‘It’s not often we come down here, Professor, so you’ll have to excuse the disorder.’
The archivist reached into his overcoat and pulled out a key. Fumbling with a heavy padlock for a few moments, he tugged open the door and groped around for the switch. Overheads flickered into life, revealing a large rectangular room. The concrete walls were streaked with algae; in the centre was a shallow, sloping pit.
‘The old swimming pool’, said the archivist. ‘Most of this is overflow, we’re in the process of organising it properly...’
He scurried down the steps with an agility that took the Professor by surprise. She followed cautiously, casting her eyes over broken mosaic floors and racks of vintage hardware. The archivist glanced down at a scrawl on his palm.
‘It’s at the end of Aisle 7, if you wouldn’t mind waiting a moment.’
He strode off into the gloom, returning a short while later with a slim folder, whose contents he laid carefully on a table. The Professor examined each print successively, turning them over in her hands and studying the surfaces with a pocket magnifying glass.
‘And you don’t know when they were captured exactly?’, she asked, without looking up.
‘We can only speculate. But the consensus is late 22nd century.’
‘And there’s no attribution, no indication of purpose?’
‘Nothing we can detect using present technology.’ The archivist paused for a moment. ‘Possibly someone sensed what was coming and wanted to preserve some part of the virtual. We know there were these all-encompassing networks, satellite images assembled into a sort of navigable alternate reality – by some accounts almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Very little evidence of them survived the Blackout, of course, just the odd artefact like this.’
The Professor’s brow twitched. ‘I can understand the jump to conclusions - they’re very alluring, quite unlike anything I’ve seen. And yet...’ Her finger traced some outlines. ‘These settlements...you must have considered how organic they look – unplanned and informal?’
The archivist forced a smile. ‘You know I’ve never understood the assumption that Martian settlements would look somehow rationally planned. People here believe colonisation was this rigidly controlled enterprise that would inevitably result in grids of domes, or a concentrically zoned hub. But they forget this was a frontier. It’s entirely possible that development proceeded after a time in a quite haphazard way.’
As he was speaking, the Professor returned the prints to their folder and pulled off her gloves. ‘Thank you for showing me these, Mr Volkov. They make for an intriguing sequence.’
She stood up.
‘A few years ago, I headed up the cataloguing operation for a large discovery made in the Unincorporated Territories - a bunker. It was mostly perfunctory, inventories and the like. But there was something quite unexpected: prints, similar in size to these – and remarkably well preserved. They showed great industrial cities from above - at least a few million people each. Far too big for us to have no record. But there was none. We never identified them.’
She made a move for the stairs, before turning around.
‘Forgive me, but it strikes me that if you genuinely believed they were Mars, you’d make them public.’
The archivist chuckled.
‘You know as well as I do, Professor, that if rumour of an undarkened civilisation got out, there’d be hysteria and revolt. Think of it, with us all living underground...and on a near neighbour. We’d have to explain the silence.’
And with that, he picked up the folder and withdrew once more into the gloom of Aisle 7, humming something softly under his breath.
All images generated by the ‘This City Does Not Exist’ Generative Adversarial Network by Ron Hagensieker and Tomas Langer.