2228 AD
The moderator, host of a gossip show that surpassed all news programs in ratings, squared his million-dollar face to the camera and smiled as he reminded himself the life insurance policy would actually pay out twenty million, regardless of manner of death. He hated to leave his cats, but they would be well cared for. He felt no such regret for the studio security team—stroked by scantily clad assistants, pictured and autographed—who would lose their jobs upon review of footage showing him artfully skirting the bomb detectors.
…if they survived.
He winked at one of them, just off camera.
“Now I don’t know a bit from a byte unless it has teeth,” he said from the crystal lectern at center stage. “But I’m told the first assignment of an information technology student is to code a greeting of ‘Hello, World’ into the computer. So, in that spirit, Hello, World!”
The studio audience applauded dutifully.
“Not only are we transmitting globally around the Earth, but also throughout space! To whom, you say?” The moderator rested a forearm on the lectern and raised his other hand as if summoning power from the cosmos. “We are linked in quasi real-time to the moon bases, the Mars Orbiter Stations One and Two, and the scientific space stations around Jupiter’s Europa. Our engineers—also known as magicians, ha!—have accomplished this via the worldwide wifi, gamma-cast, exo-net, as well as the more archaic broadcast technologies. They’ve even used smoke signals for those nooks and crannies here on Earth, or would have if outdoor burning wasn’t banned in first world nations, ha!” A quick laugh and collar tug. He touched his ear. “What’s that? Really? Why, it’s nothing short of amazing! Ladies and gentlemen, the producers have just relayed to your not-so-humble host that return bits indicate our live viewers number in the billions!”
More applause, with greater enthusiasm. Many preened hair and garb, well aware they would be captured on camera in a huge way at some point soon. Billions would indeed see them, though not in the manner anticipated.
“And as you might expect, the number of dead viewers is more grounded—joking! Horrible! That’s just horrible. Simply no excuse, I know. Besides, nobody civilized gets buried in the ground anymore…it’s all about getting atomized.”
Some laughs and groans.
“Hey, blame the producers. They’re the ones who hired”—he made direct eye contact with the camera lens—“the writers.” The host held this pose for a heartbeat then knocked twice on the crystal lectern. He smiled and read the words hovering just above the camera lens.
“So why are we here? It’s a question philosophers have wrestled with for eons. More specifically, why are we gathered here tonight? Our six panelists are light years beyond Programming 101, but one could conclude the Earth First Faction would like to limit that opening greeting to ‘Hello, World,’ whereas the Space Consortium of America would like to expand to the plural, as in ‘Hello, Worlds.’ What do I mean by that? Well, I’ll tell you. The pros and cons of altering Mars and possibly other planets for habitability have been on the minds of Earth’s citizens for decades now, and representatives of both the EFF and SCONA felt a public debate would help clarify their positions. Thank you all for being part of this important historical event.”
The moderator nodded to the small groups of representatives at long tables separated by an aisle culminating in the moderator’s lectern.
“The format is free-form debate with three predetermined conditions. The conditions were agreed upon by both parties prior to this event and held confidential from the media and public until now. May I have the envelopes? Thank you, Giselle. May I say, you are looking exquisite this evening. I think our viewership just jumped another billion!”
Laughter and applause. Giselle turned and blew a kiss over her bare shoulder to the moderator and added a wink to the camera as she sauntered by.
“Ah, promises, promises. If I hadn’t reached the ripe old age of fifty and already on my third liver!”
He tapped the envelopes against his palm.
“First condition: Equal time for responses. Quite reasonable, yes. Second condition: Each team must allow complete responses from the other team, as long as they are under two minutes. Interruptions will be duly noted by the moderator, halting the debate and allowing the other party to finish the compromised point. Also quite reasonable, though I have to say I am quite willing to stand by and merely listen for once!”
Laughter.
“And the third condition…”
The moderator opened the envelope. His mouth parted to speak then closed as he stared quizzically into the camera. “Perhaps one of the producers would like to examine…no? The agreements are theirs, true.”
One of the SCONA representatives tapped the slender microphone at the center of the table. “The third condition, if you please?”
When he spoke again, the moderator’s voice had lost some of its resonance.
“No violence.”
The audience fell silent.
An EFF representative leaned closer to the thin microphone stand before her. “For the record, the Earth First Faction is a peaceful organization, and while we agree to denounce violence we also deny any implication.”
The moderator cleared his throat. “Perhaps some clarification is in order. Team SCONA, to whom was that directed?”
The SCONA representative who had spoken before gazed at each member of the EFF panel and then directly into the camera covering her team. “Those who repeatedly attempt to sabotage our efforts.”
The moderator nodded sagely. “Powerful events.”
The SCONA rep’s eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
“Terrible! I meant terrible, of course. No, not our finest moments as members of the human race. Moving on, then! The EFF will open with the first question for SCONA.”
EFF: Why not focus your habitability efforts on the Earth’s moon instead of Mars? It is closer to us than any planet, after all. Wouldn’t the profiteers do better with fewer costs?
SCONA: The overriding danger to Earth prohibits moon trials. At 238,000 miles, the moon is too close to Earth and does not extend our reach throughout the solar system and beyond. It also lacks the natural resources for our goals. The case for Mars is compelling. Its distance from Earth means it is no threat to the Earth. We can mine some minerals there, and asteroids and comets for more robust mining and ice-water capture are much closer there than from Earth’s moon. And subterranean water ice is in far greater supply below its surface.
EFF: Tapping into water ice on Mars is foolish. The molecular structure breaks apart! Hydrogen and oxygen rise through the thin atmosphere and are lost to space by solar winds. Surely the great minds at SCONA realize this was the very demise of Mars’s surface water!
Laughter.
SCONA: Thank you.
EFF: For what?
SCONA: For making our case.
Laughter with scorn from the EFF team.
EFF: And how did we do that? By pointing out that water harvested from Mars will simply pass into space as base molecules?
SCONA: Hence the need for a protective magnetosphere and a denser atmosphere to trap the molecules in their composite form…water.
EFF: (pauses, laughter fading): You seek to terraform Mars, then. To make it Earthlike, with breathable air and water.
SCONA: We do. Mars once had a viable atmosphere and may hold one yet again.
EFF: Your mission is too theoretical. Too experimental. Only the Earth can support life as we know it.
SCONA: The Earth has also hosted ninety-nine percent of all extinct species, including the dinosaurs.
EFF: Humans are not brutish animals. As advanced life forms, we control our destiny. We have asteroid defense systems to avoid a dinosaur-style demise.
SCONA: If you recall, our organization thwarted one of those very asteroids using a prototype of our Cyclops Space Atomizer!
EFF: Fifty years ago, yes.
SCONA: Had the asteroid hit, we easily could have gone the way of the dinosaurs.
EFF: You take resources better used on Earth.
SCONA: Mechanical objects require use and maintenance and always run the risk of failure.
EFF: Even your great moonlike space stations, then?
SCONA: Yes, even our global space stations. We are constantly monitoring, testing, and repairing where necessary.
EFF: Then why take the risk of this Mars experiment? It appears nothing more than a waste of time, effort, and money.
SCONA: Not all threats to humans fall under the asteroid doomsday scenario. Technology has limits. Man and machines remain fallible. We are all vulnerable as long as Earth remains our only habitable planet. SCONA and other Mars expansion proponents believe the survival and progression of our species transcend planetary—and political—boundaries. Existence on Mars can serve as a failsafe for our species.
EFF: MEPs have built no fewer than three massive space stations, each at a vast cost! Those funds could be used to feed the hungry on Earth, purify drinking water, better the environment, and protect us against climate change!
SCONA: We are a viable business and cover our costs with revenues. We have private investors. We have not asked the American people, or any other government, to pay our way. Our customers are quite satisfied with the products we mine and manufacture from space, as well as our quite reasonable vacation services.
EFF: Your Martian fantasy will fail!
SCONA: We deem it worth trying. We are at a loss as to why the EFF and its supporters oppose our efforts.
EFF: Your space profits should be shared with those on Earth!
SCONA: Galactic socialism does not square with even the tattered remnants of the United States Constitution. We pay our taxes and make generous donations to charitable organizations.
EFF: The EFF merely seeks a balanced human existence while caring for our only habitable planet.
SCONA: Interesting language. The EFF were also vocal proponents for health reforms to alter the human physique under the pretense of decreasing the strain on natural resources. Our eyes are twice the size they were two hundred years ago, while our bodies are smaller on average than they’ve been since the eighteenth century.
EFF: We conquered obesity. There is less light pollution now thanks to better sight. Fewer resources are used for food and illumination. No one can deny these accomplishments!
SCONA: Not as long as the EFF defines success as alarming the masses to the point of genetic manipulation and self-limitation.
EFF: The greater good prevailed.
SCONA: If the Earth has prospered so well under your agenda, then why the constant push to marginalize SCONA? We have far more of a presence beyond Earth than upon it. We would think the EFF would be satisfied that we use very few Earth resources. In fact, we augment those limited resources.
EFF: You recruit skilled labor away from Earth’s needs with your high salaries and benefits.
SCONA: Our consortium is built upon freedom of choice and the right to work. As long as both the worker and employer are satisfied, the business relationship is intact.
EFF: Suppose you destroy Mars?
SCONA: We do not have the capability to do so. While only roughly half the size of Earth, Mars is still a very large object. Much larger than any asteroid we’ve encountered in our solar system. Extrapolating our findings from large asteroids, we believe our efforts will barely be noticeable from the surface.
EFF: What if you alter the orbit of Mars so that imperils the Earth? What then?
SCONA: Again, Mars is too big. We have made our research findings available to all. The bombs are not nearly powerful enough to alter the orbit of an entire planet. Asteroids simply do not have the core radius of a rocky planet like Mars, otherwise they’d be planets themselves.
The audience laughed and clapped.
EFF: And how many people breathe the air on the asteroids you’ve experimented on?
SCONA: Air was not the objective.
EFF: Then what was?
SCONA: Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen.
EFF: We are well aware of water’s molecular combination.
SCONA: Water, remaining as water. The creation of a magnetic field that could bind a viable atmosphere to a planet and will also hold viable air, water, and heat. In other words, habitable.
EFF: Yes, yes, the magnetosphere again. Well, Venus doesn’t have a magnetosphere, and it has an atmosphere.
SCONA: And the air pressure on Venus would reduce a human to a boiling soup!
A chime sounded.
The EFF panel members rose and removed their microphones, moved as a group offstage, ostensibly for the bathrooms, while the SCONA personnel spoke among themselves.
The moderator’s voice wavered as he spoke. “And that is all the time we have. Uh, before commercial break. And before eternity, for that matter.”
The audience quieted. Some murmured about the strange comment.
The moderator reached within his suit.
“Earth is all!”
The moderator exploded in a mass of flesh and blood.
The lectern disintegrated, the crystal shards adding more shrapnel to the death cloud of metal bearings cutting down the panelists and camera people and members of the security team.
A series of flashes coincided with deafening blasts. Twenty-five seconds of silence and smoke ensued, captured by the fractured lens of a toppled camera. A scream echoed in the stillness, followed by moans and sobbing.
The broadcast, along with a majority of people in the studio, was terminated.
* * * *
The abyss and its twin gape at the Martian sky as if aware of the pain to come.
One in daylight, the other night, they disrupt a global desert. The tunnels thrust to the very heart of the planet, as if the God of War had twice speared his namesake and wrought its demise. Mars was never a kind deity, and while he is no longer capable of violence, his blood-colored world remains just as hostile to life.
Here the sun rises and sets without mortality to mark the passage of time. The thin air constricts no lungs. The cold bites neither flesh nor frond. Beds of ancient waterways gather dust, indistinguishable from surrounding barrens. Volcanoes stand as slowly withering ghosts. The underground reservoirs that once supplied them with magma cooled to rock millennia ago. Deeper still, the once-molten outer core endured the same fate, entombing the mass of solid iron, nickel, and sulfur that had been its heat source: the radioactive inner core. Both are cold now, and there is no geologic activity throughout the entire planet.
Mars orbits the sun—half again beyond Earth’s orbit—as a rocky corpse.
But perhaps not eternally doomed.
The tunnels are the first phase of a mission where the odds are seemingly light years long and without historical precedent. Even if the mission is initially successful, the duration is unknown. Something killed Mars before and can do it again. But a chance at life has arrived where there was none. An opportunity to restore the vibrancy of the planet’s youth, now only hinted at with subterranean ice and mysterious impressions upon the withered husk of the surface.
In its first billion years, the red planet may not have appeared red at all, but purple or even blue like Earth, depending on the ratio of breathable air to iron oxide particles spewed from volcanoes and lifted by wind from mountains and deserts. Surface water existed in the form of streams and lakes and perhaps even seas. Clouds of water vapor circled the globe. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed.
Rain fell on Mars.
And it was no coincidence that the planetary cores were active and “alive.”
Radioactive heat loss and convective currents of magma produced a magnetic field that bound the atmosphere to the planet in a geologic dynamo, the like of which still functions on Earth.
What killed Mars?
Perhaps its smaller size limited the amount of radioactive supply, and it simply ran out of energy. Or massive impact with an asteroid ejected the charged particles out to space. Whatever the case, death arrived soon after the Martian inner core went cold. Having lost its heat source, the molten outer core turned to stone as if succumbing to the Hydra’s gaze. The dynamo failed and its magnetism all but vanished. Gravity alone was too weak to hold the atmosphere. Air and water molecules escaped into space. Without a magnetic shield and atmosphere to deflect them, solar winds and radiation further stripped the surface dry.
Mars lost the means to support life beyond a microbial level.
Now temperature fluctuations spawn the only weather events. Night and polar regions regularly plunge two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit; cold enough to freeze its most abundant gas—carbon dioxide—into dry ice, though at times the equator at full sun can reach as high as sixty degrees. Far less drastic temperature swings combine with the weak gravity in a near vacuum to spawn frequent dust storms. The greater the temperature difference, the larger the storm.
Dust, prevalent everywhere, is lifted rather than scoured from the surface. Storms of it can be monstrous, at times engulfing the entire planet except for the gargantuan Olympus Mons. Far more common are the dust devils that waltz through a desolate Hell.
Some of the rust-hued particles fall into the open maws and down the tunnels.
No twists or turns arrest their journey. They gain no purchase along laser-bonded walls. Down they drift like mineral snowfall, passing signal relays at every mile. The dust falls for weeks toward the core. Recent inductees will never reach bottom before Detonation Event.
Electronic relays form a spiral pattern and flash in sequence for two thousand miles, down and back again, each briefly illuminating a section of tunnel along the way. Constantly monitored by satellites positioned above, the relays are members of a large supporting cast.
The lead roles belong to the hydrogen (thermonuclear) megabombs residing at the base of the each tunnel. These are cutting-edge nuclear fusion explosives; the latest in the class of Asteroid Busters.
Ever silent, Mars awaits its chance at resurrection.