The Mars Shock by Felix R. Savage

stopped. “I don’t think we should do this.”
    The backlight of Murray’s HUD shone on his face, giving it a ghastly bluish appearance, overlaid with backwards strings of figures and letters. He nodded slowly. “I was thinking the same thing.” He opened his glove and let the refill pack drop to the ground.
    “The seals are supposed to be airtight—”
    “But it’s too much of a risk.”
    Kristiansen nodded. Airtight didn’t necessarily mean proof against nanites. They might end up drinking Martian madness, along with their nutrient-fortified soy-based sludge.
    “I don’t want to end up murdering you,” Murray joked, “even though the idea is appealing.”
    “Hey, I’m not that irritating. I work for an NGO; I have to pose as a self-righteous asshole from time to time.”
    “Ha, ha, and I thought that was because you’re German.”
    “Swiss-German-Danish,” Kristiansen corrected him.
    “But you are a pureblood, aren’t you?”
    Kristiansen hesitated. The fact was, he was a pureblood, according to the latest definition, which took into account cultural factors as well as genetic ones. He would have qualified under previous, strictly DNA-based definitions, too. He relied on his ‘Swiss-German-Danish’ cover story to deflect suspicion, but actually, his coloring testified faithfully to his parents’ genetic heritage: both of them were Teutonic to the last allele.
    But what did it matter, now that the PLAN could no longer target purebloods for their genetic heritage? Anyway, Murray would know this about him already.
    “That’s right. I’m a German pureblood. Double-plus ungood.” He was referring to the PLAN’s well-documented obsession with German romantic philosophy.
    “Yeah, you Germans can’t catch a break, can you? No sooner do you get through apologizing for World War Two, then you have to start apologizing for Heidegger.” Murray uttered the taboo name carelessly, in recognition of the PLAN’s broken power. “Then again, Heidegger basically was a Nazi. I’ve always thought it’s weird that the PLAN took the opposite message from his stuff. Instead of elevating ethnic purity to a goal, the PLAN tried to abolish it altogether.”
    “You could take any message you like from Heidegger. His stuff is completely opaque.”
    “You’ve read it?”
    Caught out, Kristiansen admitted, “Yeah. You can find copies of Sein und Zeit on the internet.”
    “Ha! They made us read it in training. Oh yeah. It was supposed to help us understand the enemy. I snoozed off.”
    Kristiansen said, “I do think you can trace the PLAN’s ideology to Heidegger, though. The idea of Being. To achieve pure Being, you have to strip away all temporal phenomena. So: no races, no cultures, no religions. In the end, no people. Totalitarian regimes always end up trying to abolish the people … the inconvenient, self-willed, obstinate people. The PLAN just took that to a logical extreme.” He grew animated as he spoke, enjoying the unusual experience of unmasking his thoughts on the fundamental conflict of their age. “We have to decide: are we going to allow self-willed polities to exist? I see this in the asteroid belt all the time—this stubborn striving after freedom, at any cost. I think it’s fundamental to the human condition. If we crack down too hard on that, we’re in danger of becoming the PLAN lite.”
    “I think,” Murray said, “the human condition is one of fundamental laziness, somewhat tempered by the urge to do reckless things with new technology. You underestimate the need for constant vigilance in that respect.”
    Kristiansen sensed the shadow of a hint there. Was that what the ISA sought on Mars? New technology—be it Chinese, or PLAN-developed—that might destabilize the solar system’s economy?
    Kristiansen believed the ISA’s primary loyalty was to the supermajor corporations that funded the UN. They would be anxious to preserve the status quo ante at all costs.
    “This came up