Before Mars

by Emma Newman

  I’m dimly aware of the wall sliding up behind me before I realize, with a bizarre detachment, that it is instead my body that is slipping downward as my legs collapse beneath me. I don’t hear anything more from Principia as a high-pitched whining sound deafens me. All I can think of is Mia, little Mia, plump and perfect, pointing out of the window at a new star in the sky over Manchester in the middle of the day.

  21

  GRIEF MAKES TIME elastic, stretching it into hours that feel like days, then contracting it sharply, snapping it back, until you blink out of a reverie and find the day is almost over. I’m not sure how long I have lain here, on my bed, back in Principia. There’s no hunger. No thirst. Barely any connection to my body. Just this limbo, this gray expanse in which shock and misery wrap themselves around me like thick fog.

  Trying to come to terms with this feels like trying to hold all the details of a mountain in my mind at once. I can visualize a peak, a sheer face covered with snow, a slope of scree, or one distant shot. More than half a billion estimated casualties and a projected four billion more deaths over the next five years; that distant view of what has happened on Earth is too pulled back to mean anything. Almost half of the world’s population wiped out in a war that took less than one hour. It’s too big to understand.

  So my mind goes to my baby. To my mother. To Charlie. My father. Geena. Drew. Sometimes there is so much grief I am lost to it, reduced to a sack of skin, excreting and emoting, nothing more. Sometimes I just stare at the blank wall, spent, letting memories of kisses and sparks of life spent with them pass through my mind like water in a stream.

  At one point I realize that for the past week or so I’ve been recording and sending messages to them when they were already dead and I scream into my pillow, the thought adding a vicious sting to the wound. All those times I got angry at Charlie for not answering me about the footprint, and at Mum for not answering my question about talking to Dad . . . It’s a long time before I can stop crying.

  Selfishly—for is being selfish not what I am best at?—I wish I had loved Charlie more, that we had nourished each other more, if only so I could be given the bittersweet solace of a pure grief. The same with Mia. If only I’d been a better mother, able to let myself be subsumed in that loving oblivion of motherhood, so that now I could feel this pain without guilt and regret.

  I cannot allow myself the simple pain of wishing for just another moment with them. I don’t deserve the cleanliness of that. I cannot permit myself to enter the delusion that all I want is to be with them again, just for one last kiss, one last embrace and the opportunity to say all the things I never said. Those desires weren’t there yesterday, when my erased brain thought they were still alive. I’m not so foolish as to believe that anything surfacing now is genuine.

  It’s simpler with my mother though. That love was pure, with only a few scuff marks of disagreement and frustration with her faith in my father. We connected through art and blood. Nothing could be deeper than that. And now she is gone. And even though I’ve always seen this on the horizon, as all children do, it doesn’t make it easier.

  And there is the grim hope that she is dead. That she did not survive the initial blasts, even though there is an appalling probability that she did. I cannot bear the thought of a slow death for her, so I hope she was in Manchester, visiting Mia, seeing that star with her. I can only hope that she had time to gather Mia up, press my child’s face into her chest and hold her when it happened. That she took the place I should have had.

  There’s a way to know, but I can’t check that yet. I need the safety of this fantasy. One of my own making, not a mersive, and not Arnolfi’s doing either.

  And then there’s Dad and Geena. Dad’s hospital was in London. While it wasn’t one of the first-wave targets, no doubt it would have been destroyed in the second or third. And as for Geena, I have no idea where she was. Which country even. All I can do is hope she had a swift death. What kind of hope is that?

  Drew and the rest of the team will have died first, working where I once worked in Manchester, in the huge GaborCorp complex that was one of the first hit. Unlike Gabor, who probably has a gilded bunker somewhere that he was stuffed into immediately, they probably didn’t even know what was happening until it was far too late. Like most people, we thought nuclear war was relegated to the status of an outdated, unfashionable plotline in cheap mersive backstories. Why would there be something as unprofitable as nuclear war, now that all of the countries that have nuclear warheads are corporations caught in a mesh of mutually profitable arrangements?

  Behind this grief, like a person waiting behind a heavy curtain, is the question of “What next? What do we do now?” but I don’t have the strength to pull that curtain back now. I don’t think any of us do. We’ve all retreated into private spaces to ride out the shock. At some point someone will seek out company, but it’s too soon for me. I manage to print a light meal, force myself to eat it and then fall into a fitful sleep.

  Another day slides by. I can’t face the company of others, and when Banks pings me, asking if I want to eat dinner with everyone else, I decline. I spend the day in bed, sometimes in my room, sometimes in a mersive. I don’t fear it now. I don’t think there was ever any risk of immersion psychosis. The side effects of the drugs Arnolfi pumped into me, to fool everyone into thinking I’d just been in zero g for months, explain my disorientation and my occasional lapses in those first days after her reset. I spend time with Mia, trying to find happy moments to cling to, only to come out of them sobbing. I ask Principia to lock access to the mersives for seven days, fearing they’re only going to cause me more harm. Unable to focus on anything, I print myself something to make me sleep, following a quick sign-off by Elvan, and let myself sink into restful oblivion.

  The next morning feels different. The sleep, despite being artificially triggered, has helped. I make myself get up and eat, shower and dress, cajoling myself through each task. There’s no safety net here, no friends or relatives who will turn up on the doorstep and help to keep the wheels of life turning while I fall apart. I don’t have that luxury.

  There’s a knock on my door as I’m toweling my hair dry. It’s Elvan.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Is it okay for me to be here?”

  “Sure.” I step back and gesture for him to come in, straighten the bedclothes quickly and dump my food tray in the recycler. “How are you feeling?”

  “Ummm. Everything? No, I’m feeling all the bad things. You?”

  I shrug. “I’m sorry—I feel I should know this—but did you have much family at home?”

  “Yeah, I come from a big family. They live all over the world. We scattered and only came back together for big things—you know how it is.”

  I nod, even though I don’t know. My small family scattered but never came back together again.

  “Most of them have died,” he says, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I’m relieved, actually. Isn’t that terrible?”

  “It’s not terrible to hope that the people we love aren’t suffering. Do you want something to drink?”

  He shakes his head. “I wasn’t married though. I don’t have any children.” He reaches out to brush my hand with his fingertips. “I can’t imagine what it’s like for you.”

  I frown at him. “There isn’t a hierarchy of grief. I don’t get to say this is worse for me. That would be bullshit. We all lost the most important people to us.”

  He nods and I sit next to him. “Have you watched—”

  “No,” I say before he can finish. I know he’s talking about the death messages. I’ve never seen one before and the thought of having several waiting for me is awful.

  I argued with Charlie about them before I left Earth. The head of the team sending me to Mars suggested I record some, and that had sent me spiraling into such a depression by the time I got home that Char
lie wouldn’t leave me alone until he’d winkled it out of me. I’d never recorded a message for loved ones to watch in the event of my death and I’d never watched one either. The thought appalled me then and it appalls me now. “I can’t face it.”

  “So you don’t know if they died.”

  “I know Charlie and Mia will be dead. And Basalt. That’s my dog. They lived in Manchester. I hope my mum was visiting them; I know she was planning to. I don’t want her to have to live in that . . .” I let the silence take the words I can’t speak. He knows what I mean.

  “It’s hard to watch the messages, but it does help. I never really liked the idea of them, but now I can see why people started doing them.”

  “We must have already watched them,” I say. “I can’t help thinking that we’ve already been through this before. It’s really doing my head in.”

  He gives a grunt of agreement. “I’ve been having similar thoughts. I have the feeling that I’ve been processing this, unconsciously, ever since Arnolfi did this to us. I didn’t tell anyone else, but MyPhys flagged up some imbalances in my neurochemistry that it corrected, but it niggled at me, you know? I thought the only thing that had changed was your arrival, and I couldn’t work out why that would be triggering those changes. I even looked at the levels and thought, yeah, it looks like I’ve just been through a major trauma. Weird.” He shrugs. “I guess it’s easy to feel stupid when you have all the answers. There was something else though . . . I wanted to talk it through with you, if that’s okay? I totally understand if this is the wrong time, given your husband and your—”

  “I’d be glad to have something else to focus on,” I say. “Truth be told, it wasn’t a happy marriage.”

  He nods slowly. Sitting this close to him, I’m fighting the urge to just lean in, tuck myself under his arm and cuddle up. I focus on my desk instead. It’s safer.

  “So, there’s been other neurochemical activity that, well . . . I don’t quite know how to say this, but it seems that you do trigger it. And like I’ve said, many times, this isn’t my specialty, but I can recognize certain patterns of brain activity. I mean, it was one of those things you go out of your way to learn when you’re training to be a doctor, even when you’re warned not to.”

  “Elvan,” I say with a weak smile. “Just tell me.”

  “Being around you triggers the same underlying chemical changes as being with a lover.”

  “Wow, that has to be the most unromantic thing I’ve ever heard.” He snorts at the quip. I smile and then I feel terrible for making a poor joke in the circumstances.

  “I haven’t finished,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s been the same for you, but I’ve had these feelings about you.”

  “It has been the same for me,” I say. “To the extent that I started avoiding you because it felt too easy to just fall into a habit I hadn’t made yet. That’s what it felt like.”

  He nods. “Yes! That’s exactly how it’s felt, and I realized that, well, maybe we did form those habits. Before she scrubbed us.”

  “It makes sense. Which means we had an affair. Oh. This is awkward,” I say, trying to seem light in the face of this obvious truth.

  It seems I can feel even more guilt. Not just for what we must have done, but also for the tiny spark of longing still within me.

  “There’s a way to verify it,” he says, still hesitant. “Just tell me if this is really not the thing to talk about now.”

  “No, it’s fine. We have to talk about it, don’t we? We have to work out where things are really at.”

  “That’s how I feel. Maybe I’m just grasping for something comforting. I don’t know. I’m not sure how to feel. About anything. But the thing we could do, that I didn’t feel was right to do alone, is review the cam footage that Principia hid from us when Arnolfi reset the clock.”

  My mouth is dry as I nod in consent. I let Elvan take the lead after I give Principia permission to display the images on the wall. I’m caught between not wanting to see myself being unfaithful and wanting to know the truth. It’s one thing to have an unhappy marriage, quite another to learn you’re the sort of person who breaks an oath, a contract, formed with the best intentions. Now I am a terrible mother and a worse wife. I have the briefest sense of relief that my marriage is over now and crush it with the omnipresent, leaden guilt. I disgust myself.

  With snippets of film, mostly taken in the medbay, we watch the progression of the affair. It started before the war on Earth, after an immediate mutual attraction that neither of us seemed able or willing to control. There’s an evening in the medbay where I play him some of my favorite music, like we’re teenagers desperate to know every nook of each other before we finally, physically give in to the lust. The Russian soul song comes on and we dance to it—the video makes Elvan jolt on the bed next to me.

  “That’s where that damn tune came from!”

  And I realize how this same music triggered the memory of us dancing, when I was in the rover. I wasn’t imagining or fantasizing; I was remembering something real, encoded in a way that managed to survive Arnolfi’s intervention. I wonder if Elvan’s scent has been triggering the urges to get closer to him, touching upon memories buried elsewhere in my brain.

  Elvan finds a segment filmed in the medbay, a week after my actual arrival. It looks like he’s doing a routine medical before I pull him down to kiss me as I lie on the bed. A movement that matches the one I craved when I was there after the memory erasure. The embrace is tight, passionate, like we’ve been starved of affection for so long and are gorging ourselves, feasting on that which we offer each other so enthusiastically. We part before we make love, fearful that we’ll be discovered, promising to meet that night. In silence, Elvan manipulates something in his visual field with his hand and the images speed up, pause and then cut to his quarters. He is in bed; the time stamp says it’s shortly after midnight. It has the distinct coloration caused by filming in the dark, all muted grays of varying shades.

  “I didn’t realize Principia films our quarters too.” My voice is hoarse with tension.

  “They aren’t classified as private spaces,” Elvan says. “Every square centimeter of the base is designated as a work space. It’s a loophole.”

  “But why film in them?”

  He shrugs. “Principia? What’s the justification for filming our quarters?”

  “All GaborCorp work spaces are routinely filmed for your protection.”

  We exchange a look, unimpressed with the same old corporate bullshit, then go back to watching the screen. He fast-forwards until there’s a crack of light that falls across his bed and I sneak in.

  It’s so strange watching myself this way. Usually I experience recordings taken through my own eyes, the sound heard through my ears. It’s hard to believe it is me, even though it clearly is.

  “I can’t stop thinking about you,” past me says. “Am I a terrible person?”

  “No,” Elvan says, pulling back his cover. “Am I a terrible person for wanting the same?”

  My cheeks are burning. It’s like watching a really bad romance mersive, only with far more guilt and discomfort. “We didn’t manage to stay apart for long, did we?” I say to him. He gives the slightest nod. “Principia,” I say. “Didn’t you report us for having an affair?”

  “No, Dr. Kubrin. I do not judge human activity; I merely gather data.”

  That’s news to me. The way the adults used to talk when I was growing up, anyone would think an AI was always watching and judging, even actively seeking out evidence of transgression. If I’d realized the sleeping quarters here were cammed, I wouldn’t have done what I’m watching now.

  “If there was a tribunal, it would be used as evidence,” Elvan says. “But it would have to be a colleague who reported us, I guess.”

  “Principia, did we spend any other nights together?”

  �
��Since the tenth day after your arrival, you and Dr. Elvan spent every night between the hours of midnight and six a.m. in each other’s company,” Principia replies. “With the exception of the night Dr. Arnolfi removed your memories, when you spent a total of nine point five minutes in Dr. Elvan’s quarters.”

  With a frown, Elvan says, “Show us.”

  The footage jumps to another nighttime shot. “I don’t want to talk about the war or the stuff you said about another base or anything Arnolfi said about it,” I say to him on the screen. “I just want to be with you. Is that okay?” Instead of grieving for my husband, I was jumping into bed with Elvan.

  “I think we’ve seen enough, haven’t we?” I ask, just as there’s a knock on Elvan’s door in the footage, making that past version of me leap out of the bed, grab my shoes and dash into the bathroom.

  “That’s Arnolfi,” Elvan says, leaning forward.

  We watch her enter as past Elvan starts to get out of bed, only to have Arnolfi tell him there’s no need. As he tells Principia to turn on the light, Arnolfi presses something to his arm and he slumps, unconscious. “I’m sorry, Asil,” she whispers, and I ask Principia to increase the volume. “This won’t hurt—I promise. And it will make it easier for you to cope. We’re all struggling, aren’t we?”

  She has a pen syringe slipped up her sleeve. She takes it out and checks it before injecting him in the neck. “You like her too much, that woman. I know you believe her, so I have to do this.” She leaves the room shortly afterward and then we watch past me come out of the bathroom, try to wake Elvan and then rush out.

  “I must have thought she’d come for me next,” I say. “That must’ve been why I went back to my room and painted that note.”

  “But why paint it?” Elvan says. “Surely you didn’t have much time?”

  “I couldn’t trust Principia, so I couldn’t leave a digital message and I would think a pencil note would be too easily faked, but painting . . . that’s something I’d believe I’d done.” I look down at the fake wedding ring. “Not that it helped. I knew this was fake, I had the note . . . it didn’t help.”