Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  Yes, her. It was a grown-up. In a uniform. Specifically, it was Lainie, as in Lainie Lainie No Complainy, making her way down the same corridor just a meter or two behind me. She smiled at me as she drew near, her normal theatrical scowl disappearing. “You sure seem happy about something,” she said.

  I shrugged. I never knew what to say to Lainie. She was everywhere, all the time, and always seemed to know the gossip before any of the colonists did. She was the only one on the ship who’d actually been to Mars: she’d lived there for ten years and returned to Earth on the first ship back to retrieve and orient the next batch of colonists.

  “Just closed out my Martian Chronicles account,” I said. “It’s kind of nice not to have to worry about it for a while, at least until Turnaround.”

  She nodded. “David Smith, right? DBOS-Corp?”

  “You know it?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “Oh, sure. There’s only a thousand of you here—I know a lot about all of you.” She tapped her temple. “Trick memory. But you stand out, of course. DBOS-Corp, that’s a legend.”

  I shook my head. “Not a lot of grown-ups pay attention to Martian Chronicles,” I said. “You really play?”

  “I played on the Mars-side server,” she said. “Lots of us did. Gave us something to do, helped us get to know each other after we made planetfall. And so I looked up the game when I got to Earth, watched it. Didn’t play, though—no time, not while we were getting the Eagle ready.”

  I said, very carefully, “I hear it’s a very different kind of game on Mars.” I didn’t want her to know about Vijay’s eavesdropping, but I also felt a weird kind of kinship with her, wanted to open up to her.

  “Oh, you hear, do you?” Her face was still friendly, but I could hear a hint of the familiar sternness in her voice. “People do talk.”

  I was self-conscious, like I’d said too much, blown it. I started to mumble an apology and move on, but Lainie stopped me. “David,” she said, her voice low. “I know how rumors spread. I wouldn’t want you going away with the wrong impression. Why don’t you stop by my cabin during office hours, and we’ll chat about this?” She looked away, checking her work space—Lainie and the crew all had work spaces on the Eagle, the rest of us had to use handheld computers—and said, “Start in an hour. I’ll book you in for my first slot, okay?” It wasn’t really a question.

  “Okay,” I said, and felt a jet of sick fear. Spreading dispiriting rumors was one of the worst kinds of whining on the Eagle, and Lainie had lots of punishments, big and small, that she could use to discipline offenders.

  The next hour was an agony of worry. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to go to the JC lounge, didn’t want to run into anyone I knew, so I ended up hanging around Lainie’s cabin, on Deck One, the crew deck, waiting for her hours to start. As soon as the clock ticked over to ship’s 1100h, her door clunked open and there she was, still in her crisp ship’s uniform, clean lines and a single gold braid around her left bicep. “Mr. Smith,” she said. “How good of you to come.” She stood aside and ushered me in.

  Her quarters were twice as big as the cabin that my whole family shared, and it felt very spacious, even though our house back on Earth had had bathrooms bigger than her entire cabin (she had her own bathroom, I noticed). She had a little writing desk and some pieces of red Martian rock in a frame over her folded-up bunk. The room was as neat as a pin, not a single thing out of place, no dust or dirt. Compared to the rest of Eagle—grubby, buckled—it was like an operating theater. “Sit, please,” she said, gesturing at a round fold-out seat. She rummaged in a small fridge and withdrew two cold bulbs of orange juice and passed one to me. “Thirsty air on this ship,” she said, cracking the seal on hers. “We keep using water for reaction mass as we go, which means the air’s going to get drier and drier. By the time we make Mars, you’re going to be as desiccated as a mummy. Drink up!” She slurped at her bulb. I cracked my own and drank it.

  “Look,” I said, still feeling scared, “I’m sorry if I said too much. I know I shouldn’t be passing rumors—” She waved at me impatiently.

  “Forget that. That’s not why you’re here. Listen, David, you’ve been kicking ass on MC for years. You’re about to start over in a new world, start everything over. And as you’ve heard, things on Mars are different. Not just on Mars, but in the Mars-side Martian Chronicles. Do you understand what things are like there?”

  “I think so,” I said, carefully. “No whiners, right? No poves. Succeeding on your merits?”

  Her expression was unreadable. Amusement? Anger? Impossible to say. “Yes, David. But here’s the thing: there’s always winners and losers, you understand that?”

  I nodded. “Sure.”

  “Even on Mars.”

  I nodded again, more slowly. “What do you mean by that?”

  “You’ve heard how things are on the Mars-side game?”

  “I’ve heard . . . things.”

  “What things?”

  “Um. That a few companies control the whole game. That no one can get ahead unless they pay off the big guys.”

  She nodded. “That’s one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that there are some very, very successful people on Mars. These people saw the opportunity, took it, and made sure that they’d keep it for as long as they could. They’re playing the game better and harder than anyone else.”

  “Wait,” I said, confused. “Are you talking about Martian Chronicles or Mars?”

  She gave me that mysterious look again. “There isn’t really a difference on Mars. Martian Chronicles, Martian life. Why bother coming up with a functional stock market, communications system, and banking system when MC has it all built in? Martian Chronicles was built to model the kind of society that Mars, Inc. and Mars Colony were hoping to build. Why wouldn’t you use it as the template for the actual Mars Colony?”

  I tried to take this all in. “But it’s just a game—”

  She looked impatient. “Just a game? What is any of this except for a game? Why am I dressed up like a member of some kind of space navy? Why do people who have all the money they could ever spend try to earn more? Why don’t you stab your friend when he gets on your nerves? It’s all a game, it’s all rules, it’s all play. It may not always be fun, but games aren’t just about fun.”

  I struggled to get my mind around this. “The game is life on Mars?”

  Her impatience grew. “Look, David, I’m talking to you today because I thought you’d be a smart kid. If you’re just going to sit there boggling at me, you can go back to your quarters. Get with the program, will you?”

  Now I felt scared again. “Okay, okay. I see. The game is life. Life is the game. Got you.”

  “Good. Now, when we flip the antennas around, you’re going to get your account on the Martian servers and you’re going to start over as a total noob. You’re going to have to figure out how to survive in a game that’s plenty rougher than any you’ve ever played. There’s a pretty good chance it’s going to chew you up and spit you out. It’s going to do that to a lot of you. And as you know, I’m in charge of heading off whining, making sure it doesn’t happen. So I’m here to help you avoid getting into the kind of situation where you’ll be whining.”

  I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about, but I didn’t want to seem dumb, so I kept my mouth shut and nodded.

  “Here’s the thing. There’s a thousand colonists headed to Mars. You’re going to double Mars’s population. But let’s be frank here. You’re latecomers. The people who’ve been Mars-side for ten years, those people took a much bigger risk than you’re taking. So they’re earning a greater reward, too. That’s only fair. It’s a meritocracy, after all. But I know people. They whine. They complain. Even colonists. Especially colonists—when they discover that colonial life is harder than they reckoned for. And when colonists get too upset about their bad luck . . . . Well, let’s just say that on Mars, as on Earth, there are plenty of people who are willing to
take by force that which they can’t earn by their wits. And we can’t have that. We especially can’t have that when a thousand new chums are fresh off the boat. That’s a volatile situation.”

  My mouth was dry. I drank more OJ. It tasted metallic, like everything on the ship, having been reconstituted with water from the ship’s condensers. “Sound, um, complicated.”

  “It’s not complicated,” she said. She managed to make me feel stupid every time she spoke. “It’s simple. The thing is, we want to head off any feeling that new colonists can’t make it on Mars. We need an example of how fair things can be, if you’re the right kind of plucky adventurer with the right entrepreneurial spirit. We need a poster child for success in the second wave. This isn’t complicated, David.”

  I reached for the OJ, but my bulb was empty. “So—” I stopped. “You want to set me up as a what? As a success?”

  She smiled condescendingly. “We’re going to start up DBOS-Corp on Mars. It’ll be a very successful corp from the get-go. You’ll have lots of great contracts in hand the second you make Marsfall. Those contracts will pay off big, and bigger. You can hire your friends. Hell, you can hire your father. You will be a symbol of the fairness of Martian society. You’ll have some silent investors who’ll help you get by, starting you out with decent capital and contacts, and who’ll take a piece of the action. This is a good deal, David. You’ve proved that you can build a business once before. It’s absolutely plausible that you’d do it again. And having a fifteen-year-old millionaire is going to be great news. Everyone’s going to go nuts for it. You’ll be a hero.”

  The word millionaire hit me like an electric jolt, made me understand the scope of what was being discussed here.

  “Lainie,” I said, and it came out in a croak. I cleared my throat. “Lainie. That’s really, really wonderful, but—”

  She cocked her head. “I’m surprised that there’s a ‘but’ here, David. This isn’t the kind of opportunity that comes along very often. I thought you were a businessman, the kind of person who seized the moment. Hell, we did a lot of research into this. Went deep on all the colonists. There were fifty potential candidates, but you were the clear winner. Were we wrong?”

  I remembered who I had been. What I had been. DBOS-Corp was one of the biggest, most successful corps in the history of MC. I’d built it with fair play, hard work, and smarts. And luck, of course. I wasn’t just a little kid. I was a success. I was smart. I had done something extraordinary. And I didn’t let anyone push me around. I sat up straighter.

  “Lainie, you’ve made your offer, but I don’t make snap decisions. I think things over. This is no exception. I’ll get back to you.”

  She nodded and dropped her offended expression. “Okay, that’s fair. Mind you, if you say a word about this to anyone, I’ll push you out the air lock.” She smiled when she said it, but not very much. “Ha-ha. Only serious.”

  There was a magic time there, after the latency to Earth became too high to play on its server, and while we were still getting close enough to Mars to do anything except look at slowly updating spreadsheets from there, when nobody thought about Martian Chronicles.

  I trickled back into the Junior Colonists’ lounge by dribs and drabs, coming in for a few minutes at a time, keeping mostly to myself, though I nodded affably enough at anyone who nodded at me, even Helene and Vijay, who seemed to be up to something intense in their private corner. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.

  Here’s what I sent to Lainie the day after she made her extraordinary offer:

  Dear Lainie:

  In regards to our meeting yesterday:

  I have carefully considered your generous offer, and on reflection, I have decided to take you up on it. I am looking forward to a long, profitable relationship.

  Sincerely,

  David Brionn Oglethorpe Smith, III

  CEO, DBOS-Corp (Mars)

  CEO (ret’d), DBOS-Corp (Earth)

  Not that I didn’t agonize over it. I wanted to make it on Mars because I was smarter and better, not because I just got lucky. But I didn’t just get lucky. Lainie’s syndicate picked me because of the job I’d done running DBOS-Corp on Earth. And let’s be honest: if the only way to win the game was to get in good with the big guns, I’d be crazy not to get in good with them. There’s no nobility in failing. Plus, I’d get to hire my Dad, which would be just delicious. Boy, was I ever looking forward to that.

  That’s really what got me. Daydreaming about what it would be like after Marsfall, when we’d all pour out onto that strange world, bounding high in the fractional gravity, our body clocks already adjusted to the Martian day from three months with the Eagle’s systems running on Mars standard. We’d go to our housing, grubby new chums around the sophisticated, happy, settled Martians, and we’d start to try to find our fortunes. No whining allowed! Even when there were no fortunes to be had, no whining allowed. There my pals, my father and mother, and everyone would be, trying to find a way to get ahead on their new planet, where all the good opportunities seemed to have been taken, and there I’d be, rebuilding Oglethorp Corp, catching all these great breaks, growing more profitable, growing bigger, getting famous. Being a poster child. A hero.

  And I could be generous! I could welcome in the new colonists, give them positions in my big, successful corp. Even Helene and Vijay, who’d come to see me as the kind of titan of business I’d always known I could be. I’d been shocked by the idea that on Mars, Martian Chronicles didn’t just influence life, it was life. But after giving it some thought, I realized that I’d always been better at MC than real life, so why shouldn’t I be glad that I was heading to the place where Martian Chronicles ruled?

  Nobody was thinking about Martian Chronicles in the Junior Colonists’ lounge. Not even me. Once I sent that note to Lainie, I realized that there was no way I could possibly end up as a debthaunted drone in someone else’s corp, and my subconscious mind stopped worrying about it. The crazy anxiety dreams I’d been having ended. The fact that Dad was still all tied up in knots didn’t faze me. My future was set.

  The second day after apogee, I drifted into the Junior Colonists’ lounge. It was my morning, along with a third of the ship’s population’s—I was on second shift, which ran from ship’s 0800 to 1600. I had a couple of my computers with me, a handheld and a bigger control unit that I used to drive my goggles and other devices. Both had just received Mars OS, the Martian operating system that ran on Martian time and used Martian protocols and converted over the whole interface, spell-checker, and everything, to Simplified English. In theory, it ran on everything that was computerized—phones, handhelds, tape-measures, music players, PCs, pedometers, headphones, cameras. . . .

  But in practice, Mars OS didn’t work as well as we’d been told it would. Lainie just shrugged her shoulders at the complaining colonists and told them, “No whining, gang. The engineers who built Mars OS have been living on Mars for the past ten years. Technology has moved on. The source code is on the ship’s server. Some of you are wicked techie. Figure it out. Or throw away your gewgaws and get used to living with fewer gadgets—or hell, wait until we make Marsfall and see if anyone’s made a Martian replacement you can buy.”

  So that’s what we were mostly thinking about in the JC lounge—how to get all our toys working again. Most of the cheap handheld devices were DOA, which was especially hard on us kids, since no one wanted to be a dork carrying around a huge computer that you needed a handbag or a backpack for. If you couldn’t wear it around your wrist or neck, or shove it in a back pocket, you wouldn’t be caught dead carrying it.

  The kids who were really into the tech side of things had suddenly become monster rock gods, able to lay hands on your precious device and bring it back to life with a few incantations. They were charging all the market could bear for it, too—getting some of the best stuff on the ship, filling huge, floating low-gee net-bags with booty: painting kits, knifes and multitools, jewelry, prize T-shirts, mus
ical instruments . . . The pathetic possessions we were able to squeeze into our luggage allowances. A lot of kids were way pissed at them, accusing them of gouging, but I shrugged and went back to our room for my harmonica and my set of permanent grease pencils. If they could do it and I couldn’t, why shouldn’t they charge all the market could bear for it?

  Besides, once DBOS-Corp was running hot and black on Mars, I’d be able to buy back my stuff and more.

  But as I lined up to hand over my treasures, Vijay and Helene drifted over to me. They were bungeed together, which was a convenient way to stay close enough to speak quietly amid all the eddies, breezes, and drifting debris in the JC lounge. As they neared me, Helene held out her hand, as though she wanted me to help her brake so that they could join me in waiting in line. I was unexpectedly glad to see that hand. I’d missed them more than I’d dared admit to myself.

  I took Helene’s hand and braced myself to help absorb their minimal inertia. As our fingers made contact, Helene whipped her arm up, keeping a tight grip on my hand, and jerked me out of the queue. We began to do slow doughnuts in the JC lounge, dizzying whirls that stopped only when we reached a bulkhead and Vijay stopped me.

  I went from glad to furious in three nauseous circles around the JC lounge. Once we were Velcroed down, I glared at them. “I’d been waiting in line for an hour,” I hissed. “Now you’ve blown it.” That was the line rule on the Eagle: get out of line, lose your place. And the Eagle was all lines.

  Helene crossed her eyes at me and stuck out her tongue. “First of all, it’s nice to see you too, stranger. Second, who cares about the line? Third, I can fix your stupid computers, and I won’t charge you anything for the favor. Fourth, we’ve got lots to talk about.”

  I took a moment to absorb all of this. “You can fix my computers?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Duh. I’ve been fooling around with Mars OS for years. I can’t believe the rest of you didn’t bother! It’s the bloody operating system that our new planet runs on! Knowing how it works is as important as knowing how to work a rebreather or patch a cold-suit. Give.” She held out her hand. I passed her my handheld and my main computer pack and some of my peripherals. She pulled a chopstick out of her hair and stuck one end of it—it was tipped with memory pins, I saw—into the handheld and began to poke at it. “You’ve got your data backed up?” she said. I nodded. She stuck the tip of her tongue out of one corner of her mouth and unfolded a keyboard and screen from her back pocket and rubbed them against the handheld to get them connected, and then went to work.