The botched terraform left most of the joint like the old Mojave was.
The rest of it's tundra, permafrost, arctic zone. I don't know how
they did it, but they truly loused it up.

Mars had the potential to be choice real estate, being the nearest
embarkation point for the stroids. Then, this bureaucratic fuckup.
Thanks, Gov! Nowadays they're building the solar system administration
planet in Mars Orbit solar opposite -- Mars-2 they call it. What imaginations.

(We call our planet Mars True, if we call it anything.)

It's like the old west around here, only redder. Only far more rufous.
Rufous sands and vast fields of small stones, strewn here and there
with expired landers. Their locations lost when JPL crashed in 12.
Whenever a Rat comes across one, it's a big deal. Rats love to tinker
with stuff. How many old rovers have I seen reprogrammed for fetching
beers or carting the trash to the cliff?

Those vast fields of stones. Stupefy the eye. Like they were placed there
by someone. They have a regularity that's pleasing to the eye. Standing
there, on drugs, looking out over a plain like that, one's mind can sometimes
drift into an infinite dream. If Mars is anything now, it's peaceful. The rattle
and clank of human industry, the terrible hum of human hermeneutics,
is gone. The terrible iron of busy industries, man's most antlike nature,
has flown from here to other worlds and stroids. Nobody gives one fuck
about Mars, and that's how we like it.