This was originally published on my ao3 in October of 2024. I'm reuploading it here, because I want to.
The story was inspired by an adoptable I picked up from the excellent artist RetroHurricane, pictured below.
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| Bradbury, cybernetic Martian orc |
I hope the literary barallels are self-evident.
———The limp body of the man whose name didn’t matter was pushed off the deck of the airship and into the mechanical jungle of Mars.
The razor-tipped edges of solar leaves cut at his flesh as he fell, the pain only barely registering compared to his other injuries.
He landed with an awful crack at the base of a turbine tree, head tilted up to look at the stormy sky.
It was always stormy on Mars.
The man knew he was dying. He didn’t accept it, exactly, but there was no use denying the obvious. He was all out of lucky breaks. Nobody on Mars would be coming to save him.
Organic matter didn’t mesh well with Martian biology, which meant his body wouldn’t really rot like it would on earth. It was possible his skeleton would remain for years, if not decades, unwelcome even in death on this alien world.
The leading theory was that the earliest Martian life was a form of microscopic terraforming machine, originally as simple as any earth microbe, that had evolved beyond its original purpose, or perhaps filling its purpose exactly as intended.
This was a strange final thought, the dying man mused. A coppery insect the size of a crow landed on his chest, and he watched as it bit down like a mosquito.
It didn’t hurt. That was probably not a good sign. Nothing really hurt, even the crisscrossed burns along his arms. Everything felt cool, and numb. His consciousness was fading fast.
The last thing he noticed was that the robot bug wasn’t swelling up with his blood, as a mosquito would have. In fact, it looked like it was getting thinner.
How odd, he thought, as darkness overtook him.
———
Mohammed was a falconer. On Mars, the falcons were the size of cars, and built more like pterosaurs, so he was not very much like a falconer of earth.
He kept a few birds in a hangar out in the badlands, where he also lived. He enjoyed the peace and quiet.
The only neighbor was the Colonial weather institute a mile away. It was a massive complex, dedicated to monitoring and controlling the wild Martian weather.
Massive tropical storms could tear through the planet with little warning, even as far inland as Tyrrhena Terra, where Mohammed lived, so meteorology was a big deal on Mars.
One of these tropical storms was approaching from the east, which had forced Mohammed and his birds inside for the past few days.
This far from civilization, he had to be self-sufficient, and he kept a cellar with months of food for just this sort of situation.
The falcons didn’t eat earth food, so he at least didn’t need to share with them, but he was running out of old tires. Next time he got a chance, he would need to pick some up.
His television broadcast was interrupted by an emergency broadcast from the Colonial authority. “BE WARY OF SUSPICIOUS PERSONS USING TROPICAL STORM 351-CSFM AS COVER FOR UNLAWFUL AND DANGEROUS ACTIVITIES.
ALERT COLONIAL AUTHORITY IMMEDIATELY OF SUSPICIOUS PERSONS. DO NOT INTERACT DIRECTLY UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. BE WARY OF SUSPICIOUS PERSONS USING TROPICAL STORM 351-”
Mohammed turned the TV off. The piercing noise of the alarm bothered the falcons, and he didn’t care for it much, either. He was skeptical of anyone committing crimes in this kind of weather, anyways.
Magpie, his largest falcon, poked him on the head with her beak. She had a tendency to forcefully request attention if she was feeling nervous, which storms tended to do. There was no wall between Mohammed’s living space and the hangar, which meant the falcons had free reign of his space.
Mohammed gave her a piece of tin foil, which she swallowed in one bite. Then, he scritched under her head, where the plate of her lower jaw met the neck. It was hot, as most of a falcon’s joints were, as they expelled waste heat across their whole body.
Seeing that there was free food available, Penguin and Shrike, his other falcons, ambled over for treats. Mohammed obliged, and he was suddenly swarmed by three very enthusiastic alien monsters.
“Okay, okay, you’re going to squish me!” Mohammed said, tossing a piece of foil far away to get him some space.
Penguin and Shrike chased after it, leaving Magpie flopping down on him like a big lazy dog. A big lazy dog that weighed nearly two tons and had a surface temperature of close to 100 degrees.
Mohammed wiggled out from under the falcon, who was smart enough to know to not actually crush him flat. She made a whirring chirrup as he stood up, the sound she normally made when she wanted to go hunting.
“Not right now, Maggie. Too windy for chickens.”
Mohammed kept chickens for, among other things, live targets for the falcons to hunt. As long as they were trained to fetch the chickens safely, there was no risk of them being eaten, and the chickens didn’t seem to care.
In Martian gravity, they could fly, which made them exciting and novel targets for what were ultimately still aerial predators.
The chickens were currently in their indoor coop, clucking softly. It was a comfortingly earthlike sound.
There was a heavy CLUNK as something slammed into the wall of the hangar. Mohammed’s home was built like a fortress, and nothing appeared to be damaged, but the lights dimmed, flickered, and went out.
Something had knocked out the power.
Mohammed had a backup generator for exactly this scenario, of course. He staggered blindly to the drawer he kept flashlights in, then made his way into the cellar to set up the generator.
The storm was howling outside, so loud he could hear it underground. Hail smashed against the roof like a constant barrage of artillery.
Working in the dark with the flashlight held in his mouth, Mohammed set up the small generator. It would last for days if he used it only for necessities, and kept his fridge sealed.
The minimum number of lamps were flicked on, casting the huge empty hangar in harsh shadows. Magpie, Penguin, and Shrike had retreated to their respective nests and entered their torpor states, as they tended to do when exposed to total darkness.
Torpor wasn’t exactly sleep, because no Martian animal really slept. They were still aware of their surroundings, and they tended to watch whatever moved in their vicinity. In this case, that meant Mohammed.
The three Martian animals stared at Mohammed silently, which was always a little ominous. Falcons were naturally chatty and made metallic sounds as they moved, so the times they made truly zero noise were rare.
Even in torpor they usually creaked and hummed, but not now. The only sound was the heavy rain and hail from outside.
It was easy to forget that the falcons were aliens. They were like animals in so many ways, intelligent and friendly ones, too. But when they sat still and silent, they really felt like statues of some ancient, alien beasts; unfamiliar and cold.
Mohammed tried to shake the feeling. They were still the same creatures, after all.
There was a knock on his door. Mohammed wasn’t sure if it was a knock, at first, as the hail could have simply struck the door, but then it happened again.
Mohammed left his birds to open the door. A huge silhouette stood in the doorway, so big he needed to lean down slightly to fit.
In the dark gray light, it took a moment for Mohammed to register what he was seeing. A huge man, with no shirt and soaked to the bone, leaned against the wall.
His skin was an unnatural-looking shade of reddish-orange, and dark eyes with golden irises bored down into Mohammed’s, more like the eyes of a wolf or wildcat than a human’s.
“May I come in?” The man asked, then fell forward as if pushed.
Mohammed caught him with some difficulty, and with more difficulty slammed his door shut with his foot. Whoever this guy was, he was fucking heavy!
“Sorry,” the strange man said weakly. “Twisted my ankle, I think…”
Mohammed helped the man to his couch, sitting him down with his hurt foot elevated. Potential questions buzzed through his head.
“What the hell were you doing out in a storm like that?” Mohammed asked. “You’re lucky you found your way here and didn’t get blown a thousand miles away.”
The man thought about this. With one hand he felt the edge of the back of the couch, seemingly enthralled by the texture. In the clearer light Mohammed could see that both of his arms were metal prosthetics of unusually high quality. “It wasn’t luck. I knew what I was doing.”
“And what were you doing?”
“Coming here. The birds said you were kind.”
Mohammed blinked. “The birds?”
The man pointed to Magpie, who was staring back at him. “Them. They told me you were kind.”
“Back up a bit. The falcons… talked to you? How?”
“I… don’t know if I can explain. I’m not so good with words.”
“Where were you before coming here? Why did you need to find me?”
“I was in a room in a building. The scientists wanted to understand what had happened to me. They thought I was sick, and were trying to cure me, but I disagreed, so I left.”
“What had happened…” Mohammed began. “Wait, you left? Did they let you leave?”
“No. They tried to stop me," the man said airily, as if it hadn't bothered him.
“And did it occur to you that they might still be trying to stop you? That they may have followed you?”
“No, I suppose it didn’t.”
“Great, okay,” Mohammed said, though it was neither great nor okay. “I guess we’ll just hide in the basement until—“
There was another knock at Mohammed’s door.
———
The blue light of the tank cast its occupant in a pallid, unnatural light. Machinery whirred and hummed, taking measurements of the specimen’s brain activity as he slept.
Two scientists monitored the data. One was an expert in Martian mechanobiology, and the other an expert in cybernetics.
“There’s no way to take it all out,” said one. “It’s tied into too many systems. The muscles, the digestive tract, the skeleton, and especially the central nervous system. At least thirty percent of the brain is being held together by this… stuff.”
“It’s going to kill him,” said the other. “Martian chemistry is too different, too alien. The heat this new kidney-analogue is producing would cook a human from the inside out.”
“It’s not killing him, it’s changing him. See, those spots are new. He didn’t have those when we brought him in. It doesn’t matter what would kill a human, because he’s no longer just a human anymore.”
“What are you suggesting? That he’s… what, some kind of chimera? A Martian? That’s preposterous.”
“Do you have any alternative hypotheses?”
“No. This is impossible. It should be impossible.”
“There are more things in heaven and Mars, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Good grief , how long have you been sitting on that line?”
“You don’t want to know.”
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