I still went to high school. The people running the Mars One project sent us back to school for six months before we were to leave. Parts of each month, anyway. We had to go for long training weekends, but most of that time we were back in school. Me to my hometown school in Madison, the other three to schools in their countries. They want all four of the teens who are going to be “habituated to age-appropriate social behavior enforced by peer interaction.” Which is their way of saying they want us to be normal.
Or, the way my friend Herc put it, “They don’t want to be stuck in a tin can with freaks.”
“Pretty much,” I agreed.
“Way too late for that.”
I sighed. We tapped pop bottles. Sipped. Watched the clouds sail slowly across the Wisconsin sky. We were sprawled on bleachers on the north side of the track outside of our school, James Madison Memorial High. It was September 10 but it felt like mid-July because of a freak heat wave that turned everything into a sauna. Humidity and temperature in the eighties. Forget anything that involved moving.
Sweating was a theme. The only easy thing to do was talk.
“And this is really happening?” asked Herc.
“Yeah.”
“Going to Mars.”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head, grinned, and took a long swallow.
“Oh, please,” I said, “if you’re going to give me the same old ‘you’re going to die up there’ speech, save it. I’m tired of—”
“Nah,” Herc said. “Even I’m tired of hearing that crap and I’m staying here.”
“Okay.”
“I’m just wondering what you’re going to do about them?” He used his bottle to point to the crowd on the other side of the chain-link fence, behind the cops and their wooden sawhorse barricades. The sunlight flashed on hundreds of cameras—cell phone and professional. Broadcast towers rose above the seven news vans parked on the street. There was a bunch of protestors, too. There always were, ever since Mars One started. Some were just whack jobs who seemed to like to yell at anyone who was doing something interesting. Some were people who wanted to try and get onto the news, even if it was via a photobomb. Some, though, were religious nuts who seemed to think going to Mars was somehow against God. Not sure how that worked, though. Those protestors were always there.
What I was looking for were the really scary ones, the ones who always wore white robes and red bandannas, the ones who called themselves the Neo-Luddites. Those guys were freaky, but I knew they wouldn’t be on school grounds. The Neo-Luddites usually only showed up at official mission events or sometimes when we were filming an episode for one of the reality shows.
The Neo-Luddites were a deeply weird kind of extremist group. Not exactly religious—I mean, they weren’t fundamentalists the way you’d think. It’s hard to explain them because they mostly talked about what they didn’t believe in and what they were afraid of, but not really much at all about what they did believe in.
As far as I could tell there were two kinds of them. Most of their group wasn’t violent. They were organized and persistent but they didn’t cause a ruckus at events. But there was a smaller bunch that was way dangerous. No one in the press or military or in Mars One could seem to decide it they were an official part of the Neo-Luddites or a separate splinter group who just used that name. But that bunch didn’t just stand around and wave signs. They sent an actual hit team out to place magnetic limpet mines on the hull of one of the SpaceX sea-launch stations. The bombs had some kind of special trembler switch that was triggered by the exhaust blast when the SpaceX team test-fired one of the new Falcon Heavy rockets. Seventeen people were killed—blown to bits—and another thirty were hurt, some really bad. The four-person Neo-Luddite team was killed too. No one can tell if it was a suicide attack or if they got caught in their own blast by accident. Dead either way. The authorities used DNA from some of the body parts they fished out of the water to identify one man who was known to have ties to the Neo-Luddites, and when accusations were made the Neo-Luddite goofballs didn’t deny it. They didn’t admit it either. What they did was post photos of the murdered SpaceX people on their website with the heading: “BETRAY THE TRUST—PAY THE PRICE!”
The Trust . . . ? They never came right out and said what that meant. Everyone on the news had been beating each other up with theories.
That was the first attack. After that the Neo-Luddites were tied to some other bombings—of a parts manufacturer making equipment for Virgin Galactic, an electronics firm building a guidance system for SpaceDev, a metallurgy plant making hull sections under contract to ARCA Space Corporation, and the chemical processing plant in China that makes fuel for the Shenzhou program. More people were killed, and every program upped its security game by a factor of ten. Definitely Mars One did. The mission shrinks grilled every single candidate six ways from Sunday. Lie detector tests, wave after wave of psych evals, questioning by cops from Interpol. It was scary as hell. All through it I felt sweaty and guilty for no reason. If they’d leaned any harder on me I’d have confessed to everything up to and including the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
There was a movement going around to have the Neo-Luddites declared an actual terrorist group. Some of them definitely were, which was why I always looked to see if there were any in the crowd wherever I went. I’d seen them a bunch of times, but always the quiet ones. None of them had chucked a bomb at me, so I’m putting that in the win category.
Scared me, though. What if they went after my folks? Or Izzy?
I wasn’t the only person losing sleep over it. I just wished it made some kind of sense.
Today, though, it was the usual suspects. Nobody to be scared of.
The sun baked us all. I sighed and rested the cold bottom of the pop bottle on my forehead.
When I didn’t say anything, Herc snorted and sat up. He was about my size: five ten, lean, built for running. We both ran track. I was faster, but he could run all day. He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt from the church a cappella choir he was in, the Preach Boys. “They’re going to dog you every day until you light the candle, you know that, right?”
“They’ve been dogging all of us since the mission administrators at Mars One announced the final team three years ago,” I said.
“Yeah, but you and the other kids are the real story.”
“How do you figure that?”
“C’mon, everyone else is an adult. They’re legal, which means they can vote, get married, whatever. They have a choice. You guys are minors. You’re going because your families are going. A lot of people think that’s messed up.”
I pulled my shades down to look at him over the lenses. Herc’s family emigrated from Mexico two years before he was born, and he had dark brown hair and his skin was a medium tan. I was eighth-generation American white boy, but I took a tan that made me darker than him. A lot of it earned when our Mars One training teams were in the Bahamas doing underwater drills in space suits.
“You think it’s messed up too?”
He shrugged. “You want me to lie or do you want to hear what I really think?”
“You always tell me what you really think. So . . . sure, fire away.”
Herc took a few moments with that, glancing at the reporters and gawkers, then back to me, then up at the sky. “I wish I was going too,” he said.
I waited for the grin, the punch line. But his face didn’t change.
“You serious?” I asked.
“God’s honest truth, Tris.”
The buzzer rang. Lunch was over. I did a slow sit-up and swung my legs off the bleacher.
“You’re crazier than I am,” I told him.
A dragonfly buzzed around me and then whizzed off.
“Saw your mom on the news,” Herc said. “She looked pissed.”
“Mom always looks pissed.”
“Nah, your mom’s cool. She’s just intense.”
“I guess.”
The news story last night was about the series of technical problems they’d had with one of the rockets. Technically they weren’t our rockets—Mars One was leasing them from SpaceX—but my mom was the chief mission engineer, so it was her job to make sure everything was totally up to code. She didn’t allow for mistakes. She didn’t even allow for “margin of error.” As she’d said a million times, “In space you get one try to do it right or you’re dead.” Herc was right; she was intense. She was also almost always right.
“That guy from CNN was riding her pretty hard,” said Herc. “All that stuff about sabotage and stuff.”
“Not happening.” I yawned and stretched. “We have better security than NASA. I’m serious.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Herc, “but people are saying that someone’s trying to stop you guys from flying.”
“People are always saying that.”
He shrugged. “Whatever, dude. You’re the one who’s going to be sitting on a big tank of highly flammable rocket fuel, not me. If you blow up, can I have your Xbox?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, man, but bite me.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
We stood up. So did the two private security guys who were assigned to me. My dad called them Frick and Frack. Their real names were Kang and Carrieri, but I called them that only when I had to. They were here to protect me and they’d apparently had their personalities surgically removed along with any trace of a sense of humor. On any given day they’d say about ten words to me.
In a strange little pack, we walked off the field and back toward the school. Even from that distance I could hear all those cameras going click-click-click.