Chapter 10 (The Great Rift 2): Slipper Bread

March 2029, Rocket City, Sa State, Liang Kingdom

Michael Max invited his girlfriend, Daphne Braun, to spend the weekend at his home. To avoid any awkwardness, he offered a seemingly legitimate reason: he said they needed to conduct an important scientific experiment together.

On the phone, Daphne asked curiously, “What kind of scientific experiment?”

With exaggerated seriousness, Michael replied, “My dear Doctor of Astronomy, this experiment is closely related to your Mars rupture theory. It requires precise electrical equipment and a complex process. The experiment is called: baking bread.”

Daphne laughed, knowing exactly what Michael meant by bread—Italian ciabatta, whose cracked surface, reminiscent of a slipper, has earned it the nickname “slipper bread.” She had tried baking it a few days earlier and had mentioned it to Michael.

Baking bread? As a pretext for a date, it was almost comically transparent.

But for Daphne, the reason hardly mattered. She was already irresistibly drawn to the energy Michael radiated.

Daphne was convinced that true love is unconditional; being with Michael brought her the greatest happiness, and no justification was necessary.

Despite being the world’s wealthiest man, Michael Max’s home was remarkably modest—just a prefab house of less than a hundred square meters, thrown up in three days on a vacant lot.

Their “important scientific experiment” began.

The “precise electrical equipment” Michael mentioned turned out to be an old-fashioned electric oven, but the complex process he referred to was quite real.

They kneaded the dough and let it rise, covering each piece with plastic wrap to retain moisture. Once the dough had proofed, the baking steps became intricate, requiring exact controls of temperature and steam.

First, the oven was preheated to 260 degrees Celsius, with both a tray for the dough and another for water inside. The tray of water generated steam. After thirty seconds of baking, the oven door was opened to spray more water, and the temperature was reduced to 230 degrees before baking continued.

The dough would expand with the heat, shrink as it cooled, then expand again. During these cycles, the crust would crack open, forming deep, valley-like fissures that resembled slippers.

“Daphne, your Mars rupture hypothesis is fascinating. If Mars expands with heat and contracts with cold, repeating this many times, its outer shell would eventually burst apart,” Michael said.

“You’re quite perceptive, Michael. The formation of Mars’s rifts and the cracks in slipper bread are caused by the same principle.” As she said this, Daphne leaned against Michael’s broad chest, their flour-covered aprons pressed together.

Through the transparent oven door, they watched the bread rise and swell, its surface splitting open with a dull thud.

When the bread was finally served at the table, the two were brimming with enthusiasm as Daphne shared her research and discoveries about Martian terrain with Michael.

The elevation difference across Mars’s surface exceeds twenty thousand meters, the greatest in the solar system. Yet, due to the lack of strong tectonic activity, Mars’s surface shows no large-scale folds; it is remarkably smooth and flat.

Overall, Mars has only two kinds of landform: flat plateaus and flat plains. The plateau hosts Olympus Mons and three smaller volcanoes arrayed to its southeast.

Lined up in the same southeastward direction from these four volcanoes lies an immense canyon, over four thousand kilometers long, called Valles Marineris, second in length only to Earth’s East African Rift.

The plateau where Olympus Mons stands meets the plain with almost no transitional zone—there is a nearly vertical escarpment, hundreds or even thousands of meters high.

The plains show abundant evidence of water flow, but not the patterns of river erosion—rather, they suggest that Mars was once warm, humid, and covered by vast oceans.

Some of the rocks at the plateau and escarpment are only tens of millions of years old, while the plain—the ancient ocean floor—has a geological age of billions of years.

The most perplexing feature is Valles Marineris, observed in 1972 by Mariner 9 and named after the spacecraft.

Valles Marineris is over four thousand kilometers long, 300-600 kilometers wide, and up to eight kilometers deep. Unlike the two arc-shaped East African rifts on Earth, Valles Marineris is perfectly straight, with no mountains or folds flanking it, just endless flat plains. How did it form?

In the 1970s, one theory held that Valles Marineris was created by one or more catastrophic floods, but this was quickly disproved. Even the largest floods could not carve a canyon of such width and depth, and there is no evidence of such events on either side of the canyon.

The prevailing theory is that Valles Marineris resulted from the collapse of the plains as the plateau of the Olympus Mons volcanic complex rose.

The slipper bread experiment and the arc-shaped structure of the East African Rift suggest that if Mars’s plateau rose due to geological activity, the rift should have formed in an arc encircling it, not as a straight line running southeast for over four thousand kilometers—longer than Mars’s own radius.

There is another unresolved mystery about Valles Marineris: a large amount of sedimentary strata has been found at the canyon’s bottom. Sedimentary layers are common geological phenomena, typically formed at the bottom of lakes or from accumulated volcanic ash.

After Valles Marineris formed, where did these additional sedimentary layers come from?

Michael listened intently and asked, “According to your hypothesis, the plateau was once land, the plain was once ocean floor, so how did Valles Marineris itself form?”

“I believe Valles Marineris was formed when underground magma flowed out through volcanic eruptions and then cooled, causing the ground above to collapse. But what I can’t figure out is why the magma would flow in a straight line like that beneath the surface.”

They fell silent. Suddenly, Michael’s eyes lit up, and he took Daphne’s hand. “I can connect you to my VESSEL. After neural fusion, it might help you think more deeply.”

He led Daphne to a special chair, pausing to add, “My brain-machine fusion project is still experimental. The VESSEL—short for Non-Contact External Brain Connector—was designed for my own brain. You know more about Mars than I do, but I don’t know if you’ll be compatible with VESSEL.”

Daphne, eager, joked, “Let me try. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just call it another failed bread experiment.”

Relaxing into the chair, Daphne put on the special helmet and signaled Michael to activate the device. As the power increased, Daphne grew drowsy and dizzy.

She tried to focus, hoping to enter a meditative state, but after a few minutes, she wearily lifted her right hand to signal Michael to shut down the device.

Michael helped her remove the helmet. Daphne slumped in the chair, eyes tightly shut, and said weakly, “It’s too dizzying. I can’t think at all.”

Daphne Braun’s experiment with the VESSEL had failed.

That night, Daphne’s head rested on Michael’s shoulder, her arm draped softly and naturally across his chest. Her breathing was even, and she drifted into deep sleep.

Was this a dream? Daphne saw a beautiful planet with vast oceans and magnificent mountains—one large, three small—four volcanoes spewing blazing red lava into the sky.

A fiery dragon of molten rock surged and ebbed, now fierce and raging, now shrinking and dim, just like the temperature in a bread oven, rising and falling. The planet’s shell expanded and cracked under alternating heat and cold.

With a crack, the planet’s crust, along with its mountains and lakes, shattered and flew off into space. The entire seabed, wrapped in water, was flung skyward, instantly freezing into ice. What remained of the planet was barren plateau and smooth plain.

Where plateau met plain, a sheer, vertical escarpment marked the boundary—once the junction of tectonic plates. The seabed above the underground magma collapsed thunderously, forming a long, deep canyon.

Some of the sedimentary strata from the lake bed on the plateau fell back onto the plain and into the canyon. The planet lost its blue and green, slowly turning to a dusty red.

Michael shifted on his shoulder, waking Daphne. In a low voice, he said, “Sorry, I woke you. I just had a dream.”

Daphne, collecting herself, asked in surprise, “You had a dream, too? What did you see?”

“I dreamed of thin clouds floating above Valles Marineris. I was deep in a chamber inside the canyon, using robotic arms to dig ice blocks from the rock.”

“Your dream is so vivid. There really is ice in the canyon walls, and thin clouds over Mars in summer—I’ve told you that, haven’t I?” Daphne rubbed her eyes and continued, “You said you wanted to build a Mars survival base deep in Valles Marineris. What did you call that habitat?”

Michael replied, “The Valles Marineris Capsule.”

&

Collected lines, with seals:

Long have I dwelt in trust, believing in spirits. — Tang, Li Dong
Dreams reveal the image’s form. — Song, Li Liuqian
Seeking the source, I enter a hidden valley. — Song, Ouyang Xiu
The tide rises outside the door, on the sandbar. — Song, Xu Ji