Two-hundred-million Miles in the Air - Ch.3 [rough draft]

The feeling was inescapable, but you might describe the vertigo as an ever present backdrop to everything else. Anywhere I went on the base, the longer I stayed the more I noticed evidence of the previous inhabitants. The drones were very thorough in their sanitizing. There were no bloodstains or broken glass. No teeth lying around. But there were dents. The frighteningly flimsy aluminum shell that partitioned us from death was remarkably easy to dent. There was clear evidence of violence done in many rooms. There were partially buffed out scratches from nails or otherwise. Mave had mentioned all this, but seeing it was different that it seemed in his ever joking tone.

My report on Captain Larson's apparent and sudden suicide had been as thorough as possible. Despite the insanity of this place, a suicide of a lone crewman was unprecedented. Parceling us out one at a time seemed to have solved all the problems. So naturally they were livid to have their perfect streak ruined. They screened us very _very_ thoroughly for this exact reason.

Now, don't get me wrong. Several former martians offed themselves after getting back home. But the media had never made a very stink about it, and the MMC weren't going to raise any alarm bells.

Following the report, I was asked to do a full diagnostic of essentially every system at base five. There were typically three redundancies for everything, but in one of the early missions, one of the more chaotic ones, an engineer had tampered with the system that reported diagnostic info back to Houston. The report system had then delivered home a warning that oxygen levels had risen to a dangerous concentration. The crew had long sense stopped responding to communication attempts at this point, so mission controll sent a remote command to the oxygen recycler to pause oxygen production and run a systems test. However, oxygen levels were, in fact, dangerously low due to a hull breach. The crew nearly suffucated before the issue was caught.

The following team fixed the system, but Houston never really trusted it again, and it was my understanding that atleast a cursory check up was normal first order of business for every new arrival.

It felt more serious now though. Missing controll wasn't certain exactly how many days Mave had been dead for when we found him. He could have been scuttling arround in the dark for days before killing himself, doing God knows what.

The first thing I found of note was Maven's journal. It was, I guess, exactly what I expected. Ninty-nine percent utterly boring, untill the entry about two weeks ago. The mind-numbingly consistent pattern of the journal entries had been simple little notes, indicating completion of daily chores, interesting thoughts, meals, etc. Little more than data to he refferenced in some later report about how banal the whole experience would be. Each page had a big obvious number in every corner, counting down the days, presumably written in advance. The final legible page had a "7" that had been violently scribbled over with a "14" and the following numbered corners had all been ripped out. Their pages were blank.

You could tell that the fateful call from mission controll had happened between "measured growth of soybean shoots in hydroponics" and "ate four protein bars for dinner" because his handwriting had turned into a shaky mess. I couldn't make out what he wrote after that. There were spots of ink smeared where tears had landed on the page.

What makes a man lose his mind over a handful of days? Mave loved life. He had a beautiful wife, a fulfilling career. The man had done two tours in Uyguristan, and Dinah had held on to him all the same.

He was a hard man, but always managed to crack a joke to lighten the mood. Christ, I sound like I'm giving a speech at his funeral. My point is, how does _that_ guy choke himself to death over seven extra days on Mars? They call it Hell for a reason. I figured then that maybe I wouldn't understand untill my time there was almost up. 

Asimov started writing about mars nearly two centuries ago, and back them Mars was this totem of future human achievement. We were going to colonize Mars, and terraform Mars, and it would be this magical stepping stone out into space beyond. To be honest, it's a miracle we even still send people up here at all, but it's all PR I'm told. The powers that be need public support and approval before they can dump taxpayer money on anything new. NASA has been talking about trying to float a habitat on Venus. Let me tell you, Mars would lose his nickname fast if they start sending people to literal actual fire and brimstone Hell.

Optimism for Mars waned as people began to realize that if we had the power to "terraform" any planet, then our best option would be to use that technology to fix the rock we already fucking lived on. Geological coal, methane, and petroleum ran out ages ago, and we _still_ struggle to build enough sequestration plants to keep up with emissions.

Even if we ignore the fact that living on Mars could only ever mean living in little tin cans, exodus to another planet was never going to solve anything on earth. The cost of trying to ship enough huddled masses off the surface to keep up with overpopulation would require centuries of nonstop production of synthetic rocket fuel. The funding and resources for that just don't fucking exist.

These days, the utopia de jure that folks talk about involves space elevators and orbital stations, and so forth. I can't shit on that too much. It feels plausible, maybe. That said, it still requires plenty of scientific advancements to happen that have failed to show themselves in the past hundred years we've been looking.

Maybe I'm biased. You'd never catch me on a fucking elevator to space anyway.