One Way

3

Frank was getting used to the taste of acid bile in his mouth, the burning in his chest and the deeper agony of feeling like he was running on knives. He was even beginning to enjoy it, after years of being numb. It was sharp and hard and relentless, a world away from the stultifying atmosphere of prison.

Even the air was different: it was needle-thin and austere, and it hurt to haul it in by the lungful. He’d never been a runner. He’d always thought himself too big and too heavy for that. What he thought, what he wanted, was no longer a consideration. He did as he was told, and right now he was being told to run up a big-ass mountain, as fast as he could. He could run down it again at a slower pace, but up was for speed-work, and his achievement was marked in splashes of vomit by the side of the trail.

He was unfit. He was a fifty-one-year-old man who’d done pretty much nothing for eight years, and eaten some pretty crappy food while doing it. Just how unfit came as a surprise: as it did, he supposed, to most.

The implant they’d inserted under the skin over his sternum talked to a computer, while the earpiece he wore told him to run to the limit of his ability. They—the medical team—wanted to know those limits. They wanted to push him right to the edge, without killing him. And sometimes, times like now, he wondered if they’d really mind if his heart burst and he dropped down right there, down among the mine tailings. For a bunch of doctors, they didn’t seem to care that much about his physical well-being, more about how best to manipulate him, puppet-like, to get more work from him.

The sky above was a deep dark blue, fading to a pale ribbon round the horizon, where the land was gray and rough-edged. His feet, encased in some surprisingly light running shoes, seemed to move of their own volition up the dusty path. A beep coincided with every second footfall, and he unconsciously fell into that rhythm. It was faster than he wanted to go, and with his position tracked by GPS, it wasn’t just his pace he needed to watch, but also his stride length. A certain speed was required. Every stride was a stretch.

He climbed. His toes dug in to the cushioning, as if trying to grip the cinder-rock trail. Sweat washed down his face, into his eyes, making them sting, into the corners of his mouth, where he tasted salt. His breathing was one-in, one-out, a pant, timed to his cadence, but never quite enough.

His calves ached like they were being flayed. And still he ran.

He ran to avoid the Hole. He ran because Mars was just over the next hill. If he could just get off the planet, then it’d be OK. He wasn’t going to crap out. He wasn’t going to fail. He’d run up and down the mountain. He’d show them what he was made of. He wasn’t going to be broken.

There came a point where all of those thoughts just faded into the background. All that was left was the road to the top, and him. It was pure and clean, and also terrible in its purity and cleanliness. Nothing existed but pain and path. The beeps were just noise, the voices in his head just static. One hundred yards. Fifty. Ten. Five. One.

He stopped, loose-limbed, leaning over. He spat on the ground. Hardly anything came out, he was so parched. He put his hands on his knees and watched the sweat drip down his nose and onto the ground. The beeping had stopped. He coughed and spat, used his already damp shirt to wipe his face, and hauled air, in a controlled, deliberate way that stopped him from hyperventilating.

He had an uninterrupted view to the east, over the salt pan in the valley and into the far distance. There was no habitation visible, and the only indications that people existed there were the contrails of planes far above him. Even the double line of fencing was invisible to his fatigue-etched sight. He was alone.

He straightened up, his hands on his hips, and lifted his chin towards the sun. There was heat in it, despite the chill wind. He had tried to forget. But the moment had gone. He’d dragged all his problems up the mountain with him, and now he had to drag them all back down.

The beep started again, and he knew better than to ignore it. The Hole beckoned. He dreamed of it most nights. The door locking behind him. The close silence. The four windowless walls.

He turned around and pointed himself down the track. Trying to get his legs to work again, trying to remember how to breathe. Beep. Beep.

Going down was a different discipline to up. He had to use his heels on the loose-surfaced path. Too fast, and he’d career head-first down across the rocky slopes, certainly injuring himself, possibly killing himself, but crapping out one way or another. Too slow, and he’d be made to do it again. And he didn’t want that either.

He ran, each foot-strike jarring his toes against the front of his trainers. Several of his toenails had already turned black. One had bled so profusely he’d had to soak the sock off, and the nail had come with it. The medical team hadn’t cared. Just as long as he could carry on with the battery of tests and exercises they threw at him.

He hadn’t met any of the other astronauts yet, so he had no way of comparing experiences. He had to assume there were others. There was no good reason for him to be first and only. They’d promised him a team. All it meant was that they were keeping them separate, for whatever purpose, and they’d bring them together at some point. Perhaps it was just until they’d completed their medical tests—no point in integrating someone into a group only for them to crap out on health grounds.

And maybe there were more than seven of them. Maybe they were competing against each other, unseen, as to who filled the crew slots. Those that didn’t make it would end up in the Hole. That wasn’t a happy thought. He was a middle-aged man, up against potentially younger and fitter specimens from Panopticon’s jails. He could lose out through no fault of his own.

He concentrated on running for a while, feeling the solid impact of each footfall, the way his body adjusted to the changes in contour and surface. Simply winning this race could mean he was condemning someone else to life in solitary. He wasn’t comfortable with that, either.

Yes, he’d shot a man. Yes, he’d done it deliberately, in a planned act of violence. He’d put him in the ground, and he’d had no qualms about it. Someone else might have continued looking for ways to solve the problem of his son’s addiction and his slow and inevitable enmeshment with dealing and criminality, but there’d been other things they’d both tried over the years, and none of them had worked.

Frank’s decision to put a bullet in the brain of his boy’s dealer had been coolly calculated and carefully weighed. They were all someone’s son, but he’d decided that his own was the one who mattered most. There’d been no innocent parties. Not the perp, not the victim. That, he’d come to terms with.

Sending someone to the Hole, though, just for being beaten to the punch by a determined, driven fifty-one-year-old? That wasn’t on the level. Another black mark in Panopticon’s ledger, making them fight each other for the limited spaces available. Were they running a sweepstake on it? Did bears shit in the wood? Someone, somewhere, was betting on him blowing up and failing.

The path started to flatten out. His feet hurt. His throat was raw. His shoulders ached. Why would they ache so much? Then he caught himself throwing his hands forwards and backwards, forwards and backwards, as a counterweight to balance his body. Every step, he swung. Could he do that more efficiently? Probably. As if there weren’t enough things to concentrate on already, there was now his form. He couldn’t afford to waste energy in exaggerated movements, because he had less of it. He had to be wise, and conserve it.

He couldn’t do anything about the others, he decided. They couldn’t do anything about him, either. He wasn’t going to slow down, stop, give up. So sorry, unknown person, even though they weren’t Frank’s enemy, and he wasn’t theirs. It was Panopticon, and this other company, this Xenosystems Operations, who owned them. It was the man who’d intimidated him on that first day here. Brack. He’d overheard that name. At least, that was what he thought he’d heard. Brack, the shaven-headed smirker who delighted in Frank’s struggles and went thin-lipped when he jumped another hurdle.

Frank wouldn’t try and take him on. He had excellent impulse control. Certainly compared to the average con. Someone else would try, though, even if it meant disappearing into the Hole.

He was on the flat. The beeps slowed slightly, but that just meant he had to take longer strides, go a little faster. Just not as punishing as the climb. They’d really pushed him on the ascent today. And still he’d made it, through willpower alone. That wasn’t going to show up on any medical chart, was it? Courage, fortitude, grit. He’d deliberately shot a man to save his son, knowing that he’d have to endure whatever sentence they handed down. He had courage by the bucketful. It was his aging body he was worried about.

He carried on, down the path, listening for the beeps, pre-empting them, and then into the long slow descent into the valley where the training base was. Squat concrete slabs as yet unbuilt on. Stainless steel pipework extruding from pressure vessels. Long, low hangars, large enough to swallow a jet. Blocks of identikit offices. Electric carts going from one to another, hauling trailers or people. Caverns in the side of the valley, with wide trackways leading to them. Some of the structures he’d been in. Most of them he hadn’t. Given that his every hour was dictated, there hadn’t been the opportunity to look around, let alone explore. Doors were locked, and opened only on a fingerprint. His finger worked only for the doors he was supposed to use, and no others.

His waking and sleeping, his resting and his activity, what he ate and drank and when, were all strictly timetabled. When he wasn’t tossing his cookies out on the trail, he was on the treadmill with a mask over his face, or making simple models out of building blocks from pictures on a screen, or watching yet another instructional video on Mars. The medics had spent longer than his wife—ex-wife—had staring into his eyes, and X-rayed him top to bottom.

And speaking of bottoms, they’d gone in with cameras: but at least they’d had the decency to lube up first.

Mental tests. Physical tests. Everything they could throw at him, they did. He had no idea if he’d passed or failed, but he was still there, so that had to count for something.

He reached the post. It was just that, a metal post in the ground, at the corner of two concrete paths, but it marked his beginning and end points. He knew better than to slow down for it. He slapped his hand on it as he passed—that did nothing, he just did it because he could—and then eased off. He felt a deep and abiding weariness steal over him as he stopped, and he wondered how long he could keep it up for. Long enough to get to Mars, for certain. There wasn’t an alternative.

The beeps ended, and a voice spoke. He had no idea if it was a computer-generated voice, or someone with such precise diction that it sounded like a computer. Either way, it never seemed to respond to his replies. “Report to Building Six, Room Two-zero-five. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged,” said Frank. That was mostly all he ever said. It was mostly all he was required to say. Brack needed more, but encounters with him were usually only once every few days, which was more than enough.

Frank wiped his face with his top again, pressing the cloth against his skin, drawing it roughly down to his neck and letting go. Building Six was that one, over there. He wasn’t expected to run, but he wasn’t to dawdle, either. The staff used carts to get around, but they were print-activated too, and he didn’t have the authorization.

He’d named things, in the absence of being told their official names. He was currently stood in the Valley. The decaying, mine-ridden mountain was the Mountain. There was also the Wire, which confined him, and the Bunker, where he slept in Building Three. The medical center was officially Building Two, but he called it the Blood Bank, on account of what they did to him there.

He walked up the ramp to Building Six, pressed his finger to the glass plaque and waited for the door. There were people walking backwards and forwards inside the foyer, but he knew better than to engage with them, or tap on the frame to get them to let him in. It wasn’t going to happen.

The door’s lock clicked. He pushed against it, went through, and waited for it to shut behind him. He’d get a ticket if he didn’t. If he collected too many tickets? He didn’t know: he couldn’t ask anyone to find out. Not the medics. Not the other staff. Especially not Brack. But he could guess.

Room Two-zero-five was on the second floor. He pressed his finger against the lock, waited for it to cycle, and went in. He’d been expecting another training video—but not a roomful of cons as well.

That was what they all were, clearly. They’d arranged themselves in the room in a way that was instantly familiar to anyone from prison: the stronger, more confident ones asserting themselves by taking space, the weaker going to the corners. Six of them. They looked at him, stained with sweat, out of breath. The older, gray-haired woman with the cheekbones and the eyebrows, who’d taken center-stage on one side of the boardroom-length table, wrinkled her nose at him. The thin black kid and the curly-headed white boy—and he was just a boy—were down the far end. Opposite Grandma was another woman, coffee skin and spiral hair. A moon-faced man was right by the door, and the last member was… vast.

Huge arms, huge legs, neck like a tire. Blond stubble on his scalp. And the tattoos. It took a moment for Frank to scan them all. 1488 on his forehead. HATE on the knuckles of the one visible hand. Swastika on his neck. Aryan Brotherhood.

Frank looked a little too long, and the man caught his stare. He gave a slight nod—I see you—then returned his attention to the short wall at the end of the room, which was one big screen.

“They made me run up the Mountain,” said Frank. “Sorry I’m late. And a bit funky.”

The moon-faced man kicked out a chair next to him at the same moment that Frank’s earpiece told him he needed to sit down. They were all wearing earpieces. They were all wearing identical uniforms. Frank realized with a start that this was his team, his crew of seven.

He slid into the proffered chair, and the moment his backside hit the plastic, the screen flickered and lit up. A commentary started to play in Frank’s ear, and judging by the expression of everyone else, in theirs, too. “This is a Xenosystems Operations training video. You will find the following orientation information vital for the successful outcome of your mission. Please pay close attention throughout.”

They all started like that.

“Congratulations. You have been selected as trainee crew for Mars Base One, mankind’s first permanent presence on the Martian surface. This prestigious project will be built and staffed by Xenosystems Operations on behalf of NASA, for the good of our nation, and all mankind. You have been recruited to help XO to fulfill that contract. You will leave Earth in six months’ time—”

Six months. Among those who realized just how short a time that was, there was a murmur of consternation.

“—and travel to Mars. You will be placed in suspended animation for the duration of the journey, which will take in the region of eight calendar months—”

More murmurings.

“—and on arrival, Phase one will begin immediately with assembly of the prefabricated module units. Establishing early self-sufficiency of the base is an absolute priority. Synthesizing enough oxygen and water to provide yourself with life support, growing your own food, and generating your own electricity will be critical milestones on this path. Your complete co-operation is needed in order to complete the base within the time allotted.

“NASA astronauts will already be in flight on your arrival. There is no facility to allow for, nor is there expectation of, a delay in the base’s readiness. After the base has been constructed, you will spend time rigorously testing the structure and infrastructure, and then enter Phase two, a maintenance mode which requires you to maintain your particular aspect of the base’s systems. If necessary, the delivery of extra materials to extend and re-equip the base will require you to resume your original Phase one functions.

“Visiting scientist astronauts and other NASA staff will have priority over your time. You will treat them with the utmost respect and assist them when and where required, remembering that you will remain serving prisoners and subject to the Californian penal code for the whole length of your sentences.”

The graphics playing on the screen showed the landing ship touching gently down on a brick-red plain, already scattered with supply canisters. People—it could only be Frank and the others—emerged and went to the nearest canister and constructed a towing vehicle. While that drove off and corralled the other supplies, the rest of the white-spacesuited crew set to and built the first module. In a slightly improbable time, they connected it to a second, and pressurized it.

Almost as if by magic, solar panels appeared, and a satellite dish. More modules popped up, with parts coming from the recovered and neatly laid-out rows of canisters. The landing craft was off to one side, and nearby there were three parallel lines of modules nestled together on the Martian surface.

Frank turned his head sideways. The base was bigger than he’d thought. Fifteen separate sections, with another couple of independent units close by. Big set of panels, dish, antennae. Other machinery he didn’t yet know the function of.

Six months to learn how to do all that? They needed to all train on how to fit the airlocks, and the structural flooring of the modules. There’d be more specialized work inside: bedrooms and a sick bay and maintenance bays and the greenhouse, and they needed power and water and air before they could grow so much as a single potato.

He glanced at the others. The black woman opposite was staring at the screen, one eyebrow arched and the muscles at the side of her jaw flexing. Down his end of the table, they all appeared to be either stunned or frowning. Being exposed to the enormity of the task had put their meager training so far into grim perspective. Frank had been there since… when? The end of February? It was, was—Did he even know? April? May? Three months, tops. They’d told him pretty much jack, and he guessed that went for the others too.

The graphics continued. Once the base was mostly complete, another ship arrived in the vicinity. Buggies went out—though Frank couldn’t see where the additional buggy had come from—and collected the crew.

The film finished. That was it. That was all they were going to get for now. Frank leaned back in his seat so far that it creaked.

“Well, that was a crock of shit,” said the gray-haired woman.

“Six months?”

“A year asleep in a spaceship? Is that even legal?”

“We can’t learn to do all that. The regular astronauts are like, trained for years.”

Frank tilted his head until he was staring up at the ceiling. “We’ve got a choice,” he said. “We can either do it, or we spend the rest of our lives in the Hole.”

“The way I’m looking at it,” said the moon-faced man next to him, “that might be more certain.”

“How many teams do you think they got doing this?” Frank slowly winched his body back until he could rest his elbows on the tabletop. “How many other groups like us do you think they have?”

“What do you mean?” asked the thin black kid, and Gray-hair rolled her eyes.

“God’s sake, it’s obvious what he means. You think we’re the only ones? You think that if we get our panties in a bunch here, it’ll have any impact on them at all? They’ll pick another team of people who might actually want to go.”

“You all heard what I’ve just heard: selected as trainee crew. Trainee. We can still flunk this,” said Frank. “But let me tell you now: every one of us in this room is going to Mars. It doesn’t matter if none of us likes anyone else. If the only way I get to Mars is by you getting to Mars, that’s how it’s going to happen. Works both ways: you’re relying on me to get you there, too. That’s pretty much the bottom line.”

“So you,” and Gray-hair gestured at Moon-face, “whatever your name is: I’m not going in the Hole for you, and neither is anyone else. You get your shit together right now.”

“Or what, lady?”

“Or Adolf over there will rip your head off and stick your tongue up your ass.”

Everyone looked at the neo-Nazi man-mountain. He shrugged. “I don’t do that any more. But neither do I want the Hole.”

Moon-face tapped his fingers on the table. “You got a potty mouth, lady.”

“Doctor, or Alice.”

“You don’t even know my name.”

“But you’ll remember mine.” She stared around the table. “No one craps out. Everyone got that?”

“Who said anything about crapping out?” said the black kid. “I’m going to goddamn Mars.”

“We’ve got six months to get this right,” said Adolf. “I’m not going to let anyone down.”

“Yeah. I guess so.” The black woman held up her hands. “It’s not like we’ve anything left to lose, right?”

The white boy squirmed in his seat when he realized people were looking at him. “It’s, it’s, it’s… fine, it’s fine. OK. It’ll be fine.”

Moon-face nodded slowly. “OK. If that’s what everyone wants. Just don’t blame me when you hate it up there.”

Frank steepled his fingers. “We’ve been bought and sold. Xenosystems owns Panopticon. Panopticon owns us. But we all said yes when they asked us to go to Mars. It’s going to be as good as we want to make it. It’s going to be our home from now on. You want to shit the bed? You know where the airlock is.”

“That,” said Doctor Alice, “sounds like a threat.”

“No. Just the truth. It goes for me as much as it does everyone else. We do our jobs, we take care of ourselves, respect each other as human beings. You wanted more out of life than that? Maybe we should have all thought just a little bit harder about our life choices.”

“He’s not wrong,” said Adolf, into the silence that followed. His voice was like a truck passing too close. “Now, I got the little voice in my ear telling me I got to be somewhere else. Play nice.”

He slowly got to his feet, seemingly filling the room as he did so, and then ducked out of the room with one more word: “Acknowledged.”

The black woman pushed herself away from the table. “Me too. Acknowledged.”

Then the kid. “I’m going to fucking Mars. Don’t forget that now.” Followed by, “Acknowledged, already. Acknowledged.”

One by one, they left, until it was just Frank and Alice. He waited for the door to close before speaking. “I remember you,” he said. “I know what you did.”

“No one else seems to,” she said. She looked at Frank, held his gaze. “We can keep it that way if you want.”

“Sure. Maybe they didn’t read the same news sites I did.”

“You can read? That sets you apart from the rest of the lumber they’ve swept up.” Her stare, her contempt, was unflinching.

“Filed my own taxes too. Didn’t need some fancy-ass accountant to do it for me.”

“I’ve got some cookies you can have as a reward.”

“You don’t have any cookies. None that I’d dare eat, anyway.”

“We all have a past. We all have a future.”

“Report to Building Four, Room Seventeen. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged,” he said, his eyes still on the doctor. “I’m Frank, by the way. And you’re still dangerous, Dr Alice Shepherd.”

“I’m glad you think so, Frank. Perhaps a little bit of danger will make this trip of ours more exciting.”

He left, and walked down the corridor to the stairs. He’d finally put it together at the very end of the presentation, looking past her at the screen and seeing her catch a loose hair out of her tightly wound bun. Then she’d turned her head and in that freeze-frame, he’d recognized her. The State allowed assisted suicide, but not for a doctor to take matters into their own hands. She’d had something like thirty counts of undocumented and unregistered mercy killings against her, and the reports he’d seen alleged many more.

Should he warn the others? That was a difficult choice. It wasn’t his business who Xenosystems chose. He had no influence over that. Presumably, she was going to be their doctor, and be treating the crew, so Xenosystems had decided that she wasn’t going to euthanize them against their will. So why was he worried?

Maybe he should just keep quiet, and not get sick any time soon.