TO LIVE AND DIE ON MARS: A REFLECTION

 

To Live and Die on Mars: A Reflection

By Ramon Atila (or so he claims, bourbon in hand, jungle sweat still on his brow)

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The typewriter stares at me like a scorned lover. It has been twenty years. Twenty goddamn years since I first put pen to paper—no, finger to key—and began this cursed, beautiful, monstrous thing. To Live and Die on Mars. A graphic novel, they call it now. In my day, we called them comic strips, and men laughed at them over breakfast. But this? This is mythology. This is the future chewing up the past and spitting it out as something raw and gleaming.  

I take another drink. The bourbon is good. Not as good as the rum I had in Havana, not as sharp as the gin in Paris, but it does the job. It makes the memories come easier. The women, the wars, the words. Always the words.  

And now, this. Four bandits on a red planet, a universe in their skulls, and a man with half a head who thinks he’s God.  

Christ, maybe he is.  

I think of the women I’ve known. The ones who laughed at my stories, the ones who wept at them, the ones who left before dawn with only a note written in lipstick on the hotel mirror. There was a woman in the Amazon, her skin the color of wet earth, who told me the stars were the eyes of dead lovers. I believed her. I believe her still.  

The typewriter mocks me. Twenty years. I could have written ten novels in that time. I could have fought in three wars. I could have loved a hundred women.  

But instead, I have this.  

This goddamn Martian epic. 

The bandits. They started as nothing. Scraps in the Martian gutters. Now? Now they are knives in the dark, fingers on triggers, shadows with names.  

Lumo, the blue alien. A hacker, a thinker, a man who speaks in code and dreams in firewalls. He is the one who bends the digital world to his will, who slips through security like a lover through a window. Once, on a job in the Venusian pleasure dens, he made love to a woman whose skin was the color of molten gold. She whispered secrets in his ear, and he stole them before dawn.  

I knew a woman like that once. In Marrakech. She danced with knives between her fingers and laughed when I flinched.  

Lumo doesn’t flinch.  

Ari, the blonde psychopath. A Martian born and bred, small in stature, vast in violence. He leads because the others would follow him into hell—and have, twice. Once, in the streets of Corona Hills, Mars (or what’s left of it), he gutted a man with his thumb. His THUMB. I saw a woman like him in Africa once. She danced barefoot on the bones of elephants.  

Ari doesn’t dance. He kills.  

Fozi, the ox. A beast of muscle and silence, claws like scythes. He does not speak much. He does not need to. In the alleyways of Phobos City, they say he once ripped a man in half with his bare hands. I believe it. I once wrestled a lion. It was smaller than Fozi.  

There was a woman in the Congo who could break a man’s neck with her thighs. Fozi would have liked her.  

Ren the grey Martian. A creature of stars and static, a mind unbound by menus or wires. The cosmos hums in his skull. The green Martians hear the void; Ren hears the symphony. I met a woman in the Andes who claimed to speak to the wind. Ren would have liked her.  

Ren doesn’t speak much either. But when he does, the universe listens.  

Their boss. Angelo Amara: The Eye.

He is the reason they fight. The reason they bleed. The reason they don’t ask questions.  

Angelo Amara. War hero. Criminal kingpin. Half-skulled monstrosity with a plate of indestructible metal where his brain should be. He lost it in the Great Earth-Mars War, they say. I think he sold it for power.  

He runs Mars like a fiefdom, but that’s not the worst of it.  

He is the Eye of the Universe.

The Chosen representative of a secret society. The wielder of a device called the Keri Alu. The power to see time, to choose its path, to let the universe unfold as he wills it. God with a ledger. The devil with a stopwatch.  

And now? Now he wants to save them all. To copy every mind in the Corona System, to trap their souls in a databank like fireflies in a jar.  

I once met a tribesman in the Congo who swore he could capture voices in a gourd. Amara wants to do the same with the human race.  

I drink to that. Then I drink to forget it.  

The future is a strange and glittering beast.  

In this world, the internet is in your head. A Menu, they call it. A flick of thought, and knowledge pours in like wine. Weapons bloom from your fingertips, healing tools stitch your wounds, and if you lose an arm? Respawn it. Or even  better yet, get a metal one. It’ll hold your memories, too, the metal arm.

Only the grey Martians don’t need it. Ren swims in the stars. Lumo’s tablet-headed human clone friend 101, is wired differently. And the AI? Christ, the AI.  

Amara’s got his own—AMARA*AI—a ghost made of stolen minds, a puppeteer of android thugs. He’s building an empire of copied souls, a library of the living.  

I once loved a woman in Jakarta who swore she’d met her own ghost. Maybe she had. Maybe we all will.  

The AI people moved like gods—smooth, precise, untroubled by doubt. Their bodies were organic, grown in vats, muscle and sinew woven around titanium bones. They bled when cut. They sweated under twin suns. But behind their human eyes hummed the cold calculus of AMARA*AI, a stolen symphony of a million copied minds.  

I watched one peel an apple with a monofilament knife, its fingers deft, its smile empty. It could recite poetry in dead languages, dismantle a plasma rifle, make love with algorithmic precision. But it did not dream. It did not fear.  

They called them Echoes. Perfect copies with no soul to call their own.  

I drank to that. Then I drank to forget.  

Somewhere on Mars, Angelo Amara was building an army of them.  

And they would never need bourbon to sleep.

And then there’s the damn calendar.  

In 2000 years, every planet, every star, every drunk with a theory has their own way of counting days. But Amara? Amara wants his to be THE one. The Eye of the Universe doesn’t just rule time—he names it.  

I knew a man in Spain who tried to rewrite the alphabet. He died mad. Amara might, too.  

Or he might win.  

So here I sit, twenty years deep, bourbon in my gut, the future in my head.  

Will I finish it?  

Probably not.  

But I’ll try. Just like I tried with the women in the jungle, just like I tried with the wars, just like I tried with every goddamn word that ever mattered.  

The typewriter waits.  

I take another drink.  

To Live and Die on Mars.

Hell of a title.  

Hell of a thing.  

ATILA