♂
How does one lose an entire planet?
Earth had always had a sentimental love affair with her depraved brother, a romantic notion of seeking an embrace with our star’s prodigal son—to make him right, bring him into the fold, change his wayward life to good health and make him productive.
In the 25th Century it was generally accepted that terraforming of the fourth planet had succeeded. Now, some time after this, on Earth we wonder: how does one lose an entire planet?
One moment it is there, the next it is not. In a twinkling of an eye it vanishes. After all of the plausible explanations are ruled out—obscuring gas, gravitational lensing, intervening dark matter, eclipse by a Near Earth asteroid, and the many others—the only answer that remains is the implausible one that the Lagrange 1 outpost reported: that it is simply gone. As if it were a private thing between Mars and someone else.
As if no one on Earth were permitted to know why.
***
CHAPTER 1
Dr. Christopher Cooke was an angry Martian. Today’s irritation only added to the generalized fury that raged within him. Being sent to collect magnetic fluctuation data in the field, a major inconvenience, was only a small blip on the extensive range of his angerscape.
He was a quiet, tense man who seldom spoke up, which is why he was the one plucked out to perform field duty when one of the usual field technicians called in sick. Still, he felt, better here than there. He had put millions of kilometers between him and the feckless bureaucracy that had killed his wife on Earth. The distance didn’t mitigate his anger, but it allowed him to function. There was no one here that deserved his rants, so he had the luxury of remaining quiet and doing his work. Even the extra work he was saddled with today.
He pivoted the tripod, aiming it at the lodestone rock that was the magnetic center of the caldera at Arsia Mons. Even though the innards of the ṺberCollider were shielded, the surges needed to run it were at the mercy of magnetic turbulence. The MagScape satellite above, while helpful, was not accurate enough to guarantee pin-point magnetic stability at the surface; it was only good for predicting massive amounts of molten core that determined the entire planet’s magnetic flux. But here on the ground Dr. Cooke was able to render a holographic plot of the lines of force. In the small box that sat atop the tripod, all of the mathematics used to determine the ṺberCollider window of safe operation whirred silently with qubits in the background, reducing the result into a mere pushing of a needle into the green on the dial.
“It’s on the green,” Dr. Cooke radioed in on the infraband.
“Good work, Cooke,” Dr. Kubacki radioed back.
Twenty-five years of education, Dr. Cooke scowled, and I can tell when the needle’s in the green.
He eyed the Martian artifacts that had helped colonization: the perfectly spherical, metallic half-centimeter dollops that seemed strewn around the lodestone he was recording. There seemed to be more in this area than what he was used to seeing, because what he was accustomed to seeing was only a rare one, usually having been extruded from a site of erosion. And then he became very still. The thin air made him conscious of his breathing. The cold now was very noticeable.
Mars had been successfully terraformed, but he still needed to became aware of everything, because that was what one had to do when noticing something gone awry. This planet offered new ways to die or be injured, as horrible as they were novel, and it paid to pay attention. What he saw made him pay attention.
One of the dollops moved. This was a dead world, and the only movement, besides the dust that rode the gales, was solely of human origin. Yet, he was sure of it—it had moved. Was it the magnetic attraction of the lodestone? He closed the dustcover over his magnetometer and walked slowly toward the small object. Towering over it, it sat there inert. He remained as motionless as it was, straining to see, wondering if he should write off the movement as his imagination. He reached down to pick it up.
These small, round structures had jumpstarted the whole Martian colony, providing a ubiquitous supply of perfect ball bearings for all of the moving parts that made a colony run. Rarely seen on the surface, when the engineers dug, they seemed to just pour out of the excavations. He reached down to pick it up like so many engineers had done in the field to collect them. Before he touched it, he jumped, for it unrolled right in front of him.
“No one’s ever seen that before,” he murmured.
And then it fired at him. It snapped violently into a small ball again, launching itself with enough force to enter his head. He reeled back, slapping his hands to the circular wound on his forehead. He fell.
After a moment he recovered. He realized something altogether new had happened on Mars. And it was an attack by something that had been placed by the thousands in all of the machinery that made life possible on terraformed Mars.
He realized he had something Martian living in his head now. His mind was frenzied. How do I get it out? Is there brain damage? Will this thing jump back out on its own? Will I have brain damage then? What if all of the ball bearings decide to snap like that?
He ran through a series of neurological exercises. His thumb could oppose each of his fingers. He could touch his nose with his eyes closed. He stood and had no imbalance. He counted backwards from 100.
And his head didn’t hurt.
He now knew his days as a data analyst for the ṺberCollider were over. He knew he had a new job. He would be studied and he supposed that was good. Although he felt fine right now, no one could predict that something insidious wasn’t conspiring against him. Yes, let them study me. I want to know what’s coming, if anything.
But he wasn’t that angry anymore.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.