Reception

There is still life on Mars.

I think I just created a monster.


Reception

She stared blankly at the console in front of her, gripping the grab bar that presented itself helpfully to one side of the screen. It seemed funny to her that after all the centuries of technological advance and development the consoles should still be sporting such a primitive feature. Not that she objected, mind you; it was coming in quite handy at the moment.

It seemed hard to believe that it was all over. After all of the planning and training, after two years of monitoring and hard work trying to keep track of the operative in her care, the supervisor had simply shut her mission down. Just like that. She had objected, of course, but the supervisor was only following protocol. She had wanted to at least send someone to see if he was alive or dead, but that was considered a waste of time and manpower. Other operatives had disappeared, their transponders going dead in the middle of a mission. The first time it had happened, they had sent out several other operatives, only to discover that the missing agent had decided to 'go native,' so to speak, and had simply shut down the transponder, choosing to live happily ever after in a different time and place.

So she was left to grip the panic bar on her monitor and contemplate the unruly stack of paperwork she would have to tame in order to close out the case. A person's life, reduced to a stack of papers. It seemed wrong somehow, but she was at a loss at to what to do about it. A sudden voice at her elbow snapped her from her reverie. "Excuse me, ma'am?"

She turned to face the voice and saw an eager young recruit standing, no, almost hopping, next to her desk. He looked like he might have just fallen out of the cradle and into the too large uniform he was struggling to fill. He clutched nervously at the binder in his hands and looked at her expectantly. She finally came to her senses enough to speak. "Can I help you?"

"Yes, ma'am, my instructor directed me to come to you for my orientation?" He actually managed to make the simple statement sound like a pleading question. She sighed. Anything but this. "Have a seat, I'll be right with you."

She slammed into the supervisor's office with as much emotion as she could muster. "Are you kidding me? Orientation for a new recruit?"

"You need to move on and get your mind on your job."

"I need to finish up the paperwork to close out the case! Maybe I can figure out what went wrong in the process."

"No, you need to follow orders, and I am ordering you to supervise this recruit's orientation."

"But..."

The supervisor stood abruptly. "Do you really think that I enjoy the thought of losing a man? You know this project is too important to just throw away anyone. But he's gone and we need to deal with that. Now go do your job."

If the young man noticed the slamming of the door, he pretended not to notice. Perhaps he was just overwhelmed by the thought of being here. Maybe it was a dream come true for him. Maybe he was just not very observant.

She fairly threw herself into her chair and rummaged through her desktop in a huffy manner. Finally, she yanked out a binder and snapped it open to the front page. "Fine. Hello. I am Controller...um, I am one of the mission controllers here. I imagine you have probably already heard about the history of the Mars Project from your classroom instructor, so I'll just skip that part." She moved to flip a large handful of pages toward the back of the binder, but the recruit interrupted her.

"No, well, I mean, we've had some history of the project, but I've always wondered where they got the name."

"The name." That, she thought, was a good question. She had always found it bizarre that when the early pioneers had first reached for the skies, they had chosen names that had little to do with their goals. Naming the missions after ancient deities was perhaps understandable, but naming them after deities whose functions had no remote association with the goals of the mission was mystifying. What had the messenger of the gods had to do with the first orbit of the Earth? Or the god of the sun with the first landings on the Moon? What, indeed, did the god of war have to do with their ostensibly peaceful work here? "The name." She looked up to see the youngster staring at her expectantly, his writing instrument hovering over his notepad, eager to record her every word. "I'm afraid that information is classified." She imagined that was probably true. If it wasn't, it was a good enough excuse.

He gave a disappointed sigh that she blatantly disregarded as she continued to flip past large sections of the orientation manual. "The greatest part of the work done here revolves around monitoring the movements and actions of the field operatives by tracking their transponders. We also set up and maintain the guide beacons that direct..." Her voice trailed off thoughtfully. They sat in awkward silence for a moment, until the young recruit finally worked up the courage to clear his throat politely.

"Hmmm?" She regarded him blankly as if she had never seen him before.

"Guide beacons?" he suggested helpfully.

"Why weren't the return beacons activated?" He stared at her and struggled to make sense of the question. Was this some sort of test? What was she expecting him to say? He didn't dare say something stupid like 'I don't know.'

"Well, I suppose, I mean...should they have been?"

She regarded his question with mounting excitement. "No, of course, you're right. The return beacons are only active when there is either an expectation of an imminent case closure or the agent has signaled an emergency. The 2006 return beacon wasn't on and the 1973 return beacon wouldn't have been activated for quite a while yet. He's bouncing back and forth between the two years because there's no return beacon!" She jumped up, grabbed his hand and practically shouted, "Come with me!"

He eagerly followed the controller down the nearest corridor, struggling to keep up with her rapid pace. Whatever it was that he had said, it had been the right thing. He had passed his first test. He could only guess at what they were doing now.

She couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it sooner. The guide beacons were set up to backup the programming on the transporters. If the transporters were accidentally triggered without having a date programmed, they would follow the nearest beacon. That much they had already considered. Return beacons could be used if a field operative ran into an emergency situation in which there was no time to program a date to return to the base. The undocumented feature of the transporters made the return beacons even more important. The transponders monitored basic health indicators for each operative. If they sensed unusual heart rate, blood pressure or any signs of severe distress, they would trigger the transporter, which was supposed to follow the nearest beacon. It had been assumed at the time of design that the nearest beacon would be a return beacon. What if the return beacons weren't activated? What would happen then?

The pair fairly burst into small room situated off of one of the side corridors they had wound through. While the Controller busied herself with a multitude of switches and settings, her bewildered companion tried to find a place to sit down out of her way. He sincerely hoped that she wasn't going to ask him anything complicated about the room they were in, or even how to find their way back to where they started, for that matter. He felt overwhelmed and excited at the same time. "What can I do to help?"

"You are going to do something very important. I am going to demonstrate to you just how a transponder tracks a beacon, and I'm putting you in charge of making sure that the return beacon remains activated so that I can return to just this exact time and location. No matter what anyone says or does, no matter how long it may seem to take, even if it seems as though nothing is happening, don't move from this spot and make certain that this indicator remains green at all times and does not go out."

"And what should I do if it does go out?"

"Just press this control until it comes back on."

"And what should I do if..." But before he could even finish his next question, she had disappeared as if into thin air. He had to admit that he was slightly disappointed. He had expected something a bit more spectacular, a flash of light, an electric sizzle in the air, something, anything. But she was simply there one second and gone the next. He looked around the room as if to assure himself that she was really gone and not just hiding somewhere behind one of the consoles. He was alone.

The minutes dragged by slowly. If he had some way of occupying himself, he might not have become so bored, but as it was, he was having a difficult time keeping his eyes open, much less focusing on the green light on the panel. This must be part of the test, he mused to himself, considering all of the possibilities of exciting things that might happen. None of them seemed to be happening, however. He found himself remembering a definition someone had coined about certain high stress occupations. "Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of terror." 'Some punctuation might be nice right about now,' was the last thing he remembered thinking before drifting off to sleep.

The shrill scream that woke him seemed like it had come from another world. He couldn't even imagine what the sound was until jumped to his feet and saw a woman's form (it must be the Controller, he thought) standing in the middle of the room, her back towards him. "Are you alright?" he found himself shouting.

She spun around to face him, her eyes wide with terror, mouth wide open as if to scream again. Her clothing was most definitely from different time and place and she held a small piece of jewellry in her trembling hands. He stared stupidly at her for what seemed an eternity and finally managed to find his voice. "You're not the Controller. Who are you?"

She said nothing and stepped back away from him, searching for somewhere to hide. He decided to try again, this time in a more reassuring tone. "Don't be afraid, you're perfectly safe. You've arrived in one of the Base control rooms. I'm Cadet Evans. What's your name?"

After a moment, she finally calmed enough to speak.

"I'm Annie."