Groundhog

Jason Geldworth drew a shuddering breath. In the waning glow of his headlamp he could see the tunnel he had been traversing the past four hours continued to narrow. Now, he could no longer crawl on his hands and knees, but was forced onto his belly with forward progress laboriously earned by digging in his elbows and pulling his body along. He fought to still his mind, the thought of the 200 feet of rock and soil above him bearing down on his crawl space threatened to crush him as surely as the inhospitable Mars surface itself. It was time for a rest. He was barely able to pull his supply pack past his ribs to retrieve a bottle of water. After a carefully measured four swallows, he switched off his headlamp, closed his eyes and listened. Aside from his ragged breathing and pounding heart, nothing. Silence. Blessed silence. In the colony, even in his 6’ by 8’ privacy pod, it was never silent. In the enveloping dark, in the cushioning silence, Jason slept.

Jason was a groundhog. The colony was divided into four echelons: the Corporation masters, the supervisors, the topsiders, and the groundhogs. The Corporation masters lived on the surface in domed communities. Rumor had it that each of them had his or her own four room house within the community. But that was just rumor. Jason had never seen it. He had never even seen the surface of Mars. The supervisors also had surface dwellings. While that was also communal housing, each supervisor had 100 square feet to call his or her own. The topsiders, although they shared bunk quarters with the groundhogs, spent their working hours on construction projects on the surface and their leisure hours in large caverns reserved for them where male and female topsiders could mingle freely. The groundhogs, like Jason, lived in gender segregated colonies consisting of their working space, a small commons area for non-working hours, and a privacy pod for sleep. Groundhogs were never allowed on the surface. As a groundhog, Jason spent ten hours a day in front of a computer screen monitoring oxygen levels in the domes and construction sites, weather – or at least as much weather as Mars had, and ore transport and traffic. Eight hours were allotted for sleep and the remaining six hours and 39 minutes were Jason’s free time – or at least as much as groundhogs, or even topsiders could ever count themselves free. 

As Jason slept, he dreamed. He dreamed of a second-floor apartment on Milwaukee’s north side. He could see pictures on the wall – pictures of a handsome man in a dark blue uniform with his arm around a pretty woman holding a swaddled baby – his father, his mother, and himself. Jason never really knew the man in the uniform; he had been killed in the line of duty during one of the many riots that ravaged the inner city. And while his mother bore a resemblance to the smiling woman in the picture, he could only see her with sadness in her eyes, graying hair, and premature wrinkles. But her voice. Oh, her voice. Jason could hear her voice…reading him stories, telling him about the man in the picture, singing him to sleep. With a chill, he also could hear her warnings: warnings to come directly home from school, warnings to not hang around the skate park, warnings of what the Corporation did with fatherless boys. Jason had ignored those warnings. Ignored them and had been caught up in one of the Corporation sweeps through his neighborhood. Children under the age of fifteen and children with two-parent homes were released. The others…  Jason soon found out the others were sent to a residential facility for a year. There, they underwent test after test to determine their strengths and abilities – and day after day of indoctrination. At the completion of the year, they were lined up to receive a physical. The last thing Jason remembered of his life on earth was the injection for the “vaccine.” When he next woke, he was on, or rather under, the surface of Mars.

Jason’s attempts to recapture the pleasant parts of his dream were what woke him. Panic nearly swallowed him as he felt the utter dark press in on eyes and mind. The fog cleared and he switched on his headlamp. Jason knew where he was now. He was escaping. Escaping to what, he didn’t know but for the moment to be out of the colony was enough. He looked at his chronometer. Twenty minutes. He had been asleep twenty minutes. They would know he was gone by now, but would they know where he had gone? Jason had been here two Martian years – nearly four earth years. By his reckoning, he was now 21, but such things as birthdays were not celebrated in the colonies. In fact, nothing that could remind a groundhog or a topsider of Earth was celebrated. That Jason could remember his past at all was an anomaly. Supposedly, the injection that sent him and all the other consignees into the long sleep erased all memory so that by the time they were wakened on Mars, they were blank slates – or almost blank slates – the Corporation’s indoctrination – the indoctrination that told them they were either groundhog or topsiders, were born either groundhogs or topsiders, and would always be groundhogs or topsiders owing total loyalty to the Corporation – was supposed to be the only thing they knew. 

Somehow, with Jason, the process failed. With that failure, from his very first day on Mars, Jason’s one thought was escape. After a few confused and  nearly disastrous attempts to discover what his fellow groundhogs remembered, Jason carefully kept his memories to himself. Yet he knew there were others like him, others who retained the memory of their life on Earth. Usually, they went mad. Now and again, a groundhog, and sometimes even a topsider, would lose it. The madness took several forms. Sometimes the person refused to come out of his privacy pod and report for shift. Other times he would start weeping, or screaming while on shift or in the commons or attempt to destroy his workstation. Some even managed to steal a pass to the access ports and head towards the surface. And some committed suicide. When it happened a squad of supervisors would descend, immobilize the person, and take them away, never to be seen again. Rumor had it they were taken to the surface and exposed where they perished in the thin Martian atmosphere. 

In Jason’s subterranean, Martian world, each colony was made up of interconnected caverns. One cavern held the workstations, another the commons area, and a third the privacy pods, bathing stations, and toilets. Meals were served in the commons and were delivered through the access ports. Jason knew that the food had to be prepared somewhere and he knew that the colonies also needed to be connected. As time went by and Jason’s skill at the monitors improved, he discovered he could tap into other channels than the ones he was assigned to monitor. He learned to hide his searches deep in the bowels of the vast memory banks to which the all the computers were connected and to limit his searching to no more than a minute at a time. It was in this way he discovered the tunnels, now long forgotten, between the colonies. With the exception of the spaceport, all the initial development on Mars had been underground. Only as the Corporation’s profits began to increase exponentially, were surface facilities developed, leaving the subterranean areas for the brainwashed and memory wiped workers. After two generations, general knowledge of the original underground network had disappeared.  It was to these tunnels Jason retreated when the memories and constant noise became too much for him. He was always cautious to be back where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there so as to allay suspicion.  After a mild Marsquake he found the crack. Over time, he picked away at it. The crack opened into a small cavern, but a natural cavern, not one that had been engineered. The cavern tapered as it went back, but the rear wall was not a wall at all but a bend. Beyond the bend was a tunnel, the tunnel Jason was now traversing. This tunnel was not on any of the charts of the early development of the Corporation’s Mars holdings, but as far as Jason had been able to determine, it ran parallel to the passage to the spaceport.

Jason had planned for months. He had squirreled away the energy bars groundhogs were given while at their workstations and retrieved a number of bottles from the recycler which he had filled with water. The headlamp he had cobbled together from bits and pieces he had scavenged from the topsiders’ quarters. The batteries had been a more difficult problem. He could only steal them one at a time and needed to allow weeks between thefts so the loss would not be noticed. The same, cautious process was needed to acquire the topsider protective clothing he now wore.

Another hour of squirming along on his belly passed. To Jason’s relief, the tunnel widened and he could once more crawl on hands and knees. One more hour and it would be time for Jason’s shift to begin. They would begin looking for him in earnest. Jason’s last theft had been a blatant one – an access port pass. He hoped the missing pass would direct the Supervisors’ search efforts to the surface. As much as was possible, Jason had wiped the history of his searches from his workstation computer, but a really talented programmer, like himself, would eventually be able to flnd it. By then, Jason hoped to be either long gone…or dead. An hour later, Jason’s progress came to a halt. Dead end. He could not go forward but he was never going back. Faced with a hopeless dilemma, exhaustion overtook Jason. He did the only reasonable thing he could think of. He slept.

A vibration and a bass rumble wakened Jason six hours later. Marsquake! Fear of being buried alive set Jason’s heart pounding, his breath escaping in rapid gasps. He could hear rocks tumbling in the darkness beyond the glow of his headlamp. Closing his eyes and clutching his knees to his chest, Jason could hear his mother singing to him when his fears ran rampant in his childhood nights. “Jesus loves me, this I know; for the Bible tells me so…” He mouthed the words of the song that had soothed his boyhood fears and recollected the stories his mother had read him from the Bible. Was Jesus here on Mars? Jason prayed…and then slept some more.

All was quiet when Jason opened his eyes again. He had slept another two hours and his headlamp barely flickered. Jason switched out the batteries. In the renewed gleam, he examined his surroundings. Rocks had fallen next to the dead end. Above the fallen rubble, the end was now not quite so dead. A hole, two hands’ width wide and four hands’ width high gaped above the rubble pile. Jason thrust his headlamp through the opening and could see light reflected from machined walls. The spaceport tunnel! He pulled a purloined pickaxe from his supply pack and began widening the aperture. In half an hour, he was able to slip through the gap. What a relief! To be able stand upright once more! Jason stretched and groaned, working out the tight spots in his muscles. He was hungry and thirsty, so he dug into his rations. He wasn’t fully satisfied when he stopped eating, but he was feeling much better. He stowed the remaining food and water away, slung his pack over his shoulder, and began to walk. The tunnel floor before him was covered in a thick layer of unmarked dust.

Jason had progressed a quarter mile when he came upon a steel door set into the side of the tunnel. He tried the handle and to his amazement, the door swung silently open. As he entered, lights came on. This frightened him as he imagined a power surge appearing on one of the monitors. He swiftly shut the door and looked for something to secure it and was relieved to see that the door itself was equipped with a bar which he swung into place. Feeling safer, Jason looked around. He felt as though he had entered a time machine or a museum exhibit. Along the rear wall ran a bank of obsolete computers and communications equipment. Over the consoles a framed picture on the wall held the portrait of a boyish appearing man. The plaque on the frame read, “Elon Musk.” Comfortable chairs, not bolted to the floor, faced each screen. Two doors each graced the parallel walls. Opening them, Jason discovered the ones on the left led to privacy pods, though considerably larger than his own. Each held a bed, A chest of drawers, end tables on either side of the bed and shelves filled with books. Real books. On the right side of the room, one of the doors opened to a tiny bathroom. Driven by curiosity, Jason turned the tap on the sink. The tap sputtered and gurgled for a long minute before emitting a thin stream of brown water. Jason quickly turned it off. Water was precious on Mars and its use was carefully tracked. The other door led to a storeroom. Jason was amazed at what he saw. Apparently when these quarters were abandoned, no one saw fit to empty them. One side of the room sported shelves filled with prepackaged meals and bottled beverages. On the other side, more shelves held clothing, bedding, tools electronic equipment, and more books…equipment manuals. Jason could live here for weeks.

Happy to have a power source, Jason plugged in his stolen tablet. He had taken every precaution he knew to shield it. Now, he could listen in to communications in the colonies. It had been sixteen hours since his escape, ten hours since the search had begun. As he had hoped, the search had focused on the access port. After several hours, the supervisors concluded he had made it to the surface and perished outside. He was written off as a suicide and the case was closed. Now, unless someone picked up anomalies in power and water usage and tracked it down to these abandoned facilities, he was safe. And the good news was that after a Marsquake, there would be anomalies for weeks, if not months.

The next few days, Jason ate, slept, and equally devoured the equipment manuals and books. Especially valuable to him were the schematics of the spaceport. Even though they were 50 years old, the basics had not changed. With his tablet, Jason learned and memorized the routines and flight schedules of the spaceport. The antique coveralls in the storage room were not significantly different from those of the current crews. Jason also learned that the spaceport was one thing not owned and controlled by the Corporation. It had been endowed by the Mars Project founder, Elon Musk, and had successfully fended off every attempt by the Corporation to acquire it.

Three weeks later, Jason was ready. An Earthbound ship was scheduled to depart the following day. Jason had tapped into the ship’s inventory and had managed to offload sufficient cargo to account for his weight and supplies. He had acquired the necessary codes to gain entrance to the unguarded ship before the crew boarded. Tonight was the night. Dressed in the antique coveralls Jason emerged into the spaceport just after midnight. He found his way to the one pressurized cargo hold and set up his makeshift launch mattress. Mars might have lower gravity than Earth, but liftoff still generated a lot of G-force. Now he just had to wait and hope he wasn’t discovered before launch.

Liftoff occurred with the Martian dawn. Pressed into his mattress, Jason could scarcely breathe for several long minutes. He was past the point of no return. Now, he needed to make his presence known to the crew and hope they wouldn’t jettison him out the nearest airlock. Jason floated in the dark to the cargo hold door. As he turned the handle, lights came on and alarms sounded. He was quickly surrounded by two men and a woman. He had expected anger and hostility but was surprised to see only relief on their faces. Their crisis was merely a human being, not a mechanical failure. It took a bit, but once Jason explained who he was, the security team brought him to the ship’s captain.

Captain Elizabeth Sutton greeted her stowaway kindly. “This is a first. I’ve never heard of anyone escaping from one of the Corporation’s slave labor camps before. I am glad to know it can be done. Those things are an abomination! The question is now, what do we do with you? Mass, fuel, food and water are all carefully calculated down to the last ounce on these journeys. We have to account for that and feed you.”

Jason interrupted. “I brought food and water with me.”

“How enterprising. But enough for seven months?”

“Seven months? I didn’t know it took that long. It’s one thing I didn’t research. When I was taken, the last thing I remember is being given an injection and then waking up in my colony on Mars.”

Captain Sutton frowned. “Seven months under sedation. It’s a wonder you survived. I’ve heard that many don’t. Well, taking into account your own supplies, the rest of the crew can plan on short rations for the trip. We don’t dare short our Corporation passengers, however. And speaking of the Corporation, we also need to keep you out of their sight. Nice uniform, by the way. It’s old, but it almost looks like one of ours.”

“Captain,” the first mate interrupted, “that gives me an idea. Those Corporation types never pay attention to any of the crew other than yourself. So, if he looks like a crew member, what says he can’t become one?”

“Good point, Rogers. So, what skills do you have?”

Jason answered, “I’m A groundhog, A programmer. I hacked into the Corporation servers while I lived in the abandoned spaceport communications center.”

Sutton grinned. “Excellent. I can use that. You will be able to earn your passage back to Earth. Sutton, find quarters and a uniform for our newest crew member. And, Mr. Geldworth, welcome to the Muskmelons.”

Seven months later on February 2, Jason Geldworth stepped out of the Cargo ship Elon and into the Texas sunshine. And the groundhog saw his shadow.