Alex dangled his feet in the forbidden water.
The bronze face of Bard Hunter looked down at him with disapproval. The statue of the long dead founder of Deimos City stood on a plinth above the lake, under the apex of the dome. While he was alive, he had asked for his effigy to be placed there so it could watch over everything he had created. From what Alex had been taught about him at school, he would have hated being powerless to control the generations who came after him.
The lake itself was a ten-meter diameter circular pool bordered by a half-meter high wall which citizens were not allowed to climb over. Hence Alex’s rebellious decision to sit on it with his feet hanging over the prohibited side. Up above him, to his right, was his shirt. He had wrapped it around one of the four surveillance cameras that watched over the lake from atop a pole so it wouldn’t recognize his face and report his misdemeanor to the Mars Security Service.
Citizens glared at him as they passed and he basked in their contempt. He heard some of them talk about him in disparaging tones. One officious woman even shouted at him to get out, but he merely swore at her and she wisely went on her way.
He was lucky it was the quiet hour between the end of the working day and the arrival of the evening crowd or he would have had more people to swear at.
Alex swayed his feet in the water and felt the cool swim through his toes. His jeans were rolled up to his calves and he was a little cold without his shirt, but he enjoyed how his display of nakedness added to his disrespect of the Bard Hunter statue and all it represented.
“Hey, Alex!” A deep masculine voice called from Central Avenue.
Alex turned to see Ivan strolling toward him. His muscular mineworker’s body looked even more impressive than usual when compared to Alex’s exposed torso. He wore one of the expensive tailored jackets he suddenly had a penchant for and swaggered with the confidence that came with being a few years older and being sure of his opinions.
At his side, Elea was an unusual match for Ivan. Younger and more academic than him, her quiet intelligence sat in contrast to Ivan’s often impulsive personality. It made her life more exciting, she had once told Alex, and she would rather hang out with the gang than socialize with her intellectual college friends.
The couple jogged up to greet him.
“Can I join you?” said Elea, looking jealously at Alex’s feet dangling in the lake.
She hopped up onto the wall and was about to swing her legs over when Alex stopped her. “There’s only a narrow area where the cameras can’t see. You don’t want to be reported.”
Elea followed Alex’s gaze up to his shirt, then across to the other three unshrouded poles with their motion sensors and facial recognition cameras still scanning most of the water.
“That’s a trick I taught him,” said Ivan.
With that, he took off his tailored jacket and handed it to Elea. He pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose to disguise his face and jumped up onto the wall by the adjacent pole. He grabbed onto it with both hands, wrapped his knees around it and shimmied up to the top. He made it in seconds where it had taken Alex minutes.
By the time Ivan had blinded the second camera with his shirt and slid down the pole again, Pete and Sammi had arrived.
They were more like Alex in that they were trapped in a life of serving the Martian corporate machine. Pete, clever enough to turn his hand to most things, but easily bored, had been drifting from job to job since Alex had met him. Sammi worked for the Mining Guild and had met Ivan when they were briefly assigned to the same shift. Sammi had loved the camaraderie of mine work, but he wasn’t much good at it and was soon moved to an admin role, which he hated.
All of them were Mars-born and proud of it.
“How did you get off work early?” asked Sammi.
Alex leaned back with his hands on the outer edge of the wall to emphasize that he had been relaxing there for some time. “I applied my cunning and my intelligence.”
“You told me someone screwed up the propagation program in the field you were supposed to be working on,” said Pete.
“That was one theory,” said Alex. “Anyway, who cares?”
Ivan, who had walked along the top of the wall to join them, bent down and rolled up his jeans. He jumped into the lake at the edge where the water came up to his knees and his movement created ripples that lapped at his legs.
“Can I come in?” said Elea.
“As long as you stay within this area.” Ivan drew a semicircle in the air with his index finger to indicate a safe zone which the blinded cameras couldn’t see.
Elea swung her legs over the wall, pulled up her tight-fitting leggings as much as she could and slipped into the water. She winced at the cold.
“A bit too chilly, is it?” said Ivan, scooping up a palmful of water and splashing it over her face.
“Hey!” Elea splashed him back, but her aim was off and only his forearm got wet. So she made a second attempt, scooping up a double handful and launching it in his direction. Water struck Ivan directly in the chest and ran down the contours of his stomach muscles.
A tit for tat water fight ensued with both splashing each other as they squealed and laughed. Pete and Sammi sat on the wall alongside Alex to watch and inevitably suffered collateral damage from wayward splashes.
By the end, they were all almost entirely soaked with forbidden water.
“If we were on Earth, we could do this every day,” said Elea. “We could swim in the sea, paddle in a lake or lay back in a whole bath of water.”
“Because we’re born on Mars we have to break the rules to even touch the sacred lake,” said Ivan, making a rude gesture at Bard Hunter. The statue seemed to intensify its disapproving stare.
“It’s because Earth-borns make the rules,” she said.
“Exactly,” Ivan agreed.
He walked around the inner edge of the safe zone he had indicated earlier as if to test its boundaries.
Elea hopped back up onto the wall and sat slowly drying next to Alex.
“We grow up to serve the terraforming project and that’s our only purpose,” said Ivan. “They want us to be their mineworkers, their scientists, their industrial laborers – all to turn this planet into a new Earth because they’ve done so much damage to their original one. They got rich on exploiting the natural resources of where they came from and now they want to do the same on Mars by exploiting us.”
His words stirred the feelings of injustice that Alex had always had, but never understood. Until he met Ivan. It was what made hanging out with Ivan’s gang more than just a fun way to kill time. “They know the gravity of the red planet traps us here,” he said.
“Of course they know!” said Ivan. “On Earth, our bodies would crumble in their gravity, our muscles would struggle, our bones could break and even our lungs would fight to breathe in their plentiful oxygen. So we are kept inside this dome, knowing that death awaits us if we step outside. Mars is a prison and we are its captive workers.”
Alex shivered and not only because of the chilling thought. He was wet, semi-naked and sitting still.
Around them, more people were approaching Central Plaza as the surrounding restaurants, holographic and other entertainment venues opened to welcome the night-time crowd. Some of them had stopped to stare at the miscreants trespassing in the lake. He thought he saw at least one of them report it on their WristTab.
“I’m going to get my shirt,” said Alex.
“Good idea,” said Ivan, moving to follow suit.
Ascending the pole was easier with the grip provided by the naked skin on Alex’s arms and the bottom half of his legs, but Ivan still reached the top of his pole first.
“MSS!” yelled Pete.
Alex looked down from his vantage point to see his friends scatter and the dark blue uniforms of two MSS officers approaching from the north side of Central Avenue. He glanced up at his shirt still wrapped around the camera. Calculating it would take too long to climb the last fifteen centimeters to unravel it, he reached up and his fingers brushed at the dangling material. He stretched until he could grab hold.
He tugged and the material ripped free.
Clutching the torn shirt to his face, he loosened his grip on the pole and slid down to the wall. The sharp pain of friction burned his skin.
“You!” bellowed the voice of a male MSS officer.
Alex swiveled his head. The officer narrowed his eyes, but he was an overweight and middle-aged man who was at least twenty meters away – which gave Alex a good chance of getting away.
He jumped off the wall, calculating he had time to grab his shoes from where he left them, and made a run for it. He dodged startled pedestrians on the south side of Central Avenue and heard the thumping shoes of the overweight man following behind. But, even in bare feet, Alex was faster and more nimble.
He glanced behind to see the officer was giving up already. His colleague, a younger woman who might have had a fighting chance of getting near him if she could be bothered to try, had also slowed to a walk. Alex could have stopped running, but it was exhilarating to feel the air flowing over his skin helping to dry the last droplets of water.
After too many people had stopped to stare at him, Alex turned into the relative privacy of a side street. His heart thumped as he put on his ripped shirt and his salvaged shoes. Like he was slipping back into the guise of being an ordinary person.
Because being with Ivan made him feel like he was more than ordinary. One day, people like him and Ivan would show the whole of Mars that young people need to be listened to.