bkmarcus.com : writing : TerraformTrilogy : 1-GreenWars : MonkeyCam

Last revised: 4 February 2001 - 12:47 PM, by bkMarcus <http://www.bkmarcus.com/>

 

 

As he healed from the incident in the outer tunnels, Ike found himself moving from apathy and disinterest for the terraform laborers to a mild disgust -- their pink hands and faces, their bulging diapers, the slow, slurred sound of their voices -- but a phantom pain followed him when he saw one brought under the 'stick.

 

MonkeyCam

 

 

On his new legs, Sergei Pavlovitch "Scarface" Aleksandr stands two meters high. His oldest scar is the only one that still shows.

 

Technically, his father was a cyborg, too. Anyone with a pacemaker or a data jack is a cyborg. But in late twentieth-century Russia, his father was more cyborg than most.

 

Sergei's earliest memory is of being cradled in his father's remaining arm. He is looking up at an eye patch while a warm metal hook scratches gently at his tummy. The memory is vivid, but not detailed  -- just the faded black patch, the warmth of the hook and the secure feeling of his father's large hand and fingers beneath him.

 

Like Sergei, Pavl Aleksandr was a big man. Like Sergei, he had been a soldier. Like his son, Sergei Pavlovitch, the elder Aleksandr had lost parts of himself in service to the Soviet Union. But where Pavl's lost limb had allowed him to leave active field duty, to serve his military as an engineer and to raise a family, Sergei's increasingly artificial body makes him decreasingly human in the eyes of the government, more and more the property of the State.

 

Pavl's first artificial eye was glass -- a cosmetic artifact. Sergei's optical implant sends his brain visual signals from a broader spectrum than his natural eye can. His father's hook could carry moderately heavy objects. Sergei's right arm can lift a metric ton. His left arm -- still partially organic -- feeds circuits down into the weaponry mounted at the stump.   

 

When Sergei was 12, his father's hook was replaced by an early bionic arm that allowed him to grasp and carry objects. Sergei got his first scar from that arm. When his father would get home from work, he'd remove the new arm and replace it with the older, more comfortable prosthetic.  Sergei would sneak into his parents' bedroom to investigate the new limb while it sat fatherless on the bureau. Inside, he found pistons and circuitry -- more complex than the electronic components he studied in school, but familiar enough in principle that he was sure he could learn the arm's inner workings.  As an adult, an accomplished engineer in his own right, Sergei remains primarily self-taught.

 

One night, overconfident, he touched the wrong wire to the wrong circuit path. His father's arm convulsed in Sergei's hands, folded fast at the elbow and struck Sergei in the eye. Lightening across a purple darkness. Pain stabbed through his head and he tried to drop the arm but it grasped and clawed as it fell.  When he looked up into his father's mirror, he saw the inside of his face gaping out of the long wound down his cheek and neck.

 

His mother, the doctor, sewed him up herself. The pink twist of shiny tissue earned him his nickname at school. Twenty years later, the scar is white, even against Sergei's pale skin. It is still twisted and shiny, but nobody notices it, surrounded by the alloy and polymer that armors the rest of Sergei's body.

 

 

Ike knew that GORBI had a sense of humor, even though popular belief was that giant military AIs were cold and menacing.

 

He had been having trouble cradling since his violent encounter with Vlad, but GORBI was still able to send messages directly into Ike's head, as well as monitor the real-time stream of data transmitted from Ike's array of cyborg sensors.

 

This morning, GORBI had included an archive image in Ike's daily orders: a black-and-white photograph, circa 1950, of a chimpanzee in a cowboy's outfit, sitting on a saddled Great Dane. The Great Dane looked very much like a horse, both in relative size and boredom, and seemed either unbothered or unaware of the grinning chimp on his back. The chimp was lifting his white Stetson in the air with one hand and waving limply at the camera with his other.

 

Ike didn't know what to make of the photograph, concluded it was an erroneous inclusion in his instructions for the day, and decided to ignore it.

 

In the afternoon, GORBI sent him a brief video clip of a color TV show, circa 1970, where chimpanzees were dressed as era-appropriate American humans: a corporate executive, a housewife, a policeman, a janitor. The chimps waddled through the human settings, their wigs askew, wiggling their lips and chins in a rough approximation of the English-language soundtrack, which included an audience's laughter every 30 to 60 seconds.

 

Ike sent GORBI a note asking if the 20th century American chimpanzee imagery was a mistake or an incomplete instruction. (Please explain chimp attachments: are they in reference to my duties?)

 

Ike was not sure how long it would take for the signal to go round-trip between Mars and Moscow, but he knew that GORBI was unlikely to respond before the next morning, so he attended to his other instructions for the day.

 

The next morning, GORBI sent back a full 10-minute sketch from a late-night American TV show, circa 1990, a segment called MonkeyCam, where a chimpanzee with a video camera strapped to a helmet, ran around the television studio -- among the audience, through the rafters -- and the signal from the mounted camera on his head was interspersed with a ground-level cameramen's views of the chimp himself.

 

When the video clip ended, Ike noticed that there were no instructions included in this morning's transmission. The undeniable conclusion was that the computer had gone insane. (This was, in fact, the basis for many jokes and stories told among the humans in the Soviet Terraform Sector -- that the Kremlin had abandoned them to the authority of an ancient, bug-ridden mainframe buried beneath Moscow and decreasingly maintained because of budget problems -- but even Ike knew that Mars was too important to Soviet plans to go unattended by Those In Power.)

 

He immediately signaled back to GORBI:  Transmission incomplete. No instructions received. What is meaning of video attachment?

 

Yesterday, he'd been able to carry out his duties after sending his (still unanswered) question, but this morning he had been given no duties. So, as he did with most of his waking downtime, Ike wandered into the central park of the Terraform Sector -- a lush greenscape under the largest dome on Soviet Mars.

 

For the past several weeks, he'd observed activity in the park steadily mounting: at first, it was small gardening robots cleaning and pruning, then the increasing presence of landscaping chimps and their cyborg overseers (known as "Cymps" among those who, like Ike, communicated only in text), and this morning there had appeared for the first time in Ike's memory, humanoid work crews.

 

Above the army of insectile gardening robots, swarming the greenery under the dome, Ike now saw a cloud of hovering drones cleaning and repairing the material of the dome itself, under the pink, Martian sky. Beneath the robots, packs of enhanced and altered primates (more than half of them in diapers) labored among the handful of African humans -- who were probably, Ike reasoned, soldiers pulled from the field for various infractions.

 

Between the bots, the chimps, the Cymps and the soldiers, Ike could see more motion than he had ever monitored before -- and a perverse but accurately representative display of the general Martian population, at least under Soviet authority, which is all that Ike knew. The only missing group was the bald blue androids that were steadily replacing the African soldiers -- a new shipload every month.

 

Ike himself didn't have a group. Throughout Mars, he was unique. Even the other specialists seemed alien to him, carrying biological and artificial appendages whose functions he only vaguely understood. While he picked an insect from the fur behind his shoulder and crushed it between his teeth, he received a second transmission from GORBI. Today, thought Ike, all precedents are broken.

 

RE COWBOY CHIMP: SORRY YOU DON'T HAVE A DOG.

 

RE CHIMP DRAMA: HUMANS FIND YOU FUNNY, IF YOU ARE DOMESTICATED.

 

RE MONKEYCAM: THOUGHT YOU WOULD BE INTERESTED.

 

RE WORKLOAD: TAKE THE DAY OFF. (BUT KEEP VIDEO CHANNELS OPEN.)

 

 

Ike scratched his neck and sighed. GORBI had given him more questions than answers, but Ike didn't want to push it. He'd take the day off -- yet another unprecedented event -- and worry about GORBI's sanity tomorrow.

 

 

When Sergei was almost 6, he got his father to himself for a whole month. Pasha had been very sick, and Ekaterina had finally taken him to Moscow "for tests".  Sergei had the impression that this involved a big school somewhere.  Location 14 didn't have any schools for 2-year-olds, which is probably why Ekaterina had to take him to a bigger city for a while.

 

Daddy had to cook, and Sergei got to help, because Daddy could only hold certain things with his hook.  He would sing to Sergei -- Russian folk songs -- and tell him stories, many that Sergei couldn't understand. Not all the stories were gentle, but Sergei could ignore the words and let himself drift off on his father's voice. Sergei liked to imagine that Ekaterina and Pasha would never return, that Sergei and daddy could cook and sing and have stories together forever.

 

In the evenings, Daddy sipped vodka and kept winking at Sergei, which left only his glass eye showing over a soft-lipped smile. Sergei pointed and laughed, and Daddy did too, which was good. One night, daddy fell asleep on the floor and snored loudly. Sergei undressed and put on his nightshirt. He brushed his teeth by himself and went to bed, happy that Pasha's crib stood empty. It was nice, at first, to have the room to himself, but in the middle of the night, he decided he wanted to sleep in the main room with his father. He dragged his pillow and bedclothes to his father's side, covered the snoring man with a blanket and crawled underneath it with him. The floor was hard, but daddy was warm and Sergei liked to listen to him breathing.

 

 

Ike's ancestors were African chimpanzees, as were those of the other cyborgized Cymps on Mars, including the aggressive overseers and guards, who managed the labors of their less fortunate, unaltered cousins.

 

All the chimps in the Soviet Space Program were genetically engineered for advanced vocal abilities -- a grunting, guttural approximation of Russian -- and for as much intelligence as Russian and African scientists could pack into a biological chimp brain.  The smartest infants were selected for phenotypic maturation and cybernetic enhancement. The accelerated maturation resulted in the prematurely dark-skinned feet, hands and face of all Cymps.

 

The technological alterations ranged from the plastic and chrome-patched overseers, to the handful of nearly-half-mechanical specialists, such as Ike himself, whose cranium was permanently capped with a plastisteel helmet, sprouting miniature camera lenses and chemical sensors in all directions, plus two stereophonic, wide-angled microphones -- one over each ear-hole. The inside of the cap contained the artificial layers of his mind, and thousands of monofilaments penetrating down into the soft gray matter of his biological brain. He could also extrude, at will, from various limbs, a laser-based directional mike for distance eavesdropping through walls and windows, a taser for subduing the occasional rogue subject of GORBI's ongoing monitoring, and various interfaces for jacking into the landline data ports throughout Soviet Mars.

 

All of Ike's input fed real-time to the radio data receivers in each subsection of the Soviet sector, so GORBI would always be a mere radio timelag away from live coverage of the terraforming project. The Moscow-based AI could, of course, monitor all of the data throughout the Soviet Space program, but Ike was his mobile monitor ... his MonkeyCam for the Martian projects.

 

 

"You know how I lost this eye, Seriushka?" Sergei didn't realize his father had lost his eye. Sergei had never seen his father any way other than how he looked now. Sergei shook his head.

 

His daddy lifted his hook to the side of his face and said, "I scratched an itch!"

 

As the images worked themselves out in Sergei's head, he began to cry.

 

"There, there, Sasha. It was a joke. I'm sorry."  And then later: "We don't have to tell your mother..."

 

 

Until yesterday's cowboy photograph, Ike had not spent time thinking about his biological self past the exigencies that a body imposed on the course of his duties. Ike ate the fruit and protein pastes that awaited him in his nest at the end of a duty shift, used the same sonic showers and vacuum toilets the other Cymps and specialists used, and slept when he was tired. 

 

But the pain of healing imposes a new level of awareness. One is never as present to embodiment as when his biology betrays him.

 

The routine of Ike's life was already gone before the first strange messages arrived. GORBI's obscure jokes (what else could the AI's multimedia non-sequiturs be if not jokes?) began as Ike struggled to recover from his injuries, performing his duties the best he could when forced to compromise and compensate for an unreliable sensorium.

 

He assumed that he would be repaired as soon as Soviet resources weren't being diverted into preparations for the upcoming peace talks. Ike was used to being a priority -- GORBI's mobile monitor. Now he was forced to learn the old Soviet virtue of patience.

 

 

At thirty-three, Sergei still remembers a dream he had when he was five.

 

Ekaterina calls him into the kitchen, where Pasha is in his crib, crying. It doesn't seem strange to Sergei that his brother's crib would be in the kitchen. Sergei says "Where's Daddy?" but his mother doesn't hear him.

 

"Your brother is sick, and I don't have anything to feed him."

 

Somehow Sergei knows what his mother wants to do: cut off his toes and put them in a broth for the baby. Sergei says no and tries to run away, but his body won't move.

 

"Aren't you hungry? None of us have eaten in years, and the government supplies don't reach the city."

 

Sergei stands in the kitchen and shakes his head. He can feel his heart pounding high in his little chest.

 

"Do you want us all to die, Sergei? Do you want Pasha to starve to death? He's an innocent. Do you want your mother to die? Aren't you hungry? You don't need all your toes, I promise you. I'm a doctor. You can walk fine with a few toes missing."

 

Sergei doesn't remember relenting, but now he sits at the kitchen table. He can feel his feet itching where his toes used to be.  His mother puts a plate down in front of him and says "Your brother is feeling much better." On the plate are three little toes, browned from the oven. He's hungry but he can't eat. He can't eat his own toes. Something rises in his throat. He pushes the plate away.

 

"Well if you're not going to eat them, I'll just throw them away."

 

Sergei realizes that he could have three more toes on his feet if he'd thought ahead...

 

 

One week ago, when Ike was still healthy and whole, his assignment for the day was to trace the latest network of green tunnels.

 

Excavation robots dug the passages through the cold, Martian rock, tracing the natural thermal corridors of the planet, expanding the Soviet Terraform Sector in a chaotic web of underground tunnels out from the central dome. Electrical units followed the diggers, running power lines and lights behind them on the tunnel ceilings. Each length of tunnel was air-locked behind the electricians so that gas-masked chimp crews could follow and prepare the walls for the engineered plant life that would slowly fill the passageways with oxygen.

 

On tunnel assignments, Ike wore clothes, and had to bring his own air. All organisms engineered for terraforming were designed to require less oxygen and withstand lower temperatures, but Ike had to wear a suit and rebreather whenever he monitored the green crews. The Cymps wore fur hats, as they oversaw the gardeners' work, but Ike was not allowed to block his camera mounts, so his head was always cold.

 

This was the assignment he liked least in his monitoring: the crowded greening of a newly prepared tunnel. GORBI could see through the diggers and electricians, so Ike didn't spend much time in the tunnels, but he had to monitor the initial greening of a tunnel segment, and once a month, scanned the progress of recently planted tunnels. He preferred the progress scans, because he had the tunnels almost to himself. He could walk for kilometers down the passages, reading the 0₂ levels, watching the growth. From time to time, he came upon a gardening specialist -- a chimp with a tank on its back and a spray wand -- treating the walls. They would ignore him. Only newcomers paid close attention to a monitor. Everyone else pretended he wasn't there.

 

After a day with the chimp crews, Ike decided to take a long route back to the dome -- the scenic route.

 

In one of the older tunnel segments, warm and rich with air, Ike found a diaper, sitting empty on the tunnel floor. He focused on the thing as he passed, taking chemical samples for GORBI. It was unsoiled, but held the heavy musk of an aging male chimpanzee.

 

Three segments further, Ike saw the dark, old chimp himself, sitting naked against the wall. The chimp ignored him as he approached, but Ike did not pass. The creature was a runaway.

 

On the rare occasion when an overseer was neglecting his duties, one of his underlings might slip away for a rest. The lazy chimp would invariably be found out. Cymp guards would apply their shocksticks until the slacker lay unconscious. Ike had seen such a punishment only once, though he had seen several limp chimps carried out of the tunnels by grumbling comrades.

 

There were almost never full-scale escapes. True runaways were caught and killed, their bodies used to fertilize the tunnels. The runaways who didn't get caught were found dead in the outer tunnels, starved to death, frozen to death, sometimes exposed to the surface.

 

This old chimp before him had no business being away from his work crew, but Ike did not want to report him. Not that such a thing was a choice. At the other end of the transmission lag, GORBI would see what Ike saw. He was, no doubt, alerting the old chimp's overseers to retrieve him.

 

"Me Blackface," grunted the chimp. Ike stood before him, recording his features. "Me Blackface," he repeated. Ike nodded. The chimp's face was the same black color of Ike's own face, beneath the peripherals. His hands and feet were dark, like Ike's. How long had he been up here in the tunnels? Long enough to grow old and black.

 

Blackface pushed past Ike and scurried down the passage, away from the abandoned diaper, back toward the dome. Ike waited, before following slowly. Minutes later, he heard screeching, growing closer. He stopped and waited. The dark chimp rushed toward him, his arms thrashing in the air. "No no no no no no no no no no, me Blackface! Me Blackface!"

 

Two Cymp guards -- one red and one black -- were in pursuit, calling to Ike to stop the runaway. Ike extruded his taser and lifted it toward the approaching form, but he didn't fire. Blackface pushed him aside and ran past. "No no no, me Blackface! No catch!" Ike stood up in time to have the red-haired Cymp shove him forcefully to the ground again. The guards ran over Ike and down the tunnel, just out of sight.

 

Ike heard a scream, then several screams, hooting and screeching. He didn't want to follow the sounds, but he knew GORBI would want the event monitored.

 

When he reached the chaos, Ike saw Blackface standing over the darker Cymp, prone and limp beneath him. He had the overseer's shockstick and was waving it at the red Cymp guard.

 

The red guard howled and bared his canines. Blackface jumped up and down in the slow motion of Martian gravity. He held the shockstick over his head and advanced.

 

Trigger the 'stick!

 

Ike hoped his thoughts at least were private from GORBI.

 

But Blackface didn't know how to use the shockstick and had resorted to clubbing at the standing red guard with it. The guard triggered his own shockstick, timed Blackface's blows to catch him between swings, and touched the 'stick to Blackface's thigh.

 

Blackface stumbled back. He tripped over the guard behind him and was down. The standing guard dove forward and pushed the tip of the 'stick into Blackface's abdomen, triggering the jolt and holding it there.

 

The old, black runaway spasmed and shook beneath the red Cymp's shockstick. His shaking body bounced on top of the unconscious black guard trapped beneath him. The prone guard's body took some of the juice and spasmed in harmony with Blackface.

 

The untriggered shockstick rolled to Ike's feet.

 

The standing guard bared his teeth and leaned his weight against his own 'stick, pushing deep into Blackface's belly.

 

From the diaper end of the tunnel, two more Cymps joined the scene and added their own 'sticks to the effort. Minutes before the shocksticks ran out their charge, Ike was sure that Blackface was dead. But the guards stood over his body and kicked it off their comrade, trapped beneath him. Standing around his corpse, they kicked and clubbed it with the spent shocksticks. Ike stood still and recorded. By the time the beating stopped, their feet and 'sticks were smeared with blood. Broken, wet and matted, Blackface lay in a dark heap in the middle of the tunnel.

 

When the 'sticks and the guards wielding them were spent, they stepped back from the corpse. One of the new guards helped Blackface's victim up from the ground. The injured guard held his dark hand to the exposed circuitry of his head and bent over. He spit on Blackface.

 

His red partner approached Ike. For the second time, he pushed Ike to the ground. This time, Ike's metal skull struck the wall behind him, and one of his sensors fritzed out. "I'm Vlad!" said the large, red Cymp. His chest and belly still heaved from his battle.

 

Ike said nothing. He could smell Vlad's hatred.

 

Vlad picked up the live shockstick from Ike's feet, and triggered it. Up close, Ike could feel the charge in the air. His sensors could hear the pitch of the 'stick come to life.

 

"You were no help." Vlad touched the 'stick to Ike's lower belly.

 

Ike's body arced upward under the voltage.

 

Here I am. Vlad, the tunnel, the 'stick ... grew distant. Safe. In the distance, Ike's groin burned. His cameras were against the tunnel wall but Ike's sensors recorded the changes in the air, the smells, the sounds. I am safe here. The data of his sensors were immediate. The pain was far away: charges running up through his belly, the loosening in his bowels, his legs writhing in agony, in the distance.

 

The other Cymp guards must have pulled Vlad off of him. His body spasmed and clenched hard against the tunnel wall. Ike's head seemed to be under water. His eyes felt fried and his ears rang, but the microphone array fed directly into the artificial layer of his brain, where it recorded Vlad's hoarse voice shouting at the other guards. "He's useless! Why are you protecting him?"

 

As the artificial layer sensed the chaos slowly retreating from the organic matter beneath it, Ike's mind reintegrated. Ike was reluctant to occupy his body again, though he knew it was inevitable. Back in this flesh, this painful, messy, disorganized vessel.

 

His ears still hummed. Vlad still ranted. Blackface's body, lay behind the guards, forgotten.

 

Ike let himself sleep.

 

When he awoke in his nest, cradled to the interface that kept his brain in sync with the rest of the Sector network, he found the new day's orders waiting from GORBI. Included was a brief note:

 

VLAD SHOULD NOT HAVE HURT YOU. HE IS BEING PUNISHED.

 

Ike dragged himself, achingly, from the warmth of his nest. A day had passed and he was late to his duties.

 

A week later, GORBI's strange simian transmissions began.

 

 

Pasha refused to leave. Ekaterina was furious. (Sergei searched his memory, but could not produce an earlier time when their mother had shown any real anger to his little brother. Pasha was now 11 years old. Not a bad run.)

 

Pasha was gifted.  He played piano at school and had a synthesizer and keyboard that he kept in the room the boys still shared. Ekaterina had gotten her younger son into a special program in Leningrad for musical prodigies.

 

Pasha was admonished against telling anyone about Location 14. "If anyone asks, you're from a village called Govlinsk. Your school records will show the same. If anyone learns of the secret city, the whole family could end up in Siberia."

 

At fifteen, Sergei had been hearing the warnings for almost ten years. Location 14 was very important to the Soviet military and to the space program -- an entire city that could not be found on any maps, a city without a name, where every adult resident helped to develop the technology that kept the CCCP ahead of the West, both on the battle field and in space.

 

It had taken North America thirty-two years to put a man on Mars -- four terms for John Kennedy and four more for his brother -- nearly bankrupting the continental superpower. The Soviet Union would now claim the planet for the glory of all working peoples -- would develop inhabitable colonies while the Americans prayed for their economy to recover from decades of unchecked Cold War spending. The secrecy of Location 14 was essential to that mission, and Sergei knew the government wouldn't tolerate carelessness.

 

But Sergei had never been outside the city, so his own discretion was theoretical. Pasha was about to see the outside -- for the second time, in fact -- and everyone, family, teachers, strangers, everyone was telling him he had to be careful.

 

And after all the warnings and preparations, Pasha had simply decided to stay home.

 

"Who wants to live in secrecy?"

 

"We already live in secrecy," said Sergei.

 

"Perhaps," said Pasha, "but here we don't have to think about it. I don't want to worry all the time, with everyone watching me."

 

Sergei did not tell Pasha about their father's prosthetics. 

 

Their father's bionic arm had recently been upgraded.  Despite the accident with the first bionic arm, Sergei still took every opportunity to study the devices that replaced his father's body parts -- including the series of increasingly complex bionic eyes that replaced the original glass one. With technology, Sergei was conservative but persistent.

 

When Sergei disassembled the recently retired arm, he found inside it hidden listening devices.  He then took apart an older arm and found an older microphone inside it. When he showed the microphones to his parents, they didn't seem surprised -- except at the fact that Sergei himself was surprised.  Had Sergei failed to understand where they lived? Who they worked for?

 

When Sergei looked into Pavl's stern face, he realized that others watched from behind the still, steely eye.

 

But he did not explain these things to his brother, who at age 11 was abandoning a promising career as a pianist and teaching himself guitar.

 

The two boys sat together in their room. Ekaterina wasn't speaking to either one of them, and Pavl was giving the woman her space.

 

Pasha, whose hair was as long as a girl's, leaned over his guitar and explored the chords. Sunlight leaked into the room past the old bed sheets that served as blinds. Sergei could see the light through the long front strands of his brother's sandy brown hair.  When Sergei would see him for the last time, a rising Rock star at age 19, Pasha would be wearing side burns and a "soul patch" of hair beneath his lower lip, but the smooth-skinned little boy with the girl's length hair was already undeniably masculine. Sergei had not been confused for a girl since acquiring the twisted scar down the left side of his face, but he still wore his hair crew-cut short, just in case. Old versions of oneself can be hard to shake.

 

Their mother's heavy boots could be heard clomping around the little apartment. Pasha sang quietly as he explored on the guitar, trying to remember a song their father used to sing to them.

 

Sergei was happy that his brother was staying.

 

 

Ike hung high above the people's park, gripping the central dome's framework with his feet. He monitored the stage beneath him, which chimps and robots had constructed in the past 12 hours. Humans began to gather around the stage, some Russian, mostly African. The synthetic soldiers began to arrive in force, silently arranging themselves in perfectly uniform rows of 2-meter tall, bald blue androids.

 

When the NATO general arrived, he would see the Soviet personnel forces arrayed before him, their geometrical uniformity in stark contrast to the wild garden of Earth-like flora beneath the central dome.

 

Ike could see a thin layer of dark pink clouds rushing overhead, reaching to the horizon. The Soviets would have preferred a clear sky, but at least there were no dust storms predicted.

 

This central dome was the only part of Soviet Mars under natural light, these central gardens the only area with Earth-like plant life. Terran trees grew higher in Mars's lower gravity, reaching their leaves and branches to the dim light of the dome, but the Soviet strategy was to grow laterally, to move sideways and in tangles, not upward. It was this lateral strategy that had begun the war with the dome-building West. The Soviet General, assumed to be in charge of Terraform Sector (though Ike had to believe the NATO forces knew about GORBI) was a stocky, Georgian man named Kvachatadze. He was not someone Ike was ever asked to monitor, and so Ike saw him only at public events, such as the upcoming meeting with NATO's General Hallek. (Did the Americans have their own GORBI, or did Hallek really run things over there on the other side of the planet?)

 

Another mid-day message from the real decision-maker: ERRORS IN RECENT DOWNLOAD. PLEASE RECRADLE NOW.

 

Ike descended on the struts of the dome until one of the taller trees at the edge of the gardens was in reach. He leapt to the upper branches and started to climb down, but an unexpected smell stopped his descent. He shifted his vision to infrared and scanned beneath him. The leaves and branches were a cold blue web across his vision. One red figure moved toward the tree, too low to the ground to be human, too warm to be artificial. Visual static played at the edges of his perception. He had not fully recovered from the shockstick...

 

Vlad.

 

His internal monitors registered the rising pulse. He shifted back into the visible spectrum. There was Vlad, waiting at the bottom of the tree, still rust-colored, even off infrared. His teeth were not bared, but Ike could still smell his hostility.

 

"Come down, Watcher. I will not hurt you here."

 

Ike had difficulty convincing his limbs to move, but he had to leave the tree. GORBI had issued an order to recradle, and he would not be pleased if Ike hesitated.

 

Vlad would not hurt him in the open. He had been punished for the tunnel incident, and Ike could not imagine the red chimp would risk a repeat of that ordeal. Ike had a brief and confusing moment of sympathy for him.

 

"Come down," Vlad repeated. "I only want a word with you."

 

Ike did not speak vocally. He sent a message to Vlad: I have been ordered to sync with GORBI. I don't have time to talk.

 

"You do not have to talk, Watcher. Just listen. I will be brief."

 

Ike climbed down from the tree. His chest felt tight, and his pulse hadn't slowed, but he tried not to show Vlad his apprehension. According to the chemical monitors in his cap, Ike was not giving off a fear smell. He wondered at his own control.

 

"I know," said Vlad, "that our friend on Earth protects you. I know that first hand."

 

Ike noticed that the left side of Vlad's face was swollen. It seemed to droop slightly lower than the other side.

 

What did he do to you?

 

Vlad showed his teeth. "It amuses me that you do not know."

 

Say what you have to say. I don't have time.

 

"Do not pretend courage with me, Watcher."

 

Ike turned to go.

 

"I am watching you."

 

He stood still, his back to Vlad. His camera array fed him visual data from a 360-degree loop at head level. Ike felt safer with his biological eyes turned away.

 

Vlad squatted behind him, his knuckles in the grass. "You are his Watcher, but he did not intend for you merely to observe."

 

He seemed to be waiting for a response. Ike didn't provide one.

 

"You have a taser. I have seen it. You are designed to disable rogues. You may have other weapons I have not seen. You are not helpless. You were not meant to stand apart from us, watching as if outside of this place. That you do by choice."

 

Ike turned back to face him. You're angry that I didn't help with the runaway.

 

"My anger is irrelevant. Someone needs to watch the Watcher.  We guard the workers -- the overseers do. They stink. They are lazy. And they are too stupid for their own good. If they were smarter, we would have less trouble in the tunnels. But GORBI does not want to make them smarter. So he has guards. Who guards the guards? You do, apparently. And who watches the Watcher? I will. From now on."

 

I am accountable to GORBI.

 

"GORBI does not see everything. That is the reason you exist."

 

He sees everything that I see.

 

"Then you will not mind having an extra pair of eyes on you, as you believe I can discover nothing."

 

Do what you want, sent Ike. Just don't get punished again. He turned and left. When Vlad called after him this time, Ike didn't stop.

 

 

Here is how Sergei made friends with Avram Pinsky: they were both on assignment in Kenya. A small, but surprisingly well-armed band of rebels were launching guerilla attacks on Russian and pro-Russian soldiers in the capital, so the Soviet Army moved into the country in force. Sergei and Avram had to arrest and retrieve the Soviet soldiers who got drunk or made trouble on the streets of the capital.

 

They were arresting a belligerent soldier, who had been picking fights with the locals. As they were binding his wrists, one of the city natives charged in and hit the soldier in the head. Sergei turned and grabbed the attacker by the arm. Sergei was over a head taller than the African and probably weighed twice as much. The African kicked Sergei in the knees and tried to pull free. Sergei gripped tighter and felt the African's elbow collapse beneath his grip.

 

Avram, still holding the bound Soviet soldier, stared angrily at Sergei, as the African sunk to his knees, howling.

 

When they had taken the African to a military clinic, and dropped the soldier off at lock-up, Avram turned to Sergei and said "Don't expect me to falsify the report!"

 

Sergei said he wouldn't want Avram to falsify anything. "It was an accident."

 

"How do you break a man's bones in your bare hands by accident!?"

 

"I didn't realize what I was doing."

 

When Avram learned that Sergei's report had been, if anything, more candid than Avram's own report, he apologized. "You know how we're supposed to play -- protect your comrades before anyone else -- protect Russians before anyone else -- but still, I shouldn't have assumed. Just because you look like a Cossack doesn't mean you're a monster."

 

That night, Sergei studied himself in the mirror. He had spent a lot of time in front of the mirror in the past year, monitoring his development, his muscle tone, admiring the results of his work. But he had studied individual body parts, glaring at himself past the giant scar down his face -- flexing his lats, or raising a bicep -- or his general outline, increasingly drastic in its tapering. He had not looked at himself with the eyes of an outsider -- he had not tried to see how the world would perceive him.

 

 

Ike had seen the tunnel spiders before. They were GORBI's robotic generalists, the flexibly skilled counterparts to the methodical specialists who dug and built the tunnels. The spiders were fast. Much faster than this one. But this one had a passenger to account for.

 

As he held tight to the cable that kept him on top of the giant plastic beast, Ike thought of the cowboy photo GORBI had first sent him. Ike had been GORBI's MonkeyCam. Now he was GORBI's cowboy, riding into the badlands.

 

GORBI was sending a time stamp so Ike would be able to note exactly when he lost contact with Soviet Terraform Sector's radio web, precisely when he rode the spider into GORBI's blind spot. A moment ago, GORBI said it was "nineteen forty" -- though it said 20:03 on Ike's internal chronometer. In another moment, he would see the digit shift in his ocular implant to 20:04 as GORBI's voice would announce that it was now "nineteen forty-one". Ike had never been so precisely aware of the radio lag between Mars and Moscow.

 

By "twenty-one thirty," Ike had had to put on the rebreather and pull furs over his body to hold in the heat. The spider's limbs still vibrated up through its carapace, through Ike's hips and into his skeleton, shaking his body with each hard plastic footfall against Martian rock. But the sound of the machine beneath him -- the sound of the tunnel walls, scraped by the passing of the creature and its rider -- was left behind with the last segment of tunnel atmosphere.  Now all Ike could hear was the sound of his own breath -- the click of the rebreather as it switched from inhale to exhale -- and the sound of GORBI's synthetic voice announcing that it was now "twenty one forty five" as Ike rode through the cold, dark vacuum under the surface of the planet.

 

Twenty one fifty five.

Twenty one fifty six.

... fifty seven.

... fifty eight.

... ... nine.

Twenty two hundred hours.

 

"I have an idea, Ike."

 

Ike startled in his makeshift seat. Had he begun to drift off? He rarely slept except as scheduled.

 

"You can correct me later, but I have moderately high confidence that you can still hear me."

 

I hear you, Ike sent, without thinking.

 

"You may not be able to hear me in another 45 minutes, so this won't work very well as a dialog. Nevertheless, I encourage you to reply as if I can hear you..."

 

I just did.

 

"... and I should be able to weave our conversation together later. If you keep talking on your way to the blind spot, I'll be able to infer its boundaries once you're inside."

 

What do you want me to say?

 

"I predict that you will want to know what to say. If I've asked you a question, please attempt to answer it. If you can think of nothing to say, just send me back the time stamp on your internal chronometer."

 

It's 22:20.

 

"You may have many questions -- not at first, but as we continue. Understand that you will only be able to receive my answers -- if I have any -- after you reemerge from the blind spot."

 

Why are you addressing me in this voice?

 

"I predict that you will want to know what you are allowed to ask. Ask anything."

 

No -- I said 'Why are you addressing me in this voice?'

 

Though Ike was familiar with GORBI's standard synthesis of a human voice from hearing general announcements in the sector and from the time stamp that had followed him through the outer tunnels for the past 3 hours, his communications from GORBI had always been text or visuals. Never this voice.

 

"I will attempt to predict what you will ask and when, but, as I suspect you can already tell, my prediction abilities are limited."

 

Yes, sent Ike. It's 22:22.

 

 

Sergei stood on the edge of the Potempkin Bridge, over the Leningrad River, and tried to convince himself to jump in. In one hand, he held a lamppost to steady himself; in the other he held the neck of a vodka bottle. He wondered if Ketina would write a poem about his suicide. She probably wouldn't, that cold-hearted--

 

He was just about to jump -- that's what he told himself, later -- when the city police dragged him off the bridge and threw him in jail with all the other Leningrad drunks.

 

With a police record, Sergei was no longer welcome at the Engineering school. Now he belonged to the military.

 

 

"You are my eyes and my ears. You are my nose. You are not my tongue, for I neither taste, nor speak through you. You are not my skin. You are not my proprioception. I have satellites above the planet. I have sensors throughout the sector.  In fact, you are not my only eyes or ears or nose, either. I can see and hear through every robot on Soviet Mars, from the aerial drones in the central garden to the security systems outside every barracks to the tunnel spider you are riding now.

 

"I have a complete, dynamic gestalt perception of our half of the planet at all times. I have near-omniscience in the Martian Eastern Hemisphere, but I am always behind the times. The speed of light is a great inconvenience. "

 

What does light have to do with your radio time lag? Ike knew he would probably be in the blind spot and out of range before he received an answer from GORBI.

 

"That is why I need autonomous systems, like you, to be my hands and feet up there. That's why I need you to ride into the blind spot at the edge of the tunnels and report back to me on what you find. Why do my robots not return from there? What is blocking their radio signals to me? My concern is not yet strong enough to divert any soldiers. But it is still important to me that you report your findings as soon as you can. If, after we lose contact, more than a day passes without a signal from you, I will have to send in troops." (So Ike might get to hunker down and wait for the cavalry.)  "That might take up to another day. You are supplied with food and water for seven days, but only enough oxygen for three." (Or maybe not.)

 

It is 02:00, sent Ike.

 

 

Ketina lit a black market American cigarette and inhaled deeply. She shook out the wooden kitchen match and dropped it in the saucer that held the unlit bedside candle. She put the cigarette near Sergei's lips. He moved her hand away.

 

Sergei lay in the narrow bed, naked but covered to the waist with the off-white sheet. Ketina wore only a short, clinging cotton top. She sat up next to Sergei, her smooth, pale legs at odd angles. The girl was so skinny without her clothes on.

 

She turned to her soldier as she finished the last of her cigarette and ran her fingertips over the muscles in his shoulders and chest. She smiled down at him.

 

Sergei had been proud of the body the military had given him. He had wanted to scare men and attract women. The natives back in Kenya feared him, as did his fellow Russian soldiers. Ketina, here in Leningrad, was finally attracted to him.

 

Maybe it just took a while to get used to a new lover's body. Though Ketina didn't seem to have any trouble getting used to his.

 

"I like you with muscles."

 

I know, he thought.

 

 

Sergei had never been a fan of music, but his most piercing memories each came with a soundtrack: his father's gravely voice, singing out-of-tune folk songs to his two boys; young Pasha's early explorations on the old wooden guitar; a European dance track, pulsing on a Japanese boom box, in the packed dorm room party where Sergei saw Ketina for the first time.

 

She sat on the bed by the window, her back against the wall, her knees up in front of her. Sergei barely noticed the other five students on the bed with her. She had her eyes all-but-closed, her heavy lashes fluttering over flushed cheeks. Her body rocked slowly to the rhythm of the dance track, like an underwater creature. A cigarette sat forgotten in her fingers, burned down to the filter. Her hair was jet black. It didn't match her coloring. Her sweater was black. Her American jeans were black. Her skin was luminous white. Her cheeks were pink.

 

Sergei remembers the music. He remembers exactly how Ketina looked. He remembers almost nothing else about the room. It was overflowing with college kids. They were all smoking, all rocking to the music. To another observer, they might have looked just like Ketina. But Ketina was all that Sergei could see.

 

That was the first time he saw her.

 

The last time he ever saw her was on another narrow bed, in a Moscow military hospital. That time, he also had a bed sheet covering him to the waist, but it had less far to travel. Sergei had lost his legs to a rebel land mine in Nigeria.

 

Ketina sat at the side of his bed and wept. She kept saying I'm sorry I'm sorry, under her breath. She rested a hand on his chest.

 

Eventually, he said, "They're going to give me new legs."

 

She looked confused. Russia was seeing more and more veterans from African wars, missing limbs and other body parts. Bionics were well known in Location 14, but the rest of the world had only begun to see powered prosthetics in the past few years.

 

"Will you be able to walk?"

 

"Yes. The new legs will be much stronger. They won't look natural, but --"

 

"Still. That's good news. And ... the rest of you?"

 

Sergei looked down to where the bed sheet fell away, to where his legs used to begin. "No, the explosion only took my legs. The rest of me is still there."

 

Ketina smiled with some relief.

 

But the military kept sending Sergei back to the hot spots of the Dark Continent, kept replacing his body parts with the latest technology coming out of Location 14 or some other nameless city.  Ketina hadn't been interested in him before he had come back with a perfect body. He didn't want her to see him with less and less of the original still intact. Maybe she would want him anyway. He didn't want to find out.

 

 

"I have another prediction. I think you will want to know about the elderly chimp runaway, the one who called himself Blackface."

 

Ike felt himself slump in his seat. He wondered if GORBI would notice.

 

"Have you wondered how the guards responded so quickly?"

 

Ike had not.

 

"The runaway was dead twenty minutes before I knew about it. Over forty minutes before I could have done anything about it."

 

Ike shuddered, wondering if they Cymp guards were able to monitor his signals to GORBI. Is that how Vlad had found him in the gardens?

 

"I would like to explain a mechanism in biology. I think it will help you understand. It's called a reflex arc. I will give you an example. A year ago, when you were still relatively new, you found a fallen power line in one of the green tunnels."

 

While Ike's head accessed a digital memory of the event, he felt his left hand clench -- an echo of the shock, a year later. It was as if his hand remembered the pain -- as if data could be stored in his organic appendages.

 

"You did not know that you shouldn't touch it, and I didn't have time to warn you. The event was over before I saw it happening. You reached down and touched the cable with the back of your finger, your left index finger.

 

"The signal from your hand to your brain is slower than you think. Too slow for your brain to decide what to do and signal your hand to pull back in time. Perhaps, in the future, I will design your kind to have fiber optics instead of organic nerve pathways, but for now, it is more convenient to use what nature gave you. 

 

"You pulled your hand back from the jolt before your brain knew about it. The reflex arc means that certain decisions get made in a mechanical way between your nerve endings and your spine, which is a shorter distance for the signal to travel than all the way up to your brain and back. The jolt hit your hand and your spine told it to pull back, well before you yourself knew what had happened.

 

"It is the same with me. I have reflex arcs on Mars. Some decisions get made automatically by local nodes on the planet. Any decision that can be made by policy, or by any straightforward algorithm, gets made by smart systems in the Martian radio web. Intelligent, but not self-aware. In less than an hour, the systems know if I approved or disapproved of the decision. The algorithm or policy used is promoted or inhibited -- rewarded or punished, if you will -- to add learning and experience to future decisions made locally."

 

Ike wondered if GORBI had approved of Blackface's execution. He also knew that GORBI knew that he was wondering that.

 

"Vlad demonstrated the downside of semi-autonomous agents, especially biologically-based agents, such as Vlad. Such as yourself. It was your duty to disable the runaway -- and if you had, it would have helped avoid the violence that followed -- but it was not up to him to deal with you. And his attack damaged you. It has cost me time and data and I can't divert the resources to fix you, yet."

 

Ike thought about the preparations for the visiting NATO delegation. Cleaning the dome, building the stage, tending the garden ... these things could not take up significant data resources. What else was GORBI doing to prepare for General Hallek?

 

GORBI was silent for a while.

 

It's 02:30, sent Ike.

 

Then later: It's 03:00.  Nothing back.

 

 

The government had given Pasha's music a second chance. At 16, the boy was called to Moscow, where he was made the lead singer of a state-sponsored rock band called Kosmonaut.

 

The wars in Africa were petering out, and things had not yet heated up on Mars. The super powers were once again exploring the possibilities of a détente and the Soviet government wanted to give North America and Europe the image of a hip young rock movement in Russia that was not in conflict with The Party.

 

By the time Pasha was 19, Kosmonaut had several major hits in the Soviet Union and two minor successes in Europe. Their best-known song in the West was a speed metal piece called "Tin Man".

 

Lying in a field of metal, lying on a field of glory

Standing all around the world, crushing everything inside you

Do you follow orders when you hold me in your arms?

 

Tin Man! Tin Man! Did they make you part of the plan, Tin Man?

 

Fighting for a better battle. Build a better field of curses

Building up a sweet and satin soft caress of stainless steel...

 

Tin Man!

 

Pasha wrote and sang the lyrics. Officially, the song was an allegory about the fractured condition of western industrialized workers, but Sergei wondered how much his brother had been thinking of their father when he wrote the words. Or of Sergei himself.

 

Just as the African rebels were succumbing to the Soviet forces, another famine hit. The Soviet-backed leaders in Africa were not efficient at dispersing foreign aid to the starving citizens, but the North American and European music industry still put together a live, two-continent marathon benefit concert called AfricAid.

 

Kosmonaut was sent to perform at AfricAid-Europe, in London. They returned without their lead singer.

 

Now Pasha was headed to North America and Sergei was being sent to Mars. If the military hadn't invested so much time and money in the hardware of Sergei's body, he would have been sent with his parents to Siberia, where he did not expect them to survive the year.

 

 

 

"GORBI doesn't see everything," Vlad had said. "That is the reason you exist."

 

It was 04:20. Moscow time. Soviet Mars didn't bother to keep a Martian clock. It had been almost two hours since Ike had last heard from GORBI. Was he secretly listening in? Or had Ike actually entered the unmonitorable territory that the Russian AI called the Blind Spot. Ike scanned the frequencies. Static. Everywhere.

 

The spider crept down the tunnel, slower and slower. Even on infrared, Ike could see nothing. He felt the spider test its footing with each new step.

 

Ike was cold. And he had to urinate.  He had eaten just after losing touch with GORBI, removing the rebreather to suck on a tube of protein paste, then replacing the mask while he swallowed. Alternating mask and tube, trying to keep his balance on the robot beneath him. It had not been built for a passenger, and Ike had to concentrate not to drop his supplies or let himself fall off. He could grip the chassis with his feet, but preferred to keep them tucked into the furs with the rest of his body.

 

He had no idea how to stop the robot's progress. If he climbed down to relieve himself, would it stop and wait for him, or continue down the tunnel, unburdened? He could probably catch up with the beast, but might as easily run straight into a wall.

 

What exactly was he supposed to report back to GORBI? There was no light. No smell or sound in the near-vacuum. All static on all frequencies. Ike was as blind here as GORBI was. Should he turn back?

 

At 04:54, Ike startled awake. This time he was sure he'd fallen asleep, completely unscheduled. Ike's head felt thick. His body was stiff. He seemed to remember colors, smells. But he had been asleep, and now, awake, he could see that there was nothing to see or smell. His cradle interface must still be acting up.

 

Ike blinked his eyes and tried to focus in the direction the spider was moving. Was that light up ahead? He scanned the radio frequencies again. There was something. An analog signal.

 

At 05:00, Moscow time, Ike was blinded by the sudden presence of white light, immediately in front of him. He felt the spider slump beneath him and begin to roll to the side. Ike fell away from his ride and tried to land on his feet, but got tangled up in his furs. He hit the ground hard, awkwardly, though the Martian gravity didn't allow for too heavy an impact.

 

Something was moving toward him. A spider -- not his spider. It was blurry. Ike closed his organic eyes and focused on his cameras, both visible spectrum and infrared. The large, multi-legged form moved toward him. Cold legs, warm torso. Arms out to the side. One of the arms pointed at him. Wires pierced his furs, touched his skin, and jolted him into blackness.

 

 

When Ike returned to consciousness, the first thing he saw was the scarred human face of the spider machine staring down at him. Ike was aware of the marked blue face of the android on the other side of the room. Ike was aware of it, though not able to actually see it. The android sat frozen in a seated position. A plasma rifle lay at his feet.

 

Ike understood things ... without knowing how.

 

The oddly shaped creature directly in front of him was a human cyborg. His name was Sergei. He was a Russian soldier. The big blue android was Sergei's field partner, Monk. Monk was dead.

 

The three of them -- Monk, Sergei and Ike -- were in the operations room of a crashed Soviet battleship.

 

A cable ran from the side of Sergei's steel-capped head to Ike's cradle interface, and back into the ship's systems. Sergei had been downloading from Ike's digital brain.

 

Ike blinked and found the cyborg's eyes coming into focus.

 

"Welcome," said the cyborg, "to my Fortress of Solitude."

 

 

Sergei was still more human than machine. Not in his body, but in his brain, where it counts. Most of his thoughts were still processed through gray matter, but almost a third of his brain mass was digital now. Based, as he understood it, on the same stuff the androids had in their heads.

 

He had asked the military to stop alerting his family when he was dismembered or killed in action. He was told that with 51% human central nervous system or greater, he was still considered a citizen of the Soviet Union. His family was therefore entitled to know of his condition. "We are not inhumane," the hospital bureaucrat had said with a stiff face, "no matter what lies they tell about us in the West."

 

His parents had stopped contacting him after his first brain damage.

 

While the android's body was more recognizably human-shaped than Sergei's own thick, metal evolution, Monk was 100% artificial, fully self-aware the moment he came off the assembly line. Androids could tell each other apart without trouble, but to humans, the fully synthetic soldiers all looked alike: tall, blue-skinned and bald.

 

Their first day out in the field, Sergei had taken a laser pen to Monk's face. The android did not protest. He carved a jagged capital M into Monk's forehead. "There," said Sergei. "Now I can tell you apart from your brothers."

 

They were in the field together for two months before their accident.

 

A hundred-ton ship crashing into the Martian surface carried enough momentum to break most of what was inside. Monk's body had stood up to the damage better than Sergei's had, but the android could no longer speak. Otherwise, he seemed fully functional.

 

Sergei's upper body still worked. His right leg was lost in the rubble. The one still attached to his pelvis did not work.

 

The ship had pierced the surface of the planet. Its nose and side were in the outer tunnels of Soviet territory -- mine shafts that had been abandoned because of the density of the rock.

 

The distress beacon didn't work. The radio itself did work, but the composition of the surrounding rock made it useless.

 

Monk, who didn't need to breathe, left the ship and came back with a tunnel spider. Still patrolling the abandoned mines, it had been drawn by the vibrations of the crash, and was poking around the ship's hull.

 

Monk followed Sergei's instructions, and the two of them disconnected the spider's central processor and wired its control unit into Sergei's empty right hip. They tied Sergei's dead left leg to the upper section of one of the spider legs so that it wouldn't get in the way. Sergei limped, but he had eight functional limbs beneath him, and once he got used to the new set of legs and their extra joints, he was able to move through the ship and the outer tunnels with speed and dexterity if not grace.

 

Sergei should not have tried to fix Monk's brain. He thought the problem with the android's voice would be superficial, but the moment he opened the back of the bald, blue head, Monk's brain fused. The burnt-plastic and ozone smell filled the cabin and Sergei had to pull on a gas mask while the filters cleaned the toxins from the remaining air onboard. GORBI did not want anyone poking around inside his creations.

 

06:00

 

"Your name is Ike," said the cyborg, pulling the crosslink cable from the side of his head. "It is short for Eisenstein. It turns out we were named after the same Russian film director."

 

Sergei switched something on at the back of Ike's head, something that hadn't been there before.

 

"I've never downloaded a Cymp's experience before," he said. "It's both more alien and more familiar than I would have guessed. I'd like to have your sensors. Even your organics are superior. We humans blunder around with so little information."

 

I am not a Cymp, sent Ike. I am a specialist.

 

"I am not a Cymp," echoed GORBI's voice. "I am a specialist."

 

"Forgive me," said Sergei. "I will try to honor the distinction."

 

Wait, sent Ike. "Wait," said GORBI.

 

I thought he couldn't  "...thought he couldn't..." hear us out here  "...out here?"

 

Sergei reached behind Ike and made an adjustment. "Try again," he said.

 

"I don't understand," said GORBI's voice. "Is that me?" The voice filled the ship.

 

"You're wired directly into our comm system," said Sergei. "I thought it would make it easier for us to talk."

 

"I don't like it," said the voice. "I don't want to sound like that."

 

Sergei raised himself up on his eight legs and walked across the room. He typed something into a console next to Monk's frozen form. "Try it now," he said.

 

"Will I sound different?" asked a feminine African voice from the surrounding speakers.

 

"And again," said Sergei.

 

"Why can't I just send text?" asked an African baritone.

 

"How's that?"

 

"Why make me African?"

 

"You're from Africa. Would you rather sound Russian?"

 

"I am not from Africa," Ike said through his new voice. "I've never been off Mars."

 

"Actually," said Sergei, scuttling back from the console, "you were born down there. You just don't remember it."

 

"How do you know that?"

 

"It's in your brain -- your outer brain -- even if you can't consciously access all of it."

 

Ike closed his eyes. He did not shut off the visual input from his cameras, which showed Sergei watching him, patiently, but closing his eyes helped him concentrate.

 

"We need to get back to the central sector," he said. His voice, filling the ship, was itself filled with authority. "GORBI will send recovery robots to salvage what they can."

 

"There's only one thing he will want to salvage," said Sergei.

 

The warhead.

 

Ike did not mean to send the words, but he heard the African voice repeating his thoughts.

 

Sergei looked at him suspiciously. "I didn't see that in your memories. How do you know about the bomb?"

 

"I don't know," said Ike. "How do I know that the android is called Monk?"

 

"How do you know that?" asked Sergei.  "Or more important: why don't I know that you know that?"

 

"What do you mean?"

 

"I've seen your briefing from GORBI. He told you almost nothing. I haven't had time to integrate it all, but I should have your entire life -- the past three years -- downloaded into my head. I don't see any bomb and I don't see any Monk. What else do you know?"

 

"I know the warhead is intact, that it has nothing to do with the radio interference out here."

 

"No, the interference is from the surrounding rock --"

 

"-- Not just the rock," said Ike. "I know that you have engineered the ship's radio transmitter to jam surrounding signals. I know that you don't want GORBI to find you."

 

Sergei's legs folded slowly at his sides. His torso lowered itself to the floor of the ship. They shared the same eye level now, looking straight ahead, each into the other's face.

 

"Your cradle interface," said Sergei.

 

"Yes," said Ike. "It's been malfunctioning."

 

"I didn't think our connection would be bi-directional. How much of my memory is stored digitally?" asked Sergei. "How much got uploaded into your head?"

 

"I don't know," answered Ike.

 

"I need to find out."

 

"We need to get back to central sector."

 

"Not until I find out how much of my past you have in your head."

 

 

16:00

 

"You know," said Sergei, "He's been watching me my entire life. That's another thing you and I have in common."

 

The cyborg soldier was still wired into his head. He crouched behind Ike and scanned a diagnostic pad that monitored the data packets transferring between their two brains. Ike felt flashes of heat, vertigo, dryness, panic, ... brief blips across his sensorium as Sergei probed the data structures of Ike's digital cap.

 

"Did you know that GORBI controls your hormonal balance? In the West, that's called chemical castration. It's something they do to prisoners. There were rumors in training that all our food contained saltpeter, but I didn't believe the rumors, because my own physical needs were undiminished. I can see, though, that it's true with you. He makes sure you never feel the need. And if you did feel the need, you probably wouldn't hide it. Animals have no shame."

 

Ike felt a wave of nausea, but Sergei made an adjustment and the feeling passed.

 

"But we humans are raised to hide ourselves. We are taught to attend to our bodies away from the seeing or hearing of others. Even in Russia, where we know that such hiding is impossible."

 

"What happened!?" One of Ike's cameras had gone blank.

 

"Sorry," said Sergei. "I should have warned you. I'm exploring your wiring. I need to test your lines of input. I'm not doing any damage. This is temporary."

 

"Please don't shut down my sensors."

 

"I won't cut off your input completely, just different subsections."

 

Another camera went out.

 

"When I lived at home, I shared a bedroom with my brother. Compared to many Russian families, a bedroom to ourselves was a sign of privilege. But we still had no privacy. I remember once, when my brother was at school and I had stayed home with a cold, I had our room to myself. I had the whole apartment to myself. My parents worked the same shift, so I was alone. But in the Soviet Union, you're never really alone. Especially in the city where I grew up. Grown-ups in that city, had a habit of disjoining their words and their actions when they got together for dinner or drinking. They would say out loud what would be acceptable to have recorded and stored, but their facial expressions, their gestures, communicated more of their meaning, showed what is was they didn't want heard by the government, or the Party, or GORBI, or whoever was listening. Showed the meaning they wanted to share with one another but did not want attached to their files. This wouldn't make sense to you, seeing how many cameras GORBI has equipped you with, but we Russians have traditionally focused on audio information, not video. I think that started to change with the new century, but habits die hard."

 

Ike saw only through his eyes now, heard only through his two ears and one directional mike, aimed the wrong way. It made Sergei sound hollow and distant.

 

"I remember lying in my bed, hot, congested, bored ... completely under the covers, wondering who could hear me, whether or not a sick teenage boy was worthy of recording. How much could they tell what I was doing based only on what they could hear. You see what I mean? Why did I assume they could only hear me? The grown-ups had taught me to watch my words, but why did I assume that there weren't cameras focused on me, even when my father was away? Unseen eyes could be monitoring the rapid rise and fall of the covers. I tried to lie very still. How much could they see me if I was covered and barely moving? I imagined thermal cameras. I tried to picture what they could see of me and of what I was doing from the heat that my body gave off. Did my fever serve my privacy? Did the heat of my whole body obscure the heat of certain parts of my body?"

 

Ike had the sense that Sergei's story was important, but it was hard to concentrate on his words. If they mattered, he could play them back later.

 

"And if I had been dying under those covers, if they watched my body cooling to blue under their thermal cameras, would someone tell my parents, or would they have to come home and find my corpse for themselves? Would the watchers just close the file, pleased not to have to waste more storage on the mundane details of my life? Have you ever tried to imagine the size of those files? What does the surveillance tape for an entire lifetime look like? That's ridiculous, I know. With digital storage, they can hold every second of the last three years of your life, for instance, in the cap that holds your skull together. More than that -- because each one of your conscious minutes contains ten times the amount of data that I take in during that same minute of consciousness. GORBI is at the point where he can store everything about a person in something the size of that person's head. Maybe smaller. OK, hold still."

 

One by one, his sensors were coming back online.

 

"We resign ourselves to it. We behave. You see others living their lives with a level of defiance, and you wonder how they get away with it. Why does he allow them to go on? You figure it must take too many resources to track and control everything about everyone. Even GORBI must need to prioritize. But the point is -- we never know what his priorities are. Its priorities! Its!"

 

Sergei was raising his voice. Ike turned down the sensitivity of his restored microphone arrays.

 

"In your head," said Sergei, "you think of it as a him. I do too. We call it a him so we don't have to face just how alien it is, how inhuman is the thing behind the artificial eyes. We have no idea how it thinks!"

 

Sergei disconnected the cable from Ike's head. As far as Ike could tell, his systems were functioning as they had been when he arrived -- less than optimal, still, but no worse for Sergei's probing.

 

"When we crashed here, when we realized that we couldn't get a signal out -- it was the first time in my life that GORBI couldn't see me. That thing has access to files on my entire life -- every moment, for all I know. Until now." Sergei was sitting back on his hind legs again, his voice quieter, his eyes focused on the door. "And between the moment that Monk's brain fused and the moment I saw you coming at me, down that tunnel, I was completely alone. I have felt loneliness in my life, but I had never felt alone before. Alone turns out to be a good thing." He looked back at Ike. "I wish you could have left me alone."

 

19:00

 

Sergei wouldn't tell Ike the results of his probe, but he did not seem happy with them.

 

Ike tried again to suggest they return to the central sector, but Sergei said "No, not yet."

 

"I don't have much more time," Ike told him. "If I don't check in again, soon, he's -- it's just going to send in soldiers." Ike wasn't sure what the soldiers would do when they found them, but having seen Sergei's memories of Soviet soldiers in Africa, Ike found the idea unsettling.

 

"I don't think GORBI expects you back."

 

"He expects me back soon."

 

"He hopes you'll report back. He wants your data. But he sent you in here thinking the blind spot was caused by a fractured nuclear warhead. If he expects you to return at all, then he expects you to return even more damaged than you already are."

 

"How do you know what GORBI expects? You said that his mind is alien to you."

 

"I don't know how else to explain what I've seen in your memories. He sends you images, assigns you to an unprecedented mission, chats with you on the way. He's toying with you. He expects to recycle your hardware soon. In the meantime, you're a possible quiet solution at a time when he needs to act with discretion. Evidence of the warhead could ruin his peace talks."

 

After a silence, Ike said "Even if you're right, he will be sending in soldiers soon."

 

"Yes," said Sergei. "He will."

 

22:30

 

The cyborg would not let him leave the ship. Or rather, he could leave the ship, if he wanted to, but he had no rebreather and no way to get back to the inner tunnel system. Sergei had disabled the spider he rode in on.

 

Ike saw Sergei settling in by a console, cabling himself directly to the ship's sensors. He wondered if Sergei was watching for the approach of the soldiers. Sergei had barely spoken to him for the past several hours. He shared the last food rations with Ike and threw some blankets into a corner for him to nest and sleep in. Ike had never gone to bed uncradled. Even as tired as he was, he struggled to fall asleep without the familiar fullness of the interface at the back of his neck.

 

00:30

 

Ike was awakened by the screams of the African voice on the ship's comm system. He looked out of his corner as the ship's lights came on full power. There was Sergei in the center of the room, crouched on his many legs, the weapon of his left arm raised and ready as the cyborg's torso pivoted in search of an intruder. The voice quieted. Sergei relaxed.

 

Ike sent What happened? and heard the ship's voice repeat the question. He had forgotten about the audio link to his text center. "What happened?"

 

"I think," said Sergei, retracting his gun, "that you called out in your sleep."

 

"What does that mean?"

 

"It means I should have thought to disable your link to the speakers."

 

Ike closed his eyes and scanned his memories. There were images there, but not in digital. Shadows. Burning. The smell of fear. Vlad looms over him, redder than before. Larger than before. His face is divided -- a baby chimp's face to the left. The right side of his face is adult, but it sags. It is enraged -- eye gaping, teeth bared. His enraged, adult face is melting off his head.  Vlad pulls the shockstick off of Ike and limps away, leaning heavier on the 'stick for assistance. His left foot drags on the tunnel floor ... where Blackface lies, his body half-decayed ... Ike can smell the blood and the rot ... the stench is filling his head, building pressure behind his eyes ... between his ears ... he can feel his cap loosening, pulling away from his head ... his skull is splitting open ...

 

Ike looked up at Sergei. "Something's wrong with my retrieval systems. I see a replay of something that happened -- but not as it actually happened."

 

Sergei led Ike over to the crosslink rig and hooked their heads together. A moment later, he unhooked the cable again. "You've had a nightmare."

 

Ike knew the word. "That's what it's like when you sleep?"

 

"Apparently, that's what it's like when you sleep -- uncradled. Normally, when you sleep, the computer you cradle with is in control. Your artificial layer becomes passive. You're just not used to your organic brain being in charge."

 

"Can you fix it?"

 

"There isn't anything to fix. It's natural."

 

"It's awful."

 

Sergei leaned back on his hind legs, and looked at Ike. He sighed. "If we sleep with the crosslink cable in place, your cap might behave as if it's cradled, but there's no system for you to sync up with. The ship's computer isn't sophisticated. Monk's brain is inert. We've learned that the digital layer of your brain is compatible with the digital sections of mine, but ... but I'm not sure I want you hooked into my memories again. And it's not how your interface was designed to work."

 

"It wasn't designed to sit empty all night, either. I just want to sleep without ... another nightmare."

 

"But why block your dreaming? Dreams are valuable."

 

Ike thought for a moment. "Isn't it my choice?" he asked.

 

Sergei smiled. Ike had not seen him do so before. "What an interesting thing for you to say."

 

"I won't sleep again, if I know that that's what's waiting for me on the inside."

 

"My understanding," said Sergei, "is that the lower layers of the brain will dream no matter what we do. The question is whether our higher layers are aware of the dreaming."

 

"Please," said Ike. "Do what you can."

 

09:45

 

"After I plugged you back in, I tried to sleep, but I couldn't. Images from your head were seeping into my consciousness. The images of Vlad -- the actual images, not the ones from your dream. The images of the chimp you call Blackface."

 

"He called himself Blackface," said Ike.

 

"I don't think so," said Sergei. "I think you misunderstood him. He was pointing out to you that his hands and face and feet were black."

 

They were sharing a breakfast of Ike's protein paste and filtered water. The ship's rations had run out. With little of his organic body left to feed, the cyborg did not eat often, but he sucked the paste down hungrily. Sergei didn't want to return to central sector, but he knew that there was little choice. Ike tried not to think about what GORBI would do to him when they returned. 

 

"I could see that he was black," said Ike. "He was old."

 

"That's not how he meant it. Think for a moment about what the chimps experience."

 

Ike sat back and crossed his arms.

 

"The young ones have pink skin under their fur. They have pink hands and feet and faces. They see the Cymps and the humans who manage them, and what do they see? Black skin. African humans and artificially matured Cymps. For a chimp, that black skin is a sign of authority.  Slaves have pink skin." Sergei looked over at Monk. "Pink or blue. General Kvachatadze has pink skin, but I doubt they've ever seen him. And maybe they would be astute to see him as a servant.

 

"The one you call Blackface was an old slave who had aged out of his pink skin and into the color of authority. I think he believed that by disposing of that diaper, he could appear to be a master rather than a slave. He didn't understand that his masters are actually smarter, that an organic chimp brain isn't capable of the kind of freedom it seeks, to see the deeper realities beyond skin color and diapers. He never had a chance." Sergei held Ike's gaze.

 

Ike felt himself growing hot in the face and neck.

 

"I admire him," said Sergei. "I admire him because he did what he could, not knowing how short of the mark that was. Most chimps -- like most humans -- would prefer comfort and safety to freedom. Some may sneak away from their labors when they get a chance, but they're not pursuing independence. Just a moment's rest."

 

"I don't understand you," Ike said. "You either won't say a word, or you won't stop talking."

 

15:45

 

There was not much room on the ship, but Ike tried his best to avoid Sergei. "I don't want to listen to you anymore," Ike had said. "Just let me know when we're leaving."

 

He didn't want to know the Russian's thoughts on GORBI's motives, or on Blackface's, nor on chimps and slavery and the color of freedom. Access to Ike's memories did not make the man an expert on chimps or Cymps or specialists. It didn't even make him an expert on Ike. Knowing each other's memories did not mean that they knew each other. When Ike looked at the pattern of Sergei's life, his behavior didn't make any more sense from the inside than it did from the outside. Why run away from everything? Why see cages everywhere?

 

This ship itself was a cage, but Ike knew it couldn't stay locked much longer. Sergei must know that they had to go back. But even if he was scheming -- searching his mind for alternatives rather than making his peace with the inevitable -- GORBI's cavalry would arrive sooner or later.

 

Ike would spend the time until then hooked into the pseudo-cradle that Sergei had rigged for him. He found himself drawn with increasing intensity to Sergei's memories, even if he was losing patience with the man himself.

 

20:55

 

Sergei had never been an esthetic. His brother loved music. Ketina loved poetry. Avram loved different flavors. Sergei's tastes were for the very abstract -- geometry and discrete mathematics -- and the very concrete -- how machines work.

 

There were, of course, exceptions. Sergei would always love any music that reminded him of the synthetic pulsing dance rhythms of his first view of Ketina. He didn't like such music, per se, but at an a-rational and pre-esthetic level, he would always love it, even after he no longer loved Ketina herself, nor any memories of her.

 

Similarly, he associated the tastes of Kenya with his friendship with Avram. Avram took him to a food stand in the capital owned by a beautiful, mixed-race woman with green eyes and crooked teeth. She sold unique ethnic foods combining African and Greek traditions. At Avram's insistence, Sergei ordered Jabini, a spiced potato cake stuffed with four cheeses. It was the best thing Sergei had ever tasted, the mix of spices against melted, creamy stuffing. Ike spent hours going over the memory again and again.

 

Ike liked insects better than paste, and liked fruit better than either, but it was hard to have a favorite food when you'd only ever eaten three different things. He knew he had no idea what spiced Jabini cakes would taste like on his simian tongue, but he loved how it had tasted to Sergei.

 

He loved how so many things tasted to Sergei. Animals have no shame. Ike had seen chimps masturbating in the tunnels. But Ike was not an animal.  He himself had never felt the need, as Sergei correctly pointed out. But Sergei's memories of climax made Ike weak in the knees. Even the darker memories that Sergei didn't focus on -- of shiny, black-skinned prostitutes, with flowered skirts pulled up over their round buttocks, or the way the teacher's hands had felt, rough and soft at the same time, warm and steady -- aroused in Ike feelings in his chest and in his belly, a rapid pulse, heat at the surface of his skin...

 

If sleep had been difficult the night before, it was for fear of the nightmare images, unprecedented distortions of experience. Tonight, Ike stayed awake for the new feelings in his body, for the sensations and events that he could access -- though they had never happened to him.  Couldn't happen to him.

 

Ike now knew what it was to be completely organic -- what it was to be human: self-aware but fully embodied. There were times, before Sergei's first major battle wounds, when he would work every part of himself with free weights, when he could feel the blood surge in every limb, the warm soreness across his tired chest. He could sometimes feel his heart beat in his hands, in each finger. Thump-thump, Thump-thump. In his neck, behind his eyes. He could look in the mirror and see the individual muscles beneath his skin. Sergei and Ike shared a love for these memories, though for Sergei, they were memories of loss. To Ike, everything was a gain. His universe was huge now. Did all humans experience so much? Would Pasha's life feel similar to Ike? Would it be very different now, living on the other side of the world? Would a Westerner know the things Sergei and Pasha knew? Could Ike learn how an American saw the world? Could a single mind hold such disparate experiences? Is that what it was like to be GORBI?

 

05:40

 

In the morning, Sergei said, "I have to let you go back. He'll send in troops soon, if you seem to have disappeared, like his robots."

 

"He'll send in troops anyway. If you don't come back with me."

 

"I'm not going back."

 

"They'll kill you."

 

"Yes," said Sergei. "If he sends in troops, then chances are I'll be killed. But I think there is another option."

 

Ike said nothing.

 

To speak his mind now would be to condemn himself. Whatever he said aloud would be recorded by his own sensors -- and eventually reviewable by GORBI.  So long as he kept his thoughts to himself, GORBI might not be able to monitor them in his memories.

 

What he wanted to say was I will betray you without ever wanting to. My eyes and my ears will betray you. My chemical sensors, my microphones, my camera array. I need never open my mouth.

 

Sergei said, "Your digital memories of the past forty-eight hours are very dangerous to me, whether I return with you or not."

 

Ike wanted to say You should run! You should defect, like your brother. Fix the ship and take it to Western Mars. NATO will welcome you.

 

"I need to wipe your memory, Ike. I can't let GORBI see what you've seen."

 

Ike gaped. "You can't."

 

"There are ways I can make it seem like an accident. GORBI might not notice the tampering."

 

"No!" said Ike. "No. I won't let you do it."

 

"You'll be fine. Once they fix your cradle jack and resynchronize you. You'll be fixed and you'll be fine. Nothing permanent."

 

"No," said Ike. "I won't exist anymore."

 

Sergei limped toward him. Ike exposed his taser and aimed it at him. Sergei stopped. Ike knew that he couldn't seriously hurt Sergei, but he would try if he had to. For now, the cyborg allowed him his distance.

 

"I won't be taking away anything GORBI can't give back. You'll be fine."

 

"No," said Ike, in his new African baritone. "You don't understand what it's like for me now."

 

"I know your experiences, Ike. I have them in my head. As you have mine."

 

"No," said Ike. "You know the experiences that a slave had two days ago. You have the download of someone who might as well have been asleep.  I'm different now."

 

Sergei shifted back.

 

"Don't think of me as Ike,"  said Ike. "I am someone new. No, listen to me! I am like you, not like him. Not like how he was. Not anymore. He was GORBI's mobile monitor, his Martian MonkeyCam!  But I am so much more than that creature now. He knew routine, how to follow instructions, how to avoid trouble ... almost.  I know what it is like to be a chimp, and a Cymp, and a specialist, yes, but also what it's like to be a human. I know the taste of borscht and goulash and potatoes, of ice cream, of vodka, of Afro-Greek potato cakes. He knew how to urinate and defecate cleanly, how to wash with sound waves instead of water, how to gain the best visual perspective in a crowd or a closed space. I know the vision of a beautiful woman, swaying to music. I know the feel of physical power in my arms and legs, strength beneath my skin. I know the comfort and safety of sleeping on the floor with my father all to myself. What I knew before was the fear of my cousins. Now I know the love of a brother."

 

"Those are my memories, Ike. They're not yours. What you have are echoes of someone else's life."

 

"But I know pleasure now. I know safety and happiness. I wasn't unhappy before -- I was worse than unhappy. I felt nothing."

 

"I don't know what you're talking about! Those aren't happy memories!"

 

"They are to me." He heard himself say it over the ship's speakers. Each statement was as unexpected to himself as it must have been to Sergei, but Ike knew that what he was saying was true. Like Sergei, Ike had considered the virtual memories as artifacts of their accidental connection -- his and Sergei's -- just side-effects of their strange days together, however interesting, however pleasant. It was only at the thought of losing them that Ike claimed them for himself. Returning to central sector was bad enough. Returning unchanged would be intolerable.

 

Sergei came forward again. Ike raised the taser, but Sergei ignored it. He lowered himself to eye level and said "You remember feeling safe with my father, Ike? Do you? He was a drunk! He never protected me from anything!"

 

"He loved you."

 

"Fine. He loved me. So what? So did my brother. He left us! He ran away, knowing what they would do to the rest of us for revenge."

 

"Part of you was happy for Pasha. And proud! Part of you wanted to follow..."

 

"And Ketina? Yes, she was beautiful, but she was cold. And she was shallow. And any happy memories I once had of her were naive. If you had any perspective, you'd see how deluded--"

 

"-- I remember the feel of her skin," said Ike, "on the inside of her upper arms ... the smell of cigarette smoke and soap on her T-shirt, pulled taught across her breasts. I remember how soft her lips were, how warm her mouth was, how she tasted. Everywhere."

 

"Enough!"

 

"No," said Ike. "Just because you don't value them doesn't make the memories worthless."

 

"I didn't want to force you, Ike ..." Sergei reached forward.

 

Ike shot his taser into the exposed flesh of the cyborg's face. Electricity flowed into Sergei's head. His spider legs clenched, but held him up. His torso fell away from Ike. His left arm raised --

 

Ike leapt away from the path of the bullets that never came.

 

Sergei writhed on top of his eight unmoving legs. Ike scampered across the ship to where Monk's plasma rifle still lay at his feet. He remembered Sergei's combat training, the feel of a heavy weapon in his not-yet-powerful arms -- the ways to compensate for a lack of strength. Thank God Sergei hadn't always been a strong man. He remembered how the rifle worked, how to power it up, how to target.

 

The ship heaved to the side. Ike and the rifle slid down the slanted floor, back to where Sergei stood struggling with the electrical chaos that tore through his upper body. On immediate playback, Ike heard the explosion. He had no actual memory of it. The ship just decided to tilt sideways.

 

Ike noticed three things at once: Another explosion -- this one at the back of the ship, by the door, which now blew open and flew off its hinges, warped, jagged and spinning into the center of the ship; Sergei toppling over, his legs aimed stiffly at the source of the explosion; two giant blue men storming into the ship, with plasma rifles of their own.

 

GORBI's cavalry had arrived. Ike was saved.

 

Ike aimed at the soldier closer to him and fired Monk's rifle. The android went down. The second android spun and targeted Ike. A spray of bullets tore at the mechanical man from the side. He turned into the hail and faced Sergei, who was firing between two of his legs. The android shook with the impact of each bullet, but remained standing. He moved into the barrage, shifting his rifle toward Sergei's prone and awkward form.

 

Ike's second plasma pulse went high and took the bald, blue head off the android's body.

 

"Help me up!"

 

Ike dropped his plasma rifle and slid down the floor to Sergei. "Help me up, quickly! Where the hell's your rifle? Go get it! There will be more of them!"

 

06:30

 

There weren't any more. Not for now. When Sergei's seizures had passed, he fixed his legs and patrolled outside the ship. The two android soldiers had landed in a small, short-range vehicle. Their radio wasn't working. Sergei's signal jammer was still functioning, though not much else from his ship was. It still had power, the onboard computer worked and life support continued, but the ship was leaking its atmosphere out onto the surface of the planet.

 

"Now what?" asked Ike.

 

"Now we go back."

 

"Can we take their vehicle to NATO?"

 

"No," said Sergei. "We can't take their vehicle anywhere."

 

"Is it working?"

 

"I think it's working fine. But we can't take it West -- it would never make it. Even if it could support us for that distance, GORBI would spot us by satellite and have fighters intercept. And we can't take it back East, because GORBI will know we killed his soldiers."

 

"And we can't stay here," said Ike.

 

"We could only survive out here for another day -- maybe a day and a half."

 

"So we die out here, or we die back there," said Ike, though he knew Sergei had a final option.

 

"Or you let me wipe your digital brain and we walk back in through the tunnels."

 

"What would that solve?"

 

"It's a way to keep GORBI from learning what we've done -- both of us. We're worse than runaways now. We're murderers."

 

"It was self-defense," Ike protested.

 

"No," said Sergei. "Not for you, it wasn't. But GORBI doesn't need to know that. I can put the warhead on a timer. Wait until we get clear and then destroy the physical evidence. The electro-magnetic pulse from the blast will wipe all digital systems within its range. GORBI can conclude that we were out of blast range, but still in electro-magnetic range when the bomb went off."

 

"You have this all figured out," said Ike.

 

"It's close to what I was thinking of doing anyway. I'll tell him that I was stuck in a dead ship with a dead android, that you showed up and helped me fix this spider rig I'm walking with, and that we started back to central sector as soon as we could. He'll conclude that the soldiers arrived after we left and accidentally set off the warhead."

 

"Clumsy soldiers."

 

"He would expect them to try to retrieve the warhead. It's an embarrassment to him, to it -- to the Soviet Union. He can't let NATO get direct evidence that we've been violating the treaty."

 

"It makes sense," said Ike. "Your plan makes sense."

 

"I won't do it if you don't want to, Ike."

 

"I don't want to."

 

"I won't force you. We can die out here together."

 

"I don't want to do it."

 

"But it's a way to survive. You'll only be losing the past week or so -- since you last synced with your cradle."

 

"I won't remember Blackface, or Vlad, or you. I won't remember your life."

 

"You'll remember everything your organic brain already knows. You'll only lose the digital, and only for the past week."

 

Ike shut down his sensor channels. He looked at Sergei with naked eyes. "How much can my chimp brain understand?"

 

"I don't know," said Sergei.

 

"I don't want to be like them. I don't want to be another Blackface. I don't want to forget what you've taught me."

 

"What have I taught you?"

 

 

11:00

 

Ike helped Sergei gather their supplies for the walk back. Anything loose within the ship had slid to the bottom of the inclined floor, including Monk and the other two androids.

 

These thoughts will be lost.

 

The three androids did not look alike. Monk had a capital "M" burned into his clear blue forehead. The second android had a giant black hole in his chest, and the last one had a black stump where his bald blue head used to be. Ike the android killer. Ike the soldier. I won't remember any of this. I won't even remember thinking that I won't remember any of it. What is the point in having a thought that no one will ever know, a thought that you yourself will never remember having.

 

Maybe I can send myself a message. Try to remember something in the chimp brain, something the future me will have access to, after he is restored. While they worked together -- silent except for the few necessary words of coordination -- Ike tried to think what message he could send himself.

 

Sergei began to shut down the ship's digital systems.

 

What was Sergei thinking? What was inside his head? Knowing his whole life from the inside, Ike still could not begin to guess. Did he struggle at all with what he was about to do to Ike's mind? Did he understand what was being lost? I'll never know his thoughts again.

 

"Sergei?"

 

The cyborg looked up from his console.

 

"I want to try to explain something to you."

 

"I don't think we have time, Ike."

 

"It's short. Just let me try. You need to try to see your life the way I do. Just look at the moments. Don't try to fit it all together. You seem very unhappy when you look at these things all connected together. But you have some really great moments. At least one of us should enjoy them."

 

Sergei left the console and moved toward him. He said nothing.

 

"That's it," said Ike. "That's all I wanted to say."

 

Sergei lowered himself to eye-level. "OK, Ike. I'll try to remember that. Now I'm going to shut down the comm system."

 

11:40

 

The supplies were packed. After he wiped Ike's brain, Sergei was going to drug him, to keep him unconscious during the return trip -- both for security reasons, and for safety: their supply of portable air was limited, and an unconscious chimp would use less oxygen than a confused and panicked one.

 

With nothing left to do, Ike climbed into the chair he had originally awakened in. Sergei slipped the cable into the back of Ike's head.

 

"Are you ready, Ike?"

 

Will it hurt?

 

"It won't hurt, no. But I need to do it now."

 

Wait, Ike sent. Not yet. I just need to think of something first.

 

What message? What message could he leave himself? What would make sense to him on the other side of the abyss? What thought could survive storage in a chimpanzee's brain? Voices within him struggled for dominance. Something about a woman, something about flavors, about Pasha, about strength, about loss ... something ...

 

He couldn't think straight.

 

"Ike, I have to do it now."

 

The voices grew louder, but no more clear. His thoughts were a noisy crowd scene, a work crew without an overseer.

 

I can't ...

 

He thought he could make out individual words. What to say?

 

"It won't hurt. I promise."

 

It was no use.

 

OK, sent Ike.

 

He felt a surge at the back of his neck. His head was growing numb. Then he had it, too late, the message he wanted to remember: Please don't forget me!

 

 

EPILOGUE

 

Robots and worker chimps disassembled the stage in the people's park. The NATO general had come and gone. Tactical nuclear warheads were banned from Mars by the Green Treaty of 2012 -- so the explosion in the outer tunnels had brought an abrupt end to the peace negotiations of 2019.  From the lower branches of a tree at the edge of the central gardens, Ike could not see any humans, neither Russian nor African. No soldiers, no technicians.  He monitored only the diapered work crews and the insect-like robots that maintained the Soviet dome.  Overhead, the sky was pink and clear.

 

He had seen the Russian cyborg only briefly before he'd been sent back into the field with a new android partner. The cyborg stood tall on two human-like machine legs. His name was Sergei Aleksandr. Ike thought he remembered him as having more legs than that. Sergei and his new partner, Monk2, were among the last soldiers to leave the central sector. The war was heating up again, and Soviet Mars was segregating itself into soldiers in the field, and workers in the tunnels and under the central dome. Sergei Aleksandr was given a day to adjust to his new legs and his new partner before returning to battle.

 

During that day, the two of them had visited with him under the same tree he sat in now. Ike was spending a lot of time in this tree. Sergei Aleksandr introduced him to the new android, who stood silent after the formalities. Ike thought that something seemed wrong with his forehead -- though he didn't look different from any other android. The cyborg seemed to want something from Ike, but he couldn't figure out what it was. Ike wasn't used to talking with soldiers -- or with anyone, other than GORBI. They said goodbye and left him alone under his tree.

 

Ike was supposed to patrol the central sector, even when he wasn't on a specific assignment. GORBI wanted constant input. But since his restoration, Ike had spent most of his time on the grass and in the branches. He knew GORBI didn't approve, but he couldn't bring himself to care. He would do his assignments, as specified. Otherwise, he wanted to be in the gardens.

 

He saw the red Cymp guard at one point, overseeing a crew by the remains of the stage. They made eye contact across the distance. Ike's heartbeat increased, but only slightly. He remembered that the red Cymp was bad, that he had hurt Ike badly, but the event seemed distant, like a nightmare, barely remembered.

 

Ike had been having sleeping dreams since his return with the cyborg. The dreaming didn't seem to interfere with his cradle synchronization, so he didn't report it.  Whatever leaked over into the digital, GORBI could see for himself. The rest, Ike kept inside.  There were repeated images of the red Cymp, images that were frightening in sleep, but they faded quickly after awakening. Most dreams were not unpleasant. In one of them, Sergei Aleksandr taught him the secret to happiness. It was simple, the secret, though not necessarily easy. As he awakened into a daytime consciousness, the secret faded away. It was something about time.

 

Today's assignment arrived from GORBI. Monitoring green crews again.

 

He ignored his sensor array for a moment and took in the gardens with his organic senses. The smell of plants, of other chimps, the smell of synthetic lubricant in the gardening robots. The rich, rusty soil. Deep African green. He wanted to stay there, but GORBI's orders were clear.

 

Reluctantly, Ike climbed down from the tree and returned to the tunnels.

 

 

 

 

With thanks to Clinton A. Johnston (<http://www.ClintonJohnston.com/>) for his moral and editorial support, and for the lyrics to Tin Man.

bkmarcus.com : writing : TerraformTrilogy : 1-GreenWars : MonkeyCam

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