P a r t 6
Disclaimer: This story is a work of fan fiction based on the concepts and settings inspired by SpaceX and its Mars mission endeavors. All characters, events, and scenarios depicted are entirely fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. The use of real-world entities, such as SpaceX, Elon Musk, or Starbase, is purely for creative inspiration and does not reflect any real events, individuals, or operations associated with these entities. No affiliation with or endorsement by SpaceX, Elon Musk, or any related organizations is implied or intended. The term "Citadel" and other original elements are products of the author's imagination and are not associated with any existing organizations or intellectual properties. This work is not for profit and is shared solely for the enjoyment of fans and readers.
The Cold Weight of Truth
The classroom at Starbase hummed with the, barely perceptible, drone of projectors and the shuffling of papers. I sat at the back, my notebook open but unmarked, my mind far from the lecture on martian geology, regolith composition to be exact. Amina’s pencil scratched beside me, but her eyes darted toward the door every few minutes, as if expecting an intruder. Ji-hoon, across the room, had moved away from his quantum circuit doodles for a nervous habit of rhythmically tapping his stylus against his tablet. Dr. Patel, seated near the front, maintained her usual calm, but I noticed by the whiteness of her knuckles that her fingers were gripping her pen just a bit too tightly.
Torres stood at the front of the classroom. Even though he flipped through slides with a practiced ease it seemed as though his mind was elsewhere. Torres’ eyes scanned the room, lingering on a few of us too long to seem natural. The cybersecurity team from Hawthorne hadn’t arrived yet, but the anticipation of their presence loomed like a gathering storm. The email from Elon had put everyone in the room on edge, and the directive to report, “suspicious activity” felt like a spotlight sweeping across the room for traitors.
I couldn’t stop ruminating about Citadel. The word was looping in my mind. These seven letters formed a single breadcrumb in a maze of uncertainty. The thumb-drive containing the footage, safely tucked into the inner pocket of my jacket, felt like it made me a target. I hadn’t told anyone else about what I found, not even Ji-hoon or Dr. Patel. Amina’s advice to keep it quiet echoed in my head, but the weight of secrecy was starting to collapse in on me. I needed answers, and I needed them before my debrief with Torres tomorrow.
As the morning’s lecture came to an end, the team started to file out for lunch. I stayed seated, pretending to organize my notes, until the room nearly cleared. Just then, Amina caught my eye and gave a subtle nod toward the hallway. I followed her out, keeping a good distance to avoid drawing attention. We slipped into a maintenance corridor, a narrow passage lined with conduits and flickering, multicolored lights. The white noise of Starbase’s air conditioning ducts effectively masking our voices.
“You look like you didn’t sleep a wink,” Amina said, her voice low but uncharacteristically sharp.
“How could I?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder. “I kept going over the footage. That word—Citadel—it can’t be random. It’s not part of the sim’s code. I checked every manual, every system log I could access. Nothing.”
Amina furrowed her brow. “You’re absolutely sure it showed on the control panel?”
“Positive. It was there for less than a second, but it was deliberate. Someone wanted it to be seen, but only by someone looking closely.”
She crossed her arms, her mood visibly darkening. “This feels like a taunt. Like whoever did this is testing us. Or maybe warning us?”
“Warning us about what?” I asked, frustration creeping into my voice. “That they can hack Colossus? That they can turn our training into a death trap? What’s the endgame?”
Amina didn’t answer right away. Her eyes flicked to the end of the corridor, where a service drone whirred past, its sensors blinking. “We need to know more about Colossus,” she said finally. “It’s the backbone of the mission—life support, navigation, comms. If someone’s compromised it, they’ve got access to everything. We need to get into the server room.”
I stared at her, my stomach twisting in knots. “Are you kidding? That’s the most restricted zone in this place. Even we don’t have clearance. You’re talking about breaking every security protocol in the book.”
“You think whoever hacked the sim cared about protocols?” she shot back. “We’re not going to get answers sitting in classrooms or waiting for Torres to spoon-feed us the truth. We need to see what’s going on with Colossus ourselves.”
I wanted to argue, to tell her it was stupid and reckless, but the memory of that red haze in the sim, the suffocating panic as our habitat collapsed, silenced me at that moment. She wasn’t wrong. Waiting for answers wasn’t the ideal option. However, the thought of sneaking into the server room, the heart of Starbase’s operations, seemed like an infinitely worse one. If we got caught, it wouldn’t just be the end of our Mars shot. It could mean jail, or perhaps worse.
Before I could respond, a shadow moved at the end of the corridor. We froze. Footsteps echoed, deliberate and unhurried. A familiar figure rounded the corner. Ji-hoon, his hands stuffed in his pockets, his expression unreadable.
“I figured I’d find you two out here conspiring,” he said, his voice lacking its usual bite. “What’s the plan? Because I’m not thrilled about the likely chances of the next sim trying to kill us.”
Amina hesitated, then gave me a subtle but concerned glance.
“We were just talking about what blasting off in that gigantic Starship must feel like.” Amina quickly improvised.
Ji-hoon smiled suspiciously, trying to get a read on Amina. He then turned his glance towards me. We stood there for what felt like an eternity. The three of us were bound by a monumental mission but divided by a single secret. The maintenance corridor felt like a pressure chamber, its walls closing in. I thought of the 98 other crew members who were still in the dark about our plan. Each of them deserved to know, but bringing them in meant risking another leak. Trust was a currency we could not afford to squander.
~
The Starbase command center was quieter at night, but the facility never truly slept. I made my way through the maze of halls avoiding security drones. I nodded to a handful of night-shift techs as I passed. Elon’s office was in the central hub that all the corridors were connected to, like the spokes of a giant wheel. The command center was a glass-walled circular fortress overlooking the rocket assembly yard.
Getting face-time with Musk without an appointment was a long shot, but I’d overheard Torres mention to one of his direct reports this would be another all-nighter. Elon was sleeping on his office couch tonight while he pored over the shit-show of a sim breach remotely with the entire cybersecurity team.
At the entrance, a biometric scanner glowed red. I hesitated, then pressed my thumb to the pad, half-expecting an alarm. Instead, the door hissed open. A voice crackled through an intercom: “Walsh? What the hell are you doing here?”
It was Elon and I felt like I was walking into the principal’s office. I froze in my tracks and swallowed hard as my mouth dried up like I was sucking on a sponge. “I need to talk with you. It’s about what happened in the sim.”
A pause, then a buzz as the inner door unlocked. “Okay, but let’s make it quick.”
Inside, Elon stood behind a cluttered desk, holographic displays casting blue light across his face. He looked more exhausted than normal, his usual intensity was tempered by something heavier, worry would be my best guess. The office was a bit like a combination of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise (Next Generation version) and the disgusting bedroom of a teenage boy. Hi-tech gadgets were strewn about everywhere along with diet pop cans on every horizontal surface—even the dried up remains of a half-eaten Chipotle burrito.
“You have my attention Evan,” he said, crossing his arms loosely. “What’s so urgent it couldn’t wait for your debrief?”
I took a deep breath, the weight of the secure drive burning in my pocket. “I don’t know who I can trust with this so I came straight to you. I found something strange in the sim footage. A word—Citadel. It flashed on the control panel right before the breach. It’s not in any of the mission files, not part of Colossus’s code. I think it’s connected to the hack.”
Elon’s expression remained unchanged, but his eyes sharpened. It was like a predator catching the faintest scent of its prey. “Citadel,” he repeated, his voice low. He gestured to a chair. “Sit here. And please show me what you’ve found.”
I plugged the drive into a secure port on his desk, pulling up the footage. The red haze of the sim filled the screen. I scrubbed through to the moment the code appeared and paused. There it was—CITADEL in bold green letters, flickering for a fraction of a second. Elon leaned forward, his jaw tightly clenched.
“And you’re sure this wasn’t a glitch? Or doctored?” he asked, though his tone suggested he already knew but didn’t want to believe.
“I’m sure,” I said. “This was deliberate. Someone wanted it seen, but only by someone looking closely. I haven’t told anyone else. Well, except for Amina. She knows I found something, but she doesn’t know I’m here now.”
Elon nodded, his gaze transfixed on the frozen frame. For the longest of moments, he was silent, the heaviness of his thoughts filling the room. Then he leaned back and sighed, rubbing his temples. “F*ck. You’ve stepped into something bigger than you can even imagine, Evan. Bigger than Starbase, bigger than the Mars mission.”
My pulse quickened. The intensity of that moment broke the ice between us completely, “What the hell is Citadel?”
Elon stood, pacing to the window overlooking the rocket yard. The scaffolds loomed under floodlights, a testament to his defiance of gravity and immense skepticism. “Citadel isn’t a single person or a corporation,” he said reluctantly. “Citadel’s best described as a shadow. A network of power that’s been pulling strings on Earth for longer than you or I have been alive. Governments, industries, institutions—they’re all merely pieces on their game board. They don’t advertise their existence, but they control more than you can imagine. Just about everything.”
I stared at him. My head was spinning. “A shadow government? You’re saying this is who hacked the sim?”
Elon turned, his eyes burning with a mix of anger and rebellion. “Not just the sim. They’ve been watching SpaceX for years, taking every opportunity to attack my companies and me personally, probing for weaknesses. The Mars mission isn’t just a scientific leap—it’s a serious threat to their control. If we succeed here, and we will, if we build a self-sustaining colony beyond their reach, they're afraid their chokehold on humanity starts to unravel. People will see the truth, there’s a future outside their suppressive system. They can’t allow that. Haven’t you ever asked yourself why anything here on Earth ever really evolves beyond a certain level, why everything is out of balance, and dysfunction reigns supreme? The answer to that question is Citadel.”
Elon’s words hit like a shock wave. I could have imagined corporate espionage, accepted a hostile nation. But this? A planet-wide cabal orchestrating immense global power, tasked with holding human evolution perpetually in an unnatural state of stasis, threatened by a Mars mission? It sounded like a total conspiracy theory, the kind I’d scoff at over beers in Brooklyn. Yet here was Elon Musk, the man who’d turned science fiction into reality, saying it with the weight of truth. This shouldn’t have come as a shock, afterall, most “conspiracies” of the last decade have eventually been proven to have at least a kernel of truth.
“But why the sim?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “Why risk lives in a training exercise?”
“They intended to send us a serious message,” he said. “To show they can reach us anywhere, even inside our most secure systems. Colossus isn’t just a computer—it’s the AI-brains of the entire mission. If they can breach the sim, they can sabotage the real thing. This was a warning shot. I have a feeling we’re only going to get one free pass.”
I sank back in the chair, the footage still looping silently on the screen. “What do we do? If they’re this powerful, how can we fight them?”
Elon’s lips twisted into a grim smile. “We don’t fight a foe like this head-on. We outsmart them. We move faster, build stronger, get to Mars before they can stop us. But we need to make damn sure they never can access Colossus again. That’s where you come in.”
“Me?” I blinked, my stomach twisting. “That’s not exactly in my wheelhouse. I’m just a videographer. I’m not a hacker or a spy.”
“You noticed what no one else did,” he said. “You’ve found the footage, you have the proof. And you’ve got a choice now, Evan. This is your last chance. You can walk away, go back to your life, and pretend this never happened. Or you can help us defeat those bastards. Ever wonder why I’m so determined? Why I work for days without sleep? Now you know. Keep digging, keep recording, but if you decide to stay you will report directly to me. No one else—not Torres, not a single person on your team. Believe me, Citadel has eyes everywhere.”
The gravity of his words smothered me. I thought of Amina and Ji-hoon. I thought of Dr. Patel, her calm starting to show cracks under the pressure. I thought of Sam back in Brooklyn, completely oblivious to the storm I’d walked into. Quitting sounded so easy, so safe. But I’d come here to Starbase for a reason. I came here to capture something larger than myself, to make a meaningful contribution, to be part of history. If Citadel was real, if they were trying to choke the Mars mission before it even began, if they were responsible for so much needless human suffering for so long, then this was the story I’d been chasing my whole life.
“I’m in,” I said, my voice sounded far steadier than I felt. “But what about my team? Amina and Ji-hoon” I paused to carefully weigh consequences, “they’re planning to break into the server room tonight. They think it’s the only way to find answers.”
Elon’s eyes narrowed. “Stop them. If they aren’t already in on this and get caught, it’ll tip Citadel off that we’re onto them. Tell them you’ve got a lead, stall them, but whatever you do keep them out of the server room. I’ll handle the cybersecurity team. We’ll trace the breach from here, quietly.”
I nodded, the secure drive heavy in my pocket. As I stood to leave, Elon called out to me. “Evan. Be careful who you trust. Citadel’s been at this game a long time. They don’t just hack systems—they hack people.”
~
I slipped away from the command center. The night air frigid against my skin. Amina and Ji-hoon were waiting, their plan was just about ready to ignite. I had to stop them, but I couldn’t tell them why—not yet. The truth about Citadel was too big, too fragile, and dangerous. As I rushed toward the dorms, the rocket scaffolds loomed large against the blinking stars in the sky, a reminder of the dream we were fighting for—and the shadows determined to squash it. One thing was for sure, I’d never be able to see our world in the same way again.
To be continued…
