Mars Nation 2

by Brandon Q Morris

  No, it was out of the question. She was perfectly capable of succeeding at the task before her, and she possessed everything she needed to do it. She was just scared. Fear was not a flaw. It’s what keeps us from doing dumb things. She accepted her fear as a warning, but she wouldn’t allow it to take control.

  Ewa positioned herself on the edge of the platform. She pressed her back against the wall and purposely lifted her chin up. Then came her first step to the side. Her heels were securely standing on the catwalk, but the balls of her feet and her toes hung off the edge. It’s just something I’m not used to, that’s all, she told herself.

  She knew there were plenty of people who always walk on their heels. She pulled her left foot after her. Now nothing else supported her. Her only means of stability was to keep her center of gravity above the ledge. Isaac Newton even knew that in the seventeenth century. Newton could have managed this feat, she was sure of that. Maybe she could have been the one who inspired him to some exciting idea, like the apple that supposedly fell on his head.

  The next step. She scooted her right foot cautiously to the side, pressed her body against the wall, and pulled herself along, followed by her left foot. That was about ten centimeters, she estimated. She continued on, minute after minute. She kept her head steady and stared straight ahead. She didn’t see how far she had gone until she was surprised to suddenly feel support under her right-foot toes again. Ewa just needed to pull her left leg into place, and the first round was finished.

  Behind her was another large pipe. To get to her destination, the narrow pipe, she needed to creep another quarter of the way around the pot. She stepped off the platform and scooted on, meter by meter, pressed against the wall.

  All of a sudden, it grew loud.

  Something crashed near her and slammed into the pot. She couldn’t see what had happened. She could only hope that this strange soup didn’t boil over as long as she was inside the pot. Step after step, she advanced further to her right before the entire construction started to suddenly sway. Ewa froze in terror. The mountain seemed to have started moving again, although very slowly. And again, she was lucky that the mountain was moving in the right direction.

  The brief movement had pressed her against the wall instead of sending her into the pot. Ewa envisioned her body being shredded by the cutting apparatus. At least the soup wouldn’t be as dry anymore, she thought. If the mountain stopped again, she would fall. Her technique was getting better and better. She was almost there. She felt for the way with her toes, which quickly proved to have been a mistake.

  This slight amount of forward momentum was enough to upset her center of gravity, and like never before, she felt the fluctuation shoot through her body. First in her tailbone, then her pubic bone. She sharply inhaled and closed her eyes. Her center of gravity lingered for a second and then retreated to her tailbone again. Slowly, she started breathing again. Her longed-for destination was still much further than she had thought. Fifteen steps later, she felt the saving grace of the platform under her toes. Once she had fully arrived on it, she sank to her knees. Her tense body simply folded in on itself.

  ‘Couldn’t have done it better myself,’ Friday praised.

  Ewa didn’t answer. She didn’t have the strength. She needed a few moments of peace and quiet, that was all. But the mountain did not comply. It rumbled and clattered again. As she opened her eyes, she caught sight of a Mars rock falling into the pot and then the teeth began to grind even louder than before. Shortly after that, a jolt reverberated through the construction as though it were moving again.

  The machine was apparently pulling in chunks of the Mars surface and grinding them into smaller pieces. But why? Was it attempting to extract raw materials? There would need to be a storage facility on board for that. She hadn’t seen one thus far, but she had only seen a small part of the construction. Maybe those strange eggs served as storage? Ewa stood up. She needed to continue her investigation of the mountain.

  The pipe she now entered was so low that she needed to duck her head. But at least she no longer ran the risk of falling with every step. The path remained mostly horizontal and snaked around without any sharp edges. It was probably a maintenance route, and she hoped it would lead her to where those responsible for maintenance entered. Ewa imagined encountering a janitor wearing a blue uniform, sitting leisurely on a couch smoking a cigarette. Then again, it could just as easily be some sort of spider with twelve legs that awaited her. Or a militarized killer robot. She felt for the taser in her bag. She still had one shot left, after all. Would it be enough to render an alien robot useless? It was better not to dwell on that thought.

  She reached an intersection. The similar paths extended in all four directions. She remembered the advice about how to find your way out of a labyrinth. You should always turn the same direction, so she took the path to her left. I’ll have to remember to always go left from now on, she said to herself.

  After only five or six meters along this path, it abruptly ended at a heavy curtain made from a material with a very similar consistency to that of leather. Ewa pushed it to the side. The room that appeared behind it looked like an egg lying on its side. It must have been one of the eggs she had seen on the ceiling of the dome. The walls of the room glowed yellow. Her universal device told her it was warm and humid.

  The path led to a sort of terrace covered with light-colored sand. It sloped toward a dark area filled with what looked more like mud. The substance had a glossy sheen to it. In several places she noticed the sort of spots that would be made by the bubbling of a thick liquid. At the end, toward the tip of the egg, was more of the same liquid. There was no sign of the guards that she had expected. The room was reminiscent of a terrarium for animals that lived in mud. Or perhaps she had landed in the sleeping quarters of whatever lived inside the mountain.

  She analyzed the air. It was composed primarily of carbon dioxide, along with water vapor and methane, and measured a temperature of thirty-five degrees. Ewa considered for a moment whether she should inspect the hole with the liquid at the end of the room, but to do that, she needed to trudge through the deep mud. Instead, she took a sample of one of the wet spots. The liquid contained almost no water, but rather short and long-chain hydrocarbons, meaning it was a sort of crude oil. Did the inhabitants need this to survive? she wondered. Instead of answers, she only came up with more and more puzzling questions.

  She exited the room and, at the intersection, took the next left, which was followed by another divided corridor. Ewa continued on and came to another curtain. The room behind this one looked exactly like the one she had just encountered, except the liquid was almost entirely missing. Could it be that there was a defect somewhere? But she wasn’t the caretaker and thus not responsible for any repairs.

  The inhabitants for whom these rooms were intended seemed to have flown the coop. Crawled away, she corrected herself. In light of what they seemed to define as comfort, she guessed they were some sort of reptile. But that was probably a little too heavily based on Earth's standards. Why shouldn’t bipeds from another planet be able to thrive in muddy oil holes?

  The third corridor, the third room. It, too, resembled the inside of an egg. Ewa remembered what she had seen from underneath. There were a good number of such eggs. She decided not to turn down any more side paths, because it wasn’t likely that she would find anything new there. However, she still counted along as she went. This corridor alone took her past twenty eggs until it led her to a 180-degree turn and a few meters up a ramp.

  The path eventually ended at another curtain. Ewa stood there and concentrated. If something was controlling the mountain, she figured, it must be hidden behind this curtain. She pushed the heavy material to the side, walked in, and froze, shocked.

  The room was enormous, more like a grand hall. She held her breath because it looked like she was standing outside on Mars’s surface. She instinctively felt her helmet and checked that it was correctly attached. Then
she took a step into the hall and sank into the sand. It was especially fine-grained sand, which looked like an accumulation of Mars dust. There was no way the inhabitants could have only two legs. Their weight would need to be distributed over a larger surface area. A seal, for example, or a crocodile would have no trouble moving around here. However, Ewa hadn’t seen any seals or crocodiles. A militarized robot also never materialized, fortunately. She was completely alone in the hall. No one greeted her, no one was expecting her. Her life pattern continued here, too. Ewa sighed.

  Actually, she had every reason to be happy about it. When she took over the wheel from the driver, there would apparently be no one to stop her. She struggled through the sand to the nearest side wall. It was cool to the touch. Since the mountain possessed no glass dome, this had to be some kind of screen that projected what the outside cameras picked up. Or whatever a computer somewhere here simulated. The position of the sun corresponded with the time of day, so it was at least a realistic simulation.

  “NASA to Ewa,” suddenly came through her helmet’s radio. She gave a start. The simulation was amazingly realistic!

  “Who’s speaking?” she asked cautiously.

  “It’s Mike, who else? Don’t you recognize my voice?”

  “I... Sorry. I’m currently inside a giant hall in the middle of the mountain and was surprised that you were able to still reach me.”

  “You’re directly below us. Look up!”

  She raised her head and saw the same drone from earlier hovering about twenty meters above her as it waved at her with its left and right propellers.

  “You can see me? That’s impossible.”

  “Yes, the camera sees you. You are up to your knees in sand.”

  Ewa looked up again. If this was a trick, it was a very sophisticated one. She measured the temperature and density. “I’m measuring twenty-nine degrees, and down here, the pressure measures half of what’s on Earth’s surface,” she said. “There must be a roof above me.”

  “The drone is giving us minus forty degrees, so you must be right. But we don’t see any roof, and the radio transmission is also unhindered,” said Mike.

  “It must have some degree of transparency across all the wavelengths that we don’t know about,” Ewa replied.

  “Not in all of them. The infrared rays are being blocked. It’s pitch black where you are despite how warm it is.”

  “That makes sense. It saves a lot of energy if the warmth is not lost to the outside.”

  “Have you found out anything that could help us, Ewa? Forgive me, we all think it’s incredible how far you have gotten,” Mike said.

  And that I haven’t met my demise already. I know what you’re getting at, she thought. “I’m not sure. This thing is processing Mars rocks into some kind of product, that much seems clear,” she answered. “Perhaps it’s extracting the raw materials.”

  “It’s taking in rock from the surface of Mars? That’s interesting,” said Mike. “We have seen the large holes it’s leaving in its wake as it moves forward.”

  “And what does that tell us?”

  “The object is giving off large amounts of carbon dioxide. The gas is flowing out of the fissure that you initially entered.”

  “I had guessed that it was using that to build up the pressure it needed to propel the hovercraft,” Ewa said.

  “That, too, probably, although that doesn’t seem to be its primary purpose. Andy ran a few calculations, and it seems that the object is programmed to enrich the Mars atmosphere with carbon dioxide. The greatest amount of carbon dioxide stored in the Mars atmosphere is found chemically bound inside the regolith in the top few meters of surface crust.”

  Ewa was surprised at the mention of Andy’s name. It was obvious that the NASA people would have long ago made contact with her old MfE friends, which meant that Theo now also knew she was alive. How was he handling the information? She shook off the thought.

  “You mean the mountain is helping to provide Mars with a real atmosphere, and thus make it more livable?” she asked. Her breathing increased. That was incredibly good news, news that she hadn’t expected in the least.

  “We suspect the object is programmed to do that, yes,” said Mike.

  He didn’t sound as excited as she was.

  “Is there a but?” she responded.

  “Two, as a matter of fact. For one, that thing is headed in the general direction of the MfE base. And the second problem is, even if it could extract the entire area of regolith that Mars has to offer, and along with that, also shreds our bases, it won’t help us very much. Mars has lost so much carbon dioxide in the past billions of years that the atmospheric pressure would increase tenfold. However, that still won’t be enough to produce enough greenhouse gas to significantly heat up Mars. And in the process, we’ll lose our basis of existence. That is not the sort of help we can use at all.”

  Ewa remained silent. If Andy’s calculations proved correct, then this alien construction was doing them a grave disservice. She urgently needed to find a way to stop it. “But then why did this thing even begin with this task? Its creators seemed to have been capable creatures to me,” she said.

  “It was located two hundred meters deep below the regolith. We don’t think it was buried there.”

  “Then what?”

  “We think it has been standing around on the Mars surface for thousands or maybe even billions of years, simply unused. Maybe someone created it at the time when Mars was threatening to become a desert wasteland. At that point, the carbon dioxide would’ve been sufficient to produce a dense atmosphere.”

  “But the machine was simply forgotten,” Ewa said, finishing the thought. “It would’ve been covered up by the dust, which over the years turned into solid rock. The entire time waiting for someone to wake it up so that it could begin its useful task. But only now, when it’s too late, we woke it up in our search for water.”

  “Yes, in so many words. Its creators probably died off. No one has ever attempted to excavate for any remains of a previous civilization at the necessary depth. There is no erosion here which would cause such ruins to emerge at the surface over time, like happens on Earth.”

  “Man, Mike, that is a sad story,” said Ewa.

  “Could be,” Mike replied curtly, “but above all, it is a danger. If you succeeded in stopping it, the scraggly remains of the human race would be forever in your debt. If not, then we will all soon share its creators’ fate.”

  Ewa sighed. “I certainly hope I will succeed,” she said before she cut the connection.

  It’s absolutely crazy, she thought. Here they had a machine they could never have built, and which was capable of improving the living conditions on the Red Planet by at least a little bit. A denser atmosphere, even if it were not enough to completely abandon their pressurized suits, would still produce some greenhouse gas and thus raise the temperature.

  The thermometer would more often reach the twenty-degree mark, even up on the northern side of the planet. Some of the polar caps would melt, and that would increase the overall humidity. There might even be rain. Of course it would not be enough to turn Mars into a fertile planet, but it would at least make life a little easier to sustain here.

  Ewa moved as close as she could to the transparent wall. In the pallid light of the setting sun, it was hard to make out what was happening below, but what was going on down there was something that was threatening human life on Mars. Giant claws broke up the material of the Mars crust, the rock was sucked in and landed in one of the giant pots she had seen where it was then freed of carbon dioxide and spit back out again. The machine would show no mercy for any manmade construction in its path.

  At the time it was created, there weren’t any humans on Mars, nor for many years to come. Why did they have to stumble upon this machine right now? Was it pure coincidence, or were there other such machines encapsulated deep under Mars’s surface? It would make sense. If someone had really wanted to make this planet mo
re livable, it would have been efficient to have more than one machine at work.

  At the moment, though, that wasn’t important. They would need to take care not to activate antiquated technology like this. If they weren’t one hundred percent sure that whatever the radar was picking up was indeed a water table, they should leave well enough alone. But what did that really matter to her? She would have nothing more to say in the future. All that she could do was enable the future to take place, make it even possible by halting the machine.

  Ewa touched the transparent material that separated her from the outside world, and just at that moment, the picture changed. In the place where her finger had touched the pane, a set of complicated symbols appeared. It was fascinating. Ewa tried it again with all ten fingers. The symbols only appeared at the spots where she was touching. Were the symbols supposed to represent some kind of language? If so, she would never be able to decipher them.

  Ewa wasn’t trained for that. She had no idea what to look for. The markings seemed to her to possess endless variations. She looked at one of them more closely. They consisted of two horizontal lines at the bottom, three circles to the right, and a plus sign to the left. Inside one of the circles was a dot. In the case of the other symbols, the positions of the lines and circles changed, though none of them appeared at the top left. That place seemed to be reserved for even stranger shapes, like a pentagon, a shaded-in plus sign with equally long arms, a half egg shape, or a dot with rays extending from it. Perhaps those were the actual words, and the lines and circles were the necessary grammar. That was about the extent of her imagination.

  She sat down with her back against the wall and closed her eyes. What was she supposed to do with all these markings? They would never tell her anything. She had come to a dead end. She needed a different way: She needed to try to sabotage the machine with force. Typical human, she thought, and typical Ewa.