PRESSING THE HEELS of my hands into my temples doesn’t really do much to help but I find myself doing it anyway. I stay on the bed until my breathing returns to normal, worrying about what Elvan and Arnolfi will make of that spike in the MyPhys data.
After a couple of minutes, the pseudo-conversation with Travis feels like a dream. The familiar yet slightly inaccurate version of my home, the pure lunacy of its contents. Is what he described even possible? Can you really piggyback mersive recordings with a totally new one? I’m certain there was some kind of prosecution for something along those lines, before I was born. It was such a notorious case it was still referred to when I was growing up. Something about a company hacking the early chips—the ones that were dubbed the Titanic model because they had been famously branded as being impossible to hack—and putting products into people’s personally recorded mersives. The scary thing was that no one reported it for days; they simply didn’t notice that the products recorded in the background had changed from one brand to another. It was only picked up when someone with atypical neuroanatomy reported seeing designer sunglasses floating in the air in a personal mersive.
Apparently it was almost the death of chip technology. Sales plummeted, anti-chip campaign groups had a field day and then the European gov-corp made a ruling that all citizen-employees of a certain pay grade and above were obligated to have a next-generation chip implanted. One that was really supposed to be hackproof. That was the iteration before my first chip, and as far as I knew, it was impossible to hack. It was all to do with the way the chip used more biosynth tech, tailoring the implant to each individual brain at a level that made it impossible for a one-size-fits-all hack to work. Once one gov-corp took that step, all the others followed. And nobody complained, thanks to a clever program of incentives. For the end consumer, it was all about the ease of monetary transactions, access to the Internet, seamless integration with gaming environments and other entertainment consumption. For the gov-corps, it meant a tighter grip on their citizen-employees, all the data they could wish for and easier tracking of movements across borders. Having to provide alternative means of Internet access and personal identification for those without chips was expensive, after all. And if there’s one thing gov-corps are good at, it’s minimizing costs.
I know all of this because of late-night conversations at the commune that I used to listen in on from my bedroom. The adults would gather around the hearth, chewing over the life they’d all left behind. None of them trusted chips, even the later, more trustworthy models. They’d all decided to have theirs switched off as a prerequisite for joining the community. Apparently having them physically removed was too expensive, and they might have wanted to go back to civilization one day. It wasn’t like the famous Circle cult, which required that all new members be free of any implanted tech.
Travis said—if that was actually real—that the GaborCorp staff who upgraded my chip would be at risk if his message was discovered. His being able to implant that message is more plausible when I consider that my chip was upgraded after I’d signed the contract to come to Mars. Travis knew I was coming and must have put the pressure on them to do as he asked, probably threatening their jobs if they said no. And I’d written him off as some vacuous decoration for Stefan Gabor’s arm. There’s obviously much more to him than I thought.
When I consider the preparation required to pull it off, I can see so many ways it could have gone wrong. I review the list of available mersives and conclude that the one I just replayed must have been hidden from the menu until today. I suppose he wanted to make sure I’d arrived and settled before giving me the message. What else could have been tampered with? Could he have somehow scrubbed my memory of painting the note about Arnolfi? Surely that isn’t possible? He made it sound as though the conversation was all preloaded onto my chip before I left Earth, so I doubt he can alter things now. Unless there’s some sort of back door into my chip. I shudder, wishing I could have the damn thing taken out. I never wanted that upgrade in the first place.
I could go back to speak to that copy of him, treat it like the gaming mersive Travis compared it to and try to find every possible response, like repeated play-throughs to experience every possible conversation with favorite characters. I’ve never been that sort of player. I don’t want to talk about Dad. Ever again.
It isn’t that I’m scared of what Travis will say about him—nothing could be worse than what actually happened.It’s that I spent years being forced to talk about it with a string of therapists. I didn’t even need to—not like Geena or Mum—but I wanted to climb the gov-corp ladder to get to the pay grade that would give me the research opportunities I craved. I needed access to good labs and the only way to get that was to play the game, or “sell out like a total fucking bitch,” as Geena put it the last time I saw her. To progress, and to have access to potentially dangerous substances and equipment, I had to jump through all the hoops. Having an official, digitally stamped clean bill of mental health was one of them.
That meant talking about it all. Over and over again. In talking therapy, in a room with an actual human therapist in real time or in virtual therapy, which was basically sets of homework in which my responses were recorded and compared against MyPhys data. I resented every moment I wasted in one of those offices and vowed I’d never put myself through that again. No wonder I bristle every time Arnolfi talks to me. It’s not fair to her, but I can’t help it.
As much as I hated it, I’m sure some of it was useful. The PTSD symptoms eased. But it rapidly became an exercise in behaving the way a healthy person would be expected to. It was easy enough to work out what that was. Then it was simply a matter of working out how I could portray someone who had been through something awful, learned from it, grown as a person and was moving on. Faking it until it was true, I suppose.
Perhaps it never became true though. Sometimes I have the sense of a place within me in which all of that fear and pain and rage have been locked away. Like a magma chamber so deep underground that the volcano is, for all intents and purposes, dormant. That’s what I like to think I am. Safe. Stable.
But I can feel that place within me now. Travis Gabor thought he could use my father as a way to get me to do his dirty work. Did he think I’d fall down on my knees, weeping with thanks that he was willing to swan in with all of his money and make everything better? The damage is done.
“Because I know what they did to him . . .”
What about what my father did to us? I can’t think of him as a man who deserves to be helped. I’ve taken all this time to put some distance between me and that time, only to have a man I barely know force it front and center again.
If it wasn’t morning, I’d drug myself back to sleep again, but soon I have to get on with the day, and then, right on cue, when I close my eyes I see the blood.
It was all over the rug in the living room, spattered up the wall next to it and over his face. I was twelve and I had walked in on my father as he was trying to murder my mother.
She was facedown, horribly still, blood trickling from a wound in the back of her head. He was standing over her, power drill still in his hand, looking for all the world like a villain from some terrible old horror movie. There was blood dripping from the drill bit down onto his hand, the blood the only thing moving in the room aside from his heaving chest.
Geena was following me in, delayed by pulling off her wellies in the porch, and the chittering of her voice brought me back from shock paralysis. I slammed the door behind me, earning a squeal through the wood, and I pressed myself against it. There was no way I would let her see this carnage.
“Everything’s all right now,” Dad said, setting the drill down next to Mum as if she were a table he’d just finished constructing. “It’s all right, poppet. I’ve got rid of the problem.”
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t do anything except press myself against that door, partly to keep Geena out, partly to keep as far back from him as I could. She yelled on the other side, thinking I was just winding her up.
“Don’t be scared, poppet. I’ve fixed the problem now and everything is going to get better. I promise.”
The way his tone didn’t match the horror only made it all more frightening. “Mum,” I said in a croaking sob. Once I’d found my voice, my desperate need for her only increased. “Mum! Mum!”
“She’ll be fine. I just had to get that chip shut down properly. She didn’t understand because the voice wasn’t broadcasting to her brain. Only mine. Don’t look at me like that, poppet. It’s Daddy.”
Yes, Daddy . . . the man who had hit me so many times and yet never admitted to it, the man who would be smiling one minute, then seething with rage the next. And yet he was acting as if the fact that he was my father was going to make everything better, as if he had no idea that the word “daddy” held no comfort for me now.
He started to come toward me as Geena stopped her pummeling and shouted an ultimatum through the door. “Let me in, Spanner, or I’ll tell Mum on you!”
“You stay back!” I said to Dad as I stared at the blood all over his hands. I wanted someone to appear, someone to be the responsible adult and tell me what to do. And then, with a sudden clarity, I remembered a story about a man who had a nail hammered into his brain and still survived. What if Mum was still alive?
I whipped my tablet from my pocket—wishing yet again that I was old enough to have a chip—but then Dad was there right in front of me. He grabbed it, dropped it on the floor and stamped on it.
“How many times have I told you not to use that thing near me? How many?”
Up close, I could see how bloodshot his bulging eyes were, how specks of my mother’s blood had caught in the whiskers of his beard. My anger at his preventing my call for help gave me the courage to answer back. “But Mum needs help. She’s bleeding, Dad.”
“I’ll patch her up. She’ll be fine. I don’t want anyone coming to the house. Now, be a good girl and boil the kettle. Mum will want a nice cup of tea in a minute, when she wakes up.”
He walked away, heading back toward Mum, and I opened the door, spurred on by the need to get help. I shoved Geena back and slammed it shut behind me as Dad yelled my name.
“I hate you, Spanner!” Geena said. “That wasn’t funny!”
“Shut up!” I yelled at her, and with both hands firmly on her shoulders, I propelled her down the hallway as fast as I could. When she started to dig her heels in, I seized her arm and dragged her. For a petite nine-year-old, she was hard to move when she didn’t want to cooperate, but I was filled with adrenaline and wasn’t going to let her stop me getting help for Mum.
The living room door opened just as I reached the front door. “Anna! Come back here! Where are you going?”
“Daddy, Anna’s—” Geena’s plea for an intervention died as she took in the blood. All the resistance left her and I finally made it outside as the sound of the drill started again.
I screamed for help until one of our neighbors came running, and then the memory collapses into a blur of distressed faces and medical emergency teams being flown in.
Mum survived because he’d drilled only into the chip, no deeper. It was a long recovery and she could never be chipped again. When I’d thought he’d resumed the drilling to hurt her more, I’d been mistaken. He was drilling out his own chip.
A wave of nausea seizes me as my room spins. I swing my legs out of bed and sit on the edge of it, breathing deeply and slowly, waiting for the flashback to pass. I know it will. It always does. I look at the desk, the door to the bathroom, reminding myself I am no longer there. Then I spread my fingers in front of me, counting each one, wriggling it as I do, calming myself and rooting my thoughts back into my body and the present.
I’ve tried so hard to be sympathetic. He was ill. He wasn’t in his right mind. But I’ve never been able to shake off the anger. The string of therapists have said that it’s fine for me to be angry. That we all process things in our own way. Mum has just as much of a right to never be angry with him, and to forgive him, even though I find it unfathomable. He so easily could have killed her. Neurosurgeons can do amazing things these days, but we lived in such a remote area that it was an hour before she was on the operating table. If it had been just a few centimeters deeper, she would have died.
The only positive about that day was that all of the months of fear and tension were over. He never came home after his treatment. He couldn’t terrorize us anymore.
And now I’m crying. Fucking brilliant. A conversation with a man I barely know—that I’m not totally sure happened in my brain—has turned me back into a useless mess. All of the pain caused by my father never totally goes away. It just lies dormant, like those seeds in the desert that can seem dead for decades and then spring to life as soon as they come across moisture. And despite everything he did, I miss him. Not the man with the drill; the man he was before. The thoughtful, gentle soul with an absurdist sense of humor that used to make me weep with laughter yet leave Mum and Geena confused. The man who still saw the world as something to save, rather than something to hate. That’s the man I miss.
I’ve been over this emotional ground so many times I am bored of it. Bored of the guilt. Bored of the bars of this emotional cell. I hate myself when I feel this way, and the only cure right now is to think of something other than my own sorry ass.
Travis springs back to mind. So, he thinks Gabor is shipping things to Mars in secret. Who cares? Stefan Gabor has exclusive rights; he can do what he likes here. We’re not bloody children anymore, thinking that Mars could be a place free of the social struggles of Earth. There’s no plan for a utopia here, and not just because no one can agree on what that would be. He could be shipping toxic waste here and nobody could do a damn thing about it. No, that’s ridiculous. There are so many places on Earth where he could dump it for a fraction of the cost.
If Travis is right, what could he be shipping here? It’s not like there’s a town to sell contraband to. If he was shipping back more than he was sending, I could understand that, but not the other way around. Unless I haven’t been told everything about what Principia is actually for.
There isn’t enough room in the base proper to set up anything too complex, but perhaps there’s another layer below us that I haven’t been told about. Excavating a level down before the base was populated would be simple. Filling it with equipment would be easy if someone on the crew here is in on the secret.
But what would be the point of hiding a lab? Unless everyone here is in on the secret apart from me. Yes, that makes more sense.
There are labs here already, but those are filmed during the show. Maybe the stuff they’re really investigating here is so top secret, having a totally separate space is the only way to guarantee that none of it is spotted back on Earth.
It seems far-fetched, and yet once I’ve had the idea, it’s hard to let it go. Is Gabor funding research that is so illegal on Earth he has to do it on Mars? Maybe buying exclusive rights when he isn’t even interested in the place is starting to make more sense. It’s hard to imagine research that wouldn’t be permitted on Earth; there are so few things that the gov-corps rule out categorically these days. If there’s profit in it, they’ll back it. It could be some aspect of genetic research but I’m not skilled enough in that field to make any educated guesses.
Whatever might be being researched here, the first thing to do is actually find a secret lab. At least I won’t have to sneak around looking for hidden doors; a simple ground-penetrating radar will show me any spaces below or around the base if they’ve been built on the same level. None of this place is visible from above, so that might be the case.
I dress, grab a protein shake from the printer, thankful that everyone meets only for dinner, and head over to the equipment storage room. It doesn’t take long to locate the hardware I need and take it back to my room.
When I switch on the ground scanner, there’s a ping asking if I want to load the data gathered to Principia in a private or public file. Shit. Of course, anything that comes out of this machine will go through Principia, and that means it could be doctored to hide something before it’s shown on my screen. I dismiss the dialog box, waiving the option to save, and kneel down in front of the device. It looks like an old-fashioned upright hoover, the sort my grandparents used to have, and mercifully is a very similar model to ones I’ve used back home. The panel I’m looking for is easy to locate, set near the top of the device with a screen inside that can be pulled out on an extendable arm. It’s a backup feature, built in for situations in the field where uploads to a reliable database might be difficult, and to accommodate operators who are unchipped. I switch it on with a tap and it lights up.
I much prefer to use this sort of interface anyway. There is something so comforting about working with this physical device too. I feel like I am actually doing something proactive, something positive, at last.
It takes seconds to set up the test, but just as I’m about to activate it, there’s a knock on my door. “Who is it?”
“Banks.”
The scanner is too big to hide in my room so I carry it to the bathroom, prop it up in the shower cubicle and close the door. “Come in.”
He’s frowning before he even gets into the room.
“I was just getting dressed,” I say, thinking he’s reading the wrong thing into the delay.
“Then where were you when I called a few minutes ago?”
Surely he would have pinged Principia for my location if he couldn’t find me. “Busy,” I say. “Did you need something?”
He’s looking around the room, at the pictures of Charlie, Mia, Mum. I don’t like the slight sneer as he does so. “I need to talk to you about the show.”
“I thought the new season wasn’t on for another month.”
“It’s not, but we film as much as we can before it starts, to take the pressure off. That’s what those ‘Focus On’ slots are all about. Surely you realized they weren’t filmed live?”
“Oh yeah,” I say, not having realized that at all. “I’m a big fan of the show,” I add. Before I met him, I would have said I was a fan of his, but where is the charming man I watched on Earth?
There’s barely a twitch of an eyebrow. “Gabor is still debating about when we show you working on a painting. He doesn’t want that to become stale, but he also wants to drive demand. So before then, we’re going to introduce you as a geologist.”
“Which I am.”
“. . . Yeah.” He says it like I’ve claimed I’m the richest woman on Earth. “So I need to talk through some possible scenes with you. Lab work maybe. You went out and got some samples, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you could hold one back for some lab testing.”
“What do you mean? They’re all for lab testing.”
He sighs, as if I’m prolonging a joke that’s no longer funny. “All right. And maybe something where you talk through the field equipment. The show runner said something about you being used to being filmed but not talking to a camera.”
“I used to film my painting. The shot only showed the canvas and my hand, but I did give a commentary through—”
“So we need to do some camera practice. I take it they didn’t cover that in your preflight training?”
I’m still smarting about being talked over. “They didn’t.” He rolls his eyes and then gives me a look like it’s my fault. “There was a lot of other stuff to cover. Like how not to die in space. You know, important stuff.”
“Well, you made it here, in all your white-skinned, blue-eyed glory. You’ll look great on film, but I’m sure you know that already.”
He says it with such a barb in his tone that I feel like I’ve just told him his mother lied about who his father was. “I can’t help what I look like. It’s not why I was picked to come here.”
“Yes, the geology. Obviously. No need to go into that again.”
“Were you an arsehole before you came to Mars or has being here so long made you into one?”
I regret it, instantly. I need to work with this man. But that shouldn’t have to mean that I just let him treat me this way with no pushback. I decide against an apology. If I just take this crap from him without standing up for myself, he’ll treat me worse as time goes on.
He’s waiting for me to say sorry though. When I don’t, he casts his eyes over the room once more and says, “I need you to come up with five ideas for ‘Focus On’ slots. I need them by the end of the week. When we have something signed off by the show runner I’ll start training you.”
He leaves, so icy he’s practically chilled the air. I close the door, resisting the urge to slam it dramatically. The thought of working with him is as appealing as dental surgery. Perhaps I’ll be able to find out why he hates me from Petranek. It’s not a reassuring thought. It feels more like playground tactics. “Why doesn’t your best friend like me?” That’s worthy of a five-year-old.
When I’m sure he’s not going to come back I retrieve the ground scanner from the shower and reactivate it. I have to hold it upright for only another second or so before its own legs extend out from just above the base and stabilize it.
I’ve chosen weak pulses with a very limited range, mostly to stop Principia from freaking out about anything unusual. The results are displayed instantaneously.
There are no spaces anywhere around the base or below. The structure is exactly as I’d expect it to be from the maps I’ve learned of the base.
“Well . . . shit,” I mutter. I’m disappointed. I guess I’d hoped it would be that straightforward. But if whatever Gabor is shipping here secretly isn’t in the base, where the hell could it be?