The Worst Man on Mars

Throughout history, the men and women selected by Fate to make truly remarkable, epoch-making discoveries have not always been the most brilliant of their day: occasionally they have been individuals who might be considered a ‘surprise choice’.

Lucy Ugg, for example, a rather formidable, bad-tempered and lice-infested Ethiopian hominid who lived three million years ago. Her ape peers would certainly have considered her a ‘surprise choice’ for her discovery, had they had the wit to ponder such things. It was she who realized that fire was not just something to run away from but that it had other uses. Such as scorching the furry backsides of her errant offspring, or torching the leafy love-nests of her philandering mate, Toby Ugg. Her greatest discovery, though, had come within the ashes of Toby’s final, fatal infidelity. The severe scorching had given her husband a rather delicious crispy crunchy coating. And so, from that simple observation, had been born the barbeque.

Aboard the spaceship Mayflower III Fate was about to select Lieutenant Willie Warner as the next ‘surprise choice’ for a monumental human discovery. As he sat wearing a PredictoHarness in the spaceship’s cockpit he hardly looked the part of a great discoverer – an Archimedes, a Kepler, or an Einstein. His was more the look of a man caught up in the webbing of a very uncomfortable high-tech truss. The PredictoHarness, a state-of-the-art exoskeleton, with built-in predictive artificial intelligence, strove to foresee its wearer’s every move and ‘enhance’ it in zero-G. Its principal drawback was that its predictions tended to be wide of the mark and its ‘assistance’ quite often more of a hindrance than a help. Once inside, it was almost impossible to escape from its clutches as it never occurred to the PredictoHarness that you might want to.

Willie had not donned the harness by choice; his mistake had been to relax and lean back in the cockpit seat, at which point the harness had latched onto its prey and prepared to take over and assist his every move. He wondered what to do. Should he call his crewmate Lieutenant Zak Johnston for assistance, as on all previous occasions? The prospect of the inevitable ridicule did not appeal.

Yet he had to do something; it was dinner time and he was hungry. There was a lunchbox in the refrigerated trunk beneath the cockpit flight desk, but how to get to it without alerting PredictoHarness? He decided to try to outwit it by stealth. Slowly, millimetre by shaky millimetre, he reached his hand towards the lid of the trunk. But the AI exoskeleton was not so easily fooled. In an instant it was aware of his movement and computing probabilities. Within a microsecond it had concluded, with 89% confidence, that Willie wanted to pull up his socks; so, to help, it rammed his arm down towards his ankles.

Locked in this position, Willie considered his options. Call Zak Johnston, or come up with a cunning plan? Still not liking the idea of the former, he focused his mind on the latter. After a few seconds thought, he had it.

With exaggerated movements he pulled up his socks, as though that indeed had been his original intention. PredictoHarness eagerly assisted and then returned him to his starting position. Step 1 successful.

With his other hand he reached towards the flight desk to retrieve a pen. Again, PredictoHarness was only too happy to help. Step 2 done. Then he, accidentally-on-purpose, fumbled the magnetic pen and prodded it towards the cover of the metallic refrigerated trunk. His aim was a little off-target and, for a tense moment, Willie feared it wasn’t magnetic enough to latch on to lid of the trunk and would drift off to the far end of the cockpit. But luckily it veered just in time and clamped itself to the lid. Step 3 complete. He casually reached to retrieve it. As PredictoHarness helped him do so, he flicked his wrist at the last second and flipped open the trunk lid. Hey presto, plan achieved.

“Gotcha!” he said as he peered into the trunk, arm still extended. Floating weightlessly inside was a solitary, ultra-slim Tupperware box – the last of the eight-month supply of lunchboxes his mother had lovingly prepared for the journey. He reached for it and, with PredictoHarness’s eager help, pulled it out; the exoskeleton even helped him crack open the lid. The aroma that assailed his senses sent him into ecstasy. Not for him the space-junk-food that the other personnel had to endure. This was the business!

He teased out a cheese and piccalilli sandwich and a mini Curly Wurly – his favourite confection, a chocolate-covered caramel ladder. Behind the latter was a little surprise: a photograph of his dog, Boo-Boo. His mum must have slipped it in so that, on the eve of the first human Mars landing, he would be reminded of home.

Holding the picture in one hand, Willie bit into the sandwich, sending a stream of piccalilli into the zero-G atmosphere where it joined a spiralling galaxy of empty crisp packets, crushed beer cans, a banana skin, and thousands of tiny globules of congealed gravy; the detritus left by Mission Commander Flint Dugdale from the previous watch.

Willie stroked the image of Boo-Boo, his only friend, and a powerful wave of homesickness hit him in the gut. A tear beaded in one eye. Mechanically, he reached to wipe the tear away but, for reasons known only to PredictoHarness’s unfathomable algorithm, his movement was interpreted as a punch to his own face. Helpfully, the metal clamp around Willie’s wrist directed a perfectly placed uppercut to his chin, rendering him instantly unconscious.

The warning chime, heralding Willie’s imminent epoch-making discovery, cut through the general hum of his dazed brain. Little did he realize that this annoying noise was signalling a profound change in the way humans viewed their place in the Cosmos.

He forced his eyelids open and focused on the fist he had punched himself with. Crushed inside it were the soggy, sticky remains of his half-eaten sandwich. The Curly Wurly and photo of Boo-Boo had drifted away from him, now too far to reach. Indeed, the Curly Wurly was no longer worth reaching having lodged in the outlet of the central heating system where the warm air had reduced it to a flaccid bag of melted chocolate and caramel. Willie felt like crying.

Somewhere in the forest of instrumentation before him and around him, the bleeping continued its incessant call. It had progressed from merely irritating to totally infuriating. He looked about, fuming, searching for the source, ready to smash the device responsible. Having spotted an instrument with a winking light to his left, he then searched for a suitable weapon with which to destroy it. With nothing readily to hand he leaned down and removed the standard-issue space-clog from his right foot. The exoskeleton monitored his movement, calculating probabilities. Eyes fiery red, mouth hissing with rage, Willie raised the clog high, ready to beat the noisy instrument into silence. But that was as far as PredictoHarness let him go. Based on its comprehensive database of human actions it was 73% certain that Willie had removed the space-clog because a small pebble was lodged inside it. Of course, there was always some uncertainty when it came to humans, but 73% was a pretty good bet, so the harness helped Willie vigorously shake the clog to clear it of any foreign matter.

Willie grunted with frustration as the beeping went on and he let the clog float free from his hand. Another idea came to him. With all the guile of his boyhood hero, Batman, he reached into his utility belt and pulled out a pair of nail scissors. PredictoHarness perked up, switching to a state of high alertness, ready to monitor the lieutenant’s every move. What’s he playing at now? it wondered, scanning the cockpit eagerly for clues. The human intends to cut something. But what? It watched Willie flip the lid of its own central processing unit, grab a bundle of multi-coloured wires and smile cruelly as he held them between the scissor blades. Got it, thought the harness and happily helped to squeeze the fingers of its own execution.

As Willie floated gently free of the harness’s suddenly limp restraints, he at last became aware of the significance of the irritating bleeping noise. It was coming from the infra-violet detector. A gob of piccalilli, ejected from his sandwich when he had punched himself, had squirted onto the detector’s touchscreen, refocusing it on a new section of the Martian surface.

“Blimey O’Reilly,” he said, letting out a low whistle. He doggy-paddled through the air to reach the detector, wiped the pickle off the equipment and prodded a button to silence the alarm. His eyes grew wider and wider as he read the results displayed on the screen. The scans of the Martian surface, some 58,000 feet below, had detected something of great significance. “Positive identification at 99% confidence level,” was the on-screen message. “Multiple strong, highly-localized, energy-expending anomalies of a non-geological origin, consistent with metabolizing, thermodynamically open chemical systems, highly suggestive of underlying organic mechanisms”.

Willie blinked several times. From his astronaut training he knew exactly what that meant. It meant that the infra-violet scanners had detected living creatures on the planet below. More importantly, it meant that the piccalilli from Lieutenant Willie Warner’s sandwich had brought about a truly remarkable discovery: he had become the first person to discover Life on Mars.

The question was: what kind of life had Willie just discovered and would it be pleased to see them?