Universal Monsters XX
“Here’s how terraforming Mars will work.” Space was rolling now and maybe a little drunk on a story that’s been fermented and aging in his mind-cask for over a decade and we don’t know if he cared that we were in the room at all at this point. He didn’t seem to notice but someone switched the presentation on the planetarium dome from “Sunrise” to “Mars.” The red planet spun overhead like a blood-stained Deathstar and Space said, “Asteroids,” and then there was another long silence, which had become kind of trademark at this point.
“It sounds like something out of a terrible movie but this is how it will happen. We’ll attach nuclear thermal rocket engines to giant, icy, ammonia filled fuck-off asteroids and hurl the bastards at Mars. We know where these asteroids are, they’re just hanging out on the edges of the solar system, all we have to do is duct tape the rockets to them and we’re off. The energy released from the impact of each ten-billion-ton asteroid would be approximately one hundred thirty million megawatts. Enough to power the Earth for a decade. Enough energy to send the Delorean back in time 107,438 times.” Space did that math in his head without slowing down.
“Each asteroid would raise the temperature of the planet three degrees Celsius and melt a trillion tons of water. Enough to form a lake the size of Connecticut and one meter deep.
“We would do this for fifty years. For fifty years we’d sling rocks at her and at the end of it all we’d have a temperate climate on that shithole of a planet, which would now be about twenty-five percent covered in water.
“What I’m saying is, creating an environment where life can flourish is violent like you can’t imagine. We can go up there right now. I’ve built the rad shield, we’ve got the rockets. But we’d have to be hermetically sealed. We could walk around a bit, even build a little bubble, probably. But that’s not living. That’s quarantine. And that’s not who we are. A rock is not the boss of us. Not while I’m around. I can bend proud planets to my will. Mars is hard. I’m much harder. And to live like you mean it? To thrive? Fifty years of nuclear powered asteroids, each one equal to seventy-thousand one-megaton H-bombs is what it takes in the best case scenario.
“Living, really living, is violent like you can’t imagine.
“So I looked her up in the phone book. It was a day-trip to her place. Her front door had a five pin tumbler lock. The house was wired with a single circuit alarm. My cat could have bypassed it after an hour of googling.
“But first I just watched. I built a surveillance van to spec with what the FBI was using at the time, working with designs I took off of their server. Three trips to radio shack and I was set. Wired for video and sound. I had eyes and ears on them twenty-four hours a day.
I could set my watch by their schedule. Get up, shitty breakfast, peck on the lips for goodbyes and off to their jobs, about as aware of their lives as Rags. Home, shitty dinner, shitty TV and bed. Husband on the north side of the mattress, wife on the south. Never touching Not even a peck for goodnights. No talking if they could help it. No thinking. Even the toddlers’ tantrums were on a timetable, accurate to within seven minutes and dependent on how far they were from a snack and a nap on each end.
“Emerson taught us that ‘consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’ but he never warned us about the enemies that fire consistency at us from orbital stations. Husbands and children and television shows about doctors that never go to work and mortgages and cheese you eat in strings.
“That’s not living. That’s quarantine.
“She was just so…ordinary. That’s not who we are. And it was. It was treasonous.
“And I can bend worlds.
“I did what had to be done. In the middle of the night on day fourteen, after accumulating terabytes of data, when I was dead-sure my hypothesis was correct and articulately simple to the point a fourth grader could have presented my findings and won the school science fair, I bypassed her lock and her security system and I walked into her home and I very gently murdered her husband and her children and I set everything she owned on fire. Because her life-entire needed to burn.
“She needed to watch her world explode and to catch the ashes on her tongue.
I watched her lay on her lawn and sob. And her tears pooled into a lake roughly the size of Connecticut. And one meter deep.”
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