“Legacy”
Leaning back in his chair, Brian said, “System, call Grandma.”
His AI assistant System replied in a neutral voice, “Calling Grandma.”
A few seconds later, a holoscreen appeared before him with the image of his smiling grandmother. She was sitting on her porch with one of her cats in her lap.
“Hi, Grandma.”
“Hey Brian. How’s my favorite grandson.”
Brian sighed at the old joke. “I’m your only grandson.”
Both smiled and did the punchline, “That still means you’re my favorite.”
After a chuckle, Grandma asked, “So, what’s the occasion for the call?”
“I know it’s a long shot, but I was hoping you might solve a little mystery for me.”
“Oh?”
“I was going through some of dad’s files, and I came across a video of my Fourth Birthday.”
“Oh, you were such a beautiful baby.”
Brian raised an eyebrow. “You seem to say that as if I’ve changed … for the worse.”
Grandma shrugged. “I wasn’t the one who made the system that we all start as beautiful babies, but over decades turn into wrinkly, bitter old sacks, such as myself.”
Brian – who had just been going for a cheap joke – wasn’t sure how to take that.
Grandma smiled. “So what’s your mystery?”
Brain cleared his throat. “Here’s the bit of video I had a question on.”
The view of Grandma shrank to a corner, and the rest of the holoscreen showed the video. A group of adults – including a younger Grandma – were sitting around a table talking, although what they said was hard to hear with the noise of kids playing in another room. A very young Brian rushes in, and climbs up on the chair at the head of the table. Standing up he raises both hands and announces, “I’m going to Mars.”
The adults all stop talking, and there’s an almost awkward silence for a few seconds. Then the man next to Grandma says, “You don’t even have a robot.” At this the adults start laughing. The younger Grandma slaps the man’s arm, but she’s laughing as well. A somewhat confused Brian then gets off the chair and runs into the other room.
The video ended, and the view of Grandma refilled the holoscreen. “I know it’s been almost thirty years,” Brian said, “but was there some old family joke I don’t know about? I’ve watched the whole video but there’s no other mention of robots or Mars. And I don’t remember wanting to be an astronaut.”
For several seconds Grandma was lost in thought as she petted her cat. Then her face lit up. “Oh. Oh!” She then gave a deep laugh. “So, there was this asshole billionaire who, if a tenth of the things said about him after his death were true, then he was an utterly despicable human being. Anyway, one of his pet projects was going to Mars. He was one of those that wanted to spend billions of other people’s money building a colony on Mars to ‘save humanity,’ but wouldn’t spend a dollar of his to clean up pollution here on Earth. Another of his pet projects was building robots.
“Well, when he died, at first it was reported that it was an accident while testing one of his prototype robots. But then it was revealed the ‘testing,’” here she made big air quotes, “was sexual in nature. And very quickly, ‘Going to Mars’ was just slang for ‘Robotically assisted autoerotic asphyxiation.’” After a moment, Grandma added, “It’s likely you heard the phrase from somewhere and just took it at face value and thought it sounded neat.”
Brian nodded a few times. “Okay. Um, thanks. I guess if I find any other odd things, I’ll just let them remain mysteries.”
Go back to the main Monthly Story page, or the main page of my website.
For each story I publish, I like to give the backstory, or anything interesting that happened while writing it. You can see what I wrote for this story on my Published Works page.
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If you liked this story, you might want to check out The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars, a collection of essays on why going to the Moon is better than going to Mars. (In the putting people in rockets and sending them to the actual planet sense. If you want to “Go to Mars” as in the story, then do it safely. Probably don’t use a robot.)
