Mars Shot – A Tale of New Beginning

When I was young, I read about the moon landings and wondered what it would be like to stand and look back at the Earth. Over fifty years passed before we thought about going back, but the only talk was about Mars, and just how difficult it would be. With the technology we already had, the trip each way would be nine months. Then there was the time on the Red Planet before the Earth was nearing a suitable position to come back.

I, like everyone else, wondered what it would be like to have seen such a place and come home, having missed a whole two years of life here. That would be enough time for a small war, another pandemic, even catastrophic flooding from climate change.

Now, as I wait for the transport to take us out to our capsules, I know that I would be one of those to experience all of those feelings. I had done well at school, had graduated with Honours in Astrophysics, had joined the Astronaut Training Academy, and had graduated from that with nineteen other men, all chosen for the trip to Mars. And, I hoped, back again.

What had changed was not the propulsion technology, even though we got more power from the new engines. No, the biggest change had come about in hibernation technology. I, like all the others in the crew, had been tested over a one-month period, strapped in a capsule, heart rate slowed and in an induced coma. We had tubes to give us nutrition and liquids, and other tubes to take it away again. The attachment of some of the tubes wasn’t nice, but we proved that they worked. It had been a project that my father had worked on, before he was sent on a secret project. We hadn’t heard from him in years.

The capsules were in a special trailer parked under our waiting rocket. We would be placed in them, comatose and inert. Then the capsules would be lifted up the gantry to be fitted into the module that would sustain us for the trip, with only me being able to be revived early, should something go wrong, as I had the greatest knowledge of the systems.

When we arrived at the trailer, we all shook hands with the technicians and politicians who had come to see us off. We didn’t look like astronauts as we didn’t need the heavy suits in the capsules. They provided our protection against gee-forces and our breathing supply. Compared with the old Apollo missions, this looked like a Sunday drive.

It took almost half a day to get us all ready and installed in the capsules. For me, after I blacked out, I knew that the next thing I would see, if all went well, would be the surface of Mars as we were in orbit. If things didn’t go well, I wouldn’t know anything about it. The lift-off time was late afternoon, and I had seen enough of these to know what would be happening in Mission Control, having sat there for three moon shots.

When I next had consciousness return, I felt like an old man. The nutrition tubes must have given me the medicine to bring me round and all the tubes had automatically been removed. The trouble was that I was so stiff after being in one position for a long time. There had been mechanisms in the capsule that was supposed to move my arms, legs, and head so that I didn’t freeze at the joints, but I thought that these may have malfunctioned some way into the trip.

When I did manage to get out of the capsule, I was able to move freely in zero gravity, with a long beard wafting around my face. Standard procedure was to look after yourself before anything else, so I floated to the washing capsule, where my whole body was subject to high pressure sprays to revive the nerves as much as a cleansing operation. Thoughtfully, the builders had supplied an electric shaver, with clippers, so I could clip the beard off and then shave smooth. After all that, I was feeling more like my old self, only a bit older.

My schedule was to check our positioning and the state of the survival systems first, so I floated around the command module looking at all the gauges, testing the air purifier, looking at the positioning and then opening a screen to see what we were flying over. What I saw, up close, was the surface of Mars and it didn’t look very inviting.

I was wondering why the crew hadn’t joined me as I looked at the computer screen to see what messages Mission Control had sent. The older ones were standard operating messages, and then there was a period where we didn’t get any at all. The last message rocked me. It just said, “Whoever finds this spacecraft, please treat the occupants well. They were heroes.”

Now worried, I floated back to the capsule area and looked at my companions. All of them were in an advanced state of decomposition. I didn’t bother to open any capsule, as I knew that I didn’t want to live with the smell of death around me. I expect that the system had automatically sent the message when the capsules failed. That’s why my manipulation system failed, but my survival system had kept working.

I went back into the command module and tracked backwards with the sensor logs. I had plenty of time and wasn’t going anywhere else. I finally arrived at a point where all the sensors went crazy. We must have flown through a cloud of cosmic dust that penetrated the survival module. The automatic resealing would have fixed any leaks, but, by then, the damage had been done.

By this time, I was tired and hungry, so got an energy bar from the storage, and a plastic container of energy drink. Then I just latched myself to a convenient clip and drifted into sleep in the softest bed I had ever known.

I woke up with a headache but feeling better in my joints. I flexed everything I could several times to get some movement, then floated over to the stores to get an energy bar for breakfast, also snagging a couple of aspirin which I swallowed with some water from a container. Then I turned on all of the cameras and screens to see where I was in relation to the surface. Last time I had looked, I thought that I was dangerously close.

This time, I was closer, so called up the height logs. I discovered that I was in a craft that was in a decaying orbit and would likely be burnt to a crisp in a matter of hours at the most. I switched to the camera that would be pointing towards earth, wanting to see if I could glimpse the blue planet before I died. There would be no use me calling the Mission Control now, as they thought I was dead already.

You could imagine my shock when the screen showed another spacecraft, above me in a stable orbit. It was quite large and looked futuristic. Was it manned by aliens? I turned on the low power radio we should have used for space walks and read the name on the nose. I flipped the switch and said, in a croaky voice, “Amazonian Spacecraft, do you understand me?”

There was a short period of static, then a female voice quavered when she answered.

“Martin, you’re alive?”

“Only just. Everyone else has been dead some time. I’m likely to be dead when this crate drops out of orbit. How the hell did you know my name?”

“That’s a story for later. Now, we have to get you out of there. Go and float in the centre of the command module as if you’re standing up. Do not latch to anything, do not be holding anything. Leave the radio open and call out when you’re ready.”

I did as instructed. When I called out, there was a short feeling of vertigo and I opened my eyes to find myself standing in normal gravity, in a large room, being supported by three ravishing blonde beauties.

“Just relax Martin. We’ve got you. It’s hard to feel normal gravity after so long in space. We’ll take you to the sick bay so that we can check you out. Then we’ve got to get out of this bit of space as quickly as we can before we’re all fried.”

I was half carried to a small room with a normal bed, where I was lifted up by these strong women, laid on the bed and strapped in.

“Just so you can withstand the acceleration.”

One pulled down a screen from above and positioned it so I could see. The picture showed the Mars spacecraft in orbit below us. They left me alone and went off. I looked at the picture as the spacecraft seemed to shudder as the orbit decayed to entry trajectory. I watched as it fell closer to the surface, finally exploding as the high temperatures ignited any remaining fuel load. Then the picture changed to the view towards earth. I could make out a couple of the other planets, but there, in the middle of the picture, was the sun, and it wasn’t happy.

I suddenly felt a massive acceleration and the sun seemed to recede quickly. I guessed that we had left the solar system when the sun went nova. I could feel continuous acceleration as we outran the waves that a star going nova can create. Whoever these women were, they were very close to being fried as they watched over my death.

Eventually, the acceleration dropped, and the picture stabilised on the death of the solar system as I had known it. The nova looked as if a big chunk of the Milky Way was disappearing. I now had no home to go back to and started to wonder where I was going, and also who these Amazonian women were, and how they could speak English and even knew my name.

As if they were reading my mind, the screen lit up and there was music playing. I watched, in wonder, as I saw pictures of myself, as I was now, with the narrator telling how I had been the only man saved from the extinction of the human race. I was referred to as Martin Prime. The story went on to show me being examined and having bloods drawn. The narrator said that I was the origin of all the males on Amazonia, with a shot of another world where all the men looked a lot like me, and all the women were tall Amazons.

This was weird. If I was the origin, how did they have pictures of men who looked like me? I just had to lay there as the screen went blank. In a while three of the women came in with a tray of medical items. They proceeded to take quite a lot of my blood and no less than ten different swabs for DNA.

It got worse when they exposed my penis and jerked me off into a test tube. Sometime later, they came back and did it all again. They refused to speak to me except tell me that it would all be explained once we arrived at the home planet. One did relent, telling me that I had saved the entire race with all the fluids they had taken. I wondered how this could be, or why they didn’t just wait until we were there.

I was about to go to sleep when the screen lit up and a voice told me to prepare to enter the worm hole. I figured that we were well away from the nova, possibly well past Andromeda by this time, considering the speed that we had left the solar system behind.

The voice started a countdown from twenty, and I wondered what the feeling would be like going through a worm hole. These had been proposed many years before, usually in science fiction stories. The consensus was that they were highways between different sections of the Universe, some thought that they could be short cuts between dimensions. I guess that I was going to find out.

When the countdown reached zero, everything around me changed shape and the walls warped. I felt a great pain throughout my body and realised why I had been so well strapped down. I would have been writhing on the floor, screaming in agony if I hadn’t been securely held. As it was, I could hear this voice screaming. Over a short period of time, the voice rose into a higher register, and I blacked out.

When I came to, I was in a soft bed and had a sheet over me. One of the women sat beside me. When she saw that my eyes were open, she gave me a water bottle to squeeze some into my mouth. As I reached for it, the hand and arm that I extended wasn’t the one I had spent my life with.

“What’s happened to me?”

“You’ve been through the worm hole to our home constellation. That passage changes everyone who takes that trip into a female. You now look like my twin sister. That’s why we took all those fluids. Our scientists had thought that the separated fluids may take the worm hole without changes.”

“All right, I’ll swallow that. What I don’t swallow is how I’m the origin of the race, but you came back to collect me before the elimination of the solar system.”

“Another effect of the worm hole is that you return to the solar system to a time which is undetermined. Our trip to the red planet was the last one of several hundred that have been taken. It was our luck to arrive at the time that you arrived and alive. Many arrived after the spacecraft crashed into the planet, others arrived to find the entire crew had died. Your trip to that planet has taken place in dozens of timelines and maybe hundreds of parallel dimensions.”

“So, if we went back, you can’t be certain that you would arrive before or after the nova?”

“That’s right. At least fifty of our expeditions never returned, so we now think that they may have been caught in the nova. Seeing how close we were, it’s possible that there was only a window of a couple of hours when the result was successful. We consider ourselves lucky. When we arrive at home world with a living Prime and the fluids needed to create males, we will never have to want for anything.”

“But, on the screen, I saw a world of both men and women.”

“Alternate dimensions and timelines can be visited, but the original timeline needed you to start the male section of the race. It will take a while for your semen to impregnate some of us. We also have the means to replicate you from your bloods and DNA, but those babies are not fully able to think independently. They are usually only used as slaves and workers in those timelines that have made them.”

“How on earth do you keep track of all the alternatives?”

“We don’t. Mostly we just ignore them.”

“All right, this is the one question that I imagine there’s no answer to. How is it that you exist and have done for generations before you saved me to start the original timeline?”

“That, dear Martin, is clouded in mystery and many theories. In my world, you are a god, who existed to begin the world but was taken from us, only to rise again in other timelines. When we get home with you on board, it will be rejoiced as the true Second Coming.”

“There’s a problem with that. I’ve been changed to female by the worm hole. How can you tell them that I’m Prime when I look just like the rest of you. The zealots will say that I must have been a stowaway when you left and it’s all a hoax. Yes, you have my fluids, but some will insist that you found me dying and took them as I expired. I can’t see me standing before your people and telling them that I’m really Martin, the Mars astronaut, not looking, and sounding, like this.”

“We didn’t think about that. We will have a conference of all of the crew. There are thirty of us and we are able to telecommunicate. If you lie quietly, you may be able to tune in. It’s a bit like learning to talk and takes a while to achieve. When you do, you will be able to contact us individually, or as a broadcast. The range has not yet been determined but is generally line-of-sight. There’s energy food and drink on this tray. Regain your health and you’ll be better than you ever have been. One thing that I must tell you is that the worm hole regenerates you as a young woman, at the first month of fertility. You also age very slowly, so have a long time to study the problem and find an answer to the dilemma. Who knows, with your special knowledge, you might be able to control our return to your world before the nova.”

She left me and I pondered on all she had said, while sitting on the edge of the bed and munching energy bars. As I moved, I started to get the senses that this different body was telling me. The movement and weight of the breasts, the blonde hair that swirled about my face as I moved my head. The feeling of something different in my groin was the last thing that came, and when it did, I realised I needed the toilet. As I thought about that, a door slid open on the wall, and I saw a toilet waiting for me.

My first genuine pee in over nine months was sitting on the toilet, something I would never have imagined. I started wondering how they maintained normal gravity in the spaceship, knowing that I had a lot to learn. That’s when I started hearing voices in my head. It was a bit like hearing a conversation from another room. All the voices were similar, but I started to detect individual personalities as the debate went on.

They were debating the concept that the victorious homecoming may not turn out the way they imagined it, some saying that they have to tell the truth to confirm the legend, others afraid of what would happen when others question the whole thing.

The conversation carried on as I thought about clothing and another door slid back, revealing racks of clothes and drawers of undergarments. I dressed as I thought of my mother, who had been sad at my leaving, but proud of my success. She was gone, along with all my relatives. That made me think about the fluids that had been taken before I changed. I would be fathering more children on the new world, maybe even mothering one as well!

The debate was going around in circles so I decided that I should add my own idea to the mix. I concentrated on a thought that they could hear me and said, “Can I say something?”

There was a pause, and then I was answered.

“Martin, Prime can say whatever he wants. Your brain is still that of Prime, even if the body isn’t. We wait for your words of wisdom.”

“All right. Why don’t you all agree that you got to my spaceship while I was still in the sleep capsule and was able to take all the fluids to bring back before the nova. That way, you can start regenerating your world. If you get home and tell them you were too late and only just escaped with your lives, you could start the regeneration in secret, without anyone else having a say. You could just spirit me away to your home as if I was just another crew member.”

“Why would we do that?”

“Because it would give you power. I’m sure that there are different layers of society on your world. If you contact the main people within your own society, I’m sure that they would be happy to regenerate their own kind first, so becoming the first families of the Origin. Just think of it, if you all had babies from my sperm, you would be the top of society.”

“Actually, Martin. That is exactly what the history books tell us. Let’s take a vote.”

One by one they voted to do it my way. Then the main door opened and one of the crew beckoned to me to join her. She told me I looked good and then took me on a tour of the spacecraft. We ended in a section near where I had been strapped in.

“This is our medical room. We have spoken to each other without telecommunication. Everyone is listening in now. Martin, we want to be impregnated with your sperm. The trip to Home World will take about one third of the gestation time, so we will all be able to confirm our pregnancies and the sex of our offspring before we land. I’m asking you if you will agree to be the first to be impregnated?”

It was such an odd thing to ask, but I had no hesitation as I said that I would. She laid me on the examination bed and pulled the panties down. They had already separated out the sperm and it didn’t take long to extract a fresh egg and inject the sperm, then putting the egg back.

I was then taken to a room, loosely described as the Library, and was shown how to access the data. Over the next three months, every waking hour was spent learning about the new technology and working it in with what I had already learned. I came to be able to recognise my sisters from their mental aura, and also had some ideas about this problem with the space- time continuum.

When we approached the Home World, all of the crew were approaching the second trimester. When we were in range, they made a call to their leader, asking for a secure mind meeting. When that happened, they were truthful about what had happened, and told her that it had been decided to keep the success quiet, and why. A few hours later, we had a radio message with the site to land, away from prying eyes.

When I could see Home World on the screens, it was an amazing sight. The main planet was an earth-like one, but with three moons. It travelled on an elliptical orbit around two suns at each end. I was told that each complete orbit was called a cycle, about three earth years. My companions were all two hundred cycles old, and none of them looked over twenty years.

When we touched down, we were greeted as if we were royalty, with me being kissed by a lot of blonde women. When I saw some of the older ones, I remembered old sepia photos of my great - grandmother that looked like them. We became the centre of the birthing project, and a quarter of a cycle later, we all gave birth within days. I had a beautiful son who I called Jesse.

This confirmed the old legend which had a large number of virgin births, as the planet had no males on it prior to our children. My son grew to be a very bright toddler. He had absorbed everything I could teach him, along with the other children, before he looked like an earthly six-year-old, some twenty cycles later.

Twenty cycles after that, this new cadre of super-intelligent children had solved most of the problems with the space-time continuum. We experimented by sending a few of the crew out for a quarter of a cycle, to return inside a set time well short of the actual trip. It worked perfectly. From that, we planned a return to earth some time before the nova, to see if we could save some of the population.

We had the Amazonian to use, and the crew was fourteen of the originals and their children, plus me and Jesse. Of the fifteen children, only three were boys, the other boys kept back on Home Planet to procreate. Going back through the worm hole was strange, with the warping of time and space, but we all arrived within sight of the Milky Way as we had left Home World, proving that the reverse trip didn’t alter genders.

We landed the Amazonian on the dark side of the moon and left a skeleton crew on board. They teleported us to earth one night as the Americas were closest. We appeared in a quiet spot, a little way away from Los Angeles, in the year nineteen hundred, quietly fitting in as typical Scandinavian blondes that were prevalent at the time. We had gold coins, taken from a private collection on Home World, which we used to acquire a little land and play with the stock market.

With my knowledge of the best stocks, we gained wealth and bought a large tract of land in the early twenties, building a few large sheds and setting up a company making airships. We did build a few for show, but it was just somewhere that we could bring the Amazonian to, one quiet and moonless night before radar had been invented.

We home schooled all the children, and they grew almost naturally. Fifteen beautiful blondes didn’t go unseen, and several left the group to marry and have earth-born children. I was one of those, leaving Jesse with the group. My husband and I had a son and a daughter, bringing them up with private school education. I aged slowly, but much faster than on Home World.

We had filled a hold in the Amazonian with life support capsules, and I, along with the rest of the crew, said goodbye to our families, to go on a world tour, after all our husbands had died. That coincided with the Second World War, so nobody was surprised when we didn’t return. We spent nearly a hundred years in stasis.

My son married well, and they had a daughter. She was a laboratory technician and married one of the scientists. They had a son that they called Martin. That was when the return trip was put on the agenda. Twenty years later, I, and all my sisters, were brought out of stasis and set to making the Amazonian ready. We contacted all the best minds from within the families, including Martins’ father, to recruit them for the trip of a lifetime. Together, we stripped the life-support capsules from the Amazonian, giving them to scientists that were working at one of our companies, to develop as if they were a new invention. The Amazonian was equipped with sixty extra sleeping quarters and loaded with long-lasting supplies.

The crew had the core of the fifteen of us, our Home World children and the sixty intrepid explorers. We made sure to tell them that the travel would change all the men into young women, but that they would retain their own memories and brain power. To help them decide, we showed them the film of the sun going nova, in only a few years into the future. Many wanted to bring their families but were told that any earth women would age naturally and would die within a very short time.

One moonless night, the Amazonian was brought out of its hanger and lifted off at low enough speed to look like a large balloon that had got free. Once in space, we headed for the worm hole, going into the very fast speed beyond Mars. When we went through the worm hole, every man became a buxom young woman, and, oddly, all of us original women lost the age that we had lived while on earth.

Jesse, now looking like me, took us to Home Planet, at the right time in its evolution, with plenty of animals and no large predators. And no humans. So, we set up the Original Home World, as a new outpost of humanity. Oddly, the fluids that we had taken from the men didn’t survive the trip, being contaminated by a burst of micro-sized space dust, which didn’t bother the rest of us, except to give us small bleeding spots.

Of course, the only thing to do now was to start working towards returning to Earth to collect my great grandson on his Mars shot and begin the cycle all over again. That took several generations, by which time all of the original facts had become folk law and the world was then populated by clones of the original crew. I had moved to another dimension, along with Jesse, as nothing we could do would alter the history of that timeline. We did drop in, from time to time, to see how they were going, and to tell them that the project was doomed to forever repeat itself but, as usual with young girls, they would never listen to their elders.

Marianne Gregory © 2024