Methheads on Mars

Part 1: “Eyes Open, Mouths Dry”

Ace’s eyes snapped open just as their head smacked against the seat harness. The ceiling above swam in dull beige and flickering blue lights. For a terrifying few seconds, they couldn’t tell if they were dreaming or overdosing. A low mechanical groan echoed through the cabin like the belly of a starving animal.

“Fuck,” Ace mumbled, trying to sit up. Their joints cracked. Their tongue felt like it had been sandpapered.

Around them, others were groaning, shifting, waking up like hungover mannequins. Sparks was first to vomit. Projectile, but with nowhere to go. No warning, it hit the inside of his helmet visor before he could unfasten it.

“Elena,” Ace croaked. “You dead or just ugly?”

A sharp grunt from two rows over. “You wish,” El muttered. She pried herself out of the harness and removed her helmet, her black curls frizzed like she'd been electrocuted. “Are we on Mars yet? Because this is not how I imagined it to look.”

“Get back in your seat!” shouted Quinn. “We’re not there yet.”

“What?” El yelled back as she tried to stuff her hair back in her helmet and get strapped back in.

The ship gave a sudden, violent jolt. Lights flicked to orange, then red. Quinn’s voice, softer than before, trained, but terrified, rose from behind the main display screen. “Brace! We’re entering the atmosphere.”

“We’re not in the atmosphere yet?” Sparks whimpered, his voice muffled inside his vomit visor.

Another jolt. Ace’s stomach turned to liquid.

Across the aisle, Jam checked his wheelchair was securely clamped to the deck. His jaw was tight. He didn't say a word. The Doc, slumped beside him, mumbled in his sleep, a droplet of drool clinging to his lip.

“Where’s Meg?” Nina called out, she was already half-unstrapped when she heard Quinn telling El they weren’t there yet. She slumped back in her seat and redid the straps up.

Meg raised one hand from behind the supply crate pile. Her tablet pinged weakly in her lap, already typing: “Alive. Pissed off. Hungry.”

The descent grew louder. Static burst over the intercom.

Ace clenched the armrests. “Just confirming, this ship has landing gear, right? Not just hopes and prayers?”

Quinn didn’t look back. “Technically… it’s both.”

The floor tilted. Nina swore. Sparks shrieked.

A final growl of metal, a scream of retro-thrusters, and then…

THUD.

Everything stopped. The ship vibrated for a full five seconds. Then silence, broken only by Sparks’ pathetic whimper: “Did anyone else poop a little?”

Ace squinted toward the viewing port.

Red.

Dust.

Flat nothing stretching out to a cracked horizon.

“Mars,” they said, deadpan. “Still better than rehab.”

Part 2: “Welcome to Nowhere”

“Still better than rehab.” Ace had said.

The silence that followed was thick and uncertain. Then a hiss from the airlock release, like the planet exhaling.

El was the first to get up and immediately regretted it. “Oh no…” she managed before the queasiness overtook her. Her breakfast, if the grey nutritional paste qualified as that, splattered against the inside of her visor.

“Oh come on!” Sparks groaned. “This is becoming a theme.”

The ramp extended with a hydraulic whine, grinding and jerking before locking into place. A blast of reddish light poured in through the crack of the outer door, framing them like a reluctant birth canal.

Quinn stood, tugging on his gloves, his steps shaky. “Okay. We stay suited up. We go slow. No sudden…”

Sparks darted for the exit like a dog chasing a squirrel. “I call dibs on the first Martian footprint!”

“Dickhead. Take it stead…” Jam barked too late and was cut off short.

Sparks missed the last step. His foot caught on the ramp lip and he tumbled in a slow motion somersault down the incline, landing in a puff of Martian dust. The group stared in horror.

Then: “I’m good!” Sparks wheezed from the ground. “Mars is... soft?”

Ace zipped up their suit, checking their seals twice. They followed Quinn down the ramp, Meg and Nina behind them, then El and Jam. The Doc wandered last, still muttering, eyes adjusting to the harsh red glow.

They stood together at the bottom, ankle deep in rust colored grit.

The wind howled, not loud but eerie, like a breath from the throat of something ancient. The sky above was burnt orange, the sun a pale coin. Dust devils skittered across the horizon like ghost children.

And in front of them stood the base.

“Seriously?” Nina said.

It was a squat, metallic dome, like a blister half sunken into the dunes. The silver plating dulled and pocked with micrometeorite hits. A long crack ran down one side like a scar. The solar panels were coated in so much dust they looked painted.

“That’s not a research habitat,” El muttered. “That’s a fucking garage.”

“Not even a good garage,” Ace added. “More like the kind you get murdered behind.”

The group stood still for a long time, wind biting at their suits, faces lit by the weird, ancient light of another world. Sparks coughed, then stood up, brushing red powder off his arms.

“So... we unpack?” he asked.

Nobody answered.

Then the Doc, quietly, nodded. “Let’s get on with it.”

They trudged toward the base, leaving uneven boot tracks behind them in the soft Martian dust. Tracks that led from nothing into nowhere.

Part 3: “Unpacking Hell”

The outer door wheezed open like it was exhaling forty years of neglect. Inside: darkness, stale air, and a smell like warm plastic and dead batteries.

“Welcome to the Ritz,” Sparks muttered, dragging a duffel in behind him. “Don’t touch anything. It’s probably covered in space fungus.”

“What the fuck is ‘space fungus’?” retorted El, not really expecting a reply. She flicked her helmet lamp on. “Is the heat on?”

“Doubt it,” Quinn answered. “No one has been here for years.” He reached for the panel by the entrance, flipping switches like he knew what he was doing. The lights crackled, then flared, then died again.

Sparks leaned in, chewing his lower lip. “It’s a voltage issue. Or a gremlin.”

“Stop saying gremlin,” Nina snapped. “Not everything is gremlins.”

“I haven’t mentioned them since takeoff when that lamp burst and all the lights went out.”

“That and the 70 bazillion times you said it during selection.” Nina replied, rolling her eyes.

The Doc moved deeper into the gloom, finding the main circuit box. He crouched, gritting his teeth, hands working with a surgeon’s precision through the newly developed ultrathin space gloves. “We have partial power. Core battery’s in hibernation mode.”

“You can fix it, right?” El asked.

He hesitated. “Define ‘fix.’”

Sparks had already opened an access panel and was jabbing a stick of chewing gum into a bundle of scorched wires. “There. Science.”

Ace rolled their eyes. “Your entire method is ‘just shove stuff in it until it stops sparking.’”

“Hey, it’s a system.”

Quinn pulled open a dusty panel near the airlock. The display screen flickered, lines of Martian mission text scrolling sluggishly by. “O2 recycler’s online... barely. But water filtration’s stuck in override.”

“So we drink our own pee, but we get to breathe. Cool,” Ace said.

Meg sat cross legged on the ground, typing on her tablet. The tablet spoke her words:
“I found the dorm hallway. There are... five beds.”
Then, a second message:
“Also a raccoon skeleton. Maybe.”

Nina walked the perimeter, taking silent inventory of everything broken, bent, rusted, or simply missing. “We have five beds. Eight people. And one Doc who snores like a whale.”

“I don’t snore,” he muttered, still elbow deep in the circuit panel.

Ace moved toward the back wall, drawn to a blinking green light on a panel that wasn’t labelled.

“What’s this?” they asked.

Sparks turned to look. “That? Probably some busted diagnostic crap. Or a bomb. Who knows?”

Ace crouched. The light pulsed. Not rapidly, but rhythmically. Not blinking like a warning. More like... waiting.

They pressed a few keys on the corroded panel. The screen stayed black. No response.

“Huh.” exclaimed Ace.

“What?” said Sparks.

“Just... this wasn’t in the specs we trained on.”

“None of this was,” Quinn said quietly, brushing dust from a control terminal that read OBSERVATION MODE: STANDBY.

Ace tapped the unmarked panel one more time.

The light turned red.

Part 4: “Rooms with No View”

The corridor that led to the sleeping quarters was narrow, dim, and smelled like freezer burn. A flickering overhead light blinked with just enough irregularity to inspire madness.

Five rooms. Eight people.

“This is some Hunger Games shit,” Sparks said, eyeing the faded stenciling on the metal doors. “Should we draw straws or wrestle?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Nina said, striding ahead like the decision was already hers. “We rotate. First week, the ones with health issues get priority. Then we—”

“I call this one,” Jam interrupted, stopping his wheelchair in front of the second door, which had the most ramp clearance. “Not debating. I need access to the bathroom without doing Martian parkour every night.”

Nina glared at him but said nothing.

Meg wandered past them, tablet in hand. She typed without looking up.
“I’ll take the cold one. Doesn’t matter. I sleep under five blankets anyway.”

She disappeared into the farthest room, where the heater was already clicking like a dying beetle. Sparks peeked into the next room and made a noise like a game show buzzer.

“Nope. That mattress has a weird stain. Could be murder. Could be jam.”

“Could be Jam,” Ace said without looking up.

“Unfunny.”

Quinn stepped into a corner bunk with a small porthole facing west. He touched the glass, fogged it with his breath, then turned to the group. “We’re not going to solve this by arguing. Just… someone pick one. Then next person goes.”

El looked like she might explode. “I’m not sleeping next to Sparks.”

“Why not?” Sparks asked, actually offended.

“Because you hum in your sleep.”

“That’s a comfort mechanism!”

“And you fart like your ass is haunted.”

“That’s medical!”

“Guys,” Quinn said, stepping between them like a substitute teacher diffusing a lunchroom brawl. “Pick bunks. Tonight. You can renegotiate later. You want to spend your first Martian night fighting over who snores?”

El huffed, rolled her eyes, and ducked into the nearest empty room. “Fine. But if he sings in his dreams again, I’m ejecting him into space.”

“Rude,” Sparks muttered, claiming the room across the hall.

Ace lingered in the corridor, still glancing toward the blinking panel by the airlock.

Nina passed them, giving them a sharp look. “You good?”

“Define good.”

“Fine, define not-about-to-screw-up-the-life-support.”

“No promises.”

They both moved on.

The Doc shuffled past last, dragging a pillow under one arm and muttering to himself about microbial insulation and “goddamn hibernation lag.”

Soon the hallway was quiet again.

A slow hum built behind the walls. Not machinery—more like... observation. As if the walls themselves had started paying attention.

Part 5: “One Small Step for Meth”

The hallway lights dimmed for a moment as the artificial gravity adjusted—a dull, nauseating shift that made everyone sway like they'd just stepped off a tilt-a-whirl.

“Cool,” El muttered, leaning against the wall. “My stomach just did a backflip.”

Ace clutched their helmet under one arm, staring at the airlock door. “So… do we do the thing?”

“What thing?” Sparks asked, chewing on a protein bar like it was cardboard.

“You know. The... step onto Mars. Say something profound. Make it a moment.”

“Oh. That thing.”

Quinn reappeared, helmet clipped, expression unreadable. “We should. I mean, we’re here. Might as well make it count.”

Nina handed out helmets from the rack. “Anyone blows chunks this time, aim it at Sparks.”

“Rude,” Sparks said, already fumbling with the seal on his suit. “You people are very abusive to historic figures.”

Meg signed: “You’re not historic. You’re just loud.”

Jam powered up his rig and wheeled into position at the base of the airlock. The system wheezed, cranked, and then finally hissed open. A curtain of red dust hung just outside, as if the atmosphere had forgotten to settle.

They moved in together—eight silhouettes in mismatched suits, boots scuffing metal, breath audible in their helmets. The outer hatch opened.

Martian wind greeted them again, cold and thinner than paper.

Sparks was the first to step off the ramp, feet crunching into rust-colored soil.

He raised one arm. “I claim this land in the name of... dysfunction!”

“You’re an idiot,” El said, stepping out after him.

One by one, they followed, until all eight were standing in the dust. The light was dim, shadows long and alien. The sun hovered low, weak. No sound but wind and the faint hum of their suits.

Ace looked up—at the endless ochre sky—and frowned.

“No satellites,” they said softly.

Quinn tilted his helmet. “What?”

Ace pointed. “No orbital glints. No overhead hardware. We were told there’d be support infrastructure. Comms relays. Surveillance sats. But there’s nothing.”

El crossed her arms. “So what, we’re alone?”

Meg typed on her screen, holding it up to the group:
“We’re not alone. We’re just not who they want to watch.”

They stood there a moment longer, surrounded by red.

No cheers. No banners. No mission control applause.

Just wind, and sand, and the heavy silence of a world that didn’t care who they were.

Or so it seemed.

Far below the Martian crust, hidden in a buried room beneath the base, a camera whirred gently. Its lens adjusted. A feed blinked to life. Somewhere, far away, someone leaned forward in their chair and smiled.