This will be a brief but hopefully interesting update. After a few days of unwinding and trying a new brand of drinking chocolate, I thought I’d better check my spying devices to see whether anything had happened on Mars. But – and here’s the interesting part – I couldn’t find the stream feeds.
At first, I thought there must be some system glitch, or a fault in the device hub. But I looked much more closely, and found that I’d never installed the devices. I mean that literally. I’m not saying it was as though I’d never installed them, or that I’d installed them and then flown back to Mars in my sleep and destroyed them. No, nothing like that. I mean that I checked my stores, and they were all still there.
Then I remembered that I’d been unable to find Psi-spy the second time I searched, and I’d assumed, at the time, that I’d just screwed up my attempt to hack the hyperwave web encryption. Now, though, I started to wonder. This was a mystery, and it needed investigating. I set off immediately to return to Mars once more.
I must say, I was relieved to find the hideout was still there. I’d been starting to wonder whether I’d dreamed the whole thing! I entered the strange place once again, and made my way to the fan room.
I almost lost my cool when I saw what awaited me. Every screen in the room was showing a face – but this time, not my own face. No. It was the face of Maria Thessifus! And every one of them wore a silent smirk.
It took me only minutes to piece it all together, during which I took a much more detailed look at the device I’d placed on my head before. I can now say with 94% certainty that it was a memory injector. It had faked every one of my odd experiences – the infinite recursion of mind-piggybacking myself; the investigation into Psi-spy; being trapped for so long under the headset; and of course, my installing the spying devices as well… all of that was induced in my own mind by this machine, to distract me. Maria had left this strange installation on Mars to divert me from the L3 point, should I ever go looking there during Saturn’s opposition.
Honestly, I really admire her attention to detail. This was beyond evil! A pity for her that it didn’t work because of the dead pod that never received the mind backup. We all have bad luck now and then, despite our genius.
This time, I did destroy the entire place from altitude – being careful to avoid the gaze of NASA by synchronising my actions to their absence from the sky. They might notice a few rocks out of place, but they’ll probably just think they missed a landslide. Now I’m rid of Maria T. for good, I’m looking forward to a quiet Summer before I set up precautionary defences in preparation for the likely forthcoming winter riots. Good luck with that, by the way – I hope you all have water stockpiled.
The up side of this whole episode is that I do not, after all, have to revise my world view to encompass psionics. I’m not sure whether I’m relieved about that or not: even I, deep down, would kind of like magic to be real.
