Mission Critical: Journey to the Red Planet Read online

  Mission Critical:

  Journey to the Red Planet

  By

  Marilyn Peake

  http://www.marilynpeake.com

  Mission Critical: Journey to the Red Planet

  © Copyright, 2020, Marilyn Peake

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

  Book Cover Art by Cheri Lasota at Author's Assembler:

  https://www.authorsassembler.com/

  About the Author

  USA TODAY and Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author Marilyn Peake writes Science Fiction and Fantasy. She’s one of the contributing authors in Book: The Sequel, published by The Perseus Books Group, with one of her entries included in serialization at The Daily Beast. In addition, Marilyn has served as Editor for a number of anthologies. Her short stories have been published in numerous anthologies and on the literary blog, Glass Cases.

  AWARDS: Silver Award, two Honorable Mentions and eight Finalist placements in the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards, two Winner and two Finalist placements in the EPPIE Awards, Winner of the Dream Realm Awards, Finalist placement in the 2015 National Indie Excellence Book Awards, Winner of “Best Horror” in the eFestival of Words Best of the Independent eBook Awards, and Semi-Finalist placement in the Young Adult category of the Kindle Book Awards.

  Author Links:

  Marilyn Peake’s website: http://www.marilynpeake.com

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  Amazon Author Page:

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  Allison Jiang: Computer Diary Entry

  One-Way Ticket to Mars. The words jumped out at me. I’d won! After a grueling year living in a Mars Simulation Habitat out in the godforsaken desert of Utah, after all the physical and psychological tests, all the poking and prodding and blood and urine samples, I’d been chosen! I was one of only ten people—five males and five females—selected from thousands of applicants.

  After staring at my computer, then printing out the email so I could hold it in my hands and make it part of the physical universe, I went downstairs to tell my parents. That did not go well. My mother screamed. She put her head in her hands and wept. My father’s face tensed, while fear glistened in his eyes. He looked distraught, torn between wanting to comfort my mother and wanting to plead with me not to do it.

  My mother did the pleading. Why? Why? Why would a beautiful, smart young woman like me want to throw away her life on a one-way trip to Mars, the first manned trip ever to Mars? Anything could go wrong. If we made it that far, I’d never be able to return home to Earth. I’d die there. I’d never marry, have children. She’d never see me again.

  She was frantic, desperate.

  When I’d first applied to the reality TV show, Mission Critical: Journey to the Red Planet, she tried to talk me out of it. I drew a line in the sand, stood my ground, rebelled like a teenager. She backed off, eventually laughed about it, assuming it was just a passing fantasy that would never happen. How could it? It was a reality show, for God’s sake. On Mars.

  But the producers had gotten some impressively qualified scientists and medical doctors on board and the mission had continued to inch forward toward becoming reality. Training out in the Utah desert had been run like a survival reality show, everything recorded for later TV viewing. My mother had assumed I’d get beaten by the harsh conditions and rigorous training. In the end, however, I was one of the final contestants who survived the ordeal. There were twenty of us. We were sent home to wait the selection of the final ten chosen by a team of space scientists and medical professionals for the actual trip to Mars.

  I could hardly believe it: I was one of the chosen. After receiving the notification, I was to report to training camp within thirty-six hours. Not in the Utah desert where we had initially trained. This time, we were going to Florida to blast off from Cape Canaveral. Awesome. So many rockets had blasted off from there. This thing was becoming real.

  Once again, my mother pleaded with me not to go. I felt her fears were unfounded. I knew the reality show had announced this was a one-way mission. But how could that be true? It was just a brilliant publicity stunt. They’d bring us back, I was sure of it.

  I was twenty-six years old, recently finished a Ph.D. in Biology, still living at home with my parents and deeply in debt. Going to Mars would secure my future. First of all, the reality show offered to pay all outstanding education bills for its participants. Second of all, if we returned to Earth, which I was pretty sure we’d eventually do, I could earn a living through tours and speaking engagements. And what if I did end up living on Mars forever? I’d be one of the first people to colonize a new planet. I could live with that.

  My mother refused to see me off at the airport. My father drove me. My last glimpse of him through the glass wall showed him bent over crying. He looked so small and broken. He’d always been larger than life to me, an engineer who worked for NASA. I saw myself as following in his footsteps. I wanted him to be proud.

  At the base camp, I had to make my first difficult decision. I knew it was coming. All the females had been warned and prepared. We had to decide whether or not to be sterilized. We were informed of the risks with either decision. If we chose not to be sterilized, we would be given enough birth control for the first two years. There would be a regular schedule of rocket ships blasting off from Earth bringing cargo to our settlement on Mars. Birth control would be continuously available that way.

  We were warned that Mars atmosphere is inhospitable to humans. We could never, ever go outside unprotected. We’d have to either be inside one of the reality show’s habitats or wrapped up inside our spacesuits or traveling in a rover that had life supports. No other options. That was it. I opted for sterilization. I wasn’t sure I wanted children, anyway. And I couldn’t imagine bringing a child into that kind of world. Although for that matter, I couldn’t imagine bringing a child into the world as it existed on Earth either. The constant water wars and droughts, the massacres forever flashing across TV screens, the floods and fires. There were times I felt petrified watching the news. It felt like being trapped in a burning building. All my survival instincts screamed: Run! Run! Get the hell out of here!

  I was getting the hell out of there. I was leaving for Mars. If we could establish a thriving colony there, it would represent an escape hatch for people on Earth.

  Shortly after arrival at base camp, I found myself on a gurney, meds dripping into my arm to make me drowsy, relaxed, letting go of everything, not caring. Count down from 100. 100, 99… That’s all I remember. I woke up a changed woman. A human being with a womb, but tubes tied into knots that would prevent my eggs from ever traveling down through them—happy potential kids screaming and shouting their way down a sparkly pink waterslide on a hot summer day—to splash into the water and dance and commingle with their waiting partners. I would never be a mother. Not unless I decided to have my tubes untied and it worked.

  When I recovered, I felt I’d made the right decision. We’d been warned that nobody knew how pregnancies would fare on Mars. There would undoubtedly be
miscarriages. There might be deformities.

  We were colonists. We were forging a path. Doctors would be part of our team. They’d assist with pregnancies, do things and invent things to try to counteract any negative effects from our environment.

  In Roman mythology, Mars was the god of war. On the planet, our bodies would be at war with the god and his red, dusty, suffocating world. We’d always be fighting for survival.

  When the day finally arrived for blastoff, we got to speak to our loved ones by videophone. My mom and dad both managed to keep a stiff upper lip. They wished me well and promised to watch the show.

  Then we filed into the first spaceship that would rendezvous with another one already orbiting Earth. That second one, named Mission Critical, would take us all the way to Mars.

  Our bodies jounced around and trembled as we fled Earth’s surface. Strapped into chairs tilted back so that we were lying on our backs, we were pushed down into them hard by g-forces increasing to 3gs, meaning we had three times the normal force of Earth gravity acting on us as we blasted off into space. That was intense. And frightening. I wasn’t an astronaut. Neither were any of the others chosen for the reality show. We had very little training, just enough to get where we were going and set up a colony unlike anything people had ever before attempted in the entire history of the human race.

  After docking with Mission Critical, we walked one by one through the docking port into the belly of the beast that would soon break free of Earth’s orbit at an escape velocity of 25,000 miles per hour to set off for our ultimate destination.

  As soon as we entered Mission Critical, we became sardines. We were crammed into a vehicle that had so little space, it felt more like a tin can than a rocket ship. Each of us had our own separate room, but it was tiny. We’d sleep on a shelf above our tiny living quarter. We couldn’t shower; there weren’t any facilities for that. Instead, we’d be taking sponge baths using warm soapy water that we squirt out of a tinfoil pouch. We’d eat canned and freeze-dried food, along with vitamins and other supplements. We’d get to know each other in the kitchen area the size of a pantry and at regularly scheduled get-togethers in a social space so small it was basically a circular couch surrounding floor area only big enough for a few of us to stand at one time. That is, if we could stand. I’d originally thought our ship would have one of those large spinning wheels or some other method of creating gravity. But that type of ship costs money. Mission Critical had zero-g. We’d either be floating around inside the ship or strapped and tethered to something our entire journey. When we reached Mars, Mission Critical would be jettisoned out toward the sun, discarded in space. That’s how cheap it was.

  Everything in the public areas would be filmed. As would the stories we told in a Confessional the size of a phone booth.

  That first night in the social area made it very clear that we weren’t astronauts in any traditional sense of the word. We were nothing more than reality show contestants in astronaut clothing. We were zoo animals: living creatures placed in a cage for people to learn more about us. Also, to learn about human survival on Mars. Mission Critical had been billed as the Out-of-This-World Reality Show of Reality Shows, the one that everyone on Earth would watch.

  The show, no doubt, would make billions of dollars in advertising money and merchandise. We had all signed away the rights to our own likenesses. From now on, my face could be plastered all over merchandise whether or not I approved of the products. If the show wanted condoms or dog food cans or sparkling rainbow-colored unicorn butts with my face on them, I could not complain.

  I knew that I had to accept the reality I had signed up for, and I had to get along with everyone on the Mission Critical team. This was my new social group, my new family. It would soon become my one and only society. I made myself let go of judgment. I forced myself to accept things however they unfolded, to go with the flow.

  Serious and studious by nature, I tend to analyze and judge everything. I mostly let go of that only through fantasy. Third generation Chinese in the United States, I was raised by parents less strict than their own; but they still insisted on high performance in school and some pretty strict rules. Determined to give me more freedom than they had experienced as children, I did have access to television shows and movies, computer games and whatever I wanted to read. Those were my escapes and where I felt safe to let down my guard and explore new ideas.

  Mission Critical would be my real-life computer game, the place where I’d banish judgment and just play the game. Wherever it led. However it unfolded.

  The social interaction room had a sign above it: Constellation Room. It had a double meaning: a group of stars in the sky…or us, a group of stars in a groundbreaking TV show, also high up above Earth.

  Our first entrance into that room was dramatic. Filmed by multiple cameras, we were invited to the room one by one over a loudspeaker. As soon as our name was called, we were to fling open the door to our private room, float out into the hallway that had bedrooms on either side and use handles along the wall to propel ourselves to the Constellation Room, all the while beaming with smiles and waving with a free hand whenever possible. As soon as the first door opened, lights started flashing all over the place. Blue, yellow, red, purple, orange. Lights ran along the edges of the floor, in straight lines along the ceiling, and blinked haphazardly all over the walls. Upbeat, kick-ass music accompanied them. It was like being in a disco. A very tiny disco. The hallway was so narrow, it reminded me of the garbage compactor that closed in on Luke Skywalker and his companions on the Death Star. Good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic. I banged my elbows up pretty badly propelling myself toward the Constellation Room that first time.

  Nevertheless, my fears melted away. I felt excited, happy and proud to be exactly where I was. If music and lights were part of this grand experiment, surely all the basic safety measures needed for this trip had been taken care of. The frivolous was rarely built into a venture before the basic elements of survival had been locked into place.

  After all of us had entered the Constellation Room and strapped ourselves into a place on the circular couch, the show’s host greeted us on a large-screen TV. Max McKinney: flamboyant, charismatic, full of energy and enthusiasm. His carrot-colored hair shaved on the sides and long on top gave the impression under the bright studio lights of a flame flickering across the middle of his scalp. His blue eyes burned with passion. They could change in a blink from excitement to concern to anger. If Mars wasn’t enough to draw in a huge viewing audience, Max should do it.

  And then there was our fellow crew member, Scarlett Love. She was a wannabe Hollywood actress. She insisted Scarlett Love was her birth name, not a stage name. Twenty-eight years old, she’d moved to Hollywood from some little town in Ohio five years earlier, hoping to make it on the big screen. We all had to go around the room…well, around the couch…and introduce ourselves. It was clear from the moment she opened her mouth that she was potentially big trouble as well as a big draw to bring in an audience. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Blond hair, blue eyes, breasts that were easily Double D squeezed into a skintight V-neck T-shirt, and language that would make a sailor blush.

  Max asked, “So, Scarlett, would you say this is your first big Hollywood role?”

  Scarlett looked up flirtatiously, directly into the camera that was part of our TV screen. “Why, yes, it is, Max. And a pretty amazing role, don’t you think? Hollywood’s never had a role this important, this fantastic before.”

  Max came right back at her, like a tennis player slamming the ball into her court where she might not be able to reach it. “You’re twenty-eight, right? Why do you think the audience has never heard of you before?”

  Scarlett’s cheeks reddened. The joy left her eyes for a moment, replaced quickly by a flash of anger. “Well, I could have been a household name by now. But, you know, I don’t play the casting couch game. A movie role isn’t worth a blow job or having to fuck some skanky dude.”


  Max didn’t flinch. Throwing his head back in laughter, he returned the ball full-force. “OK now, Scarlett Love, I guess you’re going to keep our censors busy. Let’s not do that too many times, though, OK? We don’t want your lines to be all, Bleep…Bleep…Bleep, right? Let’s not ruin your one chance at becoming a big star. Prove to the audience you’re more than casting couch material. You’re getting up there in age and we want you to become one of the world’s greatest celebrities. When people look up at Mars burning brightly in the night sky, we want them to think of you, Scarlett Love, as the biggest, brightest star of them all.”

  Scarlett was flustered, but she fought back. Max’s statement was so filled with passive-aggressive meanings, it made our heads spin. But Scarlett raised her own head high as she replied, “I’ll never forget my interview on your couch, Max. I’m surprised I made it this far.”

  Max had the ability to take anything thrown his way and dance with it. He never faltered. He grinned from ear to ear at the camera and then responded as though confiding in the audience. “I don’t even have a couch. This girl is crazy. But we love her already, don’t we, audience? We’re all gonna fall in love with Scarlett Love, I can feel it in my bones.”

  Poor choice of words, but there you have it. Reality TV. The making of a star.

  The rest of us paled in comparison. Only Ace Whitaker came close in charisma and raw sexual appeal. He was good-looking and cocky and had a bad boy vibe. He gave the impression that he thought of himself as better than the show, even though he hadn’t done much with his life after graduating college. He introduced himself by saying, “I’m a frat boy through and through. I get along pretty much with everybody, so I think I’ll be a good fit for this team. I also got good grades in Science and Math…I was a Chemistry major…So if we run into any problems, I should be able to help.”

  He kept looking over at Scarlett and she kept looking back. There was some definite chemistry there, and I’m not referring to his college major.