“Turn on your camera please, Pauline, and pan my room.”
Pauline was sitting on the side table by his bed, plugged into the wall. Her camera was a little fiber thing, rarely used, and the image on his wristpad was small, and the room was dim with only a nightlight on; and his face-plate’s curve was yet another barrier, so that even with the wristpad right against it, he couldn’t quite make out the images— gray shapes, shifting. There was the bed, there was something on it, then the wall. “Back ten degrees,” John said, and squinted trying to comprehend the two-centimeter square image. His bed. There was a man lying on his bed. Wasn’t that what it was? The bottom of a shoe, torso, hair. It was hard to tell. It didn’t move. “Pauline, do you hear anything in the room?”
“The vents, the electricity.”
“Transmit to me what you’re picking up on your mike, at full volume.” He leaned his head to the left against his helmet, cramming his ear against the helmet speaker. A hiss, a whoosh, static. There was too much transmission error in a process like this, especially using these corroded old jacks. But certainly he heard no breathing. “Pauline, can you enter the Underhill monitoring system, and locate our vault’s door camera, and transmit its image to my wrist, please?”
He had directed the installation of Underhill’s security system just a few years before. Pauline still had all the plans and codes, and it didn’t take long for her to replace the image on his wrist with that of the suite outside his room, seen from above. The suite’s lights were on, and in the camera’s sweeps he could see that his door was shut; that was all.
He let his wrist fall to his side and thought it over. Five minutes passed before he raised it again and began giving instructions through Pauline to the Underhill security system. Possession of the codes allowed him to instruct the entire camera system to erase its surveillance tapes, and then to run them in an hour loop rather than the usual eight-hours. Then he instructed two of the cleaning robots to come to his room and open its door. While they did that he stood shivering, waiting for them to make their slow roll through the vaults. When they opened his door, he saw them through Pauline’s little eye; light poured into the room and momentarily blazed, then adjusted, and he had a much clearer view. Yes, it was a man on his bed. John’s breath went shallow. He teleoperated the robots, using the minute button toggles on his wristpad. It was a jerky procedure, but if lifting the man woke him up, so much the better.
It didn’t. The man lolled down on both sides of the robots’ cradling arms, which lifted him with their algorithmic delicacy. A body hanging down. The man was dead.
John deliberately took a deep breath, then held it and continued the teleoperation, directing the first robot to deposit the body in the second robot’s big trash hopper. Sending the robots back down the hall to their storage vault was easy. Several people walked by them as they rolled along, but there was nothing he could do about that. The body was not visible except from above, and hopefully no one was paying enough attention to remember the robots later.
When he got them in their storage room, he hesitated. Should he take the body to the incinerators in the Alchemists’ Quarter? But no— now that it was out of his room, he didn’t need to get rid of the body. In fact he would need it later. For the first time he wondered who it was. He directed the first robot to put its extensor eye against the body’s right wrist, and read with its magnetic imager. It took a long time for the eye to hit the right spot on the wrist. Then it held fast. The tiny tag that everyone had implanted on a wristbone held information in the standard dot language, and it only took a minute for Pauline to get an ID. Yashika Mui, UNOMA auditor, based at Underhill, arrived 2050. An actual person. A man who might have lived a thousand years.
John began to shiver. He leaned against the glazed blue brick wall of Underhill. It would be an hour before he could go inside, or a little less. Impatiently he pushed off and walked around the quadrant. It took about fifteen minutes to walk around it usually, but now he found he was doing it in ten. After the second turn he walked over to the trailer park.
Only two of the old trailers were still there, and they were apparently abandoned or used only for storage. Figures loomed out of the night dust between them, and for a second he was afraid, but they passed on by. He returned to the quadrant and circled it again, then walked out the path to the Alchemists’ Quarter. He stood looking at the antiquated complex of tubes and piping and squat white buildings, all covered with their black calligraphic equations. He thought of their first years. And now it had come to this, in what seemed the blink of an eye. In the gloom of the Great Storm. Civilization, corruption, crisis. Murder on Mars. He gritted his teeth.