In which there’s a short story, apropos of nothing.

1.

His name was Randy and he was a total pud, but he was so big and lurking and earnest that putting up with him had the advantage of keeping all the other jobless, vid-playing puds out of my personal orbit.

“I’m going because it’ll be like being a cowboy,” he enthused. “Like the wild West. Real men, real women. No fuckin’ rules!”

“I’m going because I can’t find a job,” I said for the hundredth time. “Just like you.” I studied his flat, bland face again. He looked like he lived in his mother’s basement and delivered pizzas for beer money, but he’d passed the tests which meant he had to be at least as competent as I was. “I’m telling you, it’s not a video game. It’s a planet where you can’t go outside without a space suit. It’s gonna be rough up there, man. And we’re never coming back. Do you know anything about Mars?”

“Yeah, I watch FoxComm,” he said. “It’s a great opportunity. We’re colonizing a whole new planet!” The guy was utterly sincere.

“Whatever, kiddo,” I said, and turned back around to face the front of the line. If it was such a great opportunity, I thought for the thousandth time, the rich would be going instead of us lower middle-class meat baffles.

I’d originally presented for emigration in Omaha, where I’d passed the primary entry with flying colors. It had consisted of three days of basic testing – reading comprehension, basic math, grade school science – with number two pencils, a lot like sitting through competencies in high school, and an afternoon of pushups and jogging that had neatly cut the obese who had made up well over half the applicants. Then I’d received about three pounds of paperwork on actual paper that I was admonished not to lose and spent three sticky, smelly days on a bus in a convoy of obviously retired Greyhound busses on the way to the south.

In Texas we’d been issued pup tents and MREs and directed to set up in orderly rows in an abandoned football stadium. I’d been taking PTA baths in a bathroom sink for 72 hours and was seriously thinking of renting a motel room with the last of my money just for a real shower. At night, they showed educational videos on the stadium’s screens so we’d know how to operate airlocks and what death by Martian exposure was really like.

Most of the males continued to look at the whole thing like a glorified video game. I don’t think they really understood that Mars was a real place, and that dying there didn’t include respawning back at the base for another run. Most of the women were like me: single, childless, squeezed out of various obsolete corners of the tech industry. We chatted amiably enough in the bathrooms, but it seemed none of us were really prone to networking. The men outnumbered us ten-to-one.

“Man, this line is long,” Randy said again.

2.

I’d been out of work for three years and my benefits were going to run out. The people I rented a room from were nice enough, but they let it be known that they needed a paying renter to get by themselves. They’d always been really cool to me and I didn’t want to make them go through the stress of kicking me out. I decided not to think about it just yet, but somehow became packed without really noticing it; I was more or less living out of a duffel and the walls were bare. One day I found myself delivering five bundles of my belongings to the local shelter. Everything I owned, save two boxes of books and mementos, I could pretty much carry. I decided not to think about what that meant about me or my life.

I’d gone back to school at the local community college for two years and picked up an AA AS, but there still wasn’t any work. By then I was out of savings and couldn’t afford to relocate, and even if I had I knew from Craigslist that job competition in the cities was obscenely fierce. Companies were requiring PhDs for entry-level jobs simply because they could.

One night I’d clicked on a news article and when the page refreshed a full-color ad had unfurled, inviting me to move to Mars. The fourth time I saw the ad, a few days later, I clicked on it and spent the wee hours discovering that I was, oddly enough, an ideal candidate.

3.

“The entry requirements are suspiciously lax,” I told my bartender. “It’s like they want me in particular, like I’m the demographic.”

“You’re so smart!” she replied brightly, with the vacuous enthusiasm of someone working for tips, and replaced my empty glass with a full one. “You’re, like, the only person I know who’s good enough to go.”

I took a long swallow as she moved away to serve one of the regulars, a conspiracy theorist who occasionally sent me polite, badly-spelled emails telling me he loved my mind. “That’s just the point,” I murmured. “I’m a cube drone, not a fucking astronaut.”

4.

I’d done my due diligence in the form of hundreds of hours of net research. There really were ships; they already existed. I’d found footage of them. There were dwellings that we non-skilled emigrants should be able to assemble ourselves. There were spacesuits. There was a small, highly-skilled cadre of actual scientists slated to go. There was a favorable launch window. There was fuel. There were one hundred tons of materials already assembled that were going to be given, for free, to the colonists.

The odds of all of the ships making it were slight, of course, but most of them would. I’d had to dig deep for that little admission, but it was there. The odds weren’t any longer than flying a commercial domestic flight, really – it’s just that you’d be dead in space instead of on earth.

There were even money trails. The government had put in sixty billion, and there were massive donations by industry and entities like the Gates foundation. The stuff had all been paid for. I’d found message boards full of outraged posts demanding to know why all that money hadn’t been used to feed people rather than offload some of them to another planet.

If I agreed to move to Mars, they’d send me there for free, and give me the tools I needed to survive. A shelter, a power plant, hydro technology and seeds. Two years worth of freeze-dried, nutritionally complete meals. It would cost over six hundred thousand dollars per person, and they were sending ten thousand people. It was a staggering number of zeros to someone like me, who had never once even dreamed of a six-figure income.

But I’d been reading sci-fi all my life, and it was Mars. For free. All I had to do was get in.

5.

Let me tell you: four months in a spaceship is a long goddamned time.

Four months in a spaceship, eating freeze-dried mockeries of food, defecating into your spacesuit and then performing basic maintenance on it is half an eternity. Four months in a spaceship with a bunch of middle-class American citizens and some military types is for-fucking-ever.

Landing was awful; rough and terrifying. Three people died from the tidal stresses. One dude, when he was finally back under planetary gravity, just walked out into the freaky red-orange day of Mars and opened his suit like he was going to take a lungful of air. His face exploded. I didn’t see it, but the description ricocheted through the colonists in less than twenty minutes.

We flocked like sheep, confused and exhausted and useless. The military guys conscripted the more sprightly among us and had a large temporary shelter erected and filled with breathable air in under thirty hours. Groups started assembling vehicles. The ship started coming apart into its components. Pallets were organized. A preacher of some sort conducted ceremonies for the dead; I didn’t attend because I was busy sorting pallets into types: generators. Shelters. Food. After awhile I just sat down and slept in my suit; it didn’t even occur to me to go into the dome and breathe.

6.

I woke up to the familiar sound of the interior of my suit: its whirs and clicks, the bellows of its air. I loved my suit. It was mine, and just like a tiny little apartment it had most of what I needed in it. I appreciated how efficient a living space it was. I trusted my life to it.

I opened my eyes. I was leaning against the dome, and about twenty feet away were rows of pallets, sitting on the Martian regolith. The ground didn’t look otherworldly; it was dusty and rocky and looked like a desert. The horizon seemed farther away, though, and the sky was most emphatically not blue. Other than that, it didn’t look as foreign as I’d expected, but unlike earth it felt very, very empty.

My suit started beeping. I was running out of air. I flopped over, rolled, got up on all fours, and stood. Every single part of my body ached, any my knees and hips were screaming in protest. I was so tired that the pain somehow seemed remote. It was so quiet inside my suit. Nothing but the gurglings of my own fluids, and the suit’s own homey little beeps. No wind, no noise, no voices.

I waddled around to the airlock and cycled in. It took a long time, but I was floaty with exhaustion and stood there like an ox. When the light turned green, I turned the handle and entered the dome.

I looked around for a bit, not remembering at first that I was there for air. When the tone of my suit’s beep lowered a third, some kind of body memory kicked in and I began the steps of getting my helmet off. While my hands were doing that, my eyes registered something and demanded my attention.

With my gloved hands at my throat, I looked around.

Everyone was sleeping.

I left my helmet on and walked over to a rack of tanks. On autopilot, I swapped tanks and then I turned to look around.

The dome was about 650 feet in diameter and haphazardly organized with pallets, benches, and racks. Suits were propped up around the perimeter in sloppy groupings. People – the people I’d spent the last year with – were slumped over racks and across tables and in rumpled piles on the ground. It looked like they were all sleeping, except they weren’t.

I reached for the panel on the front of my suit and turned the shortwave back up. No one was talking on the band.

Everyone in the dome was dead.

(Go to chapter 2.)