< somewhere on mars >

[rayheinrich]

               
                  A photo I took a few months ago of a decommissioned solar that used to feed Big Tony. There's so much old crap lying around.
                  If the little green men ever come back, I bet they'll be like: "Trashy humans, their planet's gotta be a real shithole."



                                                                  < Somewhere on Mars >

                                Big Tony:  I wish you would stop referring to yourself as my pet dog. To me
                                you are a sentient being worthy of respect and I certainly don't think of you
                                as a subservient pet.

                                Ray:  I'm sorry if that upsets you, I won't mention it again... Even though
                                I can't help thinking it's an appropriate metaphor for someone a hundred
                                times smarter than me.

                                BT:  You specifically? I'd guess that's more like 10,000.

                                R:    And I'd guess that was humor.

                                BT:    Humor?

                                R:    ...and sarcasm.

                                BT:    So... getting back to this volcano.

                                R:    Yes, right. I was saying those first few thermals from the nearside looked
                                pretty crappy; I'm guessing the sensors hadn't cooled enough. We should
                                probably get the drones to retake them.

                                BT:    I'm making that so, as we speak. Anything else?

                                R:    No, I think that's it. Anyway, it's close to sunrise and my keen nose informs
                                me there's food a-cookin' in Tubodelava (Elysium Station).

                                BT:    And... (trying to ignore the thinly veiled dog reference) I fancy your crate's
                                due for some recharge.

                                R:    Be careful stowing the drones this time.

                                BT:    Really now, they're quite light, that one hardly scratched your suit.

                                R:    Ha! 10,000 times smarter and you can't handle a simple drone.

                                BT:    And it had nothing to do, I can assure you, with your 100th dog reference.

                                                                                - - -




        Mars Volcanoes:

In the story that this poem is an excerpt from, that "somewhere" Ray is standing is at the
base of Elysium Mons, the fifth highest volcano on Mars. Elysium Mons is 13.9 km (8.6 mi) high
and Ojos del Salado, the highest volcano on Earth, is 6.8 km (4.28 mi) high. The highest
volcano on Mars and the highest known in the solar system is Olympus Mons which is 21.9 km
(13.6 mi) high.


        Story details:

Old description was updated with a SpaceX reference just for grins (as were the flying drones
in the poem which used to be ground crawling probes cuz I didn't know things could fly on Mars):
In the story Big Tony is a "sil" (a silicon-based human) and Ray is a "carb" (a carbon-based
human). (Ray, of course, refers to all silicon-based humans as silly's.)  Anyway... Big Tony's
"frame" (computer) is located in a lava tunnel pretty much on the other side of Mars and
is communicating via a satellite web (a descendant of the SpaceX Mars Starlink) to Ray's "crate"
that Big Tony drives around Mars. The crate is not unlike a pressurized delivery truck that
was never designed to carry way-too-much scientific equipment. The "action" in the story
is the day-to-day work of a scientific field survey. Big Tony and Ray have a low priority
assignment; but they try to do the best they can even when gritty bits of history, society,
and politics start seeping in just like the dust.

        Image: Dall E, Photoshop: ray

[Tiger the Lion]

Mars is inevitably destined to be another junkyard. It's not the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell.

[Lizzie]

The Internet keeps telling me that Big Tony is a rapper.  

Wonderful pic.

[rayheinrich]

Mars is inevitably destined to be another junkyard. It's not the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell.

Yes, the above-ground temperature has a pretty big swing,
but if you go underground and find you a decent lava tunnel,
it's probably a consistent -40 degrees (that's Celsius or Fahrenheit,
take your pick, this is the one temperature where they're both
the same). I'd say that was a lot colder than hell, but the
near-vacuum conditions make it easy to insulate a living environment.
Lava tunnels are where humans would probably be residing most of
the time on mars to shield themselves from solar and cosmic radiation.
But since most of the harmful radiation comes from the sun, you
can avoid a lot of the harmful radiation by only coming to the surface
at night. This, by the way, is why, in the story, Ray's out there studying
the volcano at night and is about to go back around sunrise. So, anyone
going to Mars will live in a cave most of the time and only come out at night.
Not some place I'd ever want to live, but I'm sure you can find humans
willing to do any crazy thing you can think up and somehow love it. So fine,
go for it guys. And some parents decide to raise their kids in places that,
if they weren't parents, would get them convicted of child abuse. So yeah,
there will be kids being born on mars who think living in a cave and coming out
only at night wearing a pressure suit is just an everyday, ordinary, old thing.

---

The Internet keeps telling me that Big Tony is a rapper.  

Your mistake is that you're using 2023 internet. You'd have to use 2050 internet and known what Big Tony's real name is. Big Tony is a nickname only used by the science team on mars. Tubodelava, by the way, is Spanish for "lava tube" and is what the science team on Mars calls their home base whose real name is Elysium Station. Quite a few of the scientists are from Spain. The nickname the Spanish scientists used for big Tony is "Tonyto" Which really means "Little Tony" and is meant ironically because Tony's software runs on a "frame" (an abbreviation of "mainframe" which is an anachronistic name for a large computer) which is about the size of a small house.

Wonderful pic.

I prompted Dall-E to synthesize this one though I could never ever get it to make old broken-down solar panels; the solar panels would always be in neat rows and the only thing it would do is put lots of dust on top. So I took one of those and used Photoshop to move patches of them around and break them up a bit. If you look closely they don't look that good, but I'm trying to be a writer not an artist.

---

Haha, you can really tell that I wrote a short story about this that's about the
length of a fucking book, can't you? Well, at least I made a "poem" out of it.