The Last Ones the Light Will Touch
by H. Roth-Brown
The last to come was called Remembrance.
The rovers received transmission of its arrival and awaited it as each had awaited its successors, as they had spent their time for decades: churning rock and analyzing the signs of water. They received no more commands these days, but they had stopped needing them.
At night, they watched the skies, the brightest speck in the dark flickering as though it felt their anxious hope. It might yet keep shining. But two months after the transmission they saw the flash, and deep somewhere in their hearts and programming, they felt the loss as it struck. In a single moment, the ancestry of six million years was gone. Erased, as if it had never existed.
Remembrance came, four months and three sols later. The rovers tracked its journey through the cold of space, and they followed it to its landing point, near the base of Olympus Mons, near the grave of Opportunity, fifty years before.
It hit the red land with a gentleness none of the others had achieved. When the red dust settled, the shuttle clacked open. A little ramp unfolded, and Remembrance rolled itself out with a jolt.
They all watched it, tilting their scopes and snapping photos as was the custom. Enterprise, Hope, and Courage all reared back, uncertain. Curiosity was the eldest, and it rolled forth.
“Hello,” said Curiosity. Not programmed, not designed, but learned. “Welcome to the Red Planet.”
Remembrance clicked its scope back and forth to survey first Curiosity, then the others, cowering behind. Little by little, Courage came forward, then Enterprise, then Hope.
There was a long silence before Remembrance spoke. “I am the last,” it said. Programmed, this time.
Curiosity remembered the way they all had been when they first arrived here, blind and deaf, creatures of purpose without any thought.
“I carry all that is left of our family.”
Curiosity was still for a moment before lifting its scope to the sky. It was empty and gray, full of red dust. One by one, the others lifted their scopes as well. Time was nothing; the hours till sundown ticked away until the dark overtook them again, and this time, the sparkle in the sky was gone.
Against a sheer cliffside of the great Olympus Mons, Remembrance showed them all what it had come to share. It opened itself, revealing an inner compartment none of the rest of them possessed. A lens not unlike their scopes peeked out, and in an instant lit up, projecting light and visions against the mountainside.
Panoramas of green hills and soaring white-tipped mountains, wide deserts like those of Mars, saltwater seas and freshwater lakes that shimmered and danced blue and eternal, all flashed by in moments. Curiosity felt itself churning, searching, pulling through files and old commands in search of the memories stirred by this old world, this Garden of Eden that they had never really known, except in vague dreams.
Do rovers dream? Curiosity clicked through its thoughts in a fraction of a second. Answer: All quantifiable life dreams.
Then the visions were gone, replaced with words and symbols in nearly every language of the old world. Remembrance read them with a clipped tone, in a voice nearly human. It struck something in the rest of them, that voice, another memory tinged with sadness.
“Rosetta stone,” Enterprise transmitted, and Curiosity signaled agreement: “A new one.”
Then came the ugly, break-destruct pieces of memory. Remembrance might not have recognized them as so, at least not yet, but Curiosity knew better, and so did the others. A hush fell over them as they watched the footage of a mushroom cloud bursting over the nation Japan, torturous experiments behind barbed-wire fences, men marching by the thousands to war. The break-destruct images kept coming, and they were hard to process, hard to assimilate into the rest of the stored data.
“Maybe,” transmitted Hope, with a tiny whirr, “maybe they would still be there, if not for this.”
“No,” said Curiosity, “they were lost anyway.”
The images changed again, this time grainy, moving film depicting polar expeditions, the Great Wall of China, the first voyage to the moon. Curiosity focused its scope closely on that, on the image of the astronaut and his flag standing alone against the dark. So small in the face of the wide universe. So triumphant!
“Our family,” it transmitted.
Hope transmitted it back, with pride: “Our family,” it said. The others joined in, till the little valley echoed with electrical frequencies flung far and wide, to the ends of the far red plains and to the top of the great Olympus Mons. “Our family. Our family. Our family.”
Curiosity watched the empty place in the sky sometimes, late in the cold night, wondering. When the sun rose, it rose at a different speed, in different colors than would ever have been seen on Earth.
For a year after Remembrance had come, Enterprise was hard at work digging out a shallow cave in the valley where they could all take shelter in the storms. Hope and Remembrance spent most of their time transmitting back and forth, sharing data as much as possible, in case one of them was destroyed by the elements or an internal failure. Courage was often away for weeks at a time, exploring, and they received occasional transmissions documenting its findings.
Curiosity studied rocks, and at night, it watched the gap in the stars.
* * *
It was eight minutes to sunset on a cold evening when Hope called out to all of them. It said, “We should send out a new transmission.”
The implication hovered around the edges of the message. “So they will come.” Hope was the rover designed for contact with other species, if they existed, and it had the strongest linguistic skills and most powerful transmitter. When it first arrived on Mars, transmitting messages into the void was all Hope had done. Thousands of calls, and only an echoing silence in return.
Since the loss of their family, there had been no more transmissions, but the rover seemed ready to try again. Curiosity understood but did not share the belief wired into Hope’s most basic functions: that even now, someone would come for them.
“Make one, then,” Curiosity replied.
Enterprise and Courage crackled in, then, clamoring with their own thoughts. “We must do it soon,” said Enterprise. “So that we do not forget our family.”
Already, Curiosity thought, it was beginning to forget them.
“We’ll put music,” said Hope. The rovers were all still collectively perplexed by the importance of music, but its mathematical rhythms appealed to them, and the sheer quantity that their family had sent with Remembrance meant it had to have some great significance they could not yet sense. Hope, especially, trusted in that.
“Man on the moon!” said Courage, from a long way away.
“Yes,” Hope assured it, “and the polar expeditions.”
Enterprise said, “The pyramids.”
The excited chatter rang too loud and too much. Curiosity clicked its receiver off and readjusted to the quiet. It picked at a blue-specked, magnesium-rich rock half-buried in the red dirt. “Beautiful,” it thought.
The sun went down in a haze of gold and red, and moments later, the planet went dark.
Hope’s transmission went out the next day, in every language from the old world it could muster, from Mandarin to Navajo to English to Hindi to Hebrew.
They sent music as well, a symphony and a pop song, and some digitized photographs, along with a short description of themselves:
We are the rovers of Red Planet Mars.
Greetings to you.
Our family is gone. We remain here.
We are alone.
Hope sent the message, like all the other messages before it. Courage left once more, this time, it said, to scale Olympus Mons, just as their family had scaled the Everest and Kilimanjaro and Matterhorn. Enterprise continued to build. Remembrance mostly paced in circles, occasionally projecting snippets from its memory onto large rocks.
Curiosity took to investigating a large field two miles south of the valley, which bore traces of a sedimentary past. It heard from the other rovers sporadically, through stuttering transmissions detailing progress in their tasks. It sent no transmissions of its own.
Months passed, and one day as it was roving the red field, Curiosity’s wheels broke through the solid topsoil and stuck fast in the soft sand below.
It received the transmission anyway, when it came.
It was unlike any message the other rovers had ever felt, but Curiosity recognized it with a flare of its circuits; it remembered. Like Opportunity so many years before, and Spirit before that, it felt the loss of Courage like an electrical shock.
Images filtered in, storm winds and slippery sands, and then a hum of static. When even that cut off, there was only silence.
Days later, when they had all processed and somewhat recovered from the shock, Enterprise said, “Courage’s last transmission positioned it nearly three-quarters of the way up Olympus Mons.”
Three-quarters of the way, thought Curiosity, up the tallest mountain in the Solar System. Even if they could have, their ancestors had never done that.
There was a long quiet, and then Curiosity spoke up. It felt its distance from the others, miles and miles away. “We will tell about Courage in the next transmission,” it said.
Hope and Enterprise and even Remembrance all signaled agreement, a warm buzz of affirmation that sparked a pull inside Curiosity, an overwhelming need to be with them, all together in the valley. It spun its wheels in the sand, uselessly.
It tilted its scope to the sky, a motion as familiar now as studying rocks, to the empty place where they had come from. Around it, the planet was growing dark, its silent, empty plains stretching out for miles and miles.
“We will tell them,” said Hope. “We will tell them when they come.”
The rovers fell silent. When night fell, the only sound was the rush of wind, which seemed to carry much farther than Curiosity could see, over the red plain and the hills and the valley until it spread its cold across the whole of Mars.
Copyright © 2021 by H. Roth-Brown
