How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  The days went like that—engineering work during the day, plus meals, and then a mostly relaxing sleep at night. That voice did very occasionally pop up—once in the third evening while he was eating and twice since then in the middle of the night, waking him up in the middle of odd dreams of fluorescent light and hazy forms. Again, he didn’t recognize the voice, and again all it said was Stefan. Now these were statements rather than questions. Stefan looked this up on his tablet, and found that it didn’t count as hearing voices, in a psychiatric sense, if what you heard was someone calling your name. Egocentrism being a normal human state, apparently.

  He had checked the lander many times, and had yet to find a camera or microphone. Let alone a speaker. Still—he didn’t put it past Destination Mars! to find a way to needle him from across the solar system.

  Stefan considered trying to read Kierkegaard’s Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, but then he didn’t try to read it.

  All the while, the lander was warm, the food was plentiful, and the air was perfectly good and odorless. Odorless, that was, aside from Stefan’s increasingly unbathed status—he didn’t know what he was going to do about showering or cleaning his clothes, as a matter of fact. Perhaps he would get used to his own sharpening smell, as his distant ancestors must have done with theirs. It would be different, he felt, when it was your own smell and not someone else’s. He didn’t know what the plan would be when he ran out of food, either, but that was a while off. There were some other minor problems—he wasn’t producing all that much potable water, for one thing, and so was very slowly working his way through what he’d borrowed from the others. Also, the solar panels required a good deal of regular dusting. And the radiation shielding was, he realized, probably thinner here than it was at Home Sweet. Meanwhile, when he had his suit on, he occasionally got a voice through the radio, wondering where he was and if he was going to come back—“Come on, you crackers boy, you big sook,” Trixie said once. “Enough of the sulk.”—but he continued to ignore those, as well as all of the other concerns.

  One night the voice added Hello to Stefan.

  About a week in, he woke up hazy from a more elaborate dream—the forms were more definite, though definite in a way he couldn’t have described when he woke up—to the sound of a relatively elaborate utterance. From right next to him, from inside him. Could it really be inside him? Could Destination Mars! have put a chip inside him or . . . no, they couldn’t have, could they?

  Stefan, the voice said again. Stefan. And then, with some apparent effort: Repattern the chaos.

  The next morning he named the goldfish. Guld and Fisk. Gold and Fish.

  That wasn’t exactly what we meant, Stefan, the voice said next time.

  Was Stefan bored? Only some of the time. Generally there was work to be done to get the various life-sustaining machines and devices in finer fettle. And in any case there was nothing the matter with boredom.

  Was Stefan concerned about the voice? Only some of the time. One night it said They make a mess, Stefan. “Yes, they certainly do,” he said in return, somehow knowing that the voice meant the people back at Home Sweet. By this point, he was starting to doubt that this was Destination Mars! talking, which was not reassuring, given that it had clearly progressed beyond the simple use of his name that his tablet had assured him was within normal parameters—but he also knew that one of the traditions of hermits was to be a bit mad.

  The wise hermit slowly grew eccentric, he narrated about himself.

  Was Stefan happy? Some of the time, definitely.

  Repattern the chaos, he was again told one night. We think you’re the one who can do it.

  Did Stefan ever wonder if this living situation was what he actually wanted, or if this reclusion, like his anarchist period, was something of a red herring? Perhaps yes, perhaps no.

  And then, one night, while he was in the middle of eating some freeze-dried and reheated fish cakes, the voice that was next to him or in his head or somewhere said something at considerable length and which left him pondering at even more considerable length.

  Now, why is it that you have to make do in this little lander while those other twits get the whole habitation center to their messy selves?

  We think you would use the word twits.

  He wasn’t entirely surprised that they came and found him, knocking on the lander door late one morning the following week, but Stefan was so keyed up from the voices that he did jump a bit.

  The window wasn’t right on the door. Nonetheless, he peered through it and could see the rover parked outside, and the edge of at least one person in a puffy spacesuit.

  He sighed and put on his helmet. “You found me,” he said into the radio. His voice cracked a little from lack of use.

  Josh said, “We actually pretty much knew where you were right away. Like, within a day.”

  “You did?”

  “Bootprints.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’d like to come in,” Nicole said. Everything she said sounded to him like a command. Stefan supposed it was her Air Force background. Or being a medical doctor; doctors did get bossy sometimes. Or maybe it was only the fact that he was slightly frightened of her.

  Stefan glanced at Guld and Fisk as though for support. “It’s a bit tight in here,” he said into his radio.

  “Or you could come out,” Nicole said. Also a command.

  “Is it just the two of you?” Stefan said.

  “Just the two of us,” Josh said. “Jenny’s back at Home Sweet, of course, and Trixie’s there because someone doctor-y ought to be there with Jenny just in case, which I should be, too, honestly, but here I am.”

  “And Roger?”

  “He was reluctant to come.”

  Stefan could understand that. It was Roger’s fingers he had once broken, for, he had to admit, no good reason.

  He sighed again. If he didn’t give in, perhaps Nicole would rip the door right off the lander. “Let’s try indoors.”

  They came in one at a time, using the stretchy one-person airlock Stefan had rigged up. Josh was duly impressed as he squinched his way through. “Pretty slick,” he said, showing a big, open-mouthed grin when he took his helmet off. Then, once he was all the way in, Nicole took her turn with the airlock—if she was impressed, she didn’t say so—and then the lander was fairly full.

  “I probably should have come outside,” Stefan said.

  “Well, here we are,” Josh said. The three of them were sitting cross-legged in the space, like kindergarten children or American Indians from the old movies. The lander was, in fact, shaped something like a tepee.

  “We’re like Indians,” Stefan said, chuckling. Nicole gave him a sharp, surveying look and he stopped chuckling. She had shaved her head all the way to the scalp since he’d last seen her. It did not make her more approachable. “Are . . . are you hungry?” he asked.

  “We had some tube food en route,” Nicole said. She had a look on her face that suggested she was acutely aware of Stefan’s long-unwashed smell.

  Josh reached out and almost touched Stefan on the knee and then instead withdrew his hand. “How are you, Stefan?” he said.

  “Good, good, good,” Stefan said, eyebrows high.

  “Are you?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Hmm,” Josh hmmed. “Because it’s sort of a big deal, just leaving all of a sudden to live in a U-Haul in the middle of nowhere on Mars.”

  Stefan looked around again, frowning. He didn’t know what a U-Haul was, but it sounded like some perhaps boxy thing that you used for hauling and, to his mind, the space was more like a metal tepee than that.

  “We’re worried about you,” Josh said. His face was soft, and Nicole’s was still not. “It was pretty abrupt. And dramatic.”

  Stefan thought for a minute. At this point there was no harm, so far as he cou
ld imagine, in just saying it. “It’s madness at Home Sweet. Loud and messy. And it’s getting worse.”

  Josh tilted his head and made an expression that said, Well, fair point.

  “I don’t think anyone really wants me there, in any case,” Stefan said. “I am not . . . well-liked.”

  In response to that, Josh made an implausible You must be joking face. “Now, come on,” he said. “That’s not true.”

  “Listen,” Nicole said, leaning forward in the way she did everything: sharply. The lander’s interior light gleamed off her scalp. “This is besides the point. Stefan, as far as I’m concerned, you can live wherever you want to, so long as you don’t deprive the rest of us of anything we need.” She looked pointedly around at some of the equipment that Stefan had installed in the lander and that was humming quietly and productively behind him.

  “These are backups,” Stefan said. “Backups of backups.” Even the rover chamberpot was a backup.

  “And,” she continued past him, “among other things, your move has deprived us of an engineer.”

  Well, and that was a fair point.

  “Here’s the thing,” Josh said. “Jenny’s really about to go into labor any day now.”

  “Oh.” Stefan felt a surge of anxiety, as though Josh had just said The giant spiders are crawling in this direction.

  “And the electricity back at Home Sweet,” Josh continued, “just started acting up again.”

  “We need you to come back and look at it,” Nicole said.

  Stefan blinked.

  Then, right at his ear, the voice, rather loud: Repattern the chaos.

  It was loud enough that, although he’d gotten used to this sort of thing, Stefan spun around to look. Nobody there, of course. And when he turned back, the faces facing him were showing concern. Concern plus varying levels of sympathy.

  “So I gather you didn’t hear that,” Stefan said.

  Josh shook his head slowly.

  So it was only Stefan on the receiving end. And receiving what, exactly? Repattern the chaos, indeed.

  Go with them, the voice said quietly.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll come back.”

  Welcome to Your Machines

  (Section 17 of the unofficial Destination Mars! handbook, as written by the founder of Destination Mars!)

  You will, obviously, be surrounded by machines. We mean this literally. The rocket is an enclosing tube composed entirely of machinery; the surface rover is a mechanical, wheeled box; in the habitation center there will be machines on all sides of you; even your spacesuits are essentially machine clothes.

  This will take some getting used to, but you won’t have much choice: you will have to get used to it. If you take away the machines, the machines that warm things up and produce air pressure and give you oxygen to breathe, Mars will kill you more or less right away. Like, in one or two minutes, is what we’re told by our people who calculate that kind of thing as part of their jobs. One of our people says fifteen seconds, but he is known for having something of a dramatic flair. And we were given an estimate of an hour from a person who sometimes wears a “Be Happy” T-shirt to work. To work. This is why we take averages, and, all drama and unwarranted optimism aside, your average is: dead very quickly.

  So accustom yourselves to technology. And probably you already are at least a little accustomed to it. You’ve already got technology coming out of your ears (sometimes literally). It’s in your homes, in your pockets; it takes you from place to place. (The internal combustion engine may not be the latest thing, but it’s still a machine.) Our relationship with technology is already called a “dependent” one by some individuals who hate progress instinctively and write a lot of op-eds online.

  Still—your Mars setup does take things to another level. If you were outside wearing a helmet on Earth for some reason, and someone took it off your head, you wouldn’t get carbon dioxide poisoning within a few breaths and pass out, right before your organs ruptured and then froze solid. So this is another level of dependency for sure.

  What we recommend, as far as getting used to all this, is to expand your idea of what’s natural. Because that’s the problem. The truth is that we’ve never, ever been independent, in terms of our survival. Plants, animals, the sun—we’re leaning on a lot to get through the day. But we call those things natural and tell ourselves, Hey, I’m self-reliant, just living off the fat of the land. It’s a narrative that doesn’t stand up to close investigation, but it sustains us, and we would be foolish to abandon it altogether.

  Consider your oxygenator, then, the fat of the land. Consider your nuclear reactor the fruit of the earth.

  The fact is, we could go into a pretty lengthy critique of the concepts “natural” and “artificial,” and early drafts of this chapter did go into that pretty lengthy critique—the thumbnail version is that these concepts aren’t so black and white (if a person puts a bed under a willow tree, is that living naturally? if a bird makes a nest in a radio tower, using gum wrappers found on the ground, is that artificial?)—but in the end the detour did seem self-indulgent.

  The point is that your life is built around the things you live with, and you will be living with things that were built by human hands and, actually, other machines, and that run on electric power. This will by necessity become your new natural. We recommend you do whatever it takes to adapt.

  Adaptation may involve developing personal relationships with the technology that will surround you. Not in the sense of anthropomorphization—none of the machines around you will have souls, per se—but something closer to the way people regard household pets. Naming the HVAC system will make it seem like a minor member of the family; using gender-specific pronouns to refer to the rover (which could easily be called Rover) will help you bond. He’s a little sluggish today, you might say, or Rover? He’s always ready for some adventure! Military pilots do this kind of thing all the time, though we understand that they usually think of their vehicles as “shes” rather than “hes.” It’s the same for sailors and boats. But we have no intention of dictating the gender of any of your equipment; that’s strictly your choice. And in fact it might be a good idea to think of their gender in more fluid terms.

  Better yet, consider embracing this technology as part of yourselves. That’s how intimate the relationship will be. As the philosopher Donna Haraway wrote, “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” And that was decades ago. The twentieth century. We didn’t even have cell phones when she wrote that.

  To the end of helping you into this crucial intimacy, this chapter will introduce you to the machinery that will surround you, and prepare you for maintenance and repair. It’s not going to be as profound as the more metaphysical material that we cut out of our early drafts, but we acknowledge that it might be more immediately useful. And it will probably keep you from dying in an untimely way.

  First, a general note: We’ve included separate, individual manuals for the maintenance and repair of every machine you’ve got—even the blender. And rest assured that these are not the kind of manuals you’re used to from Earth, written first in Slovenian or Korean or Afrikaans and then translated into English by an underpaid and undereducated person distracted by debt and the family problems that come from debt. Nor are they the kind written in English by well-meaning but purely pragmatic engineers. These manuals were written by people who first spent significant time interacting with, even living with, these devices and the people who designed them, only after which, when they were fully satisfied, did they begin composing the instructions and troubleshooting guides. In our opinion, these manuals are worth reading for their own sake, even when the machines are working just fine.

  You will also have at least one engineer among you, very intentionally. When i
n doubt—say, for example, you’ve encountered an exhilarating but enigmatic passage in one of the repair manuals—turn to your engineers. They know their stuff backward and forward. Ideally you’ll all pay good attention while they’re working so that everyone can learn the basics of maintenance and repair—the responsibility falls on all shoulders—but it has been said more than once that engineers are born, not made.

  That said, plenty of things can go wrong with engineers, too, which is why we include the manuals.

  Again speaking generally, the keys to a good relationship with a machine aren’t all that different from the keys to a good relationship with a human, or with your own body: sensitivity and attention. A devoted caretaker will know when an engine is overheating before any warning lights start flashing, will be able to gauge the health of a water pump based on tiny changes in pitch, will sense problematic moisture levels in a server even before the server knows it. And then that caretaker brings to the machine what the machine needs, knowingly making things right—a retuned dial, a new transistor, a period of rest, whatever it takes—before things go very wrong. Be that caretaker.

  The most important machine in your lives will be the nuclear reactor. Sometimes people hear those words—nuclear reactor—and get nervous. They think Rajasthan or Fukushima, or, if they know their history, they think Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. That kind of thinking is, of course, outdated. This is a small and safe nuclear reactor, and all of your energy for everything you do is going to come through it. Well, we’ve thrown in a couple of solar panels because of pressure from certain quarters, but they’ll probably be covered by dust most of the time, and, unless you want to spend your lives on the roof, dusting, your best bet is probably to ignore them. Basically you’re going to be getting your power from the nuclear reactor, which is fine. Just put it a little distance from the habitation center and you’ll be fine.