“Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them, slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised.”
-Etienne de la Boetie
And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
-Genesis
Jim Fox lay just below the rim of the crater, his belly pressed against the yellowish sand. He was trying to catch his breath before climbing to the rim. It had been a long hike from the rocks where he had hidden his rover. The soft sand dunes at the crater’s base had made it difficult to walk, and he had slid backwards several times as he scrambled up the crater wall. Now, he lay close against the steep slope, his feet braced against an outcropping of ragged rock, his short but muscular frame stretched out on the loose, gravelly surface, with 50 kilograms of gear on his back. He looked through his face shield at the reddish brown dusts of iron oxides and clays that draped the smaller stones. They were the same dusts that clung to his pressure suit, and part of the mystery that had obsessed him for two months now, the mystery that waited over the rim.
A breeze blew along the rim of the crater and carried away a small, burnt sienna plume of the fine powder. As he listened to the whisper of the breeze against his helmet and watched the fleeting cloud of dust, it was as if the wind blew away the facade of his intellectual interest in this assignment, and exposed the raw ache in his heart. His despair returned. He felt so trapped: trapped in his pressure suit, trapped on Mars, and most of all, trapped in the Unification. And yet, as he watched the dust on the wind, a faint feeling of hope struggled toward the surface of his despair.
Rudely, a cold female voice crackled from his CommandLink receiver. “Data request… Update requested… Is there a problem, Director?”
Trying to hide his irritation, Jim whispered, “No problem, Command. Just catching my breath, that’s all, and preparing for observation of the subjects.”
Again, the sterile voice from Command, “Soil and atmospheric analysis requested.”
Reluctantly, but obediently, Jim rolled over and removed the analyzer from his pack, placed it against the slope, and turned it on. It cycled through the sampling sequence three times, transmitted the data, and turned itself off.
He had hardly returned it to his pack when he heard Command again, “Transmit video when available.”
“Of course.” He waited a minute to see if there would be further instructions. He was so sick of Command, always talking through the tiny CommandLink implanted behind his ear. The voice was incessantly questioning, always monitoring his every word, seeking data, directing his every move. Sensors in the CommandLink even sent his heart rate and body temperature, and of course, his location, to Command. He felt like an ant in a colony. He felt like the symbol of the new government. He glanced down at his uniform, at the silver ant reflecting the light from the sun. At least he did not have one of those new devices… yet. He got an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach at the thought of it.
He sat up, braced his feet against a small crag, and looked out across the crater. It was an awesome site. He felt dizzy, like he was hanging in space. Three hundred meters deep and two kilometers wide, he could just see the other side through the dusty air. It reminded him of the mountains back on earth where the headquarters of the Resistance were hidden, the ravine, and the camouflaged entrance to their subterranean world. There, complete with underground farming systems and fusion reactors, the Resistance had remained so far undetected, hoping against hope for some chink in the armor of the Unification.
Leah was there. He could almost see his precious daughter, her dark eyes and that smile that lit up his life. She was so full of vitality and joy, even in the midst of…. He felt a twinge inside as he thought of all they’d been through, then turned his mind to the task at hand.
He removed the video transmitter from his pack and slowly, cautiously, crawled the last few feet and looked over the rim. The scene below was beautiful. About 300 meters off were at least one hundred dust devils, their slender, swirling forms moving in sinuous paths, like dusty fingers of the gods writing in the sand, a great choreography of small tornadoes. Friction made them electrical as well as mineral, and they crackled with short sparks of lightning as the charged mineral particles sorted themselves along the vertical gradient of the majestic funnels.
How wonderful—amazing! The swirling whirlwinds of dust, some perhaps 20 meters high and two meters wide at the base, moved with synchrony in great undulating curves across the reddish ground, like a school of codfish or a flock of starlings, the whole mass billowing and breathing like a single, nebulous, electrical organism.
He carefully watched as some of the vortices left the group and interacted with the small structure he had planted there the day before. One by one they spun closer to it and touched it, lifting it off the ground, turning it, then gently, precisely returning it to its place. He marveled as, one by one, they returned to the larger group on the ejecta ridge. His heart beat rapidly, his keen mind assimilating the data.
“Director Fox… Is there a problem? We are awaiting video transmission.”
“No problem, Command.” Jim was nervous now. “Just a moment.” He waited until the dust devils were moving along again as a group, then switched on the video transmitter.
He mentally reviewed what he had seen. All of the signs were there. As he continued to watch the dance through the camera, he exulted in his intellectual triumph. He was right. There could no longer be any doubt. He had previously established that they were alive, and he was reasonably sure of how they worked: particles of dust, attracted to each other by weak static electrical charges, harnessing the power of the sun and wind, organized themselves into tiny self-replicating helical structures that formed the dynamic framework of the vortices. But now he knew something else: they were intelligent. Just as mindless individual termites or ants, interacting, become an intelligent colony, a thinking beast, so from the midst of a multitude of colliding, cohering particles of dust, a mind had emerged. But living, intelligent dust devils? It was hard to believe. But yes!
Almost crying with joy and excitement, he turned off the camera. He was putting it in its case when a strange sound came through his CommandLink speaker. It was not the sterile voice of Command this time, but an odd garble. Interference from the dusts? But it almost sounded like speech. There was a certain cadence to it, and excited inflections. He concentrated, his mind focused in a kind of auditory squinting. Yes, there was something there. Again, his mind worked fast, bringing to bear years of training in intelligent systems theory. Could they be communicating through radio frequency waves? His heart almost stopped—the implications were staggering.
Somewhere in his mind a light turned on, and the seed of a plan began to form, but his thoughts were interrupted by the eternal voice of Command, “Transmission received…You have performed well, Director… Enjoy the fulfillment that comes from the progress of the Unification.”
Jim smirked. Progress. Fulfillment. He felt no fulfillment in obeying their commands. What was the Unification to him? Fulfillment was gone—they had robbed him of it when they took away his freedom.
The CommandLink buzzed, “You will return tomorrow to set a sampling trap and begin experiments to explore the nature of these phenomena…Return to the station now without delay… There are issues awaiting your attention.”
“Yes, Command,” Jim replied, and the seed in his mind began to germinate.
