Mars! What would science fiction be without the mysterious Red Planet? This is much longer than my flash fiction “Ghosts of Mars,” but it also reflects my continued fascination for Mars. It was, in fact, Mars that made me decide to become a science fiction writer in the first place, when I became enthralled with the classic film, The War of the Worlds, when I was just a kid.
The core inspiration for this story, though, doesn’t come from Mars, but from computer software. I worked in a large government research lab in the 1980s and 1990s, when personal computers were just beginning to gain a foothold in office work. I was one of the first to have a Mac Plus on my desk, and I loved it.
It was also the first time I had encountered the phenomenon of obsolete software. As upgrades were made and new versions became available, we would toss out the old versions and install the new, better versions. But it struck me that there was nothing wrong with the old version of the software—which still worked the same as it always had, which was perfectly adequate to do the work and had, in fact, even seemed remarkable when it was the newest version. Yet, it was obsolete, discarded.
What if a certain group of people were modified to perform a specialized task, and they did that job well, but found themselves obsolete as the task was completed or a better version came along? How would those people react to being discarded?
I found this scenario so rich that even this novelette wasn’t enough for me to explore all the things I wanted to do. “Human, Martian—One, Two, Three” is the springboard for my complete novel Climbing Olympus (currently available from WordFire Press).