The Martian Code of Ethics

What a fucked up few months we've had. Our first pandemic. That wasn't too bad, some people are thinking. Oh, you just wait, friend. Shit ain't even started.

Flash forward a few years and there's smoke on every horizon. The air's acrid and putrid. The flies just won't go away. Crops burn. Rivers no longer exist. The oceans are salt flats. Humans either live at the poles, underground or on Mars.

Those who could afford it escaped to the red planet in 2021. After the western United States exploded, taking Canada and most of the Pacific with it, shit went south. It was kinda fun for a while. Watching it on the news was exciting. But then things got exciting in the streets so we stopped watching TV and began watching our backs.

Many people disappeared one night. We woke up and half the planet was gone. Empty beds. Quiet neighbourhoods. Empty launchpads where the rockets once stood. At first we assumed they'd come get us, or at least send a message.

We wouldn't have ever known if it wasn't for the cast-offs, rejects, outcasts, and condemned banished back to Earth for transgressing one of the rules of the Martian Code of Ethics.

It read very much like the American Declaration of Independence with a bit of the Tao and a sprinkling of Battlestar Galactica. The outcasts spoke of cities of gold and rivers of milk and honey. People communicate telepathically and hate has been expunged once and for all.

For us heathens, scorched earth remains. Like beasts we scratch on our bellies in the dirt, eating roots and roaches and drinking toxic slime. We die early. Thirty-five is old and wise. We've forgotten all we once knew. I'm writing this using a stick and some mud.

I myself have been banished. The outcasts cast me out. I live at the bottom of a burned-out elevator shaft in an apartment complex in what used to be the capital city all bustling and noisy with laughter. I hope life is different for you.