Movie Night on the Red Planet

by Amanda Bintz

Like most things, the rich received air conditioning first. The first time regular people experienced this luxury was at the movies.

In the 1920s, it was installed in theaters to coax patrons out of the summer heat, into the dark, cold screening rooms. It was not magnanimous. Before air conditioning, film tycoons lost money from June to September. After air conditioning, the “summer blockbuster” was born. 

The rich only ever get richer. Even the end of the Earth didn’t stop them.

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The Aonia Terra Theatre is a massive, retro-futuristic, art-deco structure, rising out of the flat red ground like a mythic golden palace built for the gods.

I enter through the back, dressed like a servant—tan and white linens, hair shaved close, no ornamentation of any kind. The stars and privileged others, they glided in on the red carpet hours ago, dripping in glittering gems, floating and galivanting about in their glitzy gowns and gaudy suits, cameras flashing, striking poses, flaunting and fawning and grinning with the whitest of teeth.

I blend in with the hordes of servants in the kitchen preparing for the post-premiere gala. With my mask off, the smells overwhelm me. Meat searing, fresh vegetables roasting, creamy sauces simmering. My mouth waters. It has been so long since I had real food instead of poor freeze-dried imitations.

The chef notices me standing still and shouts at me to get back to work. I grab a lone chef’s knife and julienne some carrots until he is busy berating another nameless, featureless human about the state of a stew. I pocket the knife and slip out the swinging doors.

There is a near-silent, constant hum in this place. I doubt they even notice it anymore.

For the rest of us, it is the sound of hospitals.

It is air conditioning, but not like that of the ‘20s. It cools the hot arid air to a crisp 68 degrees, yes, but it also converts the overwhelming amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to oxygen. Amazing technology, but costly, so costly—both in terms of money and energy. Of course, they don’t care about money. 

There was air conditioning in the vehicles that dropped them here, and in the enclosed, domed, red-carpeted pathway they walked into the theater. They have it in their houses, in their studios and their offices, in their second houses. All of it strains the grid to a degree, but their constant parties, galas, and balls most of all.

The electrical grid on this planet is uneven, like most of our infrastructure. It is well built and efficient in some places—the places where the colonizers first came, where the early money still resides—and spotty in others. It is unreliable at best where I live, in the Diacria, a highland with little resources where the last of the escapees from Earth settled—the so-called “dregs of society.”

There is a large hospital there, and keeping its air conditioning going 24/7 sucks up the majority of the power available to our community. Every day, we wear masks that invade our nostrils to pump oxygen directly into our lungs. They were supposed to be a temporary solution, but they strapped one on me the day I was born, and I am sure I will wear one until the day I die.

It feels good to breathe on my own, through my nose and my mouth.

It is a luxury they choose not to do without.

Here in the theater, the air conditioning has been running all morning and will run late into the night. It will be supporting thousands of people. The last time they held a premiere like this, the grid failed—all the power in the theater went out and the food spoiled. It was a big to-do in the papers. But it knocked out other things entirely, things they neglected to cover. It knocked out the hospital in Diacria. Only for a few minutes, but that was enough.

I was there visiting my daughter in the NICU. One moment: fluorescent lights and a comforting hum; the next: dark, deafening silence. Alarms blared, but the sound was muffled and so high-pitched it could hardly be heard. The nurses tried to get the manual life support generator going in time to save them all, but some were too weak. My daughter, for instance, had a congenital lung defect common to babies born on Mars. I tried vainly to give her my mask, but her nostrils were too small. I tried breathing for her, inhaling from my mask and exhaling directly into her mouth. A nurse stopped me before I suffocated.

I watched my Alexis turn blue in my arms. Every breath I have taken since feels like a betrayal.

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It is easy, in the end. The door isn’t locked. There are no guards. It is unthinkable to them, I suppose, what I plan to do. I secure my mask. I unplug everything I can see, and for good measure, I slash through all the connecting cords as well. My pocketknife can’t cut through some of the wires completely, but the chef’s knife I stole from the kitchen does the job. Still, the air conditioning hums. It is not until I find the generators and chop their thick cables to bits that everything finally goes dark. The emergency lights come on, and the alarms too, but it’s pointless. No one is coming for them until the party is over.  

I watch from the top of the stairs.

The theater doors burst open. The celebrities and their entourages stampede into the main hall. They scream into nothingness. Their eyes bulge with fear. Some fall as they run. They are trampled by high heels and fine leather shoes. They drop like flies. I watch them all turn blue.

I hope it hurts them to know, at the end, how common they really are—that even the stars die without oxygen.

This story first appeared in Rathalla Review’s “2023 Spring Issue,” published June 2023.