Nate shook his head. “Time comes with a nineteen minute gap. Truth is in the radio silence. It’s an AI.”
Four more minutes of silence.
When the image next refreshed, it showed the two homesteads, nose to nose.
Four minutes.
The panorama looked the same.
Four minutes more.
No change.
Four minutes.
Only the angle of sunlight shifted.
Four minutes.
A figure in an orange pressure suit stood beside the two vehicles, gazing up at the tower.
Before the Martian Obelisk, when Shaun was still alive, two navy officers in dress uniforms had come to the house, and in formal voices explained that the daughter Susannah had birthed and nurtured and shaped with such care was gone, her future collapsed to nothing by a missile strike in the South China Sea.
“We must go on,” Shaun ultimately insisted.
And they had, bravely.
Defiantly.
Only a few years later their second child and his young wife had vanished into the chaos brought on by an engineered plague that decimated Hawaii’s population, turning it into a state under permanent quarantine. Day after excruciating day as they’d waited for news, Shaun had grown visibly older, hope a dying light, and when it was finally extinguished he had nothing left to keep him moored to life.
Susannah was of a different temper. The cold ferocity of her anger had nailed her into the world. The shape it took was the Martian Obelisk: one last creative act before the world’s end.
She knew now the obelisk would never be finished.
“It’s a synth,” Nate said. “It has to be.”
The AI contradicted him. “Text message,” it announced.
“Read it,” Susannah instructed.
Alix obeyed, reading the message in an emotionless voice. “Message sender: Red Oasis resident Tory Eastman. Message body as transcribed audio: Is anyone out there? Is anyone listening? My name is Tory Eastman. I’m a refugee from Red Oasis. Nineteen days in transit with my daughter and son, twins, three years old. We are the last survivors.”
These words induced in Susannah a rush of fear so potent she had to close her eyes against a dizzying sense of vertigo. There was no emotion in the AI’s voice and still she heard in it the anguish of another mother:
“The habitat was damaged during the emergency. I couldn’t maintain what was left and I had no communications. So I came here. Five thousand kilometers. I need what’s here. I need it all. I need the provisions and I need the equipment and I need the command codes and I need the building materials. I need to build my children a new home. Please. Are you there? Are you an AI? Is anyone left on Earth? Respond. Respond please. Give me the command codes. I will wait.”
For many seconds—and many, many swift, fluttering heartbeats—neither Nate nor Susannah spoke. Susannah wanted to speak. She sought for words, and when she couldn’t find them, she wondered: am I in shock? Or is it a stroke?
Nate found his voice first: “It’s a hoax, aimed at you, Susannah. They know your history. They’re playing on your emotions. They’re using your grief to wreck this project.”
Susannah let out a long breath, and with it, some of the horror that had gripped her. “We humans are amazing,” she mused, “in our endless ability to lie to ourselves.”
He shook his head. “Susannah, if I thought this was real—”
She held up a hand to stop his objection. “I’m not going to turn over the command codes. Not yet. If you’re right and this is a hoax, I can back out. But if it’s real, that family has pushed the life support capabilities of their homestead to the limit. They can move into our vehicle—that’ll keep them alive for a few days—but they’ll need more permanent shelter soon.”
“It’ll take months to build a habitat.”
“No. It’ll take months to make the tiles to build a habitat—but we already have a huge supply of tiles.”
“All of our tiles are tied up in the obelisk.”
“Yes.”
He looked at her in shock, struck speechless.
“It’ll be okay, Nate.”
“You’re abandoning the project.”
“If we can help this family survive, we have to do it—and that will be the project we’re remembered for.”
“Even if there’s no one left to remember?”
She pressed her lips tightly together, contemplating the image of the obelisk. Then she nodded. “Even so.”
Knowing the pain of waiting, she sent a message of assurance to Destiny Colony before anything else. Then she instructed the synth and the beetle cart to renew their work, but this time in reverse: the synth would unlink the fiber tiles beginning at the top of the obelisk and the beetle would carry them down.
After an hour—after she’d traded another round of messages with a grateful Tory Eastman and begun to lay out a shelter based on a standard Martian habitat—she got up to stretch her legs and relieve her bladder. It surprised her to find Nate still in the living room. He stood at the front window, staring out at the mist that never brought enough moisture into the forest.
“They’ll be alone forever,” he said without turning around. “There are no more missions planned. No one else will ever go to Mars.”
“I won’t tell her that.”
He looked at her over his shoulder. “So you are willing to sacrifice the obelisk? It was everything to you yesterday, but today you’ll just give it up?”
“She drove a quarter of the way around the planet, Nate. Would you ever have guessed that was possible?”
“No,” he said bitterly as he turned back to the window. “No. It should not have been possible.”
“There’s a lesson for us in that. We assume we can see forward to tomorrow, but we can’t. We can’t ever really know what’s to come—and we can’t know what we might do, until we try.”
When she came out of the bathroom, Nate was sitting down in the rickety old chair by the door. With his rounded shoulders and his thin white hair, he looked old and very frail. “Susannah—”
“Nate, I don’t want to argue—”
“Just listen. I didn’t want to tell you before because, well, you’ve already suffered so many shocks and even good news can come too late.”
“What are you saying?” she said, irritated with him now, sure that he was trying to undermine her resolve.
“Hawaii’s been under quarantine because the virus can be latent for—”
She guessed where this was going. “For years. I know that. But if you’re trying to suggest that Tory and her children might still succumb to whatever wiped out Red Oasis—”
“They might,” he interrupted, sounding bitter. “But that’s not what I was going to say.”
“Then what?”
“Listen, and I’ll tell you. Are you ready to listen?”
“Yes, yes. Go ahead.”
“A report came out just a few weeks ago. The latest antivirals worked. The quarantine in Hawaii will continue for several more years, but all indications are the virus is gone. Wiped out. No sign of latent infections in over six months.”
Her hands felt numb; she felt barely able to shuffle her feet as she moved to take a seat in an antique armchair. “The virus is gone? How can they know that?”
“Blood tests. And the researchers say that what they’ve learned can be applied to other contagions. That what happened in Hawaii doesn’t ever have to happen again.”
Progress? A reprieve against the long decline?
“There’s more, Susannah.”
The way he said it—his falling tone—it was a warning that set her tired heart pounding.