Has anyone ever told you just how boring space travel is? I mean, yes, we're deadheading most of it, but there's vital services that need to be done by living, breathing humans on ship, so we take it in turn being up and awake. At first I thought it was really exciting, I mean yay, we're going to Mars. We're setting up the first colony off Earth. To be honest, Earth was getting a bit soft for me. Sure, the end of work seemed like a good idea at the time, but there's only so much leisure I can take. Yeah, I took various jobs, but there was no risk in them. Worst case scenario I took a major whuffie hit, but what then? I still get to eat, sleep, drink, surf the nets. On Mars if I screwed up I'm dead. And not just me, but my team mates.
Anyway, the yay Mars! Feeling wore off around the 2nd or 3rd time I was awoken for my shift. Robotic science has eliminated most of the tedious jobs on Earth, but we weren't on Earth, we were halfway to Mars. We had priced up the weight of the droids against the service they could render, and we just couldn't justify bringing too many bots. So here I was, fresh from deadheading and ready to clean out the vacuum toilets. Joy. We were traveling in micro-gravity. Later jaunters, as we colonisers became known, would have simulated gravity of various descriptions. The guy who solved that problem had whuffie to burn. So plumbing wouldn't work properly, so our toilets sucked. Literally. It was a bit messy and a bit weird, but we got used to it.
Microgravity sucked. Yeah, Earthside you could go for a ride in the "vomit comit", a plane that went in parabolic flights to get a few seconds of nullo, but beyond that, it really sucked. Getting to sleep was the worst. My overclocked monkey brain kept screaming that I was falling, and must cling onto the nearest tree branch. After a few nights waking up screaming I started deadheading the nights. Well, simulated nights. We had full spectrum lighting in the "day" which dimmed and gave us "night". Slowly it was adding a minute here or there, to get us used to Mars' extra half hour a day. My gramps remembered something called "daylight savings time", where the clocks would add an hour for 6 months of the year. No gradual change there, the switch was 1 hour in the middle of the night. Nice one way, an extra hour in bed. But the trade off was 1 hour less in bed the other way. There were so many people with mild jetlag on leap forwards/backwards day that the Bitchun' society abolished it. Most people didn't need to get up for a certain time anyway. Mars would be an eternal leap forwards day for anyone not prepared.
Later jaunters would have all the bots they needed, and would come out of deadhead whenever the feeling took them. Some of them would do ships duties for fun! The thought did occur to me, while I was cleaning out the toilet. Dave, the guy with the shift before me, was a pig. He never cleaned it properly. His whuffie took a small hit while I laboured at the caked on cak. Yes, we brought the trappings of the Bitchun society with us. We weren't leaving the Bitchun society, just taking it to a new frontier. If we were just sick of the Bitchun society we would have deadheaded until a more exciting time, or joined the outsiders. Though they might have kicked us out or killed that copy of us thinking we were missionaries. The goal of Earth being entirely Bitchun is still unachieved. Mars started entirely Bitchun and has stayed that way. No outsiders have the resources to get a shuttle there.
I maintained a blog, which kept whuffie coming in. Everyone wanted to know every little detail of what was happening on mankind's first colonisation mission. There had been other missions, of course. Mostly scientific short stay deals. No life found as yet, but we had a few scientists who would keep a close eye out for anything from bug-eyed monsters to bacteria. And we didn't have permission to terraform the planet. We would live in domes - glorified stationary space ships. I was travelling in a sealed off part of one of the domes, just enough for one person to live in. And boy, was it "just" enough.
Data storage was no problem. We all had a very generous personal allowance, and for good measure we had our copy of the library of alexandria. Every book ever written was on the ship. We were going for the long haul. The ship only had enough resources to get to Mars, and keep us alive. If we wanted back we'd have to signal Earth with our backup. One or two crew went Earthside instead of taking another shift. One of them returned for the landing, and accrued a lot of negative whuffie for that stunt.
Between shifts I read and I read and I read. I've always loved reading, and had grown up with every book ever written being available free to download. Gramps remembered dead tree books. Expensive things they were. And short lived. There's so much of the dead tree era of books that simply hasn't survived to the digital age. Now with the library of alexandria on most home boxen no book will ever die. And if the author is living and wrote a good book, they get whuffie. If the book is bad, they don't. Whuffie is a very fair system.
So there I was, on my lonesome, cleaning, checking the autopilot, even fixing the odd bit of machinery. Life support wouldn't cover two people awake at once, and after so long I was desperate to talk to someone in realtime. My deadhead crew were as good as dead for talking to, and Earth was rapidly getting away from me, the lightspeed barrier causing longer and longer delays in conversation. My first shift I had walkie talkie conversations, record a bit, squirt it, wait for the response a few seconds later. By my 3rd shift I was down to text with minutes of lag. Email was the only way to talk.
There wasn't even an emergency to liven up the trip. Everything was engineered so well that nothing serious broke, and we were never in danger of "dying". We kept regular backups and synced with Earth. If we suddenly blew up then we'd be back on Earth and ready to go on a second shuttle, as soon as the problem was fixed and we had it built. As far as the trip went, we'd thought of everything. Well, except the tedious boredom. I spent a lot of time listening to The Beatles. Great stuff. Everything in the Bitchun society was autotuned. It was refreshing to listen to some real singing, with good singers. And a touch of surrealism in their later stuff. Gramps' dad had seen The Beatles live, and each generation had been handed the LPs, then the cassettes, then the CDs, then the mp3s. Bitchun music was about being popular, rather than about the music. Yeah, there were a few people who had whuffie to burn who just enjoyed making music, and I enjoyed some of them, but it wasn't the same as money-era music.
We landed, and we got hard to work. We had supplies to last a couple of years, but our first priority had been self-sufficiency. This had been carefully tested Earthside with large habitable bio-domes. Big sealed environments where life can stably live. We had lovely big hydroponics growing mostly blue-green algae, gen-enged to be edible and nutritionally complete. We were on the frontier, we didn't have room for other plants like grasses or trees. We had debated bringing a ship's cat for morale and portable heat, but we just couldn't justify it. Later, when we were well established we got a cat beamed from Earth, backed up just like us and had the save file squirted to us. It was the most adorable kitten I'd ever seen, and Mars' first housepet. RIP fluffy.
You may be wondering why we didn't simply squirt our backups Marsside. Well, all the ships there had failed in the latest big dust storm. Many were pissed off to be restored to life Earthside rather than where their obsession was. Some were transmitting data about the dust storm right up to the point where it killed that copy of them. Many came on the ship with us, as it gave them the chance to study Mars in a bit more of a permanent position than the yearly windows they were given by the lifesupport systems prior to us.
Life was hard on the frontier, but it was what I wanted. I'm also one of the lucky few who has been for a walk on Mars pre-terraform. Okay, it was to patch some of the circuitry that required being outsite, but a Marswalk is a Marswalk. Okay, it was quite boring really. Every mission like that should be. It only gets exciting when it goes wrong.
I worked in the hydroponics that first year. We all worked in vital areas in the first year, even the scientists. Even when we were sure that things were working well and we had equilibrium we kept going for the full year in case anything unexpected came up. Some scientists were upset to be away from their research for another year, and we looked the other way while some carried out experiments when we were certain things were working. It was good work. If I mucked up then the colony wouldn't have air or food. Earthside I couldn't get into such a position.
After the first year we declared equilibrium and had a party. Air, water, food and energy were all coming freely. We could offer the basics of life to a limited number of people. The scientists were free to do their research. I wasn't one of the scientists, and I wasn't one of the tourists. I was there to work. Some people tried to do the bare minimum, or less. This was not the Martian way. Their whuffie dwindled until they got the point and went Earthside. We had limited places on Mars. Anyway, I wasn't one of the tourists. I worked in the hydroponics until I was replaced by a robot. Robot building came soon after equilibrium. After they declared equilibrium robotics work started.
I moved to the robotics factory after losing my work in the hydroponics. The robot kept shooing me out of the hydroponics. Shame, because that was one of the most peaceful areas in the colony. I requested feed from the camera in it streamed to my home box as a screensaver. There wasn't much work at the robotics factory, and it was no longer a matter of life or death. It was a matter of taking away the menial jobs from humans. The factory line was automated, and was mostly supervised by a program. I started getting bored again. I was in danger of becoming a tourist at this rate.
What could I do? I could get into the fledgeling parliment, but I hated politics. As I've matured I've found time for it, but I wasn't mayor material then. I could move from vital system to vital system, waiting to be replaced by bots each time. That wouldn't last long. The robotics factory was efficient. I could deadhead until there was another colony being set up, but the Mars colony was still fresh. And anyway, one of my fellow Martians had caught my eye. She was one of the scientists looking for Martian life. I had my 1 outdoor walk, she did it most days. The other days she was looking at samples under a microscope, as far as I can tell. We got chatting in our bar. Algae make a pretty poor vodka, and that was all we drank, alcohol wise. For a while I was too shy to ask her out, especially as she had a purpose on Mars and I was losing my purpose. Soon the robotics factory would be self sufficient and would only need 1 person to look in every week or so.
Eventually I got the courage to ask her out. Ultimately it was out of necessity. I had no job and needed a reason to take up valuable Mars space. Partners got looked on differently to tourists. Well, long story short, we're still together. We've spent the odd decade apart, but we need each other. We spent some of the time deadheading, but we did that together too.
Before long, Mars colony was like the Earth I had worked so hard to get away from. I needed a new colony to work on. I loved working in a new colony. But this was before the Earth-like planets were found outside the solar system, and if I thought that the journey to Mars was dull then I'd have serious issues with travelling light years. Eventually I did help set up some of these colonies, but this was after we could dead head the whole way, or spend time awake and have other people awake at the same time. There was some good expansions going on Earth's moon, as astronomers spread out to take advantage of the almost non-existant atmosphere and using craters to build large radio telescopes. But my girlfriend (as she was then) was working on Mars. She'd found some exciting bacteria fossils and was seeing if there were any viable specimins in them. I have since taken a degree in Biology to undestand her work better. In hindsight the solution was simple. There simply wasn't enough space in the Mars colony, so we needed another colony. I put the idea to the mayor who was frankly sick of tourists taking up space that could be taken up by more scientists. So I went on to form the first hotel on Mars. Well, effectively.
Getting Earth to send another ship wasn't hard. There were a lot of tourists Earthside, so the whuffie was good for it. They sent me a skeleton crew of workers. I borrowed robots from Mars colony 1 as it was now known, and went to form Mars colony 2. I built it a few miles North, so we were in the same timezone and weather. We didn't get too many duststorms in colony 1. This time I stayed in charge of the hydroponics, but had some robots doing the boring bits I didn't really enjoy. Some bits are so messy that a deep shower won't make you feel clean again. We established a good magtube link with colony 1. Tourists liked to go around colony 1 and sleep in colony 2, nice and out of the way of the scientists. It also meant I could visit the girlfriend frequently. If I live to be 1000 I won't forget the views from the tube. You could deadhead it, but you'd miss the amazing views. The amazing red of the rocks and the pink of the sky. Now lost forever, as Mars has been terraformed.
I'm glad I got off Mars before it got terraformed. Me and the family (as we were then, my whuffie was good from running the hotel colony) got off to the first colony on Europa. The challenges here were harder. Eventually we found livable planets outside the solar system, and these raised new challenges to be solved, and the prospect of actual alien life. Nothing alive was found on Mars. After so long looking they decided to terraform, and it's just a lower gravity Earth these days. Still, I've had other planets/moons to love. And my family, jaunters, the lot.
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