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the intervening time went, as Alice continued mid–sentence. She punched floor–one and then sniffed her thermos.
    “–so since the federal initiatives pretty much mapped out every possible risk assessment, and since the private industry sort of took over low orbit stuff anyway, a few companies were able to generate pretty reliable profit estimates for funding mining operations around Olympus Mons. They figured they’d just recruit a few frontier types to live on Mars for three year rotations and–”
    “Wait,” I said.
    We stepped off the elevator – Alice stopped and arched an eyebrow.
    “This is what I’m talking about,” I waved around the hallway. “How did we get here?”
    She frowned. “Well, we just–”
    “We were at your desk talking about the coffee–”
    She thought about it and looked back the way we had come. “And then we were walking to the elevator.”
    She said, “I can’t remember.”
    She became increasingly unsettled and moved through the series of events in her head. Finally, she looked at me with unyielding confusion and fear. “What’s going on Lance?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think you were taking me somewhere.”
    She started moving again, watching her feet as she walked. “I was taking you to the filing department, but…”
    We turned down a few more hallways.
    “Forget it for now,” I said. “You were saying.”
    After a few more steps, she shook her head and continued. “It’s a long story. A lot of politics and rabble rousing, that sort of thing. NASA made a few more trips to Mars, but for the most part, there wasn’t anything left to do there. Terraforming, atmosphere building, mining, geology and all that, but this wasn’t anything anybody else couldn’t do. That’s what the politicians were at least beginning to understand – you couldn’t put the responsibility of space exploration on market forces. You can’t make money unless you can assess all the risks, and space exploration is all risk. NASA had their eyes on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, not to mention some of those giant asteroids zipping around out there. After the International Space Initiativefinished mapping out the various ore deposits around Mars, the private sector had a pretty good idea what they were looking for anyway.”
    I studied my new surroundings, waiting for the next weird signal that reality was going to slip away again.
    “That’s how it has always worked,” she continued. “Government funded operations have always manifested the frontier of the unknown, and it’s only after that happens, private businesses can follow. Columbus and Magellan; Lewis and Clark; the moon race; the earliest Mars probes – this is how things have always been.”
    We stopped by her office and she pulled out a document trolley stacked with different sized folders. I noticed my name on the office two down from hers.
    “But they didn’t count on finding anything like that. By the time they knew what they had their hands on, the government was all over it. Lawsuits, coups, power grabs, arrests, shit fits – it turned into media frenzy, and that’s when we came into the picture. But one thing is certain, when the diggers found the artifact in a chromite mine three miles below the Martian surface, it sparked a whole new kind of space race. It was almost like another cold war – Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Sweden, Norway, China, Germany, Japan and America suddenly dumped trillions of dollars into their space–programs, paranoid about who was going to make first–contact. Nobody knew what was going on, except you.”
    I stopped to look at her.
    “And this is strange, because you’re telling me that you can’t remember anything before the accident. It’s strange because out of everyone that has been involved until this point, you were our best bet at cracking this thing. And now you’re all messed up.”
    I thought about that. I felt the weight of everything hinging on my