3.

Sixty years before Dr. Cooke had received his ball bearing:

The vast engineering feat of terraforming Mars was finally deemed, announced, and celebrated a success. Not by the engineers or the geologists. Not by the scientists.

The planet itself made the announcement with its first-ever spontaneous thunderstorm.

The word success, for those on Mars who had witnessed it, seemed an exaggeration, even funny; the thickening of the atmosphere was still in progress back then and still required the breathing assistance of OxyVents for those who dared to inhale out-of-doors. And announcement seemed a somewhat premature declaration, the thinness of the atmosphere presenting the thunder to human ears four octaves higher than the roar of Earth thunder, as if a real Earth vinyl record had been played on an antique 78-RPM phonograph, reducing a bone-rattling planetary phenomenon to a cartoon sound effect. Nevertheless, the psychological victory went public as a monument to the next step in humanity’s evolution.

And to capitalism and the business model.

For the terraforming of Mars, too expensive for nations alone to pursue alongside the crippling obligations of their societal entitlements, necessitated partnerships with the incorporated rich of Earth –Big Energy, Big Pharma, Big Comm, Big Transport, Big This and Big That.

From the beginning, the terraforming of Mars was a business relationship between nations and the companies large enough to take the investment hit first in exchange for the payoff later. And so it was that the ballyhoo of terraforming was seized and hyped and was as profitable as any insider trading. The initial payoff for corporate investors was inflationary only: stocks rose to new heights and titans of industry towered even higher. Suddenly Valles Marineris was sexier than Silicon Valley and more intoxicating than Napa.

Participating nations waxed idealistic with proclamations of a new sphere of peace in the solar system, destined to host the best that Earth had to offer. “Mars vigila,” borrowed from Latin literature, was the official triumphant slogan:

“Mars, awaken!”

Meanwhile, the thunder on Mars sounded comically falsetto and anemic, an adolescent’s voice breaking. Mars boasted, Earth cheered, but the handful of colonists remained strangely silent, pressing on in pursuit of real red thunder, which would take another busy sixty years.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 4,090

This is as good a place as any to begin my journal. By good place, I don’t mean this place—Mars, just the place I’m calling Page 1. But maybe I do mean the place, Mars, because that’s what’ll make it so interesting, right? Perhaps one day it will be a best-seller.

My name is Jon Latorella. I am 85 years old, although that doesn’t really matter. I’m a Telomorph, and because of my telomere and mitochondria manipulation, I should be able to live, well, forever. The Fountain of Youth. We humans were looking for it even before Ponce de Leon, so I suppose this is a golden age that’ll see my own golden years go on to be my platinum years, then my diamond years, then—I’m an engineer, not a romantic. But I know I don’t regret it. There’s been talk of making a law that limits the life expectancy of new Telomorphs to 150, but the way I understand it, I’m grandfathered in, which is a pretty funny way to put it.

As a geologist, I’ve been selected to be one of the observers for the moon crashes. It’s all part of the terraforming protocol. There won’t be anything interesting to write about before then, but if there is, I’ll put it in. Otherwise, I’ll just wait until Sol 4,100.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 4,100

I still have some ringing in my ears as I write this. Moons Phobos and Deimos were on schedule for their euthanasia. It had been easy to force Phobos below the Roche limit into the planet, and Deimos, although about three times farther away, was only half its size and easier to nudge. For the few colonists here that would witness what would normally be an extinction event, it was a dramatic test for the PoroCement that housed us, like observers huddled in utero. Both moons were timed to impact within minutes of each other, which offered a unique opportunity to observe the seismic overlay of a dual impact, one at each pole. Team Gamma, my team, was hunkered down one half kilometer below zero elevation datum, surrounded by three meters of PoroCement. We were positioned a few degrees north of Airy-0, so as to be as close to 0º/0º as possible. Holovideo surrounded our location on the surface, and it worked well until the fire/shockwall passed through. We saw a glowing barrage of immolation, all of the burning dust carried along the shock wave, as if a meteor shower approached sideways. We estimated its speed toward us to be nearly fifteen thousand kilometers per hour. The sky was red, with countless points of light rushing toward us, their pinpoints offset blue from the reverse redshift. In a way it was breathtaking, until the video feed abruptly ended.

But what was most impressive was the sound. Not the impact—we never heard the sound of the two impacts. Never mind that. A sonic juggernaut approached. The thin atmosphere bunched the frequencies together and at the height of the firestorm/shockwall pass, a high-pitch siren made it through the thousands of tons of rock above us. Even though it was very high-pitched, it was very “full.” It was also very painful. It lasted a full two minutes and I had to hold my head firmly with my hands over my ears. Even so, bone conduction continued the torture. The high-pitch knifing through my brain didn’t mitigate until the sound Dopplered lower as it was distancing itself from our site. Many of us passed out from the pain, but there were no casualties. All in all, a very unpleasant experience.

What the hell am I doing on Mars?

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 4,155

Mars, besides being closer to the asteroid belt than Earth, also offered less friction from its atmosphere, so Mars’ moons had impacted fairly intact; the seismic data from the moons’ impacts established the extremes that could be withstood should something bigger accidentally wander into Mars’ orbit. This is prudent information, considering what goes whizzing by in the next outer orbit around the Sun. As a geologist involved in Phase I, the sacrificing of Phobos and Deimos was crucial. Already on the outer edge of the Sun’s Goldilocks zone, Mars lost even more sunlight as pulverized dust partnered with the injected radiodegradable nanoreflectors suspended high around the planet. But in spite of the diminished sunshine, the two native moons’ deaths created a firestorm that was debated as the “nuclear option,” when devising the plan to warm the planet up. The moons’ debris created a thermoreflective canopy and raised the temperatures for the nanoreflectors to recycle downward. What rubble that had escaped the upper atmosphere became an equatorial ring around the planet.

And it is stunning. Almost makes the ringing in my ears worth it. Almost.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 19,320

I have to apologize for the boring ramblings of my previous journal entries. It’s just that there have been no big surprises to spice it up.

Until now.

I like birthdays on Mars. You get to celebrate them twice a Mars year. By the time of my 110th birthday, Phobos and Deimos had ultimately been replaced by the large near-Mars asteroid, Ancile. For a Martian year-and-a-half I and the other colonists watched a point of light grow into a globe as it was reeled in, and when it grew no longer, the spectacular fireworks began. Ancile made quick work of cleaning up the halo reminder of moons past. I loved the ring around Mars. I was there at its birth, and I am grateful I had over 20 years to stand in awe of its nighttime grandeur before it was cannibalized by its replacement. Ancile swept up the billions of orbiting particles from perigee to apogee, rather dynamically, you might say. There were almost twenty flashes a second initially, which made the new moon flare so bright that staring risked arc burns into the human retina. Over another 1,000 sols the flashes slowed to about three an hour, and by 2,000 sols, it was a wrap and the ring around Mars was gone. After that, the pyrotechnics were rare enough to provoke superstitious wishes.

The new imported moon begot the polar magnetic fields that stabilized our atmosphere. Once Ancile was tidally locked with its planet, water could accrue, dust could settle, oxygen and carbon dioxide could assume their rightful positions in and out of my human lungs, and I could finally stow away forever my OxyVents and ARESuits. By the sixty-years after the first spontaneous thunderstorm, the colony population had grown to 2700 persons, including me, and the first compound was ready to bud off into a second. All had gone well until this point. Nice, boring, and poor material for a diary.

Then the ferropods came alive.

Dr. Christopher Cooke, some data analyst at the Mars ṺberCollider, found this out the hard way.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 22,031

The living and dangerous ferropods were an astonishing surprise that set the entire Mars program back six Earth years. Half a centimeter in diameter, these nearly perfectly round structures, made of primarily iron in an alloy mixture of silicon, zinc, and over a hundred other trace elements, were a presumed natural resource used wherever ball bearings were needed in the colony . They were perfect as far as I was concerned. On top of perfect shape, there was a duplicity in their perfection as bearings: they were also self-lubricating, covering themselves with a non-degradable slick that originated from deep within their concentric layers. We all thought they were inert and non-viable. They were easily available, littering the planet’s surface or just inches below the surface in the numerous canyons and calderas. I’m as guilty as the rest of the engineers in recommending that all novel industrial design for Mars use the ferropod’s dimensions as the construction standard for ball bearings. It certainly made sense to me. Why import from Earth what lay around for the picking here, free?

Why the grace period? Why pose as the perfect widget, just long enough for us to complete the entire Phase I and use what we had as the stable platform to launch Phase II? Why be so agreeable and then declare war? Perhaps it was the achievement of an ambient temperature above 40 degrees or maybe a humidity self-sustaining at 2%—or a combination of these and a dozen other man-made Martian corruptions. All of our little ferropod workers in the colony went on strike; they no longer functioned as ball bearings. We suddenly lost environmental and indoor climate control, refrigeration, flywheel use, turbines, transport steering, axles, universal joints, graviton cones, and engines of every sort. All we engineers could do was stick our thumbs up our asses.

The colony collapsed.

When the tightly stratified little balls came back to life and weren’t happy in whatever niches, crevices, or interfaces we had placed them, the whole damn settlement had to be retrofitted. Like one of your body parts rarely thought about until it is missed, something as mundane and unseen as a ball bearing threatened a whole world by abdication. The problem was so devastating that the colony population was halved within four months as evacuees to Earth exchanged with massive crates of ball bearings of the inanimate type.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 22,102

It’s pretty amazing that these ferropods, simple as they were, ushered in such a cultural upheaval: there was life elsewhere in the universe, and the fact that it was just next door on Mars implied that it was probably everywhere in the universe. Everyone freaked. In typical bureaucratic overreaction, a Cultural Psychology Committee was created, bringing to Mars a panel of distinguished psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers to assess and if possible implement responses to the colonists’ difficulties in “grasping the gravity of the situation.” I don’t really get it. Life elsewhere? I mean, it’s nice to know—even exciting—but I wasn’t going to blow my brains out or anything like that. And as far as “grasping the gravity of the situation,” I think that already being on Mars was already as surrealistic a life choice that no surprise could nonplus.

Back on Mother Earth, a lot of philosophers sold books, a lot of evangelists sermonized, a lot mental health workers evaluated, a lot of politicians strategized, and a whole lot of ball bearing tycoons became very rich. I guess Big Balls joined the other Big This and Big That megacorporations.

Since we needed ball bearings, our ball bearing-dependent colony on Mars retrofitted and recovered. Once the population again surged to over 2500, there was new talent: a Botany and Biology Consortium, along with its Veterinary Studies Division, or VSD. The ferropod was apprehended, studied, and also feared; it appeared that when its globular attitude stretched out into a linear, shiny, slug-like shape, snapping back into a ball released enough kinetic energy to make the re-formed ball ballistic. So far, three humans, including Dr. Cooke, had suffered strikes to their heads, with varied results.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 22,657

We geologists searched for more of these strange little beasts in hopes of determining what they live on, besides that brain in Dr. Cooke’s head. (He had become rather famous on Mars and had given a lot of job security to many scientific departments. There were two more victims, but for some reason they’re Classified.)

Our searches yielded two fantastic results.

The first was the discovery of the Ares arboreta plant, an ambulatory green flora with functional limbs that had begun germinating from long-dormant spores; again, who knows? The rise in temperature? Humidity?

The second was the discovery of the Sonotomes—unearthly songs and vocalizations(?) which seemed to come out of thin air from the mountainous areas. With all the buzz over Ares arboreta, The Botany Division of the Botany and Biology Consortium had swelled to parity with the Biology Division, but a new group, designated Electromagnetic Archeology, came on board in attempts to decipher the mysterious Sonotomes and hopefully find fossil remains of those who sang them.

Actual Martians. Wouldn’t that be something?

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 22,809

The ferropods brought a lot of changes, but the biggest change was the birth of politics on Mars. I personally think this put into serious jeopardy our mission statement of bringing only the best Earth has to offer. Politics? The Botany and Biology Consortium joined the Cultural Psychology Committee, the Electromagnetic Archeology Council, and the old and long established Terraforming Maintenance section of my own Geology College of Mars. Together, they made up the New Mars Colony Project Security Council, or MCPSC.

The business interests of Earth were not without representation on the MCPSC. The Nations of Earth—the NOE—formerly the United Nations, were no longer united except by business relationships. They sent an NOE liaison to the MCPSC as a non-voting member. The official function of the NOE liaison was to authenticate that the colony did in fact consist of the best Earth had to offer—philosophically, ethically, and humanistically. The real function of the NOE liaison, if you ask me, was to step in—to intercede—on behalf of the business interests of the NOE. That way, I figure that thoughts of independence—or even insubordination—could be reported back to Earth and, if necessary, “contained.” There were rumors that this person had at his disposal a secret Prestige Guard who would help him secure the colony, should this ever become necessary. The MCPSC welcomed him as an interested guest; he accepted as nothing less than a predatory spy, forever crouched in a striking position.

I guess it was another business decision.

But we all knew business was good, so the MCPSC kept administering and no one ever heard about the NOE liaison who obviously kept observing politely and unobtrusively. Any suspicion or intrigue was buried under the wonders of the discoveries thus far—life in two disparate species, spanning flora and fauna, botany and biology, and on the very next world at that! And evidence of a sentient species, extinct, but which left records for study. And now even the Martian thunder sounds right. Mars is no longer comical; Mars is serious.

As they say, “Mars vigila.”

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 26,488

Found a publisher for my diary. He told me that it’s too long already, and he wasn’t pleased when I told him I am still writing entries. He said he’ll put out what I have so far as Part 1, and if it sells, he’ll do the Part 2 I’m writing now. But that’s all irrelevant here.

It’s been over 10 Earth years of MCPSC deliberations and agendas, but our Electromagnetic Archeology Council has failed to find any rusted fossils that were ancient Martians. “Nothing to report,” the routine entry to the minutes, became a joke, and finally a cliché. As a geologist working with the archeologists, I could sense their building frustration over the profitless years that promised—no, teased—us with the initial discovery of the Sonotomes.

All this time, hordes of xenolinguists have flooded into the research divisions of the colony. Under the auspices of Electromagnetic Archeology, xenolinguist Deniz Mickal, DXL, accompanied her husband, Dr. Evan Mickal, to our little colony. Evan was a Ph.D. in both biochemistry and physiology and he joined the Veterinary Studies Division (VSD). Deniz worked in the Xenolinguistics (XL) Division. Since Evan studied ferropods and Deniz translated the Sonotomes, I often worked with both of them in the field. When I went off alone on an excursion, Evan was back at the VSD trying to investigate experimental interactions between the imported Earth animals there and ferropods, but there were none; for some reason, the globular critters just weren’t interested in “snapping” into any animal’s head. The three humans who had not been so lucky justified a bullet-proof glass barrier that separated the ferropods from the other rooms, hallways, animals, and humans at the VSD, which went a long way in putting me at ease when I’d visit.

Meanwhile, Deniz and her fellow XLs have made great strides with the Sonotomes, thanks to me. More about how in a minute. My find, a crucial one, was unfortunately the last great discovery before the Electromagnetic Archeologist malaise of persistent non-discovery. Nevertheless, what I had found gave everyone plenty else to do, since it opened these oral recordings for the XLs.

“The book from Mars is an open book,” the XLs said, their work allowing even the unscientific to translate the texts as easily as a Greek scholar might translate Homer. It was a fascinating language with grammatical rules that seemed to corral syllables into a choral cadence as if it were meant to be sung by many. Harmonies, centered on the same word, indicated emphasis or nuance. It was if there were several Martians needed to say one thing the right way. The XLs codified it substantially enough to allow almost anyone, so inclined, to work on translation.

The actual recordings had been a different matter, and I’m not too shy to say I’m the guy who figured it out. Rendering them required much more actual geology since they were based on a mysterious recording process uniquely Martian, using rust as a substrate. The canyons played them naturally, but only under certain conditions. It wasn’t until I realized that ferric oxide enantiomers were used differently in recording vs. listening that the musical intonations of the language, as theorized by the XLs, were confirmed. (Levoferric oxide had been used to lay down the audiotracks long ago, but dextroferric oxide was needed to lift them off of the rust.) I got the idea to separate the two chiral forms of the oxide and run each through a magnetometer. I used the Department of Geology one, the one that allows you to plop down large strips of shale for evaluation. That’s when I noticed both oxides had wave forms of intensity which varied over the length of the sample. The enantiomers were mirror images of the same thing in different directions—like a coming and a going. I remember looking at the plotted data and damn if it didn’t look like a sound file. Not coming and going. Recording and playing back, possibly? I used an algorithm to convert the patterns into a playable format and put them through the piezo-quartz transducers.

I had never been lucky enough to hear them produced in the canyons naturally. Sure, I had heard recordings of them; everyone had. But my own transcription that day had a signal/noise ratio that rendered the clarity needed if we were ever hopeful of translating them. I listened. Couldn’t understand what I heard. Couldn’t grasp the melodic scheme. I listened.

And I wept.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 26,914

Water changed everything.

Outside in the Martian canyons, the sound made by the ancient recording process played back spontaneously, but rarely, creating the ethereal “singing canyons.” But you needed to be patient, guessing where to be and when to be there, to hear it. I wasn’t lucky enough to catch one for a long time. I still needed electronic transformation to convert the magnetographics into oscillations that carried any song I heard through speakers.

I had always heard that the natural renderings were thrilling—even life-changing—compared to the studio-enhanced final products, because in the canyons the experience was fortuitous and accidental, a fluke by-product of someone having used iron at all, along with the natural processes that fetched the frequencies into the air. They must have been singing for eons, waiting for the right set of ears to be in the right place at the right time.

Then there was water. During the terraforming maintenance phase, it was we engineers who concocted the re-debut of water back into ancient rock. After that, Mars would literally burst into song for me and the heavily armored biologists visiting the canyons to collect more ferropods for study.

The singing canyons!

They were astounding! For me, anyway. It was like comparing a mere recording of Wagner or Beethoven to an actual performance of orchestra and chorus. To an inexperienced listener, the sounds from the canyons at first were heard as musical non-sequiturs, gibberish. In fact, I couldn’t even recognize them to be vocal renderings at all, much less sentient vocalizations. But strangely beautiful, people better and smarter than me studied and decrypted them, using my algorithm to unlock the recordings in a sound lab so the ancient Martians could not only be heard, but finally listened to. We all had played a part, from my discovery of the recording process and then on to the polygamy of geology, sound engineering, and xenolinguistics; we brought the first authentic recordings to the ears of humans two Earth years after the canyons were first heard singing their postdiluvian songs.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 27,040

After my discoveries related to the Sonotomes, the MCPSC authorized a nine-fold increase in the Botany and Biology Consortium budget. (And I got a bonus, but they called it a stipend.) The new budget allowes a Dr. Renée Niemann the opportunity to come to Mars and assume the Division directorship of the VSD. I guess it makes sense that a real veterinarian join the team. She would join Dr. Evan Mickal there. Even though Evan’s assignment on Mars is very different from his wife’s duties, there is still a lot of opportunity for the couple to cross paths with each other and with me—such as in the canyons. Deniz seems very energized with her work. She tells me that the Sonotome translations often refer to an as-yet unidentified symbiosis in the Martian life-epic. She feels that there are instances where “soul” may seem a better translation than symbiosis, but that could be a dangerous and erroneous conclusion. I suppose. I also suppose that shared field work as well as stories and songs of symbiosis give Evan and Deniz common topics of conversation at their dinner table each evening.

Evan’s a pretty bright guy. His primary tool, Magnetic Resonance Physiology (“MRP”), has been a staple of human medicine since the cancer cures and telomere lengthening technology had increased the human lifespan. By the way, the lifespan of telomorphs has now been legislated to a limit of 150 years. I knew that would happen. Sooner or later they over-bureaucratize everything. I haven’t received any notifications, so I guess I really am grandfathered in.

Evan’s MRP has reconciled human life from atoms to organs, so I know Evan is dying to use it when we discover the remains of ancient Martians. Even a fossil could be MRP-scanned for significant results and profitable payback. I know Dr. Evan Mickal dreams of Martian mummified remains.

Just imagine.

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 27,153

A little geology for you—

Based on the Sonotomes, the extinct Martians had lived, evolved, and died during a range of time from the Late Hesperian to the Early Amazonian epochs, a transition time of three million years when oxygen concentration in their thin atmosphere was greater than 92%. From the songs, Deniz tell me there is evidence they had awareness of their coming demise, but the reason for it remains unsung, so far; their name for it translates as “forgotten,” which the XLs agree can’t be accurate. Forgotten by whom? They sing songs that give every indication that they were the dominant life form.

I’m no poet, but as the details of language are elucidated, the poetry on the subject is being described as nothing less than lofty and brilliant by the most expert translators. The demise, the “forgetting,” always figures prominently. Questioning your mortality is one thing, but waxing philosophical on the death of your whole race is probably as beautiful, desperate, and chilling as the sudden wisdom from any last agonal gasp could be.

The VSD, additionally, is assigned the task of pursuing any biological risks of cross-contamination between Earth and Mars. Any new world interaction poses dangers for the sitting ducks—both any exposed natives and we visitors alike. After arrival, we were lectured on the cautionary tales of gonorrhea for Native Americans or, as payback, syphilis for the landing Europeans, which seemed to strike an interplanetary chord. So far, here, contamination across worlds had been a one-way street, the few ferropod attacks offering nothing short of a terrifying and lethal welcome mat for humanity’s second home.

Welcome to Mars. Have a nice day.