GOING MARTIAN | futurity

At 16, ANNA STEIN is bewildered why she was brought into her vacant and pointless existence. She wants out. This urge will eventually take her to the far margins of existence. On the way, she’ll fail over and over to be a contestant on a reality show awarding one-way tickets to Mars, to be among the first permanent settlers. Instead, she’ll live on the street performing theater about Death, have a life-altering chance encounter with Edwin Shank, work as a tour guide for space tourists, which she’ll despise until she commits an instinctual act of heroism, saving many lives, and this will change her. The event will draw the attention of Edwin Shank’s very smart and strange clone, who sees her as kindred, hateful of limits, and will hack into whatever system is necessary to get her to the Red Planet.

Mars Colonization is the beginning of a Plan B for the Earth, which is a cynical approach to Climate Change, but a viable idea already in the works by, among others, a reality show (mars-one.com),. Once the new settlers are all settled in, they’ll rely on a powerful artificially intelligent computer system to manage life support and many other things, including birthing. So when the first native Martians are born ‘different’, is it possible they were genetically engineered by AI?