A Million Miles Away

The crimson dust swirled, a perpetual, suffocating embrace. Seth Adams, hunched over the humming machinery that scrubbed the very air he breathed, felt it seep into his soul. Each metallic clank, each hiss of recycled oxygen, was a hammer blow against the crumbling edifice of his hope. Mars. The grand experiment. The salvation. It was, he now knew with a bitter certainty, a gilded cage. And Earth, the doomed planet he’d so eagerly fled, had been a lie. A colossal, planet-sized con.

He worked his fingers, calloused and stained with the grime of Martian labor, over a faulty valve. The schematics on his datapad swam before his eyes, blurring into the same sickly orange as the sky outside. He remembered the speeches, the impassioned pleas from the “elite,” their faces etched with feigned sorrow as they spoke of the asteroid, the inevitable demise of their home world. A necessary sacrifice, they’d called it, to ensure humanity’s survival. Survival for whom, though? Certainly not for the millions crammed onto these rust-colored rocks, breathing manufactured air and dreaming of a planet that was still, in fact, a vibrant, verdant paradise. A paradise, he now understood, that was merely being cleared out for more manicured lawns and exclusive country clubs.

A sharp, metallic ping from his comm unit jolted him back to the present. It wasn’t the usual monotonous chime of a work alert. This one was urgent, its staccato rhythm echoing the frantic beat of his own heart. He swiped it open, his brow furrowed.