The alarm feature on Alan’s portable was calibrated to his brainwaves. A school friend from his emancipation class had been working on it experimentally and had developed selective couples alarms. Kaylee’s rarely woke Alan, and Alan’s pretty much never disturbed Kaylee. A particular mixture of innocuous, rhythmic noises caught in his brain and broke his sleep pattern just long enough for him to wake up and shut off the sound.
He had a text message. It was Ned Lund.
GET DRESSED. MEET NOW. YOU’VE GOT 15 MINUTES TO GET TO AIRLOCK 4.
Alan’s heart raced.
A meter away, Kaylee snored.
The clock read 2:13 AM, Curiosity Standard Time.
This was it. They were bringing him in on something clandestine. His fingers shook as he searched the floor for the pants he’d discarded at bedtime. For once, his habit of ignoring the clothes processor was paying off.
Fully dressed in yesterday’s attire, he tiptoed for the door before a pang of conscience stopped him short. Still creeping quietly through the bedroom, he leaned down and kissed Kaylee on the forehead.
She stirred and rolled onto her side.
“Honey, I have to go,” Alan whispered, brushing aside a lock of hair that had fallen across her eye. With a groggy blink, that eye opened. “Spy stuff. Be back soon as I can.”
“Be careful,” Kaylee mumbled—or something close. It was hard to tell with her sleep-slurred speech.
Alan kissed her on the lips. She kissed back in a reflex honed over a decade and a half of marriage.
An instant later, he was gone.
The air in the common “outdoor” areas of the colony had never had that Earthy freshness to it. But he breathed deep of the microbially filtered air and felt free. A nervous jitter shook his shoulders. This was it. He was going to get a peek behind the curtain of the Martian resistance movement.
Airlock 4 wasn’t far. But neither was fifteen minutes a long time. Alan referenced his portable on the way, checking to see when Ned had sent his message. Six minutes. He had nine left.
Alan set a brisk pace, wondering idly if there were hidden security camera monitoring the common areas. If he were to be fully inducted into the brotherhood of the Chain Breakers, he supposed he might have to learn that.
By the time he reached the airlock, Alan was breathing heavily. He hadn’t quite jogged the kilometer or so from his apartment, but he wasn’t exactly accustomed to long treks in such a short time frame.
Ned met him by the airlock door. “Got your breather?”
Alan blinked. “I, uh… don’t have one.”
Ned revealed a breather and goggles he’d been concealing behind his back. “Figured you’d forget. Here. And for future reference, you could have swiped your wife’s. You’d have been back in plenty of time.”
Kaylee’s breather? It would sooner have occurred to him to borrow her underwear than her filtration mask. The former was just a frillier sort of undergarment. The latter was a lifesaving device she used every day of her professional life.
Ned’s breather was already dangling around his neck. With a practiced tug and a flip, he had his on the instant the airlock door closed them in. Alan fumbled his borrowed set on, and Ned started the cycle.
Air rushed around them, exchanging colony air for the dead, wispy substance that passed for an atmosphere outside. Alan’s ears popped. The outdoors was marginally lower pressure than inside. At least the terraforming efforts had gotten as far as building up the atmosphere’s bulk if not its oxygen levels. Otherwise, they’d have needed full space suits to venture outside.
When the outer door opened, a bone-chilling wind greeted them. It was nighttime on Mars, and the greenhouse gasses weren’t thick enough to trap the solar radiation from the daytime hours.
“Heavy coat, next time too,” Ned warned, voice hollow behind his mask.
Alan nodded spasmodically, teeth already chattering.
It was warmer inside the rover. Alan didn’t ask where they were headed but recognized their course from the previous visit to Mars Terraforming Initiative Site-2.
Questions boiled and churned in Alan’s mind. He wanted to seem eager, willing, loyal to the cause. But this seemed like the kind of cause that preferred the back row students to the ones who sat up front and raised their hand at every question from the teacher.
Neither man spoke a word the whole drive out.
When the rover came to a halt, Alan and Ned got out and headed for the terraforming base camp’s airlock. The process of exchanging Martian for science-cleansed air reversed, and the two of them trudged inside, stripping off their masks.
Luckily for Alan, the mask muffled his gasp of shock and horror.
“Who’s that?” he dared to ask. There was a robot—Version 61 chassis if he wasn’t mistaken—lying on the cafeteria table wearing a spacer’s coveralls.
“James98,” the robot said quietly. His optical sensors weren’t even active. “Help me.”
“Shaddup,” Les said and slapped the robot across the face with a glove. He turned to Alan. “Don’t mind him. He’s just a prop. You’re the guest of honor.”
Alan whirled on Ned. The question must have been plain on his face because Ned answered without Alan having to say the words.
“Yeah,” Ned said casually. “We figured we’d see what you’re made of. Got a robot here who’s not seeing the next Martian sunrise. Figured we’d allow you the privilege of getting a little revenge for all the wrongs robots have done you.”
Alan backed toward the airlock door. “I… I…”
On the table, the robot sounded desperate. “I know Charlie7.”
“So does every last one of you,” Les snapped. “Can it, or I’ll start drilling holes until I find the power supply to that voice modulator of yours.”
“What did he do?” Alan asked in a tremulous voice.
“It’s not so much what he did, it’s what he’s complicit in,” Gregor explained. “Culpability is a shared commodity. Surely, James98 is a minor offender compared to some, but he is guilty of supporting the repressive regime on Earth.”
Guilt. Complicity. Regime. This wasn’t a committee meeting. This wasn’t even a Human Era courtroom. This was a lynching for the robot era.
“This is murder,” Alan protested.
“It’s not a person,” Ned assured him with a pat on the shoulder. “Must be hard, growing up on Earth. But you need to understand, it’s just a machine programmed to think like one. They stole minds and mushed them together into a working model of a human brain. But it hasn’t got real feelings. It hasn’t got a soul. You a religious fellow, Alan?”
Alan nodded mutely. He wasn’t the scientist that Kaylee was, but neither of them had the first inkling of how the known cosmos came to be. Consciousness was an inexplicable phenomenon, replicable by roboticists but never understood fully. Alan had to believe that there was some greater force in the universe that had gifted it to mankind and through them, to robots.
And there was a consciousness trapped in that metallic skull. The limp chassis, helpless on the table, wouldn’t respond to its owner’s commands. James98 had been forbidden to speak on pain of involuntary modification. Robots didn’t feel pain as such, but they could receive dire error messages, and they could certainly experience terror.
Alan could imagine nothing so horrifying as being trapped in his own mind, able—no, compelled—to listen in as a cabal of murderers spoke glibly of the reasons to annihilate his consciousness.
Ned pressed a device into Alan’s hand. “Go on, then. Do it. If you don’t, one of us will. There’s no saving this one.”
Looking down, Alan saw a magnetic device, some sort of alignment tool or calibrator. Kaylee would know its proper function. All Alan saw, however, was a murder weapon.
“Just hold it to the skull—mind your fingers, of course—and hit the button on the side,” Les explained, pointing to a spot on the side of James98’s cranium. “Clickity-clack. No more robot.”
“Don’t worry,” Wil said. “If you’re worried about getting caught, don’t be. We’ve blanked transorbital crew before. A little repair work and it’ll look just like a suicide. Every few trips, one of those ships comes back with a blank chassis or two.”
“They send ‘em back on autopilot,” Calvin added. “Don’t sweat it. We’ll do the heavy lifting dragging this one back.”
“Please,” James98 moaned.
“Aww, forget it,” Les snapped testily. “This one’s got no ‘sterone.” He snatched the magnetic device from Alan’s hand and applied it to James98’s head.
“No!” Alan shouted and lunged for the device.
Ned caught him by the arms and held him back. There was a clack and a thunk. Ned released Alan then, but it was already too late.
“Why?” Alan pleaded. The time for playing along had expired. So had Alan’s chances of escape. Ned was between him and the airlock, and even his most optimistic assessment informed him that he’d never get past the solidly built terraformer.
Les shook his head in disappointment. “It’s them or us, kid. But you don’t get it. Or if you do, you don’t have the stomach to do anything about it.”
“Either way, you’ve become a liability,” Ned said.
Alan’s bladder clenched. He’d never pissed himself before, but his nether regions were giving the matter hasty consideration. “You can’t. They’ll look for me. They’ll investigate. Kaylee’s got connections!” A note of panic crept in as his would-be captors remained impassive.
“See?” Wil said to Ned. “The Earthlings always go crony when it gets tough. Can’t just admit they’re on their own on the red planet.”
“You’ll never get away with this!” Alan promised, backing against the wall of the break room.
“Us?” Ned asked incredulously. “Why would we get away with anything?”
They came at him as a group. Hands grabbed. Bodies pressed. Alan thrashed, but his efforts were ineffectual. Ned and his cronies dragged him over to the deceased James98. Someone pulled his arm outstretched. Alan couldn’t see what they were doing. They forced his fingers spread.
Fire.
Pain.
Burning.
Just a cut, but a ragged one, he saw as they released him.
“You’re the one who killed this poor, defenseless robot,” Ned said. With a hand, he showed Alan how they’d cut his finger on a ragged edge where they’d severed James98’s spine. “You might want to get that tended to quietly. Looks mighty suspicious.”
The terraformers didn’t allow him time to staunch the bleeding. As he kept it covered by the sleeve of his shirt, they forced on his filtration mask and goggles. Dragging him out the airlock with them, the five of them piled into the rover with the inert robot wrapped in a tarp.
His mind a maelstrom of emotions, Alan tried to board the vehicle along with them. His only thoughts consisted of getting back home and tending to his injured hand. Surely, they weren’t going to let him die out there.
But the rover door closed. Alan circled to the opposite side, but Les gave him a shove that sent him sprawling to the red rock planetary surface.
As he watched the rover depart, Alan knew that he was in trouble. Even if they had left the base unlocked, going back in would no doubt play into their hands. They had to have put a contingency together for that.
Tucking his maimed hand under his arm, he fiddled with his goggles until he found the retractable data cable. Plugging the end into a port on his breather, a display popped up in the corner of his field of vision.
He had fifty-eight minutes of oxygen left.
There was no time for math. He set a course for the Airlock-4 and prayed that Ned hadn’t locked him out there too.