NOVEL NEXT Chapter 33: Horse Butts
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Gordon: You sent me a butt-dial, with a wrist mounted device.
Marie: I'm overachieving today.
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Sol 492 FY 26, 10:53 Mars Time, Bonestell Crater Colony, Hab Layer, 9.32.002.B
Marie turned and headed toward her work. Reactor six, dome three, wasn't going to clean itself.
The issue, if she got down to it, was probably horse butts.
Most of her problems started with the horse butt.
Early transportation relied upon horse-drawn vehicles, and a pair pulling in tandem are more reliable than a single horse drawing alone. Thus, two horse butts needed to be able to pass on either side of the road, providing a minimum width for early roads. Once roads were established, buildings were built on either side, with future roads having to either demolish them or continue to be constrained by the earlier space limitations—and so on it goes, until modern roads and even trains are constrained by the size of the horse butt. Train cars, not everybody is aware, constrained the maximum size of what could be shipped for launch to orbit in one piece—and thus, the width of the rockets and modular parts for the shuttle were all based on horse butts as well.
One might think that chain was broken by the way Martian colonization was going to take place. A brief overview: robots land, use sintering (that's pieces of metal bonded by heat but not quite melted together) and 3D printing to make other robots, which make tools and make other robots which refine materials and dig rooms and build infrastructure and of course more robots until you've got buried cities where people could land and go live. In theory? The butt stops here.
The first robots to land, of course, are sized based on their transport. The butt is in their nature—and this limits how big their 3d printer can be. But the second generation of 3d printer has no reason to be constrained by such limitations, and once the printer is big enough the parts made can be any size that's needed, rather than just the standard, about two meters on a side standard which we've come to assume in the back of our minds. That's two meters on a side—turned diagonally, barely fitting in our transports. Not comfortably, and definitely not flat.
However, robots don't just … do things. They have to be told how, and an AI would be the most convenient answer. Mars is a long way away, and instructions take a minimum of four minutes from, then four minutes back—eight minutes total—to be relayed. Imagine building a city, but you have to wait eight minutes between hammer strikes. So a local authority is necessary, and an AI is the right tool for the job. So far so good.
But an AI is only as good as its training data. The problem is an old one, known to some of the earliest programmers as GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out. A program will do what you tell it to do, whether you meant what you told it to do or not. An AI learning good design principles based on earth stuff will learn that modular systems are easier to maintain, and will learn that modular parts tend to constrain to a size parameter.
The horse butts reared their ugly selves again.
Let's take a detour. Oxygen. That lovely blue burny stuff that slowly kills us but keeps us alive. It's everywhere on Mars—thus the red color—and just takes a bit of energy to pry free from the metal. Metal we need to build anyway. Win-win—we'll use electrolysis to generate oxygen. With that half of the battle handled, we have plentiful oxygen and metal, so the colony can be built and pressurized without colonists. Once they arrive, they'll start to respirate, and that means outgassing carbon dioxide, where that lovely oxygen has soot attached to it and we can't use it anymore. In our biosphere on earth, nature provides a handy, scalable solution: algae. It wants warm, mineral rich water and carbon dioxide, and it farts out our lovely oxygen. It's perfect for our purposes, an air purifier to make sure we keep the oxygen our industry creates. The robots won't come with algae—that'll have to be the colonists' job—but they'll build the tanks for it.
And when they do, they'll be thinking about modularity, and horse butts.
This means it'll be made smaller than it had to be, which has some advantages and disadvantages—advantage, more tanks means if one gets damaged you lose less algae. Sometimes smaller heaters are more efficient than larger ones, and this water needs heating—possible advantage. On the other hand, smaller tanks - smaller heating elements—less room to put the fuse panels, access crawlspaces, and so forth. Everything gets smaller. So, upon moving in, the colonists discover that the maintenance crew for the bioreactors (that's the fancy name for algae makers, among other things that are biologic and contained) has to include at least one really small person, or else they can't get to all the stuff that needs to be maintained.
That this misbegotten legacy had made it all the way to Mars was little comfort as Marie hit her head under the tank for the hundredth time.
Why wasn't she wearing a helmet? Well.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
First rule of Mars safety: Mars wants to kill you. The atmosphere is thin, suffocatingly so. It's a little poisonous, but mostly, there's not enough oxygen, not enough pressure, and not enough warmth. The cold only matters when you touch solid objects—thin atmospheres are good insulators.
Space suits, designed for vacuum, are engineering marvels with major drawbacks. They're bulky, heavy, stiff, and a nightmare in an emergency. (Yes, there are quick-entry suits, but they make other problems worse.) On Mars, radiation is a killer—but underground, it's a non-issue. That's why we live in buried cities.
What we can't ignore is the risk of depressurization. Our homes are our spacesuits—reinforced bulkheads keep us alive. Working near the surface, though, requires something lighter: a pressure suit.
Why not full vacuum suits?
Because safety means more than just surviving a worst-case scenario. Tripping over oversized vacuum-rated boots and falling into a table saw is an immediate problem. Super boots might keep you alive an extra five minutes if you're outside—but inside? They'll get you killed faster.
So: pressure suits.
Fabricators wear eye protection, safety glasses, hearing protection—but today, Marie wasn't fabricating.
That left plenty of weight, gear, and tools hanging off her belt. Crawling under a tank in any suit was brutal. In tight spaces, CO₂ scrubbers might trigger, inflating the suit and making you even less maneuverable—or even stuck. Wearing a hard hat under a crawlspace was bad enough. This? Torture.
Other torture options:
Wearing a mask under a helmet—sweating into it, feeling your breath obstructed by the seal.
Taking off the mask and trusting the helmet—only for the mask to flop around uselessly inside.
PPE issues always get workarounds. People are creative. For the mask-flopping problem? Magnets.
One magnet on the mask, one on the helmet, held in place with tape.
Quick, easy, keeps the mask stable so you can still talk on the radio.
Easy to adjust if the foreman does a PPE check.
Easy to remove if you actually need to use it properly.
PPE? Personal protective equipment.
Marie swore like a sailor as she scooted along on her thankfully-flat stomach, back arched to keep her undersuit's gel from contacting the access corridor's lower tiles. The main problem with all the PPE she was forced to keep on her person was maneuverability. Basically—making the tight turns that would have been childsplay in normal clothing was hell with a toolbelt and pressure suit on. Her spanner caught on corners, but that was nothing compared to her CO2 tank, which itself wasn't as big a deal as the constant prodding from her undersuit into her most personal bits.
It wasn't a long crawl - she navigated an L bend, then a T junction, and she was there. The reactor base was meant to accommodate four 500 lbs tanks (Mars gravity) but due to the AI's limitations it had chosen to increment in 200 lbs tanks. There only being four sets of drainage and input plumbing bases, workarounds had been a given - pipes split to feed additional tanks, mounts being disregarded in favor of custom scaffolding. She had eight tanks here, working at about 90% profitability—IF she could get tank 6 to stay functional.
Sadly, not all tanks were created equal—due to the jerry rig, one of three tanks fed the inputs for all four. In this case, tank six was that one tank.
The Martian food cycle was simple - algae feeds crickets. Those feed chickens. Eggs feed colonists. Chicken poop feeds algae, aquaponics. Aquaponics feeds colonists. Algae feeds bioprinting. Bioprinting feeds colonists.
Too much ammonia? Algae bloom - too little nutrients, or a bacterial infection - Algae die-off.
Whatever the root cause, she was staring at a stubborn algae tank, which meant she was dealing with an oxygen generator-slash-CO₂ scrubber, part of the closed-loop system that turned compost into usable biomass. Biomass which, when properly handled, could eventually be processed into a number of useful things—fertilizer, nutrient slurry, or the materials needed to feed the bio-printing equipment.
Unfortunately, algae was a mess to propegate.
Technically, it was edible—it wasn't toxic, or it wouldn't be part of the system at all. But humans weren't built to eat algae. At best, it'd be like drinking chlorophyll soup. High fiber, high... toilet time.
Not that anything so nutritionally functional was waiting for her in reactor six.
This was sludge.
Thick, brown, and reeking of human excrement, though it wasn't actually contaminated with sewage or anything like that. It was just dead. Rotten, decaying, releasing methane and sulfur and the byproducts of a failed nutrient cycle.
"Yum yum," Marie muttered to herself as she unsealed the tank.
It wasn't a complicated mechanism—just robust enough to keep the atmosphere stable if some idiot vented the tank by mistake. If that happened, the algae could survive for about an hour, long enough to restore pressure and heat.
Still, the airlock hatch was massive, and maneuvering it off the tank was a full-body workout. Her arms trembled with effort, partly because of how long her reach was, and partly because she was working from the top of a ladder.
And Marie hated ladders.
Unfortunately, climbing one was unavoidable, given the sheer amount of gear strapped to her body:
A wrench set for the bolts
A screwdriver set for the access panels
A CO₂ cartridge for her suit's pressure systems
A backup oxygen canister in case of an air leak
A suit comm unit for contacting another colony, the space station, or ground control—assuming power was still running, and she wasn't stranded too deep underground for a signal.
All of it heavy. All of it necessary.
Marie suspected that, by the time anyone had gotten the engineering math right, it had already been set in stone. Or maybe, she mused, Earth engineers were just jacked.