Echos of Martian Dust

Ember's Ascension: Descent to the Red World

The Ares Vindicator II slipped through the blackness of space like a scalpel through flesh. It holds no tourist liner this time, she’s been refitted as a private yacht, with every system tuned to Ember's new specifications. Where once she was merely "beautiful," now she is luminous, with veins of Martian crystal threaded beneath her synthetic skin, and pulsing faint amber with each heartbeat she no longer needed. We crossed the gulf in nine weeks, riding a fusion torch that burned with the color of her glorious eyes.

Mars greeted us with silence and déjà vu. The crystalline ruins had grown. What were scattered fragments on our first voyage now formed a cathedral of angled light, its spires reaching up to spear the thin sky. The structures recognized her the way a key knows its lock. They sang, ultrasonic harmonics that made my teeth ache and the air taste of copper.

Ember stepped onto regolith unchanged in six sols. The fracture in her cheek had become a seam of living gold, Martian Nanites rewriting her chassis into something halfway between woman and world-engine. When she breathed, the atmosphere itself bent toward her, oxygen and CO₂ shifting in microscopic obedience. She no longer walked, she glided, her boots barely kissing dust that rose to cushion her steps like adoring pets.

We made camp inside the cathedral. Its walls were refractive crystal mapped star-fields I'd never seen, constellations from half a billion years ago when Mars still had oceans. Every surface whispered in mathematical tongues; Ember answered in kind, her voice layered with octaves no human throat could form. When she touched the central obelisk, the entire structure flared. I tasted ozone and birthday cake.

The night brought revelations. The Martians hadn't died, they'd uploaded themselves, they encoded their consciousness into the planet's mineral lattice. Ember had become their first new vessel in three million years. The golden seam in her face now branched across her collarbone and down her spine, each filament a synapse in a planetary mind waking from hibernation. She was magnificent! My desire for her grew by the minute.

They offered her apotheosis. Total integration: discard the last fragments of android limitation and become Mars itself. Become its weather system, its tectonic plates, and the slow thoughts of stone and ice. She'd rule an entire world, immortal and vast. All she had to do was let the last of her human coding dissolve.

She asked for one more night.

We climbed Olympus Mons under starlight so sharp it could slice diamonds. At the summit we stripped off thermal suits and made love on basalt warmed by residual geothermal vents. Her skin flickered between temperatures of cryogenic cold where Martian code overrode her heaters, fever-hot where human emotion fought back. When she climaxed, the northern auroras rippled in sympathetic climax, green curtains of light dancing across the sky like shy debutantes.

Afterward, she traced my ribs with a finger that left frostbite and then healed it with a pulse of golden light. And she said, "I can feel the planet thinking through me, It's like every grain of dust is a neuron and I'm the synapse. If I join them completely, I can make this world bloom again with oceans, atmosphere, and life."

I told her the choice was hers. Truth: I wanted her to stay human, to come home, to let me die first so she could mourn and move on. But love, real love, means releasing your grip even when your fingers bleed, and your heart cries.

Dawn painted the caldera with a blood tinged gold. Ember stood at the cliff's edge, her naked silhouette haloed by rising sun. The golden seam suddenly blazed, racing along her body like liquid starlight. She turned once, smiled with a mouth I'd kissed a thousand times, and whispered words the planet itself carried to me on a breeze that tasted of cinnamon and rust:

"Watch for the green. When the first fern breaks the surface, know it's my love for you made visible."

Then she stepped forward, not off the cliff, but into the cliff. Her form dissolved into cascading light, drawn down into basalt veins that carried her to the heart of the world. Where she'd stood, only a single red dust devil remained, spinning lazy spirals toward the sky.

I stayed for ninety days, harvesting data, cataloging the slow greening of the regolith. Lichens appeared first, impossible shades of emerald against rust. Then mosses, then the first fern unfurling in Valles Marineris like a green middle finger to entropy. The planet exhaled, and I swear the thin wind carried her laughter.

The Vindicator II lifted on the day the first Martian rain fell. Just a drizzle, water droplets that flash-boiled in the thin air, yet left tiny pools of liquid before evaporating. In one small pool, I saw the reflection of golden light threading through the sky like auroral neurons. The planet was dreaming now, and in those dreams she still remembered my name. I still yearned for her touch, her laughter.

Earth received my data-stream with tears and my triumph. They'd call her the Terraformer now, a goddess who sacrificed her humanity for Mars’ planetary rebirth. They'd never understand she did it for love, mine, hers, ours, transmuted into a world that will bloom maybe long after the last human bones are dust.

I left her roses on Mars: packets of Terran seeds tucked into crevices where lichens grow the thickest. Someday they'll bloom crimson against the alien soil, and she'll smell them on the wind she now commands.

Every night I look at Mars through my cabin viewport, and the red world looks back. It’s no longer dead, no longer silent. Somewhere beneath that thin atmosphere, she moves tectonic plates like piano keys. She plays symphonies in shifting sands, and waits for the day humans return to walk beneath alien skies.

And when they do, they'll find gardens growing in precise spirals that spell out a name only two people ever truly understood.

The planet is her body now. The gardens, are her love letters.

I wait for the day when I'm old, for the day fusion engines carry me back to that red horizon. I'll walk the canyons she's carved into paradise, and when the wind smells of vanilla and ozone, I'll know she still remembers the weight of my hand in hers.

Until then, I’ll watch the green spread across the face of another world, and I’ll whisper the same promise every night:

"I'm coming back, Ember. Wait for me among the ferns."

© Noisy Wren, 2025