Walt D. Odell was born in the belt. Like many other Jovean workers, he does 'the long haul'. Moving the most valuable substance in Sol... Water. It isn't a bad life. Pays well. AI companionship. Excellent healthcare benefits. After 100000 years struggling in the mud the human race got its shit together. Everything was going great until Walt tries to make a splashdown in the Heinlein Sea. Routine drop and some R&R planned to build up some muscle mass before going back into microgravity. But the great domed cities of Promethei Terra aren't there. He can't establish contact with the belt or Earth. And there's green along the Lowell Canals? ----- Hello, I am a professional copywriter who has mainly worked in soul-crushing corporate positions.  Inside sales operations, CRM database administration, and email lead gen... yuck. And I read terrible, escapest sci-fi.  Sometimes to get through the day.  But, mostly I like it.  Alway have.  Always will. For a while now I have commented on other stories here on RRL.  I wanted to contribute more.  To share my love for and experience with old school science fiction and fantasy. Not just Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke.  But Haggard, Burroughs, Wells, Norton, DeCamp, Howard, Lovecraft, Leiber... all the giants from the golden age. The guys who inspired the modern space program and a million pages of pulp. I'm currently reading Mother Of Learning (here on RRL) and The Deathworlders (off-site and don't care, HFY all day). And I suddenly had a question THIS IS A HUGE SPOILER Spoiler: Spoiler What if the entire surface of Mars was an intelligent Von Neumann Machine bent on 'perfecting' all life? I will be exploring some of my favorite tropes sprinkled with my favorite references once a month as the MC tries to organize himself against the biggest bad I could think of. Hopefully, I will become a better writer in the process... This is my first effort to write something marketable outside of business academia or the corporate marketing neighborhood. If it is too technical, verbose, or if the dialogue sucks more donkey dicks than a Tijuana sex show - Please let me know in the comments.