Clarkesworld, March 2026
The narrator is the ghost of an astronaut — later revealed to be Captain Rogers — who died of a stroke before the Mars mission launched but whose corpse was kept aboard the terraforming ship rather than jettisoned into space. This accident makes the narrator the first human ghost to travel between planets and, ultimately, the first to set foot on Mars. The story is told in first person, directly addressed at its close to the sole surviving crew member, Cho, with the narrator’s final plea being that their pioneer achievement be reported back to Earth.
The journey itself is harrowing. In space, stripped of gravity and human presence, the narrator’s ghost loses coherence — dissolving into formlessness, forgetting their own name and their mother’s face, sustained only by a consuming drive to reach Mars. Upon arrival, gravity reconstitutes the ghost, but the experience of Martian death differs sharply from Earth’s: there is total silence, no bodily sensation, and the environment begins reshaping the narrator’s spectral form into something increasingly alien and crab-like.
The crisis arrives when the landing craft carrying four crew members — Fuller, Rivera, Cho, and Jensen — malfunctions and crashes near a canyon’s edge. One crew member, Rivera, is dying. The narrator, powerless to interact with Earth-made objects, tries desperately to find a way to help, even digging at the buried hatch with ghostly hands. That night, Martian ghosts emerge — ancient, crab-formed entities of crimson light — and the narrator makes first contact with them, conveying the crew’s predicament through shared imagery. Though the Martians cannot manipulate Earth materials either, their appearance signals that Mars has its own rich spectral ecosystem.
Rivera dies and joins the narrator as a ghost, which opens a new avenue: fresh ghosts can still interact with physical objects from Earth. But before this insight can be exploited, a catastrophic misstep sends both narrator and Rivera plunging into the canyon. They discover the afterlife on Mars is layered — a second, deeper realm of tunnels riddling the planet’s interior, crowded with ancient Martian spirits endlessly drawn toward the planet’s molten core. The narrator nearly succumbs to the core’s siren song before Rivera, now able to communicate telepathically, pulls them back. During this journey the narrator learns their own name and identity from Rivera.
Returning to the wreck, the two ghosts establish radio contact with the surviving crew. Fuller and Jensen, realizing the oxygen situation is hopeless for all three, make the deliberate choice to sacrifice themselves — pooling their air tanks to keep Cho alive — and remove their helmets. Their freshly minted ghosts pry open the hatch, and Cho retrieves and launches the distress beacon with their guidance. The story ends with the narrator remaining inside the wrecked lander beside Cho, having orchestrated the rescue, and asking only that Cho carry the story home. Tell them I was first.
R.L. Meza is the author of Our Love Will Devour Us (Dark Matter INK, 2023), with stories in Clarkesworld and Nightmare Magazine. Meza writes speculative fiction from a not-haunted Victorian house on the coast of Northern California, where he lives with his husband and the strange animals they call family.