About

"Life will find a way." A domed city surrounded by the swirling barren red sands of Mars was about as far from a Pacific jungle island as possible; yet this first Martian outpost was also staffed with scientists meddling with nature - specifically their mission was to engineer and release various microorganisms which would slowly terraform Mars, eventually turning it into a second home for mankind. So they thought it humorously apropos to dub their little arcology "Jurassic Mars".

Despite their grand dreams of a green Mars with clouds and rivers and wildlife, or maybe even because they had such a big, vivid, collective dream, the scientists were beginning to get cabin fever living cooped up in their little metal and plastic dome. They were okay during the day, when they had lots of work to do to keep them busy. But when night fell and they were laying in their bunks, just listening to the continual sandstorm whispering against the walls, trying to claw its way in... well, they began to dream strange dreams.

They dreamed of wise eyes watching them from out in the red desert. They dreamed of shining horns stronger than steel, pointing the way to a future unfettered by the mundane problems of entropy and economics. They dreamed of feathered wings cupping the airless sky, as if taunting the humans by saying, "Look how free I am. Look how easy it is. Come outside and play." And most of all they dreamed of eggs. Eggs couched on leaves, or feathers, or sand; but all decidedly eggs, the universal symbol of potential. No two people dreamed quite the same dream - each was a unique individual twist on a common human longing for the natural world.

Wicked, the mission team's psychologist, was fascinated by the common trends in these dreams, which seemed to get wilder and more vivid each night. But she was also worried for the safety of her teammembers. The vivid colors, the rich scents, the tantalizing mysterious potential of the eggs, which promised great things if only they could be attained and hatched... the call of the dreams was more powerful than the prosaic reality that outside the dome lay only burning heat, freezing cold, unbreathably thin air, and dead sand. Wicked feared that the fundamental human belief in magic and fate would overwhelm their scientific sense, and someone would walk out the airlock in search of their dream-egg and find only death. She was a scientist, and she knew perfectly well that the only answers to be found on this planet were in people's own minds, not out in the empty sands.

As Wicked talked to people about their dreams, and tried to channel them into theraputic activities like painting or writing stories about their dreams, she saw a clearer and clearer picture emerging - something in these people knew there had to be life out there. And then Wicked started having her own dreams - of an egg growing quietly in her belly.

Of course she knew it was just a dream, and interpreted it as an affirmation that her own theory was correct - the answer to all this yearning lay inside, in people's own minds, not outside in some imaginary world. So when she missed her period she was shocked; but then she realized that of course it must be just a psychosomatically induced symptom. A figment of her overactive imagination, and the stress she had been under trying to keep everyone else sane. Then as the dreams got steadily worse, she found herself so busy trying to convince people not to walk out the airlock that she forgot about her own minor problems. If she was gaining a little weight, that was probably also due to stress.

Then late one night everything came to a head. A mad officer commandeered an exploratory vehicle and drove off into the alien desert with a party of egg-hunters. And Wicked, hearing the news over the intercom, sat down heavily in her chair... and felt a pang in her stomach. An ulcer, perfect, that was all she needed. She rubbed the uncomfortable spot and was shocked to notice exactly how round she had gotten. But- but the mission team's rations were, well, rationed! How could she possibly have gained so much- then the next contraction hit, harder than the first, and her water broke, and she felt the undeniable compulsion to arrange the blankets on her bunk into a nest...