* * *
It took a lot of luck and a lot of nods from the right heads before they considered your now notorious (considering if notoriety would be even close to fitting to the entire weight of this thing within its (notoriety's) comparitavely modest history) Fifty-Year Plan, involving the colonisation of a barren, alien, for the most part unexplored, and til-then-so-far-only-superficially-observed planet with the help of all those super tiny as fuck robots. A lot of luck considering that this money would be lining the pockets of the plans of a once esteemed heart surgeon disgraced by a string of coke offences and missing sex workers, a string as long as the line you pulled that one time the span of your dining room table while puffy nippled redhead Legs Fawn watched over from her propped tippy toes, not quite dangling from the ceiling suspended leash tight right around where her neck became her jaw.
You certainly took those Indian chaps for a ride with your wide-as-the-world promises about what would ultimately render their vindaloo or whatever powered interplanetary probes running off parts hoarded from some unmanned NASA spacestation that conveniently fell out of the sky during their testing of an archaeic plasma beam thing back in the twenty-one twenties the equivelant of "down syndrome in space" as your interpreter roughly translated it to the long rosewood table of grey yet seemingly eternal, and slightly bewildered Hindustani businessmen. Bewildered as in who the hell is this guy jostling Bodiba our versatile errand boy and part-time translator all the while yelling about the wonders of a planet roughly the same colour as the unlidded sharpie held up to young Bodiba's throat?
"Good fellow," one of the elderly men began as he tried to haunt you with a dose of emtpy wisdom: "you come to us with no wife to speak of and have not yet conceived, yet you already name your son Chandrashekar." So you slapped him back with a no, that's what I called your mother last night. Bam motherfuck. While gesticulating those last two words, your hostage broke free and whimpered out of the boardroom like a little Bengali bitch.
"What my colleague means to say is," another intervened.
You told that walking colostomy bag to zip up; that it was time to watch the shit out of a movie you'd shot in your third wife's luxury double-wide along with spliced footage of the centuries-old John Carpenter documentary Ghosts of Mars starring an actor who had grossed high profits in the Old Money for his exploits as an explicit hoodoo mentalist (all the rage to dour brainwaves of the twentieth C). Before this Iced Cube could even grace the screen's presence with his penchant for taking care of business, you were ejected from the building by the hands of khaki-uniformed mercinary twins and jailed in an Opticon Sphere for three weeks on minimal rations until your lawyer had successfully leaked rumours that you were in fact the spokesperson and CEO of the American Space Program's most valuable asset. Soon thereafter you were held at gunpoint in a building with India's greatest physicists devising what you promised to be the future of life as they could not possibly yet know.
* * *
Once your business associates brought in the cocaine, along with a handful of other vital stimulants, your head was right to be getting down to it, and it never failed to surprise you how a person's negative predisposition of your character would be out the window after seeing you function in the lucid grasp of a wholehearted drug bender. Suddenly the mutterings of an unshaven white guy about silicon-based nanomachines engineered out of a unicellular algae known as Thalassiosira pseudonana weren't so utterly retarded, and maybe somehow he would still get them out of this laboratory at the end of it without a bullet in the head and a ticket down Mumbai's now famous "Class C" toxic sludge channel.
The practical application of diatom nanotechnology had been shelved more than one-hundred and fifty years ago, and so it wasn't until you had something up and running in the lab that your fellow scientists began to take you seriously. When you weren't in withdrawals, you were an artist; weaving impossibly complex organic machinery from a dish swarming with chaotic blooms, tracing them to schematics guided with nothing more than simple hand augmentations and the lens of the nanoscope. Now with adequate funding, and a little less of the guy pointing the gun in your face twelve hours a day, you had within a week sketched out the basic prototype of you would lead the world to believe would be mankinds bringer of life to the most unforgiving of living environments: The Universe.
Once your business associates brought in the cocaine, along with a handful of other vital stimulants, your head was right to be getting down to it, and it never failed to surprise you how a person's negative predisposition of your character would be out the window after seeing you function in the lucid grasp of a wholehearted drug bender. Suddenly the mutterings of an unshaven white guy about silicon-based nanomachines engineered out of a unicellular algae known as Thalassiosira pseudonana weren't so utterly retarded, and maybe somehow he would still get them out of this laboratory at the end of it without a bullet in the head and a ticket down Mumbai's now famous "Class C" toxic sludge channel.
The practical application of diatom nanotechnology had been shelved more than one-hundred and fifty years ago, and so it wasn't until you had something up and running in the lab that your fellow scientists began to take you seriously. When you weren't in withdrawals, you were an artist; weaving impossibly complex organic machinery from a dish swarming with chaotic blooms, tracing them to schematics guided with nothing more than simple hand augmentations and the lens of the nanoscope. Now with adequate funding, and a little less of the guy pointing the gun in your face twelve hours a day, you had within a week sketched out the basic prototype of you would lead the world to believe would be mankinds bringer of life to the most unforgiving of living environments: The Universe.
* * *
Your reluctance to first approach the Chinese with your proposal came from a previous business deal where you had received the misinformation that over at the embassy they in fact preferred being paid in one kilo bags of heroin instead of dirty American greenbacks, when it comes to the intial bribe amount needed to earn some face time with the relevant consul. If it hadn't been for your quick thinking and ability to be able to unflinchingly kick another man in the testicles, they'd have you rotting in a cage somewhere (perhaps still living) with your ears clamped to a car battery, waiting to be traded off for some war criminal, so think yourself lucky that you only lost your eleven keys of a-grade junk that day.
You were explaining this situation to your second wife at the end of your morning circuit, while she wiped her brow and bent down a little with her hands around the sides of her thighs as she always did when she was tired from the running, and you looked down her top a little bit because you believed it made you try that little bit harder to impress her and maybe you could go so far as to say that it motivated you to do the things you did. Because at heart you were a simple man, and maybe a quick glance at some ripper cleavage was all it took. When she looked up again, you instantly adjusted your eyes to cross her gaze and she gave this look like if anyone could find a way it would be you, and more specifically, if anyone could find a way to her again, it would be you. Try harder...for me, her eyes totally were saying.
Your reluctance to first approach the Chinese with your proposal came from a previous business deal where you had received the misinformation that over at the embassy they in fact preferred being paid in one kilo bags of heroin instead of dirty American greenbacks, when it comes to the intial bribe amount needed to earn some face time with the relevant consul. If it hadn't been for your quick thinking and ability to be able to unflinchingly kick another man in the testicles, they'd have you rotting in a cage somewhere (perhaps still living) with your ears clamped to a car battery, waiting to be traded off for some war criminal, so think yourself lucky that you only lost your eleven keys of a-grade junk that day.
You were explaining this situation to your second wife at the end of your morning circuit, while she wiped her brow and bent down a little with her hands around the sides of her thighs as she always did when she was tired from the running, and you looked down her top a little bit because you believed it made you try that little bit harder to impress her and maybe you could go so far as to say that it motivated you to do the things you did. Because at heart you were a simple man, and maybe a quick glance at some ripper cleavage was all it took. When she looked up again, you instantly adjusted your eyes to cross her gaze and she gave this look like if anyone could find a way it would be you, and more specifically, if anyone could find a way to her again, it would be you. Try harder...for me, her eyes totally were saying.
* * *
Three years of being held captive and losing most of your body weight to the putrid water, and India finally got their shit into space. With a combination of fusion sails and antimatter propulsion, the craft took three months to travel to Mars, where it split into two pieces. One was a payload of machinery which would begin colonising the planet, the second part, the remaining spacecraft, would continue on to the asteroid belt to further separate into series of mining probes situated on Cereus, and surrounding planetismals.
Your fifty-year plan had been an optimistic figure you'd pulled out of thin air regarding the time needed for the rudimentary machines being sent to the planet to evolve into a full-scale terraforming regiment. They would begin by melting the ice-coated surface, washing over the previous fuck-ups made by the former United States (as they pumped the last dollars of their shithole economy into promising about twenty-five rich guys that there was indeed a better life for them, a very affordable seventy million kilometres away, which in turn resulted in twenty-five very dead rich guys), and set the ball rolling for an Earth-like atmosphere, all the while your creations would make it their duty to use what they had to do the best that they could, and every day they would better their best. As your lab assistant Raja liked to say in times of great triumph those fuck robots are kicking goals my man and you'd pat him on the back and you'd tell him to stand still while you did a line off his shoulder.
All the positive footage India had provided the world of their terraforming expedition was fake. Slave-labour CGI artists worked twenty-one hours a day rendering out dramatisations of how things were, and in honest truth they never even had the technology to communicate with any space craft so far from Earth. At the time they assured it was totally cool though.
Whatever you'd sent to the Red Planet was only truly revealed to the world when the craft you had built for the Chinese was close enough to observe and relay back to us; it was certainly some kind of big fucking mess, though at the time no one fully knew the extent of it.
Flipping through the channels with a powdered nose and your ex-wife curled up napping beside you on the sofa, you saw the news feed: Mars In Ruins. From what they had so far captured, the planet was being dissected into millions of tiny pieces, and ejected from the planet's gravitational pull to float freely in space. They estimated one third of the land mass to have already been sectioned and released and it was being labelled a cosmic eco-disaster beyond compare. For the past six years your creation had been tearing apart every hope our species ever had of exploring beyond the confines of our measly planet, and here you were sending another little space ship of nano-terrorists to help finish off the job.
Then when there was time for a break from the shocking footage of what was unfolding in space, they finally had a moment to put your face up there. The blame so easily planted; they had found you fast. You swallowed a mouthful of vomit and stood up to get a glass of water. This was your ex-wife's house, no-one knew you would be here, no-one would suspect, not for a while anyway. There was nothing yet on the news about rewarding your capture, just that you were being sought by authorities for questioning. Your fone had been switched off; no doubt they'd been calling it.
Months later the observable remains of Mars resembled nothing of its preceding five-billon year history. Stripping away thousands of square kilometres of this planet left behind an annexing of alien geology and artificially evolved technology, as though the machines had latched onto some kind of mysterious life force at Mars’ core, an awe-inspiring beauty reminiscent of something dreamed up from ancient mythology. There could be no doubt that it was, whatever it was, aware of itself, but more terrifyingly the way it was observed to be re-positioning and aligning itself with Earth, made it very likely that it was aware of us too.
It moved through space as a gelatinous shapeless mass of platinum sheen, living metal, with the rear in constant displacement to become the front and front waiting in the middle for its turn at the back, in sluglike strokes at a frequency well beyond that of the naked human eye. At its greatest stretch it spanned more than five-hundred kilometres.
A few thousand kilometres short of our Moon, the entity took pause, and remained orbiting the planet for the next decade, blocking from every angle our access to sunlight. The man who shot you through the brain during those initial months of global night, when looting and street anarchy erupted to its peak before drizzling into a desperate clawing of anything, didn’t know who you were and even if he did the pursuit of any kind of reward or recognition at that point was about useful as all that solar powered crap we’d finally gotten right and were so proud of that, in those days, it was good enough to run anything.
Your fifty-year plan had been an optimistic figure you'd pulled out of thin air regarding the time needed for the rudimentary machines being sent to the planet to evolve into a full-scale terraforming regiment. They would begin by melting the ice-coated surface, washing over the previous fuck-ups made by the former United States (as they pumped the last dollars of their shithole economy into promising about twenty-five rich guys that there was indeed a better life for them, a very affordable seventy million kilometres away, which in turn resulted in twenty-five very dead rich guys), and set the ball rolling for an Earth-like atmosphere, all the while your creations would make it their duty to use what they had to do the best that they could, and every day they would better their best. As your lab assistant Raja liked to say in times of great triumph those fuck robots are kicking goals my man and you'd pat him on the back and you'd tell him to stand still while you did a line off his shoulder.
* * *
Your busy little world builders had been kicking so many goals that in fact your fifty-years was cut down to more like five, and now you'd given a nation busting at the seams an entire planet to effectively call their own. To decide who stays and who joins them on this Higher Earth.
While you were free to walk the streets and make a pretty penny milking psychoactive river toads with the urchin ladyboys (as you often did), you were still unofficially considered property of the Indian government, and it was not easy for a Chinese consul to meet with you, but as he stressed, grabbing your wrist in a very undelicate manner, he'd been assured he could promise you your old life back. You weren't entirely sure the consul knew what that entailed but any variation of it that wasn't this seemed good enough at the time.
After faking your death using the seaborne headless cadavar of a much smaller Chinese man (executed in his country for trafficking cattle whose stomach's had been genetically renovated to harbour schools of an illicitly synthesised lifeform known as Peruvian Mullet (a.k.a. "The Pale Rider"). Physiologically resembling and behaving like a fish, this "mullet" is biologically composed of ninety-five percent pure cocaine, with impurities present only in the lips, eyes and genitals), which your consul buddy had assured you would "bloat out in ocean; he fit you suit, real nice", you were given safe passage to the Isles of New Pakistan (formerly the United Kingdom), where you reunited with your troupe of research colleagues having the pleasure of informing them that if you didn't put your heads together for one last coke-addled-space-craft-slash-colonisation-drone-engineering-(arguably-for-the-good-of-mankind)-nine-month-house-party, that you would (every one of you) be temporarily knocked down with blow darts and wake up secured to a dentist chair sharing two hundred square metres of abandoned hangar with an old dude wearing OR scrubs and someone's daughter as a pair of pants fumbling around with an arc welder.
While you were free to walk the streets and make a pretty penny milking psychoactive river toads with the urchin ladyboys (as you often did), you were still unofficially considered property of the Indian government, and it was not easy for a Chinese consul to meet with you, but as he stressed, grabbing your wrist in a very undelicate manner, he'd been assured he could promise you your old life back. You weren't entirely sure the consul knew what that entailed but any variation of it that wasn't this seemed good enough at the time.
After faking your death using the seaborne headless cadavar of a much smaller Chinese man (executed in his country for trafficking cattle whose stomach's had been genetically renovated to harbour schools of an illicitly synthesised lifeform known as Peruvian Mullet (a.k.a. "The Pale Rider"). Physiologically resembling and behaving like a fish, this "mullet" is biologically composed of ninety-five percent pure cocaine, with impurities present only in the lips, eyes and genitals), which your consul buddy had assured you would "bloat out in ocean; he fit you suit, real nice", you were given safe passage to the Isles of New Pakistan (formerly the United Kingdom), where you reunited with your troupe of research colleagues having the pleasure of informing them that if you didn't put your heads together for one last coke-addled-space-craft-slash-colonisation-drone-engineering-(arguably-for-the-good-of-mankind)-nine-month-house-party, that you would (every one of you) be temporarily knocked down with blow darts and wake up secured to a dentist chair sharing two hundred square metres of abandoned hangar with an old dude wearing OR scrubs and someone's daughter as a pair of pants fumbling around with an arc welder.
* * *
Your work with the Chinese ran perfectly to schedule, and this you always knew, was a sign of bad news to come. The world waited those three agonising months, for what was being touted the Democratization of Mars. But really it was more of a joint dictatorship, if anything. And it wasn't even that.
All the positive footage India had provided the world of their terraforming expedition was fake. Slave-labour CGI artists worked twenty-one hours a day rendering out dramatisations of how things were, and in honest truth they never even had the technology to communicate with any space craft so far from Earth. At the time they assured it was totally cool though.
Whatever you'd sent to the Red Planet was only truly revealed to the world when the craft you had built for the Chinese was close enough to observe and relay back to us; it was certainly some kind of big fucking mess, though at the time no one fully knew the extent of it.
Flipping through the channels with a powdered nose and your ex-wife curled up napping beside you on the sofa, you saw the news feed: Mars In Ruins. From what they had so far captured, the planet was being dissected into millions of tiny pieces, and ejected from the planet's gravitational pull to float freely in space. They estimated one third of the land mass to have already been sectioned and released and it was being labelled a cosmic eco-disaster beyond compare. For the past six years your creation had been tearing apart every hope our species ever had of exploring beyond the confines of our measly planet, and here you were sending another little space ship of nano-terrorists to help finish off the job.
Then when there was time for a break from the shocking footage of what was unfolding in space, they finally had a moment to put your face up there. The blame so easily planted; they had found you fast. You swallowed a mouthful of vomit and stood up to get a glass of water. This was your ex-wife's house, no-one knew you would be here, no-one would suspect, not for a while anyway. There was nothing yet on the news about rewarding your capture, just that you were being sought by authorities for questioning. Your fone had been switched off; no doubt they'd been calling it.
Your ex woke to find you no longer on the couch but now hunched over by the livingroom window with the curtains drawn peeking out through the crack of light in the middle. She was asking you something, she was saying honey in a soft voice, but you did not hear the other words as separate, only as a fog and you did not turn to her as she spoke.
* * *
Months later the observable remains of Mars resembled nothing of its preceding five-billon year history. Stripping away thousands of square kilometres of this planet left behind an annexing of alien geology and artificially evolved technology, as though the machines had latched onto some kind of mysterious life force at Mars’ core, an awe-inspiring beauty reminiscent of something dreamed up from ancient mythology. There could be no doubt that it was, whatever it was, aware of itself, but more terrifyingly the way it was observed to be re-positioning and aligning itself with Earth, made it very likely that it was aware of us too.
It moved through space as a gelatinous shapeless mass of platinum sheen, living metal, with the rear in constant displacement to become the front and front waiting in the middle for its turn at the back, in sluglike strokes at a frequency well beyond that of the naked human eye. At its greatest stretch it spanned more than five-hundred kilometres.
A few thousand kilometres short of our Moon, the entity took pause, and remained orbiting the planet for the next decade, blocking from every angle our access to sunlight. The man who shot you through the brain during those initial months of global night, when looting and street anarchy erupted to its peak before drizzling into a desperate clawing of anything, didn’t know who you were and even if he did the pursuit of any kind of reward or recognition at that point was about useful as all that solar powered crap we’d finally gotten right and were so proud of that, in those days, it was good enough to run anything.
