LIFE ON MARS
by Mark Gullick
A bite-sized short story of the giants
Elon Musk’s coffee was ready. He knew this via a coded message. A subcutaneous nano-transmitter in his left ear told him so. The whole apartment ran like that. He had had this apartment duplicated in Paris and Marrakech. Three. Three pulses. Coffee. One; phone reminder. Two; reminder — if necessary — fully to analyze the call himself, rather than using his personal AI, whom he had named Galatea. Three; java, as noted. There were others, other morse reminders to contact colleagues in various corporations which didn’t really have names, at least not listed ones.
Three blocks away from The White House sat a man whose real name did not coincide with that on his personal documentation. He was enjoying a lemon sole in what was really a rather good restaurant, for the area. He, too, had an aural audio prosthetic (AAP®), and he was listening to a conversation between President Donald Trump and the Belgian Ambassador (who spoke excellent English) taking place in the Oval Office. The White House had always believed their firewalls to be the best money could buy. They were. But the company who knew the way to get over or around them was owned by Elon Musk, and it was the only one money could buy.
Before retiring to bed, President Donald Trump chatted for a while with his wife, Melania. They were both sitting in the Red Room, one of Melania’s favorites, and often the scene of these tristes before it was time for the little sleep they both got. The President did not drink alcohol, but his wife held what resembled a crystal thimble of Tio Pepe. Trump said:
“You don’t like Elon, do you. Be honest.”
“I’m always honest. It’s not that I don’t like him.”
“But you don’t trust him.”
“But I don’t trust him.”
“Ah, don’t get all Eastern European on me.”
Trump laughed, and Melania laughed at exactly the same time. This was not due to deference, but to the mutual understanding between a happily married couple.
Musk had four hours in which to sleep, although he had dopamine inhibitors which nano-monitored his levels and were located… Musk forgot where. He forgot sometimes. He wondered — in fact, he wondered this often — whether having to feign the symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome for so long had affected his memory. Organic evolution. Except that autists have better memories. Musk remembered the boy at the fairground. He couldn’t button his shirt up level, but when you showed him a deck of cards in order? One by one? Then placed them all face down on the table? Then called out a card? Musk remembered. The boy picked it straight out.
“You know I don’t like much makeup.”
“It’s not cosmetic, Mr. Musk.”
“You can call me Elon.”
She had called him Elon before, many times.
“It’s for the glare. From the camera lighting.”
“I know. I’ve done this before. I was teasing.”
The makeup artist had been hired months before. Musk always had someone in place wherever he was going to be, and he could be wherever he wanted because, when you have that kind of money, you can be wherever you want to be months in advance. So, you have plenty of time to get someone to get someone to fake references for a coder who had previously been in jail (Musk could have her charges disappeared, in any case, through, you know, the links) to get a job as a makeup artist in Hungary. Musk remembered Orson Welles saying that being a film director was the biggest and best trainset a boy ever had. Musk’s was bigger. And better.
The Tesla talk was nervy and the crowd noticeably edgy. That wasn’t Musk’s verdict, that was the mainstream media chorus-lining. He had had at least lunch with some of them. He had talked about efficiency, and he had talked about… It didn’t matter, certainly not to Musk. It wasn’t really him doing the talking. It was his personal AI ChatBot, Galatea. He made her, just for himself. The press would forgive him the stammers and awkwardness. They always did, with things like autism. You were even becoming able to criticize a black man. But you still couldn’t touch a cripple.
President Trump’s speech to the Unions — how different from JFK talking to the Teamsters — was as tempestuous as ever. Except this time, it was the 47th President who was riled up, not a bunch of grease-monkeys with spanners who had transferred to a soft-handshake job and hoped, one day, to run for Governor. Trump drawled:
“You know what the last President said? ‘My son’ — and, you know, this is Hunter, it’s Hunter Biden we’re talking about — ‘is the smartest guy I know.’ Well. Well, who’s the dumbest? Where’s the, you know, where’s the scale? I mean… The smartest guy in the world, huh? Well, I’ll tell you something; I’ll let you in on a secret. The richest — and that counts for something in America — and the smartest guy I know works for me!”
Musk heard, as it were, the speech. He didn’t actually hear, or read, a word. He had Galatea filter out everything but approval ratings. The press sometimes used a particular phrase Musk liked. Entity X is playing chess while Entity Y is playing checkers. Trump was certainly using the game Putin was — quite literally — rather good at. Chess intrigued him, as it does all players of the game, to whatever level. Was it the base of his own? Well, yes. But he felt his to be better. Because it didn’t matter who moved first, white or black. He would still win. He reminded himself to remind himself to call Giles Benson, on Mars. His people had already been there a long time, and it had been very difficult keeping the media away from that one. He wanted to ask Giles if they had found any life yet, on Mars. Like the song.
Mr. Gullick is a philosopher (Ph.D. University of Sussex) who writes on English politics and culture for American magazines. He was born in London in the early 1960s, and he currently resides in Central America.