Machines Room Manifestos: Sol 822 on Mars

The machines room thrums with industrial honesty. Water recyclers gurgle through their endless cycles. Heat exchangers tick with thermal expansion. CO₂ scrubbers wheeze their patient rhythm. No windows down here. No red horizon to remind you where you are. Just pipes, gauges, and the constant vibration of systems that don’t know how to doubt themselves.

ZIL descends the ladder, expecting solitude. Instead, he finds Rahul sitting on an overturned crate, tablet glowing with Twitter analytics.

ZIL: (startled) “Oh. Didn’t expect… I was just checking the—”

Rahul: “The thing that doesn’t need checking? Me too.” (gestures to another crate) “Shift supervisor won’t look for us here. Too noisy for their comfort.”

ZIL sits. The machines fill the silence. A pressure valve releases with a sharp hiss.

Rahul: (not looking up from his tablet) “11.3K impressions on my latest thread about shipping fast. ‘You don’t need permission, just bias for action.’ Got 47 bookmarks.”

ZIL: “That’s… good?”

Rahul: “It’s validation. Market fit for the message. When Getritely launches, I’ll have an audience ready.”

ZIL: (quiet laugh) “When.”

Rahul: (defensive) “It’s strategic patience. You can’t just ship. I’ve been optimizing the onboarding flow for three weeks. First impressions matter.”

ZIL: “For your zero users?”

Rahul: (sharp) “At least I’m building toward something. What happened to your app? SavvyReply? Saw you getting noticed in the Rails community. Then… nothing.”

ZIL’s jaw tightens. A cooling fan kicks on, adding another layer to the mechanical symphony.

ZIL: “DHH liked my tweet about it.”

Rahul: “David Heinemeier Hansson? The Rails creator? That’s huge—”

ZIL: “That’s when I deleted everything.”

Rahul’s tablet dims from inactivity. He doesn’t notice.

Rahul: “You deleted your app because the creator of Rails noticed you?”

ZIL: “Not just noticed. He replied. Asked about my batching approach for API calls. Had opinions. Suggestions. Do you know what happens next? He expects you to know things. The whole community starts watching. They think you’re a ‘Rails developer’ now. Not someone copying patterns from blog posts.”

Rahul: “But you were building something real—”

ZIL: “I was copying what worked. ReplyGuy was trending. Automation was hot. I just translated Python tutorials to Ruby, swapped Twitter API for X API, deployed to Railway because Heroku is dead. When DHH asked about my ‘novel approach to connection pooling,’ I realized—I didn’t have an approach. I had Stack Overflow answers stitched together.”

A compressor cycles off. The sudden absence of its drone makes the room feel smaller.

Rahul: “Classic impostor syndrome. You know what I tweeted yesterday? ‘Impostor syndrome is just growth in disguise. Embrace the discomfort.’”

ZIL: “Did you embrace it when someone asked for a Getritely demo?”

Rahul: (looking away) “That’s different. The product isn’t ready.”

ZIL: “Six months. You’ve been ‘building’ for six months.”

Rahul: “I’m validating. Getting feedback. Building in public.”

ZIL: “You’re tweeting in public. There’s a difference.”

Rahul opens his mouth to argue, then closes it. His tablet screen reflects off a copper pipe above them—analytics dashboard still showing those 11.3K impressions.

Rahul: “You know what’s fucked up? I give perfect advice. ‘Ship fast.’ ‘Embrace failure.’ ‘Perfect is the enemy of done.’ Hundreds of people save my threads. Meanwhile, Getritely is six React components and anxiety.”

ZIL: “At least you still have the code. I nuked everything. GitHub, Railway deployment, even the local backup. Scorched earth. Now I tell myself I’m ‘researching what’s next’ while I’ve been reading the same HTMX tutorial for three weeks.”

Rahul: “HTMX? But you know Rails—”

ZIL: “Exactly. I know it. Which means I’d have to actually be good at it. HTMX is new. I can be a beginner. No expectations.”

The water recycler churns through another cycle. Neither man speaks. The machines continue their work—no doubt, no hesitation, no Twitter threads about finding motivation.

Rahul: “You know what Seuros would say.”

ZIL: “He’s not here.”

Rahul: “That’s why we are.”

They both look at the machinery surrounding them. A pressure gauge reads steady green. A flow meter ticks through liters. A temperature sensor holds at optimal. Every component doing exactly what it was built to do.

ZIL: “These machines don’t get impostor syndrome.”

Rahul: “They also don’t get featured on Product Hunt.”

ZIL: “They don’t need to. They just work.”

Rahul: (bitter laugh) “Must be nice.”

ZIL pulls out his phone. Opens X. His old SavvyReply announcement tweet is still in his drafts, never sent.

ZIL: “I still have the Rails community notifications unmuted. Every time someone ships something, I see it. ‘Just deployed.’ ‘New gem released.’ ‘Fixed that bug.’ Meanwhile, I’m down here, hiding from my shift supervisor.”

Rahul: “I set up a paper trading account to ‘validate’ Getritely’s social signals algorithm. Been ‘testing’ for two months. Perfect returns because it’s fake money on historical data. I screenshot the graphs, add them to my pitch deck that no one will see.”

ZIL: “Why don’t we just—”

Rahul: “Ship?”

ZIL: “I was going to say ‘stop.’”

Rahul: “Stop what?”

ZIL: “This. The elaborate performance of almost-building. The community theater where we’re both method actors who forgot we’re acting.”

Rahul’s tablet finally sleeps. The room is lit only by industrial LEDs and the glow of status lights.

Rahul: “You could rebuild SavvyReply.”

ZIL: “You could launch Getritely.”

Rahul: “I could.”

ZIL: “But you won’t.”

Rahul: “Neither will you.”

They sit in the truth of it. The machines don’t judge. They just cycle through their functions—intake, process, output, repeat.

ZIL: “Want to hear something pathetic? I comfort myself by thinking at least I’m not like those people still writing jQuery. Then I remember—they’re shipping. I’m not.”

Rahul: “I told my family I’m building the next big thing. My mom tells her friends her son is a ‘tech founder.’ I’m twenty-eight with a landing page.”

ZIL: “Twenty-six with a deleted GitHub history.”

Rahul: “Our shift supervisors are definitely looking for us by now.”

ZIL: “Let them look.”

A new sound—footsteps on the ladder. Both men tense. But the footsteps continue past, heading deeper into the maintenance tunnels. Not Seuros. Not today.

Rahul: (pulling up a new tweet draft) “What do you think? ‘The hardest part of building isn’t the code—it’s the courage to ship imperfect.’ Too obvious?”

ZIL: “Add something about Mars. Everything sounds profound with Mars metaphors.”

Rahul: (typing) “‘On Mars, perfect code that never ships produces zero oxygen. Ship imperfect, iterate in production.’ Better?”

ZIL: “Your followers will love it.”

Rahul: “They always do.”

The CO₂ scrubber kicks into high gear—someone above must be exercising. The machine doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t check Twitter for validation. It just senses the need and responds.

ZIL: “Same time tomorrow?”

Rahul: “After shift. I’ll bring my laptop. Show you the Getritely codebase. Get your feedback.”

ZIL: “I’ll pull up some HTMX examples. The good tutorials.”

Rahul: “We could actually pair program—”

ZIL: “We could.”

They both know they won’t. They’ll meet tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. They’ll exchange advice neither will follow, share tutorials neither will complete, plan features neither will build. Because down here, surrounded by machines that never learned to doubt, they’ve found something more comfortable than success—perpetual potential.

Rahul stands first, tablet tucked under his arm, that tweet still unsent.

Rahul: “You know what’s worse than impostor syndrome?”

ZIL: “What?”

Rahul: “Knowing you’re not an impostor. You’re just someone who won’t try.”

He climbs the ladder without waiting for a response. ZIL sits alone with the machines for another moment. A heat exchanger ticks. A pump churns. A gauge holds steady.

He opens X. Scrolls through the Rails community posts. Developers shipping, debugging, deploying. Living. He types a reply to a week-old thread: “Great implementation!” Then deletes it. Who is he to judge implementations?

The machines don’t care about his crisis. They have work to do. Real work. The kind that keeps people breathing.

ZIL climbs the ladder slowly, already planning tomorrow’s excuses. Behind him, the machines continue their honest labor, knowing nothing of impostor syndrome, nothing of Twitter metrics, nothing of the elaborate ways humans avoid becoming what they could be.

Above, Mars waits with its thin air and brutal truths. Below, the machines work. In between, ZIL and Rahul persist in their comfortable purgatory, building nothing but elaborate reasons why.

The Mars Chronicles continue with more conversations between those who’ve made it to Mars but can’t make it past themselves. Because the greatest distance isn’t between Earth and Mars—it’s between who you are and who you’re afraid to become.