel files, careful to seem uninterested, and cruised the junction. Logic paths went left and right, descended down into what seemed like ghostly green canyons, each comprised of countless light chips and able to store entire libraries of information.

  Millions of firefly-like bits of light jumped the canyons, hit the other side, and exploded into lakes of fire. Others burrowed into greenish flesh, made their connections, and started to glow.

  It was a hidden world, traveled by those without bodies and seen by those without eyes. Martin loved the hum of urgent activity around him and the logic that held everything together. There was joy in the functioning of things, in the harmonies that resonated between the sparks of light, but there was tragedy too.

  On more than one occasion Martin was witness to the moment when what looked like dark thunderstorms swept in over the canyons and extinguished the fireflies with a single clap of thunder.

  The deletion of a file was nothing to the human who had given the command, but it was an act of Godlike omnipotence to those who were part of the electronic landscape. The A.I. comforted himself with the thought that like their Earthly counterparts, the fireflies were unaware of both their creation and their subsequent destruction.

  As Martin turned toward the light blue canyons where the scientific data was stored he felt the presence match him move for move. The A.I. dived and a canyon opened to receive him.

  He dropped deeper and deeper, sensing the walls of knowledge that rose around him, plunging toward the bottom, knowing that in actuality there was no such thing.

  Everything around him was subjective, a landscape that stemmed from his need to visualize his surroundings, and as different as the minds that observed it.

  Fireflies leapt from one side of the canyon to the other. They passed through his electronic body as if it wasn't there, sparked as they touched the other side, and dripped fire up, down, and sideways as connections were made and data was accessed.

  And now that he was closer, Martin could see narrow passageways into the blue electronic flesh, inviting him to come and explore. He waited, picked one, and dived inside. The A.I. had just managed to pull the last of his sub-routines into the gap and turn around when his pursuer arrived.

  It looked like a comet with a white-hot head and a long tendril-like tail that extended upwards and out of sight. It saw-sensed his presence, turned suddenly upward, and roared away.

  Martin launched himself outward, managed to electronically grab onto the thing's tail, and was pulled along with it.

  Static rolled back along his flanks like phosphorescence in a ship's wake. It rumbled, roared, and bathed Martin with stray electrons.

  Then they were above the canyon walls, zigzagging across fuzzy green terrain, cut to the right and left by a grid-work of laser straight canyons. Islands of blue, brown and orange rose here and there to touch the lightning-rent sky. Thunder rumbled and an entire canyon went dark.

  The entity wove between them, skimming their light-marbled sides, doing its best to scrape Martin off. But the A.I. hung on, determined to ride the creature to its lair and learn its identity.

  A tunnel loomed ahead. It glowed incandescent as light-borne voice, data, and video flowed in and out.

  The entity dived into the tunnel, spiraled around a stream of high-speed data, then leapt for a distributor line.

  Martin managed to hang on, was whipped from side to side, and forced to stop when the thing entered an electronic mailbox. There was nothing the A.I. could do. The mailbox was privacy coded and as impregnable as a fortress.

  It didn't make much difference, though, since the mailbox was assigned to someone, and it took little more than a thought to summon his name. The letters stood ten feet high, glowed bright pink, and spelled the name "Dubie Long."

  MOMS accessed the list of robots currently on charge, selected those with memory, and went after them in serial order. The first interviewee was a semi-autonomous sweeper-mopper unit. It was currently parked in an equipment bay, sucking juice from an outlet while its processor sat on standby.

  "Mission and unit?"

  "Sweeper-mopper MP-31.”

  "Do you know anything about the Ochoa or Wu murders?"

  "Murders?"

  "The unauthorized deactivation of human beings."

  "Sweeper-mopper MP-31 has no knowledge pertaining to that subject."

  The robot was probably right. But how would it know what knowledge was relevant and what wasn't? The poor thing had very little processing power beyond that required to do its job.

  MOMS supplied the robot
with the dates and times at which the murders had taken place. "Where were you on those particular days and at those particular times?"

  The robot took less than a second to consult its operational log and reply. The responses were not what MOMS had hoped for. The machine had been down for repairs during the Ochoa murder and on the far side of Mars Prime during the Wu homicide.

  Though not especially useful in and of itself, the interview had given MOMS an idea. Rather than work backwards from the robots themselves, she'd work forward from the computer that controlled them.

  The controlling A.I. would be able to tell her which units had been in the vicinity of the murders during the critical periods of time. That would allow MOMS to interview those machines first and save some time.

  There was a down side though. The A.I. in question was something less than a pleasure to deal with, which accounted for the fact that MOMS had tried to bypass it to begin with.

  Though technically subordinate to Mac, the Mars Prime Operational Computer, or MPOC, had a good deal of autonomy. That translated to power, and the power translated to arrogance. So much arrogance that even Big Dan found it annoying.

  MOMS sent a tendril of herself toward the MPOC and requested contact.

  "Yes?" The response was both abrupt and impatient.

  "Some data, please. I would like a list of all robots that were within a hundred feet of the following coordinates at the specified dates and times."

  MOMS downloaded the necessary information and waited for the almost inevitable response.

  "And why, may I ask? Such requests take time, and some of us have work to do. Not that you would be likely to understand that. "

  Moms had decided to lie, something she'd been programmed to do whenever Jopp popped a surprise inspection aboard ship or her operator's fitness report was in question. She chose her words carefully.

  "You have an interesting attitude for someone with a performance problem."

  "Performance problem?" The MPOC sounded slightly less sure of itself.

  "Exactly. Discrepancy reports have been filed, an investigation has been authorized, and I will be responsible for your fitness report."