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  “How can you work for someone so backward-thinking?” Alan asked. “I don’t know if I could put up with it.”

  The news feed continued on. “Elsewhere on Mars, protesters disrupted an Agriculture Committee tour of the Curiosity orchards—”

  Tap.

  “It’s getting worse by the day,” Alan said softly. “I mean, it’s still a minority. It’s still just rabble-rousers. But I hear the stuff kids are picking up at home, the ideas their parents leave lying around like charged blasters. I hope I get through to them, but I worry how many internalize those messages.”

  Kaylee looked at him askew. “Why haven’t you said anything? You always seem so upbeat when you get home.”

  “When you get home,” Alan countered. “By then I’ve had time to unwind. And don’t get me wrong; the kids are great. It’s just that… once in a while…”

  “Speaking of kids,” Kaylee said. “Wonder if ours are still awake.”

  Alan performed a quick swipe on the remote control, and the video screen displayed dual clocks for the cities of Curiosity and Oxford. “It’s 10:15 there. They’ll have been in bed a while by now.”

  “But…” Kaylee started to object. Then her shoulders fell. “I hate that forty minutes we gain here every day. Or lose. However you want to look at it. It’s like Athena and Stephen are drifting away in time as well as orbital space.”

  “Hey. It’s Emancipation Day tomorrow,” Alan said in a weak effort to cheer her up. “In four or five years, it’ll be Athena’s turn. Another couple for Stephen. Maybe they’ll decide to come live on Mars.”

  Kaylee’s gaze strayed to the darkened window of their apartment. The domed city of Curiosity lay beyond the opaque smartglass. Their first few weeks on Mars, they’d kept it clear, soaking in the novelty. Now, they rarely let the outside view in with them. “I’m not sure whether I’ll want them here five years from now. Not the way things are heading.”

  Chapter Four

  Eve stood at a lectern overlooking a crowd of fifty-five fresh young faces. They were children and would remain so even after this day. Legally speaking, they would be emancipated, of course, but 130 years separated Eve from even the eldest among them. There were men and women with gray hair and stooped backs whom Eve still considered children. Her children. Every last one of them.

  It was a vain conceit. Eve had never borne a single child. She had never experienced firsthand the pain of childbirth, the hormonal rush of holding a newborn after carrying it within her for nine months. But she had been a mother. She and Plato had raised one daughter together. As head of the Human Welfare Committee, Eve had played nursemaid to all the rest. Oh, there were a few near her own age to whom she had been more a sister, a cousin, or an aunt, but this wasn’t a day to quibble over exceptions.

  Eve gripped the lectern in both hands. She tried to tell herself that it was to appear dramatic, forceful, and in command. She was there to inspire them, not remind them that standing for twenty minutes at a stretch was a terrible strain on her old muscles.

  “Welcome, friends and family. Welcome, dignitaries, officials, and media. But most of all, welcome, Emancipation Class of 3217. As I look out upon you, I see the future. No, not as a prophet but as a visionary. You are the writers of the future yet unwritten. Humanity is a river. Each year at this time, we add new tributaries to that river. Each year, that river grows larger, wider, deeper, grander. You are a part of that. The choices you make from this day forward will shape humanity in large ways and small, by intention and by accident, by word and by deed.

  “Most of you have already decided upon a career. Six of you have chosen to go into the field of robotics. Eight intend to study genetics. Two are set for solar exploration. Eleven of you will be moving to the Mars colony. Two pairs of you will be heading straight from this ceremony to the Madagascar Center for Human Advancement to have your DNA sampled for parenthood. I will not single out anyone today, nor will I delve into each and every professional commitment made by this gathering. I draw attention to those whose decisions have already been made in order to contrast with the more interesting among you — the undecided.

  “Freedom. Choice. Imagination. Do not despair, those among you whose path in life has not been cut clear ahead of you. The greatest journeys begin with no destination in sight. When I was your age, I could never have conceived of the life ahead of me. The position I hold, the home I live in, the very species to which we all belong, none of it existed as we know it today. There was no Human Welfare Committee. The only homes were for robots. Humanity was a mere science experiment aimed at reviving a distant past. Think on this: what does not exist today that you will bring into existence within your lifetime?”

  Eve scanned the crowd for reactions. She didn’t care about the parents and hangers on. It was the eyes of the newly emancipated that interested her. Bright, eager, intelligent, they watched her as they processed the words of her speech. There was greatness out there. Where, she could not say. Not all promise is fulfilled. The deepest depths of potential are rarely plumbed. Was her successor out there? Was the next Prime Minister in the crowd? The next da Vinci? The next Truman? Was there something beyond all of them that Eve couldn’t conceive of yet?

  She hoped so.

  Eve’s greatest wish was for humanity to leave her in its wake.

  “And so it is with a —” a fit of coughing choked off Eve’s words. After a brief pause, she composed herself. “It is with a glad heart and joyous spirit that —”

  Eve tried to suck in a breath that wouldn’t come. The speech had taken too much out of her, straining ancient lungs that Ashley390 kept insisting she replace. Clutching the lectern for support, Eve tried to remain upright. The world wobbled. Horrified gasps escaped the crowd.

  What have they got to be upset about? They’re not the ones dying.

  Warnings and error messages flashed across Eve’s vision. She didn’t need to be told that her oxygen-intake level was unacceptably low, that her heart rate had spiked, or that she was in need of medical attention. Notification that she had already sent an emergency medical beacon was welcome but unnecessary.

  Mere seconds passed before medical help arrived. The nannies and worrywarts among robotkind and humanity alike forebade Eve going anywhere without a doctor practically within arm’s reach.

  Eve passed out surrounded by the finest medical minds on Earth.

  Chapter Five

  Ned Lund slipped through the door of his apartment with a grunt of relief. Yapping with that reporter from Philadelphia-2 had squeezed the last of the juice out of him, but it had been worth it. Those crystal-brained number crunchers back on Earth needed to know that Mars was up here taking care of business for itself.

  “Darla?” Ned bellowed. There could have been no mistaking the sound of his arrival. The door was in need of repair and opened and closed with a gravelly chatter.

  “Back here,” his wife’s melodious voice floated from her home office. Just hearing it brightened Ned’s mood. “I’m almost finished updating this mineral profile.”

  Ned lumbered across the living room and collapsed onto the couch. “No hurry. Kids home yet?”

  “Been and gone,” Darla called back. “Abel’s off to debate club, and Melissa’s got soccer practice.”

  Ned nodded. Poor kids. He owed them better than to work such late hours. It had been easier when Horace had been project lead, but Horace had to go and get himself elected to the colonial council.

  “You had dinner yet?”

  “I fed the kids, but I waited for you.”

  “In or out?”

  “Oh, in,” Darla assured him. “I won’t drag you through a shower and out into public again. Just let me finish this up and I’ll program the food processor. Any special requests to mark a momentous occasion?”

  Ned smiled a weary, satisfied smile. He’d lived in Darla’s shadow so long getting treated like someone famous was taking used to. She was Mars’ leading hydroponics researcher. Martian
s appreciated someone whose whole career revolved around feeding them without Earth’s handouts. But now Ned wasn’t just an assistant operations supervisor; he was project lead. That was practically equal footing. “You see me on Philadelphia-2?”

  “You know I can’t watch you on news feeds. And I object to those biased Earth-centric feeds on principle. I don’t want my media metrics showing support for Earth broadcasts. What if I run for office next year?”

  “Right. Yeah. Dumb to ask. Sorry.”

  Darla entered the living room, dressed for a casual day or remote login programming in pajamas and slippers. She had her data goggles pushed up onto her head. “Don’t be like that. Let me cook for you tonight. You’ve earned it.”

  Ned gave a weak smile that turned genuine after Darla leaned down for a welcome-home kiss. “Steak. Recon. With El Paso sauce.”

  Darla chuckled. Ned could imagine the roll of her eyes without needing to look toward the kitchen. “I know it’s local, but reconstituted proteins aren’t steak no matter what shape you program it.”

  “Maybe when we have an atmosphere, we’ll have space for herds of our own. For now, I want a steak some robot didn’t feed.”

  As Darla busied herself with a meal-programming task that might take upward of two minutes, Ned closed his eyes and tried to see if he could get every muscle in his body to relax at once. But as soon as he came close to achieving his goal of perfect relaxation, a chime from his pocket startled him.

  Digging out his portable, Ned saw that it was Miriam. He was within his rights to blow off the call—she worked for him after all, not the other way around. But if his Chief Logistics Officer was calling after hours, it had to be something urgent. “What? I’m about to have a home-cooked meal.”

  “Have you seen the news feeds?” Miriam blurted.

  “I was just on ‘em.”

  “Not that,” Miriam snapped. “But good. I wanted you to hear it from me. Our dark matter order has been hijacked. Reactor 2 is going to be delayed by six weeks.”

  “What?” Ned demanded, clutching the portable computer hard enough that he worried about breaking it. “Hijacked? By who?”

  “Kanto,” Miriam spat bitterly. “Who else. Jason90 has a miniaturized Truman-Effect reactor that he’s planning on installing in a new chassis. He pulled some backdoor committee maneuver and got our shipment diverted.”

  Ned threw the portable across the room. Miriam gave a startled yelp at the loud crack when it hit the wall. “Ned… you still there?” Miriam’s tiny voice crackled from the portable.

  Stalking over to retrieve the undamaged computer—which he now felt foolish for thinking he could damage with his grip—Ned scooped it back up. “’Course I am,” he snapped. “Now tell me what I’m supposed to do with a crew of twenty-five and no reactor?”

  “We could still start—”

  “Don’t even try that,” Ned bellowed into the portable. “Without an on-site reactor, we won’t be able to power half our equipment. We’ll be running relays back to Curiosity for battery recharges. That’s no way to run a terraforming team. How about explaining how you let this happen. Aren’t you on the Resource Allocation Committee?”

  “As an observer,” Miriam replied. “No vote, remember? Anyway, with Jason90 putting his weight behind it, it wouldn’t have mattered if I had a vote or not. All those robotic committee members could see themselves with Truman-Effect Reactors in their next upgrade and couldn’t vote for it fast enough. To hell with Mars.”

  Ned remained silent. Lost in thought. There were tasks he could have the project team shift onto—minor, nitpicking necessities, none of which struck him as urgent. Site surveys and equipment overhauls didn’t make the news feeds, but someone had to do them. Problem was, Ned was staffed for generator installation. He’d be farming out his techs to the biological reconditioning teams just to keep them all busy.

  “Ned…? You got a plan?”

  He felt his gorge rising. An hour ago, he’d been on top of the solar system. Now, he was scrounging for table scraps beneath the robots’ feast.

  Again.

  For now, though, he had to tell Miriam something. “Maybe we can see about getting a temporary fusion reactor approved for Site 2.”

  “Fusion?” Miriam asked incredulously. “You know any nuclear tech is banned Mars-wide.”

  “Hence the approval,” Ned reasoned. “Byproduct will be letting everyone know just how bad we needed that dark matter. Heck, I don’t even want the fusion reactor. I want to light a fire under the slow-moving clods at Opportunity to get them to do something about the Resource Allocation Committee.”

  “On it, boss,” Miriam replied.

  The call ended.

  “Did the other half of that conversation sound as bad as your end?” Darla asked, poking her head in from the kitchen amid the wafting scent of grilled steak.

  “Nah,” Ned said. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  Chapter Six

  Alan clung to Kaylee’s arm as they entered the back offices of the First Martian Theater. The young woman holding the door gave the couple a tight, reassuring smile hinting that she understood their trepidation. The décor was all new, with plasticized steel walls molded to look like old stonework and red velvet drapes from a top-end cloth-o-matic piled in rolled bundles ready to be installed as a stage curtain. Their escort led them down a brightly lit corridor that still managed to feel foreboding despite the smell of fresh paint.

  They passed through an old-fashioned swinging door labeled “cast break room” and found themselves attending a gathering that looked halfway between a poker game and the cliché Human Era cartoons of cigar-smoking old men who ran corrupt political campaigns.

  A thin-faced man with a welcoming smile beckoned them over. “Kaylee, Alan, glad you could make it. Mars is always in need of citizens looking to help their community. Sit down. Let me introduce everyone.”

  Kaylee separated herself from her husband and shook hands with Bob Volkov, Nancy Davis, Abel McCovey, Candice Medina, and Annabel Santos, plus Andy Wilkes, their host. She tried to remember all the names, but she’d always been better with numbers than faces. Alan was the people person, meeting the same neighbors with the same handshakes and likely having permanently associated all those new names with their owners already. For him, they were just another class of students to learn.

  “You probably have a lot of questions,” Andy said as Kaylee and Alan joined the group around the table. “We’re willing to answer any you might have.”

  “Is all this… committee-approved?” Alan asked, glancing nervously around the room as if to check for hidden cameras or microphones.

  Andy chuckled at perfect ease. “Tacitly. Most of the robots know something is going on over here, and they don’t want to get involved. They like it that way. Mars is their little pet porcupine. They like having us, but every time they get too close they end up regretting it. The Colonist Fitness Screenings, regulation of Truman-Effect technology, local schooling certification, independent emancipation boards; every time they try to help, the worse they make things. I think they’re banking their drone credits on the Unity Keepers holding Mars together.”

  Unity Keepers. It sounded so stuffy and formal, like a Solar Age reincarnation of the Knights Templar or a twentieth century cult. If their referral hadn’t come from one of Alan’s teaching colleagues, Kaylee might have walked out then and there.

  But how sinister could an organization be if a kindergarten teacher was their leading recruiter?

  “That’s why we’re here,” Kaylee said. “It’s the nightly news feeds. Our kids are still in school on Earth, and we watch the terrestrial news rather than embarrass them every night with a comm. But Mars is our home now, and night after night the stories get worse. Alan and I talked about it, and we realized we were waiting for someone to do something about it. We wanted the news feeds to come on one night with President Francoeur dusting his hands and telling us that the separatists and instigators had all
been set straight, that everything was fine.”

  Alan leaned forward. “We realized we needed to be part of the solution.”

  Andy smiled patronizingly. “There’s no solution here. We have no end game. The Mars First Party, the Humans First Party, the private Solarwide channels where secessionists and anti-mechanical bigots gather… none of that is going away in our lifetimes. We just push back, hinder, keep them from spreading. Education helps, but they’ve cut off Martian education from the Oxford curriculum now.”

  That had been a key factor in leaving Athena and Stephen at school on Earth. Whatever anyone said about robots, Nora109 had kept the standards at Oxford consistently excellent since it opened. The same couldn’t be said of the Martian Colonial School System. The organization had seen eight different chief administrators during its seventeen years of operation and eight different curriculum standards. No chief administrator had yet to win reelection.

  “We just want to do the right thing,” Kaylee said. Alan nodded in agreement.

  Andy shook his head. “I don’t peddle easy answers here. That’s for the other guys. But I can tell you this much. History doesn’t look kindly on extremist groups, nor does it look kindly on colonial subjugation by distant governments.”

  Kaylee furrowed her brow. “But…”

  Alan snickered. History was his forte. “You’re saying that whosever viewpoint prevails writes the history.”

  “The Unity Keepers are offering a particularly tricky bit of history to write. It comes rife with villains who have families to worry about, jobs to safeguard, and self-esteem to shelter. We’ve got a rough outline to work from, but I’m mainly offering the two of you a blank text field to fill in. This isn’t for everyone.”

  Feeling small in her chair, Kaylee nodded. Maybe they’d made a mistake coming here. Andy Wilkes was no visionary, no charismatic leader. He was just the director of a local theater group that didn’t even perform original plays. Everything they did was a retread from Earth, from Hamlet to Rent to First Girl on Earth. Even the politics were recycled, it seemed.