That Which Survives

I reach out into the dark and let Earth settle on the tip of my finger. I do this a lot, probably more than I should; too much time staring at that speck, an ember that once burned with Shakespeare and Springsteen, blue whales and redwoods, pizza, Curie and Christ. It’s a strange cocktail of homesickness and survivor’s guilt and a longing for something more than endless red dust.

We’ve been here a while now, long enough for the novelty and some of the fear to wear off, and even the strangeness of an extra moon has given way to routine. Our leaders used to spend a crazy amount of time and speeches trying to convince us that this is a new start, that we’re the #NewMartians, but it didn’t take long for us to recognise that really we’re refugees. We may have travelled a lot further than those who once fled the drowning of Miami and London, Osaka and Dhaka, but all the same we landed in a hostile environment with nothing but that we carried, no-one to welcome us, no-one really cheering us from the chaos back home, other than the prayers of desperate parents. Our Exhibition Lead still calls us pioneers, insisting that we left behind relics such as borders and flags, but all our clothes have a logo neatly stitched onto them, and it’s hard to feel pride in that when you know that the textile factory and the branding company that created them are both now underwater.

Still, we survived and that’s no small thing, and as a history teacher I carried the memories of civilisations here with me, some of them at least. For all my heartache, I’m grateful to be here; doubly so, given that I was on the last ship out (the wave of techno-utopianism that flew us here very nearly swept away those of us with specialities in the arts and the humanities, but the Percival Lowell was finished with days to go before that final launch window). But still, I’m nervous; that tiny ember is still there and I hear its echoes every day. This isn’t something I often say out loud, but it’s noticeable that our mistakes stowed away with us; some quarters are substantially larger than others, and the algorithms that help maintain the Habitat seem to have inherited the sins of their fathers, with security cameras resting a little too long on some of us, and decades of data on each colonist being among the first cargo loaded onto the first ship to leave. The promise of a fresh start only extends so far.

But the other day I noticed a rude joke scrawled on the door of a toilet stall. I know that one of the botanists has a homemade still hidden away in her quarters, and only yesterday someone rebelliously threw an old blanket over the solar array powering the mission’s cryptocurrency. On a short term mission, these would be acts of dangerous incompetence, but now we’re here to stay, it feels like something vital has survived despite the glossy brochures and the elitism, the drive to tinker, to hack, to laugh and create in the face of desperate circumstances. And so I smile and let the ember continue on her way as the remnants of humanity gather in the observation lounge, as the last musicians in the universe play their instruments and programmers make drones dance against the Martian sky.