Red Mars, Grey Moon, Green Earth - Chapter 5

Meera was sitting in her room and thinking about the last few days. 

She had reached the Moon illegally. She had also boarded one of the cargo vessels supplying to the Moon. She had come from Earth. She was given a drug that allowed her body to survive the journey on board a cargo vessel. There were three days that she did not know what happened to her. When she woke up, Gafur was sitting by her. 

“Please have tea,” he said. 

“I …”

“I am Gafur.”

She had been told Gafur would take her drugged body to a US lunar base. She was trying to use her daemon to scan her surroundings. 

“The daemon is only a toy. It shows up as a daemon. But, it does not function.”

She tried to use her faculties but it only hurt her head. 

“Please have tea,” he repeated. 

When she sipped her tea, Gafur stood up, stretched, and walked out. He then spoke to someone in the corridor outside. The next time she heard of him was when Chintu spoke his name. 

When she finished her tea, she saw a woman enter the room. She was with whom Gafur had spoken in the corridor. 

“Hi, I’m Nisha.”

Nisha and Meera spoke for an hour. She shared plans about how they would move her to an Indian base near Shiv Shakti Point. 

The isolation room doors opened and a woman engineer walked in. The engineer wore a simple grey T-shirt and jeans. 

“We will install a daemon inside you. The daemon will be trained to do work.”

“How will that work?”

“When you … break into the base … it allows us to install a daemon inside you. One daemon for one brain works better than multiple daemons for one brain. The daemon runs on the power provided by the neurons. You can opt to use the daemon to use the daemon to do other work within the base.” 

“Like?”

“Get groceries, fill up forms, etc.”

“Buy clothes?” 

“Yes.” 

“But, most importantly, daemon work puts money in your account which you can then use to buy the things above.”

They sat silently while the engineer removed the toy daemon and installed the new daemon.

The daemon told Meera she needed to sleep so that it could charge and it would need 8 hours to learn its task. Did it speak subconsciously? 

The engineer walked out of the room. 

She took a deep breath and went to sleep. 

When she woke up, the daemon informed her that it had charged and undergone training. Before it could work, she had to report physically to the Operations Base at 9 AM (Base Time). It was only 6 AM (Base Time).

She pulled out her backpack. She wore the dress she got from the engineer yesterday - a grey T-shirt and jeans. She kept that on her bed. 

She spent a few minutes meditating. She did a few rounds of deep breathing. She did a few Surya namaskaras. She sat on her chair to meditate. She knew how to sit on the ground and meditate but her brain had a new embed. She wanted to test its capabilities first. 

When she reached Operations Base, she saw Chintu. She called out his name but he ran … to the bathroom? 

He perplexed her. She did not understand him. She reported to the Base Leader. He looked at her neck tattoo and recorded her details. 

“I am Mansoor. I am your supervisor. I am your point of contact on this base.” 

She nodded. Mansoor nodded and went to meet the new recruits. Many were the people who had entered the base with her. She remembered a few faces from when they had entered.

Her daemon said it had connected with Mansoor’s daemon and it had got its work instructions. It warned her that it may hurt for the first few days of its use and suggested rest and advised against Yoga for a few days. 

She went back to her room and meditated. But, really she was trying to study her daemon. She calmed her breathing and began to explore this embed inside her. It seems to draw very little power from her nerves to work. She could not figure out how it was talking to her yet. It did not seem invasive otherwise. But, she would still be alert. 

She saw another woman enter the room next to her.

“Hi, I’m Meera.”

“Hello, I’m Jasmine.”

“Did you also… ?”

“Yes, I came from Mars about an Earth month back.”

“Oh!” 

“Where did you come from?”

“Earth.”

Jasmine seemed stunned. “If you had a life on Earth …”

“Things are not as Green on Earth as it seems from the Moon and Mars.”

They spoke to each other on a set of chairs outside their rooms. Jasmine was older than Meera. Her parents had taken her to Mars. Her father had lost his job. Her mother had a difficult time after that to survive on Mars. They had applied to be transferred to the Moon. They had waited two years. Her father did odd jobs to survive. Her mother tried to stitch clothes to make a living. However, people on Mars were not good with paying for their services. Her father tried to recover the money but failed. 

They got lucky this month. But they were transferred to Earth and not the Moon. She and her father had jumped ship on the Moon. Her mother continued back to Earth. She did not know if either her father or her mother had made it. She tried to convince her father to come here but he did not trust Gafur and had made some other friends who had offered jobs on the Moon. 

“Gafur seems like a shady character.”

“He was such a sweet man. He explained things to me personally.”

“He handed me over to another woman.”

“Yes, you must have been drugged.”

Meera was silent. Jasmine was silent. 

Jasmine stood up and walked into her room. Meera fell asleep on her chair outside the room. She woke up an hour later. She had a terrible headache. She went into the room and fell asleep on the bed.