The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are

By Michael Rizzo

The God Mars is a pulp-style science fiction series set in a rich world of varied cultures and colorful characters. The series plays out a partially-terraformed Mars, a half-century after a man-made disaster cut thousands of colonists off from Earth, and the fear of a rampant nanotech plague prevented rescue. Left to survive for generations with few resources, the various groups develop unique new cultures at different levels of technology, ranging from the primitive to the frighteningly advanced. And all fear the return of their home planet, because they believe Earth intentionally tried to annihilate them, and will do so again.

In Book Three: The Devil You Are, the peoples of Mars are caught in an escalating war between an oppressive Earth terrified of potentially infectious nanotechnology, and an apparently invincible enemy who claims to be from a nightmare future caused by that technology. In the middle of this, Colonel Ram awakens to find that he has been remade into an immortal superhuman in order to try to save all that he holds dear. But those he would help are terrified of what he’s become. And he’s not the only one of his kind...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael Rizzo
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301942534

Michael Rizzo

In addition to writing dark speculative fiction, Michael Rizzo is a graphic artist (yes, all those covers are his), a martial scientist, a collector and frequent user of fine weaponry, and a pretty good cook. He continues his long, varied and brutal career as a mercenary social services consultant, trying to do good important work while writing about very bad things.His fiction series include Grayman and The God Mars. (The research he’s done for the Grayman series has probably earned him the attention of Homeland Security.)Check out his Facebook pages ("The Grayman Series" and "The God Mars Series") for lots of original art and updates.He causes trouble in person mostly in the Pacific Northwest.

Book preview

Part One: Pride and Prejudice and Paradox

Chapter 1: What I Am and How I Never Came to Be

It’s cold, but I don’t actually feel it.

In whatever shell I’m sealed in, in the dark, I only know it’s cold because something keeps telling me about power consumption, how much energy I’m bleeding to maintain myself at this comfortably insensate temperature balance.

(Objectively, I know there’s no such thing as cold. Cold is just the sensation of heat energy being drawn away. And since I can’t feel, it’s just numbers. Heat loss to whatever is around me. Air? Metal? Rock? I have no idea.)

The drain appears to be insignificant, at least for now. I ignore it.

I have no other choice. I can’t move.

I am dead, after all. Or in some stage of dying I can’t explain. I didn’t really expect to be conscious, aware. I expected oblivion. Accepted oblivion. Final, total, perfectly natural peace. As easy as falling asleep and never dreaming or waking.

But I am aware. And that’s curious. (Maybe this is just a hallucination, a vivid dream generated as my brain shuts down for good, robbed of necessary oxygen because I know I was irrevocably bleeding to death.)

I wasn’t aware—and I don’t know how long I wasn’t, since my last shock-addled memory—but I think I am now. I think. Therefore. I. Have no idea.

(I don’t even know how long I’ve been aware. I have no frame of reference except the hallucinatory gauge somewhere in the back of my mind clicking off heat loss.)

Another thing I realize I don’t feel anymore is pain. This isn’t a relief.

I remember the broadsword going through me, the thing that used to be Captain Thompson Gun Bly running it through my body like I was liquid. The pain itself didn’t start for a few seconds, but the shock was almost instantly taking my wind and my legs and then everything else while I vomited my blood all over the deck of Chang’s big ship. (Way too much blood—I think I knew I was dead as soon as I saw it, and somehow that was okay.)

I remember laying on that cool metal deck, curled up in my own still-warm blood like some appropriately ironic reverse-birth, unable to move. Sakina screaming. Star picking me up and carrying me away from there, away from the battle, away from where I needed to be, then putting something far more excruciating in my guts, in the hole through me under my ribcage, to try to keep me alive a few moments longer because she needed to tell me something, then wasting time telling me my liver was destroyed because I was dying anyway of blood loss and infection. Everything was pain and shock. And cold. So cold. Dying seemed like the best idea, but Sakina was crying and Star had other plans. A plan. An offer. Too bad she took too long to get around to explaining it to me. I think I was rude and selfish and died in the middle of her pitch.

The pain and the cold and everything—even me—went away. And it was perfect, natural—the most natural thing in the world…

But then somewhere in there my lives started flashing before my eyes.

Both of them. Over and over for what seemed like a long time. Re-watching the same two movies in an endless fever dream. Same cast and characters in each one, but different plots.

The first one I know. History Channel stuff. My ugly career. UNACT. War on Terror. Killing bad people to make the world a better place. Then dropping for a while into bureaucratic command roles, playing politics but trying to keep my hand in the action, no matter how nervous that made some people.

Then Mars started to go wrong.

Too many folks were scared of the corporate research going on there in safe isolation, no matter how many trillions the public—even the scared ones—kept spending buying the toys and meds it produced. Popular fear fostered a movement of Ecos, and the more radicalized ones started attacking the on-planet labs, seizing facilities, because they were sure the greed-driven research would produce things that would get loose and end us all. And then someone—Eco or cutthroat competition—had managed to place flying drones—Discs—that started shooting the place up, destroying insanely expensive facilities and interfering with insanely profitable production. So Mars needed a military presence. To protect the insanely well-paid corporate colony workers. (Really to protect the trillion dollar facilities and profit streams. They weren’t fooling anybody.)

It was a great excuse to get the hell off the planet of my birth, for an old man to go play soldier again. (A space soldier no less—how cool is that?) And maybe die a good death. (Did I die a good death?)

But—to pretty much everybody’s surprise—I managed to help make peace with the Ecos instead of killing them. Unfortunately, a condition of that peace was putting a failsafe system in orbit, a nuclear weapons platform more than capable of sterilizing the occupied surface of Mars if any of the scary nano- or bio-tech work got loose from the labs and fabs.

Of course, as soon as we got the thing online, the drones hacked the system, staged a convincing multi-site containment breach, got the platform to arm. Then they hit us hard in orbit, cutting us off and pinning us down while they set it off, raining nuclear fire on our heads.

Tens of thousands of people died in minutes. It was only by the miracle of human stubbornness that some of the nukes got taken out or at least deflected from the ground. But we still got pounded. And Earth got convinced we were all dead, and that the planet was a permanently contaminated death trap.

Me, I got to sleep for the next fifty years with almost twelve hundred of my fellow survivors in one of the few places with a mass emergency shelter, waking up clueless and cut off, our corner of Mars partially terraformed, and not as alone as we expected.

There were survivors. Most kept hiding, sure Earth nuked them on purpose and would try again if they saw anything moving down here. Over the generations they adapted, thrived, created new cultures, and competed violently with each other over limited resources. A few we managed to make friends with. Others… not so much. And then there were the terraformers themselves—the ETE—shut up in their monastic Stations with a cache of salvaged research, and nothing better to do (while their automated machines cooked Mars) than play with it, making themselves somewhat more than human.

We did finally contact Earth, of course, only to find it gone stranger on us. And still afraid—to the point of turning itself into an anti-science semi-theocratic neo-dark-age utopia. We were declared quarantined until Earth could convince itself we weren’t harboring some extinction-level contamination, and conditions were put on our relief. Conditions that got my people hurt and killed.

Then, just when I thought the situation couldn’t get darker, the Shadowman came, Syan Chang. Telling a children’s story about time travel from a doomed future. He admitted ownership of the drones and everything they’d done to us, seducing some of the survivor factions with the promise of power and protection through his advanced technology, and pledging to stop Earth’s return to Mars at all costs.

Friends of mine were killed in the battles that followed, including my best friend. And then me: Trying to buy time and get a look over Chang’s newest flying battleship, I got myself stabbed by what used to be a man who had plenty of reason to stab me. And then my body was carried off to a cave. By an ancient god. Who turned out to be another old friend.

And then I bled to death. The End.

(Shitty place to end. The battle wasn’t even done. I don’t know what happened.)

The other movie is really bad scifi, and the ending is much, much darker (though just as annoyingly unresolved).

In this one, the R&D on Mars progresses mostly unmolested. The scariest (and most potentially lucrative) breakthroughs are in biological hybrid nanotech, fusing living bodies with semi-organic molecule-sized machines; machines that can work together to mimic functioning organs and tissues, rebuild cells, even alter DNA sequences. Lives were extended, diseases were conquered, bodies modified—mostly for vanity or convenience or entertainment, but some of the mods were particularly appealing to soldiers. Or other kinds of professional killers.

Feeling old and really not liking it, I let some of my shadier cohorts talk me into an experimental implantation program, well ahead of full commercial production. After a month or so completely out of it, I woke up a young man again, and better: Stronger. Faster. With onboard interfaces and the ability to heal fast and survive even the most catastrophic of traumas. Everything a soldier or a killer would want.

The price was being kept as a lab rat for awhile, shown off to people who wanted to live forever young and could afford it, so I never really got to do much of anything with the gifts I’d been given. But within a few decades, everybody could afford it (and subsidy laws were passed to make sure of it). And I was free to do what I wanted in a world that didn’t make sense anymore.

Some people refused the mods, chose to live and age and die like God intended. But most ate up the newest mods as soon as they hit the market. And now we had a whole world of functionally immortal superhumans, which meant a world without mortal consequences. It was a nightmare of excess and boredom, gratification at all costs, wanton destruction, and finally apathy…

I remember trying to rebel against it, but it was a hopeless cause. There were only a few of us, wanting to give the human race (or what the human race had become) a purpose beyond idle thrill-seeking or selfish comfort.

The next part is fuzzy. I think I fell into some kind of depression, shut down, gave up on the world we’d made. My last mortal friend died of old age, no longer my friend, because I was no longer his.

And then I heard about something that scared me—but scared was the most profound thing I’d felt in as long as I could remember. There was a project to take humanity to the next level, to create the ultimate hybrid of life and technology, to evolve us beyond the pathetic drives of our bodies. It was terrifying but intriguing. And there was a prototype.

There was also a radical fringe of scientists trying to take what we’d become away from us by force, strip us of our mods even though billions would die without them (a cost they justified because we would be human again, as God intended). When they failed, one of them got hold of a new technology designed to monitor past events directly, and he did what should have been impossible: He used the sub-atomic links to create nanotech seeds to build things in the past, things that could change the chain of events, stop (or at least stall) the modding of the human race before it began.

Changing the timeline was supposed to be impossible, the paradox itself unbeatable. No one with a scrap of sanity or credible science had any faith the fantasy plan could succeed. But apparently there was just enough faith to move a few of us to do something about it. And apparently I still had enough faith that the human race was worth saving to try to stop something that could literally erase all of us from existence.

But that’s where the story ends. Just like that. The End.

And I’m back here in the dark, unable to move, unable to feel, with some vague alert nudging my brain that it’s cold outside.

I’ve long since lost count of how many times I’ve seen the two movies of my real and unreal life when I suddenly realize it isn’t dark anymore.

My eyes are open.

I’m awake.

I’m also inside of something, something snug around me like a pressure suit or Sleep Pod. Through transparent lenses, I see red rock, and slowly realize I’m looking up. The rock wall is a ceiling above me. I do vaguely remember being taken to a cave to die. I guess I’m still here.

I try to move, to find some way to open whatever I’m inside of, and it moves with me.

Suit. Definitely a suit. Complete with a helmet. But it doesn’t feel like a pressure suit. It feels like metal. Plates. Armor. A lot of armor. But it isn’t heavy.

And it doesn’t hurt to move.

But moving is slow. Like I have to think about it. My body doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like me.

Something is restricting my movement.

I can only move upwards. I’m in some kind of rut, a snug body-shaped divot in what feels hard enough to be stone, makes scraping sounds like metal on stone as I try to move.

Then I think about sitting up, and my body does it for me, smooth and fast. Disorienting, like I’m on a carnival ride. And now every movement I make is smooth and fast, less like I’m doing it and more like I’m in some kind of brain-wired servo-frame, but it’s me: my bones, my muscles doing the work. But nothing feels right, nothing feels like me.

And it should hurt to move. I should at least be stiff. Old man, lying in a cold stone rut for who-knows-how-long. I should be in agony.

I’m staring at my legs.

My Mars-red camo UNMAC Light Armor uniform is gone. I’m wearing black, all black. Tall heavy boots and plates of black metal armor all the way up my legs, all plain and practical and looking too dense to lift. Over me is a kind of shin-length tunic or robe, like a medieval knight’s surcoat. Under it are more plates: chest, gut, pelvis, back—all in bug-like sections to move with me. My arms… I hold them up in front of my mask (and I am wearing a mask). There’s heavy chainmail sleeves with small rectangular metal splints woven in like tiles, terminating in backhand plates like a samurai’s kote. And thick black gloves. The only color is some blood-red piping and Japanese-style lacing on the arm guards.

It should be too heavy to move in. It isn’t heavy at all.

I reach up and pry the helmet off my head—in unseals at my touch (or maybe before my touch, anticipating), lifts off. And I feel: air on my skin. My face. Cold but not unbearable.

I bring the helmet in front of me, get a look at it.

Oh… That is not right…

It’s a big ram’s skull. A bad joke with big horns. Ugly as hell. Stupid as hell. A prop from a crappy fantasy.

The horns… move… Like a thing alive. The coils shrug at me, draw in as if offended by my criticism.

I have a flash of a memory then, a comforting nostalgic familiarity: I made this. A badly inspired craft project, during a phase when I was trying to force meaning on a bored pointless immortality through artistic expression. But like all my artistic expressions, I like the results less-and-less as time goes by, as I see the flaws.

But why am I wearing it?

And I suddenly realize I’ve done something stupid.

How am I breathing?

I look around. I am in a cave, albeit a man-made one, cut by mining equipment, probably into rim rock. Faded markings in familiar style on the walls tell me it probably was a Zodangan outpost, maybe another one they abandoned when they threw in with Chang. But that means I’m up in the cliffs of the Northeast Rim. Even at valley floor elevation, the atmospheric pressure is only 0.28. Everest density. And I’m probably at least hundreds if not thousands of feet above that…

The Zodangans used shelter-fabric shutters to seal their caves, keep a livable pressure. But they take them when they move, wasting nothing.

I’m up and turning. Behind me, I can see: the cave mouth is open to daylight, whistling with the almost-constant thin winds. Thin.

How am I breathing?

I realize: I’m not. And I haven’t been.

Like I have an interface on, my vision lights up with another gauge. Somehow I’m reprocessing CO2 into O2 down in my lungs, and my carbon level is still optimal. I’m not sure what that means. I take a breath anyway.

The air is freezing cold and thin. I see my O2 levels jump very slightly, but when I try to exhale, something stops me, and I get a pressure warning. I hold my breath again. Effortlessly.

What the hell am I?

I’m standing in the rut I was laying in. It is me-shaped, like I’d lain down in deep mud or wet concrete which has since hardened, but the rock is old. The rut looks dissolved into it. And I see veins—dark root-like things that radiate out into the rock, bore through it, like I’d become a kind of plant growing out of its pot. But there’s nothing there now but the empty cuts and bore-holes.

What the hell happened to me?

Armored from neck to toes, I can’t see my skin, can’t see if I still have skin. Which is when I realize I have hair. Lots of hair. I’d been shaving my head for decades, and now the stuff is falling in my eyes, piling around my shoulders, dark and thick and wavy with no visible gray. Rock star hair. Like I had when I was in high school.

Uugg…

I really never missed having hair, once I chopped it all off for military service. I thought I would—and dreaded losing it—but I came to love being buzzed, then bald. Now I’ve got a mop of it as I run my gloved fingers back through it, pulling it away from my face. My first instinct is to shave it off.

Which is when I realize I’m armed.

There’s a pistol on my right thigh, a largish knife in the small of my back, and a sword on my left hip.

Bly broke my sword. Before he killed me.

But it’s back: Japanese katana. Black wrapping over white ray skin. Black iron fixtures. Black lacquered scabbard. I need to draw the blade to prove it’s as intact as I know it is. But it’s better: Finer than even the gift the Shinkyo had given me. Perfectly balanced, beautifully polished, flawless, gorgeous temper-line, and…

Moving.

I look close, and my eyes zoom in like mechanical lenses, enhancing.

The grain of the metal swirls like quicksilver. Alive.

I snap my vision away, refocus.

I heft the blade—it feels like a normal sword. And I cut.

It screams in the air. I’m fast, really fast, and really strong. Then I do something I would never think of doing with one of my old swords: I try it against the only target handy: stone. The blade cuts the rock of the cave like soft wood. And the edge is still perfect, the finish unmarred. It should be chipped to hell, mangled. But it cut rock.

I knew it would. Like I somehow know the blade is an adaptive morphic nanomaterial that can change its characteristics, self-edge to cut on a molecular level. I know this from my bad-movie life.

Just like I know about the gun.

I put the sword away, managing to perfectly re-sheath it without looking—better than I ever could with all my years of anachronistic training—and draw the pistol.

Big thing. Shimmering stainless. Vent-rib barrel. It looks something like my antique automag—what Matthew always called my Big Stupid Gun—but it isn’t. And the action works without me racking it. Opens. Let’s me see the golden rounds inside. Then locks shut, ready. I wonder where it came from, where the bullets came from, but my other life knows:

It grew out of me, just like my armor, just like the sword. And the magazine cases at my hip will replenish the ammo, customizing it to my needs. All I need are the raw materials to process…

The roots in the rock: I can draw raw materials from my environment. I made everything I’m wearing and carrying, automatically, when I was out of it. (Except the helmet. Star gave me the helmet. But technically I made that in my other life.)

The big knife is the same swimming metal as the sword, but it more significantly changes its shape as I consider uses for a knife: tool, weapon, culinary instrument…

I make the blade flat and wide like a Bowie. Use the surface as a mirror to get a look at my face.

Oh shit.

Young. I’m young.

But not the young soldier, meaty from PT and enhancers. And not the skinny twig of a kid that came before him. Both and neither. Almost feminine. Late twenties. Picture of health. And the scars are all gone. (I miss the scars. I feel sad looking at this pristine man-boy pretty face.)

My eyes…

No longer hazel. Metalic. Irises like hematite.

I can’t look anymore.

Nor can I sit put.

Others were here. I wasn’t alone when I died (or whatever it was I did to get replaced with this).

Ra brought me here: theatrical fake god that came out of nowhere and saved my dying ass and threw me on some kind of flying thing and brought me here. Told me the same story that Chang did about the future (the same story as my bad-movie life). Tried to put the ugly helmet on me. Told me I had to become what I was, the me from that other time, if I still wanted to save this world, save my friends. Then showed me she was Star. I loved Star, a long time ago. (But there she is in my movie life, still around as the world goes wrong, wanting to help me fix it.)

And Sakina. She came, wouldn’t let Star take me, wouldn’t leave my side. I felt her holding my head while the world went black, went away. She was here. Right here.

Now there’s no sign anyone’s been here in a long time (except me, growing into the rock, turning weird and pretty and able to breathe without breathing). Just old footprints in the dirt, dulled by wind. Other patterns I can’t make sense of, maybe made when Ra—Star—was trying to keep me alive, when she put the helmet on me.

How long have I been here?

I get tired of lugging the ugly helmet around and it seems to get that and it folds up into a flat piece of metal like a magic trick. I can stick it inside my surcoat—there’s a handy pocket just the right size.

My strange new body walks me out to the cave mouth, out into daylight. I shouldn’t be so exposed in daylight, but more of the handy hallucinatory gauges insist that the UV and cosmic radiation is well within tolerable limits (I fully expect I could just put the silly helmet back on if that changes). This semi-intuitive communication with whatever I’ve got running inside of me also lets me know that my skin has apparently hardened against the low atmospheric pressure and temperature (possibly accounting for the reduced sensation).

From the view, I am somewhere up on the Northeast Melas Rim, in the cliffs just above the talus slopes that drop down into the shell-shaped valley, hundreds of kilometers of rolling desert. It’s midday, the sky ruddy pink ochre overhead. The steam-clouds of the ETE Stations sprout around the rim, billowing up until they hit the EM Atmosphere Net and flatten out. (Somehow I can see relatively clearly all the way across the valley, just like I can see microscope-close.)

The Melas valley looks peaceful enough, a serene expanse. There is certainly no sign of battle, or even visible traffic, air or ground. The place could be as uninhabited as it was before the Land Rush, when Harker’s expedition first set boots here.

Standing here, in this moment, not knowing what day it is or how long I’ve been gone, it begins to crush me just what has been done to my body, my mind, everything that I am. I know the bad movie isn’t a fiction. Those were my memories, from a me from a time that now doesn’t exist and never will, erased by what Chang did.

Star brought me here to change me, to put me the way she knew me in the other time. She said the helmet held the nanotech that was programmed to recreate that me, the same nanotech that made me what I was then.

A god. Chang said I was a god. He knew the other me. He was surprised (and idly amused) to meet this me—well, the old this me—here in this world.

And that was part of the bad movie: We actually started thinking we were gods, or at least the next best thing. Immortal. Indestructible. Powerful. (And petty and thoughtless and destructive.) We were even trying to create life…

I know that’s why Chang came, why he would be so desperate to stop us, all of us. The path we were on… But it doesn’t give him the right to kill so many people. And to erase so many many more.

I look down at this new body, feel what’s been done to it, to my brain—my brain—and I realize: I chose this. I decided to become this, in that other world. Why would I do that? Am I that proud, that vain, to think I needed to live forever? For what?

And I realize: I think I chose it again.

Star said I needed to give her permission to change me. The seed in the helmet could have made the other me, memories and all, out of any dead meat raw materials, just like I apparently made this armor and these weapons out of the cave and what I was wearing. But she needed me alive. She said something about a failsafe, that my existing memories—me—wouldn’t be overwritten, that I’d be both: One who knew this world, cared about the people in it. The other who knew this body, and the other world, what was lost (and maybe should have been lost).

I’m not feeling any other me in here. Just the memories, ghosts of what I apparently lived through. But then, maybe that’s all there is to anyone: Conscious awareness, personality, ingrained behaviors, and memory to give it a back story, an identity.

Am I only a vessel for two sets of data?

Did I tell Star yes? Or did she make the decision for me?

Would I have said yes?

I am alive (whatever I am). That means I’m still in the fight, I can still do something. Maybe more than I could do before. Maybe enough to beat Chang. Save the world. Or at least the people I care about, if they’re still alive.

Yes. I think I would have said yes.

I wonder what else I can do.

I need to get back to the fight.

I remember Paul telling me he got around the valley on his little unauthorized explorations by walking, that he found it soothing. I’m not sure how much of his dry humor was in that statement, considering the trip from his Blue Station to our Melas Two base was about a hundred and sixty klicks, the first dozen on a severe down-slope. I wonder how many days it took him (or weeks, considering the ETE never seem to be in a hurry about anything).

My curiosity is more urgent than his, and thankfully I have maybe only a hundred and twenty klicks to hike (with a lot less downhill).

Remembering an old Chinese adage about a thousand-mile journey, I find a convenient cord in a pocket inside my surcoat, tie back my still-annoying hair, and step to the edge of the cliff cave.

The Zodangans were big on fortification. The rim foothill slopes are a good hundred meters below me down a sheer wall. This place would only be accessible to their airships or to patient, skilful climbers with O2 reserves to spare.

Me, I seem to have no fear of jumping. So I enjoy the view across the valley for another long moment, and do just that.

The fall feels gracefully slow in Mars’ 0.38 gravity, but I know it’s still more than enough to break bones. Alarms go off in my head (I hope I haven’t just done something remarkably stupid), and I feel something shift in my skeleton. And then the talus comes up at me much too fast, and I hit. And sink. Like someone dropped a car into a sand dune.

It’s stunning and ungraceful and I’m on my armored knees in a fresh hole almost as deep as I am tall, and the talus slope is threatening to give and send me further by way of avalanche, but it settles. And I seem to be none the worse for wear, though I ache deeply—a sensation I find I’m actually grateful for. I can be hurt. I can feel.

Continuing my gracelessness, I crawl out of the divot I’ve made, slipping, and the loose rock keeps sliding out from under me. There are gouges in the plates on my legs, but they fade as I watch, and I feel my left ankle popping back into place.

I get back up onto the slide slope, and start the awkward skipping dance downhill.

Not godlike at all.

I make the lower foothills in a few more hours. The sun has moved west over Tithonium and Ius. The winds begin their tidal shift back eastward, putting them at my back.

I’ve been daydreaming all this time, filling in the details of my other life. I remember that we did nothing good with our gifts. We stopped caring about the planet as we stopped caring about ourselves. Art and literature dumbed-down to childlike crap, easily produced and more easily dismissed as our attention spans decayed (and one would think an immortal would have a long attention span). Everything was about distraction and entertainment. More than half of the population simply disappeared into virtual worlds, their now-perfect bodies in eternal stasis, while the rest did a garish job of making their fantasies into reality. The world became a collection of absurd amusement parks dedicated to every imaginable extreme behavior. There were, after all, no physical consequences.

Even crime became a pointless issue: No one could be hurt by assault, no one could be murdered. In fact, the experience of victimhood was actually sought by some, just to have any thrill at all. (And unpleasant memories, unwanted traumas, could simply be erased.) Property crimes were equally meaningless when anyone could make anything they wanted at will. So what was once a social plague became another form of entertainment. (I remember when early video games about committing violent crimes were the subject of controversy. Now it was a consensual reality: Hurt me. Kill me. Rape me.)

Our bodies had become valueless in their eternity, and everything else followed.

I try to remember how long it took. Only a few years, I think. Maybe a decade. My sense of time was another casualty of our evolution.

I look down at my plain black armor, remember I had no taste for gaudy excess, and maybe that was my saving grace: I appreciated the simple things. Even the experience of this long walk through a monochrome desert.

I realize none of the Martian dust is sticking to me.

I also eventually realize I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since before that battle that killed me. More gauges in my head appear to report varying levels of depletion in energy, oxygenation and hydration, but my bioframe is nominal.

I wonder if I can even be considered to be alive anymore.

Answering a more practical question, my eyes do their HUD trick again and pick out what I know is a tapsite on an ETE feedline in the distance, not far off my course. I change my direction of travel accordingly.

I reach the tapsite by sunset. I still have not seen sign of any activity on the surface, but I know how skilled the Nomads are at hiding, digging in to the terrain. And I expect I make a disturbing sight: Black armor and no mask, taking a leisurely stroll across the open waste.

My internal gauges tell me it’s already dipping below freezing, which also registers as an increased power drain. My new eyes have no problem with the fading light, and I find the tap easily enough.

The ground around it is well-trodden, and there are items left behind, both trash and gestures of Nomad hospitality mandates. In the latter category I find a few usable O2 and water cylinders, and a survival blanket. Amongst the trash I find a broken rebreather unit—one of the portable air recyclers favored by the Knights—looking like it’s seen multiple repair attempts. Not discarded in the sand, it’s been left hanging near the taps, perhaps for more skillful hands to try restoring.

I use one of the canteens to draw fresh water from the corresponding line. It’s already near ice-cold, and tastes of metals, but provides soothing refreshment (and my hydration levels start rising back toward green). I take the time to fill an O2 cylinder, only to find a slow leak. But then, holding the cylinder and thinking about it, I watch the seals repair.

Testing the phenomenon, I try the rebreather. I realize I have no knowledge of its mechanics, but somehow they seem intuitive, simple. I embrace the mechanism like a precious treasure, and feel it begin to fix itself.

After it’s done, I fill its tanks and test the unit. It seems to work well enough, though not as-new. I use my eyes to look close, trying to find some sign of active nanotech (as if I’ve infected the thing) but the materials appear inert. I test my growing hypothesis by breaking a seal and setting it down on a rock, stepping back. It does not self-repair. Not until I pick it up again.

Huh…

I perform a similar trick with a discarded heater unit, charge it with hydrogen and oxygen from the tap, and find I now have three of the necessities of survival (even though I don’t really seem to need them at all).

As there is no food (the most precious commodity on the planet, even above ammunition, and therefore unlikely to be left for wandering charity), I consider making small shelter out of the blanket, but find my surcoat provides a hood and robe-like sleeves on demand. I settle in front of my fire, sip water and oxygen from my cylinders, and let myself drift.

I try to stay in the memories of what I consider my real life, my life as a soldier and an officer, a life I hope had at least some meaning, some good service. But I can’t shut out the other life…

At least I tried to do something about it, tried to get people to do something meaningful and worth immortality, however hopeless. I remember thinking that maybe one day we would wake up, find better direction, hopefully before we had done irreparable harm. But I also remember losing faith as the years passed.

I realize I almost understand Chang, why he would want to undo what we had become, even if it killed most of us. And how meaningful were most of our lives by that time? In our self-absorbed selfishness, we’d even stopped having children.

There were still a few isolated holdout colonies of bio-normals living fragile mortal lives—our only remaining crime was harassing them, a cruelty too many found idly tempting (and giving a few of us purpose as Normal Police to stand as protector, but challenging them became just another cartoonish game). Perhaps they would re-inherit what was left of the Earth after the rest of us died without our precious mods.

Apparently I do still sleep.

It’s light. The eastern sky is purpling with dawn. I assume I’ve only been out for the one night (my heater is still running). And I’m not alone.

Idiot. I shouldn’t have fallen asleep in such a well-traveled place.

They’re hiding from me in the rocks. I can see their heat, their enhanced motion. A half-dozen Nomads, possibly from Abbas’ band, laden with canisters as if taking a trip to the local well.

I try to move slowly, non-threateningly, keeping my hands away from my