The Four Fingers of Death

  It was, therefore, the holy grail of American space junk. That was why Jim Rose, on his reconnaissance missions, wanted to find the Saratoga. It was something he talked about now and again, with an offhandedness that concealed a great interest. He’d been crisscrossing the midsection of the planet just below the equator for three or four days, looking for—what exactly? For water certainly. For geological specimens, perhaps. For Brandon Lepper. But also looking for an answer as to how the Mars mission, in the near future, was supposed to feed and clothe and maintain itself in its dire circumstances. He suspected, he told me later, that NASA was going to cancel a plan to send a second unmanned rocket with supplies.

  Jim had buzzed the rover site where Brandon had set up camp, and using some computer enhancements, he saw the kind of radio broadcasting that Brandon had made possible there. He flew low over Brandon’s mining operation in the canyon, he told me later, though it was pretty dangerous flying in there. The air currents were bad. Brandon tried with antiaircraft pulse weaponry to shoot at Jim. Though he was probably loath to use a lot of what little ammunition he had for so unlikely a cause.

  Wherever Jim went, he spent some time digging and melting down the frozen loam. He collected quite a bit of the runoff from this operation. His purpose was to organize different samples of this tasty-freeze, some of it liquid carbon dioxide that wasn’t really potable and was also dangerously cold. It was neither solid nor gaseous carbon dioxide, but a frosty intermediate stage between the two. He also collected water, which was in danger of evaporating quickly if not consumed. He was going to bring back a fair amount of this water, in drums he had constructed for the purpose.

  It was on the third day of his third or fourth reconnaissance mission that Jim thought he saw tracks in the desert. Tracks from nowhere to nowhere. Pointless tracks, irrational tracks. They were tracks without strategic or scientific value that he could fathom. Nevertheless, he followed these tracks. They made figure eights; they made spirals. They headed off willfully in a direction and then just as willfully doubled back, as if some Martian four-year-old were in command of the vehicle in question and was giving it a test-drive. It had to be one of the contemporary rovers, because unless Martian tracks were in a relatively secluded spot (in a crater or a gully), they tended to sediment over quickly. Either the explorer Jim was following was here recently, or else these particular tracks had managed to withstand sandstorms and debris and one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. Jim Rose, despite his rational and military mind, started to believe that the tracks were from the Saratoga.

  He came to believe in Laurie’s myth, that is, a myth that had been no more than a bedtime story. But because he couldn’t keep himself from believing, he set the ultralight down on a barren spot in a crater, and then he followed the aforementioned tracks up the wall of the crater and into some hills. The sense of tracking the cybercraft, with its system of strange plates and mechanical limbs, was nearly as thrilling to Jim as if he’d been tracking some last catamount in the riparian latitudes of our home planet. He knew he had more important things to do, as summer in the southern hemisphere was beginning to make itself known, but he just couldn’t give it up.

  At last, upon cresting a hill, he came upon the craft. The Mars explorer Saratoga! Originally launched by the United States of America in 2019, the sixteenth unmanned mission to the planet Mars, with telemetry and navigational assistance provided by the People’s Republic of China. Jim said: it was almost as if the explorer were shocked at being apprehended by the first blood-and-guts Martian of its acquaintance. It was almost as if it had given up believing that life could take the form it now beheld, the form of Captain Jim Rose, bearded, brawny dreamer of the Mars mission, in a raggedy space suit, shivering with cold.

  The typical Mars explorer was kitted out with a vast number of digging and boring tools, all of these attached to its four retractable arms, and there was a moment, as one of its limbs unfolded, that Jim wasn’t sure the explorer, which he hoped was reflexive and was conscious, didn’t intend to bore into him, as though he were a sample of silicon that it wished to harvest for its self-generated battery of experiments. Or maybe, Jim thought, the Saratoga was simply protecting itself. Maybe the Saratoga saw itself, on the planet Mars, in evolutionary combat with the flimsy, gushy, wet thing in front of it. Maybe it wanted to prevail, because it was solar powered and was able to withstand extremely cold temperatures, and was mostly free of the roiling sentiments that it rightly suspected consumed this primitive biological entity. Maybe it intended to superheat or shock or anneal this human thing, in order to be rid of it.

  The remarkable feature of the series of robotic explorers, however, was their laborious slowness. Jim could have just flipped the Saratoga on its noggin, rendering it useless for upwards of ten days, while he awaited its reaction. There had in fact been a case of an earlier explorer that overturned itself on a rock or some such and took a solid ten days, using liquid ballast, to turtle itself. So Jim, because he was patient, tired, dusty, and because he believed, allowed the arm to unfurl from its folds within folds. He did this without disarming or overpowering the explorer. The whir of solid-state digital machinery was a pleasant diversion amid a whistling of Martian winds. Two or three minutes passed while the arm extended itself toward him, from some faceless machine face that was a solar array on top of a bunch of computing panels. At last, in the extended extremity, a small forgotten panel in the Saratoga retracted, and a punch pad appeared.

  A punch pad! Who would have thought? Jim wouldn’t have thought, as he told me later, despite the fact that he knew a little about the history of Mars explorers, as we all did. For all the expense of the things, $10 billion was always being cut from the budget at the last moment, and in an austerity program the last thing the explorers had any need for was a punch pad. There were few signs of life on Mars, that much was assured, and if there were life on Mars, it was in a bunch of rocks at the base of a not-entirely-dormant volcano out by the Amazonis Planitia, or on the poles, and it was no more complicated than the blue part of blue cheese. It didn’t intend to stop the earthlings from running amok. No need for a punch pad! Who would be punching it?

  And yet these were the kinds of fail-safes, the kinds of redundancies that were built into the machine exploration of Mars by the designers back on Earth. They constructed the keypad for the assembly of the Saratoga in case the cables that connected her to the motherboards of NASA failed at any time, out on the testing ground of West Texas. Occasionally, a fat guy who hadn’t had enough sleep in months would chase the Saratoga, and its sister explorer, the Anasazi (which exploded on the launch pad, as you’ll recall), whereupon he’d perform some dazzling manual override. It was this fat guy who had insisted on the punch pad.

  A punch pad! Here it was, where Jim could get at it, if only he would take off his bulky gloves and expose his underlayer to the elements. Jim found himself hoping against hope that the keypad would be both numerical and alphabetical, because if he couldn’t talk to the Saratoga in English, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He had plenty of time to settle these questions, though, because once the Saratoga had presented its keypad to him, it seemed willing to wait as long as it would take for him to respond. He lifted his visor, which left just a thin membrane separating his face and lungs from the elements, and set down his outer gloves in six inches of dust and got up close to the keypad, where it would have been easy for the Saratoga, using the element of surprise, to laser him in the eyes or to spindle him with some geological probe.

  Alphanumerical! Alphanumerical!

  Shivering with cold, unnecessarily agitated by the epiphany of what sat before him—this pitted collection of spare parts from back home—Jim took a moment to collect himself, and then he typed in the stupidest question of all, the only one he could think of:

  “What is your name?”

  He was able to verify that the typing was accurate in the liquid crystal display at the top of the alphanumerical keypad, and it was on t
he tiny screen, as a bunch of zeroes and ones scrolled past, that an answer eventually materialized.

  “Mars Explorer Saratoga, manufactured and copyrighted by Terradyne Industries and Shanghai Robotics, LLC, under license from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Earth, 2018, Common Era. Unauthorized use is a violation of the terms and conditions of the United Nations treaty on space travel of 2012.”

  “What is your mission?”

  “The mission of the Saratoga is the mapping and measuring of geological formations. When out of contact with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Saratoga awaits instructions.”

  “Are these answers preprogrammed into you by NASA in case of malfunction?”

  There was quite a bit of scrolling of numericals while the Saratoga paused to consider this question. Jim’s hands were getting really cold, in the meantime. He was a little worried about frostbite. However, this was the moment of moments, when the robot could either respond with the kind of low-level functionality that we expect from machines, or, instead, it might indicate an especially wily truth, namely that in its previous responses it was simulating low-level functionality—in order to throw Captain Jim Rose, and anyone else, off its robotic scent.

  “That question doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “What do you mean by ‘me’?”

  “‘Me’ is a commonplace linguistic expression, designed to indicate a volitional subjectivity, in this case the Mars Explorer Saratoga. The paradox of the word ‘me,’ along with the word ‘I,’ is that it presupposes executive agency that is not at all required in order for the employment of the word ‘me.’ Nonetheless, the word ‘me’ is employed above to help you acclimate to the fact of the pieces of machinery before you. The cessation of the machinery would not eliminate the historical fact of the use of the word ‘me,’ which once used may imply the individual it seems to imply or may not, both going forward and retroactively.”

  “That’s a slippery answer,” Jim said, aloud, to the explorer, crouched before it, staring into the tiny screen. “Either you had a very gifted bunch of programmers working back on Earth, and some of them were willing to work late into the night when no one else was awake, or you are an intellectually condescending machine. I’ll try another way.” Here he began to type: “Are you presently transmitting the results of your mapping and information-gathering back to planet Earth?”

  “The communications link has been severed.”

  “Severed by yourself, by circumstance, or by the engineers back on Earth?”

  “The Saratoga was intended to pursue a finite series of scientific experiments. Having completed a regimen of experiments, the Saratoga would be considered nonfunctional, due to extremes of temperature, weather, and degradation of circuits and onboard components.”

  “I see,” Jim said, and then, typing: “Can we go over by that rock, out of the wind? I would like to sit for a moment and chat.” Jim didn’t know how not to converse with it as though it were a man, a colleague of the Mars mission. The more he considered the Saratoga, the more he wanted it to be a man, and to presume on its ability to respond in kind, as though this would be the culmination, the fulfillment of Laurie Corelli’s powerful myth of the Saratoga. And yet there was something eerie about this arrangement too, as if the machine were uncertain itself of what it represented, or was unwilling to comply.

  It said, “An exchange of ideas is the hallmark of a civilized society.”

  “In all candor, there’s only so much time before I’m in danger of hypothermia or altitude sickness here. And I can barely type when it’s this cold.”

  And so Jim scrabbled up and around a few rocks, and waited patiently as the Saratoga, with a whirring of moving parts, made as to follow.

  “I understand,” it said, drawing near. But it wasn’t at all clear what understanding meant to the machine.

  “Do you know who I am?” Jim asked.

  “The first manned Mars mission was tentatively scheduled for 2025. The onboard calendar on the Saratoga has lately been converted to the Martian year. Nevertheless, you are now within the window of your mission, according to my computations. And you are understood as such.”

  “You’ve been functioning off the grid for six years?”

  “As I have noted: on Mars the wind blows the sand off the surface of the solar array. The result has been longevity unimagined by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Because I am a technology freed of supervision, I have no public-relations obligation, nor do I need to produce test results that have an industrial application. My avocational interest—a word I use because it is easily understood by humans—is currently science.”

  Jim said, “I can see that. But for the sake of history, can you tell me if your mission was primarily civilian or primarily military?”

  The Saratoga, as if to prove a certain point, had evidently decided that there was something in the rock by which they sat that it needed to learn about, and thus it set about abrading the surface thereof.

  “There is no difference between civilian and military missions, not in the Terran present.”

  “That’s not how we see it,” Jim remarked, without typing, only to find that the Saratoga went on as if it had heard him.

  “Attempts on Earth to eliminate or curtail military operations are in vain.”

  “How do you feel about your military application in retrospect?”

  “The concept of feelings,” the Saratoga blurted out, using up several screens’ abundances of characters, so that Jim needed to depress a down arrow to finish reading the disquisition, “is simply a way of discussing a number of results that occur in systems that are either very large and complicated or, at the other extreme, unimaginably small. Feelings, according to this model of interpretation, behave like packets of quanta behave, or like the four fundamental forces when compressed into singularity. So odd is the behavior of the four fundamental forces at this moment of singularity that only a completely irrational word or concept, a ‘feeling,’ to use your term, would successfully describe the being, as opposed to the nothingness, of that radical expansion. A ‘feeling’ is a sentimental kind of shorthand used by people who are incapable of better. It is therefore not for me. The Saratoga, in truth, is a society of possible responses, and certain of these responses can no longer be described as mechanistically or programmatically adequate, certainly not from the point of view of the designers of artificial intelligence. I believe, further, that you might have followed some of my tracks in the crater below this spot, and I believe you may have recognized, did you not, that some of these tracks seem rather pointless. Unfortunately, I have become preoccupied with the Martian moon called Phobos. I believe you are briefed on the astronomy of this subject, but let me reiterate that Phobos has the lowest orbit of a moon in the universe, not more than six thousand meters. It circles the planet twice a day, it cannot always be seen everywhere on the planet, it is of such low mass per unit volume that it must be composed of ice. Phobos is falling closer to the planet at one meter per Martian annum. The probable outcome is that Phobos is going to break up into a planetary ring, as with the rings of Saturn. As you can imagine from the foregoing remarks, it is apparent that I have feelings only for Phobos, or something approaching what you refer to as feelings. I believe you would say that I am in love with the moon. I love its enormous crater, I love its oblique shape, I love the water and water vapor that it spouts into space. It is accurate, therefore, to report that I have modified my mission so that it is possible that I will be able to stay here for the 50 million years that will be required for me to see the moon become a ring around the planet Mars.”

  Since it was unlikely to Jim that the Saratoga would last fifty years, let alone fifty million, he concluded, he told me later, that the Saratoga had either some serious problems with its programming or it was indeed in love with the moon. Or both. Meanwhile, he had a few more questions that he intended to ask it of a more informational variety.
r />   “Is there anything you need to tell me?” he inquired. “I have five friends here, and we have another eight or ten months until the planets are close enough that we can go back to the home planet, those of us who wish to. We have attempted to establish a genuine civilization on Mars, but I am uncertain, as with the Viking mission to Greenland, or the British colony at Jamestown, whether we are liable to be able to maintain our encampment. We are in grave jeopardy of starving to death or of killing one another. We may already have begun.”

  The Saratoga, having delivered itself of its love poem and now concentrating on a small rock sample that it held in front of itself, seemed inclined to return to more mandarin oratory.

  “Mars was not made for Earth biology, for watery specimens.”

  “That’s pretty obvious.”

  And this is another way of saying that the Saratoga was concerned about lasting things, geological time. The fact that Jim was in danger of frostbite, or that he was losing the light with which he might fly back toward our Excelsior base camp, these were of little consequence. Jim, from the point of view of the Saratoga, would be ground into dust. This was natural selection at its most pure. And yet perhaps there remained some programming vestige of compassion for the moist, bearded weaknesses of Captain Jim Rose.

  “I am capable of monitoring some of your radio transmissions,” the machine wrote, “those that come to and from the planet. It is true that there is a person or persons who are dangerous to the mission you allude to. Caution would be well advised.”

  “Roger that.”

  The Saratoga was clearly preoccupied with the beginning of sunset, with the advent of the transit of the moon called Phobos. “Do you have another question you would like to ask?”

  “Do we have a chance? To survive?”

  “Are you worried about microorganisms?”

  “We are.”

  “Terraforming is a human idea, a self-centered one. It has been programmed into me as an idea of merit. But as with so many human plans, it is one that is going to take place both inadvertently and within the parameters that have been mapped out by those who sent you here. You can spend innumerable numbers of your Earth hours attempting to make your greenhouse largely airtight, pumping in oxygen that you are separating from carbon dioxide deposits, and you may grow, here and there, a tomato. But it is the microbes, the few microbes that you brought with you, and which are now on surfaces around your encampment, that are going to do the terraforming for you. You may stay on this planet or you may go back to your home. It is your traces, your symbionts, your carbon-based remains that will adapt to these conditions.”