S Morden - One Way

“Yeah. I guess so.” The black woman held up her hands. “It’s not like we’ve anything left to lose, right?”

The white boy squirmed in his seat when he realized people were looking at him. “It’s, it’s, it’s… fine, it’s fine. OK. It’ll be fine.”

Moon-face nodded slowly. “OK. If that’s what everyone wants. Just don’t blame me when you hate it up there.”

Frank steepled his fingers. “We’ve been bought and sold. Xenosystems owns Panopticon. Panopticon owns us. But we all said yes when they asked us to go to Mars. It’s going to be as good as we want to make it. It’s going to be our home from now on. You want to shit the bed? You know where the airlock is.”

“That,” said Doctor Alice, “sounds like a threat.”

“No. Just the truth. It goes for me as much as it does everyone else. We do our jobs, we take care of ourselves, respect each other as human beings. You wanted more out of life than that? Maybe we should have all thought just a little bit harder about our life choices.”

“He’s not wrong,” said Adolf, into the silence that followed. His voice was like a truck passing too close. “Now, I got the little voice in my ear telling me I got to be somewhere else. Play nice.”

He slowly got to his feet, seemingly filling the room as he did so, and then ducked out of the room with one more word: “Acknowledged.”

The black woman pushed herself away from the table. “Me too. Acknowledged.”

Then the kid. “I’m going to fucking Mars. Don’t forget that now.” Followed by, “Acknowledged, already. Acknowledged.”

One by one, they left, until it was just Frank and Alice. He waited for the door to close before speaking. “I remember you,” he said. “I know what you did.”

“No one else seems to,” she said. She looked at Frank, held his gaze. “We can keep it that way if you want.”

“Sure. Maybe they didn’t read the same news sites I did.”

“You can read? That sets you apart from the rest of the lumber they’ve swept up.” Her stare, her contempt, was unflinching.

“Filed my own taxes too. Didn’t need some fancy-ass accountant to do it for me.”

“I’ve got some cookies you can have as a reward.”

“You don’t have any cookies. None that I’d dare eat, anyway.”

“We all have a past. We all have a future.”

“ Report to Building Four, Room Seventeen. Acknowledge .”

“Acknowledged,” he said, his eyes still on the doctor. “I’m Frank, by the way. And you’re still dangerous, Dr Alice Shepherd.”

“I’m glad you think so, Frank. Perhaps a little bit of danger will make this trip of ours more exciting.”

He left, and walked down the corridor to the stairs. He’d finally put it together at the very end of the presentation, looking past her at the screen and seeing her catch a loose hair out of her tightly wound bun. Then she’d turned her head and in that freeze-frame, he’d recognized her. The State allowed assisted suicide, but not for a doctor to take matters into their own hands. She’d had something like thirty counts of undocumented and unregistered mercy killings against her, and the reports he’d seen alleged many more.

Should he warn the others? That was a difficult choice. It wasn’t his business who Xenosystems chose. He had no influence over that. Presumably, she was going to be their doctor, and be treating the crew, so Xenosystems had decided that she wasn’t going to euthanize them against their will. So why was he worried?

Maybe he should just keep quiet, and not get sick any time soon.

[Private diary of Bruno Tiller, entry under 11/26/2038, transcribed from paper-only copy]

If I hear of yet another robot failure, I swear to God I am going to send the engineers in their place.

Frank had been out on another run. It had hurt, and he was determined to show that it hadn’t. In the shower, he’d cramped, and he’d struggled not to cry out in pain, in fear, in desperation. He’d bitten down on the fleshy lump on the back of his hand between thumb and forefinger, and he’d left marks.

And he’d barely turned off the flow of tepid water before he’d got his next instructions. He showered with his earpiece, he ate with his earpiece, he pissed with his earpiece. He was ragged, and felt every one of his fifty-one years. Apart from that one time at the training video, he was as isolated as he’d always been. Brack’s intermittent appearances—and really, fuck that shit—didn’t count. He could turn from someone who was disdainful and condescending into a mean, vicious weasel in a second. Perhaps he thought it was motivating.

Instead, Frank felt like throwing in the towel. He could just call it quits and make it stop. He could break up his crew, and maybe throw them all in the Hole too.

Maybe he couldn’t. He was still on the program. If Alice Shepherd could stay the course, then maybe so could he.

As told, he went to the room they watched their training videos in. And there was another person there—the black woman.

She was seated at one end—the far end, below the screen—of a long table, in the shadow cast by the dark-tinted windows dialed to almost opaque. Her hands, previously resting on the tabletop, withdrew like the tide and retreated to her lap.

Frank, with deliberate slowness, walked around the far side, and, with the windows at his back, sat down near—but not next—to her, on the diagonal. He made a fist, and held it out, thumb-side up. She looked at it, and him, then at his fist again. She curled her own right hand and lightly tapped it on Frank’s.

“Hey,” she said.

“Frank.”

“Marcy.”

“Everything’s being recorded, right?”

“Yeah.”

“OK.” Frank leaned heavily on the desk. He blinked and realized that there was a bottle of water on the desk in front of him. He’d missed it in the gloom. He reached over and snagged it, twisted the top off, and offered it to Marcy first.

“Knock yourself out,” she said.

He drank it all, the plastic bottle flexing and snapping as he sucked the last from its neck.

“I seem to be permanently thirsty these days.” He hoped it wasn’t a sign of some underlying medical problem that was going to get him canned.

“Dry air, I guess. Coming off the flats.”

“Sure. That’ll be it.”

They risked a glance at each other.

“You doing OK?” asked Frank.

“Well enough. Enough to avoid the Hole for now.”

“Me too.”

“Son of a bitch never told me that when I signed,” she said.

“Yeah. That. So let’s not crap out.”

“Why are we here? You and me. This room. Is this another test?”

Frank wiped his lips with his thumb. “Got to talk to each other sometime, right? And of course it’s another test. If we show we can work together, then we’re more likely to get on that ship.”

“Guess so. What did you do outside?”

“Build shit. You?”

“Drive shit.”

“OK. They need people on Mars who can build and can drive.”

“But do they need us?”

Frank shrugged. “We’re here. We just need to make them think it’s easier to take us than can us.”

“Like they’ve left us a choice.”

He pushed the empty water bottle away from him, to stop himself from playing with it. “So what do we do now?”

“I don’t know. Are we supposed to get to know each other, tell each other our life stories?” Marcy looked down into her lap. “I’m not comfortable with that.”

“I don’t think they care about that. But while I’m in here, I’m not running up that Mountain and the medics aren’t draining my blood. I’m good with that.”

“They cut you open?” She gestured to the deeper shadow between her breasts. Frank glanced up long enough to know what she was talking about, and not so long as to make it embarrassing.