So, it is one thing to make a list of things to do, it is another to wake up in the morning and attempt to start doing them.  There's no two ways about it, we floundered at first.  Nobody really knew how to do the thing they were supposed to do, and I think we were still in the back of our minds expecting somebody older to show up and tell us how to do it.  Or maybe do it for us.  So, we knew we had to at least pretend to try, but we didn't really expect to be able to do whatever we had been assigned to do, and at first we were kind of thinking maybe as long as we tried hard, that would be good enough for somebody else to decide to do it for us.

But, obviously, there was no "somebody else" who could show up to do it for us, and after not too long we realized that, not just intellectually but at a gut level.  So then, there were alternating periods of panicky "I can't do this, nobody ever told me how to do this," and then moping around waiting to die, and then frenzied attempts to try something, anything, to get something to work.

I was supposed to figure out a way to send a message to Earth, and I suppose that was because my mom was the person who did most of the communications work.  Not the administrative stuff, I mean the actual running of the equipment for transmitting and receiving.  I had watched her do it, but to be honest when I was doing that I was mostly watching her, not what she was doing.  So, I had to try to remember what I hadn't paid that much attention to in the first place.

I also had to do it with Mia sitting there next to me, looking up at me, waiting for me to do something.  I was sitting in Building 5, which you can reach from Building 3 without going Outside but we were both wearing our suits anyway, in case Building 5 depressurized, with only our helmets off because that would take only a few seconds to put on.  That was one lesson that the trip to Building 29 had taught us, anyway, was to not assume that the other buildings were going to stay pressurized.  I guess the same was true of Building 3 but really, if it depressurized all of the crops would die and then we would starve to death anyway, so what was the point of preparing for that.  But, whenever we left Building 3 we suited up.  Building 5 has a walkway that connects to Building 3, but there's an airlock partway through it, so Mia and I put on our suits before we went through the airlock into Building 5.

Mia is 7 Earth years old, the same as Lucas, but much quieter.  She is dark skinned, with dreadlocks, but these green eyes that look enormous in her little elfin body.  She is always looking up at older people with this alert expression that seems to say, "ok, I'm watching, do something impressive now," and it really kind of puts me off.  Like, if what I'm doing is futzing about at my mom's work station failing to figure out how to use the communication tower to contact Earth, it's not great to have someone who is that alert watching you do it.  But, at least she was quiet, so I could just imagine her wondering 'when is he going to do something useful?', instead of hearing Lucas actually ask me when I was going to do something useful.

I did figure out how to turn her workstation on, which was reassuring.  I recognized the startup screen, and I knew her password because I had covertly watched her type it in enough times.  If only I had watched the rest, but you know the password was interesting to me back then because I wasn't supposed to be able to see it, but the rest seemed to be pretty boring.  Not boring now, though, and what I wouldn't have given to watch her do her job just one more time.

But, that was true for several reasons, of course.

I kept having flashbacks to when I was younger, maybe Mia's age, watching Mom do her job.  Did I stare at her like that?  At least she knew how to do what she was meant to be doing.  I wandered electronically through the various menus, trying to find something that made sense or looked familiar, but after a while I had looked at everything, and none of it made much sense.

"Did you ever see your mom do this?" asked Mia, and I said "Yes!" in what I guess was kind of an annoyed tone of voice.  She didn't say anything for a while, but then eventually she tried again.

"Maybe if you write down everything you remember your mom doing here, it will help you," she said.

Now I didn't really like this idea, because if I remembered then I would just be doing it, and if I don't remember then how can I write it down, but I opened an editor on the workstation and started typing stuff out, mostly because I didn't know what else to do.  Then it occurred to me that if I put it on dictation mode, where I could just talk and it would take down whatever I said, it might prevent Mia from asking a dozen questions, because she wouldn't want to interrupt.  It would also give her something to listen to, I guess.  So anyway, I did that, and here's what I dictated, with Mia there listening to me as I did it.

Well I remember seeing my mom here when I was pretty young, younger than you even, and back then I didn't really know what she was doing.  I would ask, and she would say "sending reports to Earth", or "getting the new quota targets from Earth", or something like that, and I didn't know what that meant.  I think at one point I thought Earth was a person, and asked "who is Earth?" and Mom found that pretty funny and laughed, but she didn't answer.  Probably she was too busy thinking about what she was doing; I hadn't really thought about that before.  I guess I talked to her while she was working a lot.  Hmmm.  Karma.

Anyway as years went by I would spend more time at our apartment while she was working, but still every once in a while she would take me with her when she came here.  Usually when I was older I brought my tablet and watched something while she was working, but every once in a while I would look over her shoulder.  She would be sending big tables of numbers, and sometimes typing out some kind of explanation of why not everything was the way it had been planned.  She would also get tables of numbers back.  There would be a 'ping' noise to indicate a message from Earth had been received, and she would have to read it and type up some kind of response.  Then she would flip the switch to turn it from receive-only mode into send mode...oh hey, I forgot about that.  The send mode takes more power, so it was normally turned off.  Or at least it was, until one time she tried to send without putting it in high-power mode first, and so the signal was way too weak, and I guess the Earth people yelled at her about that.  After that, she just left it in high-power mode all of the time, which I guess meant it took more power but, anyway.

My dad I didn't see as much, he was one of the people who was supposed to be doing the planning for the colony.  What to ask Earth to send, how much we needed to keep food in reserves and how much could be just eaten now, how much water could be spared for this or that.  I think he ended up dealing with a lot of people complaining to him that they weren't getting all the resources they needed, so he was usually home late.  Or maybe it was just to stay away from Mom, I don't know.  I'm not sure if Mom had not been as interested as my dad in going to Mars in the first place, or if sending messages to Earth all the time kept her thinking about Earth too much, but she was never that happy about the fact that we were here.

But I remember once I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted a glass of water, so I got out of bed and when I went into the front room I found him asleep in his chair, with the screen in front of him still.  I had to go behind him to get to the sink, and I looked at what was on the screen, and it was a bunch of numbers about power and water, how big our shortfall was.  I think he was trying to figure out if the same thing was causing both problems.  But really it wasn't something I was supposed to be looking at, and when he woke up and realized I was there, he was a little bit grumpy about it.

I talked to him about that after the Evacuation, the night before the Electrocution actually, and he said that was the real root of the problem that caused all of the others.  Every problem was linked to every other problem, and nothing could be solved until everything else was solved.  Like, they could have gotten more water extracted from the soils if they had more power to do it, but one of the reasons they didn't have enough power is that the panels got dusty and we couldn't clean them enough, and one of the reasons was that it would have taken too much water.  He was one of the only people who was optimistic after the Evacuation, because he thought that maybe we were actually down to a small enough group that our infrastructure was enough now, but I guess the problem was we didn't have the people with the right skills to maintain the infrastructure.  Or maybe that wasn't the problem, maybe we just had a lot of bad luck.

Anyway, I'm going to try to find that switch and see if that helps.

So, then I ended the dictation, and by then I guess my memory had gotten stirred by telling Mia all that, and I had remembered which button Mom had pressed when it was time to send a message.  Immediately, some more options appeared on the screen menus, that hadn't been there before.  Then I remembered Mom had talked to Dad about getting yelled at by Earth, and he had said they would upgrade the software so that it wouldn't let you send if the comm tower wasn't in high-power mode, so it wasn't possible to make that mistake.  I guess Mom didn't trust it, which is why she kept the power on high most of the time?  On the other hand, it had been put in lower power mode by whoever was here last, which was probably her.  But anyway, putting the system into higher power mode meant I could find the option to send a message to Earth.

Now at that point, I had actually gotten done the thing I was supposed to do, which was find out how to send a message to Earth.  We hadn't discussed what we should say.  But, I was a little suspicious if I had really figured it all out, and I wanted to test it.  But what to send?

"What should we tell Earth?" I asked out loud, mostly to myself but I guess Mia thought I was asking her.

"Just ask if they can hear us," she said.

I couldn't think of anything better, so I hit COMPOSE MESSAGE (EARTH) and then typed "CAN YOU HEAR US?" and hit SEND.

I looked over at Mia.  It would take fifteen minutes or more for our signal to even get there, and then as long for their answer to come back, even if they responded immediately.  The distance to Earth varies a lot over time, but it was near its minimum when the Evacuation happened.  At first it was supposed to be to reduce the number of people in the colony to the essentials only, so that the amount of power and water would be enough, until they could convince Earth to send more solar panels and such.  But then more and more people started to volunteer to go back, and it turned into almost everyone.  I was pretty sure the ship hadn't even gotten back to Earth yet, but presumably they had been told what had happened?  Then, I realized, what if Charlotte's parents hadn't known how to use the comm station?  Earth might not have heard anything since the Electrocution.

I realized Mia was still looking up at me, with those big green eyes.

"What if they say yes?" she asked.

I just stared back at Mia, not sure what the answer was.