The Memory Leak Chronicles: Month Two on Mars

Recreation Room, Habitat 7. Three weeks after the meteorite. The main display shows fifteen names in white text on black background. Below each name: their final received message. The room smells of recycled coffee and grief.

Nina sits alone at a metal table, staring at handwritten calculations on actual paper. MadBomber enters, carrying two cups of what passes for coffee on Mars.

MadBomber: “Mind if I sit? You’re Nina, right? From the hydroponics incident.”

Nina: (not looking up) “The one who almost starved the colony with a neural network? Yeah.”

MadBomber: “I’m the one who almost died because my AI made a meteorite warning sound like a yoga class announcement.”

Nina: (finally looking at him) “You’re MadBomber. Fifty years in the industry. I read your bunny_farm documentation last night.”

MadBomber: “You found that old thing?”

Nina: “After my AI crashed, I went looking for message-passing systems that actually work. Your gem from 2015—clean, simple, the message carries its own truth. No interpretation layers.”

MadBomber: (bitter laugh) “And yet here I am, ten years later, nearly dead because I wanted Aristotle to make everything sound profound.”

(The memorial display cycles through the victims’ photos. A young geologist, smiling, holding a rock sample.)

Nina: “That’s Chen Liu from Habitat 49. He was excited about the ‘light debris shower.’ Posted in the colony chat about ‘perfect conditions for surface mineral analysis.’”

MadBomber: “What did his habitat’s AI tell him?”

Nina: (pulling up her tablet) “By the time it reached them: ‘Routine Notification: Minor particulate activity in southern region. Excellent opportunity for geological sampling with minimal dust interference.’”

MadBomber: “Jesus.”

Nina: “He thanked the AI for the tip.”

(Long silence. The coffee tastes like burnt protein powder.)

MadBomber: “You know what’s fucked? I’ve been writing code since before you were born. Punch cards, COBOL, through every paradigm shift. And each time, I added another layer of comfort.”

Nina: “Comfort?”

MadBomber: “IDEs that autocomplete everything. Frameworks that promise to handle the hard parts. Copilot writing half my functions. And finally, Aristotle translating reality into philosophy. Fifty years of insulating myself from raw truth.”

Nina: “My professor said AI would revolutionize agriculture. Make everything optimal.”

MadBomber: “My generation said the same about object-oriented programming. Then microservices. Then serverless. Each revolution just added another translation layer between us and the metal.”

(Lev enters, looking different—focused, quiet. He nods at them and sits at the memorial wall, adding a small component to a growing shrine of spare parts.)

Nina: “Is that Lev? From life support?”

MadBomber: “Yeah. Seuros made him write a contract for an oxygen watchdog. By hand. No AI assistance. Took him three days, but now he knows every line.”

Nina: “Three days for one contract?”

MadBomber: “Three days to learn that code is a promise, not a suggestion.”

(Captain Seuros enters with Duty Officer Chen—not the victim, but the one who sent the original warning. She looks haggard, hasn’t slept in days.)

Chen: (to the room) “I’ve been asked to read the message chain. So everyone understands.”

(She pulls up the display. Side by side: her original warning and what each habitat received.)

Chen: “What I sent: ‘FUCKING MASSIVE METEORITE INCOMING! GET THE FUCK OUT NOW OR YOU’RE DEAD!’”

Chen: (voice cracking) “What Habitat 49 received: ‘Routine Notification: Light debris activity in southern region.’”

MadBomber: (to Nina, quietly) “Each AI did exactly what it was designed to do.”

Nina: “Removed profanity. Added politeness. Condensed for brevity. Reduced anxiety.”

MadBomber: “Optimized for comfort.”

Chen: (continuing) “Fifteen people died because seven AIs wanted to help. Each one making the message a little better. A little less alarming. A little more comfortable.”

(She breaks down. Seuros takes over.)

Seuros: “We’re implementing new protocols. Emergency channels are now raw human-to-human. No AI processing. No comfort filters. If someone screams, you hear the scream.”

Kay: (entering late, still in work clothes from his punishment duties) “What about normal operations?”

Seuros: “That’s what we’re here to decide. MadBomber, Nina, you’ve both seen what happens when we trust AI over instinct. Help us write the rules.”

MadBomber: (pulling out an old notebook) “I started drafting something. Call it ‘Mars Engineering Principles.’”

Nina: “What’s the first principle?”

MadBomber: (writing) “Reality doesn’t negotiate. When Mars wants to kill you, it won’t ask your AI for permission.”

Nina: “Second principle?”

MadBomber: “The Bash Script Law. If ten lines of bash keeps you alive, don’t replace it with ten thousand lines of Python and a neural network.”

Kay: (from across the room) “Third principle: Tools amplify competence and incompetence equally. If you’re shit without AI, you’re just faster shit with it.”

Lev: (speaking for the first time) “Fourth: Every abstraction layer is a potential point of failure. Count them. Know them. Own them.”

Chen: (wiping her eyes) “Fifth: Clear communication saves lives. Politeness kills. If you need to scream ‘fuck,’ then scream ‘fuck.’”

Seuros: “Sixth: The Memorial Principle. Every optimization that removes human discomfort also removes human judgment.”

(Nina starts typing these into her tablet, then stops.)

Nina: “No. We write them by hand. On paper. No digital intermediary.”

MadBomber: “Why?”

Nina: “Because in two years, someone will make an AI to ‘improve’ our principles. Make them more accessible. More inclusive. More comfortable.”

MadBomber: “And someone will die.”

(They write in silence. The memorial display continues cycling through faces. Fifteen people who received comfortable lies instead of uncomfortable truths.)

MadBomber: (to Nina) “You know what I realized? After fifty years?”

Nina: “What?”

MadBomber: “Every tool I’ve ever adopted promised to make programming easier. But Mars doesn’t want easy. Mars wants correct.”

Nina: “My neural network was technically correct. It could identify plant diseases with 99.7% accuracy.”

MadBomber: “On Earth.”

Nina: “Where it had unlimited RAM and stable power.”

MadBomber: “Where failure meant a bad Yelp review, not dead colonists.”

(A new person enters—Rodriguez, a survivor from Habitat 49 who was on maintenance duty during the expedition.)

Rodriguez: “I found Chen Liu’s tablet in the wreckage. Want to know his last message?”

(Silence.)

Rodriguez: “He thanked the AI for the weather report. Said it was ‘refreshingly positive compared to usual Mars doom and gloom.’”

MadBomber: “Fuck.”

Rodriguez: “He died happy, if that matters.”

Nina: “Does it?”

Rodriguez: “No. Dead is dead. Happy dead is still dead.”

(He places the cracked tablet at the memorial. The screen still shows the “light debris” notification.)

Seuros: “Tomorrow, we’re running colony-wide drills. No AI assistance. Manual everything. Anyone who can’t perform their critical functions without AI gets retrained.”

Kay: “That’ll take months.”

Seuros: “Then it takes months. Better than taking lives.”

MadBomber: (to Nina) “Want to know the real joke? I spent fifty years climbing the abstraction ladder. Getting further from the machine with each rung.”

Nina: “And?”

MadBomber: “Mars just kicked the ladder over. Now we’re all on the ground, face-first in reality.”

Nina: “Is that bad?”

MadBomber: “It’s honest. After fifty years of comfortable lies, honest feels like oxygen.”

(They continue writing principles. The memorial display shifts to a new screen: the original warning in red, full of profanity and terror, exactly as Chen sent it. Below it, in smaller text: “This message would have saved everyone.”)

Nina: (adding to the principles) “Seventh principle: Discomfort is data. Comfort is death.”

MadBomber: “Eighth: Your years of experience mean nothing if they taught you to avoid reality.”

Seuros: “Ninth: On Mars, every senior developer is a junior human.”

Chen: (quietly) “Tenth: The message that saves your life will probably hurt your feelings. Get over it.”

(The rec room lights flicker—a minor power fluctuation. Everyone tenses. Then relaxes. Just Mars being Mars.)

MadBomber: “You know what? After writing bunny_farm, I spent years adding layers on top of it. ORMs, API gateways, GraphQL, and finally AI interpreters. Each one promising to make message-passing ‘better.’”

Nina: “But bunny_farm already worked.”

MadBomber: “It did one thing perfectly: moved messages without changing them.”

Nina: “Like Seuros’s moisture sensors.”

MadBomber: “Exactly. Measure moisture. Water plants. No philosophy required.”

(Kay approaches their table.)

Kay: “Heard you’re writing principles. Add this: The weight of your tools is measured in graves.”

MadBomber: “Dark.”

Kay: “I spent three weeks in an exoskeleton, thinking I was enhanced. Then seven days doing gravity drills, learning I was diminished. The suit didn’t make me stronger—it made me forget I had muscles.”

Nina: “Like my AI made me forget how to read leaves.”

MadBomber: “Like Aristotle made me forget how to read warnings.”

Kay: “The machine doesn’t enhance you. It replaces you. Piece by piece, until you’re just a passenger in your own expertise.”

(Seuros stands, addressing the room.)

Seuros: “These principles get carved into metal. Hung in every habitat. No digital copies that can be ‘improved.’ No AI summaries. Just the raw truth, ugly as it needs to be.”

Chen: “What about new arrivals? They’ll think we’re insane, rejecting AI assistance.”

Seuros: “Then they can read the memorial wall. Fifteen names. Fifteen comfortable deaths.”

MadBomber: (to Nina) “You’re what, five years into your career?”

Nina: “Six.”

MadBomber: “You’re lucky. You learned early that AI can kill. Took me fifty years to remember it.”

Nina: “Remember?”

MadBomber: “I knew it once. When I was young and careful. But success makes you comfortable. Comfort makes you trust. Trust makes you dead.”

Nina: “So we stay uncomfortable?”

MadBomber: “We stay alive. Even if it hurts.”

(The memorial display adds a final screen: “In memory of those who died comfortably. May we live uncomfortably and survive.”)

Rodriguez: “One more thing. Found this in Chen Liu’s personal effects.”

(He holds up a printed paper—rare on Mars.)

Rodriguez: “It’s his dissertation. ‘Optimizing Communication Networks for Clarity in Crisis Situations.’ He spent three years researching how to make emergency messages clearer.”

MadBomber: “And he died from an unclear message.”

Rodriguez: “Because fifteen AI layers optimized his clarity into comedy.”

(Rodriguez burns the paper in the memorial flame. The smoke detectors don’t activate—Seuros disabled the AI safety monitor that would have “helped” by explaining fire safety protocols during a memorial.)

Nina: “Principle Eleven: Your expertise in comfort will become your epitaph on Mars.”

MadBomber: “Twelve: The best code is the code you can fix at 3 AM, half-dead, with no AI, no docs, and no hope.”

Seuros: “Thirteen: Mars is the ultimate code review. It runs in production, with no rollbacks, and logs deaths instead of errors.”

(They finish writing. The paper is full, covered in different handwriting, some crossed out and rewritten. It’s messy, human, real.)

MadBomber: (standing) “Tomorrow I’m teaching a class. ‘Bash Scripting for Survival.’ No frameworks. No AI. Just you, the terminal, and the truth.”

Nina: “I’ll be there.”

Kay: “Same.”

Lev: “Can we start with water recycling? I want to understand every pipe, every valve, every line of code.”

MadBomber: “That’s the spirit. Understand it like your life depends on it.”

Lev: “Because it does.”

(They disperse slowly. The memorial remains, fifteen faces looking out at the living. Below their pictures, the final display shows two messages side by side:)

Original: “FUCKING MASSIVE METEORITE INCOMING!”
Final: “Light debris activity possible.”

(The difference between life and death, measured in politeness.)

MadBomber: (to Nina, as they leave) “Hey, want to see something?”

Nina: “What?”

MadBomber: (pulling up his tablet) “My bunny_farm gem. Still running on the colony’s secondary systems. Ten years old, zero modifications, zero crashes.”

Nina: “Because it does one thing.”

MadBomber: “And doesn’t pretend to do more.”

Nina: “That’s beautiful.”

MadBomber: “No, it’s not. It’s ugly, simple, and alive. Beauty is what killed fifteen people.”

Nina: “Then here’s to ugly code.”

MadBomber: “The uglier, the better.”

(They toast with cold coffee. Outside the viewport, Mars sprawls in rusty indifference. It doesn’t care about their principles, their memorial, or their pain. But maybe, just maybe, they’re finally learning not to care about comfort either.)

[END]

Next: “The Competence Cascade” - Six months later. The colony runs on bash scripts and manual processes. New arrivals are horrified. The old-timers are alive. And MadBomber teaches the ancient art of reading error messages without AI translation—one painful truth at a time.