Chapter 13

Exactly one Martian month later, Slurry was sitting behind her desk on the 59th floor of the Martian capital building. Her office was small and did not feature a view, or even a window for that matter, but it was hers, 36 square meters of real estate, equipped with a plastic desk and a computer terminal and featuring her recently bestowed title on the door: DR. SLURRY FRAZIER - HISTORIAN. She was as proud of that title as she was of the office itself. Slurry was deliriously happy these days. She was about to start a family with the man she loved and, professionally, she was doing exactly what she had always wanted to do with her life, not teaching, for she didn't have the necessary patience for that, but researching. She loved looking up facts, ferreting out details from the endless stream of information on the Internet, loved the thrill that came with the discovery of each corroborating or dissenting notation or memo uncovered. She thought she could happily spend her entire first career in this office doing exactly that, and maybe even her second career as well.

Of course being the new kid on the block-and one of the youngest ever accepted into the ranks of the elite Martian Historical Advisement Department-the official research she was assigned was not all that important yet. In fact, it was quite mundane. Her first two weeks had been limited to learning the computer system and the procedures to be followed in referencing and checking facts. She had then been given her first assignment-cross checking minor points in the new edition of the ninth grade History texts the Martian school system would be using for the upcoming school session. The facts in question were those relating to her area of expertise-the mid-twentieth to mid twenty-first centuries-and mostly had to do with non-controversial subjects such as price-indexes, crop growing methods, land use, and specific dates and times of certain events. Anyone but a dedicated historian would have been bored to tears by now but Slurry found it exhilarating work, especially when she considered that she would eventually be assigned to more important research.

What was most fascinating about her new job was not the research she was now assigned or would some day be assigned but the method used to compile that research. Since she was now a part of the MHAD she had been given a security clearance-something she had been unaware the Martian government ever did. Now that she was cleared and had agreed not to discuss the methods by which information came her way, she had the full power of the Martian computer hacking technology at her fingertips and, as she had discovered, that power was almost omnipotent when it came to penetrating both the EastHem and WestHem networks. The Martian government was able to see just about anything stored on any Earth computer database anywhere and from any time period. No birth record or death record or inter-department memo or photograph or text message or email or financial transaction was out of her reach if she knew where to look for it. And with the ability of the Martian computers to cross-reference millions of individual databases, it wasn't difficult to find where to look for things. She had access to information the Earthlings themselves didn't even know had been stored, and could read the most private thoughts of people throughout the timeline from when computerization of data became standard. This ability to read and examine the most secretive records of the time period was a historian's greatest dream, allowing the ability to discover what had actually happened in the past instead of what the corrupt and biased media sources said had happened.

Though her official duties did not often require her to dig very far into this vast sea of data-at least not yet-she was allowed, even encouraged, to browse it for her own pleasure and curiosity on her breaks and during her lunch period or after hours. This was something she did with relish, with a compulsiveness that was almost addictive in nature. She spent her lunch hour every workday at her desk where she would eat a cold cafeteria sandwich and delve into the secret files of WestHem and EastHem history. On at least one of her days off each week-usually when Ken was working-she would come in on her own time and spend six to eight hours doing the same. She had been able to uncover so many things during these free-lance periods, and had dug up so many covert deals and blatantly deliberate historical inaccuracies.

Most of the things she discovered had long been known by the Martians and were already noted in official Martian history. The pharmaceutical industry corruption she had told Ken about on their first date was one such thing. It was a well-known fact that such corruption existed. Martian high school and college students were taught about it as part of the curriculum on how their parent society operated. Specific examples-such as the suppression of medical research into diseases like the common cold and influenza because of the fear of losing the profits treating symptoms of those diseases generated-were cited as well. But now, with her omnipotent computer access, Slurry could actually see the discussions and negotiations that led to that corruption, that had set it in motion and maintained it for generations.

She had spent the greater part of her last day off examining financial transactions, secret memos, and personal text messages from a period spanning almost a hundred years. She had tracked how money had flowed from the pharmaceutical CEOs to politicians and members of both the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association-which, by the turn of the twentieth century had become nothing but corporate tools of these drug companies with little interest in the health and well-being of the populace. She had read memos discussing how certain avenues of viral research needed to be shut down, either by cutting off their funding or discrediting the teams that were performing the research. She had seen how politicians owned by these companies made sure to appoint only "reliable" people to the FDA-which meant they would do what they were told by their political masters. She had seen how the AMA members had been appointed in a similar manner.

Eventually, the corruption spread beyond research suppression into out-and-out profiteering. She read memos from pharmaceutical CEOs ordering the AMA to change diagnoses and treatment guidelines for certain diseases such as hypertension, depression, and attention deficit disorder so more doctors would be forced to prescribe pills to treat them. She had seen how this same body had basically fabricated new diseases, such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, that doctors could diagnose hypochondriacs with and the pharmaceutical companies could then sell pills to treat. She had seen memos ordering the FDA to fast-track approvals of these and other drugs of questionable safety and effectiveness for real and imaginary maladies so they could hit the market and start bringing in the profit. She had seen how the FDA would refuse to certify other pharmaceutical remedies, such as herbal drugs, that did not come from the companies that sponsored them. It was a look into the evolution of the corporate mindset that was both fascinating and horrifying.

By no means was this sort of corruption and single-mindedness confined only to the pharmaceutical industry. On the contrary, it permeated every national corporation to one degree or another and grew worse as time went by. She was able to see the actual memos that led to the suppression of cold fusion technology by the energy corporations. She was able to see the transactions that led to the suppression of alternate fuel technology by the oil corporations. She tracked illicit connections between tobacco companies and the Western Cancer Prevention Association charity. She tracked similar connections between gun manufacturers and a national anti-crime group, between a feminist healthcare corporation and an anti-abortion group, between a homosexual rights group and the Catholic Church. She found that even during the darkest days of World War III, when the Asian Powers were pushing southward down the west coast of the North American continent and the fate of the entire free world was in peril, the deals were still going on. Arms manufacturers were bribing politicians to choose exclusive contracts instead of allowing every factory capable of producing war materials to churn them out. The big auto manufacturing conglomerates were trying to out-bribe and undercut each other to see who would be allowed to produce battle tanks and APCs. The aircraft industries were doing the same to see who could exclusively produce specific warplanes. There was no end to it and it was a process that was still going on in both EastHem and WestHem to this very day. Slurry thought it astounding that they had managed to carry on with this contradictory economic and political system as long as they had. In any other society the citizens would have risen up and smashed the ruling class down long ago, but the complete control of the sources of information-namely the media-had so far kept this from happening.

"How much longer can they keep going?" Slurry had asked Rigger Johannesburg, the senior twentieth century historian assigned to train her in her duties. "At what point will the common people finally decide enough is enough and do what we did here on Mars? Will it ever happen?"

"It has to happen at some point," replied Rigger, who was 44 years old and close to final retirement. "It's as inevitable as the yearly dust storms. They simply cannot go on like this indefinitely before the pressure becomes so great an explosion will occur. Both WestHem and EastHem realize this on some level but refuse to acknowledge it on another level. They continue to try to deal with the problem the way they always have-with the cycles of alternating permissiveness they are perpetually locked in. WestHem is currently using fear as their anti-revolt weapon. They demand conformity from their citizens according to a rigid set of behavioral rules and enforce it by excessive surveillance, oppressive laws, and encouragement of betrayal of each other. EastHem, on the other hand, has already run this weapon to the point where it was about to blow up in their face so they counter the revolt instinct by liberalizing their society, granting new freedoms of sexuality and dress, by repealing the old laws and giving their citizens the illusion that reform is taking place. When these freedoms begin to have the opposite effect intended and encourage demands of greater reforms, such as nationalization of industries or the legalization of non-corporate owned businesses, the pendulum will swing in the other direction and their conservative cycle will start back up again. At about the same time, WestHem will have reached the point where their oppressive cycle has reached the end of its effectiveness and they'll start to liberalize. That's how it's always been on Earth but it is the belief of most of us here that this may be the last cycle they get away with before the collapse finally comes. The common people-from which revolution stems-simply aren't responding to it as easily and as deeply as they have before. A lot of that has to do with our successful revolution here on Mars. We have shown it is possible to break free of that system for good and no matter what lies they tell in their media, no matter how evil and decadent they portray us to their people, they simply cannot deny the fact that we are, in fact, free and that we are, in fact, productive enough under our system to supply them with the bulk of their food. If we ignorant greenies can break free and form our own government, than they could do it too, if they so desire."

"But the powers-that-be won't let it happen without a fight," Slurry said.

"No," he said, shaking his head sadly. "And as they realize more clearly what a predicament they're in, they're liable to do anything in response. Absolutely anything."

That thought was often in Slurry's head these days as she realized just how important she and her more experienced colleagues really were to the Martian government, how important and vital their historical advice was, how critical it was that they uncover every last detail of how that perverted capitalistic system operated and what excesses they were capable of. This made her become all the more fascinated and obsessed with her work, all the more dedicated to the mission statement she had vowed to uphold when inducted into the ranks of the MHAD.

On this day, however, as the end of her official office hours drew near, her thoughts were on more mundane matters of history. She had just received a data-dump from the WestHem system in response to a request made earlier and she was sorting through a batch of search results one by one, looking for the exact figures she needed. It concerned the corporate takeover of the American farm industry in the 1980s, when the majority of the country's independent farmers were forced to sell out under threat of foreclosure. The WestHem history books and official historical sources naturally did not give any explanation of how this takeover had come to pass. They didn't mention it at all. They just pretended Agricorp and Marks Foods Corporation and Proctor Agriproducts Corporation had always owned all of the farmland. The Martian textbook, on the other hand, required a detailed synopsis of just how the takeover had been accomplished and which particular pre-merger era corporations had set it all in motion. And they wanted this all in chronological order with cross-references. The previous edition covered how the takeover came about. The corporations in question used their political influence to lower crop prices so the independent farmers could not possibly sell enough of what they grew to cover the mortgage payments on their land, and then followed up by pressuring the banks to foreclose. What was lacking was the timeline of the who and when. This was Slurry's assignment for the week-to research and write such a chronology so Rigger could verify it and have it printed up in the next edition. She spent the remainder of her day back-checking through old memos and money transfers, matching them together to confirm the first known instance of the plan being put into place.

At 1500 she received a com from Rigger, startling her out of the maze of computer records and data-base entries. "Time to call it a day, Slurry," he told her. "I checked over what you sent me today and it's looking good. You have a real flair for this kind of work."

"Thanks, Rig," she replied, rubbing her tired eyes and stifling a yawn. "I'm glad you liked it."

"Can I walk you down to the tram station, or are you staying late again?"

"I'm gonna stay just for a little while," she said. "Ken is working today and won't be home until 1730 anyway."

"You newbies and your enthusiasm," he said affectionately. "Just don't burn yourself out."

"I won't, Rig," she promised.

"Truth in history," he said companionably. This was the motto and prime directive of the MHAD, and was often used as both a greeting and a farewell between members of the department.

"Truth in history," she returned. "See you tomorrow."

Rig broke the connection and her computer screen returned to her database index. She looked at it for a moment, debating finishing up a few more entries, but finally decided to put it aside until tomorrow. She was on her own time now and there was something of a personal nature that she had wanted to look up. Now was as good a time as any.

"Computer," she said. "New search. WestHem Internet."

"Fuckin' aye," the computer replied. "Gimmee the shit."

"Cross reference the Martian Internet and get a digital image of Kenneth Frazier. Any one taken in the last year will do."

"Are you down with this one?" the computer asked two seconds later.

A picture of Ken appeared on the screen. It was the official identification photo that had been taken of him when he'd been hired at his current job. Like bureaucratic issued photos throughout the history of the solar system, it was not the most flattering likeness. His hair was out of place and the camera had caught him with a goofy, fake smile on his lips. But that didn't matter for Slurry's purposes.

"I'm down with it," she replied. "Perform facial recognition analysis and search the WestHem Internet for all pictures that match those analysis qualities." What she had just ordered was for Ken's digital image to be "fingerprinted," or broken down into more than a hundred distinct points that were unique from person to person. The computer would then look for matches of Ken's face in the vast sea of WestHem data. In theory, this would return every picture of her husband that had been stored in any database anywhere from the time Ken was an adolescent to the time when he last appeared in a newspaper article several years after his shooting in 2003. Slurry was primarily interested in the younger pictures of her husband-pictures that could only be found by this method since they likely would not be referenced in the database with his name or any other identifying information.

"Fuckin' aye," the computer said, and then, a second later, "Request sent. Awaiting reply."

The reply, she knew, was going to take about sixteen minutes. This was not because of the time needed to search through the databases-Martian computer technology made this sort of search almost instantaneous-but rather because of the biggest inconvenience the MHAD and other governmental offices based on Mars faced in their hacking duties, that of the light speed barrier. Mars and Earth were currently 146 million kilometers apart and the speed of light was just under 18 million kilometers per minute. Her request was digitized, encrypted, and sent through a secure communications system out into interplanetary space, heading toward a civilian communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific Ocean. It would take eight minutes to get there and another eight minutes to get back.

While she waited, she paged through other entries she had pulled in during her lunch break. She quickly lost herself in the flurry of secret memos and transactions between the United States government and the various oil corporations just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. This was one of the more fascinating case studies for historians because it was a textbook example of how easily the majority of a populace could be swayed to support a war of conquest by being told it was something else. People wanted to believe so badly that their government was acting in their best interests instead of in the best interests of their corporate sponsors that they would rally behind even the most ludicrous of explanations as long as the explanation was presented to them properly and as long as even the differing points of view within their media seemed to agree with the underlying reasoning. The Iraq conquest of 2003 had been the first major test of this theory after the consolidation of the media companies under corporate ownership had begun. It had been somewhat rough going, particularly in the aftermath, but could only be counted as a success by the corporations because the majority of the American population had enthusiastically cast aside what Occam's Razor should have told them was nothing more than a grab for the second largest oil reserves in the world.

"Yo, Slurry," the computer said, interrupting her perusal. "The shit you asked for is here. We're talking 648 photos found. Of these, 336 of them were not labeled with name, and 211 of them were not labeled with the date taken. Of the undated ones, a notation has been added telling the date the photo was digitized and put in the database as well as what database it was found in. You down with it?"

"I'm down with it," she said, pleased with the amount of gold her little prospecting mission had uncovered. "Store everything in my personal file under Ken Photos WestHem Internet and set me up a menu to access with a thumbnail on each entry."

"Fuckin' aye," the computer told her. A second later, "Done."

She looked at her watch, seeing it was now almost 1530. She only had another thirty minutes or so to look at information. It was her day to cook dinner and she needed to get home by 1630 if she wanted the filet mignon she was cooking to be ready when Ken arrived home from his job. She wished they could afford to hire a bitch to take care of dinner and cleaning but they had opted to use their dual income to pay for a nicer apartment instead of domestic help. So, with the short time she had, should she continue to look at the secret Iraq War correspondence or should she start looking through the photos she'd brought back? Her logic told her she could never even begin to look at every one of the photos and should put them aside until her next day off, when she could come in and peruse them for hours. But her logic was overridden by her curiosity. She really wanted to see some shots of her husband in his younger days. It wouldn't hurt to look at just a few of them.

She quickly stored the Iraq information in another section of her personal file and called up the newly created menu of Ken's photos. Each entry consisted of a tiny representation of the photo that had been found and a line of text explaining where it had been found-or at least when it had been stored. The entries were in chronological order, starting with the earliest. She looked at the first one and smiled, suppressing a giggle. It was a shot from 1983, when Ken had been fourteen Earth years of age-which would be near the lower limit of when his facial features would be close enough to what they were as an adult for a match to be made. The notation stated the shot had been found in what had once been a Web site maintained by John and Darlene Frazier, Ken's parents. It had been put onto the Web site in 1996, seven years before Ken was shot. She touched her finger to the thumbnail and a larger version of the photo instantly appeared on her screen.

"My Laura," she giggled, looking at it. He was so young! And so cute! It was apparently a family vacation photo taken at Yosemite. Ken was tall and skinny, his hair long, almost down to his shoulders. He was standing at the base of a waterfall-she wasn't sure which one it was-and wearing shorts and a long T-shirt that had the name of something called "Judas Priest" printed upon it. His expression was one of bored contempt, as if he were just barely tolerating the indignity of being photographed by his parents-an expression universal to the adolescents of the solar system, even here on Mars.

She marveled over the image for a minute or two and then moved onto the next. It was another one taken from the same database although it was dated about a year later. In this one Ken was dressed up in a suit and posing with his mother and father, who were also dressed up. The occasion was apparently a wedding ceremony of someone named "Lisa Gillian". His hair was a little longer in this one, although neatly styled. The facial expression of pained acceptance was the same.

Slurry spent the next twenty minutes looking at photo after photo of her husband's past, sticking primarily to the early portion of the menu since those were the shots she'd been mostly after. She saw him at fifteen when his family took a trip to Hawaii. She saw his first driver's license photo at sixteen. She saw a shot of him dressed up for the junior prom at seventeen and another shot of him at the senior prom the following year. She saw graduation photos-the last taken with the long hair-and then photos taken during his early college years. Next came the photos from his army days-during basic training, his head now nearly bald-and then a shot of him in a flight suit standing next to a training helicopter. By the time she worked her way to his stint in the Persian Gulf War in 1991, she knew it was about time to shut things down for the day and get on home.

Out of simple curiosity she scrolled the photo menu downward, just to see what kind of shots had been gathered in the later years. Here things grew a bit more grim since the entire last section of photos were mostly posthumous newspaper images that accompanied articles dealing with his shooting and its aftermath. These were somewhat depressing and she did not call any of them up for examination. Her mouth was opening to tell the computer to shut down for the day when her eyes happened across the very last image pulled from a database. She stopped, staring at it, puzzled.

"Must be a mismatch," she said to herself as she looked at the accompanying explanation line. Although the Martian governmental computer did not make many mistakes-and those it did were always due to human originated programming errors-that was the only possible reason for what she was seeing. To confirm this she touched her finger to the thumbnail.

The photo filled the screen and her breath caught in her throat as she saw it. There had been no mistake. A security camera at some place called the Bull Valley Indian Casino and Bingo Parlor had taken the image. It was undoubtedly a picture of her husband. But how was it possible? And what did it mean?

"Impossible," she mumbled, feeling goosebumps break out on her flesh. "This is just impossible."

All thoughts of getting home in time to make dinner left her. There was no way she could just walk away until she got to the bottom of this, until she figured out just how what she was seeing had happened.

"Computer," she said, her voice now trembling a little, "New search. WestHem Internet."

Ken was in a good mood as he rode the elevator up to the 86th floor of the upper class housing building he and Slurry lived in. It was 1730 and he was anticipating a nice steak dinner with all of the fixings, a few glasses of good red wine, and, afterward, a long session of lovemaking to help the food settle. Perhaps they would be prudes tonight and actually do it in the bedroom instead of in the hot tub or on the kitchen floor or on the playground slide up on the serenity level. After all, there was a lot to be said for the missionary position in an actual bed, wasn't there?

The elevator doors opened and he stepped out into the hallway, turning right and heading toward the door marked 8613. On the way he passed several of his neighbors-most of them married couples or triples with children-who were either returning to their own homes after work or heading out for a night on the town. He greeted them by name as they passed-knowing one's neighbors was a common and traditional thing on Mars-even stopping to chat with Colander Globosely outside her door for a few moments. Colander and her husband were the owners of Globosely's Kick-Ass Meats, the butcher shop in the lobby of the building. Both were in their late twenties, the butcher shop their second careers, and both had been hinting quite strongly of late that they'd enjoy a little spousal swapping session with Ken and Slurry. This was exactly what Colander was hinting about now, in fact.

"Aegis and I are going to be cooking up some lobster we scored from the last Earth shipment tomorrow night," she said, her eyes unabashedly looking up and down Ken's body in a manner that could only be described as greedy. "You and Slurry are welcome to join us if you're down with it. We'll have some bonghits and some wine, boil up the scavengers, and then see what kind of stinky things pop up from there."

"That sounds really static, Collie," Ken told her with sincerity. Though Colander was in her late fifties in Earth years, she certainly did not look it. A sixty-year-old Martian woman would easily pass for under thirty had she been back on Earth in his time and Colander was no exception. And, as Ken had delightfully discovered during past encounters with other older Martian women, forty years of experience at the act made for an incredible, almost sublime session of sexuality. "I'll talk to Slurry tonight and see what she has to say about it. I imagine she'll say yes. She's been wanting to get together with you two for quite some time now."

"That's the shit," Colander told him, putting a kiss on her finger and then touching it lightly to Ken's crotch. "And since you and Slurry are thinking about starting a family we'll have to make this happen before you get your reproductive blocks turned off."

"That is true," Ken agreed. And it was. He and Slurry were planning to see Manny Mendez, Karen's now husband, the following week to have their reproductive systems activated. Once that happened a Martian couple practiced strict monogamy until conception of a child was confirmed. At that point the male had his reproductive drive turned back off and, according to Martian tradition, the couple then invited all of their friends to their house so they could share the good news and host an orgy. Ken was particularly looking forward to this part. For all of the sex he'd had since awakening, he still had never been to an actual orgy.

He and Colander said their goodbyes and went their separate ways down the hall. Ken arrived at his front door a minute later-his mind still thinking of reproduction and announcement orgies-and put his finger on the keypad. The door slid open and he walked in. He had been expecting the smell of cooking steak to greet him. His mouth was actually watering in anticipation. But the odor of the apartment was nothing but fresh air. Nor was there any sound. Slurry was nowhere to be seen.