Zoom on Mars... Its biggest city... An arcane of streets, in fact corridors caved from the slope of Olympus Mons... A commercial neighbourhood, a factory of some sort, and then an unending series of aligned doors... Behind one of them, a small room... A big couch in the middle, facing a TV screen shouting silly commercials...

Paying attention, a viewer might try to understand the pun. But the screen switched back to a flashy orange and violet title. 'Epic fails' bellows the deep voice of threatening man. Then it turned yellow, and a sexy women voice added, 'brought to you by suicide TV'.

'Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen!' boomed the voice of a presenter with flashy white teeth. 'Tonight we have yet again a fresh batch of attempted suicides. And I say attempted, because they were all...' He turned around dramatically to point at the audience in the studio who was more than happy to complete with a loud and unsynchronised 'Epic Fails'.

'Good. Now that I got back your attention, let me go through the specifics.' Big flashy smile supported by rolling eyes. 'First of —'

'Next channel,' prompted an outside voice.

The presenter kept on with his speech. 'You know I love the ones who send messages before departure. Well, my first choice in the coming series did not exactly managed to depart, of course, but he did send a clear message. Maybe gory is a better word than clear in that case. Look for yourself.'

The screen snapped to a busy pedestrian alley, obviously from a perched surveillance camera. From that vantage point offering a broad view, the camera zoomed onto a single man standing immobile in the middle street and not looking at anything in particular. He put a hand in his pocket, sighed and finally decided to get it out again. Probably too quickly because he fumbled with the gun that was inside. While a red subtitle alert started bleeping on the surveillance camera for the benefit of the police monitors.

The presenter commented, 'not sure a clumsy guy like that should raise any alert other than...' And the delighted audience shouted again, 'Epic Fail!'

The outside voice grumbled and ordered, 'next channel'.

The TV screen, unperturbed, displayed on the footage of the unhappy man who was now on his knees trying at the same time to catch back the weapon and to hide it from the inquiring crowd. When he got hold of it and stood up, he realised the anti-suicide force had already spotted him and was quickly making its way through the crowd. The thought of failing made him involuntarily drop his mouth and stupidly pull the trigger.

The explosive bullet disintegrated its foot when it should have been his head. The man howled in agony but immediately pointed the gun at his temple. At that moment, he was lifted into the air by a pair of officers who had jumped at him at full speed. The three meters long fly of the trio was broadcast in slow motion, since the artistic director of the show judged it would be more dramatic. The shock back on the floor knocked the wind out of his lungs but he successfully fought over the direction of the next shoot. The poor man finally got his chance and smiled directly at the barrel as he triggered.

The weapon did nothing since it had only one bullet.

The man made a face, and failed to see the blow than knocked him out for good.

'Oh, I wish we had a better view on his face when he realised he was a sucker,' commented the anchorman. 'That could have been the epic fail of the year. But I'm sad to say he would have been disqualified anyway. Yeah, you know the rules. The candidate must survive his true attempt to be allowed to compete. And in this case, the guy ended up brain dead. Oh oh, you'll tell me. How come? It was a perfect case of Epic fail, was'nt it? Well. Take a look again, but that's not obvious from the images you saw. What you couldn't see was that the punch he received projected his head on the hard floor and resulted with a breached open skull. The anti-suicide squad screwed up again, but this time by being too active. Oh, and sorry for the family who posted the video. No fail...' And the crowd completed again, 'no gain. And there will be no compensation for your loss.'

'For Olympus' sake,' started again the outside voice, which now appeared to belong to a middle-aged bearded man, 'I have to do everything by myself.'

He stepped out of his diminutive kitchen, which was opened up on the living room so he could watch TV over the couch. The couch, in which in never sat, was actually his bed. He liked the idea of living in a small place, supposedly like students, for he was a professor than that genuinely wanted to share things with his students.

He badly faked to have the same penniless lifestyle but that was mainly due to the very low pay check of a boring teacher. Indeed, none of his rare students ever gave him a tip, ignoring the custom which should have doubled his revenues.

So, denying his boringness, he blamed his lack of popularity on his very specialised field of research, the ancient Earth ecology or arch-ecology.

And on that point everyone agreed, that domain was absolutely useless on the modern Mars.

'Voice recognition down again, I guess. Bloody brainless machine which only works partially, just to annoy me. I hate the incompetent engineer who couldn't properly program your total obsolescence.'

He grabbed the emergency remote controller and pressed forcefully on the next channel button which was, as he feared, without effect.

'And I hate the technical advisors of the useless government who employ all of us! Look at me, you're supposed to work fully or not at all. Otherwise why bothering with programmed obsolescence?'

He muttered again and pressed directly on the screen to zap onto another channel. The screen immediately switched to the picture of a lion in the savannah. At last, a complete success.

'I declare myself a self-regulating body with full powers in my own room. By voluntarily disrupting the quietness of this place, you, remote controller, have committed an act of high treason towards the owner. You have confessed and you are now convicted. In the name of the judiciary powers, that I happily grant to myself, I hereby sentence you to death.'

And he crashed the remote controller on the floor. For good measure, he jumped on it with both feet, and felt an extreme pleasure at doing it. With a smile difficult to refrain, he walked back to his kitchen, while the wild life documentary started.

'You might have missed the episode called "Life in the jungle" from "School", Season 3, but this spin off series is here to fill the gap. We will bring you a wider or I should say wilder understanding of the terrible living conditions of the remote and fearsome Earth.'

The professor Robert Longbreath focused on the real ancient tomatoes he had directly retrieved at a unreasonable cost from a farmer supplying the food factory. These had indeed the red opaque skin they were famous for. He put them back religiously on the kitchen table and fetched a knife.

He was suddenly taken aback by a simple fact: the antique recipe of Bolognese pasta did not mention whether he had to cook the tomatoes gross and whole. Surely, the seeds were to be removed at some point and it was easier before cooking. On the other side, peeling off the renowned skin seemed a step too far. Prudently, he decided not to decide for the time being and proceeded instead to crush the pills of meat in his milling pot.

The documentary went on, displaying a pride of lionesses approaching unaware antelopes.

Robert stopped milling the meat pills when he obtained two centimetres of fine powder in the bottom of his pot. He added only one centimetre of water, reasoning that the tomatoes contained water as well. A little bit of stirring and the meat was ready to be mixed with the rest.

Probably too late, the antelopes started running but in disarray. The lionesses formed a curved line of sort and pressed on. One younger antelope had switched several directions and was therefore dangerously closed to the line. At some point, it veered completely back and darted in between two big cats. The entire pride then stopped following the herd, and elected the youngster as its prime target. He was soon caught up.

Robert had kept on watching the TV while experimenting in the kitchen. After all, it was not every day that he could he review a broadcast on his research field.

After a long period of silence, the commentator resumed, 'what you just saw are of course images which came out of ancient Earth before the Cerberus was put in place. But there is no reason to think it is different nowadays, because this kind of situation has happened on Earth every minute for millions of years before the arrival of the men. Now that they are gone, Mother Nature has certainly called back her children again and this is their playground. But what looks like just a game is in fact a fierce struggle for survival. There is only one law on Earth, it is known as the law of the jungle: "Eat or be eaten". This is why we are calling the Earth, the true wild.'

Robert had slightly cut himself with the knife when hearing the stupidities proffered by the documentary.

'No, no, no! You can't "Eat or be eaten" in that way, otherwise everybody will think the antelopes can be carnivorous. You are unworthy to teach anything, just worth mining asteroids. Morons. You're the proof that programmed obsolescence has been applied to humans.'