The God Mars
Book Three: The Devil You Are
By Michael Rizzo
Copyright 2013 by Michael Rizzo
Smashwords Edition
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Table of Contents
Part One: Pride and Prejudice and Paradox
Chapter 1: What I Am and How I Never Came To Be
Chapter 2: Never Go Home
Chapter 3: Stages of Grieving
Chapter 4: Tranquility
Chapter 5: The Price of Utopia
Chapter 6: Here There Be Monsters?
Chapter 7: Death From Above
Chapter 8: The Devil You Know
Chapter 9: Revenant
Part Two: The God War
Chapter 1: Old Friends
Chapter 2: The First Casualty of War
Chapter 3: Bad Toys
Chapter 4: The Chess Masters of Mars
Chapter 5: Extreme Measures
Chapter 6: Siren’s Song
Chapter 7: Leverage
Chapter 8: Suspension of Disbelief
Chapter 9: For A Better Tomorrow
Chapter 10: Exodus
Map of Melas and Western Coprates
Part One: Pride and Prejudice and Paradox
Chapter 1: What I Am and How I Never Came To Be
It’s cold, but I don’t actually feel it.
In whatever shell I’m sealed in, in the dark, I only know it’s cold because something keeps telling me about power consumption, how much energy I’m bleeding to maintain myself at this comfortably insensate temperature balance.
(Objectively, I know there’s no such thing as “cold”. Cold is just the sensation of heat energy being drawn away. And since I can’t feel, it’s just numbers. Heat loss to whatever is around me. Air? Metal? Rock? I have no idea.)
The drain appears to be insignificant, at least for now. I ignore it.
I have no other choice. I can’t move.
I am dead, after all. Or in some stage of dying I can’t explain. I didn’t really expect to be conscious, aware. I expected oblivion. Accepted oblivion. Final, total, perfectly natural peace. As easy as falling asleep and never dreaming or waking.
But I am aware. And that’s curious. (Maybe this is just a hallucination, a vivid dream generated as my brain shuts down for good, robbed of necessary oxygen because I know I was irrevocably bleeding to death.)
I wasn’t aware—and I don’t know how long I wasn’t, since my last shock-addled memory—but I think I am now. I think. Therefore. I. Have no idea.
(I don’t even know how long I’ve been aware. I have no frame of reference except the hallucinatory gauge somewhere in the back of my mind clicking off heat loss.)
Another thing I realize I don’t feel anymore is pain. This isn’t a relief.
I remember the broadsword going through me, the thing that used to be Captain Thompson Gun Bly running it through my body like I was liquid. The pain itself didn’t start for a few seconds, but the shock was almost instantly taking my wind and my legs and then everything else while I vomited my blood all over the deck of Chang’s big ship. (Way too much blood—I think I knew I was dead as soon as I saw it, and somehow that was okay.)
I remember laying on that cool metal deck, curled up in my own still-warm blood like some appropriately ironic reverse-birth, unable to move. Sakina screaming. Star picking me up and carrying me away from there, away from the battle, away from where I needed to be, then putting something far more excruciating in my guts, in the hole through me under my ribcage, to try to keep me alive a few moments longer because she needed to tell me something, then wasting time telling me my liver was destroyed because I was dying anyway of blood loss and infection. Everything was pain and shock. And cold. So cold. Dying seemed like the best idea, but Sakina was crying and Star had other plans. A plan. An offer. Too bad she took too long to get around to explaining it to me. I think I was rude and selfish and died in the middle of her pitch.
The pain and the cold and everything—even me—went away. And it was perfect, natural—the most natural thing in the world…
But then somewhere in there my lives started flashing before my eyes.
Both of them. Over and over for what seemed like a long time. Re-watching the same two movies in an endless fever dream. Same cast and characters in each one, but different plots.
The first one I know. History Channel stuff. My ugly career. UNACT. War on Terror. Killing bad people to make the world a better place. Then dropping for a while into bureaucratic command roles, playing politics but trying to keep my hand in the action, no matter how nervous that made some people.
Then Mars started to go wrong.
Too many folks were scared of the corporate research going on there in “safe” isolation, no matter how many trillions the public—even the scared ones—kept spending buying the toys and meds it produced. Popular fear fostered a movement of “Ecos”, and the more radicalized ones started attacking the on-planet labs, seizing facilities, because they were sure the greed-driven research would produce things that would get loose and end us all. And then someone—Eco or cutthroat competition—had managed to place flying drones—Discs—that started shooting the place up, destroying insanely expensive facilities and interfering with insanely profitable production. So Mars needed a military presence. To “protect” the insanely well-paid corporate colony workers. (Really to protect the trillion dollar facilities and profit streams. They weren’t fooling anybody.)
It was a great excuse to get the hell off the planet of my birth, for an old man to go play soldier again. (A space soldier no less—how cool is that?) And maybe die a “good death”. (Did I die a good death?)
But—to pretty much everybody’s surprise—I managed to help make peace with the Ecos instead of killing them. Unfortunately, a condition of that peace was putting a “failsafe” system in orbit, a nuclear weapons platform more than capable of “sterilizing” the occupied surface of Mars if any of the scary nano- or bio-tech work got loose from the labs and fabs.
Of course, as soon as we got the thing online, the drones hacked the system, staged a convincing multi-site containment breach, got the platform to arm. Then they hit us hard in orbit, cutting us off and pinning us down while they set it off, raining nuclear fire on our heads.
Tens of thousands of people died in minutes. It was only by the miracle of human stubbornness that some of the nukes get taken out or at least deflected from the ground. But we still got pounded. And Earth got convinced we were all dead, and that the planet was a permanently contaminated death trap.
Me, I got to sleep for the next fifty years with almost twelve hundred of my fellow survivors in one of the few places with a mass emergency shelter, waking up clueless and cut off, our corner of Mars partially terraformed, and not as alone as we expected.
There were survivors. Most kept hiding, sure Earth nuked them on purpose and would try again if they saw anything moving down here. Over the generations they adapted, thrived, created new cultures, and competed violently with each other over limited resources. A few we managed to make friends with. Others… not so much. And then there were the terraformers themselves—the ETE—shut up in their monastic Stations with a cache of
salvaged research, and nothing better to do (while their automated machines cooked Mars) than play with it, making themselves somewhat more than human.
We did finally contact Earth, of course, only to find it gone stranger on us. And still afraid—to the point of turning itself into an anti-science semi-theocratic neo-dark-age utopia. We were declared quarantined until Earth could convince itself we weren’t harboring some extinction-level contamination, and conditions were put on our relief. Conditions that got my people hurt and killed.
Then, just when I thought the situation couldn’t get darker, the Shadowman came, Syan Chang. Telling a children’s story about time travel from a doomed future. He admitted ownership of the drones and everything they’d done to us, seducing some of the survivor factions with the promise of power and protection through his advanced technology, and pledging to stop Earth’s return to Mars at all costs.
Friends of mine were killed in the battles that followed, including my best friend. And then me: Trying to buy time and get a look over Chang’s newest flying battleship, I got myself stabbed by what used to be a man who had plenty of reason to stab me. And then my body was carried off to a cave. By an ancient god. Who turned out to be another old friend.
And then I bled to death. The End.
(Shitty place to end. The battle wasn’t even done. I don’t know what happened.)
The other movie is really bad scifi, and the ending is much, much darker (though just as annoyingly unresolved).
In this one, the R&D on Mars progresses mostly unmolested. The scariest (and most potentially lucrative) breakthroughs are in biological hybrid nanotech, fusing living bodies with semi-organic molecule-sized machines; machines that can work together to mimic functioning organs and tissues, rebuild cells, even alter DNA sequences. Lives were extended, diseases were conquered, bodies modified—mostly for vanity or convenience or entertainment, but some of the mods were particularly appealing to soldiers. Or other kinds of professional killers.
Feeling old and really not liking it, I let some of my shadier cohorts talk me into an experimental implantation program, well ahead of full commercial production. After a month or so completely out of it, I woke up a young man again, and better: Stronger. Faster. With onboard interfaces and the ability to heal fast and survive even the most catastrophic of traumas. Everything a soldier or a killer would want.
The price was being kept as a lab rat for awhile, shown off to people who wanted to live forever young and could afford it, so I never really got to do much of anything with the gifts I’d been given. But within a few decades, everybody could afford it (and subsidy laws were passed to make sure of it). And I was free to do what I wanted in a world that didn’t make sense anymore.
Some people refused the mods, chose to live and age and die “like God intended”. But most ate up the newest mods as soon as they hit the market. And now we had a whole world of functionally immortal superhumans, which meant a world without mortal consequences. It was a nightmare of excess and boredom, gratification at all costs, wanton destruction, and finally apathy…
I remember trying to rebel against it, but it was a hopeless cause. There were only a few of us, wanting to give the human race (or what the human race had become) a purpose beyond idle thrill-seeking or selfish comfort.
The next part is fuzzy. I think I fell into some kind of depression, shut down, gave up on the world we’d made. My last mortal friend died of old age, no longer my friend, because I was no longer his.
And then I heard about something that scared me—but scared was the most profound thing I’d felt in as long as I could remember. There was a project to take humanity to the next level, to create the ultimate hybrid of life and technology, to evolve us beyond the pathetic drives of our bodies. It was terrifying but intriguing. And there was a “prototype”.
There was also a radical fringe of scientists trying to take what we’d become away from us by force, strip us of our mods even though billions would die without them (a cost they justified because we would be human again, as God intended). When they failed, one of them got hold of a new technology designed to monitor past events directly, and he did what should have been impossible: He used the sub-atomic links to create nanotech seeds to build things in the past, things that could change the chain of events, stop (or at least stall) the modding of the human race before it began.
Changing the timeline was supposed to be impossible, the paradox itself unbeatable. No one with a scrap of sanity or credible science had any faith the fantasy plan could succeed. But apparently there was just enough faith to move a few of us to do something about it. And apparently I still had enough faith that the human race was worth saving to try to stop something that could literally erase all of us from existence.
But that’s where the story ends. Just like that. The End.
And I’m back here in the dark, unable to move, unable to feel, with some vague alert nudging my brain that it’s cold outside.
I’ve long since lost count of how many times I’ve seen the two movies of my real and unreal life when I suddenly realize it isn’t dark anymore.
My eyes are open.
I’m awake.
I’m also inside of something, something snug around me like a pressure suit or Sleep Pod. Through transparent lenses, I see red rock, and slowly realize I’m looking up. The rock wall is a ceiling above me. I do vaguely remember being taken to a cave to die. I guess I’m still here.
I try to move, to find some way to open whatever I’m inside of, and it moves with me.
Suit. Definitely a suit. Complete with a helmet. But it doesn’t feel like a pressure suit. It feels like metal. Plates. Armor. A lot of armor. But it isn’t heavy.
And it doesn’t hurt to move.
But moving is slow. Like I have to think about it. My body doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like me.
Something is restricting my movement.
I can only move upwards. I’m in some kind of rut, a snug body-shaped divot in what feels hard enough to be stone, makes scraping sounds like metal on stone as I try to move.
Then I think about sitting up, and my body does it for me, smooth and fast. Disorienting, like I’m on a carnival ride. And now every movement I make is smooth and fast, less like I’m doing it and more like I’m in some kind of brain-wired servo-frame, but it’s me: my bones, my muscles doing the work. But nothing feels right, nothing feels like me.
And it should hurt to move. I should at least be stiff. Old man, lying in a cold stone rut for who-knows-how-long. I should be in agony.
I’m staring at my legs.
My Mars-red camo UNMAC Light Armor uniform is gone. I’m wearing black, all black. Tall heavy boots and plates of black metal armor all the way up my legs, all plain and practical and looking too dense to lift. Over me is a kind of shin-length tunic or robe, like a medieval knight’s surcoat. Under it are more plates: chest, gut, pelvis, back—all in bug-like sections to move with me. My arms… I hold them up in front of my mask (and I am wearing a mask). There’s heavy chainmail sleeves with small rectangular metal splints woven in like tiles, terminating in backhand plates like a samurai’s kote. And thick black gloves. The only color is some blood-red piping and Japanese-style lacing on the arm guards.
It should be too heavy to move in. It isn’t heavy at all.
I reach up and pry the helmet off my head—in unseals at my touch (or maybe before my touch, anticipating), lifts off. And I feel: air on my skin. My face. Cold but not unbearable.
I bring the helmet in front of me, get a look at it.
“Oh… That is not right…”
It’s a big ram’s skull. A bad joke with big horns. Ugly as hell. Stupid as hell. A prop from a crappy fantasy.
The horns… move… Like a thing alive. The coils shrug at me, draw in as if offended by my criticism.
I have a flash of a memory then, a comforting nostalgic familiarity: I made this. A badly inspired craft project, during a phase when I was trying to for
ce meaning on a bored pointless immortality through artistic expression. But like all my artistic expressions, I like the results less-and-less as time goes by, as I see the flaws.
But why am I wearing it?
And I suddenly realize I’ve done something stupid.
How am I breathing?
I look around. I am in a cave, albeit a man-made one, cut by mining equipment, probably into rim rock. Faded markings in familiar style on the walls tell me it probably was a Zodangan outpost, maybe another one they abandoned when they threw in with Chang. But that means I’m up in the cliffs of the Northeast Rim. Even at valley floor elevation, the atmospheric pressure is only 0.28. Everest density. And I’m probably at least hundreds if not thousands of feet above that…
The Zodangans used shelter-fabric shutters to seal their caves, keep a livable pressure. But they take them when they move, wasting nothing.
I’m up and turning. Behind me, I can see: the cave mouth is open to daylight, whistling with the almost-constant thin winds. Thin.
How am I breathing?
I realize: I’m not. And I haven’t been.
Like I have an interface on, my vision lights up with another gauge. Somehow I’m reprocessing CO2 into O2 down in my lungs, and my “carbon level” is still optimal. I’m not sure what that means. I take a breath anyway.
The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are Page 1
