Posthuman Blues

(Here's something else from the depths of my hard drive . . .)

Simone stood near the concave depression that was the Eye. In the failing Martian sunlight, the depression looked deeper than it was: an almond-shaped pool of grays and muddy reds carved from the mesa's surface by tools long since lost in time and sand.

She lifted herself to the balls of her feet, the soil unyielding under the thin soles of her membrane suit. The suit -- if that was the right term for it -- was essentially a single body-hugging nanocomposite veneer; the shiny green finish rendered her into an unlikely dominatrix.

Simone stepped forward, the hiss of oxygen in her ears as the suit's symbiotic metabolism synced itself with her own. It occurred to her she was essentially naked, lacking the thick exoskeletal armor of the first crewed Mars missions. The only portion of her suit that didn't conform to the contours of her body was the swollen, bifurcated globe of her helmet, with its attendant synthesizer block molded into the small of her back.

The visor, split into two opaque domes like the eyes of a grasshopper, seethed with eglyphic readouts from orbiting observatories, along with the obligatory pop-up advertisements from the commercial consortium that had financed the first permanent human presence at Cydonia Mensae. Ostensibly, the benefit was for the jacked-in masses on Earth who would shortly be watching and experiencing Mars through her eyes. Edging her way into the Eye's basin, Simone had the maniac urge to scratch the top of her close-shaven scalp, where consortium neurotechs had installed her optical uplink.

As she made her way farther down into the Eye basin, the ubiquitous dust grew thicker; her flexible green boots kicked ill-defined clouds that encapsulated her ankles and lingered in her wake like cigarette smoke.

She had been exploring the Face's periphery for the last three hours. Almost half of that had been spent scaling the framing mesa's western edge, all the while diligently examining the multitudinous fossils that encrusted the Face like stubble. The base had vehicles for most exploratory work, but Simone considered the Face somehow exempt from routine measures. Strolling atop the Face reminded her of touring some vast open-air museum; the presence of terrestrial technology, such as the brightly painted machinery that defined Cydonia Base, seemed an unsightly intrusion here.

Simone made out the tip of the Pupil dimly silhouetted against the arcing horizon of the Face's jutting, almost Neanderthal, brow. Calling it a "pupil" was a misnomer, of course, although no doubt the vanished architects had intended it to represent the Eye's center. Seen from above, the Pupil appeared oddly cubist, as if some Platonic shape had been partially melted, twisted and left to dry. Project archaeologists had described it variously as a blunted pyramid and faceted cone. Seen from the depths of the Eye's basin, the Pupil was merely a straight-edged shape, undefined and beckoning.

As the shrunken sun fell behind the horizon, the base's floodlights switched on, casting jaundiced yellow light on the darkening red landscape. Simone turned from the dim, angled bulk of the Pupil and gazed out at the base lit up in the distance, so far away the disparate structures seemed a purposeless bauble glued together by light. The deep Martian night swallowed up the broad, eroded seawall of the Fort to the west, which remained defined solely by the illuminated markers installed by reconnaissance missions over the previous decade.

Even snug inside her membrane suit, Simone experienced a chill. Gaudy animations scrolled in her peripheral vision, requesting her presence back at the base. Angrily severing her attention from the looming Pupil, she summoned a flyer. Immediately a gossamer craft rose from the base's landing field and traced a fragile helix in the night sky. The automated flyer moved with the skittish economy of an insect, leaving a smear of pixilated red light across her electronically assisted eyes.

She urged her helmet-mic closer to her lips with a deft flick of her tongue. "Simone Broden reporting back," she said, typically unsatisfied by the sound of her voice filling the bulbous helmet.

"We have you on the monitor." The answering voice could have been one of the base AIs for all of its enthusiasm. Or else one of the contracted project technicians. Simone marveled that even here, mere kilometers from the complex's outcroppings, boredom remained possible.

"Pickup approaching," Simone said as the flyer swooped into a low ellipse. Its slender titanium thrusters winked as it circled and deployed its grapples. The polymer guide-ropes slithered blindly through the air, only faintly visible as they drew suddenly taut. The flyer's blades slowed and it dropped alarmingly, guide-ropes momentarily slack as it turned on its flood lamps. Simone found herself shielding her oculars with splayed fingers. The flyer's blades were just barely visible in the impossibly thin air; she could hear them amplified by her helmet speakers, politely superimposed on the trance score she had downloaded from the media archive that afternoon.

The helmet's electronics filtered the flyer's glare. Relieved, Simone took a step back to watch the brittle-looking device roll to a practiced stop in the dust. Its lamps threw airborne sand into whirling red cones.

The foamed-titanium carapace fell open unceremoniously. She climbed aboard amidst a cloud of glowing dust that immediately flocked to the static-charged panels glued to the narrow floor and thin canted walls. The flyer was a cramped affair with barely enough room for one; the base used them primarily for telepresence excursions.

The craft ascended automatically as soon as Simone had buckled the single, flimsy-looking restraint harness. She watched through jagged windows as the Face fell away like some great mask. She watched the dim lump of the Pupil eclipsed by distance as the flyer sped over the frozen plain, flood lamps bobbing as if to affirm the existence of the surreal structures fringing the horizon. To the south, she could see the broad, tortured peak of the D&M Pyramid coming into view. Holographic beacons formed a lopsided triangle on its bulging northeast flank, shining like pastel flames as they cycled through their retinue of advertisements.