Midnights on the Bloor Viaduct | Sonnets Made of Wood | Apres Moi, Le Deluge
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by Leah Bobet
"Well, that's it," said Meadows when I hit the situation room at the start of my shift that night. "That's the last one. Doctorow's dead."
I promptly spat my mouthful of coffee. It burned my throat and sent sugar fumes up my nose. And yes, the alerts were blaring red nonstop, like everyone in the world had just got ahold of a laser pointer and was waving it around in a Spontaneous Global Woodstock. The techs beat at their keyboards with blunted fingers, sweating; the whole situation room smelled like a comics shop.
This was not a drill.
"I thought Doctorow died over the Atlantic?" I said, mopping at my shirt with a napkin. It was a good thing Defense Department cafeterias never made the coffee actually hot. Either way, it was going to stain.
Meadows shook his head, jaw set, full dress uniform rumpled. His medals were askew. The lieutenant-general's medals were never askew. "No. Escaped somehow. They found his body behind a dumpster at the San Diego Convention Centre this morning. Two bullets through the back of the head, execution-style."
I sucked in a breath. Two years, we'd thought we were safe. Two years after the last uploaded science fiction writer had bit the biscuit--at least that we knew of. And now the arctic bases, the fishing fleets, the California coast would never evacuate in time. In their corner of cyberspace, on whatever illicit server hosted their virtual readings and pamphleted the internet with downloadable novellas, the Uploaded Pastafarian Cabal was probably laughing. "Have they issued any statements yet?"
Meadows scowled. "Doctorow's upload is sponsoring a reward for information on his murderer. Stross's is making Grey Goo jokes about his old sinuses. Schroeder and Watts are drinking with Vinge. Macleod's building prayer wheels. And they're all saying we should have funded NASA while we had the chance."
I fixed my eyes on the bank of screens; I didn't look at Meadows. I had never heard so little hope in my boss's voice. "And the icecaps?"
"Have started to melt," he said.
I retreated to the boardroom and watched from behind double-sided glass. It was better for me to get out of the way: the engineers hated having us breathing on their Dilbert bobbleheads on the very best days. Jack, the other profiler on night shift, got in five minutes after with a stack of digest-sized magazines.
"We've been through this before," I said, but even I wasn't believing myself this time.
"They'll want reports," he said, and paged open last month's issue, stiff lurid cover and newsprint that sucked the moisture from your fingers.
"The reports won't say anything we didn't say last year." I watched the laser-light dance flicker over weather systems, camera feeds of the glaciers, temperature maps. It wasn't like it mattered now. We were all going to drown.
"Who would have shot him?" I asked. "Everybody knows about the deadman's switches."
"Well, they might have thought he'd respawn," he said. "Disney World, Disneyland, they probably don't know the difference."
I tapped the rim of my coffee cup. "They're weird, but they're not stupid." Jack was a shitty profiler and he knew I thought so. He ignored me and kept counting the second letter of every word in a story by somebody named Reed.
And that was the real question: everybody had seen the Pastafarian Ultimatum broadcast and podcast on a million frequencies, then replayed into nonsense words by the major news networks. They had made movies about this fateful day, the day of the Transcendence: maps of the United States drowned in blue, glowing red nanoreactors pulsed in the icecaps, people drowned and Dustin Hoffman frowned in sixty-foot technicolour. Even the smallest schoolchild knew who held the delicate string of our survival on Earth between their Creative Commons-stained fingertips.
Only a nihilist would dare to fire that shot.
So who had killed Doctorow?
The Lieutenant-General let himself in after an hour, staff in tow, and I was still turning it over in my head. All the computer terminals were in use; I couldn't even start trolling the fan forums, and my fingers were itching for a keyboard. I paced and watched Jack dutifully take notes while the staff sorted out their papers, beverages, seating arrangements by rank.
General Allen took the head of the table and coughed once; the shuffling stilled. "I assume everyone's been briefed," he said.
Nods rounded the table, terse. "We've picked up underground heat emissions from the monitoring stations at both poles, beginning three-thirty this afternoon. The nano-solars are warming up. This is for real."
I swallowed. I'd only been in junior high when the Pastafarians had uploaded. I still remembered the monthly climb-and-cover drills, crouching atop little metal desks the size of a port-o-potty. We'd always known this was coming, but it had become so abstract, so unreal--
"Vinge. Egan. Macleod." Meadows' lip curled; his hands clenched, in profile. "Living like engineer kings in their collectible-filled mansions. We should've blown them out of the sky when we had the chance, General."
"You know we couldn't do that," Allen said evenly, posture stiff, chest thrust out in the traditional at ease, in the way I privately thought prevented women from getting far in the military. "All our attempts to deactivate the deadman's switches were ineffective."
Meadows actually winced. I didn't blame him. I'd read the file on how Stephenson died, babbling feverishly about offshore banking and memetics in the secretest of government facilities. Meadows had been there, supervised the tests and the interrogations. He never sat in on the meetings where they briefed us on the latest intel from the few fen captured on American soil every month.
An emotion almost like sympathy flickered over Allen's craggy features. "Eva, Jack, any theories?"
"Clearly the work of a splinter sect of skiffies," Jack put in, all puffed-up ink-stained importance, like we weren't just a convenient change of subject.
I straightened. "Respectfully disagree, Sir," and Jack's chair scraped standard-issue military tile floor.
"If my esteemed colleague would refer to the report on last month's pulps and my discussion of the alien-POV trend as rejection of the patriarchy--by extension, the fen's skiffy masters--"
I snorted and tried to hide it; it came out sounding like a muppet's cough in the dry, nano-scrubbed installation air. Jack turned to me, eyes bugging out, ready for another intradepartmental spat. "Sir," I said to Lieutenant-General Meadows, "I'd been thinking about my first day here."
He paused, nodded. He'd asked me if I had the emotional stamina to fight invisible, intangible enemies for an indefinite time period. He'd said their last profilers had either burned out or gone native. He'd asked if I had the right stuff.
Like anyone says to their new boss, I'd said yes. "Just one thing, Sir," I'd asked, still young enough to confuse eager running off at the mouth for initiative and commitment. "Why a flood? Aren't the skiffies environmentalists?"
He'd sized me up; I tried to hold eye contact for a while, failed. This was back when I was still intimidated by military types. "They are," he'd said, "but they love those Biblical twist endings."
"Sir," I'd said, surprised. I had never thought the skiffies were...religious. Six years past, and that contradiction kept me questioning my instincts, cross-checking any answer too easy, remembering that people--even the cultish, slavish skiffies--were complex organisms.
It seemed Lieutenant-General Meadows remembered it too. "Go ahead, Eva," he said, in a much more serious voice.
"I don't think it's a splinter sect, Sirs," I said, uncomfortable with the quiet in the boardroom. Nobody even picked at their donuts. We weren't just a change of subject now. "Someone closer, someone at the core. Doctorow's been at the forefront of the Pastafarian movement even before the uploads, and now he's--was--the last man standing. The skiffies are looking for a Messiah."
There was a short silence. "And what actions would you recommend in the face of that?" Allen asked. I swallowed. I was just a junior profiler. I wasn't used to all this attention, all this being taken seriously.
"I'd...I'd like leave to investigate, Sir," I said, and sat up straight in my chair to look taller, more confident. "I know these people better than anybody. Maybe if we find the perpetrator, the fen'll break cover and we can get coordinates on the server."
And stop this thing, went through everyone's head at once. Their mouths had opened identically, hands closed abruptly: all the tells of people trying to get a grip on hope.
Allen sized me up, a measuring look that I knew had made recruits wet their pants on the parade ground. "All right, Eva. Report to Lieutenant-General Meadows at two-hour intervals. I want to keep this a tight ship. Jack, work your connections for the same information. As for the rest of us, I'm giving the evac order to the coasts."
The meeting stood as one, the military hivemind of protocol in action, and dispersed. Jack didn't look at me. "God," I said, running a hand through my hair. "Get over it or we'll drown," and left him to clean up the boardroom.
I went home and packed an overnight bag--a few changes of clothes, toothbrush, laptop, my nearest and dearest possessions--and drove back to work as the blockades went up. Everyone else was driving out, looking for higher ground. Electric cars sparked, cut off from the grid, abandoned shells along the highways. Only the beat-up hybrids and gas guzzlers were making it through.
The city was dark, half-emptied in an hour. A spotlight flickered raggedly over a roadside billboard: The Singularity: Is It In You?
I got into work, poured a fresh coffee, and got down to business.
The fen forums had been busy in my absence. I logged into my alter-ego, a knitting, cat-keeping software engineer from Maryland who liked Picard over Kirk and Spike over Angel. Everyone was chattering about the murder, the floods: some of them were even throwing end-of-the-world parties. They had fifteen theories on who had done it, and most of them pointed straight at us, the government, The Man.
"We're not that stupid," I muttered at the screen. "People are complex organisms." Clearly the fen didn't know about it. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it was just some random act of violence, some 'net-illiterate kid packing a gun taking a little revenge without thinking it through and I was no better than all the other kids who'd asked their parents why?
I heard a rattle, another, and noticed my hands were shaking on the keys.
"No," I said, clamping down on the nausea in my gut. "Pull it together." I dumped my coffee and poured a glass of water, readjusted the privacy filter on my laptop screen. I still had my source of last resort.
I made sure Jack was engrossed in his own laptop screen, and then logged myself into the SFWA newsgroups.
Looking for something in Meadows's office a few years back, purely with permission, I'd come across the file on Stephenson. All the interrogation techniques, the transcribed interviews, the scrawlings he'd covered every bit of paper with before his heart gave out. Meadows had kept the stories, the last stories, dark and bloody and expository things more reminiscent of his youth than his Baroque phase.
And I had photocopied them, and typed them out, and submitted them to the pro-paying, seditious, banned science fiction magazines.
When the third was accepted, the contract encased in a spoofed phone company envelope and full of legal clauses as to editorial policy, legal trouble, and obligations in case of torture, I had worked the byzantine network of connections I now had and applied for SFWA membership. It gave me an edge I didn't like to use too much, an edge I'd been saving for a rainy day--and it sure as hell was about to be raining.
Once the server authenticated my new random password I started from the top thread down, not even stopping at the political arguments, the territorial spats, the neverending discussions about readership and new distribution models that'd make money while being below-board enough to avoid legal detection. There had to be something here. I needed there to be something.
I glanced through the minutes of the latest meeting, two days past in Los Angeles, sorting out the financials of LACon VII. Doctorow had been in attendance; so had Vinge, downloaded into a cloned body for the occasion, one of the one-use ones that only lasted a few hours and didn't store well. He'd disintegrated halfway through the argument about panelist rebates and they'd had to draw straws to find someone to mop up. They were already laughing about it on the personal newsgroups; he seemed to be taking it well. There was a request for anyone in the Los Angeles area to pick up the bucket of cellular goo from its drop point and courier it back to the cloning centre.
"No shit," I said out loud, and Jack looked up at me. I set my jaw and looked back down at the screen, then opened my e-mail.
My SFWA alter ego did not knit, had no opinion on Star Trek or Buffy, and mostly kept quiet. But she was listed with three professional sales and only three in the database, and the same rules applied there as in the military: anyone of a lower rank would do anything to kiss up to those with a higher one--rule the first--and secondly, doing favours got you noticed.
I'll be in L.A. this weekend, I sent to the poster. Where do I pick it up and where do I take it?
And in that way people trust you when you're preapproved and screened, the location of the Pastafarians' body factory fell straight into my hands.
The statement came through at 0300 hours, plastered on every frequency, spit out of every fax and printer, e-mailed to every address that existed and some that didn't. All five of my inboxes lit up with the new mail icon, and I cycled through them all before settling down to read the Pastafarians' press release.
Our intent, it read, scrolling through in all the major languages and a dialect of Klingon, is not and has never been to punish you, the public. The nanoreactors were a defensive measure, an assertion of strength to those who would shut our servers down. There is no provision in law for the rights of uploaded consciousnesses, and thus we were forced to make our own to protect our citizens, our bodies, and ourselves.
The icecaps were already melting. The ozone is already tattered. The viability of life in the flood zones has been in question for many years.
There is server space for anyone who wants it; our servers are on secure high ground, and guaranteed power, maintenance, and virus protection. You will not be carded for SFWA membership to upload and there is no application process.
There is hope for humanity and posthumanity. Our doors are open.
"Slap a trace on that!" Meadows shouted from the other side of the mirror-glass, and white-shirted tech staff scurried from their stations to shut down the fax, call the service providers, find a source for that IP. He stalked from station to station, peering over the techs' shoulders, and I got the feeling there wasn't going to be an update on our progress until the signal was either captured or died out in a labyrinth of firewalls, wrong turns, and the other smug little tricks the Pastafarians had mastered.
"D'you want breakfast?" Jack asked, something like a flag of truce for him, sliding around to get a good look at whatever was on my laptop screen.
I blanked it with the touch of a button. "Sure. Whatever the cafeteria has is fine."
He grunted, thwarted, and paced into the situation room and out. I was hungry, I realized: the last thing I'd eaten was a donut around ten-thirty, and I'd worked straight through the night shift lunch hour--we all had.
Meadows was still moving around the situation room like a force of nature, expression tight and formal, which meant nobody better get in his way. I needed to report the cloning centre address to him, but...really, what would they do? Raid the place, shut it down, and there had to be backup facilities in place: the Pastafarians never did anything by halves, and they were patient. By the time we got any data the water would already be rising at the coasts, and the quarry would be long gone to ground.
I picked up my cell, dialed the phone number that had come along with the address, and tried to control my breathing.
"San Diego Hydroponics," said a snappy, precise voice. Male, I noted, and not scared-sounding, and still at work. Not in fear of his life.
"Hi there," I replied, sounding much more nervous and feeling it. "I was told to talk to you about a delivery of Pixie Dust."
There was a wary silence; god, I'd got the password wrong, or my contact had, or this was the wrong number altogether or a plant or a sting--"that'd be the Pixie Dust from this last weekend or last night?" he asked, and a little drumming sound stopped. I'd been drumming my fingers on the table.
Who had downloaded last night? "Um, this weekend," I said. "Is it still safe to drop them at the same location?"
"Oh, yeah," he said cheerfully. "We're flood-proofed."
I took a breath, let it out, went out on a limb. "And are there any other pickups you'd like me to do while I'm in the neighborhood?"
"Let me see..." he said, a little surprised, but still talking, still had him, still on the line. "There should be something at the San Diego drop point in two days. If you're coming that way."
San Diego, I scribbled on a corner of Jack's abandoned notepad and tore it off. "All right," I said, trying to stay disinterested but cheerful, your average person doing an average thing. "I suppose I'll see you then."
He said goodnight, hung up, and I beat it out to the situation room double-time. Meadows was reaming out someone over something – I caught coordinates, but that was it. I hustled over to one of the few female techs on the team and got her attention. The girls stuck together. Maybe she'd do me a favour.
"Terry," I said, and leaned over her desk. "I need a link to the satellites."
She glanced up at me, annoyed, still curious. Her hands didn't stop moving on the keyboard. "We're in the middle of a major crisis here--"
"Yeah," I cut her off, something I'd get reprimanded for later. She outranked me. "This is really, really important. I need a look at this address for last night."
"What time last night," she said witheringly. Techs always assumed you knew shit about shit, especially when you did.
"I don't know," I said, "just check until you find someone coming out."
She called up the digital archive with a few crisp strokes that said I really, really owed her, and we leaned over the screen as it fast-forwarded through late afternoon, darkened into evening, and then a figure zipped out and down the walk between blinks--
"Wait--" I said, and she scrolled back. The man opened the door, glanced around, and strolled down the walk on his merry way into the city. Even on satellite surveillance, imprecise as it sometimes was, that face, that beard were recognizable anywhere.
Stross.
Stross had downloaded a copy of himself into a temporary clone at 1900 that evening. In San Diego, not L.A.
I checked his weblogs--public and the locked one that everyone knew about anyway--and there was no mention of a public appearance, or a shopping trip, or a pub crawl, and Stross always said where he was going somewhere or other. Blogger habits died very hard even when you were an enemy of the state: omission wasn't forgetfulness for that type. He was hiding something.
It was circumstantial at best.
"I don't care," I muttered aloud, and smiled to Terry, took myself back to my laptop. "It's a chance."
I sucked in a breath and then typed in an e-mail address that just knowing about meant court-martial, incarceration, interrogation, and never working again in any town. No subject line, no sigfile. I typed slowly, counted to three, and then hit send.
Mr. Doctorow, it said, I know who killed your body.
The call came over the situation room screen bank no more than a minute later, weather patterns and outdoor cams fading tile-by-tile into a monstrous, poreless face, buzz-short hair and black-rimmed glasses peering into the most secret depths of the Defense Department like an angry, beardless god. "Hi there," he said. "I'd like to talk to your profiler, please."
There was a beat of silence before the situation room went nuts.
"Mr. Doctorow," Meadows called out over the din. "This is a private channel secured by the United States military at order of the government, and--"
"Yeah," he said, "I don't care about your systems. Hacking the Pentagon's really eighties. I'm just returning her call."
Every head that could turn away from the giant face on the screenbank was abruptly staring at Jack and me, behind the boardroom door. I stood up, turned the handle, and stepped outside.
"Mr. Doctorow," I said, and 48-inch digital eyes slid across towards me. I shuddered. "Thank you for calling back," I stuttered rapid-fire with my gaze cast down to the floor. It was superstitious, unprofessional, I'd kick myself later, but I couldn't bear the weight of his--its--attention.
There was a pause--time delay, I realized, a long time delay--and then his voice rang out again, sharp with intensity. "Okay. So who did it?"
"Stross," I said, reluctant, embarrassed. "He downloaded a copy last night in San Diego. We've got satellite footage."
There was a pause. A very long pause.
"He says he doesn't know anything about it," Doctorow said, a little accusing.
"Did...did you ask his copy, Sir?" Now Meadows scowled, and I glanced an apology over to him. Calling angry male authority figures who could easily ruin large portions of my life Sir was a reflex.
"His copy disintegrated and reintegrated after the meeting," Doctorow said.
"His copy never made the meeting," I replied. "Check the SFWA minutes. He wasn't in attendance." Of course he wouldn't remember. The real Doctorow hadn't made his last backup. He'd be missing time.
Doctorow frowned, thoughtful; I thought I saw a hint of confusion around the corner of his eyes. It must have been a long time since he'd been confused; out of nowhere I caught a whisper of sympathy coming up from my sleep-deprived brain. He was uploaded, all numbers and imitative algorithms, but it was still imitating a person. It could probably still be upset, or confused.
"Sir," I said, tentative, aiming it at the right authority figure this time. "Nothing's been returned to the cloning centre. He must still be out there. We can just ask him."
Meadows was watching me with a tight frown on his face. "Moyer, get on the horn to the California office and send agents out to the San Diego Apple stores."
The lieutenant punched the direct line code for the California office and conveyed sharp instructions, called out "Sir!" once it was done. Doctorow settled back on his barely-outlined haunches and waited, studying us from the screens while everyone tried to find something else to do.
"So," Doctorow said idly, affably. "How'd you find the cloning centre?"
"I'm, ah..." Meadows was staring at me. I was going to get rung up on treason if we didn't drown first. "I'm in SFWA, Sir. Qualifying story was 'Love and Economics Among the Baroquians', last May's Asimov's."
He tilted his head. "That was a good story. Reminded me of some of Neal's stuff. You read his work at all?"
"Ah--" I said, and then thank God, they found Stross.
Moyer gave us camera, and half the screen bank showed an upset display of iMacs, two suited and satisfied federal agents, and the downloaded Stross between them, jaunty pope hat askew over his spectacles. "Hullo, Cory," he said, and Doctorow scowled.
"Charlie, what happened to my body and why the hell are you in San Diego?" he asked.
"Uh, that," the eigenStross said, and had the grace to look ashamed. "Yeah, I was hoping to talk to you 'bout that when I got back up home."
"She was right," he said, mouth slightly open, and the image stuttered. "You killed me--"
"It was Bear," he said. "Gave me a whack of bandwidth to do you in. "
"We were going to win Hugos together--"
"I'm sorry, man, but I wasn't thinking of anything but the book then, and that bandwidth was just enough to finish it."
Doctorow's image froze: extreme avatar shock. I winced, looked away at the other half of the monitor bank. It hurt to watch. "Greg wanted me killed. And you went along with it."
"No, Bear-No-Relation. Elizabeth. Though I think they're totally cousins." He shifted, and the arresting officers tightened their grip until the eigenStross scowled. "I was on deadline, man. You know how it is. I'm not going to be the guy that tells their editor the book's not done when I have access to the biggest computing resource in the solar system to write it with."
The giant Doctorow-head's surprise turned menacing. "She's making a play for my server space. She's hated me ever since I passed her Amazon ranking last month."
"No, nothing like that," said the eigenStross, surprised. "She just said it'd be really eco-gothic. Explosions and stuff."
"Charlie..." the Doctorow upload said, out of words, and I clenched my hands tight in my jacket pockets. It was just an upload, a software program. That wasn't real emotion in its face.
"I really think it was the cat's idea," the eigenStross confided, and shrugged. "You know I saw it getting all cozy with her a while back? We should have a talk with that thing--it's up to something." His pope hat wobbled and his arms twitched against the cuffs. One of the black-suited federal agents plucked it off, disgust on his All-American face.
"Take him away," Meadows said mildly, breaking the awed silence in the situation room, and the agents shuffled out of the camera's view. They were probably remanding him for interrogation--whatever interrogation you could perform on a clone with a stale-date when the flood was coming in.
"Well," Doctorow said after a long pause, longer than connection distance would account for. "I suppose you did me a favour and I was offering a reward. What d'you want?"
I took a deep breath. My heart was going like a Fourth of July parade. "Can you... reverse it? Turn off the nanoreactors?" This was it. We weren't going to die. We'd done it--
"No," he sighed. "They're a self-replicating reactor; there is no halting state once they assemble. Only fantasy writers pull punches like that. You know, you really should have funded NASA," and the screens went blank again.
I sat down, hard. The room swam just a little, prematurely underwater, and I gripped the armrests until it stabilized again and tried not to think about what water did to lungs, the way you coughed and still tried to breathe reflexively, just killing yourself faster. I was not going to be sick, I wasn't, I wasn't--
"We're getting an IP address," Moyer said into a silence like the grave. His voice cracked, wavered. "Upload coordinates. It says...they'll give us a pardon for Stephenson if we upload the prisoners first."
"That is aiding in the escape of a detainee of the United States Government," Meadows stated evenly. "And as such, it is treason." He didn't look at me. I swallowed. Passing information on a Pentagon channel to rogue skiffy terrorists was also treason. So was SFWA membership. Flouting the chain of command wasn't treason, but it was up there.
It hadn't worked.
We were going to die.
"I was just trying--" my voice came out choked, teary, unprofessional and unmilitary and scared.
"And we're still doomed," Meadows said. I flinched.
Allen gave the Lieutenant-General a level look. "No, we're not. Everyone, please close down your terminals and clear your lockers of valuables."
"Sir?" came out of every mouth in the situation room.
Allen smiled, a cracked-ice twitch of the mouth. "We did fund NASA."
We took the last jet out to Florida, overnighters in hand. The water was already rising. CNN reported on the death toll up until Meadows switched it off, and he was the Lieutenant-General, the father of Operation: Nerdbuster, the original. Nobody argued.
I napped on the flight, twisted up on my side in the confined airliner seat. The tech in the next seat woke me after too short a time; my mouth was gummy and dry and my eyes ached, and we were landing.
They led us out onto an airstrip whipped by wind, gravel and grass skittering inland, trees bent-backed in the distance. I rubbed my neck and looked up...and up...and up.
The ship towered like a World Trade Centre made of steel and hybrid fuel tech, story upon story of habitat, storage, seed banks, in a smooth, fat cylinder. There were no wings, none of the innovations the era of the space shuttles had brought us. This ship was not built to return. It was almost...Golden Age.
The engineers gawked, a little excited despite the exhaustion, the depression, the hot smell of a hurricane coming in that swept over the tarmac. The officers stood stonefaced as ever: the natural reaction of a military man in an unknown situation was to strive for perfect nonchalant discipline. Jack was breathing fast next to me. "They're nuts," he said. "They're as crazy as the skiffies."
The solar panels flexed and ruffled in the wind, a giant-sized Hugo Award, a getaway car, our ticket to the stars. Inside me, the part that identified with my subjects just a little was bright with excitement. "I'm doing it," I said, joyous, and followed the techs down the runway to the collapsible stairway where the officers were already boarding.
They gave us suits, checked our helmets, and strapped us in. The floor shuddered and rumbled and a tinny voice in my ear said thrusters online. I held on tight to the armrests.
Every inch of my skin was pressed back against the seat as we took off, gained velocity, fought gravity and won. I laughed aloud.
We were going to live.
We were moving fast, faster than in the movies, faster than I thought fuel-powered engines could go. Earth receded behind us, green and grey and much too blue for comfort; guilt stabbed at my gut and I had to look away. Survivor guilt, my training told me, leftover tribal instinct. People are dying down there.
We were in orbit in three minutes, clearing it in five. I peered out the window and saw the long-sought server as we passed, covered in solar panels that glittered in the earthlight, rising out of space like an obsidian monolith. It had nanite clouds gathered at its tip, chewing on a half-deconstructed Russian spy satellite, destroying it for its spare matter. And then it was gone and the vector shifted, and we were passing the decommissioned ISS, speeding our way to Mars.
The helmet speaker crackled. "We are being pinged, Sirs."
"Report," General Allen's voice said, crisp even through the static.
"The Posthumanist Science Fiction Writers Association wishes us a safe journey, and looks forward to a healthy economic and informational trade relationship once we are well-established—" the voice faltered, cut out as the channel was killed; there was an uncomfortable mumble through the capsule.
We spent the rest of the trip in silence, sleeping, eating or just plain numb, moving further from home every second, further into the stars.
We landed at Mars habitat after a scant week, and there were people there to greet us.
I recognized most of the faces: politicians, scientists, artists, personalities. The rich, or the powerful, or the intelligent and lucky. The cream of society, huddled into a half-dozen habitats, sucking pumped oxygen like it was wine. They smiled because it was their job to smile--had been their job--but I could tell they were afraid.
General Allen took us aside after the handshakes and welcomes, and gave us our first Mars briefing.
"Ladies and gentlemen, you are here because of your dedication to duty, your service in attempting to prevent this disaster, and your noted commitment to hard work. And we'll have a lot of work to do," Allen said quietly, huddling the military personnel in close so the frightened civvies didn't hear. "Only half the habitats are built. The hydroponics are not yet activated. Anyone with an arts background will be required to spend half their solar day studying an engineering discipline until they're up to speed."
I shifted. My education was all in psych. I couldn't remember the last time I did calculus. Jack was doing the same little dance next to me: we were scuffing up red dust on the floor of the habitat. We glanced at each other: it was probably time to put the intradepartmental rivalry to bed. I offered him the tiniest smile.
"The civilians with us are the best mankind has to offer, but they are sorely lacking in practical skills. They are confused, dismayed, and delicate. They have left families behind. We will need to be the backbone of this expedition," Allen declared, parade-ground vowels muted by the atmosphere, "and I will expect military discipline, precision, and morale. Humanity depends on it."
"Sir yes sir," murmured the staff of Operation: Nerdbuster, and we broke to get to work.
Allen briefed the civvies: I sat on a boulder next to the shimmering blue wall of the habitat and listened as he gave them a speech very different from ours, one about new worlds, new opportunities, the survival of human knowledge. Basically kissing up, trying to get them out of the dumps. He sounded like a Golden Age pulp. I wondered if he knew that.
A shadow fell next to me, and I looked up at Lieutenant-General Meadows. "Sir," I said, and made to stand. It was hard in the strange new gravity: my muscles all seemed to want to go different ways at once.
"You can sit, Eva," he said, and looked out through the wall at the empty, airless wilderness.
I sat.
"I'm sorry, Sir," I said after a moment. "I should have reported right away. It was a reckless thing to do."
"I'm not going to hold it against you," he said quietly. "In times of national crisis one does what one has to do. And I think the Operation forgot that the skiffies are still human, uploaded or not. That they have human foibles and weaknesses. That was to the operation's detriment."
"Are we really going to trade with them, Sir?"
"That's probably a decision we'll never live to make. That'll be our children's decision," he said, and right then it sunk in. We were not in Kansas anymore. We were on Mars and it was for life.
The future was going to be nothing, nothing like I'd imagined.
I kicked at a lipstick-red rock. It went skittering across the sand. "Never got your first name, Lieutenant-General," I said. We needed the formal discipline, but there was no sense in upholding the formal protocols: after all, we were going to be spending a lot of time together. And there was so much to build, to do...
"Oh," he said, staring off into the distance, intent on the horizon of the new world we had to conquer. In profile his jaw was chiseled and sharp and his nose strong: a frontiersman, an action hero. A man completely--finally--in his element.
He turned to me and offered a smile. "It's Adam."
