For a while, Olivia had to stay in the War Room all day, while her legs were healing. There were pretty good tools for showing us what to do in the case of a broken bone, fortunately, and we got Earth to send some more details. The Mars colony hadn't gotten big enough to have a full-time doctor, so the medical equipment and references were all aimed at people like us (except older), who needed to know how to respond to emergencies without a lot of training beforehand (although I think there had been some adults who knew at least advanced first aid). Now that Olivia's task had, at least for the moment, been completed, she started reading up on everything we had about medical care. It didn't require her to move around a lot, and it seemed like a good idea anyway. So, she sat in the War Room in front of a terminal, reading about what we were supposed to know how to do to stop bleeding, do a blood transfusion, treat an infection, and so on. This wasn't the sort of thing little Harper could help with, since she can't read yet, so while Olivia was reading, Harper was running around with Alexander, either playing or 'helping' Liam with the crops. So, Noah and I had an easy time getting to talk to her alone, about our suspicions. "I don't know, guys, do you really think they would come all the way back to Mars just to kill us?" she asked. "Do you think they would leave us here?" I asked. "Hmmm...I guess not." "Do you think they would come back and stay?" asked Noah. "Maybe!" said Olivia, but you could tell she didn't sound too confident. "Well then," I said, "the only other possibility is that they would come back here, and take us home, pretending that we would survive. So instead of euthanizing us, they would kill us in a really slow painful way, like the way those rats that they raised here and took back to Earth died." Olivia frowned a bit, but kept her eyes on the screen, pretending to read about medical care of small children. I could tell, though, that she was actually thinking about what we had just said, so I just waited for her to respond. Eventually, she sighed, and looked up at me on one side of her, and then Noah on the other. "So let's just say for the sake of argument this is true," she said. "So what? What could we do about it?" "We could go dark," said Noah. "What?" "Stop communicating with them at all," I said, "and give the impression that we're all dead. No point in coming back to euthanize us if we're all dead. They might be willing to come back all this way to put us out of our supposed misery, but they probably wouldn't come back just to pick up the bodies." "What if that just makes them send someone faster, to see what happened?" she asked. "How do we even know who we're talking to, or who is making the decisions? I don't think we can predict how they would respond if we 'went dark'." "We couldn't predict how they would respond to us starting to talk to them in the first place, but we did it anyway," said Noah. "But that's because we needed information," said Olivia. "We needed to ask about things. And they've sent us a lot of useful instructions. It was worth the risk. But just cutting off like that, it's taking a big risk, and we don't know for sure what it would cause them to do. Maybe they would decide we're not reliable enough to leave on our own until they can restart the colony again. If we keep things running, maybe they will decide we can do it, so they won't need to take us away. Until maybe they do return for good." I wanted to believe what she was saying, but that is part of why I was suspicious of it. When you want to believe, it's really easy to deceive yourself. But after talking to her, I was now starting to have doubts. I looked at Noah, to see what he thought. His poker face, as I have noted, is good. "Well, ok," I said, "maybe we should keep pumping them for information for a bit anyway. But I think they are going to figure out pretty soon that there are no adults left, so we don't have much time before it's too late to go dark." "Let's just think about it," said Olivia, "and keep asking them for info. By the way, if they could send us anything about that medical scanning machine, like if there is any routine maintenance we need to do for example, that would be great." "Ok, I'll ask them," I said. I had by this time come up with a bit of a standard routine for the day. I went to Building 5, with Mia, to read what Earth had sent us, and send something back. I took a while to read whatever they sent us with Mia, so that she got more practice reading. Then we went together to Building 24, to get the reports on water and power levels from the workstation that Emma's mom had used. Mia was starting to get to where she could do some of this herself, if I worked with her. She would have to stand up on the chair and lean forward, and her little face would get very serious as she frowned at the screen while she figured it out. I tried not to laugh, because I wanted her to know she was doing well, but seeing a little person like that get so serious looking was, I admit, kind of funny. I remember not liking it when my parents would laugh at me sometimes, not that they were ever mean about it but it bothered me then. It made a little more sense now. So, I tried to make sure I didn't give Mia the impression I didn't take her seriously. The daily excursions to Buildings 5 and 24 meant we were putting on our suits every day, and it occurred to me that I should start thinking about what happens when one of them wears out. Fortunately, there were a bunch of unused suits in the warehouse in Building 20, plus a lot of patch/repair kits. But there was so much that we hadn't had to think about before; now, after we found out where things were and how to use them, a while later we would also have to start thinking about when it would stop working and how to prevent that. I decided we really needed to start getting some checklists. Then, I had the quite nice idea of having Mia do this instead. They were essentially like recipes, except for the day, the week, the month. She seemed to like doing it, and after we had the daily and weekly ones done if you had watched the two of us go through our day, you would have gotten the idea that little Mia was in charge, telling me what to do all day, since she was the one with the tablet, reading off the next item on the checklist. But anyway, it felt good to see things get checked off the list every day, and whenever I thought something like "oh, crap, how do we make sure we remember to check the suits for wear and tear before they start leaking?", I could just have Mia put it on the weekly or monthly checklist, and then stop worrying about it until it came up on the checklist. After we had done Buildings 5 and 24, we had a few hours before the singing recipe. Sometimes I needed to sit down with one of the little ones and help them write out their memories of what they had seen their parents doing before. Sometimes I helped Liam with the crops, since it involved a lot of doing the same thing again and again, so he could show me what was needed and then I could just imitate whatever he was doing. Sometimes Noah and I would play a video game, and he would end up beating me usually but I would win often enough to keep it interesting for both of us. This still left, usually, about an hour a day of me staring out the walls of Building 3, wondering about the future. Sometimes someone would come up to me and we would talk for a while. One day, the person who came up to talk was Ava. "Hey," she said, and I nodded, but I could tell there was something she wanted to talk about but wasn't sure how to start. I had just recently discovered that, if you wait without saying anything, the other person will usually start talking. I don't know if it works on adults, but it works with other kids anyway. I am not the type to normally shut up, like ever, but if I concentrated on it I could wait until the other person started talking to fill the silence. Often, they would say something useful to hear. I stood there, quiet, not looking away, smiling, but not saying anything, and waited for Ava to talk. This probably makes me sound like a manipulative person, and who knows maybe I am, but I thought of it as a type of skill which I was trying to practice, like being able to read or type or stand on one leg. In any case, it seemed like she had something on her mind. "I've been thinking about that idea that Elijah mentioned in his memories essay thingy. What do we call that thing you have us write?" "I guess I don't have a name for it. Noah calls it 'homework'. Which thing did Elijah mention again?" "That his dad was working on a way to extract power and water from the soil." "Oh, yeah, that. What about it?" "It would be really useful," said Ava. I looked at her, trying to figure out if that was a joke. Ava has dark skin and long, straight black hair, mostly African features but somewhat Asian look to her brown eyes. Her face is kind of round, which is funny because her personality is most definitely sharp-edged. You know if Ava is happy or upset, without asking. Just then, she looked excited, not exactly happy but definitely in a high-energy, positive mood. "Yes," I admitted, "that would be very useful, but we don't have that. I mean, we're not even sure what the idea was, exactly, much less how to make it work." "But we could find out!" said Ava. "Maybe Elijah's dad left some notes. Or maybe we could find out about it from somewhere else, if we looked. Or you could ask Earth about it." I felt this odd moment of role reversal, where I was now the older one, skeptical of what the younger person was telling me. I'm not that much older than Ava, just a few months, but she seems younger (to me, anyway). In any case, Olivia isn't all that much older than me, either. I wondered if I had looked, to Olivia, the way Ava looked to me. Probably not exactly, because I was telling Olivia about my idea of a bad thing happening, and Ava was excited about a good thing that might happen. But my expression just then when listening to Ava, probably looked a lot like Olivia's had, when listening to me. "Have you talked to Elijah about this?" I asked. Ava grimaced and looked away. I could tell that she had, and he had not been enthusiastic. "I think he never likes new ideas," she said. "Or maybe he's weird about it because it was his dad." "That could be it," I agreed, and then, "let me talk to Noah about it and see what he thinks." Ava looked happy enough with that, and I promptly forgot all about it. Which was a crucial mistake.