Invisible
3 Griffin
“Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay.”
Griffin looked up from his phone. His eyes tracked Mateo as he left the plant for the day, while he absent-mindedly swept his fingers across the blue screen. He waited. Mateo lived in the center of the sprawling metropolis that was Mars One. He had been lucky enough to secure a living unit at Dragon Bay, which at the time had been a trendy new neighborhood, but had eventually become the city’s downtown once it was decided that the space-port needed expanding. He would walk home. Griffin, on the other hand, was waiting for his transport to take him to the newest section of the city, unofficially called Skid Row.
Mateo paused at the plant exit, he pawed his pockets and suddenly turned. Caught off guard, Griffin flashed a smile and Mateo, who caught his eye, waved with one hand while, with the other, snatched his phone from his back pocket. Mateo’s expression relaxed, and he waved one final goodbye at Griffin as he exited.
Griffin’s eyes slowly shifted towards the blue light. On the Am, he scrolled through pictures of his cousin’s vacation in the verdant meadows of the New York Preserve. He swiped the app away grunting lowly and opened the news. Meteorologists predicted the current storm would pass by the end of the day Friday, but, meanwhile, they warned everyone should stay inside their living units where they were doubly protected from the dust. But in the next line they contradicted themselves, saying that the dust storm provided an extra layer of protection from solar radiation, and it might be worthwhile to engage in outdoor botanical activity. The duality of Mars ever present.
The transport, an oval-shaped white pod on a maglev track, finally arrived and just as Griffin was getting on Gabby, from engineering, called out. “Hey, hold the transport, please!” Griffin hovered near the door to keep it from shutting close. The automated systems hollered repeatedly, “Please step away from the doors. ”
Gabby sprinted inside and immediately extended her hand for the first silver handle hanging from the ceiling she found without even looking around. The doors slid closed as Griffin scanned the transport for a seat. Gathering speed, the transport passed through the Nuclear Broiler finally shooting into a dark tunnel at the far end of the building.
The transport lurched downwards without warning as it sped deeper into Mars. He hated this leg of the trip. Apparently, they were expected to believe that humanity would move underground. Griffin doubted it, but the most expensive project in the history of either world was taking place under Mars One in the Valles Marineris gorge where several large and surprisingly wet veins of underground springs met.
Humanity had decided to carve out a city-sized cave in which to build a new megalopolis to house twenty million new souls as the population of Mars exploded. Griffin grabbed one of the silver handles dangling from the ceiling; there were no seats.
“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
He paused his T feed on the qoute. It spoke to him. That’s what these tunnels and underground systems felt like to Griff; “the dying of the light.” It was as if we had collectively decided to murder the sun. Even on Earth they had plans similar to the Marineris One Underground city. The UN had approved plans to move New York’s drowning and burning population two hundred miles inland and 50 miles underground—at least, until the radiation died down.
Gabby bumped into him as the transport suddenly evened out. “Sorry,” she whispered and then said, “aren’t you Griffin, from maintenance?”
Griffin broke his reverie and looked up from his phone to Gabby. Her face was serious, but her deep-brown eyes curved into a welcoming smile. Her head was shaved neatly to the scalp and her ears were lined with pale-green, martian olivine gemstones. “Yeah, Gabriella—right?—I think we met when nuclear engineering was having difficulties with its HVAC system last year.”
“Oh yeah, that was it,” Gabby nodded, “I normally, work a shift earlier, but with the two evacuations today, I was asked to stay later, and, well, here I am.” Her hands gestured from her head to her torso in one swift, fluid motion. “Where you headed?” The way she inflected her a’s told him she was clearly from the muggy state of Miami.
“Up in Skid Row,” Griffin said with a laugh.
“Oh, that’s funny, that’s where I’m going too,” Gabby said.
“Really,” Griffin said in surprise, “I just figured…” his voice trailed off.
“That a Nuclear Physicist lived downtown?”
Griffin laughed again. “Well, yes. Isn’t that one of the perks?”
Gabby shook her head. “You’d think, but not really. Living units are tight, especially with all the new couples arriving for the Marineris Underground project.”
“More Elonese or is it Muskivites—I forget what’s the term they are using over there now,” Griffin said as he rolled her eyes.
“Exactly,” Gabby, “I think it is Elonese now. What’s left of the Russian Federation filed a formal protest about the use of Muskivites at the UN because it sounded too similar to Muscovites, and you know how sensitive they are about the Muscow Memorial.” Griffin nodded silently. “So, if you aren’t partnered they move you right over to Skid Row and expect you to find someone,” she scoffed, “or something like that.”
Her last sentence hung over the filtered air like the pungent smell of rancid orange juice.
Griffin didn’t know what to reply to that. Everyone knew it, singles were sent to Skid Row, but no one outwardly acknowledged it. Being single in Mars was a sign of anormality, a breakdown of society. Everyone came with a partner, they were supposed to live with one, and if they ever left—for pregnancy or other reason—they did so with one. What happens when you suddenly don’t have one? you’re an outcast, an other.
The red wall, which had been floating silently by, suddenly dropped off showcasing the Marineris Underground cavern in its vastness. The immense space was flooded with the lights of ant-shaped crawlers—thousands of them—that methodically removed, parsed, and recycled martian rock. Giant support concrete columns periodically pierced the cavern straight through creating a sort of grid that one could see was the beginning of an organizational structure. From the ceiling, scaffolding dropped at measurable distances where tiny people in spacesuits could be seen crawling over immense rectangular metal structures.
Griffin had hoisted his phone up awkwardly for a moment, but decided against it. “Look, it looks like they are getting ready to install the HVAC systems down here.”
“Hmm, yeah,” Gabby said looking off into the distance. “You know, I wasn’t trying to be forward, sometimes I just start talking and forget—” Griffin nodded as Gabby fell silent.
Griffin broke the silence suddenly, awkwardly. “She had a miscarriage at seven months, and shortly after that she stepped outside the dome in her suit, opened her helmet, and killed herself.”
Gabby let go of the silver handle and let her hands hang limply by her said. A man in a nearby seat shifted and plugged his EP’s into his ears, blasted his music. Someone behind them coughed. Meanwhile, the HVAC hummed in full crescendo for a moment as the transport swished past a concrete column.
“I—I’m sorry,” Gabby finally said.
“No,” Griffin said, “I’m sorry. I—it’s been so long since I’ve even allowed myself to think about it. I didn’t mean it to come out like that. Um, just. It’s okay if you want to—” he pointed at the phone in her hands and stared out the window.
Gabby fiddled with her phone turning it over and over in her hand. In a slow, deliberate motion she slid it into her pocket. “Jack died in an EV expedition to the Northern Polar Reserve. A storm appeared out of nowhere and he got separated from his work crew. They looked for him for weeks, but his MPS was dead. I had a funeral.” She shrugged. “Months later they found his body mummified under several meters of sand.” She puffed her lips in an attempt to fight the tears welling up in her eyes. “I told him to skip the trip, we didn’t need it. We had enough for a preggers loan.”
Griffin nodded chewing on his inner lip. “Mars’ a bitch,” he said as the transport darkened when it entered back into the complex maze-like tunnels that connected Mars One together.
