Bird on Mars

"Are you the type of person who not only knows what the right thing is but knows it and does it too?"

Avery Daley was the youngest person on Mars by seven years. Her new friend and colleague Sagi Herron was twenty-eight, a macro programmer and drone operator. Avery was a farmer. She had been all her life. But this place—Kannur Research Laboratories on Oxia Palus, slightly north of the Martian equator just outside Danielson Crater—this was the strangest place Avery had ever tried to raise a crop. There were concerns about such a young researcher being allowed on base, serious questions regarding whether she’d fit in, whether she’d be able to handle the separation from peers and family, and serious questions about whether so young an aspiring scientist was qualified enough to be taking up a coveted spot on Kannur.

The facility itself amounted to a giant Kevlar fabric bubble that, from the outside, looked more like a makeshift football stadium than a scientific outpost. NASA’s nickname for Kannur, the “circus,” seemed fitting on two levels, the giant tent being the obvious, while the variety of the research and the characters performing it did seem a little circus-like at times. Antrim Tomasín took his job as onsite Mission Operator far too seriously for the “circus animals” working in that big Martian tent, as many of the researchers and engineers sometimes jokingly referred to themselves. It was an exclusive club of space scientists, and Antrim had not been happy about admitting a twenty-one-year-old undergrad to it, especially when Kannur had been promised her advisor, the esteemed plant geneticist Nicholas Penny. Professor Penny had broken his femur skiing moguls on an icy day at Cannon Mountain three weeks before launch and was given the choice to scrub and delay their group’s research by two years or send a grad student from his lab. Both of his PhD students were petrified of the idea of going to space, and his post-doc had proven far too incompetent to trust with such a major project. NASA suggested delaying, but Nick knew the two-year delay was far too long with the off-world population growing exponentially. “Why don’t I send you Birdie?” he told the Ag group at NASA. “She knows the project as well as any of the grad students anyway.”

NASA loved the idea. Antrim Tomasín hated it. “We have enough real work to do up here without having to babysit a teenager,” he’d responded initially via email, which only strengthened Penny’s resolve to get Avery cleared through NASA to participate. So Avery knew from the outset, long before her shuttle touched down outside Kannur, that Antrim would be keeping a close watch on her. With so much on the line, she’d promised to make absolutely no waves, and it turned out to be a promise that hardly took six weeks for Avery to break.

Antrim woke one morning to find that one of the empty cargo containers scheduled to be sent back on the A & A bimonthly had gone missing. He found it fixed to one of the fourth-story girders along the exterior of the lab’s scaffolding, ratcheted to one the tent’s tie-downs. He didn’t even look for a suspect, just stormed into the Ag lab shouting.

“This is what I get!” Antrim began his tirade. “Allow children in a lab and you get childish pranks. I don’t know what the hell you think you’re trying to pull with this stunt, Ms. Daley, but an outrage like this will never stand.”

Avery looked as stunned as the other twelve researchers on the second floor, who’d gathered outside the Ag lab to gape at the unfolding scene. A floor above, Sagi Herron got word that Antrim was freaking out. She called Avery.

“I’ll be right down, Birdie,” Sagi’s voice echoed in Avery’s ear.

“Um, I think Sagi would like to have a word about it, Dr. Tomasín,” Avery told Antrim.

“For what? To make a bigger ass of me?” Antrim grumbled, staring at Avery.

“I—” Avery began.

“You’d do well to keep your mouth shut,” Antrim said.

Taking the crate had been Avery’s idea, but there was a good reason for it. And neither Sagi nor Fred Cho, their other co-conspirator, had considered the possibility that Antrim would view at as some kind of personal slight. It was just a packing crate, after all. Avery had asked them whether they should clear it with Antrim first, and they’d both said it would be better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

“Just tell me one thing,” Antrim said. “Was it Sagi or Cho. I know you didn’t run that thing up there yourself.”

Avery shrugged, “It was all of us. It’s not what you think.”

Sagi stormed onto the second floor, shouting at Antrim loud enough to be heard halfway across the tent. Antrim had let his emotions get so heated about the crate, he hadn’t even bothered to ask what was in it. Avery would have happily explained, but the shouting match between him and Sagi was too heated for her to feel like she could intervene. Antrim threw them both out of the lab and then stormed off, ranting about getting Fred Cho back in to take down the crate, but he was out with the survey team operating their drones for the next four days. Antrim was so furious he wouldn’t even see either Avery or Sagi, who went right back to work in her lab in spite of what Antrim had told her.

One of NASA’s research scientists, Forrester Braun came to see Avery in her bunk, where she was composing an email to Professor Penny to explain the situation. Forrester was one of the senior astronauts. She’d been extremely helpful getting Avery set up, because she’d been performing Ag research in space since before they started sending actual Ag specialists.

“Birdie, what is going on?” Forrester said when Avery opened the curtain on her bunk.

“I think he thought we were pranking him. He’s not taking it so well, I guess. Both Sagi and Fred said it would be fine, but Antrim’s blaming me.”

“What’s in the box, Bird?” Forrester said.

“Cell cultures.”

“Cell cultures?”

Avery nodded.

“Did you have to put them in the rafters?”

“Fred thought so. The whole things a long story, but it’s not like… Honestly, Forrester, I’d never intentionally try to make Antrim look bad.”

Forrester shook her head, and despite her best efforts, she cracked a smile and began to laugh.

“Just tell me what’s in the box and what you clowns are up to and I’ll go have a word with Antrim. It better be worth all this trouble, Birdie.”

Avery nodded and explained the whole situation. It helped that Forrester understood Dr. Penny’s research—at least superficially if not in detail. Nick’s lab at UNH was pioneering minimal growth, a hydroponics process that essentially cut the plant out of the food production process. Nick and a few post-doctoral colleagues at Texas A & M had been the first to successfully grow fruit directly from stem cells on an artificial substrate. When Avery heard about this in her Intro to Cultivated Plants course at UNH, she became singularly focused on working in Nick’s lab. The first time she saw a cherry growing out of one of the clear growth plates, she nearly fainted. Now, a little more than three years later, she was testing the process on Mars.

The main limiting factors for widespread adoption of minimal growth farming were facilities and specialized equipment to support newer Ag systems, which had yet to be put into mass production, and labor—a lot of labor relative to traditional farming. And mass production of growth plates and support structures would likely never happen at scale until the labor problem got solved. Traditional agriculture had been almost fully-automated for decades, and the growth substrate—the world’s farmland—had already been cordoned off and dedicated to the purpose. Corporate farms could send out their machine fleet to seed thousands of acres in the spring, fertilize and water, and do little else except harvest when nature had done all the work for them. In minimal growth, it took a trained molecular biologist who also needed to have a knack for some key skills in agro-tech, like drone piloting to monitor crop progression, testing balances in the hydroponic solution, timely deployment of hormones, and if all that went right, there was still the labor of harvesting all that food, which would require a complete redesign of current field-based farm machinery. Until all those problems got solved comprehensively and economically, Avery knew minimal growth would be little more than a neat parlor trick for plant nerds on Earth and a niche market in space. Up here, anything that grew needed a medium engineered. Hydroponics was commonest, because anything grown in soil, needed the soil flown to the growth site, more or less.

Cho and Sagi, Avery explained to Forrester, had been drawn in by the parlor trick. It was cool enough science that even space nerds thought this branch of Ag was cool. She’d shown them videos from Nick’s lab at UNH on her first day aboard Kannur, and though the advances they’d made hadn’t occurred to them initially, it had started a conversation. Drone monitoring was cumbersome and inefficient, even when AI were flying. Cho insisted that what Nick and Avery really needed were bots on the growth site itself.

“What, like, miniature people that climb up the panels and measure the fruit?”

“I was thinking more like spiders,” Cho had said, “Creepy crawlies.”

They kept talking about it, the two robotics specialists and the farmer. Jokes led to ideas, which led to conversations which led to plans. One day about four weeks after Birdie arrived on Mars, Cho came into the Ag lab with a jar of glowing jelly, put it down on her worktable, and said, “Okay, Birdie, let’s try this.”

“What’s this, space jelly? How is it on toast, Cho?”

“No, check it out,” Fred said. “It could be our solution. It’s an electro-reactive semi-solid nano-goo, is the technical term for it. Drop in a tech suite and watch.”

Avery had seen some cool things in her life, but perhaps nothing wilder than watching what she later described to Professor Penny as “a glowing crystal spider spontaneously crawling out of a puddle of clear goo.”

Cho started going on and on about the graphene, the electrical field, the limitations, and the potential applications in her project. Avery didn’t hear a word. It was just too damn cool to do anything else but marvel. That clear spider balanced on the rim of the jar and fell to the table as it tried to descend the tall glass cylinder. Then it righted itself and stood by on her lab bench.

“Not quite as nimble as the natural born blueprint,” Cho joked, “but much more obedient.”

The idea was sound but still needed quite a bit more troubleshooting. For instance, the bots’ semi-solid outer skin acted more like a liquid in contact with some surfaces—like glass, so the bots would fall off most sheer surfaces, even in a low G environment like Mars, and they wouldn’t be much use in a scaled Ag setting if they couldn’t crawl more than a few inches off the floor. Birdie was a biology major, though, and a climber. She told Cho and Sagi about Gecko Gloves and asked Fred if there was a way to create textures on the skin that would naturally adhere better than the liquid surface tension of the nano-goo. It took about a week’s fine tuning during Sagi and Fred’s free time before their little circus spider bots were climbing up the scaffolding inside Kannur’s tent.

Next, they started testing their prototypes on actual Ag applications—the labor a human would have to do to raise a full crop. They had to write specific code to teach the spiderbots to set growth plates in their frames and then implant stem cell cultures on each plate’s surface, and each had to be oriented correctly so that the sucrose solution contacted the backs of each plate correctly. It was delicate, specialized work, and the spiders themselves were dumb. But according to Fred, the spiders didn’t have to be smart if they followed orders from a smart system.

Once they’d tested the proof of concept in the lab, they needed a place to run a practical simulation of a real crop cycle. Avery was the one who’d suggested the empty crate because it was watertight. Sagi was the one who’d thought it would be a good idea to put it out on the rafters, a) because it couldn’t be disturbed by anyone out there, and b) because it made human intervention in the experiment all but impossible. Even at Mars gravity, nobody would risk crawling out onto those fourth-story girders. Sagi had tried to explain it to Antrim, that she and Cho had operated the macros that had carried the thing up there, and they’d done it at night so no one would’ve gotten hurt if it had gone wrong. There’d been nothing sinister about it.

“There’s no way in hell Antrim would have let you do that if you’d asked,” Forrester told Avery when she’d finished telling the senior astronaut all the details. “It’s cool as hell, if you ask me, but Antrim’s kinda prickly about thinks like having a coffee cup in the lab. I’m not sure how Sagi thought he’d do anything but lose his mind finding a cargo crate in the fourth-floor rafters.”

Avery shrugged.

“I’d say you should have known better, Birdie, but then again, how could you? I’ll do my best to make sure he doesn’t take it out on you.”

“Thanks, Forrester,” Avery said.

“How’s it going so far?”

“What?”

“The experiment.”

“Nothing’s even going yet. We just got the crate up and ran the tubing from the algae tanks last night.”

“Piece of advice,” Forrester said. “No matter what happens this afternoon, get something set in there ASAP. Antrim can’t get the crate down until Cho comes back with the survey team. Fill that sucker with cell cultures before he gets the chance.”

Avery and Sagi each had about a liter of coffee that night, sneaking up and down from the Ag lab to the fourth floor, carrying growth plates for the spiders to run along the rafter into the cargo crate. Sagi had ten little glowing creatures running round-trip cycles on a programmed loop. It took about six hours just to get the plates up and another three to program the planting sequences. Avery figured it was best to have each bot dedicated to a specific cultivar so there was no cross-contamination on the growth plates. They’d conceived ten different experiments that she’d run by Professor Penny having to do with different hormone levels in the solution, planting patterns on the plates, and sucrose levels in the water. Nick said it was all good science.

All they had left to do the following morning was convince Antrim.

By mid-morning, things had still not blown over for Avery. Antrim’s anger had shifted largely from her to Sagi and Fred Cho, but she was all tied up in it. Dr. Tomasín had come to accept that it hadn’t been a prank, a stunt, or an attempt to undermine his authority, but Antrim was still furious that none of the three had sought out his approval before raising the crate to the rafters. Luckily for the co-conspirators, Antrim never discovered that they’d setup the growth plates after his explosion the previous day. Around lunch their time, Nicholas Penny sent Antrim a video message apologizing for whatever part he’d played in the affair and asserted that the science his student was doing was important and sound. He asked Antrim to consider keeping the crate up; after all, it was already installed and the experiments were already running. Initially, NASA was not happy, mostly taking Antrim’s side until the Ag group started looking at the schematics of the spiders with the nanotech research lab planetside. Message boards began to erupt into a huge battle between mission logisticians and the nano and Ag groups, who were hugely supportive of the “Kannur Rebels,” as Avery, Fred, and Sagi had come to be called. When the sun rose over India and their senior engineers got word of the controversy, they were sympathetic to Antrim’s ire, but they were also in unanimous agreement that it made no sense to pull down the crate until a full structural assessment could be done and a process for its safe removal analyzed. They directed Antrim to keep the crate where it was and perform a full investigation of how the incident had unfolded, including separate interviews with the three principal actors, and that all three should be put on probationary status. The final edict from management read as follows: “In light of the seriousness of procedural violations and her status as junior scientist in training, Avery Daley should be removed from her duties in the Ag lab and exited from Kannur at the earliest possible time.”

Avery wasn’t shocked by the news, more by the person who came to break it to her. She was lying in her bunk re-watching a video message her boyfriend Josh had sent to cheer her up when Antrim Tomasín knocked on the frame.

“Excuse the interruption, but we haven’t properly talked,” he said. “I’d like to set that right.”

“Sure,” Avery said.

“Can you be in my office in five minutes?”

“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir. I’ll be right up.”

“Good then,” Antrim said, betraying little emotion as he turned and exited the scientists’ quarters.

Avery pulled her thoughts together and put on her Kannur mission coat, which she thought was slightly more formal than the T-shirt she was wearing. Five minutes was hardly enough time to pull together all the things she’d been wanting to say to Antrim over the past two days. But if she was getting thrown off Mars, she was going to say as much as she could think to say on short notice.

She climbed the stairs to the fourth floor and into the annex to the director’s office, where Antrim signaled her to enter through his open door. She sat.

“Here’s the situation, Ms. Daley,” Antrim said. “The Indians would like to send you home. NASA and Dr. Penny think that would be a mistake and are very angry about it. Two of my best young engineers are on probation for sticking a cargo crate in the rafters, and then there’s you—the only person up here who really understands what’s going on in that box with the plant cultures, and you’ve been banned from the lab.”

“Technically, they’re not really plant cultures, Dr. Tomasín,” Avery said. “If we’re being precise.”

“A good scientist always should.”

Avery nodded and examined Antrim’s eyes. Absent the anger of the past few days, she was surprised to see the eyes of a person and not an antagonist. Avery didn’t know what she should say next, so she thought common ground would be the best place to start. Science.

“Precisely, they’re stem cell cultures.”

“Yes, I’ve been reading. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about you, Ms. Daley, and I figured the best place to start would be with Dr. Penny’s research. I’m supposed to assign another scientist to do your labwork while you sit idle taking up very valuable space. I can’t say I love that idea. How do you feel about it?”

“Getting kicked out of the lab?”

Antrim nodded.

“The work’s about the only thing keeping me sane in this place,” Avery said. “That and Sagi and Fred.”

“You don’t like it here?”

“I’m from the mountains. I haven’t been outdoors in forty-three days, since the day I left Apogee.”

“You’re lucky you got to come on the Ake. Most of us got here on a seven-month transit. Forrester hasn’t been back to Earth in nearly three years.”

“I don’t know how she does it. She’s amazing.”

Antrim sighed. “The first ship out for you would be the Perth, and we’d have to bump one of the A & A hands who’s been trying to get out for over six months. What are you going to do up here for six weeks, Ms. Daley?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“I suspect there’s zero chance you won’t become a distraction. I don’t say this to belittle you.”

“No, I understand.”

“If I take the work away from you?” Antrim shook his head. “I don’t want to do that.”

“I’d appreciate anything you could do to keep me working. If I’m honest, I was already struggling a little before all this. I miss everyone, and it’s hard not being able to go outside.”

“I understand,” Antrim said. “I need something from you, though, Ms. Daley.”

“Anything.”

“I need you to try to understand my perspective. I know Sagi has her opinion of me, and she’s entitled to it, but she doesn’t understand what it’s like to be chiefly responsible for the lives of over sixty people and four hundred research projects with tens of billions of dollars tied up in each of them.

“We had to pull in Kannur’s original structural engineers on short notice to assess the risk from that crate to the shell and the scaffolding. It’s cost us nearly two hundred thousand dollars for that two days of engineering analysis, Ms. Daley. That money won’t fund other grants now. I know it’s easy to get lulled into thinking this is a normal place. We try to make it look that way so people feel comfortable. But this is not a normal place.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Tomasín.”

“Call me Antrim. And expect regular visits to your lab to check in on you.”

“You’ll be welcome,” Avery said.

Antrim didn’t need to tell Avery that the way things went over the following six weeks would shape her future. Going home early was going to be a huge stain on her reputation, one that would follow her whatever she wound up doing after college. She knew making peace with Antrim might go a long way toward changing how the story got told to future employers or grad schools, but more importantly for Avery, she didn’t want to leave Kannur on bad terms.

She was grateful for the chance to work and for the oversight. Even with Dr. Penny back at UNH paying close attention to what she was doing, the transmission lag was almost fifteen minutes now, and Kannur was operating on a six-hour time-zone difference to New Hampshire anyway. Apart from Sagi and Fred, who were more engineers than researchers and knew nothing about agriculture, Avery had been on her own, without a mentor’s guidance.

Over the first few days back in the lab, Avery focused on Dr. Penny’s original experiments as much as she could. But in agriculture, the truth is that the real work gets done by the plants once the seeds get planted. Sure, she had to monitor progress and take measurements, but that amounted to about half her day. She tried to occupy her time reading journal articles and taking notes, usually on topics related to Dr. Penny’s work, but not always.

On her third day back in the lab, Fred Cho came back from the field. He and the survey team had been delayed, but Sagi seemed to think Fred had been dragging out the survey work as long as possible before coming back. Antrim held Cho chiefly responsible, because the experiments couldn’t have come to pass without his bot design concept. Avery didn’t see Fred until several hours after he’d been in with Antrim.

“How’s he treating you, Birdie?” Fred asked when he saw Avery and Sagi at dinner that night.

“Actually, surprisingly good,” Avery said. “Antrim’s coming down to the lab twice a day to check up on me. Forrester too.”

“So how’s the stuff?” Fred asked.

“You make it sound like she’s cooking drugs in there,” Sagi said.

Avery laughed. “It’s a little hard to tell because the bots don’t have high magnification on their camera, and it’s dark, but there’s definitely healthy cell growth going on in there. The fruits are all seated. Now it’s just monitoring and keeping a steady flow.”

“Are we gonna be able to eat the fruits and all that when you’re done?”

It was a question Avery hadn’t even considered was a question.

She shook her head. “It’s fruits and vegetables, Fred. We’ll have to let some spoil to measure shelf life, and sure I’ll have to smush up some to get sugar profiles from the refractometer, but there’s going to be a lot of food in that crate in a few weeks.”

“Cherries?”

Avery nodded. “Two different cultivars of cherries. Albion strawberries too—like the best strawberries you’ve ever tasted in your life. We grow those at home. The apples and pears will take a little longer, but I’ve got a couple favorites in there too.”

Sagi and Fred looked at each other, both shaking their heads.

“I hope you grew enough for everyone, Birdie, or there’s going to be riots over fresh fruit,” Sagi said.

“Total yield? We’re going to measure it, yeah, but I haven’t done a proper estimate based on our UNH data. I mean, it’s a big crate. We’ve got a lot of stuff growing in there. Everyone will definitely get some.”

Efficiency was the key problem, so for Avery, yield on her crops was the main point, but she hadn’t had the time to calculate an ideal yield for what the cultures should produce. Their rogue experiment had come together so fast. To Avery’s surprise, Dr. Penny sent her a link to one of the internal Ag message boards at NASA. In the absence of details about her experiments, there was an entire thread dealing with speculation on potential yields for minimal growth—ideal numbers from crop to crop. One of the Ag Food Systems engineers had done a calorie-for-calorie breakdown comparing space required for traditional Ag versus minimal growth, concluding that if verticality were incorporated to models, it would be possible to fit the food production of the entire Midwest into a ten-story building the area of Rhode Island. He called that estimate “conservative.” There was also a thread on the rumors from Kannur that Birdie’s rebels had solved the labor problem with verticality. Avery thought it better not to fuel speculation by commenting on anything, especially since they were a long way from even preliminary results, but it was fun to see so many high-level specialists speculating on their work.

Antrim came into the lab one afternoon later in the week while Avery and Fred were reviewing some of the code in the AI’s monitoring patterns for the bots.

“Want to see something cool?” Fred asked Antrim. “Watch.”

Fred pulled up the camera feed from one of the spiderbots. There was a dim blue glow on the screen in a halo, and it was difficult to make out anything for a few seconds. Then, out of the haze, there was a shape that looked a bit like a tiny green spear, or perhaps a blade of grass with a rounded tip. The shoot appeared to be growing right out of the clear growth plate.

“Right. What is that we’re looking at?” Antrim said.

“That is a fast-growing Bing derivative,” Avery said, eliciting a blank look from Antrim and Cho. “Sorry, a really nice cherry cultivar from one of WSU’s labs. It’s pretty well developed for less than a week’s growth, too.”

“That’s a cherry?” Antrim said.

Avery nodded. “Well, it should be in a month or so. We’ll see how it does.”

Antrim had been monitoring Avery, yes, but until that moment he set eyes on what was growing up in that crate, he hadn’t really been all that interested in the work—more ensuring his Kannur Rebels didn’t get into too much trouble. The moment Antrim saw that cherry shoot, his attitude changed. He stayed with them in the lab for nearly an hour watching the spider bot as it took observations, asking questions about the bots, the growth plates, the hydroponic supply network, and the different cultivars in the crate. As he was leaving to get back to his work, Antrim asked Avery for a reading list so he could bring himself up to speed on their work.

Over the next few weeks, Avery found herself taking time out of her day to explain the specifics of the system to Antrim in great detail. He was a quick study, and as they went along, he highlighted points where engineering barriers might pop up, both here on Mars and back on Earth. At one point, he suggested that he, Avery, and Dr. Penny publish an article on potential deployment of minimal growth in deep space environments.

About four weeks after Avery and Sagi had started the cultures, Antrim noticed that some of Kannur’s workers spontaneously began to gather along the fourth-floor balcony near the cargo crate. When he asked the engineers why they were out there, they just said it seemed like a good place to have a coffee. Three days later, the mystery was solved. Antrim left his office in the afternoon and detected a faint odor. It was so pleasant, he had to follow it. A few steps in, he realized what it was.

“Grapes,” he said aloud.

The odor grew stronger as he neared the outer fourth-floor walkway. He arrived at the balcony to find nearly ten engineers taking their coffee break to the heavenly smell of ripening Concord grapes. At that point, Antrim later joked to Avery, his only concern with the project was whether he could keep everyone from climbing across the girder to get an early sample before they collected their data. He was excited, talking about how important their solving the labor problem with minimal growth would be, possibly to the entire future of humanity.

“I don’t mean to downplay anything,” Avery said, “because, so far so good. But from a farmer’s standpoint, unless you’ve harvested your crop and taken it to market, no one’s eating and no one’s getting paid. I’ll get excited if Cho’s bots can bring in the food we’ve grown.”

 As maturation approached for the different fruits and vegetables in the crate, Sagi, Fred, and Avery began working with several of the other engineers on refining the code for the spiderbots to harvest. They’d printed plastic analogues the shape and weight of the various fruits, reconfiguring the spiders’ bodies to adapt to fit the situation. A cherry or a grape was relatively easy for a bot to grip and carry over uneven surfaces and up and down verticals. An apple would prove a greater challenge. The team began devising different shapes for the bots to take—ten-legged spiders, bigger ten-legged spiders, six-legged spiders with bowl-shaped backs for lugging bigger cargo like apples and pears.

The final challenge was one that Dr. Penny had been working on back at UNH—how to actually harvest the fruit using what he’d been calling “the jellybots.” Fred Cho’s semi-solid bots couldn’t cut the stems, and every mechanical solution he’d devised had failed in one way or another. Dr. Penny had been working on an aqueous enzymatic solution that rapidly dissolved the connection between the growth plate and the stem. By this time, there was enough fruit in the crate that they’d have several thousand chances to perfect their system for harvesting their crops. With the smell of grapes in the normally stagnant air, it was the only thing anyone on Kannur was talking about.

The night before they were set to begin harvesting the grapes, Avery was in her bunk composing a message for her boyfriend Josh back home when Antrim interrupted with a knock on her bunk’s frame.

She pulled back the curtain. “Hey, Antrim.”

“Hello, Bird,” Antrim said. “I’ve been having a running battle with Bangalore over this whole suspension for the past few days. I know we haven’t talked about it, but I think it’s stupid and short-sighted to be sending you home in two weeks. They’re not willing to budge on it so far, but they’re not really that invested in what you’re doing because, they’re just hiring out lab space to NASA.”

Avery shrugged. “What difference does that make?”

“They don’t really know what you’re up to. I took what you said about harvesting to heart and decided to wait and see how it went before discussing it with them fully. I presume you’re giving Nick regular updates?”

“Nightly reports,” Avery said. “What’s this all about, Antrim?”

“I’d like to keep you here, Bird, if you’re up for it. I know it’s been hard adjusting for you, but…”

Antrim paused and seemed to contemplate for a few seconds.

“I think the reason I came down on you so hard early on is that I didn’t appreciate the value of…not so much your work but your presence. Watching how far you’ve come in four weeks…I think we need that—obviously not with every project, and there’d be considerations with how many young researchers we could bring on but…”

“I’m still not sure what you’re trying to say, Antrim. Am I still getting kicked off the station in two weeks?”

“I’m confident I can talk NASA into smoothing things over with ISRO in the short-term. I’m talking long-term, though. I’d like for you to stay and keep working with us. I’m sure we could work something out with Cal-Tech or even UNH so you could get your PhD. There’s a real future for you in space, Avery. A bright future.”

Avery sighed. “That’s a lot to think about.”

“Of course, it is.”

“I’ve been operating with the mindset to just get through the next two weeks as best I can.”

“Still a little stir crazy up here?”

“Yeah. Maybe. The delay is hard. I miss Josh. I miss my parents, the mountains. I didn’t think it would be this hard.”

“You weren’t supposed to be going home for another six months, though.”

“I know, but in a way it was sort of a relief to get kicked off. Since then, I’ve had that target in my mind, just two more weeks. Now, you want me to stay. I mean, I’m really grateful, but psychologically? It’s a lot to think about.”

“Please do think about it, Bird. You’d be a great addition. Regardless of what you decide, I’m very much looking forward to witnessing your harvest—and getting a taste of some of those fruits, as it turns out.”

“That’s always the best part,” Avery said.

The following day, the anticipation among the engineers and research scientists at Kannur was so high that Sagi and Fred put down a line of yellow tape along the walkway to remind everyone to keep a clear pathway for the crew of little harvesters. They’d decided that given the complexities of the situations the bots could face in the future, they wanted to see how their bots would do with a challenging course. If all went well, they would pick the fruit, climb out of the crate, crawl down to the girder and across to the walkway, then proceed down two flights of stairs to Avery’s lab in the middle of the building. Avery, Sagi, and Fred were watching from the monitors down in the Ag lab as the bots began running the protocols the team had put together over the two weeks prior.

Dr. Penny’s enzyme worked far faster than Avery had expected. A few seconds after application, even on a sizable grape stem, each small bunch would drop off, slipping into the waiting arms of the spiderbot along the frame. A few moments later, the team knew all was going well when Antrim displayed his feed from the balcony two floors up. The staff gathered there was laughing and cheering as a succession of the little creatures crept along in a line, down the crate, across the rafter, under the railing, down the walkway, then disappearing down the staircase toward Avery’s lab.

“Oh my God, it’s working,” Avery said.

“This is thrilling,” a smiling Antrim said, pointing his camera at himself. “What a joy to be a part of.”

When the first little spider bot crept into the lab, it was almost impossible for them to see their little worker under its cargo. The small bunch of grapes seemed to be crawling along the floor of its own accord. The first bot climbed up the side of the lab table, deposited its ripe purple fruit, and then scurried off again for another trip.

The feeling up on the balcony was festive and jovial. None of the workers had left, for it seemed to them a bit of magic, and they were all marveling, wondering when the seemingly endless progression of little harvesters would run out of grapes to harvest.

Down in the lab, Sagi and Fred were staring down their young colleague.

“Well?” Sagi finally said.

“What?” Avery said.

Sagi made a gesture toward the grapes with her eyes.

“Oh, I need to run a test or two before you can try them,” Avery said; then she popped two grapes into her mouth and said, “yup, tastes good to me. Make sure you count how many you eat before we weigh them.”

A few hours later, after the bots had finished making their rounds, Avery’s lab table was nearly overflowing with grapes from a single row of the crate.”

“We could make wine,” Sagi said.

“Yes, please,” Fred said.

“That’s kind of a different grape,” Avery said, “but I’m sure Dr. Penny could get us some nice cultures from a vintner.”

It was an unqualified success. It didn’t take long before Antrim came in to report that the workers were growing restless. He took a look at the growing pile of discarded grape stems on the side table behind Sagi and shook his head.

“Care to share with the rest of your colleagues?”

“Those on the far table,” Avery said, pointing toward the back of the lab. “We have to weigh the rest of these first.”

 Antrim filled up a small box and began to make trips between the Ag lab and the mess, where people instantly began to congregate.

It took Avery another two hours to finish weighing and cataloging the data for the entire grape yield. She and Sagi and Fred were still sitting there on her lab benches, surrounded by more grapes than each of them could eat in a year, stuffed with more grapes than they ever thought they’d eat in a single night, when Forrester came into the lab.

“Birdie, I need to give you a hug,” the old astronaut said. “I haven’t had real fruit in over two years.”

She came over and started hugging Avery and wouldn’t let go. Sagi came around the table to join in the hug the moment she realized Forrester Braun was crying.

The rest of the early harvest went flawlessly. Strawberries, blueberries, and cherries followed the grapes. Within a few days, the crew at Kannur had almost had their fill of fruit, but they all kept eating, unsure when they might get such a bounty again. They were all talking about Avery, rumors circulating about whether she’d stay or go. Even Avery didn’t really know. She’d planned on doing as much work as she could up until the moment she had to decide.

Unexpectedly, two days before the A & A ship that was supposed to take Avery back to Earth arrived, an SF-run shuttle touched down on the flat outside Kannur. They needed to print a part to make a repair that the NASA outpost in Elysium didn’t have the derivatives for. It was a veteran crew of spacehands, all of whom nearly fell over when they were greeted by bowls of fresh fruit. The commotion and accolades had almost fully died down by then, but at some point, each of the newly-arrived astronauts sought her out to thank Avery for the fruit.

The last to approach was a clean-cut sergeant who walked into the Ag lab with a look on his face like he was seeking out someone or something.

“Can I help you?” Avery said.

He scrunched up his eyebrows. “You’re a young pup,” he said. “What are you doing up here?”

“I’m working here, and you?”

He pointed to the seal on his uniform. “That, and I’m looking for someone named Bird or Birdie. You know who that is?”

Avery smiled. “I’m Birdie.”

He looked at her probingly.

“It’s a nickname that seems to follow me wherever I go no matter how hard I try to keep it a secret.”

“Followed you all the way to Mars?”

“My friend Sagi overheard a video message from my mom,” Avery said, shrugging. “I was homeschooled on a farm, and whenever it was time for lessons, poof, I’d flit off to the field chasing after my dad—called me her little birdie. Up here it’s more of a reminder I can’t get outside.”

“What should I call you?” the guardian asked.

“Avery Daley,” she said, extending her hand. “Or Birdie, I’m used to it.”

“Master Sergeant Eliot Ward,” the man said. “Good to meet you, Avery. I was told to get an answer from you. I guess A & A needs to put someone else in your slot on the Perth if you’re not planning on going back. They need to know this afternoon.”

“Who sent you?”

“NASA sent word through my commander, and when I asked where I could find you by name in the mess, they told me to come up here and ask for Birdie.”

“Oh,” Avery said.

“What should I tell them?”

Avery sighed. She didn’t answer.

Ward stood by for a moment and studied her face. She still didn’t answer.

“I could leave you alone to think about it? Come back in a bit?”

Avery shook her head and looked at Ward.

“If you’re looking for advice from me, Avery, I’m not your guy. I don’t know anything about your situation.”

 “I have a theory.”

Ward looked around the lab. “I’ll bet you do.”

“If you ask someone you know for advice, you have a good idea how they’ll react, so you’re probably just looking for confirmation. I don’t know anything about you, though, sergeant.”

“Except that I’m in the military, older than you, accustomed to structure and order, and now you know I have a logical mind. Theory’s looking a little thin, Avery.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t expect you to say all that. You’re a contrarian too, by the way.”

“What’s your issue? You don’t like it up here?”

“I don’t even know where to begin. I do and I don’t. It’s just psychologically, being cooped up in this one building, no personal space, no privacy. It’s not fun.”

“Is that all?” Ward said. “Remember you’re talking to a guy who spent over a decade of his life in barracks that weren’t nearly as cushy as this outpost.”

Avery smiled. “A contrarian, like I said.”

“At your service.”

“You’re right, though. It’s more than that. I didn’t mean to end up in space, Eliot. It just sorta happened. My professor was supposed to be doing this work and broke his leg, and I was the one in his lab that had done most of the day-to-day lab work on his experiments. It was just repeating it on Mars, so they sent me.”

“What are you doing?”

“Growing fruit.”

“Oh, you’re the one I have to thank for the strawberries?”

Avery nodded.

“Well, thank you, Birdie. Best strawberries I’ve ever had.”

Avery smiled. “The Albions are always a crowd pleaser.”

“So now they want to keep you up here and you’re not so sure?”

“That’s the simple story.”

“What are you scared of, Avery?”

“It’s not fear. My family has been farming for generations. The sole reason I went to UNH was to learn cutting-edge techniques so we could still survive.”

“You mean like a proper family farm?”

Avery nodded.

“Aren’t too many of those left,” Ward said.

“I made promises when I left.”

“Gotcha.”

“And now I see this different future unfolding in front of me that I never anticipated. All because my professor broke his leg.”

Ward grimaced. “They wouldn’t want to keep you for no good reason, Avery. You’ve got a lot to do with that. If I get a kid under me who can’t cut it, they’re gone before they know what hit them. The ones who do work out, and I sign my name to keep them around, it isn’t because they lucked into the opportunity, it’s because they nailed the opportunity when they got the chance. So consider what you did to make them want you, because there’s a long line of people who work their asses off to get on an outpost like this, and I mean dedicate their lives. It’s not a small thing to be here.”

“No, I know.”

“You’re doing a lot more than growing fruit, aren’t you? It’s much bigger than that. Word travels.”

Avery nodded as Ward set his gaze back on her.

“Are you the right person for the work? Be honest.”

“Yes.”

“Can you keep your head about you living in this place? Again, be honest.”

“Yeah, I can do it.”

“And you know it’s important work?”

Avery nodded. “Hugely important. I can’t even begin to understand how much it will change everything for the better. In space. On Earth.”

“Last question,” Ward said. “Are you the type of person who not only knows what the right thing is but knows it and does it too?”

“Oh, you jerk,” Avery said, sighing. “I don’t know you and I already hate you so much.”

“About your theory, Birdie,” Ward said. “Why do you suppose you would ask a random stranger in a military uniform advice on a question that had to do with duty and obligations to something bigger than yourself?”

Avery shook her head.

“You can pretend to hate me all you want, kid, but I’ll know better. It’s a good theory. I’ll tell the folks at NASA to ship the A & A guy.”

Avery took a deep breath.

“Okay?” Ward said.

“Yeah,” Avery said.

“You’re sure? It’s a big decision.”

Avery nodded.

“I’m shipping back with them too, so I’ll be stateside in a couple days. If there’s anything you want me to send to your folks, I’m happy to do it. Just catch me out on the lower level before we take off tomorrow.”

“Sure,” Avery said as Ward made his way to the door. “And, sergeant—”

“Don’t thank me, Birdie,” Ward said. “I’m only looking out for me and mine. I just want a bowl of cherries every time I get a layover on Mars.”

Eliot Ward was out the door before Avery had time to thank him.

She spent half the afternoon in her bunk recording, deleting, and then re-recording messages to Josh and to her parents, explaining that things had changed, that she’d be staying, and that she didn’t know when she’d be coming home again. She didn’t tell them that in all probability, it would be years not months before she saw them next. Avery figured she’d have plenty of time to break that news to them in stages.

The following morning, Fred, Sagi, and Avery worked nonstop, dialing in the coding on the harvest procedure for their first apples—a McIntosh-Liberty hybrid named after a town in New Hampshire not far from the Daley family farm. Avery didn’t have much time to think about the layers to the fact she was harvesting that particular apple on Mars the same morning she had been scheduled to depart. Instead, she was so busy working in the lab, she never even got down to see off Eliot Ward and the shuttle crew. There wasn’t any message she could have sent home in the mail that she couldn’t say in a video anyway. And the day seemed to fly by.

They were almost finished by mid-afternoon when the announcement came over Kannur’s PA, preparing everyone for the sound and vibration that would come with the jetwash from the upcoming shuttle launch. The AI kept a steady minute-by-minute countdown from the ten-minute mark over the PA. She couldn’t see the shuttle, as Kannur didn’t have more than the single window in the outer airlock, but Avery felt like she could sense it out there on the red plain—her ride home, leaving without her.

Avery stepped out for a cup of tea and ended up by herself, alone on the fourth-floor walkway, leaning on the railing, her eyes fixed on the sight of the cargo crate that had set everything in motion. As the countdown got within the minute, Avery noticed the hands holding her tea tumbler had begun to shake with anticipation. She felt like she was going to cry. She could sense someone approaching and standing beside her, but Birdie didn’t look over because she was afraid she might be caught out as she lost control of her emotions. So she stood still, saying nothing and facing forward as the countdown from thirty seconds wound all the way down to liftoff. Then the ground shook and it was too loud to say anything anyway.

It took about a minute for the thundering sound to dissipate to a steady dull hum overhead. Then Avery looked over. It was Antrim, smiling at her supportively.

“I see you’re still here,” he said.

“Yeah. Still here.”

“I’m going to say something I should have gone out of my way to say the day you got here.”

“What’s that, Antrim?”

“We’re happy to have you here on Mars, Bird.”

“Thank you,” Avery said. It was hard for her to say in that moment, but she managed it. “I’m grateful to be here.”

Avery turned back toward the crate, and so did Antrim. They stood in silence together as she sipped her tea, and before long they both observed movement along the open crease at the top of the container. In the dim light, a faint blue glow and the outline of an apple could be seen to seemingly crawl of its own accord, slowly descending the side of the crate to the girder, across the beam and under the railing, between their feet, and progressing down the fourth-floor walkway toward the Ag lab Avery Daley had decided to call home.