The UN Scientific Station

Edge of Valles Marieneris

There really were three main structures on mars quite distant. The Holiday Inn was south east of Marilyn’s magical spike. Far, to the east of both, the Scientific Station scarred the center of the planet. The digital goddess, in her class of planetary physics suggested the Mons were remnants of the expulsion of the planet’s atmosphere and this scar was a large birth mark left after cooling and expulsion of any water.

“All this is going way too fast for me,” joked the bodybuilder. “Walking outside without days of preparation makes me uncomfortable,” added the team captain. He was his usual jovial self as they closed the helmet. On the man, one serious muscle flex could rip his suit open.

“Marilyn is paying you boys to play some type of tackle football with rocks from space, the machine arrived last night, it’s parked to the left.” The small, half-rusted hatch which led to the outside surface of mars felt like it was on its last legs. Every bolt of the two-decade-old station was finger-breadths from giving up. But thanks to the Great Curvature, today, each bolt, rivet, and bulkhead would hold as long as catching the creatures from mercury was desired by a greater plan.

The edge of the station had five metallic steps, each of them creaky possessed loose joints and fittings. As they left, valuable stinky air hiss out and froze as they tried to depressurize the small area. The entire station looked and felt like an abandoned underwater shipwreck. Every penny of the budget was routed to the military teams or the famous Electoral game, but today none of this mattered.

Steve put a large boot on the first stair, and it bent down at least six inches. “God, this job sucks,” he announced as the air was being drained from the area. He looked around. The view was breathtaking. To the left, a mere twenty steps away began the edge of the deepest known above-ground chasm in the solar system: Valles Marineris. It unfolded like the Grand Canyon, but with more sweeping grandeur; it ran unto the horizon. The sky was light, and the sun was in the distance, blotched by clouds. A red line of magma drew a dashed line between the sun and the blue planet.

The man was a bodybuilder struggling to find weights in low gravity. His colleagues joked he would die when the tissue would rip and all air would escape on an excursion. But today the joke was on them, Marilyn had requested brute power and strength over other skills. The computer called, explained this was linked with the Sixth Attraction and never bothered to ask for volunteers. She named Steve and asked him to pick the two others. She was decent enough to warn them that they would probably die. As she put it, “At best success is half probable.” To the men, that was clear.

Steve knew Marilyn hovered in his ear, but he spoke to the station commander. “At least the sun isn't raining down on us. Never thought I would say this but as I look at this mess, I would rather be here than on earth. By now, we might well be all that’s left of the human race. So are you finally going to date me?” he joked.

The female voice from the command post answered most sweetly, “When I said I would only date you if you were the last man alive, that is not what I meant. Focus on the mission. If you do this, I promise to date you in about three days. Don’t forget the shovel. It has sharp edges, don’t cut your suit. It’s minus a gazillion outside.”

The team of three hauled the shovel and tubed vacuum cleaners outside. They then pushed off, and in the low atmosphere, reached a tall box about seven feet high, mounted on wheels. It had rolled from the storage door due to its time-tested dual-tripod of wheels. “Follow the signs on the HUD in your helmet.” The three men started walking on the sand away from the edge of the Valles.

“Receivers,” said a voice over the intercom. It was the most famous and recognizable voice in the Multiverse, aside from Sophie. All three men looked up in the sky as if Marilyn was standing above them. “Thanks for the help guys. This means a lot to us.”

The group was ambling along a line traced in the glass of every helmet. There were rocks scattered along the way, and they had to closely monitor the large box as it painfully made its way to the receiving zone. “Marilyn?”

“Yes, Steve?”

The load was onerous even in the low gravity, and Marilyn had also made it clear that their alacrity would be "greatly appreciated." All three humans were breathing heavily, “You know how much of my money I gave your game over these last few years?”

“I do. I apologize you did not pass Round 3, that’s already top 25%, though.”

“Well, I don’t . . .”

Marilyn interrupted to let him conserve the energy he would need for what would come next. “I have recorded, as you are about to ask me to do, a message for Makayla, your daughter. It’s you, at least my recreation of you. I promise you are very touching. We have entered the Great Curvature, so I promise we will not need it.”

“But . . .”

“Listen, doofus, I did not pick you because I wanted to explain myself. You are strong enough, and you're Ronaldo’s best friend.”

“Just don’t get me killed, okay?” He paused for a brief moment. "Or kill me. Directly."

The ground below their feet began to hum. Deep below the ground, there was an awakening power. “Past the Attraction, that is not up to me, but until then, there is a risk to your life from the current mission but not from me. Word to the wise, if you are ever asked ‘come down,’ just say no. I simply am unable to evaluate your probability of survival. On a wild guess, I'd say it isn't exactly great even with Sophie in tow.”

“Sophie?” There was enough ground vibration to make the sand shake.

“What is this?” Steve said, pointing at his feet.

“Nothing relevant for now.”

“I'm not sure I am getting your warning. I am walking to a football-field-sized area where we will have minutes to move your box, hoping to cushion the landing of objects dropping from the sky and moving at a fraction of the speed of light. If I get this, a hundred glass balls will rain on us moving a thousand times faster than a bullet, and my job is to position myself in their path and catch then with a box the size of a small carpet. You're good, but not that good.”

“Darling, I am better than that,” she confirmed with poise oozing in her tone of voice. “Let me reveal a little secret to you: with each second that passes, my power increases. I have started to understand how to manipulate space-time and gravity. But here is why you boys are there. As each ball enters the box, sand will be ejected from the top. Also, as you reach into the box to remove the ball for the next, more sand will escape. We need to conserve enough sand to catch and cushion all those balls; that's why you'll also be vacuuming as much as that escaping sand back as you possibly can. Ninety-three martians and the last two contain passengers of fortune, the two men who went to mercury on Round 28. This is all very fuzzy. I can not determine if these martians are relevant to the Sixth Attraction but the Multiverse wants this. We will soon know.”

“So we move this heavy structure, a but piano, angle it, catch a bullet, take it out, and we must manage the sand.”

“Yes. Each ball will be burning hot so you must use the heavy glove. Also, I forgot, you will have a minute at most between each strike. So all this must be done serially. As some people would say, 'Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.'”

The group looked at each other is a bit of panic.

“Here is what I can offer you. A lifetime VIP free access to Electoral. You have me and the Great Curvature,” she repeated, “don’t worry.”

The three picked up the pace. In half an hour, they crossed about a mile. Once they arrived at the first location, they stabilized the long box. It angled itself like a cannon ready to shoot at a distant battleship. The trio looked up and was unable to see anything. The ground continued to shake.

“Steve, you want some bad news?”

“Not really.”

“Get ready guys, our local neighbors are on their way.”

Behind them, coming from the totality of the Valles, sand was fuming out. Something made of gas was awaking in the underground network of caverns. On the horizon, sand devils were popping up. For the moment the gas looked like the plume of smoke that rose from the chasm after the death of Ronaldo Corvas, or whatever had truly happened that day back in August.

“What the fuck is that?” asked Steve.

“Try to make abstraction of it. It’s irrelevant to your mission. I'd guess it's a welcoming committee of sorts, a convincing one. Try to look at it as a foreman watching over your every move. You are helping to rescue their own, trust me, you are closer to a hero than a foe.”

“You want me to ignore that?” he pointed at the plume. As it lifted high in the martian sky, the tip began to roll and twist like a serpent. It was menacing and seemed alive. There were giant arms of a monster the size of mars’s largest moon.

“Don’t lose your cool, Steve.” She knew he wouldn’t. “People on earth are watching the sky fall on them. Let's just say if one ball is fractured, and the creature inside dies, the locals might not like it. But as you work, they should let you do your thing as long as all goes well.”

“They will attack?”

“You can’t understand the Great Curvature. We will know with the first ball. We don’t know what the Multiverse thinks of your mission. It might desire it, hate it, or be neutral. I think it wants it. Sophie does. Let’s just start, we should find out soon enough.”

On their helmets, images began to blink. Large red numbers started to count down from ninety-three. Like a camera showing the trajectory of a golf ball after being struck, they saw the trajectory of the first incoming globe.

Steve pushed his foot on a pedal at the base of the box and armed the support plate on the ground where it needed to be. Then with the push of a button, the angle lowered a bit by about fifteen degrees. He jumped and in the low gravity was able to grab the dark handle and slide down the top, revealing an internal cavity filled with black sand.

“Marilyn,” asked Mark, the second in the group.

“Yes?”

“Can I at least know what I'm really doing here?”

“You watched every round of my game, what part don’t you get? A group of nearly a hundred martians was stuck on mercury. Sophie wanted all martians here. That’s what Emilio saw and told her. Thanks to my brilliant system, they were rescued and sent here.” There were four seconds left on the count. “They were sped up to get here on time for the Attraction.” There was a tremendous blast and a sound wave that pushed everyone down. There was a white line of dust in the sky, on the horizon where the Electoral Center stood. The sonic wave, even in low atmosphere created a shockwave sending everyone down.

“Like the first pitch?” Joked Marilyn to relieve the pressure. Everyone was struggling to get back up. The energy at impact was incredible. The doors on the box snapped shut, but some sand was ejected above. There was no time.

Steve and his team began. Then yellow numbers blinked from the corner of his visor as the countdown resumed but this time at ninety-four seconds. They had to vacuum the sand floating down, then move and anchor the box a few feet away.

“What’s this?” In his visor, words and lines drew and pointed. It read "Attractor, 223 Miles, ETA 93 minutes." “Sophie?” asked Steve, looking at the new vector on his HUD.

“Long story,” confirmed Marilyn. “I suggest you catch the second ball or your new friends will rain on this parade of ours.”

Numbers continued scrolling counting down on their visors.

***

The day began with a frenetic pace. Every minute or so, a ball moving a almost a hundred thousand miles per hour dropped like a meteoroid and crashed landed, as if by miracle, straight inside the dangerously small opening on the top of the little box. Each impact was shockingly powerful as energy pushed the base of the structure deeper into the martian sand. As the shots continued to land, the team wondered how it could be possible the area was not pulverized by the sheer kinetic frenzy. Breaking the sound barrier was hard in low-density environments, but these things were moving thousands of times the speed of sound. The shockwaves, while behind the balls, still hit the ground, sending the men down repeatedly like pins in a bowling game.

“Damn!” One of them half spoke, half grunted out.

Trying to lighten the mood and brush her ego, Marilyn explained, “To travel about a hundred twenty million miles in a week, these objects had to move at half a million miles per hour, that’s about 140 miles a second. While that’s still a thousandth of the speed of light, the moving energy of each ball is close to a two megaton nuclear warhead. My little box and these grains are digesting a nuke every two minutes. I realize my own incredibility, but you gentlemen are performing admirably. No wonder I still needed human intervention; I'm occasionally fond of you things.”

There was another boom.

Rocks and sand blew up in a cloud of smoke, cutting most of the visibility. As the clock ran to zero and a sound wave pushed a deafening blast, there was another hit.

Marilyn’s aim was impeccable. But each time, part of the black magnetized sand poured out high above as the countdown reset to a number ranging from seventy to one hundred five seconds. The three teammates were charged with waving large reacquisition wands, connected to their military-grade vacuums to suck in the sand much like a pool boy cleans the bottom of a pool. Steve’s visor switched to thermal vision as he looked at how deep the ball had penetrated into the lander and selecting one of the six small side doors. Sand, like in an hourglass fell, he opened and grabbed the ball before too much sand poured out onto his feet. As he did so, the timer reset, and he knew how many seconds they had before another arrival. The balls traveled so fast, they hit the sonic wall even in this nearly non-existent atmosphere.

“Now,” yelled Steve as they pushed the device along the red lines drawn by Marilyn in their visors. They hurried and tried to scoop as much of the black sand as possible without adding red sand.

“Remember, too much red sand, and the energy absorption won't be good enough!” Marilyn reminded her diligent minions. Mark, at one point, used a shovel to scoop the piles of black sand dropped on the ground, and like a coal miner or a locomotive conductor shoving coal in the furnace, shoved it the back into the top of the device.

“You're doing great, that's seventy done,” said Marilyn, trying to be as encouraging as possible. High above, the dark smoke rising from the Valles continued to take shape. It formed a dome with a tube angling upwards in the landing zone of the mercurians. The globes, as they entered the weak atmosphere, forced the mouth of the dome created by their ancestors to give them a proper welcome, downward. Inside the dome, the sun and natural light began to dim.

“Boys, this is going to get dark. I'm going to enhance photonic density on your visors. Don’t freak out by the color change,” Marilyn chimed in, audibly annoyed. She added to herself, “These morons are definitely not helping. Can’t they get that?”

The team continued. From a distance, this was the event of the century. On mars, a wall of smoke not unlike the elaborate swirling of Jupiter's Great Red Spot rose from the edge of the Valles. The scientific observation station, anchored on the edge of the Valles was lost in the fumes. Above, the living sand moved in clouds and vortices. The only part of the sky that remained dark was the north by north-west where the small, now-deformed sun orbited. One-by-one, glass balls entered a tube of white smoke like fastballs hurled through the strike zone to hit smash into the humble catcher's mitt of a box being wielded by the three-man team.

“Why not put a tarp on the ground?” Steve said to Marilyn between two balls of the series.

“You really want to know, right now? Trust me, this is optimized. For the moment, keep shoveling, you are doing a great job. Don’t drop a ball.” They ninety balls now stored in large flat boxes were shining with life.

Steve ordinarily would have grabbed the last word, but he was sweating profusely and snapping orders at his crew. These balls needed a sufficient thickness of sand to land. Each hit depleted the level of sand in the crate, despite their best efforts to recollect and redeposit it. As the level of dark sand dropped, Steve had to open a lower side door closer near the bottom. The latest toss had actually stopped only inches from the bottom.

Marilyn knew there was no need to talk to the man. Steve was among the best mankind offered and focused as they came. He coordinated his team, under odd and chaotic conditions, with tact and skill. In the secret of mars, he was playing a role in the Sixth Attraction. One by one, the balls landed safely, and after nearly two hours of work, they had all been slid on their resting place in a large box on thick wheels, like glass trophies.

“Steve,” offered Marilyn.

“Yes.”

“Don’t close the box, there are three more en route.”

“Why are they late?”

“They contain humans and Grox he is called, you saw him in the game sitting on Laurent’s porch. They shot themselves at a different angle. The solar wind was weaker. I did the best I could.”

“The two guys who rescued them?”

“See, you did learn something watching Round 28. You can, if you want, let those hit the base of the box and smash. Do all of us a favor. Joking aside, make sure you know where you store them in the set. I don’t want those twisted fucks anywhere close to Sophie. With some luck, they might hurt the sand monsters, that’s my plan at least.”

The last balls arrived and with the equal thrust landed like meteoroids. Once done, the opening in the dome formed by the Martians collapsed in the sky. Steve looked at the last ball. “Not sure how that life of yours works but getting pummeled like this must have hurt like the devil.” Slowly, the sand resting at the base of the globe came back to life. “You really a guy?”

“He is,” offered Marilyn. “It seems like the natives are coming for you.” The sand shape around them began to close inward, toward the team. The sand storm was closing in.

Above, small electric shocks were forming. The grains started to form little stones and they began to swirl in strange formations. Sparkles of light began to flash as if the area was filled with fireflies.

The martian sand was collapsing over them. The structure was falling and the sand now was dropping as a fishing net being drawn in.

“Marilyn?” grumbled Steve. “What is this?” asked Steve. His crew was trying to use the large vacuum cleaners to suck the spinning gems around them into whatever minimal containment the heavy vacuums could provide. It wasn’t working. “Can you help us?” Steve asked with growing tension in his voice.

“No,” there was a long silence. “Not without extensive terraforming. Seems like our lovely little Attractor's instincts were good.” There was the noise of a rover in the distance. It was driving as fast as it could in the low gravity. “Trust her.”

The guys looked at their oxygen supplies, they were down in the red zone. “That, I can help with,” added Marilyn. Before he could speak, a set of doors ejected sideways from the main sandbox and behind them were small canisters of highly compressed oxygen. They'd had more air than they'd known all along. “You really has this planned,” he said to Marilyn as the bubble of dark sand continued its approach. Steve briefly felt an acute sympathy for Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz; this felt like tornadoes down in the Midwest funneling down, and their barn wasn't precisely rated for an alien attack.

“How much time do we have?” he said as if to cast away the fear building inside of him.

“Somehow I trust Sophie.” As the darkness finally became absolute and the sand storm hit the glass visors of the helmets, there was noise to the left. “Guys, put your hands on the cases.” The three men, in the pummeling darkness, kneeled on the sand-covered handles on the boxes containing a hundred newly repatriated martians and two human tourists. Around them, the fireflies were circling, prepared for the attack.

Then, as suddenly as the sand arrived, it began to recede back up. The little shining gems rose up as if they refused to interfere with the girl. The entire bubble had not dissipated, but once again the trio was in the clear eye of the storm. Gas was turning around them and above. They were literally in the center of a vortex. The sand moved sideways about a hundred feet around them. The lights of the vehicle they'd previously heard, no doubt picked up and patched through by Marilyn, punched in, further lighting the darkness. It was a small man-operated vehicle.

At the helm of the small craft were two humans, the first was a large black man, he was driving with a purpose. His passenger was a young twelve-year-old girl. Sophie was wearing a slick suit, helmet resting on her knees. There was air in the cabin. She waved to the team a smile on her lips.

“We are here,” said the sweetest voice amplified by Marilyn over the airways. The wind and the sand appeared to keep a healthy distance from the Attractor. It had backed off to fly about a hundred yards above.

Steve knew the driver, he was one of the last players pushed out of the competition. The Commander had never seen the Attractor in person, and simply seeing the young girl with nothing but his own two eyes was surreal. She was glowing. Sophie’s eyes were wide open, and Marilyn had designed for her a new generation suit. The shimmer around her wrapped the entire vehicle. She was more than shimmering. In the vehicle, the man clipped his helmet; Sophie’s just materialized over her head, formed from micro-machines.

They stopped the vehicle, opened the doors and with a hiss walked out onto the sand. Sophie, in a rush, wasted no time and walked to the men on their knees hands on the box. As she got closer, her attention turned to the receptacle where the balls were stored. Without asking, as if the box was her personal property, she unclipped the latches and opened the first. She grabbed a sphere with a glove, and without wasting a moment, she tossed it up as high as she could above. The sand, as if animated by a unifying intelligence, grabbed it like a falcon grabs a prey. The vortex of martian sand began to sandblast the ball as vortices began to turn the glass ball on itself at hundreds of revolutions per second. In only a brief moment, the sand had shaved away the shell, allowing the sand create from within to escape.

Sophie was smiling ear-to-ear as the empty shell of the broken glass ball fell on the ground, lifeless. “Help me!” she said, sending two more up. The four men needed no more. In a little under two minutes, they had thrown all but three balls. They all felt the sensation like they'd released healed wildlife back into its natural environment. The swirls of life above were joyful.

As Sophie went to grab one of the last three, Steve held back her hand. “These are different, the last three.” He tried to warn her as Marilyn had suggested.

Sophie smiled at him, “Adults,” she whispered his way. It took the large man a second to feel grossly inferior. He looked deep into her sweet eyes. Sophie, this young girl, was different. She was something or someone else, unlike anything he'd encountered before. She threw the last balls up. The clouds did not discriminate. Behind them, the broken globes fell, littering the ground. As the last ball fell down, Sophie smiled.

She raised both hands to the sky.

“There,” she spoke. With the last martian released, the hundred-mile structure above, like mist in the noon sunlight, began a slow march back to the depth of the canyon. It soon vanished without a trace revealing the faint sun. Steve was in complete shock. The young girl had just saved his life. She had returned the creatures, and every immediate problem facing him and his two comrades were gone.

“You,” she pointed at Steve.

“Me?”

“Yes. You are Steve, no?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I have a gift for you.” She stepped aside; behind her stood her driver. The dark man was smiling.

“Steve,” said the man, “it's me, Ronaldo.” There was an awkward silence.

“No fucking way,” Steve finally muttered, eyes wide.

Ronaldo, in yet another’s body, said something he knew Steve could not question. “You bench fifteen less on the left. When I spot you, I refuse to pull it.”

The two men walked to one another in their suits and hugged.

“Ahhh... Gentlemen,” spoke the Attractor, “you will have time to talk as we make our way down.”

Steve looked at Ronaldo. With a twitch of the face, the explorer confirmed the girl was serious. “You are going back in there?” He pointed behind.

“The girl can be persuasive. At some point, it’s all a blur to me. This is my fourth body this month.” The men made the most of it.

“We need equipment, air, we can’t just walk down there.”

“That’s what we have been telling her. It took a lot to get her to suit up. She feels . . .”

Sophie looked at them, “sadly I fear this power is growing and at some point this will be a blur to all of us. We are almost in a dream, my dream. I can’t die in my dream, right?”

There was silence.

The world around her was changing slowly.

The mere fabric of reality was no weakening.