ELVAN ADJUSTS THE bed so she’s sitting up and gets her a glass of water. “I’m sorry,” she croaks before taking a sip. “I’m not quite myself.”
“It’s perfectly natural after a neural shutdown,” Elvan says as Petranek shrugs off Banks’s hand and goes back to leaning against the wall, arms crossed, frown back in place.
I watch Arnolfi gather her wits, like she’s putting her armor back on, fixing her face and taking deep breaths. Like someone about to go onstage. “What exactly did everyone consent to?” I ask, not wanting to give her another moment to build those walls back up. I know how much can be hidden behind them.
She swallows, unable to look any of us in the eye for a moment. “This place had to stay a secret. The order came from the top.”
“So now you’re saying there was an order to keep this place secret?” Petranek says, and Elvan holds up a hand.
“We can’t trust anything she said in the first couple of minutes of waking up,” he says.
“Including the part about us being left here to die?” Petranek asks.
“Especially that,” Elvan replies evenly. “Let’s start again.”
I press my lips together in frustration. She never answered my question and Elvan isn’t helping. He’s too trusting, but I can see I have an ally in Petranek; ze doesn’t seem to be buying into Elvan’s excuse either.
“I knew about it. It was part of my job to make sure that it never got leaked through the show. And most of the time I never even thought about it. I focused on my own work. I didn’t like you all being kept in the dark and I tried not to dwell upon it.”
“Why not tell us?” Banks says. “We’re all locked into contracts. We’ve all signed NDAs, for all sorts of stuff.”
She shrugs. “That’s what Gabor wanted. Strictly need to know.”
“What did everyone consent to?” I ask again.
She bites her lower lip. “I want you all to know that I had no choice in this.”
“Shit, this is bad, then,” Petranek mutters.
“Everything was spiraling out of control and I had to make sure that the primary mission wasn’t jeopardized, so . . .” She puts the cup down and presses her shaking palms together. “So I had to dial back. I had to perform a neurophysiological procedure to . . . to help you all to forget about this base.”
“What. The. Fuck?” Petranek says and Banks puts his hand on hir shoulder again. “Are you saying we all knew about this place too at one point, and you made us forget about it?”
She nods and winces at the expletives that burst from Petranek. Banks seems strangely calm and Elvan looks at me. We stare at each other for a few moments, both of us processing what she said.
“So that is how I found this place, then,” I say, feeling strangely reassured. “Some part of me must have made me head in this direction subconsciously. I guess you didn’t do a good enough job of scrubbing my brain.”
“It was all your fault!” Arnolfi blurts out, then reaches for the water again.
“My fault?” I ball my fists. “What, my fault that you lied to your colleagues, that you tried to make out that I was having a fucking psychotic break? That was my fault?”
“You found this place, about a month after you arrived,” she says through her teeth, barely able to hide her anger now. “You wouldn’t let it go.”
A month after I arrived? It’s so chilling, hearing her speak of something I did and have no recollection of. She may as well be describing a parallel universe. Now I know why she looked so angry when I went outside during the fake storm and reported what I’d seen. It was because I was doing it all over again.
“You placed me in an impossible situation.” She looks away from me, trying to suppress that rage at me again. “I didn’t want any of you to get into trouble!” she says to the others. “It was the simplest, cleanest solution.”
“And we consented?” Banks asks. When she nods, he says, “Do you have something we signed?”
“Fuck whether we signed anything!” Petranek says. “You scrubbed our memories? I mean, how does that even work? It’s not like we’re computers! Elvan, you said yourself it was only theoretical, and potentially dangerous!”
Arnolfi looks at him in confusion. “Why were you talking about it?” she asks.
“Because of the paintings,” he says.
“Did you bring them here?” I ask. She nods. “So you’ve scrubbed out, what, a month of our memories? What have you told our friends and families back home?”
“The comms blackout.” Petranek snaps hir fingers. “That’s to cover all this up, isn’t it? JeeMuh, that is some fucked-up shit right there.”
Arnolfi doesn’t reply. She looks at me. “I couldn’t dispose of the paintings back at Principia. The material isn’t degradable enough for the waste processor. I couldn’t risk burying them, not with you likely to use ground scanners and being so”—her lip curls—“so curious about everything. So I brought them here.”
“This is unbelievable,” Petranek says. “I mean, literally unbelievable. Are you seriously telling us that you thought that a risky, potentially dangerous neurophys procedure was the best option? Seriously?”
“Would you have preferred me to report the security breach? To potentially—”
“Yes!” Petranek cuts her off. “Yes, I would have preferred that, like any sane person would. People find shit out that’s above their pay grade all the fucking time, and I bet they don’t get scrubbed. I would have preferred an adult conversation in which we all agreed to sign an NDA. Was that not an option?”
Arnolfi squeezes the cup, her knuckles white. “Not at the time, no. It wasn’t.”
“Why?”
She doesn’t answer.
“So, you’ve altered all the time stamps,” Banks says, still unemotional. “To make us think Kubrin just arrived a few days ago? Why wipe a whole month though? Why not just from the day we learned about the base?”
“Kubrin made it all very difficult. If she wasn’t here, it would have been far easier, and not just because she found Segundus.” Arnolfi waves a hand at the room. “That’s what this place is called.”
“Easier because of our routines?” Elvan asks.
“Yes. I could have taken a day of memories, no problem. But Kubrin is an oddity for us all. And we all encode memories on multiple levels in multiple parts of the brain. I had to dial you all back to the day she arrived, so I could be certain I took out—”
“What else did you take?” Petranek yells. “Can you cherry-pick?” Ze glares at Elvan and Banks. “Why are you both so fucking calm about this? She fucked with our heads! I would never consent to that! Never!”
“Petranek,” Banks says, putting himself between Arnolfi’s bed and his friend. “Lynn. We’re all shocked here, and we’re all upset. But we have to keep calm. Okay?”
Petranek searches his eyes. “Why aren’t you angry?”
“I am,” Banks says. “I really am, but right now, I’m keeping it under control. And you need to do the same; otherwise, this could escalate into something we can’t take back. Okay?”
I find myself admiring his self-control at the same time I’m wondering whether he’s honed it over the years of his indenture. Constantly holding back his anger has become second nature to him. The thought is sobering.
Despite what Arnolfi has done to us, I don’t feel angry. I’m not sure how I feel. Numb. No, that’s not right. Something between that and being vindicated. But the whole consent thing doesn’t sit right with me at all.
“Do you have proof we consented?” I ask, watching the vein at the side of her forehead pulse. “Do you?”
“You pre-consented in your contracts,” she finally says.
“That’s it,” Petranek says, balling a fist. “I am going to—”
“You’re going to take a deep breath and stay back,” Banks says, moving himself between them again. “Seriously, Petranek, there are more important things to address here than your need to punch her. Right?”
“I thought so,” I say. “I must have known what you were going to do somehow. That’s how I left the note for myself,” I say to Elvan.
“What note?”
I ignore Arnolfi’s question. “And what about my wedding ring? Did you replace that too?”
Arnolfi nods. “Wedding ring?” Elvan asks.
“This one is fake,” I say, holding up my left hand. “It should have an engraved message inside, but it doesn’t. I guess you didn’t know about that,” I say to Arnolfi. “You just printed a new gold band. Shit. You stage dressed everything. Did you carry me back to the rocket and strap me in?”
She nods.
“And you activated that mersive? The one that I was in when you first—I mean, when you pretended to first greet me?”
Another nod.
“That’s why you recovered so quickly from the flight,” Elvan says. “Damn it.” He looks at Arnolfi. “Did you drug her to simulate the weakness and . . .” He trails off at her nod. “I should have looked more closely at the blood work.”
“There wouldn’t have been any point,” I say. “Principia held that back from the results, didn’t it?” I watch her nod again. “It’s been in on this all along. You weren’t incompetent,” I say to Elvan. “You were duped, like we all were.” I focus on Arnolfi again. “Where is my real wedding ring?”
“I don’t know. You weren’t wearing it when I had to—”
“So you didn’t ask me?”
“You didn’t know where it was. You’d lost it.”
“Really?” I look at the others. “I don’t think I went into this memory scrub willingly. I don’t think any of you did either.”
“Agreed,” Petranek growls.
“And there’s something else that doesn’t work for me here,” I say, feeling a dark satisfaction at the way patches of sweat have appeared in the underarms of Arnolfi’s onesie. “So, I found this place the first time round, you scrubbed our memories, most likely without our consent, and then what? What were you planning to do? Because resetting everything, changing the dates and presumably having the old, original messages from home re-sent to us—all that seems like short-term thinking to me. You might have faked a comms blackout when those messages started to get difficult to manage—I guess we didn’t just repeat the same stuff we sent the first time, so they started to get disjointed—but how long were you planning to keep that up?”
“Until she left with them,” Banks says. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
Arnolfi doesn’t reply.
“You wanted to keep us all in the dark until the ship left; then you didn’t care if we found out,” Elvan says, “because you were supposed to be on it.”
Arnolfi remains silent, trying not to cry, or pretending to be upset. I can’t be sure.
“But they left you behind,” Petranek says with a bitter laugh. “And now you have to face the music. You may as well lift the comms blackout, now we know. And we’ll have to renegotiate our contracts, like we should have the first time round, for fuck’s sake.”
Banks is frowning at the floor. “What is it?” I ask him.
“You said this base was need to know,” he says to Arnolfi. “This place was more important than Principia, presumably, for you to have gone to such lengths to keep it secret. But not the base; the ship, right? That ship was the primary Mars mission all along. Not our science. Not the show. That was all pantomime distraction, to hide this place. Tell me if any of that is wrong.”
“It’s all correct,” Arnolfi whispers.
“And now that ship has left, so the primary mission has been completed. I don’t think you were upset about being left behind because you wanted to go with them—and we’ll get to where that is in a minute—I think you were upset because you had to stay here.”
My stomach starts to churn. Elvan moves away from the bed, pushing away the medkit as he passes it, coming over to stand next to me.
“But why be upset about that?” Banks continues. When Arnolfi remains silent, he looks at the rest of us. “I don’t think the comms were cut by her to cover up the message issues. Principia would have stored that month’s worth of the original comms. It’s clever enough to mark out discrepancies—hell, she probably reviewed them all to make sure her cover-up was still intact. What if the comms blackout happened for a different reason? What if it’s because, with the primary mission completed, GaborCorp has closed its Mars operations—for good?”
Arnolfi covers her face, stifling a sob.
“What, just leaving us here?” Elvan asks. “No, that’s not possible.”
“Think about it,” Banks says, ignoring Arnolfi’s distress. “If GaborCorp only put us here to cover for that ship being built, then why spend the money to send us home again? We’re surplus to requirements now.”
“No,” I say. “They wouldn’t do that. It would be a PR disaster, for one thing.”
“They can spin any story they like,” Banks replies. “No one will question it. We’re too far away for an investigation. And—”
“No!” I say, more forcefully, knowing where all of his speculation is coming from. “I’m contracted to do a minimum of one hundred hours of promotional activities when I get back to Earth, to help flog my paintings. And Gabor needs them to be shipped back too! And all of you have hugely valuable skills and experience. Even if GaborCorp doesn’t want to continue having a human presence on Mars, it makes no sense for them to just leave us here to rot. We have a rocket and the fuel to get back. It’ll be a squeeze for all of us to travel back in it, but we could. That’s not what’s going on here.”
“Can you lift the comms blackout?” Petranek asks Arnolfi. She shakes her head, face still covered with her hands, tears slipping out from under them. “Did you enforce it in the first place?” Elvan asks. Another tearful shake of her head.
“Principia,” Banks says with a look of resignation. “Did you initiate the comms blackout with Earth?”
“I did not, Dr. Banks.”
“It really originated on Earth?”
“It did, Dr. Banks. Would you like me to participate in this conversation? I have relevant information that Dr. Arnolfi seems to have omitted from—”
“You keep out of this, Principia!” Arnolfi says, pulling her hands away from puffy eyes. “That’s an order.”
“I must inform you that you do not have the authority to impose that upon me, Dr. Arnolfi. Your authority has been revoked due to your suicide attempt and will not be restored until you have passed a full mental and physical evaluation. Dr. Banks now holds the highest pay grade and resulting security privileges.”
“Has your time limit elapsed, Principia?” he asks.
“It has, Dr. Banks. I apologize for the inconvenience. Would you like me to participate in this conversation?”
“Yes,” Banks says, and Principia’s avatar shimmers into view, no available doorways or perspectives to trick us into thinking it has just walked in. I prefer this form of arrival. There’s an honesty to it.
“I want you to answer our questions, Principia. No tricks,” Banks says. “Did you assist Dr. Arnolfi in her efforts to keep this base hidden?”
“That is a complex question,” Principia replies, eliciting a groan from Petranek. “Would you like me to itemize the actions I took to keep Mars Segundus a secret at the behest of Dr. Arnolfi?”
“Bloody AIs,” Petranek mutters as Banks gives Principia a nod.
“As there are over three thousand seven hundred actions, I shall group them into broad categories,” Principia begins. “I edited incoming data from satellites and drones to remove any images that could lead to the discovery of Segundus from the results. I falsified weather data and external cam footage to create the illusion of dust storms to prevent the use of drones within a twenty-kilometer radius of the base and to ensure that members of the Segundus crew and Principia crew would not encounter one another on the surface. I falsified records relating to multiple items of hardware to prevent the discovery of their reassignment to Segundus. I assisted Dr. Arnolfi in the management of messages to and from Earth to replicate personal communications when the base time stamp was changed. I omitted blood work data before presenting the results of Dr. Kubrin’s tests to Dr. Elvan. I gave an objectively verifiable lie as a response to one thousand, two hundred and three queries made by the crew. I ring-fenced data accumulated in the first twenty-seven days after Dr. Kubrin’s true arrival and prevented any access to that data and ensured there were no ways for anyone except Dr. Arnolfi to review it. I altered the time and date stamp in Principia’s mainframe. I—”
“That’s enough,” Banks says. “Did you help Arnolfi to take our memories?”
“Not directly, Dr. Banks. I assisted with the production of specialized drugs, at the direct request of Dr. Arnolfi.”
“Did you know what they would be used for?”
“Given Dr. Arnolfi’s research and the neurochemicals that would be affected by the drugs, I was able to form a hypothesis. That was why I challenged Dr. Arnolfi when she made the request to use the molecular printer to create them.”
“And she told you?” Elvan asks.
“Yes.”
“And how did you reconcile that with your duty of care toward us?”
“Quite easily, Dr. Elvan. Dr. Arnolfi’s skill at minimizing side effects and the results she’s obtained in the past made the risk of physical harm very low. Safeguarding the preservation of memory is not a stipulated requirement within your contracts, or in the universal basic human rights agreement made between GaborCorp and Norope.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Petranek spits. “You were more than happy to keep us in the dark too, given the fact that Segundus is actually the primary Mars mission.”
“That was taken into consideration; however, Dr. Arnolfi has led you to believe that it was a level-one security requirement to keep the knowledge of Segundus secret from the crew of Principia that led her to remove your memories. This is not true. Sensitive activities that are conducted on a need-to-know basis are common within GaborCorp and on the rare occasion when there has been informational bleed, the breach is handled with additional clauses to contracts. Not the removal of memories.”
We all look at Arnolfi. She is hiding her face behind her hands.
“So why did you do it?” Elvan says to her.
She remains silent.
“Principia? Did she tell you?”
“No, Dr. Elvan.”
“The ship that was built here,” Petranek says. “Where has it gone?”
“The ship Semper Gabor has set course to follow the Pathfinder.”
Petranek laughs, the same kind of strained guffaw that comes from my own lips. “I don’t believe it,” ze says. “We were right.”
“But no one knows where they went,” Banks says.
“The knowledge of the Pathfinder’s destination has been in GaborCorp’s possession for approximately thirty-six years and three months,” Principia replies.
“But that’s almost as long as Atlas has been gone.” Banks falls quiet. “I guess no valuable information stays secret if you have enough money.”
“Is this the stuff that’s supposedly in the locked time capsule?” Petranek asks.
“Yes, Dr. Petranek, along with additional data secured by GaborCorp relating to the technological advances made by the Pathfinder and her team.”
“So Segundus was set up to build a ship using that technology to find her?”
“Yes.”
“Whoa. I cannot wait to see that!” Petranek rubs hir hands in anticipation.
“I am sorry, Dr. Petranek. That data has been deleted. It was stipulated in the mission brief that as soon as a successful takeoff was achieved, the data would be wiped to prevent any future corporations from using it, should GaborCorp lose exclusive access to Mars.”
“Shit. So that’s why Gabor paid through the nose for that access, then? Because of the highly sensitive nature of the information—presumably stolen or bought in a very shady secret deal—Gabor decided that the best way to keep the project truly secret would be to build it on Mars, where he controls all of the satellites, all of the data, all of the access. Everything.”
“Yes, Dr. Petranek. Mr. Gabor decided that the massively increased cost was an acceptable security investment. With industrial espionage so rife, and information so difficult to control should it fall into the wrong hands, he decided to remove those risks.”
“And he smuggled the crew here?”
“The word ‘smuggled’ implies the secret transportation across borders of illegal goods. Rather, there was simply no media coverage of the crew of Segundus leaving Earth.”
No one can split hairs better than an AI. I look at Arnolfi. “So, judging from the way you reacted when I said the ship had taken off, I guess you really, really wanted to go and find God with the rest of the crazies.”
“Shut up!” she snaps.
“So why did you have to wait to tell us this?” I ask Principia. “It’s not like we could do anything about the ship now it’s left.”
“I consulted Captain Singh about the events that have occurred here, and she asked that I wait until the ship was out of real-time communications range.”
“So we couldn’t call her up and talk to her?” Banks says, incredulous. “That seems pretty damn rude.” He looks at Arnolfi. “Perhaps she was worried that you’d say something mean about leaving you behind.”
“So now the ship has left, is this place just going to be mothballed?” Petranek asks.
“No plans have been made for the continued use of this facility.”
“And Gabor didn’t plan to mothball Principia, once that ship was done?”
“No, Dr. Petranek. The ship was completed six months ahead of schedule and no guidance has ever been given with regard to Principia’s continued funding once Segundus fulfilled its mission.”
“Six months?” Petranek gives a low whistle. “I’ve never known a complex engineering project to be finished that far ahead of schedule.”
I notice how quiet Elvan is, and the way he’s staring at Arnolfi. “What aren’t you telling us, Arnolfi?” he asks.
She doesn’t respond.
“I’ve known you for over fifteen years,” he says. “I’ve seen you go through the death of your father. I’ve seen you go through a divorce, and through a cancer scare. I have never seen you fall apart. What aren’t you telling us?”
Her hands drop onto her lap. She looks terrible with her pale lips and bloodshot eyes. But it isn’t just those physical things. It’s something in the way she looks at Elvan. Like some part of her has given up.
“I didn’t lie to you when I said I was struggling with some news from back home,” she finally says. “And I didn’t lie when I said we’ve all been left here to die.” She laughs mirthlessly, like a woman who has just discovered that life is simply a terrible joke that she shouldn’t have fallen for. “You always wonder what you’ll be like in a disaster. You know I’ve always loved those old movies where there’s an earthquake or a volcano or something and you follow all these characters through the crisis. Cathartic, I suppose. I think I used to watch them and wonder whether I’d be like the hero. Saving people. Being selfless.” She laughs again, bringing back the sense of dread I felt earlier. “I’m not. I’m the one who does everything they can to save themselves at the first opportunity. The one who dies because it looked like a sure way to survive but it wasn’t.” Her face creases into such an expression of despair that I cover my mouth, feeling as if I know something awful has happened, something worse than I could possibly imagine, just at the edge of my consciousness. “They lied to me. So that I would help them steal the hardware they needed to finish the ship more quickly. And I betrayed all of you. People I care about. That I love. Just to be left behind. I . . .”
Her words are swallowed up by a heaving sob and she breaks down, leaving the rest of us to bear reluctant witness.
“What was the news from home?” Elvan asks. “Tell us!”
She shakes her head. “I can’t. Oh God! I can’t go through it again!”
“Principia?” Banks looks at the avatar. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
“Yes, Dr. Banks. I believe Dr. Arnolfi is referring to news that came from Earth shortly before the blackout. I must warn you that you will find this emotionally distressing.”
“Just fucking tell us!” Petranek yells.
“On the morning of December thirteenth, shortly after one p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, three thermonuclear missiles were fired from the United States of America, targeting three key locations in GaborCorp’s R and D divisions in Andalusia, Madrid and Manchester, followed shortly by a second wave targeting key GaborCorp facilities in France, triggering a full-scale nuclear retaliation from the European and Noropean gov-corps in which one thousand five hundred missiles carrying a total of over five hundred nuclear warheads were launched. We lost communications with Earth shortly afterward. Initial estimates of deaths caused by the first strikes in Europe and Norope are over eight million, with a further—”
I’m dimly aware of the wall sliding up behind me before I realize, with a bizarre detachment, that it is instead my body that is slipping downward as my legs collapse beneath me. I don’t hear anything more from Principia as a high-pitched whining sound deafens me. All I can think of is Mia, little Mia, plump and perfect, pointing out of the window at a new star in the sky over Manchester in the middle of the day.