The collected heat forced the rolling sweat beads down the foreheads of the domesticates. They roamed under the ironic earth, underneath the domiciles which they called home. But it wasn’t home for anyone. They left home when they decided to go against the laws of the governing bodies. They were imprisoned somewhere else before, and that was still home, but when the cells got too crowded, men and women pushing up against the bars because there was no other place to move, people defecating in their spots because they couldn’t squeeze through to get to the single toilet in the cell, humans having the life squeezed out of them as they stood with no mobility of their arms, their legs, or even their lungs. And while the people protested, both within and without the prisons, the government continued to pile people into these cadaverous caverns.

Out of the twenty-two billion people on Terran, one billion were entrenched in the prison system. More people were being incarcerated daily and new prisons, or domiciles as they called them, were being built at a much slower rate. The issue that the people had was the amount of money allocated to the prison system while people on the outside were still being driven to poverty and depression. Rehabilitation wasn’t even a concern. People were just being thrown into prisons if it seemed like they were going to do something wrong. The Ugly laws, of the late 19th century, were basically in effect. Homeless, the psychologically ill, addicts were picked up and given a locked trial on false pretenses, being told they were given a fair trial, but the verdict was already definite. They saw the issue of the overpopulation within the prison system, but they didn’t see it from the citizens perspective, they saw it from an imperialistic perspective. That’s what pushed them to make the interplanetary leap.

Mars: little, red, sister planet of Terran, 249 million km away, rich in iron, magnesium, chromium, and other ore, a short jump from the asteroid belt, another planet to be infested.

In the year 2158, Commander Don Barkus, Commandant of the Terran Defense Force, governing the planet since the Great Incursion of 2149, gave the order to build the first domicile on Mars. Using materials originating on Mars, fiberglass and concrete was created without needing water which was to be shipped from Earth to Mars by payloads, though they were working on the first terraforming machine which they sent to the Moon for a trial run. Still no word on that yet. The fiberglass was spun by melting Martian sand and the concrete was mixed using sulfur as the binding agent instead of water. The metal used was collected from titanium and iron the probes were collecting and creating strong alloys from. And so, in 2164, after years of designing and building, the first domicile was built. It was designated The Martian Domicile for Reconstitution. The first building created on Mars was a prison.

By 2165 they were flying prisoners up without a choice to be the first residents of a new planet. It was a great ship that would eventually be repurposed for interstellar travel called Ezekiel, and it consisted of 200,000 men, imprisoned for crimes of fluctuating severity. They were cryosealed during the month-long trip, kept alive by cheap nutrients and electric muscle stimulators so they could immediately start to work once they landed. Not a soul was heard, only the casual beeping of the vital monitors and the whirring of machinery prepping materials to be stocked within the domicile.

The prisoners came out of their frozen sleep, dreamless and long, dreary, feeling like a hard rain had fallen upon them and they were caught without an umbrella. Luckily (or unluckily, however you look at it) they’d never need an umbrella again. They were syphoned from the ship, prodded by their robotic guards down the large gangway which was enclosed in a glass tube which was secured around the opening of the ship. They looked up to the red sky above, out at the red sands around, great sandstorms off in the distance, but all in all, the quiet emptiness of the outside world. They were the first and only people on this planet. If only they could’ve looked at it like pioneers instead of slaves.

They were groggy and their bodies ached everywhere. Many were irritated and tried to take down their mechanical herdsman or started fights with their fellow inmates, but they found their attempts only led to a wall of futility as they were brought down by twenty milliamps paralyzing the muscles in their body from a small chip implanted within their brains. These men fell down face-first and were struck with paralysis for a few minutes before regaining their muscular capabilities, but retaining the painful aftershocks. They were pulled up to a crawl and pushed, forced to muster ever quivering muscle in their body into a uniform half-crawl-half-rolling maneuver. Eventually, when the futility set in and they all fell in line, they made it into the glass of the external dome, crossing a bridge over a sort of moat with the clearest water within, into the interior glass dome. Then the impenetrable glass slid shut soundlessly. And all was silent, which was more eerie than any silence because of the 200,000 inhabitants within this megalithic structure in the middle of a barren planet.

In front of the mass stood a towering concrete structure, only the hulking reddish front, made by the Martian soil, visible to their eyes. Spanning from each end of the inner dome, the prison curved around at the edges, indicating more building behind. The massive concrete portcullis lowered to the ground, exposing a black interior of impenetrable darkness, a void of unknowable proportions. They walked in and upon entry were implanted with the cell designation and the directions to said cell. Some prisoners meandered around but were brought down by intense shocks that the other prisoners could only either be sympathetic of or laugh at. Some of the more brutish inmates would kick the others while they were on the ground only to receive shocks of their own, more intense, hypertension of every muscle so that shearing was caused, lasting damage.

They went to their destinations, passing by rec rooms, mess halls, greeneries, and rooms with odd equipment that a few of them knew what the purpose was. Mining. There were diamond-tipped laser drills, making a more powerful beam to break through the rubble at a faster and more efficient pace, all while reducing the amount of power used so they wouldn’t have to keep being recharged as much. There were suits, which looked like hazmat suits, but were heavier looking, like lead or some other heavy metal. There were oxygen packs and masks and apparatuses of the respiratory sort. There were also your run-of-the-mill pickaxes and high-powered vacuums to remove the rubble, sending it to be reconfigured into building materials. The ones who didn’t know just saw it as a room with weapons or for torture or something.

Not a word was said as they found their cells. They were 6 x 8 cubes with a toilet and a sink and a mirror made from ultra-polished aluminum. The one part that each of the prisoners took solace in was that they knew it hadn’t been used before, so there would only be two butts touching the toilets while they were there. The cell doors closed when everyone was acquainted with their hovels for the next lifetime. Some inmates introduced themselves to their bunkmates, but for the most part, they waited for the next instructions. They didn’t want to upset their overlords who were doling out shocks like fliers at a Prisoner Retribution Rally which happened on a weekly basis in every big city across the globe, until it was broken up by the gases dropped from the military hovercrafts. They only needed one big bundle of tear gas to break up the ten-thousand-person rally and get enough arrests to fill up a whole block in a prison.

It wasn’t long before the doors opened and new instructions were implanted into the chips in their heads. Food. Those who even thought about figuring a way to remove the chip received a quick sharp shock which cut the thought of having the thought. They filed out of their cells towards the mess hall located on their floor. It was just a room with small, high windows and grainy tables with conveyer belt tops and grainy benches. It wasn’t somewhere anyone wanted to be seated for long. They all sat down. The tables went all the way down to the wall on the other side of the room. A panel slide up at the end of the table and trays slid along the belts, one for each prisoner sitting at the table. on the tray were a few different cups. One contained a brownish chunky gel which looked like beef gravy and turkey chunks. Another had an orange creamy texture. Another was just a blue liquid. The final one was actual pieces of beef, shredded, but real. Unfortunately, the prisoners learned that this was the only meal they’d receive anything like that.

The orange cream stuff tasted like a chalky citric medicine that was used on Terran to treat scurvy and stomach ulcers. The chunky gel was a sweet strawberry shortcake flavored thing which made the prisoners more disgusted than satisfied because they had to question why it looked like that, except for Bill, the dumbest one there, incarcerated for killing his mother, though he had no idea what he was doing with an IQ of 48. He happily ate the morbid goop. The rest clenched their eyes shut, pinched their noses closed and gulped down whatever all that was. The blue liquid was just water, a little thicker, but that was because of the necessary minerals that were added, or that’s what they were told by the implanted messages. In reality, it was a chemical designated Hydrofill that was used to make the water reserves last longer than they would have without the chemical. It wasn’t something that was supposed to be directly ingested. Most of them saved the beef for last. They’d put the dry piece of meat on their tongues and leave it there, savoring it for as long as they could before a slight droning shock told them to swallow. And it would drop down their esophagi, much to their dismay. Then the conveyer belts took the trays back and a new message was implanted. Work.

They were directed to the room with the mining equipment. It was large and there was a great hatch in the center and an open door leading off with what looked like lockers. They received their locker numbers and went to get them. Some of the more inquisitive prisoners (not Bill) called out looking for answers, but the only answer they got was a mind-crushing shock. The rest of the prisoners opened their lockers and retrieved their heavy suits. They slipped them on, the leaden material weighing them down causing some of them to fall to their knees which issued them a slight shock until they got back up. The problem of the weight was quickly answered as the suits were inflated (just like the aeronauts) and they were able to assume a normal position. On one of the walls was a large metal door which was over thirty feet high and about as wide. The men couldn’t tell what was behind it. In the middle of the floor was a hatch. It was large and closed like claws in the center. It was meant to keep pressure at the level necessary for life and to contain oxygen.

Tubes came from the ceiling and attached to the suits of the inmates. While they had no idea what they were doing, most of them figured out that they’d be given some sort of direction to figure out. And that’s what they got. Some of them received messages of laser drill while others received messages for vacuum. Some received pickaxes. Some received powerjacks (which was a more pronounced jackhammer). Only one of them received “Gun”—one per room, that is. There were multiple rooms because while they were trying to conserve space, they weren’t going to cram 200,000 men into a room. The executors on the decision to send them up decided it was torture enough that they could never contact their families or see domestic soil ever again. But the gun was nothing more than a small laser pistol. There were no settings on this one though, so the inmates who carried it didn’t know what kind of power it had.

After they were all prepped with their gear and saddled up with oxygen, the entry door hissed as a big metal shutter came down, clanging at the bottom. Then a siren blared as the men remained where they were because they didn’t know if a single movement would cause a shock to course through them. In each room the same thought coursed through one person’s head, “them or me?”, and a shock was issued, a shock that was specified to inhibit the use of their fingers, so firing the gun was impossible. The clawed hatch slid open in the center of the room, the sound of grating metal riffing along causing many to grit their teeth as the whining echoed off the cavernous walls. And as it opened an expulsion of air flew into the room causing some of the men to fall back—no shocks were issued because of that. The doors rumbled under the feet of the men until they settled causing the whole room to fall to an even deafer silence than before. Where the doors had been there was but a void. Some of the men leaned over to see what was in there, expecting some monster to come crawling out of the oozing depths of this forgotten planet, but they were only greeted by darkness, and a sharp shock to keep them in line. Mechanical whirring started and the void was soon displaced by a large metal platform. The message ran through all of their heads, “board” and they stepped onto the platform as orderly as 2,000 men did their best to rank onto the platform. It was going to take a couple of trips, but they descended down into the no man’s land of a world where no man was except them.

The first group, led unintentionally by the guy with the gun—in this case it was Bera Paerto, a Hispanic gangster who was a part of the Bloodthirsty Mongrels back in New York—stepped off the platform into the cold, unforgiving subterranean wasteland. There was a bit of cave hollowed out, but a large dirt wall greeted them to the front. Bera held the gun by his side. “West” came the message in all of their heads. Bera ran his gloved hands over the wall of the cavern several hundred meters high and several thousand wide. The walls were singed. He knew what the laser drills could do and how fast work they could make of any job, especially severing limbs from bodies. What surprised him was that there was water running through the openings. When he looked at his glove there were moist droplets that gathered on top. They shimmered under the bright lights which shined from the top of his helmet. The water was reddish and sulfuric, but beautiful and a comforting sight to behold. Then a powerful shock came to all those that didn’t take to the directions and they fell back. Bera shouted because he received a different shock than anyone else because of the gun. After it was done he was given the command, “command” and he called out the orders to start digging, so they listened. And they dug west. They didn’t know how they knew where west was, but it was ingrained in them along with every shock they’d ever receive.

They made quick work, all of them coordinating their efforts to cut through many miles of dirt, rock, rubble, metal, and other lesser known materials, all of which were sucked up by the group of men designated to the large vacuum tubes which used a magnetic pull to suck up the materials, allowing the men to remain unaffected by its pull. They were transported to the reconciliation room to distribute the raw materials into an automated forge that would give them the materials to construct more domiciles.

As the day dragged on and tired muscles started to wane, a message went through their brains. “Leave now.” An imminent and immediate calling for them to evacuate. The only one who knew that this message was different than the other messages was Bill, but when he called out, “new man! New man!” no one paid him any mind as they began to move back towards the lift. A shock pierced through all those who moved bringing them to their knees. All except for Bill.

After going through a few more miles, clearing out the caves, cauterizing any substantial leaks that could cause damage to the integrity of the drilling, they were given leave to shower and sleep. They all did, soaping and shampooing, not needing to turn their eyes because they knew that no harm could be done. They went to sleep quickly, most of them crying missing the smog-ridden air of Earth, compared to the artificial air of the domicile.

The next morning, they were woken up promptly at 6am Terran time. They were driven to the mess halls and given their rations of blue cup, white cup, pink cup, and bits of strawberries which all of them saved for last, thinking that meals mightn’t be so bad if they go the little bit of real food to go with the other stuff which might’ve been yogurt or it might’ve been processed eggs and bacon, none of them could tell after not having real food for such a long time. They weren’t given time to brush up. Most of them only brushed once a day anyway on Terran, if that much, so they were sent straight to work. They geared up and descended in groups again. Every now and then if someone got too close to someone else there would be a bit of a pushing fight on the lift, but that was stifled quickly by a sharp jolt, subduing the anger that would’ve resided.

When Bera’s unit got down into the cave they saw that all of the lights that had been hung up had been broken. It was pitch black without the headlamps, so they switched them all on and walked carefully into the cave. Bera had his pistol at the ready, taking the front, trying to show his manliness in front of everyone else, with a false sense of courage because of the device he held in his hand which he didn’t even know if it worked or not. The walls dripped some and each drop that hit a shallow puddle caused men to jump, which set off a chain reaction of jumps because of the shocks that proceeded. Bera sensed something wrong, so did many of the other men. Bill was humming a tune he thought of when he was in the cave the day before. It was an eerie tune and some of the men beside him told him to shut up, but he couldn’t hear them.

When they got to the end of the cave they were given no more answers than they came in with. They looked around, looking at one another, some murmuring about their speculations, but no one being able to come up with a good enough guess. Some spoke of the idea that someone’s chip short-circuiting, allowing a man to sneak around undetected and cause havoc. But these chips were designed to withstand a supernova, so further analysis of that possibility ceased quickly. It was fruitless because after standing around long enough another shock came. They went to work and tried to shut their fears out, but they constantly kept their eyes peeled for anything amiss.

A robot was stationed in each of the caverns. They had a tank of water and once an hour the men were given water breaks. These tanks were conceptually indestructible, made of some alloy able to withstand a nuclear explosion. Bill worked tirelessly, chipping away at a wall with a great pickaxe as if it was his ultimate goal in life. After twenty years of construction it made sense. He hummed the whole time and it echoed from the walls. At around ten-fifteen, a sharp crack was heard in each of the caverns. When the men turned their heads to look, fighting against a small shock, they watched as their mana drained out of those massive tanks, spilling into a puddle on the floor underneath the robots’ hovering carapaces. The robots were undisturbed but the men were confounded. Some of the more ingenious men of physics and chemistry who’d been imprisoned for treason and protestation couldn’t understand how something could’ve happened without any force enacted. There was no source that could’ve cause such an incident and the men continued to work, this time doing their best to conserve their energy because they didn’t know when the next break would be.

Noon came and the men were told to leave. Having gone many miles, transport trucks, from behind that large metal door, descended and relieved the men of having to walk the whole way. If they’d had to have done that it might’ve killed them because of the epidemic of dehydration that plagued the majority of them. They loaded their tools onto the trucks and went up to lunch.

Green chunks, purple cream, and bits of cheese, along with the thick blue substance that passed for water. That was inhaled by most, while Bill sipped casually like his mama taught him to. They ate and were relieved to be given leave for an hour to spend some time in the yard before the next shift. Most of them sat down and just collected their thoughts.

The yard was nearly enclosed within the prison, which was a semicircle around it, but there was an opening in the walls that overlooked the barren red mountains far beyond the glass enclosure. The sky was red and a great sandstorm was kicking up miles and miles away. Bill stood at the edge of the yard. Going beyond there would issue a near fatal shock and he understood that without having to test it. Among the hundreds of thousands of men scattered around the prison, he was the only one who wasn’t lost in his thoughts. He smiled at the relentless scape.

The men took their begrudging charge back to their stations and put on their work gear and loaded into the trucks. The robots received new tanks, though the men couldn’t have been sure as to how many more tanks this place was supplied with. Nothing of note happened during shift except for the amount of water droplets seemed to increase. Bera and some of the other more intuitive men sensed this. He noted it as he watched over the workers, gun at the ready to do… whatever was going to be done.

A couple of men left their tools in the caves with no shocking consequences, but the majority of them took them back, having grown attached to their particular tool as a sort of friend, one that wouldn’t bring them pain and neurological torture. They went to dinner, slurping up whatever gruel was in the cups along with pieces of shredded chicken, which they didn’t question if it was chicken or not because it didn’t matter, it was substantially better than the others. They finished and pushed on through the final stretch. They were courted down into the subterranean world which was their home for the majority of the day and were taken to where they’d left the excavation.

Where there had been the tools which were left by the men were only piles of rubble. Those men who had left their tools, as those tools were designated to those specific men, they received a shock greater than anyone received since arriving and it was the last shock they were given. The unquestioning robots loaded the men onto the car and they were disposed of quickly, being smelted with the rest of the raw materials for later use in the building of the next domicile.

After the cars with dead men left Bera took a commanding role. “Who da fuck’s been doin’ dis?” he called out to the men, fighting through a slight shock, his voice bouncing off the walls accusing everyone in there.

The men murmured and their voices bounced and echoed. One voice came out clearly over the clinking sound of metal on rock. It was a humming. Bill’s voice carried over everyone else’s and after everyone quieted down they all turned to look at him. He was smiling and picking away at the wall. When everyone was quiet, he stopped humming but kept smiling. “Ain’t none heah ben hurtin’ dem toos. Is dem ova deyah, on da otha side.”

Bera was frustrated. The men were scared. And the longer the men didn’t work the dull shock increased until it became unbearable, so they grabbed their tools and chipped away. Bera went up behind Bill and watched him for a while, overseeing his work, watching how the big man, red-haired and freckled, went tirelessly at it, humming the strange unearthly ditty. “Wha’chyou mean by that?”

Bill didn’t turn around and didn’t even pay him any mind, so Bera asked again. When Bill didn’t respond again Bera stepped towards him but was greeted by another shock. Bera resigned, but the question persisted. When Bera started to back away Bill spoke quietly, so that only Bera, whose ears were tuned in on the man, could hear. “They’s comin’. They i’nt happeh.”

Bera stared. He was afraid, but he wouldn’t show it. “What’chyu mean? Who’s they?”

The big man resumed humming and the shut the rest of the world out. Nothing was happening in his world besides the chipping away at the wall in front of him because there was somewhere he had to be. In Bera’s mind something started to hum beyond the buzzing of the electricity.

“Was ichyou? Man, you best answer me.” He stepped towards Bill and the buzzing shock resumed. Everyone felt the shock. Bill felt it but he didn’t mind, it was like a tickle to his brain. Someone called out to him from beyond the wall and he chipped harder. Bera raised the gun slowly, fighting against the growing pain of the shock as men groaned and struggled to continue working.

“Fucking stop!”

“Let us go!”

“I shouldn’t be here!” The voices all called out at the same time creating a great hum over the buzz of the static in their brains.

“Did you do this? Did you kill those other guys?” Bera held strong and moved his finger from the side of the gun onto the trigger. The shock was horrid and he fell to his knees, but his arm kept strong. “Leaving time,” a message came through his mind. His fingers were tensing up but he knew that if he acted he could get a shot off and he didn’t wait for Bill to answer as the men groaned and keeled and squirmed and he pulled his finger towards him—click… Nothing. “Never…again,” hummed the message. And Bera lost consciousness and never woke up.

The robots came back with the truck and water was dispersed among the men. Bera’s body was loaded onto the truck. The shift ended and the men showered. They ate their slop plus a cup of minced meat. But as they carried out this routine the thought meandered among the inquisitive bunch of men (everyone except Bill), did he have something to do with it? And they went back to their hatches where their equipment was and suited up again, weary to descend back into that hell pit. The masses wondered if death would’ve been a better option. There wasn’t a problem with this shift in that cavern, but the men of the prison found out that there had been a few cave-ins killing some five-hundred men and injuring many more, which basically meant they were dead because the medical provisions in this prison were scarce, in so many words. The message came as a precautionary measure to ensure that no prisoner would make the same mistake as to cause a cave in and everyone took it as that—everyone except Bill who just smiled and said. “Wuzzen no mayun.”

Breakfast came without any treat the next, just slop cups and blue gelatinous water. One man swore he’d seen a cockroach in one of his cups and refused to eat. No cockroaches were transported to Mars and, had the food been inspected by the recycling mechanisms that turned the slop into other slop, they would’ve found no trace of a cockroach in there. The prisoner next to him tried to take his food but only received a shock like the slap of a cane on wrists. They went to their stations and suited up again. Down they went, hopping aboard their transport trucks and rolling down the murky depths, over the puddles which were expanding gradually and further away from the comfort, underneath extraterrestrial forbidden zones. They were beyond the reach of the prison, but there were sensors that scoured the caves and the brain scanners always knew the intentions of the inmates before they did.

Bill returned to his spot, chipping away. Everyone avoided him, except for one man. Polo Ontonkin, a Jew from Brooklyn who’d been imprisoned for stealing a piece of challah from the local bakery because he didn’t have the cash to pay for it. It was a short sentence, but unfortunately for him, he was among those selected, extending his sentence indefinitely. “Let me chelp you m’boy,” he said with a heavy accent. His head was shaved but for the grey payot which twirled down the side of his face. He used to have a beard, but it was shaved. The prison system respected his religion enough to let him “keep the curls,” as the orders went. The two of them picked away at the spot. Polo didn’t know why he was helping, but he knew he wanted a friend. He was scared and lonely and Bill didn’t seem like a guy who’d do him harm. The humming was even refreshing for him to listen to as they worked.

After the next water break was when the wall the two men worked on started to give way much faster, as if it were more of a hard clay than pure rock. Polo felt something wrong, just as the rest of the men did, but he knew it was better to be wrong with Bill than without Bill. The humming only intensified.

A scream came down from the left and Polo looked to see thick red liquid dripping down from the ceiling in torrents, falling over men, covering them in the viscous mess of whatever it was. He knew what it was. The screaming was ceased by the overpowering shocks which forced their bodies into hypertension as the blood flowed down on them, encasing them in what looked to be a blob of jellied blood. Polo blinked and they were gone—not dead… just gone along with the blood, leaving only the tools they carried in a small pile. The surrounding men screamed and were brought to their knees by the shocks. Polo was brought to his knees by a duller shock because of his racing thoughts, but he looked up at Bill who was still breaking down the wall in front of him.

Some men chose death at that moment by charging at the robot supervisor with their laser drills or their pickaxes, but the rest took to their feet and resumed working, always keeping Bill in their sights, moving further away. Polo remained and chipped away. No announcement was made about those men and it made the men think that it was just imagined. At lunch, some talked about it with each other and came to the conclusion that Bill was doing something down there.

Polo wished Bill was smarter. He wished Bill could’ve explained what was happening rather than giving only cryptic utterances every now and then. He understood that what they were chipping away at was unnatural, but he felt that Bill actually knew what this was. The other men were stricken with fear by that hulking man who did nothing but hum and pick, but they worked and they cut through more rock. Some of them took note of the different material that was being exposed and they took interest, drawn to it because of their habituation to stone and their desire for differentiated stimulus. Santos Desario and a few of his colleagues (men who were from Cuba) decided to help. They were scared of the man, but they knew what Polo knew which was that Bill knew more than all of them.

With five men working, not even taking a water break until they had to when the shock forced them out of the fugue state of motivated excavating. The four men and Bill came to, Bill still humming his tune with that dopey smile plastered on his face, and they took a drink and nearly ran back to the digging.

“Hey!” a man called out causing people to look. “There’s a plant here?” Others saw it. It was bright pink with a thick green stem and silvery leaves branching from it. The man reached out to touch it. It was sharp and it actually cut a hole in the finger of his suit. The air quickly drained from it and weighed him down, but it was understood that the air in the cavern was breathable. The man did receive a gnarly cut on his finger. The suit was able to close itself off and retain air again so the man stood up again and started working, avoiding the flower but mesmerized by it.

“Don’ move,” Bill said.

The four others nodded as they chipped away. Santos started humming a tune similar to Bill’s though a bit more melodious making it even worse to everyone’s ears.

“Somethings…wrong,” the man said. “My finger… it’s pulsating.” He stopped working and a buzzing headache from the shocks came on him. He started shaking violently which issued harder shocks, and he gurgled and his hands came to his stomach. The men couldn’t tell what was happening so they worked and watched as the man rolled on the floor, screaming gibberish with small intercessions of “Thank you Lord!” and “Thy will be done!” He wasn’t known to be a religious man. But it all stopped with the sound of a clacking squish, followed by a liquid scratching and then a tear and a breath of air as his suit was ripped open and centipedal, mandibular, foot long, red-eyed, purple-carapaced creatures crawled from the man’s bloodied and decimated body which continued to shake from the shocks as they broke trail and tore along the walls and onto the suits of other men, ripping through them or causing them to run to their shocking deaths. Men were killed by the razor-sharp mandibles of these things as they made their way further down the line. When they got to the five, who continued to work on the clay, which they knew was much larger than expected, as if nothing had happened, the creatures just went around them, uncaring of their presences. The creatures disappeared once the message for dinner was called. Two-hundred men had been killed and there was no trace of the creatures, but the entrails of the men were plastered on the walls and in the bloodied puddles. It took a while to corral them and the leftover men were carted back to eat, though most of them were unable. Bill, Polo, Santos, and the two other men ate just fine. One man’s head exploded in the middle of the mess hall. Cause of death: doesn’t matter.

The call for the final shift came. Only five hundred men showed up. The others chose death. All of them understood that only death was waiting for them down in the black pits, but they chose to chance it. Bill and the four others were the first to jump aboard the trucks and the other men filed in with dragging feet and pounding hearts, having given up the fight for their lives because their own brains didn’t allow it. Every emotional spike led to a horrible shock that sent their bodies into convulsions or loss of consciousness or even death. When they didn’t follow orders, they were given shocks that many times resulted in death. When they walked or talked out of line they were shocked and they weren’t even given a rulebook as to what was acceptable, but it was a little late for that.

They all descended as the darkness surrounded the trucks, the lights from the front and side beams illuminating the expansive cave surrounding them, beneath the Martian surface, in an unknown and cold world that only allowed death to reproduce. They stopped at the place the place where all those men were massacred the day before, guts and blood still caking the walls. No signs of bugs or plants on this day though. The five hundred walked out into this massively empty cave, hearing the echoes of the souls of the former inmates that populated these caves with them. There was room to breathe and that didn’t comfort any of them one bit. They started chipping away. With nothing left to live for—with no expectation of life—they worked and worked without a complaint, without a thought other than when? They chipped away at the walls as the whistling tune bounced off the walls, tearing through the airflow of the suits and filling the empty spaces. Some men started to cry, some men didn’t but only because there was nothing to cry about.

In the midst of the echoing tune one man cried to the heavens (which were but a dripping cave ceiling) “when God? When will you strike me down as you have all the others? Why have you set this shit upon us?” He wasn’t known to be a religious man. “Kill me quickly please, that I may feel no pain, for if I do I shall turn to the Devil and never forgive you.” His name was Dennis and he was a construction worker who’d been arrested for stealing a jackhammer from his workplace—sentenced to six months.

No incidents happened that shift. Bill and his four chipped into the clay structure some more and they understood that they were soon going to be upon something that would forever change the world as they knew it. In the showers Dennis complained of an aching stomach. He thought through his depression, must’ve been the slop they served up, though it very well could’ve been the Hydrofill that they’d been ingesting in greater quantities than were safe for humans to ingest. That night, no one slept in the cell block that Dennis stayed in as his pained moans echoed over the Martian cement of the corridor. He cried as his stomach was being eaten away. He moaned as his liver decomposed. He cursed God as his lungs rotted away and each breath became more burdensome than the last. He babbled as his brain was ripped apart, piece-by-piece, degrading him into a gibbering idiot with nothing to say or think, but continuing to talk, leaving the chip in place so that it continued to shock him the more he acted up, leaving him in a constant state of bodily hypertension as all of his organs decomposed at such a slow rate. He didn’t show up for breakfast, but when everyone who was left in the cellblock awoke, they found him dead in his bed. The robots came shortly after to whisk him away and turn him back into the prime material from whence he came, but his calls and babbles were heard for the whole night until the last. He died slowly and in more pain than anyone had ever felt on this planet. Cause of death: prolonged organic necrosis.

Man didn’t have a God to pray to anymore.

At breakfast three men choked on tentacles which ripped out of their throats, spattering the men around them with blood before they blinked and the tentacles were gone. Most men didn’t touch their food even before that happened. Bill, Polo, Santos and his boys had a decent appetite though. They ate the goulash which definitely wasn’t goulash, and the blue gel, and the white foamy substance deeply. They couldn’t discern one from the other because nothing tasted like anything anymore, but they had to eat to be energized to work. And when breakfast was over, they were the first to march towards the equipment room. They held smiles and a tune on their lips. All were different tunes but they all worked together in an eerily harmonious way. They got down to the mines and worked. Two hundred left.

On this shift, some rocks were shook loose by some of the work that was done and they came down upon Polo, crushing his leg under the rubble. The message that coursed through Bill and the other three was, “Send...” and Polo’s humming grin never left his face, not even when Bill’s pickaxe pierced the top of his skull destroying his disfiguring brain which had been changing ever since he started digging away at the Martian clay. He left this world as he lived his life, with something covering the top of his head. Bill pulled the pick from his head, trailing the blood out as men vomited in their suits and tried to keep their composure, though some were killed as they stepped away from the mess. Bill’s chip was going off, but his brain didn’t care about the amount of electricity that would’ve killed all humans—his brain wasn’t a human brain.

They lined up for water and some of the men drank. The twelve took their rations and returned to working, but they didn’t work for long as black goo started leaking out of their nose, their eyes, their pores, and every other orifice they had. The black goo melted through their suits, bubbling as it came in contact with the metallic alloy and eroding it away quickly, eventually tearing through everything leaving nothing but a pool of bubbling black bile where twelve men stood.

The majority of the men gave up in that moment. There were about thirty men who continued, driven by some gumption from somewhere outside the realms of man, and they chipped away at the wet rocky walls, unfearing, uncaring. How could one be afraid when they knew the only thing left for them was a painful death and accepting that fact?

Lunch was called and the thirty-five men left went and ate their meals. No one died, though it was expected. One man coughed on the Hydrofill, but he hit his chest and recovered. The men around him barely noticed. They weren’t lost in thought. They were lost in emptiness. It wasn’t peace, but it wasn’t chaos. It…just was.

Bill was more excited than he’d been since landing on this desolate rock. He hummed a tune so cheerily that he started singing it with la’s and do’s. When he opened his mouth it was clear that all of his teeth were missing and that his gums had taken on a shade of black that was worse for the men who still retained their humanity than seeing all of those other men die horrible deaths.

The prison was quiet. There were only a few hundred left out of the 200,000 that had been before and they understood that their chances weren’t great for survival…they understood their chances weren’t anything.

The men went and Bill and Co. skipped to their stations, loading up their equipment. Gary Quall had a wife and daughter back at home that he’d never see again. He sent a prayer out to them as he descended into the mine. Mathias Emerson Lewis stared at the wall and thought of ice cream. Vernon Ninsky, a Russian who’d been incarcerated for his work in the organized criminal sector, thought of his mother, sick at home probably wondering when he’d be home. He smiled as he thought of her smile. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to wait long to see her again because she was on her way towards those pearly gates. They found their way back to where they were. The cave didn’t progress as fast as when there were thousands of men. But Bill and Santos and them took their positions.

Gary was tired and saw the men working tirelessly so he walked towards them, baring through the shocks. “Lovely weather we’re having,” he said dryly.

“Yessir. Sure is,” Bill said through monstrous gums. “Gon be best.”

Gary leaned on his pickaxe, the shocks increasing. “So, what’s that you’ve got there?

“S’is God.”

Gary’s shocks were unbearable and he started chipping away at the rock wall beside them, being careful not to touch the clay because, even though he had nothing to live for, he didn’t want to turn into whatever it is they were. “Well, God, it’s good to finally meet you.”

Santos turned, sclera smudged with black spots, and smiled his gummy smile. “’E siz ‘Gary…now’”. He turned back and chipped away.

A chill ran down Gary’s neck as the words slipped from the non-human lips of the Hispanic man. He went back to work.

“Garrrryyyy.” The words were ghastly and effeminate. He turned to look at the guys but he knew it couldn’t have been them, so he just chalked it up to cabin fever or his unconscious letting him know that he was on his way towards death. “Gaaaarrrrryyyyy.” The voice was lighter, but no less spooky and it sounded in pain. It came from all around him. “GAAARRRRYYYYY” came both of the voices he heard, and he turned to see his wife and daughter standing behind him. They were both smiling. Gary’s electric brain was on the fritz and the shocks were unnoticed by him.

“M-Meredith? Clarica?” Tears filled his eyes as they gazed upon a visage he never thought he’d see again. “Wh-what are you doing here?”

“Weee neeeeded tooo seeee youuu,” they said in unison, their voices trailing off at the end of each word. “Weeee lovvve youuuu.”

They walked towards him, getting closer to the light from his head lamp, and they were borne. They were just as he remembered them, beautiful and perfect. He walked towards them, dropping his pickaxe. His arms were outstretched as he ran towards them, but as he got closer, something was wrong. The two of them smiled at the same time, baring their blackened gums. Their eyes were lit by his luminescence showing how there was not a speck of white in them and black goo oozed from their nostrils and ears. Their hair fell out as he got closer, clumping in brittle piles around them. He screamed as he came upon them, seeing the loves of his life turn into monstrosities that only the sickest minds could conjure in the worst nightmares.

“We l-uv y-uuuu…” their voices came out choked and raspy.

Gary fell to his knees before him, the shocks growing rapidly, nearly tearing his consciousness away along with his life. The girl and woman leaned over him, looking down with those horrible dead eyes and smiled, black goo falling from their mouths in torrents, landing on his face mask and melting through burning into his eyes, blinding him, tearing into his brain, melting him. The other men saw nothing except his outburst and him melting into a pile of black goo.

Mathias worked, watching Gary die, and thinking shouldn’t’a left th’line. Inside of the suit it was warm for him. But he felt a chill overcome him. Where there had been a rock wall were piles of ice cream. He didn’t hesitate to jump into them and he tasted the most amazing vanillas and strawberries and coffee flavors that he’d ever had. Then all he tasted was rock as his head was crushed in by the wall that replaced the mounds of delicious dairy desert. Everything from the neck down protruded from the wall as his head was emblazoned within the rock.

Ninsky watched the boy’s head morph into the rock wall and sighed. Somehow, he knew he was next and was hoping for it to come because he’d like to see his grandfather and some of his other relatives who’d been killed fighting for Russian freedom while he was in America working for his deadbeat uncle and piece of shit brother.

“No,” the voice called from behind him. “Please, don’t.” It was his mother’s voice. He wouldn’t have mistaken it for anyone else’s.

“Ma?” he called out, turning his back to the wall and his light falling upon her and someone else. To his horror, the large stock man gripping the collar of his mother’s shirt was his brother Demetri.

“Vernon, please!” she called out and he ran, but as much as he ran, he couldn’t get any closer and he could only watch as Demetri punch his mother repeatedly, bloodying her face, his fist pressing into her with increasing force, concaving her cheekbones, pushing her broken teeth down the back of her throat, forcing the bone to protrude from her nose as she choked out futile pleas. But he kept running. “Please stop him!” His punches came faster and he watched as her face was punched in, concaving beneath the pressure. He was gaining ground though and as Demetri gave a few final punches, leaving her face a tittering pulp of gushing blood, Vernon jumped out to catch her as she fell. He was dead from the exorbitant voltage upon hitting the ground.

Upon the next hit from Bill’s pickaxe, the wall opened up, breaking open and crumbling away as an awful glow penetrated the darkness beyond. It was green and Bill smiled at it. There was God, in all its glory. The light expanded, washing over the faces of the men turned Martian, and absorbing everything they were into itself, gaining strength. It washed over the rest of the cave, absorbing the other men who were still alive. It washed over the robots and the trucks. It washed over the Domicile. And it absorbed it all. In the place of the great dome which adorned the face of the planet, marking the first colony on the barren planet, was just red desert and nothing else. The planet was returned to its original glory. A message was sent out, emanating in all directions to be picked up by every being in the solar system. “Ne-ver…Re-turn.”

“Suh! Suh!” a prominent voice of a deep southern accent came from beyond the doorway of Commander Barkus’s study.

He sat, a calmed expression over his face turning into an annoyed grimace. He was in the midst of meditation and made it clear to all of the people who worked under his supervision (which was everyone) not to disturb him during this time. He was willing to hear the calamity for the other twenty-three-and-a-half hours of the day, but this time was the only time he had for himself, among his solid gold statue of Buddha reclaimed from the Temple of Boscus, a cult that used Buddhist idolatry to send a disguised message of peace which was really only to perpetuate Dean Boscus’s hateful tendencies towards Blacks and the Irish. The entire church which consisted of nearly two thousand members, scattered at different temples which were opened in different states, was arrested. Many of them died in the reclamation of Mars.

“Commanduh Bahkus,” the voice came again.

Barkus sighed, leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. He was in the middle of a vision of a mandala consisting of a horrible green light. He put his hands on his desk and looked languishingly at Buddha, smiling in his meditative pose, third eye wide. “Oh, you just love mocking me, don’t you?” the Commander’s heavy Georgian accent expressed as he spoke to the inanimate token of his desire. He wanted to be at peace like said token. But peace doesn’t come for someone like the Commander. “What is it?”

The door slid open and the lanky man walked through, checkered shirt, stylish khakis, and shoes that reflected a blinding light. He wore horn-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose. He stood at attention in front of the desk. “I apologize faw the inta-rusion, suh— It’s impawtent.”

“Yeah, yeah. Get on with it Kersh.” He crossed his arms and didn’t hide his insolence for this mere disturbance.

“Well, it seems theah’s been an incidant at the Dome.” The man looked down at his notes curiously, checking to confirm the information he was expelling was correct.

The Commander braced himself for some menial problem that could’ve waited until he was done with his daily practice. He prepared his mental equilibrium so he wouldn’t blow up on the man in front of him. They were old friends after all, and he knew that Kersh never understood when his presence wasn’t wanted or necessary. “Dammit Kersh, just say it you buffoon.” Calm down Don. It ain’t worth the aneurism.

“Suh…it’s gone.”

Barkus sat back and put his hands down on the desk, staring expectantly at Kersh. He eyed the man, looking for any signs of a joke, though Kersh wasn’t one to joke. Barkus bellowed out a laugh that would’ve caused the neighborhood dogs to howl. “Oh, you old prankstuh. You got me good.”

“It isn’t a joke suh. The Dome… it just disappeuhed. One second it was theah, the next it wun’t.”

The Commander picked on the sterling silver, Hebrew etched pen that he reclaimed from a protesting Jew named Polo. Don was quite good at remembering the names of the people who he reclaimed treasures from. He twirled it around and examined the etchings of the Hamsa and the dove with an olive branch. He thought about the time he went to Israel to oversee negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis for two sovereign states. It was 200 years later than it should’ve been. “So yuh saying that yuh lost the Dome?”

“Weyell, in so many words… but theah isn’t even a trace of it.”

“Onleh you, Kersh. Onleh you.” The Commander stood up. “Yuh know, ah entrusted you with this position because you wuh the best fah the job. You wuh to ovahsee the Dome and enshooer the protection of it. Ah you telling me yuh couldn’t do that?”

“It’s not—”

The Commander sighed. “I’m tiuhed Kersh. I want a rest. I want to see my wife. But I have a job to do. Yuh don’t see me losing track of Africa now, do yuh?”

Kersh shook his head resignedly. “No suh.”

The Commander looked over the pictures, the awards, the certificates on his wall and took one down and smiled at it. It was him, Kersh, and his wife Nancy before they were married, back in college—University of Georgia. He remembered the partying they did and the tomfoolery that occurred, just the three of them. His father was pressuring him to enlist in the army because he was a general, but he had a different route. “Kersh, what’s the next step?”

“Weyell, we have more ships on theah ready with supplies to build one hundred moah Domes.” Kersh looked at the picture Don was holding and thought fondly of the times before, back when he had time to joke around.

“Good… good.” The Commander’s voice was distant, reminiscent. He chuckled at a memory. “Figyah out what happened. Look fuh sinkholes wheah theah shouldn’t be. Find out everything about the topography of the Mahtian landscape. I don’t want anothuh complication.” The Commander put the picture back up and turned to face Kersh. He smiled and nodded, inferring for the man to leave.

“Thank you, suh.” He took his leave.

“Don’t let the door hit yuh ass on the way out.” The Commander sat back in his chair and laughed to himself, seeing a younger Kersh running through the quad completely naked and drunk being chased by the campus police. “Dammit Kersh, yuh ol’ bastard.” He closed his eyes to return to meditation for the next ten minutes and was enveloped by the wholeness of quietude.

Kersh walked out of the room and his assistant was waiting there, her hair pinned back, sharp features beneath thin glasses, judgmental eyes piercing through. “Now we’ll be able to study that anomaly all we want. The Commanduh gave us puhmission to carreh out the next step.” He sneered at the Commander’s ignorance and rued the day that he stole the woman he loved from him, though that was an unconscious drive at this point. Mars was dangerous, but Kersh was willing to give anything for the chance to meet the inhabitants that took out an impenetrable piece of Terran manufacturing with just a flash of green light. He didn’t realize how much he’d eventually have to give up.