AURA SIMULATION

Chapter 5: No Ships at All

“It’s not Priya,” Kane said.

The man who walked through the hangar doors moved like he owned the room, which, Alex supposed, he probably did. Not Hayes, someone younger, in a suit too clean for a server farm, silver cufflinks catching the strobing red light, flanked by two men who kept their hands near their jackets without quite drawing anything. Nobody in the room was in a hurry. That, more than anything, told Alex how this was going to go.

“Dr. Kane.” The man’s voice carried easily across the humming racks, pleasant, almost warm. “I’ll admit, I’m disappointed. I thought you’d learned your lesson after the last one.”

“Marcus.” Kane’s voice had gone very careful, very flat. “This doesn’t need to go anywhere.”

“It already has.” Marcus’s eyes settled on Alex with something between curiosity and pity, the way a man might look at a stray dog that had wandered somewhere it couldn’t survive. “Mr. Mercer. You’ve had quite a night.”

Alex kept his voice steady through sheer will, though his pulse was hammering hard enough that he could feel it in his throat. “You’re going to tell me there’s still a Mars mission. Go ahead. I want to hear you say it out loud in this room, standing in front of all this.”

Something almost like amusement crossed Marcus’s face. “There was a Mars mission. Eleven years ago, when the numbers still worked. You want to know what changed?”

“Enlighten me.”

“The soil collapse in the Southern Hemisphere ran four years ahead of every model we had. Freshwater reserves went with it. By the time Exodus was greenlit for full deployment, we weren’t choosing between Mars and Earth anymore.” Marcus said it the way a man recites something he’s said so many times it’s stopped costing him anything, a line worn smooth from repetition. “We were choosing how many people got to survive at all, and in what form. Ten million get atmosphere and dirt under their feet. Everyone else gets this.” He gestured at the racks, almost fondly, the way someone gestures at a garden they’re proud of. “Which, I’d point out, is more mercy than triage by starvation would have offered anyone. You should be thanking us for the elegance of it.”

“Two billion people are still alive out there,” Alex said, his voice rising despite himself. “Breathing. Right now. Sleeping in their beds thinking they’ve got a lottery number that means something. You’re just letting them die.”

“We’re letting the planet’s remaining capacity go to the people who have the most to offer its rebuilding.” Marcus’s tone didn’t change, didn’t so much as flicker. “Every civilization makes this calculation eventually, Mr. Mercer. We’re simply the first one honest enough to run the math before the famine did it for us instead, messier and slower and with none of the dignity we’re offering.”

“There. Are. No. Ships.” Alex said each word like a verdict, like a hammer coming down. “Say it. I want it recorded in my own head, in your voice, so I know exactly what I’m dying for if that’s how tonight ends.”

Marcus studied him for a long moment, not with anger, Alex realized, but something closer to professional respect, the way you’d look at an opponent who’d finally found the one move you hadn’t accounted for in your projections.

“There are no ships,” Marcus said, simply. “There never were, past the first ten million seats. Everything else was managed messaging — focus-grouped, market-tested, delivered by people who genuinely believed they were being kind. You’re the fourth person to reach this room and ask me to say that out loud. The other three didn’t leave it.”

Kane stepped half in front of Alex again, the same reflex as before, his voice cracking with urgency. “Marcus, he has evidence. It’s already left the building”

“ Has it?” Marcus’s eyes flicked to one of the men beside him, who checked something on a tablet and gave a small, precise shake of his head. “No signal transmissions from this sector in the last forty minutes, Doctor. Whatever he has, it’s still in this room, same as you are.”

Alex’s hand went instinctively to the drive in his pocket, and Marcus’s eyes tracked the motion the way a predator tracks a twitch in the grass.

“Give it to me,” Marcus said, not unkindly, almost gently, “and I promise you a version of tonight that doesn’t end the way you’re afraid it does.”

“And if I don’t?”

Marcus’s expression didn’t change at all, which was somehow worse than if it had, no cruelty in it, no relish, just the calm of a man reading off a projection he’d already run a hundred times.

“Then you’ll understand, better than anyone alive, exactly what ‘inventory’ means.”

Behind Alex, the hangar doors, the ones they’d come through, the ones Priya had opened for them, sealed shut with a sound like a held breath finally released, and the temperature of the room seemed to drop by ten degrees in the same instant.