Hieroglyph (50 page)

When they first settled Deimos, the Community blasted out a huge bubble a kilometer across under the east pole, filled it with air, piped in sunlight, and then turned some of the solar system's finest species designers loose to create a wonderland. The centerpiece of the park was a titanic baobab tree, with trunks leading off in all directions to the walls of the cavern. The branches and buttresses soared and coiled to form a green wood spiral galaxy half a kilometer wide. Grapevines, almost unmodified, stretched through the whole space like a demented spider's web. The thicker vines had footholds and guidelines to serve as bridges or ladders, depending on which way you were going relative to Deimos's ghostly gravity. Thornless roses, orchids, and bromeliads grew on the branches and vines. Most of the flowers were built with bioluminescent pigments, so when Deimos went into eclipse behind Mars at midnight, the cave turned into a spectacular swirl of glowing colors.

The reception was right in the center of the tree, where floors on several levels were anchored to the surrounding trunks and limbs. All of us contestants showed up exactly on time—except Sofia Komu. I didn't see her.

I called Micromegas, the main AI for Deimos. “Where is Sofia Komu?”

“Ms. Komu is currently in her room.”

Sick? Bailing out of the competition before it began? The stress was pretty intense.

We milled about for half an hour. I tried not to look as nervous as I felt. Heavy use of adrenaline antagonists; my brain stem was trying to convince my body it was time for a mammoth hunt or something, churning out fight-or-flight chemicals that were no help at all.

“Good evening!” In the center of the lowest floor a spotlight circle picked out a tall, spindly man in a severe black outfit, with just a hint of gold at his neck and wrists. Text boxes in my vision identified him as Piers Tyana, one of the referees. “I'm so glad to see all of you here, and I'm sure everyone is very excited about the competition. There will be three contests; each of you will be scored individually by all the interested members of the Community. At the end, the person with the highest score will join Deimos as a full member.”

Failed contestants from earlier youth competitions had a tendency to burn out, disappear into freaky subcultures, or apply their creativity to killing themselves.

While Tyana bragged about how great it was to be part of the Deimos Community, all us contestants were waiting for him to describe the tests. In the past they varied, with no predictable pattern. But as soon as he described what we'd be doing, eight very sharp brains would go into overdrive.

Everyone in that vine-walled room at the center of the baobab tree turned to watch Sofia Komu as she floated gracefully down to a prime seat just outside the spotlight. It was impossible not to notice her—she'd timed her entrance to coincide with Deimos entering eclipse. As the flowers around us began to glow, her outfit outshone them. She was wearing sensible tights, with some interesting transparent bits to show off her dancer's body, and luminous ribbons streamed from her arms and legs, swirling around her as she dropped, like the wings of some fantastic bird. When she landed neatly in her seat, the ribbons configured into a skirt and a wide collar.

This was going to be harder than I'd thought. I'd been approaching the competition as a project. Show what you know, solve the problems, work hard, produce good results. I could do that. Sofia understood the event was a
performance
.

Tyana resumed as if nothing had happened. “And now we come to the subject in which all of you are really interested: the nature of the contests. This year we have decided to choose competitors on the basis of creativity, imagination, and ability to solve problems.”

Good: they were playing to my strengths.

“The first contest is free-form: create something. There will be another reception in this space in exactly one sol, and the contestants will show us what they have made. Impress us. Once that is done, you will learn the nature of the second contest. Good night; I'll see you in twenty-four hours and thirty-eight minutes.” He finished up just as the clock hit 0001.

WE ALL HAD SEMI-UNLIMITED
fabricator access, so actually making whatever we decided to create would be trivial. The real test was our ability to dream up something.

I'd like to say I developed my idea by some rigorous process of logic and research, but on my way down to the workspace it just popped into my head: the Most Beautiful Mask. The Deimos Community still makes a decent amount every year from licensing my Mask. (Yes, we had to sign away the rights to everything we created for the competition. Deimos didn't get incredibly rich by letting people keep valuable ideas.)

The concept was so simple that the first thing I did was a search to make sure nobody else had thought of it. It's still cool: a mask of smart plastic that changes its shape and color, with a simple brain linked to the local network. It uses the ambient sensors to watch whomever the wearer is interacting with, and it changes in response to that person's reactions. So while you're talking to someone, the Mask becomes more and more attractive to them. It works better with people who aren't regulating, but even with the most locked-down Martians it can pick up on eye-tracks and attention time.

They gave us a big unadorned section of ten-meter tunnel with a steel mesh floor to work in, with four big fabricators and eight workstations with smart-matter tools. Flimsy partitions gave us the illusion of privacy, but of course anyone in Deimos could look over our shoulders through the network.

While I got my station set up I was already roughing out the design. I could use freeware for most of the systems. I had the basic machinery done by 0400, napped for an hour before tackling the software, and sent my design to the fabricator at a minute before 1100.

I couldn't resist the urge to peek a little at what everyone else was doing. Sofia's workstation had a couple of big tanks on it, with something feathery-looking growing in the liquid. She was curled up in her chair having a nap. She'd changed out of her smart matter and looked comfortable in a loose coverall made entirely of unmodified plant fiber.

Haruko Sato, from Luna Farside, had the biggest project, a tall cylinder with massive power inputs, and four spider bots working on it. She gave me a haggard glance, and I waved, but she turned back to her bots without acknowledging me.

I kept the Mask wrapped until I got back to my workstation. The blank silver face was still for a moment, then it started to shift as it responded to me. At first it worked perfectly: the face narrowed, the eyes widened, the skin tone shifted from shiny silver to a more realistic tan color. And then . . . it got freaky. The eyes began a weird oscillation, one growing while the other narrowed, then switching. The rest of the features reacted to my consternation by squirming around like something out of a horror show.

Obviously a software issue. I could run tests to figure out which piece of kitbashed algorithm wasn't playing well with the others . . . or I could just rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Which I decided to do because I knew I'd wind up doing it anyway and it made more sense to start at 1130 rather than try to power through it at 2350.

After about six hours of writing code I needed a break. We had unlimited allowances at the El Dorado dining room, so I went up there and binged on protein—broiled chicken, steamed shrimp, fish balls, tamagoyaki, and some sausage-stuffed peppers for my vegetable.

“Mind if I join you?”

I looked up from my plate and saw another contestant—Reinette Luz, from Deimos itself. She was a
pathik,
one of the permanent guests who live in hotels and rental space but aren't part of the Community.

“Sure,” I said.

While she took the chair opposite I checked her info. She was older than I'd thought—twenty standard years, though she looked about fifteen. Heavily modded: what I'd taken for an elaborate paint job was actually her skin, shifting colors in elaborate patterns that always drew your eyes back to her face.

My heart rate and hormones took a little jump despite the antagonists I'd hit myself with. I decided not to monkey with them. Hers were elevated, too.

“Are we feeding you enough?” she asked.

“It's better than anything downstairs,” I said. Martians think of food (when they bother to think of it) as nutrition, not “cuisine.”

While I spoke, she sent me a private message. “I've been watching the feeds,” she sent. “There's a lot of chat about the eight of us.” At the same time she said aloud, “The Community has some of the best chefs anywhere. How's your project coming?”

“Almost done,” I said. “How about yours?”

“I already finished,” she said. She added a silent message: “We need to fall in love.”

“What?” I sent back, while I managed to stammer aloud, “You work fast.”

“This isn't just an exam,” she sent back. “It's entertainment. That African girl understands it—I loved her entrance last night. But we have to take it beyond just looking good. The audience wants drama.”

“You want to fall in love in order to get eyeballs?” I sent.

“Yes. Just enough for people to notice. Work up some will-they-or-won't-they suspense. As we get closer to the final decision, we can play up the conflict: lovers and rivals. Maybe a fight. What do you think?”

Aloud she added, “People are going to love what I've made.”

“That's a lot to think about,” I sent her. “You must really want to win this thing,” I said aloud.

“Absolutely,” she said. “I've lived here since I was little, but I want to be inside. I
belong
here. What about you?” she asked after a moment. “Why is a Martian trying to join the Community? I thought you people hated Deimos.”

Maybe her skin pattern had subliminals in it, or maybe I wanted to impress her. I don't know. “I've got this idea,” I sent. “It's big. Really big. Too big to create on Mars. I need the Community's support to make it real.” For the cameras I just shrugged.

“What is it?” she asked privately. Her eyes were bright.

I almost spilled it then, but I couldn't tell who she might talk to. Plenty of smart people there—one hint could let someone make the same jump I'd made back at Eos.

I said, “Got to get back to work.”

She looked a little startled. Silently she sent, “What about falling in love with me?”

“I'll tell you tonight at the unveiling,” I messaged. Aloud I said, “Nice meeting you,” and got out of there.

It took me another three hours to get the Mask up and running, and by then it was time to go back to my room and clean up. With my door locked and all the privacy filters set to max, I opened the box and looked at the Mask once more. The smooth silver skin shifted to a flesh tone, the eyes widened, and the cheeks and jaw changed shape. After just a second, I could recognize the face. The features were a little exaggerated, the proportions a little neotenous, but the face was recognizably that of Sofia Komu.

I stuffed it back into the box and reset everything.

SOFIA AND I WERE
the only ones in the center of Lupita Forest at the beginning of the second night's reception.

I showed up early because my Mask was as ready as it ever would be. Sofia was there because she had accurately predicted what all the others would do, copy her late arrival the night before, and wanted to monopolize the attention of the Deimos Community. A hundred people were physically present, and a big slice of the rest was watching. She looked fabulous in a loose tunic and pants made of silk, which turned out to be made by invertebrates.

Sofia set up her project, the Mycofilter, on a stand near the entrance. She'd brewed up an aerophyte mushroom, a cloud of feathery mycelia filtering moisture, dust, skin cells, mites, and other debris from the air. According to the pop-up box she'd written, it would produce about a gram of protein per day and clean a million liters of air. She tried to make it pretty, with bioluminescence against a flat-black background, but under the spotlight it just looked like a mass of gray threads. Some of the more serious-looking people stopped to talk to her about it, but most just gave it a glance and passed by.

My Mask stayed in its box. When people stopped by my table, I just told them, “You'll find out at midnight,” and smiled. When I checked the Deimos media feeds, I was gratified to see a minor buzz of anticipation.

Reinette Luz showed up about twenty minutes into the reception. She was wearing something medieval-looking in velvet and leather. Her skin was gold now, with faint cracks in it, so she looked like an old painting in a church.

“So what have you got?” I asked her.

“It's a business plan,” she said. “I'm more of a strategy person than a techie.”

She had a projector displaying a plan to set up a colony of robots on a sun-grazing metallic asteroid, smelt the thing using solar mirrors at perihelion, use the same mirrors to boost it into a Mars-grazing orbit, and finally park the mass of finished metal at one of the Trojan points along Mars's orbit.

“I can give the Community a century's supply of low-cost metal. That's our biggest import,” she said, as much for the benefit of invisible viewers as for me. “My analysis shows a return on investment of 65 to 200 percent over ten years,
and
it will make Deimos independent of Mars and Luna for minerals.”

Which would lock in their hegemony for good. It made sense, really, but I couldn't resist the urge to needle her a little. “You realize you've just given this plan of yours to the Community, right? Even if you don't win, they can still use it.”

Her smile didn't shift a millimeter. “That's fine with me,” she said. She added a silent personal message: “I've worked out a counterplan I can pitch to Luna investors if the Community wants to go ahead with this. Like I said, I'm a strategy person.”