MARTIAN CHRONICLES

Cory Doctorow

They say you can’t smell anything through a launch hood, but I still smelled the pove in the next seat as the space attendants strapped us into our acceleration couches and shone lights in our eyes and triple-checked the medical readouts on our wristlets to make sure our hearts wouldn’t explode when the rocket boosted us into orbit for transfer to the Eagle and the long, long trip to Mars.

He was skinny, but not normal-skinny, the kind of skinny you get from playing a lot of sports and taking the metabolism pills your parents got for you so you wouldn’t get teased at school. He was kind of potbellied with scrawny arms and sunken cheeks, and he was brown-brown, like the brown Mom used to slather on after a day at the beach covered in factor-500 sunblock. Only he was the kind of all-over-even brown that you only got by being born brown.

He gave me a holy-crap-I’m-going-to-MARS smile and a brave thumbs-up and I couldn’t bring myself to snub him because he looked so damned happy about it. So I gave him the same thumbs-up, rotating my wrist in the strap that held it onto the armrest so that I didn’t accidentally break my nose with my own hand when we “clawed our way out of the gravity well.” (This was a phrase from the briefing seminars that they liked to repeat a lot. It had a lot of macho going for it.)

The pove smelled like garbage. There, I said it. No nice way of saying it. Like the smell out of the trash chute at the end of our property line. It had been my job to haul our monster-sized tie-and-toss bags to the curb every day and toss them down that chute and into the tunnel system that took them out to the Spruce Sunset Meadows recycling center, which was actually outside the Spruce Sunset Meadows wall, all the way in Springville, where there was a gigantic megaprison. The prisoners sorted all our trash for us, which was good for the environment, since they sorted it into about four hundred different categories for recycling, and good for us because it meant we didn’t have to do all that separating in our kitchen. On the other hand, it did mean that we had to have a double crosscut shredder for anything like a bill or a legal document so that some crim didn’t use it to steal our identities when he got out of jail. I always wondered how they handled the confetti that came out of the shredder, if they had to pick up each little dot of it with their fingernails and drop it into a big hopper labeled PAPER.

Mom and Dad were forward in the adults’ cabin, where they were being served fake no-booze Champagne (no one was allowed to touch alcohol for seventy-two hours before lift—this was also from the briefing, and had been accompanied by graphic images of free-fall vomit), far from the howling, spitting kiddilees.

The announcements played twice, once in English and once in “Simplified English,” for the foreigners. Simplified English had been new to me when I entered the program, but I soon got used to it, words of one or two syllables drawn from a vocab of five thousand or so. I sometimes even found myself chatting in it over dinner with my parents, which drove them crazy. But Simplified was the official mission language, which had been decreed by the Mars Corp in its charter on the sensible grounds that we couldn’t have a new world with a hundred stupid complicated languages, but English was as stupid and complicated as they come—“the tough coughs as he ploughs the dough”—so Simplified was the right compromise.

The pove listened closely to both sets of announcements, like he was anxious to learn Real English so he could stop being such a pove, but I knew it was a lost cause. Poves are poves are poves. Once you’re born a pove, you get all the lessons of being a pove, the idea that the world owes you a living, that you can just get by being lazy and begging, and it’s nearly impossible to unlearn that lesson. But he’d have to, if he was going to make it on Mars. No handouts on Mars, pove!

They played the liftoff countdown through the PA in the cabin, and at first we all laughed and counted down with it, like it was New Year’s Eve: 10, 9, 8 . . .

But by 4, no one was counting along. The whole ship was rumbling like a dragon, shaking slightly, feeling full of potential, like it had its legs coiled underneath it and it was getting ready to jump, which it was. And when it did—3—we would be under way, on a one-way journey to an alien world, and we would never see the green hills of Earth again.

At 2, I started crying, really bawling, though I couldn’t tell you why. Screw the Earth, anyway, the crummy old planet with its environmental bellyaching, its teeming anthills of poves and refugees and crazy religious people with their suicide bombs. But it was Earth, my Earth, my homeworld, and—

1.

I wasn’t the only one crying. We were all sobbing, and the only reason it didn’t sound like a nursery school before nap time was that the engines were so damned loud you’d couldn’t hear it if you threw back your head and screamed as loud as you could. The pove next to me was crying, too, and I wondered if his parents were forward, or whether he was one of the orphans the Mars Charity put on board the ship to show what a great bunch of people they all were. We all were.

And then we were boosting. It was like a thousand hands on every centimeter of me, pushing as hard as they could, even on the back of my throat, on my tongue, on my nose, on my lungs, and it didn’t stop, it got worse and worse and worse and then

everything

went

black.

The next thing I knew, the pressure was off, and I seemed to be falling in no particular direction. I had just enough time to open my eyes and see the loose ends of my face mask straps floating around my head and think, Free fall! and then my stomach decided to send everything it had up to have a look at the wonder of space travel. I gagged and tried to pitch forward, but the straps held me in.

Mars, Inc. had anticipated this, of course. Us kiddilees hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for twenty-four hours—the grown-ups ate like hogs, but they had the antinausea injections that weren’t kidsafe. My stomach was practically empty, except for some stringy green mucous and bile that tasted like—well, it tasted like puke!—and it burned in my throat and sinuses. A little escaped my lips and floated up my nose and back down my throat and I started to choke.

I wasn’t the only one. Lots of people were making gagging noises and choking noises. The blob of puke was lodged in my windpipe and I could only get whistling sips of air past it, and I was seeing stars. There weren’t any space attendants nearby, and even though I was mashing the call button, I couldn’t hear anyone rushing to my aid.

Then there were small, calloused fingers at my straps, undogging my shoulders, arms, wrists, forehead, so that I could lean forward—the falling feeling worse than ever, my stomach churning. A small, strong fist thumped me between the shoulders and I coughed convulsively and the puke was back in my mouth and I spat it out and saw it wobble away like a jellyfish.

It was only then that I saw whose small hands had been on me. The pove, who had somehow slipped his bonds and had hooked his foot through one of his straps so that he was able to maneuver while floating above me. He smiled at me as my puke-jellyfish hit him in the chest, leaving a splotch like a greasy paintball hit.

“You okay?” he said. He had a funny convenience-store-clerk accent, clipped but somehow liquid.

“Fine,” I said, and it came out with a rasp from my burning throat. He had drifted so that he was upside down, his face bobbing centimeters from mine. “Thanks.” It was disorienting. He had toothpaste breath. It made me conscious of the fact that my breath smelled like a dead bear’s butthole.

He put a hand out. “Vijay Mukherjee,” he said.

“David Brionn Oglethorpe Smith,” I said. He snorted. I was used to that. I waited until he’d finished snickering and said, “The Third.” It’s true. Great-grandad had been the first, converted from Brian to Brionn by a Marine induction sergeant who couldn’t spell, and I was the third to bear his name. It was silly and long and weird, but it was mine, and no one else had a name like it (except Dad and Great-grandad, of course).

I still felt like I was falling, but it wasn’t as unpleasant as it had been, and I could see where it would stop feeling like falling and start feeling like flying, eventually. “Thanks,” I said, then “sorry,” gesturing at his stained shirt. He waved off my apology.

“Think nothing of it. We’re going into space together, my friend! We can’t let little things get to us!” He shook my hand again. He had calloused fingers, but a soft handshake, limp and a little damp. Everyone I knew shook hands like they meant it. But this pove—Vijay!—had rescued me from my choking and hadn’t put up a fuss when I puked on him. (A nasty part of me wondered if his slum or whatever wasn’t carpeted in worse things than puke). I could live with a damp handshake.

The space attendant finally showed up and demanded to know what we were doing out of our straps and then didn’t want to listen when he explained. The spacer—who floated through the air with the greatest of ease—strapped us back in without missing a word in his lecture on shuttle safety.

I turned my head to look at Vijay and I could see that he was doing the same. “Thanks again,” I said, my voice muffled by my mask, which reeked of barf.

He gave me another thumbs-up, and then we boosted again and were pushed back into the chairs.

Debarking at Eagle’s Nest Station was a lot simpler than boarding had been on Earth. The space attendants swarmed us and bound us wrist-and-foot to our neighbors with soft bungee cords in chains of ten kids. Then they simply grabbed the lead kid and towed the whole chain along the length of the shuttle, through grown-up territory, through the air lock, and into the station’s mustering area. We were cut loose and then each of us was issued a set of one-size-fits-all Velcro gloves and slippers, and we struggled into them, some of us flying off into the low ceiling, which might as well have been the floor, except that no one was standing on it at the moment.

It was all pretty chaotic. Every few seconds, ten more colonists came through the air lock, pushing us all farther in, and anyone who wasn’t Velcroed down drifted away, and it soon became clear that there just wouldn’t be enough room in the mustering area for all of us, but more people started coming out, and I couldn’t find Mom or Dad in the press, and then Vijay plucked his way along the carpet to me and said, “Come on, it’s too crowded on this wall, let’s stand on one of the others,” which sounded like a crazy plan but I couldn’t say exactly why, so we pushed off together and grabbed the ceiling with toes and hands, laughing as we were skidding and ripped around until we were standing upside down (relative to everyone else, though I still felt like I was falling in every direction at once). At first people stared at us in that familiar hey-you-stupid-kids-cu-tit-out way, but as the room grew more and more crowded, many of the other kids and then some of the grown-ups joined us on the “ceiling.”

I knew some of the other kids from orientation. There was the big, butchy red-haired boy who liked to mouth off, but who was looking as pukey as I felt. There was the shy girl with the incredible movie-star face and big, wide-set violet eyes, who wasn’t looking shy at all now, but was looking frankly and unashamedly at the upside down adults below her, peering through the seaweed tangle of hair that floated around her head. There was the dreamy girl who never turned her earphones off—you could tell, even though they were implants, because she was always doing this head-bobbing thing to the rhythm—now wide awake and plucking her way across the ceiling on her hands, feet brushing the hair of the adults “below.”

I spotted Mom and Dad just before the space attendants pushed through the last tensome and dogged the air lock. As it sealed, the air pressure in the room changed slightly and I realized with a shiver that the funny-looking door I’d passed through wasn’t just a door, it was a door between two spaceships and that the only thing that had stopped me from being sucked into space where my lungs and eyeballs would explode while my body turned into a freeze-dried popsicle had been some accordioned metal, rubber, and plastic. And now that was gone, and the shuttle that had lifted us to Eagle’s Nest was floating through that same void.

The same void that I was going the spend the next six months sailing through in a tin can whose thin skin would be all that stood between me and total assplosion.

A space attendant standing sideways, sticking out of the wall like a thumbtack, touched an invisible button on her work space and a two-note whistle sounded. “Colonists, attention please.” Her voice was amplified and came from every corner of the room. It was the same system they used in orientation: the room’s cameras knew where the speaker was and tuned an array of directional mics to follow them, so that you could speak without the inconvenience of a mic. “Colonists?” she said again, when the chatter barely dimmed. It was as loud as a rocket engine (well, not quite) from all the talking. She twiddled an invisible knob, using some hand jive the ship’s computer understood. “COLONISTS,” she said again, her voice so loud it actually made we want to go to the toilet as it vibrated the poo I hadn’t realized was lurking up my colon.

The silence was thunderous. My ears rang. “Welcome to Eagle’s Nest,” she said, “I am Lainie. Just Lainie. As in ‘Lainie Lainie, no complainy.’ I am your mommy for the next six glorious months aboard the Eagle, and it will be my job to head off any potential strife before it rises to the level of complaint. We live by a strict ‘no whining’ ethic on Mars—that’s why you signed up to go—and it’s never too soon to start practicing.” She gestured at the kids and the few adults on the “ceiling.” “I see that some of you have already gotten into the no-complainy state of mind and solved your own problems by your own wits. Good people of upside down land, I salute you.” She ripped off a perfect navy salute. Her uniform was vaguely naval, though Mars Colony didn’t have a navy or an army. It had a security force, of course, contracted for out of the colonial fees and charged with enforcing our Mutual Code of Conduct and Respect. But Lainie didn’t talk like one of the meatheads who worked security around the Mars, Inc. properties; she talked like a Marsy, smart and confident and assertive. Like my parents and all their friends.

“Now, we are just about ready to move you from the Nest straight onto the Eagle. We’ve been making her ready for days now, and she is just in her final inspection from the International Space Agency—” She squeaked out “International Space Agency” in a pinched, cartoony voice, the way every Martian did. No one liked the pencil pushers at the ISA, with all their stupid rules. “And then we can get you aboard. We didn’t anticipate this delay, and unfortunately, we can’t let you wander around the Nest. This is a working jobsite, and there’s no way you could be safely permitted to move about freely, much as we’d like to let you.” She drew a breath and said, in one long word, “Marsincdeeplyregretstheinconvenience,” and grinned. More than a few people chuckled with her. Phrases like “deeply regrets the inconvenience” were the kind of thing we were going to Mars to escape.

“It shouldn’t be very long folks. In the meantime, think happy thoughts, talk among yourselves, mingle. These are the people you’ll be spending the next six months with. These are the people you’ll be sharing a planet with for the rest of your lives.”

Okay, an admission. I’m not much of a Martian. Martians are supposed to be full of colonial pluck, ready to grab Earth’s neighboring planet with both hands and head butt that mother into submission. We are the winners, humanity’s best hope for surviving once stupid Earth is used up by the poves and the stupids. We’re all rich, of course, and that’s how you know we’re winners. We didn’t whine like all the poves who claim that the world owes them a living. We made our own fortunes on Earth and now we’re off to set up a new planet that’ll be as great as the Earth could be, if only you left all the whiners out.

But I’m not much of a Martian. I’m not much of a winner. I guess that makes me a loser.

Here’s the thing: my grades are okay, Bs and B plusses, except for a C in American history, which, honestly, I deserved. I think I slept through more than half those classes. I would have given me a D minus.

Here’s the thing: I’m not the popular kid. I’m not even the popular kid’s best friend. I’m the kid that the popular kid’s best friend used to play with before he made friends with the popular kid. I’m not the last picked for teams, but I’m the last picked from the kids who aren’t total spazzes or fat or handicapable or whatever.

Here’s the thing: the only place I’m not a loser is when I’m playing Martian Chronicles, the Mars Colony game that I’ve lived, breathed, eaten, and shat for the past five years. The reason for this is that I am a stone Martian Chronicles monster freak. I can play MC for eighteen hours without coming up for air, bringing it with me to the toilet and the table. There’s something that just fits in the game, which sounds kind of boring from the outside: you are a Mars colonist and you have to build your homestead, sell your wares and services, work to elect sympathetic officials (or become an official yourself), and try to get your neighbors to see things your way when it comes to the day-to-day running of Ares City.

Boring, right? Wrong. The game is all about figuring out what everyone else wants, and how to make them feel like they’re getting it, even though you’re really the one getting what you want. I have a huge fortune in MC. I’m a ray-gun millionaire. (The Mars, Inc. company scrip—our money—is called “the ray gun,” or “the Martian ray gun” if you’re feeling formal. There’s even a ray gun on every bill, stylized and old-fashioned and cool.) Not real money, but I know that if I can do it in MC, I’ll be able to do it on Mars. And then I won’t be a loser anymore, and I’ll be a real Martian.

I am self-aware enough to know how pathetic this sounds. And I’m pathetic enough that I don’t care.

The Eagle took on her passengers after three long hours stuck in the Eagle’s Nest mustering area. For a group of no-whiners, there was a lot of complaining about the strange, lengthy time stuck there in zero-gee (not technically zero, as orientation had reminded us, just microgravity but I couldn’t tell the difference), waving back and forth in the air-recirculator’s breeze like a bed of sea kelp. They whined about the wait. They whined about the line for the toilet. Then they saw the toilet—a kind of giant vacuum cleaner you stuck your whole ass into—and they whined about that. The only ones who weren’t whining were the kids who were hanging from the ceiling and the adults who’d joined us. We were having too much fun in upside down land to worry about the toilets or the wait. And there was plenty of room on the roof.

“What’s your corp?” the girl with the violet eyes said, with no preamble at all. She was asking about Martian Chronicles—specifically, what my corporate affiliation was in-game. That is, which team I played for.

“DBOS-Corp,” I said casually. She had thrown up on the shuttle, too—I could tell by the flecks of dried puke down the front of her shirt.

She nodded sagely. “I hear good things about it, but isn’t it a hard company to ladder up in? Super-competitive?”

“I don’t really need to worry about that,” I said. “I’m the CEO.” It didn’t come out as casual as I’d hoped, because I caught someone’s floating, gelatinous sneeze in the eye as I said it and ended up twitching and flinching away.

She cocked her head at me. “If you’re lying, I’ll find out as soon as we get our cabins. And then I’ll spend the next six months making fun of you.”

I held up two fingers in an obsolete Boy Scout salute. “I swear by Ares, God of War. May he strike me down with, uh, lightning?” (I wasn’t really clear on what Ares—the Greek name for Mars—did in the course of his war-godly duties.)

“Okay, that’s impressive.”

“Seriously,” said a voice from a few centimeters “over” my head. I looked up and found Vijay floating in space just “above” (Okay, I’m going to stop with the “above” and “over” and “below” quotes. There was no up or down, okay?) “That is fantastic. Really top-hole.”

He’d taken off his light jacket and twisted it into a rope with one of his Velcro gloves safety-pinned to the end of the sleeve and stuck to the bulkhead’s surface. In effect, he’d created an anchor line, and he was using it to fly around the middle of the room like a superhero.

Violet-eyes’s face twisted up like, Who’s the pove? and I said, “This is Vijay. He flies. Apparently.”

Vijay stuck his hand out and she took it. “Helene Gonzales-Ginsburg,” she said.

“I’m Dave,” I said, feeling like I was falling behind.

“Dave Smith,” Vijay said, inches from my ear. “I should have made the connection when you told me your name. Well, that is interesting!”

“What corp do you work for?” Helene said, pointedly.

“Oh,” he said, airily, “I work for the auditor-general.”

Now it was my turn to boggle. The AGs were one of the exalted heights that every player secretly aspired to. They only recruited players with absolutely, positively impeccable reps, and gave them the power to kick open the doors of any corp, any meeting, and go over its books with a fine-tooth comb and confiscate any money that wasn’t properly accounted for. They could take away your corporate charter, bust your character down to the bottom rank. You didn’t get to be an AG without playing a long, hard, tight game that made you a lot more friends than enemies. I was a pretty top dog, but Vijay was a minor god. Whoa.

“Work for?” Helene said. “What does that mean, work for? You snitch for them for money?”

“No,” he said. “I am a senior auditor.” We both boggled. A bit of drool actually attained separation and liftoff from my lip, forming a glossy sphere that drifted off toward one of the air-recirc vents. Senior auditor! He wasn’t just a god, he was a major god.

Suddenly I felt very self-conscious. Vijay could buy or sell us all ten times over in MC.

But then I realized that I could probably buy and sell Vijay ten times over in real life. It’s a kind of nasty, ungenerous thought, but it made me feel better. And worse.

“Of course,” he said, “that’s all just for another three months.”

Three months. Turnaround. In three months, we’d stop facing Earth and the ship would spin around to face Mars. In three months, we’d be closer to Mars than to Earth, and the light-speed lag would hit a brutal one hundred seconds, making the game almost unplayable. So in three months, the ship’s network array will cut over to Mars and we’ll all start fresh, new characters on the Mars servers.

Yes, Martian Chronicles is big on Mars. Yes, they actually play a life-on-Mars simulator on Mars. Except, of course, on Mars, it means something, because the best lessons learned on Mars server are actually turned into policies for Mars government.

In three months, we’d all start over as noobs in the Martian Chronicles. And three months after that, we’d touch down and we’d all be noobs on Mars. I was abandoning DBOS-Corp. Vijay was abandoning his position as senior auditor. Thousands of hours flushed down the toilet.

“Who do you play for, Helene?” I said.

She grinned, not looking shy at all anymore. “I’m a raider,” she said.

We both drew back from her involuntarily, and I lost my balance and ended up standing on my head for a moment while I sorted myself out.

A raider! They were the scum of Mars. They’d borrow a giant amount of money and use it to buy up a majority share of a corp, then they’d vote that the corp should take on their debt. Then they’d sell off all the corp’s assets to pay the debts, leaving behind a hollow shell, sucked as dry as a bug in a spider’s web. It was great for the “investors” who loaned the raiders their initial stake—they could take millions of player-hours’ worth of work and turn it into a nice fat bank balance for themselves. Was it “legal”? Well, no one would send you to jail for it. And it was an open secret that some of the biggest corps had been founded by—or had bankrolled—raiders. If an auditor caught raiders in the act, he could bust up the party, but it was all part of the game. That didn’t change the fact that I was instantly tempted to punch Helene in her movie-star nose and then push her out the air lock.

She giggled.

“You should see the look on your face! Come on, it’s just a game.” They always said that. “Besides, maybe I’ll change my ways when we hit apogee. Start clean on Mars as a goody-two-shoes corporate worker bee.”

Vijay nodded. “And maybe I’ll be a raider,” he said.

I swallowed. I wanted to say something like, “I will be a CEO. I have always been a CEO. It’s all I ever wanted to be.” But “it’s just a game” didn’t allow me to say anything like that. There was one place in the world—and off the world—where I wasn’t a loser, and that was in the Martian Chronicles. I’d come to grips with the fact that I was going to have to abandon my beautiful, perfect corporation in ninety days, but only by promising myself that I’d start building a new corp on day ninety-one.

“It’s just a game,” I said.

The Eagle had only been finished two weeks before we boarded, the last carpets laid, the last bunks prepared, the last safety checks completed. But it still smelled like people had been sweating freely in its corridors for generations. Smelled like a cross between the locker room and the garbage-filled green canal outside of the wall of Spruce Sunset Meadows on a hot day.

The Smell—it deserved the capital S—traveled like a sneaky fart into the Eagle’s Nest in small gusts as the colonists mustered in groups of ten through the far air lock, just as they had entered by the opposite lock. Each time the lock cycled, a little bit more of that toxic air puffed out, until the room was choking on putrescence. Dad broke off from the intense conversation he’d been having with his buddies and gestured impatiently for me to join him and led me to the lock. He had a look on his face of steadfast refusal to face reality. He was not going to admit that the spaceship we were about to take up residence in had a Smell. We were going to Mars and it was all going to be so freaking awesome that it was impossible to even take notice of any imperfection, not even a Smell with its own capital letter. No whining!

Mom took my hand and helped me down onto the same local vertical as them and we Velcro-shuffled our way to the lock, rip, rip, rip, a family hand-in-hand, with our space-bags slung over our shoulders, about to become pioneers, about to leave behind Earth and all its authorities and laws and rules and governments. We were going to a place where we could be Free, with a capital F, and if Free had a Smell, so be it.

The air lock closed behind us; the equalization hiss was the only sound in the lock. There were ten of us, and I noticed that Vijay was part of our gang and managed to nod at him and he nodded back. Now that the lock was sealed, we were officially, irrevocably gone. When the International Space Agency completed its certification tour of the Eagle, they completed their duty to the citizens of Earth’s nations, and now they had no more authority over us. No one on Earth did. We were in space, and we were a new human race, free as almost no human being had ever been free. No one had any claim over us or our work or our freedom except for our peers, the people we’d elected to go to an alien world with. We were off to start anew.

And we couldn’t arrive a moment too soon.

Spaceships suck. You probably didn’t realize that, but they do. Spaceships are small, cramped, smelly, and crowded. Our cabin—the room that Mom, Dad, and I would spend the next six months in—was smaller than the mudroom at home, where we took our boots and coats off before going into the house. All the furniture folded away into the walls, and there was no toilet or shower. We had to share the communal toilets at the end of the hallway. Supposedly, there was one toilet for every six people, which someone had calculated was optimal. At home, we had four toilets for three people, not counting the one in the basement. And anyway, Helene did a count once we were under way and calculated that there was one toilet for every twelve people, not that any of the grown-ups would listen to her.

The toilets had a double Smell—that putrid human smell that got worse, not better, as time went by (as though my nose was bravely refusing to get used to it, sacrificing itself by insisting on staying totally revolted by it so that I would know that I should get out ASAP), and the lesser smell of the air-freshener that squirted constantly out of little misters around the giant vacuum cleaner head that we stuck our butts into. That was like the smell of bubble gum, times one million, and it clung to your clothes after you used the head so that you smelled it for hours.

Yes, we were pioneers. Pioneers had never had it very comfortable.

“They drove covered wagons across America,” my Dad said. “They were killed by bandits, by Indians, by disease. They starved. They baked. They froze. They drowned.” Dad’s grandparents came to America from Spain and Holland. They were middle-class architects who met at university and married and moved to San Diego because they wanted to live by the Pacific Ocean, and they did for most of their lives, retiring to Arizona just before most of San Diego ended up underwater. The closest anyone in my ancestry had come to a covered wagon was a business-class seat on a British Airways 777 to LAX.

“Yup,” I said. “They sure did. Nevertheless, Dad, you have to admit that this ship is kind of crappy. None of the carpets are laid straight. Half the doors don’t close right. Your bed falls off the wall every time you fold it out.”

He grinned a little. “Yeah, okay, it’s not exactly the Queen Mary. But it’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to get us from Earth to Mars in one piece. If you don’t like the room, there’s always the lounge.”

Junior Colonists (yes, seriously, “Junior Colonists”) had their own lounges, three of them, one on each deck. These were comparatively large spaces in the center of the ship, where there was almost no gravity. The Eagle was a big spinning doughnut, with lots of centripetal force—which feels a lot like gravity—around the edges, and almost none in the middle. The floaty parts in the middle were mostly shunned by grown-ups, who found them a little ulpy-gulpy and were prone to losing their lunches in the middle of our play areas. That was fine by us.

The JC lounges were pretty big to start with, but the absence of gravity made them even bigger, because it meant that we could use the ceilings, walls, and middle as functional space, and we did. At any time of the “day” or “night”—the ship had a twenty-four-Martian-hour clock that the colonists stuck to—you’d find it full of kids, most of us in our teens (the little ’uns had supervised play areas that parents took turns overseeing). We’d be flying around the space with fins on our hands and long bungee cords around our waists, or we’d be tethered to something, with our faces masked by goggles and our hands running up and down virtual keyboards suspended in midair.

I never gamed with goggles and virtual keyboards at home, but then, I never had to. My Martian Chronicles competition had all been physically separated from me, but now they were literally on every side of me, and if I’d used even a small screen, dozens of people would have been able to shoulder-surf me.

“Good morning, boss,” Helene said, her voice so clear through my headset that she might have been right beside me. Then she tapped me on the shoulder and I shoved my goggles up on my forehead and realized that she was right beside me, floating in space sideways to me, lazily sculling the air with her hand-fins to keep herself from drifting away on the air currents. I suppressed a scowl.

“Good morning, Helene. Why have we abandoned operational security on this fine day?”

Helene was supposedly going straight. She had vowed that she would give up raiding forever once we made Marsfall, and go into legit business. This had cheered Vijay and me no end, and, at Vijay’s insistence, I had given her some minor status in DBOS-Corp, so that she could get some experience working for a living instead of destroying things. But she was a total loose cannon. She knew that we only talked business through the game to avoid being overheard. The game had good crypto protecting our conversations, something that was totally lacking in the cheek-by-jowl (by-butt-by-knee) atmosphere of the JC lounges.

But she wanted to actually talk, face-to-face.

“You’re supposed to have been this big deal raider,” I said. “How did you survive? You’ve got the secrecy instincts of an elephant.”

She shrugged, which caused her to start spinning in slow circles, which she seemed to enjoy. She’d shaved her head after the first day in space and kept it clean to the scalp, something that a lot of other kids had done since. “I suppose I managed to keep it on the downlow when it mattered and ignored it when it didn’t.”

“This is exactly the kind of thing that’s going to get you in trouble when you go to work for some corp Mars-side,” I said, aware that I was lecturing, but unable to stop myself. “Companies need to have policies; employees need to obey those policies. It’s fine to have ideas of your own, to try to get them circulated within the company and adopted. But you can’t just go rogue whenever an idea comes into your shiny bald head.”

She rubbed her gleaming noggin—she must shave it every day to keep it so shiny. “You seriously get off on this? Seriously? Role-playing that you’re some bigshot in a suit telling other people what to do and amassing a fortune?”

She’d hinted many times that she thought that straight Martian Chronicles players were suckers and drones, but this was the first time she’d come out and said it to my face. She had that same lazy smile and didn’t seem to be intending offense, but it got my back up. I swallowed a couple times. “I get off on making things. I pay a good salary to people to help me create amazing things that succeed, that make money and make people happy. Making things together requires that you give up some of your individual freedom in order to help the company succeed. If you don’t want to do that, you shouldn’t take a job.”

“Okay,” she said. “I won’t take the job. Thanks for the memories!” She gave no impression of being upset. She never showed much emotion beyond a kind of lighthearted, detached amusement.

I was so shocked that I just watched her grab hold of her bungee, use it to pull herself to the bulkhead, where she could get her legs coiled under herself, and then push off and go sailing away through the lounge, dodging and weaving between the players with their goggles, and the other fliers who were generally a lot less reckless than she was.

Vijay plucked his way along the wall to me, taking dainty, quick Velcroized steps that seemed ridiculous but actually got him around the space with a lot of speed and control. “What was that?” he said, drawing level with me and stopping his motion with a single finger pressed lightly against my shoulder.

I became aware that I was snorting hot air from my nose like a cartoon bull with a head cold. I made myself stop. “She quit,” I said. “Because I asked her to adhere to corp policy.” I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess there’s no helping some people. She must have been born to be a raider.”

Vijay pressed his lips together and managed to look both disapproving and nonjudgmental at the same time. I don’t know how he did it, but he did. After a week on the Eagle, Vijay seemed to have worked out where all the angles were—he was bunking in a hardship-case dorm with thirty other poves, but he knew which dining room served the biggest portions, which gangways were fastest, which viewing ports were most likely to be free.

No one apart from Helene and I talked to him. We might have been the only ones who saw him; peoples’ eyes just slid over the poves like they were invisible. Vijay never gave any sign that he minded. He used his invisibility to get into places where we couldn’t go, and he always had a fun adventure—what he called a “good wheeze”—up his sleeve.

“Well, I suppose she’ll have to figure it all out when we get to Mars, anyway,” he said. “As will we all.”

“What does that mean? I know how to build a corp. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again.”

“But you’ll be a different kind of person on Mars than you were on Earth. You’ll be an immigrant. A newcomer. You won’t have any assets. You will be a pove, if you’ll forgive the expression.”

I had never called him a pove. I was raised better than that. But we both knew that he was a pove and I wasn’t.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I can’t be a pove.”

“Why not? If you don’t have money, you are poor. You have poverty. You are a pove.”

What a stupid day this was turning out to be. First Helene’s temper tantrum and now Vijay was trying to needle me. “In the first place, no one is an immigrant on Mars. An immigrant is someone who comes to your place—your country or planet—to live. But Mars is our country. Mars, Inc. and its stakeholders—that’s us—own it.

“In the second place, a pove isn’t someone who’s poor. A pove is someone who refuses to stop being poor. They want handouts, not work. Their governments have told them that they have the right to food and shelter, so they want what’s theirs by right.”

Now, I had heard and said these words hundreds of times. They were part of every civics class I’d ever taken. They were repeated several times a day through the Mars, Inc. orientation. But I have to say, I never really thought about what it would be like to hear those words if you were a pove. Not until they came out of my mouth on that day.

I felt the blush burning in my cheeks. “I mean, Vijay, not you, obviously. Obviously you want to work, you want to get out, and see, you did! You’re smart and motivated. That’s how you became an auditor. It’s how you got to get on the Eagle.”

He cocked his head. “Dave,” he said. “You never asked where my parents were.”

I swallowed. “No,” I said. “I mean, I figured that you had to be an orphan—”

“Oh, yes, I am an orphan. That’s because when I was ten, a P&G neutraceutical plant near my village leaked seventy thousand tons of toxic fumes into the air. It killed over 95 percent of the people for two hundred kilometers around. Many of them worked at the plant, or provided services to the people who did. The company argued that the division that owned that factory was totally separate from P&G, even though P&G was the majority shareholder in it, and its only customer was P&G. Because of this, the Bangladeshi court was only able to render judgment on this ‘separate company,’ which was practically bankrupt at that point. Luckily, there weren’t many of us alive. The ones who lived got enough money to go to a good school and not to one of the bad orphanages where the survival rate is about the same as that of people living in the toxic plume of a P&G plant.”

I tried not to show how much this shocked me. It practically skewered me. It was so much goddamned reality. Made everything I knew seem so . . . fake. Pointless. Like I’d been complaining about a splinter in my toe and this guy had had both of his feet eaten off by a tiger. So first I felt surprised. Then embarrassed. Then angry, though I didn’t know at who or what. Maybe my parents for keeping me from reality, though hell knew that I wouldn’t want to live through what Vijay had been through.

“Dave,” he said. “Please, calm down.” Made me wonder what my face had been doing. I hadn’t said anything. “I just wanted you to see that people aren’t just poor because they’re lazy. Some people work as hard as mules, every day of the week, and die poor.” Unbidden, the thought rose to my mind, They must be stupid then. It’s not enough to work hard. You have to work hard doing something valuable. “Some people work hard as mules and get hit by a bus or a chemical leak. Some people sit around on their fat asses all day and get rich.” I saw that some heads turned when he said this. Statements like that one were about the worst thing you could say to a Mars colonist.

I knew what I was supposed to say here. It was drilled into me. I said it. “If someone figures out how to do more with less, that tells us that he’s doing something right, and he should be rewarded for figuring stuff like that out. We don’t want people to just work harder—we want people to work better.”

He nodded. “Of course, Dave. That’s what we’re told. But Helene is a raider and she’s figured out a way to get a lot of money without working hard at all, by ruining the hard and valuable work of others. Where does she fit in?”

I swallowed. “I suppose that’s why it’s not illegal. But—” I fumbled for the argument. Lots of people were listening. I felt like I was divulging corporate secrets to my competition, even though nothing we were saying had to do with my business. “Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s good.”

“No,” Vijay said. “But you just said that anyone who figures out how to make more money with less work should be rewarded.”

I wanted to sink through the floor. I felt like everyone who was listening in could see that I really was just a loser, one of those people who didn’t really understand everything that Mars Colony stood for, not in my heart. I should have had some decent arguments right there on the tip of my tongue. But all I had was ashamed, furious blushing.

“Listen, pove,” said a voice from below me, loud enough to be heard around the room. “You’re a guest here. Nobody wants to hear your opinion on what successful people deserve or don’t deserve. Why don’t you go hang out with your own kind?” It was Liam, the redheaded mouthy kid. He ran an investment bank in Martian Chronicles, moving giant chunks of money around on behalf of big corps and big players. He was always too friendly with me, and too loud, but he also managed to make me feel like I had to go along with him or he might punch me in the gut. Not that I’d ever seen him be violent—he was just, you know, intense.

Vijay nodded his head, not ducking it, but nodding, as if Liam was confirming something he’d suspected all along, which somehow made Liam seem like even more of a jackass. “As you say,” he said, and took off into the middle of the room, using a hard shove to get himself moving and steering himself expertly through the crowd. Liam swiped at his ankle as he passed, but missed.

Liam righted himself relative to me, so that we were face-to-face. “You need a better class of friend, Smith. Judge a man by the company he keeps. You’re going to have to get yourself set up again Mars-side and the impression you make on this ship will follow you around for the rest of your life. Just some friendly advice from your banker.”

You’re not my banker, I didn’t say. And I also didn’t say, You’re not my friend. And also not, The impression that’ll follow you around for the rest of your life is going to be of a big-mouth jerk.

And also, I didn’t say, Vijay’s my friend and I’m proud to be his.

Instead, I plastered a smile on my face and waved vaguely at him and plucked my way along the wall to the hatch and made for the gravity in the outer rings.

Helene came and got me a couple days later, rescuing me from a truly epic sulk in my parents’ cabin.

“You look like Martian crap,” she said.

“How’s that different from Terran crap?” I asked her.

“It’s redder, with a slightly longer day. Also, less gravity.”

My father chuckled and my mother smiled and I heard the klaxon go off in the back of my head, the one that went ALERT! ALERT! PARENTS ARE ABOUT TO SAY SOMETHING LIKE “IS THIS YOUR LITTLE GIRLFRIEND, DAVID?”

“Mom-Dad-this-is-Helene-we’re-going-out-now-’kay-bye,” I said and grabbed Helene and dragged her down the corridor as fast as I could. From behind me, I heard my parents call sarcastically, “Nice to meet you, Helene!” and “Come by anytime,” and other parents looked at us from their bunks through their open doors as we tore ass toward the hatch that led in-ship, toward the low-grav zones.

“What is it?” I asked, when we were through the air lock that separated the decks.

“I’ve been leaving you messages in-game but you haven’t answered them. Finally, I decided to see when you’d last logged in and I saw that it had been like seventy-two hours ago and I decided you must have something terminal so I came to find you so I could tell you my secret before you died.”

“What secret?”

“You’re really a crown prince who was hidden away by the king and queen, sent to live with a provincial bourgeois family so that the evil grand vizier couldn’t catch you. You are the rightful heir to the ancient kingdom of Freedonia.”

“You’re weird.”

She bowed. “Indeed. So, what is it? Cholera? Plague? The crushing ennui of daily existence in a futile and uncaring universe?”

I squirmed. The deck we were on was lightly trafficked—it had a different night than we did, everybody slept in shifts—and semideserted at this hour. I was conscious of the fact that Helene was very pretty and somehow managed not to smell like the Smell, but rather like something slightly floral and nice. I was conscious of the fact that we were alone. I was conscious of the fact that the last time I’d spoken with Helene, I’d chased her off by treating her to an uninvited lecture on corporate responsibility.

“I just didn’t feel like coming out,” I mumbled, staring at my shoes.

“Oh, right then,” she said. “Okay, back you go. See you later.”

She began to walk away. I stared at her retreating back.

“Wait!” I said.

She looked over her shoulder at me. “Yes?”

“I feel like coming out now,” I said.

“Oh, all right then. Let’s go find Vijay.”

I felt weirdly disappointed. Helene wanted to hang out with me and Vijay, which suggested that the half-formed romantic suspicion I’d felt was totally unfounded. Of course. Why would someone as pretty as Helene want anything romantic to do with someone like me? Besides, she was as weird as a sack of snakes; there was no way to predict what was going on in her pointy little head.

I knew, approximately speaking, where Vijay’s quarters were. The “scholarship” bunkroom—the place where poves who’d been lucky enough to get a free ride on the Eagle slept—was also at the ship’s hub, where there was no gravity to speak of. This allowed for a much higher density of humanity—you didn’t need bunks, just loosely tethered cocoons where people slept. Vijay had told us about it with a shrug, as if to say that it wasn’t any worse than his Bangladeshi orphanage, but I’d had a vision of a huge space, in perpetual twilight, where insectile sacks filled with softly breathing people drifted silently into one another, and it had given me a shiver.

“You’re sure he’s not in the JC lounge?” I asked.

“No, he stopped showing up two days ago. The lag was killing him.” The farther we got from Earth, the laggier the game got, as our play traffic had to traverse the widening light-speed gap between us and the servers twice, once in each direction. Almost immediately after takeoff, we’d lost real-time voice communications with the dirt-side players. We could leave them voice mails and they could reply the same way, but that was all.

Then we lost real-time graphics. Rather than flying through a constantly updated, pin-sharp rendering of the Mars of Martian Chronicles as it was, we saw it in blocky, symbolic graphics covered in glyphs warning us that these buildings and people and vehicles might or might not still be there.

Finally, the game turned into a set of spreadsheets that were updated once every minute, filled with vital statistics about market activity, sales, mergers, acquisitions, corporate raids . . . And as we sped farther and farther from our worn-out mother planet, the update lag would be worse and worse. Until apogee, the point where we were an equal distance from Earth and Mars, when our antennae would be reversed and we’d begin three months’ worth of reverse flight, finally slowing down enough to put us at a relative standstill by the time we reached our new home. At Turnaround, the ship’s networks would change over to the Martian Internet, a system that was almost entirely separate from Earth’s spam-riddled cesspool. The two networks could barely communicate with one another—for one thing, Martian computers reckoned time differently, counting by Martian seconds, which were 1.025 Earth seconds long (just as the Martian day was 2.5 percent longer than the Earth day).

“So, if you’re sure he’s not in the JC lounge, are you also sure he’s in his quarters? You know Vijay, he could be anywhere.”

“It’s the tail end of his sleep cycle. He’s due to wake up in about thirty minutes. He’ll be there.”

The pove quarters announced themselves with their own Smell, a Smell distinct from the overarching Smell of the Eagle. This was the smell of people stuck together so close that every fart blew directly into someone’s face; every toe dangled tantalizing inches from someone’s nose; every armpit was wafting its perfume into someone else’s breakfast. As we neared it, we heard the Hum, the perpetual sound of a thousand people whispering, trying not to wake the others who were on sleep shift.

The dim room was just as I’d imagined it. Unsurprising, since my impressions were based on candid photos posted to the ship’s blog, snapped by colonists who’d snuck down to see how the other half lived. It really was like looking in on a termite’s nest or the underside of a rotten log, a squirming mass of half-seen humanity wrapped in gauzy harnesses.

“Looks like the povetowns in Martian Chronicles, doesn’t it?” Helene said, in a normal conversational voice that cut through the Hum like a cymbal crash. I squirmed with embarrassment, mostly because I’d been thinking just that. You could always tell when a Martian Chronicles player was a pove, because they built houses and businesses that looked like the pove slums you saw in the news. They were too close together, and they ran businesses right out of their residences, and they always tried to do three thousand things at once—jetpack repair, accounting services, hairdressing, space suit designs, all with enthusiastic, badly spelled signage.

“I guess,” I mumbled and squinted into the darkness. There was a pove sitting by the door, a man with a little cracked palmtop clipped to his flowing white shift. Apparently the backlight had gone—he was reading it by the light leaking in from the doorway, which we were blocking by standing there, gawping. He made an impatient gesture at us. “Come in, come in,” he said in accented English. Maybe he was African? It sounded like the African accents in the games I played.

We scooted past him, and were enveloped in the close, overbreathed air of the pove quarters. I had the same feeling I got when I stumbled into povetowns in Martian Chronicles: claustrophobia, nausea, and an awful, nagging guilt. And then anger. Why were we taking the poves to Mars anyway?

Meanwhile, Helene was floating through the space, peering at peoples’ faces, looking for Vijay. “Found him,” she sang out, again too loud for the space, and people rolled over in their cocoons and gave us dirty looks. I drifted over to her, grinned weakly at Vijay, who was scrubbing at his eyes with his long, skinny hands.

“Hello,” he whispered. “Funny meeting you here.” He struggled out of his cocoon and I saw that he was wearing gray underpants and a T-shirt, and I looked away as he snagged his clothes from the dittybag under the cocoon and pulled them on.

“Toilet,” he said, and led us out of poveland. There was a huge line for the nearest toilet, but he sailed past it and led us down a maintenance corridor that was barely wide enough to pass through, even turned sideways. “ ’Scuse me,” he said, and ducked into a niche I hadn’t even seen. A moment later, I heard the pee-plus-vacuum sound of a low-gee toilet. “I think they used this while they were building the Eagle,” he called over the noise, seemingly unembarrassed by having an audience for his toilet experience. “It’s not even on the as-built drawings. But they must have had a toilet while they were working, after they pressurized her.” Before pressure, everyone would have worked in space suits and gone in a diaper. He emerged, fastidiously wiping his fingers on a sani-wipe that he tucked in the waistband of his loose cotton pants. “Okay,” he said. “Onward, stout comrades!”

He led us farther up the corridor and I felt myself growing heavier, a sense of downhill that told me we were headed into the higher-gee outer rings. I heard muffled conversations from beyond the thin bulkhead—snatches of conversation in Simplified English and then in Spanish, which the crew spoke when there weren’t any colonists around. They were mostly Mexican, poves, really, and they were getting a free ride to Mars and a free start as colonists in exchange for driving the big tin can across the solar system for us.

“Where are we?” Helene said in her stupid loud voice.

“Quietly, please,” Vijay said, without rancor. “Crew quarters. This corridor goes all the way from the center to the outer ring. This is about as far as you can go before you start sliding downhill, though. I thought it’d be fun to come back sometime and do it again with pitons and ropes, see if we can get all the way down to the passenger decks without falling straight down and breaking both legs.”

“That does sound like fun,” Helene said. “Count me in.”

“You two,” I said. But it did sound like fun. We had months left in this tin can. And spending it all playing Martian Chronicles didn’t sound nearly as much fun as it had before we’d actually left for Mars. “Okay, Vijay, you’re officially the coolest guy in outer space. Can we go now? It’d be nice to actually be able to see you guys, rather than the backs of your heads.” We were all turned sideways, remember. There wasn’t even enough room to turn our heads.

“Don’t you want to know what I learned here in my secret perch in crew territory?” He was barely speaking above a whisper—we were all keeping it quiet—but he managed to convey unholy glee.

“Do tell,” Helene hissed in a very loud whisper—like a whispered shout. The voices outside the walls got quieter, and we all held our breath for a second. Then they got louder again.

“Well, I speak some Spanish,” Vijay said. “Just a little, but it’s helpful in Martian Chronicles to be able to audit a company’s books in the language that they’re kept in. And there are so many Mexican and South American corps now in MC—”

“Farmers,” I snorted. Everyone knew that the Spanish-speaking corps were just fronts for “farmers”—players that did mindnumbing, repetitive tasks in-game to amass wealth that they could sell to real players who didn’t want their transactions to show up on the official registry.

I could hear Vijay’s silence from farther up the corridor, just make out his shoulders tightening. “Many of them are very good firms,” he said. “Operating under the highest ethical standards.”

I opened my mouth to say something that would defend my position, but Helene spoke before I could. “You were saying, Vijay?”

“Yes. Well, the thing is, the crew are very active MC players. And they have access to the Martian Internet.”

“Jesus,” I said. “That must be laggy as hell.”

“Oh yes,” Vijay said. “About two hundred seconds of network delay. But that’s plenty fast enough to let them get a look at Martian Chronicles.”

“They’re logging in?”

“Oh, yes. Logging in and even joining up with corps. They want to be sure that by the time they land, they have a good position. Think about it. Once we hit apogee and switch the Eagle’s main systems over to the Martian Internet, there’s going to be a thousand colonists all trying to get in with the corps or found their own, all at once. They’re beating the rush.”

“But that’s cheating!” I said, too loud, and again the voices from outside dipped.

“Go,” whispered Vijay. “Quietly.”

Quietly, we backed down the corridor, turning around to face the way we were going only when we reached Vijay’s secret toilet. We popped back out near poveland, and Vijay floated up onto the ceiling and gestured to us to join him. We put our faces close together and spoke softly.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But it is cheating.”

“No it’s not,” Helene said. “It’s just taking advantage of circumstances. Look at the colonists who went up on the Falcon.” That was the first Mars, Inc. colony ship, which had made the voyage ten years before. “They got to set up Mars-side Martian Chronicles without anyone else in the way. They had a totally blank world. They could mine the best mineral deposits, grab the best mountains to hollow out and pressurize, stake out the best oxygen patches. Are they cheating? Should they have waited for us to get there before they started?”

I swallowed. “It’s not the same thing,” I said, but I didn’t sound very convincing.

Helene waved her hand at me in a dismissive, floppy gesture.

“What did you find out from them, Vijay?” But before he could speak she put her finger to her lips. “Dave, you might want to move out of earshot until we’re done here. Wouldn’t want you to get tainted by all this cheating.”

“Children,” Vijay said, with mock sternness. “Enough.”

I glared at Helene, who smiled at me with so much dimple and lip action that I felt myself blushing.

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

“Now, what I discovered was this. The Mars-side game is almost nothing like the game we play. It’s a lot meaner, and raiding is the order of the day. Four corps control the entire show, and every corp has to pay tribute to one of them for a license to operate, or face financial ruin. The four main corps hate each other, but they’ll work in concert to destroy any independent corp that threatens their arrangement—anything it takes: price-fixing, unfair advertising, market lockouts. . . .” He went on, rattling off a long list of sins that only auditors truly understood. Basically, these were all the ways that a corp could try too hard, like when all the corps in one sector, like oxygen, make exclusive deals with all the Mars habitats to supply their air at a discount on the condition that the habitats agree not to buy water from some other corp. This was strictly forbidden on Martian Chronicles—Earth-side, at least—though of course people were always trying it.

“So that’s the shape of things,” he concluded. “The Eagle’s crew are trying to work out—from the spreadsheets and news bulletins they’re getting from the Mars servers—which of the four corps they should go to work for. They’ve decided to offer themselves as a team, thinking that they’ll get higher wages if they all stand together.”

I shook my head. “That’s collusion!” I said. If there was one thing that was even more against the rules I’d always lived under than unfair competition, it was labor collusion, when a bunch of workers decided in secret to hold out for a higher wage, or to stop some of their friends from being fired or having their hours cut. It wasn’t just illegal in Martian Chronicles—it was illegal on Mars, one of the fundamental tenets of Mars, Inc.’s charter. Totally free labor markets!

“It’s a different game on Mars,” Vijay said. “Besides, what’s really wrong with it? A company puts a lot of workers together so that it can earn more profits—why shouldn’t workers get together to earn more wages?”

Helene raised her eyebrows at me, as though to say, Do you have an answer? One that you’re okay saying in front of Vijay?

I tightened my lips. “Vijay, can I say something to you without worrying that you’ll be offended?”

He smiled and bobbed up and down in the null-gee. “Of course, Dave. You’re my friend. Let it all hang out.”

“What you’re talking about is pure pove talk. The world has two kinds of people in it: whiners and winners. A winner goes out and starts a company and figures out how to make as much as possible. A whiner complains that the winner isn’t paying him enough and, rather than starting his own company, complains and demands more money from the winner. The real way to get higher pay is to take a risk, start your own business, make something important in the world.” I checked to see if he was offended. He was floating upside down, so it was hard to tell if he was smiling or not.

I continued: “Okay, so this is why you can always find the poves in Martian Chronicles. They’re the ones bitching about the unfairness of everything instead of doing something. It’s why there are so many poor people on Earth. It’s a thought virus they all catch from their society, demanding that the world provide for them instead of providing for themselves. And it’s the job of the doers and the winners to ignore the whiners and go on doing and winning so that the whiners will have somewhere to work.”

Vijay was looking at me with something like a mild smile on his face. I replayed my words and heard just how offensive they might sound to someone like Vijay. “Look,” I said, no longer meeting his gaze. “Look. I’m not saying it’s genetic—no one is saying that poor people are inherently inferior or anything. But it’s a disease, and you catch it from the people around you.”

Helene shook her head at me. “You really believe everything your dad tells you, don’t you?”

I nearly turned around and left then, but I was still keenly aware of the loneliness I’d experienced for the three days I’d spent locked up in my parents’ cabin. So I stood my ground and pretended I hadn’t heard her.

Vijay said, “I’ve heard this theory before. There’s only one thing I wonder about. Maybe you could help me with it.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Can you explain where the people who died in the P&G leak were whiners?”

I shook my head. “No, of course not, but—”

“Do you have any idea how many workers I’ve met who are missing fingers or eyes or hands? How many of them were called whiners and sent away because they asked their employers for compensation because the machines mutilated them?”

I shook my head again. “You don’t get it—”

“No,” Vijay said, and I heard that the calm voice he used—that he always used—was just a tight belt cinched around an enormous pool of anger. That Vijay was angry at me, at us, at the colonists. “No, Dave. I do get it. Do you know what cognitive dissonance is?”

We’d studied it in school, but I hadn’t paid a lot of attention. “It’s like when you believe something and the facts don’t agree with it.”

“That’s right. So say, for example, that you believe that the world is fair, but when you look around it, you see that you have so very much more than everyone else.” I could see where this was going. I began to walk away, but he floated and skipped after me, continuing to talk. “So you have cognitive dissonance. How can the world be fair if you have more than everyone else? It must be fair for you to have more, then, right? And how can that be? It can only be if you are better than everyone else—and everyone else is therefore worse than you—”

I reached a hatch and passed through it and moved out toward the living quarters, downhill in the gravity.

For some reason, there were tears in my eyes.

I didn’t go back to the Junior Colonists’ lounge for a whole week. Instead, I spent the time with my dad, who seemed pleasantly surprised that his son wanted to hang out with him. It made me feel bad, like I’d been neglecting him. But it also made me ask myself why my father didn’t think it was weird that I wasn’t spending any time with kids my age. Dad had always been busy on Earth, traveling half the time for work, spending his time at home with his computer over his face, barking angrily at it while his hands worked the keyboard like a mad player attacking a church organ.

I didn’t mind, to be honest. Actually, I preferred it to those times when Dad decided to get all dadlike and insist on throwing a ball with me or take me to some kind of sports match or play some game on the big living-room screen with me. It wasn’t that it wasn’t fun, but there was always a moment when we stopped talking about the game or the project and found ourselves sitting in awkward silence, trying to pretend that the reason we had nothing to say was that we were concentrating too hard on the matter at hand.

On Earth, Dad had been a hotshot statistical risk analyst. This is not an easy thing to explain. But basically, what he did was tried to figure out how to balance investments to minimize risk. Say there’s an industry that benefits when someone finds a better way of growing wheat—the bread industry, say. And then there’s another industry that suffers when someone finds a better way of growing wheat, like, maybe, I don’t know, the corn industry? I forget how he explained this, to be honest, but this is generally the idea. So what he does is figures out how to invest some money in both industries, so that if someone finds a better wheat-growing technique, the investment in bread pays out, and if no one invents it, the investment in corn pays out. That’s the rough idea. What he did was like ten million times more complicated, though.

And anyway, it doesn’t really matter now. Now we’re going to Mars, and there are no risk analysts. When we got to Mars, Dad was going to have to start a new business, or start a job, or something. He had bought us into the gold tier for Mars settlements—that meant that we were going to get our own private pressurized space, six months’ worth of food vouchers, and a million Martian ray guns (this sounds like a lot, but keep in mind that a pressure suit costs MRG450,000 at last count). For this, he traded everything—every penny we had, our house, our furniture, our savings, everything. What were we going to do with it anyway? It wasn’t like we could take it to Mars. Our personal luggage allowance was limited to fifteen kilos each.

“Dad,” I said, as we loitered in one of the corridors, nodding amiably at the other colonists as they went past on their way to the toilets or the common rooms or wherever it was everyone else always seemed to be going.

He didn’t hear me. He was looking into space, lips pursed, brows furrowed. It was the expression he’d worn back in his office when he’d been neck-deep in work, computer plastered across his face, only his lips and nose visible. It was weird to see him making that face without a computer. More than weird. Scary. Like he was seeing into a world I couldn’t see.

“Everything okay, Dad?” I’d never asked him that before.

“What? Oh, yes, sorry. I was a million miles away.”

“Fifteen million miles,” I said. “According to the morning Barsoom.” That was the ship’s blog, written by some crew member in Simplified. “But we’re closing fast. Mars in forty-nine days.”

“Right!” he said. “Right. Exciting, huh?”

He said it so unconvincingly that my heart nearly broke. For years, he’d been talking about Mars and how great it would be when we got there. He hated Earth, hated all the rules and regulations, all the whiners who wanted him to invest in “ethical” funds that gave up on profits so that other whiners would get paid more. Mars was like some kind of promised land that we were headed to, a better world for people like us.

“Exciting,” I said. He looked away. “Dad, you don’t seem so excited, though.”

He put on a big, fake grin. “I’m excited, son. It’s just . . . You know. Space travel isn’t as glamorous as I thought it would be. You know me. I’m no good at sitting idle. I’m just itching to get some work done.”

“How about starting something up with someone onboard? I heard that lots of people are starting their own little corps. You know, hit the ground running.” I couldn’t believe I was lecturing Dad about business. It was quite a switch from the years and years of Dad telling me that I should be more entrepreneurial, play a harder game of Martian Chronicles.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Well, that’s something I’ve been thinking about. But you know, I’m investigating opportunities. Don’t want to jump into something that turns out to be a bust.”

“Dad, what’s going on? Back on Earth you were always telling me to seize the opportunity, fail fast, move on. Why are you being so . . .” I wanted to say scared, but Dad’s face had gone all furious, the way it did, so I didn’t finish the sentence.

“There’s some things you don’t understand, kid, believe it or not. Some things that you’re going to have to age a year or two before you can grok ’em. Why don’t you run along and play, sonny?” He said it in the tone he used when he was telling off some idiot who just didn’t get it, someone who was a whiner or a bureaucrat. He often asked those people, What planet are you living on? Which I’d always thought was funny. After all, he was the one who wanted to leave the planet and go to a better one.

It wasn’t funny now. I slunk away to the room and found Mom.

One of the other moms had come over to our cabin for a chat. All the moms in our corridor had found each other shortly after launch, and it seemed to me that they’d nearly instantaneously formed a tight social club. I kind of envied them the ease with which they came together as a group. It reminded me of when I’d been a little kid at after-school programs and the moms would all be in this tight cluster, chatting away merrily, even as the dads stood off in quiet clumps of two or three, twitching impatiently at their computers.

Mom and her friend Ms. Bonilla, who spoke Simplified mostly, though Mom said she could also speak French and Portuguese as well as her native Spanish, smiled at me as I entered. I wanted to say something like, “Mom, is Dad losing his freaking mind?” but I couldn’t say that in front of company.

“Hello, David,” Ms. Bonilla said. She was very pretty and seemed young, and I remembered Mom telling me that she’d had a ton of surgery and took pills all the time to keep up her appearance, because “Mexican companies are even harder on aging women in the boardroom than American ones.” Dad had made a face at that—it was getting into whining territory, and the Eagle was a no whining zone.

“Good day, Ms. Bonilla,” I said. That’s what we’d all settled on onboard the Eagle, where it was always morning for someone, always afternoon or evening or midnight for someone else, depending on which sleep schedule you kept.

Mom cocked her head at me. “Things not so good with your father, David?” Of course she knew. She spent more time with him than I did.

“Always the same for Mr. Bonilla,” Ms. Bonilla said. “All the men. It is the no-activity. They can’t live with no-activity.” A lot of Simplified was like that, taking a word like “activity” and making its opposite by putting “no-” in front of it.

Mom sighed. “David’s father has it big-big. From big-big important to small-small no-important. Making him crazy.”

“Mars,” Ms. Bonilla said. I remembered that she had been a “big-big important” too—the head of a giant cement company—but somehow she was coping okay in transit.

“Mars,” Mom agreed. Mom liked to pore over the Ares Plain Dealer—Colonist Edition issues that came in over the ship’s radio, especially the want ads. “My husband wants start a corp on Mars. Not me. I say work for some time, see how all is, then start a corp. Why run without looking?”

“But Dad is—”

“He’s crazy. It’s temporary. There are many no-knowns about Mars. He wants information. Wants to try things. Can’t do either. Your father is big-big information processor. Without information, he starves. He’s big crazy with hunger. Understand that, David. He’s not angry with you. Just frustrated with the delay.”

That settled it. But if Ms. Bonilla wasn’t there, I would have said, “How come so many other dads manage to cope? Why are there are all these other dads out there trying to form corps and get ready to hit Mars running?” But not in front of company.

There wasn’t anything to say to Mom. Dad didn’t want to talk to me. My only friends onboard weren’t talking to me (or was it me who wasn’t talking to them?). There was only one thing left to do: get back into the game.

Here’s how you get to Mars: first, you boost for a couple hours at one gee, which gets your ship really moving. Since there’s nothing in space to stop it—except a few stray hydrogen atoms and the odd gust of solar wind—it’ll just coast Marsward pretty much forever. So you switch the engines off and ride your momentum ever and ever Marsward. If you’ve timed it all correctly, Mars should also be moving toward you, swinging around the sun at 13.3 km/s and closing fast.

Once you’re closer to Mars than you are to Earth, you flip the ship over, so that your main antenna array is pointed at the red planet, and reboot the ship’s computers, bringing them back online running a Mars-compliant OS that runs on Martian time. Then, about ninety days later, you turn the engines back and boost away from Mars for a few hours, because 13.3 km/s and closing fast is fast—fast enough to turn your rocket into a cloud of atoms and a giant shockwave if you run into Mars instead of going into a gentle orbit around Phobos Base for transfer to a ground shuttle.

We were almost at Turnaround, which meant that we were nearly equidistant from Mars and the Earth. That meant that almost no one was playing the game anymore, because it was at 640 seconds of latency, meaning that a message sent to Earth took 320 seconds to get there and 320 seconds to get back, which made playing the game nearly impossible.

I’d planned to do an orderly shutdown of DBOS-Corp long before this, liquidating my shares and giving the proceeds to a charity that helped new players get established in the game, then leaving my lieutenants to break up the firm’s assets according to their shareblocks and either merge with other corps or try to make it on their own. Without my authorization, none of that would be possible, and the company would just putter on for a couple months until the fact that there was no one at the steering wheel caught up with it and it crashed. I’d put far too much work into it to allow that to happen.

Or at least, that’s how I’d felt when we left for Mars. Now, in the middle of the black and endless sky, it was hard to figure out what was so important about this imaginary company and its imaginary money. But there was a certain peace in shuffling the paper for my old, familiar company, making the spreadsheets dance to their traditional tunes. I was breaking up my stock, modifying the board, changing the org chart to shuffle corporate officers around. My lieutenants had been sending me increasingly worried notes by long-delayed e-mail, asking me when I’d get around to this, promising (good naturedly) to give me a real thumping when they got to Mars if I didn’t see to this in good time. Well, now they’d be happy. I fired off the signed orders to the Earth-side game server and waited patiently while the speed of light oozed its way across the reaches of outer space and over to planet Earth and then back again.

But then it was done and the strings were cut. I was free. My company was no longer mine. I was, as of this moment, not a player in either the Earth-side or the Mars-side Martian Chronicles. I found I was pretty happy.

I set off down the corridor, whistling, heading for one of the observation decks, where there was a huge video-wall that displayed the view of the space before us, Mars glowing with enhanced color. I was whistling “The Red Hills of Mars,” a folk song that I’d learned at Mars camp when I was all of six years old, and as I made my way along, someone else joined in, her whistle a very tuneful trill.

Yes, her. It was a grown-up. In a uniform. Specifically, it was Lainie, as in Lainie Lainie No Complainy, making her way down the same corridor just a meter or two behind me. She smiled at me as she drew near, her normal theatrical scowl disappearing. “You sure seem happy about something,” she said.

I shrugged. I never knew what to say to Lainie. She was everywhere, all the time, and always seemed to know the gossip before any of the colonists did. She was the only one on the ship who’d actually been to Mars: she’d lived there for ten years and returned to Earth on the first ship back to retrieve and orient the next batch of colonists.

“Just closed out my Martian Chronicles account,” I said. “It’s kind of nice not to have to worry about it for a while, at least until Turnaround.”

She nodded. “David Smith, right? DBOS-Corp?”

“You know it?” I couldn’t believe it.

“Oh, sure. There’s only a thousand of you here—I know a lot about all of you.” She tapped her temple. “Trick memory. But you stand out, of course. DBOS-Corp, that’s a legend.”

I shook my head. “Not a lot of grown-ups pay attention to Martian Chronicles,” I said. “You really play?”

“I played on the Mars-side server,” she said. “Lots of us did. Gave us something to do, helped us get to know each other after we made planetfall. And so I looked up the game when I got to Earth, watched it. Didn’t play, though—no time, not while we were getting the Eagle ready.”

I said, very carefully, “I hear it’s a very different kind of game on Mars.” I didn’t want her to know about Vijay’s eavesdropping, but I also felt a weird kind of kinship with her, wanted to open up to her.

“Oh, you hear, do you?” Her face was still friendly, but I could hear a hint of the familiar sternness in her voice. “People do talk.”

I was self-conscious, like I’d said too much, blown it. I started to mumble an apology and move on, but Lainie stopped me. “David,” she said, her voice low. “I know how rumors spread. I wouldn’t want you going away with the wrong impression. Why don’t you stop by my cabin during office hours, and we’ll chat about this?” She looked away, checking her work space—Lainie and the crew all had work spaces on the Eagle, the rest of us had to use handheld computers—and said, “Start in an hour. I’ll book you in for my first slot, okay?” It wasn’t really a question.

“Okay,” I said, and felt a jet of sick fear. Spreading dispiriting rumors was one of the worst kinds of whining on the Eagle, and Lainie had lots of punishments, big and small, that she could use to discipline offenders.

The next hour was an agony of worry. I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to go to the JC lounge, didn’t want to run into anyone I knew, so I ended up hanging around Lainie’s cabin, on Deck One, the crew deck, waiting for her hours to start. As soon as the clock ticked over to ship’s 1100h, her door clunked open and there she was, still in her crisp ship’s uniform, clean lines and a single gold braid around her left bicep. “Mr. Smith,” she said. “How good of you to come.” She stood aside and ushered me in.

Her quarters were twice as big as the cabin that my whole family shared, and it felt very spacious, even though our house back on Earth had had bathrooms bigger than her entire cabin (she had her own bathroom, I noticed). She had a little writing desk and some pieces of red Martian rock in a frame over her folded-up bunk. The room was as neat as a pin, not a single thing out of place, no dust or dirt. Compared to the rest of Eagle—grubby, buckled—it was like an operating theater. “Sit, please,” she said, gesturing at a round fold-out seat. She rummaged in a small fridge and withdrew two cold bulbs of orange juice and passed one to me. “Thirsty air on this ship,” she said, cracking the seal on hers. “We keep using water for reaction mass as we go, which means the air’s going to get drier and drier. By the time we make Mars, you’re going to be as desiccated as a mummy. Drink up!” She slurped at her bulb. I cracked my own and drank it.

“Look,” I said, still feeling scared, “I’m sorry if I said too much. I know I shouldn’t be passing rumors—” She waved at me impatiently.

“Forget that. That’s not why you’re here. Listen, David, you’ve been kicking ass on MC for years. You’re about to start over in a new world, start everything over. And as you’ve heard, things on Mars are different. Not just on Mars, but in the Mars-side Martian Chronicles. Do you understand what things are like there?”

“I think so,” I said, carefully. “No whiners, right? No poves. Succeeding on your merits?”

Her expression was unreadable. Amusement? Anger? Impossible to say. “Yes, David. But here’s the thing: there’s always winners and losers, you understand that?”

I nodded. “Sure.”

“Even on Mars.”

I nodded again, more slowly. “What do you mean by that?”

“You’ve heard how things are on the Mars-side game?”

“I’ve heard . . . things.”

“What things?”

“Um. That a few companies control the whole game. That no one can get ahead unless they pay off the big guys.”

She nodded. “That’s one way of putting it. Another way of putting it is that there are some very, very successful people on Mars. These people saw the opportunity, took it, and made sure that they’d keep it for as long as they could. They’re playing the game better and harder than anyone else.”

“Wait,” I said, confused. “Are you talking about Martian Chronicles or Mars?”

She gave me that mysterious look again. “There isn’t really a difference on Mars. Martian Chronicles, Martian life. Why bother coming up with a functional stock market, communications system, and banking system when MC has it all built in? Martian Chronicles was built to model the kind of society that Mars, Inc. and Mars Colony were hoping to build. Why wouldn’t you use it as the template for the actual Mars Colony?”

I tried to take this all in. “But it’s just a game—”

She looked impatient. “Just a game? What is any of this except for a game? Why am I dressed up like a member of some kind of space navy? Why do people who have all the money they could ever spend try to earn more? Why don’t you stab your friend when he gets on your nerves? It’s all a game, it’s all rules, it’s all play. It may not always be fun, but games aren’t just about fun.”

I struggled to get my mind around this. “The game is life on Mars?”

Her impatience grew. “Look, David, I’m talking to you today because I thought you’d be a smart kid. If you’re just going to sit there boggling at me, you can go back to your quarters. Get with the program, will you?”

Now I felt scared again. “Okay, okay. I see. The game is life. Life is the game. Got you.”

“Good. Now, when we flip the antennas around, you’re going to get your account on the Martian servers and you’re going to start over as a total noob. You’re going to have to figure out how to survive in a game that’s plenty rougher than any you’ve ever played. There’s a pretty good chance it’s going to chew you up and spit you out. It’s going to do that to a lot of you. And as you know, I’m in charge of heading off whining, making sure it doesn’t happen. So I’m here to help you avoid getting into the kind of situation where you’ll be whining.”

I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about, but I didn’t want to seem dumb, so I kept my mouth shut and nodded.

“Here’s the thing. There’s a thousand colonists headed to Mars. You’re going to double Mars’s population. But let’s be frank here. You’re latecomers. The people who’ve been Mars-side for ten years, those people took a much bigger risk than you’re taking. So they’re earning a greater reward, too. That’s only fair. It’s a meritocracy, after all. But I know people. They whine. They complain. Even colonists. Especially colonists—when they discover that colonial life is harder than they reckoned for. And when colonists get too upset about their bad luck . . . . Well, let’s just say that on Mars, as on Earth, there are plenty of people who are willing to take by force that which they can’t earn by their wits. And we can’t have that. We especially can’t have that when a thousand new chums are fresh off the boat. That’s a volatile situation.”

My mouth was dry. I drank more OJ. It tasted metallic, like everything on the ship, having been reconstituted with water from the ship’s condensers. “Sound, um, complicated.”

“It’s not complicated,” she said. She managed to make me feel stupid every time she spoke. “It’s simple. The thing is, we want to head off any feeling that new colonists can’t make it on Mars. We need an example of how fair things can be, if you’re the right kind of plucky adventurer with the right entrepreneurial spirit. We need a poster child for success in the second wave. This isn’t complicated, David.”

I reached for the OJ, but my bulb was empty. “So—” I stopped. “You want to set me up as a what? As a success?”

She smiled condescendingly. “We’re going to start up DBOS-Corp on Mars. It’ll be a very successful corp from the get-go. You’ll have lots of great contracts in hand the second you make Marsfall. Those contracts will pay off big, and bigger. You can hire your friends. Hell, you can hire your father. You will be a symbol of the fairness of Martian society. You’ll have some silent investors who’ll help you get by, starting you out with decent capital and contacts, and who’ll take a piece of the action. This is a good deal, David. You’ve proved that you can build a business once before. It’s absolutely plausible that you’d do it again. And having a fifteen-year-old millionaire is going to be great news. Everyone’s going to go nuts for it. You’ll be a hero.”

The word millionaire hit me like an electric jolt, made me understand the scope of what was being discussed here.

“Lainie,” I said, and it came out in a croak. I cleared my throat. “Lainie. That’s really, really wonderful, but—”

She cocked her head. “I’m surprised that there’s a ‘but’ here, David. This isn’t the kind of opportunity that comes along very often. I thought you were a businessman, the kind of person who seized the moment. Hell, we did a lot of research into this. Went deep on all the colonists. There were fifty potential candidates, but you were the clear winner. Were we wrong?”

I remembered who I had been. What I had been. DBOS-Corp was one of the biggest, most successful corps in the history of MC. I’d built it with fair play, hard work, and smarts. And luck, of course. I wasn’t just a little kid. I was a success. I was smart. I had done something extraordinary. And I didn’t let anyone push me around. I sat up straighter.

“Lainie, you’ve made your offer, but I don’t make snap decisions. I think things over. This is no exception. I’ll get back to you.”

She nodded and dropped her offended expression. “Okay, that’s fair. Mind you, if you say a word about this to anyone, I’ll push you out the air lock.” She smiled when she said it, but not very much. “Ha-ha. Only serious.”

There was a magic time there, after the latency to Earth became too high to play on its server, and while we were still getting close enough to Mars to do anything except look at slowly updating spreadsheets from there, when nobody thought about Martian Chronicles.

I trickled back into the Junior Colonists’ lounge by dribs and drabs, coming in for a few minutes at a time, keeping mostly to myself, though I nodded affably enough at anyone who nodded at me, even Helene and Vijay, who seemed to be up to something intense in their private corner. I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything.

Here’s what I sent to Lainie the day after she made her extraordinary offer:

Dear Lainie:

In regards to our meeting yesterday:

I have carefully considered your generous offer, and on reflection, I have decided to take you up on it. I am looking forward to a long, profitable relationship.

Sincerely,
David Brionn Oglethorpe Smith, III
CEO, DBOS-Corp (Mars)
CEO (ret’d), DBOS-Corp (Earth)

Not that I didn’t agonize over it. I wanted to make it on Mars because I was smarter and better, not because I just got lucky. But I didn’t just get lucky. Lainie’s syndicate picked me because of the job I’d done running DBOS-Corp on Earth. And let’s be honest: if the only way to win the game was to get in good with the big guns, I’d be crazy not to get in good with them. There’s no nobility in failing. Plus, I’d get to hire my Dad, which would be just delicious. Boy, was I ever looking forward to that.

That’s really what got me. Daydreaming about what it would be like after Marsfall, when we’d all pour out onto that strange world, bounding high in the fractional gravity, our body clocks already adjusted to the Martian day from three months with the Eagle’s systems running on Mars standard. We’d go to our housing, grubby new chums around the sophisticated, happy, settled Martians, and we’d start to try to find our fortunes. No whining allowed! Even when there were no fortunes to be had, no whining allowed. There my pals, my father and mother, and everyone would be, trying to find a way to get ahead on their new planet, where all the good opportunities seemed to have been taken, and there I’d be, rebuilding Oglethorp Corp, catching all these great breaks, growing more profitable, growing bigger, getting famous. Being a poster child. A hero.

And I could be generous! I could welcome in the new colonists, give them positions in my big, successful corp. Even Helene and Vijay, who’d come to see me as the kind of titan of business I’d always known I could be. I’d been shocked by the idea that on Mars, Martian Chronicles didn’t just influence life, it was life. But after giving it some thought, I realized that I’d always been better at MC than real life, so why shouldn’t I be glad that I was heading to the place where Martian Chronicles ruled?

Nobody was thinking about Martian Chronicles in the Junior Colonists’ lounge. Not even me. Once I sent that note to Lainie, I realized that there was no way I could possibly end up as a debthaunted drone in someone else’s corp, and my subconscious mind stopped worrying about it. The crazy anxiety dreams I’d been having ended. The fact that Dad was still all tied up in knots didn’t faze me. My future was set.

The second day after apogee, I drifted into the Junior Colonists’ lounge. It was my morning, along with a third of the ship’s population’s—I was on second shift, which ran from ship’s 0800 to 1600. I had a couple of my computers with me, a handheld and a bigger control unit that I used to drive my goggles and other devices. Both had just received Mars OS, the Martian operating system that ran on Martian time and used Martian protocols and converted over the whole interface, spell-checker, and everything, to Simplified English. In theory, it ran on everything that was computerized—phones, handhelds, tape-measures, music players, PCs, pedometers, headphones, cameras. . . .

But in practice, Mars OS didn’t work as well as we’d been told it would. Lainie just shrugged her shoulders at the complaining colonists and told them, “No whining, gang. The engineers who built Mars OS have been living on Mars for the past ten years. Technology has moved on. The source code is on the ship’s server. Some of you are wicked techie. Figure it out. Or throw away your gewgaws and get used to living with fewer gadgets—or hell, wait until we make Marsfall and see if anyone’s made a Martian replacement you can buy.”

So that’s what we were mostly thinking about in the JC lounge—how to get all our toys working again. Most of the cheap handheld devices were DOA, which was especially hard on us kids, since no one wanted to be a dork carrying around a huge computer that you needed a handbag or a backpack for. If you couldn’t wear it around your wrist or neck, or shove it in a back pocket, you wouldn’t be caught dead carrying it.

The kids who were really into the tech side of things had suddenly become monster rock gods, able to lay hands on your precious device and bring it back to life with a few incantations. They were charging all the market could bear for it, too—getting some of the best stuff on the ship, filling huge, floating low-gee net-bags with booty: painting kits, knifes and multitools, jewelry, prize T-shirts, musical instruments . . . The pathetic possessions we were able to squeeze into our luggage allowances. A lot of kids were way pissed at them, accusing them of gouging, but I shrugged and went back to our room for my harmonica and my set of permanent grease pencils. If they could do it and I couldn’t, why shouldn’t they charge all the market could bear for it?

Besides, once DBOS-Corp was running hot and black on Mars, I’d be able to buy back my stuff and more.

But as I lined up to hand over my treasures, Vijay and Helene drifted over to me. They were bungeed together, which was a convenient way to stay close enough to speak quietly amid all the eddies, breezes, and drifting debris in the JC lounge. As they neared me, Helene held out her hand, as though she wanted me to help her brake so that they could join me in waiting in line. I was unexpectedly glad to see that hand. I’d missed them more than I’d dared admit to myself.

I took Helene’s hand and braced myself to help absorb their minimal inertia. As our fingers made contact, Helene whipped her arm up, keeping a tight grip on my hand, and jerked me out of the queue. We began to do slow doughnuts in the JC lounge, dizzying whirls that stopped only when we reached a bulkhead and Vijay stopped me.

I went from glad to furious in three nauseous circles around the JC lounge. Once we were Velcroed down, I glared at them. “I’d been waiting in line for an hour,” I hissed. “Now you’ve blown it.” That was the line rule on the Eagle: get out of line, lose your place. And the Eagle was all lines.

Helene crossed her eyes at me and stuck out her tongue. “First of all, it’s nice to see you too, stranger. Second, who cares about the line? Third, I can fix your stupid computers, and I won’t charge you anything for the favor. Fourth, we’ve got lots to talk about.”

I took a moment to absorb all of this. “You can fix my computers?”

She rolled her eyes. “Duh. I’ve been fooling around with Mars OS for years. I can’t believe the rest of you didn’t bother! It’s the bloody operating system that our new planet runs on! Knowing how it works is as important as knowing how to work a rebreather or patch a cold-suit. Give.” She held out her hand. I passed her my handheld and my main computer pack and some of my peripherals. She pulled a chopstick out of her hair and stuck one end of it—it was tipped with memory pins, I saw—into the handheld and began to poke at it. “You’ve got your data backed up?” she said. I nodded. She stuck the tip of her tongue out of one corner of her mouth and unfolded a keyboard and screen from her back pocket and rubbed them against the handheld to get them connected, and then went to work.

Vijay had been silent until now. Finally, he said, “Dave, I’m very glad we found you. We have something we would like to discuss with you, in the utmost confidence.” We were tethered to a relatively deserted stretch of bulkhead in the JC lounge—“deserted” for the JC lounge would have been “crowded” anywhere Earthside except for a mega stadium concert.

“Here?”

He smiled. “My place,” he said.

He led us back down his private maintenance corridor, where his tiny leftover toilet was. We were strung out sideways again, Helene behind me and Vijay in front of me, and I hunched over a bit, so that we could see each other.

“You’re a very mysterious person sometimes, Vijay,” I said, trying for a joke and failing. Vijay did me the courtesy of a weak smile.

“You know what the crew are planning to do with MC?” he said. “You remember? Forming a syndicate? Offering their labor as a package?”

“I remember,” I said. “It’s totally illegal. And doomed. If the MC market is as tough as they say it is, the big corps will laugh them off and then crush them like bugs.”

“I agree,” Helene said.

“Me, too,” Vijay said. “The problem is, they’re not thinking big enough. Look, these syndicates have clobbered competition on Mars. They have the whole thing sewn up. But there are only a thousand Martians today, plus a few kids born Mars-side. We’re about to double their population. That is going to be massively destabilizing.” I started to get déjà vu. And I started to get uncomfortable. Didn’t I just have this conversation with Lainie?

“Here’s the thing. When the markets there go into chaos, all bets are off. If there was a leadership team with a new corp, a better corp, one that would give the new chums a better deal than the syndicates would, well—”

“Who wouldn’t join it?” Helene said behind me. I wished I could see her face.

“Even the old timers who are at the bottom of the food chain. Imagine if there was a trio—a former senior auditor, a former high-powered raider, and a former successful CEO. Imagine the power of a trio running a company with the integrity of the auditor general, the guts of a raider, the acumen of a leading CEO! We wouldn’t have to take whatever deal the syndicates there are offering. We could topple the syndicates, institute a fair, competitive market—”

My mouth was dry. The thing was, it was a good plan. A wonderful plan. If they’d made me this offer before Lainie had made hers, I would have jumped at it in a second (and that’s without knowing that MC was real life on Mars). But now that I’d made my deal with Lainie, I had already committed to the same syndicate Vijay and Helene were planning on destroying.

I had a momentary vision of going to Lainie with this, telling her that I had two clever friends who’d be perfect at helping provide cover for her plan. We could start our radical, destabilizing corp, bring all the new chums into it, let everyone think that we were destroying the old order, and meanwhile, we’d be taking our own orders from the syndicate. We would be the syndicate.

But there were so many ways that could go wrong. Could I trust Helene? She was a raider, after all—she specialized in dismantling corps without regard for the work that went into them. Could I trust Vijay? You don’t get to be an auditor without being stiff-necked about the rules and regulations. And what if Lainie said that she didn’t want any “help” from my friends? What if she made good on her promise to shove me out the air lock for discussing it? (No, I didn’t really think she was serious about spacing me, but with Lainie, there was always a tiny corner of me that believed she meant it).

And there I was, trying to talk myself out of trusting my only two real friends for millions of kilometers in all directions. I felt, I don’t know, disembodied, like I was hovering over myself, watching myself decide to turn my back on my buddies.

I wanted to turn and run, but in the narrow slip space with Helene behind me and Vijay before me, there was no way I could. And there was a better me, the me that wasn’t floating above myself but was in myself, sweating so hard it ran down into my eyes, that needed to talk.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“We are talking,” Helene said from behind me.

I ignored her. My eyes were locked on Vijay’s. “What did you call it, ‘utmost confidence’? I need to talk to both of you in utmost confidence.”

Vijay looked grave. “Sounds like you have a secret.”

Helene sighed. “How come everyone’s got a big, dark secret around here?”

Dad burst into the cabin, outraged. “Is it true?” he said, his eyes redrimmed, burning, his chest heaving. Mom leapt off the bunk where she’d been working with some of the ship’s polymer maintenance putty to make one of her little abstract sculptures.

“David, please, calm yourself,” she said, in her I-really-meanit voice. We all listened when Mom used that tone. It made Dad pull up short like he’d been whacked over the nose with a rolled-up magazine.

He took a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. Okay.

“I have just heard the most remarkable rumor about our son here,” he said, gesturing at me. “A truly incredible rumor.”

Mom started to say something, but I got to my feet and she stopped.

“It’s true,” I said.

“What’s true?” Mom said.

I reached for my handheld and dialed up the ad we’d sent to every mailbox on the Eagle:

MEMBERS NEEDED

Announcing an altogether new kind of corp: The Martian New Chums Co-operative is open to anyone who is willing to work for the cause of a fair deal for all Martians.

WHY?

Because the deck is stacked on Mars. Four large companies monopolize all the wealth, power, and privilege on our new home, and when you land, you can expect to spend the rest of your life working your guts out for the new aristocrats. You may think that this only applies in Martian Chronicles, but we’ve got news for you: life on Mars IS THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. No one’s mentioned it to us yet (I wonder why not?) but it makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, why set up a government, stock exchange, messaging system, and all the other machinery of society when you’ve got a perfectly good one sitting right there on your game server?

Oh yes, there’s LOTS they haven’t told you about life on Mars.

Rather than whining about it, we’re DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

The New Chums Co-op will not trade with the cartels. We will make our own oxygen, generate our own power, and manufacture our own goods, buying and selling from anyone except the cartel. We won’t have the same stuff, but your ray guns will go to fellow New Chums, and their ray guns will go back to you, and we’ll all prosper together. We’ll be a democracy: one member, one vote. And we’ll help each other.

Want to join? Great! The New Chums Co-op will begin signing on members in seventy-two hours, which should give you plenty of time to get your kids to show you how to use Martian Chronicles, get you set up with an account on the Mars server, and verify what you’ve read here.

In the meantime, watch out for dirty tricks from Mars, Inc.! Watch out for unexplained network outages. Watch out for your fellow colonists being arrested in the name of “preserving morale.”

Aren’t you old enough to make up your own mind about what’s true and what isn’t? Do you really want a big-daddy corporation locking up people who say things that it disagrees with?

Membership opens in SEVENTY-TWO HOURS! Meantime, any questions: ask the Co-op’s founders:

Vijay Mukherjee (senior auditor, retired)

David Brionn Oglethorpe Smith, III (CEO, DBOS-Corp, retired)

Helene Gonzales-Ginsburg (liquidity specialist, retired)

PS: If we get arrested, the Co-op is still on. Organize yourselves. No whining!

Mom looked at me as if I’d sprouted another head and three extra arms. Dad was trembling slightly, suddenly looking much, much older.

I leaned back in my seat. I’d known this was coming, had feared it, had come through the fear. It was a relief to have it out in the open after all the stress of wondering what would happen when my parents found out. When the whole ship found out. Helene had said to me, “The fear of the consequences are always worse than the consequences themselves.”

“I don’t think they can afford to arrest us, not after everyone on the ship has read it,” I said, trying to sound casual, trying to convince myself that I was calm.

Dad slumped. “I can’t believe that you—”

Mom put her hand on his arm. “Is it true, David?”

“Which part?” I said, again, trying for a nonchalance I didn’t feel.

“All of it!” I could see that, beneath her calm exterior, she was ready to lose her cool.

“All of it is true,” I said. “Mars is run by four corps, and everyone works for them. You can verify it for yourself—just create a Martian Chronicles account and start looking around. And yes, Mars runs on the Martian Chronicles server. Have a look and you can see it: our quarters are assigned, in the Burroughs warren, the spaceport is booked for the Eagle’s arrival. The city hall forum is full of people talking about real life.” We had decided not to mention Lainie’s offer to me. I had promised her that I’d keep it a secret, and I didn’t want her to be able to go around telling everyone that I didn’t honor my promises. I needed to be squeaky clean if I was going to be on the Co-op’s steering committee. “And it’s true that we’ve started the Co-op. Technically, it’s just another corp, but Vijay structured the bylaws so that it gets to run like a co-operative. He’s good at that sort of thing.”

“Vijay?” Mom said.

“The pove,” Dad said. “The one he pals around with.” He sounded shell-shocked.

“We’re all poves now, Dad.” I swallowed, looked into his eyes. It was hard to do. “We’re headed to Mars to clean the toilets. That’s the thing that we discovered. And the people Mars-side, they’re fine with that. After all, if we were too good for toilet cleaning, we would have been in the first wave. They’ll say that they’re too good to clean toilets, and they’ll prove it by pointing out that we’re all broke and the only jobs they have for us are the worst, crappiest jobs. Anyone who disagrees will be a whiner.”

That had been the real surprise, once Mars OS was running on all my devices: the message boards filled with Martians fantasizing about how great it would be once the next wave of colonists arrived, how they’d be able to “solve the labor shortage” and finally hire people at “affordable wages” to do the real work of running the colony.

A tear slid down Dad’s cheek. “David, you’re making trouble for us, for our family—”

Mom pulled him into a hug. “Shh,” she said. “Sounds like trouble was already there.” Dad kind of collapsed into her arms and she met my eyes and made a little scooting gesture behind his back. I took the hint and left.

Standing outside the door was Lainie. She was perfectly composed, leaning against the corridor wall. There was no one else in the corridor. Lainie had that effect on people—if you saw her standing somewhere, you’d go somewhere else.

“Hello, David,” she said.

I’d talked this over with Helene and Vijay, too. Helene had been busted dozens of times, and Vijay had made plenty of busts. They knew how it went.

I nodded and held my wrists out, as though for handcuffs.

She smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I’m not going to put you in the brig, young Mr. Smith. Not at all. The last thing I want to do is create a martyr for your little cause on Mars.”

(When I told Vijay about this, he nodded curtly and said, “Smart.”)

“But I just want to put a little whisper into your ear, a little seed of doubt for you to remember when we land on Mars, when the people I work for take serious steps to ensure that you don’t upset the apple-cart. You ready for it?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak—barely trusting myself not to wet my pants.

“It’s this: you could have been a king. A CEO. Rich. Famous. Powerful. Admired. You could have had it all. But now, no matter what happens, no matter whether your little ‘co-op’ is crushed or soldiers on raggedly, you will always be a pove, and a leader of poves.”

She whispered it like a curse, and I knew she was right.

They arrested us forty-eight hours after Marsfall. Every Co-op member. Conspiracy in restraint of trade.

We put up quite a defense and accused Mars, Inc. of the cardinal sin of “whining” at every turn.

And they did let us go, eventually. And by the time they did, nearly every New Chum had signed up for the Co-op, and the game got really, really fun.

CORY DOCTOROW (www.craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and blogger—the coeditor of Boing Boing (boingboing. net), and the author of the bestselling novel YA Little Brother. His new novel is For the Win. He is the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and cofounded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in London.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

There’s a certain circularity to the argument that goes, “We have to get off this planet, we’re using it up!” I often hear it from people who are comfortable with using the planet up to get off-planet, which, to me, sounds a lot like, “I have to eat all the cookies, because once the cookies are gone, I won’t have any cookies!”

Space exploration is great for science and for our dreams, and it spins off some cool technologies, but it will not reduce population pressure on Earth (you’d have to march people into spaceships at breakneck speed to make any significant dent in population growth and you could feed, clothe, and house a person for years for what it costs to lift her space suit into low Earth orbit).

Space colonization fantasies are all too often silent on the question of what happens to the world’s majority of poor people when the rich folks have buggered off to the stars after expending the planet to get there.