The Martian Krummholz Barrier

by Donald B. Tiver

Argun Montane was part of a burgeoning movement of sexual fetishists calling themselves “Realists.” In a day where computer simulation was indistinguishable from the absolute real thing, Realists were those that received a special, inexplicable feeling knowing that the person they were watching had actually once been alive.

This salient desire to bond with another human consciousness was lost on the less articulate, who’d point to an “it’s just better” sort of open-and-shut argument when defending their preferences. Naturally, this limited the true depths of customizable desire, which was virtually unlimited. When confronted with this, a Realist would often rant about the monotonous details of the life of their favorite porn stars. Favorite foods, films, and hobbies frequently topped the conversations that would inevitably bore all listening parties.

This was a particularly tough fetish to suffer from when, just shy of fifty-five million kilometers from Earth, there were very few living people at all.

Argun happened to be aboard this state-of-the-art space craft for very different reasons than the rest of its crew; he was not a career astronaut, a cutting-edge physicist, or a world-class engineer. Argun was a twin with a unique characteristic—the complete and utter disgust for his twin. They could hardly stand to be in the same room together and it wasn’t because of Elliot. Elliot was a very nice man by most people’s standards but Argun suffered from uncontrollable bouts of rage when around him. They had long gotten over it, realized it was something innate and that it was neither of their faults. But, because of this, they weren’t very close and lived in different parts of the world. This allowed for a series of experiments to be conducted where Argun would be sent out to orbit Mars and Elliot would stay home and neither would worry about what it would do to their relationship.

Elliot interrupted Argun with a video call precisely as he was sitting down to enjoy his “hobby” in the thirty minutes a day he was allowed freedom from a live feed.

“Yes?” Argun answered without any emotion at all, not even begrudgingly.

“Arg, I’m not feeling very well,” Elliot began. Argun may have seen an opportunity for a jab but he let it slide. “These experiments, they’re pretty invasive.”

“Look, we signed up for the same stuff. It’s all pretty routine. I don’t understand what the problem is. Scans, logs—all shit you can’t even tell they are doing. Are the memory games bugging you? Too much like kindergarten for ya? Or you just miss me, is that it?”

Elliot looked downright worried, not something Argun was used to seeing. He was the uptight sort, not Elliot. Hearing a knock on the cabin door, Argun angrily called back to wait. Didn’t they know this was his private time? Now he had two goddamned interruptions.

“Arg, they’re putting me under. I think they’re cutting into me when I’m out. My head is sore. They said they aren’t but I just don’t know. I’m confused all the time, I can’t sleep. I lose time.”

Argun sighed his last remaining breath of humanity, “Look, I’ll make sure they give you extra home time, okay?” He could say that—he was a higher up. Sort of.

Elliot wasn’t involved in Envisage Space Corp aside from the fact his brother was a mechanic on Ursula, the famous ship “headed to the Moon.” Ursula was supposed to set the terraforming in motion, which was a big deal. Such a big deal that even a guinea pig mechanic had some weight he could sling around.

With only the slightest frazzled nod of acceptance from Elliot, Argun turned off the holofeed and opened his tiny cabin door. It must have looked silly to outsiders, as he had a tiny broom closet that he had to share with his supplies and he had to back up slightly so that the opening dual hatches wouldn’t catch his clothes on the way up or down.

Before the visitor could speak Argun began, “Could you see to it Elliot gets a little more R & R? He needs to relax, he’s fucking this up.”

Ingrid Poulson, second in command herself, didn’t see why everyone else put up with the mechanic ordering them around, but she was warned not to stir things in the past. “Fine. We’re beginning the briefing for MD001. You might want to be there for it, since it can’t start without you and everything.” She shot him an open-eyed glare that was already telling-him-so.

They always did things so formally, and it bothered Argun. Those government types just had too much rigidity for him, too many right angles where curves and twists should have been. “Yeah, yeah, just tell me what the hell to do,” was all that ran through his head for the first fifteen minutes. There were nine other people on the crew but only Ingrid and the ship commander, Patrick Neville, were present for the briefing. Argun was getting frustrated, as he didn’t quite understand why they made it seem like he would be gone for months. “I know, I’m passing beyond Demios after about an hour, so what?”

“We need you awake. Once you pass Phobos’ orbit you’ll be tempted to look at Deimos. It will look huge and you may irrationally think you will collide with it. We have had people pass out in the past so if you think for even a second you are getting vertigo command the holovisors to block your view. We recommend that you do so, anyway, but we also firmly believe in choice. The visions that our rare breed are privy to here in the beyond are too fundamental to the human will to impose upon.” Ingrid took great personal pride in championing the Envisage vision and its particular outlook on space travel. She thought that this would make it the sustainable choice for space flight in the future. Aside from that, her confidence came from knowing they could keep him awake remotely through endogenous pharmaceuticals he had been stocked with prior. This was all in the contract Argun most likely didn’t read but surely signed.

“That said, get ready to puke. You know the drill. You’ve been up and through the orbital procedures before, so you know how you react to them. Just be vigilant,” Patrick reminded. He was a man of great import and relished in breaking his expected formalities. What should have been a clever ribbing by a boss to relax an employee was completely lost on Argun, who didn’t seem to think it was a big deal for Patrick to act like a normal human being for once.

“Right, well, I’ll prepare my bags.”

“Wait,” Patrick started. “You aren’t even going to ask about the probe?”

Argun glanced at him through rolled eyes, “I’ve got all the specs already. It’s all I’ve been going over for months now. This ‘big’ job of yours doesn’t really seem that complicated to me. I need to replace a few things with the robotic arm and there’s not much more of note. Other than the footnote that this is the first repair job this far from Earth. Who cares, right? No one even knows we’re here.”

Argun was referring to the fact that their mission was incredibly top secret, likely keeping him humbly from the record books. The highest levels of corporate espionage were expected. For these reasons, even Elliot thought the mission was taking place somewhere between Earth and the Moon, another failsafe for critical information. As far as mostly anyone on Earth had known no man had been past the Moon just yet.

Finally, Argun Montane sat back down at his holofeed and started digging around where he left off. He should have been sleeping but he didn’t care. If they wanted him to be well rested they shouldn’t have interrupted him before. There was something about the flesh itself—the matter—he couldn’t get out of his head. It was why he was a Realist. He could just as well jerk off to any number of completely made-up CGI fantasies and he’d be the first to tell you he couldn’t really tell the difference, yet something remained. A sense of connection, little as it were, with knowing the person virtually pleasing him used to actually be alive at one point.

The way most old-world fetish websites sorted themselves by category, this one, cleverly titled Realist.com, sorted itself by bio. You could find an actor or actress based on when they lived, when they died, where they were born, or even where they filmed their most memorable clips. Searching the 1990s for women born in Texas (admittedly, an absent-minded, random choice), Argun found something very odd.

Iris Decantur. Born in ’92, blonde, 5′2″. Graduated from Harvard with a degree in quantum computing and bioengineering. Argun was almost angry; he couldn’t even find a regular girl in order to feign normalcy. He just had to pick the pornstar that probably designed the intersolar internet he was trying to use to get off.

But then, examining closer . . .

It was Ingrid. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Although, it couldn’t have been her. A grandmother? Christ, he thought, there’s no way. If those vids were to be believed she would have to be in her late nineties now. Maybe it was wrong. Maybe it was all CGI or perhaps the crew did this to pull an elaborate prank on him. He found himself gazing on as Iris—or Ingrid?— did some very boundary-blurring things, things that didn’t interest him except for their immediate shock.

Argun had heard of this kind of thing before. After all, the technology was now such that celebrity (and noncelebrity) sex tapes could be entirely faked at a believable level. The world was also abuzz with the controversy as how this related to pedophilia since faked videos circumvented the need for involving children. Proponents of the legality of this practice argued that it could save lives, yet with the inability to recognize real from fake, it also could provide a cover for actual abuse. The reality of it was mind-boggling and most of the world was not prepared for the conversation, so it was ignored. Even Argun chose not to think about that sort of thing, though he couldn’t help but ponder it now, for the first time feeling like he was actually intruding on someone’s privacy. He shook off the thought.

“Joke or not,” Argun mused, “I’ve now seen Ingrid in much more detail than I previously imagined. I wonder what would happen if I brought it up? Maybe that’s what somebody wants. Best to hold off. Fuck, this isn’t right . . .”

A clear and frantic need to contact Elliot erupted in Argun’s chest. It was intense but passed very quickly. Over it but still intrigued, he sent out a holocall directly to Elliot, something he had never done before.

Elliot slowly sat up into the view of the camera. He looked like he had been asleep or something. “They give you a new schedule?”

Elliot stammered, “I, uh. I can’t leave. Not supposed to. But it hurts! Goddamnit.”

Argun’s face remained unchanged, as if he hadn’t known how to react. “What do you mean you can’t leave? Are you on meds?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Don’t remember? Jesus, Elliot. Have you been eating? For fuck’s sake let me go, okay, I’m going to talk to whoever the hell is managing you down there.”

The holoscreen shifted to a directory, an internetwork listing of all the people involved in Envisage, adjusted to suit Argun’s clearance levels, of course. After some time, he found the listing for the director of the Moon Probe Ground Team, which was a very broad title, as this seemed to mean he was in charge of the psychological needs of Earth-locked twins as well as knowing what the cost of rocket fuel was.

“Doctor Zwei’s office,” a woman said, rather pleasantly.

Figures, a secretary. “Yeah, this is Argun Montane, calling from . . . very far off. You guys have my brother all doped up and I need him fixed. It is crucial to this mission.” He lied, or so he believed. It was crucial indeed but it was not his job to worry about it. He wasn’t even really sure why he was so worried but he intended to find out.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Montane. Have you known about Elliot’s night terrors?”

Argun couldn’t recall, perhaps never paid enough attention for the twelve years they lived together before boarding school. “No, can’t say I know about them at all.”

“Oh, yes, they’re very bad. We have him on watch because he wakes himself up screaming every few hours. It’s actually much worse when he doesn’t wake up since he’ll pick up anything close and shove it into his skin. We had him keep a dream journal until he stabbed himself in the neck with a pen. Now, he writes with voice activation. We don’t let him near anything like that after bed.”

Argun had no idea what to make of all of this. “So, when he talked to me just now he was asleep? I mean can he respond normally like that?”

The secretary paused. “No, I don’t think he should be able to hold a conversation. He seemed strange though, huh?”

“Yes, very. He said you wouldn’t let him leave and that ‘it’ hurts.”

Distressed, the woman responded, “Of course not, sir. Must be the sleeping aids he’s using. Poor guy is probably very confused. I’ll have someone look in right away. Thanks for letting us know you spoke to him.”

Argun was hung up on. He had more questions than before. Deciding there was nothing else to do and his free time was already interrupted enough, he hit the lights out and laid in his cot. He commanded the holovisor to show him exactly what was on the other side of his cabin. It was tremendous and horrifying the way he could see Phobos in the near distance. It was at least the size of the Moon from Earth on its best day, yet at only nine miles around, it must have been awfully close to have that apparent size. Argun was sort of terrified by space and this mission—everything. But something made him creep as close to the edge as he could stand. Seeing as that view was no way to sleep, he switched the holovisor to sports radio. The feed he received was often months out of date but it would do. Fat wonder, he pondered, we can instantly connect with a doctor’s office but it takes Earthnet relays forever to get current podcasts out here.

Somewhere much closer to Argun than his home planet, a small ship followed the Ursula at a very safe distance. What had been determined “safe” took a lot of effort, but the doctors on that ship were sustained by some of the best results they had ever seen. They knew something that Argun wasn’t allowed to know—that no one had ever been past the Phobos Krummholz Barrier. This was the invisible state line circumscribed by the transit of Phobos around the Sun and no one had ever crossed it and came back.

This small ship, called the Remora, was staffed with some of the best brain surgeons under military employ as well as some of the best physicists. Among them was also Elliot Montane, who was missing a sizable piece of his skull and oscillating somewhere between conscious and not with on-demand anesthetics. Doctor Patrick Neville carefully controlled the level of anesthetic based on the computer-generated models as well as his own instincts that had been developed over the years. Anesthesia was no less a guessing game than it had been for the last several hundred years; however, with these new computer models (initially developed for use with dreams), accurate, readable thoughts could be obtained from the user. Some of the time these could even be turned into approximations of visual imagery. These were accepted as fairly accurate when tested against subjects who had been asked to recreate memories while the scanners were providing readouts. Sometimes details like colors were different and sometimes the point of view wasn’t even first person, much like a dream could be. However, the meat of the memory was typically considered reliable by its source.

Elliot was providing the good doctor with invaluable information. His inherent link with his brother was proving strong enough to bring Argun farther past the Martian Krummholz zone than anyone had been before. This was the name for the zone near Phobos where no human mind could retain activity. It was a term few people were aware of due to the secrecy of the ongoing research to surmount the problem. It was a complete mystery as to why this happened and was even the cause of an infamously denied and disastrous mission that killed dozens of crew. To test the Krummholz zone, a crew was sent out, timed to miss the orbit of Mars by several Martian months. Still, none of the crew retained sentience. The last few days of their mission were filled with indiscernible vocalizations, inexplicable behaviors, and finally, complete radio silence.

If the truth were known it couldn’t be predicted how it would affect investors on Earth. Perhaps, it would have even provided interest and competition, but this wasn’t a chance Earthcorp or the UN Space Council was willing to take. So, it was kept under as much obfuscation as was possible.

Elliot began to squirm and show signs of nearing the theta wave threshold, meaning he was dangerously close to waking up. Patrick wasn’t sure whether this was good or bad at this stage in the operation, or whether or not he should interfere.

He merely observed.

* * *

Argun slept for five hours, which was five hours less than he was hoping to. Knocks at his door assured him he had to be up. Lazily, he got up and dragged his bag of clothes and personal items into the main artery of the ship, where Killian, the navigational expert, led him to the pod he was to inhabit for the next few days. “You will barely have space to move around so remember that your suit is designed to dispose of waste. I know, everyone says they’ll deal with it but it’s always weird the first few times.”

“Hey, how old is Ingrid?” Argun asked.

“Why, you wanna ask her out? She’s like forty. I think.” Killian smiled but was not met with another.

“Know anything about programming people’s likenesses into preexisting footage?”

Killian’s smile faded, “This is getting weird, man. I can’t do that kind of thing.”

“Forget it, I wasn’t asking you to,” he finished as Patrick and Ingrid could be seen approaching.

“Everything ready?” Ingrid asked with a surprising twinkle in her eye. Then, without pause, “Great. Get in, check your radio and we’ll begin preparing the pod’s detachment.” She looked at Patrick in approval and they looked back at Argun.

Something snapped in the man. He heard Elliot’s voice screaming from inside of his own head, felt emotions flood into him that weren’t there before. He suddenly realized how wrong all of this was. “No!” Argun cried and tried to throw Killian out of the way. To his surprise, he slid right through the man. Then through Patrick and then Ingrid with no resistance.

 All holograms. Fucking holograms.

A high-pitched noise brought him to his knees, clutching his ears and the sides of his face. It was immediately replaced with Patrick’s voice. “It’s totally normal to have fear at this point. That’s why we used holos—to protect us and to help you. If you get in the pod quietly we will crank the noise back down. Deal?”

“What the fuck is happening?!” he asked no one, everyone.

Ingrid’s voice cut back in, “We are several thousand kilometers away from you right now, Argun. You’re already the farthest out anyone has been. You’re going to help us realize why we can only get so far.”

“Don’t overload him,” Patrick said. “Give him a break. Look, just get in the pod and we’ll explain a little more after you calm down, okay? The important thing to understand is that there is no going back. So, please, go nicely.”

It only took about forty seconds of fighting the excruciating sound waves, seemingly sharpened to knives, for Argun to crawl into the pod. He didn’t want to cry but he did.

“The brain—consciousness—doesn’t allow us to leave home, Argun. We’re not sure why, but we’re tethered to mother Earth. We accidentally figured out that those with the ability to dissociate—trauma victims, multiple personality sufferers, and the like—could withstand the separation slightly more. From this we wagered a bet that maybe also certain genetics or even twins could better handle the distance also,” Patrick explained.

Argun said nothing. He was torn between trying to understand and letting go of caring about anything at all, as any investment could have meant more pain. Perhaps if he numbed himself to the itch of knowledge he would ease better into his inescapable situation. He tried not to listen but Ingrid continued, “We hope you realize you were a necessary sacrifice for the species. You might not have chosen your conditions but there has been no one more qualified. We’ve already learned so much from you. Monitoring your vitals, we’ve realized that it’s the very magnetic repulsion to your brother that has improved your quality of life. Most people succumb to the loneliness of space, yet you seem to benefit from it. You are more relaxed than ever, as if you long to be alone. Or at least away from Elliot. Haven’t you noticed your sense of ease?”

“You don’t know anything about me. How could you? If you did you’d know human contact is the only thing ever really on my mind,” Argun whimpered, realizing for the first time the truth himself as he said it.

Ingrid nodded, her hologram still indistinguishable from reality, peering at him from the other side of the pod window. “Of course, your obsession with Realism. Again, Argun, we don’t know everything. We wouldn’t be doing this if we did. But you can’t argue with results, and your stats are nearing the levels of Buddhist monks. It’s almost like you’re dreaming the entire time you’re awake. Haven’t you felt that?”

“I’ve felt calm. True calm. And I’ve fought it!” Argun yelled. He meant this but hadn’t been fully aware of it until his current state of panic. The entire voyage had been so remarkably comfortable for him, though he chose not to question it.

“What are you feeling now, Argun? Please, tell us.” Patrick asked, and it somehow felt both cruel and humane.

Argun thought about whether or not to respond, to give them what they wanted. “Were those videos of Iris—of Ingrid—real?”

Ingrid and Patrick looked at each other with a look of disappointment. Ingrid spoke up, “Could be. We’re wondering that ourselves. If we gave you a simple yes or no, would you even believe us?”

Argun couldn’t laugh or cry or respond in any meaningful way.

Isolated. He had been for some time but now, out there, he knew it—truly felt it. It would have been excusable that he hadn’t been with a woman in six years if four of those hadn’t been on Earth doing the same kind of day to day everyone else was.

“Blame it on the Japanese,” he’d heard them say. They were the first to truly outsource intimacy. Pay to fuck, pay to cuddle, pay to talk to someone who pretended they gave a shit—as long as you weren’t too far from legal tender you could get all the same things that people used to get just by being close to one another, showing each other who they really were and making them deal with it.

So, we dealt with it. We boxed ourselves up in standing-room-only coffins and didn’t make eye contact with the barista. And when that was too much for us we just bought that coffee we loved online and made it at home. We went to work, hating, concealing. We toiled alone finding out new ways to get ourselves deeper into nothingness and now . . . here I am.

Argun could hear Elliot’s faint voice telling him that he was okay but the sadness in his tone made it hard to believe. He intuited that he was in another layer now, as he could sense a presence but it was fewer in strength and number, as if fewer people were there. Looking up and out the pod glass he could see the tiny specks of light from the previous layer. He knew now they were observational ships from other governments and corporations. They were all gathered here to see why the human consciousness couldn’t traverse Mars’ orbit, the Krummholz zone.

Argun finally let go of all the anger he had toward them, all the decision-making that he hadn’t done to get him to this point. Some of it was his; in fact it was pretty equally shared. He found solace in that. He chose this as much as he was chosen for it. He wouldn’t have gotten on Ursula at all if some small part of him didn’t want to be exhaustedly far away. Letting go of all of that unnecessary emotion allowed him to clearly see what was in front of him—the planet.

Deimos and the gossamer rainbow barrier were behind him now and the red planet in front. As if using a squeegee on a windshield the entire view of the planet shifted slightly, under a clear clean coat that washed away, revealing teeming life where there had been desolation before. What was once a barren reddish rock looked alive with pulsating, crowded life. It looked like a snake nest, Argun thought. Tons of different life forms but all cooperating in a sort of cyclical way, he saw them eat and birth each other in rapid succession. Either they experienced a different flow of time or it was his that was changing.

Time—that is the constant. His perception of time must have been adjusting to theirs. They had previously been invisible to humanity not because they were from a different time, but because they operated in a different pacing or bandwidth of time. That must be why we can’t see them, he thought.

Simultaneously he felt immense love and incredible fear. The horror at being confronted with the first and closest foreign consciousness that truly was not human in origin was the same thing as being awed by the love for complexity and life itself. Argun then knew he was on the border. He was too far away from the Collective Consciousness on Earth to feel as connected to it as he used to be, and now, so close to the Collective of Mars, he felt assimilation. A gentle suffocation of all that was inside him that used to be him being smothered by what he was becoming.

He thought of Elliot. He wondered if Ingrid was ever a real person.

Of course she was, she was in my head. That makes it real. I have to remember that.

Then he felt what it was like to be a Martian snake.

* * *

Patrick pulled down his surgical mask and looked at Ingrid. She sighed and looked away. There was a quiet roar as the audience got up, pushed their chairs aside, and began leaving without ever talking to one another. On the table, underneath the viewing dome, they had lost Elliot.

“He hung in so long,” Patrick said, nearly crying, but for the first time in a long while not caring that he was showing it.

Ingrid looked at the holocube that showed the extremely amplified inner circuitry of Elliot’s brain as he lay there below a contraption that was designed to keep his brain fully operational outside of his skull, connected to him by a mere extension cord of sorts.

They had used everything in their power to track the seat of consciousness, the one infinitesimal point where a human could be found fully intact. They had seen its quantum electric buzz and chased it into different lobes and were this damn close to cornering it, making it spill its proverbial guts—and they lost it. Being closer than ever, they should have felt joy. And to some degree that was there, too.

Ingrid thought of the images that Elliot’s brain displayed before his death. Wild, twisting nests of almost bacterialesque life forms covering the surface of Mars. Could it be not that humans were tethered to Earth, but that Mars was protected by a different mind? She couldn’t bear to explore that in the moment, especially not with the Observers who were sitting there hoping for something definitive.

The last thing Elliot managed to mumble before he died was “rainbow.” He shouldn’t have been able to even say it—he wasn’t registering any brain activity at that point. “Rainbow,” Ingrid repeated, looking into the holoscreens, knowing all the other Observers were looking toward her for some sort of closure or ending statement. And all she could think of was the trillions and trillions of dollars behind her, both in space and in time.