by Unknown
Van der Whall was drowned out by the increasingly loud whooshing of something overhead. Looking up, he saw a huge spaceship floating into place above them. “You have to do something!” Van der Whall shouted. “If you don’t—”
Before he could finish his sentence, Van der Whall found himself back in the Things and Stuff shop in Kensington Market. The skinny woman, who seemed to be waving some kind of incense over his head, appeared to be grateful that he had returned to the corporeal world. Confused, Van der Whall rushed out to the street, but there was no alien mothership in the sky. Running back to Augusta, he found that the dead body at the centre of the police investigation was no longer there. It hadn’t been taken to the Coroner’s office: the ambulance was still there and, in any case, there was no blood on the street. The body was gone. Checking the QED, he found that there was no trace of the winged creature, either.
What the hell? Van der Whall tried to get back to Drabeck’s…memory? imagination? something in between?—but he couldn’t find it. Checking with the hospital (the actual building, not any of the staff, as the literary shorthand might lead you to believe), he found that Drabeck’s life support system had been shut down because his insurance had run out. He had died without coming out of his coma.
Later, Van der Whall would write an article about this experience for The Journal of Object Psychology D, in which he would warn that dying writers should be monitored to ensure that their works didn’t bleed into the real world. He would add playwrights and screenwriters for good measure. He would emphasize that science fiction and fantasy writers should come in for special scrutiny. If a Jane Austen novel manifested itself in the real world, the worst that could happen was that the Emo community would grow by a half dozen people. If a Philip K. Dick novel manifested itself in the real world…
Copyright © 2014 by Ira Nayman. All rights reserved.
Art Copyright © 2014 by Bob Bello. All Rights Reserved.
Finity
by Felicity Savage
Raphaella Chang woke up with an advertisement tattooed on her face. She remembered orbiting the pop-up booth on the high street, taunting her friends, the promise of free painkillers. She dragged herself to the bathroom, and knew she wasn’t going in to work today. The advertisement was for a new model of smartphone. Her eyes were icons, her nose a scroll wheel, her mouth a start menu. Her friends were not real friends. Everyone had let her down.
The cheque, she’d done it for the cheque. She fumbled for her own smartphone, accessed her bank account. She didn’t have to go to work. Ever again. Sod the NHS.
She was supine on the bathroom floor, reaching for the Vicodin she’d taped under the sink, when reality encroached. The fee from the smartphone company, although large, was finite. Everything was finite. She rolled onto her back. Her brain felt like a mouth that had bitten off too large a chunk of an ice lolly. The clawed feet of the bath, scaled with greenish rust, bloated, knotty, looked like the roots of a chestnut tree. She got up on her knees and vomited into the toilet.
She used some of the money to get into London, where the news had said they were holding auditions for the Mars First expedition. The BBC had treated it like a joke, and she did see a few people in Star Trek uniforms, but most of the hopefuls looked normal, and there were thousands of them queueing outside the Gherkin in the sticky heat. Thousands. So sod the BBC. If they had any idea what reality was like, they wouldn’t be surprised that so many people were competing to sign up for a one-way trip to Mars.
A sleek blonde with a European accent took one look at Raphaella and said, “Ms. Chang, are you depressed?”
“Me? What, you kidding? I just broke up with my boyfriend. That’s why I got this done, to celebrate, in it. Plus I’ve quit my job. Wiping the arses of old dears on the vegetable ward, waiting for them to shuffle off. I went into nursing because I love people, I really do, but it gets you down. I mean, by the time they’re in terminal care, they’re not people any more, are they?” She added, self-indulgently, “Maybe I am depressed.”
But the blonde was no longer listening. “Ms. Chang, did you say you are a registered nurse?”
In her evaluation file it said: Outgoing, bubbly, adventurous. Opportunity for product placement deal with Samsung???
Already by the third round of auditions, the Mars First YouTube channel topped the global rankings, and each live-streamed episode of the show (lightly edited for verisimilitude) attracted a global audience of millions. Advertising revenue was exceeding targets, and this mattered, because advertising was an important source of mission funding, second only to the contributions of the Russian philanthropist who had founded Mars First. “Whatever the government can do, the private sector can do better, faster, and cheaper,” he had said. “Of course safety will be our top concern.”
This was no mere slogan. The short-listed candidates endured months of training in an undisclosed location in the Gobi desert. In addition to hab maintenance, systems diagnosis, and self-treatment in the event of a radiation overdose, they learnt to put on an EVA suit in twenty seconds flat, right a flipped rover, and find a pinhole leak in 2.5 kilometers of hydroponic irrigation tubing. They had to memorize a series of lengthy checklists known collectively as ‘The Script.’ The point was to reduce the future Martians to appendages of the onboard computer. Human error was to be eliminated by depriving the humans of scope for independent action. Their role was to react, and look hot doing it.
The American government had announced the previous year that it planned to put a man on Mars by 2032, using the once-cancelled, now-resurrected Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle. This had provoked roars of mirth around the globe from the fraternity of billionaires and wonks who drove the conversation about manned spaceflight. However, the president’s declaration seemed to trip a switch in the zeitgeist. It was suddenly acceptable to throw money at what had been seen as a fringe obsession. Within a few months, no fewer than three other governments and eight independent consortia had announced technically serious, intellectually heterodox plans to put a man…or a woman…or several of each…on the Red Planet.
Only the Mars First Project eschewed professional qualifications, selecting its ‘pioneers’ on fuzzier criteria. None of the crew ever did find out exactly what those criteria were. “At the end of the day,” Raphaella said, “everyone’s fumbling in the dark, aren’t they? Give us that joint, Deet.”
Deet, real name Dieter Arnaldson, was an improbably short Swede. A compulsive student of risk, he explained to the others that their ship, the Roquentin, was basically a gigantic flying bomb. All but two of the rivalrous Mars missions relied on the same nuclear propulsion technology pioneered by NASA in the 1950s. The proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world had broken the taboo on the development of fission engines, throwing open the route of least resistance to the solar system. Limited availability of plutonium-238 had set off a scramble for supplies, in which Mars First’s philanthropic Russian founder held a murky edge. So they had their fuel. But so did the Chinese, and so did the Mormons.
“Obviously we’ve got to beat the Chinese,” Raphaella said. She extended one leg straight out in a yoga pose that only looked easy. She had abs now, and her brain was no longer populated by lemming-hordes of panicky thoughts about dying alone. The doctor had told her she had a problem with her cortisol, and given her adrenal support meds. Just like that, what she had always thought of as her demons had vanished. She breathed in, breathed out, smelling the smell of socks that permeated even the most advanced Russian facilities.
Off-camera, the producer mentioned the fact that Raphaella’s own surname was Chinese.
“Yeah, but I never met the cunt. Did a runner before I was born. My mother’s maiden name was Winston. She never divorced him. She was punishing him, see?”
After that episode went live, Raphaella got a Facebook message with the subject line Hello! Raphaella! From Your Real Brother Ha ha! This Is Francis! She deleted it unread.
The day before lau
nch, her mother telephoned the facility and begged to speak to her. Raphaella relented.
“All right, Mum. Everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see.”
Her mother wept about their estrangement and how sorry she was that she’d “let Raphaella go.”
Raphaella felt her self-control melting. “You didn’t let me go. I went. Even you can see the difference, I expect. I’ve got to go, Mum, I’m being paged, but let’s Skype when we get there.” She laughed wildly. “We’re going to be connected, of course we are, wouldn’t be much of a reality show otherwise, would it?”
She was not being paged. It was just Deet, lumbering into the room with a new laminated pass around his neck. He announced that he had been named Field Producer, meaning that he would be responsible for organizing their video feeds from Mars. Raphaella congratulated him. She wouldn’t have wanted that job, but Deet saw it as an honor. More power to him.
The Roquentin took off on a fiery palm tree of exhaust. A conventional two-stage launch rocket carried the ship into orbit. The crew filmed themselves ping-ponging weightlessly around the cabin. Raphaella gawked at the famous sight of Earth floating in the darkness like a soap bubble. Then they had to strap in again. The fission engine’s computer-controlled ignition countdown had begun. A message flashed up on Raphaella’s goggles from Sanjiv Kapoor, the former Bollywood stuntman and cut-up of the crew: This is your captain speaking. All electronic devices must now be switched off…
They laughed on the Roquentin. They laughed on Earth. They laughed all the way to Mars. The joke, of course, was that they had no captain.
INT. HAB 1—DAY.
We PAN over grey inflatable couches littered with tools and crumpled ration packs. Imagine the office of a social media start-up, crammed into the galley of an Aeroflot 747. A large MONITOR is propped on stacks of computer equipment.
ON MONITOR—A pinkish sky bends to meet an icy brown plain, which is devoid of topographical interest, except for one low rise on the horizon. The sun is a pale blob a thumb’s width above this feature. In the foreground stands the Roquentin, its silver radiation shielding badly abraded. Further away, a rover with an earthmover attachment stands idle beside a shallow scrape. Fastened to the rover by tow ropes, a mass of silver foil like a crumpled parachute rises and falls on the Martian wind. It is HAB 2, the twin of this one, in its deflated state.
DEET (V.O):
So, the towing idea didn’t work. Sanjiv and Mary will just have to stay here with us. But I think the problem is they have ripped Hab 2. Later I will try to reinflate. Anyway, they could not detach tow ropes from Rover 2, so they stole Rover 1. They have taken it towards Little Big Hill. Raphaella is checking now did they steal anything else.
The door unzips and Raphaella FALLS into the hab, catching herself on her hands and inadvertently somersaulting. She bangs her tailbone on the low table.
RAPHAELLA:
Ow.
We ZOOM IN on Raphaella’s bosom as she wobbles to her feet. The logo of the Mars First mission is stamped across the chest of her EVA innersuit, which looks like a skin-tight leotard. We FOCUS on each nipple in turn and then hurriedly ZOOM back out. The frame STEADIES. Deet has put the camera down. He limps into the frame. Like Raphaella, he is puffy-faced but thin, suffering from both emaciation and subcutaneous edema. His beard is flecked with bits of dry skin.
RAPHAELLA:
I love Martian gravity, have I mentioned?
DEET:
Did you check the reactor? The water extractor? The nitrogen trap?
RAPHAELLA:
I’ll have to cut those tow ropes. The knots Sanjiv tied are absolute cunts.
DEET:
You look like something’s missing.
RAPHAELLA:
They took the HGAS.
DEET:
Fuck! They what? That’s not possible!
RAPHAELLA:
Go and look for yourself if you don’t believe me. They took the fucker right off its brackets. Sanjiv must’ve climbed up the outside of the ship while Mary was crapping on at me about her unenduuurable paaain.
DEET:
All right. OK. This is a disaster.
RAPHAELLA:
It’s only a radio. Everything else is there.
DEET:
No, no, I mean…I’m worried about them. If they didn’t take any food or water, how can they survive?
RAPHAELLA:
They’ll come back, of course.
DEET:
I am not sure. Sanjiv was very angry.
RAPHAELLA:
Well, I understand his point of view, to be honest. You’ve been acting like you’re in charge or something ever since we got here, and I’m sick of it, too, since you ask.
DEET:
It’s not for me to make such a big decision. I also have pain, but I’m not complaining!
RAPHAELLA:
I’m going back out.
DEET:
No! You’ve already reached your EVA limit today!
RAPHAELLA:
Someone’s got to dig, and it’s obviously not going to be you, is it?
She slithers out of the airlock, her feet waving in the air like a diver’s flippers.
DEET (to camera):
I can’t believe Sanjiv took the High Gain Antenna System!
Deet paces. The cramped dimensions of the hab allow him to take a maximum of two steps in any direction. His gait is stooped, hobbling.
DEET:
I know why he took it, of course. He is a Chinese spy. He’s probably gone to them now. We know they landed safely, same window as we did, although we were first. This crap about operating on Mary is only a cover story. He will lie and say Raphaella and I are dead. But we are not dead, not even in trouble. Nuclear power is OK, water mining is OK, oxygen conversion is OK, farm is OK, all according to the Script! So what, we lose radios? Only Mr. KGB will lose his millions from selling my films to worldwide audience. Fuck him.
Deet halts and rubs his kidneys. He grimaces in pain.
DEET:
Everything is OK.
—CUT—
Clumsy in her EVA suit, Raphaella climbed up the ribbed hose that led from the airlock of Hab 1 to the surface. It was blowing a gale of 120mph. Dust storms hazed the distant edge of the plateau. She experienced the wind as a light breeze, thanks to the low density of the atmosphere, but she knew that its apparent gentleness was deceptive. She might as well have been standing in a storm of ground glass.
Her loping stride belying her haste, she bounced to the rover. Crouching in the lee of the vehicle, she dusted off the solar array. That blur on the horizon looked too weak to charge an iPad, let alone a Mars rover, but the battery indicators were solidly in the green. She settled into the cockpit and started the engine.
It had been known for more than a decade that the polar plateaus of Mars held high concentrations of water ice. The microwave-powered water extractors in the Roquentin and Hab 1 worked perfectly, condensing up to 50 litres of water a day from the frozen soil. Nitrogen traps provided the other component of their air. The main bottleneck was the water extractors’ need to be fed several tonnes of soil per day. The rovers, with their vibrating digger blades, were crucial for this task.
Raphaella now calculated the effect on their water and air supplies if Sanjiv and Mary didn’t come back. The loss of Rover 1 (bad) had to be balanced against the loss of Mary (good). The American woman had clung to the wasteful habit of washing. “She was even stealing water from the farm for her beeyootee routine,” Raphaella murmured to herself. “I’m sure of it.”
She dwelled for a while on all the things she hated, make that absolutely fucking loathed, about Mary, while she trundled to and fro between her dig and the hopper that stuck up from the dirt above Hab 1. The rover lurched over the hollows of past digs she’d filled in again with dry, used-up soil. Fantails of dust spurted from the treads. She’d come all the way to Mars just to end up driving a JCB for ten hours a day…
Gettin
g back to her calculations, she settled that the non-reappearance of Sanjiv and Mary would give herself and Deet a better chance of survival. If the dust storms didn’t get any worse. If the reactor didn’t crap out. If Mission Control didn’t somehow manage to feed the computer new instructions that would close her sanity loophole. There were so many different variables. But for the first time since they landed, she felt cautiously optimistic
The Mars First mission planners had got a lot of things right. The Roquentin had touched down smack in the middle of the designated landing zone, without breaking so much as an antenna, thanks to hitherto-untested aerobraking technology that worked like a dream. The ship had then shifted into ‘supply mode.’ Two months into the homesteading phase of the mission, the solid-state fission engine was cranking out more power than four people could ever use. Periodical discharges of electricity sparked lightning storms over the settlement. Another reason to bury the habs. That had been anticipated. So had the radiation. Two meters of Martian dirt now sheltered Deet in his nerd cave from bombardment with heavy ions.
Unfortunately, the mission planners had not reckoned sufficiently with the best-known challenge to human health resulting from microgravity: the loss of calcium from bones, and its consquent excretion via the kidneys, where it caused agonizing kidney stones. Mary had gone down with the ailment first, during their 90-day voyage from Earth. Magnesium citrate supplementation had been prescribed for all of them. It turned out that Mary had not been taking her pills because they gave her the runs. Surgery judged too risky, the only treatment prescribed was to wait until she passed the kidney stones, and in the meantime hold her down and make her take her pills—a duty that Raphaella, as medic, performed with perhaps-excessive zeal.
Poor Mary, however, remained in so much pain that she could not help the others to perform the hundred and one daily tasks ordained for them by The Script.