There were still a few hours to go until they reached that point. He unlatched the harness, stood up, and opened the cabin door. His tiny room opened onto a shaft. Once they were in zero gravity, this space would turn into a corridor. But at the moment the ship was sitting on its stern. It was as if someone had set a jumbo jet on its tail fin. This was the image in Rick’s mind—a 106-meter tower rising up out of the rolling plain of the central California coast. He was still amazed that the structure didn’t tip over. As an engineer, he knew that he didn’t need to be concerned about the rocket’s stability. However, the emotional impulse to take cover nearby persisted.
He looked down. It was eight meters to the bottom of the shaft. The upper level, where he was currently located, measured almost fifty meters. Underneath the living quarters sat the cargo bays, which would no longer contain breathable air once they reached space. It was considered a waste of life support resources. Rick pulled himself through the door and climbed up the ladder. The common room was situated above the cabins, and the command bridge sat on top of these in the nose of the ship. He was jointly responsible for the propulsion system, but his tasks wouldn’t start for real until they had reached Earth orbit. Here at Vandenberg AFB’s Launch Complex 3, the on-site engineers were taking care of everything.
Rick was surprised at how much the climb tired him. By the time he reached the common room, he was out of breath. Robert probably would have accomplished this quite easily. He might even have swung up with one hand trailing along the handrail. But Robert wasn’t here. Ha! How long would it take for them to clarify everything? A few weeks at least, and by that point, he would be well on his way to the Red Planet.
“Hi Rick, have you heard about Robert?” Rick tried to place the face in front of him, and then recalled that they were all wearing name tags. Of course, this was Tetsu Anan, a physicist with Japanese roots.
“Yes, I was shocked. Have you heard any more details? The boss was pretty tightlipped about it.”
“Something with drugs, at least according to Tanya from Security. She knows some people who work on the force. She used to be an officer herself.”
“I can’t imagine Robert doing something like that. He has a family!”
“You can never tell with people, Rick. Maybe that’s why he was always in such a good mood.”
“But how would that have worked on the flight to Mars? He never would’ve gotten that stuff on board.”
“He would’ve had to quit cold turkey,” Tetsu theorized. “But I don’t think you give much thought to the consequences when you use that stuff.”
“True. There wouldn’t have been any other option,” Rick said. “See you later.”
He strode through the common room as if he were looking for something in particular. The room was as large as a small school gym. It looked more like a silo, thanks to the vertical position of the rocket. The bar area was situated above him in the right-hand corner. Comfortable chairs and low tables were attached to the side walls. Rick was reminded of a surreal painting by Salvador Dalí. He would have preferred to be checking out the command bridge, but there was bound to be lots of chaos up there, and he would seem more out of place there than down here.
A Mr. Cummings was kneeling beside an open hatch in the wall. As Rick caught sight of his last name on his suit, he remembered the first name that went with it—this was Keith.
“Hi, Keith,” he said in greeting.
It seemed that Keith was fully occupied with what he was doing, since he didn’t respond.
“Anyway,” Rick said, turning around and heading back.
“Sorry, man. I was trying to measure something,” Keith called after him in an astonishingly high voice.
But it was too late. Rick could barely hear him.
Sol 65, Mars surface
Sleeping in her suit was torture. The skin on Ewa’s joints was raw where the HUT had rubbed. Her muscles ached from the long distance she had covered. And yet the main thing she felt was filthy. Her sweat had formed a crust on her skin, and her diaper had reached maximum saturation ages ago. The stench of her own excretion was now combining with her air supply. The life support system wasn’t calibrated to filter out the smell. Ewa was hardly able to inhale despite the fact the oxygen level was at an optimal level according to the gauge. She was revolted by herself.
How was she supposed to continue like this for five times as long as she already had? Ewa shook her head as she got onto her knees to finally stand back up again. It was impossible. She hadn’t slept more than three hours. The nutrient solution that she could suck up through the left tube provided her with the most essential vitamins and minerals, but her stomach wasn’t accustomed to going for more than twenty-four hours without solid food. It was reacting to this state by cramping.
She was facing fourteen long hours, or even more if she didn’t manage to cover five kilometers per hour. Ewa considered her options. If she decided to set up her tent tonight, she would inevitably lose oxygen, as well as time. On the other hand, she would be better rested by morning and could perhaps make better progress. It would be worth trying at least.
But first she had to set off. She would be able to think more clearly tonight, once she had covered the seventy kilometers. Ewa checked the time and looked up into the sky. The sun was making it easy for her today. What more could she want? The weather was nice, and she was entering uncharted territory with each step she took. She was the first person to ever walk across this plain. She was a scientist, wasn’t she? A few scrapes couldn’t outweigh that!
Ewa moved her left leg. The muscles hurt, but the leg did as she wished. Progress! Now her right leg was up. The pain in it was stronger, but she had advanced another thirty centimeters. One leg after the other. She gritted her teeth until she tasted blood. She leaned forward slightly. Gravity helped her walk more easily. Her instinct guided her legs so that they stayed underneath her center of gravity, preventing her from falling. The pain didn’t vanish, but it was bearable.
Ewa could visualize it sitting on her shoulder. Like a living being, the pain was whispering in her right ear, telling her that she should just stop walking. Ewa began to murmur to herself so she couldn’t hear its enticing suggestion. The pain eventually gave up. It continued to jab knives into her joints, but it no longer spoke to her. It must have realized that she wasn’t so easily controlled.
‘You’re doing a good job,’ her finger wrote in the sand during Ewa’s lunchtime rest break.
Swell, she though. Here we go again with the monologue.
‘You aren’t talking to yourself’ appeared as a response in the sand.
Ewa leapt up. She obviously couldn’t take even a short rest. Otherwise her mind would immediately veer off course. She hoped her legs wouldn’t start acting up again. Although she expected some kind of bizarre reaction, nothing happened. Her legs kept carrying her westward, as if nothing had happened. The pain sat on her shoulder and kept her company along the way.
“Would you mind shifting to my other shoulder sometimes?” she asked it.
‘Of course,’ it replied. ‘As long as you don’t demand that I vanish completely, I’ll do whatever you want.’
Her other shoulder instantly felt heavy. Ewa glanced to her left. There it was, the pain, grinning back at her.
It was already dark by the time Ewa set her backpack on the ground. After the sun had set, Mars’s moon Deimos had shown her the way. Ewa was unable to think clearly by this point. All she wanted to do was sleep, and she felt relief at the prospect. She was now functioning like a robot. All of a sudden she found herself sitting inside her airtight spacesuit within the unsealed tent. She couldn’t remember how to set it up. The only thing she recalled was that she needed to close the tent before she could fill it with breathable atmosphere. Ewa hooked up a fresh bottle to the tent. She waited until the pressure gauge reached the halfway point before removing her helmet. The air was so fresh and cold that for a second she felt dizzy. But this didn’t last
long, since the stench from her suit quickly tainted the air in the tent.
She took off her diaper first. The absorbent material was stiff and hard, and covered with a brown crust. She wouldn’t be able to dispose of her garbage until tomorrow morning, since she couldn’t open the tent until then. Pulling a plastic bag out of her backpack, she stuck her diaper in it and tied it off. She inspected her pubic area and flinched in pain. Underneath the grime, her skin was infected. She dampened a rag and started to clean herself. It was painful, as if the entire skin area down there were a burn blister.
Ewa rummaged around in her backpack. There had to be a sterilizing cream in the first aid kit. If she didn’t watch out, she would get blood poisoning. There was the tube. Ewa felt relieved. But the skin inflammation was so widespread that there was no way the package would last until the end of her trek. Were there any alternatives? She shrugged. She wouldn’t worry about that until tomorrow. There was enough cream for tonight.
She removed her thermal underwear and examined the rest of her body. She had to use a mirror for her back. Her backpack had left deep welts on her shoulders. All the folds in her skin were red, and her joints were severely abraded. She applied more lotion to these areas. Her feet were in an astonishingly good condition. At least a little good news! She was probably just lucky that the suit’s boots fit her so well. Her calves and thighs felt like solid steel. Her muscles were probably overworked. Ewa tried to relax them, but to no avail. She thought longingly about a massage, but then quickly banished the thought. There were so many things she could yearn for.
Ewa checked out the feeding equipment before sticking a cube of nutritional concentrate into her mouth. It was supposed to taste like chicken soup, but it was way too salty. The cube gradually swelled. She bit into it, but needed a gulp of water to choke the stuff down. The crackers were much better! She found two packets in her backpack. Ewa inhaled one of them completely, but decided to save the second one for the final night of her forced march, as a reward. She already felt the thrill of anticipation.
Her bladder suddenly piped up. She hadn’t drunk all that much, had she? She opened the first aid kit once more to look for the urination devices. The package was still sealed. She opened the seal and removed one of them. It was triangular in shape, and had instructions printed on the side. Ewa folded the device as stipulated, squatted down, and pressed it against her pubic area. The pee burned as it drained out, but it felt good to empty her bladder. She sealed the bag and decided to add it to the trash bag along with her diaper. A foul smell wafted out of the bag as soon as she opened it. She forced herself to withstand the stench. All of this had come from her. She was the only person located in this tent, despite her uncertainty about how many personalities she was composed of.
She shoved the trash back into the furthest corner of the tent before making herself as comfortable as possible. She stretched out on the thin mattress. A pillow would be nice! Ewa fished around in her backpack until she found a sweater, which she pulled out. She brought up her notebook with it. Should she maybe keep a journal? That might help her remember things in case the other Ewa gained the upper hand. She shouldn’t forget, for example, that she was heading west. No, she corrected herself. It was the other Ewa who wanted to go that way. She had wanted to go south, where she would have eventually come across the NASA base. At some point after her death.
Ewa lay down on her back. No, that wouldn’t work. Her shoulders hurt when they came into contact with the ground. She folded her sweater such that her head was elevated higher off the ground. Her eyes traveled across the tent’s low ceiling. It was a shame she couldn’t see the sky. This was insane. She was lying naked inside a tent on the surface of Mars. Her friends had banished her. They wanted her to die, and rightfully so. Nobody knew what had happened to Earth. Ten billion people might be on the verge of dying, but despite that, she still felt good in this tiny moment.
Oh, the journal! She wanted to fill it with her experiences. Ewa propped herself up on her right arm to search for it. It was lying beside her backpack, a pen clipped to the back cover. She opened it. The book was virginal and empty. She jotted down the date on the first page. Sol 65. They had adopted the NASA crew’s dating system. If MfE had used their landing date as Sol 0, they would now be up to Sol 59. What was today’s date on Earth? She had no idea.
‘I know what it is,’ the pen in her hand suddenly wrote. No, it wasn’t the pen. It was her hand holding the pen that was doing the writing. She was the one who had jotted down these words.
“Anyone could say that,” Ewa answered out loud. Her words sounded muffled in the cramped tent.
‘Do you remember the operation you had during your training?’ the pen in her hand asked.
Ewa, you’re crazy, she warned herself. Stop talking to yourself. But why should she? She thought about what she still had to face. The MfE initiative had banished her. She couldn’t go back there, and she wouldn’t see another human face as long as she lived. How long could she make it without someone to talk to? She might be introverted and content to be on her own—but loneliness would bother her as well. Wasn’t it preferable to at least talk to herself some?
The operation, she thought. Yes, she recalled what had happened. They had wanted to check on the implant that she had been using for a long time to prevent epileptic seizures. It had been doing a good job. Before their launch, the clinic had wanted to examine it one last time. Had something unexpected happened during that operation?
‘You haven’t been alone since then,’ her pen wrote in her journal.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
‘Your implant isn’t what you think it is, not anymore. At that time, they installed an advanced BCI, a Brain-Computer Interface, in your brain.’
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “It was a routine checkup.”
‘Who conducted it?’
Ewa couldn’t recall. After breakfast, they had given her a strong sedative. “A doctor?” she asked.
‘No, a robotic surgeon.’
Of course! Now she remembered. The implant was situated at the center of her brain. The doctor had entered the data into a robot. She could still see the doctor’s face behind the pane of glass, his outstretched thumbs doing the programming.
“That’s standard practice for brain surgeries,” she said. “Completely normal. Don’t feed me any of that nonsense.”
‘The robot did more than the doctor had programmed it to do. It installed the BCI. And me.’
Ewa read the lines and felt her anxiety increase. She would try to give herself the slip if she could. The monologues hadn’t been such a good idea after all. The conversation was starting to frighten her.
“You are me, and I am you. And I’m done with this pointless conversation. I shouldn’t have listened to you to begin with,” Ewa declared.
She snapped the book shut and clipped the pen back onto it. She waited unwillingly for her fingers to start defending themselves, like her legs had done when she had wanted to head south yesterday. But nothing happened. She was in complete possession of her faculties. She was in control.
“I rest my case,” she said aloud.
There wasn’t another living creature for a hundred kilometers around, but she suddenly felt exposed, lying naked here on her back. She tried flipping over on her side and curling up in a fetal position, but the pain in her shoulder was too great. She reached into her backpack and wrapped her fingers around a towel that she pulled out and used as a makeshift cover.
5/25/2042, Spaceliner 1
Terran Carter was printed in simple script on the label affixed to the door of the neighboring cabin. Was Arial responsible for that? He belonged to the company’s upper admin. He never spent money on non-essential purchases, and if even something so trivial as a font could be used free of charge, then the marketing department wasn’t allowed to spend money on special ones. Rick ran his finger across the sign. It was paper, and the name had been printed by a cheap in
kjet printer. Some intern must have produced this sign.
He didn’t recognize the name of the cabin’s resident. Terran, a resident of Terra. That fit brilliantly with this journey, at the end of which they would all become citizens of Mars. They had trained in teams of ten, so that no one except the supervisors knew the names of all the passengers.
Where was Terran right now? Was he in his cabin? Probably not. Most of them were floating in front of the view windows in the common room, where they couldn’t get enough of the sight of Earth. Rick had spent a few minutes there, too. He had needed confirmation that he had actually made it this far. The launch had been awe-inspiring—that feeling of soaring upward into endless space, and that final sense of all weight dropping away. However, he was very visual. He had needed to see Earth 400 kilometers beneath him.
Last night he had dreamed about Robert. In his dream, he saw his rival sitting in an electric chair. His ten children were gathered around him, weeping bitterly for their father. Rick had only peered briefly through the execution chamber’s keyhole, but the children had caught sight of him, causing them to point at him and scream all the louder. The adult viewers, including the President of the United States, had simply ignored the children’s shouts.
Rick laughed. How ridiculous. He pushed against Terran’s door and it opened. He really shouldn’t have been surprised by this since his own door didn’t lock, but he was still a little startled. This was probably due to the fact that there didn’t seem to be any obstacles to his plan. He looked around. After making sure no one else was in the corridor, he quickly slipped into the cabin. It looked just like his, albeit very messy. They had only just launched, and Terran’s quarters already looked like... He couldn’t come up with a comparison. What did people say? It looked like... whatever. He flicked a hand and waved the thought away.
Mars Nation: The Complete Trilogy Page 30