Tales from the yeast vat
My buddy Mike and I came here on the 5th trip of Hercules III to Mars. Here at the Colonial Settlement Fargo 17 we live, work, and try to keep the sane mind. Which is not as easy as it may seem.
I've been working as a Chief of Nourishing Substances for half a year now. The job is not that different from the one I had on Earth. I am in charge of five yeast vats, two of them are protein yeasts, one amino acid, and vitamins yeasts and another two are fat yeasts. We brought them from Earth and modified them just a little bit so they are more adapted to Martian life.
Apart from that I also control the production of the chlorella in the three-vat facility next dome. This is a bit trickier as it needs more stuff to grow properly - lighting, pH control, minerals, agitation, and aeration. To be honest, it is a pain in the ass.
I have 8 workers under me at the Nourishing Substances facilities which take care of almost everything. They clean the vats, collect yeast and chlorella, dry them, and prepare them for transportation to the Food Processing facility. They are good guys (except maybe for Brad, he's been rather hostile to me at the beginning, but we are on better terms now), and most of the time I spend in the lab - either performing QA or experimenting on the new strains of yeast and algae.
I've just mentioned the domes and you may have thought of those beautiful glassy domes drawn by the science fiction of the 20th century. Shiny and transparent - with Utopia underneath. Well, the reality is ... complicated. We have domes, all right, but ours are built inside the underground caverns in the web of caves found by the intelligence team when they first started scanning the surface for places to live.
But the bubble shape - that idea survived. After all - the best shape if you want to pump something that is surrounded by an essentially empty atmosphere with a hundred thousand pascals of air.
Unfortunately, we wouldn't get much sun heat even if we lived on the surface. The need for water drove all of the settlements to the poles of the planet, so the conditions on the surface are not that bad, but not ideal.
I live in the dome nearby that is connected with my working stations via the network of tunnels. These are inflatable too, and they have worn out since their installation. Every now and then you'll hear that another air alarm went off because of some small hole in one of the passages. Yeah, air alarm, that's a thing here. There are some talks about redesigning the tunnels, making them from reinforced Martian concrete. An acquaintance of mine at the Beta 2 Scientific Station works on this project and they've had some success with prototyping the building technology. But they say it'll be at least a month or two before we can start changing the tunnels.
My living quarters are in the Dome F17-9, which is located on the second level of the cave. It's a small place - a bed, a small wardrobe, a little desk with light shelves, and a small shower which disposes criminally small amounts of water to wash. I'm lucky to have another one at work - as workers of food tech, we must take every precaution not to contaminate the culture.
And boy do you need that shower. The smell - how do I describe it to you, it's acidic, fruity, and not that bad in small doses - we can eat our product after a small amount of cooking. But it slips through the lids that are not tight, it flies up in the air when you drain the medium from the vat. It absorbs into your nails, hair, and skin. Don't forget that the vats are kept at a comfy 38 C level so that our little friends grow faster and healthier, so they generate a lot of heat. We're lucky the air conditioning removes any excessive moisture that we might have – otherwise, I would call our facility "The Fermenting Jungle".
We once had a spill of algae medium - one of the valves has given up and leaked. It wasn't a lot, but those precious liters were enough to fill the room with moisture and the smell of blooming chlorella. And of course, we had to prolong the shifts to clean and sterilize everything. We're lucky we did not have to discard the whole batch - guys at Red Dune 1 had to borrow yeast samples from us when their vat died and a couple of hundred liters of yeast died and spoiled.
The whole "city" feeds off a small nuclear reactor that is located conveniently in the next cave. Of course, we wouldn't want to be close if that thing had a malfunction or blew up. So the cave next door it is. We get electricity from it that feeds everything here - from a simple table lamp to big vat heaters and lighting and safety systems all around the block.
Another thing you don't expect at the very beginning - the amount of sealing doors here. Almost every module can be closed shut from others should anything happen. And when you see these doors everywhere you go - that's nerve-wracking.
Yesterday I was put on a task with a couple of guys from the Biology and Medicine facility. I've been growing some modified yeast and chlorella samples lately and now we go outside and put them on the surface in what are essentially big petri dishes to be open for elements. We want to see how well have we prepared them for life in Martian conditions. This sort of experimenting has been going on here since the first settlements rose.
I've been trying to do some experiments in my free time. The food here is not awesome. Bricks of processed yeast and algae with occasional rehydrated dessert brought from earth or a piece of vegetable grown in experimental labs here on Mars. But I'll be honest with you, those tomatoes are not the same as back home.
So as I did my research it turned out, that you can put all sorts of flavors into the colorless bricks of goo we call food. I've managed to create a recipe for chicken-like broth and beef-like broth with the help of my chemist friend. The good thing about this place - the internet lines here are kept in order. It may be not blazingly fast, but fast enough for you to get a reasonable amount of data from the main storage or send a genome sequence to your colleagues in a matter of seconds.
We've recently collected parts for a new dome and materials to build another vat – the Chief of Civil Operations has given the green light to my projects with modified microorganisms. I am also launching an experimental chlorella station at the surface by the end of the week. We'll see how well it would perform without artificial lighting (however we cannot go without heaters yet). If this works out, it could be a revolution in Martian algae-growing research. And it would also be a small step towards living on a surface instead of a cavern. That's the dream.
It seems that dreams are what brought us here in the first place. Dreams and hopes for a better future. A future where we got a clean start and did not screw it up. At least not yet.
Tomorrow's my birthday. I'm turning 46 on this cold, windy, and messy planet. If you looked at it from space, you could think that no life can survive here. And yet, here we are. Sitting in our borrows and digging new ones. Peeking at the surface and driving around on rovers. Life here is as precious as it is rare. It should be impossible but it is real.
Bob K., Chief of Nourishing Substances facility
Stardate 36.08.21 21:56 UMT (Universal Mars Time)