OLIVER: Let's start with your name and age, then maybe your earliest memory of meeting the others. SOPHIE: My name is Sophie, and I'm 10 Earth years old (5 in Martian years). I don't actually remember when I first met one of the other kids, sorry. I suppose it must have been pretty soon after I was born, but I can't say for sure; I don't remember a time when I didn't know Amelia and William and Charlotte. I do remember meeting James. He was in Building 29, and our family went there for some reason and his parents and mine were talking and they put us together. We were both pretty young, but I already knew Amelia and William and Charlotte. He was playing with these magnetic toys that you could stick together to make a kind of lattice crystal thingy, and he was just really focused on that. I mostly sat and watched what he was doing. It kept coming apart, and I was wanting to help out but for some reason we didn't even talk, and I just watched what he was doing and waited for him to figure out how to make it hold together. I also want to say something about the time William said he was going to piss on the furniture because he was a wolf and that's how they mark their territory. Charlotte made it sound like I was freaking out. The thing is, he said he was going to, and started to lift his leg like he was going to. I don't know if wolves actually lift their leg when they're about to piss on something, but William looked very serious, like he was really going to do it. I guess I shouted, which sounds like I'm crazy, but William usually does something if he says he's going to do it. I guess he was just pretending that time, though. But I am not normally a crazy shouting person. OLIVER: What did your parents do? SOPHIE: They worked in Building 11, where they do glass production. Like panels for new domes of Building 3, or window panes if they need replaced anywhere, and also glassware for Buildings 8 and 13, and anything else that was glass, they made it. I think Dad worked there first, then Mom started working there when she came to Mars and that's how she met Dad. OLIVER: Did you ever get to see them at work? SOPHIE: Not too much. Once or twice they took me, but most of the time I would stay in the common area in Building 27. I remember once they were making us some glass cups, one for each of us, with our names on them, and they took me there to see them get made. I didn't understand very much of what I was watching, and it was pretty hot in there. They made me wear these special goggles, and also a big thing like an apron with arms and gloves built in, to protect me in case something went wrong and some of the hot glass splattered on me. It was all sized for adults, and I was pretty much buried in it, but I could see that the glass was glowing, like fire, but they could use tools to shape it like food or clay or something, and as long as it was hot it could be shaped. Then they would let it cool down, slowly, and then it eventually was cool enough to touch. It seemed like magic. I guess it still kind of does. My parents liked to talk about their little projects like those cups. I think they spent most of their time at work making glassware for Building 8 or new panes for the geodesic domes in Building 3, but the smaller projects were what they really enjoyed. They would make people gifts, or make decorations to hang for the parties in Building 20. They would sometimes talk to Charlotte's parents about that. They would sketch out what they would look like, well Mom would, and Dad would look at it with her and they would talk about how to make it and what to add to the glass to change the color, and all that kind of thing. I think maybe they took notes on their little projects, on what they had added and how hot to fire it and that sort of thing. I wonder where those notes went. Maybe if I went back to our apartment in Building 27 I could find their notes. After the Evacuation, they stopped doing any of that sort of thing. I think they were worried it would seem frivolous, or they would make people mad for using energy to do that. Plus there was a lot of other stuff that needed doing, although nobody seemed to know exactly what. Sorry, I didn't mean it like that. OLIVER: No it's ok. SOPHIE: I guess your dad was trying really hard, it just wasn't easy to keep it organized. OLIVER: Yeah. SOPHIE: Oliver, I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that. OLIVER: No no, it's fine, let's talk about you. SOPHIE: What should we talk about? OLIVER: If you could ask Earth for information about something, what would you want to know about? SOPHIE: Oh, so many things. How do we get more detergent when the box we found in Building 6 runs out? James and I finally figured out how to use the laundromat right, so that it actually cleans our clothes, but it only works if you have detergent, and we only have one box. Or at least that's the only one that we know where it is. Did we always get it from Earth? Or did we have some way to make that? OLIVER: You know it's really nice having a clean shirt. I never used to care about that very much, but a month without cleaning my shirt made it pretty gross. SOPHIE: Thanks! It was kind of awesome when we finally had figured out how to do that. It seems so stupid that we didn't know before. It really isn't that hard, but I just never thought about needing to know how to clean clothes. But now I am wondering about everything; we can make food, but where do we get salt from when the salt we have runs out? What do we do if little Alexander's spectacles break? Or just need replacing? What do we do if we need to fix one of the washing machines? One of them is broken, which right now is no problem because there's a bunch of them, but someday we're going to need to fix them. Do we have anything that tells us how to do that? I guess that's what I'd most like to ask Earth. OLIVER: Those are good questions, I'll ask them about that. Anything else? SOPHIE: Well, uh, no that's it. OLIVER: Are you sure? You looked like you had another question. SOPHIE: No, it's just...well...I guess they can't tell us for sure, but, if they don't come back, is it possible for us to just stay here? And live? Like, are we going to live?