The Edge of the Chaos Terrain
DALLE-2 generated view of Jupiter from Europa
The Great Eye of Saturn stares back as I awaken. The ever-present wind is blowing across my gossamer tent as I begin my stretching subroutine. Proprioceptive information answering if today I’m the same as I was last night. Starting from the bottom I count my toes and assess their range of motion; pumping each leg at the hip socket to work off any ice accumulation. My hands creakily respond to commands, playing a shadow piano piece. Today is the three-hundredth time I’ve performed Brain Damage to an angelic audience. There’s little room for movement in my future coffin, but there’s enough space to push myself off the ground and roll my neck preparing to greet the world. The buffeting does not cease but I perceive variations in the noise outside the tent as ice shards ping across its exterior and tumble on into the beyond. It’s -225 Celsius outside, unseasonably warm for where we are.
I stand and open the tent. Five of my companions greet me as we face each other, nearly perfectly separated. The perfection is broken by the absence of my colleague to my right. Hank had been making mistakes for several cycles leading to this morning. A day earlier we amputated his left arm - an action that now seems a waste of energy. The remainder acknowledge the loss with a synchronized nod, and in the exchange a data transfer begins as we reprioritize our collective knowledge.
Today we follow the unit known as Shack. Turning in place, our leader makes a 450 degree circle and is satisfactorily oriented 2 degrees off west, heading along our designated path. Our fallen comrade’s cairn is out of Shack’s sight before the last of our party departs.
It’s our last day on the plains, for we’re in the home stretch of the outbound portion of our endeavor. Today we cross into the chaos terrains. Marching in two columns the group bounds towards icy cliffs. Our movement is instinctive, rhythmic walking on a bipedal platform ending in wide, adaptive feet. Generations of our ancestors litter the Earth’s moon, the body’s gravity nearly identical to our current residence. Lunar regolith memorializes the tracks of their struggles, while our steps disappear as quickly as they’re created.
After 9 hours of constant pace we slow. We register the change in surroundings through the tips of our feet: the ground composition is becoming more saline. Brine crystals form complex tube structures growing fractally to colossal proportions. Another hour and we stop. One of our columns landed in between a fissure, and we assemble a belay system to drop a probe.
Europa’s icy surface averages 15 miles thick, but here the moon’s chemistry and Saturn’s tidal pull striates the planet into dazzling scenes. Our probe returns unexpectedly quickly. The ice we’re on is merely 10 feet deep, and thinning: thick enough to support our combined 8 metric tonnes, but had we advanced further our mass and the wind would likely result in our demise. After conferring with Val, today’s #2, Shack leads us south. Seven hops later we realign west for two units, and we continue this ratio into the unknown. On our now apparent ridge line, the grandiose danger is revealed.
As far as we perceive, The Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa repeats and is amplified before us. Ancient sea water greeting Europa’s thin atmosphere creates a vista of swirling inhospitality. Roiling forces created this field on a timescale incomprehensible to the human mind.
Ten days later I’m the party lead, and we’re 0.62 hours ahead of schedule. We’re deep into the chaos terrain, and critically low on power. Instructing our strongest four to dig in a grid pattern, we blow our time lead and slip back to on schedule. 30 hours of digging achieves our result: the cached corpses of Trekking Party 1138. These eight have been in this place for years, their bodies slowly absorbing into the surface. Never receiving their next day’s orders, the crew de-energized and awaited this moment. Three lie in armless state identical to our Hank.
Their corpses serve as nourishment, for we harvest their spare fuel cells. This generational fate is one that our party hopes to achieve. It’s better to live on in the data than to succumb to the accidentally untimely. Our party comms officer Alex notes one functioning battery and one defective battery. The bodies of our predecessors are past reactivation. The salty oxygenated environment brings destruction for all metal beings. Surfacing we continue beyond the ossuary.
Progress is smooth over the jagged field. Near our target we receive deactivation orders for Shack. This isn’t goodbye but a planned retirement, his adaptive programming is not required for this stage but will be invaluable on a future leg of the mission. Shack’s tomb is special: we carve blocks of ice to build a pyramid for our leader. Shack’s right eye sits atop his shrine and acts as an RTK base homing us to the target.
An obsidian monolith marks our destination. Stark against the twinkling white, this microstation was the first of its kind deployed to the surface. Antipodal attempts met untimely ends. Seasonal tilting makes the northern hemisphere a hotbed of moonquakes, the Jovian pull churning all attempted stations to oblivion. Footage relayed of this standing homage delights millions of nerds on Earth, the ~50 minute trip using the last energy stored in one of my companions. We receive feedback to continue.
Activating the monolith, we de-energize for 7 days. Our prize surfaces during our slumber.
Our mission, our target, our reason for being is a sample container the size of a pencil. This vessel contains an answer to the question: does life exist on other worlds? My team and I are unequipped to answer the question, but it’s our job to extract this sample and return it to the research base station. The 3,500 mile return begins as soon as our disassembly of the monolith is complete, and we set back out the way we came across the windswept chaos terrain.
This is the first of what I hope to be a series set on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Feedback is welcome, and thank you for reading my story.
