The Four Fingers of Death (41 page)

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
.

A punch pad! Who would have thought? Jim wouldn’t have thought, as he told me later, despite the fact that he knew a little about the history of Mars explorers, as we all did. For all the expense of the things, $10 billion was always being cut from the budget at the last moment, and in an austerity program the last thing the explorers had any need for was a punch pad. There were few signs of life on Mars, that much was assured, and if there were life on Mars, it was in a bunch of rocks at the base of a not-entirely-dormant volcano out by the Amazonis Planitia, or on the poles, and it was no more complicated than the blue part of blue cheese. It didn’t intend to stop the earthlings from running amok. No need for a punch pad! Who would be punching it?

And yet these were the kinds of fail-safes, the kinds of redundancies that were built into the machine exploration of Mars by the designers back on Earth. They constructed the keypad for the assembly of the
Saratoga
in case the cables that connected her to the motherboards of NASA failed at any time, out on the testing ground of West Texas. Occasionally, a fat guy who hadn’t had enough sleep in months would chase the
Saratoga
, and its sister explorer, the
Anasazi
(which exploded on the launch pad, as you’ll recall), whereupon he’d perform some dazzling manual override. It was this fat guy who had insisted on the punch pad.

A punch pad! Here it was, where Jim could get at it, if only he would take off his bulky gloves and expose his underlayer to the elements. Jim found himself hoping against hope that the keypad would be both numerical
and
alphabetical, because if he couldn’t talk to the
Saratoga
in English, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He had plenty of time to settle these questions, though, because once the
Saratoga
had presented its keypad to him, it seemed willing to wait as long as it would take for him to respond. He lifted his visor, which left just a thin membrane separating his face and lungs from the elements, and set down his outer gloves in six inches of dust and got up close to the keypad, where it would have been easy for the
Saratoga
, using the element of surprise, to laser him in the eyes or to spindle him with some geological probe.

Alphanumerical! Alphanumerical!

Shivering with cold, unnecessarily agitated by the epiphany of what sat before him—this pitted collection of spare parts from back home—Jim took a moment to collect himself, and then he typed in the stupidest question of all, the only one he could think of:

“What is your name?”

He was able to verify that the typing was accurate in the liquid crystal display at the top of the alphanumerical keypad, and it was on the tiny screen, as a bunch of zeroes and ones scrolled past, that an answer eventually materialized.

“Mars Explorer
Saratoga
, manufactured and copyrighted by Terradyne Industries and Shanghai Robotics, LLC, under license from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Earth, 2018, Common Era. Unauthorized use is a violation of the terms and conditions of the United Nations treaty on space travel of 2012.”

“What is your mission?”

“The mission of the
Saratoga
is the mapping and measuring of geological formations. When out of contact with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Saratoga awaits instructions.”

“Are these answers preprogrammed into you by NASA in case of malfunction?”

There was quite a bit of scrolling of numericals while the
Saratoga
paused to consider this question. Jim’s hands were getting really cold, in the meantime. He was a little worried about frostbite. However, this was the moment of moments, when the robot could either respond with the kind of low-level functionality that we expect from machines, or, instead, it might indicate an especially wily truth, namely that in its previous responses it was
simulating
low-level functionality—in order to throw Captain Jim Rose, and anyone else, off its robotic scent.

“That question doesn’t make sense to me.”

“What do you mean by ‘me’?”