YEAR: 25

Braheton City, Central Tharsis, Mars

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Alex stood with Ric next to the riverbank, sizing up the huge silver-green pedestrian bridge with trepidation. Fashioned as a gigantic double helix, it hung low over the Cochran River. "Low," however, was a relative term; it was a good fifteen meter climb from the shore to the lowest beam. Not only that, but the surface of the cylindrical supporting beams was smooth, with no obvious hand or footholds. Alex looked at Ric, who raked his hair back as he gazed up at the bridge.

"Aye, well, your da made it up there, and he was older than us when he did it."

Alex had spent all his free time the past few days going through the data on the holodisk. At some point while wading through the mass of unsorted files he'd come to the realization that Ben had dumped the entire contents of his private Feed onto the disk along with all the work he'd ever done. Alex had almost given up in despair at that point. How could a person find a needle in a haystack when he didn't even know what a needle looked like?

"Use a magnet," Ric suggested when Alex relayed this concern to him.

Alex had bitten back a retort at the time, but the more he thought about it, the more he became obsessed with the idea of applying a sorter to the data that would, indeed, act as a magnet to the needle he sought. His father had meant for him to see the contents of the disk; that much he knew. And if Alex had to hazard a guess, he'd say that Ben had made it deliberately difficult for a stranger to get their hands on it; why else would he deliver data via a physical platform, with two intermediaries? Why complicate the process of retrieval with so many irrelevant files? Whatever he was looking for, it had to be something Ben believed only Alex would recognize.

Alex tried several methods, from looking for odd words in private Feed entries—he discovered his father had kept a terse diary of sorts that dated back to Alex's childhood years—to running saved gaming sessions through analyzers on the chance his father had encrypted messages within them. It wasn't until he took a break that he began to question why Ben would send him a message through media he'd never even bothered to share with him in life.

And then the revelation hit him.

When Alex was seventeen, Ben, in a rare fit of paternalism, had given him the opportunity to "earn" a solo trip to Spain by checking the math on his architecture drawings. Alex would spend hours on them sometimes, only for the client to request a change in design, necessitating a new round of calculations. At one point he'd asked his father why he didn't just wait until he knew he had the final version in hand before giving them to Alex to vet. Ben had just laughed at him from his desk and said, "You never know which design is your last. Better to have each stage perfect. You'll understand someday."

Now he knew. Whatever his father was trying to impart was buried somewhere in those architectural drawings. Once he figured that out, it was a simple matter of checking each one for any irregularities. He found his needle, at last, in one of his father's first projects, one Ben had interned on while he was still getting his architecture degree—the helix bridge.

Standing there now, Alex frowned as he compared the rendering on the disk with the real structure before them. "Now that I'm seeing it in person, the spot my father marked on here doesn't make sense. It looks like it's in mid-air." He pointed up between the support beams, which swooped down to form a series of rectangles and triangles along the bottom of the bridge.

Ric's eyes moved back and forth between the bridge and the holographic architectural model several times. "You're right. It's just an empty space. How can that be?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know? Bloody hell. I thought you knew everything."

"Not helpful." He walked along the shore, Ric straggling behind, until he stood directly underneath the bridge. The soil was bare and rocky here from lack of sunlight, still damp after last night's rain. It wasn't as littered as he'd expect—a few empty liquor bottles, but that was all. The place had an abandoned feel to it; even the river seemed to shy away, flowing by the bottom of the slope with barely a gurgle. In front of him, past the solid bottom of the bridge's entrance, the helix spiraled far away towards the opposite shore and South Braheton.

Ric caught up with him and looked upwards and then back at where the bridge met land. "You may be able to climb from this angle if you start back there. You're sure you've got the right place?"

"This was the only one with an irregularity. The others are perfect. I checked them all to be sure."

"And you really think he hid something up there?"

"That's my best guess. The mark he made on there, it was the mark he used to make to tell me to pay special attention to an area, to be extra careful to make no mistakes. All the other models are final renderings with no markup. Plus, it would make no sense otherwise for him to have put that mark on such an old draft. I wasn't even born yet when they built this bridge. There must be something up there—we probably just can't see it from here."

"This is like the episode of Space Pirates with the interdimensional treasure map where Princess Giella has to swim through the sharwhale tunnel to steal the Tarvanian power crystal."

"Sharwhale?"

"It's a cross between a shark and a whale. Very dangerous." Ric squinted at the curved lattice work of the giant beams converging over their heads. "You can be Princess Giella. I'll be the lookout."

"Gee, thanks."

Ric glanced at him. "Well, I can't be Princess Giella. I'm a man."

"If I get out of this without breaking my neck, I'll pay you back for that comment."

Ric pointed to the shortest support, about two meters tall and set into the soil at the furthest inside point. "I'd start climbing there if I were you."