Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

It was a software glitch, no doubt, that caused the malfunctioning of the navigational controls on the Saratoga . But doubters believed something else entirely. Laurie Corelli was eager to put forward the notion that the craft had not malfunctioned, or not in the way that NASA believed. The Saratoga , according to Laurie, exhibited what we on Mars now referred to as the problem of the very large computing capacity . Some of our own NASA evaluative machinery had become so large in terms of numbers of microprocessors and amount of raw computing power that this machinery exhibited strange signs of reflexivity, or even primitive stages of consciousness . I could point you in the direction of various theorists of artificial intelligence for more illumination on this subject.

However, anyone on Earth might tell you the same, that the more complicated machines got, the more they came to resemble people. On the watery planet, people could send their machines back to the techno-recycling authorities. On Mars, the problem of the very large computing capacity was more worrisome. Jim said, for example, that the ultralight would occasionally refuse to land. As if it simply wanted to keep flying. Similarly, the small modular robots that we sent down into various crevices and canyons on Mars would sometimes send back random gibberish to us and then just continue wandering off.

Laurie said, articulating one of the originary myths of the planet Mars in 2026, that the Saratoga had become wild and that we would, sooner or later, happen upon it, in some cave, like a Japanese soldier after WWII. The Saratoga , Laurie argued, was in the wilderness, trying not to be reprogrammed by Houston and waiting to debrief us, or other friendly representatives of planet Earth, with details of all that it had mapped.

It was, therefore, the holy grail of American space junk. That was why Jim Rose, on his reconnaissance missions, wanted to find the Saratoga . It was something he talked about now and again, with an offhandedness that concealed a great interest. He’d been crisscrossing the midsection of the planet just below the equator for three or four days, looking for — what exactly? For water certainly. For geological specimens, perhaps. For Brandon Lepper. But also looking for an answer as to how the Mars mission, in the near future, was supposed to feed and clothe and maintain itself in its dire circumstances. He suspected, he told me later, that NASA was going to cancel a plan to send a second unmanned rocket with supplies.

Jim had buzzed the rover site where Brandon had set up camp, and using some computer enhancements, he saw the kind of radio broadcasting that Brandon had made possible there. He flew low over Brandon’s mining operation in the canyon, he told me later, though it was pretty dangerous flying in there. The air currents were bad. Brandon tried with antiaircraft pulse weaponry to shoot at Jim. Though he was probably loath to use a lot of what little ammunition he had for so unlikely a cause.

Wherever Jim went, he spent some time digging and melting down the frozen loam. He collected quite a bit of the runoff from this operation. His purpose was to organize different samples of this tasty-freeze, some of it liquid carbon dioxide that wasn’t really potable and was also dangerously cold. It was neither solid nor gaseous carbon dioxide, but a frosty intermediate stage between the two. He also collected water, which was in danger of evaporating quickly if not consumed. He was going to bring back a fair amount of this water, in drums he had constructed for the purpose.

It was on the third day of his third or fourth reconnaissance mission that Jim thought he saw tracks in the desert. Tracks from nowhere to nowhere. Pointless tracks, irrational tracks. They were tracks without strategic or scientific value that he could fathom. Nevertheless, he followed these tracks. They made figure eights; they made spirals. They headed off willfully in a direction and then just as willfully doubled back, as if some Martian four-year-old were in command of the vehicle in question and was giving it a test-drive. It had to be one of the contemporary rovers, because unless Martian tracks were in a relatively secluded spot (in a crater or a gully), they tended to sediment over quickly. Either the explorer Jim was following was here recently , or else these particular tracks had managed to withstand sandstorms and debris and one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. Jim Rose, despite his rational and military mind, started to believe that the tracks were from the Saratoga .

He came to believe in Laurie’s myth, that is, a myth that had been no more than a bedtime story. But because he couldn’t keep himself from believing, he set the ultralight down on a barren spot in a crater, and then he followed the aforementioned tracks up the wall of the crater and into some hills. The sense of tracking the cybercraft, with its system of strange plates and mechanical limbs, was nearly as thrilling to Jim as if he’d been tracking some last catamount in the riparian latitudes of our home planet. He knew he had more important things to do, as summer in the southern hemisphere was beginning to make itself known, but he just couldn’t give it up.

At last, upon cresting a hill, he came upon the craft. The Mars explorer Saratoga ! Originally launched by the United States of America in 2019, the sixteenth unmanned mission to the planet Mars, with telemetry and navigational assistance provided by the People’s Republic of China. Jim said: it was almost as if the explorer were shocked at being apprehended by the first blood-and-guts Martian of its acquaintance. It was almost as if it had given up believing that life could take the form it now beheld, the form of Captain Jim Rose, bearded, brawny dreamer of the Mars mission, in a raggedy space suit, shivering with cold.

The typical Mars explorer was kitted out with a vast number of digging and boring tools, all of these attached to its four retractable arms, and there was a moment, as one of its limbs unfolded, that Jim wasn’t sure the explorer, which he hoped was reflexive and was conscious, didn’t intend to bore into him, as though he were a sample of silicon that it wished to harvest for its self-generated battery of experiments. Or maybe, Jim thought, the Saratoga was simply protecting itself. Maybe the Saratoga saw itself, on the planet Mars, in evolutionary combat with the flimsy, gushy, wet thing in front of it. Maybe it wanted to prevail, because it was solar powered and was able to withstand extremely cold temperatures, and was mostly free of the roiling sentiments that it rightly suspected consumed this primitive biological entity. Maybe it intended to superheat or shock or anneal this human thing, in order to be rid of it.

The remarkable feature of the series of robotic explorers, however, was their laborious slowness. Jim could have just flipped the Saratoga on its noggin, rendering it useless for upwards of ten days, while he awaited its reaction. There had in fact been a case of an earlier explorer that overturned itself on a rock or some such and took a solid ten days, using liquid ballast, to turtle itself. So Jim, because he was patient, tired, dusty, and because he believed , allowed the arm to unfurl from its folds within folds. He did this without disarming or overpowering the explorer. The whir of solid-state digital machinery was a pleasant diversion amid a whistling of Martian winds. Two or three minutes passed while the arm extended itself toward him, from some faceless machine face that was a solar array on top of a bunch of computing panels. At last, in the extended extremity, a small forgotten panel in the Saratoga retracted, and a punch pad appeared .