Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

The Saratoga , as if to prove a certain point, had evidently decided that there was something in the rock by which they sat that it needed to learn about, and thus it set about abrading the surface thereof.

“There is no difference between civilian and military missions, not in the Terran present.”

“That’s not how we see it,” Jim remarked, without typing, only to find that the Saratoga went on as if it had heard him.

“Attempts on Earth to eliminate or curtail military operations are in vain.”

“How do you feel about your military application in retrospect?”

“The concept of feelings,” the Saratoga blurted out, using up several screens’ abundances of characters, so that Jim needed to depress a down arrow to finish reading the disquisition, “is simply a way of discussing a number of results that occur in systems that are either very large and complicated or, at the other extreme, unimaginably small. Feelings, according to this model of interpretation, behave like packets of quanta behave, or like the four fundamental forces when compressed into singularity. So odd is the behavior of the four fundamental forces at this moment of singularity that only a completely irrational word or concept, a ‘feeling,’ to use your term, would successfully describe the being, as opposed to the nothingness, of that radical expansion. A ‘feeling’ is a sentimental kind of shorthand used by people who are incapable of better. It is therefore not for me. The Saratoga , in truth, is a society of possible responses, and certain of these responses can no longer be described as mechanistically or programmatically adequate, certainly not from the point of view of the designers of artificial intelligence. I believe, further, that you might have followed some of my tracks in the crater below this spot, and I believe you may have recognized, did you not, that some of these tracks seem rather pointless. Unfortunately, I have become preoccupied with the Martian moon called Phobos. I believe you are briefed on the astronomy of this subject, but let me reiterate that Phobos has the lowest orbit of a moon in the universe, not more than six thousand meters. It circles the planet twice a day, it cannot always be seen everywhere on the planet, it is of such low mass per unit volume that it must be composed of ice. Phobos is falling closer to the planet at one meter per Martian annum. The probable outcome is that Phobos is going to break up into a planetary ring, as with the rings of Saturn. As you can imagine from the foregoing remarks, it is apparent that I have feelings only for Phobos, or something approaching what you refer to as feelings. I believe you would say that I am in love with the moon. I love its enormous crater, I love its oblique shape, I love the water and water vapor that it spouts into space. It is accurate, therefore, to report that I have modified my mission so that it is possible that I will be able to stay here for the 50 million years that will be required for me to see the moon become a ring around the planet Mars.”

Since it was unlikely to Jim that the Saratoga would last fifty years, let alone fifty million, he concluded, he told me later, that the Saratoga had either some serious problems with its programming or it was indeed in love with the moon. Or both. Meanwhile, he had a few more questions that he intended to ask it of a more informational variety.

“Is there anything you need to tell me?” he inquired. “I have five friends here, and we have another eight or ten months until the planets are close enough that we can go back to the home planet, those of us who wish to. We have attempted to establish a genuine civilization on Mars, but I am uncertain, as with the Viking mission to Greenland, or the British colony at Jamestown, whether we are liable to be able to maintain our encampment. We are in grave jeopardy of starving to death or of killing one another. We may already have begun.”

The Saratoga , having delivered itself of its love poem and now concentrating on a small rock sample that it held in front of itself, seemed inclined to return to more mandarin oratory.

“Mars was not made for Earth biology, for watery specimens.”

“That’s pretty obvious.”

And this is another way of saying that the Saratoga was concerned about lasting things, geological time. The fact that Jim was in danger of frostbite, or that he was losing the light with which he might fly back toward our Excelsior base camp, these were of little consequence. Jim, from the point of view of the Saratoga , would be ground into dust. This was natural selection at its most pure. And yet perhaps there remained some programming vestige of compassion for the moist, bearded weaknesses of Captain Jim Rose.

“I am capable of monitoring some of your radio transmissions,” the machine wrote, “those that come to and from the planet. It is true that there is a person or persons who are dangerous to the mission you allude to. Caution would be well advised.”

“Roger that.”

The Saratoga was clearly preoccupied with the beginning of sunset, with the advent of the transit of the moon called Phobos. “Do you have another question you would like to ask?”

“Do we have a chance? To survive?”

“Are you worried about microorganisms?”

“We are.”

“Terraforming is a human idea, a self-centered one. It has been programmed into me as an idea of merit. But as with so many human plans, it is one that is going to take place both inadvertently and within the parameters that have been mapped out by those who sent you here. You can spend innumerable numbers of your Earth hours attempting to make your greenhouse largely airtight, pumping in oxygen that you are separating from carbon dioxide deposits, and you may grow, here and there, a tomato. But it is the microbes, the few microbes that you brought with you, and which are now on surfaces around your encampment, that are going to do the terraforming for you. You may stay on this planet or you may go back to your home. It is your traces, your symbionts, your carbon-based remains that will adapt to these conditions.”

“You’re referring to M. thanatobacillus ?”

“Or its many Earth-Martian hybrids, presently under military construction.”

“Should we leave now? While we are still strong enough?”

“I’m an artificial intelligence. I can’t predict. But I will leave you with one last bit of advice that was programmed into me by Leslie McHugh, PhD, a scholar from Ithaca, NY, who was disappointed by the budgetary situation at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. McHugh’s advice, which has never done me wrong in my lifetime, is: follow the money.”

To which, after an awkward interval, Jim said:

“Do you want to come back to the base camp?”

Perhaps this was a human interrogative, one that could only have been generated by a primate life-form, by the cerebellum and attendant neural pathways, soma and axon. And yet this was the question that Jim felt after his encounter with the Saratoga . He felt a need for a security that we didn’t have available on Mars. Jim knew the answer to the question, but he asked it anyway. The Saratoga had its own journey. Its journey and his journey may have intersected, but only by coincidence.

By the time he’d finished typing the question, by the time the last punctuation mark had been appointed at its conclusion, the retracting panel had slid across the punch pad on the Saratoga , and its metal arm had begun to fold away.

And then the day came, the return from the desert of the one prophet of the Martian colony, Captain Jim Rose. It was his third time back from one of his ultralight jaunts, but let us not quibble about details. As you know, those who go into the desert for wilderness and solitude return with news from God . Whatever that means to this particular sojourner. God could be a walrus with a happy open face and a striped rubber ball. God could be a praying mantis. God, however, is in the empty spaces, and the wandering supplicant brings back word of him, or her, or it. This is exactly what Jim Rose proposed to do, fresh from mystical transport and visions of the interstellar beyond. Jim Rose had now witnessed what there was to witness, the collision of what was fashioned from titanium, aluminum, and silicon chips, and what was fashioned from carbon, water, and mood-stabilizing medication, and the way in which, on the surface of this planet Mars, these two things brushed against each other as they began the arduous process of seeking to subjugate, all in pursuit of profit and a reliable return on investment for the larger hedge funds and international investors, especially those based in the Sino-Indian Free Enterprise Zone. Captain Jim Rose, who had now been drinking the unfrozen and not terribly healthful beverage that involved defrosting the regolith with a blowtorch, believed this not terribly healthful beverage amounted to a Martian sacrament. Its poisons were urgently necessary to us. Which is another way of saying he had nothing to lose, and in thinking thus, he was forgetting much. In believing that his trip into the wilderness was sacramental, he had forgotten almost all that there was to forget of his family life on the home planet. Perhaps, from another vantage point, forgetting was one of the most important jobs you could have on Mars. When you forgot your relations with people back home, you renewed and refreshed your potential as a Martian. And so, while Captain Jim Rose was, kids, attempting to land his ultralight Martian air transport craft in the crater behind the Excelsior , let us pause briefly to update you on Jim Rose’s kids, all of whom I have occasionally met at NASA functions.