Shannon looked out the bedroom window.

“Lee?”

“Yes, dear.”

“When did armed guards start riding in school buses?”

“Huh?”

“And when were military escorts required to follow the buses?”

Lee traced a figure-eight on Shannon’s lower back.  She sat next to him in bed, a sheet held up to her neckline while she craned to watch the world flowing by.

“I don’t know.  A couple of years ago, I guess.”

“Have I missed that much?”

“More.”

Shannon turned, letting go of the sheet to lean down and kiss Lee.

He pulled her to him. “You know, we’re supposed to be following up on census reports.”

“I know.”  Shannon bit Lee’s ear.  “But which would you rather do in this heat?”

“Ask a rhetorical question, get a philosophical answer.  ‘The future of our country lies in our hands.’”

“Lies?”

“Better than laid.”

“You and your choice of words.”

“Hey, it’s not me.  It’s the official motto of the Census Takers Union.”

“Is it?  Guess we’d better go.”

Lee watched Shannon slide off the bed, her freckled chest and shoulders giving an illusion of strings of pearls invisibly dancing in the air, leaving shadows on her body.

She grabbed the bra off an old recliner propped against the footboard.  “How much longer have we got?”

“Oh, a couple of weeks, depending on the crews.”
“What time do you meet your crew today?”  She stepped into her panties.
Lee sat up.  “At three.  What about you?”

“Six.”

“Uh-huh.  So I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“No.  I’ve got to take my mother to the doctor.”  Shannon pulled her jeans up over her panties.  “Unless you want to tag along.”

“Mmm…sounds tempting.”
“Liar!”

Lee laughed.  “Your mother’s catlike curiosity is killing me.”

“What’ll be your excuse once this census is over?”

“Excuse?  Oh, I’ll think of something.”

Shannon clipped the Martian Frontier Settlement nametag to her shirt.  “Ever wonder why we still wear these things?”

“No.  I asked, anyway.  Some settlers still use visual confirmation of door-to-door census takers.”

“But the likelihood of counterfeit tags is high.”

“That’s what the media outlets will lead you to believe.  Instead, I’ve met with the MFS security.  There was only one attempt at impersonation, and that was just a kid trying to sneak into his girlfriend’s house.  Besides, he was terminated.  Word gets out fast.  You don’t want to get caught faking a census taker’s identity.”

“Terminated?”

“You missed that, too?”

“Have the past two years been that tough?”

“It’s only a matter of perspective.  There’s nothing tough about citizens obeying the laws to ensure fair treatment and survival for all of us.”

“You know, for a rabble rouser like you, you sure sound like a Compliant Conventional Citizen.”

“I AM NOT and NEVER WILL BE a member of the CCC Corps!”

“But I thought…”

“Just because I meet with CCCC team leaders in private does not mean I practice their rituals.”

“Is this something else I missed in two years?”

“No.  I haven’t changed.”

“In some ways, though…”

“’Though,’ what?”  Lee smiled and jumped out of bed.

Shannon dropped her hands from her hips and turned to look at her face in the mirror.  “I don’t know.  You aren’t as carefree as you used to be.”

“A reporter with the skills of a slug sent to a hostile planet where every citizen must double or triple his skill set to keep the settlement from collapsing in on itself…yeah, the past two years have been a challenge…”

“’To say the least,’” they said in unison.

Shannon smacked Lee on his bottom and kissed his left shoulder.  “Guess I’ll see you dayafter.”

“Yep.”

Lee spun around, grabbed Shannon around the waist and squeezed until she grunted, indicating he’d popped a loose vertebra of hers back into position, a drawback of the months-long trip from Earth’s moon to Mars, getting used to gravity again and body parts shifting around.

Shannon peck-kissed Lee on the lips.  “Thanks, dear.”

“No problem.  Dayafter?”

“Yes.  Only if you have to miss my mother.”

Lee smiled and let go of Shannon.

After Shannon left, Lee tapped his wrist and brought up MG, the Mars GPS location tracking app, using the 3D projectors in his knuckles to display above his hand the movement of citizens in the MFS zone.

He sensed a pattern change. Something was going on.

A noise outside the window startled him.

He turned.

A miniature messenger bot attached a package to the window frame and flew off.

Lee stepped into his underwear and opened the window, waving at neighbours walking their kids to after-school family time, a mandatory requirement for parents who insisted on attempting to raise children on their own.

Lee held his wrist up to the package binding, verifying his identity through the ultra low power body scanner that double-checked his blood DNA against the package label.

“Please hold the label to another position,” a tinny voice on the binding insisted.

Lee sat down and held the package to his knee.
“Thank you.   Please hold the label to another position.”

Lee sighed.  This must be some deal.  He held the package against his chest.

“Thank you.  By the way, you have an elevated white cell count, high heart pulse and unhealthy blood pressure.  Please contact the settlement medical staff as soon as possible.”  The package binding then opened.
Lee unfolded the two shells and looked at a two-centimetre wide cube.

= = =

While government after government collapsed in the 2010s on Earth, citizen brigades banded together, finally announcing that the authority to kill another human no longer belonged solely to government employees.

Murder returned to its everyday value as a quick means to resolve an argument or negotiate a contract.

Those who once held positions of power through economic terrorism – raiding government funds, setting up legal or illegal Ponzi schemes, selling adverts that overvalued bland food or cheap goods, exploiting ignorant workers – were killed for sport, for pleasure and to appease the billions of starving, unemployed workers.

Local communities held mock courts to examine evidence against corrupt, lazy, inefficient government officials.  Dozens of elected politicians were slaughtered at a time, some for simply showing the appearance of favoritism for “elitist” constituents.  Expense reports were used to determine whether government and private company employees were sentenced to death by hanging, firing squad or dragged through the street by out-of-work, over-the-road truckers.

Civility was raised to a new level, nicknamed Sauvage Nobel, a play on the concept of the noble savage, twisted in honour of the Nobel Peace Prize, home of one of the first heroes of the First Global War who had slaughtered a regular melting pot of young political trainees on a now-famous tourist island.

To ease tension, brothels and dating services for both men and women were set up around the planet.  Comedians labeled them “Le DSK Amour House of Restored Repute.”

Basic science and technology R&D ground to a halt for a decade.

Then, in the early 2020s, privateers who had foreseen the political and economic turmoil, offered to free their brothers and sisters of nonpretentious intelligentsia.

At a price, of course:

ñ  Complete DNA reconfiguration.

ñ  Some memory loss.

ñ  Cybernetic organism conversion.

ñ  Personality shift.

Typical futuristic promises.

Thousands of citizens with hordes of gold bullion, perfect college entrance exam scores and spotless business performance joined the privateers on floating fortresses.

Pirates, using former government military ships, submarines, planes, missiles and satellites attempted to kidnap or destroy the privateers.

Anticipating the barbarian backlash, the privateers had secretly moved off Earth before they made their offer.

Only a few hundred citizens were able to rocket to the hidden Moon base before pirates destroyed the launchpads attached to the floating fortresses.

= = =

Lee held the cube in his hand.

Matte black in shadows, the cube shimmered in sunlight.  Light in weight, as if composed of solid aluminium.

He pressed the cube against the checkpoints on his body but neither the cube nor his body registered a response.

That in itself was odd because his body was programmed to assess and report objects he pressed against him.

For fun, Lee threw the cube to the floor.  It stopped short by less than a millimetre.

Interesting…

He kicked the cube and it bounced across the floor but stopped short of the wall.

Odd behaviour…

Lee queried his memory for any instances of similar material reported in general news, technical reports or scientific research.

Mentally sorting through the available data, Lee found no specific public mention of the cube or its characteristics.  He pulled the random set of images and sounds from his body’s subdermal network and used the resulting key to open backdoor access to several private databases he’d bribed himself into.

Nothing.

He walked across the room and picked up the cube, setting it back down in the shipping box.

Reality called.  He had an interview to conduct for SolSys, the entertainment channel.  Another celebrity lab technician marriage breakup had shocked the populace, lowering research productivity by two percent.  Lee’s boss wanted the breakup detailed and resolved before the next daily MFS productivity report was instantly digested by everyone.

With a limited population, Mars could not afford even the tiniest distraction.

= = =

As 2011 flowed into 2012, angry mobs grew larger and more organised.  Hackers built alternative mobile phone networks, converting handheld units into portable transceivers, the latest point on the continuing line of mesh network development.

As police and military attempted to crack down on flash mobs, confiscating smartphones and other communication devices, shutting off cell towers, and closing down prepaid phone sales, the hackers used stolen credit card data to buy time at biology research centers, accelerating the design of biological communication systems.

Governments debated the EMP option – using nuclear weapons detonated strategically around Earth to release a giant electromagnetic pulse, effectively cutting off all electrical power, including biological devices.

Small underground tests had demonstrated the danger of killing off anyone with electronic implants, including several prominent members of society.  The politicians decided against the option, assuming it would be political suicide.

Instead, they were hoping for the sacrifice of the many for the sake of the few, the ageless tactic of worldwide war.

Unfortunately, they hadn’t figured out the power of the people was in the people’s hands, not theirs.

Assassinations quickly followed kangaroo court trials of public leaders.

After murder was legalised, justice and law precedents were flipped on their heads, leaving communities to sort out neighbour disputes before they turned into smallscale wars.

Money lost all value, regardless of currency.

Stocks, bonds, derivatives, futures, dividends became buzzwords for a lost civilisation.

The barter system of hard, reliable skills rose from the ashes.

Anyone claiming to be an expert was often riddled with bullets first and quizzed with questions later.

Charm and personality to sell anything of questionable survival rather than social value was considered an act of desperation.

= = =

After she met with the census takers, Shannon returned to her flat, took off her clothes and then removed her artificial skin.

Although she could afford a chameleon skinsuit, she knew some of her so-called lovers were highly-specialised spybots like herself, able to detect chameleon skin cells.

She pulled her bed away from the wall and opened a hidden door.

Thinking toward tonight’s rendezvous with her mother’s friends, Shannon decided to put on an olive-coloured skinsuit, reflecting her father’s heritage.

She adjusted the skin on her body, making sure the contact points were secure, and then, by touching a few pressure points on her configurable skull, selected a facial bone feature set that made her look more Indian than Caucasian.

Shannon looked in the mirror.  A Bollywood princess!  Time to test who else on Mars was not an authentic humanoid settler.

Phase II of the Botnoid-Humanoid War had just begun.