The Call

  55-year-old Daniel Blythe, one-time owner and CEO of a Canadian potable water company called Aqua Relief, which he had started with the help of his wife and two sons back on Earth, sat in a yoga position in the center of his transparent isolation pod on the surface of Mars. He pulled his personal Earthlink communicator from the large pocket of his robe and flipped it on. A glowing blue screen appeared in space some ten feet in front of him, nearly touching the wall of his small octagonal enclosure. Roughly fifty inches across and thirty inches high, the screen was packed tight with legal mumbo jumbo, which he squinted at because he hadn’t needed reading glasses when he’d left Earth three years earlier, but boy did he need them now. Whatever – here on the red planet you did your time and made do with what you had. If you didn’t make it back, well, that had been part of the deal going in, hadn’t it?

  The words on the glowing screen were his last will and testament, as written before his wife Annette had died along with most of Florida in the latest barrage of super hurricanes to try to annihilate North America’s eastern shore. His sons had been in a business meeting in Canada at the time of her death. Robert and George Blythe had moved north along with a throng of desperate Americans. In the cyclic climate shifts that had started in real earnest in the late 2020’s and reached their second crescendo (hopefully) in this year 2045, Mother Nature had blessed Canada, making it one of the nicest places on Earth to live, pleasantly tropical most of the year, while much of the rest of the globe transformed into some level of Dante’s Inferno. Living space in Canada, once a sparsely populated country, was now at a premium, and money talked. His sons had been able to buy themselves into permanent residence in northern Ontario. His wife Annette had refused to leave their place in Florida, and she had paid the ultimate price for her stubbornness.

  The largest governments of Earth had joined in 2030 to create Project Life Raft, a strategy to send small groups to Mars every two years to begin a habitat that could someday guarantee human existence. No experience necessary, and no age restriction -- you just had to put your name in a lottery, pass some basic qualification tests, and be willing to go for the four-year stint. They had learned early on that they had to promise a trip home, or they simply wouldn’t get the mass cooperation from the public that they required. Anyone who survived the four years and made it back had 500 million dollars waiting for them in a secured account -- enough for a down payment on a primo condo in downtown Toronto. If you didn’t make it back, the money was distributed according to your will.  

  He hadn’t needed to come to Mars; he had done it to prove something to his sons. He was retired, his sons had taken over the business, and he loathed the direction they had taken it. They had begun offering those most desperate and unable to pay for the potable water shipped from the melted glaciers of the Arctic Ocean a deal called the Aqua Relief Lifeline -- sign away half of all future income to them for six months of drinkable water. Daniel, an ex-military man who believed in service to others over self, had been aghast. But the strategy had made his sons the richest two people on Earth, at least on paper, in less than a year.

  He had agreed to put his name in the lottery, something neither Robert nor George would do, because, as he told them, it was the right thing to do for mankind.

  “We are at war with our own greed and short-sightedness here on Earth,” he’d said. “The frontline of this war is on Mars, and your old man is signing up.”

  He had agreed to funnel his Mars pay into Aqua Relief, the idea being to prove to them you could make money honestly. He’d made his announcement at Thanksgiving, and his sons had laughed about it over turkey dinner. None of them had expected him to be picked. With half the world population on the list, statistically you had a better chance of being hit by lightning whilst being devoured by a shark.

  And yet here he was. He had bequeathed the money to Annette because she had always been level-headed and couldn’t be pushed around by her sons. She would see that the money was transferred legitimately. Only now she was gone.

  “Delete ‘to Annette Blythe, to be distributed as she sees fit to my sons, Robert and George Blythe’”, he said to the room. The words on the floating screen rearranged themselves. “Replace with ‘back to Project Life Raft, on agreement that it be distributed to those families who have signed up for the Aqua Relief Lifeline’.”

  Maybe that little twist would teach them something, although he doubted it.

  He could have told the small soft-cornered device he held in his hand to send, and that would have been it. Roughly twenty minutes later and Mission Control would receive his directive. Due to the concerns over dementia, he and the others could only change their wills twice per Earth calendar year – any more often than that and Mission Control could freeze all of their assets until their return, or distribute the estate in accordance with general law if they didn’t. In Daniel’s case, that would mean the money would be split evenly and go directly to his sons.

  Instead of sending, he laid the device on the round carpet that he had brought with him from Earth and walked to the edge of his enclosure. He stared out the transparent plexiglass panes at the other enclosures glowing around him. Together they looked like an outcropping of pimples. They were all self-sustaining, with chlorophyll-based oxygenators built underground that would last the four years, give or take. The take end had meant that three of the forty people Daniel had landed here with had already suffocated. They all ate dehydrated food, which was likewise kept in the ground under their tiny enclosures. Again, four years’ worth, give or take.  Low-lying fans built into tubes in the ground generated electricity when the absurdly strong Mars winds blew. These were stationary, and if the winds didn’t blow in your direction, too bad, you were in the dark.

  The first pioneers to arrive had built a large single commune, which had proven disastrous; none of the original forty had survived, and those that came after them said that the winds had decimated the original enclosure until there was no sign of it. After that, they built things stronger, smaller, and lower to the ground. Individual pods were considered most stable, although they inhibited the work necessary to grow a communal outpost. Work was currently underway on a larger structure that, with modern materials from Earth and the potential to build from raw materials on Mars, would hopefully stay standing. To work on the new structure, those in their pods had to don their single spacesuit, tethered to their pod by a thin hundred-yard life tether, also stored buried under their pod. If your spacesuit or tether malfunctioned, well, too bad for you. You would be spending the remainder of your time sitting uselessly in your pod, trying to maintain your sanity while you circled the inside attempting to maintain your muscle mass.

  None of this hardship and uncertainty bothered Daniel much. He’d spent his thirties and forties in the bleak deserts of Afghanistan. He’d seen his friends die in ridiculous circumstances, over nothing more than putting their foot on the wrong patch of land or letting their guard down around the wrong civilian. This was no worse, really. Only different.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true. Something new had cropped up recently. It had been nicknamed The Call and was considered by many, including Daniel, to be nothing more than isolation-onset insanity.  He’d seen enough of that in the Afghan desert. Others thought it might be something else.

  It would start with the affected pacing their enclosure. Of course, many of them paced their enclosures when not working, so that wasn’t a reliable indicator, but they would also appear to talk to themselves. Arguing, shaking their head, sometimes stamping their feet on the ground in apparent anger. When someone started showing such symptoms – and everyone around could see them through the transparent walls of their pods – it was reason for concern.

  So far, they had lost five people to The Call. Out of a crew of forty, that was reason for concern. Worse, there seemed to be a pattern. Three of them were all from the same quadrant of nearby pods, the other two similarly grouped. Some were saying that this suggested a form of transmission.

  Either that, Daniel thought to himself, or it was just coincidence. Five people did not make a statistically significant group upon which to draw any strong conclusions. Madness was common enough here. They would probably lose a few more that way in this final year, with only thirty-two left.

  Those that did succumb to the crazies, or The Call, or whatever you wanted to call it, eventually breached their pod without their suit on. The rash of two deaths had been just kiddy corner to Daniel’s pod, and one had killed himself while Daniel slept, but the other – a woman in her sixties with flowing grey hair – had done it right in front of him. Her face had been beatific, as if she thought she was about to meet her personal God, or whatever deity the voice in her head prayed to at any rate. She had gotten no more than twenty feet before her lungs collapsed and she dropped to the ground already half frozen, landing like a toppled mannequin face-first in the rusty dirt. She had lay there all the Martian night until the morning crew disposed of her.

  Daniel had watched her descent into madness with some fascination. It had started with a few ticks of the neck. He had seen people who suffered from Tourette’s syndrome; it was a similar affectation. Then she had started the pacing and the talking to herself, her thin white gown trailing out behind her like a flag as she did quick circles of her enclosure.

  He had paid close attention to her mouth, because he had the impression that she was not speaking German, her native tongue. It wasn’t English, either. Her face was too animated, her tongue seeming to perform some strange acrobatics. He had felt a cold realization grow inside him that the language she was spitting so vehemently wasn’t in the human lexicon at all.

 Now he shook his head, trying to clear it of the memories. He was going to go crazy himself if he wasn’t careful. He went back to the circular rug, sat down, and picked up his communicator.

  “Send,” he said to the device.

  It chimed in a tone that sounded like a question. It was requesting confirmation.

  “Confirm”, he said.

  A progress bar appeared at the top of the screen, verifying that the document was being sent to Mission Control. The contents of the document also scrolled by as it sent. The device, like everything here, was designed for low power, and it couldn’t manage much more data throughput than an ancient twentieth-century modem.

  Daniel’s signature scrolled by at the bottom of the document… only it wasn’t the bottom. The document continued to scroll; the screen filled with a solid block of nonsense. A lot of i’s and k’s, t’s and r’s. Nearly all consonants, very few vowels.

  “Cancel,” Daniel said, but it was already too late. The screen indicated that the document had already been sent.

  The communicator auto recorded when it was being dictated to, keeping the last fifteen minutes or so in case of mistranslation or corruption. Daniel pressed a button and the document on the screen was replaced by his own likeness. Screen Daniel had just picked the device up and sat down after his look out at the darkness of the Mars nightscape. Daniel expected his likeness to say “Send”, but it didn’t.

  On the screen, Daniel’s head twitched spastically to the left. Three twitches in quick succession. He looked directly into the camera, and his eyes grew dark. He began to speak, but it wasn’t like any language Daniel had ever heard. It was all clicks, grunts, and high-pitched squeals. Those sounds made the watching Daniel want to crawl out of his own skin.

  Then the screen Daniel’s eyes cleared.

  “Send,” he said.

  “Confirm.”

  Daniel shut off the device. He thought he understood now. The Call was indeed infectious. It was spread via that inhuman language he had just heard himself speak. If he was right, then it could be transmitted by the mere act of watching an infected person’s lips as they spoke it.

  Daniel’s heart was beating fast. He set the device aside, sat cross-legged, and tried to calm himself. He had always somehow known that he was destined to die far away from home. Earlier in his life he had thought it would be in some foreign country. Instead, it would be here, in this cold wasteland.

  In approximately twenty minutes, Mission Control would receive his will, along with the unplanned payload at the end. Would the madness spread to them through the simple act of looking over the drivel at the end of that message, the communicator’s attempt to translate an alien language using the English alphabet? He didn’t know.

  If it did, things were about to get worse on Earth. A whole lot worse. He suddenly felt a flood of love for his two sons, as powerful as a shot of adrenaline. As disappointed as he had been in their endeavours, he hoped that they beat whatever he might have just wreaked on Earth. If they didn’t beat it, he hoped that they could at least fight it with some honour.

  “I’m so sorry,” Daniel said. He closed his eyes.

  Outside, the Mars wind lifted a comb of dust two hundred feet into the infinite black sky.