Scene 15

"So are you going to tell me?"

"I will," Marcus agrees.

"Now?" Aion asks.

"You're embarrassing yourself," Marcus tells him.

He streams to the encrypted channel to show Aion he's halfway through a scan of the whistleblower site they'd found. As he watches, Aion calls out each open port and vulnerability just before it appears on the screen.

"Am I lagging? How are you doing this?"

"Guess, Marcus."

Marcus thinks for a moment. "You already ran this scan."

"So close!"

Processing this, Marcus tries again. "You recognized the interface. You've seen this CMS used somewhere else."

Aion emits a bizarre sort of suppressed giggle.

"I'm right, aren't I?"

"I'll tell you if you tell me how you figured out my trick with Osterman's credential."

Focusing on the task at hand, Marcus says, "Here's our key to this front door."

He configures the browser and loads the URL from the file. A moment later he finds himself in an admin dashboard. Hunting for the database management menu, he finds it and begins an offline backup.

"Where have you seen it before?"

"Everywhere," Aion says.

While the download runs he jumps back to the admin root and scans the menu options. He finds the user submissions and clicks into the list.

"You said it was a trap. "

"Because it is."

Hundreds of submissions. Marcus starts scrolling. The first dozen are noise. Chemtrails, flat earth, flat mars, one poster insists Osterman isn't a reptilian, but he met with the reptilian delegate at Bilderberg.

"Not for us…for the people making these submissions." Marcus realizes out loud.

"The real people, yeah. No money in stealing identities from bots." Aion says. "The reptilian delegate at Bilderberg? Give me a break. You wouldn't even find a reptilian on the wait staff."

Marcus snorts involuntarily. A submission catches his eye and he stops scrolling.

Jesse Garza, Ares Launch Operations, Texas.

I work pad-side, fueling team. Since Window 3 started we've been told to skip the post-fill thermal conditioning recirc. That loop takes forty minutes to stabilize the bulk temp, but they want us turning pads in under six hours now. I raised it with my shift lead and he said the order came from upstairs. Claimed the software can compensate for the stratification. I don’t buy it. If a warm slug hits the turbopumps, very bad things.

"Not exactly sure I understand, but this one seems real," Marcus says.

"Unfortunately for Jesse, whoever runs these sites probably already applied for credit in his name, or used it to social engineer their way into Ares Frontier. My guess is both."

More noise. A few more that feel real, but filled with unnamed sources and vague suspicions. Nothing concrete. Nothing actionable. One in particular grabs his attention:

Patricia Liang, Cohort 2 Spouse.

My husband David has been on Mars for twenty-six months. I talk to him every day. Except it's not him. I've been married to this man for eleven years. I know his voice. I know what makes him laugh. I know what he sounds like when he's lying. I can't prove it, but the person in those videos is not my husband. I am not crazy but nobody will listen to me.

Marcus stares at the screen. "I think we saw something she posted online too."

"Yes," Aion says, "Not that it matters, but she probably should have included the detail about his nonexistent childhood friend in her submission."

Marcus shakes his head. "Sounds like she's in a pretty bad place."

"Exactly. In a bad place, reaching for a lifeline. Finding only a simulacrum designed to exploit her desperation. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: Humanity."

Marcus continues scrolling. An unhinged rant about 5G signals relayed through Martian soil. A surprisingly well-written post about orbital mechanics that somehow concludes the Ares Titan is a hologram.

Then he stops cold.

Anonymous, Ares Frontier Software Engineer

After the Cohort 1 accident, Osterman commissioned a project to train a model called ORACLE on colonist communications. Personality profiles, speech patterns, writing style, family relationships. Everything from Cohort 2's pre-mission training. He said it was to clean up transmission artifacts, but this goes way beyond that. I'm concerned he might plan to use it to hide the truth next time something goes wrong.

No name. No documentation. Just an email address.

Marcus reads it again. He takes a moment to process it. Aion's silence seems ominous.

"I'd file this one alongside the reptilian delegation, except every single conspiracy post seems determined to point fingers away from Osterman."

"Reach out. Offer lunch. Nice steakhouse, on me. Worst case, a Russian agent spikes your tea with Polonium."

"All right. Thanks for that thought. I'll reach out to the wife and the fueling tech too."

"Excellent!" Aion says. "Just give me a minute, I'm almost done."

Marcus hovers over the icon to disconnect the session. "And exactly what are you doing?"

"Leaving a present. I've seen this exact setup forty-six times. Job portals, veteran support sites, but whistleblowers seem to be a favorite. Always the same mediocre AI generated CMS, same deployment. Whoever runs this operation is always spinning up new sites to target some community that's vulnerable and easy to exploit. They never rebuild from scratch. They just copy and paste."

"So you're..."

"Making sure the next copy comes with a surprise inside."

"Osterman's credential could be handy right about now. We go right through the front door and hunt for ORACLE on their network."

Aion is quiet for a moment. "Scanning the inside of a network is a completely different animal than pulling manifests and warehouse feeds. And employee records—And last time it was just Chuck on the other end. We're not getting that lucky twice. Let me poke around the edges. See what I can find without kicking down any doors."

"Fair enough."

"Marcus, please don't use it."

Marcus is quiet for a moment. "I won't," he promises.

"At least tell me how you figured it out?" Aion asks again.

"It was easy," Marcus admits, "once I remembered what you said about the broom closet."