The Martian Conspiracy by Read John

Author:Read, John [Read, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-07-25T22:00:00+00:00

H3’s private security escorted us back into the helicopter and flew us to the far side of the Presidio. It was an engineering marvel as impressive as the colony. As we flew further from H3’s mansion, we could see at least a hundred estates poking out above the trees.

“Hey, where did these trees come from?” I asked. The trees were tall. They obviously didn't come on the Martian transports and couldn’t have been grown there from seedlings.

“3D printed,” the man said, “like everything else in this shithole.”

“What climbed up your ass and died?” Kevin said. “At least you get to live here.”

“We don’t live here,” another guard grunted.

The helicopter landed on a pad near the wall of the complex.

We stepped down from the helicopter and entered a hyper-tube car. The car was the size of two buses parked side by side. Its roof was a display, extending the “sky” of the Presidio. Couches and chairs filled the interior and it looked like an upscale lounge.

Like regular folks riding the metro, the three of us sat on a couch, facing forward, helmets on our laps. Holovisions popped up in front of us as we sat down. My HV showed a video of a honey badger, Kevin’s an aerial view of Seattle, and Avro’s a Japanese village. Looking directly at the display immersed us in these locations. Kevin was the first to put his hands together in a silent clap, issuing the universal command to shut off the system. Avro and I did the same.

Kevin seemed happy to have been on this little adventure and was eager to summarize. “Okay, so our aircraft was destroyed by a freak kangaroo drone accident. We crawled across the surface of Mars, stumbled into some sort of freakish mirage and met the king of Mars. The king, though angry, freed us, and sent us home in an oversized pontoon boat.”

The tube-car came to a stop in what looked like the lobby of a Ritz Carlton. Passersby looked in to see three gentlemen in spacesuits. A group of women in cocktail dresses stuck their noses up and walked away, and some people pointed, tapping others on the shoulder.

“The circumferential channel is right out those doors,” the guard said.

“Can you at least summon us a car?” Kevin asked. “I forgot my wallet.”

“No.”

We didn’t wear pants under our spacesuits, so taking them off wasn’t an option. To top it off, one of us had urinated in the suit’s diapers.

We walked out of the station and looked around, standing in a pavilion larger than the one in the central dome. You could now count us among the few individuals who had seen the Alamo with their own eyes. It wasn’t like the rest of the colony. The interior looked more like a shopping mall than anything else. Unlike the domes in the circumferential, with buildings and roads, the Alamo was a solitary structure.

“That explains why the Alamo isn’t transparent,” Avro said, looking around in every direction.

“Those look like condos,” I commented, pointing at the structure’s exterior.

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