MARS: Renaissance

by Matthew Ellis

  MARS:

  Renaissance

  Matthew Ellis

  ©2014 Watermelon Mountain

  Albuquerque, NM

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, businesses, and events either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual person, place, thing or event is purely coincidental.

  Mars: Renaissance

  Published by Watermelon Mountain

  ©2014 Matthew Ellis

  ISBN 978-1463509293

  Printed In USA

  First Edition

  Cover Photos Courtesy NASA

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be disseminated in any way without the express, signed written consent of the author.

  For my very supportive wife, Sylvia

  I think that you’ll like this series.

  “I look forward to never looking back”

  -Chelsea Aragon

  Also by Matthew Ellis:

  Tornado Mountain

  Introduction

  In 2080, Scout Ellison published a book entitled “I am a Strawberry,” in which he detailed his disdain for money. The basis of the book was the following story:

  I am a strawberry. I grow in the ground and provide food for both people and animals. I should be a very simple thing, but I am not. I am, in fact, extremely complicated. First, a farmer buys seeds to make me from a large corporation, which owns the patent on my DNA. The courts said this was okay a hundred years ago. Then, he drives my seeds home in his truck. This truck used to run on diesel fuel, until the world exhausted its supply of fossil fuels. People knew this would happen, but they did very little to prevent it. The truck now runs on ether, but that will someday also be exhausted. Electric vehicles were tried, but making electricity once also used fossil fuels, so it is seldom used today. Most electricity comes from cosmic electric, where the solar rays of the sun are captured in space and then beamed down to Earth, but it is very expensive and only the very wealthy have access to it.

  Once the farmer gets me home, he plants me in the ground. The farmer first places chemical fertilizers in the ground because poor planting technique a hundred years ago used up all of the good soil. The old time farmers would use the land for only one crop and never allow the land to rest, so the soil got depleted very fast. They did this because they could make more money if they were poor stewards of the land and used it all for themselves. They could not think about the future because it was not cost effective. The chemical fertilizers then leak nitrogen into the underground water supply and run into the local streams causing algae to take over the pond and not allowing other life to exist in its natural state. This has been overcome by killing the algae with natural predators, but only corporations that specialize in environmental cleanup do this. They charge a fee to make the water usable again, so only the very wealthy have access to clean water. The water then has to be treated before it can be used for any purpose. This involves yet another corporation that has control of the water quality. They are supposed to have a safety and quality liaison that is not employed by the corporation, but this person is just another paid employee. The liaison’s interests are not the same as the customers’, so there really is not any safeguard against corruption.

  The next step before I am in the ground is to eliminate pests. The farmer does this by paying a corporation that makes caustic chemicals to create poisons that will kill insects. These chemicals destroy all small animals as well as the insects that they were meant to kill. They leave a residue on the plants once they begin to grow. The plants also absorb these chemical poisons as they grow, so the end consumers end up putting the poison in their bodies. To prevent killing their customers, the farmers have paid pharmaceutical corporations to create both antidotes for the end customers and washes to clean up the produce in the fields.

  Once I am in the ground, the farmer needs to water me. He does this by paying another giant corporation, which owns all of the water in that region to provide him water for his crops. This used to be done by irrigation of natural lakes and rivers, but all of the natural water is now so polluted that it is unusable, unless a corporation that cleans the water controls it. The solution that the farmer’s government found for this problem was to sell all of the water to a corporation so that everyone must pay for water and no one may take even a drop of water out of the region that the corporation controls. If there is not enough water in a region, they buy water from another region and build pipelines to move that water from the natural source and into the buyer’s region. This was called a “free market solution.” For some time, people bypassed this problem by desalinating ocean water, but corporations have usurped that power as well. The only water that is not controlled by corporate interests is ocean water that is in international waters. The government has allowed corporations to enslave everyone everywhere to their control of the water supply.

  The seed has now been planted and watered, so now it needs the sun to grow. The problem is that the sun is blocked from the sky for a large portion of the year. This is caused by pollution from all of the old coal and gasoline in the air. The solution for this problem is to pay yet another corporation to clean the air by making it rain. Before the corporation can make it rain, it must first pay the water corporation in that area for the water it intends to extract from the clouds. Every time the clouds are seeded, the air is improved by about 1%, so it takes many seedings to make the air breathable. Then, when the wind blows pollution from somewhere else, the process must begin again. Governments pay corporations for this service, so the government is then forced to tax its citizens to provide this service.

  The next thing that happens in my life is the harvest. People are needed to pick the berries, but no one wants to do the labor. They don’t want to do this work because it pays so little, and people need to pay for everything they have. If they did the farm labor, they would not be able to afford the high price of living in this society. So the farmer hires people who are in the country illegally or imports slaves that the government does not know about so that the work will get done. He does not pay the illegal immigrants much because he does not have to, and he keeps his costs down and his profits high with the illegal slaves. This is what all farmers do to keep pace with foreign farms and other slave keeping farms. The low prices that they can offer to the market have forced the farmers to break the law, and if the authorities were to crack down on this practice, the economy would collapse. The farmer only pays the other workers what he feels like paying them, and they have no recourse. They need a job to have a chance to stay in the country, and he needs cheap labor. If he hired legal labor (assuming he could even find someone willing to do it), the price of berries would triple and no one would buy me.

  Next in my life is the transport to the factory where I am packaged. I am placed in a truck filled with other strawberries, and then taken to the factory. The truck runs on ether, which is now very expensive and not likely to get any cheaper ever. The driver of the truck is paid to drive the truck to the factory. The people who work on the dock are paid to unload the berries. The factory must pay for water that is used to wash me at the factory, and by this time my price has been increased tenfold from the price of the single seed that I was.

  Sometimes, there is another step in the process. This step is the airplane to take me far away from where I was grown. This involves a shoddy safety inspection to make sure that there is a chance that I will arrive at my destination. The safety of planes used to be done by the airlines, but that was sold to yet another corporation that only cares about profit and not about what is best for anyone else. The safety inspections and shoddy craftsmanship also applies to the trucks used in the prev
ious step. Assuming I make it to where the airline sends me, I will then be taxed to add even more to my price.

  The final stage in my life is the store. They must pay for water, energy, and labor. My price is doubled from what I was at the factory, but it is not legal to buy me directly from the factory unless you are a store. It is also no longer legal to buy me from the farmer unless you are a factory. All of these laws were passed in order to assist the “free market.” This market is anything but free.

  Section I:

  Earth

  Chapter One

  Rally

  Scout looked out at the early spring crowd. He was amazed to have such a large turnout for the rally. The temperature was 4° C, and he didn’t think that the people of Portland, Oregon would understand the purpose of his demonstration. He expected a few dozen people, maybe even a hundred. He stared out at a massive throng in front of his eyes. There were probably fifty thousand people on the grass in front of him. Most of them wanted to hear more of his ideas, even if not everyone completely agreed with them.

  Scout stepped up to the microphone and said, “Thank you all for coming out to support us. I know that many of you think my agenda is radical. I realize that my ideas are very unorthodox. I think that some of you are here to learn more about my plan to save the human race from our own greed. I also think that some of you don’t agree with me. I don’t ask for complete agreement, I only ask to be heard.”

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a digital reader.

  He read, “Over the course of human history, people have felt the need to assign values to the things they need, make, or use. In the beginning of this process, transactions were fair and represented compensation for a person’s labor or items were simply traded. Then we invented a thing called money, or currency. It replaced the old barter system with a more advanced system. This system allowed money to change hands in exchange for goods and services. The problem with this system is that it creates ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ Certain people, like CEO’s and investors, get rich off the backs of other people, usually the people doing all the actual work. That is, at least until the person with the money decides to replace the workers with machines because they will save him or her money. Many of you here today have lost your jobs to machines because they were cheaper, more efficient or smarter than you were. Others may have lost your jobs to legalized slavery. All of this has happened while we have privatized the entire world’s clean air, fresh water and food systems. Now you have no job and no money, so you’re without any way to sustain yourselves without the government’s assistance. Meanwhile, the world’s governments are going bankrupt trying to fix the problems that they created by selling the air, water, food, and energy production to private corporations.

  Then there are some people who do nothing with their lives but entertain people for a short time, and then they don’t feel the need to contribute to society anymore. We are all fools for using our limited resources to fund this ridiculous system.”

  This brought a calm quiet to the audience. They had never thought about how much money they spend to support the entertainment industry, and most people saw it as an escape from the harsh reality of their daily lives. They wanted to live vicariously through movies, television, and sports teams. They did not realize that this diversion was actually causing some of the problems in their daily lives.

  Scout continued, “Someone has to be in charge or there would be chaos; but why does the person at the top get all of the reward for doing very little of the work? I’m also not saying that entertainers are bad. Sports professionals and other entertainers contribute to the enjoyment of society while they’re working, but why don’t they feel the need to continue contributing after they retire?

  The dichotomy I referred to earlier was what communists called the “bourgeoisie” and the “proletariat,” but I am not here to revisit communism. I am here to offer a radical alternative to any system offered on Earth.

  Imagine a world where everyone works for the good of society and only for that end. Imagine the new technologies that could be developed. Imagine how far medicine could advance. People can have this perfect society where everything gets better without need of funding. Projects that are beneficial to humanity would just get done, and inventions that improve our lives would just get made. Money is the only thing holding us back. Imagine how far man can go if we give up money.

  I can’t offer this new system here on Earth because that would require fundamental changes to Earth’s system. That can only be accomplished by a revolution filled with bloodshed, and I’m not interested in bloodshed. I’m offering an alternative to this world somewhere else.

  I’m prepared to escape the gravity of this world and travel through space to form a new colony on Mars to accomplish these goals. It will be very difficult, and the details are still being worked out, but I offer the chance to escape the system to anyone who will follow me. I offer a world without money.”

  The people in the crowd looked at this 23-year-old man, many of them stunned at what he was suggesting. Was this tall man with the buzz cut flaming red hair, sparkling green eyes, and booming voice actually proposing that his people should leave the planet to find a new home 250 million kilometers away? Could the person that everyone thought to be the future of humanity have actually lost his mind, or was this really the plan to save the human race from itself? The crowd continued to listen to the tan, hefty man who seemed to talk with his hands as much as his voice as he made his next point.

  As he spoke, a group of heavily armed military operatives began to surround the rally. The governor had called them in to keep the peace, but their leader had other ideas. Their commanding officer had heard of Scout, and considered him an insurrectionist. His operatives wanted to end the threat that this man posed to the way of life that money represented. He did not expect his men to take the action that they took. He believed in following every rule to deal with problems. His subordinates clearly did not.

  They were three young men in full camouflage gear hiding in the forest immediately adjacent to the park. One was armed with a .50 caliber cannon in his arms, while the other two were there to communicate the best position to the shooter. They were there to stop a radical from ending their way of life. Their livelihoods depended on maintaining the current system. The truth was that the governments of the world had become corrupt.

  They needed some people to be comfortable while others were in despair, as this was what kept them working. The operatives were not there to keep the peace, nor to arrest Scout and thereby silence the threat that he posed, but to assassinate Scout Ellison. Their commanding officer, while he considered Scout to be a threat, would never allow this action. He knew that assassination victims become martyrs, and martyrs can never be silenced.

  Scout continued, “The investor class is the wealthiest one- percent of the population. They control well over three quarters of the world’s resources, while the bottom three quarters have just two percent. The wealthy are motivated only by greed. Their greed has caused banks to fail several times this century, and they never seem too eager to fix the problems that they caused. They just cover up the scandals until the people who were hurt by their greed are silenced. This is usually accomplished by passing laws through corrupt politicians or by killing dissenters.

  The economies of this world are so fragile that any disruption of whatever vehicle, usually money, which makes them work, will cause major catastrophes even when the disruption seems minor and short-lived. People lose their jobs, and then the rest of the economy collapses because no one has any money to spend. Then the people who work the hardest are the least compensated. People who can barely afford to feed their families are the ones creating most of the wealth for corporations and investors, and they’re the most at risk of injury or disease from the work that they do. These corporations don’t care that these people are diligently working for them, but accomplishing nothing in their personal lives. When the p
eople who work very hard begin to do well, it seems as if some machine invariably replaces them because it can do the job faster or better, or certainly cheaper. Even when they don’t switch to a machine, they find near slave labor in some depressed part of the world. What these corporations really want is a return to legal slavery. They continually find ways to make things cheaper, and they have progressively found more and more people to oppress over time. When one group rises up and demands reasonable wages, they find people who will work harder and cheaper. Then when there are no more disposable people, they invent some machine so that people will be able to buy their junk.

  Large chain stores started this trend at the end of the last century, and they did it by tricking poor people. They kept prices low by guaranteeing that the poorest people stayed poor. They did this by paying very low wages and finding people in depressed countries to make their products cheaply. This created a massive cycle of poverty. These stores finally failed when the poor people that they were exploiting had no more money. Now only rich people have any money, and they trade with other rich people. To make things worse, they elect people who pass laws that make it illegal to be poor. They want to jail or destroy all of the poor people on this planet. Soon no one will be left working for pay once a machine or slave replaces every worker. Then the great economic machine will collapse and be irreparably damaged.

  Another reason to give up money is that many wars are started because one nation is wealthy not because of their hard work, but because of some resource they possess that other nations don’t possess. Then the wealthier nations gouge the nations that can’t do anything without those resources. The bloodshed begins when the poor nations get tired of the exploitation. I propose a place where every person is required to work to benefit the whole of the society, and members of the society are equally compensated for their labor.