The Worst Man on Mars

Karl Eckrocks, the robotic mutant created by Zilli, was in rock-collecting heaven. Everywhere he looked there were rocks. Big rocks, little rocks, rough rocks, smooth rocks, red rocks, not-so-red rocks. He barely knew where to start as he lumbered along the Martian desert like some vast mechanical Quasimodo with an obsessive interest in minerals.

Spoilt for choice, the nightmarebot resolved to let Lady Luck determine the first rock he would examine. Switching off his optics, he stretched out a telescopic rock-grabber and randomly groped about in the sand until he felt a small chunk of the hard stuff. Seizing it, he opened his optics and eagerly examined the rock that fate had dealt him. He took in the rugged contours, the sand-dusted faces and the rusty colours, practically gulping down the delicious photons as they bashed into his CCD retinas.

He named the rock Rock 1. After photographing it from every conceivable angle, noting its dimensions and its weight, he plunged his beloved hammer-action power tool into it and felt the satisfaction of the diamond drill-bit penetrating deep into the soft grainy material. Again and again he drilled, rotating the rock a little each time. Once he had peppered it with holes he swung his mighty sledgehammer of scientific truth and smashed it to smithereens, secretly hoping he might spot a creepy crawly scuttling from the debris. Slightly disappointed he had not disturbed any exotic bugs, Karl collected the dust for spectral analysis and held his electronic breath as he awaited the results.

But the readings, while geologically fascinating, failed to reveal any signs of life.

Undeterred, he randomly selected a second rock which, after much deliberation, he named Rock 2, and repeated the procedure.

Still no life.

Rock 3 and Rock 4 were the same. Bit by bit he inched across the Martian landscape, leaving a trail of fine dust in his wake as he bashed rock after rock for scientific analysis.

Some time later, as he approached Rock 1,696, he felt a burst of electrical activity coming from one of the remote processors in his hybrid cyber-self. An English-built CPU was trying to attract his attention. He struggled to understand the accent and make sense of the signal. It seemed to be coming from the Beagle 2 unit, located at around his left hip-joint, yapping at him about some discovery it had made.

Karl tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t leave him alone. Beagle 2 had never had a chance to use its sensors, or its camera, or any of its instruments. So it was fresh and keen to make discoveries. And it had spotted something of great interest about fifty metres away.

Karl enquired whether it was a rock. If so, he wanted to know if it was large or small, dull or shiny, and what was its colour? His preference being, a large, red, shiny one.

No, responded Beagle 2, it was not a rock. It was organic-looking; a possible sighting of a living thing.

Deep down in Karl’s robotic guts, a component from the Curiosity rover piped up that it too had seen the life-signs. Indeed, that it had been the first to spot them, a claim that Beagle 2 robustly challenged.

Calmly, the Frankendroid trained his optics in the direction the squabbling processors were indicating. There, stretched out on the ground was a multi-coloured thing, about the size of a large van. It was most definitely not a rock. Its central region consisted of a scaffold of curved white struts, like a rounded cage. Around this lay what looked like soft matter that had dripped or fallen off the cage, coloured with bright reds and browns and yellows. Some of the soft matter had delicate, filigree offshoots fluttering in the Martian breeze. Any human would have immediately identified it as the corpse of a very large bird-like creature, with two twisted legs, a pair of vast wings, a head, a beak and two empty eye sockets. This bird-like creature would have stood about 12 feet tall when alive. Now it lay, partially decayed, the remaining flesh desiccated and freeze-dried by the icy Martian winds.

Karl concluded that the object did indeed merit investigation; perhaps it was the source of the life-emitting signals he had detected. But, just as he was about to engage forward thrust, a Soviet Mars 6 Lander processor, located in his right wheel-arch, jammed on the brake. Its old circuit-board reminded Karl that there were 4,257 rocks between him and the anomalous object, all requiring classification. He hesitated. The scientist in him knew that the Mars 6 Lander had a point but, with Beagle 2’s excited yapping in his audio receptor, he succumbed to temptation. A robot arm, complete with clippers, reached down and deftly nipped a wire, sending the Russian unit to an eternal electronic sleep and, at the same time, releasing the brake.

When building Karl, Zilli had struggled to find suitable wheels for her roving monster and, in the end, had plumped for a design solution that had a dramatic effect on vehicle manoeuvrability. On one side she had used a tank caterpillar track and, on the other, a series of what appeared to be supermarket trolley wheels. The result, apart from a permanent tilt to the left, required Karl to aim several metres to the side of his chosen destination and hope for the best. Up until now, it hadn’t really mattered whether he’d arrived at the correct rock or not, since one rock was pretty much like any other. But now he had something other than a rock to aim at he took the greatest care in calculating a hyperbolic path that would deliver him to his desired end-point.

The legs of the long-johns strapped to the flagpole flapped wildly in the wind as the six-metre tall mechanical monstrosity clambered over the crusty landscape. His battered bearings squealed in apparent agony under the strain of a one tonne battery Zilli had bolted to his back. In the 1970s the battery pack had been all the rage and had even made the front cover of Robot Monthly, its proud inventor draped across the terminals wearing a very fashionable tank-top under his corduroy jacket. But now, with the advent of Lithium Air Featherlite cells, it had become an embarrassment and no self-respecting robot would be seen dead wearing one.

Slowly, torturously, he approached the splayed-out cadaver. Beagle 2 was excitedly transmitting the pictures from its camera to Earth, to Jupiter, to Neptune, to anywhere that would have the technology to receive them. It was trying to transmit a running commentary at the same time, but all it could manage was the digital equivalent of: “Wow. Look at that! Look at that!!”

Karl brought his ramshackle construction to a halt and scanned the thing from one end to the next. With the majority of his old-fashioned processors programmed only to recognize rocks, he had trouble working out what to make of it. But then something caught his optics. A glint came from inside the large, cage-like structure. And another. He zoomed in. Nestling in a mix of frozen flesh and feathers were ornate stones of every hue that nearly blew his circuits. Pebbles, rather than rocks. They weren’t even listed in his Observer’s Database of Boulders, Rocks and Pebbles. They were perfectly spherical. And transparent. And contained something inside. To a connoisseur of rocks like Karl, this was the mother lode.

Carefully, very carefully, he extended an arm with a grabby thing on the end and snapped off several flaps of frozen organic matter that still remained on the white struts. Then, using a thinner collecting device, he extended it between the ribs of the cage and lifted one of the spherical pebbles. Holding it up to the light he could see that it was a mathematically perfect, transparent sphere, approximately one centimetre in diameter, with a swirl of bright colours encapsulated in the centre.

A child would have identified the pebble as a marble and would have wondered how a small cluster of them had ended up inside the stomach of a giant Martian bird. But to Karl it was an exquisite find, perfect in every detail. The product of an unknown geological process.

Greedily he grabbed the remainder of the marbles from the bird’s corpse and stored them in his special rock pouch. He and the other rover components congratulated themselves on their collective success. At long last their respective multi-billion-dollar space missions had paid off, big time.

That night at 8pm sharp – Karl’s normal shutdown time – the rover components held an internal party. An all-nighter.

Only Beagle 2’s core processor seemed vaguely bothered by the discovery. Not so much by the stones themselves as their location. All that frozen and feathery material surrounding the pebbles. Why had Karl Eckrocks not tested it for life?

And, more disappointingly, why had Beagle 2 not received a response to the images it had beamed to Earth? Why no answer? Why no instructions on what to do next? Why no guidance?

Reluctantly, Beagle 2 made its way through the maze of electrical connections to the old Viking 2 jukebox in Karl’s abdomen, where the other components were circuit breakdancing and popping to some old Kraftwerk tunes.