I, Mars

The Story

Emil Barton is an eighty-year-old man living in the abandoned cities of Mars. He has been marooned on the planet since 2037, when an atomic war on Earth prompted a total evacuation of all colonial outposts. Barton, left behind, has spent his long, solitary exile surrounded by the ghosts of his own ingenuity. On the evening of his eightieth birthday, a phone in his home—silent for two decades—suddenly begins to ring. When he answers, he finds himself speaking to a recorded, automated transcription of his own voice at age twenty. This younger version of himself, arrogant and vibrantly alive, mocks the old man’s frailty and his desperate, decades-long wait for a rescue that never came.

As the conversation progresses, the reality of Barton’s situation becomes clear. In his early years of loneliness, the young Barton had obsessively constructed a vast, planet-wide network of recording devices, relay stations, and telephonic "brains." He populated the empty Martian towns with these transcriptions, programming them to simulate the sounds of a living society—slamming doors, children singing, and the smells of cooking. He created an army of younger Bartons to keep himself company, never considering that his future self would one day be trapped in a nightmare where he was forced to relive his own youth through the taunting, mechanical repetition of these voices.

The old man, suffering from heart trouble and the crushing weight of his memories, attempts to shut the machines down. He descends into the streets of his town, intending to silence the noise, but he finds that he has long since lost control over his own creations. Haunted by the memory of the robotic populations he once built and subsequently destroyed—drowning them in the Martian canals—he feels the pull of the past. As he wanders, the telephones in every house he passes begin to ring in sequence, a cacophony of his own past selves demanding his attention, arguing that they are the "real" ones because they possess the vitality of youth.

The conflict escalates into a frantic, internal war. The young, recorded Barton threatens his elder, calling it a battle between the "regiment" of the past and the failing reality of the present. Driven to the brink of insanity, the old man arms himself with explosives and rifles, setting out to destroy the transmission towers and phone lines. However, his resolve falters. He is terrified that if he destroys the network, he will miss the impossible chance that a rescue rocket might actually arrive and attempt to contact him. His hope, though irrational, is his only tether to sanity.

The climax arrives when a phone rings with a voice claiming to be a Captain Rockwell, reporting a successful landing of an Earth rocket nearby. Desperate for human contact, the old man ignores his suspicions—fearing it is just another cruel trick of his own making—and drives frantically across the Martian landscape to reach the tarmac. He arrives at the site only to find it empty and desolate. The "Captain" is revealed to be yet another elaborate, automated trap designed by his younger self to lure him into a fatal exertion.

Exhausted, his heart failing, the old man retreats to an office filled with phones. When they begin to ring in a maddening chorus, he violently destroys the equipment, ripping wires and smashing receivers in a final, futile act of rebellion. As he collapses and dies, the remaining machines continue their pre-programmed cycles. With the old man gone, the recordings of his younger selves remain, unknowingly calling out to one another in the silence of the empty city, celebrating birthdays and exchanging greetings in a cycle that will continue long after the last human breath has been drawn.

The People

• Emil Barton (The Old Man): A frail, eighty-year-old survivor who has spent sixty years in isolation. He is defined by his regret, his failing physical health, and an enduring, painful hope for rescue. He represents the tragedy of a life spent waiting for a future that has already passed him by.
• Emil Barton (The Younger Selves): A collection of recordings spanning from age twenty to sixty. They are arrogant, cruel, and relentlessly optimistic because they cannot perceive the passage of time. They function as a collective "id," an automated force that refuses to acknowledge the old man’s suffering.
• Captain Leonard Rockwell: An entity that exists only as a voice on a wire. Whether he is a genuine hallucination or a sophisticated trap crafted by the younger Barton, he serves as the final catalyst for the old man’s physical collapse, representing the cruel intersection of desire and deception.

In Its Own Voice

The old man contemplates the horror of his situation, realizing that his younger self is trapped in a loop of optimistic ignorance while he is left to deal with the terminal reality of his existence.

“Neither can warn the other, even though both respond, one to the other, one automatically, the other warmly and humanly.”

The young Barton explains the callous nature of his recordings, admitting that he is fundamentally incapable of empathy for the man he will eventually become.

“I’ll go on being young and cruel long after you’re dead.”

As the old man reaches the end of his struggle, the realization hits him that his own past ingenuity has become a prison from which there is no escape.

“He furled the hot wire like serpentine in his fingers, ripped it into red bits which fell about his stumbling feet.”

What It's Really About

At its core, this story is a meditation on the cruelty of time and the psychological danger of looking backward. The "telephonic brains" are not merely plot devices; they are externalizations of the human tendency to live in the past. By building these machines, the younger Barton attempted to conquer his loneliness, but he instead constructed a monument to his own vanity. He created a world where he could forever be the hero of his own story, but in doing so, he ensured that his future self would be unable to find peace. The book suggests that memory, when weaponized or artificially preserved, becomes a burden that stifles the ability to live in the present.

The story also explores the nature of identity. The old man and the young voices are technically the same person, yet they are complete strangers to one another. There is a profound ontological horror in the idea that one’s own past actions can "haunt" the future. The younger Bartons are "alive" in their persistence, but they are hollow—they lack the capacity for growth or suffering, which the old man argues is the hallmark of true humanity. The conflict between the old man’s desire to destroy the phones and his fear of disconnecting from the possibility of rescue highlights the human struggle to let go of dead dreams.

Furthermore, the book serves as a bleak commentary on the isolation of the human condition. Barton’s reliance on mechanical companionship illustrates how technology can mimic human connection while ultimately deepening the sense of alienation. The empty Martian cities act as a vast, uncaring stage for this drama. The planet itself is indifferent to Barton’s struggle; the wind and the hills remain unmoved by his birthday or his death. The tragedy is not just that he is alone, but that he has filled his solitude with echoes that can never offer genuine comfort. The ending, where the machines continue their chirping in the silence of the dead city, underscores the idea that a life defined by ego and the obsession with one's own voice leaves behind nothing but mechanical noise.

Why Read It Today

Readers who appreciate psychological suspense and the uncanny will find much to admire here. The experience of reading this is similar to watching a slow-motion unraveling of a mind; it is intimate, claustrophobic, and deeply unsettling. It captures the specific, cold loneliness of the space age—the feeling that one is a tiny point of consciousness in a vast, empty expanse. The writing is sharp and efficient, favoring the stark, biting dialogue between the versions of Barton over lengthy descriptions, which gives the story a brisk, rhythmic tension that carries the reader toward the inevitable conclusion.

However, the book is not for those looking for a traditional science fiction adventure. There are no heroic exploits or technological triumphs here, only the slow decay of a man who has lived too long with his own ghosts. The period attitude toward "colonials" and the technological anxieties of the late 1940s—such as the fear of atomic war and the reliance on bulky, wire-based communication—are embedded into the fabric of the story. While these elements date the work, they also add to its eerie atmosphere, grounding the science fiction in a mid-century sensibility that feels both grounded and hauntingly alien.

You should read this if you are interested in stories about the fragility of the human ego and the way we trap ourselves in our own histories. It stays with you not because of its plot twists, but because of the image of the old man on the floor, surrounded by the mechanical echoes of the person he used to be. It is a stark reminder that if we look backward long enough, we eventually lose our footing in the present. It is a demanding, dark, and beautifully executed exploration of the cost of refusing to let go.