L.I.F.E
The year is 2057 and mankind has developed deep space
travel, a rather new technique made possible with the successful bending of
space and time curvature. In the recent past water (in solidified ice form) was
discovered on Mars, and there was an exponential increase in missions to Mars.
India achieved history in 2014 after sending the MoM Mangaalyaan which still
orbits the red planet. Back Earth, the space crunch had already started and new
missions were sent to planets like Jupiter, Mars and its moons.
Mr. Chakravorty
(read: me) was one of the crew members sent to Mars as part of extended
experiments to be conducted on Martian soil as to whether it was capable of
supporting life or if intelligent alien life exists for that matter. Yes,
manned missions have already begun!
Mangaalyaantra
(Mars machine) was a spaceship that was completely developed in India and was
capable of carrying 5 members strong crew into the atmosphere of Mars-along
with Mr.Chakravorty were Mr. Srinivasam, Mr. Singh, Ms. Patel and Ms. Das,
the brightest brains in India on space travel, planetary soil, robotics,
geology and other experts who would work extensively on the surface of Mars and
unearth and test the so called ice found under the red and rocky terrain.
March
23rd, 2057: The probe landed,
rather crash landed on the Martian landscape and it was I, Mr. Chakravorty who
first broke out from my cryogenic induced sleep. Waking up the other crew
members, I went to resume controls when I saw the surface of Mars. It was just
like our planets except that it was…so devastatingly red, like all life just
bled out and died and their remains nowhere to be found. Deadly UV rays of the
sun could barbeque anything within seconds here
Mr. Srinivasam (speaking aloud):-
We crash landed! All systems are down, starting emergency backup power, and saying
this, he started rotating the huge handle to generate the backup EMF- after a
few seconds, the spacecraft bathed in the electronic lights and everything was
back to normal.
Mars had deep river like trenches which when seen
serves to tell that eons ago, water may have flowed through them like on Earth.
Maybe billions of years ago, when the weather and climate were much favorable,
life had flourished on Mars, maybe we are just derivatives of the life that had
formed here. Thoughts like these were obviously clouding up my mind and maybe
that is why I totally forgot to pick up the soil samples that I was instructed
to do. A warning from Ms. Das startled me and her sweet and soothing voice put
me back on my prime directive, collecting the solidified ice like substance as
well as well as Martian dirt for sampling and testing.
Ms.
Das (taking the container from my hand):-
Let
me run some tests, and check for traces of materials that are expected to be
found here, her sweet voice trailed off at the last to some unknown place.
Mr. Srinivasam, Mr. Singh and Ms. Patel took my
place to run for experiments in to the deeper trench like structures and that
is where the problem first unveiled itself before us.
Ms.
Patel:- Alpha 1 to control unit, we’re getting
some interference from the west side, we better check it…
Mr.
Singh:- The Sun is so much bright at this time,
the lack of any atmosphere, ozone layer and magnetic field combined and coupled
with such low atmospheric pressure (0.6% of Earth’s sea level pressure) life
could never survive here. What is interesting is…
Mr. Singh’s words remained inside his shiny space
suit for they were spell bounded by something moving in the distant horizon!!!
Shocked and out of words, Mr. Srinivasam, the cool headed one, was the first to
speak among them- “We’ve discovered something moving on the west boundary just
at a little distance from the ravines, and Ms. Das, its huge, blackish and
moving!…”
Life
on Mars!
Anita Das almost instantaneously revolved the camera
to the direction in which the Alpha team was pointing and what I saw on the
screen made my knees weak and I sat down with a thud on the floor. Huge
creatures, eight legged with massive tentacles and suckers were advancing in on
our current position. While all of our cameras and satellites and transponders
were sending information like crazy, mad scientists we were thinking of a
rational explanation for all this! Life on Mars! “H.G Wells was right!” was the
first thought that came to my mind! But I needed to think clearly and
rationally, it was a defining moment for all of humanity and at the moment the
people of Earth would depend on the five of us-knowing that we would help
unearth (or un-Mars) the solution!
No time for sarcasm or jokes though! A primary analysis
and scan of the creature revealed similarities with a micro-organism found on
Earth! Barely 1.5 to 2 mm long, Tardigrades are eight legged creatures that are
known to withstand extreme conditions and can survive even in outer space! Mars
would be a nice and cozy home to them!!! Is this any divine intervention or
just calculations gone awry?
The earlier Mars missions must have acted like
pollination agents and brought them here where in the absence of competition
and some amount of frozen water, they flourished and magnified manifold to
attain the shape and size that we are seeing today! Whatever maybe the case,
these gigantic Tardigrades are a force to be reckoned with and we must pack up
and leave before they kill us, thus we had a chance escape because those huge
Tardigrades were fast and due to their adaptation in the Martian environment they
had attained great speed too!
As we were returning, I could not help but think of
the sardonic situation here, that man on his own curiosity induced alien life
on Mars and roared out laughing as the spaceship corrected itself into
trajectory and we prepared for our final cryogenic sleep.
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