A Parable of the Red Caves

An orange hue darkened his empty living room. Pull chains ticked on a wobbling ceiling fan above his head as it swirled a light smokey scent in the air. Summers used to be fun, Trent thought to himself. Contemplative, he stared through the large window past the pressed squares and circles on the carpet where his furniture once sat. The dark air outside colored the apartment complex across the deserted street, and the haze brought a sad silence to the city during the fire season. Trent remembered a time as a kid when he used to play outside in the summer. People would go out with their dogs and walk around town or go for hikes. Over the years, the fire season kept getting longer until people found themselves waiting for fall and winter to bring an end to the suffocating smoke. Waiting for the weather to smother the firestorm and smoldering trees in the forests surrounding the city.

Trent and his partner Olivia got married in their late twenties and had been married for eight years before she was finally beaten by lung cancer. It didn’t feel fair. She was never a smoker. Trent tried not to think about it much anymore. He did enough of that during her gradual death. They never had any children, though they tried for a short time later in their marriage, before Olivia’s diagnosis.

The twenty thousand that Trent got from Olivia’s life insurance policy wasn’t much, but it was enough to buy a ticket. As a kid, when Mars was first being explored, Trent was excited to one day go. As he got older, though, after he married Olivia, he gave up those ambitions and decided to settle down.

In a final glance, Trent’s eyes swept reminiscently around his empty apartment. There wasn’t much to look at anymore. His eyes landed on the little black book that sat on top of his oversized and overstuffed backpack. He picked it up. Holding it in his hand, Trent ran his thumb across its fine, soft leathery cover. He thought he might read from it in the last moments in their apartment. He couldn’t bring himself to open it. Sliding it in the top pocket of his bag, Trent swallowed his pain. “That’s it, I guess” he said to himself as he bounced his pack until it sat high on his shoulders. Beyond the glass, he saw the haze and inhaled deep into his chest before opening the door. Trent walked out of his apartment for the last time.

____________

The bus station was crowded, but the chatter was sparse and unenthusiastic. Repressive dimness from the orange glow that dominated the large glass windows gave the terminal and all its occupants a dispirited character. Looking past the heads of the passengers in line in front of him, Trent saw the digital sign that read Texas above the bus’s entry platform. The line shuffled slowly forward. His heavy pack thumped the ground with its thick fabric as he dropped it between him and the luggage worker. To keep the black book close to him, Trent reached in the front pocket of his pack to grab it before the worker stuffed his bag next to the others in a compartment under the bus. Near the back, he found two empty seats and scooted into the one by the window, safely tucking the little book in the seat by his leg. Trent leaned his head back and closed his eyes to rest. It’ll be about thirty hours before he arrives at the Xplor launch site.

“Where you headed?” Trent heard a man’s voice next to him. His seat slightly shook while his neighbor situated himself. “You goin’ all the way?” The man looked sturdy. His voice sounded years too young for his worn and weather-beaten face.

Trent looked around the bus and guessed that most of the passengers, who were all working age men and women, were likely headed to the red planet. He shifted slightly, moving his shoulder against the window to create more space between them. “Yeah, all the way to Mars,” he said.

The man looked amused. “Figures. I bet everyone on this bus is lookin’ for work up there. If they were goin’ for any other reason, it means they probly got money and they’d take the HyperTrac instead of this old slow-roller.”

Trent nodded, pressing his lips in a frowning gesture of agreement.

“My name’s Dilly,” the man said.

“I’m Trent.”

The electric engine hummed and whined as the bus pulled out from the station’s gated lot.

“So,” asked Dilly. “You got any mining experience? Or are you like the rest of us poor bastards who got suckered in to saving the Earth, as the say.”

“I don’t have much left here,” Trent said.

Through a side-eye smirk. “Ah,” Dilly said. “You’re one of those type.”

Trent felt oddly comforted.

“Since, I’m guessing you’re not a miner, do you at least know what we’re mining?”

Trent admitted that all he knew was that there were large graphite reserves on Mars.

Feeling compelled to oblige, for the rest of the trip Dilly shared is not unimpressive knowledge of current affairs.

____________

It was an especially hot day on the southern tip of Texas. The air smelled sweet as the sun softened the asphalt that surrounded the launchpad. Dilly and Trent had been split up and were waiting with their respective groups, assigned by flight cabin, to board the rocket that would take them to Moon Base Artemis.

Trent thought the travelers in cabins A and B looked like business executives and government officials. Cabin C, the cabin that Trent would fly in, had people like him who were on their way to mine on Mars and could afford their own ticket. He knew that cabin D would transport all the folks who applied to the incentive program that Dilly was in and had told him about. The program was worked out between Xplor, the rocket company, and Graphex, the mining company, to allow for workers to travel to the mining sites and use part of their paycheck to eventually pay off the ticket. It was sponsored by the government. Trent had seen the commercials. Government funded advertisements for Graphex that flashed images of beautiful cityscapes with blue skies. Ads that included text that read “DO YOUR PART” and “EARTH NEEDS YOU” and “MAKE EARTH GREEN AGAIN.”

After his conversation with Dilly on the long bus ride, Trent had a better idea of what the global effort was all about. Trent knew, generally, that the graphite mines on Mars helped to stabilize Earth’s climate, but he didn’t know how. He also didn’t know that on Earth the largest graphite mines had been depleted in the 2040s when the world descended on Sri Lanka in a global effort to rapidly overhaul the worlds energy infrastructure.

Near the end of the first half of the twenty-first century, world leaders came together in the Global Climate Initiative (GCI) which worked to completely phase-out all vehicles, and other instruments, powered by fossil fuels in the Great Recycle that started late in the ‘30s. During the overhaul, batteries became instrumental in powering the planet, and graphene, a mineral extracted from crystalline graphite, became the most valuable and sought-after commodity on the Earth.

Trent knew that there were huge deposits of graphite on Mars, but he learned from Dilly that the graphite was in Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system, because it functioned differently than Earth’s volcanos. Olympus Mons formed more slowly, and its foothills were packed with 99% fully crystallized carbon, the element from which the highly conductive graphene is extracted and used as the crucial ingredient in the worlds mass battery production.

Moon Base Artemis was an international outpost for the Global Climate Initiative. It was the place, Trent and the other travelers were told, where governments collaborated with the corporations Xplor and Graphex in the global effort to extract graphite from Mars. Artemis was a true masterwork of collaborative engineering. The base housed all of the bureaucratic offices that Trent and the rest of the travelers were told they would do their in-processing before the long journey to Mars. It was the place they would sign their contracts.

Trent, and the other travelers, boarded the long elevator that reached high up the rocket to cabin C. He, and the others with him, were excited to be a part of something bigger than themselves. They were signing up to save the planet.

____________

It had taken a couple of days, but they finally arrived at Moon Base Artemis. Docking the rocket to the Artemis entry tunnel seemed as if it took hours. Trent was anxious to see the Artemis station. He wondered what it looked like, and he wanted to properly stretch his legs after the three-day journey.

Naturally, Trent thought, they offloaded cabins A and B first. Trent could see the business-looking people as their cheerful, relieved faces passed a small window in the tunnel that led to Artemis. The green light finally turned on above the cabin C door and it opened into its tunnel. Trent and the rest of the eager travelers filed through. Midway through the tunnel, Trent looked out of a little bubble window at the Artemis base and he could make out the words “DARE MIGHTY THINGS” in red letters across its side. Excitement swelled in his body. In the same moment, he heard voices murmur at the end of the walkway. When he got to the end, he realized that they walked straight into another rocket.

“Welcome to SkyBus”, they heard an automated voice over a loudspeaker.

“What the hell?” a woman said who was visibly irritated. “I thought we were going to stop at Artemis first.” Trent, and the rest of the travelers, shared the woman’s frustration.

“Please feel free to move about the ship,” the automated voice said. “Your belongings have been transferred to the cargo area where you may retrieve them. We will be departing shortly.” Just as the voice ended, the doors locked and sealed behind the travelers.

Trent scanned the cavernous common area that looked like a county jail with rooms with sliding doors around its edges. He noticed that there were several floors connected by systems of ladders. He climbed to the floor below and in a similar room was a crowd of similarly frustrated and confused travelers. He saw Dilly.

“Trent!” Dilly barked.

“What’s going on?” asked Trent, desperately.

“They got us buddy,” said Dilly as his eyes glossed in an angry admiration.

“What do you mean?” Trent pleaded.

“You’ve just signed up to be a career miner.”

Trent felt a jolt of terror that shocked his body like he had been suddenly hooked up to a graphene battery.

Dilly saw the horror in Trent’s face.

Trent, in a voice that sounded like he was trying to make sense of it, said “I mean, I planned on going up there to mine. I bought a ticket.”

Dilly put his hand on Trent’s shoulder. “I don’t think we’re goin’ home, man. I think they got us savin’ the planet. C’mon, let’s go get our bags and find a place to set up.”

____________

A few months had passed. Their fears were justified. Mars was a mining colony run by ruthless overseers that they never made actual contact with. Trent, in his tattered thermal mining suit with its meager bubble-faced breathing mask, stood at the foot of Olympus Mons at the red cave opening. It was black inside. He could see the little blue dot in the dark sky. Every time he saw it, he felt a miserable helplessness. He pulled out his little black book and turned to the last entry that Olivia had written before she died. “Death,” she wrote. “Is nothing but a surrendering of life.” Trent looked into his dark cave.