Mars Plus

Chapter 14 The Secret Underground

By waiting until the middle of the afternoon, Demeter was fairly sure Lole Mitsuno would be out studying rocks somewhere, looking for new water, and Ellen Sorbel would have her head in a computer program, doing ditto. Still, Demeter crept warily over the algae-slimed walkway, listening for voices or other sounds coming from the secret room.

All she heard was the thunk-thunk of the liquid surface in the tanks, thrumming in an outlet pipe off along the perimeter somewhere.

Beyond the tankage, she found the abandoned tunnel and the plain steel door. Demeter's memories of the sexual minuet leading up to last night's encounter with Mitsuno were a little hazy; had the door been locked? If not then, it was now—with a flat metal hasp and a big tumbler lock.

Demeter wrapped her fingers around the lock's smooth, stainless-steel case. She gave it an experimental tug; the shank jerked solidly on the thick metal staple. Demeter looked at the face of the lock's black dial. Forty white hash marks, numbered off by fives, spun under a triangular marker etched into the rim. She flipped the case up and read off the backside that this was a Crypton lock, serial number AB-2301435-YA.

What they teach you only in Elements of Espionage 101: every commercial lock comes with a default combination. For the convenience of lock company salespeople and troubleshooters, the standard combination is keyed to all those fussy little letters that are part of the serial number. For example, all Cryptons of the "YA" series initially open with the sequence 7-14-38, always going right-left-right and being sure to come all the way back around past the second number on your way to the third. Of course, the default combination can always be changed. That takes the customer, or the sales representative, about twenty minutes with a micropick and a jewelers loupe. Not everyone bothers.

Fifteen seconds later, Demeter had the lock off the hasp and was putting her weight against the door.

Scree-eee! Rusty hinges protested, but the door moved.

Inside, she reached around in the folds of cloth on the nearest wall until she found the switch that activated the leeched power circuit. The caged bulbs came on, showing the cave's interior. Coghlan walked past the bed and the hanging that closed off the chemical toilet. She was headed for the back wall.

Something very spooky was happening in this place.

Everyone of her acquaintance had seemed to know within hours last night that she had gone missing. Not just that she had wandered outside the purview of the video lenses and earjacks that were scattered around the complex. People must do that hundreds of times a day: when they went outside on the surface or sat quietly in their rooms or fetched something out of a broom closet. No, for nine hours there the grid and its systems had been totally blind to her. Not just unplugged, as she preferred her cybernetic eavesdroppers. But banished.

Demeter rubbed the black, wide-weave mesh that draped these rock walls and ceiling. It seemed to be some kind of slippery plastic, maybe an acrylic fiber. She picked the warp and weft apart with her fingernails. Deep in the fabric, she found what looked like a metallic thread. She traced it down, plucking the black strands apart at spaced intervals, until the wire came out at the hem. There, under a blob of solder, it joined another wire running parallel to the floor. Demeter followed the latter to one of the pitons anchoring the cloth. The base wire was wrapped and soldered around the steel rod. And the rod, by the look of it, was grounded at least nine or ten centimeters into the native stone.

What could all this metal be for?

There was an old device—the Faraday shield—that anyone could make by simply connecting a set of parallel wires across one end, then grounding the common point. It was used to block electrostatic charges and to keep a voltage potential from building up between whatever lay on one side of the shield and the other. That would be useful, certainly, in protecting this room's contents from electrolytic corrosion, say, from seeping groundwater. Or it might screen out static noise that would interfere with delicate circuitry or degrade radio reception inside the room.

But would such a screen also serve to block out electromagnetic transmissions? Would it, perhaps, shield circuitry cached in this hideaway from detection by distant sensors? Would it protect the occupants from surveillance by telemetry?

Demeter had taken only the basic science-survey courses recommended for junior diplomats. But she remembered that, back in the twentieth century, when telecommunications signals and power transmission often went by underground copper cable, anti-corrosion devices attached to the outside of the sheathing didn't inhibit the signal-carrying capability. Nor did they stop eavesdroppers and power thieves who leeched off the surface of the cable with electromagnetic toroids.

Clearly, the wire mesh surrounding this room was intended to do something. It might be keeping something out, random voltages or sapping currents. But it would have nothing to do with keeping secrets inside. Quod erat demonstrandum....

In following the hem of fabric across the end of the secret room, Demeter had to pull out part of the store of canned goods and survival gear she had discovered last night. A draft, down near the floor, stirred the fine hairs on the back of her hand. There was an opening behind the boxes—had to be.

She set about moving the big items farther into the room. When she had opened a squeeze space, Demeter pushed the cloth aside and wiggled under the low lintel into a short tunnel. It was about three meters long, negotiable on her hands and knees, with a dull, caged light at the end. Clearly, the same purloined circuit that illuminated the first room brightened the space beyond.

The second room was hung with the same dark cloth but had none of the comfortable old furnishings or other amenities. Just a table of recycled, pressed plastic and a collection of... components.

Without touching anything, Demeter examined them. As she traced the shielded wires and mesh-sheathed ribbon cables between them, she began to get a sense of their function.

This box, certainly, was a power supply. It was fairly big, slab-sided, with a heatsink on the back and a red switch on the front. The switch had a "zero" and a "one" position, with a light-emitting diode aligned with the one's place. The black cable coming out of it connected to...

That cabinet was flat, like a pizza box. It spider-webbed with parallel cabling into a nest of modules that might-could be peripherals or possibly identical memory units. The cabinets flatness convinced her it contained a breadboard: that is, a hand-built circuit with the chips laid flat on an embedded gold-copper trace and soldered into position. That was how cybernetics inventors made one-offs and prototypes. The best commercial, mass-produced circuits from Earth, on the other hand, were spherically cast in layers under a microgravity environment. Like Sugar, they were a single unit, resembling pearls.

And this nest of modules—probably memories, now that she thought about it—all had a damaged look about them. Each of the ceramic cases had been cracked open, something done to their innards, and then resealed with liquid epoxy. . . . Very hand-built. And by a certifiable paranoid.

What Demeter couldn't identify was the input-output module; the system had no keyboard, trackball, or display device, no helmet or gloves. That, and there didn't seem to be any connection to network resources. She looked for cables leaving the tabletop in any direction, or something that might double as an antenna, and found nothing. Except, of course, that the grid could hear a cyber of this power and complexity just from the electromagnetic emanations of its cabling, sheathed or not. Simply turning it on would send out a radio-frequency signature.

"Why, you bastard!" Coghlan said aloud, meaning Mitsuno.

Despite all his assurances, and in the face of his apparent compassion and tenderness, Lole had lied to her. From the evidence spread out on this table, his secure little hideaway—"someplace you'll like," he had said, where he "usually required a strip-search" before allowing the uninitiated to enter—had housed its own cyber device all along.

Counting up the memory modules and dividing by four, she guesstimated that it operated well within the range of artificially intelligent. Probably with a Stanford-Sunnyvale quotient of sixteen hundred or more. And anything it sensed and processed, the grid would know a nanosecond later through electromagnetic interferometry.

"You unparalleled bastard!"

Lole Mitsuno and Ellen Sorbel entered their favorite watering hole, still wrangling about the botched datafields on the Hellas survey.

"You know there's no way a bed of olivine crystals can have extruded sideways into those sedimentary layers," Mitsuno told her. "I know there's no way it could have happened. Olivine is igneous rock. When it enters a formation, all the orderly structure just evaporates. Literally. So tell that to your cyber."

"I tried, but he's stubborn."

"Well then, we'll talk him over with Wyatt. Maybe the boss program can pound some sense into his diodes—"

"There you are!"

Lole glanced up and saw Demeter Coghlan bearing down on their table. From the flare in her eyes, she wasn't the happy woman he'd left ten hours ago.

"Demeter! Good to see—"

"Do you want to tell me what that tunnel's really for?" she demanded.

"What tunnel?" he asked, face dropping into a mask.

"Lole, what have you—?" Ellen sounded worried.

"The secret room where we . . ." Demeter glanced at Sorbel and her jaw tightened. "Where we fucked last night."

"Lole!" Ellen gasped. "Did you—?"

But Mitsuno cut her off, talking fast. "As I explained, Dem, its a place where some of us go to unwind, to discuss things in private, maybe hold a litde party. Its no big secret. Really."

Demeter chewed this over for just ten seconds.

"Then will you also explain to me," she said in a lower tone, "why the minute I go there, everyone is worried about it?"

"Who's worried?"

"Sun, the Korean playboy, and Orthis, the North Zealand negotiator. Both of them came asking after me this morning. Both said they missed me last night. They went looking right away and couldn't find me."

"Well, I think I mentioned that those tunnels aren't exactly open to the public," he replied slowly, trying to signal her with his eyebrows. Hadn't she figured out yet that the grid listened everywhere? There are no real services in that part of the complex. There are no terminals or glasslines, let alone electronic, uh, observation points. So people looking for you might not be able to, uh, contact you."

"You're lying to me," she countered sharply. "You've got a computer in there."

Lole heard Ellen draw breath beside him.

"We do?' he asked, once more semaphoring with his eyes. This was extremely dangerous talk, and Demeter ought to understand that. "How do you know?"

"I saw it."

"Oh? And when?"

"This afternoon. I went back there."

"Why would you do that?"

Coghlan paused. "I was looking for... my earrings. I lost them last night."

Mitsuno honestly couldn't remember whether she had been wearing jewelry or not. He remembered Demeter seeming awfully naked when, statutorily, she had been fully dressed.

"You should have asked me," he chided. "I would have looked for them."

"You were busy today." She shrugged. "And besides, you never said not to go back."

"But the door was locked."

"A cheap mechanical tumbler. They teach us how to get around those."

"Who teaches you?" he wondered aloud.

"My university courses, for future diplomats."

"Ah! Spies."

"You got it."

"I'm sorry about the lock," he said, hoping to distract her. "But, of course, with no power, we can't use an electronic thumb pad."

"So I figured. But then, you've got enough power for that computer."

Lole sat up straight and looked her levelly in the eye. "If there's a computer in that room, Demeter, it's news to me. You must've seen something else and thought it was a computer."

"I'm not that dumb, Lole."

"Demeter, dear ..." Ellen cut in.

The Coghlan woman barely glanced at her.

"That whole corridor is like a public dump, you know," Ellen went on smoothly. "I'm sure you'll find pieces and parts of terminals, virtual-reality gear, old cybers, bit registers, lots of stuff, just strewn around." Now Sorbel was wig-wagging with her eyebrows. "Some of it's probably even wired together, as it was when the owner tossed it. But none of that junk's working. You understand?"

"So? You're in on it, too?" The way Demeter sounded, the news didn't surprise her much.

"In on what, dear?'

"On whatever it is you two're trying to hide." With that, Demeter puckered her lips in a frown, nodded once, stood up, and walked away.

Ellen turned to Mitsuno. "Lole, what have you done?"

"I don't know, but I guess I'd better undo it."

"Do it tonight," Sorbel told him.

Ordered him.

Demeter was keying into her hotel room when a hand touched her elbow.

"Demeter?'

She knew without looking that it was Lole Mitsuno, probably come to give her more explanations. Demeter jerked her arm out of his grasp.

"Don't try to mess with my mind, Lole. I know what I know."

Her thumb stabbed at the lockplate. The door clicked open.

"I have something to show you," he said. He took her elbow again, but lightly.

"I don't want to—" But she didn't pull away again.

Through the crack in the door, her cubicle beckoned. It was a safe place for her. It had a bed, all her clothing, access to metered water, a terminal she could eventually teach to take accurate dictation, and a degree of privacy. After the shit that had come down today, all she wanted was to go in there, lie down, and not even dream.

"What?" Demeter asked finally.

"I can't tell you." Lole was doing that thing with the eyebrows again. Was it some kind of twitch? "I have to show you."

He was drawing her down the corridor, but gently. It was like the tug of microgravity, or a cat's-paw breeze.

She sighed. "Is it far?"

"You know the way."

"All right." She pulled the door closed, turned, and came with him.

After three changes of level and four cross tunnels, she dragged her steps. "If you think I'm going back to that room and ... service you, think again. Lole, I am not in the mood."

"It's not that."

"But you said the room was for ... partying."

"Among other things. We have a lot to talk over."

"We did talk, at the Hoplite, remember?"

"Talk over in private, I mean." He headed off down the corridor. She could either stare at his back, or follow.

Demeter hurried to keep up.

Over the bridge and into the abandoned workings, Mitsuno led her up to the sheetmetal door. He moved his shoulder to hide the lock as he twirled the tumbler, then grunted and let her see.

"You know how to spring this?"

"Nope."

"Then how—?"

"I know the combination."

He shook his head. "I've got to be more careful, next time." Mitsuno went in and turned on the lights. The room was just as they had left it. Demeter was nothing if not a neat spy

"Now, where was it you thought you saw a computer?" he prompted.

"Not 'thought.' Did see. Back behind that pile of stuff—" She pointed to the replaced supplies. "—there's a secret room. More secret, anyway. The computer is on a table in there."

Mitsuno relaxed. His shoulders came down a fraction. "You really did a job in here, didn't you?" He went over to the pile, tipped the base box up on a corner, and pivoted it out of the way. Then he went down in a duck-walk and passed through the connecting tunnel. Demeter followed him.

"Yup, that's a computer all right," he said, standing in front of the table.

"Like I said, you lied to me."

"No, I didn't. It wasn't turned on when we were making love. That's your condition, isn't it?"

"But you said these things were always on."

"Not this one." He reached over to the switch on the power supply, flipped it to the one's position. A heat crackle from the wires and boards was the only response. "Now it's on."

"What's the input-output scheme here?" she asked. "I couldn't figure that part out."

"Voice operated, like your chrono."

"Oh. Can it hear us?'

"I hear you."

The sound was deep and hollow, like a rusty old lawnmower. Whoever programmed this machine hadn't paid much attention to the personality modules—if there were any—or to the vocal inflection. It was the same as with the lock on the door: default values had been good enough.

"What are ... what are you called?" Demeter asked.

"Lethe."

"What's that?'

"That's Ellen's idea of a joke," Mitsuno explained. "Lethe is a river in Greece, on the Eurasian Continent, Earth. Its water is supposed to have a hypnotic quality that makes people forget."

"Forget what?"

"Everything they hear, for one. Lethe is our community memory. We come here, tell him something, and then we can forget about it. He does the remembering and correlating."

"Who is 'we'? You and Ellen and who else?"

"A group of us. You've met Dr. Wa Lixin? He's part of our organization."

"Are you a rebel group?" Demeter asked.

"You might say that. Well, yes, that's probably what we are. Revolutionaries."

"Then who are you rebelling against? You Martians don't have much of a government. None that I can see. There's barely a city administration around here. So who?'

"Against the machines, as I told you before. We don't trust them."

"Yet you use them. This one, for example." She pointed to the components piled on the table.

"Lethe is special. Ellen built him in here, from the circuit boards up. Each piece was obtained separately and at random, wiped down electronically, brought in here, and assembled. Lethe only knows what Ellen put in his head. It was all done with voice programming, starting from a kernel system that she wrote out in longhand on a scribe pad, all zeros and ones. He brings in nothing from the outside except raw silicon and empty registers. And, of course, he has no connection to outside resources. Lethe is our child, born and bred."

"Why go to all that trouble?" Demeter asked.

"He is our safeguard. Lethe protects us from the grid finding out what we know. In the early days, we kept notes in pencil on paper. It was cumbersome, but safe. Except that paper is a special requisition on Mars, as are pencils, pens, and charcoal sticks. We pretended an interest in the arts and asked for paints, but even that drew inquiries from the accounting section. So, rather than attract further attention to ourselves, we decided to make Lethe.... He puts our collection and collation effort on a much higher level, too."

"That's a nice story," Demeter said. "But of course the grid knows about him."

"It can't!" Mitsuno replied sharply.

"Sure it can. Lethe radiates low-frequency electromagnetic fields, like any device. The grid's sensors are proficient at detecting and coupling onto those."

"This place is thoroughly shielded."

"Not really. I've seen your Faraday screen," Demeter said. "It'll keep out static electricity, probably. Maybe even ground faults, too. But it won't block field emissions. Anyone who holds a pickup within a kilometer of this room can read your machine's mind like an open book."

While she talked, Mitsuno started grinning. By the time she finished, he was laughing out loud. "Between us and the grids closest nexus, the main array in Tharsis Montes, there's about a million liters of water," he said. "That tank farm blocks all kinds of radiation."

"What about roving units on the surface?' She pointed straight up, over their heads. "Like your walkers?'

"Can they read a source through forty meters of solid rock? Remember, this patch of ground has a high ferrous content," he added seriously. "Our tunnel is dug in too deep. We've done spot checks. Trust me, nobody—and no thing—can find this machine."

"All right." She sighed. "I'll accept, provisionally, that you've found a way to avoid alerting the grid with your activities. ... That's assuming, of course, the grid much cares what you think about it. And I don't know why it should. It's just a machine."

Mitsuno looked thoughtful. While he pondered, the man reached over and casually switched Lethe off, without even a 'Thank you' for its services. Demeter felt a pang at that. An artificial intelligence, even a caged one—no, especially a caged one—was not made any saner by having its sensorium interrupted at random. With that kind of treatment, Lethe's world-view must be somewhere between that of a toddler and a psychopath by now. Demeter thought of that deadened voice. She wouldn't want to spend much time with Lethe, or entrust it with any vital information.

"I'm not sure exactly where your feelings lie," Mitsuno told her. "You're clearly afraid of the machines, because of the accident one of them dealt you. You'll hardly undress in front of them, and that implies a certain deep-seated fear. Yet, at the same time, you don't seem to think much of them. In your own words, they are just machines.' As if that explained everything. I'm confused, Demeter."

"Its really simple." She took a calming breath. "I would prefer not to think of them at all. I'd rather deal with people. Or with inanimate objects, like pens and paper, knives and forks. For me, the grid and its cousins are a middle ground. Not human. But not inanimate, either. I don't know how to relate."

"But can we trust you to keep our secret?"

"Oh, sure! I mean, what's to tell?"

Lole was frowning now.

"Reading motives into the grid is the newest indoor parlor game these days," Demeter hurried on. "All said and done, it's just a switching system, isn't it? To be sure, it's very big, very fast, and so darn complex that it sometimes tosses off apparently random results. After a while it can begin to feel, well, alive. Like the weather used to be—on Earth, at least. Anything that seems to move of its own volition, and that has the power to knock you down when it wants to, becomes a magnet for people's curiosity. Give them enough time and insufficient understanding, and they'll eventually worship it as a god."

"Yet you don't believe," Lole said simply.

"I sure as hell do not." She smiled back at him.

"What if I were to tell you that the Autochthonous Grid, comprising the interlinked systems on both Mars and Earth, was tossing off more than just random numbers?"

Demeter's smile held, but she could feel it trying to slip. Mitsuno read her expression and nodded. "You don't believe that. But it's true. The evidence is all there, stored in Lethe, and, if we had all night and most of tomorrow, he could spell it out for you. But the short form is that we've found imbalances all over the system. Debits for consumption of energy and supplies that aren't accounted for anywhere to anyone's credit. Our watchers say the grid is up to something, but the pattern hasn't emerged yet."

"Okay, I'll bite. What do you think is happening?"

"The grid is preparing an attack against humanity."

Demeter kept herself unfazed. "Give me a for-instance."

"Three shiploads of industrial-grade explosives— inert, high-impact resin, with fusing modules—were ordered for delivery to Mars, ostensibly for mining purposes. As near as we can trace from the cargo manifests and hull numbers, they never arrived. Hell, they never left low Earth orbit. When you query the grid about them, though, it denies that the transports even exist— and that's going all the way back to their construction in orbit and the waybills on other cargoes that we know traveled in them. Just another random number?"

"All right, the grid made an error and tried to cover for it," Demeter said. "Could be the work of a virus."

"Then there's the new power satellite, the one being built over the Marineris region. Ellen asked you to check it out, didn't she?"

"I—uh—" Coghlan stopped to think. "I took a packaged V/R tour of the power stations, yes. And I thought it included a pass through the one under construction, leeched off the construction monitoring circuits. But apparently the signals got crossed up and I was seeing something else."

"Funny about that, hey?'

"What are you trying to say?"

"The machines are building that station, ostensibly under contract to the North Zealanders. That much is confirmed by our mutual friend, Nancy Cuneo, although she's never seen plans on the satellite. No one from her agency has gone aboard to inspect the work to date, even in V/R. No one is even sure of the rated output."

"But I know that," Demeter burst in.

"You do?... Well, what is it?'

"Three times the projected consumption of the Canyonlands development, however much that is. I only know the proportions, not the numbers."

"How do you know?'

"Sun II Suk told me."

"All right, I'll get to him in a minute. . . . So, the power station is a mystery. Except that, under telescopic magnification from the planet s surface—this is working purely by optics, mind you, without any electronic image enhancement—we can detect some strange features on the outside. We see things that look like turrets, maybe weapons pods. Who knows what's happening on the inside?"

"You think three shiploads of high explosives are going to end up as part of the package? Making a weapon they can hold, literally, over your heads?"

"I don't know what to think at the moment. Just that, when we try to communicate with the grid— your simple, garden-variety, random-number-tossing machine—about these things, then we get screwy answers. It gives us facts that don't compute. And the pattern of lies seems to be, well, pretty desperate."

"Hmm . . ." Demeter stood, looking down at the inert cyber on the table. It was an ugly thing, made of dented metal and twisted wire. It had none of the compactness and spherical elegance of her lost Sugar.

"What do you know about friend Sun?" she asked finally.

'That's why I wanted to search you. Sun II Suk's been a busy little bee, fluttering all over Tharsis Montes, from the moment he arrived. And he asks questions like—"

"I know." Demeter rolled her eyes.

"He showed a keen interest in Ellen and me. He kept dropping hints, asking leading questions. I think he was angling to get invited here."

"But you didn't bring him, did you?'

"No. During the quarantine examination, Dr. Lee found an implant in his skull. Sun said it was a hormone-triggering device, to aid in his diet. But the ultrasonics in Dr. Lee's examining table showed it was self-powered and had a lot of circuitry inside. More than a hormone pump would need. We think it might have been subverted to other uses."

"Such as?"

"Monitoring and recording whatever Sun sees and hears. Then reporting back to some control device— attached to the grid, of course, either here on Mars or somewhere on Earth. Not that it makes much difference." Mitsuno shrugged. "Lagtime in the signal processing, is all."

"Golly."

"We thought you might have an intelligent prosthesis, too. But you're clean."

"Thank you."

Mitsuno led her back out through the low tunnel, into the first room where they could sit on the comfortable, castoff chairs.

"So, what does it all mean?" she asked.

"I wish I could give you a hard answer, but all we've got is guesswork. We don't know for certain that anything is really wrong with the computers. But the, um, rather artful lack of certainty worries us."

"It's like the old argument about the intelligence of dolphins," Demeter said. "No one's ever seen them attack a human being. So, either they are secredy hostile to humans and hiding their attacks, or they're positively friendly because they sense a comparable intellect despite the whale hunting and other predatory things humans have done. Both answers would tend to prove their intelligence. Similarly, the grid either is producing systematic errors, or it's operating secretly and hiding its intentions."

"A perfectly circular argument," Lole pointed out.

"Yeah—except that both answers are a sign of bad things for us humans."

"We've considered turning all the computers off, you know. That would be very difficult, of course, because the grid controls our air and water supplies. In fact, the whole environmental balance of the tunnel complexes up here is under cyber control."

"Not to mention a lot of your social dynamics," Demeter pointed out. She was thinking of the system of electronic monitoring, gas sniffers, food additives, and homing bracelets that maintained the heterogeneous population of Tharsis Montes somewhere below the boiling point.

"Of course," she went on, "if you try to shut down the machines and fail, you might precipitate the very thing you're afraid of."

"Right," he said with a nod. "Retaliation. That's why I have to ask you—as a friend, as someone who cares what happens to Ellen and me and all the other people you've met—not to talk about anything you've seen or heard here."

"I won't."

"Not even among ourselves, unless it's in the confines of this room."

"I said I wouldn't."

"It's not that we're afraid the grid is going to send the Citizen's Militia to round us up. It's just that, when we're ready to take action, we have to catch the machines completely off guard, with something they're not ready for. We have to succeed on the first try"

"I know." Demeter nodded. "They're very quick, like nanoseconds."

"And they'll never give us a second chance."