Luka told the others he couldn’t join them for dinner because he had to stay late in the office to get some work done. It wasn’t true. The minute Erik, Pete, Myra, Inger, and Roman were gone, he breathed deep and allowed himself to relax. Relax in a nervous, fearing he might be caught, kind of way.
He had been waiting all day for this moment and, now that it was here, he wondered if he was doing the right thing. Spurred on by his conversation with Julie, he needed to find the proof to back up his suspicions or confirm his doubts about what happened to Gianni one way or the other. That meant looking closer into the woman at the heart of Gianni’s diary entries: Anita.
He had considered confronting her directly, but he doubted she would reveal anything to him voluntarily. After all, she had completely blown up at Gianni on the couple of occasions he had questioned her. Luka needed more evidence first and that meant breaking into Anita’s personal files. Not a difficult thing. As a member of the tech team, he had access to the ThorGate network. He only needed to bypass any extra security she might have set up and make sure that his delving around didn’t leave any traces which could lead back to him. None of this was difficult, but it was probably illegal and almost certainly immoral.
Luka’s finger hovered over the control for his screen. He contemplated turning it off and forgetting about the whole thing. It wasn’t too late to chase after the others and spend an hour or so joining in with their frivolous chatter over dinner. But, after that, he would still have to go home and, in the quiet solitude of his room – the room that Gianni used to live in and where he had recorded his diary entries – the questions would come back into Luka’s mind. Questions that he would never have the answers to unless he took a risk.
With his rumbling stomach complaining it was dinner time, Luka connected to the back end of the ThorGate network and went into the message server. He found Anita’s messages easily enough without having to jump through any security hoops, but the result was disappointing. They only went back a couple of weeks, and they were all boring and work-related. There was a long list of correspondence with Rufus Oladepo, the chair of the Terraforming Committee, about the continued shutdown of the Noctis City construction site, and some more recent ones about the CrediCor/Ecoline proposals for Noctis Labyrinthus. Others were suggestions around how to occupy the migrant construction crew with work on other ThorGate property and there were some very officious notices from corporate headquarters on Earth about a budget overspend.
Luka placed his elbows on the desk, interlocked his fingers, and rested his chin on the bridge of his hands. He sat like that for several minutes, looking at the messages he had uncovered, before he admitted to himself that he was at a complete dead end. Nothing he had found would have caused Anita to be furious at Gianni. None of her messages appeared personal, they weren’t even that confidential from a business point of view. There had to have been something else on her window in her apartment that had caused Anita to react as she did.
He didn’t think he would be able to gain access to her personal window through the ThorGate network and, indeed, he couldn’t. He could see where it was connected, but he couldn’t get past the security protocols to probe any further. The system was designed to keep out the most sophisticated hackers from other corporations, so Luka knew he had no chance of breaking through. The only way to see what secrets she might have stored locally was to sit in front of her window and look. Just like Gianni had done on that night that Anita had become angry and accused him of invading her privacy and snooping around in things where he had no right.
•••
Luka waited in the street, pretending to be interested in a small flower which was growing in a one meter square of grass set into the paving between two rows of accommodation blocks. He kept his head down and his back towards the apartment building where, according to ThorGate records, Anita lived. Ahead of him, if he angled himself properly, he could see the reflection of the main access door in the glass of a window – a traditional window which allowed someone on the inside to view the outside – and waited for her to come out.
At last there was movement in the reflection in the glass and Luka watched as a small woman emerged from the building and began to walk up the street. He couldn’t see her face, but her body shape and hurried, confident stride, told him it was Anita. Luka tuned his hearing into the sound of her shoes on the paving and watched them coordinate with her steps. When the angle of the glass was no longer able to show her reflection, he kept listening until the sound became so distant that it merged into the hubbub of Thor Town.
With Anita safely out of the way, he took a slow and casual stroll towards the door, running through in his mind the various scenarios for persuading someone inside to buzz him in. But he didn’t need to. Another woman came out as he approached and held the door open without him needing to ask. He was a ThorGate employee after all. He had the right to be here. They exchanged a smile and he ventured inside. Luka stopped and listened to the door click shut behind him.
He noticed the security camera at the base of the stairwell out of the corner of his eye and hoped the temporary malfunction he had arranged was still working as he climbed up to the second floor. Entering the corridor, he looked right and then left as if crossing a busy road back home in Germany, then padded past the first two doors to the apartment where Anita lived.
Lifting his WristTab, he ran a program to access the Thor Town system and override the security settings on Anita’s door. Most security personnel were few, due to the absence of a police force but also the need for human efforts to go elsewhere. Building security was mostly regulated by the machines, with a security detail addressing various problems in Thor Town as required. As he waited and stared at the small, red light of the lock mechanism, he felt the moisture from his nervous sweat soak into his shirt. It was a long thirty seconds but, just as Luka feared it wasn’t working, the door sounded a series of electronic bleeps, the red light turned to green and it clicked open.
Luka placed his index finger on the panel of the door and pushed it slowly out of his way. Stepping inside, he listened for sounds of movement, but all he heard was the faint tweeting of birdsong and what sounded like the whisper of a wind blowing through trees. He closed the door behind him and, hearing the click of the lock shut again, a little bit of the tension fell away. He was certain he was in there alone.
Anita’s lounge was large, luxurious, and dominated by a large window along one wall. It stretched almost as wide as the wall itself and was about a third as deep. Most people kept their windows turned off when they were not there – it was a Terraforming Committee directive to stop unnecessary use of power – but Anita had left it on to show a live view of snow-capped mountains towering over a lush, green forest. It was clearly the source of the sounds of nature which played out of speakers hidden in the ceiling. It was a beautiful memory of Earth, even if it was an idyllic one that few people who lived there would ever have the chance to experience.
Facing the window was a small table with a dirty cup, plate, and cutlery gathered up in one corner. In front of it was a sprawling two-seater sofa big enough to fit four people sitting side-by-side. At the back of the apartment was a kitchenette area – a rarity on a planet where limited food resources meant everyone was required to eat mass catering most of the time – and two internal doors which almost certainly led to a bathroom and a bedroom.
But Luka was not there to be jealous about how the privileged lived. He was there to snoop into Anita’s personal and private files. She would be gone for hours at the office, but with a bit of luck he would be in and out in ten minutes.
He sat on the same sofa that Gianni had sat on that night when he couldn’t sleep and turned off the view of Earth. When he did so, just like Gianni, he found that Anita had left herself logged on. “Good,” Luka said to himself.
He easily accessed her messages and saw the same ones from the last two weeks that he had been able to access from his office screen. As he scrolled down, he felt an enormous sense of validation as he went past the last few weeks and saw older messages. Hundreds of them. She obviously stored all her files locally and kept very little on the network.
A few of the messages had intriguing titles which promised to reveal more, but turned out to be just as boring as those with mundane titles. Some were audio files. He played a couple of the ones which looked interesting.
“Hi Anita, it’s Jakob,” said one. “I really need a decision on what to do about the migrant habitat for the Noctis City site. If you could get back to me, that would be great.”
“Don’t you ever answer your WristTab?” said an irritated male voice in another. “This whole new solar farm order’s doing my head in. Can you at least acknowledge my meeting request? This is Alan, by the way, in case you didn’t realize.”
He frowned. It could take hours to listen to them all.
As Luka continued to scroll through, he expected to see messages from Gianni. The two of them had been lovers, after all. But there were none. That’s when he took a closer look at the dates and realized there were six months of messages missing. Everything from around the time that Gianni’s diary entries had started to the day before his death had been deleted.
Luka had friends back in Germany who, after a particularly bitter relationship breakup, had tried to distance themselves from the painful experience by getting rid of everything that reminded them of the other person. One had even used liquid fuel to set light to a stash of mementos and, in his enthusiasm, accidentally set fire to an outbuilding and had to call out the fire service. Deleting a whole six months of messages, including everything to do with work and some that might have been important, sounded like the actions of a woman who wanted to wipe every trace of memory of a man who had hurt her. But, even in Gianni’s diary entries when he talked about the arguments they had, Luka hadn’t got the impression that they had split up acrimoniously. He didn’t even think they had split up at all. Anita had certainly exhibited grief when Gianni was killed. It didn’t make sense for her to destroy everything in that way.
Unless the reason she had deleted the messages was the same reason that Luka was looking for them: they contained evidence that she didn’t want anyone else to find. If he was right, that was what Gianni had inadvertently stumbled upon during the night he couldn’t sleep, and it was why Anita had been so furious. Luka sat back on Anita’s sofa and looked at the list of messages he had risked so much to see. All they revealed was an absence of evidence. An absence of evidence was no evidence at all.
But just because Anita had deleted the data from her home system, it didn’t mean it was gone for good. Some years ago, when he had worked for the Climate Corporation on Earth on a project to rejuvenate the Black Forest, he was called in by an executive who was tearing her hair out because she’d accidentally deleted details of a contract negotiation which had gone awry. Her system told her that everything had gone and was irretrievable, but in fact the data still existed in areas which had not yet been overwritten. That might also be the case for Anita’s missing messages. There were ways, of course, of ensuring deleted files were genuinely deleted, but he was willing to bet that Anita – like most people – either didn’t know about them or had failed to implement them.
Luka came out of the user interface and delved deep into the background systems which controlled Anita’s computerized window. There, he found junk data that wasn’t indexed or obviously linked to anything else. Luka’s brain, trained to look for meaning and pattern, picked out the occasional word nestled within the mass of symbols and letters, such as ThorGate or Gianni, but jumbled and out of context they didn’t mean very much.
He did find one intact audio message, however, from Gianni that was dated the day he died.
He played it and listened to Gianni’s familiar, but frustrated voice. “Anita, I know you’re angry at me, for whatever reason, but you can’t ignore my calls when we still need to work together. I need more information about what’s wrong with the computer system at the research station before I go over and take a look at it. Will you please call me back.”
Interesting. Confirmation that he had contacted her about the reasons for going to the research station on the day he died, when Anita had claimed she didn’t know why he was there.
He ran a recovery program and tapped an impatient thumb on the sofa cushion beside him as the computer systems tried to form something meaningful out of the apparently meaningless.
Titles of deleted messages began to appear. Some of them were gobbledygook, having been corrupted while lost in the back end of the window’s operating system, but most appeared intact.
As he watched, one name came up repeatedly: Sara Hansen. Luka didn’t remember seeing that name in any of Anita’s other messages. The titles were uninteresting at first glance – Mars Temp Stats, Power Output Variance, Postpone Lunch Meeting – so he opened one at random.
It consisted of one short sentence: The power plant must be empty of all power on the date, it said. Failure to achieve this objective will nullify the agreement.
Luka stared at it for a moment. It seemed, on the face of it, fairly innocuous. He opened another message. This one was corrupted in a few places, but was still readable: I’ve arranged for some samples to be deli$&red to your office. If you could let me know the color you x%^ld prefer.
Individually, the messages were ordinary and made some kind of sense, but, together, there was something strange about them. The first one, about a power plant was logical because ThorGate was the leading provider of electricity on Mars. Whereas the second one about color samples seemed to be about interior design. Putting aside the fact that the opportunity to choose the color of anything on Mars was usually limited to the one color that was provided, for the same person to be messaging about both was very odd.
Luka didn’t remember hearing of Sara Hansen before and accessed the Mars global system to look her up. But there was no record of a Sara Hansen working on Mars in the current list of personnel or in the archive. Luka went back to check if he had mis-read the messages and perhaps they had come from Earth instead, but the address confirmed they were sent locally. Following the address back to its origin revealed that it had come from a server belonging to Ecoline.
Sara’s messages, he felt, had to be the key. There was no record of anything from her before or after the six months of deleted messages, and the ones he was able to recover were all written in the same, strange format. They were always short, of no more than a few sentences and completely without any pleasantries. No “hi Anita” or “thanks for your last message” or “looking forward to hearing from you.” Highly unusual, especially for two people who seemed to have communicated a lot. The more he read, the more he believed that the messages – on completely different topics – were written in a thinly veiled code.
There were two in particular which Luka stared at for a long time. The first had to refer to the area where the Martian microbes were found:
I agree that the aquifer below the cons%20&xxtion site is the best target area. Drilling must be deep enough for protection against radiation and extreme temperatures.
The second alluded to some form of payment:
The offer will be substantial enough to buy out your contract. Returning to Ea&*h or staying on Mars isn’t something that concerns us.
Their meaning, it seemed to him, was clear.
Luka glanced at his WristTab and realized he had been in Anita’s apartment for two hours. So much for his plan to be in and out in ten minutes.
He was going to have to transfer all the data he had and decide what to do with it later. He initiated the process, but it had barely started before he heard a series of bleeps coming from the door. He shuddered as he realized someone was accessing the electronic lock. Quickly, using his WristTab to control the window rather than voice commands, he covered up what he was doing by switching the display back to the snow-capped mountain overlooking the forest.
The sound of birdsong and wind rustling through the trees returned to the speakers. Luka stood, trying to calm his thumping heart, as he looked around for somewhere to hide. But it was too late, the lock clicked, the door swung open, and Anita stepped in through the doorway.
She stopped mid-stride when she saw him. “Luka Schäfer? What the hell are you doing in my apartment?”
Luka forced an innocent smile to his lips. “I’ve fixed your window for you. There was a problem connecting to the network, but it should be fine now.”
Anita glowered at him. “I didn’t report a problem.”
“Oh, didn’t you?” Luka’s mind was racing almost as fast as his heart as he tried to think of a reasonable excuse for breaking and entering. “Well, someone reported it. But, as I say, it’s fixed now.”
He stepped forward to leave, but Anita backed up and pushed the door shut behind her. She lifted her WristTab to her mouth. “Security, this is Anita Andreassen. There’s an intruder in my apartment. I need assistance immediately.” She lowered her WristTab and regarded Luka with suspicion. “You have five minutes to tell me why you’re really here, or I’ll have you detained and questioned.”