If you see them coming, leave. That is what I did. I am an exile by choice. More than that: I am a man without meaning.

I long ago learned to mistrust those with meaning; that is to say, most everyone I know. They come in armies. They come bearing metaphysical torches. Mostly, they smile.

On my old planet meanings were so important, every citizen was required to have one. They were printed on our ID cards, and when we went to the doctor, one of the first questions was, “What Is the meaning of your life?” If you were unable to think of a meaning, there were throngs of people who were more than happy to provide you with one.

Some government-financed study had suggested that people who reported a sense of meaning in their lives were healthier and less likely to commit crime than those without one. Laws were made. Before long no one trusted anyone, unless they had a meaning they could sum up in a phrase at parties.

The alternatives to having a meaning were unpleasant. Not that you were jailed or executed. But you were not allowed to draw money from the bank or drive or buy groceries because an ID card without a meaning on it was considered invalid.

Despite all the pressure, I would have loved more than anything to have a meaning, a real one that brought hope to my life, one that I could keep to myself, not something thrust on me by some zealot or bureaucrat.

My card said “architect,” but it was such a lie, I could hardly look at it. The label was given to me at age three when my parents observed I enjoyed playing with toy blocks. Not to have a meaning, even as a toddler, is frowned upon, but as you grow, your meaning is expected to become more “mature:” feeding the hungry, spearheading an art movement, or discovering a cure for some disease.

A meaning does not have to be big though. Others include: caring for an elderly parent; healing sick animals; or knitting clothes for babies of impoverished parents.

After you reach age 17, hardly anyone believes you anymore if you say your meaning is “architect.” About 70 per cent of babies get tagged with “architect” or some kind of artistic label.

“Spelunker” is not trusted either, after one impatient mother made the news after labeling her newborn son that. When asked why, she replied, “Well, clearly he likes to tunnel.” In general, though, job meanings are considered shallow, and by 18 most people are able to come up with something more original.

But me, I never found a meaning, and I thought meaning was too important for me to lie about it. I longed for something real, something to give me real hope, not just a tagline or a system of dogma.

Besides, I was different. After a pumpkin killed my adoptive mother when I was eight, a feeling that there was meaning to anything was hard to come by. I had loved her. And I had watched her fall from a rusty old ladder to her death one October day while trying to tape the cardboard pumpkin to my lofty bedroom window.

A vampire or a zombie I might have understood, but who gets killed by a pumpkin? It had looked so harmless, with dangling hinged legs, green striped socks, and a welcoming smile. The tragedy made no sense. It had no meaning.

I think I cried once, but what I mainly remember was how the colors changed. They all seemed covered with a thin grey film, and it was hard for me to get excited about anything, except I always hated Halloween. And anything cardboard.

Though I craved meaning, I never understood why you had to tell a meaning to every person you met. I was born. No one had asked my permission. It just happened, yet, every day of my life I have felt obligated to justify my existence, to explain to every grocery store clerk, neighbor, and medical professional why I am here.

All the pressure was driving me into a hole. I continued to buy groceries with my architect card, but the clerks always eyed me with mistrust. They were right to do so. I had a meaningless job at a seed packaging company and I was unable to tell a Doric column from a fence post.

My meaningless existence led me to loner-dom. That was partly because there were those who took their meanings way too seriously. They were the people with fire in their eyes who were so confident about their meanings they felt compelled to thrust them onto everyone else.

They targeted people with art labels like mine, the kind children were always getting, musician, painter, or sculptor. As an “architect,” I was a magnet for the meaning zealots, and every time they approached me they reminded me of the meaning I lacked. My stubbornness prevented me from changing my card to something more acceptable like “helping the lame,” and it was ultimately because of all the pressure that I went to Mars at age 26.

A great number of astronomers had made getting to Mars the meaning of their lives, and the faraway planet was just beginning to be colonized. I enrolled in a program for transferring to Mars, which included an extensive orientation and training course. There were too many people on Earth so changing planets was encouraged.

Since the terraforming had begun many generations ago, the temperature had warmed and the air was approaching breathability, but for the most part people inhabited their air conditioned “greenhouse” homes and wore their life maintenance suits whenever they wanted to go outside.

Humanity had gotten a foothold in the red planet, but just barely. Problems abounded. Anyone who went to Mars had to commit to do their part in solving them, which required ongoing training. There was risk. The low gravity could lead to bone deterioration and other health problems. Despite the risks, the idea of going to Mars was the first thing I had felt hopeful about since I was a kid. I went so far as to have my ID card changed from “architect” to “interplanetary explorer.”

Even that meaning sounded unconvincing to my own ears, too narrow. But I must have impressed the man at the space dock when I showed him my new ID card. He smiled, nodded, and waved me through.

The flight to Mars was long, and I could tell stories about it. However, now is not the time to tell them. But even during the flight, the great thing about going to Mars was that nobody talked any more about what their meanings were.

First the space flight, and then the arrival on Mars, undid everyone. Mars was cold and red and its sky was not blue but an odd yellow color during the day. There were often two moons in the night sky, not one, although Deimos looked more like a bright star than a moon, so I liked Phobos best with its irregular asteroid shape.

Although no one was required to have a meaning anymore, everyone had a job. We had to continue the work of those who had come before us. I was responsible for helping to seed Mars with plants that could tolerate Martian soil. Others were tasked with doing research or providing medical care to those whose health was compromised by the low gravity. There were doctors there, farmers, engineers, and, yes, even architects.

I was not one of them. I had been trained as a seed farmer with rudimentary botanical knowledge. Training had also included what equipment was best to use, and how to take safety precautions. Seeding felt like menial labor but I liked planting things and watching them grow. I did my job just like everyone else, but not a soul on Mars had any meaning as far as I could tell. We were all too disoriented, too obsessed with just surviving in an alien land.

I was disappointed, because it seemed like if you were willing to travel all the way to another planet, you ought to be able to find a meaning there, and not just another job.

But for the most part I liked being on Mars. To find myself on an alien planet was surreal. That I had come to a place that had previously been just a dot in the sky had showed me I was capable of surprising myself. Mars was so beautifully desolate, and I wondered why its wide open spaces were so captivating to me.

The years tiptoed by. As the terraforming went on and Mars became a more hospitable place, more colonists arrived. They came flashing their cards with their meanings on them. And the more of them that came, the more Mars became like Earth. Grocery and supply stores began requiring meanings to be shown on ID cards again. I was even asked to show my meaning to my employers each day when I arrived to work.

The new regulation sickened me. I had been on Mars first. What right had these newcomers to make me self-conscious about my meaningless existence once again? Even worse, one day I showed up to work and I was told my ID card was invalid because “interplanetary explorer” was too vague. Anyone on Mars could make a case for being an interplanetary explorer. I would have to think of something more specific if I wanted to continue to work. I wanted to tell my employers to go to hell, but I needed an income.

On that night I could not sleep. I thought about dangerous pumpkins and zealots and why I had come to Mars. I thought about seeds and the flowers that were able to grow in an icy desert with hardly any air. I got out of bed.

My home like most of the others were designed to insulate colonists from the inhospitable Martian atmosphere. Part of the structure was made of a transparent glasslike material in an area everyone called a sun porch. Most Martian homes had one. There you could gaze at the sky and landscape without having to go outside, even though you felt like you were outside. Special fans even simulated wind to add to the illusion, and real Martian soil was brought in.

I did not usually go onto the sunporch at night. Being a planter was exhausting work and I usually fell right into bed afterward. But at that moment I wanted to see the night sky. For the first time in years, I wanted to see the earth, a distant dot, if I could find it, the planet of my birth.

I sat down on the rust-red floor and gazed upward into the night sky, but I did not see the earth that night. Instead I saw Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars, Phobos in its waxing gibbous stage and Deimos receding, as tiny-looking as a distant star. They seemed so lonely to me.

For billions of years those moons had glowed for no one. No human or animal had observed them. They had been content to revolve, spin, and shine without an audience, without a goal, without a reason for billions of years.

For eons those moons had just been there, and that had been enough. I thought about what a wonder that was, to just exist, unseen, without justification or apology, without even a basic use. Theirs had been the purest kind of existence; unlike me and all I had known, they had never faced the burdens of seeming or serving.

I could not think of a new purpose for my card that night. I could only think about Phobos and Deimos. As I looked at Phobos, the closer one, a tightening pressure rose to my throat and I felt a chill at the base of my neck, and I swallowed hard as tears filmed my eyes. At that moment I loved those moons more than I had ever loved anything, for being so remote, so meaningless, and so beautiful.

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