This is the first part of a short story I wrote a few months ago about the upcoming (once and future) Mars Colony. I'm a bit of a space fanboy, but what I ended up enjoying about this story was the sense of new beginnings and unimaginable potential.
Meyers and Hiroshi, Inc.
The name itself invoked everything that was good about the Martian society. The colony had so recently outgrown is early,
idealistic origins. Small communes, often just a central dome and packed to the brim with youthful idealists, had begun to
morph into spaceports that traded with each other. At the center of every commune was a single block station, buried deep
underground and stamped with an immortal golden seal.
Meyers and Hiroshi, Inc.
The opportunities to work with your hands and mind, so scarce on automated Earth, abounded on this new frontier. The frontier calls to its own, and they had come in their grungy coveralls and their bucktoothed individualism. The dream was to stake a claim, to wrest away from the cold vacuum of space a tiny bit of hyroponic utopia. But in order to do that, you needed water. And to make water, you needed ice.
Meyers and Hiroshi, Inc. mined the purest ice in the entire Colony.
Earth had developed into a hellhole. The Third Syrian War, begun by scraps of several former Arab nations, had escalated
into a major shooting war. The incineration of the Japanese economy had sparked economic collapse throughout the global supply chain and bread riots from Juneau to Jakarta. It was a fantastic time to own automated machines but rather terrible if you were newly unemployed, or young, or vulnerable.
So the newly unemployed, the young, the vulnerable, and the restless had set off for the Red Planet. Most of them had
crowdfunded their trip, using the combined fantasies and fifteen dollar investments of a tired generation. A few had paid
outright, and no one wondered where they had acquired their money. Far too many had gone to the loan sharks and the
predatory usurers who clung to the Florida and Arizona and Sezhuan and Guiana spaceports.
And so they had landed, broke and hopeful and fearful, and gazed out on the frigid redscape of their new home.
“Welp,” said Meyers, sucking at an illusory cigarette. Smoking was banned onboard the flights, and heavily taxed in the
domes. “This is either our future or our grave.”
Hiroshi said nothing. He had said very little since the day the missiles flew in on Osaka as he stared helplessly at the livefeed, sitting in the graduate students’ offices at Caltech. He nodded.
“I figure we could set up close to the polar sheets,” said Meyer. “We’ll need to mine water.”
“The Company is planning on bombing the ice caps,” said Hiroshi. His English was the too-perfect dialect of the highly-
educated and H-1B.
“And we need to be there, to mine the slush, to make the methane,” said Meyers.
“You can’t make methane out of water,” said Hiroshi. “You have to make hydrogen and oxygen out of water.”
“Right,” said Meyers. “Rocket fuel. It’s pure money, brother.” He sucked a bit more on his water tube, the reflexive habit
feeling strange in the pale Martian noon.
“It is more complicated than that,” said Hiroshi. He felt like a stereotype, the highly-educated Asian talking to the down-
country white man. But after the missiles flew, only the highly-educated were left, fulfilling every stereotype of his people in the other man’s mind. “And I am not a magician.”
“I believe in you,” said Meyers, clapping him on the back. Why, exactly, this Asian never smiled, and looked uncomfortable,
Meyers barely knew. He had wondered, during the long spaceflight, when the endless night surrounded them, how many people Hiroshi had lost. Or if he had lost anyone. He seemed to recall the man saying something about California.
They had loaded up their 3D printers and their expandable habitats and their supplies onto the massive half-track and set
out for the ice caps. The drive to the ice caps rested for a long time in the minds of both men. For one, the conditions inside the half-track were crammed and they quickly ran out of sex stories and fart jokes. There were no political jokes, since the Martian government did not even exist on paper and Earth was busy annihilating herself. An uneasy silence settled over them, as they rolled past endless red rocks. They were the color of blood.
Thirty-six days they had rolled through the frigid desert. Thirty-six endless days, filled with some silence and some trivia and the occasional in-depth discussion about Dungeons and Dragons. Thirty-six days, and five of them spent staring at the slowly growing hunks of ice as they neared the poles. For the final fifteen days, not even the long-range satellite radios had relayed any traffic. They were alone.
At last, the GPS-M coordinates announced they were at the Meyers and Hiroshi, Inc. claim. Meyers set about opening the
habitat, setting up the printers, and unloading the supplies. Hiroshi immediately deployed the mining probes (he had printed them on the trip, unable to stand the boredom, his mind as restless as his hands were still).
“The ice is very pure here,” he said, over their first dinner as business partners. The freeze-dried food was terrible, they both
had agreed, but the more expensive food heads for their printer would have hurt their bottom line and credit score. “We won’t have to print a purifier, just a refinery barn.”
“Well I’m fixin’ to have those uploaded in the morning,” said Meyers. “We could have the whole place built in a week.”
Hiroshi nodded. He was pondering, again, at Meyers’ enthusiasm for everything. It reminded him of someone, a person from his past. Even now, he could not get over that loss. Ashes and smoke, nuclei and electrons, were all that remained of that part of his life.
“The company is fixin’ to bomb the Northern Pole,” said Meyers. He had already flipped on the radio, his hands as restless as Hiroshi’s were still. “But they’re leaving us alone. They want to flood the area around the planned cities to trigger an
atmosphere.”
“But they won’t have enough fallout to trigger atmosphere creation,” said Hiroshi. “This plan is poorly thought out.”
“They don’t have enough bombs,” said Meyers, repeating what the radio had already announced. “It’s saying that the
Canadians seized the last of the stockpiles for use as a deterrent against the Russians.”
“The game of kings and emperors,” said Hiroshi. “I have probes to monitor.”
In the next few days, they set up the printers and churned out a boring machine, the refinery barn, a small mining
locomotive, and a still. This last was a contribution from Meyers, who was “mighty pleased.”
Hiroshi had smiled and accepted the moonshine. It had been as nasty as the stuff they’d made during undergrad, late at
night and underage. Chemistry majors created their own parties, in and amongst all their self-pitying tears about finals and their lack of a love life.
The next few days were spent in the initial setup of their mining operation. The boring machine proved to be exceptionally
problematic, despite its 3D printed glory. Meyers could often be heard cursing it out, cursing its whole progeny, occasionally
even lewdly describing its conception in graphic detail. Once, he had even attempted to shoot it with a hastily printed pistol.
Hiroshi had put a quantum key on the weapons blueprints after that.