Thank you for reading my story, I hope that you enjoy it. Love Mica xx, Yorkshire England.
Please note that I am a British female, and I write in British English and vernacular, so for me a fanny is the correct term for female genitalia, a pussy is a pet cat, and the ass is a bum or arse.
I apologise for any typo errors in my story - I edit these myself, and I'm not perfect...
The journey from Earth had taken a little over four weeks, the newer nuclear thermal powered engines speeding up journey times dramatically, only using regular methane and oxygen fuelled rocket engines for take off and landing. The nuclear ones being too toxic near land, be it Martian or Earthen.
A sealed coach docked with the spacecraft and after the requisite checks, the inner door opened and we were allowed to disembark and journey to Musk City, the Martian Colony started last century by an American called Elon Musk. The Martian gravity felt heavy after the relative weightlessness of space for most of the journey, and I knew that I would have to do some exercises whilst on Mars to get my muscle tone back.
I was on a six-month contract to operate the Copernicus Space Telescope, the CST, and continue its explorations of the earliest times after the Big Bang. Although the Big Bang Theory (BBT) was pretty much now ignored, it was still used as a general reference to the earliest of times. Still, no one had been able to quantify an alternative to the big bang, but people kept trying.
The CST took deep space images over long durations and then they were stacked and examined. I did the exposures and stacking, other people did the examining. They do, or so I read, keep finding things that shouldn't exist if the BBT holds true, but then they don't fit in any of the alternative theories either.
I just asked the question, if everything is moving away from us, then why aren't we the centre of the universe. "Don't be so stupid," I was told. Oh well, I guess that is why I am only smart enough to operate the CST and point it where they say. I don't mind to be honest, I have enough to the think about.
Our sleeping arrangements are now quite good compared to the early years of the colony, we get our own rooms and washing facilities nowadays. A small shower and toilet, a double bed and a wardrobe and table. It is okay and it is much better than they have on the moon for example, there you share bunk rooms and shared toilets and showers.
One innovation here on Mars is waste disposal. Human solids are collected and are broken up, mixed with other biological waste from the city, such as food, and then buried under around a foot of Martian soil. The plan is that it degrades using some kind of anabolic reaction and to create, in the longer term, a viable growing medium. As the process happens it releases oxygen into the thin carbon dioxide Martian atmosphere, never be enough to make the atmosphere viable, but every little bit helps.
Musk City is a large single story multi-roomed facility that is almost self-sufficient. There is water on Mars, deep down and it is mined and filtered and purified. The wastewater from the city is also filtered and purified and added to the city water supply. If the population were under one hundred then it would be self-sufficient, but there were around one hundred and twenty five currently in the city.
I had worked for a while in Antarctica Station, and that place felt more cramped that Musk City and was also a place where you had less privacy. It was on a par with life on the moon. Here felt much more relaxed, and much more private.
I sat in the communal recreation area. No alcohol on Mars, and no smoking, vaping or illegal drug use. Anyone found breaking those rules would be confined to quarters and shipped back on the next shuttle and when back on Earth, would be fined more money than they would earn in a lifetime and with no way of finding the money, they would be unemployable. No one risked it, the corporations were too big and wielded too much power.
No point in denying it, saying it was a fix, no, the corporations would simply deploy a number of deep fake evidences using your voice and your image confessing to whatever they said that you had done. No, much better to simply go along and do your job and earn the money that they were paying you.
"Mica? It is Mica isn't it?"
A man stood by me, tall, probably around six feet two inches, something like that, toned, but no bulging muscles, his shorts indicating a presence, a hidden presence, his accent was vaguely English, possibly midlands?
"Yes, I am, why?"
"Well, you are new and so I thought that I would be the friendly face that everyone needs when they arrive here."
"Oh, right, okay then, well thank you, and you are?"
"Jon, Jon Fairburn at your service."
What an old fashioned way to speak, people, in my experience, only spoke like that two centuries ago. The politeness in English from British people compared to, for example, transatlantic English speakers, still remained, but speech no longer harked back to the days of servitude, dating before the first of the world wars.
"You need not be in any service of me Jon Fairburn," I replied with a smile on my face. I wondered who he really was. I knew that the intelligence communities had various assets in place, all of whom were looking to catch the saboteurs that they were convinced existed with the sole aim of destroying the Mars colony. He could be one of those assets.
"Are you really you?" Jon asked as he sipped at his water, the most sought after drink, pure, and very expensive in relative terms.
"Am I really me what?"
"You know what I mean, are you just you or are you also, you know, a watcher?"
"A watcher? I have no idea what you mean. I am just me; I operate a telescope for clever people, I save money, I pay taxes and that is just about me."
"I see, but then if you were a watcher Mica, you wouldn't admit it."
"Good grief." It was amusing to be honest, nearly everybody went through the same routine when they met someone. The corporations were so paranoid that they basically spied on everyone, the ran powerful algorithms that tracked out every mood and analysed our behaviour. They knew what we thought before we did.
"I guess therefore that you are? I mean the odds on neither of us being one must be really low." I threw the ball right back at him and leant back and sipped at my water. Water used to be called Adam's Ale back when religions meant something apart from a chapter of history, now few people would understand what was meant by it. Tempus Fugit, Time moves on.
"Yes of course, that must be it. So, now what do we do?" Jon had a broad smile across his face. The truth was neither of us would ever know if the other were a corporate spy or just an ordinary keeping their head down type of person, and it didn't really make much difference there was so much surveillance in society that they already knew everything.
If the Corporations decided that they didn't like you, then they would just use deep fake and frame you, simple. So, we all just towed the Corporate line and tried not to make trouble. Life went on. Wars were a thing of the past, the nearest that we might get to a war these days was a hostile corporate take-over, and that was exceedingly unlikely as the seven Corporations in existence, the seven that ran the world, were each pretty much the same in terms of size and global reach.
SpaceTech, the Corporation that I was employed by, pretty much ran all of space, but much of its technology came from the other Corporations, in truth, the seven had a symbiotic relationship with each other, wars and hostile takeovers were counterproductive.
I looked at Jon and liked what I saw to be honest. Pleasant on the eye, and pleasant on the ear. His clothes were pretty much like everyone else's, shirt and shorts. In his case his shorts seemed a little inadequate shall we say. He certainly appeared to be a big boy.
My shirt was a little tight on me, my breasts quite apparent, but then I am a woman, and breast size is pretty much always obvious due to the clothes that we wear, our fannies are pretty much kept unobvious, it has kind of been like that for hundreds of years.
Of course pornography still exists, it probably always will but mores have moved on, we behave differently to each other, and women selling themselves to needy men has pretty much died out, we all admit that we like sex, and sex is pretty much a casual affair. But we all do like looking at naked bodies, hence the continuance of pornography, but nowadays it is pretty much the models themselves that share their nude imagery.
Jon was sitting easy, smiling at me, and the few other people in the recreation area were mostly those that came on the same shuttle as me. We hadn't yet settled into a work routine and were pretty much space lagged. The journey from Earth is pretty discombobulating, and takes some getting over, three of four days for most people, and this was day one.
"What do you do Jon Fairburn?" I asked, "you know about me, but apart from you being a Corporate spy, I know little about you."
He laughed and held up a hand, "wait a moment," he said and went and refreshed our waters before sitting down and facing me more directly.
"Well, I wait for some flunky to line the telescope up and take the pictures I need, and when I get that, I start analysis."
"Cool, I have never met anyone who takes my end product."
"End product? You make it sound like something you would buy from a shop."