by Nolan Oreno
Hollis shook his mind into the moment. He rounded the room and placed his hand on Asnee’s back. The serene music swelled around them. Hollis could see that Asnee’s suit-identifier, the outline of a technician's builder drone, was flashing red. He was not well.
“Talk to me, I haven’t seen you in a while. I want to know how you’re doing." It all seemed so familiar to Hollis. He knew the moves like steps in a dance.
No reaction. Only slow moving eyes tracing fast moving fish.
Hollis continued. “I know- I know it’s been tough, for you- for all of us, but that’s common sense and you don’t want to hear that right now. I- well- I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you. Whatever’s going on, I’m here for you."
Hollis felt like the Computer during one of its sessions, only with less direction and more problems of his own. He had to try to guide Asnee as the Computer would, because as it seemed, Asnee’s own sessions with the therapist were much less fruitful than his own.
“It’s like this at first, remember what happened to me? With my family?" Hollis said. “I was much worse. I didn’t only try to harm myself, but I tried to harm others, remember? I snapped and attacked Franco because he asked me what my daughters name was. He was trying to console me, I know now, in his own stupid way. It was just-"
“Be quiet. Watch," whispered Asnee as he drifted farther from his friend and closer to the sea beyond the glass. “Watch."
Hollis watched as Asnee continued again with his hand ritual, quivering his fingers in pulsations and sentient grasps. He drew his hand in this circular motion around a section of the aquarium, luring the mindless fish in figure-eights and more complex designs, and after he was noticeably satisfied with his presentation, he returned to Hollis.
“I don’t understand," apologized Hollis.
Asnee looked disappointed. “That was, right there as you saw it, the meaning of life. The answer. The reason why we’re all here, right now."
Hollis dropped his eyes. It was not enough to lose someone in death, but to lose someone in life, that was far worse for one to bare.
“Asnee, I’m going to Janya’s grave now. I’m going there to mourn for her and to love her and to accept her as she is and was." Hollis turned for the door. “If you can meet me there, on the hill, I would like that very much." The door was sliding between the pair. “And so would she."
The fish darted at random angles at the sound of the sealing door, and Asnee peered through his own reflection trying to understand what it all meant.
The hill looked the same as it did before. Great clouds of sand blew off its peak but the shape was unchanged and remained exact. With each grain of sand taken by the winds, there was another one waiting to fall into its place. It was as if every grain of sand on the planet was linked together in a ubiquitous awareness and the desert was a single, endless entity. Hollis saw this as he climbed the hill in his exosuit. The pounding of his boots displaced the levels of the sand but before he could lift his foot, sand from the hill's peak trickled down to cover his prints below. The desert was keen on showing no signs of his existence on its surface. He would leave no tracks to follow home and the desert wanted it this way. It wanted him to get lost out in its roaming hills as he did before. It wanted him to lose his mind. It was hungry to bury his bones. But Hollis refused to give it a chance to take him again, and so he kept climbing and maintained his eyes forward to the top.
Where before he saw the shredded corpse of Janya now settled a wooden spike that swayed and rocked in the sandy gusts. The blood coated sands were replaced with their cleaner cousins, and it looked nearly too pristine that Hollis second-guessed this was the correct location.
Hollis shook his head and tried to look at the grave site in a more positive perspective. This was where his friend was now. Janya was with him. There was peace to be found on the hill-top, he realized, and he listened to the winds flutter by with good thoughts for a good friend had.
Hollis recalled his favorite memory of Janya.
It was in the cold of Russia a year before their departure and two years into their training. The clandestine colonists were assembling in a dilapidated warehouse full of unused car-parts. They were meeting in an old automotive assembly plant. Sections of the building’s tin-siding were recoiling out towards the frozen tundra outside, leaving large gaps where the cold snow rushed in, but the edifices exposed facade was a factor in its defense. Upon the rickey high-lofts perched dozens of UNF, or United National Forces, snipers, and they aimed their guns out of the naked walls. Beyond the warehouse was an unmapped region of the Central Siberian Plateau. It was nearly impossible to navigate through the ridged weather conditions of the area, and in a place with no roads or signs, the only way to get there was by helicopter or drop-ship, and that was precisely how the colonists had arrived.
The extra precaution of the meeting place was due to the sensitivity of the information being disclosed. Space was cleared in the warehouse’s center for a conference between the twenty-two soon-to-be colonists and the project lead, Adrian Minor. Minor, a retired American politician, looked nearly too old to be operating such a vital mission. He appeared to be on the verge of death, with hair as white as the Siberian snow and skin as frail as wet tissue paper. Most wondered how he was still walking, let alone leading mankind’s most important operation, ultimately forming the Extraterrestrial Colonial Society after years in politics. His voice was just as dreary as expected when he spoke to them. He was a ghost in a ghost house.
“Hello colonists of the new world, my name is Adrian Minor, as some of you may already know, and it is very much my pleasure to meet you all for the first time. I have been the puppeteer pulling the strings to this colonial movement, funded of course by NASA and the United Nations, and I am glad that we can finally meet one another face-to-face. I know now, looking upon all of your young and eager faces, that we have indeed picked the perfect cast to fulfill our needs. You will be the ones to build, what I have named, our backup world. The same way one makes copies of important documents in case of a data corruption, we will make another copy of our civilization. But you must ask yourselves: what is the likelihood of us losing the original?" Adrian paced back and forth on the platform, pausing for dry breaths in the cold air. “And that’s what I am here to tell you, an old man in the snow, breaking his doctor’s orders in leaving his house: to divulge to you the truth."
A nearby body-guard wrapped a thick blanket around him.
“Thank you, thank you," Adrian nodded. “I had to tell you this myself, not through others like I so often have done before. I had to tell you about Protocol Downpour and the effects it has brought upon our planet."
The colonist mumbled to themselves, and Adrian began the talk he waited decades to have.
“Thirty years ago I worked for the United States government as a higher-up in the National Security Office, as it is known to all of you I am sure. I was informed of top-secret information involving the rising conflicts centered in Southeast Asia, China, and North-Korea specifically. A war with the Chinese was inevitable, I was told, over resource and economic gain. Their population was growing too large for its borders to contain, and they would eventually be forced outwards, like the water of an overflowing bathtub, and this would be the spark to the third World War. Unfortunately for us, this risk-analysis came true some thirty years later and as such the United National Forces was constructed to hold back the suppressor from world domination. But the UNF is losing the war, and losing the war means many nations lose their sovereignty. We can’t have that. And sadly, for our sake, we refuse to have it."
Adrian took a minute to catch his breath. He had never spoken this loudly since he was first afflicted with old age. He had to fight the urge to want to lay down and admit to what he was: dying.
“Thirty years ago I was revealed a last-ditch effort. A way to end the Chinese threat once and for all if they were ever suspected to win the war. This effort was called Protocol Downpour, as I’m c
ertain you are aware. In its initiation, the UN governments under the cover of the UNF would send packages of specially-designed ultra-nukes via stealth drones that would lay waste to massive areas of militarized space in South-East Asia. It would be Hiroshima magnified a hundred times over. It would be the solution to winning the war, but also the end to billions of lives. Some innocent, some not, I am sure."
He gave the colonists a minute to catch their breaths as he caught his own.
“Protocol Downpour has been operational for the last three years, and because of our ignorance, we did not expect the nuclear retaliation to be so great by the Chinese and their allies who had hidden their secret facilities from us with satellite-blockers. Flash forward three years and the consequences are clear today. Our over-usage of nuclear weaponry on both sides has been devastating to our planet as it is evident in our struggles with crop-growing and air-pollution. However, what is perhaps the most disturbing, and what I am here to talk to you about today, are the other after-effects of Protocol Downpour. The one’s that are being hidden from the general public."
Adrian looked around the warehouse to be sure only the ears in the room could hear what he had to say next.
“This is the will be unsettling for you to hear, but remember that this is all still based upon rough calculations. It has been an active effort of the UNF to keep this information above top-secret and out of the world press, but environmentalists are catching on to what is really happening. A council of well-regarded scientists were selected to study the implications of a continued use of Protocol Downpour, and a notable number made the conclusion that such continual high caliber strikes of atomic explosives not only radiates our soils but deteriorates the ozone layer. Large impact events of that size are too hard to calculate with far too many unknown variables, and our knowledge of nuclear radiation is minimal, but we know now that it has been unrelenting upon the thin layer of gases that protects Earth from the even more irradiated vacuum of open space. As the ozone layer weakens, as it has dramatically over the last years, there becomes a possibility of a tear like that you would find on a balloon. The inevitable pop would leave the Earth essentially naked to the universe, initiating a rapid rise of the global atmospheric temperature to that beyond the survivable. A hole in the ozone would flood the surface of the Earth in hours with solar fires and cosmic radiation and suck the oxygen right out of our lungs. It would be a mass extinction in less than half a day. Our mass extinction. One just as unexpected by us as it was the dinosaurs, except two important differences: they weren’t the culprits of their own demise as we are, and they didn’t have a chance to save themselves as we can."
The audience mumbled and stirred.
“My friends in high places have told me that the beginning stages of a possible tear has been detected above the north Atlantic Ocean. Now, it seems highly unlikely knowing this information that Protocol Downpour wouldn’t be shelved for good, but don’t give the UNF more credit than they deserve. Keep in mind that this was the minority of the council's result after analysis and the majority of the others deemed it safe for continual use. The UNF will do anything to win this war and are foolish enough to continue striking nukes to do so. We can’t assume that they won’t stop sending the nukes China’s way if it means our sovereignty for a little longer. Upon hearing this top-secret covenant that may destroy the world thirty years ago, I knew that something had to be done, as anyone with a right mind naturally would. But I couldn’t save our planet, not as one man against a dozen armies. Instead, I decided to create another. Protocol Downpour is the reason I founded the Martian colony project and the Extraterrestrial Colonial Society. Eventually, after the UN nations became aware of their mistake, they began funding my project as well. I convinced them the need for a Martian colony where, three years after the initial touchdown of twenty-two highly qualified colonists, and after construction and terraformation, we will begin to traffick in refugees from Earth. And as you all are aware, your families will be the first to come."
Adrian almost regretted telling them everything in that instant. They looked scared. Too scared. Would they turn back? Would they stand up and leave? Leave to where? He could not lose any of them, not after all the work that was done in the selection process. Each one was as vital and the next, but some, like Saul Lind and Hollis Reyes, were in-expendable.
“I know this is hard to hear, but this is the truth of it. I don’t want to frighten you but fuel you. Give you a reason to build faster and better. Keep your families safe-”
Adrian’s breath ran away from him, and he left the colonists in an eerie stillness. A guard came up behind Adrian and whispered into his ear.
“I- I must be leaving now. I am a tired, old man, but I hope you have a new appreciation for the mission. For the colony. For each other. And remember, the seed of civilization is yours to grow."
He waved off the crowd, too sad to look them in the eye’s. He was a father sending his kids off to war. He felt responsible for them, for Earth’s fate, but their destinies were on Mars now. It was out of his hands. So he let them go. He had to say goodbye.
Hollis remembered shivering in the masses in the Siberian warehouse. He remembered holding his gloves between his trembling legs and heaving plumes of cold steam from his lungs. He had thought about turning back. About standing up and leaving. If the tear in the atmosphere was real he wanted to be with his daughter and his wife for its opening. He could not leave her alone for three years while he was planting trees in a far away desert. It made no sense. He held his convulsing knees steady as he lifted himself from his seat, and before he realized what had happened, he was standing up. He was the only one standing in the trembling crowd and all of their terrified eyes were upon him, waiting to see what he would do next. He knew that if he left now, with all of them watching, most would follow. So he just stood, for a few seconds, perhaps minutes, thinking about Rosa, Elena, and Earth.
It was seconds before he decided to run that a small and young Asian girl in a white parka beside him took his glove in hers. She held his hand tight, and Hollis looked down at her rounded and honest face to see a girl who he would come to know as Janya. She spoke almost as quietly as the old man and with just as much love.
“Stay just a bit longer," she nearly begged. “Please."
And Hollis did. He scanned the shaken onlookers who scanned him back, let out a great puff of his breath, and he settled back in his seat. He would wait until the meeting had finished, he thought. At the very least out of courtesy.
“Thank you," he whispered to the girl at his right.
That was what Hollis remembered best about Janya as he smiled at the wooden spike that shivered in the desert just as he once did long ago in the snow. He remembered her reassuring words more than any other spoken that night, and there were plenty of other powerful sentences to win his favor. Janya's words had more impact than any one of Adrian Minor’s or the other mission counselors. She always had the ability to sense a situation and figure out the perfect thing to say. She saw what no other could and knew when to stay or when to leave. But if that were true, what then of the current situation the colonists of Mars found themselves in? She was the one who stood up and left them. Was she right to leave? Was he right to stay? If only Janya had someone to tell her what she told him so many years ago. Stay just a bit longer. It may have worked, mulled Hollis.
It may have worked.
Hollis turned to leave when he saw another figure climbing up the hill after him. They struggling not to fall against the shifting incline of the sand. Hollis thought to help but thought it better to let the figure make the climb themselves. To rise, to fall, to get up again and fight against the running sands. Hollis waited until the driven figure made it to the top of the hill before he took him in an embrace.
“Stay just a bit longer," muffled Hollis into Asnee’s shoulder.
The two cried on top of the hill until they felt satisfied their sins were washed away.
Part Seven
: The Children of Mars
The water was not warm enough. The man reached forward and cranked the lever a few more inches to the left and looked up again into the forceful stream, blinking as the liquid beads rolled into the corners of his eyes. Not warm enough. He tried the knob again and realized it was at its furthermost direction. Sighing in acceptance under the cold current, he began to lather his long and tangled blonde hair with a dollop of organic hair gel. The curls slowly straightened and the desert’s dirt was taken with the rushing water into the drain beneath his toes. This had been his first shower in weeks. He had been too busy surveying the ruins of the Refugee Settlement, hopeful to continue construction and rebuild what was lost, and he would be going back again today.
The Refugee Settlement had been frozen-in-time since the colony discovered the fate of Earth, months ago. For the two years prior, Saul worked daily in the design and construction of the twelve high-rise towers that made up the desert city. With the partnership of head engineer Maven Atoll and the other eleven engineers, as well as the drone technicians who used their robots to do the heavy lifting, Saul had already developed much of the foundation for the towers. Each tower had the capacity of housing 1,500 citizens of Earth in accommodating, albeit minimalistic, conditions. The towering complexes were similar to metropolitan apartments, however, containing far less space and only the basic amenities: water, generator-run electricity, and a robust air-conditioning system that separated out the Martian air. Anything beyond these features was nonexistent, and the only means of entertainment was an old-age emergency radio system built into each apartment. In their early forms, the towers were meant to keep the Earth-fleeing families alive and not much beyond that. The future, however, might allow for a more evolved cityscape with bustling sidewalks, sprawling parks, and commercial shopping. For now, Saul could only focus on convincing the others in the colony to join him in the settlements reconstruction, and this would be as difficult task considering there were no Mars-bound refugees coming from their old planet anytime soon. But it was not for Earth anymore, it was for Mars. For their future. Saul alone recognized this.