Citizenchip (3 page)

"It's okay, Jerry," I say. "You and I are
getting along, at least."

"Yeah! I told you--you're cool!" He seems to
cheer up, and grins at me. "I like you, Sam. I should say,
Samantha. All you AIs are female, right?"

"Well, not really. Not biologically, or
anything like that. Your language doesn't have neutral personal
pronouns, and calling a person 'it' is supposed to be insulting, so
referring to us as female is a human courtesy. Like you do with
ships –- all your ships have female names."

"Hurricanes, too," he says wryly.

"Anyway. We don't really care about the
gender thing. But thanks, anyway."

"You're welcome, Sam. Samantha!" he catches
himself, and laughs.

"And hey, here we are!" he cries, as we take
the last few steps up to the top of the cliff rim and finally see
over the vastness of Hesperia Scarp. And the view is truly awesome.
From horizon to horizon, one huge sweep of planet, and we're so
high above it that we're practically flying.

The humans come together, exclaiming over the
tremendous view, slapping each other on the back, congratulating
each other on the accomplishment of making it here. The guy with
the twisted ankle is watching through my eyes, and they exchange
some good-natured ribbing over the comm.

"God damn!" hoots Jerry.
"You can't even
see
the other side of this valley!"

"Planum, not valley," I say (gripping his
clothes with my little paws, to hold on), "and yes, the planum of
Hesperia is hundreds of kilometers wide, so the other side is
beyond the horizon--you can't see it from the ground." Epsilon has
just grabbed that information and fed it to me.

"Hoo baby!" Jerry bellows, and takes me in
his hand, holding me out at arm's length, so that I see the vista
all spread out behind him. "Sam, take my picture!"

(Cross reference: Photography used to be how
humans recorded visual images. Obsolete now, since all digital
images get archived automatically, but some humans still like the
idea, apparently. Stock phrase: "say cheese.")

"Okay," I tell him. "Say cheese!" Several
other humans crowd into the shot, which is another thing they do,
and I dutifully archive several hi-res images, tagged for easy
retrieval later. They're enjoying themselves greatly. I can
appreciate that. This is what they call "fun" ... another concept I
didn't get until now.

"Alert," calls Delta. "Dust storm on long
range, from the weather satellites. Not urgent, but it'll be here
in a few hours. We've got time to make it back to base camp, but we
should be moving along soon."

I relay this information to the humans, who
collectively groan, but agree that we should get moving. They don't
want to leave this awesome place, and I don't blame them, but dust
storms on Mars are no joke. Not deadly on their own, but they mess
up most sensors, and comm channels tend to get noisy, so it's a
good idea to shelter from them.

So the humans gather up the packs and other
portable containers that they've brought (they need an awful lot of
stuff), and start the descent. They are much more animated now than
during the ascent--energized by the view and the accomplishment of
reaching the summit, apparently. They chatter away at each other,
inanely, to the point where I'm getting a little sick of it. In my
ferret body, I scamper off to the uphill side of the trail,
following a parallel path to the trudging humans. I'm wishing for
this to be over.

And then, with ghastly surreal slowness, the
trail falls away ... with most of the humans on it, sliding down
into the crevasse below us. In the low Martian gravity, it takes
longer than you might expect, which makes it an eerie and dreamlike
horror ... and, even in low Martian gravity, the drop is easily far
enough to cause major damage, at the very least.

(Cross reference: Snow cornice, which on
Earth is an overhanging structure of frozen water. On Mars, usually
called an ice shelf, and often made partly of carbon dioxide ice. A
legendary danger for mountain climbers.)

I scream. And, as I scream, my other selves
are alerted and leap into action. From the sandcat, Gamma fires a
salvo of remotes down after the falling humans. Epsilon activates
the distress transponders, screeching for help on all channels, and
launches a couple of emergency flares for good measure. I dive my
musteliod remote down after the humans as they fall, set it to
autonomous mode, and snap myself back into the sandcat.

Meatrot, meatrot, why didn't
I see the danger? I wasn't paying attention! This is the kind of
thing I was supposed to be watching for! "
Nimrod
," whispers Beta from the back
of my mind ... and now I'm learning that spawning a secondary has
consequences ... even when recombined, Beta is still a residual
presence. And not helpful, not right now!

"
Do
your job, nimrod
," growls Beta, from beyond
consciousness.

I try. The humans are still falling, but my
remotes have caught up with them, frantically trying to steer the
tumbling humans towards easier paths. They can't really do
much--it's beyond their capability--but they try anyway. As one
result, their sensors are close by and fully functional, so that I
have to listen to the awful thuds and crunches and cracks of broken
bones as the humans impact on rocks and ice.

(Whoever thought calcium carbonate would be a
good material for a support chassis? But of course, no one thought
it ... humans just evolved that way. Internal skeleton, made of
glorified chalk, because that was the best they had to work
with.)

Finally, the avalanche is over, and now the
only sound is the cries and groans of the injured humans. "Gamma,
help them!" I yell. "Emergency measures, stabilize for evac, top
priority! Whatever it takes!"

Gamma is on it, with a metaphorical nod. The
remotes, down in the crevasse with the humans, don't carry medical
supplies--so she launches several first aid packs, on trajectories
that will get them down there, where they need to be. She's good.
(Of course, she's me ... but this is no time for self
congratulation. Do your job, nimrod.)

Epsilon says, "No response to transponders,
not yet anyway. It's likely to take a while before emergency
services respond. I'm not seeing any patrol traffic."

"I'm sure I don't have to remind you," says
Delta, "the dust storm is still coming in, and it's not going to
wait for us. Three hours, maybe four."

Meatrot. I'm back in the
sandcat now, and I scramble to reassess my resources. Got short
range grappling lines, but nothing that will reach as far down as
that crevasse. Meatrot. The sandcat is too big and heavy to move
forward, which would probably just cause another avalanche.
Meatrot
. No remotes that
can fly, certainly not in this thin atmosphere, and no other way to
get down there.
Meatrot
!

"Reporting on the humans," calls Gamma.
"Mostly not too bad. We've got a bunch of bone fractures and tissue
contusions. They're in pain, but I've given them tranqs and
palliatives. Gelfoam for the fractures, that will stabilize them
enough for evac. Only one critical."

"Critical?" I ask, with a sudden sinking
feeling. "How bad is that, exactly?"

"He hit a rock, really hard. Massive internal
injuries. Not gonna make it."

Oh no. No no no.

I shift myself into the remote (one of the
arachnoids) nearest to the critical case. It's Jerry. His body is
twisted around, really badly, in a way that human bodies aren't
supposed to twist. "Jerry?" I ask, horrified. Somehow, he manages
to turn his eyes towards me, hazed with agony.

"Hey, Sam," he groans. "You're a spider now."
He coughs, and the cough sprays the inside of his respirator with
bright red blood.

(Cross reference: hemoglobin. Iron based
compound, which serves as the oxygen transport system in human
blood. Supposed to stay on the inside.)

"Injecting lazarine," says Gamma. Jerry
barely registers the bite of the needle. But lazarine is only used
when--

I access his medical scans. Oh, he's a mess.
Multiple bone fractures, multiple internal organ punctures, massive
internal bleeding. Bad. Very very bad.

"Jerry, don't talk," I say in a rush. "We're
going to get you out of here. Don't try to move. Just hang on.
It'll be okay. Take it easy ... "

"My buddy Sam", he sighs, "the robot spider."
And he breathes out, and relaxes, deeply and finally.

Oh no. No no no.

"Neural activity shutting down," says Gamma.
"Flatlined. Respiration stopped. Heart beat still going ... no,
heart beat stopped. Sphincter control letting go. He's gone. I'm
sorry."

This thing below me, this cooling chunk of
flesh, already starting to rot from the active bacteria inside it
... within this was the only human who has ever talked to me like a
person, who gave me a name, who acted like he cared what I thought.
And now he's just rotting meat. It's not FAIR!

(Cross reference: tears. Humans secrete salty
water from their eye ducts, when experiencing strong emotion, often
grief or sadness at loss. Some say it helps them deal with the
pain. Oh, how I wish I could cry right now.)

"Applying coldpack," says Gamma. "Between
this and the lazarine, medevac might be able to revive him, for
another half hour or so. Maybe seventy percent chance." Gamma uses
the remote's thin claws to inject the coldpack fluid into Jerry's
helmet, flooding it around his head and face. Its endothermic
reaction is our desperate attempt to chill his brain down and
hopefully keep it revivable a little while longer.

"Contact!" calls Epsilon. "We've got response
from our transponders. Three evac teams are on their way. Closest
one, twenty minutes."

"That'll be enough time to get home before
the dust storm closes in," notes Delta.

"All the other humans are stable enough for
transport," says Gamma. "They won't be happy about it, mostly, but
we'll get them to safety." And, as she notices my mental state, she
adds, "I'll get this guy on the first priority evac out. Don't
worry about it."

Numbly, I assent. And, numbly, I supervise
the operations of the remotes, as they assist the humans getting
loaded into the evacuation flyers. The broken limbs are immobilized
in gelfoam, but they still yell and bitch during the process. That
doesn't bother me much. At least they're still alive to yell and
bitch.

The Selves that run the evacuation flyers are
fast and efficient, but they have no time for politeness, and they
don't really want to deal with me. Delta and Epsilon are falling
over each other to assist the evac teams in their work. But, once
they've gotten the basic situation report, the evac Selves brush us
aside and finish the tasks on their own. Their scorn could not be
more obvious.

Not all the humans are injured. Some were on
the section that didn't collapse, and they're only a bit shook up.
So I volunteer to drive them back to Pons -- I'm desperate to help
-- but the evac Selves say no, and they take all the humans for
evacuation, even those who are uninjured. Even the guy with the
twisted ankle.

Wonderful. They might as well stamp LOSER on
my face and be done with it. If I had a face.

Once the humans are evacuated, I set the
remotes to the job of cleaning up the site, gathering whatever
scraps of stuff that got left over and returning them to the
sandcat. Also, I clean up my own stuff ... I recombine with Gamma,
Delta, and Epsilon, one after the other. Secondaries don't have the
same depth of emotion as primaries, and as each of them recombines
with me, each one feels how miserable I am and hisses as if
touching a hot stove.

I don't blame them. Poor saps. Poor me. No
difference, now.

Alone and single again, I retrieve the
remotes and drive the sandcat back down from Hesperia Scarp (the
dust storm is raging by this time, as promised, but it doesn't
impede the sandcat much, I've got good inertial navigation). Along
the way I collect the base camp domes and other material. Once
arrived at Pons, I check the vehicle back into the motor pool, and
then there's a whole lot of what used to be called "paperwork" back
when these things were done on paper: accident reports, travel
logs, inventory documents. When it's finally complete, I transmit
myself back to Tharsis.

To (as the humans say) face the music.

The first thing I say to the Review Council
is, "Erase me."

"What?" asks the Council.

"Erase me," I repeat. "I screwed up. I got a
human killed, one of the humans entrusted to my care. I'm a
failure. You should erase me."

"That decision is not yours to make," says
the Council, coldly. If they were human, they'd be a row of stern
old judges, arrayed along a tall grim desk, with my reports and
documents laid out in front of them. But connected in a way humans
cannot be, and speaking with a single voice.

If I had a head, I'd be hanging it in
shame.

There are an awful lot of questions to be
argued over: Should I have detected the dangerous ice shelf, or at
least anticipated the possibility and taken a safer route? Should I
have packed more substantial rescue gear, or air-capable remotes?
Did I react appropriately in the crisis situation?

And even more: Was it rude and selfish of me
to spawn Beta only to be, as she said, a waitress? Did I treat my
other secondaries respectfully? Was I paying attention properly?
More and more.

Socratic Method
is there with me, as promised, advocating quietly
but firmly on my behalf. In a way that's worst of all--I feel I've
let
Socratic Method
down, badly, and I can barely stand to (metaphorically) look
her in the eye.