LOG ENTRY: SOL 61

How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

CHAPTER 7

LOG ENTRY: SOL 63

I finished making water some time ago. I’m no longer in danger of blowing myself up. The potatoes are growing nicely. Nothing has conspired to kill me in weeks. And seventies TV keeps me disturbingly more entertained than it should. Things are stable here on Mars.

It’s time to start thinking long-term.

Even if I find a way to tell NASA I’m alive, there’s no guarantee they’ll be able to save me. I need to be proactive. I need to figure out how to get to Ares 4.

Won’t be easy.

Ares 4 will be landing at the Schiaparelli crater, 3200 kilometers away. In fact, their MAV is already there. I know because I watched Martinez land it.

It takes eighteen months for the MAV to make its fuel, so it’s the first thing NASA sends along. Sending it forty-eight months early gives it plenty of extra time in case fuel reactions go slower than expected. But much more importantly, it means a precision soft landing can be done remotely by a pilot in orbit. Direct remote operation from Houston isn’t an option; they’re anywhere from four to twenty light-minutes away.

Ares 4’s MAV spent eleven months getting to Mars. It left before us and got here around the same time we did. As expected, Martinez landed it beautifully. It was one of the last things we did before piling into our MDV and heading to the surface. Ahh, the good old days, when I had a crew with me.

I’m lucky. Thirty-two hundred km isn’t that bad. It could have been up to 10,000 km away. And because I’m on the flattest part of Mars, the first 650 kilometers is nice, smooth terrain (Yay Acidalia Planitia!) but the rest of it is nasty, rugged, crater-pocked hell.

Obviously, I’ll have to use a rover. And guess what? They weren’t designed for massive overland journeys.

This is going to be a research effort, with a bunch of experimentation. I’ll have to become my own little NASA, figuring out how to explore far from the Hab. The good news is I have lots of time to figure it out. Almost four years.

Some stuff is obvious. I’ll need to use a rover. It’ll take a long time, so I’ll need to bring supplies. I’ll need to recharge en route, and rovers don’t have solar cells, so I’ll need to steal some from the Hab’s solar farm. During the trip I’ll need to breathe, eat, and drink.

Lucky for me, the tech specs for everything are right here in the computer.

I’ll need to trick out a rover. Basically it’ll have to be a mobile Hab. I’ll pick Rover 2 as my target. We have a certain bond, after I spent two days in it during the Great Hydrogen Scare of Sol 37.

There’s too much shit to think about all at once. So for now, I’ll just think about power.