The Mars Colony

The Mars Colony was real, everyone knew that.

The actors all knew it because it was in their non-disclosure agreements.

The problem was that the radiation of the Van Allen belts and the interference of the asteroid field made any direct, real-time communication almost impossible.

That’s what the set was for. And the costumes.

The messages would come in piecemeal, densely coded, gradually over weeks or all in a rush during unpredictable windows.

The experts would decipher and translate and jigsaw it together, and then “Major Tom” and “Science Officer Helen” and the rest of the crew would put on the fully-functional Explorer environment suits and carry out the exact same experiments here, in Studio B, as the real astronauts were certainly doing on the Armstrong rock field near the martian equator.

That, or they would do interviews. Answering pre-arranged questions from their “habitat pod” over sat-link, using the real words the real astronauts had sent back in the previous transmission windows.

It wasn’t scripted; it was just…writing down something unscripted and then repeating it. Reporting a vaguer, more distant news. And it wasn’t faking, it was just recreating. Uniting the fragments of a disparate truth into a cohesive visible reality.

It was important work, because the people of the world needed to be able to see and hear their heroes in order to appreciate the true scale of the accomplishment. That’s what the directors said.

It had to be important, or they wouldn’t have been paid so much.

*

The Mars Colony was real, everyone knew that.

The engineers knew it because they built it.

Obviously, they didn’t build the whole thing; they just designed the fuel injection pump for the secondary phase orbital booster. Or the thermo-proof cultivation pods. Or the radiation shielding for the digital broadcast array.

The engines were actually installed at another lab, and then – in turn – the full rockets were put together over the launchpad by the assembly crews.

But that fuel injection pump was definitely real, and it definitely worked. It cost thirty million dollars and was tested for years.

The silicon-sealed kevlar-weave habitat panels worked too. Advanced Materials Team Beta-9 was working on those at the environmental laboratory inside Site 17, and the resulting patents had made almost as much money from camping suppliers as they had from the government.

And so did the improved gyroscopic impact dampeners for the re-entry capsule.

The oxygen recycling system that Atmosphere Management Team 31 was designing at Site 19f had won an engineering award.

That’s why anyone doubting the Mars program had to be crazy, because every scientist and engineer on the project knew hundreds of people in turn who had all worked on it.

Or, at least, on the fuel injection pump of the secondary orbital booster.

*

The Mars Colony was real, everyone knew that.

The Astronauts knew it because they had trained for the mission for years; they had worked into peak physical and mental condition in order to face the rigorous aptitude tests. Then worked hours in the simulator, going through take-off sequences and landing gear orientation, and testing low oxygen endurance in the atmosphere pods.

They hadn’t been selected, in the end, but it was an honour to even be on the short list.

None of them had actually met the team that was chosen, but that wasn’t unusual. The nature of highly classified missions made compartmentalisation essential, so each team only ran their missions and simulation runs in isolation.

The isolation was actually part of the training, since the picked crew would be going to Mars and spending years living as a five-person family, it was deemed important that during the training phase, all prospective crews would talk only with each other. No inter-crew contact was allowed.

So it only made sense.

Some crews grumbled after the selection was announced, suggesting the Captain wasn’t old enough to reach his rank and wondering if he had family connections. Others suggested the team’s “diversity” had worked in their favour, since there’s no way the women could have graded as highly as some of the all-male crews.

That was probably at least partly true, but since the crew was meant to represent all of humanity, a certain amount of PR-friendly selection was bound to happen.

Anyway, they had all been told, there was always next time.

*

The Mars Colony was real, everyone knew that.

The journalists knew because they were given access. They got a guided tour of the technological research centres, propulsion labs and even the launchpad. They interviewed the astronauts before and after the launch.

They talked with Captain Thomas Harrington and his crew all the time; they were the ones who gave him the nickname “Major Tom”

It was inspirational, the crowning glory of humanity’s achievements, and to question it would be an act of insane cultural vandalism and potentially break important trust in global governmental institutions.

Obviously, it wasn’t perfect; no human endeavour was, but that didn’t take away from the momentous achievement.

The public wasn’t ready for a discussion of the complex nature of an international, interplanetary operation of this scale, so there was an agreement amongst the more powerful editors and more respected science reporters never to publish that insider information to which they were privy. But they knew how it all worked.

The funding scandal around Mars Missions 2 and 3 had been massive news, and the charges of embezzling funds through inflated sub-contract rates had forced several high-ups at Space Command to resign.

That was real-world journalism that disappointed conspiracy theorists and bored the public, but it mattered. The reporters who broke that story won a prize.

Clearly, it wasn’t all exactly as it was presented on television; nothing ever is. Truth is spiky and complicated and difficult to understand for most people.

The work of the press was to take the difficult, secret knowledge they were party to by virtue of their mental acuity and subtleness of mind, and translate it into easy-to-understand parcels of simple facts, so the less clever people, who weren’t taken into the state’s confidence, could gain at least a partial understanding of their world

At the same time, any good reporter had to exercise their honed wits in such a way as to keep the people in power honest.

It was a hard balancing act, but that’s what makes journalists so important.

*

The Mars Colony was real, everyone knew that.

The Conspiracy Theorists knew it because of the leaked documents. In fact, the colony had been real for far longer than anyone would admit.

Except that was all controlled opposition.

The real purpose was building an off-world living space for the Rothschilds and their class after a nuclear war renders the Earth uninhabitable.

It was all the biblical texts if you knew where to look.

Except that was all controlled opposition.

The new elements harvested on Mars had already been used to create free energy technology that was being suppressed. Secret communist cells within the Deep State had used Mars rock extract to experiment with new mind-control techniques.

A whistleblower who worked for SpaceCom for six months had published a best-selling book on the secret Chinese funding for the colony prior to global integration, and how pockets of old-world order nationalist thinking were trying to undermine human progress.

Except that was all controlled opposition.

Because the world was actually flat.

And did you know that Captain Tom was Jewish?

*

The Mars Colony was real, everyone knew that.

The ordinary people on the street knew it because it was on TV every day. New discoveries and successful experiments made headlines once a week.

You could log on to martian-stream.com 24 hours a day and watch the live webcam feed if you wanted.

When two of the astronauts had forgotten the camera was on and shared a kiss, the footage went viral.

Nobody had known “Major” Tom and science officer Helen had been having an affair. The shipping on social media was intense, but an angry-haired lady wrote in the Guardian that it was degrading that the science officer had been reduced to a love interest in the public eye, and even suggested that the captain had been abusing his position.

Most people just thought it was sweet. There’s a rumour they’ll be married over satellite link next season.

When the first corn grown on Mars was harvested and sent back to Earth in a transport pod, they held a giant raffle for who would get to eat it.

Tickets were pretty cheap, considering, and who didn’t want to sample space corn?

They’d never eaten any themselves, but a friend of a friend had known someone who did, and apparently, he said it was sweeter than normal corn.

A column in Wired explained that it was because of alkenes in Martian soil and the synthetic oxygen interacting with the complex carbohydrates in the corn’s cellulose.

How could they know that if they hadn’t really been there?

*

The Mars colony must be real, everybody knows that.

They know it because they watched it, read about it, debated it, thought about it.

They built it, and they got paid for it.

They saw it.

They waved the flags and bought the t-shirts and ate the corn.

Besides, it stood to reason that nobody would spend half a trillion dollars on a rocket that didn’t work to go to a place they had no intention of going.

It was a grand unionising moment in human history, that’s what it was. And you can’t fake those.

You can’t.

Why would you even want to cast doubt on something like that?

Even thinking about it was too much, really. That kind of hollowed out trust and unspoken doubt and repressed anger could drive a person mad.

What would living with that do to a person? Or a people?

Imagine a society like that.

Millions of brittle souls teetering on the crumbling edge, humming away in pretended calm. That’s no way to live, is it?

The Mars colony doesn’t exist; everybody knows that.

But nobody ever says it, because they can’t afford to, and they no longer really know how.

Originally posted on my SubStack, which I plan to use as a place for non-political writing, and a safe haven should OffG get taken down.