“Nate?” she asked in confusion.
“This project matters,” he insisted, gazing at the obelisk. “It’s art, and it’s memory, and it does matter.”
Of course. But only because it was all they had left.
“Come into the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”
Nate’s tablet chimed while they were still sitting at the kitchen table. He took the call, listened to a brief explanation from someone on his staff, and then objected. “That can’t be right. No. There’s something else going on. Keep at it.”
He scowled at the table until Susannah reminded him she was there. “Well?”
“That was Davidson, my chief investigator. He tracked down a Red Oasis shareholder who told him that the rights to the colony’s equipment had not been traded or sold, that they couldn’t be, because they had no value. Not with a failed communications system.” His scowl deepened. “They want us to believe they can’t even talk to the AIs.”
Susannah stared at him. “But if that’s true—”
“It’s not.”
“Meaning you don’t want it to be.” She got up from the table.
“Susannah—”
“I’m not going to pretend, Nate. If it’s not an AI driving that homestead, then it’s a colonist, a survivor—and that changes everything.”
She returned to the Mars room, where she sat watching the interloper’s approach. The wall screen refreshed every four minutes as a new image arrived from the other side of the sun. Each time it did, the bright orange homestead jumped a bit closer. It jumped right past the outermost ring of survey sticks, putting it less than two kilometers from the obelisk—close enough that she could see a faint wake of drifting dust trailing behind it, giving it a sense of motion.
Then, thirty-eight minutes after she’d sent the new instruction set, the Destiny AI returned an acknowledgement.
Her heart beat faster, knowing that whatever was to happen on Mars had already happened. Destiny’s construction equipment had retreated and its homestead had started up or had failed to start, had moved into place at the foot of the tower or not. No way to know until time on Earth caught up with time on Mars.
The door opened.
Nate shuffled into the room.
Susannah didn’t bother to ask if Davidson had turned up anything. She could see from his grim expression that he expected the worst.
And what was the worst?
A slight smile stole onto her lips as Nate sat beside her on the couch.
The worst case is that someone has lived.
Was it any wonder they were doomed?
Four more minutes.
The image updated.
The 360-degree camera, mounted on a steel pole sunk deep into the rock, showed Destiny profoundly changed. For the first time in seventeen years, Destiny’s homestead had moved. It was parked by the tower, just as Susannah had requested. She twisted around, looking for the bright green corner of the factory beyond the distant ridge—but she couldn’t see it.
“Everything is as ordered,” Susannah said.
The Red Oasis homestead had reached the green survey sticks.
“An AI has to be driving,” Nate insisted.
“Time will tell.”
Nate shook his head. “Time comes with a nineteen minute gap. Truth is in the radio silence. It’s an AI.”
Four more minutes of silence.
When the image next refreshed, it showed the two homesteads, nose to nose.
Four minutes.
The panorama looked the same.
Four minutes more.
No change.
Four minutes.
Only the angle of sunlight shifted.
Four minutes.
A figure in an orange pressure suit stood beside the two vehicles, gazing up at the tower.
Before the Martian Obelisk, when Shaun was still alive, two navy officers in dress uniforms had come to the house, and in formal voices explained that the daughter Susannah had birthed and nurtured and shaped with such care was gone, her future collapsed to nothing by a missile strike in the South China Sea.
“We must go on,” Shaun ultimately insisted.
And they had, bravely.
Defiantly.
Only a few years later their second child and his young wife had vanished into the chaos brought on by an engineered plague that decimated Hawaii’s population, turning it into a state under permanent quarantine. Day after excruciating day as they’d waited for news, Shaun had grown visibly older, hope a dying light, and when it was finally extinguished he had nothing left to keep him moored to life.
Susannah was of a different temper. The cold ferocity of her anger had nailed her into the world. The shape it took was the Martian Obelisk: one last creative act before the world’s end.
She knew now the obelisk would never be finished.
“It’s a synth,” Nate said. “It has to be.”
The AI contradicted him. “Text message,” it announced.
“Read it,” Susannah instructed.
Alix obeyed, reading the message in an emotionless voice. “Message sender: Red Oasis resident Tory Eastman. Message body as transcribed audio: Is anyone out there? Is anyone listening? My name is Tory Eastman. I’m a refugee from Red Oasis. Nineteen days in transit with my daughter and son, twins, three years old. We are the last survivors.”
These words induced in Susannah a rush of fear so potent she had to close her eyes against a dizzying sense of vertigo. There was no emotion in the AI’s voice and still she heard in it the anguish of another mother:
“The habitat was damaged during the emergency. I couldn’t maintain what was left and I had no communications. So I came here. Five thousand kilometers. I need what’s here. I need it all. I need the provisions and I need the equipment and I need the command codes and I need the building materials. I need to build my children a new home. Please. Are you there? Are you an AI? Is anyone left on Earth? Respond. Respond please. Give me the command codes. I will wait.”
For many seconds—and many, many swift, fluttering heartbeats—neither Nate nor Susannah spoke. Susannah wanted to speak. She sought for words, and when she couldn’t find them, she wondered: am I in shock? Or is it a stroke?
Nate found his voice first: “It’s a hoax, aimed at you, Susannah. They know your history. They’re playing on your emotions. They’re using your grief to wreck this project.”
Susannah let out a long breath, and with it, some of the horror that had gripped her. “We humans are amazing,” she mused, “in our endless ability to lie to ourselves.”
He shook his head. “Susannah, if I thought this was real—”
She held up a hand to stop his objection. “I’m not going to turn over the command codes. Not yet. If you’re right and this is a hoax, I can back out. But if it’s real, that family has pushed the life support capabilities of their homestead to the limit. They can move into our vehicle—that’ll keep them alive for a few days—but they’ll need more permanent shelter soon.”
“It’ll take months to build a habitat.”
“No. It’ll take months to make the tiles to build a habitat—but we already have a huge supply of tiles.”
“All of our tiles are tied up in the obelisk.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her in shock, struck speechless.
“It’ll be okay, Nate.”
“You’re abandoning the project.”
“If we can help this family survive, we have to do it—and that will be the project we’re remembered for.”