12.
Three weeks after the streakship launched, bound for the Great Ship, the AI doctors pronounced Amund well enough to travel. His stitches hadn’t healed completely, and the scar tissue would never vanish. But those problems were bearable, and at least his guts were back where they belonged. Besides, there was too much to do.
Amund was always the sacrifice. The one lie that he told was that he had any choice in this matter. But there wasn’t going to be a staged event full of fake religious noise. The culmination of change and age and his own willingness to continue: That was why he would die. His flesh had nowhere to go but to join with the rivers, and these creatures were older and far more patient than any captain or clerk wandering long among the stars.
Along with the AI doctors, Mere had left behind portions of the streakship’s machine shop and enough raw material to build a fleet of reasonably mindless devices. And following his instructions, a submarine was built and ready.
The river still listened to him, but it wasn’t talking back anymore. Which was understandable. Honestly, what more could be said at this point?
Amund stepped inside the submarine and asked to be moved. No engines were necessary. The ship supplied breath and clear windows and spotlights. But those lights weren’t needed. That was obvious soon after the river pulled him under the surf. The blue flesh of the land was replaced by glowing white flesh that lit the water and Amund’s face and his great wide smile. The entire day was spent crossing the continental shelf, and then the edge came and the river set him where he could see the spectacle. A great current was crawling its way out of the depths. A waterfall flowing backward, milky and brilliant and vast. The world was shaking as the river pulled its reserves out of the abyssal plain: The first surge of an invasion that would rebuild the planet in less time than it would take this one man to die of old age.
How many people were able to watch a new world made?
Everybody could, of course.
But at the end of the day, how many ever took notice?
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. Her most recent novel, Company Town, was a CBC Books Canada Reads finalist, and winner of the Copper Cylinder Award. She is also the author of the Machine Dynasty series. She has written science fiction prototypes for Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, the Atlantic Council, and others. You can find her at madelineashby.com.
DEATH ON MARS
Madeline Ashby
“Is he still on schedule?”
Donna’s hand spidered across the tactical array. She pinched and threw a map into Khalidah’s lenses. Marshall’s tug glowed there, spiralling ever closer to its target. Khalidah caught herself missing baseball. She squashed the sentiment immediately. It wasn’t really the sport she missed, she reminded herself. She just missed her fantasy league. Phobos was much too far away to get a real game going; the lag was simply too long for her bets to cover any meaningful spread. She could run a model, of course, and had even filled one halfway during the trip out. It wasn’t the same.
Besides, it was more helpful to participate in hobbies she could share with the others. The counselors had been very clear on that subject. She was better off participating in Game Night, and the monthly book club they maintained with the Girl Scouts and Guides of North America.
“He’s on time,” Donna said. “Stop worrying.”
“I’m not worried,” Khalidah said. And she wasn’t. Not really. Not about when he would arrive.
Donna pushed away from the terminal. She looked older than she had when they’d landed. They’d all aged, of course—the trip out and the lack of real produce hadn’t exactly done any of them any favors—but Donna seemed to have changed more dramatically than Khalidah or Brooklyn or Song. She’d cut most of her hair off, and now the silver that once sparkled along her roots was the only color left. The exo-suit hung loose on her. She hadn’t been eating. Everyone hated the latest rotation of rations. Who on Earth—literally, who?—thought that testing the nutritional merits of a traditional Buddhist macrobiotic diet in space was a good idea? What sadistic special-interest group had funded that particular line of research?
“It will be fine,” Donna said. “We will be fine.”
“I just don’t want things to change.”
“Things always change,” Donna said. “God is change. Right, Octavia?” The station spoke: “Right, Donna.”
Khalidah folded her arms. “So do we have to add an Arthur, just for him? Or a Robert? Or an Isaac? Or a Philip?”
The station switched its persona to Alice B. Sheldon. Its icon spun like a coin in the upper right of Khalidah’s vision. “We already have a James,” the station said. The icon winked.
“Khalidah, look at me,” Donna said. Khalidah de-focused from the In-Vision array and met the gaze of her mission manager. “It won’t be easy,” the older woman said. “But nothing out here is. We already have plenty of data about our particular group. You think there won’t be sudden changes to group dynamics, down there?”
She pointed. And there it was: red and rusty, the color of old blood. Mars.
His name was Cody Marshall. He was Florida born and bred, white, with white-blond hair and a tendency toward rosacea. He held a PhD in computer science from Mudd. He’d done one internship in Syria, building drone-supported mesh nets, and another in Alert, Nunavut. He’d coordinated the emergency repair of an oil pipeline there using a combination of declassified Russian submersibles and American
