< somewhere on mars >

[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.