The days passed at a glacial pace as Zed waited for word from Johns. Zed, Miranda, and George fell into a daily rhythm.
The one burst of excitement during their wait was the grand unveiling of Zed’s work on the mess hall overlay. As far as Zed knew, no one else was aware he was working on it, besides Commander Jones, George, and Miranda.
No one had given him any restrictions on how and when he could load it up, so one morning, as the breakfast crowd peaked, Zed pulled up his CIG interface and hit submit.
At first, no one noticed. Zed raised his arm, drawing Miranda and George’s attention to what was happening further up the domed ceiling. Miranda gave a quiet gasp.
“Whoa,” George said as he scooted back in his chair with an involuntary flinch.
The dome began to crack. Apparent breaks in the Martian concrete forked out and down like hardened lightning. At the same time, holes began to form as broken sections of concrete appeared to be sucked away from the dome and into the void.
The first sign that people had noticed was a horrified squeal that Zed assumed was from a woman until he looked and saw the source was, in fact, Jonah Gruene. Others were taking notice now, quickly standing from their benches. Zed heard a few trays fall to the floor.
It was at that moment that Zed began to question his decision to make the reveal a surprise.
The dome was now shot through with at least a dozen large holes, with nothing but darkness on the other side. As the crowd’s concern grew, one of the larger openings near the floor sprang to life. A golden sun rose on the other side of the breach, revealing a rainforest canopy like the kind that Zed had only seen in pictures from the most remote places back on Earth.
The crowd went silent, all conversation dying off as every head turned toward the warm glow. The silence broke as a flock of exotic birds exploded from the dense foliage and poured out of the wall, swooping low over the heads of the colonists.
There were gasps and cheers. People laughed, and Zed thought he might have even seen a few damp eyes.
There was a lull in the conversation, followed by another wave of cheers as the rest of the openings in the dome began to populate with all manner of life.
People pointed as sharks swam past the ocean depths Zed had created. Other openings revealed more fantastical sights, such as dinosaurs and alien worlds. Some played with perspective, like the one that felt like looking through a mouse hole into a giant nineteen-fifties kitchen.
Zed just sat there, taking it all in. He wanted to absorb every detail of this moment and never forget it. Never before had he shared his art with a real audience. Certainly not an in-person one. He’d never experienced anything like it.
This must be what getting high feels like, he thought.
As they sat there enjoying the show, a notification pinged in the corner of Zed’s vision. It was a brief message from Johns.
“See if you can make this mess presentable. Bonus points if you can find a way through the maze.”
-The Robotanist
Zed glanced at the files. Data. So much data. Bel and Nebo had been hard at work.
Zed wasn’t sure the CIG would be able to handle the sheer amount of information that came spilling out of Johns’s message, but it seemed to take it in stride.
“Looks like today is the gift that keeps giving,” Zed said.
Miranda and George turned toward him as one of the colonists tried to throw a piece of fruit into a dinosaur’s virtual mouth, only to have it bounce off the very real wall.
“Just got the mother lode from Johns. Time to start piecing things together.”
“Let us know if any aliens pop up,” George said, only half-joking.
Zed made his way to hydroponics and found a seat at the edge of one of the grow silos. Despite his near-fatal encounter with Andy the last time he’d hung out around one, he still found the smell of life and the shine of the grow lights on wet leaves to be great fuel for creativity. Johns never objected, so he made himself at home.
Zed fired up some software he had brought along for processing photogrammetry, Gaussian splats, and any other technique that could turn images into useful 3D spaces. He began feeding it the footage from Bel and Nebo as fast as it would take it.
By comparing thousands of images the drones had taken from different angles, the software was able to create a textured 3D representation of all the areas explored so far. The drones had also captured rudimentary information on the composition of minerals on the surfaces, radiation readings, and a host of other metadata that was beyond Zed’s ability and knowledge to utilize.
The work was tedious, but Zed didn’t mind. There was something peaceful about the monotony of stitching the branches of the cave system together as the chunks finished processing.
It took the better part of the week, but at long last, he had stitched together an explorable version of everything that Johns had sent him.
For a moment, Zed considered taking a look through the cave himself before showing it to Johns, but then quickly realized that he didn’t actually have a clue what he was looking for. Johns said this was meant to help plot a path to whatever anomaly the previous survey drones had picked up, but Zed didn't know where that was or even what it was.
He spun the root-like structure in front of him, but from the outside at least, it really did just look like a cave. No “X” to mark the spot or oasis of Martian trees that he could make out. And yet, Zed hesitated. It was a moment he didn’t want to end. Even in his ignorance, somewhere in this twisted environment was alien life, or at least potential life. Right now, he was, in a sense, closest to it, and a part of him didn’t want to give up that sense of significance just yet.
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An idea emerged from Zed’s hesitation.
“Yo, Douglas, can you look through the sensor metadata for each image used and see if anything stands out? Anything that doesn't look like a rock?”
A miniature version of Douglas appeared on Zed’s knee, gave him a tiny thumbs up, and vanished. A circular countdown timer materialized on Zed’s wrist like a watch. It read five hours and twelve minutes.
Zed glanced at the current time and saw that it was almost midnight. No sense in waiting up. If something was there, it had been there a long time and could certainly wait until morning.
“Johns!” Zed shouted as he burst through the front door to hydroponics.
Zed was out of breath and likely had a few new bruises. He hadn’t tried a full-tilt run since arriving on Mars, and it hadn’t gone terribly well.
At the moment, though, he couldn’t care less about a few bumps. When Zed had gotten up and checked the results of Douglas’s search through all that data, he’d gotten more than he could have hoped for.
“Over here, Zed,” Johns said, his voice echoing through the open door to his office.
Zed rushed in but pulled up short when he saw that Johns was talking with a few of the technicians who worked under him.
As soon as Johns saw the grin on Zed’s face, he hurriedly dismissed the techs and gestured for Zed to follow him as he made his way out to the more open space of the hydroponics hall.
“By the look on your face, I take it you have news for me, young man,” Johns said, clapping his hands together with a mighty crack that echoed down the trench.
Zed said nothing and instead opened the completed virtual environment, enabling shared viewing with Johns.
Now they were no longer standing in hydroponics but in the Martian cave, looking up at the light streaming in through the shark-toothed opening in the crater floor above.
Under their feet was yet another crater, but this one was within the cave. Because the most recent meteor impact had punched through the floor of the old crater, it had created a brand new one here underground. There were half a dozen offshoot caves branching from this central chamber.
Most were small enough that a human could get through them but would have to bend over or even crawl to do so. Zed had lit the cave with virtual lights. It took away a certain amount of the realism, but that wasn’t really the point here. Exploration was, and that was difficult to do in utter blackness.
“What do you think?” Zed asked, turning his attention to Johns’s face.
Johns shook his head slowly. “It’s perfect, my boy. This is exactly what I needed. How extensive is it? How far do the side passages extend?”
Zed smiled and, with a gesture, collapsed the whole scene into his palm. The large chamber they had just been standing in was now the size of an apple in Zed’s hand. The side passages branched out for various lengths all around, some extending several feet and opening into other smaller chambers and passages of their own.
“Oh, proper job, Zed. Proper job!” Johns was rubbing his hands together so rapidly that Zed half expected to see sparks. “There’s more here than I could have hoped. This is going to make planning an excursion deeper much easier and much more likely to get approved. Now then, let’s see if I can show you the spot they’ll be trying to get to.”
Zed grinned and grabbed the miniature cave system, moving and expanding it until a particular cave branch stood between them.
“It wouldn’t happen to be about here, would it?”
For the first time since he’d met him, Zed saw genuine surprise on Johns’s broad face.
“Now isn’t that something. How’d you guess that, boy?”
“No guessing. I used the metadata from the sensors you built into the drones and had Doug—uh—Gin look for anything that stood out.”
Johns shook his head, confused.
“I didn’t equip them with any sensors to look for organics. There was no need. We already know where we’re going; we just needed an ideal path.”
“It wasn’t organics that they detected,” Zed said, triumphant glee amplifying his smile. “They found radiation and heat.”
Zed hurried on before Johns could respond.
“And no, I’m not talking about cosmic radiation. I thought that at first too. I had to get a little assistance to make sense of what I was seeing. This is nuclear radiation, as if there was a fragging reactor down there!”
“OK, now it makes even less sense. It could have been a sensor malfunction, or I might have hooked something up wrong on the drones. Those sensors were leftover parts I pulled from a hazmat drone. I never meant for them to even be a part of the survey.”
Zed shrugged, still smiling and in no way deflated. “Well, all I can say is that both drones passed through that area, and both drones picked it up.”
Zed clasped his hands behind his back and rocked on the balls of his feet. Johns turned his attention away from the cave rendering and cocked his head at Zed.
“Why do I get the feeling you want me to ask what else you found?”
“Because you totally should!”
Zed jumped into the middle of the cave geometry and hurried to expand one section.
“How did they know there might be life down here?” Zed asked.
“It was the organics they detected along with possible traces of water in the air.”
“So they don’t have a picture of whatever it is, right?”
Johns’s Neanderthal brow shot up.
Without another word, Zed stepped close to Johns and expanded a section of the tunnel. He pulled their perspective down low, revealing a floor-level opening.
Johns looked at Zed and then leaned closer to peer through. The opening looked like just enough room for one person to crawl through on their stomach.
The clarity of the scan broke down the further in you looked. It appeared that one of the drones had passed low through here and managed to capture just a few images down the tunnel. It looked to go about five meters in before opening up into what was presumably another chamber.
That far in, there wasn’t really any dimension to the scan; it was just an image—just enough to make out the floor of the other chamber. Whatever night vision Bel and Nebo had been using to scan in the dark only extended a few meters into the chamber before fading into blackness, but there was just enough to make out a pattern of blobby shapes that appeared to sprout from the cave floor.
“Is that—,” Johns broke off as if afraid to continue for fear of sounding ridiculous.
“Mushrooms?” Zed finished for him.
Johns nodded. “I mean, I’m having a hard time believing it, but they really do have an odd resemblance. They certainly don’t look like any rocks or stalagmites I’ve ever seen. And even if they are rocks, what an odd pattern. We can’t see the whole thing, but they almost look like they form concentric circles.”
Zed just smiled.
“You did well, young Zed. Very well.”
Johns looked back at the scan, a hungry drive in his eyes.
“I’m going to set up a meeting to get this in front of the commanders. I want you to see if you can come up with a few paths through the cave to our little Martian mushrooms here—paths that a human could get through, of course.”
Zed didn’t need any convincing. He was relieved that his part in this wasn’t yet over. “Absolutely, whatever helps.”
“Good, good,” Johns said, staring at the opening to the mysterious chamber.
“I’ll let you know as soon as the meeting’s set. Shouldn’t take long.”
***
For the first time since arriving on Mars, Zed went to bed feeling like he belonged, like he was a part of something here. When sleep took him, he dreamed of crawling his way through the rock-clogged tunnel that stood between them and alien life. No matter how fast he pushed himself along, he could never quite make it to the other side; the blurred, mysterious growths were always out of focus and perpetually just out of reach.
