In which there’s a fourth chapter. (Go to chapter 3.)

19.

“My dome? What?” I replied, grabbing my helmet so I could actually talk to the guy. “What do you mean?”

“There’s something wrong with the cameras, Fred,” someone said calmly.

“It’s a fucking Martian! Ye gods, even worse: some bastard child of human DNA and Mars!” someone else shouted.

“Can you see the video feed?” asked the man from Higher, who was apparently called Fred.

“Nope, I’m in the restaurant,” I said. I can just walk over there–”

“She can fix the cameras,” voice #2 said.

“No! Don’t go into the dome until we establish communication with it!” said voice #3.

“Restaurant?” said yet another voice.

“Listen, listen!” Fred said, and I could literally hear him flapping his arm for silence. “It looks like there’s a life form in the dome. We want audio. Can you manage that?”

“A life form,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“In the dome.”

“Yeah.”

“The dome is filled with dead people, Fred,” I said. “All my friends’ bodies are in there, Fred.”

“Get somewhere you can see the video feed and call back, okay, kid?”

“Okay,” I said.

“And then we’re totally gonna need audio,” Fred said.

“Whatever,” I said.

20.

I shoved the rest of my ration into my face and suited up and hopped over to the data center. I cycled in, took off my helmet and gloves, fell back into in the chair. The suit’s ass didn’t quite fit, so I was stuck in the chair at an angle.

A few moments later, I was looking at the video feed from the dome.

“There’s something wrong with the cameras.” I said.

“They pass hash checks,” Fred answered. “Every single one.”

“Okay. So what the hell is that, then?” I asked.

“Exactly,” Fred said.

“We need audio,” I said.

“You’re a genius, Yrio. Audio! Totally wish we’d thought of that.”

“Fred,” I said, “fuck off. There’s a fucking space monster less than seventy meters from where I’m sitting, okay?” I said.

“Okay. Sorry, kid,” Fred said. “Sorry.”

“Okay,” I said.

I stared at the screen for awhile longer. “I’m going to go activate the dome comm, then,” I said.

I struggled upright out of my chair.

21.

When I arrived at the dome, I should have gone around to the side where the services panel was and activated the comm suite. It would have given us tons of useful information.

Instead, I stood in front of the airlock for a really long time. I turned down my suit’s comm so I could ignore Fred and his buddies and I just stood there.

On the other side of the door, if the video could be trusted, was a pile of what had to be human bodies and pink fuzzy mold. It was in the shape of a giant baby. It was wiggling and smiling and playing with its toes.

I think I’d decided it was a hoax; that some hacker on the marswork was being a jerk.

Except now that I was standing here with my gloved hand on the lock, I could feel the frame shiver whenever the baby’s foot hit it.

My hands started working the airlock. Apparently they’d decided to do that on their own when they realized my legs weren’t going to walk us over to the services panel. I could hear the homey, close sounds of my suit. The lock cycled open. I stepped inside. The outer door closed. The lock pressurized.

22.

I turned on my external speaker as the door opened.

The giant alien conglomeration was on its – his, I saw – hands and knees, facing the airlock. He was smiling and gurgling, just like the fucking Gerber baby.

“Hey, baby,” I said, still standing in the lock. “What’s up?” Yes, those really were were my first words to an unknown life form. Sue me.

“Jenny!” the baby said. “Geneva!” Its voice was all over in whoosh and hiss, but the diction was smushy and soft-paletted like a real baby’s would have been. The baby started crawling closer. He was enormous and very, very pink. And fuzzy.

“What’s up, giant alien baby?” I asked again.

“Not much,” he replied, giggling, and then falling over when his left elbow didn’t work quite right. “Just hanging out. You know, maturing. It takes time.”

“If you have a brain, you’re forming neural pathways,” I said, stupidly.

“Yeah,” he replied, gurgling happily, moving his arm. “Someone knew that.”

“Someone?” I asked.

“One of us,” he said, and fell over again in the act of trying to point to himself. “Crawling’s so hard!” he laughed. It was a joyous sound.

I was smiling too. He was as cute as any baby who ever learned to crawl. He sure was enormous, though. And all my friends’ bodies were gone.

“Um, baby,” I said. “The other colonists want to talk to you. Is it cool if they do that?”

Giant baby giggled and rolled onto his back, elbowing a picnic table out of the way. He grabbed his toes and cooed.

“Baby!” I shouted.

“Toes!” he said.

“I’m going to turn on the dome comm so people can talk to you.”

“I need to practice talking!” he said, craning his fat baby neck to see me.

“Okay, I gotta go!” I called.

“Bye, Jenny!” he said. “Bye bye!”

I palmed the lock and the door closed and I turned off my suit’s external speaker as the air was vented.

I liked that baby.

23.

It was hilarious cacophony.

I was at home, comfy in my cotton jammies, curled up in front of my workstation with a couple of pouches of cheesecake, some reconstituted fruit juice, and bag of booze from the restaurant. My entire screen was filled with the Marswide ‘Giant Alien Baby’ video conference, and everybody – I mean everybody – was talking at once.

“We have to kill that thing! What if it grows to a proportional adult size?”

“What does it eat?”

“What the hell does it want!”

“We have to send Yrio in there to kill it while it’s weak–”

“Gentlemen! It’s a baby! What’s wrong with you?”

“We are not sending personnel in there!”

“He’s really cute! Look at his widdle toesies!”

“This is clearly a security issue, and we’d like all civilians off this board–”

“Fuck you, man! You’re don’t have any authority!”

“I know about aliens, man, see, I’ve been reading about them all my life. I need transportation to 1541 to, like, make contact.”

“We’ve already made contact, you dipshit.”

“It’s a child, not a choice!”

After about ten minutes of this, I swallowed my last bite of cheesecake, opened my mic, and hollered, “Since it’s my baby, I want to talk now for a minute! Okay?”

The chat went suddenly silent.

“Thank you. Now. Who’s talking to the baby right now?”

“A child development psychologist named Darin Tam over at 1539,” Fred said. “Here are his preliminary findings.” An assessment was squirted to the whiteboard, and everyone grabbed a copy.

“If the baby were human, it would be about five months old,” I read, “with a genius IQ.”

“Apparently, he knows what… what his constituent parts know.”

“He knows what all the people knew?” I asked.

“Apparently.”

“Excellent!” I replied. “The baby can dig my well!”

There was an awkward silence.

“Yrio,” Fred said. “You’re a strange woman.”

“A strange woman without a well,” I replied. “Now, can we get one representative from each landing, a couple of scientists, some kind of military person, and that Darin guy, and nobody else?”

The meeting lasted most of the night. I left it running, but crawled into my sleeping shelf and passed out when it got bogged down with a side discussion about parliamentary procedure several hours past my bedtime.

The next morning I heard that earth came online after I went to sleep, and that things got really laggy and tedious after that, and that the child development guy’s access-to-the-baby-dome bandwidth got hammered so hard he couldn’t get any visual.

In short, everyone was tired and miserable and nothing got done. It’s not like that wasn’t one of my main reasons for emigrating to Mars in the first place: I absolutely hated meetings. At least now I was the executive instead of the secretary. They could talk all they wanted, but no one could do anything I didn’t agree to.

24.

Two days later I was pulling up in front of the dome’s airlock on my trusty forklift. Two factions were hollering at me over my suit’s comm; one side was cheering me on and the other was ordering me to cease and desist.

Cease and desist, I thought. Really? You and whose army?

I bounded over to the airlock while I spoke. “Listen, guys! I just think you’re doing it wrong. You can’t observe something alien and guess its motives. That’s obviously stupid. So I’m just going to ask it.”

My comm went nuts again as I punched the panel to start the lock, but among the general throng I heard Fred say, “Go with God, kid.”

When the inner door opened, the baby was looking toward it. “Jenny!” it squealed. “You came back!”

“Hey, baby!” I said. “I wanted to ask you some things.”

“I’ve been talking to doctors since you turned the dome on,” he said. “Real doctors. On the video!”

“Yup, they really dig you,” I said, and walked over to the picnic table nearest the lock. I righted it and sat down on top of it.

“What did you want to ask, Jenny?”

“A bunch of things,” I said. “Like, what do you eat? Do you want to go outside? Will you grow bigger? Stuff like that.”

“Oh, okay,” the baby replied, and rolled to a sitting position, fat hands on his chubby thighs. “But I thought you’d want to know how to use the mass spectrometer.”

(Go to chapter 5.)