Uber Eats on Mars

A short story

“Dude, you know we’re not supposed to talk about it,” Santiago said as he wriggled his legs and shook his arms to get comfortable in the cryosleep chamber. Not that it mattered because there was no such thing as comfortable or uncomfortable in cryosleep—only unconsciousness. Still, habits were hard to break. He straightened his knees and bent his elbows. 

Better, he thought.

A low hum from the ship’s engines filled the spacecraft. The Earth loomed large in one of the two windows; a twinkling starscape illuminated the other. Random clicks and whirs sounded like the machinery was trying to speak to the two astronauts in an exotic language. 

“I just wanna know,” Harrison said from his adjacent chamber. “They’d better be paying you and me the same, that’s all.”  

“We’re being paid ten thousand times more to deliver a pastrami sandwich to Mars than you were ever paid to deliver one to West End Avenue. That’s good enough for me and should be good enough for you. Plus, we get to sleep while making the delivery, which we can’t do on our bikes—not unless we want to end up as pastrami ourselves. Not to mention that we’ll be famous when we get back.”

“What good is being famous and rich if you’re not alive to enjoy it?” Harrison’s brain lit with all the possible disasters that could happen during their six-hundred-thirty-eight-day, two-hundred-seventy-five million kilometer trip to Mars. This job couldn’t have come at a worse time, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. Marcy had just proposed to Harrison the day before Uber selected him to be one of the two delivery astronauts, a mission that would delay their wedding for years, assuming he survived, but would also grant them riches they had never imagined. Back and forth they went, discussing Uber’s offer for twenty-four hours, not sleeping, barely eating, and in the end, Marcy and Harrison decided the risk was worth it because of how this job could change their lives. 

“You’re still worried? Even with all the safety equipment, system redundancy, backups, and remote updates built into Uber Mars? This is the safest spacecraft ever—”

“It’s the dangers that nobody can predict I worry about the most. There are still zillions of unknowns between Earth and Mars.”

“Despite the colonists having arrived safely?”

“Despite the colonists having arrived safely.”

Harrison glanced at the interior display to the left of his head. Three green dots, everything nominal. Still, he shivered from fear he could not shake. He tried to fluff the pillow where his head would rest for the next one and three-quarter years, but the pillow’s polymer resisted fluffing. 

“If you’re this frightened, why didn’t you stick to delivering pizza and falafel, where the worst that can go wrong is crashing into a suddenly-opened car door, spinning over the top, landing on your head, suffering only bruises and maybe a concussion, and then getting smacked by an SUV and dying,” Santiago said. 

“What?”

“My point is that there are hazards everywhere, and it’s probably more dangerous to deliver meals by bike in Manhattan than to fly to Mars. You know as well as I do that if something unforeseen goes wrong while we’re asleep, the AI will fix the problem in seconds, but if it can’t, Mission Control will send Uber Mars new computer code to correct whatever’s broken and the code will self-execute without us having to do anything.”

“What if a hacker—?”

“Just shut up already, and enjoy the sleep and the pleasure of knowing you’ll make sixteen Martian colonists happy when you hand them pastrami sandwiches from Katz’s with Swiss cheese, Russian dressing, and coleslaw on rye bread. I don’t know what the colonists’ food is like, but I'm sure it’s not as good as this.”

“Think they’ll make a movie about us?” Santiago asked.

“You can count on it. That’s why—”

Sixty seconds to cryosleep, boomed a voice over the speaker. 

“—Uber’s doing this—for publicity.” With the cryosleep clock ticking down, Harrison spoke faster. “Uber, Uber Eats, Uber Doc, Uber Plumber, Uber Massage—Uber will be even more ubiquitous after we deliver the meals.”

“Do you think the colonists will tip?”

“Very funny.” 

“You know they originally ordered Rubens, but even Uber Eats couldn’t figure out how to ensure the sandwiches remained hot without liquifying over the twenty-one months.”

Thirty seconds to cryosleep. 

A transparent covering slid over them, sealing them with a whoosh. 

A sweet, lavender scent filled their chambers. The pre-sleep sedative. Cryosleep involved several drugs and environmental changes. First, an inhaled tranquilizer, followed by a cocktail of pharmaceuticals you drank, then lowering the cylindrical chambers’ temperature to ten degrees above freezing, and finally, a mix of gasses that remained in the chamber the entire time. The secret ingredient was a drug derived from a phosphorescent fish living in the Mariana Trench, eleven thousand meters below the ocean’s surface.

A team of NASA specialists had beautifully wrapped the pastrami sandwiches in twenty-four-carat gold foil and meticulously positioned them inside their own special stasis machine the day before Uber Mars launched from Cape Canaveral on May 4, 2031. A one-meter cube with a quad-layer wall of titanium, cork, fiberglass, and concrete, the sandwich transport machine, STM, was filled with a mix of argon, helium, and nitrogen, cooled to precisely one degree Celsius and bathed in a static electric field of zero-zero-point-two Coulombs. To protect the sandwiches from one of the delivery astronauts succumbing to temptation, Salvador and Harrison needed to simultaneously enter different five-digit codes on the STM’s lock pad to open the sandwich chamber. 

“I’m a little nervous, too,” Santiago admitted. His voice sounded tinny over the inter-chamber comms. He slid his shaking hands over his bald head. 

“It’ll grow back,” Harrison replied. Bald was mandatory for extended space missions because even while in stasis, their hair would continue to grow, albeit more slowly, and long hair could interfere with their space suits’ seal. 

Ten seconds to cryosleep. 

Nine, eight, seven, six…

“Goodnight, Santiago.”

“Sweet dreams, Harrison.”

Two, one, zero.

Uber Mars’ interior lights shut off to conserve power, as did the ship’s life-support systems, except for the cryosleep cylinders. The only light that stayed on was a three-centimeter tall LED indicator that pulsed green imprinted with the words DATA LINK OKAY.

Seventeen days, six hours, and thirty-three seconds later, the LED’s color changed to orange, and the display read, “DATA RECEPTION IN PROGRESS.”

Two minutes later, the text changed again: “NEW CODE ACCEPTED,” followed by “EXECUTING INSTRUCTIONS.”

All of that occurred without the Uber delivery astronauts waking.

Also, without the Uber delivery guys becoming conscious, Uber Mars changed course toward Jupiter, accelerating as it approached the massive planet. Three years later, Uber Mars received a second course correction, hurtling it toward the Sun at an even faster speed, and when it passed by the Sun the following year, Uber Eats sped to one-point-two percent of the speed of light, thanks to the star’s gravitational assist, solar wind, and updated computer code that improved Uber Mars’ thrust.

Seven years later, had Santiago and Harrison been awake, they would have had a glorious close-up view of Halley's Comet with its shimmering twenty-two million kilometer tail between Neptune and Pluto’s orbit, and in 2055 they would have been the first humans to have seen a ringed rogue planet wandering in the interstellar void billions of kilometers from Earth.

Two-thousand-sixty-six years after its launch, Uber Mars parked in orbit around a planet in the Tau Ceti solar system. 

A massive purple and silver spherical craft with a dozen kilometer-long segmented-metal tentacles attached to the underside approached Uber Mars. Its exterior door, located in the center of the undulating tentacles, opened wide, swallowing Uber Mars like a jellyfish consuming its prey. 

Uber Mars rested on a large dinner-plate-shaped platform inside the alien ship.

Two creatures with bodies shaped like asparagus stalks, heads like foxes, and legs like Komodo Dragons, entered the Earth craft. One of the aliens turned off Santiago and Harrison’s cryosleep systems while the other powered on the interior lights. The cryosleep chambers’ clear covering slid open with a hiss. The aliens hovered over the Earthlings, waiting for them to rise from stasis. 

Two minutes later, Santiago opened his eyes, blinked, and screamed. 

Harrison screamed, too, and the combined volume of their voices nearly cracked the aged spacecraft’s hull.

One of the aliens said, “Welcome to Prigesux! We have waited a long time for your arrival, and we are glad you are here.”

“What the—?” Santiago started to say, “fuck,” but even in the fog of post-cryosleep, he was perceptive enough to restrain from profanity lest a bad word anger their captors.

Santiago sat up in his chamber, and Harrison followed suit. 

“Where are we?”

“I said at Prigesux, part of the Tau Ceti star system, eleven-point-nine light years from Earth. You’ve been traveling for over a thousand of your years.” 

Santiago blinked so hard that the sound echoed off the craft’s interior walls. 

Harrison’s face turned pale, and a sea of nausea rose from his belly. 

Both Uber astronauts gripped the side of their sleep chambers as if they were rollercoaster cars. 

“Why?”

“Our species loves to eat more than anything; we relish new flavors, textures, and aromas, especially meats.” The alien inhaled through its pink, bulbous nose, placed a hand on Santiago’s shoulder, and opened its mouth wide, exposing four rows of bone-white teeth, two on top and one below. Its dark green forked tongue flitted in and out. “We sent the course correction instructions to your ship, overriding the original programming. We’ve done this thousands of times before with myriad other species. This is how we sample new foods.”

It poked Santiogo’s arm with its longest of eight fingers. 

Santiago and Harrison pressed against the cryosleep chambers’ far side, trying to put as much space between them and the two aliens. 

The alien’s hand slid down Harrison’s body to his thigh.

“When a species such as yours reaches a level of technological advancement where artificial intelligence can control, reroute, and repair spacecraft, we capture them. In addition to your ship’s route, we also coded improvements to the engine, shortening the trip by decades and increasing the potency of your cryosleep so you remained alive for all that time. The improvements we made kept the objects of our desire from becoming stale and tasteless.” 

Santiago tried to swallow, but his throat was desert-dry. 

Harrison took in air with wheezes. 

“We have monitored Earth for a long time. We’ve learned your language, understand your culture and television, and know your history, but your tastes are still unknown to us. We live for flavor. It’s the difference between seeing a picture of—what do you call it?—a sirloin steak and tasting that steak. I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Santiago didn’t know if he should nod or shake his head, but his paralyzed muscles thwarted him from doing either.

His eyes misted, and a sheen of tears fogged his view. 

The alien continued, “Where are the pastrami sandwiches?”

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If you enjoyed Uber Eats on Mars, I think you’ll also like The Planet at the End of the Rainbow.