362 Terraforming Mars, Part 13: Inside Out

Dr. Renée Neimann was ready to get down to work. Real Martian work. The welcome mat muddied quickly when the ball bearing crags began to "snap" into humans.

Three victims so far. Three head wounds. Three roly poly, shiny little aliens occupying space in human brains. Renée suspected there were more. There had to be more. Her suspicions, however, remained undiscoverable in the classified research. Not that she didn't try to dive deeper.

Extensive evaluation of the three known casualties provided the natural history and nascent epidemiology of ferrism:

1. One victim had committed precipitous suicide, seeming to relive all of his life's traums simultaneously. Selective amnesia is a wonderful thing, otherwise no one would survive life.
2. Another victim romanticized about her indwelling memory-jogger while exhibiting epileptic symptoms before assuming her catatonic state.
3. And a third, mysteriously, carried on life as normally as any over-scrutinized person could. He was right. Now, as the only surviving victim who was still living normally (was he? who knows what's in someone's head), he was no longer tasked with taking magnetic readings in the field, but refused to avoid magnetic resonance readings in his head. This person did well to stay away from magnets.

Renée’s Rebirth vocation was to provoke and study ferrism in her animals—specifically, induce ferropod-mammal interactions; or even more specifically, attacks. It was hoped that a valid translational science could be applied to humans similarly affected.

She was not involved directly with the Martian Tempconciliation Project, which hoped to bring together the contemporaneous modern human colonization on Mars and its antediluvian past, in an isochronous superimposition. (Whatever could go wrong?) However, indirectly, her initial research would provide a basis to understand, after tempconciliation, how in the hell native Martians co-existed with their ferropods — with these little brain-seeking ballistic critters.

Had they been immune to the little buckshot millennia ago.

She laughed when she improvised a ridiculous thought: perhaps these crags were Martian droppings. Did these Martians eat the ferric oxide dust and just shit ferroballs? She felt it best not to bring this up to Dr. Cooke, who now worked alongside her at the Veterinary Center. He certainly wouldn't think such a thing was a joking matter.