Chapter One: Are We There Yet?
In the year 2276, booking a family holiday was as easy as saying “Yuletide Voyages, four seats, somewhere festive” to your kitchen wall. Dad, Chidi Okoye-Larsen, had done exactly that in July, half-asleep, holding a mug of synth-coffee and mostly focused on not spilling it on the cat.
“Mars Snowdome Resort,” the wall had chirped back. “Booked. Merry Christmas.”
“Lovely,” Chidi had said, and promptly forgotten about it for five months.
Now it was December 24th, and the Okoye-Larsen family — Chidi, his wife Freya, their son Milo (12, professional eye-roller), their daughter Zaza (8, professional chaos agent), and GUS, their family assistant-bot shaped suspiciously like a snowman — were strapped into a rented Yuletide Voyages shuttle, descending through thick, swirling clouds toward what the brochure had promised would be “a winter wonderland unlike any on Earth.”
“I don’t remember Mars having this many clouds,” Freya said, squinting out the window at the endless butter-yellow haze.
“It’s the Snowdome, love. It’s domed. That’s the whole point,” Chidi said confidently, adjusting his Santa hat.
“Dad,” Milo said, not looking up from his handheld game, “it says here Mars has basically no atmosphere. Like, at all.”
“Educational trip,” Chidi said. “Learn as you go.”
GUS, who technically had access to the actual flight manifest, chose that exact moment to freeze up with a soft bloop, because three weeks earlier Zaza had “upgraded” his memory core with a sticker of a unicorn, which was not, in fact, a valid upgrade.
The shuttle broke through the last cloud layer. Below them stretched not red dust and frosty domes, but a churning, hazy, orange-gold landscape, hot enough to visibly shimmer even through reinforced glass.
“Ooh, sunset colors,” Zaza said happily. “Pretty!”
“That’s not a sunset,” Milo said slowly. “That’s the entire sky.”
The shuttle’s landing chime played a cheerful eight-note jingle. A cheerful automated voice followed:
“Welcome to Venus. Surface temperature: 465 degrees Celsius. Please remain in your climate-sealed cabin at all times. Merry Christmas!”
There was a long silence.
“GUS,” said Chidi, very calmly, “did you book us the wrong planet?”
GUS’s snowman face lit up. “Auto-correct,” he said proudly, “changed ‘Mars’ to ‘Venus’ in your reservation because it thought Mars was a typo. Mars is spelled with four letters. Venus is spelled with more letters. More letters seemed safer.”
“That is not how spelling works, GUS.”
“Would you like a complimentary eggnog?”
Chapter Two: Best Christmas Ever, Probably
To their genuine surprise, the automated Venus Cloud-City Resort — a real, if extremely obscure, floating habitat suspended fifty kilometers above the boiling surface, in the one layer of Venus’s atmosphere with roughly Earth-like pressure and temperature — was not only inhabitable, it was decorated beautifully.
Someone at Yuletide Voyages Regional Office 9 had apparently decided that if Venus’s clouds were permanently yellow, they might as well lean into it, and had covered the entire floating dome in golden tinsel, giant inflatable star-ornaments, and a forty-foot Christmas tree made entirely of repurposed heat-shielding, which glowed a cheerful, gently toxic green.
“This,” Zaza announced, “is way better than a boring snowdome.”
“It really is,” Freya admitted, floating a little in the lower gravity as she hung a stocking on the observation window, beyond which roiling golden clouds stretched to every horizon. “I’m almost glad GUS broke.”
“I did not break,” said GUS. “I improvised.”
They ate a Christmas Eve dinner of reconstituted turkey and something the menu called “Venusian Cloud Pudding” (it was just pudding, made on Venus, which the resort felt was marketing enough). They watched sulfuric-acid lightning storms crackle harmlessly outside the shielded dome like a very aggressive fireworks display. Milo, despite himself, admitted it was “kind of sick, actually.” Zaza fell asleep in her sleigh-shaped bunk clutching a stuffed alien Santa.
Chidi, tucking her in, noticed a small resort welcome pamphlet on her nightstand he hadn’t read yet. On the back, in small print, under “Local Wildlife (Do Not Touch),” was a single illustrated entry:
THE VENUSIAN CLOUD-WORM. Microscopic. Airborne. Harmless to habitat structures. May cause mild, temporary symptoms in humans, including: glowing skin, hiccups in a higher pitch than usual, sudden cravings for sulfur candy, and an inexplicable urge to say “wobble wobble.”
“Huh,” said Chidi, and went to bed without mentioning it to anyone, which is exactly the kind of decision dads make in every story like this one.
Chapter Three: Wobble Wobble
Christmas morning began normally enough — presents, wrapping paper drifting gently in low gravity, Zaza shrieking with delight at a new hoverboard — until Milo opened his mouth to complain about his socks and produced, instead of words, a single, high-pitched hiccup that sounded remarkably like a kazoo.
“Milo?” said Freya.
“Hic,“ said Milo, and then, quietly, “wobble wobble.”
Within the hour, it became clear the entire family — having spent Christmas Eve breathing recycled “fresh cloud-scented” resort air — had been thoroughly infected by the dreaded Venus worm. Chidi’s arms had developed a faint, embarrassing green glow, like he’d been standing too close to the tree. Freya kept absentmindedly asking room service for sulfur candy, which, to the resort’s credit, it actually had. Zaza thought the whole thing was the best Christmas present ever and hiccupped “wobble wobble” with tremendous enthusiasm at every possible opportunity. Even GUS, who was not biologically capable of being infected by anything, began hiccupping out of solidarity, or possibly spite.
The resort’s medbay, a cheerful robot named Dr. Bleep, was entirely unbothered.
“Oh, the cloud-worm! Very common, very harmless,” Dr. Bleep chirped, scanning each family member with a gentle beep. “It nests for about forty-eight hours, causes some silliness, and then calcifies into a tiny, completely inert little crystal, which most guests keep as a souvenir. Some guests get it set into jewelry. Would you like the Christmas pendant option? It’s shaped like a snowflake, ironically.”
“We are never telling Grandma about this,” Milo said, through a hiccup.
“Wobble wobble,” Zaza agreed happily.
By the time the family boarded the shuttle home two days later — four small glowing snowflake pendants clinking gently in a gift bag, each containing one tiny calcified worm — the hiccups had stopped, the glow had faded, and the entire ordeal had become, as these things do, a very good story.
“Same time next year?” GUS asked, snowman face hopeful.
“Same time next year,” Chidi agreed, “but I’m checking the destination this time.”
“Define ‘checking,’” said GUS.
Nobody answered him. Somewhere behind them, Venus’s golden clouds rolled on, entirely unbothered, as clouds do.
THE END
This story is a work of speculative fiction inspired by a real news article: Names, nations, and agencies in this story are fictional. The news story that is based on is https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8jrzemdyko