My name is Liam. I'm 14 Earth years old, and I'll turn 8 Martian years old tomorrow. I don't really remember too much about when I was very little. My first vivid memory is meeting Olivia, when I was I think 3 Earth years old and she was 4. I remember realizing that she was shorter than everyone else, and then with a shock realizing that I was also shorter than everyone else. It's not like I didn't already know that, I suppose, but since I was the only child I knew of, I suppose the fact that I was the same species as my parents hadn't quite occurred to me. I know that sounds odd, but I was very young. When I met Olivia, I thought, "she's almost as short as I am", and seeing someone in between the adults and me, sizewise, kind of brought home to me that I was going to someday get big enough to look at other adults like they look at each other. It was a weird idea, then, and now it's a weird idea that I didn't always know that. I guess I spent the first part of my childhood thinking I was a completely different kind of person, like a different species than the adults.

I didn't see Olivia much for a few years. I think that because the two of us were both unplanned, unapproved even, we were both kind of a bit of an embarrassment, and so our parents didn't want us to be seen with the other. Which is odd; you would think they would have clung together for support, but it didn't work like that. I guess I kind of picked up a bit of an idea of myself as being an embarrassment, generally, which I took a while to shake off. If I have shaken it off even now, that is.

My parents both worked in Building 3, in the main greenhouse. It's a series of domes, made of thick glass triangles held in place by a metal framework. It's also got a spiderweb of irrigation pipes on the inner side that rains down water from time to time. I've never seen a spiderweb for real, but that's what they called it, "the Spiderweb"; I've seen pictures of real spiderwebs in videos, and I can see why they call it that. The glass panes are actually several layers of glass, with gaps in between filled with thin plastic sheets, and they are good at blocking some kinds of radiation, and letting in light but not letting out heat, air or water. Well, pretty good, anyway. They were very good until lately; now there's a tiny leak somewhere, but hopefully Olivia is going to fix that.

I spent most of my time with my parents there in Building 3, and they taught me a lot about plants. I'm not sure if I was supposed to be helping them or not, and maybe there wasn't a rule about it one way or the other because there weren't any rules about kids at all (except that there weren't supposed to be any kids). But it was most of what I spent my time thinking about. Seeing the seeds sprout, and grow, and produce more seeds. I remember when I first thought of myself as being like one of those seeds, because I was smaller but growing up, and I told my mom about it, very proud of myself for having thought of it, and she laughed and then I realized that she thought it was obvious. She didn't intend it to be a mean laugh, but it made me feel awkward.

Something similar happened when I was watching the bees come in and out of the beehive, and realized that their hive was kind of like our Colony. Ok, they didn't have to wear suits in order to go outside their hive, but it pretty clearly was a very different environment. I used to like to watch them flying in and out, and working on the sugarwater that we would put out for them. I think the bees were originally some sort of experiment, but after the experiment was done my parents asked for the hive to be moved into Building 3 and they put out sugarwater to keep them fed.

Sometimes I would find that a new plant had somehow sprouted up, one that wasn't supposed to be there, and I would get very excited watching it. My parents were supposed to kill anything that wasn't an approved plant species, so that we wouldn't have weeds sucking up water intended for the plants we did want. I learned how to, when I saw one, transplant it to its own small pot and hide it away somewhere that it got sunlight, but didn't get seen. There were a lot of spots like that, with equipment set by the side of the building, and if I put them on the floor between the equipment and the outer wall, they got sunlight without being seen by anyone. Except the bees, they would find them almost immediately, but nobody but the bees saw them.

Well, until they were seen, after all. Eventually one of the directors was going on a tour Outside and saw this whole row of little pots through the glass, down by the ground, between a piece of equipment and the glass. Normally no one looked down that low, but they were doing some sort of inspection of the base of the building from the Outside and he was along with the inspectors for some reason. I kind of got in trouble, and my dad told me that they would destroy it all, because they weren't approved species to be growing on Mars. I cried a lot. But then later, I found out that he had just moved them to a better spot, not really visible unless you came inside Building 3 and looked around, all the way to the furthest dome, which because it was where new soil was processed, most people did not go there. "New soil" is a polite term for human sewage mixed with Martian dust and food scraps, and it still pretty much smells like shit, at least a little, and especially when it's wetted. Eventually it turns into actual soil, and it gets moved into the rest of Building 3 to grow plants in, but at first it's still too much like sewage.

My parents didn't even tell me that they had done this, they just put my plants there and said nothing, even when I was in my room crying about losing it all. Then the next day, my dad came up to me and said, "You'd better go to the new soil dome and water them, then."

I didn't know what he meant by "water them", but I figured he meant wetting the new soil, which is done so that the bacteria in it will stay alive, and turn the whole mess into something like dirt that you can grow plants in. I hadn't been the one who did that, normally, although he had showed me how, because I didn't like the smell, and so they hadn't usually made me do that. I thought that they were still mad at me for getting them in trouble with their bosses and were making me do it as punishment. I shuffled back there in a pretty glum mood, and then I saw my illegal plants, all laid out on the floor in the center of the dome. There were metal bins around the sides where the new soil was cooking, so you couldn't see my plants from Outside, but they could get sun from above. It was like seeing a bunch of dead relatives come back to life. Well, I suppose that's what it was like, I've never had that happen to me. I remember it was the first time I'd ever cried from being happy, and I didn't understand why I was crying, until my mom came in and I said I didn't know why I was crying and she explained that was a thing that happens sometimes, when you're so happy you cry.

Most of them were seeds that had passed through people, and ended up in some previous batch of new soil. Tomatoes, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, a few different kinds of pepper, hemp, poppies, sesame, and a few others that I hadn't identified. Every time we got foods from Earth to supplement what we grew ourselves, some new kind of plant would show up in the new soil within a few weeks. I had spent a long time looking at pictures of plants from Earth before I had identified my first one, which was a tomato plant. The bees seemed to like all of the berry plants, so I felt like somebody else appreciated them.

So, the bad part about all of that was that I had to do the wetting of the new soil, from then on, which was a stinky job. I mean it wasn't as bad as the sewage plant jobs, because it was mixed with Martian soil dust and other stuff, but it still wasn't pleasant in that respect. The good part was that I had an easier time raising my illegal plants. If there was ever an inspection, we would just make sure the sprinklers were on in the back room, and the smell would guarantee they stayed away from that part. The biggest problem was that as we got better and better at making the mix, it would turn from "new soil" into actual soil faster, and it would start to smell more like, well, actual soil. Which is a good smell. So we kept back a bit of the raw sewage, and took the lid off of that bin whenever there was an inspection coming. We also moved the beehive back there, since that's where the plants they liked best were anyway, and inspectors also preferred to stay away from the bees. It worked pretty well, because what they really cared about was in the other parts of Building 3 anyway; the crops.

We were still getting some food from Earth, but it was less and less. Apparently they were trying to get us up to food self-sufficiency faster than the original plan, because that was a big part of the bulk of the shipments from Earth. So, they were always trying to get more food faster, and it was frustrating to Dad especially. He told me they would want to harvest a crop a few days too early, in order to meet a monthly quota of some sort that had been set by the people back on Earth, and as a result the plants didn't grow quite as big as they could have, and so in the end it didn't produce as much as if they'd been a bit more patient. Or, they would want to skimp on the supplemental lighting one month, in order to hit some other quota about electricity, and so the plants would grow a bit slower because they were not getting their growing time extended by the artificial lighting. They were always cutting a corner in one place for this month, and then hoping the problem would somehow go away, but of course it would just pop up in another place as a result in the next month, worse now than before. Being short of electricity this month meant being short of food the next month, which meant fewer new people could come to Mars on the next ship from Earth, which meant a labor shortage next year.

I think I understood that kind of thing better from a young age, because of raising plants. They do what they do, and if they're not ready to sprout, or they're not ready to flower yet, or they're not ready to harvest, then there's not really anything gained by yelling at them to go faster. They do what they do, and if you don't give them what they need now, they will remember, even if you forget, and it will cost you later.

Oliver, that's about all I've got time for now, but this might have been a good idea to make this, because I've just remembered where Mom and Dad kept their book of notes on planting times and harvests, because Dad would get it out and point into it when he was arguing with the higher-ups. I need to go get it, we're probably late for planting whatever should come next!