I spun around and made a beeline straight for the blue man. My excitement bubbled up as I neared him and envisioned the stream of likes I’d get if I managed to snap a picture with him, right here, on my very own street!

I felt confident in my greeting. We all had taken basic Cave Martian in school after the livestreams. “Greh-grah,” I asserted and waved as I walked past, expecting a friendly hello and wave back, which would allow me to get closer and take the perfect shot. He shrugged his shoulders and glared at me before continuing, more quickly than before. A few feet down the road another person forced the same greeting on him. I wondered in confusion at his coldness. I had just wanted to say hello. It then struck me like the spark of a well-worn carpet rubbed by woollen socks. He’s the one! The one we all watched as a kid. The martian with the robot dog.

Or perhaps he wasn’t? I suddenly doubted myself. They all kind of looked the same anyhow.

“If another person says hello to me I think I’m going to…I don’t know”, he said resignedly to himself knowing that whatever he did would be perceived as odd. His blue skin and tall antennae ensured that he was the centre of attention wherever he went. There were a few more of his kind in the region, but they were a very slim percentage of the population. The customs of this planet felt so strange to him, but at least they ate more than dirt, although some of the packaged stuff tasted worse. He didn’t know what to make of this world. Life here often irritated him and sometimes he missed the silence of his cave.

Greetings, in particular, pissed him off. On his planet greetings were reserved for those you knew well, which were usually less people than you could count on one foot. They weren’t thrown about carelessly like dirt at a Martian birthing. He felt like every time they saw his alien face and uttered a few mangled syllables in his language that they weren’t satisfied until he gifted them by displaying his teeth.

“They’re just trying to be hospitable,” his colleague had told him when he was in one of the rages where he started searching for tickets back to his home planet. She was a local, but one that had been to Mars and respected his customs enough to leave him in peace. She knew his kind were just like her kind, just creatures out in the universe trying to survive. But she also agreed that the absolute worst was when they recognised him.

“It’s the boy from the cave!”, they would shout and take selfies with him without even asking.

The bright lights burned his eyes terribly. “You and your dog were so cute”, a few would say before another inevitably muttered snidely, “But you know that dog belonged to NASA, it was never his to begin with”. They would all disperse after a few minutes, leaving him feeling sore and abused, like when one of his cavities had to be swabbed for an interplanetary health assessment.

A small dog-like robot tunnelled down through the ceiling of a Martian cave and landed abruptly at the feet of a young boy. The small Martian child held up the strange creature and declared that it was the best present he’d ever gotten! If his parents had been there they would have agreed, not wanting to admit that the small mud pies they made him, on the very rare occasions that they saw him, were all that the boy should expect.

The boy tied the small drone robot on a long string that he’d previously used as a necklace. He had begun to walk it around the cave system he lived alone in, with the occasional company of his grandfather. The two of them were shrunken, hungry and blue with giant shining eyes that were adapted to seeing in the dark. Their heads did not have hair, but rather two arm-length antennae that sensed the vibrations alerted them to cave ins. They were also not a lovely colour of blue, like that of the ocean, but rather more like the colour a human becomes when it’s been deprived of oxygen.

A coalition of Earthling scientists and programmers had watched in shock as the small boy wandered about dragging the hundred-million-dollar drone, that had taken 6 years and 48 iterations to get right, around in the dirt.

They considered reaching out to the boy, speaking to him through the robot, but instead they brought in a famous dog whisperer and asked him to help program the robot to befriend the boy.

There was not much that the scientists of Earth agreed upon, but suspicion of new civilisations was one, so they decided at first that gathering intel was their best bet in this situation. So, they monitored all of the livestreams from the robot’s video cameras, until at some point the livestreams leaked and they decided to broadcast them publicly. It was after all a momentous discovery, life in the universe, but it was also a fantastic way to increase their funding.

They broadcast livestreams where people could watch the boy and his robot dog at all hours. And in these livestreams, the population of Earth soon learned that Mars was a society far poorer than theirs.

The boy’s home was a pitch black cave system that was constantly falling in around him. It reminded people of bugs they found when they dug in the earth with their bare hands or overturned a rock.

The boy looked remarkably human and as the whole world watched his escapades they soon discovered that Martian children were quite similar to human children. Naughty, sweet, endearing, secretive, playful, although a bit more lethargic due to the fact that they slept 15 or so hours a day and seemed to only eat dirt.

The boy slept at the entrance of the cave, as he was taught to do in case of a cave in, with one antenna resting on the floor and the other on the wall. He curled his body around his robot dog. The boy would often cry out in his sleep, grasping at the air and the robot dog would nuzzle in and calm him. The boy’s arm would curl securely around the tiny metallic creature, finding comfort in the sharp edges poking into his small twig like arms.

Everyone’s favourite part of the livestream was when the boy played tricks on his grandfather, who didn’t quite seem to remember that the robot dog was there.

During the day the old man walked around in circles muttering and grunting to himself, turning up at regular intervals to offer dirt to the boy. At the time, viewers thought it was just an odd Martian behaviour; later they’d learn that the old man had a form of dementia similar to that found on Earth.

The boy, who never had other children to play with, enjoyed playing with the old man’s only possession, a long cane that he leaned on as he teetered in circles. The boy would throw it down a well or hide it in a tunnel for the robot dog to retrieve, which the dog, as he was programmed, did very quickly, always laying it at the feet of the grandfather as the boy had gestured. The grandfather was usually so surprised by the reappearance of his stick and a small robot dog he’d fall over laughing. The boy erupted in giggles at the sight and went immediately to work planning an even more difficult place to hide the walking stick.

Most of the non-suit type people on Earth agreed that the boy needed this dog. That his life was terribly sad and that ethically, NASA should donate the dog to him, while they worked out a way to bring him to Earth for a proper upbringing.

“We can’t let him keep that robot! We’re not a charity. We need the data this dog, I mean robot, has gathered from the caves. We need to learn what the atmosphere is like down there. The robot can even gather skin samples from the Martians!”, one suit argued passionately.

“And anyhow, we shouldn’t be interfering. As scientists we need to gather data without influencing environmental factors like this”, the head suit of NASA said with finality.

A military suit chimed in, “We sure as hell can’t go about giving our most sensitive technology to alien civilisations. Can you imagine if they figured out what they’ve got their hands on!”

The many suits looked around at one another and nodded in agreement. In the name of science, peace and progress, they’d take the robot dog away from that boy.

The day the robot’s programming updated to the program, Escape To The Surface, the boy had been planning his most elaborate adventure yet.

“Here boy,” he whistled to his little companion in his native tongue and ran his hand over it’s pokey skeleture, unaware that dogs usually felt soft and furry. The people on Earth loved to laugh about this; how the boy was like a child raising a snake and thinking it was a kitten.

“I’ve got gramp’s cane again”, he said conspiratorially to the dog. “I’m going to drop it into the darkest pit by the north corner. I bet you’ll fetch it in no time.”

Usually it took the dog 20 minutes or so to retrieve the stick. The boy liked to listen with his ears and his antenna to the dog tunnelling deep into Mars. He watched in fascination as the dog’s square head transformed into a drill head that whirred around faster than anything he’d seen before, except perhaps the cave in that had taken his grandma from him.

He dropped the stick down and listened intently as it whooshed and then thudded a very long way below them. He imagined what was at the bottom, perhaps a cave more beautiful and with far tastier dirt than this one. He watched as the dog transformed, but this time instead of digging down with a quick jump and a scoot, the dog dug into the side of the wall, in deep and then up, up and above to where the boy couldn’t hear or sense him anymore.

He wasn’t aware that the dog’s programming had instructed him to implant the boy with a camera while he’d been sleeping. It was a move from the suits that was meant to placate the angry masses of a planet far away that wanted to watch the strange little boy grow up. They wanted to witness the day that the white-suit men would take him to the surface, after his long and desperate search for the dog that had been taken from him in the middle of his favourite game.

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