DATE: Year 486-B Day 688
LOCATION: New Paris, Main Colony
The end of the B-years saw a lot more festivities than the end of the A-years because the Sol count reset to Day 1. In a way it was a double new year’s eve celebration. The human language had evolved that year meant two things, the 688-Sol cycle, and the A- and B- years, the particular meaning evident from context and verbal and non-verbal cues.
Most of the solar system followed the Martian Calendar, using the A and B years and the Sol Count, but naturally there weren’t as many celebrations. The largest celebrations were on New Paris, the largest of the chartered associations on Mars, and the location of the planetary headquarters of the MTC. It was also, mostly because of that, that Mars’ time zones began with New Paris.
The MTC had established the final form of the Martian Calendar. A 688 day Sol count had been used since the first wave of human settlement on Mars, although there were a great many number of year ones. The second wave of human settlement, which lasted through the Rip and to whom most humans in the solar system say they trace their lineage, started by using the Earth year and adding the Sol count beginning with the first day of the Martian spring in the Northern hemisphere. Eventually different charters started establishing different year counts for their own jurisdictions. The MTC sporadically tried to standardize it. In the eventual order from what historians now refer anti-septically to as “the reconciliation,” a period of infighting on Mars after the Rip that saw the population dwindle to half a million, the MTC established Year 1 as the year of the Rip, but dated it 40 years earlier, selecting a date when the first day of spring on the Martian northern hemisphere coincided almost exactly with Earth’s northern hemisphere, and creating space for a new origin history for themselves as saviors of Mars.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Their attempts at a fake history didn’t work but the year count stuck, and the Earth year fell out of use except for ecclesiastical purposes. The start of the yearly Sol count on the first day of spring in the A year for the north and the B year for the south was less useful than it used to be. What was left of the planetary terraforming corps was losing ground every year. At its peak, before the Rip, nearly a third of the planet had been terraformed, with ground-level pipes assisting in the maintenance of oxygen levels. There were just bits and pieces left now, and very little farming done anymore.
New Year’s Eve celebrations were important on New Paris because they gave the charter authority the opportunity to show its settlement that it was still well-resourced. They handed out a bread-like substance in place of the slurp most people used for nutrition, and presented games and shows in the different settlements, culminating with an ancient tradition, the dropping of a ceremonial ball.
Security was tight across New Paris. There had been a planetary warning from the NEC about terrorist activity, although it did not specify the source of any threat. The declining population, and particularly an acute gender imbalance, had led to a lot of malcontented youth. The NEC was doing what it can offering work programs, mostly on doomed terraformation resurrection projects, but the MTC had simply picked up the pace on its research and development of autonomous systems, with the help of the Happy Android Kabushiki. There wasn’t a need for more than a hundred thousand humans, across the entire solar system. The logistics of a larger population were becoming untenable.
