Killing Time On Mars Read online

  We went through the main airlock and into the underground colony.

  The passage was dimly lit, with pipes running along the ceiling and the walls. There were two doors immediately on the left.

  “Karl’s in there,” said Pete, pointing to the first door. “We’ll catch up with him tomorrow.”

  “This is us,” he said, pointing to the second door.

  Security was in one of the oldest rooms in the colony. It was vaguely circular—tight angles could make the plastic lining pinch and rupture. The walls were coated with three layers of grey, airtight plastic. The room was obviously built before effective dust extraction, as there were red smudges and stains on the walls. A handful of light plastic chairs sat randomly in front of a semicircle of work screens around the walls. Ventilation tubes and power cables ran above the lightweight plastic door, which was sprung to close automatically but had no lock. The room was bitterly cold like the rest of the colony. The chairs and screens on the walls made it seem much smaller than I was expecting.

  Glen, the other security officer in my team, was sitting at a screen on the right side as we entered. He had a thin, angular face and short brown hair.

  “Hi, Mike. Nice to meet you,” he said quickly, shuffling around in his seat.

  “Hi, Glen,” I replied with a smile “How are you going?”

  I was trying to put him at ease. Long before I arrived I had decided that I would be professionally polite and pleasant to everyone, grease the cogs that needed greasing, but not get too close to anyone.

  “Good, good,” he said, and then looked around the room. “What do you think?”

  He had a little wry smile, which I realised later was very rare and usually forced.

  “It’s cosy,” I said, still smiling.

  “Don’t worry, we have everything we need here,” said Pete. “Access to everything. We’re basically the centre of the colony.”

  “How was the trip?” asked Glen, and I got the sense that he was not as positive about the Security Office as Pete.

  “You know,” I said, “very long and boring. I did all the extra training modules, played games and watched TV. I worked out a lot so I’m in pretty good shape, physically at least. It’s unbelievable to finally be here. I’m definitely ready to get to work.”

  As I finished speaking, the image on Glen’s screen behind him switched to a big picture of Earth.

  “Homesick?” I asked him, nodding toward his screen.

  “What?” he said, looking over his shoulder. “Oh, that. It’s the live feed from the space station above Earth.”

  “That’s live?” I asked.

  “Well, the signal has to travel through space, so it’s delayed by a few minutes, depending on how far away we are. Obviously, we lose the signal completely when we’re on the other side of the sun.”

  “There’s also a feed from the station above Mars,” said Pete with a furrowed brow. “But Glen prefers the one from Earth.”

  “Yeah, well, I miss it, okay? Almost everyone does. It’s tiring here, and cold, and the food is so boring,” said Glen. I wondered if he complained a lot.

  “Glen thinks we should start unfreezing the livestock embryos and farming animals,” said Pete, shaking his head.

  “I miss meat,” lamented Glen. “I mean real meat, not the synthesised stuff they make here.”

  “I gather the colony isn’t far away from being able to support a sustainable population of livestock,” I said, trying to be positive.

  “We could keep some smaller animals now, maybe some chickens,” said Glen.

  “Maybe we could,” said Pete, “but JOSEV wants to wait a few more years before starting to farm animals. We get everything we need from our plants and supplements anyway. Come on, Mike, let’s keep going.”

  We left Glen to stare at Earth and think about meat. As we went out into the main passage, Pete turned left, up a slight incline into the hillside. We came to the dining room on the left, which was the largest room in the colony. It was low and wide, with a series of columns holding up the ceiling. On the right, beside the door, were tables with food stations and a medicine dispenser. Some of the other new arrivals were already in the dining room, eating a late breakfast.

  “Are you hungry or should we keep going?” asked Pete.

  “Let’s keep going,” I said. “I’m too buzzed to eat right now.”

  He looked at me quizzically. Later, when I was more familiar with the drug problem in the colony, I understood his reaction to my use of the word ‘buzzed’.

  Further along the passage on the right was the lounge, which was nearly empty. It looked comfortable and inviting, full of sofas and coffee tables. We looked in for a few seconds and then kept walking and came to a T-intersection. At the top of the T, opposite the main passage, was the door to Systems. To the right was a passage that led to the underground workspaces and amenities, and to the left was the passage to the dormitories.

  “Let’s meet Loo,” said Pete.

  He knocked on the door to Systems, and I noticed that it also had a closing mechanism but no lock.

  “What?” said a high male voice from inside.

  Pete frowned, opened the door and walked in. I followed him into a room that wasn’t much bigger than Security but jammed full of hardware. Cables were running along the walls and into boxes, and I noticed that vents above the door were circulating a breeze. A series of screens were standing on a long, curved desk, and ‘Loo’ was working at one of them. He didn’t turn around.

  “Loo,” said Pete, “this is Mike. He’s just arrived and is joining Security.”

  He finally turned around, stood up and took a single step toward me, scowling.

  Liu had compiled the Systems briefing notes for new starters, so I knew that he had arrived in the first fleet and was almost single-handedly responsible for networking the entire colony. He had been nominated to join the first fleet by China, where he had been a developer and entrepreneur before joining JOSEV. I had profiled him as a sci-fi fan and imagined he thought the idea of going to Mars was cool. From his briefings, it seemed the reality had been a major letdown.

  “It’s pronounced lee-oh, not loo,” said Liu, emphasising each syllable.

  “Hi, Liu,” I said. “How are you going?”

  “Fine,” he replied, and then his face softened a little and he added, “You’re not American.”

  “Yeah, I’m Australian.”

  Liu nodded.

  “I imagine Security works quite closely with Systems,” I said.

  Liu grunted dismissively and waved a hand at the racks of hardware behind him. “This is mostly just a gaming platform, with a big cache of content from Earth.”

  “Oh,” I said, wondering if he was just in a bad mood or if this was his normal personality.

  Liu looked at Pete and raised his eyebrows.

  “Well,” said Pete after a moment, “I just wanted to introduce you. We’ll keep going.”

  “I’ll see you around,” I said to Liu with a smile.

  I decided that I would work on my relationship with him, despite his surly disposition. He was an interesting challenge and my instinct told me I might need his help later. Liu was already going back to his screen and just said, “Uh huh,” without looking back.

  We went out into the passage, and I looked at Pete with one eyebrow raised, wondering if he was going to say anything about Liu’s behaviour. He was still frowning and his lips were tightly closed.

  “So,” he said eventually, “Let’s go see the rest of the colony.”

  We looked at the kitchens from the doorway and then passed the bathrooms. We walked past the workspace rooms for Operations, Colony Development, Administration, Biotechnologies, and the infirmary, and eventually reached the gym at the end of the passage. It had about 30 exercise machines, including a rubber-band lifting bench and rowing machine that we had used on the ship from Earth. They were all facing out to the walls, where screens were showing content from Earth. It
was surprisingly full for late in the morning on a work day and smelled a lot like an Earth gym, though there was also a slightly metallic tang in the air.

  “Everyone needs the gym, and it’s not really big enough,” said Pete. “There’s a roster and allocation system. You’ll need to get on to that quickly, and for the rest of this month you’ll only be able to exercise in off-peak times.”

  I wondered if using the gym very early might help and made a mental note to try that the following day.

  “Let’s go find your room,” said Pete. “You’re in…three twelve. There are hundreds, of course. Every few months, Colony Development adds a new wing, so there are always more beds than colonists. They can fit up to four folding beds, but most have only two or three colonists.”

  “Does anyone have a room to themselves?” I asked.

  “Some. Usually because their old roommates have moved out. Lots of people move in with friends or partners. It’s so easy, you know, you can’t bring anything much from Earth, and there isn’t a lot to collect when you get here. As a rule, we discourage single rooms, partly because it’s an inefficient use of space, but also because JOSEV thinks it’s safer and better for the emotional wellbeing of the colony to share. We usually allocate a couple of colonists from each batch of newbies to the singles, but if you know the right people you can stay on your own.”

  It almost sounded like he was one of the singles.

  “Here we are. You have two roommates, Pablo and Tony.”

  Pablo turned out to be a perpetually absent man from Operations, who moved out to share with his girlfriend a couple of weeks later. I later found out Tony was unofficially the most important person in the colony, colloquially known as the ‘head of pipes’. His team was responsible for the proper functioning of water, sewerage, air and power systems, and was consequently both highly valued and completely taken for granted. Another person might have abused their position for personal gain, but not Tony. He had been in his role since the first fleet because he would turn up within moments of being called, and arrive with a cheeky smile, a bad joke, and a willingness to fix whatever dirty or dangerous problem was present.

  “Listen,” said Pete, “I’ve just got a message about an incident in the main hangar. Can I leave you to settle in? Maybe grab some lunch, meet a few people. Why don’t you settle in for the rest of the day and then report in around nine tomorrow morning?”

  “Okay,” I said, allowing disappointment to creep into my voice. I wanted to get straight to work, but Pete just turned and left.

  There were four beds in the small and roughly circular room, each with a small set of drawers at one end and a hanging rack at the other. Two of the beds were obviously occupied—the sleeping bags were a mess and the furniture was in use. The bed on the left and closest to the door had a rolled sleeping bag on it, and there was a new undersuit hanging from the rack.

  I sat down on the bed. It was the most abstract and surreal moment of my life—I was sitting on a small folding bed in a grey room under a hill on a new planet. I picked up the rolled sleeping bag with a single finger and tossed it to the ceiling. It bounced off and came floating back down.

  “Okay,” I said aloud. “Now what?”

  I wandered back out to the main T intersection, turned right, went down the main passage and looked into the lounge. A handful of people were sitting alone and waving their hands in the air as they interacted with their heads-up displays. I guessed they had come to the lounge to find a quiet place to work, so I left them alone and kept walking up the main passage. As I passed the dining room, I caught myself slouching. I felt like a stranger, almost like I was trespassing.

  I wandered out past the Security Office and briefly considered dropping in and talking to Glen again. Instead I went out through the main airlock and wandered around the greenhouses, trying to remain inconspicuous.

  Standing inside a greenhouse was like standing inside an enormous red caterpillar. Sunlight filtered through the dust caked onto the outside, so everything inside glowed red. Hundreds of rows of corn stood in front of me, in a geometrically precise pattern—as you walked through it you could see down straight lines in front and behind, to the left and right, and through the diagonals. The dark green corn was fully grown and stood four metres high. It gently rustled in the artificial breeze.

  After wandering around for a while, I became hungry. I went back to the dining room for lunch and filled a plate with food. It smelled quite good but did not look very appetising. Most of it was grey, apart from some dark green salad leaves and some tomatoes that were oddly orange. I gathered plastic utensils and turned around to survey the room.

  People were eating lunch at most of the tables. I noticed that there was a significant segregation along the lines of the JOSEV investor nations—the tables were predominantly occupied by either Chinese, American or European colonists.

  A lone man was sitting at one of the furthest tables. As I passed between the tables I received a mixture of stares, nods and smiles. It must have been obvious that I was one of the day’s new arrivals. I sat down diagonally opposite the lone man.

  We made eye contact and I nodded.

  “Hi,” he said, holding out his hand across the table. “I’m Eli.”

  “Hi, Eli. I’m Mike.” I shook his hand.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  “Melbourne, Australia,” I said, expecting a positive response.

  “Ah!” he said happily. “You’re Australian.”

  “Yep. And you? Where are you from?”

  “I’m originally from New York.”

  “A New Yorker,” I said with a smile.

  “Not anymore,” he said as his smile faded and he shook his head. “I’m Martian now.”

  “I think you mean JOSEVian,” I said with a smile.

  “No,” he said emphatically, suddenly intensely serious. “Definitely not that. Martian.”

  “Okay,” I said and shrugged.

  It was the first Martian patriotism that I encountered and the first hint that JOSEV was not universally liked on Mars. To me it seemed disloyal, almost traitorous. JOSEV employed everyone in the colony and thousands of people back on Earth. And JOSEV’s mission was so important that it was not just an employer but the future of humanity.

  One man, tinkering obsessively in the loft above his parents’ garage, was responsible for both the solution to, and creation of, Earth’s greatest problems. Like many brilliant inventors, he was obsessive to the point of being anti-social. His life and actions are the subject of many biographies, which are littered with half-truths and hypotheses. Here is what I believe.

  3. JOSEV

  Simon Tobler was an only child raised in a wealthy urban area outside Munich in Germany. His parents were cold and distant, and he learned from an early age to entertain himself; he was given any possession he asked for, but very little attention. He particularly liked dismantling machines. After he was found with the remains of a laptop, he was given an electronics set and enrolled in a robotics club after school, which he quickly abandoned. He made transient friends with various groups, meandering from the robotics club to a chess club and a church youth group, but he didn’t stay long with any of them.

  In high school, Tobler demonstrated innate ability in mathematics and physics. However, he had very little drive or interest and relied entirely on his mathematical gift to float through his education. Unfortunately, his ability did not extend into any other area—despite perfect scores in both maths and physics, he failed or barely passed all other subjects and he was not admitted to university. I suspect he would have been highly employable by any organisation that performed analytics or physical design, but I guess it never occurred to him to approach them. Instead he spent an entire year after high school lying on his bed playing video games.

  His parents eventually became worried about his anti-social and obsessive behaviour, and they organised a job for him at the nearby Institute of Technology, tutoring students
with borderline results in maths and physics. He was bitter and angry and watched the students walk around the campus with envy. He wore jeans, a non-descript sweater, and had plain round glasses on his pointy thin face. His personal hygiene was suspect and his hair was long and greasy—so he blended in perfectly on campus and everyone ignored him.

  Tobler seethed and stewed for three years, invisible to the teaching staff, helping kids that he believed were inferior and yet were more successful than him. He didn’t care about the problems of the world, the people problems, but he knew that there were some major physics problems that nobody had solved. He would solve one and show those university professors what their papers were worth. So he set about designing and building a small, cold-fusion engine. The Tobler engine, as it’s known today. At the time, fusion on Earth was only possible in enormous explosions or inefficient laboratory experiments. Tobler wanted to create an engine that was small, controllable, and clean. He instinctively chose to use the Helium-3 proton-proton reaction. Perhaps if he had chosen a different reaction, one that didn’t target other planets for resources, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

  He used the money he earned tutoring to buy 3D printers, tools and parts, which gradually filled the loft above his parents’ garage. He also collected discarded self-illuminating exit signs from garbage dumps. They contained small amounts of tritium, which he collected in an ingenious radiation-proof container. He then managed to filter the naturally decaying isotopes into metal bottles, under pressure. Any of these inventions would have been at the limit of the abilities of the brightest minds at the university, but to Tobler they were simply enablers.

  Then he started to build his engine. He spent several months perfecting a design to limit the volume of isotopes in the reaction, direct the energy against a surface to create thrust, and diffuse the remaining free protons into the atmosphere. His first few attempts were unsuccessful and he was lucky to escape in one piece. At one point, his father’s car needed repairs that the mechanic later described: “as if a laser had cut straight through the roof and floor”. We know now that a tight beam of protons had sliced through the floor of the loft and straight through the car, luckily missing everything flammable. The thin crevasse in the concrete and rock below was several metres deep.