The Homestead

by G R Higginbotham

  The first thing that Moses noticed in the stainless steel waiting area was that the dim lights cast from the various electronic devices around the floor were multiplied in all of the reflective surfaces that surrounded the room. Red and green and amber lights reflected dimly from more sources than he could have imagined. Some were constant, others blinking. The reflected lights served to illuminate a room that could only exist in a reflection, twisting and veering off through external walls into directions that would lead into the Martian soil and certain death. The disorientation that he felt at the unintentional hall of mirrors was amplified by the lack of motion-sensor-triggered lights overhead. Lacking light switches on the wall, Moses was left to feel his way through the eerily lit entryway. Now he was grateful for the sparse but uncomfortable chairs that his already injured knees and feet would not be forced to stumble into.

  When he finally reached the door that led deeper into the nerve center of Homestead IV he found it unlocked and this concerned him even more than the lack of lights. With his unbroken hand, he opened the door and stepped into a place he was never meant to enter without an escort. This area was for official staff only. Even a medical emergency would not excuse him if he were caught in here. It would almost certainly mean being sent back to Earth. Some things were more important than an entire planet of people who would look at you as a failure for coming back home. He never would have thought that before, but it was clear to him now. He had to find Rebecca.

  The desks were in a grid through the large open space he was in, making it easier to navigate by touch along the tops of the desks. Many people would report to work tomorrow with their trinkets and pens in disarray. He made his way through the maze quickly, and reached the back hallway without delay. This hallway housed the offices of maintenance, scheduling, resource allocation, and inter-habitat communication. None of the doors had labels, and if they did he couldn’t have seen them anyway. He was eager to be done with this exhausting multi-level tour of the most dangerous offices of Mars. So far he had been attacked, left to die in toxic fumes, surrounded by cleaning drones, broken his hand, and all of it had happened in offices. Hopefully this hallway would be friendlier to him.

  As he crept down the hall, he listened for the gentle buzzing that would no doubt give away the location of the cleaning robot repair center. He heard them when he was halfway between two doors. Placing his ear to each in turn, he chose the one he thought led to the correct room. These locks were not nearly as difficult to pick, the designers assuming that the locked outer door in the waiting area would stop anybody with nefarious intent. They hadn’t counted on that door being left unlocked.

  Moses picked the lock without difficulty and entered the room, instantly blinded by the light inside. The cleaning force of Homestead IV was in constant motion. If the ICE command center that filled the top floors of the habitat were the nerve center, then the cleaning drones were the lymph system. They traveled inconspicuously through secret tunnels and removed waste and debris from places where nobody was looking. But the drones themselves gave off a radio frequency that canceled out the automatic lights in order to allow the populace to sleep soundly while their entire facility was cleaned and sterilized. So why were the lights on in this room?

  Moses searched the room and found nothing of importance. He had assumed that this would be the place where Rebecca had organized her own mechanized alert system. But if she were stuck in this room for the entire time she was missing someone would have discovered her. And she wasn’t here now.

  The doctor took a seat to rest his body while he considered his options. Just like the lymph system in the body, this system mostly ran itself. The drones had a set routine, and would report back to this command center if something needed the attention of multiple robots. Then the system would auto-generate orders that would send the nearest cleaning robots to the site in question. But also like the lymph system of the body, there had to be an override in place sometimes. Something to regulate it, allowing a mindless system to operate in rare situations that required insight and planning. All of the automated systems of Homestead IV had one source of input that could change underlying programming to coordinate and execute a plan that would operate among multiple systems.

  And suddenly everything clicked into place. There was now a clear picture of all that had transpired. Moses knew where Rebecca was. And he knew who killed Adrie Petersen. And who killed Dr. Epps. Hopefully she wouldn’t mind staying where she was just a little bit longer. She could hang on for a few more hours. The work day would start in under two hours, and then everything would come together perfectly.

  He closed the door to the cleaning drone room and left the floor the same way he had come. There would be no way to fix the knick-knacks on the desks of the workers, but he tried to hide every other trace of himself that he could.

  Then he returned to his personal rooms. He checked his living quarters and all of the drones had gone back into their hidden tunnels, somehow satisfied that their command had been sufficiently carried through. He checked on Idleman, who was still unconscious on the floor in the treatment room. She would be fine until the morning, but just to make sure, he locked the room from the outside. She would wake him if she suddenly reached consciousness. But he needed some sleep before he could execute his plan.

  After fifteen minutes at his personal tablet, he shut it down and laid on his bed, not bothering to undress. It would be too painful, anyway.

  He was drifting off to sleep as a cleaning drone buzzed quietly back into his bedroom, doing its innocuous work to keep Homestead IV shiny and safe for everyone. Moses heard the sound while he was in the place between sleep and awake, and he smiled.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  Dr. Moses Truman entered the office of Chief Shane Jacobs, director of ICE at Homestead IV, with certainty and confidence. Pulling the groggy and healing Stephanie Idleman along beside him, he looked around the room. At his request, it was filled to capacity. The small office wasn’t designed to hold a lot of people. There were conference rooms for this sort of thing. But as explained in his message from just hours ago, it was imperative that they all gather in this office. It was for the safety and efficiency of not only this facility, but the efficacy of the entire terraforming project on Mars. In effect, Moses had said the one thing that would guarantee that everyone he wanted to show up would be here. And they were. And everyone was watching him, waiting for him to debrief them on the medical emergency, and wanting to know how they could help him prevent it. He could tell that they were also all very curious about what had happened to him and Dr. Idleman that could leave them both bandaged and obviously injured. But they politely waited for him to speak.

  The alarm on the high-priority message would not have shut off until the recipient read it. The medical priority messages were only to be used in the event of imminent failure of an entire habitat. Moses had the option to send it facility-wide, planet-wide, or even up to the orbiting command station that oversaw all surface and underground operations. He could also use discretion and send it to people he felt could help prevent the medical emergency before the habitat had to be shut down. The off-loading of an entire facility’s personnel would be quite an undertaking. The likelihood of everyone making it to the orbiting station before a true medical emergency resulted in tragedy was small. Fortunately this was not a widespread disaster even within Homestead IV. And Moses believed they could contain it easily once everyone heard him out.

  Harold Petersen sat directly across the desk from Jacobs, both men red-eyed and weary. They must have had some trouble sleeping after receiving their message. Idleman took the other upholstered chair beside Petersen. The rest of the attendants sat in folding chairs that had been brought in to accommodate everyone. Chen sat in the corner, rubbing his temples. He looked worried at the prospect of a medical shutdown. Seated beside him were the man and woman in white suits with short haircuts and anonymous faces, well-rested and well-groomed. Not a hint of wor
ry on their face. Moses remained standing, leaving one chair empty.

  “Good morning.” He smiled as he addressed them. “Sorry to bring you all in here like this. But as I stated in my message, Homestead IV is facing a deadly situation. One that could impact every resident of the planet if allowed to go unchecked. And I think the people who are in this office are the only ones who can help me stop it.”

  “Truman, I thought that the respiratory problem was under control. Are you saying now it is going to kill people?” Jacobs was at wit’s end already, trying to cover for their previously underreported sickness in front of his supervisors.

  “This isn’t about the ventilation system. This is much worse.”

  “How so?” asked one of the executives in white, tilting her head as she waited for a response.

  “Two people have already died from this, and I’m hoping to prevent a third death.”

  Jacobs slammed his open palm down on his desk. “That’s ridiculous. Nobody has died here since you’ve arrived. What are you talking about? If you’ve abused your authority as physician to waste our time, I will see that you are sent back to Earth!”

  “Just hear me out, sir. Please. It started when Adrie Petersen-”

  Jacobs was going to interrupt again when the woman in the white suit stopped him with a hand. That’s all it took. She wanted to hear what he had to say. “Please, continue doctor.” She lowered her hand.

  “Thank you.” Moses went on. “As I was saying, it all started when Mrs. Petersen noticed that her plants were getting sick. Some of them even died. She got concerned this could become a facility-wide emergency. She starting looking into the problem, examining plants from a good number of the levels. She found that the problem was concentrated in the levels closest to the bottom of the facility.” When he saw the looks of confusion on some of the faces, he realized he should tell them how he found all of this out. “It is all detailed in her personal notes to which I gained access. It was all very concerning.

  “After a while, she finally found that the problem was in the bees. Her pollinators were somehow entering the algae farm and carrying poisonous samples of the stuff along on their pollination route. She got permission from command,” he indicated Jacobs, “to look into the problem down in the mycophycology department using their equipment. It was here that she ran into trouble.

  “She began a thorough reprogramming of her bees to prevent the contamination. At first, it seemed to work. But after a while the problem became worse. Her programming was being overwritten by someone. Her husband had accidentally given access to the controls to Stephanie here, who was trying to use the bees to carry on algae experiments on the inhabited levels of the facility without clearance. She should have recognized the dangers of what she was doing, but was blinded by a desire to be the one to single-handedly reduce the time it took to make Mars a fully habitable planet by thirty per cent.”

  Idleman raised her head, listening now but still sluggish.

  “What really happened was that Adrie’s advanced age and relatively poor immune response wasn’t up to the task of handling the bees that were carrying the algae. If she had only done it one or two times a week it would have been no problem. Or had worn the protective gear that everyone down in the algae labs wears while dealing with the poisonous samples. But this became her obsession. And the more bees she dismantled and reprogrammed, the more Dr. Idleman started tampering with their function. It simply became too much for Adrie’s system to handle.”

  “Why wouldn’t Dr. Epps have been able to identify and treat the problem?” asked President Chen.

  “Epps wouldn’t have known what he was seeing. If it were a system-wide problem like we had before, then maybe he should have drawn the conclusion that the facility was being slowly contaminated. But the mycophycology labs are contained. It is either a total facility contamination, or none. There is no predictable way that just one person, and one who doesn’t even have access to the vats, could be contaminated by micro-doses of toxic cyanobacteria-algae spores. You can’t fault him for not finding the problem.”

  Harold began to sob quietly, rightfully disturbed to learn of his role in the death of his wife.

  Moses went on. “Once the problem was apparent, if Dr. Idleman had come forward and admitted to her actions outright, a treatment could have been developed and given to Mrs. Petersen. She could have been saved. But for some reason she chose to keep her mouth shut on the topic.”

  Stephanie addressed the room while looking at the top of Jacob’s desk, “I couldn’t risk the research,” she said. “Nobody else can carry on the work I’ve been doing. Nobody understands it the way I do.” Her voice was flat and unemotional. Moses could tell she had been reasoning this out in her head since Adrie had died. She had to rationalize it to maintain her sanity. She wasn’t equipped to carry the death of someone on her shoulders. So she insisted that she had no choice.

  One confession down, one more to go.

  “Whatever the reason, it cost Adrie her life. The slow, day by day poisoning of Dr. Petersen resulted in the prolonged respiratory response that eventually killed her.”

  “So you’re saying that Dr. Idleman murdered Adrie Petersen and Bill Epps? Who else is she going to kill? You said there was a third person,” Jacobs interjected. Moses was unsettled by how calm he was.

  “No, sir,” Moses answered. “I’m saying you and Stephanie allowed Adrie to die, and that you murdered the doctor.” As anyone accused of murder would do, Jacobs shot out of his chair and prepared to throw himself at him both verbally and physically. Seemingly out of nowhere, Kam darted into the room from the hallway and grabbed Jacobs by the elbow, twisting it back behind the smaller man’s back painfully. It took any fight out of him.

  “Hi, everybody,” Kam said. “I ran into Moses last night and we had a talk. He told me I might want to hang out around here this morning. You know, for security. I know my shift is over, but I don’t mind.” He smiled at everyone through growing bruises and a split lip. “Mr. Jacobs, can you sit down and listen to the good man?” The two people wearing white shared a look with each other.

  Jacobs nodded assent and returned to his chair, trying simultaneously to rub his elbow and his shoulder. He was grinding his teeth.

  “Jacobs figured out what was going on because he was the one who gave Idleman the idea of expanding her research. Wasn’t he, Stephanie?”

  “How did you know that?” she asked.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” said Moses. “He has the most to gain by having the most productive facility on Mars, and the hybridization of the algae and cyanobacteria has already been more beneficial than anticipated. What better way to rise through the ranks of the International Conglomerate of Entities than go further than anyone else to make Mars live-able?

  “So once Adrie became noticeably sick, Mr. Jacobs forced Epps’ hand and had her sent to Earth. If she remained here and an autopsy were done then the cause of death may have been discovered. Idleman kept quiet about it because she wanted to continue her research. It was the perfect cover. Until Epps became suspicious. Over time, the death of Adrie Petersen kept gnawing at him. No doctor likes to lose a patient, much less one who should not have died in the first place. All of her screenings and checkups were clean. But eventually he figured something out. It was buried in his notes, but we found it. During one of their visits as she was getting sicker, Adrie mentioned her concerns about the spread of spores onto the plant life in the habitat. He was focused on treating her illness at the time, and wasn’t focused on plant health. It wasn’t until after she died and he kept reviewing her files that he picked up on the connection. That the contamination of the plants from the farms was the same thing that killed her.

  “Under the guise of trying to find a treatment for problems just like Adrie’s, he began working down in the labs as well. Coincidentally, he was working at the same workstation Adrie had been using. I’m not sure if he found some of her old notes, or just e
nded up getting lucky, but he started to put the pieces together.

  “What does any normal person do when they discover that someone gets killed by someone else? They report it. So he did. He reported it to Chief Jacobs. That very night, Jacobs somehow added a deadly dose of spores into Epps’ nightcap. Not the whole bottle of whiskey, just the ice. That’s how fatal the dose was. But it didn’t trigger a slow respiratory failure. This wasn’t just a little dose to make the guy sick over time. It was enough to cause him to have sudden heart failure. The death must have been extremely painful as the spores tore through his system. But it was quick. Quick enough to ensure that he couldn’t tell anybody else what he found. He intentionally used the delivery method that Dr. Idleman used so he could blame her if the poisoning was discovered. But she didn’t know that Epps was murdered. She had no idea that he had even suspected what had happened with Adrie.”

  “He was going to bring the whole place down!” Jacobs shouted. He started to rise again until Kam moved toward him. “If control found out what happened they would have shut the research down and this whole project with it. No more civilians. No more Homesteads. Just back to the old system of ICE Stations and hundreds of years of terraforming.”

  “Did you know that Rebecca Martinez was with him the night you killed him? They shared a glass of whiskey to celebrate her new status as ICE orientation officer. If she had taken ice in her drink, you would have killed her too. Who would have believed she had a heart attack? What would you have done then?” Moses challenged.

  “Then she would have been out of the way sooner, and you never would have figured any of this out.”

  “That’s not quite true. Do you know what gave it away?” Moses did not wait for an answer. He had been waiting to tell Jacobs how he had figured everything out since last night. “You wanted to frame Dr. Idleman for it, just in case anybody looked past the heart attack. So you shut down cleaning drone access to the room that night. That’s the only way this sample of water would have survived.” He held up the small vial of water he had taken from Epps’ belongings. “The whiskey was all gone, helping the small dose of poison be absorbed even faster into his system. You have the only override that would prevent a single room from being cleaned. And this vial did throw me off-track for a little while. But I do have one question, though. Did you visit Dr. Epps in his room to poison the ice?”