All anyone talks about lately is Mars. Mars this, Mars that, when are we going to colonize Mars, as if they don't have a perfectly good planet here, with air they can actually breathe and water they can actually drink.

Back in 1997, NASA landed its first successful Mars rover: Sojourner. It lived a whole 95 days, far exceeding its original life expectancy of a week, before it died a miserable, friendless death one morning in October, its scrap metal corpse forever uncollected, buried in martian dust. What was learned from this exorbitantly expensive endeavor: Mars is a big fucking rock, go figure, and it speaks — or it spoke, once — a single chattering wail bounced from Sojourner to the Mars Pathfinder base, then back to Earth again. A scream. A cry for help.

A marker: H̷̖̥͖̘̩̼̫̰͚͙̐̋̏̆͗E̵̘̕L̴̯̮̜͖͙̖̋̒͋͊̆́̆͌̈̓̏̕̕̕L̶̢̯̠̜̞͔̏̌Ó̷̧̦̣͕̣͉̺͍͖̭̪̝͜ͅͅ,̴̺̈́̓̑̒̌̒̄̑̆̅͐̽̚͠ ̵̛̙͈̃͐̊́̇́́͌͒̈̕͝͝ͅẄ̵̨̛̺͓̬́O̵̡̧̗̤͈̝͉̖͊̑̇̑̈́̈́̽͠R̵̢̪̖̥͚̭̘̼̺̻͆̄̎̄̿́͗̈́͑̈́̀̆̿͘L̸̫̣̤̭͍̬̈́̄D̷̬̩̩͇̫̹̉!̸̰̹͊̾̕

Spirit and Opportunity couldn't repeat this sound in 2004, or Curiosity in 2012, or Perseverance in 2021. Like Sojourner's corpse, it was forgotten or explained away. Human error. Faulty tech, maybe. It was the nineties, after all.

But Vikram remembers.

The true trial of fatherhood is that you can't always control what your children do or do not do, or what they do or not create, or what monsters they invite under their beds or strangers they talk to in the dark of space while your back is turned for half a second, half a beer, half a drunken century. Where did the time go? He only has so many eyes. All anyone talks about lately is Mars, but Vikram doesn't know where the fuck Mars came from, and that's a goddamn problem when you're God.