by T S Hottle
LOG ENTRY: 1009 22-Sagan, 429
Well, this is different. Equalia is most definitely not a glass pancake. It is, however, a crater, and that sort of annihilation indicates it’s a whole other type of screwed. The radiation is slightly higher here, but I suspect that the dome’s fusion plant wasn’t vaporized. It’s simply crushed, which means there’s a mass of scrap metal that will be hot for the next fifty years somewhere under the crater floor. Modern fusion bombs generally don’t leave craters when detonated above ground. No, this was the result of a kinetic device, what the Compact Navy likes to call a “Rod from God.” Basically, that’s a large cylinder of some material, lead or tungsten or sometimes even glass, fired from a giant rail gun. In space, they wreak havoc on the ships they target. Fired from orbit, they have generally the same result as a fusion blast, just without that initial burst of radiation or turning the target area into a glass pancake. Rods from God leave craters. I guess God likes to sign His work.
I had planned to bypass Equalia as once you’ve seen three glass pancakes, you’ve seen them all. But this was a crater. I got out to look. There was nothing left, and I’d already seen the ejecta from the blast about a hundred kilometers out. The sensor road, however, remained intact within five kilometers of the blast. So far, that’s unheard of. I could even let the rover find its way to the other side. No manual driving. Woo hoo!
After sightseeing and taking some pictures, I let the rover find the road beyond the former city. The next stop is not really a dome. Yet. They began construction on the dome called Solaria about six months ago. It’s possible that whoever blew up the other domes spared this one. It might be barely habitable and populated by drones awaiting orders, but it could be intact. It may also have survivors. And food. Real food!
LOG ENTRY: 1628 22-Sagan, 429
Pit stop. Yea! Before construction began on Solaria, the next dome over from Equalia was the unfortunately named Enteron. I say unfortunately because “enteron” is a Neo-Latin word for the intestinal tract. On Etrusca, the word figures prominently in the local fart humor, which, by the way, translates quite well into Humanic. Suddenly, “Helium” and “Equalia” don’t sound quite so stupid, do they? I suspect this is one of those jokes that happened in the early stages of colonization. Unfortunately, jokes like that tend to stick. Humanity’s first interstellar outpost started a cult to a World War Era actress as a sort of group joke to tease visitors with. It’s now a major religious sect on Jefivah. And before you ask if people in my time take it seriously, Kremlin has a Marilynist temple near the center of its dome.
Or had, anyway. So, I suspect that, had Farigha not been bombed back to before the Stone Age, it would have a city named Enteron. Every Etruscan visitor would laugh his head off.
Enteron, however, is approximately five thousand kilometers from Equalia. The usual two-day trip stretches out to ten. Hence, they built Solaria (That name a literary reference I haven’t found yet.) Until Solaria came online, rovers and even drone transports had to use pit stops along the way, sealed caves and dug-out chambers where supplies can be kept. Any kind of supplies: Food, medical supplies, unprogrammed drones for whatever tasks needed to be handled out in the wastes, spare parts for the rovers. Anyone can access them.
We never worried about these storage chambers getting ripped off. Everything on Farigha before The Event had been rationed, though quite generously. If you had more than you were rationed, you likely bought it black market or were the black market. And black markets did not last long here. Most of what is in these caves isn’t worth shipping offworld for resale. The only people to sell to were other Farighians (Yes, that’s what we called ourselves.), and you could pretty much trace how something had been bartered. If someone tried to get cute and hoard supplies from the pit stops, that person would be packed on the next OCD transport and find himself on trial on Mars for profiteering. This is the Citizens Republic, and until Farigha becomes semi-autonomous, only the government can make a profit. Anyway, most of the cool stuff worth anything lay in the storage vaults below the domes. That’s where all the terraforming goodies were stored.
And we all know how my last foray into one of those turned out, don’t we?
I came across the pitstop about six hours out from Equalia and decided to stop. I needed certain things like extra medical supplies, food (all ration bars and freeze-dried packets), and most of all, CO2 filters. This last extended my life expectancy by a hundred and twenty days, more than enough time for the Marines to show up and get me off this rock.
Guess what I found in here. Chocolate! Okay, it’s synthetic chocolate concocted in a lab somewhere on a lesser core world, but… Come on! It’s chocolate! I also found a more comfortable sleeping bag and one better equipped to handle an emergency in the pop tent. This sleeping bag has a large pocket inside for my helmet, the one I keep near me in case of breach. In the event of sudden depressurization, the sleeping bag basically would seal me up and pressurize itself until I could wrestle my helmet on. I still have to sleep in the emergency pressure suit, but now I can go sleep up at the poles if I wanted.
I don’t want. It’s cold enough here at the equator.
LOG ENTRY: 2158 22-Sagan, 429
Long day. Got a lot of supplies stashed in the rover, maybe too much. I found another rover stashed here at the pit stop. Right now, I’m formulating a plan to turn it or another rover to be named later into a trailer. Then I can hoard supplies. Who’s going to stop me?
I also need to work on a plan to access the hyperdrone up on Loki. I need to figure out a way to activate it, get it to obey my commands, and to return to Farigha instead of Loki, which will make downloading easier.
The rover’s soft brain can handle downloads and communications. I might even have a semblance of an internet in terms of content. I mainly want anything that can tell me how to survive. More importantly, I want to talk to human beings again, even if I have to send the drone to a busy hypergate to yell, “Heeeeelllllp!”
Assuming I figure all that out, where do I send it? Mars is clearly not doing anything about Farigha. Not even an OCD transport has shown up. Yeah, I know. Our hypergate is gone, but OCD uses projection drive ships, no hypergate required.
"So, what, John Farno," you say, oh, alien intelligence to whom I'm a mere archeological curiosity who likely died by his own stupidity, "what in the name of insert-ancient-god-we-still-invoke-but-don't-believe-in-here is 'projection drive'?"
Okay, if you're actually human, I'm going to assume that's a stupid question. But maybe you're not. Or you live in a world where projection drive is forgotten. In the present day, we get around the stars via wormhole. Originally, we found stable wormholes like the Firenze Pass leading from Sol's Kuiper Belt to Jefivah. And that's how the first human core worlds were founded. Later, we discovered we could not only built hypergates to replace the naturally occurring wormholes, but we could access hypergates anywhere within a certain range. Eventually, someone figured out that ships could generate them if you miniaturized enough power. The ship has dishes at either end, one on the bow to "project" the wormhole, one aft to hold said wormhole open until the ship reaches the far end. It's highly efficient.
It also causes nausea and vomiting if you look directly into a wormhole. The human brain does not like visual evidence that other dimensions exist.
OCD uses these ships almost exclusively. You need interstellar access if you're going to be the Compact's 400-kilo gorilla. So, Mars, or maybe the Office of Colonial Development, is being deliberately obtuse. “Hmm… Farigha went silent. Oh, well, accidents happen. Let’s shift our resources elsewhere.”
Earth is an even worse idea. Humanity’s cradle assumes the entire universe revolves around humanity’s cradle. Yeesh! I’m thinking maybe somewhere in the Jovian Federation. Every so often, the people of Sol’s asteroid and Kuiper belts, and those living above the gas and ice giants, like to remind Earth and Mars that, without them, they would not exist. Not as interstellar heavyweights. Other
core worlds might not be a good idea. Why should they care about a distant terraforming project Mars abandoned? Most people in the Compact hate Earth and Mars.
I’ll think of something.
From the warm and less-stale confines of the pit stop, goodnight.
DAY 10
PIT STOP ON THE ROAD TO SOLARIA
LOG ENTRY: 0842 23-Sagan, 429
Good morning! I slept in. Nude!
Sort of.
The pit stop is a huge cavern and heated. It’s got its own fusion core and ventilation. The chamber is actually not all that airtight, but that’s by design. Cracks in the rock above allow air from the outside to flow inside. Some genius rigged up an elaborate oxygenation system that converts all the CO2 from the outside into breathable oxygen inside. If only I could rig up such a system for the rover. Best of all, the pit stops vent oxygenated air into the atmosphere, slowly increasing the oxygen levels outside. At this rate, though, Farigha will have a breathable, if frigid, atmosphere in about five thousand years, roughly the time someone comes to pick me up.
The air is warm in here. Not as warm as the rover, but warm enough. And the knowledge that air flows freely through a passive life support system prompted me to shed it all as I slept on some couch left in one of the offices set aside for crews to use to communicate with the domes, other rovers, or even the hypergate when that was a going concern.
Unfortunately, the pit stop also has drafts. Cold drafts. Through some quirk in the system, maybe a glitch that could be fixed with scheduled maintenance, ventilation sends through a blast of cold air throughout the entire storage complex, cold enough to shrink my…
My little John Farno.
*Ahem.* Anyway, my night of sleeping without the pressure suit in an emergency sleeping bag required an adjustment. I found some fresh clothes in a storage bin, as well as a jacket, and stretched out once more on a luxuriously long (if lumpy) couch in the office.
So, you may be saying as you listen attentively to this shortly before 2 Mainzer collapses into a ball of stellar ash, you’re heading out to this Solaria you talked about today, aren’t you?
In the words of my generation on Bonaparte, “Uh uh.” I’m taking the day off from survival. In theory, I could live in here for the rest of my time on Farigha. If I circle all the way back to Musk on this fool’s errand, I just may. But I answer to no one at the moment. The rover is functional with a few extra niceties and the bounty of this particular pit stop. Its fusion core is not likely to give out for six months, in which time I can probably figure out how to replace it with one in storage. If it comes down to me living in a stone vault until rescue or death come for me, then so be it. While I’m going to be an active participant in my own survival, I have the means to, as they say on that archaic world of Jefivah, “chill out and be.”
So today, I’m going to explore the vault, make plans, and, well….
Chill out and be. Dig?
(Wait. Do they say “Dig” on Jefivah? Never had the urge to go there and find out, and I don’t think being stranded here in the Apocalypse has changed my mind.)
(Yet.)
LOG ENTRY: 1007 23-Sagan, 429
Out of curiosity, I climbed into the rover stored here and combed its computer for whatever the last person had loaded onto it: Streamed movies (all rendered 2-D. These are rovers, after all), more books, and a better selection of music. I also cleaned out the stored rover’s food supply. No gelava fruit ration bars!
What I wouldn’t give for some fresh fruit right now. Or even freeze-dried fruit.
So, I picked that rover clean, staged everything in the airlock for transfer, and did a long EVA to load up my rover. Now I have to sleep in the pop tent when I’m on the road. I’m so glad I mounted it on the airlock. My rover, good ol’ 19, is now packed.
Which leads me to the problem of trash. Rovers aren’t meant for permanent use, not the way I’ve been using mine. At some point, I’m going to have to bring it in for maintenance. In the meantime, I’ve so loaded the thing down with supplies that eventually some of it will be turned to non-recyclable trash.
Well, Farno, what did you do before the world ended?
Glad you asked that, future person finding my mummified corpse. When Mars first started working on Farigha, the rovers spent up to ten days out in the wilderness as we started building domes. As a matter of fact, I’m on day ten now. The designers created them to go for almost a month if need be. Eventually, the rovers would have to report back to the tuna can landers that founded this rock as a colony (all once under Helium’s dome — Thanks for asking.) or later, to the domes. Piss, shit, and air all get recycled on the fly. Those systems can run indefinitely. Some of the rations come in edible wrappers, so no waste there. But CO2 scrubbers, dirty laundry, and assorted consumables aboard the rover all build up over time. Laundry got done at the domes since I’ve been here, and the rest of the mess humans make could be recycled or destroyed to leave behind something recyclable at the domes.
I’m already wearing fresh clothes. As a matter of fact, they have showers here in the pit stop, a luxury I granted myself before attempting last night’s nude slumber. This one has a laundry facility. But there’s no one here to render the rest of the trash I generate into something useful. The pit stops are not designed for that. They’re designed for quick resupply during extended missions away from the domes, for emergency rover maintenance, and for short layovers. They’re not meant to be homes.
If all the domes are destroyed or Farigha is completely uninhabited (your humble narrator excepted), then there is nothing and no one to do the dirty work of rendering my trash.
In the name of preserving humanity on this outpost, namely me, I’m going to have to start littering.
Sucks, don’t it?
LOG ENTRY: 1334 23-Sagan, 429
What a good boy am I. I did clean out the trash in Rover 19, I buried it outside, well away from the sensor road. I just couldn’t bring myself to leave piles of paper, polymer, and assorted leavings in Farigha’s airless desert. One could make the argument that I’d be leaving behind an archeological record of my time here, the only man to survive The Event.
But a little part of my brain told me that we will eventually restart the work of making this planet warm, wet, and wonderful. For that reason, I’m leaving the archeological evidence of my existence in the ground. Let someone with a shovel a thousand years from now puzzle out why they’re looking at the clothes I soiled when I panicked in that storage vault a few days ago. The permafrost is a couple of meters down, so they’ll be nice and sterile before the week is out.
I have also made a decision. I am the last person on this planet. The Citizens Republic of Mars has not installed a new authority to replace that which was taken out by The Event. Therefore, until Mars sends new leadership (and a rescue ship while they’re at it), I am assuming the mantle of governing Farigha. It’s all democratic, voted upon unanimously by the current population of Farigha. So what if my Citizenship is still technically on Bonaparte? In the absence of Citizens who claim Mars as their homeworld, a resident alien has the right… Nay, the obligation to take on the burden of state until such time as Mars or the OCD can restore normal authority.
I, therefore, have declared myself Farno, First of His Name, Emperor of 2 Mainzer, King of Farigha, Lord Protector of Rover 19, and the only survivor of The Event™. I don’t have a crown, but I do a lot of EVAs to survive on this rock. So, no crown.
For my first royal decree, I am hereby renaming this planet Farno. If you wish to change it back, you may petition the king. Oh, wait. That’s me.
And I ain’t changing it.
LOG ENTRY: 1334 23-Sagan, 429
Crap. I just hit a snag with my plans to communicate with the Compact.
The hyperdrone up on Loki is perfectly functional. I pinged its AI, and it started pinging back. After an hour, I got all of its systems online and was ready to record my first message to humanity. By the way, how do you spell “HEEEEEEEELL
LLLLLLP!!!!”?
Okay, this was voice recording. But I really wanted the emphasis.
Anyway, I went with something a bit more professional:
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
To anyone receiving this message,
My name is John Farno, and to the best of my knowledge, I am the last surviving human being on the Martian terraforming project known as Farigha. Our satellite constellation is gone. Our hypergate is gone. I have been to four domes, three of which have been flattened by clean fusion devices while a fourth has been destroyed by a kinetic weapon attack. I have no access to a projection drive vessel to get off planet and out of the 2 Mainzer system. Please send help.
