The Ghost Doctor

Libra 28, m0039, continued

The team report back to the embassy, where Schmidt acknowledges a job well done and accepts their report. After lunch, they head out to look around the town for extra resources that they may need for their work; they also find that there's a shipping box being held in the embassy stores for Florence, which turns out to contain the additional weapons which she requested; they are now fully equipped, they feel (and, when visiting many communities, Florence may have to carry some of her gear in electronically locked boxes with diplomatic service seals). In due course they take a walk out of Port Lowell to acclimatise themselves a little more to the Martian environment, testing their biomod adaptations to the conditions and so on; Florence practices the flamboyant martial arts moves in which she's been trained, proving that she can get clear over the head of a human opponent in a standing leap, and also confirms that her sidearms are fully functional.

Libra 28-March 2, m0039

Over the next couple of days, the team settles into their new posting, completing any necessary paperwork, learning their way around Port Lowell and the surrounding region, and trying out some of the bars and restaurants which they've had recommended to them. Port Lowell is a rather drab corporate town, perhaps, and the architecture is rarely worth a detour, but the variety of nationalities there, many of them fairly well-paid corporate or diplomatic employees, does ensure some fairly healthy nightlife. It also ensures steady employment for the consular functions of the E.U. embassy, and the team learns something about the mundane practicalities of all that; they may, after all, sometimes be assigned to deal with routine business when there's no call for their special talents.

The embassy itself is a modest-sized building, not much more than a large house - even on Mars, many of the staff do much of their work over the Web from home or from wherever they've been sent, and the team have no permanent office of their own, although they should have priority claim to hot desks when they can show need. They also discover that Quentin rules almost as much space in an ancillary building as the embassy proper provides; providing special resources required by E.U. contractors and even trans-shipping material is a large part of the embassy's function.

March 3, m0039

Then, when they arrive at work one morning, the team find that they have a brief meeting scheduled with Colette Schmidt. She comes straight to the point.

"It would appear that we have a possible murder case involving an E.U. citizen. Unfortunately, the incident happened nearly an Earth year ago now, but we've only just learned that it may not have been an accident, so the trail may be rather cold. However, the victim may naturally have rather strong feelings on the subject. I'd like you to go and talk to him in person - all else aside, he may need some moral support just now."

"Ah - he's been ghosted?"

"Yes. His name is Dr Tiberius Vartex. He's here on E.U. government sponsorship, so we have a duty to him. You'll have to travel to Haiyuan City..."

The team decide to set out straight away, reviewing the details of the case on the maglev as they go. Tiberius Vartex, it turns out, was - is - an English-born ex-military medical doctor who came to Mars as part of the E.U. special skills secondment programme. About a year or so ago, he was asked to act as medical officer for "Nova Iquitos Station", a semi-mobile Peruvian scientific unit operating on the eastern edge of the Elysium Planitia. After a couple of weeks there, he arranged to take a routine break, borrowed one of the unit's hoppers (with NAI pilot), and set off to fly to one of the Chinese-international towns west of Olympus Mons (with multiple refuelling stops along the way). He never made it; his hopper came down somewhere along the way. Luckily for him, a Chinese medical team were in the (very general) vicinity in their ambulance hopper, were able to reach the site within an hour or so, discovered his body in a somewhat-recoverable condition, and had the time and equipment to get him into nanostasis.

He was then transferred to a full hospital, initially in New Shanghai, where doctors confirmed that only an upload was feasible, and his E.U. contract certainly covered that. However, suitable facilities are still quite thin on Mars, and the most efficient approach proved to be to leave him in the hands of the Chinese medical services. Then, his medical plan, any living will arrangements that he'd made, and general custom, suggested that his ghost should be installed in a cloned bioshell - but that would take months to prepare and grow, and the best available facilities for that were in Haiyuan City. The hospital therefore didn't attach any particular priority to completing the upload; after all, while computer resources are cheap, they aren't free, and ghosts running on static systems in VR sometimes get uncomfortable. Hence, although the scan was run soon enough, and the conversion/compilation eventually followed, and was quite successful according to validation analysis, Dr Vartex's ghost was only really run, for initial test and acclimatisation purposes, a few days ago, when his bioshell was confirmed as functional and nearly ready for use.

Which was when Dr Vartex himself started raising questions about what happened to him. He hasn't said much yet, and he comes across as rather dour and still perhaps slightly traumatised by what happened to him, but he's dropped broad hints in messages to the embassy that he's highly suspicious of something. Anyway, he may need some practical or psychological support when he's first installed on the bioshell. The team also skims the official report on the hopper accident, which does strike them immediately as rather thin; the investigation was conducted by Chinese police, as the nearest authority to the crash scene, but given that they were dealing with a TSA vehicle and an E.U. citizen, it was perhaps predictable that they might not have been especially thorough.

With all this in mind, the team reach Haiyuan, and make their way to the hospital, where they meet Dr Feng, the attending surgeon on the case. He's pleasant but businesslike, persistently referring to Dr Vartex as "your program"; the Chinese don't grant ghosts full civil rights, which would explain a certain casualness in their attitude to the personal side of this matter, although there's no evidence that they were at all incompetent in regard to the technical aspects. He also reminds everyone that the process usually fails to recover the contents of very recent short-term memory - the last few minutes, possibly even hours, of the patient's life - and remarks that, while the procedure appears to have been quite successful in this case, there is always some danger of loss of other conscious memories or skill functions. It's clear that this is pro forma stuff, intended to protect the hospital against legal trouble, although the points he's making are entirely valid. Anyway, Dr Vartex has been running on the hospital mainframe, but it seems that his bioshell is checked out and ready to use, so the team are soon taken through to the room where a couple of technicians are linking it up to the download system.

(Any suspicions that such technicians will have loaded some compliant NAI onto any new shell in testing hours if not days ago, and then amused themselves seeing what they could order it to do, would of course be intolerable slanders on an entire profession. Anyway, the bioshell shows as being in perfect working order, complete with some minor internal upgrades that were included in the specification received by the hospital and a variety of protective nanomods.)

The download runs, all validation checks show positive, and Dr Vartex opens his eyes. Jianwei greets him and introduces himself and the other two, and suggests that they move to the hotel which has been booked for all of them. Vartex agrees, and the necessary administrative concerns are quickly resolved with the hospital. Jianwei requests that all backup copies of the new ghost be transferred to E.U. systems, along with the raw scan data from Dr Vartex's brain; although it would of course be impolite to mention any such thing to the Chinese, this could be used at a later date to validate the compilation job, if any suspicions arose about tinkering. As Dr Vartex won't have full human-equivalent rights in Chinese territory, Jianwei also suggests that he should set up another E.U.-registered holding company, with Dr Vartex as sole owner and himself as a non-executive director and the ghost and bioshell as its assets when it is operating in territory where they are regarded as property. This is handled in seconds; meanwhile, Dr Vartex downloads the last available backup of his assistant NAI over the Web and installs it as a secondary process on his computer. It comes as close as a NAI can manage to expressing surprise over the time that has passed since it last ran, and at its new situation.

And so the four beings head to the hotel, a comfortable but plain place in the business district, and the consular team can ask what's been worrying the unsmiling Dr Vartex. He confirms that he does indeed find the circumstances of his accident suspicious, but he hasn't wanted to say much to anyone while he was running on the hospital computers; being ex-military, he is fully aware that software running on a system controlled by someone else has no useful guarantees of security at all, and anything he chose to say might therefore have been readable by unknown parties.

As to the actual problem; Vartex looked over the details of his flight (which, no, he doesn't remember), and realised that he had been taking the obvious direct route from the Nova Iquitos base to his destination - until a few minutes before the crash, when the hopper made a slight but definite diversion. It was just a few degrees, but enough to require some explanation - which isn't available. He too has reviewed the official report, and the more that anyone in the group looks at it, the more they agree that it's clearly a very standard piece of writing, blaming the crash on an unspecified mechanical or software failure which of course can't be identified because the crash destroyed much of the vehicle.

It's getting late in the day by now, and the group all have rooms booked for the night in the hotel, so they settle in there to consider the matter further. Looking at the hopper flight log in detail, they realise that, at the same time it changed course, it switched from full real-time logging on external storage - the norm, which provides useful "black box" details - to a minimal level of recording, showing little more than bearing, speed, and altitude. Still, they can get a little from this; notably, they eventually discover that the hopper had begun a slow, controlled descent a few minutes before the catastrophic events of the crash, and so was lower than normal operating altitude at that time, although not yet quite low enough to raise a red flag for the routine Chinese investigation.

Next, Vajra pulls what he can find in the way of satellite imagery of the area of the crash from around the time of the accident off the Mars Web. This is relatively skimpy - better images almost certainly exist somewhere, but a lot of the satellites in orbit round the planet belong to military organisations - but it seems to confirm that confirm what aviation management records also say; that there were no other air vehicles in the vicinity. However, later, examining these images at length and especially scrupulously, the team will decide that there may well have been a ground vehicle very close to the point where the hopper's descent path would have brought it to land.

Everything does now seem to be pointing to foul play, but there are many unanswered questions remaining. Why did the hopper change course? Could its NAI have been subverted somehow? Who wanted it to land, and who may have been waiting for it? And still, what brought it down? The next step seems to be to examine the wreckage, and a quick records check shows that the Chinese investigators removed it - or at least the largest parts - to their facilities in New Shanghai. So the team decides to travel their on the next day, and make a few arrangements before retiring to sleep (or in Vajra's case, to meditate).

March 4, m0039

Another slightly boring maglev journey takes the four Europeans to their next destination, and a taxi then takes them to Police HQ, where Jianwei's immaculate grasp of procedure and the team's diplomatic credentials earn them admission to a storage unit on the edge of town. A large tray slides out of a stack, and the team are presented with a fine collection of scrap metal, consistent with the model and type of hopper and the story that it hit the ground at some speed. They are also given a large collection of images recorded at the site before anything was moved by the investigators. This isn't a perfect forensics exercise, though; the Chinese only collected up fairly large pieces. At Jianwei's instruction, Aunty loads up a forensics skill set, and under her direction, wearing suitably advanced anti-contamination gear provided by the building owners, he begins a careful examination of the wreckage. This isn't exactly conclusive, but it does look as though, at one point on the hull, where the jet exhaust emerges alongside the tail structure, the metal may have been driven inwards with explosive force - not outwards, as would be expected if the problem was an engine explosion, and not consistently with ground impact either...

"Okay, we have prima facie evidence that you were shot down."

Looking at the damage and the forensics program outputs, Florence, the team's weapons expert, decides that something large-calibre but man-portable was probably involved. That may be a small relief.


The team identify certain crucial elements of the wreckage, and make a formal request to the Chinese authorities that these should be transferred under forensic seal to E.U. embassy custody. It's been a long time, unfortunately, but it's possible that sufficiently fine examination could find further evidence of weapons fire. A SEFOP round would almost certainly leave traces of explosively-forged metal; a HEMP round or other shaped charge might only leave small traces of very volatile materials. Out of interest, they also request and receive footage from the medical unit's cameras. (Jianwei asks briefly if Vartex wants to look at this, given that it's likely to contain rather gruesome images of his own former body. Vartex points out that he's both ex-military and a doctor.) This doesn't add much to their information, but confirms that the wreckage was indeed much as the Chinese investigators' information indicates.

Working methodically along the chain of evidence, the team decide that their next stop should be the crash site itself - it's been a while, but the site has probably gone undisturbed, out there in the wilderness. Of course, this will mean quite a bit more travel; more than 1,500 miles by maglev - a full day's travel - to the nearest substantial community (the place where the medical team were fortuitously based, in fact), where they can rent a heavy rover vehicle, and then another three or four hundred miles to the site - another full day, and they'll need to rent a fuel trailer along with the rover to get them home again. Well, at least if they then decide to locate Nova Iquitos Station, it's just further in the same direction along the equatorial railway. They are only a little concerned that they may be about to tangle with people who are prepared to kill in the course of their machinations - and Florence doesn't seem worried at all.