Yet there was hope. A third option, to return to Earth - where the sunrises were slower: a planet already with forests and lakes, seas and grasslands; room enough to hide from hands and eyes of an invisible enemy.
Cautiously he ascended the ladder to the city’s wall, designed not to keep an enemy out but the Earth-like atmosphere in. The single wall encircled all of Tremon and from it sprung the membrane that rose far above the buildings and streets of the Martian capital.
Here, on this wall, he had found his final refuge.
Above a mountain rise, dawn broke on the red planet. The colours split into a million forms, from bright pink to rust. Behind him the mountain’s shadow retreated across the plain, and the city began to glisten. The sun, now fully visible, hovered above the summit. It was a new day.
Justin Deimos was a citizen of this city, and it was from this city that he was, in part, trying to escape - and from his peers: peers who tolerated him only because of his status. Like JD, the city kept unearthly hours - for him, waking and sleeping were activities dictated by contracts, not the spin of the planet. For JD was a Net-Runner - the best. He was also the oldest - even in when the average life expectancy was theoretically eternity, a twenty-five year-old Net-Runner was ancient.
Net-Running was big business on Mars, and contracts always went high because of the rarity of candidates: for more then a century, RNA-manipulation ensured every citizen of the new world would receive a twenty-first birthday present they would never forget: immortality.
One drawback of the procedure however was that it extended, by a fraction of a second, the response time of the inductee’ brain, rendering direct interface with the Net impossible. With the death rate almost non-existent, the government enforced strict population control. Consequently, JD was hot property.
Corporations contracted pre-immortalised citizens for their unique ability to run on the Net, for jobs ranging from simple search errands, to breaking into a competitor’s system and stealing trade secrets. And it did not end there - in the ongoing commercial on-line war, most localised system crashes were due to teenage mercenaries. Electronic espionage combined with genetic engineering ensured total youth employment. The government tolerated it because whatever pitfalls a planetary computer network with multiple artificial intelligence modules, three billion subscribers, and a transfer speed in the range of terra-bytes per second, it was all worth it. Data was the life-blood of Mars - without the Net, cities would die.
Most net-runners though were not aware of what only two decades of interfacing would teach: all these wars of spy versus spy were chicken feed. The government had its own Cyberguild - the big guns, mavericks that chose to postpone the life extension process. Like overlords they guarded the environmental controls, terraforming project, and other sectors that kept mars alive.
Ten years ago, breaking every rule that the Guild set down and getting away with it, JD was recruited by the Group of Eight - the Guild’s elite. The number was adhered to like glue - when he accepted, one resigned. They were a clique - sharing knowledge and looking out for each other.
Slowly, however, they had begun to retire. And no one had filled their place. Since their retiring, JD sent and received emails from them often enough - yet he had shook the hands of none of them since.
Most net-runners would not have seen the distinction, but JD knew all but flesh could be simulated. They had dropped out of the picture and this could mean only two things: death or a life-long contract by an entity that wanted them all for themselves.
JD knew he could have proved it if he wanted to - but the group he was up against would inevitably control the very means of dissemination. JD had been the youngest member of their clique before its members had progressively hit twenty-one and resigned. They had been good friends as wells a guild-members, and while the latter meant that they could all access the Cyberguild, the former meant that they never took contracts that would compromise their friendship.
More was at stake here than old alliances, however. They were watching him with electronic eyes, waiting for the moment they could take him under their guidance. As soon as he resigned, they would come for him. His prominence in the Guild was probably his only protection. Eventually, entering the synapses of the city would begin to cook his own neurons, and to survive he would have to go off-line. In doing so the protection of the Guild would fade. They would come for him. He would vanish - and never reappear.
Yet there was hope. A third option, to return to Earth - where the sunrises were slower: a planet already with forests and lakes, seas and grasslands; room enough to hide from hands and eyes of an invisible enemy.
Turning back to morning, Justin Deimos followed the monorail from the city, along the red desert, to the spaceport beyond the mountains that shuttled immigrants from the sanctuary planet to the red planet. Against the tide of Terrans he would return to his ancestral world, back to greens and blues, beyond the city walls.
And there he would perform the slow suicide: he would grow old.
