I knew she was right. The pages might be buried in snow, or have rotted away long ago, but there was magic in the Book and somehow I knew that finding them wouldn’t be a problem. The girl waiting for me at the end of the trail was the real unknown. “Penarddun wouldn’t have sacrificed himself if he didn’t think we had a chance. I have to try to find that cave.”
She looked at me with a mixture of disbelief and... dare I say it? Admiration. “Well, if you’re going north at this time of year you’ll need provisions. I think I even know a guide with a snowmobile for rent.”
“A snowmobile?” I asked, bewildered.
“It’s like a motorcycle, but it runs on snow. They’re not that common yet, but some of the Inuit hunters are replacing their sled dogs with them. You can go a couple of hundred miles on a single tank.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I can’t thank you enough.”
She shook my hand. “Take care of yourself Declan, you know, gracelessness and all.”
The Changing Face of Mars
by Emily C. Skaftun
Swindlers lined the dusty main drag of the town everyone called Nutsack, popping up from the half-sunk doors of ModPod businesses like meerkats offering lodging, get-rich-quick schemes, and stews of the finest Martian-grown chickenpork. Tracy thought Nutsack resembled the Old West, if you squinted past the glare of holo-ads and solar sheeting and ignored the mining bots and maglev trains.
The people, about three-quarters of whom were criminals, only added to the feeling. To them, Tracy was just a mark, one of the eggheads working for WentiCo on bio-engineering. Which, of course, he was. But an egghead who’d spent his share of time in the field, harvesting genes from the rarest creatures on Earth. One frontier town was very like another, he’d found. He suspected this desert colony six kilometers south by southeast of the infamous “Face” on Mars would prove no different.
“Get your Stingbrush Soywheat Tea!” one of the hucksters yelled, brandishing a walking stick obviously not made of native wood. “Cures the wobbles!” The woman looked wobbly herself, leathery skin hanging from skinny limbs. Tracy wondered what she’d been exiled to Mars for. She was by far the oldest person Tracy had seen since landing.
Something like fever rushed over Tracy, and the thin atmosphere felt unbearably thick. The world’s weak gravity tugged at him and he stumbled, eliciting a wave of laughter and renewed shouting from every storefront on the block. Sweat broke out on Tracy’s forehead. The street scene wavered like air over hot asphalt.
When it resolved, Tracy saw the old woman limping toward him, a serious face against a backdrop of hyenas. She wore a long, woven dress the same red as the street’s dust, and beaded necklaces of regolith that looked too heavy for her hunched frame to support. “Come,” she said. Her voice was friendly now, and even though Tracy was late for his first shift at WentiCo’s bio-lab, he reckoned anything that treated the “wobbles” couldn’t hurt.
He followed the woman into a cool dark ModPod, where she sat him on an air pillow and presented him with a steaming ceramic mug of something that looked like dirty milk and smelled like burning tires. “Drink,” she said.
Tracy did, and immediately retched back into the cup.
Now the woman laughed, bending backward like a coyote howling at the moon. Or moons, Tracy supposed.
“You old hag,” he said, struggling to get his legs under him to stand. But the dizziness hit him again, fiercer this time, and he sank back into the cushion. “You poisoned me.”
“Not me,” the woman said, a knowing glint in her eye. “Give me the news from Earth.”
Tracy wasn’t sure why he should do anything the old woman said. But as he watched her lift another mug of the same acrid concoction to her lips, he reflected that it probably wasn’t poison. And anyway, he was in no condition to leave. She lowered herself with surprising grace onto an air pillow opposite Tracy, and he dutifully related conditions on the home planet: storms and diseases swirling up from the tropics, cities stretching toward the sky, fractious factions scrambling for answers and blame, building solutions as fast as they could, which wasn’t fast enough.
The woman just nodded. “Same as it’s been for an age.”
••
Tracy settled into his work, building new species for the terraformed planet. Round after round of asteroid bombardment had already done the hardest work, giving Mars its habitable atmosphere and liquid water; WentiCo Labs had to do the rest. Aside from some primitive bacteria and lichens that had bloomed in the asteroids’ wake, all life on the planet had been engineered there, from genetically altered prairie dogs to the hardy pseudo-lupin they ate, to any of a thousand failed agricultural strains like gamma maize and colossal crickets.
Tracy made no progress. Some days it felt like Mars itself was fighting him, killing his creations no matter how well adapted they seemed.
It felt like Mars was trying to kill Tracy too. Dizzy spells came more often, more severely, and he started to sneeze. But he couldn’t be sick; he’d been thoroughly screened and scrubbed while still in lunar orbit. There was no way the disease he’d dug up could have survived those treatments. Or so Tracy kept telling himself.
He took to drinking in the ModPod saloons. Liquor was one of the only native Martian products that flourished; it could be distilled from even failed crops.
One night, after a particularly traumatic episode with a marmot variant and an especially disorienting bout of dizziness, the old woman with the beaded regolith necklaces appeared on the barstool next to Tracy’s. “You’re not well,” she said.
Tracy knew that. It didn’t take a doctor.
“I’ve seen the news from Earth. Bad plague. Started right around the time you left.”
Tracy knew that too. Boy, did he. He downed another shot of burning crabwheat vodka.
“Mars can heal you. You just have to ask.”
Tracy scoffed. “Look, lady. I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m no fool. Ask Mars, indeed.”
“I know exactly who you are, emissary. Better than you do. Mars will listen, and you will succeed in your task, but you must go where she can hear you.” The woman smiled with what Tracy could only take for wisdom. Or insanity.
But when he looked closely at her, Tracy almost fell off his barstool. Her skin hung off her no longer, she was no longer stooped. Tracy wondered why he’d ever thought her old; she was beautiful.
His skepticism drained away. “And where’s that?”
“I think you know.”
Tracy did know.
••
The journey took longer than Tracy would have imagined. It was only six kilometers, after all, up the imaginary spinal column linking Nutsack to the Face. But his borrowed buggy crapped out somewhere north of where the nipples would be, and he had to walk the rest of the way. The prairie dogs followed him in their dodgy way, glowing with faint luminescence. He thought of turning back many times.
Tracy didn’t believe there was a mystical Martian spirit who would grant his wish like some kind of wizard. People had known for a century that the Face was just a plateau, that the human-like image had been a trick of light and low-resolution photography.
But he kept going until he stood somewhere under the thing’s chin. It was taller than he’d imagined, and looked nothing like a face. It looked like a big dusty heap of disappointment.
“Oh hell, Mars,” Tracy said, scuffing at the soil. The stubborn, inhospitable soil that failed to nourish all but the most gnarly of his engineered plants. “You can’t help me. You’d have done it already if you wanted to.”
A wave of dizziness more severe than any he’d yet had passed over him. Tracy fell to his knees, sneezing repeatedly, and he wasn’t sure if what he saw before him was real or a product of his fevered collapse. A veil of dust lifted from the Face, swirling and whooshing like something escaping from Pandora’s box. The dust coalesced in one great twisting gust of wind from the plateau, invading his eyes and nose and pricking his
skin like needles. While it passed he thought, for one mad second, that he heard a voice speaking to him.
Thank you, bringer of seed.
Tracy’s head cleared and he blinked dusty tears from his eyes and nose, looking up to an astonishing sight.
••
By the time he returned to Nutsack, Tracy felt better. As crazy as it sounded, he felt like his sickness had been pulled out of him by the wind that gushed away from the Face, pregnant with possibility.
He was not surprised to see where that wind had gone.
The lab was in ruins. Smashed equipment lay among a wreckage of flimsy ModPod buildings and broken glass. Among it all was a sickening ooze that Tracy knew was biological, a mix of lab samples and whatever the wind had carried. Workers in HazMat suits were already approaching it with sterilizing intent, but Tracy sent them home. “Let it find its own way,” he said. He was sure the biological stew would bloom into something wonderful. The lab at Nutsack had become a womb.
He expected trouble from the higher-ups at WentiCo, but none came. New satellite images of the Face stunned everyone to silence. It had changed, dusty plateau lifting away to reveal the true visage underneath – not human, not anything anyone had seen before.
But even that was nothing compared to what Tracy had seen, close up: life. Grasses and trees and animals of all kinds had spilled out of the plateau as though from an eggsack, a spreading ecosystem as complex and alien as anything he’d ever seen.
About Animism: The Gods' Lake
Animism: The Gods’ Lake began as a teen-focused animated epic that combines the best parts of urban fantasy with the timeless storytelling of Aboriginal myths and legends. The arc of that nationally telecast series tells a classic hero’s journey tale of Mel Ravensfall as she struggles to understand her otherworldly identity and confront the timeless supernatural beings that lurk beneath the Gods’ Lake.
This journey takes her through the Veil and into a world largely forgotten by humanity: it is a place where the balance between nature and progress is still finely tuned and where mythical and half-imagined creatures still roam. It is also a precarious reality, one that is steadily cracking under the relentless forces of the Wetiko, a cannibalistic being who seeks to take ultimate control.
We wanted this new story to reach entirely new audiences. We decided to work across an array of orchestrated storytelling platforms: our creative team went “all in” to create a transmedia experience that was fully realized across a range of platforms. These included a hidden-object game published by Big Fish Games, a complete graphic novel, an alternate reality scavenger hunt and, finally, the collaborative fiction collection that you’re holding in your hands.
The inspiration for this collection was to give fans a chance to write short fiction alongside some of the best-selling writers that they admire most. By opening the story bible and crowdsourcing inspiration, we have created a body of work of which we are unbelievably proud.
About Zeros 2 Heroes Media
Since 2007, Zeros 2 Heroes Media has produced compelling digital experiences that are driven by detailed audience analytics, showcased through the latest social media techniques, and crafted via a virtual studio that gives us access to the best creative talent from around the world.
But, first and foremost, we try to structure each experience to ensure that we draw on the creative talents of aspiring creatives, many times giving them their first professional “break”. This crowdsourced approach to creativity has helped us create dozens of graphic novels, web series, games and award-winning alternate reality campaigns to support popular science-fiction television series.
In addition to conceiving, developing and producing the original animated television series, Zeros 2 Heroes is the creative force behind the Animism transmedia strategy. Plans are underway to launch the next generation of experiences set in this world, including a second nationally broadcast television series.
The Book of the Emissaries: An Animism Short Fiction Anthology Page 26
