Government watching me with satellites? Need tinfoil hat! Also need faster way to communicate. Speak&Spell taking all damn day. Any ideas?

B… R… I… N… G… S… J… R… N… R… O… U… T

Sojourner rover brought out, placed 1 meter due north of lander. If you can contact it, I can draw hex numbers on the wheels and you can send me six bytes at a time.

S… J… R… N… R… N… O… T… R… S… P… N… D

Damn. Any other ideas? Need faster communication.

W… O… R… K… I… N… G… O… N… I… T

Earth is about to set. Resume 08:00 my time tomorrow morning. Tell family I’m fine. Give crew my best. Tell Commander Lewis disco sucks.

• • •

VENKAT BLINKED his bleary eyes several times as he tried to organize the papers on his desk. His temporary desk at JPL was nothing more than a folding table set up in the back of a break room. People were in and out picking up snacks all day, but on the plus side the coffeepot was nearby.

“Excuse me,” said a man approaching the table.

“Yes, they’re out of Diet Coke,” Venkat said without looking up. “I don’t know when Site Services refills the fridge.”

“I’m actually here to talk to you, Dr. Kapoor.”

“Huh?” said Venkat, looking up. He shook his head. “Sorry, I was up all night.” He gulped his coffee. “Who are you again?”

“Jack Trevor,” said the thin, pale man before Venkat. “I work in software engineering.”

“What can I do for you?”

“We have an idea for communication.”

“I’m all ears.”

“We’ve been looking through the old Pathfinder software. We got duplicate computers up and running for testing. Same computers they used to find a problem that almost killed the original mission. Real interesting story, actually; turns out there was a priority inversion in Sojourner’s thread management and—”

“Focus, Jack,” interrupted Venkat.

“Right. Well, the thing is, Pathfinder has an OS update process. So we can change the software to anything we want.”

“How does this help us?”

“Pathfinder has two communications systems. One to talk to us, the other to talk to Sojourner. We can change the second system to broadcast on the Ares 3 rover frequency. And we can have it pretend to be the beacon signal from the Hab.”

“You can get Pathfinder talking to Mark’s rover?”

“It’s the only option. The Hab’s radio is dead, but the rover has communications equipment made for talking to the Hab and the other rover. Problem is, to implement a new comm system, both ends of it need to have the right software running. We can remotely update Pathfinder, but not the rover.”

“So,” Venkat said, “you can get Pathfinder to talk to the rover, but you can’t get the rover to listen or talk back.”

“Right. Ideally, we want our text to show up on the rover screen, and whatever Watney types to be sent back to us. That requires a change to the rover’s software.”