Tierra Roja
When my boss’s assistant hands me the notice of my latest job assignment, I can’t believe my eyes. I flip the paper, still warm from the touch of his pudgy hands, over and back a few times, as if the job title will change upon a ninth or tenth or eleventh look.
‘Again?’ I ask him, incredulous.
His eyes don’t move, but I swear that for one tiny second, his mouth twitches as if he’s holding back a laugh.
‘Sorry, buddy, that’s just how we’re doing it this time.’
His tone indicates the matter isn’t up for discussion. And this was someone with whom I used to joke around! Man, he’s really let the power go to his head over the last couple of years. I know there’s nothing to be gained by arguing, so I do my best to keep my expression neutral. He gestures towards the automated door of the management pod, and I shuffle towards it, waiting for it to open. I step out, and the first of a long line of waiting men steps in – ready to receive his next job assignment, which I’m sure is going to be more favourable than mine.
The moment I come out of the pod, a familiar wallop of noise assaults me. Excavators tearing through the ground in search of minerals, creeping ever closer to our modest homepods. Cranes lowering the final layers onto the long-awaited medical tower. Everywhere, the endless drone of machinery, with no beginning and no end.
Between the job notice and the grinding din, I can feel my heart rate climbing, anger flushing my face as purple as the Martian sky. I stamp across the red earth, kicking up clouds of dust.
This isn’t the Mars that I came for.
They promised me choices. Freedom!
Instead, all I’ve been given – for the third year in a row – is shit. Literally.
I don’t know why Mr. Matters chose me to be the colony’s farmer. Back on Earth, I was in sales. The first time they assigned me to farming, I told myself, fine. Sooner or later, we’ll have to do every job. Might as well get this one over with.
But I lost my motivation pretty quickly. Every day, I had to empty sanitation tanks filled with waste from people’s homepods, pour it into different barrels, and ferment it with specific bacteria depending on which crop it would be used to grow. You can’t imagine the smell. Eventually, my brain simply switched off my olfactory system, and I found myself drifting between the tanks like a ghost. When this happened, I tried not to worry too much; according to the colony rules, we were to rotate jobs every three months to keep morale high.
I’m not sure if my Martian carrots were growing too well or what, but when the next job assignment day came around, Mr. Matters’ assistant handed me another piece of paper that said FARMER. The same thing happened on the next assignment day, and the next one. Then the next, and the next after that. Before I knew it, three years had gone by.
These days, I feel like a shell of the man who arrived here. But while I’d love to blame my job for all my troubles, the truth is even without the fermented shit, I wouldn’t exactly say that the last three years have been wonderful.
The first few months were full of hope: a flurry of construction activity and camaraderie among the colony, heady days saturated in the ecstasy of having survived a four-year journey through space and made ourselves at home. After a decade living in my mom’s basement, I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be independent, surrounded by like-minded men with my own space to live in.
Things went downhill pretty quickly.
We were supposed to have an equal say in how the colony was run, but Mr. Matters and his inner circle (who insist we refer to them as ‘the Managers’) make every decision themselves. I was supposed to receive a three-storey homepod with a cactus garden, but nobody figured out how to get the cacti to survive. We also ran so short on building materials that my home was made with just one level, with half the square footage I was promised. I was supposed to find a wife, but most of the single women left during the first year after they discovered Mr. Matters had forgotten to pack tampons.
The last issue hit me particularly hard. I’ve always wanted to have children, but natural fertility declines quickly on Mars. None of us were warned about this before – maybe Mr. Matters had no idea. In any case, the Managers have come up with a solution to this: every month, a little robot with pigtails comes to my pod. I masturbate into it while it plays soothing music, and when I’m done, it ferries my sperm away for cryonic storage.
I know this intervention is meant to keep up morale, but frankly it just makes me sad. The robot isn’t even that cute and I’m beginning to realise that I might never find love. I spend every evening sitting alone in my pod, staring at the wall-sized television that’s meant to imitate a window. Red dust swirls endlessly across the screen in slow circles.
It’s not like I haven’t made any efforts to turn my fortune around. After a particularly uninspiring session with the robot a few months ago, I’d decided that something had to change. I had to shake myself out of this endless numbness. Two months ago, I finally worked up the courage to write to Mr. Matters and ask for a different job.
I sent him a fax through the colony’s communications system. He’s rarely more than a few hundred metres away, but since he’s an important man, this is generally the best way to get a hold of him. In my fax, I explained that I was ready for a new challenge. More than anything, I was hoping to be given a job at the clothing store. Now this job is the jackpot: all you need to do is empty the colony’s cleaning robots, pick out the human hairs they’ve collected, feed them into a reactor, and watch them come out as a fully formed sweater. Steam, fold, and sell. Couldn’t be easier.
A few days later, I received confirmation that the fax had reached his inbox. I waited anxiously for his reply, but it never came. Still, on today’s job assignment day, I’d allowed myself to feel a glimmer of hope that maybe he’d take my request on board, that he’d appreciate my initiative. But nope – once again, I’m going back to the shit. And once again, I’m trudging away from the management pod with the feeling that my eyes might fill with tears before I can make it home.
As I walk, I pass the Gym. The walls are made of impenetrable steel – windows aren’t allowed on Mars because of the dust storms – but I know that inside, hundreds of people are pedalling stationary bikes to generate electricity for the colony.
Usually I’d be in the mood to blow off some steam after work, particularly on a job assignment day, but today I just can’t stomach it. No matter how many hours I spend pedalling, my legs have stayed as thin as toothpicks. Without proper atmospheric pressure, your muscles waste away, yet another issue that none of us were warned about.
I look down at them now with a fresh wave of despair, feeling them wobble in my space suit like hot dogs in the wind. Disgusted, I force myself to look up, fixing my eyes on the hazy horizon where nothing lies ahead and nothing behind. It takes me a minute to notice that I’ve reached the door of my pod. I’m overcome by the urge to flop down onto my couch, yet my hand hovers over the door sensor, not quite ready to trigger its opening.
A new, sudden thought occurs. Maybe those women who left over the tampon fiasco weren’t so wrong after all. Maybe I should leave too. After all, what’s keeping me here? I don’t think anything good is going to happen anymore. Honestly, I’m not the only one who’s miserable. The mood across the colony is so sharp that it feels like it could cut into you at any moment. The other day, one of the Gym employees told me his friend at the cinema – the one that can only show films we downloaded before we left, and let me tell you, I’m getting thoroughly sick of Marvel characters – said there’s a whole group of people who’ve had enough of Mr. Matters and want to seize control of the colony themselves. I’m not sure I want to be around to witness that; I’ve never been particularly good at choosing sides.
Yes, I think to myself, with the first wave of clarity I’ve experienced in years – or maybe even in my life. I should go. Quietly. I wave my hand across the sensor and step inside my pod to make a plan.
There is no dawn on Mars, just a sickly red light that casts a pall over the constant semi-darkness. I creep out of my pod before the morning alarms go off across the colony, pausing to stare at the television that served as my window. I wonder if I should say goodbye. I touch two fingers to it and hurry towards the door, waving my hand impatiently at the sensor, which has started to lag by two or three seconds over the last year. I won’t miss that moment stuck in space, neither in nor out, here nor there. After what feels like a miniature eternity goading me to change my mind, the door opens and I rush out, taking the back route to avoid walking through the mining area in case anyone is awake.
I arrive at the Travel Control Depot and put my Unique Coloniser Number, or UNC, into the security pad. It beeps three times in affirmation, and a sliding door opens. The depot is vast – the size of a car factory, but with none of the noise or movement. Here, it’s quiet apart from the sound of my own breathing, as I walk through rows and rows of parked Space Flyers, the kayak-sized individual spaceships that we used to transport ourselves here.
Each second that passes feels longer. I’m moving quickly now, looking for the flyer that matches my UNC. Technically, I am not doing anything wrong. When we came up here, Mr. Matters always said we were free to leave. But rumour has it that the last person who tried to go, after publicly announcing his plans, was never seen again – not even for the goodbye party that is customary before one flies away, and certainly not actually flying away, even though those events used to be televised in our pods. Recently, they’ve started showing more announcements about the sorry state of Earth that we’ve left behind. That does make me nervous, although it’s hard to think of anything that could be worse than spending my days swimming around in shit.
Z033160. My flyer. She’s looking as fresh as she did on that thrilling morning when we took off 10 years ago, bearing no trace of the fact that I spent four years inside her, unconscious and snoring as she hurtled me towards nirvana. Seeing her again, something that took such good care of me, I feel a wave of calm. I pop open her lid, lower myself inside, and the next steps come to me like muscle memory. I flip through the two preprogrammed routes: EARTH (MIAMI) TO MARS and MARS TO EARTH (MIAMI), selecting the latter. The flyer begins to rise; a small square in the depot’s ceiling opens. I attach the charging cable that snakes towards the passenger seat into the small port made in my belly button. The port has been unused for so long that it’s hard at first to squeeze the cable’s charging end in. I squirm around for a minute or two, and as soon as it connects, I immediately feel myself beginning to power down. The last thing I see before my eyes close is a swirl of red dust, throwing itself against my windows like a stain.
When I arrive, I barely look older. I’m awoken from my Suspended State by the heartbeat-paced beeps, which become steadily louder as the pod alerts me to the fact we’ve arrived. Groggy, I pull the cable out of my belly button and check my face in the mirror installed on the control panel. You’d never know that four years had passed. Maybe I have a few more wrinkles here and there, but it’s nothing that some Botox can’t fix – if that sort of thing is still as easily available.
My flyer has landed itself back in the same airfield we left from, on the outskirts of Miami, not so far from the airport. I let myself out of the pods and walk towards the highway, figuring that I can flag down an Uber to bring me back downtown. I take my first few tentative steps towards the road and realise aghast that I am moving strangely. On Mars, the wind is so strong, and our space suits so cumbersome, that we walk with our legs spread wide, feet turned slightly out, as if constantly having to straddle a bench or avoid putting pressure on very sore testicles. Whenever I try to bring my thin legs closer together, they buckle.
On Mars, they told us this left-behind earth would be scorched, with nothing but sand dunes and misery, but I’ve got to say that Miami is looking even more lush than I remember. It’s almost like the Miami of my early childhood, before we cleared the mangroves to make space for individual marinas and took down most of the palm trees to replace them with wind turbines to power Bitcoin mining. It’s also far quieter. When I get to what should have been the edge of the six-lane highway that connects back to town, I realise it’s gone. Instead, a walking path meanders through the fledgling palm trees that line the start of the marsh. Even the marsh looks cleaner, less like the expired bean soup that it was when I left; the top of the water seems to have a pearly sheen.
I start to walk, and at first I’m alone with the sound of chirping birds, but as I get closer to town, the walking path begins to branch off into dozens of others, and everywhere I look, women go jogging past. Seeing people in their human form, without the sheath of a space suit, jolts me awake. I’m back. All the women have glowing tanned skin and alligator smiles. They jog in pairs, slapping each other’s hands and laughing as they tell stories between them, or with energetic dogs on leashes, dogs of no particular breed, the kind that used to scavenge around the city limits once the mangroves had been scraped away. The path is dotted by signs explaining which species have returned to the marsh. Some, like the pink flamingo, are animals I never realised were even real.
I have no idea where I am, but eventually the walking path flows towards the familiar outline of the city centre, although there seems to be far less concrete and much more wood in the buildings than I remember. One glass tower now has greenery springing wildly off its roof; on the building’s side, there is a hand-painted mural of a spaceship with angel wings and some writing underneath. I squint at it but can’t quite make out what it says.
I suddenly realise how tired I am. Immediately, I remember what I used to do when I felt tired, here on Earth. A coffee. With milk foam.
My heart jumps into my stomach. We haven’t had coffee on Mars since Year 1, when the trees we transported with us failed to reintegrate, even with my special shit fertiliser. Mr. Matters told me not to worry about it, that the atmosphere wasn’t primed to grow tropical shrubs. So we took to injecting ourselves with a type of amphetamine derived from lithium when we were tired instead. But it would leave me unable to sleep for days and no visit from the pig-tailed robot or an Ironman rewatch could calm me down. So eventually I just decided to stay tired.
Like an apparition, I see a coffee shop looming some 50 feet away. I start to scuttle towards it. My weak hands grasp its frosted glass door and manage to fling it open.
Inside, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Ambient music plays in the background. The space is bathed in warm tones; the tables, floors, and counters are all a warm beige marble, punctuated by the verdant green of succulents. Beyond the interior space lies a courtyard, where a small waterfall trickles soothingly into a pond patrolled by a glittering koi.
When I left Miami, people were constantly on edge, angry, barking into their phones and scrolling news like the pixels were sapping the life force out of them. Even on coffee breaks. But in this coffee shop, people seem happy, relaxed, co-operative. Almost everyone inside is a woman. Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen many men around until now, which is a welcome change from Mars. In here there are just two of them, seated together in a corner, with one holding a well-thumbed book and reciting a passage as the other looks on in interest. Nobody is on their phones.
I stagger up to the counter to give my order to the barista, a smiling woman with round brown eyes.
‘CAN I PLEASE HAVE A LATTE’
The sound of my voice makes me jump. It sounds like a vacuum cleaner that has sucked up a pile of pumpkin seeds, hoarse and rattling. The barista looks equally startled. On Mars, the constant whirring of machines and whistling of the wind is so loud that we usually need to talk at full volume. I hadn’t had a chance to notice how worn out my vocal cords had become.
The barista rearranges her smile, but I see her eyes dart down my body, over my faded black shirt and pants, so different from the pastel colours and buttery-soft yoga clothes that everyone else around me seems to be wearing. A shadow passes over her face as she appraises me; but then she shakes her head almost imperceptibly, as if trying to tell herself off.
‘Sure!’ she says. ‘What kind of milk would you like?’
‘REGULAR,’ I rasp. I may as well be a barking dog. My voice is so loud and my throat is so dry.
Another cloud passes over the woman’s face. There is something I must not understand. She whispers something to her colleague, another smiling woman, this time one with golden skin and perfectly conditioned curls, who comes closer to her and looks at me, a hint of a frown gathering on the horizon of her brow.
‘Sorry, we don’t have “regular” milk,’ the barista says, making air quotes around ‘regular’ and staring probingly into my eyes, as if hoping I will answer a question before she has to ask it. ‘We haven’t had that in a long time. Is…seaweed fine?’
What? Seaweed milk? The thought of a coffee without the thick, slightly sweet foam that I’ve missed so much after leaving Earth makes my spirit go limp. But I’m even more conscious of my presence now, like an elephant at the zoo that’s barged into the delicate habitat of a rare African crane.
‘SEAWEED FINE,’ I rasp, trying to smile but realising the muscles on the corner of my mouth don’t quite turn up anymore. My face is collapsing like an underbaked cake. The barista’s eyes, previously narrowed in interrogation, widen with alarm.
As she retreats behind the coffee machine I can sense that she is still hyperfixated on my presence. While foaming the seaweed milk, which appears to be surprisingly beige, she crooks a finger as a gesture for her colleague to once again come close. She whispers something in her colleague’s ear, and her colleague whispers something back.
They look at me quickly, probably expecting that I would have by now averted my gaze. But I have not. I’m too nervous. When they see that I am still staring at them, they whip back around immediately. The barista pulls something that looks like a pager out of her pocket. She tries to keep it hidden in her fist. But near the edge of the counter, I see her palm it off to her colleague, the way that I remember girls used to pass around pads in high school. The barista turns her chin up just a few degrees, enough for me to catch her mouthing to her colleague – PRESS IT. PRESS THE BUTTON – while tilting up the corner of her eyes to show she’s talking about me. With a look of rising panic, her colleague thumbs the button.
Instantly, everyone in the café sits up and starts looking around them. All eyes focus on me. I feel the urge to turn away.
One of the only men in the café stands up, dropping something quickly. I realise it is the hand of the other man he’d been sitting with, who has remained frozen in his seat. The one standing has painted nails and is wearing a mid-length purple skirt. Now I feel more disoriented than ever, as if I’ve taken a flight back in time. That kind of dress had been banned for people assigned male at birth since I was in high school.
Suddenly, the barista is in front of the counter, tugging on my elbow. She is no longer smiling. Her round eyes are deadly serious. ‘You need to come with us,’ she says, steering me towards the exit. I don’t even pretend to offer any resistance; my flimsy, wide-set legs flail forward. Only as she pushes me out the front door do I realise I won’t be getting my coffee. Visions of frothy milk appear before my eyes, like an angry wave breaking onto the shore.
‘Again?’ I ask him, incredulous.
His eyes don’t move, but I swear that for one tiny second, his mouth twitches as if he’s holding back a laugh.
‘Sorry, buddy, that’s just how we’re doing it this time.’
His tone indicates the matter isn’t up for discussion. And this was someone with whom I used to joke around! Man, he’s really let the power go to his head over the last couple of years. I know there’s nothing to be gained by arguing, so I do my best to keep my expression neutral. He gestures towards the automated door of the management pod, and I shuffle towards it, waiting for it to open. I step out, and the first of a long line of waiting men steps in – ready to receive his next job assignment, which I’m sure is going to be more favourable than mine.
The moment I come out of the pod, a familiar wallop of noise assaults me. Excavators tearing through the ground in search of minerals, creeping ever closer to our modest homepods. Cranes lowering the final layers onto the long-awaited medical tower. Everywhere, the endless drone of machinery, with no beginning and no end.
Between the job notice and the grinding din, I can feel my heart rate climbing, anger flushing my face as purple as the Martian sky. I stamp across the red earth, kicking up clouds of dust.
This isn’t the Mars that I came for.
They promised me choices. Freedom!
Instead, all I’ve been given – for the third year in a row – is shit. Literally.
I don’t know why Mr. Matters chose me to be the colony’s farmer. Back on Earth, I was in sales. The first time they assigned me to farming, I told myself, fine. Sooner or later, we’ll have to do every job. Might as well get this one over with.
But I lost my motivation pretty quickly. Every day, I had to empty sanitation tanks filled with waste from people’s homepods, pour it into different barrels, and ferment it with specific bacteria depending on which crop it would be used to grow. You can’t imagine the smell. Eventually, my brain simply switched off my olfactory system, and I found myself drifting between the tanks like a ghost. When this happened, I tried not to worry too much; according to the colony rules, we were to rotate jobs every three months to keep morale high.
I’m not sure if my Martian carrots were growing too well or what, but when the next job assignment day came around, Mr. Matters’ assistant handed me another piece of paper that said FARMER. The same thing happened on the next assignment day, and the next one. Then the next, and the next after that. Before I knew it, three years had gone by.
These days, I feel like a shell of the man who arrived here. But while I’d love to blame my job for all my troubles, the truth is even without the fermented shit, I wouldn’t exactly say that the last three years have been wonderful.
The first few months were full of hope: a flurry of construction activity and camaraderie among the colony, heady days saturated in the ecstasy of having survived a four-year journey through space and made ourselves at home. After a decade living in my mom’s basement, I couldn’t believe my good fortune to be independent, surrounded by like-minded men with my own space to live in.
Things went downhill pretty quickly.
We were supposed to have an equal say in how the colony was run, but Mr. Matters and his inner circle (who insist we refer to them as ‘the Managers’) make every decision themselves. I was supposed to receive a three-storey homepod with a cactus garden, but nobody figured out how to get the cacti to survive. We also ran so short on building materials that my home was made with just one level, with half the square footage I was promised. I was supposed to find a wife, but most of the single women left during the first year after they discovered Mr. Matters had forgotten to pack tampons.
The last issue hit me particularly hard. I’ve always wanted to have children, but natural fertility declines quickly on Mars. None of us were warned about this before – maybe Mr. Matters had no idea. In any case, the Managers have come up with a solution to this: every month, a little robot with pigtails comes to my pod. I masturbate into it while it plays soothing music, and when I’m done, it ferries my sperm away for cryonic storage.
I know this intervention is meant to keep up morale, but frankly it just makes me sad. The robot isn’t even that cute and I’m beginning to realise that I might never find love. I spend every evening sitting alone in my pod, staring at the wall-sized television that’s meant to imitate a window. Red dust swirls endlessly across the screen in slow circles.
It’s not like I haven’t made any efforts to turn my fortune around. After a particularly uninspiring session with the robot a few months ago, I’d decided that something had to change. I had to shake myself out of this endless numbness. Two months ago, I finally worked up the courage to write to Mr. Matters and ask for a different job.
I sent him a fax through the colony’s communications system. He’s rarely more than a few hundred metres away, but since he’s an important man, this is generally the best way to get a hold of him. In my fax, I explained that I was ready for a new challenge. More than anything, I was hoping to be given a job at the clothing store. Now this job is the jackpot: all you need to do is empty the colony’s cleaning robots, pick out the human hairs they’ve collected, feed them into a reactor, and watch them come out as a fully formed sweater. Steam, fold, and sell. Couldn’t be easier.
A few days later, I received confirmation that the fax had reached his inbox. I waited anxiously for his reply, but it never came. Still, on today’s job assignment day, I’d allowed myself to feel a glimmer of hope that maybe he’d take my request on board, that he’d appreciate my initiative. But nope – once again, I’m going back to the shit. And once again, I’m trudging away from the management pod with the feeling that my eyes might fill with tears before I can make it home.
As I walk, I pass the Gym. The walls are made of impenetrable steel – windows aren’t allowed on Mars because of the dust storms – but I know that inside, hundreds of people are pedalling stationary bikes to generate electricity for the colony.
Usually I’d be in the mood to blow off some steam after work, particularly on a job assignment day, but today I just can’t stomach it. No matter how many hours I spend pedalling, my legs have stayed as thin as toothpicks. Without proper atmospheric pressure, your muscles waste away, yet another issue that none of us were warned about.
I look down at them now with a fresh wave of despair, feeling them wobble in my space suit like hot dogs in the wind. Disgusted, I force myself to look up, fixing my eyes on the hazy horizon where nothing lies ahead and nothing behind. It takes me a minute to notice that I’ve reached the door of my pod. I’m overcome by the urge to flop down onto my couch, yet my hand hovers over the door sensor, not quite ready to trigger its opening.
A new, sudden thought occurs. Maybe those women who left over the tampon fiasco weren’t so wrong after all. Maybe I should leave too. After all, what’s keeping me here? I don’t think anything good is going to happen anymore. Honestly, I’m not the only one who’s miserable. The mood across the colony is so sharp that it feels like it could cut into you at any moment. The other day, one of the Gym employees told me his friend at the cinema – the one that can only show films we downloaded before we left, and let me tell you, I’m getting thoroughly sick of Marvel characters – said there’s a whole group of people who’ve had enough of Mr. Matters and want to seize control of the colony themselves. I’m not sure I want to be around to witness that; I’ve never been particularly good at choosing sides.
Yes, I think to myself, with the first wave of clarity I’ve experienced in years – or maybe even in my life. I should go. Quietly. I wave my hand across the sensor and step inside my pod to make a plan.
There is no dawn on Mars, just a sickly red light that casts a pall over the constant semi-darkness. I creep out of my pod before the morning alarms go off across the colony, pausing to stare at the television that served as my window. I wonder if I should say goodbye. I touch two fingers to it and hurry towards the door, waving my hand impatiently at the sensor, which has started to lag by two or three seconds over the last year. I won’t miss that moment stuck in space, neither in nor out, here nor there. After what feels like a miniature eternity goading me to change my mind, the door opens and I rush out, taking the back route to avoid walking through the mining area in case anyone is awake.
I arrive at the Travel Control Depot and put my Unique Coloniser Number, or UNC, into the security pad. It beeps three times in affirmation, and a sliding door opens. The depot is vast – the size of a car factory, but with none of the noise or movement. Here, it’s quiet apart from the sound of my own breathing, as I walk through rows and rows of parked Space Flyers, the kayak-sized individual spaceships that we used to transport ourselves here.
Each second that passes feels longer. I’m moving quickly now, looking for the flyer that matches my UNC. Technically, I am not doing anything wrong. When we came up here, Mr. Matters always said we were free to leave. But rumour has it that the last person who tried to go, after publicly announcing his plans, was never seen again – not even for the goodbye party that is customary before one flies away, and certainly not actually flying away, even though those events used to be televised in our pods. Recently, they’ve started showing more announcements about the sorry state of Earth that we’ve left behind. That does make me nervous, although it’s hard to think of anything that could be worse than spending my days swimming around in shit.
Z033160. My flyer. She’s looking as fresh as she did on that thrilling morning when we took off 10 years ago, bearing no trace of the fact that I spent four years inside her, unconscious and snoring as she hurtled me towards nirvana. Seeing her again, something that took such good care of me, I feel a wave of calm. I pop open her lid, lower myself inside, and the next steps come to me like muscle memory. I flip through the two preprogrammed routes: EARTH (MIAMI) TO MARS and MARS TO EARTH (MIAMI), selecting the latter. The flyer begins to rise; a small square in the depot’s ceiling opens. I attach the charging cable that snakes towards the passenger seat into the small port made in my belly button. The port has been unused for so long that it’s hard at first to squeeze the cable’s charging end in. I squirm around for a minute or two, and as soon as it connects, I immediately feel myself beginning to power down. The last thing I see before my eyes close is a swirl of red dust, throwing itself against my windows like a stain.
When I arrive, I barely look older. I’m awoken from my Suspended State by the heartbeat-paced beeps, which become steadily louder as the pod alerts me to the fact we’ve arrived. Groggy, I pull the cable out of my belly button and check my face in the mirror installed on the control panel. You’d never know that four years had passed. Maybe I have a few more wrinkles here and there, but it’s nothing that some Botox can’t fix – if that sort of thing is still as easily available.
My flyer has landed itself back in the same airfield we left from, on the outskirts of Miami, not so far from the airport. I let myself out of the pods and walk towards the highway, figuring that I can flag down an Uber to bring me back downtown. I take my first few tentative steps towards the road and realise aghast that I am moving strangely. On Mars, the wind is so strong, and our space suits so cumbersome, that we walk with our legs spread wide, feet turned slightly out, as if constantly having to straddle a bench or avoid putting pressure on very sore testicles. Whenever I try to bring my thin legs closer together, they buckle.
On Mars, they told us this left-behind earth would be scorched, with nothing but sand dunes and misery, but I’ve got to say that Miami is looking even more lush than I remember. It’s almost like the Miami of my early childhood, before we cleared the mangroves to make space for individual marinas and took down most of the palm trees to replace them with wind turbines to power Bitcoin mining. It’s also far quieter. When I get to what should have been the edge of the six-lane highway that connects back to town, I realise it’s gone. Instead, a walking path meanders through the fledgling palm trees that line the start of the marsh. Even the marsh looks cleaner, less like the expired bean soup that it was when I left; the top of the water seems to have a pearly sheen.
I start to walk, and at first I’m alone with the sound of chirping birds, but as I get closer to town, the walking path begins to branch off into dozens of others, and everywhere I look, women go jogging past. Seeing people in their human form, without the sheath of a space suit, jolts me awake. I’m back. All the women have glowing tanned skin and alligator smiles. They jog in pairs, slapping each other’s hands and laughing as they tell stories between them, or with energetic dogs on leashes, dogs of no particular breed, the kind that used to scavenge around the city limits once the mangroves had been scraped away. The path is dotted by signs explaining which species have returned to the marsh. Some, like the pink flamingo, are animals I never realised were even real.
I have no idea where I am, but eventually the walking path flows towards the familiar outline of the city centre, although there seems to be far less concrete and much more wood in the buildings than I remember. One glass tower now has greenery springing wildly off its roof; on the building’s side, there is a hand-painted mural of a spaceship with angel wings and some writing underneath. I squint at it but can’t quite make out what it says.
I suddenly realise how tired I am. Immediately, I remember what I used to do when I felt tired, here on Earth. A coffee. With milk foam.
My heart jumps into my stomach. We haven’t had coffee on Mars since Year 1, when the trees we transported with us failed to reintegrate, even with my special shit fertiliser. Mr. Matters told me not to worry about it, that the atmosphere wasn’t primed to grow tropical shrubs. So we took to injecting ourselves with a type of amphetamine derived from lithium when we were tired instead. But it would leave me unable to sleep for days and no visit from the pig-tailed robot or an Ironman rewatch could calm me down. So eventually I just decided to stay tired.
Like an apparition, I see a coffee shop looming some 50 feet away. I start to scuttle towards it. My weak hands grasp its frosted glass door and manage to fling it open.
Inside, it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. Ambient music plays in the background. The space is bathed in warm tones; the tables, floors, and counters are all a warm beige marble, punctuated by the verdant green of succulents. Beyond the interior space lies a courtyard, where a small waterfall trickles soothingly into a pond patrolled by a glittering koi.
When I left Miami, people were constantly on edge, angry, barking into their phones and scrolling news like the pixels were sapping the life force out of them. Even on coffee breaks. But in this coffee shop, people seem happy, relaxed, co-operative. Almost everyone inside is a woman. Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen many men around until now, which is a welcome change from Mars. In here there are just two of them, seated together in a corner, with one holding a well-thumbed book and reciting a passage as the other looks on in interest. Nobody is on their phones.
I stagger up to the counter to give my order to the barista, a smiling woman with round brown eyes.
‘CAN I PLEASE HAVE A LATTE’
The sound of my voice makes me jump. It sounds like a vacuum cleaner that has sucked up a pile of pumpkin seeds, hoarse and rattling. The barista looks equally startled. On Mars, the constant whirring of machines and whistling of the wind is so loud that we usually need to talk at full volume. I hadn’t had a chance to notice how worn out my vocal cords had become.
The barista rearranges her smile, but I see her eyes dart down my body, over my faded black shirt and pants, so different from the pastel colours and buttery-soft yoga clothes that everyone else around me seems to be wearing. A shadow passes over her face as she appraises me; but then she shakes her head almost imperceptibly, as if trying to tell herself off.
‘Sure!’ she says. ‘What kind of milk would you like?’
‘REGULAR,’ I rasp. I may as well be a barking dog. My voice is so loud and my throat is so dry.
Another cloud passes over the woman’s face. There is something I must not understand. She whispers something to her colleague, another smiling woman, this time one with golden skin and perfectly conditioned curls, who comes closer to her and looks at me, a hint of a frown gathering on the horizon of her brow.
‘Sorry, we don’t have “regular” milk,’ the barista says, making air quotes around ‘regular’ and staring probingly into my eyes, as if hoping I will answer a question before she has to ask it. ‘We haven’t had that in a long time. Is…seaweed fine?’
What? Seaweed milk? The thought of a coffee without the thick, slightly sweet foam that I’ve missed so much after leaving Earth makes my spirit go limp. But I’m even more conscious of my presence now, like an elephant at the zoo that’s barged into the delicate habitat of a rare African crane.
‘SEAWEED FINE,’ I rasp, trying to smile but realising the muscles on the corner of my mouth don’t quite turn up anymore. My face is collapsing like an underbaked cake. The barista’s eyes, previously narrowed in interrogation, widen with alarm.
As she retreats behind the coffee machine I can sense that she is still hyperfixated on my presence. While foaming the seaweed milk, which appears to be surprisingly beige, she crooks a finger as a gesture for her colleague to once again come close. She whispers something in her colleague’s ear, and her colleague whispers something back.
They look at me quickly, probably expecting that I would have by now averted my gaze. But I have not. I’m too nervous. When they see that I am still staring at them, they whip back around immediately. The barista pulls something that looks like a pager out of her pocket. She tries to keep it hidden in her fist. But near the edge of the counter, I see her palm it off to her colleague, the way that I remember girls used to pass around pads in high school. The barista turns her chin up just a few degrees, enough for me to catch her mouthing to her colleague – PRESS IT. PRESS THE BUTTON – while tilting up the corner of her eyes to show she’s talking about me. With a look of rising panic, her colleague thumbs the button.
Instantly, everyone in the café sits up and starts looking around them. All eyes focus on me. I feel the urge to turn away.
One of the only men in the café stands up, dropping something quickly. I realise it is the hand of the other man he’d been sitting with, who has remained frozen in his seat. The one standing has painted nails and is wearing a mid-length purple skirt. Now I feel more disoriented than ever, as if I’ve taken a flight back in time. That kind of dress had been banned for people assigned male at birth since I was in high school.
Suddenly, the barista is in front of the counter, tugging on my elbow. She is no longer smiling. Her round eyes are deadly serious. ‘You need to come with us,’ she says, steering me towards the exit. I don’t even pretend to offer any resistance; my flimsy, wide-set legs flail forward. Only as she pushes me out the front door do I realise I won’t be getting my coffee. Visions of frothy milk appear before my eyes, like an angry wave breaking onto the shore.