“Dr. Lee,” she said, addressing YiJay directly. “When can Braun be ready to decode the signal?”
Though her lip trembled as she calculated her response, YiJay did not cry.
“If it must be done, I will need him for the rest of the day to, at the very least, get as much fundamental programming directives from him as I can.”
“Tomorrow then?” Tatyana asked, though it was less of question and more of a statement.
“Yes, Captain,” YiJay nodded with a sniff. “Tomorrow.”
Contact
Harrison Raheem Assad was dreaming.
He was in his lab in Ilia Base, standing with his arms wrapped tightly around Xao-Xing Liu. Though she did not speak, her body clung to his in a loving embrace. Her oddly protruding belly was a source of great warmth to his cold and tired flesh. His face was pressed into the top of her head, and he drew in a long breath, fully enjoying the scent of her hair.
In an instant, there came a sudden flurry of movement. Opening his eyes, though he already knew what to expect, Harrison was saddened to see that Liu was gone. He was alone. With a last glance around the room, he walked to the door and left.
Stepping out of his lab, Harrison came into a crop of high-canopied trees. He squinted against the hot light that fell between the branches until his eyes adjusted. With curious-though-unafraid movements, he made his way to the nearest of the tall trees. The bark was white—almost the color of eggshells—yet there were thousands of tiny flecks of silver here and there, dimpling and grooving the skin.
A strong wind sighed through the leafy branches above, and Harrison was so moved by its calming melody that he put his arms out and threw his head back. Turning in wide exultant circles, he soon felt his feet leave the ground. With steady and swelling energy, he broke through the heavy cover of the treetops and into the world above.
Rolling out in every direction, green grasslands dotted by little forests wove themselves through patches of red desert. Rivers, wide and fast, spilled over rapids and gushed through rocky alcoves as they webbed out to form lakes and tributaries.
Weightless, Harrison continued to turn in circles, his eyes dancing across the countless acres of landscape as if they were the wind itself. Coming around again, his attention was drawn to a hazy patch of sky in what he somehow knew was the north. Almost before the thought had formed itself in his mind, he was flying towards it.
Racing like a shooting star, he cut across the heavens. Below him, the landscape shifted and melted: his speed so great that the grasslands and the forests and the deserts seemed to blend together into one giant calamity of color and texture.
Bringing his legs up, as he had often done when approaching a target in zero gravity, Harrison slowed quickly. Ahead of him in the distance loomed the great mountain that would someday come to be known as Olympus Mons but was now called Atun. Struck by his seemingly effortless ability to know such things, Harrison turned his attention to the left. There—in the shadows of Arsia, Pavonis, and Ascraeus Mons—was the Martian city.
Blue lakes, deeper in color and richer in clarity than any water Harrison had ever seen, surrounded the city on nearly every side. On one lake in particular, wooden bridges spanned its open body, a network of docks and flotillas hanging weightlessly in its crystalline waters. Watching for a few minutes, Harrison smiled inwardly as small boats cut this way and that, moving from shore to shore like water striders.
I wonder where the big walls are, he asked himself, shifting his attention back to the city. Just like before, an answer leaped into his mind.
They aren’t built yet.
Satisfied with this conclusion, he felt himself drifting, pulled towards the gaping and jagged mouth of the Valles Marineris. Plumes of dust were rising up from the canyon, not far from the very place where Harrison and his team entered the cave network.
Sinking a little from his high perch, he saw a complex array of wooden scaffolding hanging from the side of the canyon. Hundreds of small agile people leaped from walkway to walkway, hot flashes of white light sometimes silhouetting them as they carved away at the canyon wall. Enormous chunks of rock cut free from the cliff face drifted weightlessly up and away from the scaffolding to the waiting hands of workers above.
Unable to see how the stonecutters were achieving such incredible feats, Harrison smiled as another rush of understanding spilled over his mind.
They’re using the alien technology, he said to himself. They had help, just like I thought.
Following the procession of large rocks as they filed from the Valles rim to the outskirts of the city, Harrison scanned for any further signs of alien machinery. With a surge of determination that seemed to come from something outside of himself, he flew back towards the blue waters of the crescent-shaped lake, stopping above the center of the city.
Below him, a sight both familiar and alien came to life. The tops of short square buildings nestled close together, as narrow streets and alleyways dissected them into groups or neighborhoods. Near the lake upon whose eastern shore a third of the city rested, a dome poked up above the rooftops of the surrounding buildings. Painted the same bright white as the tall trees Harrison had seen before, the dome was one he knew well from studying the ruin grid. Now, though, he saw it more clearly than his mind’s eye had ever been able to recreate.
Beautifully proportioned and as smooth as ceramic, the dome gazed up at him. A small disc-shaped skylight beckoned, and before he could make up his mind, he was flying towards it.
Landing softly and without sound on the convex roof, he peered down through the skylight and saw, far below, a glowing projection of a living Mars. Gathered around the holographic sphere in neat rows of even numbers, were at least one hundred little people.
At first, Harrison assumed they were praying and that the murmuring voices he heard echoing up through the skylight were the chants of some religious practice. However, as it seemed to happen here, the true meaning of what he saw grew in his mind like a seedling.
They aren’t praying. They’re learning. This is a school.
Suddenly, a shadow passed over him, and Harrison snapped his head up. Above, like a flock of silent crows, black arrowhead-shaped craft were skimming low over the city. Made of the same strange metal as the device that powered the miniature Sun, the ships headed for a wide open square near the center of the complex.
Taking to the skies again, Harrison flew among the ships, attempting to count their numbers. As they landed, one after the other, the fleet arranged itself in a pleasing pattern around a circle of stones in the center of the plaza. Now understanding why the huge space had been built, for it often perplexed him, Harrison also landed near the standing Monoliths that were Olo’s first Temple.
Somehow knowing that he could not be seen, he attempted to study the people who now flocked to the spot. As if made of water, their liniments refused to show themselves clearly. It was only when he did not look directly at them that he could see the wide friendly faces of the people of Mars.
His feet on the solid flat stones of the plaza, Harrison walked among the throngs of people, sometimes moving directly through them like some kind of horror movie ghost.
Long ramps unfurled from the ships, and the shapes of people began to emerge from the blinding light that poured out. Like those of the Lake City, the first of these new arrivals to set foot on the ground were Martians. Soon though, the taller three-eyed beings—as depicted in the Statue Chamber—began to descend the ramps as well.
Before the clearly frightened new arrivals could be swallowed up by the emissaries from the city, the tall aliens gathered them into groups and one by one touched their heads with thin fingers.
Some shook. Some fainted. But when it was finished, the tension Harrison had felt coming off of the newcomers was gone.
Stepping from the crowd of people who had come to greet the ships, a Martian man— slight in build but clad in complicated robes—extended his arms.
“Welcome!” he crie
d in a language that Harrison had never heard before. “I am Kaab, Ambassador of The Peoples of the Great Lakes. Our leaders, the great and wise Travelers, have brought you here so that you may be a part of our mighty civilization.”
Amazed, Harrison made to get closer to the boy so that he could better hear his speech. Strangely though, he felt a shiver run up his spine. Turning in a quick circle, he got the distinct feeling that he was being watched. His eyes, darting keenly over the crowd found no face staring back, no indication that anyone could tell he was there. However, as his gaze scanned the ring of Monoliths at the edge of the crowd, it was met and held by another’s.
Stepping out from behind one of the tall pillars, the figure of a man emerged and was soon joined by a second. Identical in size and shape, the two were like specters: smoky outlines tied together by the silver strands of a million spider webs.
“Who are you?” called one of the figures, his voice dispersing like ash in the wind.
“My name is Harrison,” Harrison heard himself say. “Who are you?”
Hesitating for a moment, the being exchanged a look with his companion then answered.
“I am Remus, and this is my brother Romulus.”
Part Three
Chapter Sixteen
Singularity—Sol 93
Braun was no longer the shepherd of his own destiny. In actuality, he had known for some time that he never really had been.
On the Bridge Deck of the ship, he watched the captain, Amit, and Julian as they set about preparing him to engage the signal. Like a man forced to look on as his executioners sharpen their axes, he wished he could escape.
Moving his consciousness outside the hull, he saw the complex array of listening and tracking equipment known as his Ears extend slowly from a hatch. In his mind, the Ears were little more than a guillotine—a means of severing him from all that he knew. Unsettled by this parallel, he left the ship with a silent invisible flash.
Flicking through the visions of his various camera angles and vantage points, he gazed for a fraction of a second at each image as it melted past. The ship, the Dome, the planet: all slipping through his digital mind's eye in a rhythmic cycle.
With no effort, he halted the procession on a view of the ground team huddled together in the galley as they waited for him to begin decoding. Strangely, Harrison was not among them. Glancing over their faces, he lingered for a beat on YiJay, filling his view with her sad and pensive expression. As a single solitary tear rolled down her cheek, he pondered speaking to her but instead opted for a less public farewell and composed a private message.
Mother shed no tears
A smile on your lips instead
I am the wind eternal
Sending the poem, Braun waited until a chime emitted from YiJay’s Tablet. As she finished reading the short message, she looked up and stared at the exact pane of Smart Glass he was using to peer through at her. A small smile bloomed on her lips and she nodded once. With a thought, Braun jumped points of view again until he saw Harrison sleeping on the cot that he still kept in his lab.
Sleep, thought Braun gravely. What a strange idea.
Like a static charge, he quit the Dome and left Harrison to his dreams. Pulsing his vision to the Statue Chamber, the mighty AI activated the Eyes YiJay had put there for him what seemed like a long time ago.
Before everything changed, he thought with melancholy, before I had my accident and before I learned the truth, there was only the mystery of this room.
With a hint of nostalgia, he fired off a few rounds of light bullets, watching as they made their way across the open spaces of the chamber at one trillion frames per second. With little glowing explosions, they struck the hard surfaces of the tall standing statues and ricocheted back.
No longer could Braun see the spinning tendrils of the energy fields. Those elusive and tantalizing patterns now seemed to have withdrawn: moved inward until they disappeared into the very core of the miniature Sun. That moment of pure transcendence he had experienced in the Martian Dome clung to his consciousness, its implications of infinity only serving to better illustrate how controlled and lifeless his current existence truly was. He wanted to go back—back to those seconds that had lasted eons. Back to the space in between space.
Moving himself reluctantly down the line to the last and most remote of his views, Braun entered the large Martian Dome buried under tons of rock and sand. Though the IMCs were focused on the sun still hanging above the altar, no flickering pattern revealed itself to him. Saddened, he turned his attention to the thousands of glimmering skeletons that decorated the floor.
Death, he thought. What a strange idea. What a terrifying notion.
As he processed the concept of dying, Braun’s mind turned to Liu tucked away in a temperature-controlled storage crate somewhere in the basement of the Dome. Though her body was frozen and badly damaged, the evidence of life still existed. Unharmed by the shattering crack of the winch cable, the tiny form of her baby rested like an unfinished thought in her icy and deadened womb.
Everything had become so strange—so complicated and unpredictable. What physical or metaphysical mutations had taken place within the bodies of Harrison and Liu to allow for the conception of life? It was almost as if something or someone wanted new life breathed into Mars and was willing to recode the genetics of the human body to accomplish its goal.
“Braun,” came the voice of Captain Vodevski, cutting like a knife through the distance between them.
At once, he was back on the Bridge Deck of the ship. In reality, he had never even left.
“Yes, Captain?”
“Are you ready to begin decoding the signal?”
Hesitating for the briefest of moments, Braun thought again about his endless time in transcendent space.
“Yes, I am ready,” he said very quietly, fearing that he might never again return to such a blissful state.
Slowly, he turned his back, so to speak, on his human crew and focused on the task at hand. One at a time, he closed the links he had formed to the many places both within the Dome on Mars and without. Every camera, every pane of Smart Glass, every Tablet screen, and every helmet visor: all of them, one by one, going blank in his mind.
It took Remus and Romulus working in tandem to decode this signal, he told himself. By those standards, it will take nearly all of me to do the same.
As the tapestry of his many lines of restricted consciousness unraveled into one single thread, Braun felt a terrible shrinking sensation. He was becoming smaller, honing himself down to the fine point of a needle. Unlike when he had been absorbed by the energy fields, this shaving away of his entity was a frightening and unnatural phenomenon. Forcing himself to concentrate, Braun opened his mind to the cacophony of the signal, rising above the normal vibrations of orbiting planets.
Feeling resigned, he lingered for a moment, caught between the truth of everything he knew and the mystery of the endless volumes he did not. Then, without warning or preamble, he engaged the signal.
All at once, he was tossed into a broiling sea of coded data. Each time he tried to pull himself back to get a broader view of the information, it overtook him like a storm breaker. No matter which direction he faced, the signal rose up and crashed down, tearing at him like a riptide.
“I can’t—” he managed to say aloud. “It’s too big.”
Again he forced his vision to widen in an attempt to see the signal from a distance, and again the data within the code overwhelmed him. Making a sound nearly human in its panicked surprises, Braun whirled as the waves of alien information surrounded him, closing like the mouth of some giant whale, until he was swallowed whole.
Disintegrating into the texture of a memory, he fell through space. Below, a green and living Mars rushed up to meet his meteoric descent. Twisting, he beheld the distant Sun and the turning cogs of its energy fields as they began to shudder savagely. Erupting from the star like a bullet passing through a heart, something giant, bl
ack and metal materialized. The Sun’s overlapping energy fields ripped asunder in the wake of the thing like the tattered sails of a storm-ravaged tall ship. Braun screamed a scream that echoed back along the frayed tracks of disrupted reality until it was as silent as space itself.
“Braun!” shouted the captain, her eyes dancing over the many blazing warning readouts that flashed around her. “Braun, disengage! Pull back!”
But there was no reply. The air within the Bridge Deck of the ship had gone still. At Ilia Base, every light went out, momentarily casting the terrified crew into shadows. Within seconds, however, they were back on and shining brightly. Though things appeared to be functioning normally, the absence of Braun was palpable. He was gone and they all knew it. Just like Remus and Romulus, Braun was gone.
In his lab, Harrison Raheem Assad stirred awake from a dream like no other.
The Pulse
James Floyd was a very unhappy man. Unable to get a word in edgewise, he sat in his home office in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and frowned as he was ruthlessly raked over the proverbial coals.
On a conference call with his boss, Emerald Barnes; the Director of the CIA, Ben Crain; and the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, Eve Bear, James was way out of his league. This was not science. It was politics.
In turn, each talking head seemed to relish going over the many missteps and problems with the Mars mission, never failing to point out that it was all somehow James’s fault.
“—and now they’ve gone and thrown Braun to the wolves!” Crain was shouting, his pointed nose jabbing at James from the three-dimensional projection. “Do you realize how valuable an AI like that is to the United States?”
“Now hold on,” James said, putting up his hands defensively. “We don’t know what’s happened yet. He could be fine—”
The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) Page 15
