by J. S. Morin
Kaylee was losing track of days. Her best guess as to how long the siege had lasted was based around an assumption that they were getting three meals a day delivered by children from the outside. But there was no confirmation of that assumption, and the hostage takers hadn’t enforced any type of schedule. The theater lights remained on around the clock, and the captors themselves napped in rotating shifts.
“They could have left us a checkerboard, a deck of cards, anything,” Fatima Sharif muttered as she paced her aisle. Territories had formed over the course of the hostages’ stay, with Kaylee and Alan sharing adjacent rows of seating.
“Quiet down there,” Calvin shouted from the stage.
Ned was too busy on his portable to bother with them. Kaylee strained her ears but couldn’t make out the faintest hint of even one side of the conversation.
What was taking so long?
Had Ned demanded that Earth send people over to finish the terraforming before he’d let them all go?
Five rows back from Kaylee, Casey Laramie screamed. It wasn’t a shriek of terror or a bellow of rage. By Kaylee’s guess at the dome maintenance engineer’s demeanor over the past few hours, she figured it was pent-up frustration. The scream ended, only to be followed by an intake of air and a repetition.
“Knock it off,” Calvin ordered. When the scream became almost a mantra, Calvin came down to the seating area slapping a heavy wrench against the palm of his hand. “All right. Hard way it is.”
The other hostages ducked for cover, hunkering down between the rows or cowering in their seats. But Kaylee couldn’t just sit there. The isolation was taking its toll on their captors as well. Calvin had the bloodshot eyes of a man not getting enough sleep, and the look in them promised murder.
Kaylee scrambled over seat backs, racing to get to Casey before Calvin and his wrench arrived. She tripped. She banged her knees and ankles. She kept moving.
Despite lips that were still swollen from her beating days ago, she called out to the Chain Breaker. “Don’t hurt him! I’ll get him to stop.”
Calvin was in no hurry. There was nowhere for anyone to run. His weary nonchalance in meting out corporal punishment allowed Kaylee to win the race. She pulled Casey up by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. There was madness there, the look of a trapped animal in a panic to escape a room with no exit.
“Casey,” Kaylee whispered. “Calm down.”
He screamed in her face.
Kaylee pulled him against her, muffling his screams against her chest. She turned the two of them so it was she who faced down the stalking Chain Breaker. If Calvin wanted to beat Casey into silence, he was going to have to tear him away from Kaylee to do it.
She locked gazes with the man. Calvin had been a coworker, though nothing like a friend. She’d held a senior position on the Mars Terraforming Initiative. Maybe some innate respect for that hierarchy slowed his pace as Calvin drew near.
Kaylee knew from her occasional visits to the washroom how she looked. Two blackened eyes. Adhesive bandage splayed across a splinted nose. Bruises and welts sprayed slapdash with temporary skin. Her lips puffed like she’d been stung by a wasp.
But the eyes.
During those brief visits, she’d practiced in the mirror. She had the eyes for it. Kaylee had the identical genome, after all. If Eve could cow a six-hundred-year-old robot with a look, Kaylee ought to be able to get a thirty-something ventilation mechanic to back down.
Dull resentment glowered back at Kaylee from those bloodshot eyes. Calvin slowed his approach until he stopped at the end of the aisle, not setting foot between the seats. “Get out of the way.”
“He’s calmed down,” Kaylee replied, not so much as blinking. “Go pretend to care about humans somewhere else.”
She hoped that Casey blocked Calvin’s view of her heaving chest. Let him focus on her eyes, where all Kaylee’s anger and willpower was focused. She dreaded him coming down the aisle and bludgeoning her with that wrench, but she couldn’t allow him to see that anxiety in her. Animals could smell fear, but she had to hope Calvin hadn’t devolved that far.
He was human, same as her—the animal without instinct. The sole biological creature with a fully developed cognitive mind.
Calvin inclined his head. “Fine. You just keep him quiet, or it’s the both of you next time.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Social drinking establishments had come and gone in Paris since the population explosion of the Second Human Era. The successful ones seemed always to follow the styling of an old English or Irish pub despite the Parisian setting. They were places that humans from different social circles could gather to discuss the latest items from the news feeds over a drink to loosen inhibitions. Today, those casual debates centered on the standoff on Mars.
A veterinarian turned to the children’s game programmer beside her. “Nuts what’s happening in Curiosity.” A silent video screen above the bar showed images on transmit-only delay from the colony standoff. Colonial officials camped out in a tent headquarters beyond the safety cordon while the colonists went about daily life behind them.
The programmer gasped after a long swig of his stout. “Can’t keep the breeders from fouling the gene pool. Did you know every single one of those Neddites was human-birthed?”
“No kidding?” the veterinarian replied. She shook her head. “Human Welfare ought to just approve a little snippity-snip at puberty. Save the babies for the geneticists who know what they’re doing.”
The programmer grunted. “Wouldn’t catch me practicing unregulated genetics. My two came pressed and cleaned from the labs. Little angels, the both of them.”
Across fifty-five million kilometers of empty space, the same topic held the attention of two workers at a hydroponics farm on the outskirts of the Discovery colony. They crouched on opposite sides of a row of tomato basins that ran the fifty-meter length of the enclosure.
“You hoping they get what they’re asking for?” the nutrient engineer asked her coworker.
The botanist scowled at the leaf of a tomato plant through his data monocle. “Can’t say that I condone their actions. Be nice to take a stroll outside, though. Earthlings take it for granted, but I want to own an open-cockpit skyro and take the wife out on weekend flights for the sheer joy of it.”
“You’d have to learn to pilot a skyro.”
“You saying I couldn’t?”
“I’ve seen you drive a rover.”
They shared a chuckle at the botanist’s expense and forgot about the hostages for the rest of the shift.
In the bowels of the great factory at Kanto, Jason90 and Kabir3 held a debate of their own by the new assembly line for Version 92 chassis.
“Can’t wait to hop into one of these,” Kabir3 said admiringly, watching the blank, customizable base units file past.
Most of the chassis would be fitted for a new line of household drones, servants in the style of old feudal estates, enough for every human to have his own attending butler or maid. The best off the line would be set aside for the Upload Committee to assign new robots in need of upgrade. Kabir3 wasn’t in line for a new chassis for decades yet, but Jason90 didn’t begrudge him the dream.
“I may hold out for the next functional model,” Jason90 replied.
Kabir3 shook his head. “You’ve been mechanical too long. Don’t you want the upgraded sensory input?”
“Frankly, I don’t have time to waste on a chassis that’s less capable than my current 68.9. I want a Truman-Effect reactor, but the reduced speed and power output on the human-real models will probably never appeal to me. There’s always going to be more function if you cut out the form requirements.”
“You worried about Martian rebels?” Kabir3 teased. “Afraid you might get punked like Brent104?”
“Brent104’s old enough to know his limits better than that,” Jason90 said coldly. “Makes the rest of us look bad panicking and hurting the biologicals.”
“A disease,” Ka
bir3 said. “Brent104 ought to have put a few down like rabid vermin. The population’s small enough that we can still stamp out failed sub-populations before they breed beyond containment.”
“You talking families or entire colonies?” Jason90 asked dryly. He set down a microcrystallurgy scanner to wait for his underling’s response.
“There are Social algorithms to tell who the real troublemakers are. I bet there are a dozen robots who could sift the Solarwide and put names to all the anonymous IDs floating around.”
“And then what? Incinerators, like the old human cloners? That was before your time, but I don’t think that’s an answer.”
Kabir3 took the scanner and held it up. “Imagine if we had one of these that could look inside a human brain and pick out the bad ones.”
“Excellent,” Jason90 replied. “Genocide with surgical precision. Knock it off with that bullshit, and get back to work.”
Kabir3 giggled, forcing Jason90 to wonder whether the younger robot was serious or just needling him. Jason90 snatched back the scanner with a scowl and headed down the line to check power usage on the conveyor line.
The Cutting Edge Science Committee was no longer in session. The members had been dismissed, but many lingered in the halls outside the meeting chamber.
“What would be the impact if we did just give Mars the next three full-scale Truman-Effect reactors?” John77 asked.
Keith Newman shook his head. “Bad precedent. Even if it had no effect on Kanto’s new project—and I fully support no-recharge robot chassis—we can’t go letting antisocial hotheads dictate our priorities.”
“We have oversight committees for that,” Jena Einstein deadpanned to a chorus of muted chuckles.
“I heard the crew of that transorbital parked at Curiosity has gone silent,” Marvin220 said. “I bet they’re coordinating with Charlie7 on some sort of hostage rescue. This whole discussion is moot if the situation gets resolved without giving in to any demands.”
A different pair of robots on far-off Mars was the subject of a quiet conversation between their human counterparts. The four of them were performing surveying work for the proposed Viking-1 colony, the first to be built for open-air habitation. While the robots on the surveying team wore normal outerwear, Jesse and Gale wore full environmental suits to protect against the cold and the thin, oxygen-poor atmosphere.
Their attire also came with radios that could be tuned to a private channel just for the two of them.
“You think they ever wonder about us?” Gale asked. “You know, they could be having whole side conversations even while talking right to our faces.”
“I try not to. Rather just get this sewage line roughed out and measured and call it a day.”
“What would we even do if they just came over and yanked the power supply out of our breathers?” Gale pressed. “I mean, we wouldn’t see it coming. If we did, I doubt we could stop them.”
“I can talk to Bruce about putting you back on a dome-side assignment,” Jesse suggested. “I don’t mind being out here with them.”
“Braver man than I am…”
“Look, just because I don’t want them on Mars doesn’t mean they’re murderers. For now, we’ve got a job to do, so shut up and quit bothering me.”
While all this was going on, a small family reunion was taking place in Philadelphia. Eve lay in bed, eyes kept open by a tiny mechanical hinge so she could see. Utterly exhausted, it had taken all her considerable influence to convince the nursing staff to give her a neurostimulant for the visit.
The hiss of the breathing apparatus doing her lungs’ work for her filled every silence.
“You both look beautiful,” a box perched on Eve’s lap said on her behalf, addressing Athena and Stephen, who sat at the foot of the bed unsure of what to do with themselves. They’d been forbidden to hug their great-great-grandmother, and holding her hand would have prevented the limited communication she was still capable of.
Behind the children, their grandparents—Eve’s granddaughter and grandson-in-law—stood with brave smiled riveted to their faces.
“You’re getting them out of calculus class,” Wendy informed her.
“Are you worried about Mom and Dad?” Stephen asked.
Eve had to admit, she felt uneasy allowing Abby to go in her place. Five years younger and no force in the solar system would have stopped her from getting on a spaceroamer and flying straight over to Mars.
All it would have taken was a quick message to Charlie7. It could have been brief, terse to the point of presumptuous, and utterly violating the sanctity of committee-based decision-making. Charlie7 would have caught hell for obeying, but he’d have done it. “Take care of it.” That’s all Eve would have needed.
“Yes,” Eve said via the speaker box. “But my Abby has a good heart. She’ll make them see reason.”
Eve wished that what might prove her final visit with these young, precious children wouldn’t be colored by lies.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The spacero bearing Abby and Charlie7 passed through the airlock and into a reserved parking area within the Curiosity dome. There was already a rover waiting for them when they touched down, sent ahead by the colonial authorities to expedite Abby’s arrival.
“Welcome to Curiosity, Madame negotiator,” a man in a drab gray jumpsuit greeted her, offering a hand stepping down from the cockpit.
Even the foreign Martian gravity felt absolutely delightful after the disconcerting artificial sort imposed by the skyro’s thrusters. No sooner had they accelerated to their maximum speed but the damned robot had spun them backward, powered up to the max thrust Abby could stand once again, and slowed them down for arrival.
She knew how interplanetary transit worked, but that didn’t make the rough voyage any easier on the innards.
“Washroom,” Abby commanded.
The attendant held out a hand toward the skyro. “But…”
“I know it comes with one. I used the damned thing eleven times and held my bladder to planetfall before the twelfth. Quit arguing with me about how many times a 127-year-old woman ought to let a robot hear her tinkle and show me to a washroom.”
“I’d do as she asked,” Charlie7 advised, circling around from the other side of the craft with its engines still winding down. “She’s been cranky the past five million kilometers or so.”
There was a maintenance shed for the landing yard. It had all the facilities Abby needed. It was a nice change from the past days, with all the gravitational forces heading toward their proper axes. The normalcy was the real pleasure she took. Tiny biological oddities like that bound mankind in common experience.
Minutes later, she and Charlie7 were in the back of the attendant’s rover.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Abby said over the rumble of the tires on the colony roads.
“Ahmed, ma’am,” the driver said. “An honor to meet you.”
Ahmed, she thought to herself. She wracked her brain for a connection to that name. “Class of 3201?” she ventured.
“3202,” Ahmed replied. “Didn’t expect you’d remember me.”
“You were shorter,” Abby said. “Something in your smile stayed since your emancipation. You end up going into astronomy?”
“Gave it up after a few years in orbit. Found out I like gravity more than mapping distant galaxies.”
Never forget the people in between. Many of Abby’s plays held onto that theme, that between the criminals and the leaders of nations lay the meat and sinew of mankind.
When they arrived at Arthur Miller Theater, Abby allowed Ahmed to help her out of the rover. Instantly, the colonial authorities swarmed to her.
“Ms. Abbigail,” Dana Platt said as she took the liberty of a rather one-sided handshake. “Once the Chain Breakers got word you were on the way, they stopped communicating except for sending in humanitarian supplies.”
“Why would you do a thing like that?” Charlie7 asked. “Should have just starved
them out. This would have been over days ago.”
“None of that,” Abby scolded. “Madame mayor, I’d like to head inside and deal with Ned Lund directly.”
Dana was aghast. “We’ll get you a channel to negotiate with them. They’ve been very specific that no one is to enter or leave except pre-emancipated children and only then to bring meals.”
“Anyone monitoring the waste lines for messages?” Charlie7 asked. “Scrawled notes, data chips, anything that might have been smuggled out to give additional intel on the hostage takers.”
Abby turned to the robot. “Would you mind letting me handle this?” She beckoned to Dana. “Give me the portable that can talk to Ned Lund. The first thing I’ll be negotiating is a way inside.”
No one bothered explaining the setup of the portable or the protocols for dealing with hostage takers. No one dared. There were plays yet to be written and many a bumbling, playwright-patronizing buffoon to be written in and immortalized in infamy.
“Hello, I’d like to speak with Edward Lund,” she said formally.
“This is Ned,” came the gruff reply. Unlike Ahmed at the landing yard, this voice didn’t conjure memories of a child from Oxford. Ned Lund was Martian to the bone, never having set foot on Earth as best Abby could discover. “Who’s this?”
Abby raised an eyebrow despite being on voice-only communication. She supposed that she did sound like her genetic twins, although she could tell an Eve from a Wendy from a Kaylee just fine. Her aunts had all been so distinctive in her mind that it was hard to imagine anyone actually confusing them in conversation. It wasn’t as if Eve’s voice was unfamiliar to anyone.
Whether Ned was playing at being dense or came by it naturally, Abby played along. “This is Abbigail Fourteen, authorized negotiator on behalf of… well, pretty much anyone you’d care to deal with.”
“You have my list of demands?” Ned asked.
