But if I’m being honest, that’s not the real reason I’m interested. I’m sick of being on my own, damn it! Once I got Pathfinder working, I got used to talking to Earth. All that went away because I leaned a drill against the wrong table, and now I’m alone again. I could end that in just four sols.

But it’s an irrational, stupid thought. I’m only eleven sols away from the MAV. Why go out of my way to dig up another broken-ass rover to use as a makeshift radio when I’ll have a brand-new, fully functional communications system within a couple of weeks?

So, while it’s really tempting that I’m within striking range of another rover (man, we really littered this planet with them, didn’t we?), it’s not the smart move.

Besides, I’ve defiled enough future historical sites for now.

LOG ENTRY: SOL 492

I need to put some thought into the bedroom.

Right now, I can only have it set up when I’m inside the rover. It attaches to the airlock, so I can’t get out if it’s there. During my road trip that doesn’t matter, because I have to furl it every day anyway. But once I get to the MAV, I won’t have to drive around anymore. Each decompress/recompress of the bedroom stresses the seams (I learned that lesson the hard way when the Hab blew up), so it’s best if I can find a way to leave it out.

Holy shit. I just realized I actually believe I’ll get to the MAV. See what I did there? I casually talked about what I’ll do after I get to the MAV. Like it was nothing. No big deal. I’m just going to pop over to Schiaparelli and hang with the MAV there.

Nice.

Anyway, I don’t have another airlock. I’ve got one on the rover and one on the trailer and that’s it. They’re firmly fixed in place, so it’s not like I can detach one and attach it to the bedroom.

But I can seal the bedroom entirely. I don’t even have to do any hatchet jobs on it. The airlock attachment point has a flap I can unroll and seal the opening with. Remember, I stole the airlock attachment from a pop-tent, which is an emergency feature for pressure loss while in the rover. It’d be pretty useless if it couldn’t seal itself off.

Unfortunately, as an emergency device, it was never intended to be reusable. The idea was that people seal themselves in the pop-tent, then the rest of the crew drives to wherever they are in the other rover and rescues them. The crew of the good rover detaches the pop-tent from the breached rover and reattaches it to theirs. Then they cut through the seal from their side to recover their crewmates.

To make sure this would always be an option, mission rules dictated no more than three people could be in a rover at once, and both rovers had to be fully functional or we couldn’t use either.