So my name is Emma, and I'm 13 Earth years old (6 in Martian years).  I just want to say that my first memory is when I met Olivia.  I suppose we were in our apartment in Building 23, but I only really remember that Olivia was there, and we were playing with a couple of parts of machinery of some sort, I don't know what, but something that Olivia's dad had, and he let us play with them.  I think we were pretending they were a rover and people in the rover, and I didn't know what a rover was and Olivia tried to explain it to me.  I didn't really understand what she was telling me, but I was having fun and wanted to be around Olivia as much as I could after that, because she would explain to me how things worked, and never got tired of me asking her questions.  Olivia was always smart that way, and also patient.  My parents were nice, but they sometimes would get kind of impatient with me always asking 'why' and 'how does it work', and Olivia never did.

By the way, I just want to say in case you've read Olivia's part before mine, that I think she looks great.  I like the way she looks.

Anyway, my parents worked in different buildings.  My dad worked in Building 21, where the 3D-printers and the CNC machines and the ceramic kilns are, and Mom worked in the admin building, 24.  I never really got to see what my dad did at work, but I went to where my mom worked sometimes.  I guess that was because she just worked in an office, which was safer, whereas where Dad worked in building 21 there were a lot of high temperature or high voltage things that were too dangerous to let a kid get near, I guess.  It would have been nice to see how some of that worked, though, when I got older, but it just never happened, and I guess I never asked to see it either.

Mom's job seemed to be a lot of typing on a computer, and telling people 'no'.  I would be there by her desk, and she would be getting voice calls and talking to people who all wanted something, more power or more water or whatever, and she would look something up on the computer and then tell them 'no'.  Then usually there would be some kind of story about how someone else was getting more power or more water by just stealing it somehow and lying about how much they were using, and Mom would have to say something.  Obviously, she didn't want to say that it was ok for people to steal extra water or power.  But, she also didn't want to say that she was going to do anything about it, because the reality was that she wasn't going to, because she didn't really have the authority to do that, I guess.  So, it would end up more or less as, "that's not ok but we're not going to do anything about that; please don't copy that behavior yourself".  I asked her about it once, and she got kind of grumpy about it.  I think maybe she was tired of dealing with the same complaints all of the time and not knowing what to do or say about it, and I was just one more person making her talk about something she didn't really want to talk about because she didn't know what to do.

But most of the time, Mom was really nice.  She was the only person I liked talking to as much as Olivia.  We would talk about the shows we got from Earth, and what had happened and what we thought was going to happen in the next episode.  Sometimes, when there was some nice juicy gossip about the characters on those shows, she would then tell me about something that had happened on Mars where people had acted like that.  She told me not to talk to anyone else about any of the gossip, but I would talk to Olivia about it sometimes.  Like when people would steal from each other, or talk bad about each other when they weren't around but smile and be friendly when they were there, or when people would sleep with someone else's spouse.

It would happen on the shows we got from Earth, and at some point Mom would say who that character reminded her of, and I would try to guess which of those bad things they had done, that made Mom think they were similar.  Eventually, we had a sort of coded way of talking about people, where we would use the name of a character from a show instead of the real person's name.  It started as a way to talk about things in front of Dad without him getting upset at us, because he didn't want to hear any gossip, but if it was just characters on the Earth shows then he didn't seem to care, he would just ignore us.  I think he might have started to suspect eventually, but he pretended not to know what we were really talking about.

When things started going bad and they were getting ready for the Evacuation, Mom was thinking that most people were going to stay, but Dad knew that most people were going to leave.  He said that he had stopped getting many requests for custom parts for repairs, and that it sure wasn't because things had stopped breaking, so it had to be because people didn't care any more since they were leaving, no matter what they said to everyone else on Mars.  He had been the person who knew how to run the machines to make specialized parts, either plastic or metal; anything that wasn't so commonly needed that it was kept in storage ready to go.  So if somebody had a cabinet handle or light fixture or electrical outlet cover or whatever that had cracked or chipped and needed to be replaced, he was the one who could do it.  I wish I knew how all that worked, there's a lot of fiddly bits around Building 3 which could use replacing.  But he wasn't very talkative, and I guess I never really asked him about it.

He told me that he was going to show me, just before he went off with the others and, you know...the Electrocution.  I guess he had finally figured out that the classes I was taking on the computer, that were sent from Earth, weren't really all that great at preparing me for being an adult.  I like to think that's why I was so bad at them, that I knew they weren't really going to help me anyway, but the truth is I also didn't study as hard as I could have, and I'm not as smart as Olivia.  But I was really excited about Dad showing me how the machines in Building 21 worked, but then he died in the Electrocution and it never happened.  Which really sucks, hard, for a lot of reasons.

You might think that when I got the job of figuring out which buildings still had power, I would have gone to Building 21 first, but I didn't.  Evelyn and I still haven't gone there yet.  I think maybe I'm a little scared of it, because it needed a lot of power and I don't want to get electrocuted myself.  But I need to go soon.  Some of the buildings it was easy; Evelyn and I just needed to suit up and walk around the Outside, and see if there were any lights on we could see through windows, for those that had any windows.  Building 21 doesn't have any windows so I will need to go in there to find out the state of things.  There's probably some other way to do it, automatically, but I don't know it, and anyway it might be in Building 10, and I'm not going there, obviously.

I never really thought about that, but I suppose at some point someone needs to go to Building 10.  Not me, though, obviously.  I mean I guess they think that because I'm the one who's supposed to check which buildings still have power, that I would go to Building 10 as part of that, but...no way, guys.  Maybe we can just skip that one.  I mean really who cares what's working there still; none of us are ever going to want to go there.

I guess I could face going to Mom's building, 24.  It is mostly just offices, nothing too dangerous or weird there, probably.  It's going to be strange being there without Mom with me, though.  I wonder if there are ghosts on Mars; if I see Mom's ghost there it's going to really freak me out, and little Evelyn is going to have to hold my hand the whole time.  She's usually wanting to tidy stuff up wherever we go, and getting upset if we don't, and she doesn't like it when I hold her hand and drag her along after me.  I guess maybe I'll just warn her now; Evelyn, when you hear this, I'm just telling you now, you're going to have to hold my hand when we check on Building 24, and if I start crying it's just Mom's ghost, so don't freak out.  Mom wouldn't hurt anybody, not even as a ghost.

You know what, though, I just remembered something about Mom's job in that building.  She had a screen up on her workstation that showed if there were any calls waiting for her, and it showed a bunch of other things about all of the buildings in the colony.  She would look stuff up to answer questions when she was taking voice calls.  I wonder if that workstation still works.  I could maybe use it to find out which buildings still have power, and air, and heat, and all that stuff.  It does mean I'll have to go to Building 24, which is a fair distance away, but it might be better than going to all of them one at a time.  For example, it would mean I don't have to go to Building 10, and nobody would, maybe ever, until the adults come back.  Assuming they do come back.