So, here we go, it's really time now to talk about the Electrocution.  It's when all of us except Charlotte lost our parents.  Well, except for kids like Olivia and Sophie whose parents went back to Earth.  I guess, in some sense, they still have parents, but when they're not on the same planet with you it might as well be the afterlife, I think.  Or maybe it's worse, because at least the rest of us know that our parents are never coming back, whereas they still might think it could happen.  But, I digress.  I notice I have been digressing a lot when it's time to talk about this.  So, here goes.

After the Evacuation, there was a short period when it seemed like things might get better.  There was finally enough air and power and water for everyone, just because there were fewer of us, and probably also it helped that there weren't any people left on Mars who wanted the whole project to collapse so they could get a ride home.  Anyone who had secretly wanted things to fail, was gone back to Earth.  For a few weeks, things seemed to be quieter, and more relaxed, and the mood lifted a bit.

But, pretty quickly, it started to become apparent that things weren't getting done.  Everybody was trying, but the mix of skills that was left was not quite optimal, and also too many things were being kept running.  We still had 29 buildings in operation, with only about 35 adults to keep everything running.  After a while, the adults could tell that something needed to change.

So, everybody moved out of the residential buildings, so that we could shut off the power and water and air to those, and that brought us down from 29 buildings to about half that.  We even shut down Building 28, the semiconductor fab, and Building 15, steel production, because they both took more power to run than we had available by that point.  There were some other buildings that got shut down.  This helped some, but there was still a problem with power.

I should mention that, this whole time, the adults were probably talking about all of this with each other, but they didn't talk about it with us, or even talk about it to each other in front of us where we could overhear it.  We were pretty much just left in Building 3 with Charlotte's parents during the day while they were at work.  It was kind of exciting and fun at first, having all of the kids together in a new environment, but after a while we started to notice that our parents were tired and worried looking all the time.  In fact, come to think of it, I wonder how much they were talking even to each other about all of this.  They must have talked about some of it but I'm not sure how much big-picture stuff they really discussed.  They might have just been rushing around too much, trying to do everything, and not spending enough time discussing how much was possible to do and how to prioritize.

Eventually, they probably realized that the robots who were supposed to keep the solar panels free of dust (which needs to be removed to keep them producing at peak levels) were not working very well any more, and the reason was that the batteries that powered the robots, were wearing out.  They can only get recharged so many times.  Also, the larger batteries that are used when the air is clear and the sun is shining so that we can store the excess power to use later, were getting worn out as well.  The problem was that the battery production facility in Building 10 wasn't a place where any of the remaining adults had worked.  The people who had worked there, all left in the Evacuation.  In fact, it hadn't really been running that well even before the Evacuation, for reasons that aren't quite clear to me.  Maybe the people running it before the Evacuation weren't doing it very well?  Maybe that's why they all left in the Evacuation.

Anyway, about a month and a half after the Evacuation, all the adults went to Building 10 together, except for Charlotte's parents who stayed to look after us.  I think the idea was that they were going to have a big work session together, and figure out how to churn out a lot of new batteries, for the solar robots and for storing surplus power during the clear days.  If it had worked, I suppose it would have broken the downward spiral, because with enough power we could have solved a lot of the other problems.  We could have run the nighttime lights in Building 3 to extend the growing time of the crops, which would have taken care of the food issues.  We could have powered the steel production and semiconductor fab again, at least for short periods if we needed something.

Instead, what happened is that nobody came back.

Charlotte's parents were mostly trying to keep our spirits up by having us play games together, or put on little plays, or do yoga, or whatever they could think of that kept us busy but didn't use up any resources.  They had been doing it for weeks, and they were pretty good at it really, most days we had some fun during the day.  But that day, as it got late and we hadn't heard anything from the rest of the adults, this awful feeling descended.  Eventually it got really quiet, and Charlotte's dad went to try to radio them to see how things were going.  When he came back into the room, he looked even more worried, and then he and Charlotte's mom had a really quiet, whispered conversation between the two of them.

In some ways, it was the beginning of about six weeks of holding our breath.  We all went to sleep that night not knowing what had happened, but thinking it was probably bad.  The next day Charlotte's dad went Outside using the rover, and came back with the rover but nobody else.  He had to tell us that everyone who had gone to Building 10 was dead, and all of us were just stunned.  Not even sad, at first, because it didn't seem real right away.  Just stunned.  We woke up every morning and the first thing we realized was that it wasn't a bad dream, the Evacuation and the Electrocution and everything else that had gone wrong, really had happened.

I should probably mention at this point, that we didn't actually know if they got electrocuted at the battery factory, or something else.  That was just what Charlotte's dad guessed, and I don't think forensics was his specialty.  He knew they were dead from the readouts from their suits (which he could see from the rover's computer screen once he got close enough to Building 10), and also of course because no one had come back.  I don't think he actually went in and looked, not that any of us ever asked him.  But the guess was that something electrical had happened, a water leak or whatever, that had caused them all to die at once.  Which, now that I think about it, was never really the most likely scenario, but I guess forensics wasn't our specialty either.  But regardless, it was pretty clear by that point that they were all dead, regardless of whether or not it was from electrocution.

Of course, eventually, Charlotte's parents died as well in Building 29, and in some ways it was a mercy.  They were trying as best they knew how, but they hadn't really been prepared for that kind of role in the Colony, and it wasn't what they were suited for.  Looking back on it, we should have stepped up and insisted on helping out as adults more, but we didn't know to do that and they didn't know to ask us to.  They thought they were supposed to somehow make everything run, and over the course of a few weeks their spirits just sort of got crushed by the Monster because they were trying to do something they could never succeed at, not alone anyway, and then they had to do it with 20 scared and wide-eyed kids watching them flail about at it.  I wish we had insisted on helping, but we were all kind of stunned and then grieving, and I guess that was also part of why they didn't ask us to help.

So, the period in between the Electrocution and Charlotte's parents dying, was sort of this foggy mental haze for me, and I think maybe for a lot of the other kids as well.  We were stunned by how much had changed in a couple months, all of it bad, and we were way out of our depth in knowing what to do about it.  Not having any adults at all there to take care of us, kind of snapped us out of that haze.  But for the next five weeks, while we were doing a lot and making progress and learning to feed ourselves and fix the leaks and all the rest, we still had a mental blind spot.  I think we tended to avoid even facing the direction of Building 10, when we were in Building 3 and could have looked that way to see it through the glass.  Not always, but just about always, we looked the other direction, and just tried not to think about what was in that building and what it represented.  But when Olivia saw that it had crumbled open because of the quake, that blind spot got torn away also.

I suppose, in reality, we could have just shrugged it off and kept on doing what we were doing.  The leaks in Building 3 were sealed, properly, and had lasted through a quake even.  We had no worries with power or water now, because the geothermal unit was working.  The crops were growing well, and we had started to learn how a lot of the machinery in the other buildings worked.  We could have just ignored Building 10, at least for a long time, until we needed to figure out how to make new batteries; with working geothermal power that might not even be as much of an issue, since geothermal works pretty much all the time (unlike the solar, where you need batteries to keep things working at night).

When Building 10 was broken open by the quake, it seemed kind of like that mental box we had put those memories in, broke open also.  We decided we had to go see what had happened, and what the situation was now.  The excuse was, that we needed to see if any of the battery-making equipment could be rescued, before duststorms and radiation ruined it all.  Really though, it was just that before we made sure to try not to see it, and so now we couldn't unsee it, and until we looked we wouldn't be able to really think about anything else.

But in my own mind, and maybe some of the other kids' as well, we all knew that Building 10 was the Monster's lair, and we were going straight into it.  I was scared.  But, I was going.

Liam also decided he was going, and Noah.  Emma and Ava also decided to come with us.  Elijah and Charlotte were both against it, and not only did they not want to go, they didn't want anyone else going either.  But, after a lot of really emotional arguing, some of it more like shrieking, Liam and Olivia quietly stated that we needed to do it, and that was it.  I think Olivia would have gone, if she had legs she could walk on.  Instead, she stayed in Building 3, and I think probably had a time of it, dealing with Elijah and Charlotte while we were gone.  She was on the radio with us, but mostly just so she could let the others know that she was still hearing us talk to each other, and things were ok.

Liam's right hand was really messed up from his fall, and he was starting to feel a fair amount of pain from it, but the scanner in Building 6 had said nothing was broken and just to not use that hand for a while, so he was not able to drive the rover very well since it's easier if you can use both hands.  Noah drove us in the rover to Building 14, and then he and Ava showed the rest of us how to operate the mechsuits.  It felt pretty cool to be inside one of those, because even though it was sized a bit wrong and I wasn't quite as tall as the people who designed them were expecting, it still made me feel a bit more like an adult to be able to lift and move around heavy things.  I had seen the training video that Charlotte's parents had made for using them, and it had a lot of safety stuff that mostly involved not breaking everything and everyone around you now that you are strong enough to do it by mistake.  When you climb into one of the mechsuits, you become a bull in a china closet.

One thing I have noticed, is that prior to the Evacuation, they spent a lot of time trying to train us about safety, and it did almost no good, because during the training we were always bored.  The world with adults all around us was safe, maybe too safe.  To pay attention during safety lessons, required willpower and lots of it, because we had no emotional motivation to learn any of it.  At a gut level we just didn't think bad things would happen to us.  Once we had so many bad things happen, including some people getting seriously hurt and others killed, our attitude changed.  Every safety tip about the mechsuits seemed really, really important, and we all concentrated on learning everything as well as possible.  Nothing like dead parents and seriously injured friends to make you take safety very, very seriously.

There was another reason that we spent quite a while in Building 14 getting familiar with how the mechsuits worked.  It felt a lot like we were putting on armor and getting ready for battle with the enemy.  Which was not true, in any literal sense; we knew there was no physical Monster waiting in the rubble of Building 10.  But on the other hand, we also knew that a lot of people had died in that building, and now it was probably even more dangerous because of being wrecked by the quake.  We were going in there not sure what we would find but with the strong feeling that something would try to kill us.