Julie had more information to work with thanks to Kareem who – after a little sleep and with a fresh pair of eyes – had managed to pull some scraps of code from the guidance system which had fused itself to the asteroid fragment. Severely corrupted, they were disjointed bits and pieces which meant nothing on their own. The only way to make sense of it was to compare the code she had with the full and uncorrupted version supplied by CrediCor. This was the point where Julie got stuck.
She felt like she was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle, using a picture on the box which didn’t match up to the pieces she had to hand. Even when she thought she had found the part of the code where one of the snippets would fit, there was always something which made her pause. Some small variation which only became apparent when she directly compared the two. The only conclusion she could come to was that the code CrediCor had sent her was not the one used to bring down the asteroid.
Julie contacted the asteroid controller to ask for the correct version. Yet, when it arrived, it was exactly the same one as she had spent the morning looking at. She swore at the computer, as if it were the machine’s fault, and kicked the desk.
There was nothing else she could do to extract the correct code from CrediCor, short of a full audit of the offices, and she didn’t think Rufus Oladepo would authorize that. Not with the flimsy evidence she had. Assuming, of course, that she was right about the data she was looking at. She couldn’t be sure either way.
It was finally time, Julie decided, to seek out her father’s coffee. She didn’t keep it in the office, but in a secret place at the back of a cupboard in her apartment. If she went to get it, it would force her to take a break and a bit of a walk would probably do her good.
Not as if there was any real “outside” in Tharsis City, only different layers of “inside”. So, when she stepped into the street, she was actually moving from the secluded area of the office building into the enclosed environment of the city. The air that she breathed and the temperature she experienced were the same wherever she was. Only her surroundings had changed.
It was the first big city to be built on Mars and consisted of a series of mostly rectangular pressurized buildings linked by walkways. By far the biggest of which was the corporate quarter which housed not only UNMI headquarters, but also most of the other corporate headquarters and the Terraforming Committee offices which lay on either side of its main street. Julie had once described it to her mother as a bit like a shopping center with many separate buildings housed within a main structure. It was a crude analogy which did nothing to reflect the technological achievement of such a construction, but it made her mother happy.
It was not long after the city was built and the first people began living there that the population rebelled to take over the running of the place and created their own cooperative, the Tharsis Republic. UNMI and other organizations, merely rented their space from the Republic and, to a certain extent, had to abide by its rules. This uncomfortable arrangement had led to a lot of the wealthier corporations branching out to build their own cities. Nevertheless, until the Terraforming Committee could agree on the construction of some sort of purpose-built capital to become the administrative hub of the planet, the various organizations had to keep a presence in Tharsis City.
When Julie stepped out of UNMI headquarters, she automatically turned left to head home. But it was only a short walk and the thought of getting straight back to work again – even if it was on her sofa in front of the window – wasn’t what she needed. So, she turned back the way she had come and kept walking beyond the corporate quarter towards the Oasis.
The Oasis, a reserve of plant life at the south end of Tharsis City, was more than a park. It was more than a garden. Rather, it was a connection to something primal. Humans had evolved within an all-sustaining ecosystem and, despite their desire to leave their home planet, they couldn’t sever the link they had to the natural world. The utilitarian buildings and inorganic materials which surrounded the settlers of Mars fulfilled their basic needs to eat, drink, breathe and stay warm, but their purely utilitarian nature risked dulling the spirit. With only an arid, dusty desert and an unbreathable atmosphere waiting for them on the outside, the builders decided to construct an oasis of plant life on the inside. It was a bit of the natural world they had left behind and a reminder of what Mars might be like when their terraforming plans were brought to fruition – even if they knew they would not survive to see it do so.
Julie could smell the organic aroma as she approached the Oasis. Its sweet oxygen, created by living things, not extracted from oxidized rock, drifted out of the reserve into the last few meters of Main Street. Within the air were other trace gases created by the circle of life. Bacteria in the soil broke down the dead leaves dropped by the plants, while flowers released enticing scents to attract insects to their pollen. There were no insects in the Oasis, of course, as the risk of them flying out into the rest of the city and causing havoc was too great, leaving a human or robot force to do that particular work. But the flowers tried to attract them anyway.
The entrance was a wide, rectangular opening a little taller than head height which was cut into the side of the domed enclosure. Stepping through, Julie transitioned from the solid, radiation-shielded roof of the main city street into a transparent arc of tessellating hexagons which allowed sunlight to filter through. It was one of the first places on Mars where it was possible to look up to the sky without being inside a cumbersome protective suit or stuck inside a rover with only a front windshield. The white disk of the sun, appearing a little more than half the size seen from Earth, shone down through a cloudless pink haze. It was so mesmerizing that Julie almost fell over a small child as he ran out from between two trees towards Main Street. He didn’t seem to notice her either, as he had picked up a twig which had fallen from one of the trees and was waving it in front of him like an ancient sword.
As she watched him escape with his contraband – it was strictly forbidden to remove any part of the environment from its designated area – she noticed the barriers at either side of the boundary and the radiation warning lights next to them. The transparent domed roof could only act as a partial radiation filter and couldn’t protect people against a major solar flare. They didn’t happen very often, but in those circumstances the area had to be sealed off to leave the plants to endure the effects on their own.
She put thoughts of radiation out of her mind as she stepped under a canopy of arching tree branches to move further into the Oasis. Narrow paved strips wended their way through the various areas, from the almost-wild woodland to the right of the entrance, to a meadow-like grassy area where flowers stood tall to reach the sunlight and opened their petals wide in yellow, mauve, and soft pink salutations to the world. Julie stopped beside them and allowed her gaze to sink into their beauty. She forgot all about asteroids, computer code and the investigation. Her breathing became deep and long, her heartbeat slowed and the tension in her shoulders eased a little.
Her WristTab bleeped. “What now?” she said.
She had forgotten to turn off notifications and there were a couple of messages waiting for her. Her relaxation time, it seemed, was over. She started to look forward to that cup of coffee she had promised herself and turned around to resume the walk back to her apartment.
•••
The smell of coffee filled Julie’s apartment with an earthy, bittersweet calm. Above her, the air filters in the ceiling were busy removing its impurities so odorless, clean air could be restored. But, for that precious moment, the aroma was intoxicating.
Julie had never been much of a coffee drinker in her younger days. She would accept a cup if it was offered, and would happily chat over whatever variety was in fashion if she met a friend at a cafe, but she hadn’t lived off the stuff like some of the people she worked with at the university back home. Living on Mars meant she couldn’t be much of a coffee drinker now that she was older either, even if she wanted to. It wasn’t a priority crop for farming, and imports from Earth were both expensive and rare. Which was why her father chose it as a present to send to her and which made each cup she brewed from it all the more special.
She cupped her hands around the hot ceramic mug and took it to her sofa where she rested a moment before switching the window away from the view of Mars to bring up the fragmented code from the asteroid guidance system. It was just as disjointed and incomprehensible magnified on her wall as it had been in her office. Revitalized eyes, it seemed, made very little difference.
Julie sipped at the coffee and savored its strong flavors while the steam settled into tiny droplets of water on her nose. As she waited for the caffeine to hit, she brought up the unfragmented CrediCor version of the code alongside the fragments. Steadily, as she stared, she began to see where the pieces of the recovered code fitted within the original.
The caffeine was starting to weave its magic.
She swigged even more of the coffee and sat forward on her seat to lean closer towards the screen. She realized where she had been going wrong in the office. She had been trying to find an exact match where there wasn’t one. What she actually needed to do was find an approximate match and, that way, she could see where the pieces fitted into the original. It was like the jigsaw puzzle had been cut slightly differently each time to form two pictures which were similar, but not the same.
Unravelling what it meant was another problem entirely. The programmers had, helpfully, put in occasional notation in English to describe what each segment of the code did when activated. Mostly, they were words such as “angle” , “thruster” , “altitude” , but sometimes they were more obscure initials. As Julie compared the fragments to the intact original, she began to see notations which weren’t in the official CrediCor version. What’s more, they appeared to relate to the discrepancies between the two, with each of the five alterations marked up with a single letter: E, R, and D.
Julie sat back and brought her coffee mug to her lips, only to discover she had already drunk it all. She put the cup on the table and took another look at the code on her window.
The initials could mean anything. Engine, Relative, Direction?
Entry, Reverse, Divergence?
It could be Ethel, Roger, and Doris for all she knew!
She rubbed at her forehead as if that would help enliven her brain cells. But the caffeine had weaved all the magic it was capable of. This was a puzzle she didn’t have the skills to solve.
Idly, she dragged the fragments over the top of the original code to get a sense of how much of it was missing from the pieces Kareem had pulled from the squashed guidance system. Her gaze was drawn once again to the five initials: E, R, E, D, R. Her mind, designed to seek out patterns in everything it experienced, couldn’t help but read the word nestled in the middle of the letters: RED.
“Surely not,” she said to herself.
If ever there was an organization opposed to the terraforming of Mars, then it was the Reds. The political party hated the fact that human beings wanted to turn Mars into a second Earth, with green forests and blue oceans because they believed Mars should remain red. The destruction of ThorGate’s research station would have thrilled them because what ThorGate’s scientists had planned to do was anathema to their ideals. If the asteroid disaster hadn’t prevented the scientists from doing their work, they would already be adapting Earth plants to grow within the mists of Noctis Labyrinthus and turning a little bit of the planet from red to green.
The Reds certainly had a motive.
But there were pieces of the puzzle still missing. The first E and the final R in the list of initials could be parts of the word Red, but they could equally spell something else entirely or nothing at all. If someone working for the Reds had marked up the code to remind them where they had made the alterations, they had been sloppy to leave the notations behind – even if they assumed they would never be found. Unless the Reds paid someone within CrediCor to do it and their agent had deliberately left clues out of some sort of divided loyalty. There were many possibilities and spending more hours staring at the code while trying to guess what was in the missing pieces wasn’t going to help her get to the truth.
The only thing Julie knew for sure was, once she had seen the word red, she couldn’t unsee it. And she couldn’t ignore it. The code was pointing her to the political party which opposed the terraforming of Mars and she had no choice but to follow. The more she thought about the possibility of the Reds being involved, the more it seemed possible. It seemed very possible indeed.