4.

Renée Niemann the veterinarian was as wise and learned as any septuagenarian could be, but she didn’t look any older than she did when she was thirty-five. Telomorphing was available but optional and over half submitted to it. It wouldn’t grow new limbs, but if one were lucky enough to live life intact, one could look forward to a youthful appearance and feel for at least 120 years. Even those at the end of the bell curve, at about 150 years life expectancy, didn’t look any older than sixty or seventy.

Having undergone the process in her early thirties, she continued youthfully in her profession until celebrating her “Rebirth” at what normally would be her retirement. Rebirth was a new folk tradition in which telomorphs received a second birth certificate with great fanfare, similar in importance to a Bar Mitzvah, graduation, or marriage. In observance of this custom, Renée celebrated her Rebirth on her 65th birthday, the official event at which she would announce her new life’s direction.

In her “first life,” as the telomorphs were fond of saying, she had been a prominent veterinarian; she had enjoyed an academic position pioneering telomorphing efforts in mammals, which revolutionized animal husbandry world-wide. For these reasons, she was well known to all biologists, xenobiologists included. It is also why she became an avid fan of the telomorphing process for herself.

At her Rebirth she stood before her friends, loved ones, and colleagues—no doubt, she thought, the same group who could have attended her funeral had she declined telomorphing like her late first husband had. Needless death.

What a stupid, needless death! She promised herself, determinedly, that she wouldn’t allow her thoughts to go there and spoil this day.

According to the newly minted Rebirth tradition, her future plans were kept secret so that, after great anticipation, she could make a surprise announcement of the direction of her new life, to be followed by the expected heart-felt congratulations.

Before telomorphing, it was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” After telomorphing, people had the joy of announcing what they would do now that they were grown up. The first half life of a telomorph, a long life in itself, often was shaped by all of the sobering near-misses and what-ifs of the world. In the new way of looking at it, the end of the first half, at age 65, was considered, finally, maturity; the time before, a childhood of preparation.

Certainly there were those whose first half of life was so successful and rewarding that the Rebirth announcement was just that they would continue on as before. And for those whose contributions impacted the world favorably, they were even encouraged to do so with tax credits and corporate perks. No one fancied the idea of an Einstein going into carpentry or a Shakespeare going into sports merchandise wholesaling.

But the majority, financially secure from doing what they had done to get that way, now had wisdom of age and experience and the security of a life that pragmatic finances had created. And conversely, no one would have a problem with a car salesman becoming a Rembrandt.

The socializing, drinking, and eating prepared the attendees for Renée Niemann’s announcement. The new direction.

They were not disappointed. She held up her copy of the bestseller, “Martian Diary of Jon Latorella, Part I.” cu

“Mars vigila!” she announced. “To Mars!” followed by a lengthy and star struck round of applause. “It’s a bestseller, you know. I plan to figure prominently in Part II!”

The questions followed, none of which she answered at first.

“Will you do veterinary medicine there?” “Will you be helping to look for any fossilized animals there?” “For fossils of actual Martians?”

“I will do more than that,” she answered, then paused in a show biz stunt of coquettish torment. “I’ll do more than that,” she repeated, “I hope to meet them.” But her gleam made it sound like a promise. Applause erupted again.

As is customary with Rebirth tradition, she now read her official statement that discussed her decision. “Dear friends, children, loved ones, and even ex-husbands,” she began, a snickering of the audience catching fire from the spark of her mischievous wink, “not all ex-husbands,” she confided, and the snickers coalesced into overt laughter, for after the death of her first spouse, her one true love, she became no stranger to carelessly re-marrying. “Some weren’t invited tonight,” she whispered playfully. She smiled through the fourth wall.

“We’ve all heard of the ferropods and the dangers they present. And we’ve all heard the strange sounds that are called the Sonotomes. There’s more to Mars than a bunch of rust, and there’s more to this,” she pointed to her head, “than a bunch of dust.”

“What about a bunch of lust?” someone wisecracked. She stopped to search the crowd for the culprit, who clearly got away with the playful barb.

“Oh,” she said, fluttering her eyelids, “My next boyfriend is going to be green.” Touché, but it was time to get serious.

“Since we’ve gotten the Higgs particle, the prisn, and the graviton in the bag, and now that we have harnessed their unruly stepchild, the chronoton, and,” she added, like a keynote speaker motivating a sales force, “now that temporal reconciliation has been documented at the quantum level, then the atomic level, molecular level, and on to grams and kilograms and even living things over at the Vet school, the Chronarchy has been readying to expand the experiment. I am happy to tell you I have been chosen to be in the first tempconciled colony that will co-exist with the original Martians.” The awed hush pleased her. “Imagine, luring their time epoch from the past to co-exist with us now. This is a new age for Man, and hopefully, a re-age for native Martians. We have much to learn from that long-rusted race.

“To us, it will seem a visit from them; to them it will seem a visit from us. Two visitations during the same time. Of course,” she said apologetically, “outside of the tempconciled zone they will have lived and died in our past and we in their future. But in the zone, tempconciliation means an exciting, unprecedented present in TimePrime, where two beautiful races and evolutions will exchange knowledge and feelings.” She darted her eyes back and forth, as if sharing a secret. “It’s called the ‘Welcome-to-the-Solar-System’ Initiative, and you’ll be reading about it on your newsfloaters tomorrow with coffee.”

“Are they really little green men?” asked one of Renée’s grandchildren, seven, one of twin girls.

“God, I hope so,” Renée answered the child directly. Then to the small crowd as a whole, “There’s going to be so many upset science fiction writers if they’re not green, right?” She neutralized her smile. “The limited geological reconciliation trials on Mars over the harsh and sterile areas of the polar areas have not resulted in wave forms with exclusion zones—”

“English, please!” from deep in the crowd. Renée regrouped, her smile returning.

“It’s gonna work. And I expect the intermingling to be enormous. I expect to earn my salary, which I hope is out of this world.” Her audience groaned. She paused. “Sorry, couldn’t resist.” Hers was a good audience, and she easily was able to swing the pendulum from flippant to serious, back and forth.

At five foot two and just over 50 kg., she seemed larger atop the stage from which she spoke, but she hoped thinner with the vertical stripes of her dress. She had already vowed to dump at least four Earth kilos on Mars, transferring four Earth kilos of potential energy she then would release into Martian kinetic energy. She amused herself with the things she chose to worry about while giving a life-event speech.

“Now that I look back on my childhood, it appears that everything I’ve done, studied, learned, performed, and accomplished during my first sixty-five years—all of it has prepared me for the second half of my life.” She swept her eyes around the entire room. “I will of course be bringing all of you with me.”

“Really?” the twin asked again, her sister looking equally invested in the question.

“No, sweetie,” Renée answered, and pointed to her heart. “Just in here.”

“When do you leave?” asked Renée’s daughter, who—having declined telomorphing—looked easily many years older than her mother.

“Well,” Renée smiled a rascally smile, “maybe I’m already there.”

***

DIARY ENTRY OF JON LATORELLA, PERSONAL SOL 27,202

The ṺberCollider, as most folks call it, is officially the Upside Prisn Collider, “upside” because of the flavor—or spin—of the Prisn used in the actual collider collisions. The one on Earth sits in a place completely devoid of natural disasters—a place called Tucson, Arizona. Tucson enjoys the complete absence of earthquakes, hurricanes, forest fires, tornadoes, or floods. It’s the largest collider in the world, circling many square kilometers of only hot dirt, with nine times more real estate than the CERN Large Hadron Collider has in-ring. It goes through more than its fair share of Earth’s BTUs just for air conditioning, what I myself consider a terraforming of sorts. The ṺberCollider’s circumference is three times larger than CERN’s.

But where CERN had to chase and cajole the once elusive Higgs particles, they literally fell out of the ṺberCollider just during its calibrations. From there, further generations of particles begot the prisn, and from there, further generations begot the graviton; and from there, further generations yet begot the chronoton, the particle that acted as the state vector which assigns the arrow of time to quantum fields. As I understand it, the scientific explanation involves recognition that everything isn’t just in space or in time, but in space-time, and since space-time is expanding, our arrow of time always looks to the future. I certainly wouldn’t look forward to the past. An engineering joke.

Retrieving different times simultaneously is now possible, since the temporal paradox of putting two times into the place of one has been reconciled on paper with new formulas. The eggheads discovered that with enough power, the breadth of the overlap of temporalities could be cautiously increased to larger tempconciliation areas and subsequently focused both spatially and temporally. At first the power needed to focus and then maintain such an area fell short of what was needed to rein in the expanding temporal paradox; then an unexpected bonus saved the day. I mean that literally, since without this rescue the day might not have ever ended.

There was a new letter in a new formula. It was with a collective sigh of relief that this bonus manifested itself to the ṺberCollider’s scientists: the speed of is. By the time it had all been sorted out, the Chronarchy realized how lucky our present had been, since the present continued. Nice of them to share this little tidbit after the fact.

Tempconciliation is defined as the process by which two different time periods are focused onto one another and a third temporal reality is produced.

You could just imagine the buzz. Talk of bringing a radius of 300 meters with perhaps a dinosaur or two into the San Diego Zoo, however, was shouted down along with the other creative proposals. The pessimists argued that because tempconciliation causes chronotons and antichronotons to co-exist in a near vacuum, that this was a bad thing.

They said—theoretically—it risked mutual annihilation of the present. The said the vacuum, by the past and the future falling into it, created the present. As it turned out, there was a 4% overage of chronotons in the chronoton/antichronoton ratio, so it wasn’t actually a perfect vacuum. So then there were some who said this was a good thing.

Turns out that this is what gives the present its time-arrow direction into the future and allows everything and everyone to move forward, which agreeably is the more pleasing direction to go on a timeline if you ask me. Assuming, like me, most folks have plans. But then, as it also turned out, the 4% advantage of “what is” over “what isn’t” is unstable, which is the nature of near-vacuums. So now folks were saying this was a bad thing.

For instance, if mucking about with time created a zone of existence that began a reverse timeline, this would be troubling; but worse would be the risk of never having existed at all. Thankfully, the ṺberCollider maintained the status quo of the vacuum that made the present, and it did it ingeniously by borrowing time as the present progressed into the future. So now some said this was a good thing.

The fusion reactor needed less and less material to power itself. Building up a debt from the future, in the present, seemed too good to be true, a breeder reactor of sorts—free power for all. 

A friend of mine, Dr. Kubacki at the ṺberCollider, told me that this might end up being a very, very bad thing.

The power of is: co-existence of the pre- with post-particles and the is-particles with the is-not particles that defines the near vacuum which is the present. The force that self-sustains it—the power of is—allows a wider 3-D volume of tempconciliation that now makes possible the coverage of much larger areas, not to mention wider epochs.

And which saved everyone’s asses in the present, at the expense of an uncertain future.

The solution in the math simply worked, but a hefty prize had to be offered for the one who could elucidate the steps in the math that derived the solution. While the world awaited the arithmetic reassurances that the present would be safe with the damn thing running, financiers and industrialists began murmuring. A profit motive began to itch the rich, and scratching seemed only natural.

Capitalism always wins.

Problem solved: do it on Mars. Away from everyone and everything except, of course, everyone and everything on Mars.

Discouraging pundits never had a chance. Bringing back Martians from before to co-exist with the colonists promised too big a pay-off on the investment. Where the whole mission was financially faltering for its investors, Tempconciliation and real Martians could more than turn it around.

There were those who argued that entering the past would change the future; they were argued back down, as it was only about the ancient Martians we were mucking about with, and their future, without our mucking about, was extinction. Hell, we’d be doing them a favor. What was all the fuss and worry about? After all, when the first experiment was powered down, all of existence did not collapse like the doomsayers predicted. There were Martians to be found; to be yanked out of their own time into ours; to offer us God only knew what new products to offer the consumer constituency.

Temporal reconciliation, aligning a place with two times—true 4-D capture—simply awaited the construction of another ṺberCollider on Mars, which ended up being completed two years ahead of schedule in spite of a ball bearing debacle.

Just to be safe, the Chronarchy decided that tempconciliation would only lasso the last five years of the Martians’ existence. Whenever that was.

***

“At least we can figure out what happened to them,” Renée told her well-wishers. “The attacks of ferropods on some of the colonists is not unlike what is seen in animal interactions with parasites, so this is where I come in.”

“Where does temporal reconciliation come in?” a young cousin asked. Cu

“When my new green boyfriend comes in.” Her pendulum had swung back. “When we finally find the Martians, whenever they are. Hopefully it will be in my lifetime, or better yet, while I’m there, although I don’t know if ‘when I’m there’ is correct grammar for TimePrime.”

Inherent in any science is the expectation of, besides the observation, recording, and explanation, a nomenclature that cordons it off from the other sciences. The new science of temporal reconciliation was no exception.

TimePrime was the standard of time against which any temporal reconciliation—or tempconciliation—was measured. This and the other new terms played in Renée’s head. To go to Mars in her immediate future and then try to retrieve a past—one that existed before this night, before her birth, before Man crawled slithering out of the water—and jam this past into her near future, made her realize that time indeed was (is?) a tricky thing. To hunt year after year until the Martians were finally found—what a thing to consider! And to answer the elusive question as to where they all went. No cemeteries, no mass graves, not even fossils had been discovered.

Preferably, tempconciliation would lurch in small steps. Just studying Martian remains could prelude a more generous 4-D overlap between the colonists and their actual living Martians. And then what? Allow them to stay in our present beyond the five years of their past? Was that even possible? If so, could that make up for our impolite “arriving” unannounced and uninvited? Could that be our gift to them? Some in the Chronarchy called this hubris, but as always with humanity, hubris prevailed.

And if anyone had a problem with hubris, wait till they got a load of capitalism. The profit motive placed an ṺberCollider completely around the current colony Renée would call home for at least the next two and a half years.

“Two and half years?” asked Renée’s daughter Zoe, her twins in tow. Officially, the Rebirth celebration was over and the departing guests gave the closest family members their privacy in dealing with their matriarch’s plans. So it was, due to the elective process of telomere lengthening—telomorphing—that an older young woman was speaking to a younger middle-aged woman. Zoe had declined the procedure, no doubt because of the posthumous influence of Renée’s late first husband, her father. Zoe and her generation had grown up with this branch of medicine, so such an anachronistic tableau of older younger and younger older did not strike her as strange; Renée, on the other hand, always held at bay an uncomfortable feeling along with the creepiness, a feeling which, she was honest enough with herself to admit, had everything to do with her dead husband’s refusal to telomorph with his wife.

Like father, like daughter, the resentment went. Their conversation endured the rude anachronism.

“I’ll be gone more like three years,” Renée explained to Zoe, “when you take into consideration points of closest approach and coming and going with or without the Mars-lead or Earth-lead. And while I’m waiting for the Mars-lead window while I’m there, I’m hoping to get two years worth of work done.”

“The twins will be over ten by then,” Zoe said, intending to foster regret and succeeding. “Teenagers if you wait for the Mars-lead after that.”

“Zoe,” Renée said, “I love my daughters very much, and you know how crazy I am about the twins. But these feelings are not exclusive of my career,” and then with emphasis, “or the other way around.” Renée smiled but it was a fake one that succeeded in eating up a beat.

“Dad,” Zoe said finally, “you didn’t mention him once in your speech.”

“I did mention my ex-husbands,” Renée argued good naturedly.

“Not your dead one,” Zoe protested. Renée exhaled in resignation.

“Please let’s not do this,” she asked.

“You’ve never forgiven him,” Zoe said.

“Please, Zoe? Let’s not?” Zoe faked a smile herself.

“You’re right,” she told her mother. “Tonight should be all about you.” Renée was uncertain whether this was well-wishing or derision. She kissed Renée on the cheek and then led her twins off hand-in-hand after they received their own Grandma kisses.

Zoe caught up with her own sister, herself also a proud non-telomorph, the other half of the routine difficulties Renée had always had with her two daughters.

Thanks to her late husband. She still didn’t miss him, she lied to herself once again.

In Dr. Renée Niemann’s present, Mars “as is” contrasted sharply with the Mars “as was” during its prephasic, Phase I, Phase II, and Phase III stages of terraforming.

The prephasic Mars was a dry, dusty, cratered and gouged frozen ball with two puny and insignificant moons. An elliptical orbit varied its distance from the Sun by 42 million kilometers between perihelion and aphelion. Its 25º axis deviation resulted in well-intentioned but wasted seasons, the mildest of which put even its peri-equatorial regions well outside the habitable zone for humans with mean temperatures a hundred or more degrees below freezing. Its atmosphere was basically CO2, a bit Nitrogen, and a trace of Argon. But it wasn’t the first breath that would kill a man; it was just about everything else.

Terraforming.

It was suggested in the 20th century, given up in the twenty-first, and completed by the twenty-fifth. Three phases tamed the anoxia and the anhydria and brought the calor to the rubor—oxygen, water, and heat to the red planet. Earth’s embrace of her brother was both heart- and planet-warming.

None of it would have been possible without an incredible stroke of luck. The discovery of a rogue Kuiper Belt object was discovered inside the orbit of Neptune. Its rocky body was on a trajectory that would ultimately cross Mars’ orbit. Without intervention, it would be merely come to be a near-Mars object, ultimately coursing toward the sun and the parabolic course that would fling it back out of the solar system forever.

This rogue minor planet allowed Earth to intervene avariciously. Appropriately named Ancile (ăn-SĒ’-lā), after the shield of the god of war, 23rd century technology nudged it gently when it crossed Uranus’ orbit so that it would become a very near-Mars asteroid. Traversing midway between the periapsis and apoapsis of Mars’ capture zone, it was annexed as a new 600-kilometer diameter orbiting moon perched 200,000 kilometers away. Its elliptical orbit’s eccentricity and angular momentum were manipulated to wrench the planet.

Now terraforming had a fighting chance.

The gravitational tugs and tidal forces on Mars’ convective 2000-km silicate mantle and 30 to 100-km crust generated heat. The iron-sulfur and iron-silicon core, which had substantially cooled over the previous three billion years, rekindled. Three thousand kilometers of molten iron sludged about Mars’ gut, and the solar wind now just bounced off of the planet. The Aurora Martialis ignited, signaling the creation of the magnetic field that was a necessity of any planet’s atmospheric survival, climatic stability, and armor against the incoming radiation.

Phase I began.

The two demoted moons, Phobos and Deimos, were euthanized for their dust that resulted from crashing each of them into a pole and blanketing the planet in a high altitude sweater. The melted water at the icecaps was appreciated as well. All dovetailed into the greenhouse effect of the carbon dioxide that raised the temperatures enough to continue melting the ice there. Trillions of nanoreflectors, designed to decay over time from the solar radiation that leaked past the electromagnetic belts, were injected into the upper atmosphere continuously for over a hundred Earth years.

Aggressive aerofracking from the automated machinery that had been assembled on Ancile freed massive amounts of water from the subsurface lakes that had sat frozen for millennia, awaiting Earth’s gumption. Acrifiers, acre-sized rovers, treated large tracts of soil to release trapped oxygen.

Mars began pulling itself up by its own bootstraps when electromagnetism, tidal forces, core heat, and liberated, melted subsurface water begot the very helpful geothermal overdrive. Oxygen accrued and stuck. Phase I had been a success beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Phase II, not to be outdone, involved lassoing and nudging three well-aimed comets to the deep Hellas, Valles Marineris, and Acidalia Planitia depressions. Automated pulverization of the central equatorial bands of latitude released more oxygen and deposited the topsoil that would be so necessary for Phase III—actual colonization.

By the end of Phase II, the planet-wide sub-polar depression known as the Vastitas Borealis became the Vastitas Ocean; the filled Hellas crater became the Mare Hellas, or Hellas Sea; and the 4,000-km long, nine-km deep, 500-km wide Grand Canyon of Mars, the Valles Marineris, with its vast array of interconnected canyons, became known as the Grand Canal. The Grand Canal’s water wasn’t very deep, but it flowed forcefully at the Valles bottom, likened to the Colorado River on Earth that flowed relentlessly within its own Grand Canyon.

The photosynthetic algae and cyanobacteria seeded into the waters around Mars produced large amounts of oxygen, and the Oxygen-Nitrogen atmosphere very much liked the ocean and the seas. They held each other in a firm embrace for the meteorological dance of this former planetary wall flower.

Mars partied.

Liquid rolled again like it had when the Sonotomes were first laid down in the canyons. When there had been actual Martians.

Phase III saw colonial expansion and the “canali” projects which dug the canals that eventually allowed communication of the Grand Canal, the Valles Marineris, with the vast hydration platforms at the poles. For the first time, real canals on Mars could be seen from Earth. Fr. Pietro Secchi and Giovanni Schiaparelli, who thought these were what they saw in the 19th Century, would have been pleased.

Phase III also involved a vast planting and forestry initiative, until bands of vegetation, kilometers wide astride the arrays of canals, presented to Earth telescopes as widening and darkening borders and bands along them. Percival Lowell, who first thought these were what he saw at his Arizona observatory a hop away form the future site of the ṺberCollider, would have been pleased, too.

In Dr. Renée Niemann’s present, Mars “as is” was a quasi-water world with chilly, but pleasant 50º-72º temperatures along its peri-equatorial bands of latitude. A very respectably sized moon graced the view above it’s 84% Oxygen/15% Nitrogen skies. Ancile, during Phases I and II, wobbled the new center of gravity between it and its planet enough to ratchet Mars’ orbit in closer to the sun, adding more warmth, as well as rounding its orbit to make it less elliptical. The Martian year was still just shy twice that of Earth’s but the perihelion-aphelion variation narrowed to almost negligible.

What was left of Mars’ two former moons was either debris at the impact sites, Asaph Hall North and Asaph Hall South, named after their original discoverer, or sitting as souvenir paperweights on many colonists’ desks. The equatorial ring they had created had long been cannibalized by Ancile.

Renée would be greeted by a Mars with sixty years of rooting and expansion of its vegetation, transplanted from Earth, and now described by landscapers as mature.

The sluggish ambulatory native species, the green Ares arboreta, referred to as Chantū in the Sonotomes, fit right in. The Chantū seemed very happy among the conifers of Scotch pines, Douglas firs, aspens, spruces, the Alpine heathers and grasses undergrowth, and the moss lichens. The botanists even determined that since the Chantū seemed to “visit” one plant or tree after another, it was actually participating in the pollination process. The Chantū even got along with the imported bees and butterflies that had escaped the large hydration dome after their cautious interplanetary introduction. Even though terrain irregularities had been successfully pulverized in Phase II to deposit a fertile topsoil, Mars was still plenty red, but no more than Alabama mud.

The day of the first genuine, spontaneous, treble rain storm, signifying the end of Phase II, became celebrated as New Mars Day, for it had heralded the closure of a planetary ecosystem barely self-sustaining but on its own.

The sixty years of Phase III brought the colony population to 2,700, and it was designated now a compound, although politics even began pushing the designation camp. Terraforming did the hard way what tempconciliation—it was anticipated—might do easily: provide the atmospheric conditions of a prior time, allowing the awakening from ancient dormancy flora and fauna, like what had happened with the Chantū and the ferropods. The xenobotanists tackled the Chantū, Ares aboreta; the xenobiologists focused on the ferropod, Ferropodia conglobinans. And the promise of tempconciliation would bring the rest of it, whatever that may be.

Ferropodia conglobinans. It was so named because its exoskeleton was made of ferromagnetic chitin, the iron content, due to the magnetic property, exhibiting varying valences; and because of its ability to assume an almost perfectly spherical shape. When the right climatic tumblers lined up just so, there ended a dormancy that would shame a 17-year locust, not to mention all of the red-faced engineers who were suddenly without the roly-poly natural ball bearings that had helped build their new world. Previously it was assumed that the worst that would happen upon stepping on one was slipping and falling on one’s rear end, the ferropod then unravelling and snapping happily away. Even the clichéd banana peel joke evolved to include the slippery ferropod. But now that there were three victims who had not so funny endings, the engineers gladly handed off the ferropod to the xenobiologists while they undertook the massive job of replacing them in the machinery upon which terraforming maintenance depended.

The Cultural Psychology Committee was just as engaged in ferropod research. Inexplicably, a retained ferropod in the brain did not result in the expected trajectory of physical trauma to the central nervous system. But there were psychophenomena, a condition collectively called ferrism: reliving many past events simultaneously in the present, major thought disorder, or at worst, a syndrome of physical and psychic suffering that could prompt expedient suicide rescue with whatever was handiest, e.g., heights, ballistics, blunt and sharp objects, or falling purposely into heavy machinery. Any neurosurgery would be too devastating to be of any use, and no ferrocidal agents—if there were any—would be attempted without the fear of killing the host.

Three victims so far. Renée suspected there were more. There had to be more. Her suspicions, however, remained undiscoverable in classified research.

Extensive evaluation of the three known victims provided the natural history of ferrism. One committed precipitous suicide; another talked about it while exhibiting other symptoms before assuming her catatonic state; and a third, mysteriously, carried on life as normally as any over-scrutinized person could.

This person stayed away from magnets.

Renée’s Rebirth vocation was to provoke and study ferrism in her animals, specifically, ferropod-mammal interaction; or even more specifically, attack. It was hoped that a valid translational science could be applied to humans similarly affected.

She was not involved directly with the Martian Tempconciliation Project, but indirectly her initial research would provide a basis to understand, after tempconciliation, how in the hell native Martians co-existed with their ferropods.