‘NASA Plays “I’ll Be Seeing You” Trying to Wake the Mars Rover’ by Chloe N. Clark
On Mars, the Rover has been still for years and years. All the data it transmitted is still stored inside of its body, a coded memory of places explored, of rocks and dust and wind. When the first explorers set foot on the planet, they joke about finding the Rover. They do not know how the sands of Mars have settled on Rover’s carapace, how easy it is to not see the machine even if you are looking for it.
There are bodies on Mars that are not as preserved as metal. The first manned crew settled into sleep inside their ship. They shifted and slipped into something other than themselves. The Rover was well before them and the Rover will be around long after their dust joins the planet’s dunes.
In years and years, the first true settlers will find the edge of a wheel, will tenderly unearth the metal. They are going to plant a garden, fill the ground with life. A little girl will point to the curves of the Rover’s shell. She will dream of it for years, the surface so scratched and marred and unrecognizable, and yet she had thought it looked alive. Her mother doesn’t know the story of the Rover, so she just says people must have sent it up a long time ago. That it must have been buried for ages, that it’s basically just junk.
The Rover will be put into a storage shed, kept away from the rocks and the dust and the wind. Inside it will still hold so much. The bodies have been buried, found by a crew who was intent on settling the bones into peace. No one looked for the Rover. To be found accidentally is not so different from being left to be lost.
Scholars will not write about it anymore. No one is around to remember, there was so much that came after the Rover. No one knows how ground control played music, under all that dust and rock, trying to stir the computers to function inside of Rover. But there was no response and no response.
When the rover had stopped moving, it sent a final message: My battery is low and it’s getting dark. And the sky dimmed and the rocks dimmed and the dust slowed and the wind, finally, finally, went so quiet that even the Rover didn’t know what to transmit.
From issue #17: spring/summer 2024
About the Author
Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities (an NPR and Brooklyn Rail Best Book of 2020), the forthcoming Every Galaxy Is a Circle, and more. She is a founding co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph.
