Without the sim, he should have seen the mountains. He should have seen a whole team of Prime employees, or at least some yellow tape demarcating their site. Lights. Cameras. Dust makers. It should have looked like a film set in Utah. Like a research facility. Like Earth.
It wasn’t just that—for a few seconds—the sky had been a different color than the sim, and also not at all blue. It was that the sky was so convincingly a real sky that it made the sim seem crude. He wondered that he could have talked himself, however grudgingly, into believing a simulated sky. How could he explain the difference? It was like if you had ever seen a dead body. In the movies or television, sometimes people were confused if a person was dead or not. Not so, in life. You knew when someone was dead. It was not a confusing thing.
It was not an Earth sky, the sky that he saw.
He saw Phobos. It was transiting the sun, an irregular lump of darkness against the pale yellow. Darker than he’d seen the moon, its definition sharper.
When the sim came back on, all the colors, the feeling of the colors, died. Death told you there had once been life.
? ? ?
IT WAS SOME kind of test. Or a computer glitch. Perhaps Prime didn’t even know it had happened.
It was possible Prime had played similar tricks on Helen and Yoshi, but those two were concealing them. Certainly, they—Helen, Yoshi, himself—had never been absolutely honest about their states of mind, but he’d thought he had an accurate sense of what they were all lying about and why. Not lying. Spinning.
He cannot afford to be suspicious of his crewmembers.
? ? ?
SERGEI KNOWS THAT paranoia is capable of making him ignore truly inescapable arguments. He knows this, and he tells himself to face these arguments. He instructs himself to defeat himself, but this is like playing against yourself at chess. He is equally good at both sides. Helen or Yoshi might give him a challenge, but he cannot play them without giving himself away to Prime and implicating his crew even further. There are other ways he can test his rightness or wrongness, but, again, he needs to do these tests in such a way that Prime will not know he is doing them. Because if he is wrong, or right, depending on the point of view, then he will ruin everything for everybody. Shame himself, his family, and fuck it up for Helen and Yoshi.
That he hesitates to test his conclusions must mean he knows—some crucial part of him knows—that he was not on Mars, is not in space. Come on.
But he is not crazy.
All the elaborate special effects to no purpose, from the very beginning. It was one thing to simulate Mars, but why simulate the flight to Prime’s launch facility in Texas, the drive to the launch pad, the elevator ride up to a Primitus perched atop the Manus heavy-lift? This was all done for psychological reasons? What real difference would this make in their psychology? None of them had believed it was real.
Why start Eidolon on the same day as the Red Dawn II launch? The synchronicity made no sense except when you realized it was possible to launch Primitus instead of Red Dawn II without many people knowing. Not easy, but possible, especially with a little help from the United States Pentagon. No one who wasn’t Prime was allowed anywhere near the launch pad. Prime had video of launching Red Dawn I and they could have released that to the public. There were space surveillance telescopes and radar trackers all over the world, and these could pick up something the size of a melon at thirty thousand kilometers, but he’d seen stealth hardware that was capable of obfuscating intelligence.
The phrase stealth melon is so stupid he can almost laugh at himself. Except this is a thing that has already been done.
Their isolation was total; every piece of information, including what anything outside their craft truly looked like, came through Prime. There was very little in the crew’s behavior that indicated they did not believe their mission was real: none of the public videos or messages they sent to Earth included the word Gofer or a phrase like “when we actually go to Mars . . .” Their private letters, yes, but those went to Prime first. And who was to say that this latest email from Dmitri was even from Dmitri? It didn’t sound like him at all. The world could be watching them go to Mars and the astronauts wouldn’t even know it. Prime could be keeping them in the dark because they had a study that showed astronauts perform certain tasks better if they believe they are in a simulation. Diabolical and risky, but not unthinkable. All twisted psychological things are very possible.
Or the world could not know. Sending the crew secretly had better motivations. In fact, there were so many reasons to send a crew secretly he was beginning to approve of Prime doing so. Any failure of MarsNOW—especially something very public and catastrophic—would be an incalculable loss to Prime, and to the wider goal of space exploration. Look at what seemed to be the fallout over the Weilai 3 tragedy. Prime was a business, even more so than the Chinese government. Why not conduct the mission in secret? If it failed, no one would know. If it succeeded, well, they had the whole thing documented. They could even tell the world once Red Dawn landed and—surprise! Three astronauts came out! You would have to deal with another scenario like the moon-landing-denying people, but this would happen anyway because people were crazy.
There was the problem of accounting for their three missing bodies if they died during the mission. Prime would be smart to arrange for faking their deaths in a way that would tarnish neither Prime nor the mission. The options were not pleasant. Prime could arrange for an explosion, say, at something like the quarantine facility in Texas or Utah, and then claim it was the work of terrorists. Terrorists would claim it anyway. But this would be very hard on his sons, this kind of senseless death.
He is being ridiculous.