“Of course.”

Jere followed Evan, even though he knew what he was going to say.

“We need his help,” Evan said. “Might as well pack it in now if we don’t have it.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you being such a dick?”

“I just . . . you wouldn’t understand.”

Evan leaned close. “Take his help.”

“Or we can fake it,” Jere said, softly.

Evan paused for a moment, then looked at Jere intently. “Yes. We could. I can call Virtefx and we can stage the whole thing. Do you want me to do that?”

Matter of fact. Like it didn’t make any difference. That was Evan. If it makes mepowerful and its cheaper and I can use someone else’s money then that’s fine, let’s do it, call it aday, and be done with it.

But that wasn’t what Neteno was like. Neteno was going against the popular wisdom, using data in different ways, taking chances. That was what Neteno was about.

“No,” Jere said.

Evan waited, tapping his foot on the hardwood floor.

“We’ll take the money,” Jere said.

“Yeah!” Evan said, pumping a fist in the air.

“Don’t be so happy.”

“Why not?”

“Now it’s not our show. It’s dad’s.”

Evan shrugged. “Depends on his percentage, doesn’t it?”

Jere laughed. “You don’t understand at all.”

They went back to Ron, who hadn’t moved from the balcony. As if he was expecting this. As if he planned this. He smiled at them and said he envisioned them having a great business partnership. And he was happy to be getting back into it, after so many years. Jere accepted with as large a smile as he could. It felt like his face was being stretched in strange and terrible dimensions.

“So what do the contestants look like?” Ron said.

And there went the afternoon.

TWO: AUDITION

Paul

Keith Paul woke that morning, staring at the cracked and rain-stained ceiling of his cell, and thought, one hundred ninety one days.

I could do that standing on my head.

Still, one hundred and ninety-one days of staring at the ceiling, eating bologna and white bread sandwiches, smelling the farts of Jimmy Jiminez in the bunk below him after a dinner of bland beans and fried chicken, and squinting at the sun for a couple of hours a day in the exercise yard was one hundred and ninety one days he would spend not in a bar, not in his own apartment, not with Jimmy Ruiz and Keira Montoya and Britney Jackson and George White, not with the open road before him beckoning.

He licked his lips. Freedom.

Of course, one of his friends might have been put away. He didn’t like to use the computers here. They looked at everything. And, every once in a while, they’d call you away and say, you know, that stuff you were selling didn’t really exist. And oh by the way, you have won another six months in our establishment. Or no, you only thought you got into the cam network. Don’t try again. One more year for you. And half the readers didn’t work anyway. Or they might have a good game. One that would work this time. If they hadn’t been so greedy last time, they probably could’ve milked that offshore bank-spoof for another year. Maybe enough to step away. Maybe enough to be satisfied.

One hundred ninety one days. He could remember that. He was always good at math. Numbers weren’t bad. Unlike letters, which would slip away when made into words. The snailmail guy came down the corridor, banging once on the steel bars in case anyone was asleep. Keith ignored him. He never got any snailmail. That was for the guys not smart enough to get out before they got old. He stared at the ceiling thought, for the millionth time, of what he was going to do when he got out. Find the nearest bar. Jaeger. Unless Keira or Jimmy would pick him up. Find a decent terminal with an earpiece so he could listen in private. That would be a good enough start.

Bang! The bars clanged.

Keith sat up in bed, almost striking his head on the ceiling. Jimmy looked up at him from the bunk below and shrugged. The asshole guard — a new one, Keith didn’t recognize him, but they cycled in and out quickly — with his stupid little paper-cart pointed at him. Keith. “Got the wrong guy,” Keith said.

“Nope. It’s for you.” Asshole mail-guard shoved a big, thick envelope through the bars and waggled it impatiently.

Keith hopped down off the bunk and reached for it. The guard drew it back, fast, through the bars. “Not so quick. Sign first.”

Keith took the little notepad and scrawled the little house-with-family that served as his signature. Asshole mailguard looked at the glowing sketch on the screen, then to the big envelope, then to Keith, and waggled his eyebrows.

Yeah, fuck you, I can’t read, Keith thought. But he said nothing. Guards talked to guards. He didn’t need to get on their shitlist. Or one hundred ninety one days would become three hundred seventy four days in a real big hurry.

Asshole guard shoved the package at Keith. “Enjoy that now,” he said.

“Fuck you,” Keith said, when asshole guard had gone on down to the next cell.

“What is it?” Jimmy said.

“I don’t know,” Keith said. The envelope was already open. Keith shook his head. Like they could send him a paper gun, or cardboard knife. He reached in, pulled out a quarter inch of cheap paper, fronted by one creamy-smooth sheet with a familiar logo on it: the stylized Neteno

“N”, above an old-timey media player timeline.

“So what is it?” Jimmy said, coming to look over his shoulder.

“Something from Neteno.” The rest of the pages were filled with close-packed text, with numbers in front of every paragraph. Keith recognized that. It looked like stuff he signed when he got credit cards. A legal contract.

But card contracts didn’t have thirty-eight pages.

Click. Something connected in Keith’s mind. The kiosk. That was it. Their wacky show. Almost six months ago, the guards had brought in a shiny aluminum kiosk, like the kind they use for making alibis to your wife or girlfriend. It had a deep purple camera-eye on an articulated stalk and a big flatscreen. They’d set it up in the lunchroom for about a week and let people talk to it. While it was flanked by Richey and Washington, the two most assholish guards in the entire prison.

There was always a big line for it. The dudes who’d talked to it said the girl they talked to was smoking hot. But that could be a chatterbot. So Keith had ignored it for six days. Then Washington and Richey came to get him. They dragged him in front of the kiosk, where the purple camera-eye followed him, like some creepy alien in a sci-fi show.

“You want pretty boys, here’s the prettiest,” Richey told the girl on the screen. Keith smiled. He knew he was good-looking. The girls always liked him. They said he had broad shoulders and a Dudley Do-Right chin, whatever that was. They were always wanting him to take off his shirt and walk through the house like that.

And the one on screen was noticing, too. She was a cute little blonde, that white-blonde like you see from some Swedish girls in the pornos. Keith wondered what color her bush was. Not smoking hot like everyone said, but nice, with a round face and full pink lips. The monitor cut off just before her tits.

She looked him up and down. The purple alien eyeball followed her gaze. She looked at him for a long time, her mouth slightly parted.

“So why do you want to be a contestant for Winning Mars?” she asked.

“Is that what you ask all the men?” Keith said, sliding into his sexy-deep voice. Even though he couldn’t read, he’d always had a wonderful ability to parrot. It had kept him from being thrown out of many hotels he shouldn’t have been in.

The girl laughed. “Actually, yes.”

“I’m afraid we haven’t been formally introduced.”

The girl paused, and her eyes widened, just for an instant.

Point to me, Keith thought.

“I’m Cassandra Wasserman,” she said. “And you are?”

“Master Keith Paul, at your service.” He gave her a comedically low bow. The eye followed him. He had a sudden urge to snap it off its arm.

She giggled. “You’re courteous, at least.”

At that moment, something passed between Richey and Washington. They looked at each other, bottom lips slack as if held down by invisible fishing-sinkers.

“Hey, step it up!” Washington said. “There’re other suckers.”

“Yeah, get to the point,” Richey said.

Cassandra cleared her throat. The camera turned to look at the guards. They crossed their arms and tried to look tough.

She turned the camera back on Keith. “So, why do you want to be a contestant?”

“It is my highest ambition, dear lady! Anything to be next to your radiance!”

Another laugh. “I’m not going.”

“Then I shall hear none of it! I refuse!”

“You don’t want to be a contestant?” Cassandra looked disappointed.

“Not if it takes me out of your sight.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what to think of you. But I like. Can I put you down on the list?”

“If it makes you happy, yes.”

“Great!”

“Are you done yet?” Washington said, hanging over the screen.

“Yes,” Cassandra said.

“Goodbye, fair one,” Keith said.

Washington came around to escort him back to his lunch, glowering with promised future revenge. “What was with all the flowery-talk?”

Keith just shrugged.

“Fucking ham.”

“Sometimes the spirit—”

“Ah, shut up,” Washington said, pushing him down onto the bench. Keith let him do it. He watched Richey and Washington drag a few more guys over, but the shadow of Cassandra’s face never seemed to smile as much as it had for him.

She liked me.

But what had she said? Winning Mars?

Keith shook his head. He only had three hundred and fifty seven days before he got out of East Valley Correctional. That was what mattered, not some tart in a box.

“It’s the show!” Jimmy cried, bringing Keith back to the present. “You’re on the show!”

“What show?”

“Winning Mars.”

“What’s that?”

Jimmy’s face closed up, like he’d just bit a lemon. “You don’t know what it is, and they want you?”

“Just tell me.”

“It’s a reality show.”

“Reality show? Like, old-time TV?”

“Yeah. They’re bringing it back. But they’re going to space. To Mars.”

“To Mars? The planet?” Keith felt something like a cold hand grip his guts and twist. And they were picking prisoners? That meant everyone was gonna die. And there was probably no way out of it. He riffled through the meaningless words.

“Whatsa matter?” Jimmy asked.

“Mars? Space? They’re sending us to die.”

Jimmy looked surprised, as if he’d never thought of that. “But if they pick you, you get out early.”

Early? As in less than one hundred ninety one days? Keith stood up straighter. And if hewas out, that didn’t mean he had to go on the flight. They might not even put him in a real jail.

“What does it say?” Keith said, handing the documents to Jimmy. Jimmy looked at it and shook his head. Pointed at the camera in the cell. “Sorry, man. Too many assholes watching. I tell you the wrong thing, they have my nuts.”

“What’m I supposed to do?”

“Take it to the library,” Jimmy said.

“We have a library?”

Jimmy just looked at him and shook his head.

At lunch, Keith discovered they did have a library. It was staffed by a young guy with a big mop of black hair who was actually reading an old-fashioned book. He took one look at Keith’s papers and shook his head.

“You lucky fuck,” he said. “Reader’s over there.”

The reader was an old cranky thing that didn’t even explain the big words. But it did tell Keith he was accepted as a contestant on a show called Winning Mars, and if he signed the papers, he would be out of jail in a week.

There were lots of words he didn’t understand, but he didn’t care. He took a real live pen from his real live librarian and signed his little house-and-family mark to it. Seven days. Seven was better than one hundred ninety one. And he was sure he wouldn’t have to go to Mars.

Not a chance.

Play

Ron made them fly out to Detroit, sketching on napkins the whole way. Jere sat back and closed his eyes, willing sleep. This is dad, turning my shit into his own, he thought. Evan leaned forward and asked questions, as if he was really interested.

“Why GM?” Evan asked. “Aren’t they #2?”

“Two or three,” Ron said. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Why not Toyota as a sponsor?”

“These aren’t sponsors.”

“What are they?” Evan asked.

“Partners.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Partners’re gonna develop technology. Plus pay for logos.”

“So why not go #1, get Toyota?”

“Don’t know anyone at Toyota. And I’m in no mood for Japanese politeness. I don’t need someone smiling and saying yes, yes, yes, when they really mean ‘get the fuck out of my office, you uncultured roundeye asshole.’”

A pause. Then, Evan’s voice: “So you know someone at GM?”

“Several someones.”

Evan shut up for a while, then started asking questions about the sketches. Jere tried not to listen, but the words crept into his brain.

He still didn’t know why they couldn’t stick with the original plan of dropping everyone on Mars and having them run a course to a specified endpoint. As in, on foot. Throw some cliffs in there, and you have a good show.

The only problem with that, the tech geeks told him, was they only had guesses as to which cliffs might be passable, so he might end up with five teams all staring up at a big vertical wall, marooned. Plus, then the team with the best physical strength and stamina would win. And it wouldn’t be much of a team thing then, either, unless they did some really stupid stuff like make two of them carry a third.

And, of course, a footrace wasn’t good enough for dad. He took one look at the plans and got out a red pen. A real red pen. He printed stuff, marked it up, sketched on napkins. He wanted some kind of rolling thing people could drive, like a 4x4. He wanted something that people had to fly. He wanted them to put the stuff together, and for the assembly to be part of the time. And he wanted an on-foot part too. Five different routes. The Russians looked at the suggestions, howled about having to do five different drops, and raised the price. Ron offered to fund the increase.

And that was, finally, when Evan looked at Jere and mouthed, I see what you mean. And Jere mouthed back, I told you so.

And dad showed them his flyeye footage of their silent conversation, and said he’d appreciate a little more respect next time.

“After Detroit, we can head to Chicago,” Dad said.

“Why?” Evan said.

“Talk to Boeing.”

“You know someone there, too?”

“No.”

Evan said nothing.

When they got up to the Renaissance Center, though, Ron’s friend, Henried Wenger, the Senior Vice President of Vehicle Development, Specialty Division, North America, who was a squat fireplug of a man who looked like he’d been poured into his seventeen-thousand-dollar suit, just shook his head.

“Mars? Are you kidding? How much are you expecting to pay?”

Ron looked surprised. “I . . . I think this is an excellent way for you to show the reliability of your vehicles in tough environments. Imagine what it would do for your image.”

Henried’s expression went dark. “So you’re expecting us to pay?”

“It’s an unprecedented promotional opportunity. I’m sure if we could talk to the right people in marketing, they’d fund it.”

“I’m sure if you could talk to marketing, they’d tell you to go pound sand,” Henried said.

“This new experiential advertising . . . they aren’t spending much on new programs. Put a few cameras in cars, give em away, pay an editor, call it a day. It’s too easy. Plus, the fanboyrallying’s always good.”

“I really wish you’d consider what you’re giving up,” Ron said. “When Pathfinder ran reliably far past its rated life, do you know what that did for NASA’s image?”

“Jack. They ain’t around today, aren’t they?”

Ron shut his mouth with an audible click. Jere had to stifle a smile. Seeing his dad shut down was funny, but it also meant a door had just closed in his face.

“We’ll have to take it around,” Ron said. “Toyota. DaimerChrysler.”

A shrug. Then a sigh. “Ron, I’d like to. I really would. If it was my decision alone, I’d do it. But they’re just looking at budgets too close these days. If that means you have to shop it, shop it.”

“I’d really rather it be here.”

Another shrug, and a perfectly manicured smile, somehow sad.

“Think on it,” Ron said. “We’ll call back tomorrow.”

“The answer’ll be the same.”

Out on the pavement, on the muggy August day, Ron stamped his foot and clenched his hands into fists.

“Fucker!” he said. “He’s still pissed about that little expose I did, a million years ago.”

“What was it?” Jere asked. “Can we use it?”

Ron looked at him. “At least you’re thinking in the right direction. But no. It’s not a big deal now. Employee sexworkers.”

“At GM?”

“No, at a big law firm he used to be at.”

Evan stirred. “He was a lawyer?”

“Yeah, why?” Ron asked.

“You aren’t gonna sell a program like this to a lawyer. He’s thinking about how many ways his friends in GM legal can hang his ass.”

“So? And I suppose you know someone better to talk to?”

Evan smiled. It was a slow, terrible thing. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

Ron did an almost picture-perfect double-take. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

“You never asked.”

Ron turned around and headed for the RenCen again. He stopped when nobody followed. “What are you waiting for? Let’s get back in there.”

“This guy, you don’t meet in an office.”

“Who is he?”

Evan shrugged. “An ops guy, but a higher-up. But he doesn’t meet in his office. Not if you want to do real business.”

Ron sucked air through his teeth. “Golfcourseware,” he said.

“Not exactly,” Evan said. “More like stripclubware. And we aren’t selling CRM, anyway.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Jere said.

The two older men looked at him, shook their heads, and went back to their conversation.

Which is how they ended up in Fast Eddie’s, a shitty little strip club built into the usable half of a half-burned apartment building in downtown Detroit. Tattered “Urban Renovation”

banners hung from the roof. A multicolored neon sign hung in one cracked window.

“He comes here?” Ron said, looking doubtful.

Inside, though, the runway was beautiful polished marble, and the bar was a chrome and glass artwork. And the girls were as perfect as surgery could make them. Flyeye-zappers popped in every corner of the bar, and heavy lead-foil offered some proof against line-of-sight wireless. Jere made himself drink a single beer, slowly, away from the dancing flesh. They made Patrice look like the girl next door.

Their whale came in at 10:30, and a whale he was. He was a large African-American man wearing a gold-trimmed red jogging suit and a very large gold Rolex. “That’s him?” Ron said, when Evan pointed him out.

“Yep.”

“What is he, a mob boss or something?”

“Oh ye of little faith. Just remember this is a chance meeting. Take my lead. Don’t go offscript.”

Ron just looked at him.

“Got it?”

“Ye-es,” Ron said, drawing it out.

“Go,” Evan said. He stood up and threw open his arms in a big expression of surprise.

“Thalos!” he shouted. “Thalos Winnfield, is that you?”

Thalos looked up, frowned for a moment, then broke into a big gold grin. He stood and lumbered towards Jere, in that strange and graceful way that very large people have. They met in the middle of the room, a collision of flesh, with Ron and Jere orbiting like little moons.

“Evan! What brings you back?”

Evan looked sheepish. “Business, actually.”

“Business? With who?”

“You, actually.”

“Me, Thalos?”

“You, GM.”

“What you doing with us?”

“Nothing,” Evan said. “Let me introduce my collegues—”

“Wait. Nothin?”

“Thalos, it doesn’t matter. Probably best we go to Toyota anyway. This is Ron Gutierrez—”

Thalos held up a big hand. “Wait! Wait! Toyota? What’s this shit?”

“Well, they have motivation. The Chinese on the moon and all . . . Thalos, this is a long story.”

“And I want to hear it,” Thalos said, gathering Evan in one big arm and herding him towards his table.

When they were situated and introductions made, Thalos ordered a bottle of thirty-year Macallan and sat back. “So what’s this crap about Toyota?”

“Thalos, it doesn’t matter. You probably wouldn’t be interested, anyway. I bet GM

engineering has its hands full, just trying to keep up.”

A nod. “You said it. Hybrids, hydrogen, fuel cells, E85, geez, whatever happened to good old gas? But you’re still gonna tell me what you’re doing.”

“We’re sending people to Mars, and we need vehicles for them to drive.”

Thalos’s face went completely slack for several long moments. Then he guffawed. “Oh. Man. You had me going.”

“No. We’re serious.”

“Wait. Wait. You work for NASA now? I thought you were just a Hollywood asshole.”

“I’m still a Hollywood asshole.”

“No. Wait. Wait. Hollywood is taking us to Mars, and you want to buy GM cars to drive there?”

“No. We want you to design the vehicles. And pay us for it.”

Thalos sat back, suddenly serious. “You’re not kidding.”

“No.”

Silence for a time. “Fuck. Wow. You’re right. Toyota would do it just to spit in the Chink’s eyes. Which means we gotta do it instead.”

“Can you?”

“Tell the engineers it can’t be done, and stand back.”

“But can you get it approved? On the up and up?”

Thalos nodded. “Yeah. Shit, you should see the money we piss away for schools and their engineering programs. Yeah. We can do it.”

Evan gave a sigh of relief. “We have a deal?” He held out his hand. Thalos’s hand ate Evan’s. “Deal. Come by tomorrow, we’ll talk to the techies. Fair warning. Whatever you get won’t look like a car.”

“We’re not expecting it will.”

They stayed. They drank. They groped. And, when it was all done, Ron asked Evan,

“What does Thalos do?”

“As little as possible,” Evan said.

“What’s his title?”

“Senior Executive Vice President, Vehicle Line Assembly and Liason, Reformed UAW.”

“Can we trust him?”

Evan smiled. “If he says it can be done, it’ll be done.”

And indeed, the next day, they had ink on paper, and even a publicity release. Jere could already see the press release. GM Sponsors Mars Shot, or something like that. And it was great seeing old Ron shut down.

But it made him feel even more lost, between two great men.

Patrice

Patrice’s locator found Jere at the Porsche dealer, buying one of their new little gumdrop-cars. Patrice wrinkled her nose. She never understood what Jere saw in the stupid things. They were expensive, but they were uncomfortable, and small, and loud, and fitting any kind of luggage in them was nearly impossible, which meant he had to take the little Caddy SUV

on long trips anyway, and . . .

But that didn’t matter. She got in her own little Kia and paid maxtax to take the Fast 405 down to Newport Beach, pushing the warnings that flashed when she hit 88 miles an hour, threatening tickets for another mile an hour over. It cost her over $160 to go from Westwood to Newport, but it was worth it, because she caught him, stylus poised over a signscreen, with a rack-suited salesman trying to hide a grin, behind his big aluminum desk.

“What’re you buying?” Patrice asked.

Jere dropped the pen and looked up, eyes wide like a kid who got peeking up skirts. “I, uh . . .”

“I thought you had to save money.”

“He qualified,” the salesman said, giving Patrice his god-I-hate-wives-and-girlfriends look. He picked up the stylus and held it out to Jere, but Jere ignored it, looking at Patrice.

“I thought everything was going to your show,” Patrice said.

“This doesn’t matter,” Jere said, looking down at the desk. His voice was soft and rough and low. His I-just-had-a-fight-with-dad voice.

“Ron?”

Jere snapped back to look up at her. “Not this time.”

“What, then?”

He looked at the salesman, then back to her. “It doesn’t matter.”

Patrice glared at him. She hated Jere when he got this way. He was a pusher, a thinker, someone who’d made himself into a big man. But he had these times when he just got into that fatalistic funk, that oh-woe-is-me shit, that she couldn’t stand. She crossed her arms. “I got another offer.”

Jere looked at her. Sighed. Stood up. “Let’s talk outside.”

The salesman leapt out of his seat, as if spring-loaded. “Wait a minute! Aren’t you going to sign?”

“I’ll be back.”

“Then why not sign now, get the final prep started—”

“No.”

A frown. “I don’t know if I can guarantee you the price that I quoted if—”

Jere paused at the door and turned back to the salesman. “I’ll be back. I’ll sign. And it won’t be a dollar more.”

The salesman shut up. Patrice smiled. That was more like it. That was her Jere. Outside the dealer, by the candy-colored jelly-bean cars, Jere turned to face her. “What is this shit?”

“Fuck you, Jere!”

“Fuck me, what?”

“You won’t talk to me like that. Like I’m just an employee! We got more than that!”

Jere clenched his fists, and his face went a deep purple-red. “Patrice, you are an employee.”

“Not just. Not just!”

Jere rolled his eyes. She knew what he was thinking, all the old phrases about mixing business with pleasure, dipping the pen in the company ink. “Look,” she said. “I got an offer. A good one. I have to consider it.”

“You’re getting paid scale.”

“Yeah, but not scale plus expenses and residuals.”

Jere frowned. “Who is it?”

“Glitchwerke.”

“The sequel to their “Ten Days in Africa” interactives?” Jere said.

“I hate it when you use that damn eyepod.”

“I know.”

Patrice crossed her arms and said nothing. Let him stew. Let him download all the financials and run the analysis and try to tell her it wouldn’t pay residuals. It was a job, in front of a camera, getting her face out in the world. Not waiting for something that might never happen.

“We can’t pay you more,” Jere said.

“But you can buy a Porsche.”

“We have to pay the other contestants, and Dad’s got plans for Mars, and Evan’s still trying to get Boeing to fold, and I’m spending on the Russians—”

“Other contestants?”

A nod. “Yeah. You didn’t think the show was just going to be you, did you?”

“You said I would be the only actor on Mars!”

“You will be. The rest are just schmoes. Hell, the only confirmed so far is a convict.”

“You’re using convicts?” Patrice heard her voice rise into a screech. Jere held up his hands. “Just a couple. Most’re just gonna be schmoes.”

“But I’ll win.”

“Your team. Maybe.”

“Who’s on my team?”

“We don’t know yet. We’re still taking contestants.”

“I don’t get to pick them?”

A sigh. Jere put his hands on his hips. “Frankly, Patrice, no.”

“So now it won’t be just me that wins. And there’s gonna be others on the show. Convicts, even. You aren’t making me want to exactly, like, leap on the rocket.”

Jere grinned. “And, in a couple of months, we start training in the high desert.”

“Desert? In the summer?”

“It’ll be winter by then,” Jere said.

“So I’ll freeze.”

“Wear heavy clothes.”

Patrice felt tears welling. She stamped her foot. “This isn’t funny, Jere!” she said. “This isn’t funny at all. I have an offer, a real offer, and I have to make a decision.”

“Based on profitability analysis, I doubt if Twenty Days In Africa will make residuals.”

“I knew you were going to say that!”

Jere looked at her with hard little eyes. There was silence for a long time. Finally, he said,

“Patrice, I understand you want to get out in front of the audience. Maybe we could step up prepublicity—”

“There hasn’t been any publicity!”

“Exactly. So if there is some, and your face is on the cover, is that enough?”

“It’s not like being in a major interactive.”

“And being in a moderately-sized, mundane-experience interactive is nothing like being able to say that you’re the only actor to have ever been on Mars.”

Patrice frowned. Jere had a point there. It was the key, the differentiator, the thing that would make the casting directors sit up and say, Wow, we have to have her. And how many actors would line up behind her, if she stepped out. She smiled. Fucking Jere. So smart. So smart at that.

“Now can I go buy my car?” Jere said.

“It won’t be that easy,” Patrice said.

“What does that mean?”

“You’re going to have to shower me with gifts. Chocolate. Dinners. You may even have to pay attention to me.”

Jere’s tense pose softened. “Of course I will.”

“I mean it!”

“I will. But first, let me get myself a gift.”

She let him go back into the dealership, thinking, Asshole. Thinking, Brilliant asshole. Thinking, You just threw away a real gig.

She looked up at the clear blue sky. If it was night, she’d have Jere point out Mars. Real

I can’t believe I’m doing this again, Jere thought, as the chill Russian stewardess strapped him down into the vinyl schoolbus-seat of the hotel shuttle. The cabin still smelled of raw aluminum and grease, and, faintly, of puke. Jere wondered if it could still be his. This time, he was the only one on board.

The stewardess made sure his belts were tight and went forward into the pilot’s cabin. When she didn’t come out, Jere realized she wasn’t a stewardess. She was a pilot. Just Jere and the Russian ice queen, headed for the Hilton-RusSpace hotel. In the interactives, a setup for a kinky time with the ice queen. In reality, Jere’s hands were too slick with sweat and his heart was pounding much too fast to think about any kind of tryst. He could think about only one thing: Kevin Cho.

Jere’d watched the Kevin Cho thing evolve over the last few weeks with half an eye. Thinking, I wonder if Neteno can do something with this. Knowing it would be dangerous in the wake of the Mississippi thing.

Kevin was a biological virtuoso. He’d been the one to design the little mini-Godzillas that swept Japan and the United States. From lizards, or something. But they stood up on their hind legs and waved their little arms at the kids, and even voiced tiny little cries that were highpitched echoes of Godzilla’s famous scream. That was the kicker. The animals themselves were cute, but the scream was what made people run to the pet stores and buy them in droves. And they bought the accessories—little model cities with little model cars and little model people that their mini-G could stomp around in, microcams so they could record its adventures, memberships in videocommunities where people shared their best stuff and rated it, or even paid to be on the mini-G channel. It had made Ling Kung Biodiversity billions of dollars, and even managed to melt the Chinese-Japanese relationship for a little while. Maybe it was the billions that set Kevin off. Maybe it was his boss, driving up to work in his multimillion-dollar custom-made Ferrari, that did it. Or maybe he was just an idealist from the start. Maybe he wasn’t just marking time in Ling Kung. Maybe he’d been learning to do what he really wanted to do. The media had tried to spin it both ways, pointing to old blogs where he talked about how there was no reason for us to need or want oil any longer. But Jere looked at those, and they seemed to be just passing college arguments, the kind you got into when you were a little too smart and still thought you could change the world. It didn’t seem to be the work of a man who had a deep-seated need to take down the world economy. But, whatever the reason, he’d taken a little trip to Iraq and injected an oil-eating bacterium of his own design into one of their most prolific oilfields. They didn’t find out about it until days later, when all that came out of the pipes was a thin brown slurry, like melted chocolate ice-cream. Analysis showed the bacterium. Oilfield records showed Kevin where he shouldn’t be.

And, in one moment, Kevin had succeeded in becoming The Most Hated Man in the World, with Muslim extremists and the American president and the various parliaments of Europe all calling for his head. Russia, self-sufficient on oil, had made a few rude noises, but the damage was done. Kevin had already booked a week-long visit to RusSpace’s orbiting hotel, territory that no country claimed. And he’d brought weapons. Handguns that looked almost alive, and shot black greasy stingers full of curare.

Jere watched the American nukes fall on Iraq, flash flash flash, three in quick succession, to sterilize the oilfield to a depth of a thousand feet. Flying cams showed the ground rippling like the sea, ahead of the blast, as the brilliance seared their pixels to black. And the Iraqi government, profusely thanking the United States for their help. Surreal, raised to the power of infinity.

And the scary thing, the newscasters and inpersons said, in hushed tones, is they didn’t know how deep the bacteria had gotten, or how interconnected the oil fields were, or if the nukes would really sterilize it. And they wouldn’t know for many years. Up in orbit, Kevin said a few plastic words about how we should have let the bacteria take its course, how we shouldn’t be dependent on oil, how the sooner we moved to a true sunbased bioeconomy, the better it would be for the planet. And he reiterated his desire simply to stay there, to become earth’s first expatriate.

Nations howled for his blood. The Russians ranted, but Jere knew they couldn’t really do much. It was Russian government versus organizatsiya, which meant stalemate. RusSpace made noises about wanting him out of their station, but they were selling media rights for bigger numbers than their weekly ops.

And they know this is the best publicity in the world, Jere thought. When this is over,they’ll have a dozen orbital hotels. Hell, they’ll have fucking resorts. The one catch: after his statement, Kevin stopped talking. He said he’d speak to only one person.

And that was Jere Gutierrez.

And now here I am, going to talk to the nut, Jere thought, as a huge hand pressed him back in his seat. He was ready for that. He was even ready for the sensation of falling. He felt the room flip. He felt his stomach flip. He filled the bag twice before they docked with the RusSpace hotel.

He went forward to the hatch without waiting for his pilot. She joined him there with a wry smile. Probably thinking he was going to get killed. Or maybe drawing some kind of bizarre connection between Mississippi and the Oilfield Incident.

“He’s in his cabin,” a big, portly American with mutton-chop sideburns said, when Jere entered the hotel lobby.

“Yeah, go get him,” said a girl, who Jere hoped was the fat American’s daughter.

“Calm, calm,” their Russian host said, pushing his hands down at the floor.

“We are calm,” the girl said. “We just want to go home.”

Jere checked his gear, a little head-mounted camera that connected to his eyepod. Which, itself, connected to nothing. The pathetic network connection between the hotel and earth had been severed. Which was fine by him. Because they couldn’t exactly sell the footage if it was beamed all over the net.

Jere still remembered Evan and Ron, eyes wide, lips slick in anticipation of money. Whatdo you mean, you don’t want to do it? Evan said. That video is worth tens – hell, hundreds – ofmillions. Because we’re the only ones who got it. Nobody else. This shit never happens, notanymore.

It’ll make up for the Porsche, his dad said.

And so now he was standing outside the door of a madman’s cabin. Tt was the same one he’d stayed in. Jere’s heart pounded, and he heard his breath rattling in the back of his throat. He knocked on the door.

“Come,” said a voice within.

Jere pushed through. The door seemed to swing in exaggerated slow motion, as if time itself had become unbuffered. He half-expected to see a muzzle flash, and feel a bullet slam into his body like a wrecking-ball.

But there was just a man, tall, slim, dark-haired, sitting hunched-over on the little bed. In his lap was something that looked like a gun, if guns were grown in fields on big gnarled guntrees. He didn’t even look up at Jere.

“Can I come in?”

“Please.” Looking up at him. The man had strange brown-green eyes that didn’t show well in his publicity photos, sunken cheeks, and a mouth that curved down at the edges in a permanent frown. His dark hair was ratty and thinning, even though he couldn’t be more than thirty-five years old.

Jere slipped into the room and propped himself in a corner. He put his hands behind his back to hold himself away from the wall.

And to be as far away as possible from the thing on the bed.

“Thank you for coming,” Kevin said. “I understand you didn’t have such a pleasant time on your first visit.”

Jere just looked at him. Questions, anytime now, he thought. But his mouth remained stubbornly closed. He imagined himself silent through the whole interview. Boy, that footagewould sell.

That did it. “Why me?” Jere said.

“I thought it would be obvious.”

“It isn’t.”

“You’re the visionary. You’re the one leading us to Mars.”

Jere’s mouth dropped open. That was the last thing he’d expected to hear. “It’s just a reality show,” Jere said.

Kevin’s downturned mouth spread into a wide grin. “That’s OK. Keep telling them that.”

“We could be faking the whole thing,” Jere said.

“But you aren’t. I looked into it. You aren’t faking a thing.”

Jere shook his head. “I still don’t get it.”

Kevin gave him several seconds of that surprising grin, then sighed. “Ask your questions. The ones everyone wants answered.”

Jere nodded. “Why’d you do it?”

“I already explained that.”

“So you did it because you think we shouldn’t be using oil?”

“There’s really no reason for it,” Kevin said.

“Over fifty percent of the world’s energy still comes from oil,” Jere said, reciting statistics that were stored locally in his eyepod. “It would be an irrecoverable shock to the world economy to lose that overnight.”

“It wouldn’t be overnight. And it wouldn’t be an irrecoverable shock. They keep oil cheap, so other forms of energy can’t compete. They keep it cheap, because they can control it.”

“Who does?”

“Every government that’s chasing me.”

Jere frowned. “That’s almost the whole world.”

“Exactly the reason I want to expatriate.”

“So you’ll . . . stay here, the rest of your life.”

“No. I want to go farther.”

“The Chinese moonbase?”

Kevin snarled. “The Chinese will never let me on their moon. I’m still an American to them. And not a Party member. And I don’t wear a uniform. And they’re addicted to oil, just as bad as everyone else.”

“Where, then?” Jere’s voice was soft. He knew the answer.

“Mars.”

There was silence in the small room. For a long time, the only sound was the rush of air in the ventilators. Kevin was the first to break it.

“I want to be a contestant,” he said.

“We aren’t going to stay.”

Kevin looked at Jere. His weird brown-green eyes appeared to be focused on something very far away. “I might.”

“You’d die there.”

“That’s OK.”

Silence again. Then, again: “Make me a contestant.”

Jere sighed. He imagined whipping out a contract and having Kevin sign it, right there and then. Spin that, Evan, he thought. He imagined Oversight officers surrounding Neteno. He imagined a brief, bright nuclear flash. No. There was no way.

“I can’t do it.”

“Yes you can! I read your contact! You’re making expats. They’re your wards. I can sign it and stay right up here until it’s time to leave. I can even help you build your transport. You’re assembling in LEO, right?”

It would be the biggest publicity to ever hit Neteno. It would be the end of Neteno. Because no matter what Ron said, there was such a thing as bad publicity. When it got so big it ran you over and spit you out like a bag of trash on the freeway, it was bad.

“I can try.”

“There’s no try,” Kevin said. He raised the little wood gun and pointed it at Jere. Jere’s heart thundered, a million miles an hour. He noticed that the barrel glistened slightly, as if wet.

“I . . .”

“You’ll do it!” Kevin screamed, leaping off the bed. He took the gun and pressed its muzzle against Jere’s neck. The barrel was warm and slick. Jere felt his gorge rise again.

“Say it!” Kevin said. “Give me your word! Say it! We don’t need paper! We don’t need screens! Your word is good enough.”

“I . . .” Jere began.

There was a sharp ping! from somewhere in the cabin, then a scream like a giant teakettle. Kevin made a small noise, deep in his throat and fell against Jere. Jere wrapped his arms around the other man to hold him up, and felt something warm and wet spreading on his back.

“Kevin!” Jere pushed him upright, but the other man’s legs buckled. His eyes were wide and blank.

Jere pushed himself away. Many things hit him at once as Kevin crumpled to the floor. His hands were covered with blood. The teakettle noise still wailed. His ears popped. He felt light-headed. There was a tiny little hole in the aluminum wall, right below the porthole. And something, gleaming and metallic, floated outside the porthole itself. There was a hole in the wall.

There was that teakettle shriek.

Jere’s eyes flew wide, and he scrambled out into the hall. He could feel the air flowing towards the cabin door. He shut it, but it buckled inwards and didn’t stop the flow. In the lobby, they shrieked at his blood-soaked hands.

“He killed him!” the daughter/wife/girlfriend said.

The portly guy nodded. “Good deal.”

“We’re leaking!” Jere cried.

“Leak?” the steward said.

“Yeah. Someone shot Kevin. Through the wall. From outside.”

“Outside? Is not possible!”

“Is possible,” Jere said. “Now go fix!”

There was a whispered conference in Russian. A guy wearing the uniform of RusSpace came down with a handpad, looking concerned. That broke it up. Jere wasn’t surprised to see them running down the hall with a sheet of plastic and silicone. Back on Earth, the video sold for fifty-seven million dollars to the Netflix delivery system, which posted 745,000,000 paid accesses in the next twenty-four hours.

“There’s the size of your Mars audience,” Evan said.

“Or bigger,” Ron said.

But when Jere went on the boards, they fed disturbing things to his eyepod. Of course, it’s a Neteno thing, they said. Does anyone ever believe them anymore?

Probably orchestrated the whole thing. I bet Kevin never existed.But the bombs.

Were YOU there? Easy enough to hack the Found Media.

But Kevin existed. He did the mini-Gs.

Do we know that, for sure?

And, most disturbingly: I bet their whole Mars thing is a load of shit.Glenn

When Glenn Rothman got the big thick envelope from Neteno, he knew what it meant. He didn’t even bother taking it up the drive to the house. He tore it open right there. Old Lady Pellerman, his crazy next-door neighbor, watched him from across the street, where she scrabbled in her mailbox for something that wasn’t spam.

And he’d sign it right there too, he thought, sign it and show Alena, once and for all. He’d look down at her from Mars and thumb his nose at her. He pulled the letter out from a big paper-clipped bunch of legalese.

Dear Mr. Rothman,

We’re pleased to accept both you and your wife Alena as contestants on our upcoming reality linear, Winning Mars.

Wait.

During the course of our review, we found that both you and your wife had applied to our program.

Oh, shit.

We’re pleased we can accept you both. Your accomplishments in the field of extreme sports are extremely impressive, and we believe you will be a very competitive team. Shit oh shit.

Please note that this offer is for both you and Alena. If either of you, for any reason, wish to decline this offer, please consider it void. The contract is only binding with both of your signatures. We do not anticipate you’ll have a problem with this stipulation. However, we did want to clarify. Please sign, notarize, and return these documents by February 12, 2021.

Sincerely,

Jere Gutierrez

CEO, Neteno, Inc.

“Shit!” Glenn screamed.

Pellerman glared at him from across the street.

He didn’t care. “Fucking Alena!”

“Watch your mouth!” Sharp, in that squeally old-lady-tone that drove Glenn up a wall.

“Watch your hemorrhoids!” Glenn snapped, and raced back up to the house. Glenn called Alena. No answer. Just the smooth impersonal voice of her attendant. Of course. Probably because she knew it was him. He called her backup home number. Our old number, he thought.

No answer. Another attendant. Fuck, couldn’t Alena have a little bit of personality anduse her own voice?

Glenn paced back and forth in his little office. He should go over to her house — their old house. He should call Neteno. He should get them to reconsider. Because Alena would never go with him.

But they would never do that, would they?

Would they?

He twisted the simple gold band he still wore. It was polished smooth, inside and out, by much twisting. If he could just speak to Alena in person, he might be able to convince her to do it, just this once. Not like they were married. Just a business thing. Because this was the biggest thing out there.

If this is the biggest thing, go big, Glenn thought, remembering the words of Mr. Henry, his high-school football coach and mentor. The guy who led him into extreme sports. Glenn sat down at his computer and paid a locator a hundred bucks to get a GPS read on Alena’s phone. It mapped to a location at the foot of Boulder Canyon. Satphotos showed it to be a parking lot. The parking lot where they left the car, back when they used to do Lady of the Light on Solar Dome. Glenn remembered those climbs well. The up-and-out, the rock alive under his fingers, just inches away from the end. His heart, like a well-tuned motor. Alena, above him. And then finally at the top, alone, looking out over Boulder and the foothills to the plains. On a clear day, it was almost as if they could see Nebraska. Sitting through sunsets with Alena, huddled close as the sky pulled the heat from the rock. She was climbing.

Glenn slammed the Neteno contract down on the table, turned to the back where the signatures went, scrabbled for a pen, and scrawled his name. He would take it to her, already signed. He’d say, You’re the only one holding us back. All we need is a signature. Just onesignature, and we’ve done the biggest thing in the world. Off the world. If you can’t do it forme, do it for the endorsements. Do it because it’s something nobody else can do. Glenn shoved the contract into his back pocket, grabbed his bag of climbing gear, and headed out for the trailhead.

Which is how he found himself, two hours later, watching Alena try to kill herself. Of course, she wouldn’t see it that way. For her, it was just being aggressive, just going max-out. That was the way she was. She always pushed it. Whether it was Tibet, or Scotland, or just a little climb right outside their hometown, she always tried to do more. Climb once, time it, try it again. Try to make that time better. Try a harder route. Or do stuff like she was doing now. Glenn stood on the ledge to the right side of Solar Dome, looking up at Alena scrabbling on the clean steep face of the Lady of Light. Not an insane route, not by a long shot, but challenging, mainly edges and side pulls with a long crux reach rightward for thin fingers. The stone was decent, nothing more. Careful and slow, it was safe as houses. Fast and loose, like Alena liked to do, and you were looking at turning yourself into ketchup right quick. Fast and loose on a winter day when the sun was warm but the rock was cold, where there were still little pockets of ice gathering in cracks and crevices, was insane.

The sun may be warm, but the rocks know the weather, Mr. Henry’s voice whispered to him, from the distance of many years.

Glenn wanted to shout. But he knew you didn’t shout. Not even if you thought you had to. He imagined her starting at the sound of his voice, slipping, falling . . there would be nothing he could do but watch.

A terrible little voice said, And she can’t sign when she’s dead. Glenn pushed that voice away and set to climbing. Starting was difficult, blank for the feet, and he had a terrible moment where his fingers seemed to find purchase, then peeled rock when he started to shift his weight. He pushed hard against the cold stone. He imagined he could hear it, laughing at him.

Slow and go, slow and go.

When he chanced his next look up, Alena was moving through the narrow slot that led to the top. She looked down at him, her eyes dark beads. But he knew she saw him. She sped up her pace.

Great, Glenn thought, and continued climbing.

The slot was icy, and Glenn’s numb fingers felt nothing as he pulled himself up. Footholds slipped and peeled. The rock itself seemed to be against him. He paused, and panted, and waited for Alena’s dark eyes to look down at him. He imagined her standing there, hands on hips.

But she never looked down, and a more grim thought came to him. Maybe she was already on her way down. Avoiding him.

Glenn climbed a little faster.

When he reached the top, Alena was sitting on the cold stone, pants flapping in the wind around her slender legs. She looked out over the foothills to Boulder, hands wrapped around her knees. Like those nights he remembered.

Except she was now alone.

Glenn went to sit beside her, but she looked up at him and said “Stop.”

She was so beautiful. Big dark eyes, set in an elfin face with high, perfect cheekbones. Arms like a dancer, with powerful muscle hiding close under flesh. Her brown hair, almost black, was longer than he remembered it, almost shoulder-length, and she let it fall free. Stupid, really, Glenn thought.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Alena said. “You almost killed yourself, blah blah, you need to be more careful, gnar gnar.”

Glenn started to sit down.

“You can’t sit by me,” Alena said, scrambling to her feet. She backed away from Glenn, like they were two prize-fighters circling each other in the ring.

“What are we going to do, then?” Glenn asked. “Dance?”

“No. And we’re not gonna fuck. I see you’re still wearing your wedding band.”

“Some of us can hope.”

Alena blew air out her nostrils. “I know why you’re here. I got it, too.”

“All you have to do is sign it,” Glenn said. “Then we’re going to Mars.”

“We. Barf.”

“Alena . . .” Glenn started, then a flare of anger made him say, “Why’d you even have to enter? I would already’ve been signed off and on my way to LA!”

“Don’t be so confident, superman.”

“Why’d you have to enter using our last name?” Glenn said.

Alena stopped pacing. She grinned. “Labels don’t matter. Too lazy to change it.”

“Is that it?”

She laughed. “Don’t read anything into it. I’m not pining for you.” She held up her hands, to show them bare of rings. “And, speak of that, why’d you have to enter? I’d be signed and on my way to Hollywood, if it wasn’t for their stupid pair-or-nothing clause.”

Glen just goggled at her.

“You know, I bet they did it on purpose. They saw both of us, said, ‘Hey, this is a greatlooking couple,’ saw we were divorced, and said, ‘Man, you can’t ask for more conflict than that,’

and threw us this curve.”

“You think we’re a good-looking couple?”

“One of us is.”

“One isn’t a couple.”

For a while, there was only the sound of the breeze, and the hum of civilization, far below. Glenn and Alena continued to circle the top of the dome.

“Well, if they’re rigging the game, there’s only one way we can get back at them,” Glenn said.

“Let me guess. Sign it.”

“No. Don’t play by their games.”

“Act the happy couple, you mean.” Alena sneered.

“Act like two people, in business together,” Glenn said. He reached around to his back pocket and pulled out the contract, now rumpled and sweat-stained. “I’ve already signed. All it takes is one more signature, and we’re on our way to Mars.”

Alena looked at the contract, and cocked her head at him, as if amused.

“If you can’t do it for me, do it for yourself. This is the big thing. The biggest thing. Bigger than Everest, bigger than freeclimbing Half-Dome, bigger than marathoning the Utah desert, bigger than swimming the English Channel.”

“Have you read it? The contract?”

“No.”

That amused look again.

“Don’t fucking laugh at me!”

Alena laughed. “I’m not.” She reached into her bag and drew out a sheaf of papers, neatly folded. “It’s just that I was going to say the same thing.”

On the back page was her signature, neat and clear.

Alena Rothman.

When they’d signed each other’s contracts, Alena went to sit down on the rock. Glenn made to sit down beside her.

“No,” she said.

“You’re kidding.”

“Not at all.” Smiling up at him, in mock innocence.

Glenn stood by her for a few minutes, then went back down the rock. If he could have Alena and the signature, great.

He grinned.

But, for the moment, the signature was enough.

Science

“I thought they found life on Mars,” Jere said.

Evan rolled his eyes heavenward. It was 4:11 AM, and they were screaming down the 5 at triple-digit speeds in Jere’s Porsche. The scrub-brush at the side of the road whipped by, ghostly gray streamers disappearing into taillight-red twilight. They were in that no-mans-land between Stockton and Santa Clarita where the land falls away and you could believe you were the only person in California, at least for a time.

Jere frowned, seeing the look out of the corner of his eye. It was Evan Shows Off time again. He loved to do that. “What? They didn’t? Talk, you fucking know-it-all.”

“They still don’t know,” Evan said. “There was that micrometeorite thing, but they’re still arguing about it. Some of the scientists say that the microstructures they’re looking at resemble ancient bacteria, and some of them say it’s wishful thinking. Typical science tempest-in-ateapot.”

“What micrometeorite? They brought something back from Mars?”

“They found in Antarctica.”

Jere frowned. He couldn’t wear his eyepod at night, not in the car, so he couldn’t ask it to confirm what Evan had said. He hated being disconnected. It was like losing part of your mind.

“What does that have to do with Mars?”

Evan shrugged. “Scientists say it was a piece of Mars, blown off the planet by a meteor. Eventually it landed in Antarctica.”

“And they can tell that shit? That it’s from Mars? How do they do that?”

“I don’t know the details.”

Jere snorted. “I thought you knew everything.”

Evan went silent for a long time. There was nothing but the hum of the tires and rush of the wind and song of the engine. When Jere thought he was going to just let it go, he cleared his throat and said, “What’s important is that the scientific community is interested and want to give us a bunch of money.”

“Funny thinking of Mars as a science thing.”

Evan shook his head, and then said, almost gently, “It’s too bad we can’t wait a few years. Do it in ‘26. The whole fiftieth-anniversary thing.”

“Fiftieth anniversary of what?”

“Viking. 1976.”

“What’s Viking?”

Evan shook his head again. The fucking walking encyclopedia. “Viking 1 and Viking 2

were the first probes we landed on the surface of Mars. We, the United States, that is. In 1976. For the bicentennial. They did some experiments that, again, some scientists say indicated life, some say they didn’t. They’re still wrangling about that, too.”

We put shit on Mars fifty fucking years ago? Jere thought. No wonder some people were getting rabid about going themselves. “We’re still on for this year?”

“So far.”

“You don’t sound so certain.”

“They’re being a bit cagey. I think they’re still trying to cope with the business after you and the Kevin stunt.”

It wasn’t a stunt, Jere thought. The United States was still denying having killer satellites, or satellites full of killers, in orbit. But Jere knew what he saw, and someone had clearly shot through the cabin from the outside. Someone who didn’t care very much whether it had ended in explosive decompression.

More silence. In front of them there was nothing but darkness and stars and the dim outline of mountains. Jere pushed the car to 130, 140, 150. The blur became a haze of motion, almost surreal.

“So what do you think about the Berkeley proposal?” Jere said.

“It’s crap.”

“Why?”

“Like, duh. Berkeley probably can’t even design the right experiments package. They’re a liberal arts school.”

“Why’d we bother seeing them?”

Evan gave Jere his don’t-be-stupid look. Jere recognized it, even out of the corner of his eye. “Because they asked. Because if we’re talking to them, others’ll be interested.”

“So we get another school.”

“No.”

“What?”

“We might see some other schools,” Evan said. “But we fish from industry. That’s where the money really is.”

“Who?”

“Siemens. Or IBM. Maybe Nanoversics. Maybe even someone like Google, with their 300-year world domination plan. Someone big, with deep pockets.”

Jere nodded. Berkeley had offered them quite a bit of money. With someone like IBM in on a bidding war, how high could the stakes get? And God knew they needed the money. Expenses kept creeping up, especially now they had to start thinking about training, launch, and ongoing support.

“It’s coming together,” Evan said. “You’re getting some great contestants lined up, now that we’re off the convict frequency.”

“I didn’t know Keith and Samara would be so problematic.”

“Nothing you could do. At least we still have one. And the Glenn and Alena thing is brilliant. This is just like the shit we used to do, back in the day.”

Ah. Now the congratulatory Evan. The politician, the manipulator. He should run forCongress after all this is over.

Still, Jere couldn’t help smiling, a little. “It’d be great of Glenn and Alena got back together, then won.”

“What do you mean, it’d be great?” Evan turned around in his seat, so he could look directly at Jere. “I thought that was what you were planning. Give ‘em a cash offer to kissy-kissy, then make sure they finish first.”

“If they win, they win.”

Evan’s mouth popped open. “You aren’t going to run this real, are you?”

“It is a reality show.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s real. Fuck. Run this real, Keith is gonna win.” Pissed. Angry. The real Evan, at last.

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes. I do know that. That’s how it works. Nice guys finish last. Assholes finish first. And Glenn is the fucking definition of a nice guy. Fucking pussy-whipped nicey-nice asshole. I’d’ve thrown his bitch wife off the rock a long time ago.”

“Whoever wins, wins. I won’t throw it.”

“You’re being stupid.”

“That’s fine with me.”

“Then get prepped to see Keith standing on the podium. How’re you going to spin that?”

“If he wins, I’ll think of something.”

Evan turned back in his seat, and slumped down so his knees hit the dash. “Better start thinking now, then.”

Silence. Nothing but them and the open road.

Mike

This is less of a party than a wake, Mike Kinsson thought, as he stepped out onto the back porch of the house he grew up in.

His parents had gotten the banners right: Farewell Mike! Win Mars for Us! Upward and Onward! And the yard was done up in a cool motif, with fresh-printed tromp l’oil canvasses of Martian terrain covering the normally bright-green grass, and panoramas of Martian sky and horizon hung at the back of the yard from the tall juniper trees. They’d set round tables with brilliant blue tablecloths in the middle of Martian scene, in almost surreal contrast to the reds and salmons and pinks of the printed landscape.

They’d even gotten the music right. As he walked out onto the porch, the bump of oldstyle rap was replaced with Gary Numan’s redo of his famous song, Cars.

“Here on my Mars, where every-thing has gone right . . .” Numan’s electronicallysmoothed, seventy-year-old voice rang out across the yard, turning heads. Eyes settled on Mike. He shrugged, feeling a small thrill of fear.

Time to run the gauntlet, he thought.

The crowd was a mix of neighbors and relatives. Neighbors probably because you couldn’t have a party anywhere these days without offending someone, so you had to have the invitation trail, and the disclaimers, and the legal notices that you might play music at a level where others might hear, and that you could not guarantee they might not get offended. Apologies in advance, and all that.

Mike’s parents lived in a small, flat neighborhood of fifty-year-old ranch houses in San Jose, part of the first wave of building before the Silicon Valley days. It was a pleasant enough neighborhood with mature trees and ruler-straight streets and homes set back behind broad expanses of front lawn, with generous-sized back yards they’d build two houses on these days. Most everyone there was old, and conservative, and remembered the days when you tolerated a little stupidity from the neighborhood teens now and again. But you never knew, so you invited them anyway.

Mike nodded at the neighbors, shook a few hands, and took a few perfunctory congratulations. Most gave him that close stare that people used when they were inspecting something unusual and maybe a little dangerous, like a jeweled 17th-century dagger or a vial of the Three-Day Death. Mike remembered almost none of them except for the Ettslers, who’d gone gray-haired and stooped in the years he’d been away. He remembered Mr. Ettsler as a tall, gaunt man with salt-and-pepper hair. Now his hair was almost completely gray, and he stooped almost to the level of his wife, who blinked out at him through amazingly clear blue eyes. Then it was on to gauntlet one. Grandparents part uno. Mom’s mom and dad sat at one of the circular tables, drinking some kind of straw-colored drink. Mike looked up to see dad happily bartending behind an antique fake-woodgrain portable bar, running margaritas in a blender. Dad didn’t drink, but he enjoyed getting other people drunk.

“So it’s off to Mars, is it?” granddad Murray said.

“Why?” Grandma Murray said.

Mike tried to smile at them. It felt like he was trying to stretch a wooden mask. “Yes, off to Mars,” he said.

“Astronauts used to do that,” Granddad said.

“Yeah, not you,” Grandma said.

“It’s a different world.”

“Ahm. Yeah.” Granddad Murray had found a groove he could fall into, like an oldfashioned turntable. “Can’t say I understand a whole lot about it anymore. Can’t say I like it that much.”

“We were talking about Mars!” Grandma said.

“Oh, yeah. Mars.”

“You talk him out of it!” Grandma said, glaring at Mike.

Granddad blinked and focused. “I know I wouldn’t do it,” he said. “Not even if someone put a gun to my head. And I was in ‘Nam.”

Mike rolled his eyes. Anything to get granddad off that frequency.

“I can’t,” Mike said. “It’s a done deal. I signed the papers.”

“It’s never done,” Granddad said. “It’s a damn movie studio, not the government. It’s not like they can put you in jail.”

Mike frowned. You didn’t see what I signed, Granddad. You don’t know what they cando with me. “It doesn’t matter. I want to go. I’m going.”

“It’s dangerous,” Grandma wailed. Heads turned towards them, then quickly snapped away.

Mike knelt down to look in her eyes. “I know. But it’s something I believe in.”

“We should fix the problems here at home before we go to other planets,” Grandad said.

“Then we won’t ever go anywhere!” Mike said, standing again. He’d heard all those arguments before. First from Gina. Then from his boss. Then over the phone from family. Now in person.

“You don’t have to shout,” Grandma said.

“I’m sorry. But I’m doing this, and nothing’s changing that.”

Granddad nodded. “It’s good to have something to believe in.”

“Right.”

“It’s just, well, it’s too bad yours is so out there. ”

Mike clenched his fists. Yes, I know. I should’ve become a stockbroker or a lawyer or something safe like that. You’ve been telling me that since I was old enough to understand. Maybe longer, for all I know. So why don’t you go back up to San Francisco, to your safe house, and your safe life, and don’t worry about me?

“I’m sorry you don’t understand,” Mike said.

“I never understood ‘Nam, but I did go. I remember—”

Mike looked up at his dad. “Oh. I think dad wants to talk. I’ll be back later.”

“We may not be here,” grandma said. “We have a concert in the city in a couple of hours.”

“Yeah, the Second Stones are playing.”

Barf, Mike thought. And they’d probably have him do that, have implants to get Keith Richard’s canned thoughts running around in my head, so I could ape his work. Dad was mixing some kind of nuclear-orange-colored drink when Mike walked up.

“Martian sunrise,” he said. “Want one?”

“No.”

“Your loss.” He set it on the bar, where it was soon scooped up by a passing neighbor.

“You didn’t have to go all out like this,” Mike said, gesturing around at all the Marsephemera.

“Of course we did,” Mom said, coming up behind dad. She smiled brightly and batted her eyelashes. She was still a very attractive woman, though in the last few years she’d decided to stop battling the gray that streaked her hair. It made her look ten years older than Mike remembered. He thought it was a little sad.

And what she said was spot-on. Of course they had to go all out. This was what they did best. The guilt. See what we do for you, they were saying. How can you leave us, how can yougo against our will, when you see all we do for you.

“Are you ready?” dad said.

Oh yeah, and we won’t mention it, so you’ll feel even more guilty. Mike sighed. “Look, I know you’re worried.”

Mom and dad exchanged glances. “We’re not—” mom started.

“Yes we are,” Dad said. “What about your job? Can you get your job back when you get back?”

“No,” Mike said. Yahoo had been very clear on that. Even thought they’d sponsored other employees to videoblog from Africa, or explore the Antarctic, or five dozen other stupid things that meant they couldn’t really do their job, they had no interest in Mars. Mike’s boss told him, It ain’t worth going higher. Something happened. They just aren’t interested in this.

“That’s too bad,” dad said. “Though you could probably get a job pretty quick with the experience you have.”

“I guess.”

“If he gets back,” Mom said, her face crumpling into an agonized mask. “You might die!”

“I know.”

Silence for a bit. Then, dad: “Do you really? Have you looked at the odds they’re giving for this thing?”

“No.”

“You should.”

Mike shook his head. He’d never looked at them, but he knew them, because people spouted them all the time. But those were the odds the bookmakers made, the guys who looked at horses or athletes or any of a dozen other things that had no real investment in winning. When you care, it’s different, he thought. He looked around the perfectly manicured yard, to the perfectly-kept little house. It wasn’t much, but it was worth millions. Why chance it? friends had asked. Hang on, take the house when they’re gone, call it aday. You’re an only child, nobody’ll be fighting for it other than you.

“You should think of us,” dad said.

“You should think of me.”

Mike’s parents goggled at him, open-mouthed. Which was the perfect entrance for Grandparents dos, the Kinssons. Grandpa Kinsson was a large, red-faced man. He sloshed the remains of one of dad’s Martian sunsets in the general direction of Mike. Mike was able to avoid the streamer of orange liquid. “He’s stunned by the prize money,” Grandpa Kinsson said.

“What’s it up to now, Mike?”

“I don’t know?”

Grandpaw Kinsson gave a big, roaring, booze-smelling laugh. “Right, right. I think it’s, what, twenty million?”

“Closer to thirty,” Grandma Kinsson said.

“That’s enough to tempt anyone. Smart boy.”

Grandpa Kinsson owned parts of seventeen wineries in the Sonoma and Russian River Valleys. He’d been nothing until the California wine collapse. Then he’d gambled, and won big. Now he drove a white Ferrari, like some overweight ghost of improbable TV shows past. And you’re one to talk about improbable TV shows, Mike thought.

“Excuse me,” Mike said.

“We’re offending him,” Grandpa Kinsson said.

“No. I’ve got to take a piss.”

And he did. But on his way to the bathroom, he passed his old room. His ten-by-twelve universe, where he would stare up at the glow-in-the-dark star chart that Grandpa Kinnson had got him one Christmas before he was rich. Where he slept under covers printed with aliens from old science fiction movies, watching those same movies on his prized video iPod. Because even then he could look out over that perfectly manicured lawn and walk down the plastic-covered carpet of his perfectly manicured house and sit at the dinner table where you ate slowly and carefully because that was what was mannerful, and that was what you did. Because he knew everything was safe, even then, and he wanted to get as far away as possible. Even though they made fun of him for doing well in science. Even though they called him geek and nerd. Even though he had to struggle ten times as hard to do well in math than in English or even Chinese. All that was gone now. His room had been wiped clean, painted in a light lavender color, with a frilly white bedspread on his old twin bed. The closet door, formerly pocked from thumbtacked posters, was flawless and smooth gloss white. Even the ceiling had been retextured with that cottage-cheese stuff they used in very old houses.

Mike went to the closet and opened the door. It was empty, except for three unused hangars. It smelled like new paint.

What does this mean? he wondered.

He shook his head, feeling hollow inside. When he rejoined the people outside, he pushed his face into a smile and held it there. He even accepted one of the sickly-sweet Martian Sunrises that dad was pushing on people. He couldn’t finish it, but it made the smiling a bit easier.

Only one more gauntlet left.

Mike sat and waited for Gina, smiling. He was determined to be smiling when she came. She was late, but that didn’t mean anything. She was always late. When his dad came out of the house, shaking his head, Mike knew something was wrong.

“Come on in,” Dad said, beckoning at the house. “You have a message.”

“Gina?”

A nod.

Inside the house, Gina looked out at him from his parents’ tiny thirty-inch flatscreen.

“Gina, if you can’t come, I—”

“Mike, I’m sorry I can’t make it—” Giggling in the background. Gina clipped on an earring.

She was getting ready to go somewhere.

“—but I wanted to say goodbye, or farewell, or whatever—” more giggling interrupted her, and she turned to look at whoever it was. “Stop it! I’m talking to Mike!”

He was watching a recording.

Unintelligible conversation from the side. “Okay. Mike. I mean, good luck. I hope you win. See you when you’re back.”

But I won’t miss you in the meantime, she was saying.

Mike stood and watched the recording, all the way through. By the time he was done, both mom and dad were watching with him.

“Weren’t you going to give her a ring?” mom said.

Mike nodded.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes filling with the first real tears. I’m not, Mike thought. Hurt, yes. Sorry, no.

He stayed. He drank. He got in arguments.

Finally, when it was night, he stood out in front of the house and looked back at its clean and tidy façade. Clean white light spilled out from the windows onto the front lawn. The walkway, flagstone, had razor-sharp edges. Not a blade of grass was out of place. From inside the house, his mom noticed him looking, and raised a hand in tentative wave.

Mike waved back at her, then turned to where his ten-year-old Corvette waited at the curb. It was weighted down with everything he felt he had to bring. He’d be in LA for three months, training.

Then off to Mars.

To Mars.

Sponsors

“It seems like a lot of work for just a show,” said the asshole from Proctor & Gamble. He was your typical lifer executive, with baby-smooth hands and a soft voice and lacquered-in-place hair and an oh-so-conservative black Armani suit that probably exactly matched the dozen-or-so black Armani suits that hung in his closet, or were trusted only to the highest level of bioproof, DNA-sampling-insured cleaners. He tapped his perfect shiny nails on the model of the Can, sprouting its ring of eleven transport pods.

God save me from execs who think they’re smart, Jere thought. Send them to the golf course and the cocktail lounge, where the conversational bar is comfortably low, and they can dazzle the gold-diggers with boring tales of imagined high adventure in the boardroom. But they didn’t really have a choice. It was scrape-the-bottom time. Pitching to anyone who might be interested in having a logo on the ship, or product placement at convenient places 92

throughout the voyage. A step up from in-stream advertisers, but not much. Today was the bigbox guys. Proctor & Gamble, Altria, Johnson and Johnson, even Foodlink. They were in the Neteno boardroom, which had been transformed into a neomodern interpretation of a 70’s NASA workroom, redone on a much greater scale and budget. A movingink banner was cycling though imagined Marsscapes and the logo for Neteno’s Winning Mars, and models of the Can, the drop and transpo pods, the Kites and the Wheels and the Returns hung from the ceiling or were suspended with cheap magnetic trickery.

“Are you launching from Russia?” said the Foodlink rep, a young thin guy in an uncharacteristically rumpled gray suit.

“That’s the plan,” Jere said.

“You’re sending up this entire thing from the ground?” Foodlink-guy said. Jere glanced at his eyepod display and saw his name was Paul Morees, and that his background was redflagged with tech markers. Degrees in chemical engineering and financial analysis. Fuckasaurus. A ringer. He was trained in more than the art of taking other people’s money. Jere eyeblinked over to the current Winning Mars mission plan.

“We’re doing a distributed launch, multiple modules to low earth orbit, then assembly and launch to Mars from there.”

“With gravity slingshot?”

“I don’t think we’d want to scrape the top of the Sears Tower,” Jere said. Paul gave him a thin grin, as if saying, Point to you. The other executives looked at each other and shrugged, or pretended not to hear.

“Your mission plan has changed, what, seven or eight times since announcement?”

Jere nodded. Yes, and we’re taking anything that’s even marginally ready to fly. Refurbs, leftovers, even end-of-lives for the unmanned stuff. Jere wouldn’t be surprised if they ended up launching fucking first-gen Space Shuttles, if the price was low enough, or the Russians thought they weren’t bolted down. He forced a smile. “One of the main differences between show business and industry is our flexibility. We have a showtime, we have a packed house, and the curtain is going to open at a set time. We do whatever it takes to ensure that the show goes on.”

“Even if it means sacrificing safety?” Paul said. The other execs leaned forward, lawyerhoned lawsuit-sense undoubtedly tingling. Jere forced his face to stay neutral. “Not at all. Every single contestant gets shuttled to orbit by the most reliable transport system ever designed: the RusSpace Orbiter.”

“What about the rest of the flight?” Paul asked.

“We’re using the most conservative, most-tested technologies available. Take the ring. It’s a standard component of the new RusSpace orbital hotels. And we’re saving four module drops by incorporating all the Return pods into a single big softlander. The Transpo pods are as simple and reliable as they get, just a big bouncing ball. Almost everything we’re doing has been used — and proven — multiple times. We’re using some of it in new ways, but never in ways that will compromise safety.”

“Probably what they said about the Titanic,” the Proctor & Gamble exec said. Jere forced his smile wider. Of course someone’s going to die, he wanted to say. Probably lots of someones. But they needed the money.

“Of course we don’t claim infallibility,” Jere said. “Unexpected things can happen.”

“In which case, what’s our recourse?” Paul said.

“We have extensive hold-harmless clauses,” Jere said. “In the case that any contestant can manage to bring suit against us.”

“I’ve seen your contract,” Paul said, flickering his eyes down to the floor. And you’re not complaining, Jere thought. Don’t think we don’t notice that.

“Who’s signed so far?” Paul asked.

“I’m sorry, but that’s confidential. If you want to buy into a prospectus package, we’ll discuss that further.”

Paul nodded.

And you aren’t saying anything about that, either, are you? Jerry thought. Because you know this is the deal of the century. Even if it goes bang on launch, it’s worth it. And if we make it all the way back, you have more publicity than you’ve ever dreamed.

“What you don’t see is the most important part,” Jere said. “The personal touch. The people who will actually make this happen.”

“You already have your team picked?”

“No. Not at all. I just want to show you what the teams might look like. Because I know you have this idea of a bunch of spacesuit-cladded guys hopping around on a dead planet. Boring, right? Well, no. Our friends at Nike outdid themselves on this one. Evan?”

Evan McMaster entered the boardroom through the double doors at the back, accompanied by a trio of young women wearing cosmetic squeezesuits and headers. Brilliant white and crystalline transparent, they looked like nothing more than young women strutting in leotards and wearing plastic bubbles on their heads. The suits hugged every one of their curves, making them seem impossibly perfect, unattainable, unreal.

There was a collective gasp from the execs, and Jere smiled. It always worked that way. They didn’t expect this.

“I don’t see how it will work.” Paul again, of course. “You’re trying to use mechanical compression to eliminate the need for a pressurized suit? Won’t that kill the wearer?”

Jere draped an arm around one of the women and smiled. “Do these ladies look dead to you?”

“No, but . . . those aren’t real suits, are they?”

Jere smiled. He’d memorized this one, too, but he usually let Evan take it. Because he could be so condescending. It stopped more questions.

“They use the same principles,” Evan said. “And it is a very old idea.”

An image of a Space.com article, circa 2005, circa prehistory, appeared on the Neteno screenwall. Contextual tags highlighted the most important points of the article, and an overlay showed a comparison between the imagined suit in the article and Neteno’s version.

“Oh,” Paul said. His voice was soft, almost inaudible.

Gotcha, Jere thought.

“I still don’t get it,” Proctor and Gamble’s asshole said. “Why don’t they look like the Chinese astronauts on the moon? Their suits are huge.”

“The moon is a vacuum,” Evan said. “Mars does have a thin atmosphere.”

“So?”

“So it makes our job a lot easier. We can provide pressurized air through a small backpack only to the face, which makes the whole suit much less bulky. The pressure required to maintain body integrity is provided by the special form-fitting polymer of the squeezesuit.”

“Showboating,” muttered one of the other execs.

“No,” Evan said. “Not at all. Which would you rather look at – this, or some old Chinese taikonaut in a wrinkled-up old body sock?”

“Your contestants may not look that good.”

Evan smiled. “The squeezesuit is of variable thickness. We can make a wide variety of body types look good. And it provides an excellent palette for logo placement.”

He snapped his fingers, and logos appeared at strategic spots on the suits. Spots with high visual magnetism, to use the geek phrase. One of the girls spun to reveal a P&G

competitor’s logo emblazoned over her buttocks. All the better to remind them that if they didn’t take the chance, someone else would.

Oh, they loved it. Jere could see it in their eyes. They were sold. They would talk tough and haggle and try to make friends and wheel and deal, but they had them. They’d try to score some free rounds of golf at the best LA courses, or nights out at Matsuhisa, or dark times in dens like the ones under Wilshire, but in the end, they would buy. Just like Panasonic and Canon and Nikon fighting over the imaging rights, Sony and Nokia and Motorola fighting over the comms deal, Red Bull and Gatorade fighting over the energy drink part of it, hell, damn near every single nut and bolt was being fought over.

Jere smiled. Go ahead, he thought. Talk. Then shut up and give us your fucking money.Nandir

For Nandir Patel, coming back to Hollywood was a little like coming back to his hometown — and discovering that it had been populated by the undead all of his life, and he had simply never noticed.

He’d grown up in Studio City, in the San Fernando Valley, the huge suburban sprawl that crept north from Los Angeles like a skin condition of houses and single-story industrial parks. As a kid, he’d cruised with friends down Sunset Boulevard until it turned into Highland and plunged into the heart of Hollywood. He’d smiled at pretty girls from the backseats of cars, and, sometimes, once in a while, met them later at a party or a bar. And, once in a very long while, he had taken them home, to crawl through the screenless window to his bedroom. Where every movement seemed to make the tiny fifty-year-old squeal like a car alarm, where his parents room, all the way across the house, seemed much too close for comfort. Because mom and dad believed. They believed in the old ways from the old country, things Nandir had never seen. They even believed in all the United States crap. They’d come to the States in the 90s, before it had gone insane. Before 911 and Homeland Security and the Twelve Days in May and Oversight. Before the money had crashed. When Nandir’s millions would carry him through the rest of his life, instead of being just enough to make others jealous and himself unsure of how long it would all last.

And the thing was, they still believed. Even after everything. They said, This is a greatplace to live. They said, Our son is so successful. They said, We’re so grateful for everything wehave, in their soft voices that they’d tried to scour clean of any trace of Indian accent. And they still lived in the same little house in the same flat part of the Valley, and still worked for the same software company that Nandir had once almost bought, just because he could. But he never remembered Hollywood being so clean, so bright, so tourist-oriented. As if everyone had been swept away and replaced by robots who only knew how to smile and say, Yes 96

ma’am, and Yes, sir. As if hordes of feral Roombas crept out at night to polish the glittering sidewalks, the shining bronze stars, the perfect blacktop.

It is perhaps related to the Hollywood Rewound branding campaign currently runningin major media channels, Nandir’s earbud whispered to him. Nandir started. It was the first time his experimental inference software ever correctly guessed his thoughts. But why was it talking like some demented UCLA professor?

“Informal voice mode,” he said.

“Sure,” his earpod said.

A young girl from a tourist family, fat and unstylish in that inimitable flyover-state way, turned to look at Nandir. Her eyes flickered up to his eyepod/camera.

“Daddy, is he an interactivemaker?” she said.

Dad, clad in a multicolored, horizontally-striped shirt and black flannel sweatpants, turned to look, open-mouthed, at Nandir. His bottom lip curled down like the business end of a pitcher. He blinked at Nandir, perhaps running him through some mental database of people seen on the late-night shows.

“Nah,” he said. “He’s nobody.”

Nandir smiled at them as they walked out of the lobby of the Hollywood Roosevelt and onto the street. The girl stared back at him, but when he waved, she snapped her eyes forward.

“What’s ‘rewound?’” Nandir asked his inference software.

“It’s a term that refers to the process of returning a magnetic tape to an earlier timemarker.”

“I thought I put you in informal mode.”

“Sure.”

“What’s ‘rewound?’”

“It’s a term that refers to the process of returning a magnetic tape to an earlier timemarker.”

Nandir sighed. “What’s ‘Hollywood Rewound?’”

“It’s a branding campaign that aims to return Hollywood to an imagined golden age, of high social and moral standards.”

“Wow, that’s dreaming.”

The software said nothing, which Nandir thought was probably for the best. He still had a lot of work to do before it was even a tenth as good as InPersonator, the software he’d sold to WErU two years ago. If it wasn’t for the big Neteno dinner, he’d be up in his room, doing just that.

They’d said to meet at 6:30 in the lobby. It was 6:43 by Nandir’s eyepod, and he was still the only contestant there. Unless he’d missed someone in the briefing that morning. Which was entirely possible. He had a poor memory for faces.

At 6:50, one of the other guys arrived. He was a tall, thin man with dark hair and glasses. The universal sign of the geek. Nandir smiled at him, wishing he remembered his name.

“You’re the owner of InPersonator, aren’t you?” the guy said.

“Was,” Nandir said. “Sold it two years ago to WErU.”

A nose-wrinkle. “I don’t like their system as much.”

Nandir nodded. “It has its drawbacks.”

“Yours was more flexible.”

“You were a user?”

“Evaluator. I worked for Yahoo.” Eyes cast down, as if embarrassed.

“Worked?” Nandir said.

“Yeah.” A pause. The guy held out his hand. “I’m Mike Kinsson.”

Nandir took it. His hand was warm and slick with sweat. “Nandir Patel.”

“Nandir. Yeah. I remember. But didn’t you make a lot of money? Why are you here?”

Why am I here? Nandir wondered. Because even with my pile of money, I don’t think I’ll be able to live the rest of my life comfortably? Because my current software is a little, well, undeveloped? Because no matter where I go, whether it’s here in California or New York or even my little research park in South Carolina, I just can’t seem to get comfortable?

“Twelve months of uninterrupted coding,” Nandir said.

“Oh. Yeah. Wow, you could probably get a lot done.”

“Why are you here?”

Mike looked away, and pulled his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger. “I . . . it’s what I always wanted to do.”

“Be on a reality show?”

A head-shake, violent and decisive. “No. Go to space. Mars.”

“A true believer.”

Mike took a step away. “You think it’s funny.”

“No,” Nandir said. “I think it’s admirable.”

Mike looked at Nandir for a long time, studying him with his dark eyes. “You really do?”

Nandir nodded. “I really do.”

Mike closed his mouth, as if he didn’t know what to say about that. Finally he nodded. And, with that, it was like they unleashed the rest of the contestants upon them. They walked, en masse, down the rough Spanish-tiled floors. Nandir recognized the hard-looking man that everyone said was a convict, the two pretty blondes that everyone said were lovers, and the business-suited blonde from Neteno.

“You should compliment this person, and ask them out to a neutral location, such as a coffeehouse.”

“What?” Nandir said.

“You should compliment this person, and ask them out to a neutral location, such as a coffeehouse.”

“What what?” Mike said.

Nandir held up a hand. “My software. It needs a little work. Inference software, why did you suggest that . . . your last suggestion?”

“You appear to be attracted to this person.”

Nandir felt a blush warm his face. “I’m not.”

“Your autonomic reactions appear otherwise.”

“I’m not. That was an incorrect response.” Nandir looked at Mike, then quickly glanced away.

“Correction noted and incorporated into the database. Thank you for your input!”

Nandir rolled his eyes. He was about to apologize for his software when the businesssuited blonde announced, “Okay, we’re heading out to Miceli’s. Anyone who doesn’t know where it is, make sure you’re with someone who does.”

“Do you know where it is?” Mike asked.

Nandir nodded. “Yeah, I grew up in the Valley.”

They ended up with one more guy, a stocky Asian who ran after them as they headed out the doors of the hotel. “I go with you?” he asked.

“Sure,” Mike said.

They walked for a while in silence, then the Asian guy said. “I know you, you the software guy.”

Nandir rolled his eyes, then turned and gave the guy a smile. “Yeah. And you?”

“What?” the man looked confused.

“What’s your story? Where you from?”

The man beamed. “Phillipines,” he said, nodding vigorously. “I’m Romeo Torres. Wanted to go to space for long time.”

“You should talk to Mike. So did he.”

Romeo looked at Mike, beaming. “You did? You see future?”

“I’m not a fortune-teller.”

Romeo looked confused.

They ended up that night on one side of a long table, in a restaurant hung with thousands of basket-embalmed wine bottles. A buffer of one chair on either side of the table separated them from the rest of the group.

Geek repellent, Nandir thought. It’s like anti-gravity. We repel everything near us.

“Insect repellent can be purchased at most major sporting-goods stores and a large percentage of drugstores. The closest confirmed stock is at Highland Drug, approximately 0.15

miles away.”

Nandir smiled. “That is an incorrect response,” he told the software. Both Mike and Romeo looked at him, then went back to their conversation about the Chinese on the moon, their moonbase, where they were going, diverting asteroids, terraforming Mars, and lots of other things that Nandir didn’t really understand. They were crazy.

And, he knew, they were probably the people he’d end up being teamed with. Lease

Jere walked through the front doors of the Neteno building, then stopped, clenching his fists.

In the lobby of the Neteno building, Gen3 Interactive was busy constructing its shining glass-and-wallscreen office. Blue-jumpsuited men scurried around, peeling protective films and polishing screens like broken shards of glass set into the gleaming wood floors. Farther back, offices hid behind milky translucency, revealing shadowy movement and the outlines of uncomfortable chairs.

“We’re the future, when you get right down to it,” said a kid, his head shaved and glowing with advertisements. A tiny replica of the floating Neteno sign circled his head, just under the skin.

Jere forced his hands to relax. “Last I heard, you were still subleasing from us. Not subleasing to us.”

The kid shrugged, wopping his lips into an exaggerated oyster-shell of unconcern.

“Who are you?”

The kid’s eyes flew open. “What? You don’t recognize me?”

“Should I?”

“I’m Ren Carstairs.”

Jere’s eyepod lit with data, but he recognized the name. The extravagant creativist of Gen3, the one who was always getting kicked out of parties for having his hand up the wrong person’s pants. Then letting the flyeyes follow them home, for instabuzz on the nets. Jere nodded, and turned to the elevators.

“We’ll have this whole building in six months,” Ren said.

Jere forced himself to keep walking. At the elevator, he stared at his reflection in the polished stainless. It was wavy and distorted, as if he was made of rubber and being pulled in many different directions by invisible hands.

It’s appropriate, he thought.

He’d spent the last month taking the elevators past the empty floors of his building, trying to ignore them. They’d add programs soon enough, they’d add staff, the building would buzz again with something more than Capitol ghosts.

But the new programs were few and far between, because they had to look real. And getting that balance between looking real and being interesting was tough. Sponsors fell out, bids went down, and opportunities decreased. Their war chest for Winning Mars seemed adequate, but the fucking risk managers were twisting their nuts again. Dad claimed tappage, in that high and tight voice that said, I’m fucking stressed, don’t push me. Jere’d thought he had much greater reserves, but the voice was real. He was tapped. Or at least thought he was. So it was back to the banks with their double-digit interest rates and smiling managers and sleek cold-blooded sharks in business suits from 411, justifying it all. And so, that day. We believe your office liabilities need to be offset. We believe that youshould consider selling the building, or at least subleasing. And so, Jere spent an hour walking through the unused floors, past the oh-sostreamlined modern office desks that still bore the smudges of hands and elbows, past the chairs that still smelled faintly of farts, past the detritus of a team gone: cubicle-walls that still bore the odd printout or snapshot, a pile of papers in the middle of an empty conference room, one lone flatscreen glowing bright blue.

Gen3 was the first to come. When Jere heard it was an interactive company, he grimaced and hoped they wouldn’t sign. But they did. Jere looked at their offerings online, half-expecting to see another Mars game on their roster. Half a dozen Mars reality games had already appeared, from outfits as big as EA and as small as a six-person studio in Russia. None of them had done well on the market, which both thrilled and terrified Jere. Thrilled, because he could think, They’re waiting for the real thing. Terrified, because he could think, They don’t give acrap about the whole idea.

When he was terrified, Evan would trot out the charts and graphs that showed yes, people did care about the whole idea, it was still a peak on the great plains, it was a huge idea, it would set them up for life.

What was more interesting were the linears that worked the same themes. Unabashedly CG, they played out the idea of a reality show on Mars. The more ambitious of them were based in realtime, run by actors who were living in the simulation. Those linears had all showed a sharp peak in traffic on introduction, followed by a falloff steeper than the falling stock prices of the first internet boom. As if people were looking for something they couldn’t find. As if they were waiting for something real.

Jere certainly hoped so.

“You’re still thinking about those assholes downstairs,” Evan said, when Jere walked into the office they shared.

“I am not.”

Evan pursed his lips. “Don’t worry about them. Six months, a year, tops, and they’re gone.”

“Don’t tell me the schedule slipped again.”

“Ok, I won’t.”

“Evan, goddamnit, we’re missing the sweeps!”

“So we miss the sweeps a little more. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

“What is it this time?”

Evan shrugged. “Components don’t exist for something or another. Have to wait for some dork in California to make them up again.”

“California? We can’t run in China? Russia? Fucking Africa?”

“No. You don’t get it. Some of this leftover crap we’re using is old. Real old. Like, so old some of the components were drawn on paper by guys with pencils. And some of the machining and other steps are lore, stuck in the head of someone who used to charge Lockheed a hundred dollars for a bolt.”

“A hundred dollars? So?”

“In 1985.”

“Ah. Fuck. So we can’t pay them to move a little faster?”

“Apparently part of the lore is you get stock only from a certain place, so we’re waiting on the foundry.”

“Do you think it’ll really make a difference?”

Evan looked at him, in that it’s-your-fault way of his. “This is for one of the passenger modules.”

“Aha. Okay.”

A quick nod. “Thought you’d say so.”

Jere went to his desk, sat down, and looked up at the Neteno sign, spinning serenely.

“Do you want to hear the other news?” Evan said.

“Is it good?”

“Mainly.”

“Crap. What’s bad?”

“Don’t you want to hear the good news first?”

Jere sighed. “Sure.”

“All the contestants are comfortably ensconced in Independence, complaining cheerily about the shitty hotel food. Do you believe this town doesn’t have a restaurant?”

“This is good?”

“It’s progress. And Keith hasn’t managed to kill anyone yet.”

“But?”

Evan flashed ironic teeth. “With the asshole, there’s always a but. Pun not intended. Keith did, however, manage to turn his teammate into something closely resembling humanburger.”

“The other crook? I thought they didn’t know who each other’s teammate was.”

“Yes, the other former convict. Terry. He’s now out of the game. Says he’d rather go back to jail. And yes, they aren’t supposed to know, but if you were Keith, who do you think you’d get paired with? Anyhow, everybody is now shitting peach pits that they might get paired with him.”

“What do we do?”

Evan sighed. “I don’t know yet. Find someone else, I guess.”

“Even though they’ve already started training?”

Evan shook his head. “They haven’t been trained to do shit, except eat and complain.”

“Then do it. Find someone.”

Evan smiled. “Way ahead of you there, chief.”

Then why’d you ask? Jere thought. He considered asking Evan who he had in mind, but decided he didn’t want to know.

Not yet, anyway.

Geoff

Geoff Smith didn’t want to go home, but he knew he had to. So he borrowed Dave’s bodysuit and spent his time in AnOther Worlds, hunched near the console for maximum bandwidth. Dave was cool to let him stay in his apartment in Hollywood while he picketed Neteno, but now that their contestants had been selected, every morning he would drop some kind of comment about how it’d be nice to get his apartment back to himself again. Geoff could see it, a little. The apartment was tiny, and muggy, and had that old apartment-smell, like a mixture of ground carpet and wet dog. He had to sleep in the livingroom, while Dave had the single bedroom. So yeah, it would probably be cool for Dave to get the place back to himself. But Dave also worked all day, sometimes twelve or fourteen hours, wrangling computers for some insurance company or something like that. So he really wasn’t home that much. And when he wasn’t home, why should he care that Geoff was around?

Truth was, Geoff didn’t want to go home. His mother had a little house up in Palmdale. And Palmdale sucked. And living with Mom sucked. Of course, it was only temporary. As soon as he got a job paying a reasonable wage, he’d be out on his own. Maybe even in his own condo. Where he could have his own kitchen, his own dining room, his own game room. His own console, and his own subscription to EA’s interactive library. He might even be able to invite Laura, the waitress at the Lancaster Café, down for a game of AnOther world. Maybe. If she didn’t get in the way too much. If she didn’t expect him to be all romantic and sappy, like the guys in the movies.

Geoff looked around Dave’s apartment and sighed. He did have to go. Sometime. But maybe he could look for work down here, and then move when he found a job. It would be better than going back to Mom.

At first, his plan to get on Winning Mars seemed to be working. He did a video of himself explaining why he should be chosen for the show — not the real reasons, of course, just the ones he thought they wanted to hear — and sent it to Neteno. For some reason, parts of the video appeared on the tubenet a few days later, set to 80’s music. Eurythmics. Til Tuesday. Things like that. People made fun of him in the video comments. Geoff was about to comment back when a strange thing happened. A whole bunch of people got together and lobbied for him to be on the show. Fat Guy Goes to Mars, they called the cause. Not exactly flattering, especially after he’d lost those 10 pounds, but Geoff didn’t really care how he got on the show, as long as he got on it. He agreed to a Fat Guy Goes to Mars interview, and talked earnestly about why he wanted to go

— again, not the real reasons. But then an even stranger thing happened. Far Guy Goes to Mars shriveled as a group. They left really nasty comments, about how he really wasn’t all that funny without the music.

That was when he went a little nuts, he knew. He filled out every form on the Neteno site. He wrote stories about what he would do when he got to Mars, with realistic scenarios about him dying from lack of oxygen. He did a little machinima thing about him going to Mars and meeting the Martians. He started his own Help the Fat Guy Go to Mars, and he showed up in a fat suit at the Palmdale mall, wearing a sandwich board. People laughed and pointed. Some of them signed his petition. He made up other names. He sent the whole thing to Neteno. At ComicCon in San Diego, he figured that he’d wear the same board, but when he did, he was booed and people threw food at him. Apparently a lot of them wanted to be on the show, too. Neteno had a thing with Patrice Klein on the show floor down there, and the place was mobbed with people filling out little touchscreens and broadcasting their own linears, and handing in their own petitions.

Patrice was beautiful. Geoff wanted to go up to her and tell her how beautiful she was, and how he wanted to be her partner for the show. How he was the right partner for the show. So he braved the smelly vinyl and leather-clad crowd and stood in line forever and finally got pushed forward to meet her. She wasn’t looking at him when he stepped onto the little circular stage under the bright red lights. She was taking a drink of water from a little plastic cup without even a water-makers logo on it, and frowning at her little plastic jellybean watch. But then she turned to him and smiled, and Geoff had a sudden moment of epiphany. He could feel everyone in the crowd looking at him. Looking at him, because he was standing next to Patrice Klein, and Patrice Klein was going to Mars, and he had to tell her why he had to go with her. Because she was smiling, and she was perfect, and there was no way she couldn’t believe.

“I have to go to Mars with you,” he said. His voice sounded forced and desperate, and he licked his lips.

“Well, you’re direct, at least,” she said. The crowd tittered, as if hearing what she said.

“I have to go! I’ll show them there’s life on Mars!”

Patrice looked a little surprised, and the crowd seemed to go silent, as if waiting for what he had to say. Geoff rushed ahead. “They’re hiding it all. NASA. The Russians. Everyone who’s been there. Ask Arthur Clarke. The trees. They have pictures of the trees. There’s life, and I’m going to show it.”

Patrice’s eyes went wide, but she said nothing.

“Clarke’s dead, dumbass,” called someone from the crowd. And Geoff realized, right there, what he’d done. Their words were being amplified and played into the crowd. He’d just managed to ignore it the whole time he was there. Because the other people weren’t important. They didn’t have anything to say.

But his words had gone into the crowd, and he’d gone and done it. He’d told them the real reason he wanted to go to Mars.

Geoff turned to face the crowd, open-mouthed, just as an ice-cream cone smacked him in the face. At first, all he felt was the cold and pain, and he wailed and clawed his face. Then he saw the remains of the cone laying on the floor, and the trail of ice-cream (it looked like chocolate mint chip, but he wasn’t about to taste it, oh, no) going down his shirt, and realized what had happened.

“Get outta there, nut!” someone called from the crowd.

Geoff looked from them to Patrice. Patrice had stepped back several feet, and held a hand over her mouth, as if she was trying to keep from laughing. Geoff ran.

He spent the rest of the day berating himself for having said why he really wanted to go to Mars. Now, hundreds of people knew his real reason. Some of them might even be from NASA or other government agencies. There was no way they’d let him on the flight now. Because he knew they were covering it up, and now they knew he was out to expose them. Someone in the crowd had taken video of his performance, so when he came home, he was taunted by people on the networks again. For a little while, they linked back to his first video, and his popularity soared. But it was short-lived. Soon he was nobody, all over again. When the agents didn’t come to take him away, Geoff decided to press his campaign a little further. He found a friend via the goonet who had a little place in Hollywood. Dave. Geoff took the bus down to his place, then walked a mile to the Neteno building. He remembered looking up at the orbiting letters and thinking, this is it.

They let him go up to the executive waiting room, no problem. But then he waited. And waited. And waited. Hours passed. People went in and out, but they didn’t call him. He waited until people were starting to leave for the day. They said, we’re sorry, we forgot about you, come back tomorrow.

Geoff came back for three days after that. Eventually, he talked to someone who he suspected was a secretary, in a little meeting-room where an outdated screensaver played on the laserprojector. The probably-secretary listened to him, nodded, and said he’d get back to Geoff. Geoff carried a sign: WILL GO TO MARS FOR FOOD, and paced back and forth in front of the Neteno building. The police came and told him to go away. He sent them photos of himself, with Mars ‘chopped into the background. He played lots of AnOther World. At night, Dave helped him put his story on the nets. But the story fell on a dead network. Nobody seemed to care.

When they put all the contestants down at the Hollywood Roosevelt, Geoff thought of taking his sign down there. But he knew the police would put him in a cell this time, a cell maybe filled with rapists and murderers and drunk drivers. So he went down to the Roosevelt and sat in the lobby and watched the lucky ones stroll by. Patrice was there, radiant and perfect. She never looked at him. Which he figured was good.

But we would have been perfect together, Geoff thought. Now they were at some super-secret training facility. Geoff had watched the bus leave the Neteno building and head up the 101. Knowing that was the end. Knowing he wasn’t ever going to be on the show.

Knowing, now, that he really had to go home.

There was a sharp knock on the door.

Geoff froze.

Knock, knock!

Maybe Dave hadn’t paid his bills. Geoff held his breath.

Muffled swearing came from outside the door. Then, harder, Knock knock knock!

A voice: “We know you’re in there! Open up, Geoff!”

We know you’re in there, open up, Geoff? A thousand little images cascaded through Geoff’s head. The police had found him. They were going to take him away. Dave had left all his bills to him. They’d found out about his little AnOther World scam. They were going to put him in a jail cell with rapists and murderers and drunk drivers.

Then, an even more frightening thought: Maybe it was NASA, come to put him away. That would make sense. It took them a long time. But they were the government. Kind of slow. They’d finally realized they couldn’t have someone saying there was life on Mars, and they were going to prove it.

Geoff went to the window. Outside, there was an old-fashioned fire escape. He tried to push open the window, but it wouldn’t slide up more than four inches. He slid it down, then up again, banging it against the top of its frame.

“We hear you in there! Come on, Geoff!”

Geoff banged the window, but it wouldn’t budge. He went into Dave’s little bedroom and checked the window there. Same thing.

He went back into the main room, expecting to be yelled at through the door. But everything was silent. He went to the door and looked through the little fisheye lens. It showed nobody in the hall.

Geoff went to open the door, then shook his head. No. Oh no. That was what they would expect. He went to the window and tried to figure out why it wouldn’t go up. He’d just found the clamp on the counterweight line when a key scratched in the lock and the door opened. Two men in identical gray suits stepped in the room. Geoff started and gave a cry like a little girl.

“Are you Geoff Smith?” one of them asked.

“No!” Geoff said.

The other sighed and looked at a handscreen. “Yes you are.”

Geoff felt his heart hammering. “So?”

“So we’ve got good news for you. Winning Mars has had a contestant drop out. If you’re interested, we have a contract for you.”

“You . . . you do?”

A smile. “Yes. Hell of a thing, finding you. Ever heard of cellphones?”

“Mom doesn’t believe in them.”

One of the greysuits looked puzzled. “How old are you?”

“Thirty.” Geoff answered automatically.

“Wow. Anyway. We have a contract. Are you interested?”

Geoff took the contract from them, half-expecting it to be a trick, for them to try to put handcuffs on him. But it was just a contract. On paper, like they said it was. He scanned it quickly.

It was real. They wanted him! For Winning Mars!

“Give me a pen,” he said, in a quavering voice.

They watched as he signed the contract on the greasy bar. Dave would be so happy to get rid of him.

Geoff smiled. And I’ll do it, he thought. I’ll prove there’s life on Mars.Astronaut

Russia was almost normal for Jere now. He almost didn’t feel the awful winter chill in Moscow, or notice the goats on the road at Baikonur. He didn’t mind grabbing cold-slick vinyl seats as their drivers deftly slid around potholes on the treacherous black-iced roads, potholes that looked as if they could hide black bears, potholes that looked like they could swallow the car, potholes so big and deep and dark they might have gone straight through to some beautiful tropical beach in Brazil.

Now they were back at Baikonur for a meet-and-greet and get-some-video with the guy who was really gonna run the show, John Glenn. Not really John Glenn, of course, but that’s what everyone called him, ‘cause he was old and happy and fit in that creepy way that people who let themselves get old had. His real name was Frank Sellers, another good generic whiteboy name, seemingly like all the other astronauts who had ever come out of NASA. Frank was one of the concessions they’d won. The Russians could build it, fine, anyone could get parts in orbit, fine, but for the big shot, when the Can was assembled and it boosted out of orbit to Mars, it had to be an American pilot. The Dick was ever so happy to show Jere the charts and graphs that tied nationality of pilot to return on investment. They could win with any pilot, but if they wanted to win big, they had to have an American. They could be flight crew, doormen, janitors, whatever, but the pilot had to be American. The Dick always had lots of charts and graphs. Jere always felt like he was hiding the big ones in his back pocket, the ones that would say, If you want to win really big, you need to have Glen and Alena win. He expected Evan and The Dick to trot them out before they sent the teams down to Mars, and lobby one last time to throw the game.

What will you do, if they show you a really big number? Jere wondered. He shook his head. He didn’t know.

They waited in the awkward RusSpace lounge for Frank to show for his interview, Jere and Evan and Ron and the cameraman, whose name Jere had forgotten. But the time ticked by, and there was no Frank. Evan managed to have the cute RusSpace receptionist page him. After half-a-dozen tries, a gruff voice barked out of the speaker.

“What do you want?”

“It’s time for your interview, Frank,” Jere said. “Remember? Neteno? The guys who’re paying your salary?”

“And damn little that salary is! I got problems here. Your talking-head stuff can wait.”

“No it can’t. We’re flying back today.”

A sigh. “Look. That stuff doesn’t mean anything. You want to fly, I need to work this thru.”

“I thought you were a pilot, not ground crew,” Evan said.