Chapter Eighteen
Door to Nowhere
Stars shown brilliantly in the blackest of black voids that surrounded them. As they looked in disbelief at each other, they saw space suits take form around their floating figures.
"Is this your program?" Rosa could see Cameron shaking his head within the protective helmet of his suit.
"Not yours either, I take it," came Cameron's response over her in-helmet speakers. She, too, shook her head.
A rusty-brown surface strewn with rocks firmed up beneath their feet. Cameron saw a distant wall of ragged red stone forming behind Rosa. He shifted his focus to Rosa when he heard her gasp in surprise. Her mouth hung open in an expression of awe. She was looking past him. Her eyes were rising to the sky. Cameron swiveled about to find that he faced a towering red-rock cliff. His neck craned in a vain attempt to see the top. The cliff seemed to rise forever. They were at the bottom of some immense canyon. Cameron turned back to face his friend. "Look behind you."
Rosa slowly turned around, absorbing the breathtaking vista before her. "This place would dwarf the Grand Canyon back home!" Rosa was startled to feel Cameron grab her waist from behind and lift her into the air.
Cameron laughed as he set her gently down. "The gravity seems to be less than earth's. What do you estimate the height of these canyon walls to be?"
Rosa replied almost immediately, "Maybe five or six miles high."
"I agree, but there seems to be no river running through the valley floor."
"But judging from this canyon, there must have been massive floods on this planet sometime in its history." Rosa gazed upward at the brownish sky and added, "The atmosphere must be thin, with little or no oxygen. There is no bluish look to the sky like on earth." She looked back at Cameron. "What's that in your hand?"
Cameron raised his gloved hand to see. "What a fool I am! It's my multiCom. I was using it to guide the Shuttle Crash simulation. Maybe we can get some more information about this place."
Rosa crowded next to him in order to view the data Cameron might retrieve. The gloves were bulky and clumsy. "It's useless!"
"It wouldn't work, anyway, even if the gloves were a tight fit," said Rosa.
"What?"
"The touch screen wouldn't work."
"Why not?"
"Because it needs direct contact with your finger. The touch screen isn't pressure sensitive like a keyboard. It's electrostatic, or heat sensitive - something like that."
As Rosa was speaking, the multiCom flashed to life. A static-etched logo of some sort flickered briefly then disappeared. It was a circle within a circle, but the circles were broken on their right sides; an arrow extended from the break to the center of the circles.
"What'd you do?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all," said Cameron.
Again, the multiCom flickered on. It read, "PLANET DATA." The visual display was of a rotating reddish-brown planet. They noted a white polar cap - was it ice? Was it frozen water? CO2? As the display rotated, they could see a deep scar, which must have stretched more than 2,000 miles across the surface.
Is this the valley we're in? Cameron pointed at the tiny display. "The diameter is a little more than half of earth's diameter... and two moons... It is a summer afternoon, local time, and the surface temperature is well below freezing..." The multiCom images flickered and died. Cameron shook the multiCom several times. "Well, that's just great! What's up with this blasted thing?"
"We have to answer two questions, Cameron. First, where are we?"
"And second," said Cameron, "how did we get here?"
They stood silently at the base of the mammoth red rock precipice. The only sound they could hear within their pressure suits was the quiet whisper of air being circulated.
"I'm pretty sure I know where we are," said Rosa. "Let's look at the facts." She scuffed her foot in the dry, dusty soil.
"Look at this dirt... The rusty color... The lack of any moisture..."
"And this canyon!" said Cameron.
"Add to that the data on your multiCom."
"The planet's size being roughly half that of earth..."
"And?"
"Summer time temperatures below freezing..."
"What else?"
Cameron tried to remember what else the multiCom display had told them.
"The moons..." said Rosa
"Oh, yeah, huh? This planet has two moons."
"Any bets that their names are Phobos and Deimos?"
"My money's with you," said Cameron. "We have to be in one of the canyons of the Valles Mariners, on Mars. Well, that answers the first question — where we are."
"But we still don't know how we got here." Rosa thought a moment. "Could this a glitch in the shuttle crash program?"
Cameron was troubled by question. Aren't we supposed to be safe in these simulations?
"Do you think that if you die in a simulation, you die in real life?"There was fear in Rosa's eyes.
A few meters away, a sudden gust of wind kicked up a whirlpool of fine dust. The small Martian dust devil slammed into the two scouts who stood, unprotected, on the surface of the barren planet. Rosa was almost blown off her feet. Cameron braced himself against the face of the cliff and quickly extended his arm toward Rosa who was able to grab hold and keep herself from falling.
"¡Mierda!"
"Just a gust of wind," said Cameron trying to sound calm, although his voice betrayed his concerns.
"Like hell it was! Mars' atmosphere may be dense enough to create winds that can raise dust from the ground, but it isn't dense enough to allow a wind with enough force to affect us – to nearly knock us over."
"You're right," said Camerom, "And the answer is no."
"No?"
"Yes, no." Cameron managed a tense smile. "No, I don't think this is a glitch in the shuttle program I wrote."
"Well, what about that 'Rosie' thing — when Beth Stein called me 'Rosie?'"
"I admit it. I wrote that in to make you mad."
"But I did an override, remember?" She could see Cameron nod in agreement. "Yet, the radioman still called me Rosie at the end. And then there was the Mickey Mouse clue."
"What Mickey Mouse clue?"
"C'mon Cameron! This is no time to play around. You didn't have Beth Stein tell me that she thought Pluto was a real Mickey Mouse planet?"
"I swear. I never put that into my program."
Another blast of wind buffeted the duo, knocking Rosa off balance. She fell face-forward toward Cameron who instinctively enfolded her in a protective grasp. The top of Rosa’s helmet clanged against Cameron’s faceplate. In Cameron’s embrace, Rosa could feel his heart pounding through the layers of their suits. She looked into his eyes. Cameron’s face flushed a warm red. There was nothing unusual in that, but it was unusual that Rosa felt the hot rush of a blush course through her entire body. Cameron put his gloved hand gently against Rosa’s visor as if to caress her face.
"Well, uh…" Rosa straightened up, trying to regain her composure. "IHT program characters don't just make things up on their own." Then she recalled something else. "And a couple of the characters had a strange sort of twitch."
"You know, I remember something strange happened during your solar rescue program. If I could only remember... I think it had to do with dinner... with going to eat... Yes! That's it! When I was called to dinner, I froze the program, and after the program began to fade, the radio man..."
"Sparks."
"Yes, Sparks. After I had frozen the program and it began to dissolve, Sparks turned."
"He what?"
"Sparks turned and looked at me. Then the program faded, and there you were on the screen."
"That's it! The IHT artificial intelligence programming must be malfunctioning."
Cameron considered that possibility a moment. The vision of Socrates Jones' head moving up the stair without his body popped into his mind. "Let's assume that you're right..." Cameron stopped in mid-sentence. "Shit!"
The shock of hearing Cameron utter such a word registered heavily on Rosa. This must be bad! "God, what is it? What's wrong?"
Cameron pointed past Rosa, up the vast canyon. "Look at that. The canyon is being erased. The simulation must be crashing."
Rosa turned and looked. She saw the upper end of the canyon being steadily obliterated. It looked like someone was taking an eraser to a chalkboard and rubbing it out, leaving behind a jumbled trail of reddish-brown chalk dust.
"Wait. It's not being erased," said Cameron. "It's being obscured by a giant wall of dust."
"A dust storm?"
"Yeah, but this storm is driving a wall of dust a couple of miles high right towards us!"
"Cameron, if this is your simulation acting up, then you need to give the emergency abort command."
"Emergency abort authorization: Cameron, two, twenty-four, fifty-one," said Cameron loud and clear.
The wall of dust moved ever closer.
"Emergency abort authorization: Cameron, two, twenty-four, fifty-one!" he repeated even more forcefully.
Nothing.
"Emergency abort authorization: Cameron, two, twenty-four, fifty-one!" Cameron was on the verge of panic.
"Damn it! Nothing's happening. "
"What if it's your simulation, Rosa? What if, somehow, your simulation didn't shut down before I initiated mine?"
"My program?"
"No time to waste, Rosa. Give it a try!"
"Costas program override authorization: Arthur, Lancelot, Guenivere."
The leading edge of the dust storm pelted them with grains of red sand.
"Execute Costas program override authorization: Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere."
Cameron shepherded Rosa toward a slight depression in the wall of the cliff. It wasn't much protection, but it was all he could find. They put their arms behind each other's back for support and stood in the shelter of the small relief — their backs to the wind.
"What is going on?" Rosa had to shout to be heard over the noise of particles viciously striking their helmets. "How did we get here? There's got to be a reason." Rosa noticed a dim light reflecting off the cliff. "What's that?"
Cameron saw it too — a faint blue-gray light wavering on the rocks about waist high. He moved his free arm to touch it, but it vanished.
"Look, it's on your suit," said Rosa.
Cameron removed his hand from the wall and looked down at his suit. The light was gone. It was on the wall again. As soon as Cameron reached, it vanished.
"It's the multiCom! The multiCom's working again." Cameron moved his free arm so he and Rosa could view the tiny screen. It was the same logo as before — two concentric broken circles with an arrow — and the words "Don't worry!" flashing at the bottom of the screen. The screen went blank.
The storm started to get worse, blotting out the rays of sun, turning day into dusk, and dusk into night. The rock cliff, against which they were huddled, seemed to melt away. In the darkness before them was a distant doorway.
How odd, thought Rosa. It was a quaint painted door — the type that opened at both top and bottom. What an odd place for Dutch doors. It was white with brightly colored tulips and a watering can painted in the reliefs of the panels. The door flew open, first top, then bottom. She and Cameron could see through the doorway. It seemed to go to nowhere.
Red dust blew by them and was sucked through the portal in a steady stream. They could feel some power from beyond the doorway tug upon their bodies, as if invisible tendrils were trying to pull them in. They tried desperately to resist the force. They dug their heels into the rocky soil. Their hands scrabbled over the rock wall desperately seeking something to latch onto. The force was too much. Rosa and Cameron lifted off their feet and hurtled through the air, somersaulting through the doorway, into the black void beyond.
– End Chapter Eighteen –
