The Drawer Discovery: Month One on Mars

Captain Seuros sits at his small desk in his quarters, sorting through mission reports while Kira, a colonist who arrived last month, helps organize his gear locker. The room is sparse but functional—every item earning its place through necessity, not sentiment.

Kira opens the bottom drawer and pauses, pulling out a pair of lightweight glasses with a small display element.

Kira: “Captain, what are these? They look like some kind of AR glasses.”

Seuros: (glancing over) “Brilliant Frame. Old ones. Found them in there, did you?”

Kira: (examining them) “Why’d you bring these to Mars? Seems like dead weight for the transport allowance.”

Seuros: “Bought three pairs before I shipped out. Hardware’s open source. Software too.”

Kira: “Open source?” (She turns them over in her hands) “So what, you can see the code?”

Seuros: (setting down his stylus) “Better than that. I can edit it. Disable anything I don’t want. Change how it flows. When you’re 140 million miles from the nearest tech support, you want gear you can actually own.”

Kira: “But why these? I mean, Ray-Ban makes those Meta glasses. Way more premium, better brand recognition, more features—”

Seuros: (a dry chuckle) “Funny you should mention those.”

Kira: “You tried them?”

Seuros: “I did get them. Battery lasted about the same as the Frame—maybe six hours real use. But here’s the thing about ‘premium’ features…”

(He pulls up something on his tablet and shows her a screenshot.)

Seuros: “This is a Facebook ad I got after using the Ray-Bans to survey the northern dunes. ‘Get a trip to Marrakesh this weekend—experience authentic desert landscapes!’”

Kira: (staring at the screen) “Wait… it saw you looking at Mars terrain and tried to sell you a trip to Morocco?”

Seuros: “Meta’s AI doesn’t understand context. It just sees ‘user looking at sandy landscape’ and thinks ‘vacation opportunity.’ The glasses were mining my visual data to build an advertising profile, even on Mars. Even when I’m doing geological surveys for colony expansion.”

Kira: “That’s… insane.”

Seuros: “That’s business models. The Ray-Bans aren’t glasses with AI—they’re data collection devices that happen to let you see. The ‘premium’ features are premium for Meta, not for you.”

(He picks up the Frame glasses from her hands.)

Seuros: “These? When I need to identify mineral compositions in rock formations, I wrote a custom analysis module. When the standard navigation overlay was eating too much power, I stripped it down to essentials. When the built-in AI started suggesting Earth-based solutions for Mars problems, I replaced it with local models trained on colony data.”

Kira: “You can just… do that?”

Seuros: “Open source means open. Not ‘open for marketing’ or ‘open for community feedback.’ Actually open. Source code, hardware designs, everything. If I need these glasses to last eight hours instead of six, I can optimize the power management myself. If I need them to interface with our colony systems instead of Earth servers, I can write that integration.”

Kira: (sitting down on the edge of the bed) “So the ‘inferior’ glasses are actually better?”

Seuros: “Depends on what you value. If you want brand prestige and seamless integration with Earth’s social media ecosystem, get the Ray-Bans. If you want tools that work for your mission instead of someone else’s business model, get something you can actually control.”

(He holds up the glasses to the light, checking the condition of the display.)

Seuros: “Hardware sovereignty isn’t sexy, Kira. But it’s the difference between having tools and being a tool. On Mars, that distinction keeps you alive.”

Kira: “The Marrakesh ad is still killing me. Like, how did it even—”

Seuros: “Because it’s optimized for engagement, not accuracy. Earth-based AI sees patterns everywhere because on Earth, there’s always another data point, another user to target, another ad to serve. Out here, accuracy matters more than engagement metrics.”

Kira: “Do the Frame glasses still work?”

Seuros: (a slight smile) “Want to find out?”

(He powers them on, and a minimal interface appears in the display. Clean, functional, with none of the promotional overlays or social media integration of the consumer models.)

Seuros: “Modified the bootup sequence—found I could optimize power by keeping the camera off until actually needed. The Lua script was triggering much later anyway. Battery life went from six hours to nearly ten. Also found why the original battery drained so fast: Bluetooth scanning was way too aggressive. Fixed that too.”

Kira: “You just… reverse engineered and patched commercial hardware?”

Seuros: “Found an RCE exploit in the BLE stack while I was at it. Reported it, fixed it locally. The FPGA code in their repo is actually high quality—made the modifications easier.”

(He taps the side of the glasses.)

Seuros: “And I swapped out their Noa assistant with my own model. You know why? Because I’m not waiting sixteen minutes for a signal to Earth just so ChatGPT can tell me ‘Yes, I heard you, how can I help you today?’ when I need to identify mineral composition in an emergency.”

Kira: “And they still work after two years?”

Seuros: “Because I can maintain them. When the original firmware had a memory leak, I fixed it. When a hardware revision broke compatibility, I wrote a patch. When the standard AI models became obsolete, I swapped in better ones. Try doing that with locked hardware.”

(He sets the glasses back in the drawer carefully.)

Seuros: “Brought three pairs because repair parts are scarce. Had to be strategic about what tech to bring.”

Kira: “Strategic?”

Seuros: (his expression darkening) “Three supply cargo bays got jettisoned en route when Astronomer’s data infrastructure contracts got pulled. Turns out their CEO got caught on kiss cam at a Coldplay concert… with his Chief People Officer. While married to someone else.”

Kira: “Wait, what?”

Seuros: “Andy Byron. Kiss cam at Gillette Stadium, July 2025. Chris Martin even made a joke about it. Wife deleted her socials, investigation launched, CEO resigned, stock crashed, clients fled. When Astronomer’s contracts got pulled, the mothership lost data sync on three cargo modules—couldn’t verify contents, couldn’t track inventory. Safety protocols kicked in and auto-ejected them rather than risk contaminated or mislabeled supplies reaching Mars.”

(He gestures toward the cramped quarters.)

Seuros: “That’s why we’re rationing food cubes and recycling components from failed experiments. That’s why every tool in this room had to earn its weight allowance twice. And that’s why I learned something about tech ownership before leaving Earth: if you can’t modify it, you don’t own it. And if you don’t own your tools, they’ll own you.”

Kira: “The Ray-Ban ads are still haunting your feed, aren’t they?”

Seuros: (closing the drawer) “Deleted Facebook before launch. Some dependencies you cut clean.”

Later, as Kira helps finish organizing the gear locker, she finds herself thinking differently about the devices around her. Every piece of tech in Seuros’s quarters is either open source or modified beyond recognition. Nothing is stock. Nothing is serving two masters.

She picks up her own tablet—a standard Earth model, locked down, constantly phoning home. For the first time, she wonders what it’s reporting about her work patterns, her sleep cycles, her conversations. On Mars, privacy isn’t paranoia—it’s survival.

Outside the small porthole window, the Martian landscape stretches endlessly—a harsh environment that demands tools you can trust completely. Here, more than anywhere, the difference between premium and dependable becomes crystal clear.

And somewhere on Earth, an AI is still trying to figure out why someone would look at sand dunes and not want a vacation package.

Next in the Mars Chronicles: “The Observatory Observations” - where fresh colonist Chen discovers that augmented reality overlays can blind you to the reality that matters most, and Captain Seuros explains why the best interface is often no interface at all.