No Marigolds in the Promised Land

by T S Hottle

  One, someone someday will find this rover and probably my bones nearby. They’ll probably want to know what happened. I hope they’re human. I hope they find me alive. Dying out in the wastes of Farigha would be worse than finding everyone else dead.

  Two, if I don’t keep track of what I’m doing, I’ll go insane.

  So, posterity, hello. I suppose I should introduce myself. I am John Farno. I am a drone wrangler for the Office of Colonial Development on detached duty to the Mars Terraforming Commission. And I am the last man on Farigha.

  LOG ENTRY: 1619 14-Sagan, 429

  Hi, it’s me again. Yeah, I know. You were expecting some lone survivor who happened to leave the dome last night in a pressure suit to go spelunking before he went to bed. Instead it’s me. John Farno, last man on Farigha. So, you ask, what does one do when one has finally accepted that everyone else in the world has been killed?

  I’m not assuming that yet. For starters, I’m can't be the only person who was out in a rover last night. There are seven domes, six of which were operational, ringing the equator of Farigha. Don’t ask me who came up with that strategy. Whether the planet is a cold desert like this with unbreathable air or a shining, pristine replica of humanity’s cradle before the Earthers crapped in the oceans and farted garbage into the atmosphere, most colonization efforts are dictated by two things: Water and geography. Well, Farigha has a layer of permafrost from pole to pole. So, all we have to do for water is drill, melt, and filter. And here I am, drinking my own piss. The first settlement on any world is usually near the equator. It’s just easier to get to and from orbit from there. But depending on how solid the surface is, the second wave of settlements usually go nearer to the poles, especially if an Earth-like planet is particularly warm. My homeworld of Bonaparte clusters its major cities in the northernmost and southernmost latitudes. Why? Have you ever been to Nouveau Versailles, our capital? Year-round, it’s like a sauna.

  If I’m not the only poor schmuck who was out and about last night, then there’s someone else alive on this planet. Hopefully human. I am painfully aware that humans are not the only ones who poach each other’s colonies. Someone might have flattened our domes because they decided we pesky Martians (and their hired hands like me) were taking too long to terraform the planet. But I’m working on the assumption that I’m only sharing the planet with other humans. Why blow everyone up and not come down to inspect the handiwork? If you’re going to take away our planet, then goddammit, take away our planet. Using us for target practice…

  LOG ENTRY: 1626 14-Sagan, 429

  Sorry. Got a bit worked up there. Surviving the end of the world will do that to you. So instead of rambling about what I think happened, let’s get down to the primary task at hand. Survival.

  I said earlier I have enough food and spare oxygen to last about a month. I can replenish the oxygen by using the scrubbing system that turns Farigha’s rustic CO2 atmosphere into sweet, breathable oxygen. As long as the scrubbers hold out, I can breathe. As long as the food holds out, I can eat. To that end, I’m limiting myself to one ration bar every twelve hours. I’m no biologist, so I don’t know if that’s too little food, but it’ll make the bars and whatever snacks I packed for the trip to Kremlin last about a month. I can recycle my own piss and draw water vapor from the air indefinitely. Farigha has a dry atmosphere, but not completely dry. There’s enough water vapor in the frigid air to cause the occasional flurry on the surface. 2 Mainzer hasn’t blown it all away. The fusion battery is good for ten years, so I’ve got heat and a means to get around. Plus I can augment that with solar power. As long as that holds out or the solar wrap gets enough light, the soft brain on the rover is safe.

  My first order of business was to weep over the destruction of my entire world. And throw things. I tried to limit that to non-breakables. Hey, I might have been having an emotional breakdown, but at least I was pragmatic about it. Tantrum done, I checked my surroundings. The radiation from the blast at Musk had died down rather quickly, and the fallout from the explosion is only a little hotter than the normal dust in the air. I’m guessing this was a clean fusion device.

  Which means this was deliberate.

  Well, duh. A meteor strike or an asteroid collision would either have peppered the whole surface with impact sites or left a much larger crater where Musk used to be. I know. Should have considered that theory, but three domes within a thousand kilometers of each other don’t go silent at the same time by accident. One or two of them should have survived, and I should have seen rescue craft from the other side of the planet by now.

  Second, I needed to find any supplies I could scavenge. Did a freight drone breakdown on its way to or from Musk? Did the EMP shut down its soft brain and leave its core computer crying for help that will not be coming? Not picking up any automated distress calls, but I’m hoping that changes in the coming days. Even freeze-dried food is food, and the less water I have to process, the less strain I put on my rover.

  But there’s another idea. Remember my little joke about a guy going spelunking late at night and missing the blast? Well, we had a guy like that named Ellis, though he preferred going out on his day off and during daylight hours. I half hoped he might have been camping out underground when the blast hit, but he, too, would have been sending out pleas for help.

  He maintains a habitat in his favorite cave. It’s not much, and his excuse is he is testing equipment for when terraforming personnel get stranded without a rover. In reality, he does it because he can’t stand people. Oh, he’s likeable enough. Or was before he was melted into glass. He loved solitude more than the pleasure of our company. So, he kept a stash of supplies, much of them generated by himself or shipped to him on supply runs. Sorry, Ellis, but for the good of humanity’s presence on Farigha, I’m going to have to confiscate whatever you have in the cave.

  If I can find it. I’m sure I can.

  Third, I need to plan where I’m going to go. Staying on the fringes of a settlement that’s now a glass pancake is out of the question. I’ve decided that, after my supply run, I’m going to go east to New Ares, the next dome beyond Musk. Assuming the sensor road is still intact, I should be able to travel around the planet and reach all seven domes. New Ares is odd in that it’s not actually on the equator. It’s a little bit north to take advantage of the high elevation there. Part observatory, part settlement, part terraforming lab. Plus I hope maybe one of the domes survived, and I’m just out of range. If not, well, it’ll take me a month to travel the twenty-four thousand kilometers around Farigha. By then, I’ll know if I need to swallow all that Vicodin.

  So, to whoever finds this, centuries from now, sorry about that.

  LOG ENTRY: 1912 14-Sagan, 429

  Took me an hour of searching, but I found that cave. Thank you, Ellis. Sadly, Ellis himself was not hiding out in the heated pop tent he used to sleep and eat in. Since I’m assuming he now exists only as his component atoms or was fused into the remains of Musk, I’m helping myself to his tent. And his supplies. He packed a lot of rations out here. And a lot of homemade beer. I feel like a graverobber. But this grave has a lot of neat stuff. For starters, he packed a high-powered portable radio, powerful enough to pick up the satellite constellation. If anyone’s alive on this rock, I’ll hear them a long way off.

  He also packed a lot of digging equipment. It’s safe to consider I might roll the rover without the aid of thermonuclear devices. Digging equipment will remedy that. Not only is dry quicksand a thing on Farigha, but there are places where the permafrost melts and turns the surface sand into soup. Some of this is human-caused, but it happens naturally, too. It was one of the first hazards we found ringing the equator with domes. In theory, the sensor road is intact and free of both kinds of quicksand. In theory. In reality, Ellis’s radio is picking up noise from the microwave towers up north and probably from the southern ice cap as well. In short, we’re still heating up Farigha even if we, as a species on Farigha, are now extinct.

&
nbsp; Is a species extinct if only one specimen exists with no way to procreate?

  The pop tent will become my home. It’s got a portable toilet I can dump without an EVA. The pop tent was originally rover equipment, but Ellis rigged it up as a standalone habitat. Thanks to my late friend’s genius for improvisation, it easily converts back to a rover-mounted device. Sweet.

  One other thing Ellis left behind: A hardened pad with cloud-free storage. Granted, he brought along only music and holos. Without a projector, I have to watch all his movies and serials in two-D like some kind of savage. Hey, I’m the last man on Farigha. Roughing it means survival, especially since Ellis’s taste in music runs to Caliphite dance and ambient music. I can either have a rave or meditate. Kooky.

  So, I shan’t be bored, and my rations have been extended by about two weeks, three if I behave myself.

  And I have beer.

  LOG ENTRY: 2105 14-Sagan, 429

  I miss people. I miss the warmth of the domes. I miss the local internet. I miss hypergate updates and the news.

  Most of all, I miss showers. God, I could use a shower right now.

  LOG ENTRY: 2338 14-Sagan, 429

  Stopping for the night in… Aw, hell, without the satellites in orbit, I don’t know where I’m stopping. I suppose, at some point, I’m going to need to pull up a map and plot it out the old-fashioned way. That means a little light reading tonight: The constellations and planets of 2 Mainzer as seen from Farigha. I’ve deployed the pop tent and am recording this from the comfy confines of Ellis’s home away from home. Tomorrow’s a big day. While the rover plods merrily along at 30 kph, I will have to come up with a checklist of things to… well… check. Unless there’s a dome I can’t pick up even the faintest signals from yet, I’m pretty much on my own with no resources. No motor pool to fix the rover if it breaks down. No hypergate that will relay messages back to the Compact to send supplies. And I have to be constantly aware of my dwindling food supply. I need a plan to manage all this, or I’m screwed worse than I already am.

  And only now does it occur to me that I need to find a way to communicate with… With whom? I’m reasonably convinced the hypergate was destroyed last night. There is a hyperdrone that carries our communications and internet updates back to wherever in the Compact we send it. And we were supposed to get a seed shipment from Amargosa today. I haven’t heard anyone from orbit calling down and going, “Hey, where’s everybody at? What’s with all the glass pancakes?” Had they come, I’d be recording this from aboard a freighter on its way back to Tian or Mars or someplace with showers.

  God, I want a shower so bad.

  DAY 2

  LOG ENTRY: 0605 15-Sagan, 429

  Spent the night in the rover. Well, where else am I going to spend the night? But I parked the rover in the mouth of Ellis’s cave. Scavenging camping gear on a planet where the air pressure is minimal is hard work, and I had other chores. For starters, the backup tanks. Designed to be used only for a few minutes and really just to top off the tanks for the EVA suits, I was down to half my supply. Fortunately, the geniuses who make these things for use on Mars thought ahead. That same system that normally keeps me breathing also makes more oxygen to store in the tanks. It sucks CO2 out of the air, scrubs it, and passes it through the reactor housing to heat it up. Pretty passive. Nonetheless, as you probably guessed, the rover, like all long-range rovers, has redundant systems. Solar wrap on the exterior, the tanks themselves to function for short periods, and a hardened computer core that runs even when the soft brain is cooked. Two out of three of these fail-safes kept me alive in the early hours of…

  The Event. (Insert “Mwahahahaha” here.)

  That’s what I’m start calling the end of this world as I know it. The Event. I’ll skip the evil laughter from here on out. I’m pretty sure that joke was already stale the first time I used it. Nonetheless, heat and air are not a major issue. As long as I can avoid leaks and don’t drop the reactor core, I’m good.

  I did have one extra indulgence last night. Ellis supplied his little hidey hole with nuts and banana ration bars. I ate two to celebrate my good fortune and had a beer.

  It ain’t Arean beer like we’d get shipped in periodically, but after a long, hard day of not dying, it still went down smooth.

  Today’s agenda: Check out the blast site itself, see if anything usable survived, then head to New Ares.

  LOG ENTRY: 0941 15-Sagan, 429

  When I say the site is no longer hot, I mean it’s no longer radioactive. That tells me Musk was taken out by a clean fusion bomb. For the sake of those who might be reading this centuries from now, a clean fusion bomb is essentially a portable fusion reactor like those that power rural areas and small towns. Or even this rover. For the most part, fusion reactors never blow up because the time needed to cause an explosion is longer than the time needed for a human or an AI to notice that all is not right within the core. At that point, the reactor is shut off, the lasers compressing the hydrogen core stop compressing, and the reaction simply stops. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of turning a reactor off and back on again.

  Unless you wrap that core in a metal or ceramic housing and power the lasers up way past the point where the fusing of hydrogen atoms cannot be contained by the device causing the fusion. Even then, you have until the moment of detonation to stop the reaction. It has to be deliberate, or the show's over. When it's not, it results in the mother of all fireworks displays, the ever-popular mushroom cloud of World War and AI War legend. So, what’s so clean about it?

  Originally, the fusion bomb was a hydrogen core wrapped in plutonium wrapped in explosives that were set off by other explosives. Complicated, eh? The original fusion bomb was really a fission bomb using a fusion reaction to make the bomb bigger. It also could potentially rain hot soot over a large chunk of a continent. This is why humanity survived the World Wars. We were too scared to do more than take potshots at each other.

  With the clean fusion device, all the radiation is released at the time of the blast, but it leaves little behind. They only leave helium and traces of the rest of the device. The idea was to leave the blast site reclaimable within days of The Event.

  So, when I say it’s not hot, I mean theoretically. I could walk into the site naked and get more radiation from 2 Mainzer overhead at high noon. I’d die of decompression and suffocation, not to mention freeze to death in minutes, but I wouldn’t get radiation sickness. You have to stay positive when beginning your post-apocalyptic life.

  Still, fusion blasts are fusion blasts: Hot (as in fiery hot, not radioactive) and explosive. Anything not blown away from the blast site is either vaporized or melted. When I say Musk is now a glass pancake, it’s not the remains of the dome itself that lie flattened on the ground. I’m probably breathing in bits of dome when I’m in the rover, assuming tiny bits of dome vapor get through the scrubbers. No, the glass is the desert sand on which all the domes sit. And, as of this morning, it’s still steaming. I’m guessing it’s permafrost that was superheated by the blast.

  The glass pancake extends further out from the center of the blast site than the dome would have. The domes really aren’t that big. They wouldn’t even qualify as a town on Mars or in some Jovian settlement in the Belt and beyond. It was big enough to house a few hundred people. Real cities on thin-aired or airless worlds consist of hermetically sealed buildings connected by underground passages. We were the advanced guard.

  I walked the perimeter of the glass pancake this morning. It took me two hours. There was nothing salvageable here, just be big, flat sheet of smooth, blackened glass. I suspect there won’t be anything at New Ares or any other dome either.

  LOG ENTRY: 1205 15-Sagan, 429

  I’ve picked up the sensor road again on the other side of Musk. At the edge of the glass pancake, the sensors don’t even exist. Naturally, the blast vaporized the ones leading into the dome and either buried, burned, or ejected the ones further out. I had to eyeball mountains in the distance to g
uess where the sensor road picked up again. This required me to manually drive the rover as the soft brain got all confused and shut down its guidance system until someone, dammit, told it where the road was. That was a close one, ladies and gentlemen. The last specimen of Homo sapiens on Planet Farigha might have been killed running into…

  Well, I don’t trust humans who drive themselves, least of all this one.

  About ten kilometers out, I picked up the faint signals of scattered sensors. These survived the blast but are pretty much useless. The idea of a sensor road is that the sensors form a defined path where no actual road exists. If the sensors are scattered, you have no idea where said road once was. I suppose if humans have found this, they will find this hilarious. On developed worlds, actual paved roads are carved out of the land or sensor roads are so deeply embedded that the path simply picks up where the sensors begin functioning again. And anyway, most of the newer worlds use trains as soon as building a rail system becomes feasible.