Lakes of Mars Read online

  “Space math?”

  “Vector calculations, astrophysics, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, atomic and molecular physics. It all helps. That’s what I thought the Fleet . . .”

  “But why the Fleet in the first place? A lot of companies use math—why not Ex-Trope or something like that?”

  He paused and thought like he had after all the questions I’d asked him, as though each one was of vital importance and he had to answer perfectly. “Because all the private companies are doing lame stuff like mineral extraction and terraforming new vacation spots, and they can’t push any boundaries since they’re hamstrung by Athena Carta. They don’t have the kind of simulations the Fleet does, and definitely not the tactical Boxes. And the thing is . . .” He looked from side to side before lowering his voice. “I’m really good in the Box—like, never lose kind of good. Ever since everything got un-networked, the Fleet’s been trying to replace the function the network served. Before, the commanders would feed the Athens AI broad objectives and the AI would execute them brilliantly; every ship, every fighter, even every gun battery commander knew exactly what the others were thinking, because every one of them was Athens.”

  “And with Athens gone . . .”

  “It’s all humans again. Admirals are good at the big strategy stuff and the captains and pilots are good at execution, but they’re difficult to bridge. In battle, if an admiral gives his captains too much autonomy, they risk losing cohesion. Though if he’s too rigid, reactions are slow.”

  “So you’re like an Athens.”

  “Minus a few billion terahertz,” he said.

  “Well, you can still do my astrophysics homework for me.”

  “But then you wouldn’t be learning—”

  “I’m joking,” I said. “I’m Aaron, by the way.”

  “Sebastian,” he said, extending his hand.

  Chapter 3

  I awoke to see Sebastian staring out the shuttle window. I tapped on the glass, wondering what would happen if the alloys holding it in place had a nerve to lose, recognizing how fragile we were and that it was only the long-past work of great minds that kept us from being extinguished in space.

  “Nothing’s getting through this,” said Sebastian, joining me in the tapping. “Though considering you wanted to go to the Rim, it doesn’t seem like you’d care so much about structural integrity.”

  “Only for your sake,” I said, glancing out the window again but turning back when I saw a drone serving drinks in the window’s reflection. “I thought the Fleet wasn’t allowed to have AIs that could do things like that.”

  Sebastian craned his neck. “They’re not. Well, I guess something like that’s right on the boundary. It’s not networked and doesn’t have a weapons system . . . I presume . . .” he squinted, “so they’d probably get the benefit of the doubt.”

  “From who, though?” I asked.

  Before Sebastian could answer, the drone scooted up to us, blinking and beeping. Sebastian and I couldn’t help but smile at the novelty of the situation as it asked, “Would you like anything to drink?” through its mouth-shaped speaker.

  I’d read about embodied AIs at school, so I knew they existed, but this was the first time I’d laid eyes upon one this advanced. “Water would be great.”

  “I wouldn’t mind wetting my whistle, either,” added Sebastian.

  The drone hesitated, probably having to dredge up the phrase from its database of colloquialisms. Then it opened the abdominal refrigeration unit and its metallic fingers, like the claw from one of those throwback arcade games, grasped two cans of water and carefully extended them to us.

  “I wonder what they were like before they got their lobotomies,” I said.

  “Their heavy-grade tread was for more than scooting down shuttle aisles, that’s for sure. It’s mind-blowing to think that AIs told us to stop making AIs and we actually listened, since it would have been them fighting on the Rim then, not us,” said Sebastian, gesturing at the drone with his water. “But considering Athens’s ninety-nine point nine three percent accuracy, I’d say we’re lucky it got its lobotomy before it gave us ours.”

  “Maybe you’ll warm up to them.”

  “I’m plenty warm, as long as they stay stupid,” Sebastian said as he watched the drone trundle down the aisle. “So don’t go feeding them any learning algorithms.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  But I did dream later, after they called our numbers and led us into our hypersleep chambers. I was in a doctor’s office and a nurse was having the AI draw my blood. She told me not to look, but I did and—having fainted—I was falling through a dark tunnel and the walls were lashing out at me with tiny razor-wire mouths—nightmares inside each other. And then I’d wake up screaming back in the office and the cycle would repeat. I guess my mind was ripe for subconscious invention, and all kinds of terrible things emerged from the shadows—nothing I could give a name to, but shapes with teeth that you didn’t think were teeth until they were almost on top of you, twisting and transforming, tearing you apart little by little. When I finally did wake up for real, I was smashing my head and fists against the chamber, blood tinting my vision.

  Eventually, a man and a woman came into the hypersleep bay, both wearing bleach-white uniforms with red Mars emblems over the breast pockets. Slowly, things came into focus and my thrashing became less frantic until I finally just slumped over, pawing at the broken, blood-smeared casing.

  “I’m fine . . . I just didn’t know where I was,” I said, embarrassed. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been shouting.

  “Some people’s bodies can sense when we exit light speed and prematurely wake,” one of the attendants assured me, as she tried to take my arm to help me down. Although it was so slick with sweat that she could barely find a grip.

  I shivered as my bare feet touched the floor of the chamber, my legs turning to putty and buckling under me as soon as I put my weight on them. There was a sensation of falling, but the attendants caught me and each slid an arm under mine.

  “What did you guys give me?” I asked.

  “Just a standard sleeping agent,” said the attendant. When I looked at her and cocked my head, she added, “People usually respond better.”

  As we walked across the snow-white floor my eyes passed over the rows of tanks holding the other recruits. The attendant was right—everyone else looked peaceful, probably dreaming of their friends and parents back home, since their subconsciouses didn’t have their guards up like mine did. And they probably would have stayed peaceful forever if it weren’t for the little alarm clock embedded in the underside of each tank, ticking away in a silent countdown.

  I caught a glimpse of Sebastian’s giant buzzed head mashed up against the glass in one of the cylinders. He looked so out of place amidst the flawless specimens that I couldn’t help but wonder, like Sebastian had, what exactly they were grading.

  I passed the voyage’s final hour alone in the medical bay with an intravenous tube sticking into my arm, but I felt that it was sucking something out rather than the other way around. A nurse was holding up vials and jotting down notes in the next room and, even though we were separated by a sheet of textured glass, I could see her constantly looking up at me. In fact, the whole crew had been looking at me with grave expressions ever since I’d awoken, giving me a weird, self-conscious, I’m-the-only-one-in-my-underwear kind of feeling.

  I felt alone and vulnerable—physically cold. So much so that even when I changed into the green Corinth training uniform they gave me, my teeth kept chattering.

  Chapter 4

  The door opened and I walked into another world: flashing monitors and loudspeaker announcements and powerful white lights that lit up the catwalks crisscrossing every which way below. Water trickled down the face of an enormous rock wall like the tears of a monster peering into the station, falling into the gaps around the blue and green-clad cadets on the catwalks, while the light dropping through the meshwor
k reflected off the tables at the base of the room in industrial-blue parasols. The distance might have been dizzying if it weren’t for the grandness which made everything more abstract and portrait-like, disconnecting me from gravity in an odd, disconcerting transposition.

  I felt naked under the huge pillars of light. Verna was always saying how secure and self-confident I was and I suppose at that time she was right, but what she didn’t know, or at least wouldn’t admit to, was that those traits hinged upon specific circumstances. The accident had changed everything, but Verna had assumed I was still the same person inside, seeing all the same hues and textures. I knew she had wanted me back, but it was that very wanting that showed she had underestimated how far I’d fallen and made everything she said out of place.

  I think she would have understood all this if I had told her—I know she would have—but I could barely admit it to myself. The source of it was too breathtakingly painful. A pain that obliterated reason. Part of me wanted to get better, but in doing so I felt I’d be downplaying how horrible it was, which just wasn’t something I had the stomach for.

  Led by a couple of transport attendants, we crossed the white floor to arrive on the nearest outstretched metallic catwalk, which was full of older cadets and the same tread-mounted AIs that we’d seen on the ship. Every once in a while, people passing would glance up at us, but they mostly seemed disinterested, absorbed in their own conversations and getting to their own destinations. Sebastian and his soft, babyish features looked even more out of place amidst the senior cadets, but I felt just as much of a divide on the inside.

  What was I doing here, anyway? I had been a good pilot, sure, having flown my dad’s cargo ships back and forth on runs to Mars’ moons, making efficient takeoffs on short colony airstrips and doing complicated docking maneuvers inside the crevasses of Deimos’ ice excavation tunnels. But that was before. If the Corinth officers were smart enough to know I’d thrown my entrance exams, surely they knew that now just the thought of a cockpit made me feel like I was doing somersaults. I’d be no use to them.

  Trying to push the thought out of my mind, I saw a stunningly beautiful girl looking down at her U-dev as we turned the corner onto an adjacent walkway. The noise on the deck hushed, siphoned back into space as I watched her; all the sharp things that had been perpetually closing in around me lost speed, their trajectories rendered innocuous in the shift, transmuting into the background. I didn’t want whatever it was I was feeling to end, but it did a few moments later when I collided head on with a cadet walking in our direction.

  “Shit, man. I’m sorry,” I said, as Sebastian and I helped him gather up the electronic papers that had floated to the ground.

  The cadet picked up his U-dev and checked to make sure it hadn’t cracked. “Not a problem, bud—hard not to get distracted the first time you see this place. And don’t worry about the papers.”

  I returned them to him, and, with one tap on top of the stack, he put them back in their correct order. “See? Magic.”

  “My friend here had a rough hypersleep and he’s still—” Sebastian started.

  “If this is the worst thing that happens to him today, he should consider himself lucky.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, looking around unsuccessfully for the girl.

  Yet when I turned back to him, the cadet—perhaps a year my senior—was already walking briskly in the other direction.

  The attendants led us down a long, narrow corridor into a staging room with a large screen on one wall. I thought they were going to play some introductory video, but instead they guided us one by one into adjacent booths the size of small closets; inside were only a chair, a screen, and a syringe lying on a tray. Having always hated needles, I hesitated when the screen showed instructions for me to inject the syringe into my right brachial artery and, after about fifteen seconds, the delay triggered a diagram highlighting the artery to flash. After about twenty I cursed, snatched up the syringe, and plunged it into my arm. Immediately the world shimmered around me and I was somewhere else. Someone else.

  “Forward checkpoints four, five, and seventeen have been overrun! Outer perimeter breaches at coordinates 17/135/127 and 16/135/128!”

  “Sierra is showing ninety percent losses and is falling back to the rally point in cavern 23A.”

  “Forward checkpoints six and seven are being overrun. Forward checkpoint three has just made contact!”’

  Shouts and screams rained down around me.

  “Bravo’s cut off and is asking for extraction; they’re requesting the gate at—”

  “There’s no time for that, shut it down! Shut it down!” the commanding officer screamed from his position behind a row of operators.

  The person I was tied in with squeezed the stock of his Pegasus rifle as his eyes darted around the room, the condensed sweat on his visor smearing people into distorted shapes, decoupling the shouts from the mouths, the reports from the speakers. We were cut free from one side of sensory awareness but grinding up against the others in a raw, claustrophobic stampede. I could sense the give in his knees, the lines of anticipation pumping out with each heartbeat, making his fingers twitch against the side of the trigger guard. His mind seemed to jump from one frightening image to the next, the clouded vision causing the worst parts of each to pile on top of the other, suffocating us even more.

  “Sierra Four, there are multiple enemy signatures closing around your position—disengage and return to the perimeter!” commanded what I thought was an operator as he read off a terminal flashing with schematics and vital readouts of the various platoons.

  “Forward checkpoints two, three, eight, and nine have been overrun. Survivors are falling back.”

  “Perimeter breaches occurring at coordinates 15/137/124 and 16/136/128!”

  “They’re fucking everywhere! Switch spreads! Shoot the—aaaaaahhhh!” A feed from one of the platoon commanders had been patched over the loudspeaker.

  “Cut that signal! Jesus!”

  The CO paced between rows of lightboards, wild-eyed, wilting a little more with each update. Given how mean and seasoned he looked when he came within a meter of us, his break in composure made things seem all the more precarious, the little pauses in his speech opening up faults of uneasiness all around him. “Each platoon leaves five men to provide suppression fire, everyone else full retreat to the inner perimeter!”

  “Relaying the command, sir,” came a woman’s voice from around a corner.

  I wanted to look around the bunker more to get better oriented, but my marine’s gaze was fastened on one screen in particular, hypnotized as the little dots next to names of soldiers out in the field changed, one after the other, from green to red. Given his lack of movement, I figured this guy must’ve been part of the command center security detail, his job being to shoot at anything that made it through the bolted door. His breath grew scarcer as that prospect grew more likely, and after a couple seconds I felt my own lungs clench tighter, as if he were pulling me on a rope, tunneling through space, the slight delay between the optical-audio and the physical signals bathing everything in an ethereal, illusory gleam.

  The ground trembled and another woman bellowed from across the room, “Sir, the lower plating is losing structural integrity. They must be burrowing up from below.”

  “Electrify it! Divert main power and put us on auxiliary!” shouted the commander.

  “Sir, if we do that, the perimeter guns’ll drop to half strength—”

  “Fuck the goddamn guns to hell! Those won’t matter if they come through the floor!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The lights flickered, changing hues. Then suddenly the bunker was gyrating, tossing monitors and people in every direction. The generator in the corner sputtered, making the overhead lights modulate dimmer as they swung, pendulum-like, in their cracked casings, igniting another round of frantic updates from the communications officers.

  “The plates are electrified but they’re sti
ll getting hit. I don’t think they’ll hold much longer.”

  “Lieutenant Daviau is reporting that only a handful so far have made it back to the rally point.”

  “Enemy signatures approaching the inner perimeter on multiple vectors.”

  The situation was deteriorating quickly, yet I couldn’t do anything. Not that I’d have been able to help if I were actually there, since he was as much a prisoner in the reinforced bunker as I was, squished inside his combat gear, his hair caked against an ill-fitting helmet. But still, it felt simultaneously strange and voyeuristic, like I was both one of those shitheads who stood idly by recording something terrible happening on his U-dev and the person watching through the Link. That kind of callousness always made me feel ill—as if there were some hidden barrier preventing people from doing the right things in life even though they were right in front of them. But with the barrier visible, its edges outlined in the dimming corona from the arrays, a kind of hopelessness bubbled up from somewhere deep inside, terrifying me even more than the pandemonium raining down around me.

  “Sir, the resupply train didn’t make it—ammo levels are insufficient to keep up this rate of fire much longer, we’ll need to—”

  “Yes, yes, drop it to . . . to thirty RPS.” The commander’s voice broke. His gray hair, lying clumped and slick with sweat, appeared out of the fog as my marine swiped across his visor.

  “Power substation four’s current flow is beginning to fluctuate—they must’ve found the cables!”

  “Christ, we don’t have much time, sir! We gotta get the fuck out of here—”

  “Inner perimeter is holding but two of the thirty-eights have jammed, the power fluctuations—”

  “Wheel in the GS generators—”

  “We might need those—”

  The ground began to quake with such violence that all speech was lost in the reverberation, and the noise outside, which had started as a dull moan, had turned into such a menacing squeal that my tie-in host couldn’t help but cup his ears. The commander shouted something indecipherable, but in midsentence he stopped and took a bottle out of a locker.