A Wave from Space

Sunset on Mars

All travel in this planet happens with a rover. Yet here I am walking in a red desert of iron oxide to reach the Hub, with the Sun setting on my left. Sunset here is the exact opposite of Earth's. The whole sky is pinkish, except for the area around the sun, which is blue. The reduced gravity makes me feel almost like I'm floating. Dangerous as it is to walk around, I can't help but feel it is worth it. This is the image I was dreaming of when I decided to move here.

I want to light a smoke and savor this moment. Watch the Sun go down, with a glass of whiskey in my hand and the sea at my feet. Maybe even take some extra pain meds for the warm pleasant numbness they provide. But the closest sea is 225 million kilometers away. Whiskey and cigarettes are a luxury that I can't afford, if I want to return home someday. My suit would prevent me from smoking anyway. Ironically opiates are the easiest thing that I can get my hands on, since I have a prescription and a doctor as my best friend.

I want to come back out tomorrow and admire this alien world but I can't risk it. Hell, I shouldn't even be out right now. One unlucky space radiation storm and I would end up needing a brain pacemaker to function. Not that there was anything wrong with the pacemakers. Before the implants, being caught in the open when a storm hit, was a sentence into a life of severe brain problems. Now people can function normally and I wouldn't even be able to tell the difference if it wasn't for the implant showing on the side of their heads. But the sight of them makes me nauseous. Partly because I don't like the idea of my brain not being able to function on its own, but also because I don't like seeing the electrodes disappearing inside the skull.

Then again maybe I would risk going out again if I wasn't spooked by the storm that hit us a week ago. Stars above, it was the worst storm I have ever experienced. I was in the lonely outpost, when the storm hit. It came from outside our solar system. Everything was fried. My life support systems was gone. I had to manually open the valves to use my oxygen reserves. All the instruments were also damaged. A few of them were some of the most expensive equipment ever produced. Earth would have to pay handsomely to send spare parts. There is a chance that even the Quantum Computer, one of only three that exist in the world, was also damaged. But it is only just a slim chance. There are plenty of safeguards protecting it from stuff like that.

My handheld out of all things survived, but for many terrifying hours it couldn't connect with any available network. It didn't make sense to think that everyone else would be in danger or dead, but my instinct couldn't understand what the lack of communication meant. When the communication satellites that were on the other side of the planet, came above us and my handheld came to life.

Doc had sent me a series of texts explaining the situation. The Hub was a mess, but nobody was hurt and the damages could be easily repaired. But I would have to live alone at the outpost for about a week, until they fixed a Rover.

I trusted him. When you spend a year traveling in a tin can with someone, without the option to even go out for a walk, you have no choice but become close to them. Paul, or just Doc as everyone calls him, was the best travelling companion I could hope for. He didn't talk much in the beginning of the journey, but when he did, he would be soft spoken and polite. Instead he would stare for hours into space and occasionally write into a little notebook or his diary, that he was always carrying with him. After a few days I asked him about what he was writing.

"Poetry," he answered. Perhaps he was feeling nostalgic and wanted to talk about it, so he told me the whole story behind his little notepad. He wasn't always a poet, until he met her. Then it was like he found inside him a bottomless source of inspiration. Every time he would think of her, new words would come to him, that he wrote down for her in this little notepad. Until one day, he gave it to her. One hundred pages of love poems. They were happy for a while.

In the next days I learned more of his story. How she just left one day without saying anything, leaving the notebook behind. How low he got when he lost her. How he found her again and the promise he gave her to never again try anything stupid.

And I told him about my problems. My addictions, my failures, my needs. There was nothing else we could do on that ship. We talked for hours. One night he told me the truth that was eating him inside. Something that he never told anyone and even in his journal, he was lying about it, in hopes that one day he might believe the lie. He hadn't forgave her for leaving him the way she did. He would never forgive her. But he still loved her anyway. So much so that he had to leave the planet, because he could never live his life, if there was even the slightest chance of being with her again. I'll never forget the expression on his face when he confessed his reason for leaving. He flinched away with pain. His mouth open in disgust with life. He wanted to die.

After that, we couldn't have been closer to each other. He is my brother here, always having my back. When that useless idiot, Derek, tried to cut me off my pain medication, triggering a severe pain reaction, Doc travelled all the way back from the Southern Complex he was visiting at the time, sacrificing his rest, just so he could overrule Derek and take care of me, with a morphine injection.

But no matter how much I trust him, I couldn't stay any longer at the lonely outpost. At first I didn't mind having some paid vacations. I managed finish a sculpture on my handheld that I've been making for over a month and I read some books I've been meaning to read. But on the back of my mind, there was always the threat of running out of oxygen. I texted Doc about that and he was answering immediately, even if it was in the middle of the night, writing in that zen like way he always used on his messages.

And finally I couldn't take it any more. I've never known Doc to play with anyone's survival, but I was down to my last oxygen container. If I didn't start walking right then, I wouldn't have enough oxygen to walk back at all. The door couldn't be opened so I had to jump off the roof. The fall wasn't terrible, thanks to the reduced gravity, but my brain was screaming when it saw the distance between me and the ground.

The sun is disappearing and some of the sky has turned black. I have been walking for hours and my limbs are tired. What wouldn't i give to have a rover drive me back to base. And to think that I used to hate driving. But now the thought of driving, takes me back, to the first time my father let me drive while sitting in his lap and to driving with my first girlfriend to somewhere secluded so we could have some privacy. To crappy mornings that I was stuck in traffic, going to a job I hated and to the long road trip I took into India to explore my roots.

I miss my home and for what? I thought I didn't want kids. That I would achieve immortality by being one of the pioneers who went to Mars. Now I'm 35, just another gear in the machine. Replaceable. People remember the first man on the Moon or Mars and you would be lucky if you could find someone who knew the second. I will leave no legacy behind me. But it is not too late. I made a mistake coming here, but I will not let it ruin my life. I'm going to be able to afford to go back one day.

Not that I am too ungrateful. Instead of teaching astrophysics to undergraduates, that would rather sleep than listen to me, I am in charge of the search for alien life, using one of the few quantum computers to help me find the truth.

I take another look at the dark sky. Why is the universe so eerily silent? It should be crawling with life by now. My calculations made it clear that 95% of the stars had planets that could support life. Fermi's words flash in my mind as I look at our own star dip even lower on the horizon. "Where is everybody?" Even if they travelled at speeds as slow as our fastest ships, our galaxy is so ancient that it should have been colonized many times over. Yet there was nothing in the night sky but dead matter. Either alien civilisations don't exist or they are hiding and I am not sure I want to know from what they are hiding from.

With the last light from the sun, I finally I see the Hub. But it is not the only thing I see.