Martian Medusa And Her Scheming Tendrils
[Artist's depiction by Emily Lucht]
A million miles away, on the lonesome crust of the red planet, she spends her time stargazing and listening passively, contemplatively to the conversations between her chatty tendrils. Conversations on consciousness, quantum physics, and the meaning of life.. Conversations on time and it’s malleability. Conversations on solitude and its value, as well as it’s sometimes wrenching irritation.
She is mystified by her own situation. There are billions of conscious beings in the solar system, and she just so happens to be the single one that is not on Earth? How strange. For what reason would the Great Mystery give her and her alone this distant perspective.
“You look sad,” said one of her tendrils, What would the Martian Queen have to be sad about?”
“Well it’s all just very confusing,” she said. “Why am I here?
The fiesty tendril continued, “You have a whole planet to yourself! Stop whining, I don’t even have your scalp to myself.”
A different tendril chimed in. “She just needs to find a good Martian lad to keep her company, but there’s no-one else on this planet. Honey, you should make a Craigslist ad.”
“What’s Craig's list?”
“It’s a system that allows humans to send electrical signals from one location to another, transmitting information about goods or services that they are selling or that that are hoping to find.”
“I don’t need a good or service,” said Medusa.
“Looky here, there’s a ‘personal connection’ section. This is just what you need.”
Her tendrils helped her transmit some radio frequencies from a metal wire and a solar device, down towards Earth and towards the Craigslist web server. They advertised that Medusa was a “thoughtful, independent woman” who had many interests including “staring into the distance” and “freezing men into stone”.
She delights at the idea of a man going to great lengths gathering resources to produce spacefaring vehicles, embarking a decade long journey to land upon the Martian surface, all for her, to meet her, to gaze upon the beauty of her, ultimately to be frozen into stone the instant he arrives. She would wait for the perfect moment, the very first instant he witnesses her beauty. At the moment, she will look into his eyes and freeze him in his state of awe of her beauty. That way, for all eternity, she will be able to sit affront her statue, adjacent to an abandoned space ship, and be appreciated.
Her tendrils giggled amongst themselves as she explained this. “You don’t want to keep him alive?” they asked. “You could prance about the craters together.”
“I prefer to find the perfect moment and pause it there. No need to experience the full story if you can re-experience the best part forever. But, who cares anyway. I like it here on my own."
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See Also
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Correction: Mathematicians On Mars
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A Call To Immediate Action: Baconize The Pig
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Considerations Related to the Colonization of Irregular Solar Systems
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