The Pedestal

by Daniel Wimberley

  The last thing I want right now is a shootout with the village supermodel, so I do my best to backpedal.

  “Listen,” I plead, “I’m sorry. That just went right past my filter before I could stop it.” I’m speaking both literally and figuratively here; throughout my life, my NanoPrint has helped shape my thoughts, funneling them into socially acceptable parameters. Now that it’s gone, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to do things the old-fashioned way.

  “Grogan,” says the woman, though her eyes remain firmly locked on mine, “who is this Neanderthal?”

  Winkley snorts with a hearty slap to an ample thigh.

  “This raving misfire is Wilson,” Grogan responds, his voice aflutter with bridled amusement. “Fiona, meet your new help.”

  Mars has a daily sun cycle very similar to Earth’s. I consider this to be good news, because my body craves a normal sleeping routine, just as it does air and food—and without the sun to set the pace, my systems are hopelessly without tempo. I experienced this firsthand aboard Grogan’s ship, trekking through space for the better part of a week with no distinct night or day. Since then, I’ve learned that recovery is a game of inches; it may be weeks or even months before I fully recuperate. Nevertheless, with an actual dusk and dawn to aid me, I’m at least headed in the right direction.

  Shortly after settling in, I discover that my body burns through much more energy here than it ever did on Earth. I’m a little surprised by this. After all, the gravity here is a fraction of Earth’s; by my estimation, things ought to be less taxing.

  As usual, my estimation is faulty.

  For example: walking from one building to another nearly drains me. In theory, it should be easy—a leisurely series of bounces, like tiptoeing across a swimming pool—but in reality, the task is made much more difficult by my cumbersome atmospheric suit, and by my inability to reconcile the energy requirements of walking outside with those of inside—the same pressurizing system that keeps indoors livable makes it impossible to ever really acclimate to conditions outdoors.

  Another contributing factor to my exhaustion is the food. I’ve always been pretty thin, yet I don’t doubt I’ll be much thinner a month from now. Food is strictly rationed among us. We don’t skip meals—nothing as drastic as that, so far—but our portion sizes are just a little smaller than our bodies crave; as a result, we’re always hungry. I’m told this is one of a few things I’m not likely to get used to.

  Probably the worst part of living on Mars is the cold. Really, I never minded the cold on Earth. That’s not to say I wouldn’t prefer a constant seventy-five degrees with a light breeze over the discomfort of a snowstorm, but I distinctly remember looking forward to winter as much as I did summer. The contrast of seasons gave me something to look forward to year-round.

  In many ways, Mars is similar to Earth. It’s considerably smaller, but otherwise fairly comparable. Climate, however, is not an attribute they have in common. The day I arrived here, temperatures hovered around the low forties. When I awoke the next morning, I could see my breath; the thermometer had plummeted to twenty below during the night. I’m told Mars has its seasons, but when the daily forecast has a standard deviation of plus or minus a hundred degrees, seasons don’t count for much.

  The complex is heated, but it doesn’t cope well with temperatures this extreme, and I’m told I haven’t seen the least of it yet. Our climate control system was undoubtedly designed in the comfort of a board room back on Earth, relying heavily on some under-the-gun assumptions regarding the anatomy of Mars. Few of these assumptions were accurate.

  Our heating system utilizes ambient ground heat, which is absorbed by a buried array of fluid-filled manifolds. This concept has proven wonderfully reliable on Earth and has been refined over hundreds of years to the extent that supplemental heat sources are literally a thing of the past. In terms of engineering, it works because the planet’s core and subcutaneous layers remain at a fairly constant temperature. Apparently, there was reason to believe that Mars would behave likewise.

  As it turns out, Mars does not.

  Something mysterious is amiss at the heart of this planet. Whatever the anomaly is, it causes the ground temperature to be far more dynamic than anyone expected. It’s as if the soil has little or no insulating properties.

  With all that said, our system does manage to reap some heat—enough to keep us from a popsicle’s fate, anyway. Since the day when Grogan first soiled his boots with smears of Martian rust, he’s been working toward a more effective heating solution. Without help from his Earthly engineers—who purportedly washed their hands of the situation, calling it an issue of comfort over survival—it’s been an uphill battle of trial and error, importing refined system components one piece at a time from Earth.

  I shouldn’t complain, and believe it or not, I don’t. Not out loud, anyway. I’ve taken a recent liking to sweaters, which were fair game for ruthless mockery back home. Even still, layered heavily in synthetic wools and insulating polyesters, the cold has found a grudging home in me, leaching into my bones with a constant ache.

  Yet if I take a moment to forget about the daily strife of Martian life—which I do on the rare occasion when I’m not freezing or starving to death—I can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity that made living here possible. It’s usually the simplest of solutions that amaze me, possibly because they often seem the least obvious to me.

  If you aren’t already aware of it—I certainly wasn’t, until Winkley took pity on me—Mars has no magnetic field to speak of, and therefore, virtually no ionosphere to deflect solar winds. This oddity has proven to be a real challenge to operations, particularly concerning communication. Now if left up to me, we’d simply shout above the winds. Or play charades—that could work, right?

  Fortunately for all of us, this dilemma was put to bed long before I came along.

  Turns out, the solution was underfoot all along. Engineers realized that Mars’s iron-rich soil was an ideal conductor, just waiting for someone to exploit it. The boots of our atmospheric suits are treaded with metal cleats, which ground to tiny microphones and speakers built into our helmets. As long as our feet are in contact with the ground, a circuit is created, allowing communication to occur across vast distances, and for our precise locations to be continuously monitored from the control room. The corroded state of the iron is overcome by extreme cold; evidently, some minerals become more conductive at subzero temperatures. Overall, this solution seems to be every bit as reliable as it is low-tech. You gotta love that kind of simplicity.

  Nineteenth-century technology applied to a twenty-second-century problem.

  There’s something else on Mars that I never tire of admiring. Fiona, though a little standoffish at times, isn’t merely beautiful, she’s also brilliant, and a pleasantly considerate boss. Struggling to establish a new, working sleeping cycle, I’m often late to the lab in the mornings. Yet Fiona doesn’t harp on me. Neither does she hold it against me that I have absolutely no education or training that might benefit her research.

  For the most part, my lack of training hasn’t yet proven detrimental; the type of busywork I’m tasked with requires more common sense than intellectual prowess. Good thing, too; I still haven’t normalized to the manufactured atmosphere in the complex—I get dizzy a lot, and my thoughts tend to wander into a soupy haze toward the end of a long work day. Blessedly—or sadly, depending on my mood—the putrid stench of trace gases and the inevitable odors of confined living become a little less noticeable every day.

  Fiona delegates a variety of remedial tasks to me, each of which is vital to her research and utterly meaningless to me: preparing BP7 samples to record various chemical measurements (crushing the scrap out of plant cuttings and pouring the pulp into little cone-shaped vials); measuring pH and alkaline levels of soil samples (dipping a little probe into cups of dirt). It’s mindless, repetitive work, yielding no gratification save for my proximity to Fiona.

  BP7 represent
s Fiona’s seventh run of blood plant hybrids, so named for the bloody color of their roots. Evidently, it’s been a rough progression:

  BP6 wouldn’t reproduce past the second generation, and it matured too slowly,

  BP5 succumbed to Mars’s intense radiation,

  BP4 choked on the extreme iron levels in the soil and wasn’t able to photosynthesize,

  and so forth.

  Fiona’s been here for three years. She’s never spoken of what brought her here, or of the life she must’ve left behind. I wonder about these details, in part because I have a lot of time to think, but especially because she’s so beautiful. I don’t mean to belabor this point; I only mention it now because I find it hard to imagine why someone like her would want to be here. Why this life of unnecessary seclusion, of concentrated loneliness? Surely she could have her pick of any of the more desirable laboratories on Earth.

  If you’re musing that I’m overthinking this, and that my naiveté is flavoring my conclusions a bit heavily, I’m not about to argue. I’ve yearned for companionship my entire life—like some drowner jonesing for the perfect fix—yet I’ve known all along that not everyone is likewise burdened. Maybe Fiona simply isn’t driven by the need for love.

  Fiona and Grogan have a complicated relationship, from what I can gather. No one talks about it, but there’s clearly a history there; the evidence is hard to ignore. For example, Grogan’s constantly griping about the BP7s’migration from the lab to the Martian surface. I’m not sure his argument is completely without merit—what do I know?—but his admonishments only manage to come off as petty. Fiona greets them like she’s humoring the rants of a child: her eyes hard, unwavering, and more than a little condescending. It isn’t merely that Grogan’s opinions carry little weight with her; the two seem embattled over absolutely nothing at all. They’re like an old married couple.

  There is one thing that really bothers me about Fiona: she’s excruciatingly vague about the big picture of her research, which is really the only vantage from which I can hope to grasp what we’re doing. She numbs my mind with technical explanations for experimental procedures, yet she offers up nothing to illuminate the basis of her work.

  If her experiments were designed to prove that plants can grow on Mars—with a little help, of course—they’ve done that. If the intention was to establish a stable species on Mars, they’ve done that, too. Unlike its predecessors, BP7 has yielded some extremely promising results.

  So what exactly is left to prove?

  Yet Fiona continues to refine her experiments, repeating them in new—and ostensibly meaningless—sequences. Even after three long years of research, she shows no intention of leaving; I’m not sure if this is an expression of will or resignation. I always figured the purpose of science was to learn things, not to invent new ways to demonstrate what you’ve already learned. But—again—what do I know?

  Grogan is not only closemouthed on the subject of research, but when I dare to ask for his input, he looks at me as if I’ve just asked an engineer to explain the nuts and bolts of botany—which, I suppose, is exactly what I’ve done.

  My options are slim at this point, so I’m reduced to pumping Winkley for information. My new friend is willing, if not completely able. I start with the basics.

  “How can they grow here with no oxygen?”

  “I wish I knew. There are trace amounts in the soil, I guess, but nowhere near enough to explain how they thrive. Fiona’s really the only one who completely gets it. I have a nutshell understanding of it, though: the extreme iron content of the soil seems to accelerate growth and toughen these plants when it should probably kill them. From what I can tell, the BPs aren’t merely tolerating the iron, they’re actually feeding on it. They photosynthesize during the day—just like their Earth cousins—but unlike anything I’ve ever seen, these guys don’t shut down at night. They store enough energy during the day to carry them through the dark hours. They’re like little biological batteries.”

  “That’s pretty amazing,” I say.

  Winkley nods. “Yeah; kind of scary, too, when you think about it.”

  My lips form a lean frown. “What do you mean, scary?”

  “Just think about what these things could do on a planet like Earth. BP7 has all the hallmarks of an invasive species, but worse than that, it feeds on iron, man!”

  “Yeah, I guess that could be a problem.”

  Winkley rolls his eyes. “Uh, you guess? Think it through, man. You have a plant that needs oxygen, but somehow manages to survive on trace amounts. Imagine how much more it would thrive with an endless supply! What it does seem to need is extraordinary levels of mineral sustenance, and it’s willing to burn right through the night to get it.”

  “Okay, so on Earth you’d have a plant that gets more oxygen than it needs. And, I guess it’s able to leach the soil of its mineral content. Not sure I see the big deal—Earth’s mineral content was pretty much wiped off the surface over fifty years ago.”

  “Exactly. So where do think these guys’ll have to go for dinner?”

  I submit my trademark dumb expression in response.

  “Infrastructure, man. Building foundations, railways. Pipelines. Wire grids. Fences. Bridges.”

  “The nexus framework?”

  “You got it. In a few years, that entire planet of yours would be stripped. Technically, you could harvest the plants to get the minerals back—if you were really determined—but it would take a concerted global effort to pull it off. You gotta admire the destructive capabilities of these things.”

  I’m truly disturbed by this analysis, and I don’t want to minimize its significance, yet I’m more disturbed that Winkley has so blithely detached himself from his planet of origin—because deep down, I know that I’m headed down that same road. And my acknowledgment of this truth fills my aching bones with unrelenting sadness.

  Cutterly and Rogers are still on the mend, though I guess they’ve left the sick bay behind for the comfort of their dorms. I’ve met the two, however briefly, in the corridors of the research base; they have a haggard look to them, and neither seems interested in me at all. They spend a lot of time resting. I still don’t know what happened to them—their hands are pink with the gristle of freshly healed wounds, and Cutterly walks with a slight limp—but I’m guessing their poor states have something to do with Montague.

  I’ve dubbed this place the b-hive; the other guys just call it base or the office. Pathetic. I guess with all the activity going on here, there isn’t much energy left for creativity. I’m a little concerned: if these people rub off on me, Fiona and I may someday have four sons named Dave.

  It could happen, right?

  Anyway, the complex does resemble a bee hive, thanks to its modular design. I’m told it’s actually the second facility to be built on Mars, the first of which was found rusted to the ground when PRMC’s mining team first arrived nearly a decade ago.

  I spend a lot of time thinking about that first facility, wondering what it was here for, what happened to its inhabitants. The longer I’m out here, the more vulnerable I feel. Anything can happen here—there’s no nexus to guide my steps, no government agency to intervene on my behalf if I make a mistake. Not even my NanoPrint can aid me here. I find myself agonizing over safety procedures—obsessing over every detail, no matter how minor—because I’m scared to death that my bones will be picked clean by Mars’s unfettered winds the first time I slip up. Grogan insists this attitude is a good thing, that my fear will keep me alive.

  I’m not so sure. It causes me to hesitate now and then, and hesitations can be lethal.

  Sometimes I miss the nexus—the music and movies, the endless array of useless, encyclopedic information I used to take for granted—all streamed to my implant, where I can no longer access it. I’ve become very aware of my implant’s silence; my hormones are virtually out of control, my emotions subject to manic extremes. The subtle chemical nudges I’ve grown up with are now completely gone,
leaving me a little dazed, overwhelmed by the excess of social cues I’m now expected to make sense of. I find, at times, that I even miss the constant white noise of its workings. I’d definitely give Marilyn a fat digital kiss if she were to bound from my periphery.

  I think about Mitzy a lot, though I try not to. The guilt I feel is enormous. Somehow, though, it grows a little dimmer every day. At times I’m not even sure what’s nagging at me, and then I remember. I consider it a good day when I’m smart enough to think about something else.

  More than anything, though, I just miss Earth. Strolling through the city in streetclothes, sipping coffee that doesn’t taste like scorched plastic. Stretching in the womb of a sunny afternoon, smelling the breeze of a breathing planet—all the things I once took for granted. It hurts to think on these things. Remembering is like probing a festering wound. Yet, if not for those memories, I’d have nothing but rust and rock to occupy my imagination. My life has ventured down a new path. It’s hard to accept that I can’t turn back, but I must.

  In the grand scheme of things, these are trivial annoyances. The thing that truly keeps me up at night—drawing sweat from my pores, despite the relentless cabin chill—is Montague. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve stared at my darkened ceiling, trying to work out exactly what happened to the man. It’s odd, isn’t it, that I should be so concerned for a complete stranger? I think so at times. Other times, I suspect I’m not really worried about him at all, but indirectly worried about myself.

  Because if Montague—a trained Martian professional—was indeed wiped from existence for a single moment of carelessness, I’d say I’m on borrowed time.