It was a bright and sunny afternoon on Mars above Paradigm Incorporated. It was entering into the late afternoon and Ezekiel Cross had one final tour to take care of before he could call it a day. He took a breath and downed the last of the water bottle he'd been favoring for the past hour, tossing it into the nearby recycling port in the wall. He straightened, adjusting his cufflinks, and walked out to the main lobby.
The initial hologram introduction program was finishing up as he strode up behind it. It stood about fifteen feet tall, the size of a small billboard, and automatically played on loop in the lobby's vast, open space. However, it was keyed to recognize the resonance key emanated by guest security clearance badges, which triggered it to start over from the beginning whenever a new one came in range of the sensor, unless a group of five or more were already gathered. There were currently six people passively watching, or just listening, to the introduction rolling over the screen now, presented by his father's upper torso and soft, firm voice.
In many company lobbies, the introduction and guide holograms had replaced personal tour guides like himself, and indeed most guests in the Paradigm headquarters lobby did end up fending for themselves with the help of a map superimposed on their ExtraLens and an incredibly polite humanoid program.
However, the six people in their lobby at this time had a net worth of over 2.2 trillion dollars. Ergo, Ezekiel was going to be giving them the grand tour, the sales pitch, and, ultimately, sucking whoever's dick he had to in order to secure their investments.
Normally he was averse to being overdramatic, but it had been a long day and Ezekiel was tired.
"...the wealth of opportunities here at Paradigm, as presented by our very own Ezekiel Cross."
Ezekiel stepped through the far side of the hologram, to the left of the scaled-up torso of his father, who held a miniature of the completely terraformed Mars in his hands. The hologram shivered and rippled as his passage disturbed it. It settled behind him, the images re-forming into a new backdrop when they detected his ID badge. The hologram now showed space, specifically, their little corner of it. The Sol Major solar system turned gently in the vacuum of stars over Ezekiel's shoulders as he straightened his shoulders and took a breath.
"Welcome, ladies, gentlemen, and otherwise. It is an honor and a privilege to stand before you all on behalf of my father. The things he has accomplished here on Mars has established for our family a legacy of enormous opportunity and responsibility in the scientific frontiers. And today, it is my duty to share these opportunities with you all. Please, regard our tiny Mars..."
Ezekiel reached out to the small holographic solar system and pinched his thumb and forefinger against the floating screen, spreading them out to zoom in on the small red planet, the one that they, in Paradigm's headquarters, now stood in. Beneath his deft movements, the rest of the solar system faded into the background, while Mars became the size of a golfball. With a flourish, Ezekiel pushed his black-gloved fingers a little ways into the floating, immaterial screen of light, captured the little red sphere, and then - pulled it free of the hologram.
There was a ripple as his small, but extraordinarily valuable audience expressed their surprise and delight. Hologram sciences had only succeeded in generating holos that could free themselves from their light pedestals recently, in select few circumstances, and it often still required a light pedestal source of some kind. The main holo's light pedestal was embedded in the floor, between the cracks of strategically placed tiles, but the small red Mars replica Ezekiel now held in his fingertips hovered there with no apparent assistance. He turned, placing his body between it and the rest of the hologram, confirming the small, glowing red ball of light was indeed independent.
Ezekiel walked towards his audience with confident, sweeping strides, smiling his single-dimple grin, his groomed blonde hair tousled in the precise way that showed he, too, enjoyed a good time, but was still in control of every aspect of his appearance. He held the Mars out before him for his guests to behold, then, stopping a few feet in front of them, left it hanging in the air before them.
This was always a little bit of risk. The feat was impressive, enough that it could distract his investors from his pitch. But Ezekiel knew what he was doing.
"Amazing, isn't it?" he asked, not really asking, as his audience beheld the little red globe. "Look at it there. All by itself." Ezekiel snapped his fingers, and the Mars scaled up by ten, now big enough to show places of greenery on its surface. Ezekiel swirled his finger upright in the air and the mini-Mars began to turn, slowly, showing itself off. "Remarkable. Fifty years ago, our ancestors set out, not with an ambition, but a
declaration
- we would make Mars habitable. And now, here we are - " Ezekiel stepped away from the globe, turning, arms spread, gesturing to not only the lobby, but in a grander sense, the whole of Mars. "Isn't it something? Our ancestors took a barren, miserable, desert rock, and raised cities on it. Plowed fields. Filled rivers, and scaled mountains." He turned back to face them again, and snapped his fingers. The sphere of Mars unraveled into a series of scenes, showing happy human Martian citizens, playing on beaches, plucking perfect, vivid vegetables from rich, loamy garden soil. One scene even showed people skiing.
Ezekiel smirked. Their attention was back on him again, as they sensed he was winding up.
"Overall, Mars has not even realized its full potential yet, but it can not be denied that we can only go up from here. My friends, Mars has reached what we professional terraformers like to call the
Golden Hour
. It has reached the point where its minimum necessities are being met and exceeded. So much so, in fact, that at this time next year, our appraisers expect to be seeing no less than tripling profits in agriculture, mineral extraction, and, of course, real estate development."
There was a murmur, a good murmur. That was the murmur of people who were thinking,
ah, that's it, here comes the interesting stuff.
Ezekiel snapped his fingers again, and the playing images disappeared. He waved a hand, and the solar system behind him whirled, resetting to its original position. He walked back over to it and reached out again, zoomed in again, this time on another planet altogether. Saturn grew to five times the size of his head, its rings a dazzling array of icey splendor, its skies dotted with the faces of its moons.
The young man reached out again, repeating the same maneuver he'd used on Mars. This time, his selection was Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and held it up for them to see. Again, he expanded the size of it, but this time, with a tap of his finger, Ezekiel sent the moon floating through the air towards the crowd while remaining where he stood.
"Paradigm has not been idle, during the past twenty or so years of prosperous growth. As the pioneers who lead the way in biodome technology during the founding years of Mars's first colonies, we have been preparing our next step out into the stars just as we have prepared Mars to spread its wings and declare self-sufficiency. And as of today, I am proud to announce the first colony of Titan landed on Titan Pearl 1, the first biodome on Titan, at oh-six-hundred hours this morning." Ezekiel waved a hand and Titan spun, its clouds parting to reveal a small gleaming dot on its surface. With a gesture Ezekiel summoned a small video clip that rose out towards the audience from the gleaming dot, a recording of the colony crew all standing inside the windows of Pearl 1 on one of her top decks, waving at the drone hovering outside as it had taken the video.
Ezekiel waved his hand a third time. The video clip disappeared, Titan lowered itself closer to the floor, and from it a series of low-poly rendered animations sprang up, depicting various stages of growth. Above these, a graph appeared, with an optimistic arrow declaring an uninterrupted rise towards success.
"Our experiences during development on Mars were, each and every one of them, invaluable lessons," Ezekiel declared, "successes and mistakes alike. We have, here at Paradigm, tirelessly refined and streamlined our biodome program in the years since the Mars project achieved open-air, to the point that our predicted timeline for open-air inhabitation on Titan is no more than..." Ezekiel paused, letting the animations and graph fade out of the air. Only when he knew for a fact that his audience was holding their breath did he finish: "...ten years."
