John Karr - Detonation Event

SCONA: We do. Mars once had a viable atmosphere and may hold one yet again.

EFF: Your mission is too theoretical. Too experimental. Only the Earth can support life as we know it.

SCONA: The Earth has also hosted ninety-nine percent of all extinct species, including the dinosaurs.

EFF: Humans are not brutish animals. As advanced life forms, we control our destiny. We have asteroid defense systems to avoid a dinosaur-style demise.

SCONA: If you recall, our organization thwarted one of those very asteroids using a prototype of our Cyclops Space Atomizer!

EFF: Fifty years ago, yes.

SCONA: Had the asteroid hit, we easily could have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

EFF: You take resources better used on Earth.

SCONA: Mechanical objects require use and maintenance and always run the risk of failure.

EFF: Even your great moonlike space stations, then?

SCONA: Yes, even our global space stations. We are constantly monitoring, testing, and repairing where necessary.

EFF: Then why take the risk of this Mars experiment? It appears nothing more than a waste of time, effort, and money.

SCONA: Not all threats to humans fall under the asteroid doomsday scenario. Technology has limits. Man and machines remain fallible. We are all vulnerable as long as Earth remains our only habitable planet. SCONA and other Mars expansion proponents believe the survival and progression of our species transcend planetary—and political—boundaries. Existence on Mars can serve as a failsafe for our species.

EFF: MEPs have built no fewer than three massive space stations, each at a vast cost! Those funds could be used to feed the hungry on Earth, purify drinking water, better the environment, and protect us against climate change!

SCONA: We are a viable business and cover our costs with revenues. We have private investors. We have not asked the American people, or any other government, to pay our way. Our customers are quite satisfied with the products we mine and manufacture from space, as well as our quite reasonable vacation services.

EFF: Your Martian fantasy will fail!

SCONA: We deem it worth trying. We are at a loss as to why the EFF and its supporters oppose our efforts.

EFF: Your space profits should be shared with those on Earth!

SCONA: Galactic socialism does not square with even the tattered remnants of the United States Constitution. We pay our taxes and make generous donations to charitable organizations.

EFF: The EFF merely seeks a balanced human existence while caring for our only habitable planet.

SCONA: Interesting language. The EFF were also vocal proponents for health reforms to alter the human physique under the pretense of decreasing the strain on natural resources. Our eyes are twice the size they were two hundred years ago, while our bodies are smaller on average than they’ve been since the eighteenth century.

EFF: We conquered obesity. There is less light pollution now thanks to better sight. Fewer resources are used for food and illumination. No one can deny these accomplishments!

SCONA: Not as long as the EFF defines success as alarming the masses to the point of genetic manipulation and self-limitation.

EFF: The greater good prevailed.

SCONA: If the Earth has prospered so well under your agenda, then why the constant push to marginalize SCONA? We have far more of a presence beyond Earth than upon it. We would think the EFF would be satisfied that we use very few Earth resources. In fact, we augment those limited resources.

EFF: You recruit skilled labor away from Earth’s needs with your high salaries and benefits.

SCONA: Our consortium is built upon freedom of choice and the right to work. As long as both the worker and employer are satisfied, the business relationship is intact.

EFF: Suppose you destroy Mars?

SCONA: We do not have the capability to do so. While only roughly half the size of Earth, Mars is still a very large object. Much larger than any asteroid we’ve encountered in our solar system. Extrapolating our findings from large asteroids, we believe our efforts will barely be noticeable from the surface.

EFF: What if you alter the orbit of Mars so that imperils the Earth? What then?

SCONA: Again, Mars is too big. We have made our research findings available to all. The bombs are not nearly powerful enough to alter the orbit of an entire planet. Asteroids simply do not have the core radius of a rocky planet like Mars, otherwise they’d be planets themselves.

The audience laughed and clapped .

EFF: And how many people breathe the air on the asteroids you’ve experimented on?

SCONA: Air was not the objective.

EFF: Then what was?

SCONA: Two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen.

EFF: We are well aware of water’s molecular combination.

SCONA: Water, remaining as water. The creation of a magnetic field that could bind a viable atmosphere to a planet and will also hold viable air, water, and heat. In other words, habitable.

EFF: Yes, yes, the magnetosphere again. Well, Venus doesn’t have a magnetosphere, and it has an atmosphere.

SCONA: And the air pressure on Venus would reduce a human to a boiling soup!

A chime sounded.

The EFF panel members rose and removed their microphones, moved as a group offstage, ostensibly for the bathrooms, while the SCONA personnel spoke among themselves.

The moderator’s voice wavered as he spoke. “And that is all the time we have. Uh, before commercial break. And before eternity, for that matter.”

The audience quieted. Some murmured about the strange comment.

The moderator reached within his suit.

“ Earth is all! ”

The moderator exploded in a mass of flesh and blood.

The lectern disintegrated, the crystal shards adding more shrapnel to the death cloud of metal bearings cutting down the panelists and camera people and members of the security team.

A series of flashes coincided with deafening blasts. Twenty-five seconds of silence and smoke ensued, captured by the fractured lens of a toppled camera. A scream echoed in the stillness, followed by moans and sobbing.

The broadcast, along with a majority of people in the studio, was terminated.

The abyss and its twin gape at the Martian sky as if aware of the pain to come.

One in daylight, the other night, they disrupt a global desert. The tunnels thrust to the very heart of the planet, as if the God of War had twice speared his namesake and wrought its demise. Mars was never a kind deity, and while he is no longer capable of violence, his blood-colored world remains just as hostile to life.

Here the sun rises and sets without mortality to mark the passage of time. The thin air constricts no lungs. The cold bites neither flesh nor frond. Beds of ancient waterways gather dust, indistinguishable from surrounding barrens. Volcanoes stand as slowly withering ghosts. The underground reservoirs that once supplied them with magma cooled to rock millennia ago. Deeper still, the once-molten outer core endured the same fate, entombing the mass of solid iron, nickel, and sulfur that had been its heat source: the radioactive inner core. Both are cold now, and there is no geologic activity throughout the entire planet.

Mars orbits the sun—half again beyond Earth’s orbit—as a rocky corpse.

But perhaps not eternally doomed.

The tunnels are the first phase of a mission where the odds are seemingly light years long and without historical precedent. Even if the mission is initially successful, the duration is unknown. Something killed Mars before and can do it again. But a chance at life has arrived where there was none. An opportunity to restore the vibrancy of the planet’s youth, now only hinted at with subterranean ice and mysterious impressions upon the withered husk of the surface.