Rachel took her seat, then watched the weather patterns of expression on the interrogating delegate’s face as her answer to his question was translated from English to Japanese. Defiantly, Rachel took a long drink of ice water, avoiding any eye contact with the row of international interrogators crouching like old ravens at the front of the room. At the table beside her sat a Thermos pot of Swiss coffee and an empty mug, but despite the thick rich smell, she avoided pouring herself a cup. These hearings offered little in the way of piss breaks, and she needed to concentrate on the accusations being shot at her, without being distracted by a swollen bladder.
Sitting silently in plush chairs along the table on both sides of her, her army of legal counsel watched with keen eyes and blank expressions. They had put a safe distance between her and themselves, in case she had to take a fall.
A few of her colleagues waited in isolation rooms for their own turns in the interrogation chair, but at the moment everything depended on her. Rachel Dycek was under the microscope. She had been the head of the adin project, and she would be thrown into the roiling waters of inquisition, to “sink or swim” as the Americans said.
Scapegoat.
She had been vivisected on camera as the whole world watched. UN delegates pummeled her with question after question, hauling out details of her failed marriage to Sergei, of disciplinary records in primary school, quoting phrases from essays she had written during her undergraduate days in college.
The questioners from India and Japan were the most vehement, but Rachel saw jealousy in the eyes of the other delegates who would not have an opportunity to question her. The Sovereign Republics had succeeded in something that had been impossible for every other country on Earth. Just like the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite; or Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space; or Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space; or Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space. While other nations dickered for years about studies and assessments, Russians simply went ahead and did the task. Rachel had done the same with her adin project.
“Thank you, Madame Chairman,” the Indian delegate—whom Rachel thought of as “Mr. Unpronounceable Name”—leaned forward and spoke into his microphone. The Japanese delegate, whose turn at interrogation had ended with his last question, sat back with a sour look on his face and keyed comments into his notebook. Someone coughed too close to an open microphone. Other delegates shuffled papers. Mr. Unpronounceable Name, however, seemed to rely entirely on his own memory. He spoke in English.
“Now then, Dr. Dycek, let us pursue this line of questioning further. I would like you to explain for us, in detail, the exact procedures you used to select your adin candidates. The world is concerned about possible human rights violations.”
Rachel followed most of his words, though she double-checked them against the buzz of Russian translation in her ear. She took another deep breath. No hurry.
She used their own terminology, since the newsnets seemed set on sticking to the same words. One of the journalists who learned of Rachel’s first and second phases of augmentation had dubbed them with the Russian words for “One” and “Two,” adin and dva, using the a instead of the preferred o transliteration. The plurals should have been odni and dvoi, but that had been too much for the newsnets, who simply added the English s plural. She sighed. The more appropriate words for “Firsts” and “Seconds” should have been perviye and vtoriye—but she realized this would be a losing battle with the media, so she did not fight it. She had enough other battles to fight. So adins and duos it was.
“The adin candidates were chosen from among prison volunteers in our facility at Neryungri. Every single person was fully briefed on the surgeries they would undergo. They were completely aware of the modifications that would be made to their bodies—and they knew they would never return to Earth. Every one of them knew all this. We have a release signature from each candidate.”
The Indian’s gaze bored into her. “But was this not a secret project? Classified government studies? Are you saying that you told every one of these people, these convicted criminals, of your country’s most sensitive research?”
Rachel shrugged. “They were already imprisoned at the time.”
The Indian delegate raised his eyebrows. “Am I to infer that once these ‘Volunteers’ received a briefing from you, they were permanently removed from any sort of parole list? What if one of them were to be found innocent of his original crime? Would you turn him loose back into society, knowing he had knowledge of your precious secrets?”
Rachel slowed her thoughts to keep herself from spouting an answer before she had mapped out the proper words. She glanced sidelong at one of the legal counsel representatives; he nodded slightly.
“It is not my place to debate the ethics of the penal system in the Sovereign Republics. The question you ask is beyond the scope of any of my duties in the adin project. Perhaps you would do better to interrogate the warden of the Neryungri penal camp. I know only that all of the prospective adins came to our project of their own free will, fully knowing the consequences of their choice.”
The Indian delegate drummed his fingers on the tabletop, causing his microphone to rumble. He spread his palms and smiled with an exaggeratedly perplexed expression. “But why would anyone want to volunteer for such a thing? To me, it sounds hideous.”
Rachel pushed her own fingertips down hard on the tabletop in what she hoped was an invisible release of frustration. The panel had already asked these questions in varying ways. She had already answered them in preliminary hearings, in written statements, in public interviews. The annoying repetition made them look like fools, not her.
“Frankly, Mr. Ambassador, I fail to understand what is so difficult for you to comprehend. It has been a long-standing practice among many of the world’s countries—yours included, I believe—to ask for volunteers among prisoners for medical experiments, to test dangerous new drugs, to conduct psychological studies. These people were all under life sentences in a rigorous work camp. I am certain they felt they had nothing to lose.”
The Indian delegate’s eyes widened as he latched on to her answer. “But if conditions in Neryungri were so miserable, as you say, how can we be certain you used proper medical procedures, proper precautions to ease the suffering of your patients—excuse me—I mean your ‘test subjects’?”
Rachel saw the photographs spread out on the table in front of her, the UN investigative team’s reports on the facilities. Each delegate had copies of everything. They already knew the answers. Yet still they asked. Again and again.
The research facility in Siberia had been a gleaming technological island compared to the squalid prison camp. The site had been quite a change even from the preliminary quarters in the concrete university buildings outside Moscow that had originally housed the project. Erected by the prisoners themselves, the Neryungri medical complex was new and clean, extravagant with heat and electricity. When the volunteers came inside for their interviews, more often than not the grandeur of the place struck them dumb.
“We had adequate facilities,” Rachel answered. “In fact the UN investigative team concluded that they were ‘state of the art and impressive’—that is an exact quote. Perhaps you have not read the summary report in front of you? Shall I give you the page number?”
She picked up her own copy to show him, to show the cameras. He obviously had an identical one right next to his elbow, but she pretended not to see it. “If for some reason you no longer have this information, Mr. Ambassador, I would be happy to procure you another copy.” Her brittle smile could have sliced steel.
Mr. Unpronounceable Name looked away. “No, Dr. Dycek, that will not be necessary. But having one’s ears and nose sliced off, a second set of lungs mounted on the back, the entire skin grafted with some sort of polymer … and then to be exiled from Mother Earth without any hope of returning …” He shook his head. “And you want us to believe they volunteered for this?”
Rachel laid her palm flat on the table in a deliberate gesture, half rising. “And they stood in line for it, sir! Russians have always been pioneers, explorers. We are accustomed to hardship. Nomads have survived on the hostile steppes for centuries, leading lives little better than what the adins now face on the planet Mars. Russians expanded into inhospitable Siberia at the time of Peter the Great. Russians were the first to send humans into space. Why is it so shocking that we should try to be the first unprotected humans to set foot on Mars?”
Pointedly ignoring his glare, she flipped through her own copy of the summary report, as if looking for more answers there. The pages felt slippery against her sweaty fingertips.
The adins had been created one step at a time, first the altered cosmetic appearances, the ears, the nostrils, since these were the least risky surgeries. At each step of the process, failures occurred—some fatal. But the volunteers knew the risks. They had signed the waivers and consent forms. She had given many of the preparatory briefings herself. Rachel had pulled no punches, but just by looking into their eyes, she could see how desperate they were. And she was giving them a way out of hell.
Four of the volunteers developed severe pneumonia or infections after the first round of facial adaptations; one died, and the other three were sent back to their former lives with a stipend and a dismissal that excused them from further labor, but they did have to remain in Neryungri. Though plastic surgeons tried to repair the damage done, those failures were never the same.
But with a large enough pool of volunteers, she had completed thirty adin subjects for the surface of Mars.
The adaptations were done under Earth-normal pressure: the skin polymerization, the addition of artificial lungs. Their digestive systems were seeded with harmless bacteria that would help them digest the strains of algae prevalent on the changing Mars; after these alterations, the adin volunteers were fed only algae grown in special tanks on Earth.
During the 120-day journey across interplanetary space, the air-pressure and temperature were gradually dropped on the cargo vessel to allow the adins to adapt. Their secondary lungs began to function. Two adins died en route.
The acclimatization process was gradual, and when the transport landed on Mars and the adins stepped out, they could breathe, they could stand upright on Mars, they could walk across the iron oxide sands unaided, turning their naked faces into the thin Martian wind.
Suddenly there were people living on another planet—and they were Russians. Siberians! As the world reeled in shock, the Sovereign Republics hailed Rachel Dycek as a national hero. She and her team came out of hiding in Siberia and raised their hands to accolades. It had been a dizzying few days, before the outcries from world authorities and demands for explanations grew too loud. Rachel had not been allowed to revel in her glory.
The Indian delegate continued his questions. “According to the transcripts from the first investigatory team, you claim to have sterilized all of the adins. Made them unable to have children.” He looked up at her, as if to confirm his facts.
“Yes, that is true. All the males received vasectomies.”
“Males? Do you mean the men?”
“Yes. The men.”
“What about the women? The females?” His voice carried a hint of scorn.
“If all the … the men were sterilized, we saw no need to perform unnecessary surgery on the women. What would be the point? The failure rate of vasectomies is extremely low, and in a small group the expected success would be one hundred percent. Additional sterilization of the women by laparoscopic tuballigation would have increased the risk of complications—by about three percent—but would have added very little to the overall assurance of sterility. We deemed it unnecessary.”
“But wasn’t the men’s surgery unnecessary also?” the delegate pounced. “This seems appalling and cruel. I sincerely doubt that adin survival on the planet Mars would depend on whether or not the men were castrated!”
Rachel nearly shot to her feet, but one of the legal representatives next to her gripped her wrist and squeezed hard enough to deflect her outburst. She took a moment to calm herself.
“Mr. Ambassador, they received a painless, simple vasectomy, not castration. I would venture to say that a handful of people in this very room—and tens of millions in the viewing audience—have undergone a similar procedure. So please let us not use unprofessional and inflammatory terms.”
Mr. Unpronounceable Name blinked with an offended expression, but Rachel continued before he could open his mouth again. “Perhaps I had better emphasize a simple point about the adins that you do not seem to understand. The augmented humans were never genetically altered. They were given enhanced abilities to survive the rigors of the Martian environment. They could not pass along those enhancements to their children.
“Thirty of the adins—men and women—were sent to Mars to live out the rest of their lives. We are not so naive as to think that they will never again indulge their sexual drives. Any children they might conceive would be normal human babies, unadapted to Mars, who would die instantly upon taking their first freezing, oxygen-starved breath. Do you consider it cruel to prevent that from happening, Mr. Ambassador? You have a strange conception of cruelty.”
Rachel raised her face to the glaring lights, knowing that her expression was being transmitted from Geneva to newsnets around the world, displayed on television monitors and newspaper screens.
Riding her anger, she turned to the Costa Rican ambassador at the head of the inquisitors’ table. “Madame Chairman, it has been two hours already, and I would like to speak with my counsel. If the Indian delegate has finished this line of questioning, may I request a short recess?”
In truth, she needed to go to the bathroom.
But while Rachel Dycek and her fellow team members went before the Geneva hearings day after day, delegates from the Sovereign Republics fought the real battle behind the closed doors of UNSA. They merely let Rachel give the world a show, like a dancing bear in a circus.
World interest in the Mars project had been flagging for years. The terraforming work had gone on longer than most people had been alive, and the average person could not comprehend the slow but steady progress of algae growth and increasing partial pressures of oxygen. The actual day when people could live on Mars was still dozens of years away. The world economy was suffering, and money spent on the project had become as easy a target as bloated defense spending had been in the late twentieth century. Stop the terraforming work, people said, and just imagine all the good things we could use those funds for!
