Luna Marine

The last few steps toward the end of the catwalk, suspended high above an invisible floor and surrounded by darkness absolute, were the hardest steps David Alexander had ever taken. He was drawn on, however, by wonder and by Howard Carter’s ghost. Like Carter, he was standing at a doorway opening to another world.

But he still needed to find the key….

“Five meters,” he said. “I’m…I’m entering the lighted area now.” The sourceless glow seemed to hover above a widening in the walkway, a structure that reminded him, disconcertingly, of the harpoon gunner’s bowsprit platform on an old-time whaling vessel.

Light surrounded him. He raised his gloved hands, staring at the white material. St. Elmo’s fire danced from the fingertips, cold and otherworldly. His fingertips traced blue arcs in the air…

…and the cavern was no longer shrouded in blackness. From his vantage point, suspended near the center of that kilometer-wide chamber, it seemed as though he was in the middle of a perfectly spherical swarm of stars, each star rigidly locked with the geometric perfection of the other stationary stars around it. There were thousands of them, in orderly, regimented splendor. Fainter glows floated among the ranked stars, forming oddly regular sweeps and streaks and dots that might have been words, an alien script felt more than seen.

“Ah, Control,” he called, his breathing coming faster still. “Are you picking this up?”

“Roger that, Aladdin. We see…something, but we’re not sure what we’re seeing. What do you make of it?”

“I’m…not…sure….”

As he focused on one section of that far-off wall of stars, one marked by one of the alien-script words, it seemed as though one section of the spherical surface—twenty degrees, perhaps—broke off and rushed toward him, each star becoming a tiny, polished facet, like a jewel.

Or…like a display screen or monitor.

How was the illusion accomplished? Was he seeing something real? Or was it in his mind?

Alexander blinked, hard. Sweat was trickling down his face, tickling his nose and stinging his eyes, and he yearned to be able to reach up and wipe it away. His mouth felt as dry as the thin, dry vacuum of the Martian atmosphere. He was looking now at an array of tiny, rectangular TV screens, an array at least fifty rectangles wide and fifty high…or were they, in fact, tiny? He had no way of judging scale. They might have been the size of a thumbnail, suspended a few centimeters in front of his eyes, or the size of a theater’s holoscreen, each three stories tall. Without a frame of reference, there was no way to tell.

“Aladdin! We’re not seeing anything here. Can you describe what you’re seeing?”

The clear majority of those screens, he saw—perhaps two thousand of them or more—were blank. But on the others…

He picked out one that was alive with a reddish hue, straining to make out the scene he could just distinguish glowing in its depths. Abruptly, and silently, the screen expanded until it filled his field of vision.

“Aladdin!” the voice called, tinny in his ears. “Aladdin! Can you see anything?”

It took Alexander a long time to answer. “Yes,” he replied at last. “Wonderful things!…”

ONE

SATURDAY, 5 APRIL 2042

Ramsey Residence

Greensburg, Pennsylvania

1635 hours EST

“Okay, gorgeous. Let’s get you out of those clothes, first.”

“But, Jack…all of them? How far do you want me to go? I mean, I’m outside, and the neighbors might—”

“I want you naked, babe.” Not that the bikini top and tight, red slacks she was wearing now left all that much to the imagination. “Make yourself starkers. For me.”

John Charles Ramsey—he preferred the name Jack—leaned a bit closer as he watched the young woman on the flatscreen that dominated one wall of his room. She gave him a sultry pout, one filled with lust-churning promise, then started slowly unzipping her pants. She was lounging on a folding chaise next to an outdoor pool, where the sunlight turned her long hair to spun gold, and she had to wiggle a bit to get the slacks down off her hips. Jack licked his lips once, then reached down to unzip his own pants.

Before long, the woman was naked, seated in that tailor’s seat, show-all pose that Jack loved best. She leaned back with catlike grace, closing her eyes and smiling dreamily as she started gently fingering her blond-tufted cleft. “Oooh, Jack,” she breathed.

“Yeah, Sam. Oh, yeah. Do it. Do it….” His hand was inside his shorts, now, squeezing with slow, deep movements. God, she was beautiful….

“I want you, Sam,” he told her, leaning even closer to the screen. The way those big, hard-nippled breasts bobbed and circled with her quickening motions was pure heaven, especially when she reached up with her free hand and rubbed them. “Oh, God, I want you, Sam.”

“Oooh, and I want you, Jack. I want you right here, inside me….”

“Jack?”

“Mom!” He started violently, bumping hard against his desk top and nearly falling out of the chair. At the code word “Mom,” the image of Sam and her breast-heaving passion dissolved in a cloud of rippling pixels, replaced in a startled heartbeat by an elderly man with a bushy mustache, bright eyes, and a white linen suit, standing in a library or book-filled study.

The door to Jack’s room, just to the left of the screen, opened, and his mother walked in. She glanced at the screen, then at Jack, who was pulling himself and his chair awkwardly up close against his desk. “Are you okay, dear? I thought I heard you…talking to someone.”

“Um, sure, Mom. I was just talking to Sam, here. You know, Sam Clemens? My agent?”

“Howdy, Ms. Ramsey,” Sam said in a pleasant, homespun Missouri drawl.

“Oh, of course, dear,” she said, ignoring the AI agent. “I just wanted to tell you that your Aunt Liana just arrived. I think it would be nice if you came down and said hello.”

“Aw, now?”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Uh, I’ll be down in just a few, Mom. Sam here is helping me download some stuff.”

“That’s fine.”

She paused to glance at the recruiting posters decorating much of the wall space not taken up by the monitor. Above Jack’s bed, a grinning, life-size Marine in crisp Class As snapped a salute, held it, dropped it, then saluted again in an endlessly animated cycle. “The Marines Want YOU” was emblazoned across the bottom of the sheet, the letters cycling through the entire spectrum, as Valkyries streaked through the sky in the background. Nearby by was a large, full-color poster of the flag-raising at Cydonia, five US Marines in vacuum armor, hoisting a small American flag on a length of pipe against the pink sky and rusty stone backdrop of Mars. The photo was signed by David Alexander, the civilian archeologist who’d taken the photograph.

The man who also happened to be Jack’s uncle.

“Come on down when you’re ready. Just don’t take too long.”

She pulled the door shut behind her, and Jack loosed a long, heartfelt sigh of relief. That had been entirely too close; usually, he could hear her coming up the stairs, but that time he’d nearly been caught. He thought again about a pressure-sensitive switch with a PC-radio link he’d seen in World Electronics for fifty bucks. It might be worth it, to be able to flash an alarm whenever Mom started up the steps. If she ever caught on to “Sam’s” alter ego…

“It’s okay, Samantha,” he whispered. “She’s gone. But, uh, keep your voice down, okay?”

At the name Samantha, Samuel Longhorn Clemens pixel-flickered back into the guise of a blond, naked, twenty-year-old woman, standing this time in the Clemens library. Jack himself was seventeen, an age particularly susceptible to the charms of commercial AI net agents who looked and spoke and undressed like her. Software packages like Samantha—the thought of the word “software” made him vent a quiet, frustratedly longing groan—were supposedly restricted to people twenty-one and older, but it was easy enough to get around those rules, especially if you had a buddy with a valid Net ID. The net vendors, mostly, just wanted your recorded assurance that you were twenty-one so that they didn’t get into trouble if you got caught. Damn it, the United States still had such uptight and puritanical laws about sex. It wasn’t like you couldn’t go to any public beach or download any movie these days without seeing plenty of nudity, all ages, all sexes, all orientations.

“Maybe I should go ahead and get those downloads,” he told her.

Reaching up, she cupped her full breasts, rubbing her nipples between her fingers. “Whatever you say…Jack. But, oooh, I would just love it if you could download me.” Watching her, it was impossible to think of her as anything other than a flesh-and-blood woman. Net agents, however, artificially intelligent programs designed to search the Net for information and to serve as secretaries, librarians, search specialists, data valets, and even personal stand-ins, were the most visible aspects of the ongoing computer revolution, and they could look like anyone, or anything, their owners desired.

“Whatcha got for me?”

She leaned forward in the screen, drawing a deep, slow breath. “Lots….”