An Important Editorial Announcement; Stroganoff Sunday at Camp Manifest
Mukbang on Mars
Dear friends, family, subscribers:
Please welcome to your inbox the newest member of the Lillian Review of Books Editorial Board: Owl-Eyed Athena, Goddess of Wisdom and Sploots, Managing Editor.
Because I am exquisitely sleep-deprived as a result of catering to the potty- and treat-related whims of the 8-week-old goddess, I have not prepared a new book review for this week. Instead, please enjoy this short story about a binge-eating Martian colonist-influencer, set in the same universe as my previously posted flash fiction piece “Career Opportunities at Fermented Freight Solutions” and my novel-in-progress.
Stroganoff Sunday at Camp Manifest
An early version of this story was published in Passengers Magazine in February 2021.
It was a dusty day at Camp Manifest and the sky was a dull butterscotch. Palmer climbed out of his semi-subterranean habitat, donned his pressure suit, and scanned the horizon with a pair of binoculars. Olympus Mons was a shy, distant giant receding into the yellow haze. Closer to home, the structures across the plain at Camp Cabot kept growing. He noticed a new set of neoclassical pillars sitting on top of one of the habitats. Palmer clicked his tongue. Canadian bastards, he thought.
He tucked his binoculars into his suit’s utility pocket and went about the rest of his morning chores. He swept the dust off of the habitat’s solar panels, checked the environmental controls on the greenhouse, and recorded the levels in their water filtration system. Most of their daily chores could be performed remotely from the safety of the habitat. The rest of the colonists let the automated system do all the work, but Palmer needed the exercise. A gut was starting to form, and he didn’t know how much longer he could hide it.
This anxiety wasn’t simple vanity. Palmer’s utility to the success of the mission was, above all, his image. Palmer, his wife Patty, and the other eleven colonists were not scientists, explorers, or revolutionaries.
They were influencers.
Every day, his and Patty’s primary responsibility was to create content for the folks back home. Red Plan-It!, Inc., collected, edited, and posted their pictures, videos, blogs, vlogs, podcasts, confessionals, emails, DMs, sexts, and selfies for a total audience of 4 billion viewers. This continual stream of content, multiplied by thirteen colonists, itself generated a secondary ecosystem of merchandise, reaction videos, explainer videos, summary videos, conspiracy theory podcasts, erotic fan fiction, music videos, and pornography. The editors at Red Plan-It! could do convincing magic with all this material, managing to piece together something that resembled a narrative from the unstructured social data of their daily lives.
At ages thirty-four and thirty-six, Patty and Palmer were elders of the group. Several years ago, they started a video channel to document their attempt to get pregnant. Patty had planned on becoming a mommy blogger, and Palmer was supportive of her aspirations, plus the extra sponsorship money it started bringing in. She posted fertility tips, beauty and self-care product reviews, a whole series on her menstrual and hormonal cycles, hauls of gender-neutral baby clothes from independent clothing lines, and vulnerable confessions of her feelings of inadequacy when she failed to conceive.
When Patty finally got pregnant, Palmer started a podcast documenting his struggle with impending fatherhood. He told stories of his own quasi-abusive, first generation Korean immigrant parents and shared his fears of turning into what he so hated and feared as a child. He called himself out for his toxic masculinity. He challenged the patriarchal norms of American and Asian American society. He questioned himself for his lifelong pursuit of white women and pondered the implications of raising a biracial child. He built a following of tens of thousands.
But it was the miscarriage that really catapulted Palmer and Patty into the big leagues. The heartbreaking openness with which they talked about their loss drew in hordes of new fans. Patty lost the baby near the end of her second trimester, after sharing her ultrasound photos, numerous photo shoots of her belly, and a gender reveal livestream. It was going to be a girl, and they had already painted the nursery a soft peach color.
Their devastating, beautifully filmed miscarriage reveal video went viral at the right time, and when Palmer and Patty applied to the Red Plan-It! contest, they were among the first to be accepted.
They were hoping for the first non-terrestrial pregnancy.
Palmer thought, as the older, more mature members of the expedition, he and Patty would have an easier time adjusting. But he had never felt less in control in his life.
The colonists were expected to generate content at all hours of the day, but they were entirely cut off from fan feedback. Under normal circumstances, Palmer and Patty were constantly tracking engagement, reading viewer comments, recording Q&As, and hosting ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions in real time. Their social media content was a vast ecosystem of interdependent relationships, two-way communication, and personalization.
On Mars, they were blind. Part of their contract with Red Plan-It! relinquished all control over their platforms. Nothing was released live. Everything was vetted by a team of communications experts before it was posted. An entire department within Red Plan-It! called Communications, Continuity, and Compliance viewed, approved, cross-referenced, labeled, and scheduled every bit of content produced by each of the colonists. Anything questionable was flagged for further review and potential follow-up with the problematic influencer.
Shortly after the Canadians showed up and set up camp just a few clicks from Camp Manifest, Palmer started eating double rations. It started with Stroganoff Sundays. His favorite meal was the freeze-dried beef Stroganoff, packaged in individual serving foil pouches. He took great pleasure in preparing the meal: boiling the water, adding the water with a sprinkling of chili flakes, salt, and pepper, stirring the dry pellets of pasta and beef, and waiting for rehydration. For a few minutes, the strange dusty world melted away while he savored the sticky, starchy slop. It was always over too soon. One Sunday, he made an extra bag for himself. On ‘Taco’ Tuesday he doubled up again. The more he ate, the hungrier he felt.
Palmer sat at his desk and glumly sorted through the fan mail mission control saw fit to forward to him. He wrote personalized notes to 75% of them, the percentage specified in his contract.
As he typed, his mind was elsewhere. He thought about the rest of the expedition ahead—they were only nine months into a three-year term. He thought about the Canadians who had shown up, uninvited, three months into their expedition. Without access to the news, they had no way of knowing if this was a joint mission sanctioned by both governments or if it was an act of piracy. Did they really have to settle right next door to Camp Manifest? What if Manifest needed to expand in a few years? Would Camp Cabot yield their land? Had they found some natural resource that the American rovers surveying the planet had missed? Why else would they plop down right here, and yet make no effort to contact the Americans?
America and Canada were historical allies, but hadn’t Palmer read something about skirmishes along the northern border just before they left? What was it about? Oil, or trade, or the climate? Damn it. He wished he’d paid more attention to international affairs.
He thought about their food supply—Red Plan-It! promised that they had enough freeze-dried food for ten years, and they anticipated being able to grow large-scale crops before the end of the year. They were experimenting with a small batch of peppers and beans in the greenhouses. But they hadn’t factored in Palmer’s indulgence.
That was how he thought of it: his indulgence. He was regularly consuming two to three times his normal allotment of calories per day, but he still thought of it as a treat. It was a treat that was occupying an increasing amount of real estate in his brain. Even now, as he wrote to fans and ruminated on the ominous appearance of the Canadians and the productive output of his fellow colonists, a larger, more urgent concern swelled in his mind. It was a cresting imperative, a Hollywood sign–sized command in his mind: EAT.
It was almost two hours before their normal dinner window. Palmer fidgeted for eight more minutes before deciding he would just get things ready now.
“Hey, Patty?” Palmer called to his wife, across the habitat at her own desk. She was composing her own responses to fan mail. Her pile was much larger than his. Patty also included a selfie with each reply. Palmer felt a tug of pride as he watched her work. She was so devoted and hard-working. Then her gaze met his, and he was chilled by the dull, guarded look she gave him.
“What?”
“I think I’m going to go to the greenhouse and pick a jalapeño for ‘Taco’ Tuesday tonight. I figured I’d record it. It’ll be good content for the Feed.”
“Umm, okay,” said Patty.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what?”
“I mean, why’d you say ‘okay’ like that?”
“Like what?”
“You know what,” said Palmer.
Patty sighed. “It’s like two hours until it’s time to eat. What are you going to do that whole time? Just obsess over your food thing? It’s weird.”
“There’s a lot of prep work involved to harvest and prepare a pepper. So, yeah, I thought I’d get a head start so I could have dinner ready for you on time.”
Patty scoffed. “Don’t you put this on me. I’m not hungry, we literally just ate lunch.”
“That was hours ago!” said Palmer.
“You’re just using it as an excuse to start dinner early so you can have seconds or thirds later tonight. It’s not healthy. It’s not right.”
“Well goddammit, sue me for being hungry! I’m a full-grown man trying to make Mars habitable for humankind, excuse me for working up an appetite.”
“Babe, we’re in here all day, creating content. Speaking of which, can you record this fight? As long as you apologize later, we can use it to humanize us for our followers.”
He shook his head in disgust and went to get suited up.
Palmer switched on his helmet camera and internal suit microphone as he climbed up the ladder to the surface. He narrated his actions half-heartedly, supposing that someone in post-production could edit his audio to make it more compelling. Usually, he preferred to send out his content fully edited, for professionalism’s sake, but tonight he was depressed.
Why couldn’t Patty just let him have his little treat? It was hard enough being stuck underground on this barren rock without his barren wife policing his every meal. So what if his waistline was beginning to expand? That’s what happens in your thirties. Besides, it’s not like gaining weight matters all that much when the gravity is 38% of Earth’s.
Palmer realized with a start that he was mumbling these thoughts aloud as he opened the above-ground airlock. He took a deep breath, mentally reset, and put on a relentlessly upbeat voice.
“Greetings from Camp Manifest, Earthlings! It’s time for another postcard from the foothills of Olympus Mons! As y’all can see, I am entering the airlock for our greenhouse right now. It is ‘Taco’ Tuesday, so I am going to attempt to harvest one of the jalapeños we planted upon arrival. They weren’t looking great the last time I checked in on them, but maybe we can salvage something.”
Palmer kept his helmet on inside the greenhouse—the atmosphere was breathable and the structure was pressurized, but it was very cold, just above freezing. The roof and walls of the greenhouse were made from a specially tempered reinforced glass that was supposed to filter out enough of the solar radiation to allow plants to survive on the surface. The technology wasn’t good enough for people, yet. And it wasn’t looking great for the plants, either.
“Well, folks, we tried,” said Palmer, tracing a clumsy, gloved finger along the shriveled, misshapen pepper. “Looks like a worm that got left out on the sidewalk. These leaves are even sadder looking than the fruit.”
Palmer plucked a couple peppers anyway. He felt sudden tears rising.
“These little guys just wanted to survive. So far from home, but they wanted to grow, and they grew the best they could. Maybe they’ll taste alright. Maybe they’ll taste like Earth.”
Palmer sniffled, wishing he could wipe his nose inside his suit. I should just delete this whole scene, he thought. My followers are going to think I’ve got a screw loose.
He took another few minutes to inspect the other plants. Most had simply refused to take root. A tomato seedling had sprouted, grown leaves, and then turned black and died. The peppers were the only plant that had lived to bear fruit. The rest of the colonists had had varying success with their greenhouses. One of them, a nonbinary ASMR sensation named Sammie Slim, claimed that they had coaxed a strawberry into existence, but had eaten it before remembering to take a picture. No one believed them.
Palmer exited the greenhouse and panned over the horizon with his helmet cam. “It’s difficult to see because it’s almost sunset, but you should be able to make out Camp Cabot just beyond that ridge over there. Yup, you’re not imagining things, they really are building it up. Our Canuck neighbors seem to be building a regular Acropolis out there.” He zoomed in on what appeared to be a large domed structure. “What the hell? That wasn’t there this morning.”
Palmer watched as dark specks low to the ground, no doubt the Canadians’ maintenance robots, circled the new building, which bore a striking resemblance to the temple at Delphi. In spite of all the new above ground dwellings, he rarely saw the colonists themselves. More than once, he wondered if they were even there, or if the humanoid figures he sometimes saw lumbering from one building to another were androids, the advance wave establishing camp before the humans arrived.
“It makes no sense that they’d build up the surface so much. I mean, what are they trying to prove? There’s no way anyone could survive on the surface in one of those houses. Nobody’s got that kind of shielding technology,” Palmer told his followers. “I mean, right? If America doesn’t have it, there’s no way in hell Canada does. Right?”
Palmer stared through the binoculars at Camp Cabot for a while longer. His stomach began to rumble. Each robot was dragging what looked like a giant stone brick from behind the camp to the space between Cabot and Manifest.
“What the hell are they building?” Palmer said. “It’s like a—a pyramid.” He sighed and dropped the binoculars. His hunger drew him back to the habitat.
“No one on Earth will tell us what they’re up to over there,” he said as he trudged back to the habitat airlock. “So if you know what’s going on that’s making these Canadians so bold, drop me a DM, eh?”
Of course, the direct messages would never come. The colonists were at the mercy of Red Plan-It! for all information from Earth, and there was apparently an embargo on all information about the other settlement. Palmer had asked RPI HQ about the Canadians multiple times; they never responded.
The first structure had gone up just a couple weeks after the Canadian lander touched down. What use a Martian colonist had for a replica of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House was anyone’s guess. Every week, another distinct architectural style was erected, and Palmer was left to puzzle and speculate. The uncertainty gnawed at him. He ranted and raved to Patty, who had learned to tune him out. He kept a careful record of every change to Camp Cabot that he could see in his personal log. The only time he wasn’t obsessing over the latest construction at Camp Cabot was when he was eating.
When Palmer entered the lower level of the habitat, where the majority of the living space was set up, it was still an hour away from their scheduled dinner. Patty didn’t look up when he came in, cradling the withered little peppers.
He took them into the kitchenette and set up his camera. He put on a cooking show for his followers, hamming it up for the camera like he was cooking a five-star meal in a professional kitchen. He boiled water, extolling the virtues of ‘Taco’ Tuesdays, and chopped the peppers. They crumbled into dust under his blade.
“Well, this is great, actually,” he said, zooming in on the grey-ish green dust on the cutting board. “It’s like jalapeño powder without going through the trouble of drying and grinding them.” Palmer called out to Patty. “Honey, you want some spice in your ‘tacos?’”
Patty didn’t respond. He waited a moment. “In case you couldn’t hear that, Patty said ‘hell yeah.’” Palmer smiled. He put a pinch of powder into each of the three bags of dehydrated ‘taco’ salad.
“It’s a little deformed from the solar radiation, but it probably won’t kill us. And it’ll be the first thing we’ve eaten that was grown entirely on Mars,” said Palmer. “Now if we could just grow some avocados and ship over some kimchi, I could die happy.”
It was still an hour until their scheduled dinner time. Palmer could not stall any longer.
“Honey, you ready for dinner?” he called to Patty. She didn’t respond. Palmer looked across the lower level to her desk and saw that she was video chatting with Zach Stoner, the bodybuilding fitfluencer in the habitat nearest to them who maintained a massive fan base by recording ingenious body weight workouts wearing almost no clothing. Palmer had caught Patty watching his “How to Stay Swole in 1/3 Gravity” video alone on two occasions. She insisted that she was just watching for tips on how to maintain her physique, and pointedly looked at Palmer’s own expanding waistline.
Stoner was not wearing a shirt as he chatted with Palmer’s wife. Palmer scowled. Patty can fix her own dinner, he thought. Triples for me tonight.
Palmer poured boiling water into all three aluminum bags and sealed them up according to the instructions on the back of the package. He could recite the instructions like spoken word poetry.
Open package at tear notch.
Carefully add 3/4 cups
Boiling water.
Stir carefully and close zipper.
Wait 5 minutes. Stir
and reseal. Let stand
an additional
4 minutes. Stir and enjoy
Right out
of the pouch.
He set a timer on his watch and settled in. He focused on his breathing. He imagined he was inside the pouch, a tiny speck of freeze-dried ground beef or cornmeal, empty and brittle. He felt the boiling water flood him and his brethren. He felt the water surround him, drowning him, until gradually his freeze-dried pores opened up and began to accept the inundation. He felt himself swelling with the welcome warmth, doubling, tripling in size as he was filled to bursting with life-giving moisture.
Palmer exhaled through his nose. He noticed that he had an erection. He stirred the pouches and resealed them. The aroma of cumin and oregano and the strange acrid Martian jalapeño was almost too much for him to bear. But he sat and waited for four more minutes.
When it was finally time to eat, Palmer poured all three bags into a serving bowl, squeezing every last drop from the pouches. It nearly overflowed. It looked like mostly grey-brown porridge, with flecks of green and red and the occasional yellow corn kernel. He drooled a little when he opened his mouth for the first forkful.
Palmer’s eyes glazed over. He stared at the wall, shoveling the taco-flavored gruel into his mouth. He couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to. Palmer watched his hand dipping his fork down into the bowl over and over again, even before he had time to swallow the previous bite. He sputtered and choked on an overly full mouthful but was helpless to slow the pace of his eating.
Palmer’s mind was empty. Camp Cabot, shirtless Zach Stoner, the bleak prospect of two more years locked underground in the barren Martian dirt—nothing existed for Palmer but the vaguely Mexican taste of his freeze-dried meals and the visceral pleasure of chewing and swallowing. The hot slop sliding down his throat warmed him like a beam of late afternoon sunlight on a lazy summer Sunday. He felt a glow like when you smile at a pretty girl and she smiles back.
As Palmer’s fork scraped the bottom of the bowl, the malaise began to settle back in. He sucked the tines dry and wiped three fingers around the bowl, licking every last particle of gravy off of his fingers. He sat back. His stomach felt rigid, but he still felt empty. He still felt hungry.
Palmer sighed. It was a beautiful, precious feeling, and it was over so fast. ‘Taco’ Tuesdays never satisfied him as much as he hoped. Only Stroganoff Sundays left him feeling full for more than a few minutes.
He blinked, realizing that he had been staring, slack-jawed, at the empty bowl for several seconds. Palmer reached over and shut off his camera. He wiped out his bowl and sat for a few more moments at the table, savoring the afterglow of his meal. Then he heard Patty laugh at something Zach Stoner said, a bright, joyous sound he hadn’t heard in weeks. His mood ruined, Palmer got up from the kitchenette table and cleaned up.
In bed that night, Palmer made a perfunctory attempt to initiate intimacy. Patty was on her side, facing away from him. Palmer scooted up against her, running a hand over her arm. His belly pressed into the small of her back. Patty squirmed away from him and pretended to be asleep.
Palmer rolled over and pulled an empty Beef Stroganoff wrapper from his nightstand. He read the ingredients list over and over again until his mind was quiet enough to drift into sleep.
Beef (beef, rosemary extract, salt). Corn starch. Sunflower oil. Sour cream (cultured cream, skim milk, enzymes). Nonfat Dry Milk. Onion. Sea salt. Beef flavor (yeast extract, salt). Less than 2% of: Mushroom. Brown sugar (cane sugar, cane syrup). Yeast extract. White pepper. Lemon juice (lemon juice concentrate, lemon oil, metabisulfite potassium). Garlic Powder. Precooked noodles: Durum semolina, whole egg, salt. Contains: milk, wheat, egg.
Palmer wondered what was on the menu at Camp Cabot. He whispered the ingredients again to himself like a lullaby.
Palmer awoke two hours later with a jolt. He ran the few steps to the bathroom, dropped hard to his knees, and stuck his head into the toilet bowl. ‘Taco’ Tuesday burned his esophagus and throat. He choked and sputtered and struggled to breathe as the interminable stream of chunky bile tore out of him. His chest heaved. His ears rang.
I’m going to die. He felt a rush of euphoria at the idea, a lightness of spirit even as his body was wracked with spasms to purge itself of the alien spice.
When the flow of vomit finally ceased, Palmer rinsed his mouth, splashed his face, and staggered back to bed. Patty was still lying on her side, her back to him.
“Did you wipe the seat?” she said.
“Yes,” said Palmer.
“Good,” said Patty.
Palmer settled back into his cold bed and thought about the pyramid rising from the Martian plain between Camp Manifest and Camp Cabot. He felt the sweat cooling on his brow. He felt empty and new.
Only five more days until Stroganoff Sunday.
If you made it this far and like what you just read, please hit the heart button or leave a comment so I know that the void is waving back. Posting fiction feels a thousand times more vulnerable than sending out book reviews, eep. Also, 1 like = 1 treat for Athena.
Ohh, I liked this a lot. The banal, modern, human problems, contrasted and woven with the strange pyramid growing on the horizon. Very fun.
Athena is gorgeous and I loved this story! I was really gripped by it and not ready for it to end. Thanks for sharing with us ✨