No. 173

The probe touched down at 0834 hours. By 0842 it had deployed its sensors and at 0909 it activated the transfer field.

I was the first person to be transported to Mars through the energy-elevator.

Within weeks the process had been refined enough that visiting another planet was as simple as walking through a door. Even my neighbor managed to get a ticket to go. I’m still not sure how he managed to do that, if they’d asked me first I’d have put him on the black list.

Anyway, the problems started soon after. At first, nobody noticed the glitches. People started arriving centimeters to the left of where they were supposed to, or two-thousandths of a second late. No big deal. Everyone had stopped paying attention by then.

By the time the margin of error had grown enough to be clearly visible, it was too late to cancel the visas and the program was making too much money to freeze.

So they sent me back with the nonspecific mission to “fix the problem”. Of course, what they didn’t know was that the problem wasn’t on the Martian end of the trip. It was on Earth.

Do you remember Earth?