The year is 2045 and over fifty thousand people live on Mars, with more arriving all the time. In this anniversary of the planet's first landing, the Mars Historical Society has chosen to return to the travails of its most famous colonist.
Twenty-five years after Jack Errores wrote his dispatches from the surface, the first colonist on Mars disappeared into history. This authoritative version from the Mars Historical Society tells the story of his achievement and ultimate betrayal. Although some would scoff that a planet so newly settled would already be claiming a history, this transcription is meant to set to rest the many conspiracy theories that Mars was never settled so early—that Jack Errores who devoted his life to the cause was a fiction perpetrated by three national space agencies—and his poignant attempt to record his life on the surface for posterity is either invented or enhanced.
Although initially compiling this history of the First Human Colonist on Mars was meant to explore the potential of independent survival on the surface, the story immediately began to drift toward Jack Errores' tragic tale. Sent alone to his death over a generation ago, his struggles have come to symbolize survival in the deadly environment that is the Martian surface and the desperation implicit in the attempts to settle the planet.
Now that the news media is overcome by claims about Martian colonization, and some hopeful few are striving to be amongst those chosen for the one-way trip, Mars is again in everyone's thoughts. Although it remains to be seen if the news is merely unsubstantiated hype, it is worth remembering that before their ink was dry Errores was fighting to survive on a desiccated planet that possesses one percent of Earth's atmosphere and whose regolith is largely silica and poisonous perchlorates.