Chapter Twenty One
“Well, hi, Lisbet,” Beck said, looking down at her for a moment before shifting his attention to the Sleeping Beauty Inc. control bracelet around his wrist. “Ah, I see that my bracelet did inform me that you had come out of cryostasis, but I was in the middle of a meeting and I didn’t realize it. Sorry. Do you need me to put you back to sleep?”
“Are you Vantz?” she asked. Her body was trembling, but the look in her eyes was steely. It was too late to act like she hadn’t heard anything.
“No,” he said, biting his bottom lip with his canine.
“I just heard you talking like him.”
Beck groaned. “To make this simple, Vantz is mine. He belongs to me.”
“Why?” she whispered. “Aren’t you working for him?”
He blinked at her like he couldn’t believe what she was asking. “Lisbet, this is none of your business, but I feel like I owe you an explanation since I made you sign wedding documents that made you believe you were married to him.” He paused after making his grand concession. “Let me repeat that. I feel like I owe you an explanation. By law, I do not. I could shock you into compliance and shove you back in your cryochamber without telling you anything at all. If I was anything like my father, I would do that. But since I do not want to be anything like my father, I have to tell you the bare bones of what is happening.”
Lisbet waited.
He didn’t continue. He ruffled his hair and looked flustered in a way she had never seen him before. When he spoke, it was almost like he was talking to himself. “It’s not going to matter if I tell you everything. We’re far enough along in the plan that soon everyone will know the truth anyway. It’s coming. Everything is coming down.” He took a couple of soothing breaths that did nothing for him, so he reached for his cigarette, clicked it on, and puffed on it like an addict while Lisbet waited. “Vantz is not a person. He began as a persona I used to hide who I was so that I could bypass convention.”
“What does that mean?” Lisbet asked blankly.
“He was my screen name that I eventually registered as a real person. Using the information that became Vantz, I was allowed to get a doctorate in terraforming at the age of thirteen.”
“Huh?”
“No one would teach me when I was eight, so I made Vantz, a diligent young man who studied at home. I did my university studies remotely. As Vantz, I have been awarded many degrees and many awards. No one would take me seriously when I was young so I needed to trick everyone into believing that I was older, but worse than that I couldn’t let anyone see me.”
“Why?”
“I’m famous,” he growled, puffing heavily.
“For being smart? Obviously.”
“No,” he said with dead eyes. “For being the son of a very wealthy miner.”
Lisbet’s mouth went dry. “Which one?”
“Carlos Beltrose.”
Lisbet hissed her breath in disbelief. “You couldn’t get a superior education with him as your daddy?”
Beck scoffed and responded. “You think a man like that would want to let anyone study anything that might lead to them taking power away from him? Even if it was his own son?”
Lisbet pursed her lips. She didn’t know much about Carlos. At least, she had never heard his name before she came to Mars and started meeting people in The Boiler Room. She had never met him herself, but Carlos had the kind of name people liked to drop. People liked to drop the names of rich people. The people on the surface hated the rich miners, but they were still strangely fascinated by them.
“How much money does he have?” Lisbet asked, trying to get her mind around the situation.
“He would never flaunt his wealth. He would do everything he could to hide it.”
“What about your wealth then?” she challenged.
“I don’t see why that matters,” Beck said, letting a certain amount of disgust show on his face. “I already told you that I’ve poured all my money into terraforming Mars.”
Lisbet growled at him. “I’m not trying to gold-dig you. I’m trying to understand what you’re doing. If I get this right, you are trying to blow up your father’s underground mansion along with everything else? You’re the one who’s orchestrating all this and you’re using Vantz as a cover?” she asked, piecing it all together.
“Vantz was my alias. Now he’s an AI I construct,” Beck said, correcting her misunderstanding. “Surely, you’ve heard that rumor.”
Lisbet nodded dumbly.
Beck went on to explain, “I can’t always be available. Vantz is better than a person because he always does exactly what will lead us to our goals without losing his nerve and without being threatened because he’s not physically present. Not being physically present is ideal because no one can kidnap him, assassinate him, or even threaten him. Even now, I don’t need to be anywhere specific to orchestrate the final phases of our plan. Frankly, it’s better if I’m not around.” He took a heavy drag on his cigarette. “I’m not as steady as an AI.”
“If you have something like that rigged up, why do you even need me?” Lisbet questioned slowly.
Beck rolled his eyes in a way that was almost playful. “Vantz definitely has his limits,” he chuckled under his breath. “The rumor that Vantz is an AI has been plaguing me for years. I have quite a lot of capable people who work for me, people like Invocation, but they don’t make good spokespeople. I needed you. You did great.”
“How did I do great?” she appealed, her mouth gaping. “I didn’t do anything!”
He laughed outright, showing a beautiful flash of white teeth. “Didn’t you? Reporters were asking you dumb questions like what Vantz smoked, what he wore to bed, what position he slept in, and how he kissed you. They were so friggin excited to see a beautiful woman that they forgot to ask you questions about the magnetic towers, about the dead ships floating in the sky, about the pleasure palaces that were being stripped daily. The relentless questions about how we were going to produce an atmosphere all but disappeared. You kept them off us for weeks, just by showing up, looking pretty, and hinting that you knew what Vantz was like under the sheets because you were honeymooning with him. It was downright magical.”
“But you own me!” she barked, interrupting his revelry. “If you were going to own the woman you got to play Vantz’s wife, why didn’t you choose someone who could match you better?”
“What are you talking about?” he asked with narrowed eyes.
She glared at him but didn’t answer.
“Oh, I get what this is about. This is because you look down on me for being only twenty years old to your twenty-six, twenty-seven? Grow up, Lisbet. The first thing is that Vantz would not be married to a girl of nineteen. Nor would he put a woman like that in charge of his PR at a social club like The Boiler Room.”
Lisbet exhaled. “I suppose that’s true.”
“Screw me for wanting to have my cake and eat it too,” Beck said grouchily. His Adam’s apple in his slim throat bounced as his vocal cords told the story. “And if you ask me, you’re still a little young for the job. I could have gotten a woman in her thirties. The thing that makes up for it is your face. The idea that I should have bought Cassica or Tiffania is laughable. They look like babies. They are babies. You’re a goddess. Look at the line of your nose, your black hair falling on your white cheek. There’s something classical about you, like a woman in a painting hung in a museum. Even the line of your chin is so unforgiving that it looks like you never took a drop of bullshit in your whole life. You are not an easy woman, and you don’t look like it. Yet, there’s something warm and reassuring about you. Like if you say everything will be alright, then it will be. And I…” he said, about to make a huge admission. “I hoped you would recognize my qualities and that something in you would resound with something in me. I had no idea you would have such a prejudice against me because of my age.”
Lisbet sighed and rubbed her temple. “I’m so relieved you’re satisfied with your purchase. I’m sorry I was too naive to realize it was part of my job to fall in love with you.”
He crouched beside her. “I never wanted to force you into anything with me. I hoped that if we worked together, this phase might not be the worst time of your life even if it ended poorly. I think you did your job at The Boiler Room very well if that means anything to you. That was more important to me than my romantic ideals.”
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
She looked up at him, confused. “What’s going to happen now? I heard you in your meeting. You used parts from this ship to rig the rocket to explode? That’s pretty impressive.”
He snorted. “Don’t trip over yourself to admire me. I’m always impressive. I’m having a transport dropped, though I don’t know what kind of vehicle it will be. We’ll go back to Noachis and I’ll get you back to The Boiler Room. We still need you to help encourage people to evacuate.”
“I can do that,” Lisbet said softly.
“Fantastic. We have a ton of scripts you can choose from if you want to read them. I can forward them to your…” He began pressing buttons on his screens.
Lisbet put her hand on Beck’s forearm that was still covered from elbow to wrist in screens. “Can’t we talk a little more before we get back to work?”
His eyes widened. “You want to talk?”
She nodded. “When I came out of cryostasis the first time, were you the one who kissed me?”
“Of course.”
“And when I had my meetings with Vantz, it was you I was talking to, wasn’t it? You were the one I danced with?” she asked softly.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” she fumed, slapping him on the side of the head. “You told me some things, like that you were likely to be prosecuted for whatever happens when the bombs go off. That you want to protect me from being lumped together with you at that moment, but did I have to be kept that far in the dark?”
He parted his lips. “Lisbet, I didn’t know if I could trust you. If you didn’t like the situation enough, you could have said something cataclysmic to the press in The Boiler Room and there wouldn’t have been anything that I could have done about it after the fact. Leading you that way seemed safest for the project. And I have worked myself to the bone for Mars. Every thought in my head for the last decade has been about how to pull this off. As much as I want you, as much as I look at you and wish you would let me love you, Mars comes first. I have to free the slaves underground. I have to give Mars air so that people can run, and so that a civilization can grow on the surface. If you and I never get together, that’s fine. I would never force you to give me your love, but I have to break Mars open like an egg and let the blood run out of it.” He stood up and looked down at her. “That’s why I’m a monster.”
“Beck… I…” she said powerlessly.
The look of him was all wrong. At that moment, his shoulders were so bony he looked like a boy instead of a man. He was beautiful, so beautiful it was painful for Lisbet to look at him. He was hurt, which made Lisbet want to throw away all her reservations, but seeing him in person, and listening to him talk was giving her reason to pause.
She hesitated. “I don’t think you’re a monster,” she finally said.
He scoffed. “If you don’t already, you will. Give it a minute. We placed bombs everywhere. We’ve warned the people about them. If they don’t stop visiting the empty pleasure palaces, more people will die. If they don’t take our warnings seriously and leave the planet before a chain reaction is set off, then everyone left on the planet may die at once.”
“Wait,” Lisbet said, grasping at his arm. “Are you saying that you don’t know when the bombs will go off?”
“How can we know that?” he asked with a blank expression. “We know the miners are greedy and they’ll set them off accidentally before the planet is evacuated. Another bomb went off this morning, but this time the mining company who did it is staying quiet, so we don’t know how many people died in that explosion. Don’t worry. We won’t have to replace that bomb. We’ve activated the magnetic field, so we won’t lose any of the gasses, but being on the surface now isn’t safe. That’s why we’re getting out of here. On the plus side, the bomb I rigged inside the rocket will need me to detonate it, so at least we can be confident it will not go off while we’re right next to it.”
Lisbet let out a shaky breath. “Yeah, that’s pretty lucky.”
“Hey,” he said, changing the subject. “Is there anything I can do for you? To thank you for being such a trooper? I don’t know how to reward you.”
Lisbet thought of something immediately. She wanted to say something cool like, ‘You already paid for me and that’s more than enough.’ That was what she wanted to say, but she was starving. “You could feed me,” she said in barely a whisper.
He leaned in. “Did you just say you need me to feed you?”
She looked up and nodded.
“We have food. Care to join me?” He disappeared around the corner with swift strides that took him out of sight.
Lisbet chased into the kitchen after him.
“Beck!” she called, bumping into him in front of the packs of dehydrated food. It was like running into a gym wall. She rubbed the sore spot on her head.
“What?”
“I want one that has a lot of cheese,” she said, sounding dumb. “Please let me eat until I’m full. I was on a really strict diet when I was living in the castle. If we might die soon, can I have cheese?”
“Your diet was too strict for you?” he asked, peering over his shoulder at her.
She nodded.
“You never complained,” he observed.
“How could I complain? You gave so much money to my father to have me look picture-perfect when I did interviews at The Boiler Room. I was scared to gain a pound. Besides, we were on a tight budget and food is so expensive on Mars.”
“That it is,” he said, choosing two enchilada packs from the pantry. “Let’s have these.” He added water to them and put them in the microwave.
Then he sat at the poor excuse for a table and nudged a chair for Lisbet to sit in. “It’s not that food is scarce on Mars,” he said, seeming relieved to have something impersonal to talk about. “It’s that the people who raise food on Mars do not want to share it or sell it. They’ve hidden fish tanks, farms, ranches, and more underground. They can’t report to the government how much land they’ve taken, because they’ve populated those places with slaves that have not been purchased like you. It’s filled with people who’ve been stolen from their lives. Whole ships full of people get reported missing. Where’s the crew of twenty? Where are the passengers? They’re all below ground on Mars. This place needs to be blown out like a candle. Looking skinny is a sign of a life without slavery.”
“But you bought me?” she asked, not looking at him but instead looking at the numbers on the microwave counting backwards.
“What I did with you is hardly slavery,” Beck said with a chuckle. “I needed to get someone I could trust to do that job.”
“Charcoal?” Lisbet supplied.
“She is far less loyal than she would lead you to believe. That’s why she’s with Tavis on her way to the Saturn system. She could never have generated the fan base you did. Do you know what you look like to the people of Mars?”
Lisbet shook her head, bewildered by what he was saying.
“They think you’re practically their princess. You’re an heiress who gave away her life of plenty to care for the people of the red planet. Vantz never got the kind of support you get. I haven’t even told you how many more people invested in my company after you started doing interviews. You’ve done a great job.”
“You know, even though you’re praising me on repeat, you sound kind of apathetic, like you don’t really care,” she commented.
He waved his hand through a stream of smoke he exhaled from his mouth. “It’s this stuff. It stops me from getting worked up.”
“And you’re massively addicted to it?” she asked, feeling like she would become reliant on it herself if she had Beck’s to-do list.
He gave her a funny look. “Yes, I’m completely addicted to not letting anything bother me. For your information, I was prescribed this stuff at the tender age of six. I started smoking it instead of swallowing it at age twelve. I prefer the smoke and the reason why will floor you.”
“Oh?”
He grinned like a crooked imp. “It’s because, under normal circumstances, I take less of it if I take it on an ‘as needed’ basis instead of just swallowing the standard dose in pill form.”
“You have had an anxiety disorder since you were a kid?” she asked, trying to be understanding.
“I’m not abnormal for having an anxiety disorder,” he said as the microwave finished. “I would be abnormal if I didn’t have one. However, as you have seen, my current project is basically something that no one should attempt… ever. Terraforming an inhabited planet is a dumb idea. I wouldn’t attempt it, except for the necessary destruction of the pleasure palaces.” He put her meal in front of her on the folding table and set his food down too. He cracked open a hatch in the floor and removed a bottle of water. He poured her a glass.
His concession was quite interesting. So was the way he moved and spoke. The competent way he moved about the ship’s kitchen was fascinating. He didn’t seem like the type who knew how to do anything. He looked too young to do anything but get on a simulator and make things happen in the invisible world of virtual reality. However, he had been surviving just fine on the ship alone while she had been in cryostasis. He had to know his way around like a champ. Lisbet hadn’t been giving him enough credit.
“Let me get this straight,” she said, lifting her glass and pausing her speech to make him clink glasses with her. “You have been getting in a spacesuit and going out on the surface of Mars to rig a bomb and you’re twenty years old?”
He gave her a dirty look as he unwrapped a fork. “Please don’t talk to me if you’re going to talk to me about my age. It disgusts me. I lived fifty lives while your father held an umbrella over your head.”
Lisbet shrugged. He wasn’t wrong about that. She unwrapped her fork and bit into the food. It tasted like melted jalapeno on soggy corn chips, which shouldn’t have been amazing, but the hot spicy cheese was amazing regardless of how it was prepared. She ate and felt the moisture in her nose from the spice in the food, a sure sign that she was having a good time.
“I don’t get why you want to have a romance with me,” she sighed. “I mean, I know you want a romance and it makes sense for you to want something like that. It’s a normal human want, but I don’t get why you want to have a romance with me. Wouldn’t it make more sense to hire me to do the public relations work and hire someone else to be your love interest? I’m sure you could find a younger, yet more experienced, woman to give you the romance you want.”
He glared at her. “You’re talking about a synthetic seduction experience and I know more about how to orchestrate one than any woman you could hire. My parents arranged for my first romance when I was under the age of ten.”
“You’ve been dating for ten years?” Lisbet asked with her mouth open.
He leaned back in his chair and gave her a level look. “The only reason you haven’t fallen in love with me is that I haven’t tried to make you. Not with your bracelet,” he said, flicking her hand, “but with one of a hundred planned techniques. I know them. I didn’t use them. I let you see me for what I was, to the best of my ability, and you refused me. It hurts like hell,” he said in a deadpan voice that usually pointed to deep disinterest.
However, this one time, Lisbet thought that was how he acted when he didn’t want any of his feelings to show.
“You’re acting like none of this has hurt me,” she said flatly.
“Has it?”
She nodded and stirred her food with her fork. “I’ve been very lonely. I really missed meeting Vantz in VR. And I was really sorry that you wouldn’t eat with me. I felt very rejected.”
Beck looked at her, his expression like he was reading a book and he didn’t understand what was written on the page.
Lisbet was confused. She didn’t know if what she said meant something special.
An alarm on one of his armbands went off. Beck turned it off and read what was written on the screen. “I have to get back to work. There are a million people who need to talk to ‘Vantz’ before we do that long drive back to the Noachis. If you don’t want to sleep, you’ll have to amuse yourself, but no matter what you do, you’ve got to be silent—no one can hear your voice— and you cannot disturb me. Feel free to prepare more food if you’re still hungry.”
Lisbet nodded, and he went back into cabin one, leaving half his food on his plate.