August 5th, 2021
Kat Reagan
The University of Iowa
Science Fiction
Content Warnings: Existential Dread
You are driving over an endless sea of tan rocks and burnt umber
ground. The treads of your wheels stir ancient dust up into swirling
clouds behind you, accenting the dirt tracks you leave everywhere
you roam. Every so often you raise your camera arm, dutifully
rotating the device in a slow, graceful circle to take pictures of the
landscape for your family to puzzle together down in the lab where
you were born.
You are sitting in a lecture hall. It is 6:30 p.m. on a Thursday night. This lecture is an hour and a half long. You have work after this, and you are regretting a great deal of your life decisions. You thought that getting your science requirement out of the way over the summer would be worth the lost free time, but instead as you pull out your beat-up notebook you also must pull yourself away from the urge to run out into the open air and scream. It has been a long week. It is going to be a long night.
This is your day, your present and past and future moments. You
drive. You take your photos. You drive again. Every once in a
while, you receive a note from home. Usually it’s to inform you
that there could be sand nearby, or that the rocks you passed the
other day should not be climbed. Not that any of this is news, of
course. You are a very smart robot. You know better than to get
stuck. You hope this makes them proud of you.
In the front of the hall, your professor is pulling up a PowerPoint
presentation. Class typically begins with the story of a
constellation before a discussion of physics and math and all the
things you never understood in high school. Today, though, you
watch as the professor pulls up a photo of a black sky freckled with
stars. It’s pretty, but it’s nothing special. Until he explains that this
photo was taken from Mars. These are Martian stars, a picture of
night from another planet. The familiarity of it unnerves you.
Though your routine is hard to change, you do not let it become
too repetitive. Your favorite thing to do when you’re bored is to
take a picture of something you should not take a picture of. It’s
like a postcard, you think, the closest thing you can get to telling
the people that receive your photos that you’re still thinking about
them all the way out in space. Today is a special day. You allow
yourself to misbehave. Just a little. As a treat.
Your professor, chuckling as he speaks, explains that the robot that
took these photos is not supposed to be taking pictures of anything
but planetary landscape. You do not laugh. Looking into the alien
sky, you feel your worries becoming smaller and smaller. No, not
your worries. You, yourself, are becoming smaller. More
insignificant in the face of the infinite and unchanging void. You
shake your head (not today, we are not doing this today) and turn
your mind back to the professor. He is still smiling at one of his
own jokes as he reaches for his mouse. The professor turns the
slide, and there it is.
In your mind’s eye, you capture the image of a robot. It is simultaneously
mechanical and adorable. The robot is staring into the lens on its external arm, the camera attached to its robotic head acting as one gleaming eye. The shutters of its head camera are tilted upward. The effect is that of a young child smiling so wide
that their chubby cheeks cover the lower portion of their eyelids, face full of joy
and excitement as they discover a new part of the world.
This is you. Today is your birthday, and you have decided to
celebrate by sending your family a picture of your smiling face so
that they know that all is well.
This is the Curiosity Mars Rover. Today is its birthday. You are
overwhelmed by your desire to hug its metal frame and tell it what
a good bot it is.
With your celebration over, you send your pictures back down to
Earth and continue driving. You find some rocks that seem
interesting, and some that don’t. There is a sand pit up ahead. You
avoid it, and you don’t pause to wonder what would happen if you
got stuck there. You continue on. And on. And on.
Your professor displays examples of pictures that the rover sends
back to Earth. They are beautiful and horrifying all at once. The
planet is a fascinating landscape of rocky crags and tall mountains
and deep umber shadows, but those aren’t the things that draw you
in. It’s the sky. A real sky, just like the one you’ve been looking at
since you were born, but this one is greige and dusty like a dry
plains windstorm, and you know that sky. You can feel the distance
of the horizon line, imagine great ashy clouds painting the grey
expanse of atmosphere above it in the day and beautiful refractions
of red and fuschia and deep orange shining across those mountain
peaks at sunset.
And you can’t help but wonder how long it’s been since you’ve
been able to see your family. The thousands of scientists that made
you, taught you, loved you, they are all 236.43 million miles away
and you have not seen them since they decided you were ready to
leave home. They love you very much. You know that they do.
They tell you as often as they can, through the little messages they
send into your head from 236.43 million miles away.
But that is not your sky. It does not have clouds, and the colors of a
sunset could not begin to pierce the planet’s dusty atmosphere.
And for the second time today, you are forced to face the idea that
your experiences in this universe mean nothing as compared to its
scale. The thought sends tremors like earthquakes down your
spine, but you are in class and you cannot shake. You grip your
pencil harder and try to make yourself focus on the way the
graphite glides along the page as you take your notes.
The knowledge that you were made to be sent away and never
touched again forms an inescapable part of your core memory and
that hurts. So does the fact that you were designed to be 236.43
miles away from the only company you have ever known. That
you are a research vessel with a very important job and that is all
you will ever be. That is all you were created to be.
Then you realize what you are writing. It’s the raisin bread
analogy. The story goes that the universe formed like raisin bread.
When the dough was made, all of the raisins—galaxies and stars
and planetary bodies and all those impossibly large things—were
close together. As the bread, the universe itself, is baked, the
raisins spread away from each other. The universe grows infinitely
bigger, and the things within it grow infinitely farther apart.
You were not created to be loved, nor were you created to be seen.
There are others like you, but you don’t see them. They are
scattered across the surface of Mars, all on their own paths doing
their own jobs, and all you ever find to prove their existence are
the tracks they leave as they move away from you across miles and
miles of the Red Planet. And you are left alone. Always alone.
You are not a crumb of the raisin bread, you think, not even a full
atom of it. It takes thousands of you to make a neutron—no, not
even a full neutron, a simple quark—and there are thousands upon
thousands of yous to choose from. You look around the lecture hall and
there they are. Sitting in rows and columns, some attentive,
some pretending to be, some not even trying. They all must know
too. That they will never amount to something notable, that they
are going to be lost to the ever-growing expanse of space and time.
All the notes have already been taken. That’s why they don’t take
theirs. You are jealous. You are still writing.
Why else would they teach you to sing “Happy Birthday?”
Why are you still writing?
You stop driving. Just for a moment. Just to recover yourself. You
look at the mountains and the rocks, the boulders that you have
seen a million times before and yet only once. You wonder what it
might have been like to be a child. To be held for longer than the
time it took to make you, to know when you grew up you could
choose not to be alone. To be loved, fully and completely. To be
known.
You don’t go to work when class ends. Instead, you walk down to
the river that runs through campus. You find a dark, quiet patch of
grass and lay down on your back, looking up into the great maw of
the night sky.
You are only five years old. On Earth, you are ten. Either way you
are a child, and your parents are so, so far away. You look up at the
flickering blue dot of Earth above you and replay those messages
in your mind, all their little reassurances and pet names, and you
miss them so much.
You are twenty years old. On Mars, you would be ten. You wish
you were ten again. Nobody asks a ten year old to consider their
place in the size and scale of the universe. They definitely don’t
ask them to have a job or go to school or try to function as a living
organism ever again directly after that, either. You look up at the
night sky and find Mars, a glimmering red speck in the distance,
and you think about it and its familiar sky and its impossible
familiarity and you let the enormity of the universe consume you.
And in that moment you feel small
Because you are one of a trillion just like you.
Because you are alone up here, on your red rock.
But as you look up at the planet above you, you realize that being part of such a
large and vast space means that there will always be massive things and forgotten things and loving things and lonely things and you, you get a chance to see them.
For now, you are here. You are known. Somewhere, someone, will feel your
influence on this universe, no matter how small, and that is such a mathematical impossibility that you can’t help but sit in awe of it. You are in love with life and
the galaxy and the absolutely ludicrous wonder that is existing.
So you begin to sing at that beautiful and far off speck of hope:
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday to You
Happy Birthday, Curiosity
Happy Birthday to You