Chapter 29 - There Is Life On Mars

It took the single green pixel a total of 185 seconds to travel from India's Mars Rover back to Earth. Along its 220 Gigametre journey it passed through an orbital satellite, then the Phobos concatenator, along the Deep Space Network to the Lunar L₄ relay, and then to the geostationary conduit which finally beamed it down to Earth. The massive network of radio telescopes in the Complex Oversized Array averaged out the transmission, discarded any data which failed checksum validation, then squirted its cargo through a fibre optic cable. The green pixel happily bounced through several splicers and boosters before it landed safely in the research institute's server farm. It was squashed and transformed by a variety of encoding algorithms before being unceremoniously dumped onto disk where it kept its secret hidden from prying eyes.

One week later, a graduate student named Lohita was assigned the grunt work of surveying the images. It was punishment for some minor etiquette breach involving a risqué joke about her professor's husband and the plague of monkeys surrounding the institute. So now, close to midnight, she was mindlessly clicking through the recently arrived data. Her finger tapped her laptop's trackpad. The capacitive sensor sent a burst of information via a priority interrupt into the CPU, which then coordinated with the operating system to find the logical address of the file she requested. Bit by bit, it began to decode the data and loaded it into memory. The green pixel rode through the mechanical merry-go-round of the hard disk, hopped through the ageing GPU, and then danced along the HDMI cable with glee at the thought of finally being seen. The Organic LED graciously accepted the pixel into its new home. The OLED's iridium molecules had begun to think its day would never come. It fizzed with excitement as it threw the 525 nanometre waves into the æther.

The journey from screen to eyeball was considerably shorter for the little green pixel. It experienced the delight of passing across the cornea and through the strange aqueous jelly within, before eventually becoming entangled in the rods and cones. As it burrowed through the optic nerve, it noticed a small cluster of friends had joined it on the journey. Holding hands, they all entered Lohita's brain together.

After a moment of contemplation, she began mentally composing her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Something classy about the support she had received from his whole team, but without actually mentioning her vindictive professor by name. The Prime Minister would probably create a new award just for her. The name "Lohita" would be written through history for eternity. She smiled and zoomed in towards the only patch of green on the red planet.

Mangalyaan-13 had been a disaster from the start but this photograph was its salvation. The previous three craft had crash-landed and 27 was a last ditch mission with shoestring funding. One of the wheels had never worked properly which meant the rover could only drive in a large circle. A software update from some outsourced shop had permanently disabled the spectrometer. The solar panels were only working at 50% of their rated value and a slow coolant leak meant that it was unlikely that the poor little craft would last the year. India's dreams of exploring Mangala were coming to an inglorious end. Until now.

Lohita checked the timestamp on the image. It was only from last week! The picture was of a fairly unremarkable rock on the bottom of a long-dry ravine, near a crater that no one had bothered to name. The rock itself was a dull rusty colour, nothing to distinguish it from the millions of other rocks a dozen different rovers had previously surveyed. But there, hanging stubbornly to the edge of it was the unmistakable texture and colour of lichen.

Pulling up the mission map, she could see that the rover was less than a kilometre away from the spot where it had noticed this impossible patch of... she hardly dared think it... this impossible patch of life. The rover had climbed a small incline because the actuators on its solar array were too clogged with dust to move, and it was scheduled to stay there recharging its decrepit batteries for another couple of sols. Lohita's heart began to quicken; she had about 48 hours to convince the entire space agency to tear up the carefully planned route of Mangalyaan-13 and send it back to look for this miracle.

Administrator Rohan claimed that he had an open door policy and that he was always willing to hear the crazy theories of his staff - Lohita was prepared to put that to the test. It was nearly one in the morning. The guards were asleep as were the screaming monkeys outside. She traipsed up from the basement and made her way to the executive suite on the 23rd floor. Rohan's office was locked, so she wrapped herself around her laptop and fell asleep in front of his door.

Rohan's secretary disagreed with her boss's laissez-faire attitude to waifs and strays, so didn't bother offering Lohita a cup of chai. She just glowered at the dishevelled interloper now sitting on the executive couch, and waited for the administrator to arrive. Rohan swept into the office chattering on the phone and caught sight of the young student tightly clutching her laptop. This wasn't the first graduate who'd made a pilgrimage at the crack of dawn and he suspected it wouldn't be the last. He held up a finger and beckoned her into his inner sanctum while still talking about end of year fiscal approvals.

Putting down the phone, he smiled and said, "Well, what fascinating discovery do you have for me, young lady?" He tried not to sound too sarcastic, and failed miserably.

Lohita really didn't know where to begin, so she just mutely handed over the laptop, its screen set to maximum brightness, and the magical image radiating out.

"Is this... Mars?"

"From Mangalyaan-13 a week ago. I've verified it came through the Deep Space Network uncorrupted. The digital signatures and checksums match. I'd like to urgently request that we send the rover back to take a second look. Sir."

Rohan leant over his desk and pressed the intercom button. "Ms Chopra? Would you kindly signal Rover Command and have the mission director attend my office with all haste." He thought for a moment, glanced at Lohita, and said "I'll also need the head of public relations. Tell her to bring a full makeup team."

The stifling bureaucratic machine could move with surprising nimbleness when lubricated correctly. The chance to resurrect the mission's glory and make history was the best motivator in the galaxy. The news leaked instantly, of course, and Lohita found herself giving interviews to every news station in the world. She became an instant poster-girl for Women In STEM and, while she didn't get granted an instant Nobel Prize, she was gracious enough to mention her professor in every speech about her discovery. She was on top of the world.

The rover, however, was not. With limited battery reserves, a depleted amount of coolant, and a broken wheel, it dragged its carcass back towards the rock. The journey was too much for its knackered suspension and dust-filled computers. It nearly looked like it would make it, but another botched software patch caused a motor to overheat and it came to a grinding halt a dozen metres away from its destination.

Five years later, the ISRO ship "Rohan" inserted itself into orbit around Mars. Its hold carried a skeleton crew and the ashes of the billionaire who had funded the mission. The journey had been arduous and the ship itself was unlikely to survive a return trip. The astronauts had all signed up knowing that this was doomed to be a one-way mission, but they didn't care. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity demanded a little sacrifice. Despite the intensity of the journey, the multi-national crew acted as one throughout the mission - until it came to decide who should be the first to step out onto the red planet.

"Well, it is an Indian ship..." "Yes - but built off stolen Chinese designs..." "Of course, a fellow Texan provided the funding for it..."

The good-natured argument continued as the lander hurtled its way towards the surface.

"Mind you, we Russians were the first in space. So it would seem fitting..." "As the first openly gay man on Mars would mean a lot to..." "Perhaps it is time for an African woman to be the pioneer for once...?"

In the end, they came to the consensus that they would turn off the ships' external cameras and reactivate them once everyone was out of the lander. The first video the waiting public saw of the crew was of half-a-dozen astronauts standing in a straight line on the sandy surface. Holding hands, they bowed. Then they began clambering into the "Lohita" rover. To avoid disturbing the only confirmed presence of extraterrestrial life, they had taken the precaution of landing several kilometres away from the target. The rover had been built for speed and structural integrity - no one wanted a repeat of Mangalyaan-13 - but this meant the journey was a bone-shaking experience. A bone-shaking but exhilarating experience! Each astronaut narrated what they were seeing in their own language which was immediately radioed back to the lander and from there to the neighbouring planet. The whole world watched the shaky video from Lohita's camera, listening intently as their astronaut spoke of the poetry of discovery. And there, in the distance, was the rock.

There were no words left to speak. Every person on the planet knew what that rock looked like; it was the most reproduced image in history. Every child had a poster of it in their bedroom, every temple took it as proof of a loving god, every conspiracy theorist spent hours each day pointing out its imperfections, every phone had it as a wallpaper, every piece of graffiti reproduced its outline, every album cover paid homage to it, and every tattooist could draw it blindfolded. As the pixels hurtled through space at the speed of light, everyone in the whole wide world held their breath.

But the rock was bare.

There were no words left to speak. This was the correct rock, but there was no lichen, no little green algae clinging to it, no wispy fungus tendrils. Just a very ordinary and very empty rock.

The Russian's howl of rage flooded the radio spectrum as he dropped to his knees, scrabbling in the dirt desperately searching for evidence of life. Behind him, his colleagues stood dumbfounded, waiting for word from mission control. The Texan trudged over to Mangalyaan-13 which sat a short distance away. Perhaps it was mistaken about the coordinates? Perhaps it held the answers to this suicide mission? Perhaps...?

By now, the little rover had succumbed to the endless dust-storms which stalked the land. It was as lifeless as a sun-bleached pile of bones decomposing under the desert sun. The Texan wiped the solar panels clean, hoping the critical systems were still intact, and he was rewarded with a small flashing LED indicating the boot process had started. Under all the muck accumulated over a decade, he found the rubberised cover for the debug port and plugged in an armoured USB cable. The data transfer cable snaked between him and the traitorous rover, and his wrist display crackled to life. His ears were filled with the screams of the other astronauts as the friendly Linux Penguin crawled onto the screen and was swiftly replaced with a blur of text. The machine paused. The screen blanked. Edging across it, character by character, in a lurid green font, came a message:

"MADE U L0000k! H4cked by l0serSopht! Bi6 GR33N m4ch1n3! ;-)))"

Thanks for reading

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You can read the complete set of short stories in order.