We have eliminated the clock function on the microwave, because we find that those are always resetting at odd moments and you end up never knowing what time it is. Your other clocks should be fine.
For the most part, you should find the kitchen equipment pretty familiar. The oven runs a little hot, so you might want to set it cooler than any recipes suggest. (Also, the boiling point of water is a lot lower on Mars, FYI. See Section 21 for more information on running a productive and fun Martian kitchen.) But most of the devices—fridge, microwave, blender, coffee bean grinder—are the ones you’re used to from home. We chose them partly because there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel, and partly because the kitchen is the true center of any home, and so it’s a good place to indulge in some occasional and well-earned nostalgia.
The HVAC system should allow you to control the temperature of your living space fairly precisely. You can even choose different temperatures for different rooms. For example, maybe you’d want the bathroom a little warmer for people to be comfortable in just before they step into the shower. But then you’d lose that delicious feeling of transitioning from a chilly space into a steamy one. It’s a tough call, and we leave it to your discretion. Just know that you have the option. As for the inevitable conflicts over choosing the ideal temperature for a room, we have no advice at all.
The air produced by the carbon dioxide splitter will probably not smell exactly the same, will probably not taste exactly the same in your mouth, as the air you’re used to from Earth. Air is a lot more than oxygen plus some inert gases, and we’ve been struck by the level of emotion people associate with the various smellable bits and pieces that get caught up in the stuff we breathe. People get to the mountains and they say, Oh, just smell this mountain air, or they catch a whiff of the Delaware River through an open car window as they cross the Benjamin Franklin Bridge into Philadelphia and they think, Home. We’re not going to try to argue against this kind of sentimentality. As a matter of fact, we’ve included a number of plug-in air fresheners in your Communal Resource Stockpile (see Section 11), and we’ve loaded each one with a mixture of all the scents from your various hometowns. There should be plenty of electrical outlets to use the fresheners if you like. We’re not sure that the different hometown odors sit all that well together—some of the people in the focus group actively disliked the combination—but we didn’t want to prioritize any one person’s olfactory experience over anyone else’s, so the combination is what you’ve got.
When a machine breaks down once and for all, it will need to be replaced. We can send many of these on supply rockets (see Section 13), and we will do our best to replace the original with something at least equally good. Maybe the new one will even be better than the original. Still there will be an adjustment period. You’ll have to get used to the new noises, the new lights, the new hum of a different motor. Things will not be the same as they were. In this way, the machines serve as metaphors for many other things.
At some point in the future, you may start building machines of your own. This will be a big step, and the thought blows our minds, really. We’re probably talking about a while into the future, here—you’d have to start refining metals and so on before you could get into it. But then again maybe you’d start sooner, by repurposing the things you already have, or by combining things. Maybe you’d make Rover smart enough to do some exploring on her own, or you could swipe some stuff from the rocket so that Rover could jet around a bit faster. That all sounds like fun to us. Maybe you’d take the sunlamps out of the greenhouse and attach them to your bunks to make tanning beds. We don’t recommend it, but we understand that you could. In any case, the larger point is that someday you may go beyond combining things to create entirely new machines. This is something that is within the power of humans to do—to make something that never existed and that is capable of functions never before imagined. Just reflect on that a moment: it’s quite something; it’s godlike power. What would these machines even be? We don’t know. The truth is, we don’t have any advice about how to handle these new acts of creation, so this bullet point is not going to advise you on that. We just thought it would be good to invite you to pause and take in the magnitude of the moment.
None of your current machines are intelligent, in the Artificial Intelligence sense of the word. This is partly because we don’t yet know how to make that kind of machine, and partly because we’ve seen all the relevant movies (2001, The Terminator, Completion, War Games, etc.), and so we know how things can get out of hand once machines start thinking for themselves. Right now your machines are completely yours, but in no time at all you can become their humans. We hope you’ve seen these movies, too. They are certainly available for viewing on your tablets. And they really hold up. Sometimes we think about what would happen if we crossed that line into artificial intelligence, and we feel a delicious tremor of excitement at the possibilities. But excitement can be good and it can also be bad. We know that. We haven’t crossed the line. If you do make intelligent machines, we suggest that you at the very least don’t make them any smarter than yourselves.
If you do create something new, just be sure to write a manual for it. You’d be surprised to see how easy it is to forget how things work. And then where will you be?
Oh—another key to a good relationship is dependability. Showing up. Being there when you’re needed. Because it’s a relationship that goes in both directions. You need them, of course—you’d be dead within a minute or two without them—but they need you, too. Without you, they would die (if a machine can be thought of as alive or dead), and then you would die. Be, therefore, the person who shows up.
You will be in possession of a number of machines designed to produce drinking water for you. (This water will also probably not taste like the water you remember from home, but that distinctive taste was largely due to unsafe things, so it’s best to let go of it.) You’ve got the ice-melter, the desalinator, the dehumidifier, and a drill to try to get at subsurface liquid water. You have purifiers to reclaim wastewater. With all of these different pieces of equipment, you should be covered as far as hydration is concerned. But don’t let the abundance lull you into any kind of complacency. It doesn’t mean, for example, that you can choose a favorite water-making machine and use it exclusively, ignoring the rest, hoping that your favorite will last forever. It will not. And then you will die of thirst.
Back to reactors for a moment: the real danger is not a meltdown; the real danger is the reactor stopping. Don’t let that happen. Mars without electricity is a dead planet.
You may be detecting a central tension in this section of the handbook, and you are right to detect it. On the one hand, the machines we’re giving you and the machines you’ll go on to create are amazing, awe-inspiring. You’re going to want to sit back and just admire them. On the other hand, they are machines, which can break, and then you’ll be dead. Although perhaps that just enhances the awe; we don’t know. You could argue that, either way, the effect is the same. Whether or not we here on Earth are currently cyborgs, you certainly will be, in the sense of not being able to walk away from the technology that surrounds you, of being in a relationship on which everything absolutely depends. If something goes right, wow. If something goes wrong, wow.
If it becomes relevant, please see Section 35: Dealing with Death on Mars.
To Think About Something
Outside the lander, Josh and Nicole more or less placed Stefan in the rover’s back seat, almost like someone being taken in a police car. Nicole held his helmet in her lap, as though setting precautions against an escape.
On the way, the rocky way, Josh chattered updates that Stefan didn’t want. Jenny was nesting—she had rearranged the furniture in the common room and had made Josh set up the bassinet that Destination Mars! had sent. Jenny was also still eating a lot of strange foods together. Orang
e juice over breakfast cereal, etc. Oh—and the baby had “dropped,” whatever that meant. Stefan gathered that it didn’t mean anything bad for the pregnancy, which, he had to admit to himself, was emotionally complicated for him. Not that he wanted anything to happen to the baby, exactly. But not that he didn’t want anything to happen to the baby, either. Well, of course he didn’t. But if it happened naturally? Of course nobody would root for an outcome such as that, but—and Nicole told him about the electricity, which had gotten back to flickering again.
“Did you read the manuals?” he asked, still a bit distracted.
“The manuals don’t make a huge amount of sense,” Josh said.
“The manuals are horseshit,” Nicole said.
Stefan knew that that was correct. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll take a look.”
Oh, you’ll take a look, all right, said the voice. Stefan kept that to himself.
Back at Home Sweet, he was greeted by a rearranged common room, with all the chaises longues bunched on one side of the room, and by music—some recording of an oud piece?—and also by awkwardness. Trixie made a big “Hallooooo” at him as he came in, but it felt even more forced than usual. Roger was on the far side of the common room, looking down at the floor. And Jenny sat on the couch glowering. Or, well, sat there until she managed to lever herself up and waddle over to Stefan and stand about three inches from his face. He flinched—he was also a little frightened of Jenny, even though she was perhaps twenty-five centimeters shorter than him.
“No,” she said, through her teeth. “You don’t get to just wander off like that. You don’t get to make things dangerous.”
He saw on her round face—as much as he could see, from this way-too-close perspective—that her most ferociously protective maternal instincts were fully awake. And aimed at him. Her breath, on his face, was sour.
Just then, the lights flickered.
“That,” Nicole said. “That was it.”
“I should probably check into that,” he said. Jenny was still there, staring right into his face.
Outside, at the nuclear reactor, Stefan grumbled silently to himself. And he pictured punching Jenny in her mouth. Or—this picture came and went in a flash—in her belly.
That thought left him open-mouthed with shock. He never would, of course. A pregnant belly was a great deal beyond fingers.
There wasn’t even any real reason to be at the nuclear reactor; there wasn’t much chance that it was the source of the problem. But you had to check, and, more importantly, it got him away from the others. Or mostly. Presumably the Destination Mars! cameras were all going. And Nicole was also suited up and standing ten meters off, keeping an eye on him, her arms folded across her chest.
She’s a twit, said the voice.
“Exactly,” Stefan said.
“What was that?” came Nicole’s voice over the radio. “Did you find something?”
“Give me a minute,” Stefan said. “I have to make some checks.”
He made some checks.
After that, he climbed up on top of the domes and gave the solar panels a good sweeping, even though there wasn’t much chance that they were the source of the problem. But you had to check, and it got him more away, in a sense, than the reactor had. Nicole stood at the bottom of the ladder, but he couldn’t see her from up there.
You could show her a right thing or two, the voice said.
Stefan nodded. He could.
Then, having dawdled on the roof as much as he could get away with, he came down and took readings on all the lines, which he knew would probably be fine, and which they were.
Finally, he checked the service conductors, which is where he knew the problem would probably be, and which is where it was. He had to replace the insulation on all the wires, and he had to replace some of the wiring, too. While he did all this, he put Home Sweet on backup power, so that they wouldn’t die.
Interesting, said the voice. You know, said the voice, if you were alone on Mars, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted to do.
Stefan could feel Nicole watching him. Now, just hold on, he thought to himself, sweating a little.
Just a notion, the voice said.
It was true that you could think about something without actually doing something.
When Stefan was finished, the lights were steady and they stayed steady. It had not been a complicated problem. As a matter of fact, he was even able to explain it to the rest of them afterward, which was something Nicole insisted he do. He supposed that she was planning for the possibility of him not being there anymore at some point. Either because he left again, or because she killed him.
Dinner that evening was a continuation of the earlier awkwardness. First of all, Roger had put on this irritatingly soothing New Age music and his gaze darted between his soup and Stefan’s face. Meanwhile, Nicole and Jenny eyed Stefan grimly, and Josh and Trixie attempted to make hearty conversation. Three years into this experience, conversation over the dinner table had become a spotty thing at best, and it was not at all common to hear things like, “Well, you had quite the walkabout!” in loud Australian, or “It’s nice, huh, being together?” in earnest group-therapy-ese.
Meanwhile the cameras in the corners of the ceiling glinted down.
Nobody objected when, shortly afterward, Stefan said, “Well, I think I’ll go in early for a bit of sleep.”
And then he lay on his bunk among all the other bunks and stared up at the ceiling and listened to voices that talked about what it would be like if everyone else was no longer there.
At first, he argued strenuously. This takes things quite a bit too far, he thought to himself.
But Does it? came the voice.
We’re talking about human beings, he said.
Is that . . . an important consideration?
He still hadn’t figured out exactly where this was coming from. It no longer seemed at all plausible that it could be Destination Mars! messing with him, because it happened even when his helmet was off, and nobody else could hear anything. And also the things the voice was suggesting were . . . a bit much for even the folks running the reality show. And it wasn’t someone standing next to him, obviously, because then they would still be there when he turned to look. Stefan had to assume that this was an inner voice, some long-latent internal compass that had stepped forward in order to guide him through difficult times. Or possibly he was deranged. Because if that was his internal compass. . . .
And then there was one other explanation, which made Stefan feel even more bonkers.
Trixie hadn’t found any signs of life in her searches. Not in the air, not in the soil, not in the water, not in the deeper water. But what if Stefan now had? And, if so, what had he found, exactly?
You should probably stay on topic, the voice said. These human beings are the worst.
But they are people, Stefan thought. Living people.
They make an awful mess of things. And they don’t like you.
Even if they don’t, Stefan said.
They don’t.
Even if they don’t! That’s no justification—
You broke that one people’s fingers, came the voice.
Once. A long time ago. And they were only fingers. And just because I get angry sometimes doesn’t mean—
They don’t want you here.
I know they don’t, Stefan thought.
Listen. The voice sounded a little different, like it was changing tone. Let’s just do the thought experiment. Just as an experiment.
Thought experiment?
Yeah. It’ll make you a better engineer. Imagining the scenarios. The—what’s the word? The what-ifs.
The what-ifs.
Or maybe you’re just not able to figure it out. Maybe it’s too complicated.
That’s not true at all, Stefan though
t.
The easiest approach would come down to the carbon dioxide splitter/oxygenator, obviously. As it stood, the machine was busily taking carbon dioxide—CO2, which was ninety-five percent of the Martian atmosphere—and dividing it into O2, which you could breathe, and C, which was released back into the atmosphere. But if you adjusted the machine so that it split the molecules into O and CO, well, then, you’d be making carbon monoxide, and you could allow that to fill up Home Sweet, having already removed all the spacesuits while everyone was sleeping and having gone off to wait in the rover. And then, when enough time had passed, you could restore the splitter’s original settings, and wait for it to make everything right again, and go in and just deal with the—
He pictured the bodies. Clapped a hand to his mouth.
Now, don’t think about that, the voice said.
Stefan didn’t have his tablet with him, but he had the feeling that he was operating well outside the normal range in taking this line of thought.
Really? the voice said. What does “normal” mean, anyway?
It was a long time before anybody else turned in, which gave Stefan far too much time to think, and to listen to the voice that kept going nearly all the time now. It’s only a thought exercise, the voice said. Only a thought exercise.
How to Mars Page 18
