A lone quad bike rattles across the frozen Martian desert, kicking up dust. Riding with the wind at his back, Kenji’s been on the move since first light. In his oil-stained, dust-covered white insulation suit he looks strangely out of place, conspicuous. Above his breathing mask, his wary eyes scan the horizon, looking for trouble but finding only emptiness. Apart from the domed town up ahead, a few hills beyond, and the faint glow of the Reef’s skeleton, there’s nothing to disturb the brooding desolation.

He passes through the vehicular airlock into the town’s atmospheric dome, and rolls up Main Street with one hand resting on the handlebars. Most of the shops and stores are boarded up; pet dogs sleep in the shade, chickens fuss in the scrub. Suspicious faces watch him pass; there hasn’t been a visitor here for months. Midway along the street he pulls up and kills the engine in front of the town’s only surviving hotel.

‘Less than 24 hours,’ he thinks as he swings his leg off the bike and stiffly climbs the hotel’s wooden steps. The Glocks in his pocket bump against his thigh like animals shifting in their sleep. The feeling’s both familiar and reassuring. He pulls off his mask and takes a sip of warm water from the canteen on his belt, rinses the all-pervading grit from his mouth, and spits into the dust.

“I’m here for Jaclyn Lubanski,” he says.

The desk clerk doesn’t look up. His face is sweaty and soft, like old explosives gone bad.

“Room five,” he says.

Lori Dann answers the door wearing faded fatigues and thick desert boots. She looks gaunt, eaten up, as if something in the dry air’s sucked the life out of her. She’s surprised to see him, and then the surprise gives way to relief and she seems to sag.

“Thank God you’re here.”

He pushes past her into the room. It has plastic floorboards and rough plaster walls. There are unwashed clothes by the wardrobe and a couple of dead spider plants on a shelf; their brown leaves rustle in the air from the open window. Through the dirty glass, on the side of a hill beyond the flat rooftops of the town, beyond the dome, he can see the edge of the Reef. It seems to shimmer in the white sunlight.

Jaclyn Lubanski lies on the bed, facing the window. She looks awful, vacant. There’s a saline drip connected to her forearm. A thin fly crawls across her cheek and she doesn’t seem to notice.

He peels off his dusty thermal jacket. “How is she?” he asks.

“She has good days and bad days,” Lori says. She fusses with the edge of the cotton sheet, rearranging it so that it covers Jaclyn’s chest. Kenji waves a hand in front of Jaclyn’s eyes, but there’s no response.

“Does she even know I’m here?”

When Jaclyn eventually falls asleep, Lori takes him to a pavement café that consists of nothing more than a couple of cheap plastic tables, some old crates and a hatch in a wall. She orders a couple of mojitos and they sit back to watch the shadows creep along the compacted regolith of Main Street. Overhead, a flaring spark marks another ship from Earth braking into orbit.

“Don’t take it personally,” she says.

Kenji takes a sip from his glass: it’s iced rum with crushed mint leaves, a local specialty.

“Does she ever talk about it?”

Lori shrugs. “She says a few words now and then but they don’t generally make a whole lot of sense.”

In her pale face, her eyes are the bleached colour of the desert sky. The corners are lined with fatigue.

Over a couple more drinks, as the stale afternoon wears towards a dusty evening, she tells him everything. It all comes pouring out of her, all the loneliness and the fear. She’s been trying to cope on her own for too long and now she needs to talk.

“We came for the Reef,” she says.

The Reefs started life as simple communications nodes in the interplanetary radio network. When that network somehow managed to upgrade itself to sentience, it downloaded a compressed copy of its source code into every node capable of handling the data. These individual nodes, like the one on the edge of town, drastically altered both their physical form and their processing power, individually bootstrapping themselves to self-awareness.

“It happened in a hundred places,” Lori says. So far, she’s not telling Kenji anything new. Similar outbreaks and crashes have plagued humanity for years: dangerous but manageable. After a while, they tend to burn themselves out. The artificial intelligences involved evolve with such blinding speed that they quickly reach a point where they lose all interest in the slow external universe and vanish into their own endlessly accelerating simulations.

“In almost all cases, the AIs disappear into a sort of hyperspeed nirvana, intractable and untraceable to humanity. The difference with this one is that when the main network crashed, it stayed here and it stayed active.” She describes how she and Jaclyn were on the Institute team that first approached it, how they sent in remote probes and discovered that the structure was still filled with life; how they dug a deep trench in the rock at its base to see how far it had penetrated; how they slowly became hypnotized by it, obsessed to the point where they wanted to do whatever they could to understand it, to sense the thoughts that drove its obstinate need for survival and growth, to find the deep underlying reason for its stubborn existence.

“Jaclyn was the first to touch it. We were wearing pressure suits but they were no protection.” Lori looks away. “It sucked her in. We thought we’d lost her.” She describes how the Reef also swallowed the rescue team that went in after, how it processed them and spat them out, how some of them came out changed, rearranged by the rogue nanotech packages that had shaped the structure of the Reef itself.

Some looked ten years younger, while others were drastically aged. One woman emerged as a butterfly and her wings dried in the desert sun. Another emerged with eight arms but no mouth or eyes. Some came out with crystal skulls or tough silver skin. Others came out with strange new talents or abilities, impenetrable armour, or steel talons.

After word got out, every disaffected nut or neurotic within walking distance wanted to throw his or her self into the Reef, hoping to be transfigured, hoping to become something better than what they were. Some emergents reported visions of former times and places, of great insight and enlightenment. Others came out as drooling idiots, their brains wiped of knowledge and experience. Some came out fused together; others were splintered into clouds of tiny animals.

No two incidents were exactly alike.

 

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