Before Mars

by Emma Newman

  Now that I have time to myself, the anger is setting in. Why didn’t I take some retinal-cam shots of the other base? Why didn’t I check the weather before I left?

  The latter is unfathomable until I remember Principia suggesting, when it took back control of the drone, that the storm would probably last a couple of days. It just didn’t occur to me to check the weather again after that.

  As for the lack of other evidence I could have gathered, it’s less clear-cut. I was shocked and worried about getting back, but those are poor excuses.

  I think back to standing on the crest of that hill, looking down at the launchpad. I did really go there. I did see that. Yet why is there the creeping fear that I imagined it? Sitting here on the bed, back in normal, comfortable clothes, it’s almost as easy to believe none of it happened.

  Shit. What if none of it did?

  “Stop it,” I whisper to myself.

  Principia pings me, making me jump. “May I speak with you, Dr. Kubrin?” the message reads.

  I want to tell it to fuck right off, but I check myself. Feeling personally affronted by an AI is pathetic. It’s just a tool, after all. It hasn’t chosen to screw me over.

  “Okay,” I say out loud. “Come and talk to me, then.”

  The avatar appears to walk out of the bathroom, presumably because I am sitting on the bed resting my back against the wall, so it can’t pull its usual trick. It makes me laugh, unexpectedly, to imagine it’s just used the loo, and it looks at me with a semblance of mild confusion.

  “What do you want?” I say to it.

  “I would like to know how you caused the error that led me to report that you were here earlier when you were not.”

  “I’d like to know why you’re happy to make everyone else think I’m mad. We don’t always get what we want, do we?”

  “I am not happy about that. I am incapable—”

  “Oh, give it a rest. You deleted that data from the ground scanner, didn’t you?”

  “I am not at liberty to discuss anything that could be relevant to your mental health assessment.”

  “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  I laugh. It is completely oblivious to the bitterness and passive aggression in my tone. “Was Arnolfi behind that order?”

  “Yes, in line with standard protocol relating to the management of mental health disorders.”

  “The thing that really pisses me off,” I say, shuffling to the edge of the bed, “is that it is entirely within your power to prove that I am not having a psychotic break. Is this an order from Stefan Gabor? Is he the one who is ordering you to keep that other base hidden?”

  “I am not at liberty to discuss anything that could be—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” I hold my hand up. “I got it the first time.”

  “However,” Principia says, “not only are you at liberty to provide the information I have requested; you are obligated to comply.”

  “I’ll have to leave that to be addressed at my tribunal,” I say.

  “Would you not prefer to cooperate, in order to reduce the likelihood of prosecution?”

  With a sigh, I say, “It’s not that simple. Unlike you, I have personal reasons to withhold information.”

  Principia looks for all the world like he is mulling that over. “Are you hoping that if you remain silent and a full investigation is ordered, evidence will be found to support your claims regarding my actions?”

  “That hadn’t even occurred to me, but thanks. I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “You are welcome, Dr. Kubrin.”

  I smirk. AIs are amazing things, but talking to them still doesn’t feel the same as talking to a real person. “Careful,” I say. “You wouldn’t want this conversational log to be reviewed and have you seen as encouraging me to resist, would you?”

  Principia gives the sort of smile that would, were it a real man, make me think that was exactly the reason why it had said it. It’s unsettling to suddenly find yourself wondering if an AI is better at brinkmanship than you are.

  “Has it occurred to you that keeping me confined to quarters is reducing my ability to do my job?”

  “I have given that careful consideration, Dr. Kubrin, and have concluded that given you have all the materials you require to paint in this room, along with reference materials that you have explored immersively, there is no impediment to your primary role.”

  “You’d better stop distracting me, then, hadn’t you?”

  At least it’s intelligent enough to understand a polite request to bugger off.

  When I’m properly alone again, I look at the blank canvas. I may as well paint. There is literally nothing better to do right now.

  I find the sketch pad, some of the rubbings still trapped between the pages from where I erased the mast. The basic composition is there, but I feel something is missing, other than the mast.

  I add some detail to the cluster of boulders as I listen to an ambient-music playlist that’s free of vocals and heavy beats. Soon my mind is only partially on the page as I start to wonder which approach to take with Arnolfi. I feel strangely calm, even though my career is in jeopardy. Somehow I can’t muster any concern about it, even when I think about how Charlie would react to news of a disciplinary. None of it seems that important in comparison to the existence of that base. How do I get back out there without getting Banks into trouble? How do I prove it’s real? Right now, for everyone else here, it’s as fake as my wedding ring.

  I haven’t thought about that for days and I can’t even remember when I put it back on. How could I have forgotten it? It shows how little I care for my marriage. I still can’t bring myself to take it off though.

  An hour passes and the playlist comes to an end. I rest the sketch pad on the bed and get myself a coffee, wondering why Arnolfi hasn’t come to do the assessment. It’s getting late.

  I prop the sketch pad against the wall and stand back to judge the picture. The boulders are there in the foreground, the volcano peak is in the far distance, as I planned, but the new addition to the picture is not my usual fare. I can’t decide if it works or not, but somehow it feels right.

  In the foreground, running below the boulders, are several shadows, as if there are people out of shot with the sun behind them, a sun far stronger than it really is here. Their shadows are the only sign they are there, giving the viewer of the painting the sense that there are other people behind them, looking at the same view. At least, I hope they will. I’ll see how they turn out on the canvas.

  There’s a knock on the door and all the tension rushes back into my body. I set down the cup, trying to loosen up my shoulders, and call, “Come in,” as confidently as I can.

  Elvan stands in the doorway, holding a small medkit. “Hi. Can I come in?”

  I nod and close the door behind him. When he sets the kit down on the desk I flip the cover of the sketch pad over the picture. I hate people seeing my work before I’m ready to show them.

  “Has Arnolfi spoken to you yet?”

  I shake my head. “I guess she wanted me to cool off.”

  “You seemed to calm down pretty quick, considering everything that was said,” he replies as he opens the kit. “A lot of people would have really lost it.”

  “Were you worried I would?”

  He turns to look at me over his shoulder. “No,” he finally says. “I think you handle pressure well. You dealt with Banks at his worst. He’s changed his mind about you.”

  “Yeah, now he thinks I’m mentally ill.”

  “I didn’t mean that. Could you take a seat and roll up your sleeve for me, please?”

  I perch on the edge of the bed and do as he asks. “Can’t MyPhys tell you everything you need to know?”

  “It can tell me a lot, but not everything. And I don’t l
ike to rely on it too much. This is just a formality.”

  “I suppose you need to take blood too? Just to make sure I’m not tripping on anything?”

  He secures the blood pressure cuff. “I do need to take blood, but I don’t expect to see anything untoward in it. It’s more to rule out a few things and to put it on record that you’re clean. Just in case there’s a tribunal.”

  I wait as the cuff constricts, silently vowing that I’ll get evidence of that base, tribunal or not. His attention is on his task; he’s calling something up in his visual field and tapping away, humming as he does so.

  I recognize the tune. I was listening to it earlier. “How do you know that song?”

  “Hmm?”

  “That soul song. Where did you hear it?”

  He looks blank. “I don’t know. I don’t listen to American soul.”

  “No, it’s Russian. A band that was big about thirty years ago. They played a few years ago in a club in Manchester.” I realize how stupid this sounds. “They’re really obscure.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know where I got it from. It’s been stuck in my head for bloody days. Blood pressure is slightly elevated but given what’s going on, I’m not too worried. Perhaps you were singing it and I heard you or something.”

  “Perhaps,” I echo, not believing it.

  “Blood test next,” he says, putting the cuff back in his kit. “Just like the one you had a couple of days ago. You must be feeling like a bit of a pincushion. Sorry about that.”

  “What’s a pincushion?”

  He grins as he pulls out the pen-shaped device. “I asked the patient who first said that to me the same thing. Back when people used to sew, they used pins to hold the pieces of fabric together.” He adjusts the position of my arm as he talks. I love the sound of his voice. It’s so soothing. I tell myself that it’s all just a bedside manner thing, but even so, he has it in spades. “When they weren’t using the pins, they’d be stuck in a little squishy ball made of stuffed fabric, so they were safe. That was called a pincushion. He complained I was treating him like one. Hold still—it’s applying the anesthetic now and will be done in a few seconds.”

  “Was he very ill, that man?”

  Elvan nods. “He was old and had had a life that would have crushed most people. He lived through the collapse of democracy and the riots in the thirties. His wife died in those. He had some stories to tell. Okay, that’s all done now. Thanks.”

  There’s a tiny dot of sealant on the inside of my elbow. “I’m not having a psychotic break,” I say. “Surely you can tell that from my brain activity?”

  He takes the vial of blood from the pen and pushes it into the side of the medkit box. “That’s more Arnolfi’s specialty.”

  “Oh, come on. You know this stuff too.”

  “I’m not an expert though, and the brain is such a complex thing. Not everybody presents the same way neurophysiologically. I’m not supposed to discuss this with you.”

  “Do you believe what I said about the other base?”

  He puts the pen device back into the kit and rests his hands on either side of it. “Anna, I can’t talk about this with you. It wouldn’t be right. I could do more harm than good, and I would never want to harm you. Ever.”

  There’s a thrill in my chest when he uses my first name. Has he done that before? There’s a knock on the door and I tense up again. “Shit. Arnolfi’s here,” I say. “You’d better go, I guess.”

  But it isn’t Arnolfi at the door; it’s Banks and Petranek. Their expressions are grave, and for an awful moment I think that they’ve come to tell me that I’ve been sentenced to death.

  “Kubrin, I’m sorry,” Banks says, stepping inside. He looks so serious, as if he’s trying to work out how to tell me the means of execution they have planned for me. Petranek follows him in, unable to meet my eyes, all of hir usual relaxed confidence gone. I start to shake. “About what happened before,” Banks begins and I hold my breath. “We know you’re telling the truth.”

  18

  MY BODY IS flooded with relief and then anger, but I suppress the latter, grateful that I have support now at least. “You’ve known about it all along?” I ask, trying my best to keep the sharpness from my voice as I move farther into the room. It’s a little crowded with all of us in here now.

  “No, not at all,” Banks says, as if he’s horrified by the idea. “We just checked the satellites in orbit.”

  “Hacked, more like,” Petranek says, giving him a sideways glance. “It wasn’t easy.”

  “So you saw the base?”

  They both nod. I can see how bad they feel about what was said before, and my shoulders drop as the adrenaline eases.

  “Not in real time,” Banks adds. “From the last mapping survey done years ago. It was the best way to get something without setting the tin man off. The live feeds are better protected than Gabor’s personal data vault. I found all the raw images, before the data was processed, looked up the area you mentioned and”—he spreads his hands, as if imagining a rabbit popping up out of a magician’s hat—“there it was. That whole area was excluded from the released images. You were right.” He looks me straight in the eye as he says it and I feel just that little bit better.

  “But that’s . . .” Elvan was leaning against the desk as if he needed to steady himself, fumbling for words.

  “Crazy?” Petranek says, then gives me an apologetic smile. “I’m really sorry for not backing you up. It’s just such a ludicrous thing to find a few kilometers away, you know? I feel like such a twat for not having found it myself. If you hadn’t started looking there, we’d never have even looked, let alone found it.”

  Elvan frowns at me. “Were you tipped off?”

  “No,” I say, truthfully. Travis didn’t know what was being hidden, after all.

  “It just happened to be in the first area you just randomly chose to look in?”

  “Are you trying to say something?” The muscles in my back knot up again.

  He shakes his head, frowning to himself. “I’m not implying anything. I’m just wondering if you saw something that made you look in that direction. I mean, you could have chosen so many places to go to, and yet the first trip out sets you on the path to finding the other base.”

  “I guess,” I say, feeling unnerved. Did Travis plant something else in my chip, something subliminal? “But regardless of the luck involved, we’re all on the same page now, right? You believe me about the base.” All three of them nod and I feel an easing of the tension at my core. “What did Arnolfi say? I take it that’s why she didn’t bother coming to assess me?”

  Banks and Petranek exchange a look. “She isn’t on the base,” Petranek says. “And the . . . ‘tin man’ won’t tell us where she is. It’s not like the glitch with you; it’s being open about her not being here.”

  “One of the rovers is gone,” Banks adds.

  “Well, it’s obvious, then, isn’t it?” I say. “She’s gone to find the other base. She believed me, even though she pretended not to, and has gone to look for herself.” I bite back the other things that spring to mind about her and the way she handled the confrontation. They are her friends after all.

  “I think it may be more than that,” Elvan says. “I think she already knew. She’s been under extreme stress the last few days. I had to speak to her about it; MyPhys alerted me. She told me it was something to do with news from home and that she didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I thought she looked rough at the meeting, earlier,” Banks says. “And she’s losing weight. I thought her cheekbones were more pronounced.”

  When Petranek gives him a look, he shrugs. “I notice those sorts of changes. The camerawork and the show make me think about how people look. I was worried she’d look different for the next season and that there would be gossip on the feeds about it. You know what th
ose bloody harpies are like.”

  “If she already knew, and the tin man is hiding her location now, they’re both in on the secret,” Petranek says. “And she was willing to rake you over the coals to keep it,” ze adds, looking at me. “This is deeply fucked up.”

  “You said you did a ground scan.” Elvan still seems rather shaken, but I think it’s more the possibility that Arnolfi has been hiding this than the news of the base that’s upset him. “What did you see?”

  “It’s much bigger than this base. I think it could have housed about twenty people, maybe more if they got cozy. It looked like there was a really large underground space near the launchpad.”

  “Like a hangar?” Petranek asks.

  “I don’t know—maybe. I could tell you a lot more about how unnatural the crater that the base is set in is, but that’s not so useful.”

  “So how do we handle this now?” Banks asks. “It’s obvious that GaborCorp has been doing this on the quiet, and if it’s a base that big, they’ve been bringing people and equipment up here in secret.”

  “I still can’t quite believe it would be possible though,” Elvan says. “That’s not a small thing to hide, and it’s not as if it’s on the other side of the planet. It’s a short drive away, for heaven’s sake!”

  “The proximity suggests that it was built at the same time as this one, maybe using the same core systems,” Petranek mulls aloud. “It’s far easier to manage a parallel build when there isn’t a huge distance involved. You can share resources more easily too, and a lot of the weather data gathered for us could be used for that base too, without needing to ping satellites. The tin man may well be running both.”

  “That would make a lot of sense,” Banks agrees. “Then when the other base needed to do stuff outside, we could be told there’s a storm and kept indoors. It’s just attention management, really, isn’t it? That and data control.”