I WAKE THE next morning with a headache, my mind leaping straight back to where it had been the night before. Just because I don’t love my husband, it doesn’t mean it’s okay to sleep with Elvan. The counter to that is less coherent, more a mess of anger and resentment and lust and loneliness. The pure id response of “But I want to! Right now. And he’s just down the corridor, and anyway, your husband is a dick.”
Trust me to end up rediscovering my libido on Mars. Millions of miles from the one man I’m supposed to shag and a plethora of devices to satisfy me when alone. I don’t feel like I can ask Principia whether any porn was uploaded to the Mars mirror of the Internet, let alone download a mersive and have that on my file. Especially when Arnolfi and Banks are probably monitoring my mersive consumption very closely.
I can’t understand why Elvan has this effect on me. He must think I’m pathetic: the stereotypical sex-starved wife who blooms at the slightest show of affection. No, I don’t think he would see me that way. I think, somehow, he sees more of me than I’ve even shown him. It’s like we’ve got shortcuts set up between us. No need to go through the awkward flirtation stage and the worrying about whether the feelings are mutual. I just know they are. I know we work together. Just as certainly as I know Charlie and I don’t.
It isn’t Charlie’s fault. None of it is. I’m not the woman he married anymore. No, worse than that: I wasn’t her back then either. She was just a construct, a study of someone who could live a corporate life made manifest in the world. All of the clothes I wore were new, chosen to fit with the kind of person I needed to be, not who I actually was. The handmade, natural-fiber clothes, sewn by our neighbor in exchange for pottery made by my mother, looked ridiculous outside of our valley. The scruffy ease of wearing my favorite combo of trousers and long tops was exchanged for the sleek, tidy lines of synthetic materials that felt better against the skin but had no history to them. I discovered a new awareness of my waist, bust and hips, and that clothes for women were all about accentuating them instead of being practical.
With the new clothes came a new lifestyle with new hobbies taken up to look good at assessments and to fill in gaps left by my bohemian childhood. What use would being able to light a fire in a wood be? Far better that I play the latest mersives and learn how to respond in virtual spaces instead of just staring and then jolting whenever it was my turn to speak.
The places I went to in the evenings to socialize were never of my choosing; they were the places other entry-level candidates were going and I just tagged along. When Charlie and I met in a bar, I in a dress that sparkled and changed color to match the music (why the hell I thought that was a good idea I will never know), he in a dapper suit, how was he to know I wasn’t who I was pretending to be?
The only thing Charlie did was fit into my image of the life I wanted. At the core was the science and getting to work in a decent lab. Everything else was built out from that. What I needed to know, who I needed to be, whom I needed to impress, all were informed by that core goal. I reinvented myself. The entirety of my teens I was doing that; why stop before I had what I wanted?
It started with pretending that I was fine after Dad was sent away. At first it was for Geena’s benefit, some misjudged notion on my part that as her elder sister, I had to show her that everything was all right. I didn’t notice that all I did was make her think I was cold and uncaring. How could I have? I was working so hard at being strong for her and for Mum as she recovered from the trauma, and besides, I was barely a teenager!
Then, when I knew what I wanted to do with my life, it became painfully clear that growing up in a community like ours was going to work against me. And it wasn’t just the skills I needed to acquire and the ones I could forget. It was all about being able to pass myself off as someone who could work in a team. Who could thrive in an environment where it was all about goal setting and project management and allocation of resources. There were mersives that provided scenarios designed to help corporates refine their soft skills. I devoured them, learning the language of the corporate world and working out the kind of person I needed to be to succeed in it: sociable, bright, ambitious and above all else, willing to value the goals of my employer above my own.
Gov-corps say that marital status makes no difference to career progression, but everyone knows that’s a lie. Society is far less screwed up about gender than it used to be but still somehow wants to lock us down in stable relationships. It’s like some part of Western mentality simply couldn’t escape the idea that if two people are married, they are somehow safer. More predictable. And when it comes to balancing the books, they’re cheaper. With minimal living-space guarantees shrinking year on year, there is no getting away from the fact that a married couple can now fit into a flat that five years ago was allocated to a single person. They may not be happy crammed into their shoe box, but it’s better than living in a singleton cube at the equivalent pay grade.
It’s not that I married Charlie so we could get a bigger place. That larger space still has to be shared, after all. For a time I really did believe he was good for me. Stable. Supportive. Driven to climb the corporate ladder just enough to be interesting but not enough to be bullish about it. With my sights fixed on reaching the necessary pay grade, it was easy to overlook the parts that didn’t really fit. I just remolded myself to accommodate. He never learned to adapt to me because I never made it necessary.
It started to unravel when Drew hired me. It’s like I could plot my happiness with Charlie on a graph; as the satisfaction of getting to where I wanted to increases career happiness, the line showing marital happiness starts to take a nosedive. The pretense of being happy to socialize more in mersives than in the real world—that was the first to fail. I just couldn’t live without seeing people in person, so I dialed back on the use of the social games he’d drawn me into and went back to some of the clubs I’d been part of before we married.
We never agreed on whether mersives were the best way to relax. For him, the ideal Sunday afternoon would be a couple of hours meeting up in a puzzle game with a group of friends on a shared server, then going off for a stroll through some exotic location, rendered fully immersively. I never liked those, though of course I never said so in the early days, when I was suppressing my own preferences to be that successful corporate climber. As time went on though, I visited Mum more, desperate for long walks around the loch and real fresh air. He couldn’t handle the insects. “Why do you want to go somewhere with thousands of little flying bastards everywhere who just want to eat you?” he’d moan every time I packed to go. I could never find the words to express why mersives were never quite good enough for me.
We were so poorly matched, but I didn’t see it at the time. I suppose I didn’t want to admit to myself how fake I had become and how false our relationship was. How I had used him.
But it wasn’t like there was nothing in it for him. JeeMuh, am I really this awful? Can’t I let him just be a nice guy who fell in love with who I was pretending to be?
I can, right up until he started getting moody, started asking why I was at the lab all the time, why I couldn’t change my schedule to fit better with his. I can think kindly of him right up until I remember the way he started to act whenever friends came to visit, or when we went out. As the lab took more of me, he seemed to resent anyone else having even a moment of my attention. It got to the point where I started canceling social plans because I simply couldn’t face going through the tedious bullshit of explaining who would be there and what we’d be doing. Taking him with me no longer worked; he’d drink too much and insult my friends.
That should have been enough of a warning. I should have left him then. But I didn’t really care about dropping ties with the people I’d simply tagged along with to look like I had a life. All carefully chosen so that when GaborCorp reviewed my social activity I looked normal. None of them really knew me. None of them missed me either.
I didn’t notice my world shrinking because I had my work and that was all I cared about. I filled the gaps left by my abandoned social life with painting. Charlie loved that: something I could do at home, that he could talk to his colleagues about. I know he showed them my videos. “Look at how talented my wife is” was one of his favorite things to boast. Then it started to feel like there was a subtext. “Look at what I caught. Surely I’m a better man for being able to find someone like her.”
But the more I painted, the more I remembered who I really was. It started to be as much about having something I could focus on that wasn’t Charlie, something that was indisputably mine. I could forget he was in the flat when I was painting Mars, shutting everything else out as I talked through the process. It got to the point where the only thing I looked forward to when I was heading home from the lab was getting the canvas out again. When we made love, I was thinking about what to paint next. Just going through the motions, detached from my body, doing enough to make him think I was still present. It was no way to live. So I decided to leave.
I packed my bags when he had a rare site visit and would have been gone by the time he got back if the taxi hadn’t been late. When he came home to find me in the living room, shouting at a virtual booking AI, surrounded by my art supplies bagged up and resting against one tiny suitcase, he lost it. He wasn’t angry, as I’d feared he’d be. He was devastated.
He cried; then I cried; then somehow he persuaded me to stay. I don’t even remember what he said. I wonder if it was as much a desire to just end the emotional barrage from him. I knew that if I left, he wouldn’t let me go. “Just give me two more months,” he said, weeping. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make you happy. Just two months, and then if you want to go, go.”
It seemed so reasonable at the time. And yet now, lying in bed on another planet, I feel such anger at myself for being so weak. I should have just walked out. I should have grown a fucking backbone and said, “Actually, Charlie, I have all the data I need about our relationship and another two months is not going to change the conclusion.” But seeing him cry, watching him fall apart and having the chance to end that distress . . . That was too powerful to resist.
So I stayed. And I did try. We talked, I tried to explain how I felt, he pretended to understand and then we spent three hours discussing his needs and feelings. He did make an effort, but the tragedy of it all was that it didn’t matter what he did. A better version of himself was never going to be enough because I just wanted to be alone and have some space to breathe. A singleton cube would be like a palace because I would be able to fill every square centimeter of it, instead of shrinking myself down to accommodate him.
Looking back at his charm offensive, at those six weeks of the Very Best of Charlie, I’m even more convinced that he knew what he was doing all along. As soon as I decided to leave I should have made different contraceptive arrangements. I should have been more careful. But it was always something he took care of, like making sure we always had spare canisters for the food printer and sorting the recycling.
He said it was an accident. That he’d been so upset by the crisis and so focused on making it better that he’d forgotten to get his treatment topped up. With so many MyPhys notifications about stress levels, he’d just muted it and forgotten to review the messages waiting for him. All of that considerate, loving, making-so-much-effort-to-please-me sex had resulted in a pregnancy I never wanted.
I didn’t even think it was possible to have an unplanned pregnancy anymore. I’d seen stories on news feeds about it but never really believed that someone could be so careless or ignorant. Nevertheless, there I was, pregnant and in shock. For days I kept it secret, telling myself it was just a bunch of cells, that I should get rid of it and not even think about it. But it would be impossible to arrange without his knowledge. While he couldn’t stop me from having an abortion, I couldn’t keep it a secret from him. It was one of the many compromises that hung over from the last days of democracy, in which the Far Right practically removed a woman’s control over her own body. The gov-corps that emerged from that time dialed a lot of it back, but not all of it. Charlie had a legal right to know about any termination. It was stipulated in the marriage contract that I had skimmed over, thinking that since we’d agreed not to have children, it wouldn’t be relevant.
Back then, I thought there were only two routes ahead of me. One was to leave, notify him of my intent to terminate and fight it out in court if he objected to my decision. With so much of the legal process run by AIs, it would have taken only a week, long enough for a human judge to review the case once all the information was in place. I would have a strong position; he had always ensured his contraception was up to date until I had almost left him and I was unaware of his failure to have the hormonal treatment updated.
The other route was to stay and make the best of it. I could have left and had the child, of course, but I simply couldn’t face it. Just as I simply couldn’t face the prospect of telling him I wanted a termination. The week before I told him, I agonized over it. Did I really want to abort? Did I really want to go through with it? The truth was, I couldn’t bear the thought of any of those options. When I imagined what it would be like to have won the right to abort if he stood against it, really thought about what it would be like to go into the clinic and have the cells removed . . . I felt awful. Even though I knew that was exactly what it was: a bunch of cells. But equally, when I imagined the pregnancy, my body no longer being my own, I was filled with the purest dread. I was simply incapable of imagining myself with a baby. It was never something I ever saw in my future.
I took to crying as soon as I left the house for work. I’d give myself the walk from the apartment block to the tram just to feel sorry for my stupid self, and then once I was on the tram, I’d scour the Web for images of babies in the vain hope that something would light up some circuit in my brain that could make the thought of motherhood palatable. But there was nothing. It was already missing. I ended up drifting to the rare communities with public settings that let people view without declaring their presence, reading countless entries written by women talking about why they’d decided not to have children. Talking about the last corners of society in which the idea that women were only for bearing children still existed and how they had left them.
Then I would cry the rest of the way to the lab.
Of course, I had to tell Charlie in the end. I think some part of me was hoping that he’d say it was the wrong time, that given the difficulties we were having, perhaps it would be best to abort. But of course he didn’t. In Charlie’s world, the last seven weeks since I’d almost walked out had been great. We’d “come so far” and he felt really good about all the ways he’d been proving he was a good husband. My hesitant confession that I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, seeing as we never wanted children, was pushed aside. “But that was before we grew together, right?” I felt so sick when he rested his hand over my lower stomach, cooing about the thought of life blossoming within me. I wanted to smash a vase over his head and run out of the apartment and never go back. Find someone at the commune who could put me in touch with people who could hide me. But I didn’t. I just smiled. I just smiled and said what he wanted to hear. Because I always fucking do that.
A notification saves me from the bottomless well of self-hatred. It’s a message from Mum. Oh good, something else I can flagellate myself with.
“Hello, Sprout!” She’s sitting by the fire, Frigg stretched out on the sofa next to her, Odin sitting on her lap. He’s so big, the top of his head is pushing her chin up and the struggle for who gets to decide where Mum’s face is allowed to rest is obviously still ongoing. “So it’s”—she squints at the clock across the room—“sometime after midnight and the wind is howling away. Can you hear it? This storm is on the way out now but it’s been a belter. These two reprobates haven’t left the house for days, have you, your majesty?” She looks down at Odin, who rubs his face against her chin and starts purring. “He’s all love and cuddles now, but you should have seen him earlier. Grumpy sod. Anyway. I got your message.Thank you, darling. You do look a little bit tired. Are they working you too hard? Is that why you haven’t sent a message to your father?”
I sit up. What the hell? I told her why!
“I know it must be hard. I may not be an expert on these things—you know I was always better at coding software than understanding people—but I do think it’s important to make an effort.”
Mum never talks about when she was a software engineer. That was her life before the commune. Why talk about it now?
“There was a feature on you on Norope Tonight! I thought they would have shown some of your artwork, but they didn’t. They didn’t even mention the painting part. They just talked about you being a geologist. They talked about the Mars show and that lovely Dr. Banks. Is he just as handsome in person? Are you going to be on that show? They said it’s the season break or something but it will start up again soon, after the capsule has been opened. It’s all very exciting. Everyone here sends their love and they are so proud of you. Not as proud as me, obviously.” She gives one of her wicked grins and Odin meows loudly at her.
“Shush—I wasn’t talking to you. I talked to Charlie earlier. I think Mia might be teething. She’s so bonny and bright as a bulb. You must be proud of her too. I never thought you’d have children. Funny, isn’t it, how things change? And I know you struggled in the early days, Sprout, but you made it through, and imagine how proud she’s going to be when she knows her mummy went to Mars!”
I lie down again. Trust Mum to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time and be totally oblivious to it. Not that she can see my face right now, in fairness, but she never did pick up on the subtleties of human interaction.
“Right, I should go to bed. Don’t look at me like that, Odin. I’m allowed to get up if I want to. You’ll soon have most of my bed anyway. Yes, I know, you’re beautiful, yes.” She kisses him on the top of his head. “Bye, then, Sprout. Oh, and if you could film a message with Dr. Banks in it, that would be lovely. You know, for science.” She adds a wink to that wicked grin and the recording ends.
First Charlie, then Mum. Neither of them addressed the things I talked about. Maybe Principia is censoring what I say and hiding it from me. I could understand that about the mention of the footprint—even though that NDA should make that concern invalid—but asking Mum to explain why she believes Dad? Why stop that from getting through? And if I didn’t ask for that, the message would have been just a few seconds long, surely? Something isn’t adding up.
I know that heading straight into a mersive is not going to look good when my usage is reviewed by Arnolfi and Elvan, but I have to go back to Travis. He might have predicted this and he might have set something up to help me. Maybe that information dead drop he’s planned could be used for messages home.
But if I go back to talk to Travis, I have to think about Dad again. What did Travis say? Dad has everything to do with why I’m here? On Mars? It makes no sense.
I wrack my brain trying to remember if there was anything Travis said at the dinner party that could hint at a connection between him and Dad, but there’s nothing. I take a mental step back. Everything to do with why I’m here . . . Did Travis know my Dad, years ago? No, Travis would have been a kid when Dad was locked up. How could they know each other?
But Dad might have corresponded with him. He is allowed to send messages to people. Over the past ten years he’s sent dozens to me that I’ve deleted as soon as they’ve arrived. It was just too painful to watch them, to be taken back to that room, listening to him ranting. Why invite that into my own living room, or worse, just the confines of my head? But why would there even be a correspondence between the two of them? No, I simply can’t imagine it.
I clench my teeth and groan. I need to stop being such a coward and face this. I know where this hesitation comes from: it’s the fear that I’ll go and play back that same mersive and it will just end as normal, Travis a figment of either my imagination or a deepening psychosis. Both seem far more probable than his explanation. Preloading my chip? How could he have arranged that so quickly? It was upgraded only a week after I signed the contract to come to Mars. There’s no way he could have gotten everything recorded, set up and found a dodgy technician in time. Unless . . .
Oh shit. Forgetting my fears, I open the menu, select the relevant mersive and go back, barely paying attention to Mia and Charlie as I wrestle with my suspicion. Then everything freezes and Mia disappears, along with the sofa and the dog, and in moments the table appears again.
“Hello, Dr. Kubrin. You came back. I’m glad; we have more to discuss.”
“You’re damn right we do,” I say, sitting in the same chair as before so I line up with where he’s looking. “Did you set all of this up, right from the start?”
He nods. “GaborCorp employs hundreds of thousands of people. Do you really think that my husband often goes to dinner parties to listen to midlevel managers beg for funding? If he did that, he wouldn’t have time to do all the other shitty things he does.”
I think back to that night, how enthused Travis was about my artwork. “You weren’t really a fan of my art channel at all, were you? You were laying it on a bit thick.”
“I like your art, very much,” he says. “But I confess that I only became a fan after I realized how useful you could be. My husband isn’t imaginative enough to come up with the idea of sending an artist to Mars. He’s one of those people who only says they like a painting after they’ve heard how much was paid for it. I bet he made you think it was all his idea to send you there.”
“Yes, he did.”
Travis nods. “Well, it was mine. As I said before, it gives you a reason to go and explore.”
“So where does my dad come into this?”
“I know someone who was an old friend of his, someone who secretly supported the commune. Did you ever find out what that was really about?”
“What? It was just a bunch of hippies who got tired of the corporate machine, wasn’t it?”
“I’m sorry, that isn’t the correct answer,” Travis says and I curse the fact we’re not actually conversing. “The commune you grew up in was a cover for activists who needed somewhere safe and remote to live. Your mother and your father were at the top of the European gov-corp’s most wanted list for about ten years, before our mutual friend got them out of trouble and gave them new identities. They tried to live in plain sight, pretending to be part of the system, but they couldn’t hack it, so a bunch of them got together and went to Scotland. Before it all went wrong with your dad, your parents were some of the most exciting political radicals in Norope. Your mum has written books that are now being used as the foundation for the next generation of activists.”
“Activists? My mum and dad? Don’t be ridiculous. And my mum isn’t a writer; she was a software engineer and now she’s a potter.” He just stares at me. I haven’t asked a question. “What kind of activism?”
“They wanted some basic human rights to be included in gov-corp citizen-employee contracts.”
“The definition of basic human rights changes with pay grade,” I say, unimpressed. “What kind of thing, specifically?”
“Well, your parents believed people had a right to digital privacy.”
The idea seems absurd to me, like an old bastion of a bygone age that only the most romantic and naïve would wish to defend. Digital privacy was one of those old-fashioned ideas that died in the ’30s along with “true democracy” and online anonymity. Ideas that couldn’t fit in the modern world and caused more harm than good—surely my parents knew that! Travis must be mistaken. “Which old friend of my dad’s do you know?”
“I’m sorry—I can’t tell you that. It would endanger him. All I’m willing to say is that they go back a long way and he tried to protect your father, but his enemies were too good at their job.”
“Okay, I’ll play along. Let’s pretend my dad was always telling the truth. Who put the voice in his head?”
“The European gov-corp. Or rather, unscrupulous people hired through a succession of shell companies and front organizations so the money couldn’t be traced. They were trying to destroy the commune. The fact that they didn’t is a testament to your father’s strength of character.”
“Yeah, he just destroyed my family and nearly killed my mother. What a hero.”
In the silence that follows, I become aware of such a resistance to the idea that it’s my father who is the victim. It feels like being told we actually lived in a palace or that I used to be an opera singer. Ridiculous.
“Wait. If the commune was this big secret thing, then why are you telling me this?”
“I’ve read your psych profile; I know you would never betray those people. I’m telling you to make you understand that I know far more about your family than you might imagine. That I really do know enough to help him.”
“And enough to hurt them too. Are you threatening me?”
“Do I need to?”
“JeeMuh, you actually predicted I would say that. You are one dodgy bastard, Mr. Gabor.” Again, I am glad this is not a real conversation.
“I haven’t told you how I can help yet. Are you able to be briefed now?”
I can digest all of this later. It’s time to get what I need and leave, as quickly as possible. “Yes. Principia is already blocking me from examining a specific area.”
He nods. “Yes, narrowing in on a specific area is the first step.”
I sigh. The program running his responses has misinterpreted what I said. “How do I stop Principia from interfering when I find the area I want to investigate?”
“Once you have a suspicion that something is being hidden—perhaps Principia is denying access to you or to cam drones—you need to pick a location that’s within a couple of kilometers from where you want to go. Make the trip to that location several times and film each trip. Audio and visual only is fine. I need you to build up a good amount of data so it can be used to create fake trips in real time to trick Principia into thinking you’re somewhere you’re not.”
JeeMuh, I had no idea that sort of thing was even possible! He’s talking about hijacking the connection between my brain and Principia, sending data that the AI will think is coming from the lenses in my eyes and being processed in my chip! The sort of thing I thought was just stupid spy mersive stuff.
Travis must have thought I’d know this was possible; he’s not giving me a chance to process it all before the next instruction. “Once you’ve done it at least three times, put the files containing those recordings into this folder.”
He points at the wall. All of my paintings disappear and the wall is replaced with a gray background with my own chip’s file structure displayed. Fuck, it’s like he’s showing me the inside of my own mind. I watch as he drills down five levels and locates an innocuous folder labeled “Mars textures research” in the area where all of my art mersives are kept.
“Don’t put anything else in there; that’s really important. Your chip has been loaded with a randomizer, the sort the gaming companies use to generate landscapes that look fresh from limited data. That’s the first part. Any questions so far?”
“But gaming companies recorded environmentals for their mersives. Can’t we just use that data?”
“I did consider that, but for one thing, I’d have to buy access to them and someone could follow the money. For another, they aren’t as accurate as you might think; it was only a couple of kilometers around the base that was recorded, even though the games companies claim they have far more. The areas outside of the zone actually recorded were generated using satellite footage that’s decades out of date. Gathering your own data is the simplest way to do this.”
He wants to feed the software with realistic data; I can understand that. But I’m not a cam drone, designed to capture environmentals. “What if there are slight variations to my route? I can’t guarantee I’ll look in exactly the same directions each time. How can I be sure there won’t be gaps in the environmental recordings?”
“Slight variations are good; they give the software more varied data to crunch. It’s sophisticated enough to handle any small gaps.”
“Have you put anything else in this chip?”
He smiles. “Only the software that does the rest of what we need it to do to fool Principia and get the data home.”
He looks so pleased with himself I’m almost tempted to end this now and send a message to his husband. But that threat over my family holds me in check. If he does really know people close to them, it would be easy for him to find out everything he’d need to make their lives difficult. Whether it’s screwing with their online lives or revealing their activist activities, he has enough money and power to be a real threat. And if he really can help my father, surely that also means he can interfere with the care he’s already receiving. Men as handsome as he is shouldn’t be allowed to be this clever and unscrupulous. It isn’t fair. “What do I do once I’ve saved the files into that folder?”
He leans forward, and the recording of him gives the distinct impression that he’s excited. “The next time you go outside, you tell Principia your route and then one minute into that route, say the words ‘Ergo Elephantine Erasmus.’ I know it sounds weird; I just really wanted to make sure you don’t ever say it by accident. Once you say that phrase, the other bit of software I’ve popped into your chip will take over the tracker dialog between the geolocator and Principia. It will trick Principia into thinking you are making the same route, and if it or anyone else on the crew chooses to examine your visuals, they’ll be shown the route you recorded. You can do this several times; the fake data being played for anyone caring to watch will be different each time.”
“But won’t I only have the same amount of time as the fake trip?”
“You will be totally safe for that duration, yes. The geolocator will give fake readings until you return to the location where you give the code. Theoretically, the fake footage of your route can be generated indefinitely, but if someone is watching your feed closely, they will notice repetition after a bit of time. Principia knows Mars too well to be fooled by it for very much longer than the footage naturally lasts. Keep it below that length of time and you should be okay.”
I shake my head. “There’s another problem here. How can I review anything I record when I’m hidden? Principia has already doctored cam footage.”
“You do it all inside your head. Record with full immersion and don’t let it save automatically. Before you start recording, specify that you want it to be saved to this folder.” He navigates to another folder in my brain. “You can immerse in it at any point. Edit and save within this folder. When you have something concrete, keep it saved there but rename it ‘ready for home’ and it will be sent back to Earth, via Principia, without it knowing.”
“How?”
“The same way that all of your messages are sent, just through a back door. It’s dark web stuff. You don’t need to know how it works—just trust me on that. It’ll dump the data in a dead drop location for me to pick up on Earth when I’m safe to do so.”
I close my eyes, giving myself a moment to make sure I understand the plan. I gather data to feed to a secret program hidden in my chip so that Travis’s tech can trick Principia into thinking I am somewhere else, so I can go to the area it has been hiding from me. It’s clear that Travis knew that Principia would be a problem when he planned all this out.
“And say I get what you want. What happens then?”
“Let’s take it one step at a time.”
I don’t like the sound of that. “So I won’t be able to just send you this data and then forget about all of this?”
“I wouldn’t want to make any promises. But I can assure you that as soon as that data lands in the dead drop, your father will be given all the care he needs.”
“Fuck you very much,” I say with a tight smile. “End mersive.”