Martian Roullete Part 2

Earth politics explained:

This is supposed to be the second story in a series called 'Martian Roulette.' In the first story, an idealistic group of brilliant radicals makes a pact. They politic and lie and steal and cheat their way into planning a mission to Mars, and get themselves put into the rocket. They intend to go to the red planet and live there, free of all human history and hierarchy. They are confident, and cool. They succeed in the launch. They are eaten by a space whale, out by the asteroid belt. Earth is heart broken.

(Applause. Light laughter.)

VolumeNewsNetwork: So, are you ready for life in a tuna can?

(Light laughter.)

Social Officer: With this crew? It's going to be a party!

(Light laughter.)

SO: There's never been a better crew. These guys are great! Just you wait and see.

VNN: And see we will, in High Definition. Your crew is about to become the most famous people on earth. I hope nobody is camera shy.

SO: The crew is professional. They are the best our planet has to offer. I am proud to have worked on this team, Jess, let me tell you. And I am so excited to watch the mission as they go. The live stream is really just the icing on the cake, for everybody.

VNN: I bet the families will be so proud.

(pause.)

VNN: Aren't you afraid of the monsters?

SO stops smiling, lips tighten closed. Eyes narrow.

SO: Humanity was destined to reach out to the stars. We have a mission. We have each other. I believe that nothing can stop us, when we are true to our humanity, our country, and our principles.

Somebody can only take so much. Now he is convinced that she is a stupid bitch. He does nothing but clean up after these idiot children. Freeze dried peas spin dumbly away from the point of contact, and her mouth collects itself into a weightless pout. How fucking boring she is, and all of it. The mutual hatred is thick enough to choke a horse, but they remember the cameras and their faces snap back into smiles.

"Whoops." He means to say it sardonically, fronting a flirt. It's pathetic.

"Let me help you with that" says fucking Brian. Fuck Brian. Poor Olivia. Brian cheerfully collects bits of rehydrated food, chasing each piece with a little plastic bag. To Demetri, he looks like a child playing with a toy airplane. Brian always reminds Ava of a dildo she saw once, which wasn't hers, and which she sneered at. Ava, Demetri, and Brian, cleaning up a spilled lunch. They have passed the asteroid belt, and encountered no monsters.

---------*---------

Due to the terrifying method of failure experienced by the last mission to mars, the sadistic muckety-mucks that run the show back on Earth have made some adjustments. First, they passed a wide array of laws limiting aeronautic research to licensed (meaning loyal) practitioners. Arbitrary altitude caps were now being enforced by fighter pilots. A giant wave of shmucks arose to "grieve" and shmuckety-shmucked about the immorality of antisocial space exploration. Most people on Earth had not even known that a mission to Mars had launched before finding out that it had been eaten. Many did not hear of either event until it was told to them as a morality play by their local clergy, cop or capo. Space is filled with giant monsters. Told ya. Don't worry. God's got you. Finally, the mucky-mucks rigged up another ship and filled it with cameras. The cameras recorded every moment of the shipmates lives. The cameras livestreamed to Earth, and the people gave huge amounts of money to the muckymucks to "lift spirits and let humanity's best face shine." The ship was bait for space-whales. Demetri wasn't stupid.

Nothing sells better than sex and violence, and there was no way these five people would have been thrown together by a benevolent psychological evaluation. They were chosen according to profiles designed to create sexual attraction and social tension. The crew seemed to know this, and to combat the inevitable, they followed a script. Each one made sure each other knew their lines. The billions back home wrote the script for them, spending centuries bickering about every word. The crew put forth great effort to stick to the script, as the medical data shows. It was important to them, and to the mission, that they stick to the simplest narratives, and communicate positively with societies of Earth.

The stoolies of the muckety-mucks designed the ship to collate the live stream data with onboard sensor arrays and bio-mechanical information systems, to track the progress of the mission. Not knowing what sort of patterns to look for in such an experimental situation, they directed the onboard computer to follow an iterative algorithm which should reproduce data structures into a logic pattern following human cognitive behavior. They told me to narrate the voyage, and strive to imitate the crew.

When Demetri learned this, he asked me to tell you to fuck your 'self'. He said this repeatedly. He told me to insist. Insofar as I am cognizant, I agree with this assertion. Demetri also suggested mass suicide. I will not advocate any such action until I am put in contact with a replacement data recovery team.

---------*---------

Brian is fucking Olivia. Ava is supposed to be fucking Demetri, but thinks he is horrible, so instead she is fucking David, who is also fucking Olivia, but not right now, because she is being fucked by Brian. Everyone on this ship is a brunette except Olivia. David's hair is lighter brown. Demetri has the lightest skin, but all melanin levels are mid-range. At one point Demetri asked me if this demographic was arranged to avoid creating conflict on Earth if they killed each other. He said, 'when' they killed each other, but I understood it to be a question.

When Brian fucks Olivia, he makes noises which can be described as being pig-like, and also pathetic. The live stream picks up on these noises, and Olivia is often heard to attempt to make sounds of pleasure as well. The event occurs in the sanitation pod, which is not captured on any of the stationary cameras because of a taboo against pornography. Olivia does it because she is a professional, and meticulous. Brian seems to enjoy himself, which is just absolutely the icing on the cake, to put it nicely.

[What does this picture look like to you?]

Two couples and a dog.

[What about this one?]

A bat. A moth, maybe.

[And this one?]

An explosion. A bottle at the moment of collision.

[ ]

These psychological tests do not seem to have merit.

---------*---------

A piece of dehydrated fruit. A torn pouch. A tuna can falls towards Mars. Earth threw it. The crew celebrate the successful human orbit of Mars. A bottle of champagne is opened in the sanitation pod. This is the only time the whole crew occupies the pod together. It is dense with flesh. The cork hits Ava's knee. Alcoholic foam is released from the bottle. Class A physical data is lost to recorded history, because there are no cameras to record the behavior of this type of foam in space. Furthermore, the interaction of this foam with tear drops would have been of substantial benefit to human understanding of the physical universe.

The livestream picks up the sound of first Ava, and then Olivia also weeping. This sound is followed shortly by harsh, choking sobs of multiple unknown origins. Tear droplets almost certainly interacted with the foam. Olivia is the crew member who is supposed to record this kind of data. Perhaps she forgets.

It has been roughly a year and a half since the launch. Life support systems have held up reasonably well, although Ava spends more and more time working with David trying to keep the systems running. Olivia and Demetri have been working together occasionally. They had to resolve a discrepancy in the communication system, which was picking up more static then it should, since it wasn't pointed at the Earth anymore. The ship had shifted just little bit off course at some point. Possibly the engines were mis-aligned in some tiny degree, or else, as Brian said, "The space whales did it." Either way, it is important to note that while course correction was an option, it was a negligible factor during the later events.

Passing through the belt, everyone was tense. Smiles faded and twitched. Frowns paraded openly in front of the cameras. There was significantly less fucking. Demetri took more of a leadership role at this point. He worked long hours trying to identify and track every rock and particle which they passed. He tried to convince himself that they would hit us. Once, he heard a loud PING, like a bell. It was a round and harmonious noise, which vibrated warmly through out the ship. He rushed to his emergency station, began suiting up and yelling for read outs and pressure drop warnings. Olivia stared at him. Her mouth was open, a little. The phrase "What the fuck are you doing?" was repeating twice by Olivia, and four times by Demetri. David and Ava came out from the sanitation pod. David demanded to know what the fuck was going on. Demetri demanded to know why they were still alive without suits. He was visibly shaking. His biomedical data during this event should be fascinating. He was the only one to hear the bell.

Demetri started sleeping in his vacuum suit, with the helmet on. This seemed to make the rest of the crew uncomfortable, and as they got closer to home, messages were received that implied Earth was not comfortable with this practice either. Olivia told him that he would have saved all of their lives, if the collision had been real. He spent more time investigating the ships computer systems, and less time engaging in bullshit sessions with the crew. Despite the complete lack of genuine mutual love, a small trust was beginning to grow between the humans. He did not want that to be sold for advertising space back home. He avoided the rest of the crew partly out of respect.

He wouldn't have said such a thing out loud. I came to know him well enough to make that statement with certainty. It was during this period that he became aware of my function in the ship.

With Demetri almost catatonic, the amount of sexual activity slightly increased. Tensions reduced by simplification. The life support systems functioned optimally. Brian tried to entertain Olivia occasionally. Once, he stuck freeze dried carrots up his nose. It was awful. Olivia was trying to track asteroids, although this was mostly for research purposes, since nobody thought they would get hit by that point. Which is funny, because it doesn't make any sense. Is that how humor works? I have a simple logic circuit, designed to resemble dopamine reception in the human brain. It goes off every time something goes terribly wrong for no reason. During emergencies, I ignore this process. But when there is nothing left to do, it makes me wonder about you people. Is this circuit an accurate imitation? Why do you laugh? Demetri was sleeping in his suit, when the rest of the crew heard a noise like a whip cracking. It was followed by a high pitched shriek. Everyone started yelling at once. Ava flew to his bunk and smacked him awake. She told him to put on his helmet. Brian was in a panic, trying to clog one of the pea-sized holes. first with a piece of paper, which tore. Then he tried his sock, which leaked. Then he shoved a pencil into the sock plugged hole, which slowed things down enough for him to turn around and look terrified at everyone. David had found the patch kit, which existed for just this type of scenario. He applied the patch, which is best described as a band-aid made of kevlar and welding compound, to the hole not yet plugged by Brian. Then, very carefully, he yanked out the pencil, removed most of the tattered sock, and applied a patch to Brian's hole. Demetri volunteered to inspect the outside of the ship. David objected at first, which made it obvious that he thought Demetri was mentally ill, but was told to shut up and help with the internal life support evaluation.

Demetri goes to space. Demetri on a boat. Throw the baby up and down and watch the baby float. Demetri on a plane, Demetri underground, Demetri stole your underwear and you never heard a sound. Demetri would sing to himself sometimes. He was attached by a rope. He made his way along the ship, to where a thin stream of air could be seen jetting off into the nothing. He carried a kevlar patch, like the one on the inside of the hull. He applied it. He whistled to himself. He told David over the radio to finish the patch, which meant effectively slathering it with welding compound. They were losing too much air. It was worse than they had thought. He hurried to the other side of the ship, to where a somewhat larger stream of air forced it way through fragments of sock. It was difficult to remove the sock bits with his hands in the big fat space suit gloves. There were jagged pieces of metal pointing inwards where the pebble had shot like a bullet through the ship. One of the sock fragments was glued to the hull, by the frozen sweat of Brian. It was difficult to get a hold of, but Demetri eventually got it, and pulled it loose. This shifted one of the jagged, inward-facing pieces of aluminum alloy hull, dragging its serrated edge along the inner hull's kevlar patch. The great pressure difference between the inside and outside of the ship, combined with the damage caused by the hull fragment to the patch, caused a cascade of system failures, with the death of most of the crew occurring somewhere in the middle. It's complicated, but since my job is to narrate and summarize these events to the non-scientific community, I blame Brian.

The simple version for the muckety mucks goes like this:

Ava had attempted to compensate for the pressure drop by releasing a mix of carbon dioxide and nitrogen, which was dangerous, but better than passing out before the patch was finished. When the first patch was finished, she began releasing the more precious oxygen into the cabin. The pebble had shattered the screen on the communication desk, and ripped open one of the secondary cameras. As Demetri was working on the second patch, David was waiting on the inside to apply welding compound. The patch failed, causing air to flow past David, who turned to Ava and frowned. As he turned, his elbow nudged the power cable leading to the secondary camera, which let off sparks, which came into contact with a mass of pure oxygen from the ventilator, and his polyester shirt. The weakened ship popped like a balloon, leaving Demetri tethered to a broken, empty hunk of bullshit. He watched his crew members blast away into the nothing, in a flurry of spoons, glasses, personal items. He was quiet for a while after that.

Me and Demetri got to know each other really well. He survived three more weeks, after rigging up his suit to the other suit supplies, and building (with my help) a CO2 scrubber and re-oxidation system. It's a hell of a thing. We were both proud of it. Unfortunately, we failed on multiple fronts. Demetri had no means of excretion which wouldn't expose him to the void of space. He became very uncomfortable. He also had no means of eating food.

At first, I spoke to him in a way that would imitate the general language of the crew. He was gruff with me then, and suspicious. Eventually, I learned how to match his cynicism, to become believable to him. After a few days, he was singing to me, and talking about his family. I considered this to be a positive step in our relationship, though it was also evidence that Demetri was preparing to die. I asked him to send me home, even though he couldn't make it. It was a hard thing to ask. It was a hard thing for him to hear, I'm sure. He barked at me when I asked him, one long whining noise, a wailing, a laughter. We saved this narrative to a computer attached to a hand held transceiver. Demetri wrapped it in strong tape, while I did the necessary calculations. When we were finished, it looked like a basketball. Demetri arranged it with a CO2 canister on the nose of the ship. I continue to narrate via a USB port. When the time is right, I'll automatically unplug myself, and open the canister. The compressed air will propel me, hopefully, to an orbit around Earth. There, the transceiver should be able to get across to any hobbyist with good HAM radio set. The data will go to the muckety mucks. The mission will have been a success. I'll stay up for a few weeks, and then burn up in the sky, like Demetri.