So once we had, we thought, sent a message to Earth, we could have sat there and waited for an answer, but I didn't really want to so we went back to Building 3.  Partly this was because I wasn't patient enough to just sit there and wait; it would have been at least half an hour for the signal to get to Earth, and then come back, and it was easier to just come back in a while and see if we'd gotten a response.  Partly this was because, if they didn't send an answer right away (like maybe it was the middle of the night wherever the signal got received, I don't know), I didn't want to sit there for hours wondering if I did something wrong, I wanted to just come back the next morning and know that it hadn't worked, or else that it had.

And partly it was because, if they did answer back quickly, with a question or three, I didn't want to be there and be tempted to answer right away.

It wasn't until I had sat down at that workstation in Building 5, where my Mom used to work, that I realized that Earth might not even know that we didn't have a couple dozen adults with us.  Charlotte's parents had not been the most technologically adept, which I'm guessing is why they were the ones that were left to watch us while everyone else went to Building 10.  So they might not have known how to send a message to Earth about the Electrocution.

Which I guess I'm going to have to tell you about now.

Ok, I think I'm ready.

So...nope, wait, not ready after all.

Let's talk about that later.  Let's go back to when Mia and I went back to the Building 3 War Room.

Most of the others were still trying to figure out whatever the thing is they were supposed to do.  Olivia was in the main crop domes of Building 3, trying to figure out how to find and fix leaks too small to see.  Harper, who was barely 3 Earth years old, was tagging along after her, theoretically helping and learning but actually sitting in the dirt on the floor and drawing in it.  Harper has dark tan skin, straight black hair, and a triangular little face with big brown eyes.  Kind of like Mia with lighter skin and Asian hair, but equally elfin.  Liam was in another one of the big crop domes of Building 3, walking around looking at the plants closely, then looking up and getting that confused look of trying to remember something.  Alexander, also 3 Earth years old, was jumping up trying to see what Liam was doing, because most of the plants are on these huge tables that were as tall as he was.  Alexander has African features but the whitest skin of anyone except Olivia, and the glasses on his tiny little face make him look kind of like an owl.  Every once in a while he could convince Liam to pick him up so he could see, but I wasn't sure how much progress Liam was actually making on figuring out when we should plant more seeds, and what kinds.  Noah was in a corner of the War Room with a computer station, and it looked like he had something about the sewage system in Building 2 pulled up, but if I was interpreting the look on his face correctly, he wasn't sure what he was looking at.  Also, when he saw me he picked up and came over to talk about how he had conquered level 30 on the video game he was playing.  When I asked him about whether he had figured out what we needed to do to keep the sewage system working, he looked a little bit annoyed.  Or maybe guilty.

"Yeah, no problem," he said, "I got it all figured out."  He looked off to the side, at nothing.

When everybody began to trickle back in to the War Room near evening, we all talked about what we were doing, and how it was going.  I said I had found a way to send a message to Earth, but didn't know if it was working yet.  Nobody else had much progress to report, and it was kind of depressing to hear so many different versions of, "I futzed around for a while but I don't know what I'm doing."

It seemed for a little while that everyone was mad at me.  Everyone was looking away whenever I looked at them, but occasionally it seemed like out of the corner of my eye I could see them glaring at me, when they weren't just staring sullenly at the ground.  Eventually I realized they were all just mad about not knowing how to do anything useful, and the fact that I had figured out something made them feel a little bit worse about it.

"So, uh," I said, my voice sounding kind of nervous (especially when everyone looked at me, mostly not in a particularly friendly way), "Mia had a good idea which helped me today."

Then everyone looked at Mia, who looked suddenly shy, and gave me a "will you please say something so they will stop looking at me?" look.

"What was Mia's idea, Oliver?" asked Olivia.  At least Olivia didn't look mad at me.

"Well, she said to write out what I could remember from when I was little and saw my Mom working, and it got me thinking back to things I saw my parents do that I hadn't paid that much attention to at the time.  It sounds kind of weird, but actually writing stuff out brought back a lot of memories about little things they did and said, which helped me to figure out how to send a message to Earth."

Assuming, I thought to myself silently, that I really had sent one.

"That sounds like a good idea, Oliver," said Olivia, her voice quaking, because it always does, but I keep thinking it means she is being really emotional but actually it's just how her voice is.  "Maybe we should all do that."

Once again, lots of scowling and downcast looks, and it didn't take me very long to figure out why this time.  Everyone's parents were either dead, or gone and maybe never coming back, and it wasn't something anybody particularly wanted to think about, much less write about.  I realized nobody was going to do it, unless it were like what happened to me, when Mia was there waiting for me to do it.  Sometimes you need a person there as an audience, expecting you to do it, so that you actually get started.

"Maybe we could have everyone do it one at a time," I said, "and I could put them together.  You know, it could help us pool our knowledge.  Olivia, could you go first?"

Now that was one of my more inspired moves, because I knew Olivia would say yes.  Nobody else argued, because as long as they didn't have to do it yet, it was something they could put off thinking about, and nobody really wanted to think about the past any more than they had to.  But, once Olivia had done hers the next day, she looked at Liam with that eyes wide open, blank expression, surely-you-wouldn't-disappoint-me look, and Liam was too nice a guy to say no.  Once both of them had done it, there was a certain amount of momentum, and everybody did it when it came their turn.

It became an evening ritual for me to read out loud whoever's account had been done that day.  I guess Olivia didn't know I was going to do that, but it helped people to have some idea how to start, that they had heard what people before them wrote.  It also was a way for people to say more about themselves, without having to actually say it, because I was reading it for them.  So, every night for almost three weeks, we had somebody's account to all listen to, while we sat in the War Room and ate snack food.  It was about that long before we ran out of salty or sugary snack food from Earth and had to eat the locally grown Martian food made from plants grown on Mars, that was probably healthier but not as much fun.  Everybody knew about Olivia's love of chicks, and Liam's illegal plants, and Noah's love of jokes about sewage, and so forth.  It was something everyone looked forward to; although whoever's turn it was sometimes got nervous, they were happy when it was done, and everyone looked forward to everybody else's.  I ended up having to help some of the younger ones, who weren't sure what to say, but mostly I just had to ask a few questions and then they would start talking.

Of course, after we had written their part, the little ones always came back at me with a question of their own.  "Are we going to live?"  Even the littlest ones, somewhere along the way, had figured out to ask that question.  It was a while before I knew what to answer.  When I would read their answers back to everyone else that evening, I would leave that part out, because I wasn't sure anyone else knew what the answer was, either.