To Mars or Not to Mars
By: Mohammed Abdel-Moomen and Tarik Kose
It was a dark and stormy night… Just kidding. It was actually a very cold and red day—pretty usual for life on Mars. Mohammed kept wishing he could turn back time and go back to Earth. Pacing the biosphere, he kept repeating, “Why did I let you talk me into coming to this forsaken planet? This isn’t life we’re living! Fuck this!” Tarik was just laid back on the cot that looked like a cloud. He didn’t even look up from what he was reading when he said, “Relax. Almost everyone from our Info-150 class from way-back-when is here. It hasn’t been an easy trip, but it’ll get better. I promise. Have faith in Musk.”
It really hadn’t been an easy trip or a rewarding 2 years. During the 5-month trip to Mars from Earth, they’d lost Brendan, Kim, and Md to COVID-420. Everyone else had barely survived the outbreak. They were lucky they got the Pfizer vaccines instead of the Johnson & Johnson ones. “I’m tired of being kept outside the loop. I thought we were going to be able to talk to aliens here. That’s the only reason I signed up, Tarik!” Mohammed sure was in a mood. Tarik turned to him and said, “Dude, just chill. We just got here, it’s barely been two years. Why don’t you go check on what everyone else is doing to pass the time?” Mohammed sighed and put on his spacesuit- which happened
to look just like the ones from Mass Effect. “I hate wearing this thing. I didn’t work on my summer body just to hide it under this.” His voice faded as the pressurization room door shut. Tarik was still focused on what he was reading:
No Date ~ Tony’s Journal
If you’re reading this, it’s probably too late for me. Strange things are happening here. It’s probably too late for you, too. Or you stole the data from my ThinkStack. Either way, I just want to have my story somewhere. My name is Tony and I don’t want to be forgotten. Today’s date is January 60th, 2100. It’s been 20 years since Elon Musk established the pathways between Mars and the Earth and declared himself supreme leader of Mars. Everything started after Tesla sold all their Bitcoin 70 years ago and decided to invest it in Dogecoin. Now, everything is bought and sold using Dogecoin. Then, because the wealth shifted from the wealthy to the lower class, shit hit the fan. The 1-percent weren’t happy about it and tried to steal from the newly wealthy. Riots broke out. Many were killed. We lost 15% of the population in a matter of days. We lost even more after the Collective exposed the world military’s hostage AI. No one knew where it came from. I tried telling anyone who would listen that it was a bad idea to keep it around and we should just destroy it, but no one believed me. After all, it was thanks to the AI that we could live up to 300 years now. Some even considered it a god. I was skeptical as usual. Always had been. And I was right. Within 30 years, the AI had transformed the earth and bionics ruled. Some humans are their assistants, completing menial tasks. The rest of us wandered about aimlessly, without a goal. Elon Musk was one of the few that survived the onslaught. He was keeping his lifelong stance against the AI. It even turned out that Teslas secretly had built-in EMP weapons that made any bionic a vegetable. As far as technology had come, electricity was still electricity. During the 30 years after the AI was discovered, Musk had developed his idea of getting people to Mars. Somehow, I was among the lucky million to get on the first trip. I wish I weren’t so eager. Oh, no. The sirens are starting again. The aliens must be trying to communicate. Musk said he had a plan to get rid of them, but wouldn’t tell us anything else. It seemed like any day we might just disappear and no one would—
The journal entry ended there. Tarik thought it was a bit cliche, but he’d experienced weirder things since starting his journey to Mars. No one knew who Tony was or what had happened to the first million to come to mars. All they had were broken pieces of communication in the space around Mars. For some reason, the words collective, ubiquitous, IoT, and privacy were heard a lot. Tarik realized he’d learned these things in his Info-150 class so many years ago. As Tarik was putting away the data crystal he’d found the writing on, Vidya, Austin, and Eve walked in with a biobag. “Tar-eeeeeek. Wanna get high?” Austin asked. “I guess. What do you have?” The three of them had a funny look on their faces. “It’s a surprise,” Vidya said as she pulled out the single-use biochip. Tarik took the biochip and touched it to his temple. After giving the biochip permission to enter his consciousness, he felt a shock and reflexively rejected the biochip. “What the fuck is this?” Eve had a look of surprise. “How the hell did you snap out of that so quickly?” she questioned Tarik. Tarik looked confused, but shrugged off what had just happened. “I don’t know what kind of shit ya’ll are on, but I’m going to spend some time back in our Info-150 class from years ago. Feel free to join.” Tarik made some gestures with his hands and suddenly his eyes glazed over.
March, 2120 ~ Mohammed’s Journal
Life on Mars. It is not a seamless experience as everyone expected, at least not yet. Tarik and I moved here from Earth about 2 years ago. The trip to get here was a grueling 5 months. A month in and I had already regretted allowing Tarik to convince me to come here. Tarik just kept repeating to me, “Supreme leader Elon Musk promised us a life that no one has ever experienced before” and to “have faith”. However, none of that mattered to me anyway and the main reason why I did come was deep down I knew I wanted to experience life on Mars and of course, the chance to talk to aliens. Not only that, but life on Earth was just not how it used to be. Everything was done autonomously for you and most of the jobs have been taken over by robots. I was tired of being an assistant to a freakin robot and wanted to get the hell out of there. Anyways, here we are now, living in Musk City, the capital of Mars.
To get here, we sold our houses and cars and converted all the cash to Dogecoin. As of right now, Tarik and I are living in a small “apartment building,” which honestly is more like a tiny biosphere than anything else. The only way we can go outside is in spacesuits. Since, the atmosphere on Mars is about 100 times thinner than Earth’s atmosphere it has very little oxygen. However, supreme leader Musk has promised to finish building a synthetic atmosphere by 2122, almost two years out from now. This will finally allow us to go outside these buildings without these bulky spacesuits. Another thing that was a nuisance for me with living on Mars is communication with people on Earth. At first it used to take almost a half hour for a text message or an email to be sent and the information was received on the other end on Earth. All communication between Earth and Mars would go through satellites, and because of the distance there was a major substantial delay. Now, with the Ultra High Frequency Antenna and the 10G that Elon Musk has installed for us it takes under two minutes. Of course, communication between people on Mars and the Internet here is at a whole other level. There is no such thing as buffering with my iPhone 80 Plus Pro Max Ultra.
Earlier this morning I got in an argument with Tarik, on what we are doing with our lives. Tarik seems to just always go with the flow, and tells me, “chill out Mohammed, with patience and time everything will start to come together.” What Tarik doesn’t know is that I am tired of waiting. I want to feel like I have a direction and purpose in life. I just ended up leaving him and going out to grab something to eat.
I stepped on the teleportation pad outside and found myself in front of MFC. The food on Mars is not bad, to say the least. I ended up grabbing a 20 piece and a chicken sandwich from MFC, Musk Fried Chicken. I put in an order to go, which means they have to put the food in its own “spacebucket” and bolt it down since it’ll be leaving the biosphere the restaurant’s in. It can get a little annoying, unscrewing it and returning it, but I guess it could be worse.
I got back on one of the teleportation pads outside of MFC and went back home. As I entered our biosphere pod, I found it packed with a bunch of Tarik’s friends. It seems they were getting high again with fucking biochips. It aggravated me a little bit to see Tarik still in his old habits getting high whether it is on Earth or Mars. I chose to just ignore them and went straight to my room. If it wasn’t for the facial recognition lock on my room door, I’m pretty sure Tarik and his friends would have dilapidated all of my stuff. I settled the food down on my smart desk and just stared out my small triangular window. For some reason, I was feeling a little bit more down than usual. A couple seconds later, I got notified by my mentally built-in assistant, “Tarik is waiting at your door” and “Would you like to let him in or not”. I thought about it for a second, seemingly I didn’t want to be bothered by anyone at the moment, but I said, “Yes, let him in” and my room door slowly opened up and let Tarik in and slowly closed behind him. As Tarik walked in, he shouted, “couldn’t care to get me some MFC with you huh?!”. I told him, “sorry, I assumed you were too busy shoving up biochips in your head.” Tarik stayed quiet for a little, and then told me “It was my first time trying it and I didn’t even know how the hell to use it.” At that point I just let it go, and even told him he could have my MFC if he wanted. I just wanted to be left alone.
Suddenly, my bed floated out the ground and the covers were pulled halfway. The windows around my room slowly tinted black while soft lights were turned on. My closet door opened up, and my pj’s were levitated out. My bathroom light turned on, and toothpaste was put on my toothbrush. I went in to brush my teeth and then the shower started up drizzling down with warm water. I took a quick shower and put on my pjs and finally got in bed. My mind was just racing on where my life would be heading. Will I ever get the chance to speak to aliens? Will we run out of Dogecoin? Will life on Mars overtake what life was on Earth? I had no idea, but what I did know is at least all of this was not just some design fiction story.
