Dead on Mars

Tang Yue pulled his cart, which was laden with solar panels while passing through the Battery Farm.

It was extremely arid on Mars. There was no place on Earth that could compare with it. In the Isidis Planitia, where Tang Yue was, it had not rained once in tens of millions of years. Rewinding the same amount of time on Earth, even the Sahara desert was a green oasis with monsoon rains.

Most of the water on Mars was frozen at the poles. In the low-lying valleys where sunlight could hardly reach, the frozen soil that contained moisture didn’t melt for millions of years. This was the most massive source of water, measuring a total of a trillion tonnes. If humans wanted to colonize Mars in the future, that would be the most important source of water.

Speaking of which, Mars had plenty of resources. It had water and methane. Unfortunately, humans had short arms that couldn’t reach them.

Tang Yue pulled a stand and propped up a solar panel as he grabbed a handful of soil and let it scatter at his feet.

Typically speaking, soil contained minute amounts of water. Tomcat had once said that if one could prop up a big enough pot and heat the soil dug from the deep depths, obtaining steam was possible… This seemingly possible solution of obtaining endless amounts of water wasn’t implemented because Tang Yue had no way of finding such a huge pot or collect such thin amounts of steam.

“Be it rain or typhoons, or the ocean currents and atmospheric circulation, it’s ultimately a result of heat flow and transfer,” Tomcat said. “Hot air rises and cold air sinks above the ocean. The steam carries large amounts of heat into the atmosphere and gets released due to the low pressure. The engine behind Earth’s complicated water circulation process is heat, but Mars is dead. It doesn’t lack water and instead, lacks an engine to drive all of this.”

“Is there a way to make this engine run again?” Tang Yue asked casually.

“The Martian engine is Mars itself, but this engine has stopped working for three billion years,” Tomcat replied. “You wish to get Mars to start working again? It’s impossible for humans. It’s work fit for God.”

“I recall using a magnetic stirrer during chemistry classes in college. Tomcat, have you seen such a thing?” Tang Yue said. “It’s a spindle-shaped metallic lump. When thrown into a solution, it will exert an external magnetic field, and the stirrer will rapidly spin. By the same logic, if we provide Mars with a sufficiently powerful magnetic field, will it restart the Martian core?

“Once the geological activity is restarted on Mars, the mantle and the gases at the poles will be released. The atmosphere will slowly become denser,” Tang Yue continued. “The Martian environment will improve.”

“The Martian core is a giant lump of iron with a radius of 1,800 kilometers,” Tomcat said. “Its mass is 1.9 × 10²0 tonnes. What kind of magnetic field are you going to use to stir 190 billion tonnes?

“If you have that ability, you can start colonizing the Milky Way. Why would you be harping over Mars?” Tomcat eventually said, “Stop imagining things. Even if there are a million ways to spark life on Mars, it’s impossible to do so now.”

Tang Yue held a long shovel as he drew in the sand.

“Tang Yue was here.

“Human civilization was here.

“Earthlings were here.

“Intelligent life from the future, if you see these words, remember. Someone was here before you.”

The sharp shovel drew a deep crevice in the sand, but the shifting sand immediately flowed back in, filling the crevice.

Soon, the words Tang Yue wrote were indistinct.

Tang Yue threw the shovel to the ground and sat down to rest. In just two minutes, the words “Tang Yue” were completely illegible. This was the force of nature’s way of corroding away the signs of civilization. The indistinct words on the shifting sands were just a miniature of that massive civilization. The natural world took ten minutes to wipe out the deep crevice which Tang Yue dug. If he dug a pit ten meters deep, the natural world would take ten thousand years to level it.

Tang Yue wished to leave something behind, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized the difficulty.

Time was a leveling machine that slowly and inevitably flattened everything.

The best vessel to record civilization was ultimately civilization itself.

“Where’s that comet now? How many sols is it from us?” Tang Yue looked up at the sky.

“Forty sols.”

Tomcat answered as it spent every moment working.

“How’s the comet?”

“It’s still being calculated… The darn computer hung again. Are HP computers that crappy? I shouldn’t have given it so many parameters. Miss Mai Dong? Miss Mai Dong, help me!”

What followed was Tomcat’s and Mai Dong’s gibberish over the comms. Orion II’s entry into the atmosphere was far riskier than the launching of the Eagle. Tomcat had claimed that if it hadn’t been pushed into a corner, it would definitely not let Mai Dong board that crappy boat that was bound to sink.

Despair gives courage even to a coward.

Despair induces curses for a cat.

Tang Yue returned to Kunlun Station after putting away the solar panels.

“F*ck! F*ck you HP for your crappy computers! F*ck everything about you!” Tomcat’s hair stood up on its back. “I hope your whole company f*cking dies! Explode to kingdom come!”

Tang Yue hung the Radiant Armor on the wall for charging and took off his clothes to wear his robe before pouring himself a cup of water. At this moment, Tomcat took out a pole from under the table and threw it over. “Catch this!”

“What’s this?”

Tang Yue caught the pole which was about the length of a cane—sixty centimeters. It was rather heavy and hard thanks to its metallic texture. Wrapped around it was a layer of white paper. Clearly, the paper had been reused. At the bottom of the pole was a paper roll attached to it with transparent tape.

“Orion II’s miniature model.”

“Orion… II?” Tang Yue cracked open his lips, not seeing the resemblance at all. Apart from being equally long and thin, it was better to call it a hammer than a spacecraft—the kind that could smash a person’s head in.

“This is the truss.” Tomcat pointed at the thin pole.

“These are the engines.” Tomcat pointed at the paper roll at the bottom. It was sealed tight with tape and weighed a lot due to some unknown weight.

Tang Yue slowly nodded. He could see it after Tomcat pointed it out to him.

Indeed, it was a model of Orion. Even though it was very abstract and in line with the Impressionist movement, Tomcat’s handiwork was nothing worthy of praise.

“It doesn’t look like it since the conditions are limited,” Tomcat said. “But I’ve tried my best to ensure the correct weight ratios. Make a better one yourself if you think you can do better.”

“This is the best! It’s truly extraordinary what kind of art you are capable of!”

Tang Yue wasn’t stingy with his thumb. Before the plan succeeded, he could go from being a broken record to a flattering machine.

With the miniaturized model, Tomcat no longer needed to use its pen for demonstrations. Tang Yue placed it vertically in his palm as it stood stable.

Tang Yue prodded it gently with his index finger.

“It’s very stable.”

“Most of its mass is concentrated at the bottom. This is why we need to dismantle Orion and Eagle. We need to try our best to reduce the center of mass,” Tomcat said. “The lower the center of mass, the stabler and safer it is.”

Tomcat took the model away from Tang Yue and stood it on the table.

“I’m resolving the problem of the attitude stability. It needs to descend vertically, and any deviations to the side mustn’t exceed 5°. If an accident happens, causing such a situation…” Tomcat flicked the pole and the model crashed to the ground with a thud. “Everything will be over.”