I’ve now grown accustomed to hearing the alarms blare at all times. The fire alarm has finally stopped, now that there’s no more fire. The low oxygen alarm should stop soon. The high humidity alarm will take a little longer. The water reclaimer has its work cut out for it today.

For a moment, there was yet another alarm. The water reclaimer’s main tank was full. Booyah! That’s the kind of problem I want to have!

Remember the space suit I vandalized yesterday? I hung it on its rack and carried buckets of water to it from the reclaimer. It can hold an atmosphere of air in. It should be able to handle a few buckets of water.

Man I’m tired. Been up all night, and it’s time to sleep. But I’ll drift off to dreamland in the best mood I’ve been in since Sol 6.

Things are finally going my way. In fact, they’re going great! I have a chance to live after all!

LOG ENTRY: SOL 37

I am fucked, and I’m gonna die!

Okay, calm down. I’m sure I can get around this.

I’m writing this log to you, dear future Mars archaeologist, from Rover 2. You may wonder why I’m not in the Hab right now. Because I fled in terror, that’s why! And I’m not sure what the hell to do next.

I guess I should explain what happened. If this is my last entry, you’ll at least know why.

Over the past few days, I’ve been happily making water. It’s been going swimmingly. (See what I did there? “Swimmingly”?)

I even beefed up the MAV fuel plant compressor. It was very technical (I increased the voltage to the pump). So I’m making water even faster now.

After my initial burst of 50 liters, I decided to settle down and just make it at the rate I get O₂. I’m not willing to go below a 25-liter reserve. So when I dip too low, I stop dicking with hydrazine until I get the O₂ back up to well above 25 liters.

Important note: When I say I made 50 liters of water, that’s an assumption. I didn’t reclaim 50 liters of water. The additional soil I’d filled the Hab with was extremely dry and greedily sucked up a lot of the humidity. That’s where I want the water to go anyway, so I’m not worried, and I wasn’t surprised when the reclaimer didn’t get anywhere near 50 liters.

I get 10 liters of CO₂ every fifteen hours now that I souped up the pump. I’ve done this process four times. My math tells me that, including my initial 50-liter burst, I should have added 130 liters of water to the system.

Well my math was a damn liar!

I’d gained 70 liters in the water reclaimer and the space-suit-turned-water-tank. There’s plenty of condensation on the walls and domed roof, and the soil is certainly absorbing its fair share. But that doesn’t account for 60 liters of missing water. Something was wrong.