Utopia? Ummm, just keep believing that...

January 8th 20081

Oh, I’m so excited! My sisters Selene and Mio and I are en route to Mars! We got these little journals from the space center. We have to document our trips, and then send them back to earth to be used as handbooks for the next group of children. I read our entire handbook and all the guidebooks our shuttle was equipped with so many times I have every fact and statistic memorized. I waited for my exception letter FOREVER, and when it finally came I was so ecstatic. We’re going to live with our aunt, and I’m going to see my best friend Talia again (she went up four months ago, and I haven’t heard from her since. The postage system is terrible). I am generally very nervous around people I don’t know, but I’ll have my sisters, aunt, and Talia with me on this new, strange frontier.2

“Oh my gosh, Mio. Are you eating CAKE?” I really couldn’t believe it. Well, she’s Mio, member of Cake-Lovers International and subscriber to For the Love of Cake magazine, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I was. I mean, cake? At a time like this? You’ve got to be kidding me.3

“Yep! I’m painting my nails, too. See?” she replied, waving her long, thin fingers in front of my face, “Pretty colors, huh?”4

“Mio! You weren’t supposed to bring that stuff!” I cried, not that there was anything we could do about it now–we’re on a pre-programmed flight, steered by an internal computer. Anyway, Mio is naturally pretty–she brushes her hair for an hour every day, and before we got our letters she’d get a manicure once a week! But the people at the space station told her she couldn’t bring her makeup kit to Mars–apparently it didn’t qualify as “bare minimum”! Selene is quiet and reserved, and really, really smart. She likes to read, she’s doing some “light” reading in this huge book big enough to be a tombstone…5

“Hey, Ayu! Selene! I finished my cake! Wanna do a chess tournament? And then we can play Uno, and Scrabble, and Go Fish, and War. Ya know, we could even play Apples to Apples, that’s always good, or maybe–“
“Mio!” Selene and I cried. Something about our tone made her listen, for once; she was silent immediately (almost). Then,
“What?” she whispered, but she heard it, too. The radio crackled.
“Flight 21, do you read me? Flight 21, there has been an accident on Mars. The oxygen has malfunctioned. To our knowledge no one is left alive. We cannot stop your flight. The oxygen will be fixed for your arrival on the deserted planet. To survive you must…fix…in the…reply…flight 21…flight…” the radio shut itself off. We were in the atmosphere of the planet of our dreams, but our dreams had died moments before.6

January 10, 20087

We landed late yesterday with no food, clothes (except what we had brought), or water. Well, I guess that’s not completely true – it turned out that Mio hid a triple-decker chocolate mousse in her sports bag and then forgot about it, so we ate that. But now its morning (earth morning, we’re going by EST) and we’re hungry again. We took a vote on who would go out, break into a deserted house in the deserted city on the deserted planet…sorry…and steal food out of the refrigerator and bring it back. Stealing from an unknown dead guy, that’s kind. Guess who got elected? Yours truly, and, no, I am NOT jumping for joy. I’ll write more when I get back.8

Later (9:00 pm Earth time)9

Okay, that was an ordeal I’d rather forget. So I found this house on the outskirts of the city – it was really big, and close, and so I figured it could be where we lived. It was…convenient, for lack of a better word. Our ship was getting really cramped. So anyway, I just kind of hiked through the tube that connects the space center (floating) to the city (on the ground) and when I reached the dome that covers the city I just walked up to the first house I saw. I guess I didn’t really think it through too much, because I just kind of walked up and tried the doorknob. Apparently the dead guy wasn’t expecting company at his present state, because as soon as I touched the door, alarms rang out in a cacophony of sound – high, tinny bells; loud, roaring sirens; dying cow sound effects; you name it, this guy had it all rigged up. Eventually it all quieted down, the cow shut up, and silence once more covered the land. Oops. So I walked around the house, and a window on the first floor was open (don’t ask me why, the oxygen is faux and there’s no breeze to speak of) so I climbed in. And landed in a heap on a cool linoleum floor – I was in the kitchen! I grabbed the shopping bags out of my back pocket and made haste to the fridge. After grabbing the bare minimum, I scurried over to the cabinets over the sink (it was a dinky little kitchen, for such a big house) and took some non-perishables, i.e. canned soup, canned peaches, canned tomatoes, black olives, and sardines. I think you can tell that, being 14, we’d never cooked in our lives. Then I made like a drum and beat it out of there as fast as I could. How “exciting”.10

When I finally got back to the ship, I was exhausted, not to mention starved. As soon as I dropped into the entrance Mio and Selene fell upon the food. I sat to make myself a sandwich and demonstrate proper manners while I ate it (they didn’t bother) and they glanced at each other and cracked up. Well, I thought, of all the rude – 11

“Hey, Ayu,” Mio gasped between snorts of laughter, “was that you who set off that alarm out there? You gotta be more careful…” and they were off in gales of laughter. I had to admit it WAS kind of funny, and after a while I was able to get a grip enough to reply, in a fake-hurt voice,12

“OF COURSE it wasn’t me! Didn’t you see that huge... um... crow fly by? It was HIM making that terrible racket, not ME!” and we were off again, laughing until we thought our sides would split. We spent the rest of the night playing scrabble and chess, just like normal as 14 year old triplets, trying to convince ourselves that it would get better. Eventually.13

January 14, 200714

The ground quakes as yet another meteor crashes on a too-close-for-comfort plain just outside the main city, leaving a crater that, judging by its landing, is probably about twice the size of Earth’s Grand Canyon. I look out the window of the ship and (almost) smile – the dust settling in soft tendrils around the hard mass of rock looks like spaghetti curling on a plate around a prize meatball. We’re doing fine, though. I mean, it’s been a death threat for the past two days now, and so we’re wary, and healthily precautious (we never leave the ship alone), but not scared, necessarily. None of the rocks have come closer than a mile to our ship, so we’re doing OK. Plus, it’s slowing down – yesterday it was almost like it was raining small chunks of rock, and the day before a huge chunk would come down about every ten minutes, but now a huge one only falls about every four hours. The city’s electrical power has been affected – our ship has its own generator, but the rest of the planet is another story entirely. The power is almost completely off. Fridges in the houses don’t work, so we’ve been reduced to canned non-perishables only. The heating system shut down late last night, and we would have frozen in our beds if a NASA employee hadn’t looked at our status and called an official in, who radioed us urgently and ordered us to “mine for carbon dioxide ice if you value your life” and when a NASA official is swearing at you as though your life depends upon it (which it does) you listen. Usually. So today Mio and Selene are out mining and I’m back here at the ship, and tomorrow I’ll go out with one of them and we’ll rotate through, two days work, one day rest (eating canned peaches in the comfort of a spaceship shaped like a giant hotdog). Couldn’t get much better than this, now could it?15

Earth’s having a terrible time, though – floods, destroyed crops, and crushed cities are everywhere, and NASA is too busy trying and failing to predict where the next one will land that they’ve had to postpone the rescue ship that they’re eventually going to send up to get us back to earth.16

By the way, we’re not the only ones on this planet – some perverted jerk’s here, too. We met him the other day; he was spying on us. Our eloquent conversation went something like this:17

“Yo, chicks. I’m Ritsu.” Then he said some other things that would make my mom have a heart attack if she got wind that I typed them, but you get the idea.18

“Do you guys hear that wind? It seems to be an extremely sick-minded wind.” That was Mio. We laughed. Rit-whatever-his-name-was was clearly trying to sort out the insults in that statement; he was slightly open-mouthed, and had a look of consternation on his face. Clearly no one had ever done anything less than crushed on him from a distance, and this turn of events confused him. We further took advantage of the situation to make sure he stayed away from us:19

“An incredibly stupid, annoying, perverted wind,” Mio, Selene, and I chorused. It didn’t stop him from tailing us for the rest of thee day, but it was a start.20

So that’s all that’s been going on here, I guess. I’ll write more later. 21

January 17 200822

Well, we have a MAJOR problem. Surprise! Its name is Ritsu. Oh, you guessed that? I s’pose we should have seen it coming…23

I think in the beginning we had him convinced that to survive we had to mine for carbon dioxide ice, work together and all that. He did help – that first day. We revised our previous schedule to include him, and it was me and him one day, the other two the next, and we cycled through. Yesterday it was our turn. It went just fine… except for one itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny detail – THAT CREEP NEVER SHOWED UP!!! As you can probably imagine, I was furious.24

I stomped back from the site to our ship after waiting for him to show up for 20 minutes, and got Mio to help me until the end of the day, when I planned to confront him. She agreed (reluctantly, and on the grounds that she would get to pulverize what was left of him after I was done) and at the end of the day I began my search. By the way, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that the gates leading to the other cities have been sealed, so that the oxygen can’t spread out and get diluted. So I knew he was SOMEWHERE in the city, which narrowed it down a bit.25

I strode through the city purposefully, glancing into promising windows and occasionally stepping inside to get my bearings, all the while keeping up a constant refrain of “kill, maim, kill” etcetera, vowing that he would never get out of this one alive. Well, actually it depended on his excuse, but that’s beside the point. ‘He should have to do several extra days of work, for ditching’ I thought, considering telling Mio and Selene my plans and watching them smile like summer come early. In the midst of my revere, I was so shocked when I finally found him, sitting on a flat plain on the fringe of the city, looking out on the desolate redness of the planet we shared.26

He was (you’re going to love this one!) PAINTING!!!27

I know, I know, you just fainted, right? Yeah, I almost did, too. And (this is no joke, I swear) he was GOOD at it. I mean really good! Well, of course, there must have been something the idiot was good at, and this was it. He had clearly been at it all day, too: the ground was littered with beautiful snapshots of the planet itself, above him on a dry ledge hung thirteen or fourteen more of the city as seen from outside the dome (though how he managed to get the perspective right on those is a mystery to me, drawer of stick figures) and on the easel he was examining was… a portrait. Of us, me and my sisters. The resemblance was remarkable: the medium was a charcoal stick, and the image seemed ready to step right out of the paper and onto the dull red brick that paved the street. I was almost ready to forgive him for ditching that day. Almost, but not quite, I thought as I recalled my aching arms and legs. I stepped forward, and my toe struck a rock and it skittered to the left – not much, but just enough that he heard it and whirled around. And, just before he blinked, I thought I saw an intelligence in his eyes that was quite different from the idiot he had been of late. A nanosecond later he was staring at me, eyes empty, mouth slightly open, the very picture of stupidity, and I knew I’d never get to sleep that night.28

January 23, 200829

I’m so glad it’s my water break now – the temperature is sub-zero, but the harsh conditions on the empty plain where we mine coupled with the stress and repetition of actually doing the mining wears you out pretty quickly. Tempers are running high between the four of us, and – WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU THINK YOU COULD DEAL WITH IT??? YOU CAN JUST GO OUT THERE AND WORK WITH STUPID ROCKS, YOU IDIOTIC JOURNAL, AND I’LL SIT HERE AND MOPE AND TAKE YOUR PLACE AS A @#*^& (pardon my French) WRITING IMPLEMENT AND…wow, I really lost it that time, didn’t I? Yelling at YOU, stupid journal, when I could be, um…yelling at Ritsu!30

Here I will document the exact happenings of this morning. I woke up. I ate breakfast: inflatable muffins (just add water and shake – it’s a Mars thing) and orange juice from a can with a side dish of inflatable tater-tots (don’t try them at home… or on Mars, for that matter). I drew a picture of Ritsu in the dirt so he looked like this: XP (turn paper sideways). Then I got my sisters, pulled Ritsu away from a portrait vaguely resembling Mio, and we all walked to different parts of an abandoned field and began to dig. The rest of the script goes like this:31

Mio: Ritsu! Dig! Now!32

Ritsu: Are we done yet?33

Mio, Selene, and Ayu: NO!!!34

(Mio throws a rock at Ritsu)35

(Selene throws a rock at Ritsu)36

(Ayu throws a rock at Ritsu)37

(Ritsu stands stupidly [emphasis on STUPID] and wonders for the 90,384,569th time exactly what he’s supposed to be doing)38

Repeat39

Narrator: Things go on like this for, in Selene’s words, AGES, during which time each of the girls gets a water break, rests for ten minutes, and goes back to work. Ritsu, of course, does not merit a water break because Ritsu, of course, has done nothing except stand stupidly and dodge rocks all morning.40

This brings us back to the present: me, at the water jug, writing all over you, stupid diary, with the egg-timer having a conniption trying to ring loudly enough to make me go back. I’ll write more later.41

Later42

I AM SOOO MAD AT SELENE! I can’t believe it… how could she side with HIM? But I’m getting ahead of myself. What happened was this: when I got back from my break freako-boy and my sisters were arguing. It turned out that Ritsu “had some top-secret information” that said that he and only he should go mine in another field that might be better to mine in than the one we were working on now. When asked why only he was allowed on said field, he merely replied that this area “might have hidden dangers” and he was just doing what was best for us. We voted that one of us would go with him – just to make sure he didn’t sneak off. Mio went with him and a while later they came back, each holding some weird object and shouting at the top of their lungs. They came closer and explained what they’d found: Mio has a chunk of rock with a phosphorescent glow wrapped in her jacket that she thinks might solve the fuel problem. She also thinks it may be a new element, and shows us the line of ugly burns the stone has made on her hand, calling it “mineral x”. Ritsu holds out a bone and tool made out of a hard volcanic rock that he found. Selene understands instantly.43

“Ritsu! Did you find those in the sand? They’re artifacts of an ancient civilization! Volcanic rock – they must be hundreds of years old! Were there more of them?” she’s so excited; I think she might blow up. Personally, I think the rock is way cooler. A new scientific discovery? And we’d never have to mine again! But Mio steps in quickly;44

“Selene… mineral x and the artifacts are right next to each other. It’s one or the other. And we’re totally going with the rock.”45

“No. the artifacts are the way to go. Come on… Ayu, what do you think?” I know I’m Selene’s last hope and I’m turning red with the pressure.46

“I’m sorry, Selene… mineral x it is.”47

“Wait. I vote artifact,” Ritsu calls out without warning. We freeze. The scores are tied, and we can’t decide either way. A shouting match ensues, but it doesn’t help. My sisters, our enemy and I are in for the biggest fight of our lives.48

January 28, 200849

Oh my god. How could we ever fight over such a trivial thing as fuel… when the universe is coming to an end? Why did we worry about a lost race… when every life form on the nine planets can be extinguished all at once like so many candles in a windstorm?50

"Mars Colony......Earth... unsafe... asteroids brought..........”51

"When you power up... leave the solar system.........total control of Earth, Mars, everything."52

"Don't ...home.....save....."53

Cryptic messages. They’ve been taken over on earth. These signals alone tell us that much. They’ve given up, in my opinion – “don’t….. home… save”? Don’t come home, save yourself? High likelihood our attackers don’t know my sisters and I exist… we were meant to be killed in the “oxygen failure” they caused. I am perversely reminded of a Social Studies class many years ago, when I studied an ancient war where an atomic bomb was the biggest threat possible. One side was in possession of that bomb. The other was powerless. All their men had to do was push a button and the war was won, the opposing side wiped off the face of the earth by a well-aimed rocket. We will be wiped out. The others hold the button, their fingers sinking lower and lower as it is pushed. There is nothing to be done except to wait for death.54

Oh, god. We’re all going to die.55