Human Phase Page 6

  “It’s voter intimidation season,” the crowd droned in unison, minus Kaylee.

  “That’s right. The Chain Breakers will be targeting mostly undecided voters as usual, but we also need to be watchful of the Scientific Frontier Party and Cybernetic Alliance candidates this time around. We have ears on the inside with a couple Chain Breakers’ cells that suggest they might start targeting candidates directly. Anyone with a pro-Earth or pro-robot platform, I want two members assigned to babysit them during public appearances. We’re not bodyguards, people, just extra eyes looking to keep the level heads on their shoulders through election night.”

  Andy projected slides on the wall, showing candidates and platforms, then soliciting volunteers to look after them. One by one, the Unity Keepers on all sides of Kaylee accepted assignments. It all happened in a haze. She was a recruit in a volunteer army that was going into battle unarmed, untrained.

  “Kaylee, think you can handle this one?” Andy asked, snapping her from a stupor.

  “Sure,” she replied by reflex. Kaylee had never been one to shy from work. She could handle anything; it was practically the family motto.

  On the wall was an image showing a young woman, perhaps fresh from emancipation. The dossier described her as the Cybernetic Alliance candidate for Environmental Management Chief for Curiosity. She was dark-skinned, with a bright smile and her hair in pigtails. In the picture, she had data goggles pushed atop her head. The name listed was Nina Forrest.

  “Great,” Andy said. “I’ll forward Nina your name and let her know to introduce herself. You… uh, did mention you voted for Cybernetic last election, right?”

  “Yeah,” Kaylee said. It had been on Earth, though, and the candidate had been a mixed robot fifty times this girl’s age. Still, it was a party open to all points on the biomechanical spectrum, after all. “Not a problem.”

  As she left the meeting later that evening, she could only imagine how she was going to explain her new duties to Alan.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Alan sucked a breath through a borrowed respirator mask. He’d been through the mandatory colonist-training program before leaving Earth, but it wasn’t the same as a 200-meter walk across unbreathable atmosphere to the Mars Terraforming Initiative Site-2 facility. It felt like breathing through a sweater.

  “Stop fighting the supply,” Ned warned him, voice echoing in Alan’s ear. “The pump adjusts to your oxygen needs.”

  Alan knew as much. But tell that to his lungs. They warned that he was a few millimeters of rubber from suffocating and wanted all the spare oxygen they could lay claim to in the meantime.

  Ned led the way inside the facility, just a hollowed-out bunker of a barracks with an airlock at the door.

  As soon as the airlock finished its cycle, Alan tore off his breathing supply.

  “Not much of an outdoorsman, huh?” Ned asked wryly.

  Alan chuckled at his own expense. “Not even where there’s air.”

  The two of them weren’t alone. Seated around a cramped table were five others, none of whom Alan had met. They introduced themselves with rough handshakes. Les, Calvin, Gregor, and Wil had grips like robots.

  Ned flicked on a brighter light, letting everyone see who they were talking to without a pall of gloom. “Everybody, this here’s Alan Greene, refugee from Earth. Been here a few months now. His old lady works for me. Alan, welcome to the Chain Breakers, working for the free people of Mars.”

  There were gruff little cheers, halfhearted but with an earnest undertone. These were cheerleaders but workmen at the ground level of a political revolution in the making. They worked as pragmatists and dreamed as idealists, at least according to Andy.

  “Tell us what brought you over,” Calvin said, making a beckoning gesture with one meaty, grimy hand.

  Alan cleared his throat. “Well, I was born on Earth, just like Ned said. Maybe you can guess by my surname, but my father was Dr. Tobias Greene, one of the original robots. When I was maybe five, he went in for a chassis upgrade and came out looking like a ghost from the archives: the original Toby Greene. I was too scared to go near him for weeks.”

  There were grumbles of sympathy from around the table.

  “It was Earth, though, and they kept sending me to a counselor until I treated him like the old dad I used to know. I knew it wasn’t, but I also didn’t like getting pulled out of class once a week to talk to a counselor.”

  “Bad as uploaders, those psychiatric robots,” Wil said with a sneer.

  “Again, it was Earth. Everyone was used to robots everywhere from the doctor’s office to their mother’s bedroom,” Alan continued. “After the chassis change, my parents had five more children cloned. At the time, I had no idea how creepy it all was. It wasn’t until I was emancipated and out of the house a few years that it started to sink in. Meeting Kaylee helped.”

  “I dated a Madison clone a while back,” Gregor mused. “I can imagine.”

  Alan was sick to his stomach knowing the common experience this man had with a woman who was genetically identical to his wife.

  “We had kids of our own, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was getting life handed to me on a platter. I got my first housing choice, right in Paris, without any fuss. When we moved to someplace bigger for the kids to play, it was custom-built inside two weeks.”

  Ned whistled. “Political connection on both sides of the family. Must be nice.”

  “It’s not,” Alan said plaintively. “It’s like winning a race and finding out it’s rigged.”

  “It is rigged,” Calvin stated firmly. “You just haven’t been on Mars long enough to see it from this side.”

  “Kaylee thinks it was her idea moving here, but I’d spent years dropping hints that climatology was easy on Earth, where the natural systems did most of the work. By the time the quality director position opened up, I’d made her so jealous of your terraforming crews that she practically dragged me onto the next interplanetary shuttle.”

  “Wait, so you’re telling us it was your idea to move to Mars?” Ned asked. “Kaylee mentioned you being down about not bringing your kids along.”

  “That much is true, anyway,” Alan admitted. “Couldn’t get them approved. Connections don’t matter as much up here. We have a provisional approval for a Mars-born, though, and I’m still hoping to take advantage of it.”

  It was a filthy half-truth. Neither he nor Kaylee wanted to raise a child on Mars the way it was just then. But he’d be damned if he let any child of his into the meat-grinder that was the Martian school system.

  But the time for interrogation seemed to have passed. Alan had told his story, and it was time to hear what had brought the others to the Chain Breakers.

  “It was a swallow of turpentine, hearing it,” Les said wiping a hand across his gray-flecked stubble. “Don’t need you. Don’t need you as a robotics designer. Don’t need you for a structural engineer. Don’t need you for skyro manufacturing, hydroponics development, or climate control. Figured if I wanted to get anything done for myself, I’d have to come to Mars where there wasn’t a robot under every rock to do the job better. I was a second-wave colonist.”

  Wil slumped in his chair. “For me, it was the women. I was born regular. None of the Earth girls from the clone vats would have the first thing to do with me. The only one who came close insisted I get a full genetic screening, and she wanted her geneticist to go over it before I was worth considering. Needless to say, once my apprenticeship in climate control was up, I was on the next shuttle back to Mars. At least the women here look at you for who you are, not what that little twist of DNA inside you says.”

  Gregor’s story was brief. “It’s a numbers game, really. It’s us or them. Humans or robots. You can’t have two dominant species.”

  As for Ned, Alan had his suspicions in advance. “The robots control everything back on Earth, no matter what a few vocal human advocates might say to the contrary. So long as we’re not starving to death or
suffocating on the local atmosphere, they feel like anything else we get is coming out of their share. Every step of the way, the Mars Terraforming Initiative has had to scratch and claw for resources. Earth would sooner build us ten more domed cities than let us alter the biosphere to support life outside. But to top it off, my only son gets rejected for emancipation. Retribution, you see. It’s because I make noise and the Earthling and their robot masters don’t like my kind of noise.”

  “You’d think, with all those processors, one of them would remember a little history,” Alan joked.

  “Like what?” Ned asked with a squinted eye.

  Alan blanched. It was meant to be an offhanded remark, something so true on the face of it that he shouldn’t have needed an example. “I, uh, mean that colonies always end up free. You can’t rule someone without being there with them. British Empire, Rome, French, Spanish, and Dutch colonies. You just can’t rule from afar indefinitely. Sooner or later, a critical mass builds and the colony takes local control.”

  At Oxford, not knowing this was inexcusable for a ten-year-old.

  Calvin hooked a thumb in Alan’s direction while addressing Ned. “This guy gets it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  After walking Alan back from the empty hulk of Site-2, Ned Lund turned back and regrouped at the same airlocked break room where they’d just convened as a meeting of six.

  Now, there were five of them, and Ned was breathing a little easier. They broke out the homebrewed beers Wil and his wife made on the side, and everyone let down their guard.

  Calvin leaned over and clinked the top of his bottle with Ned’s. “Think we got us a winner there.”

  “You think?” Ned asked.

  Calvin gave a single, emphatic nod. “Gotta admit, I was skeptical at first. Didn’t think he was our kind of people. Little too much Oxford in his lingo. But it takes all kinds, and he’s got as much gripe as anyone. Imagine being forced to live with one of them.”

  Ned’s nod in reply was far more reserved. “Wil, what about you?”

  “I doubt he’s got the ‘sterone to roll up his sleeves, but it’s nice having someone on the inside at the schools,” Wil replied. “Maybe counteract some of that brainwashing and psychiatric conditioning they put into the young ones these days.”

  “I like a man who’s honest about his failures,” Gregor said. “Never trust a man who thinks he has the world figured out—Mars or Earth.”

  Les spat on the floor. “Acting class and a sob story won’t convince me. Fancy boy with connections like his… not buying the hard luck schoolteacher routine. And don’t forget that wife of his.” He cast a raised eyebrow at Gregor. “She’s got the DNA, sure, but she’s also Eve Fourteen’s great-great-great-… aw, hell, a couple-few generations removed from the wrinkled old cyborg herself.”

  Ned snorted. “Of all the connections to have. That one doesn’t play favorites, at least not for our kind. She gets her favors on the machine market, same as any committee chair. Everyone we run against her gets steamrolled. You don’t get clout like that trading favors to get your great-grandkids grease-monkey jobs like this one.” Ned chewed the inside of his mouth. “Ya know. That wife of his is the best character witness he’s got. She’s sure as hell not all robo-eyed. A little quiet, maybe, but you get her going, she’s got a mouth like a soccer rioter.”

  Les snarled. “Look here! We get all loosey-goosey, we’re bound to get nabbed.”

  “Nabbed?” Ned echoed. “Nabbed by who? None of us was even at the soccer match. We could only be so lucky as to have Charlie-freaking-7 start rounding up political enemies. We’d have our independence so fast, we’d shift red on the visible spectrum.”

  “We already look red from orbit,” Calvin pointed out.

  “Les has a point,” Gregor said. “The words ring true. Can he back them up?”

  Ned sipped his beer as he pondered. Wasn’t it enough running the terraforming operation around here? Did he have to do all the thinking for the Chain Breaker’s Curiosity branch too?

  “All right. Got an idea. We’ll test our new buddy, Alan. If he passes this test, we’ll know he’s got what it takes.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Dinner at the Martian apartment of Kaylee and Alan was a late affair. Silverware clattered, echoing into the dim recesses of the otherwise silent kitchen. The meal was cold mush—it had been hot an hour ago, when Alan had promised to be back. Kaylee had prepared the meal as a reward for Alan’s hard work at the beginning of the school year. She hadn’t tried to call him since he’d been engaged with students. She hadn’t worried because the school was in the safest part of Curiosity, and the aftermath of the riot had cooled even in the most questionable corners of the domed colony.

  “How was work?” Alan asked without looking up from his plate.

  “Same as usual since the shutdown,” Kaylee replied evenly. Her gaze bored holes in Alan’s skull. Her fork hung motionless in a white-knuckled grip.

  “That’s nice.”

  Kaylee stabbed into the unresisting puddle of what had been chicken Alfredo and stuck a forkful into her mouth. As she chewed the cold, clammy sludge, she never took her eyes off her husband.

  Between bites that he swallowed with a wince, Alan attempted reconciliation. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t call or text you. I was just…” One stray peek at his wife’s face, and his next words stuck on his tongue.

  “What were you doing at the terraforming site?”

  “How did you—?”

  “The marks around your nose and mouth. The smell on you. Why did you lie to me?”

  Alan set down his fork to raise both hands in surrender. “Andy said it was best for operational security. You can’t slip up about what you don’t know. Besides, you have to work with those… those people.”

  “What people? Who were you with?”

  Alan listed off the names of the Chain Breakers Andy had tasked him with infiltrating, then described the meeting. “And I think they believed me.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Kaylee snapped, snatching her plate from the table. She stormed across the kitchen, shoved it into the auto-wash, and slammed the unit shut. “How could you let Andy talk you into going behind my back?”

  “Don’t blame Andy,” Alan called after her as Kaylee headed into the bedroom and closed her husband out. He continued, voice muffled through the closed door. “I volunteered. I wanted to do more than just sip tea and talk about how communal and well-meaning we all were.”

  Kaylee buried her face in her hands.

  What was wrong with this planet? Was there something to those old terrestrial legends about spacers going crazy? Alan had always been the levelheaded one, the grounded one, the one who went along with Kaylee’s crazy ideas, not the one embarking on his own.

  “Kaylee…? Sweetie?” Alan’s voice pitched higher.

  Kaylee just wanted him to leave her in peace. She needed to think. How could she undo this? The best—the absolute least dangerous—case was that Ned and his cronies believed that Alan was some mouth-breathing Human First fanatic. It was bad enough working for a guy like that.

  But to sleep in the same bed as one?

  “Kaylee, at least talk to me.”

  It was an act. She heard the contrition, the sweetness of the man she’d married. He wasn’t a bitter, burnt-out loser blaming his troubles on forces beyond his control. This was Alan.

  Alan Greene had given up a cushy Oxford teaching job to educate Martian brats who couldn’t pass emancipation at age fifteen. He’d come here so that she could breathe life into a dead planet, so that she could see Mars colonists break free of their barnacle existence, clinging to the hull of a barren rock. He was willing to go to these crazy lengths to let her have that dream as it threatened to slip away.

  She wasn’t going to let politics come between them, especially not when they were still on the same side.

  Slapping the door release, she let Alan into the bedroom. Scooting over, she made room for
him at the foot of the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated. He’d said it more times than Kaylee had kept count. “I wanted to make a difference. The stuff we’ve seen… it doesn’t matter. It’s just polishing the door handles on the tram coming to run us all down. Andy has a few agents doing more. I wanted to be one of them. He’s got spies in some of the other cells, but he hadn’t managed to crack the Curiosity chapter until tonight.”

  Kaylee stared at him.

  “Ned and the others… it all makes sense from their point of view,” Alan babbled onward. “They’ve got these hiccups in their lives, places where the path they were on jumped off the tracks, and they connect everything back to robots and Earth-based committees. Their facts aren’t even wrong, per se, but they’re ascribing motives that are completely paranoid. Every last one of them could do with some professional counseling, except that they think the entire psychiatric profession is a brainwashing cabal of Svengali hypnotists with mind-control drugs and selective behavioral upload rigs. Sort of a chicken-and-egg problem where the one thing they need most is something their psychosis prevents them from accepting.”

  Kaylee kept up her mute stare.

  “And it’s not like they’re murderers. This isn’t an archival movie or television drama. Robots used to disappear once in a while, but they don’t self-terminate at the rates they used to. And humans are all too closely knit to go missing for long. Everyone knows they can’t get away with it. Anything mysterious and the committees call up Charlie7 to sort it out. No one wants to cross paths with him, not even nutters like Ned.”

  Kaylee blinked once.

  Alan cleared his throat and continued. “We have an extraction plan. I’ve got a little emergency beacon in my shoe. It’s very clever. Won’t show up on any scans unless it’s activated. Andy won’t tell me where he got it, but I think we’ve got someone on Earth—maybe even at Kanto or Cambridge—working on spy gizmos for us. So, you see, it’s not really all that dangerous. Awkward and unsavory, maybe, but the worst that might happen is I get roughed up a little. They wouldn’t dare go any further than that.”