“Have you seen the complex yet? And your quarters?”
“I haven't taken Mr. Sokolov around yet. I wanted him to meet you first,” replied Sylvia before Dedrick could.
“Oh OK, good. Well, I’m glad you made it here without a glitch, and I have a feeling you’re going to enjoy your stay with us. I think you’ll like the place. The complex offers great amenities, including a large gym, an indoor pool, and we also have a wonderful training lab in the east wing of the building. Wait 'til you see it. You're gonna love it!”
“I'm sure I will, Sir- I mean, Lars,” Dedrick replied with a nod and a smile.
“Great! Well, I'm sure you're tired and impatient to check out your room, so I'll let Sylvia take you there. Enjoy the rest of your evening and get some rest. We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow. We'll have an orientation briefing in the morning, and you'll get to meet the other members of your team, but Sylvia will explain all that to you in details. Good to have you on board, Dedrick!” Lars finished as he shook his hand and sat back down in front of his laptop.
“Thank you, Lars. I'm looking forward to it!”
“Good,” he replied as Sylvia and Dedrick left the room.
After visiting a few key places, including the recreational area, the centrifugal room, and the 590mm reflecting telescope, that last stop at Dedrick’s request, Sylvia finally led the Russian to his quarters, deep in the east wing of the main building.
“This is your room. The cafeteria is at the end of the hallway, on the right. Dinner is at seven thirty…that’s in about twenty minutes. If you need anything, just ring the front desk by dialing pound one on your interphone. Make yourself at home, Mr. Sokolov and I’ll see you in a few in the cafeteria.”
“Thank you, Sylvia,” replied Dedrick, daring to use her first name to keep things informal.
She just glanced at him with an approving smile and left.
The apartment was decent in size. The first thing Dedrick noticed was the giant flat screen TV on the wall across from him. Below it, a fake fireplace, vaguely reminding him of the one at his parent’s house, looked surprisingly new. “I wonder if it works,” he thought. A great bay window, almost as wide as the wall it covered, offered a clear view on the lavish forest beyond the compound. To the left, a small office area was filled by an armoire partially hidden behind a desk and chair, on top of which sat a computer. He stared an instant at the “Mars First” logo, moving slowly across the monitor. Beyond, a clear glass door opened into a modern bathroom with an all-around shower and Jacuzzi bathtub. Dedrick walked to the inviting bedroom. The room was uncluttered, with a single queen bed in the middle, a dresser and one chair near the window.
After removing his jacket and hanging it in the closet, Dedrick took off his shoes and walked to the small kitchen area to make himself some coffee. The kitchen was one step higher than the rest of the apartment, in an interesting split-level design. Turning around, his back to the percolating coffee machine, he stared a moment at the retro looking dark green couch that was sitting caddy cornered, facing the large TV. Not really to his taste but nonetheless classic. After pouring himself a well-deserved cup of warm coffee, he looked up at the low ceiling while taking a sip. Dedrick was a tall man at one meter ninety-two, and the ceiling offered only another half a meter or so of room above his head, giving him a strange feeling of confinement but that slight disappointment was compensated by two large skylights that offered a beautiful view of the open sky. In fact, every part of the complex, Dedrick would later learn, was designed to receive as much natural light as possible, a choice that he fully approved. It wasn’t the home of his dreams, but he would make the best of it. He had to. He was going to spend the next eight years here.
Coffee in hand, Dedrick walked to the small table in the middle of the living room, grabbed the remote, sat on the green couch, and turned the TV on. After scanning through a few local channels, he found a documentary on the Ajanta caves of India. He could not understand Dutch, but was nonetheless immediately captivated by the amazing images of temples carved right out of the mountain. For a few minutes, he watched, pondering on the challenges of such an undertaking. But after the excitement and exhaustion of the trip, even his fascination with ancient monuments was not enough to keep him awake for long, and he was soon deep asleep in front of the screen...
He was suddenly awakened by a loud noise outside his room, forty minutes later. At first a bit disoriented, he slowly reached for the remote and turned the TV off. After getting up uneasily, still groggy and walking a few steps, he reached his front door and opened it just in time to see Sylvia slap a young man and walk away.
“I guess I deserved that,” said the man, turning to Dedrick, one hand on his left cheek.
“François! Good to see you, my friend. I see you've met Sylvia,” said the Russian with a smirk.
“Yeah. Nice girl,” replied the Frenchman.
“Come on in. When did you arrive?”
François stepped into the room and Dedrick closed the door behind them.
“Want something to drink? Let me see what we have,” continued Dedrick, heading to the small fridge in the kitchen, while François let himself fall back on Dedrick's green couch and rested his feet up on the coffee table in front of him.
“Sure. Thanks. I just got in a few minutes ago.”
“I see you’ve met Sylvia?”
“Yep. I guess I'll have to find my room later. She was about to take me there, but I don't think she liked what I said.”
“What did you say?”
“Oh, nothing worth getting so out of shape about. I just commented on how hot she looked and that I hoped my room had a strong enough bed because I intended to rock her body all night. Ha, ha. Yeah, I know...” he replied with a laugh.
“Wow! Leave it to the French! Yeah, I guess that's a bit forward for a first meeting,” replied Dedrick, laughing as well.
Dedrick and François were among the first of two hundred thousand plus applicants to sign up for the Mars First project back in 2013. After a pre-selection process that had reduced that number to a mere few hundred the following year, the two friends were now among the lucky final twenty-six scheduled to begin astronaut training.
They had met online after exchanging multiple emails through the Mars First website. Dedrick had been selected as a candidate a few weeks before François, but it was François who had contacted the Russian applicant first, asking for his help with a female Russian applicant he was trying to impress. He needed help translating some emails and a poem the Frenchman was certain would sweep the woman off her feet. Dedrick had kindly obliged and translated the documents in Russian, but not without laughing when he had read the so called “poem.” Of course, François had sent the letter enthusiastically anyway, and as Dedrick had predicted, the young woman had politely declined the Frenchman’s advances and stopped corresponding with him soon after. That incident also explained why Sylvia's reaction to François' clumsy courting tactics earlier had not really surprised the Russian. Nonetheless, the two men had become good internet friends over the past year, and they would now have plenty of time to get to know each other even better.
Over the next several years, they were going to train, eat, and live together, day in and day out. Their social skills and team spirit would be tested to the breaking point and so would their determination and morale. But with a little luck, their friendship would last and even extend beyond the boundaries of Earth, all the way to the planet Mars.
Vera
A few weeks into the program, a special celebration was about to take place, and the man behind Mars First enterprises was getting ready to speak as guests and co-workers mingled in the large conference hall.
Mars First was the creation of Netherlands Entrepreneur, Lars Bruininck. A man with a unique vision, Lars had made his money in the early 2000’s with a company named Syspam, where he had developed a new technology to harness and combine photovoltaic (solar) and wind energy. By 2011, he had s
old his share of the company and started Mars First, a non-profit organization that envisioned not only to send people to Mars, but also to establish a permanent human colony there, and begin the slow process of colonizing the red planet. The ground-breaking idea that the astronauts sent to Mars would settle there permanently had never been proposed before. Not needing to bring the astronauts back to Earth eliminated the most challenging and costly portion of the mission, the return home. Without the extremely expensive and technically challenging aspect of the journey, the return to Earth, sending a manned mission to Mars was a feasible enterprise, even for a private company. Mars First was the first company to present a feasible plan to colonize the red planet years before any other organization, even beating NASA to the punch. The other innovative aspect of the concept was that the future astronauts would be selected from a large pool of civilians who had volunteered for the chance to be one of the first people to walk on the red planet by simply applying online. The contest had been open to anyone in the world, regardless of age, as long as the applicant was at least eighteen years old, sex, ethnicity, religious beliefs, or professional background.
The critics had been ferocious, some calling the endeavor suicide, even murder. But three years after the launching of the project, and a remarkable 206,507 applicants from all around the globe, the dream was beginning to feel very real. Lars was now standing in a room filled by some of the most dedicated and respected scientists in their field, fully passionate about the company’s mission and their role in it. Alongside them, the final twenty-six future astronauts who had made it this far in the selection process were just as excited and enthusiastic. He could not have been prouder.
The room was quite large with a high ceiling, and a good eighty people were gathered for this celebration. Lars and the Mars First team had made the unofficial announcement that same morning: they had just reached the first of their six billion-dollar financial goal for the project. Thanks to public and private donations, Mars First was now ready to begin the designing and construction of three cargo ships, four habitats, two rovers, and advance to the next stage of the candidates’ training. The rest of the investment would come, it was expected, through marketing ads and the media related revenues generated by the TV coverage of said training.
Lars had discovered a few years prior the astronomical amount of money the media had been able to raise during the Olympic games. Between the sponsors and the advertisement from major corporations and trademarks, Lars had immediately realized the monetary potential of television. Mars First would create a new form of reality show; One that would follow the future astronauts during their eight-year training and would be broadcast all around the globe. The entire world would want to watch such an undertaking.
The project's timeline had been clearly outlined. In 2019, a first ship would land on Mars, unmanned, and meant not only to put to the test the reliability of the technology used, but also to begin creating an outpost on the red planet before sending anyone there. At least three cargo ships would be launched over the following three years. Along with them, two large rovers would begin constructing the outpost. This first small base, made of several interconnected pods, each the size of a small room, would also begin creating the oxygen, water, fuel, and other resources the team would need to survive once there.
The first manned mission and its four astronauts would arrive on Mars in late 2025. By then, several habitats would await them, cone-shaped containers that were once spaceships, put in place by robotic rovers. The technology to supply essential needs for the survival of the Martian colonists, such as oxygen, water, power, and other needed resources, had already been studied and deemed reliably achievable within the given time frame, using minerals and chemicals in the Martian soil and atmosphere.
Of course, many had criticized the whole project, calling it unrealistic, too risky, and too early in the race to deep space. We simply didn't know enough yet about the effects of low gravity on the human body, nor did we have any idea how much radiation the astronauts would be exposed to in Mars' thin atmosphere, let alone during the voyage there. The risks were enormous, the dangers even greater. Growing food in greenhouses had never been tested on another planet, not even on the Moon. The probability of success of such a bold proposal was simply too low for many. Some had even called it pure suicide. They may have been right, but Lars also knew every great advance in human history had involved taking risks. Although still limited, the information available on the effects of space and low gravity on the human body had been studied and well documented, ever since NASA had started the space program, and gave the Mars First company confidence that the mission would be a great success.
Either way, they now had the money they needed to cover the cost of research, the building of several test outposts, and purchase the necessary manufacturing resources to do much more.
So tonight, the company was celebrating, and everyone involved was in attendance in the big reception area.
A voice resounded through the loud speakers in the room.
“If I could have everyone's attention, please!” the conversations started dying out.
“Hello, can everyone hear me?” as the room turned quiet.
A thump reverberated through the sound system and Lars, standing in front of the microphone began his speech.
“My dear colleagues. I want to personally thank you all for being part of this great vision that has become the Mars First project. Five years ago, a few friends and I began an amazing journey to bring to life a dream. A dream to put humans on Mars, not only to…”
Lars’ speech went on for several minutes before he finally raised his glass.
“…and so, my dear friends, I would like to make a toast. To all of you and all those not here tonight who have contributed in some way in the realization of a vision, a dream I had almost four years ago. Thank you! Thank you all and Mars, watch out! Here we come!” he finished loudly, raising his glass high with the rest of the room. A few “ooooh ooohs, yay!” and shouts of approval followed.
A moment later, the main lights dimmed, and as the music started reverberating against the colorfully decorated walls of the large room, the crowd began mingling and dancing under spinning spotlights of varied colors, syncing their movements to the tempo.
Dedrick wasn't much of a social bee. He preferred to keep to himself, and was standing towards the back of the gathering, munching casually on appetizers, when he noticed her.
She was definitely looking in his direction. He was leaning against a file cabinet, and a wall was right behind him so there could be no mistake. There was no one else around. For a few moments, his glances kept meeting her gaze, causing him to look away each time, but he eventually gazed back at her long enough for the exchange of a few smiles and a toast from a distance.
By now, Dedrick knew her name, Vera. She had been in training with him and two other applicants for almost a week already. She was from Chicago and she had a sister... Katy or Cathy. She liked cats and preferred white wine over red, had been a flight attendant for a major airline until her selection for the astronaut program, and had never been married. That was all he could remember at the moment. She was beautiful, and she was smiling at him. He gave her a weak smile in return and turned his eyes away once more. He found it hard to look at her, particularly tonight in her black dress with low V-neck, cleavage cut that left little to the imagination. To make matters worse, her beautiful shoulder length blonde hair and bright blue eyes would have made any man melt. After staring at his wine glass for a few more seconds, he took his courage back and glanced in her direction once more. Now, she was walking straight for him. As a wave of panic grabbed his body, she quietly stopped right next to him and turned around to face the rest of the room.
“Hi Dedrick,” she said smiling while looking at the dancing attendees.
“Hey Vera. How are you?” he replied a bit shy.
“I’m good, thank you.”
After a few seconds pass
ed…
“Nice party.”
“Yes. It’s great!” he replied, shaking his head in approval with a bit too much enthusiasm.
“What are you drinking?”
“Oh, huh... It's Chardonnay,” he replied.
She looked down at her glass and then back at him. He followed her eyes and suddenly realized her glass was empty.
“Oh, let me get you another one,” he said, feeling a bit clumsy as he walked to a table a few meters away and grabbed another wine for her.
“There you go.”
“Thank you!” again smiling at him.
A few moments passed.
“So, what is the name of your hometown in Russia again?” she asked seemingly genuinely interested.
“Tambov. It's a mid-sized town in the region of Tambov Oblast, in East Russia,” he replied modestly. “My family has been there for four generations, now. I'm the fourth generation.”
“So, you mean, three generations then.”
“Three?”
“Well, yes. You see, since you're leaving to go to Mars, you can’t be counted on Earth as well. You’re either an Earthling or a Martian. But you can’t be both.”
He did not realize right away she was having a bit of fun with him and responded as if seriously intrigued by her statement.
“Mmmh. I guess you're right. I didn't really think about that.”
It took him several seconds to notice the funny smirk on her face that said, “Really? Can’t you see I’m messing with you?”
He chuckled.
“Ha, yes, of course. You got me there.”
“I'm from Boston, by the way, but I was born in Charlottesville, Virginia,” she suddenly offered.
“Ah... Nice. I've never been to Boston. In fact, I’ve never been to America.”
“That's too bad. It's beautiful. You should visit, sometime,” she added with a little smirk on her face.
He felt a slight tinge in his back. “I would like that,” he replied with a smile.
Kahnu (The Guardians of Tomorrow Book 1) Page 2
