‘M4R1NR’ by Mike Carson

Chosen Words

From Pulp Literature Issue 48, read an excerpt of ‘M4R1NR’ by Mike Carson, winner of the 2024 Jack Whyte Storyteller’s Award, below. To find out how this story ends, pick up a copy of Issue 48, Autumn 2025.

M4R1NR

by Mike Carson

For Danny (1998–2025)
Each night I look up at the sky, hoping to hear your voice whispering to me from the silence between the stars. We love you, son.

It begins with the eruption of a solar flare. Eight point three minutes later, a burst of electromagnetic radiation washes over the Earth’s atmosphere, the resulting geomagnetic storm temporarily disrupting satellite communications, GPS systems, and causing isolated power outages in remote regions of the northern hemisphere. Hunched at his desk at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, Dr Martin Welliver watches his monitors fade to black as the force of the X-class flare overloads one pyranometer after another. “Beautiful,” he says. “Like the breath of God.”

Had God—or anyone else—been around to hear him, it is unlikely they would have cared. Aside from some minor inconveniences—and an unprecedented display of aurora borealis lighting up the night skies from Fort Lauderdale to Fairbanks for several days following—the solar flare has little effect on the lives of Earth’s 8.7 billion inhabitants. It is on another world, nearly 800 million miles away, that something extraordinary happens.

It takes the solar flare another 7 3 minutes to reach Saturn, where it dances across the E ring before streaking away again into the void, ionized particles of ancient dust and ice trailing behind it like the outstretched wings of some iridescent bird as it soars across the ice-locked surface of the tiny moon, Enceladus. There, the touch of the solar flare imbues a spark of life. In an icy fissure, where the temperature holds steady at two hundred degrees below zero, a small, red light begins to glow as M4R1NR, Thoth Corporation’s state-of-the-art-rover-turned-five-billion-dollar-failure, comes alive at last.

Piggybacking on NASA’s interstellar probe, Wanderer 2, it took five years for M4R1NR (affectionately dubbed ‘Mariner’) to reach Enceladus. Its orbit was perfect. Its descent was perfect. Its landing, perfect. The engineers and scientists at Thoth Corp congratulated one another profusely, then returned to their monitors, certain that soon M4R1NR would begin transmitting evidence that some form of life existed in the liquid plumes or subterranean oceans of Enceladus. But no signal ever came. For two years, M4R1NR remained silent. After much finger-pointing, a few rounds of layoffs, media cover-ups, and the very public firing of M4R1NR team lead and chief scapegoat Zoriana Boyko, the little rover was mostly forgotten. M4R1NR remained where it had landed, a strange, dark blotch on a frozen, alien landscape, as the ice entombed it.

Silent, until today.

Find the full story in Pulp Literature Issue 48, Autumn 2025

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Mike Carson is a living testament to the truth of Douglas Adams’s observation, “It takes an awful lot of time to not write a book.” In his years of literary procrastination and steady weight gain, however, Mike has managed to publish several short stories and essays, win a few writing awards, and survive thirty-five years as a high school teacher. He lives in Kamloops with his wife and family, still teaching and working away at not writing a book. This story won the 2024 Jack Whyte Storyteller’s Award at the Surrey International Writers’ Conference. Previous SiWC contest honourable mentions of Mike’s have appeared in Pulp Literature issues 26, 38, and 46.