Hold Music for Olympus Mons

Ticket #4471 Category: Recreation & Amenities — Audio — Hold System Priority: Low Settler: Gage, R. (Hab-12, Unit 3)

Complaint: Hold music is Vivaldi. Has been on hold 40+ min. Wants to know who chose Vivaldi. Wants to know if anyone on this planet has heard of literally any other composer.

You open the ticket.

You check the settler’s account: active, current on contribution credits, no flags. Per the Ares Proximity Customer Relations Handbook (rev. 4.1), you compose a response using Standard Template 2-C (“Amenity Feedback — Non-Urgent”).

Dear Settler Gage, Thank you for your feedback regarding the hold audio experience. Your input is valued and has been logged for review during our next Settler Satisfaction Cycle. We are committed to ensuring that every interaction with Ares Proximity reflects our dedication to community well-being.

You read it aloud, sotto voce, checking for tone. The handbook says the tone should convey warmth, competence, and forward momentum. You mouth the words at your desk. The desk across from yours is empty. It has been empty for eleven days. Priya’s succulent is still there, in its small tin pot, and you have been watering it, though you are not sure the water rations cover it.

You send the response.

Ticket #4472 Category: Provisions — Inquiry — Reallocation Priority: Medium Settler: Okonjo, T. (Hab-6, Unit 19)

Complaint: Received the Phase-Aligned Dietary Restructuring memo. Does not understand what “Phase-Aligned Dietary Restructuring” means. Asks: Is this a reduction? How much? For how long?

You received the memo yourself this morning. You stood in the corridor and read it on your personal display. Three paragraphs. The first thanked the community. The second introduced “a refined caloric framework designed to optimize nutritional throughput across all settlement demographics.” The third encouraged settlers to “embrace this transition as an opportunity to align personal consumption with collective resilience.”

Nobody wrote this memo on Mars. The phrasing has the specific quality of language that has traveled a long distance — composed by a person who has never missed a meal involuntarily, transmitted across however many million kilometers of void, and received here where “caloric” does not mean what it means in a boardroom. Here it means a woman in Hab-6 asking whether her children will eat this week.

You compose a response using Standard Response Template 7-A (“Provisions — Policy Clarification — Supportive”).

Dear Settler Okonjo, Thank you for reaching out regarding the recent dietary guidelines. Phase-Aligned Dietary Restructuring reflects our ongoing commitment to equitable resource distribution across the settlement. Specific allocation details will be communicated through your Hab coordinator within the next provisioning cycle. We appreciate your patience and your partnership in building a sustainable community.

You send it. The word “sustainable” sits in the response like a stone in a shoe.

You open the next ticket.

Ticket #4473 Category: Water Quality — Cosmetic — Minor Priority: Low Settler: Wren, P. (Hab-9, Unit 2)

Complaint: Yellow residue on bathroom fixtures. Faucet, shower head, toilet rim. Residue appeared two weeks ago and will not come off. Smells faintly of sulfur. Settler asks whether the water is safe.

The yellow is sodium maleonitriledithiolate. You know this because you filed twenty-three identical tickets last month and looked it up on your own time. A filtration byproduct. The filters were rated for 4,200 settlers and a ninety-day resupply cycle. The population is 1,307. The last resupply was eleven months ago. The filters are improvising.

You file it under “Water Quality — Cosmetic — Minor” because the alternative — “Infrastructure — Systemic — Critical” — would escalate it to a department that no longer exists. Infrastructure lost its last three technicians to atmospheric maintenance in September. Or October.

Dear Settler Wren, Thank you for reporting this issue. The discoloration you’ve observed is a normal byproduct of our advanced filtration process and poses no health risk. Our maintenance team has been notified and will address the cosmetic concern at the earliest opportunity.

The water is safe. Probably. You send the response.

You stand up. You walk to the window.

Mars.

It is the hour when the light changes — the salmon haze of afternoon thinning and for eleven minutes the sky deepening to something that is not blue but is the closest this planet comes. The dust plain extends to the nearest ridge, the ridge the color of dried blood, and beyond it the sky holds that almost-blue like a breath held too long. Olympus Mons is not visible from here. Six hundred kilometers northwest. But you know it is there the way you know the shape of a room in the dark, and on certain evenings you understand why people came here, why they left everything green and wet and breathable to stand on iron oxide and call it home.

You sit down. You open the next ticket.

Ticket #4474 Category: Housing — Lighting — Interior — Malfunction Priority: Low Settler: Farrow, E. (Hab-2, Unit 11)

Complaint: The light in my unit is wrong. I know that isn’t a category. I looked at the categories and none of them are what I mean. The light is wrong. It’s not broken — it comes on, it goes off, it dims when I ask it to. But the quality of it is wrong. It’s not how light is supposed to look. I’ve been here nine years and the light has always been wrong but I used to not notice and now I notice every day. The light here is not the light I remember. Can someone fix this? Can someone make the light right?

There is no template for this. You have used “Lighting — Interior — Malfunction” and “Lighting — Interior — Request” and “Lighting — Exterior — Schedule” for complaints that were not about lighting, the way a doctor sees patients who come in for a sore knee and leave having talked about their marriage. Settler Farrow is not complaining about a lightbulb. Settler Farrow is complaining about sunlight filtered through an atmosphere one percent of what a human eye evolved to expect. There is no ticket category for the gap between what a species needs and what a planet provides.

You file it under “Lighting — Interior — Malfunction.” The response is warm and competent. It will not fix the light. The light is Martian. You send it.

Ticket #4475 Category: Facilities — Transit — Schedule Inquiry Priority: Low Settler: Babic, N. (Hab-3, Unit 7)

Complaint: Settler requests updated shuttle schedule for Mentor Station. Current posted schedule shows no departures or arrivals past 14 October. Asks if this is an error.

Mentor Station is the transit hub at the colony’s center. Four bays, each wide enough for a mid-class cargo lander, an arrivals board that used to update every six hours. You could stand in the terminal and watch it cycle through arrivals and departures, cargo manifests and crew rotations, and feel that the void between here and Earth was crossable and was being crossed.

The board has been blank since October.

You pass through Mentor Station every morning. The custodial bots still sweep the floors and polish the benches and keep the arrival board lit, its screen glowing a steady, empty white. The station smells of ozone and floor polish — the smell of a place maintaining itself for visitors who are not coming.

Dear Settler Babic, Thank you for your inquiry regarding Mentor Station scheduling. The current schedule is undergoing a system-wide update to reflect revised transit protocols. Updated departure and arrival information will be posted as soon as the new scheduling framework has been finalized. We apologize for any inconvenience.

There is no new scheduling framework. There is no revised transit protocol. The closest field is “Scheduling — Update Pending,” and the system accepts it, and the ticket moves to the resolved column, and the number at the top of your screen decreases by one.

Ticket #4476 Category: Personnel — Missing Person — Report Priority: High Settler: Asante, D. (Hab-14, Unit 1)

Complaint: Neighbor (Lum, V., Hab-14, Unit 4) has not been seen in six days. Settler has knocked on door repeatedly. No response. Requests welfare check.

You flag it. You route it to Security — Community Welfare. The template for missing persons generates automatically — you watch it populate the fields. The department’s listed response time is “within 24 hours.” The last time Security — Community Welfare responded to anything was nineteen days ago.

You open the next ticket.

Ticket #4477 Category: Recreation & Amenities — General — Feedback Priority: Low Settler: Gage, R. (Hab-12, Unit 3)

Complaint: Follow-up to Ticket #4471. Settler has now been on hold for 3 hours and 17 minutes. Vivaldi has looped eleven times. Settler no longer cares about the music. Settler asks: Is anyone there?

Gage, R. The Vivaldi complaint. Three hours ago the problem was the music. Now the problem is the silence behind it.

Is anyone there?

You are here. You are at your desk, in the service office, on the fourth floor of the administrative module. The office holds six desks and one is yours and the other five are empty.

You type a response using no template. This is a deviation. Deviations are logged, reviewed, and may result in a Performance Alignment Consultation.

*Dear Settler Gage, Someone is here. Your call — *

You delete it.

*Dear Settler Gage, I — *

You delete it. The “I” is a deviation. The handbook specifies the collective first person (“we”) or the impersonal (“your Ares Proximity team”). The “I” slipped out like a word in a language you are not supposed to speak at work.

You send Template 2-C again. It does not answer the question.

Ticket #4478 Category: Environmental — Atmospheric — Alert Priority: Critical Settler: Automated System Alert (Hab-7 through Hab-12)

Alert: Atmospheric recycler output in Sectors 7-12 has dropped below 94% efficiency threshold. Affected settlers may notice reduced air quality, headache, or fatigue. Maintenance has been automatically dispatched.

Maintenance has not been automatically dispatched. Maintenance is five people where there used to be forty. The dispatch notice goes to an inbox nobody monitors because the person who monitored it was reassigned to atmospheric maintenance and then was reassigned to wherever people go when atmospheric maintenance cannot maintain the atmosphere.

There is no template for automated alerts. The system does not expect a human in this loop. You are in this loop because every other loop has broken.

You tag it “Escalated — Awaiting Response.” Politeness, you are beginning to understand, is the last infrastructure to fail.

Ticket #4479 Category: General — Inquiry — Youth Submission Priority: Low Settler: Lazenby, K. (Hab-11, Unit 6)

Complaint: When is my mom coming home? She went to fix the air and she said she’d be back before dinner and it’s been four days. Is she coming home for dinner? I did my homework.

You read the ticket. You read it again. The category is wrong — “Youth Submission” is for children requesting recreational programming or educational resources. The system auto-categorized because the age flag triggered the youth filter. The youth filter does not have a category for what this is.

Lazenby. Rena Lazenby. Atmospheric maintenance. She volunteered for the deep-shaft repair on Recycler 9 four days ago because she had the certification and the risk mattered less than the air. You processed her transfer paperwork. The form asked for her emergency contact and she wrote her daughter’s name.

Recycler 9 is three hundred meters below the surface. The shaft’s communication relay failed two days ago. Nobody has come up. Nobody has gone down.

You sit at your desk. Through the window, Mars has gone dark — the almost-blue is gone and the sky is violet and brown, and the first stars are not stars but dead satellites that still orbit because orbit does not require funding or a resupply schedule.

You type:

Dear Kaia,

And you stop. The handbook does not speak to persons. The handbook speaks to settlers, account numbers, contribution credits.

You type:

Kaia, your mom is the kind of person who fixes things. She went to fix something important, because that’s what she does. The people who fix things sometimes take longer than they expect, because the things that need fixing are bigger than anyone thought. But she said she’d come home, and the kind of person who volunteers to fix the air for everyone is the kind of person who keeps their word.

I don’t know when she’s coming home. I wish I did. But I know she’d want you to eat dinner and keep doing your homework and know that the air you’re breathing right now is better because of her.

It would fail a Performance Alignment Consultation on every metric. You send it.

The number at the top of your screen decreases by one.

You stand up. You water Priya’s succulent. You put on your jacket — the thin one, with the Ares Proximity logo on the breast pocket, a stylized mountain that is supposed to be Olympus Mons but looks more like a corporate chevron.

You walk through Mentor Station on the way to your hab. The arrival board glows white and says nothing. The custodial bot is buffing the floor near Bay 3, humming as it works, a low mechanical tone that is not Vivaldi but is not nothing, and you stop for a moment and listen to it.

Mars is cold. Mars is always cold, but tonight the cold is thin — as if the air itself is stretching, as if there is slightly less of it than yesterday. You breathe in and the breath tastes of iron and the faintest sulfur, which is the sodium maleonitriledithiolate, which is the yellow on the faucets, which is the colony’s body showing its bruises.

Tomorrow there will be new tickets. The responses will be warm, competent, and will convey forward momentum.

In your hab you stand at the small window that faces northwest, toward a mountain you have never seen. The sky is dark. You think about Kaia Lazenby doing her homework. You think about Rena Lazenby three hundred meters below the surface. You will not cry because crying is not in the handbook, but you stand at the window for a long time, longer than a person who is fine would stand at a window, and somewhere out there Olympus Mons is enormous and invisible and does not answer and does not arrive and will not resolve your ticket.