THERE ARE MESSAGES waiting for me when I get back and I realize that Principia doesn’t report their arrival when I’m outside of the base. I let the brief irritation pass; it’s probably good not to be distracted while outside. They’re only from family and there are no urgent tags. I’ve been here nearly a week now, so the messages are settling into casual updates on daily life.
I empty the bag containing a few samples into the chute in the air lock that will clean the dust off of the bags and sterilize the outside of the plasglass tubes before delivering them to the lab. Petranek and I shake off as much dust as we can as a couple of drones roll in and start cleaning off the rover. We wait while the air that came in with us is sucked out with the majority of the dust and then replenished with filtered air from the base. The air lock repressurizes as we begin the process of going back through the dust lock and getting de-suited.
“You won’t say anything to them, will you?” I say to Petranek. Ze didn’t mention the footprint at all on the way back.
“I won’t—don’t worry. But I really don’t think there’s anything underhanded going on. I’ve known these people for years. You shouldn’t be so concerned.”
It’s not the footprint that bothers me; it’s the pattern. The note, the ring, Banks being unduly hostile . . . The pattern is more important than the detail. Where did I hear that before?
Soon enough I am distracted by getting out of the suit, which feels harder than getting into it, even though it’s the same process but in reverse.
Dr. Elvan is waiting in the last chamber and I feel rather self-conscious in my base-layer onesie. Petranek seems utterly unconcerned and high-fives him as ze goes past on the way out, leaving us alone.
“How was it?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say.
“There were a few stress spikes while you were out there, but nothing too unusual. Any dizziness or fatigue?”
I shake my head, wishing I was in anything but this damn onesie.
“Is there anything you’re concerned about?” he asks, taking a step closer.
“No. Should there be?”
He smiles and it makes me feel like an awkward student again. “Not at all. I’m just doing my job, Dr. Kubrin. Don’t worry—I haven’t seen anything from your MyPhys readings to suggest you need to be confined to base. You’re doing remarkably well, in fact. I thought that this would be the day you’d be just about shuffling around and doing your last physical tests. Maybe I’m being overcautious.”
To look at, he is the opposite of Charlie in almost every way. His hair is black whereas Charlie’s is ginger. Elvan’s skin is brown whereas Charlie’s is so pale that if he wears yellow it makes him look like he’s about to die. Elvan’s eyes are dark brown and Charlie’s are the blue of a clear February sky. And there’s a warmth to this man that I don’t remember in my husband.
I feel a pull toward him that I didn’t feel with Charlie before Mars and I head toward the doors, fighting that attraction with a polite smile, distancing myself. “Thanks for looking out for me,” I say, not wanting to seem cold, and then I hurry down the corridor back to my room.
Peeling the onesie off and having a shower helps. It seems crazy that I can have a longer shower here than I can back on Earth. We can’t afford the higher band of water rates back home, but here, pretty much all of it is recycled right away. There’s no reason the same system couldn’t be implemented in our apartment block. No reason other than profit, of course. No doubt the gov-corp wants to keep its profits from its water company subsidiaries nice and high.
Where I grew up, in our strange little commune, there was water everywhere. A loch full of millions of gallons of the stuff that we could swim in whenever the weather permitted. Rainwater that we collected on the roof and used to flush the toilet because Mum couldn’t cope with the dry composting toilets that Dad wanted to use. In Manchester it rains so much, but the permits required to set up rainwater collection on buildings without integrated systems are prohibitively expensive. I can remember Dad declaring that we should set up a water racket and ship it south to make a fortune. He laughed at the time, but I knew that he was actually tempted, more to stick one in the eye of the system than to make any money.
Then, just as rapidly, I recall him months later, hollow cheeked and dark eyed: “I can’t stay here on my own. I’ll go mad.”
No. I’m not going to message him. What would I say? Why do it now, after all these years? Does my mother think that being on another planet will make me feel safe enough to finally make contact? I wish she would just let it go.
I review the messages from Drew and my other lab mates, most of them making requests for samples from various locations we’ve discussed before. All asked with a grin and some sort of precursor like “I know this is a bit cheeky, but if you could . . .” It saddens me that this is what we’re reduced to. We all felt that, even when the funding for the lab was secured, we were allowed to pursue only narrow lines of inquiry, all serving some project or plan in upper-management echelons trying to find new ways to monetize Gabor’s exclusive access to Mars without actually investing any more money in it. None of us could really understand why he’d spent so much on getting that access when he barely seemed interested in the big questions. It was clear at the dinner party that he wasn’t a naturally curious man. He was more like a shark, evaluating everything he came across in terms of whether he could eat it or not.
Perhaps I’m doing sharks a disservice.
By the time that we started eating, there wasn’t any need to try to enthuse at him about the lab—the deal had already been agreed—but I was still keen to find some reasoning behind his fascination with the red planet. Apparently the negotiations to secure the exclusive rights to Mars access were fierce and the money involved was enough to make one’s eyes water. What was it about this place that had motivated him to beat off the competition? But as the evening went on, I realized that he wasn’t fascinated by Mars at all; I had just assumed he was. I couldn’t understand why he seemed so uninterested in it. Even the biggest question—whether we could find definitive proof of life there—held no interest for him.
“I’ve heard it would only be bacteria or something from, what? Millions of years ago?” he said between mouthfuls. “Not proper aliens or remains of buildings or anything impressive.”
“But even just proof of bacterial life would be monumental,” Drew said, her cheeks flushed with wine and scientific passion.
“Why?”
When Drew spluttered for words, I said, “Because there are so many people who believe that we’re alone in the universe. Showing them that life, even in microscopic form, is there on Mars would prove we might not be alone.”
Gabor shrugged. “Can’t see the profit in it myself. Though there would be a certain satisfaction in seeing how the Americans react.”
I noted that Travis didn’t share that cruel glint in his husband’s eye. “Not all Americans are those fire-and-brimstone types.”
“No,” Stefan agreed, “just the rich and powerful ones, ironically enough. This sauce is excellent, by the way.”
Even now I wonder if he bought that exclusive access just to spite the Americans. I’d like to think it was to ensure that any evidence of life wouldn’t be destroyed or at least hidden by a damaging religious agenda, but I think if anything, it was pure one-upmanship.
I send replies to all of my former coworkers, promising to gather all the samples they want. It will take dozens of trips and no doubt just as many arguments with Principia, but I have to do my bit to push back against that willful ignorance. I’ll do what I can here and then when I take those samples home, we’ll analyze them in our spare time, outside of contracted hours. Doing the real science, as Drew would say, not just corporate shit shoveling.
Not all of the work we did in the lab back home was useless; a lot of it made the previous geologist’s work here easier—finding those ice deposits as efficiently as possible and giving the base water sustainability for years, for one thing. But I want to understand the geological history of this planet, not just work out how we can best exploit it.
There’s nothing new from Charlie but it’s my turn to send a message, so that’s to be expected. The routine we got into on the trip over has been disrupted. Before I respond to his last one, I need to record one to Mia.
He’s told me she watches the ones I’ve sent already before bedtime as part of the going-to-bed ritual. Charlie likes his routine and there’s no denying it’s good for Mia, but I’ve run out of things to say to her. I was never very good at that. Anyway, I’ve always thought that it’s the tone of voice and the modulation that help children to acquire language. Charlie once caught me talking through a research write-up with her when she was about four months old. He stood in the doorway, watching us long before I noticed him, as I read out my draft conclusion to her in that singsong “motherese.” He teased me for days afterward.
I don’t think I can get away with that now; she’s too old. Another idea comes to mind though, so I start up the cam before I talk myself out of it.
“Hello, Mia! It’s nearly bedtime so I thought I would tell you a story. Once upon a time there was a little girl called Mia and she lived in a giant tree in a magical wood. Every morning she had her breakfast brought to her by little blue birds with purple beaks. They brought her berries and flowers filled with nectar and water for her morning drink. Mia loved living with her daddy in the giant tree, because he made sure no bears or zombies— Shit. I can’t put zombies in a kid’s story. I’ll edit that out in a minute . . . Ummmm . . . because he made sure no bears could come to eat her. Mia’s mummy wasn’t at home because she had to fly to a star to make the king of the wood even more rich. Ummmm . . . I’ll change that later. But every night, Mummy waved from the star, hoping that Mia might wave back.”
I stab the recording button, hating the way my throat is clogging up. I’m no good at stories. This was a stupid idea. But more than that . . . I’m missing her.
It’s a strangely reassuring ache, as unpleasant as it is. Perhaps I’m not a monster. It’s not that I don’t love her—I do—but just not with the spear-through-the-chest sort of love that those other mothers told me I would have. I regret what I said to Petranek and the lack of explanation I gave.
I should have said that when I held Mia for the first time, I just felt relief that the birth was over. I felt like I’d been thrown down a mountain. I hurt in places I didn’t even know I had. When I looked into her purply pink face, wrinkled up and blotchy and distressed by the trauma of being squeezed out into the world, I didn’t feel a rush of love. I felt fear. Shock. A quiet dread. Here was a new human being whom I was responsible for, incapable of caring for herself, fragile and terrifying to hold. The main thing I felt was the certainty that I would screw it up, not a love like no other.
Charlie was sobbing and I passed her over to him as the midwife checked me over. All of our arguments about where and how the birth was going to happen were forgotten the moment he held her in his arms. And I could see it come over him, that magic that I’d been promised by so many. How huge his eyes were, dark with love, taking in every detail of her face as if she were the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. She was still covered in the mess of birth and, in all honesty, quite horrific-looking, but he was cooing at her like some lovestruck idiot.
Thank God he was. I was free to pull back, to let him do what I should have been capable of. At the birth center the emphasis was on traditional methods, so they didn’t take her off to be cleaned up right away. It was the compromise we’d come to between my desire to be at my mum’s house and his insistence on going to a hospital. As soon as I arrived in the early stages of labor I knew I should have stood my ground and just gone to Mum’s. I couldn’t stand the bland music, the pastel colors, the soft edges to everything. All the women, dressed in uniforms with little duck patterns on them, as if infantilizing mothers in labor was preferable to the cold reassurance of professional uniforms. I’d rather have given birth in the woods behind the house I grew up in, squatting over a blanket, than in that place. It was all locked in by that point though, and I knew that if I left, I’d void our insurance and Charlie would never forgive me if something went wrong. That was the argument he’d won with. What if something happens? He simply didn’t listen to my counter, that it was more likely to go wrong if I was stressed out in some unfamiliar sterile environment.
The birth center was a disguised hospital, for all intents and purposes, designed to look more like a homely place without the scary medical equipment on full show. I found it jarring, that discordant mix of controlled environment and relaxed lighting. It heightened my sense of wrongness. Being there felt like looking at mainstream feeds curating “content for women,” recognizing nothing of myself in them. Better than a hospital, yes, but not somewhere I could feel relaxed and safe. But then, I hadn’t felt relaxed and safe for nine months, so what difference did one more night make?
It’s hard to disentangle this sensation of wanting to be with Mia from the omnipresent guilt. And I know, I just know, that if somehow, magically, I could walk out of this room and into our apartment, it would quickly fade. I’d hold her, play with her a little bit, and then I’d want to be elsewhere. It’s always like that. Why would that be different now?
The thing that no one ever seems to want to admit is that small children are boring. It felt like becoming a mother meant I had to be stuffed into a smaller box in my own life. All the things that I’d strived for professionally, all of the battles hard fought and won to carve out a career in science that satisfied me as well as my gov-corp, all of that was supposed to be put away. I was a mother now, and all I was supposed to care about was my baby.
I lie down on the bed and curl up, feeling my own hateful selfishness too keenly. I shouldn’t have had a child; that’s what it comes down to. I should have stood up to Charlie. I should have—
I stretch out, flat on my back, calling up the list of personal mersives. I haven’t used today’s allocation. I didn’t yesterday either. I’ll see Mia, cut off this craving at the root and then go to the lab and start looking at those samples.
There are huge gaps in the list. Months when I was incapable of summoning the desire to even just record with full immersion. There are a handful of five-minute snippets in her first month, then only sporadic recordings, until the flurry of those made between the meeting with Stefan Gabor in which he told me about his “wonderful idea” and my leaving Earth. It’s like looking at a timeline of my attitude toward motherhood. Those early recordings of snatched moments in between sleeping and feeding and the zombified drudge of getting through each day, then the desert of those two months before Charlie stepped in fully, and then the guilt-ridden desperation of gathering as many moments as possible before leaving.
So many of these I can remember just from the date stamp, let alone the tags I’ve assigned to them, I’ve relived them so much. I spot one that’s been neglected, tagged “wrong again,” and, weirdly, I can’t recall its contents. According to the time stamp, Mia would have been just shy of four weeks old when it was recorded.
It takes moments to whip through the series of dialog boxes requesting confirmation that I’m not controlling machinery or a vehicle, that I am in a safe environment, that I’m aware of the risks—oh yes, painfully aware!—and then I’m in our apartment again.
It’s a mess and there’s the unmistakable smell of recently changed nappy: a mixture of something awful fading and the scent of the thick white cream that prevents nappy rash. Charlie is next door in the bedroom, trying to work, and I’m in the living room, shaking a giraffe-shaped rattle a few centimeters above Mia.
She is small and wriggly, her arms and legs waving around with no control. It’s months before she’ll grab the rattle, but I’m still shaking it above her, eager to stimulate her brain.
Her lips curl up and I stop moving the rattle. “Charlie! Charlie, she’s starting to smile!”
“It’s too early,” he calls back through the door.
“No, it’s not. Come and look! You’ll miss it!”
He comes out, grinning, never grumpy about his work being interrupted like I always am. Basalt follows him out and gives Mia a quick sniff around her head. Satisfied that all is well, he lopes back to the bedroom to curl up on the bed and wait for Charlie to return. Charlie kneels next to me, leaning over her. “Hello, monkey! Are you going to smile? Smile for Daddy!”
“There, did you see that?” I say and he shakes his head.
“That’s wind,” he says authoritatively.
“No, it’s not.”
He gets up after planting a soft kiss on Mia’s forehead. “I’ve got to finish this update. Keep working on that fart, tiger,” he says to Mia.
“It really isn’t a—”
The loud raspberry noise from her nappy makes him laugh out loud. “Whoa, she’s gone red. That was a corker. You’d better check she didn’t follow through.”
I bite back the comment that I know what to do and he shuts the door. From the way the smell is lingering, there’s a chance it was more than gas.
I reach for the fasteners on her sleep suit and everything freezes.
“Sorry about this,” says a familiar voice. Someone I’ve heard before, but I can’t place him. “Just give me a moment. Everything is okay. Don’t panic, Dr. Kubrin.”
Mia disappears. So do all of the traces of her. No piles of clothes waiting to be sorted, no bags of clean nappies, no toys. The sofa disappears and so does the folded table on the far side of the room. It feels surreal, like I’m in one of those store mersives in which you can test whether the furniture you want fits in your home before you buy it. I’m too busy trying to place that voice to panic, and it’s happening so fast that before I know it, the huge temporary dining table is back, covered with the tablecloth and set for dinner like the day the Gabors came.
Travis. That’s the voice. It’s Travis Gabor.
“Hello, Dr. Kubrin.”
I turn and he’s sitting down at the table, in the place he sat for dinner. There’s even the smell of the meal recently cooked. He’s wearing the same suit, looking just as handsome as he did that day.
“Come and sit down. You’re probably feeling disoriented. I apologize and I will explain. You can’t converse with me properly, I’m afraid; this is just a rendered mersive I constructed from memories of your apartment. I’ve made an effort to predict some of your responses, and if any of those match what you say, I will be able to reply to your questions. I will make it clear if I haven’t predicted something you say.”
Dazed, I go over to the table and sit where I did at the dinner party, because that’s where his attention is focused. As soon as I sit down, it feels like he is looking at me.
“This is the equivalent of a gaming mersive,” he says with a smile. “You can’t come to any physical harm here. I’ve locked you out of making any changes though, so this is more like a loading room, I suppose. I hid this message inside one of your personal mersives, or rather, the synaptic ‘bookmark’ your chip uses to access it. It was the only way that I could speak to you without anyone else knowing.”
He seems so very different from when I met him at the dinner party. Back then, he was so . . . full-on, fizzing like soda, thrilled by everything and sparkling as much as he could. Seeing him now, listening to his voice and how calm he is, makes his previous behavior seem as if he was playing a part. Perhaps this is just the recording-a-message version of Travis, but this man seems more real to me than the one I met on Earth.
“I’m sorry if it was a bit strange when the transition was made between your mersive and the start of this message,” he continues, “but I had to design it to fit as closely as possible, and only be accessed once you were in a recording. It helps to mask what we’re doing from Principia and from your MyPhys too. I won’t bore you with the details, but I can assure you that this is highly illegal. I’m putting myself at great risk to do this, along with the other people involved in making the upgrades to your chip. If you’d had one of the later versions when you signed the Mars contract, this would have been so much harder.”
I look around, becoming aware of tiny differences. This isn’t a perfect replication of my apartment. It’s too small for one thing and the kitchen corner is inaccurate. All the paintings are faithfully reproduced, however, and I realize I’m actually able to piece together what he was interested in when he was in my apartment for real. The things he didn’t attend to have been filled in by software.
“It’s hard to give you this message without freaking you out. Believe me, I’ve given this a lot of thought. Pulling off something like this takes a huge amount of planning, as I’m sure you’ll appreciate. I recommend that you sit and stay as calm as possible. Give yourself a bit of time to process it. Don’t rush into anything once this message has finished. If you need to replay it, simply go back to the personal mersive you selected before. I only stole the last second or two of it to knit this one in.”
I’m gripping the edge of the table, seized by the feeling that my life is about to be blown apart. I know what that feels like. It’s happened before.
“You’ve been silent for several seconds now, probably because you’re shocked. Maybe a little bit scared. I’m sorry. I need you to do something for me, something very important. Anna? Are you still with me?”
“Yes,” I croak.
“I need you to understand that no one on Principia or on Earth can know about this message, or about what I need you to do. If you help me, I’ll help your father.”
“My father? What does he have to do with any of this?”
“He has everything to do with why we’re having this conversation and why you’re on Mars and nothing to do with what I need you to do for me. If you commit to helping me, I’ll explain everything.”
I can feel myself shutting down, like an overworked chip that has gotten too hot and is switching off so it doesn’t permanently damage itself. This isn’t real. It isn’t happening. I don’t need to hear this.
“Anna, I need to know you’re going to be discreet. You want your dad to get the help he needs, don’t you?”
“Stop talking about him,” I say through clenched teeth. “Just shut up.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t predicted that response. Have you noticed that something isn’t right on Principia?”
This disjointed conversation, built on Earth, played out on Mars, actually helps. If it were with the real Travis, he’d be drilling down into this reluctance to talk about the man he’s using as leverage. I’m torn between wanting to understand it all and never thinking about it again.
“Something isn’t right here. I agree with that.” And I don’t just mean in Mars Principia.
“Then let me help you work out what that is. That’s all I want. Look, I don’t trust my husband; that’s what this comes down to. I know he bought the rights to Mars for a reason, and I don’t think it’s one that will be good for anyone except himself. He’s hiding something and I want you to find it.”
“On Mars?”
Travis nods. “There are discrepancies between the officially logged flight manifests and the cargo weights that have left Earth. He’s sending more than he’s declaring. I want you to find out what that is. And I need you to get me evidence. That’s going to be difficult. You can’t trust anyone on that base, or the AI. They must be in on it.”
“But why me?”
“All of the scientific duties of his staff up there have been scaled back. They’re not even allowed to explore anymore. Mars Principia is little more than a mersive factory now, but you have good reason to get out there and look around. You’re there by the order of Stefan Gabor himself and you’ll be able to use that if Principia starts being problematic.”
“And what if I find something? How do I tell you?”
“I’ve set up a dead drop for packets of information. When the time comes, ask me and I’ll run you through it. If you blow this open, Anna, people could die. I’d be one of them and so would you. Do you understand how important it is that you not trust anyone on the base?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“In case you’re worried, you’re not going mad,” Travis says, appearing to look straight at me. “This isn’t the same as what happened to your father.”
“How the hell do you know that?” I say without thinking.
“Because I know what they did to him.”
“I can’t stay here on my own. I’ll go mad.”
I push the memory of my father’s voice away and focus on Travis. “What ‘they’ did to him? ‘They’ don’t exist.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t predicted that response. I’m going to continue with the message.”
“No,” I say, and Travis pauses. I can’t take this in. All these years I’ve been convinced my mother is simply blinded by love. And now a mere acquaintance who has somehow hijacked my chip and is using it to talk to me in secret is telling me that “they” exist? That my father really is the victim my mother has always said he was? That he was telling the truth all those times I sat there in the visiting room, silent, staring, wondering if I would ever have the man back whom I had loved so dearly? “Fuck this. End mersive.”
“Anna, there’s more I need to tell you. I can help. Principia—”
“No! End mersive. End mersive!”