RED ROCKETS
Seeking a Friend-With-Benefits For the End of the World
The Mars Breeding Program Chose Me to Help Propagate Humankind
We need you, he’d said.
Our 21st-century forebears once imagined the WALL-E scenario we’ve found ourselves in. And Los Angeles County has become the garbage-piled launchpoint at the end of human civilization on Earth.
We’re going to Mars.
They called it “Operation: Red Rocket.” The first time I heard about it, I snickered and recalled a cloud-archived South Park episode with a decidedly different tone. But we’re not talking about dog boners now. This is dead serious.
I’m a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. I’m 28 years old, and in the year of our Lord 2123 it’s just this side of palatable to society that I’m old enough to raise a child. But there’s a limit as to how many people can travel and found the Mars colony. Only a few can go.
And somehow I’ve been picked to lead and breed.
Others have gone ahead to the new planet to build the colony’s first structures — a Jamestown settlement on steroids. This will be the first permanent town, higher powers willing.
There isn’t even a hospital there, never…
