The first moment when I should have realized that Ava had talked to Noah about the idea of getting water and energy from the ground, was when I happened to come upon Noah looking at a technical diagram of something I didn't recognize. Well, it's not quite true that I didn't recognize it, I just didn't know what it was. But, I did remember seeing it. "What is that thing, anyway?" I asked. "You've seen it before?" asked Noah. "Yeah, that's the thing in the corner of Building 20, isn't it?" I said, stupidly. Noah, I believe I have mentioned, has a good poker face. So, when he changed the topic to asking about instructional videos for the 3D printers in Building 21, I didn't think anything of it, because he didn't look particularly interested in what I had just said. But in fact, he was very, very excited. Because, it turns out, he and Ava were about to hatch a plan that was intended to save us all, and in addition to that, turned out to very nearly kill us all. I, noticed nothing until it was far too late. Instead, I talked to Noah about how to use the 3D printers in Building 21 to make flexible seals that we could put into the leak at the top of the formerly leaking dome in Building 3, so that our breathing supply wouldn't be relying on rubber cement to avoid leaking out. We had found the instructional videos that Charlotte recalled her parents making, and some of them were about how to use that equipment. It was still kind of brutal for Charlotte to look at videos of her parents, and she ended up crying during every one, so I had started looking through them for her instead, to see what they were about and how useful they might be. Ava and Noah were trying to find a way to use geothermal energy to give us as much power and water as we could ever want. What they had found out, which I didn't know, was that the whole reason the Colony was put in this location on Mars, was that it was thought to be a good spot for geothermal power. This is, essentially, where you pump some water down to a spot below where it is hot, and then use the heat of the water that comes up to drive a turbine which creates electricity. There's a lot of details, but that's the gist. Given that there's a lot of water underground in Mars, you can even have more water coming up (as melted ice) than you had to send down there in the first place, and in fact once you get things going you may not have to provide any water at all. So, you drill down, and basically get free electricity and water, provided that you drill in the right spot. Apparently this is even done on Earth sometimes, but it's harder there because what you're drilling through has been compacted by three times the gravity, and the nearest good spot to do this may not be anywhere near where you're living. On Mars we could just start the Colony near a good spot for geothermal energy. But, we didn't know how to do anything like drilling, which sounded like it would require a lot of specialized knowledge that we didn't have. In the days after I had talked to Ava, she and Noah had discovered that the drilling was already done. The project had been very near completion when, for some reason, it had been stopped. Now, if they had come to Elijah with this news, he probably would have said something like, "why did they stop?" Or, who knows, maybe I would have said that. Olivia or Liam probably would have said, "let's ask Earth what they think about this idea". In any of these cases, Ava and Noah knew that they would probably not have been allowed to try starting up the project again, or at least not for a while. That is, almost certainly, why Ava and Noah decided not to tell anyone else about their idea. At some point, they made their way to Building 20, found the device (essentially a combination pump to shove water down to where it was hot, and turbine to make electricity from the hot water that came back up), and then tried to figure out a way to get something that big out to the place where it was meant to go. Outside. Now, Ava was one of the ones who had been spending the most time Outside, as part of her attemps to figure out how to change the batteries of the solar farm robots. She had only partial success there; she had changed the batteries on a couple of the robots, but it wasn't clear that they were working any better after the change. This was probably because the batteries were all getting old, and the only place to get new ones was Building 10, which was where the Electrocution happened, and none of us were going to go there. I can't even seem to write about that. Maybe now is the time to write about that. No, no it isn't. Sorry, I'll get to it. Just not yet. Anyway, Ava had been the one doing the most Outside, since she was dealing with the solar orchard. This is probably what caused her to notice the abandoned drilling spot, which was originally intended to provide geothermal power (and water to boot) for the Colony. At some point, she had decided that if she was going to be spending the most time Outside, she should learn how to drive the rover, so she got Olivia to teach her. This also made sense since, for the moment anyway, Olivia wasn't able to drive very well because there were foot pedals you needed to use, and Olivia's legs and feet were stuck in braces which didn't allow them to move (and were going to stay in braces for a few months probably). Ava is not as tall as Olivia, but she is tall for her age, so she was able to make it work. Olivia sat in the seat next to the driver and told her how it all worked, and they drove around for a bit, and after that Ava could drive the rover herself. Noah also figured out how to use the rover, which probably should have been a clue to me that something was up, but I just assumed there was something about Building 2 that the rover was useful for (like maybe they were using it to transport "new soil" to Building 3). So, sometimes Ava and Noah would go off to the rover, and nobody other than Lucas and Henry (the younger kids that they were responsible for, generally referred to as just "youngers") paid too much attention to what they were doing. Liam and Olivia (and their 'youngers', Harper and Alexander) were staying in Building 3, I was doing my rounds with Mia, and so on; everyone had their things to do, and we didn't pay too much attention to what the others were doing as long as everything got done. During the evening circle Noah and Ava had always accomplished a fair amount; the power was still on, the sewage system still worked, the "new soil" was still showing up every once in a while for Liam to turn into actual soil. It didn't occur to me to ask why it was that Noah wasn't playing video games as much, even though in retrospect that seems like it should have been a clear indicator that something was up. The other thing that Ava knew about, was the mechsuits. These were kind of like the regular suits, except they had a metal exoskeleton with hydraulics for the arms and legs so that you could lift heavy things. They were in Building 14, which was where most of the really heavy stuff from Earth was unloaded to. Stuff like heavy equipment, that wasn't going to be used right away, would get unloaded to there, and the mechsuits were what people used to unload them with. Ava knew about the mechsuits, and at first she and Noah were searching around in Building 14, thinking that was where the geothermal equipment might have been put. However, for whatever reason, it was put in Building 20, where I had seen it. After I told Noah that, they took the rover to Building 14, put on the mechsuits, took the rover to Building 20, and loaded that equipment into the back of the rover. Then they took it to the drilling site, and tried to install it. I'm led to believe that it took quite a while for them to get that done. The mechsuits made it so that they could lift it easily, but knowing exactly how to place it to hook up was not something the mechsuits were going to tell you. They spent several days failing to figure it out for a couple hours each day, until they got tired and frustrated and went back to do the other things they needed to do. I once was walking past the terminal in Building 3 when Lucas was looking at the same schematic that Noah had, and I stopped to ask him about it. "What is that, anyway?" I asked. "Geothermal equipment," said Lucas. "Wait, wasn't Noah looking at this schematic a couple days ago? What are you two up to?" I asked. Ha! Just kidding. I actually said, "Oh," and moved on, to do something else so important that I cannot recall now what it was. Ugh. So, anyway, on their fourth day of trying, Ava and Noah managed to figure out how to install the geothermal equipment, and on the fifth day they started it up. The day after that, our power and water reserves had shot up. I thought it was probably an error of some sort, but when I told people that in the evening circle, Ava and Noah were so happy they decided to tell us all what they'd been up to. Elijah, was not happy. "You did WHAT?!" "It's that thing your dad was thinking about, that you heard him mention," said Noah. "We found it, and it works!" "You didn't tell us?!" Elijah was standing up, shouting, clearly upset. "We just did," started Noah, but Elijah was having none of it. "You know what I mean! How do you know this was safe to do? What if it blew up or fried the electrical grid or who knows what?!" "Yeah, but it didn't," said Noah, "so maybe you could just calm the fuck down?" Elijah was striding over towards Noah, angry, hands balled up in fists at his sides, but Liam was quick to move over between them. "Ok, calm down now," he said, and here was a point when Liam being bigger (and quieter and calmer) than everyone else really paid off. Elijah turned angrily away and stalked off to a far part of the room, while Liam talked to Noah and Ava. "Look guys, we need to talk over things like this. I'm glad it worked out, but you were taking a big risk with the water and power supply, and you need to tell us first." "IF IT WORKED OUT!" shouted Elijah from the far corner of the building. Ok, there's not any corners in the geodesic domes of Building 3, exactly, but you know what I mean. "Dude, Oliver just told us, the water and power went up!" Noah shouted back. "A lot! It totally worked!" "Maybe we could just ask Earth about this?" said Olivia, from where she sat. Unlike Liam, she was not going to be striding over in between anybody quickly, at least not for a while. But her quavery, not-especially-loud voice still carried a lot of weight. I decided that maybe this would give us a way to get off this topic. "Ok, I'll send a message to Earth asking them about the geothermal power idea," I said. "We can find out if there's something we don't know about it, for the future, in case we need to work on it or do maintenance or anything." "Cool," said Liam, mostly I think trying to send the idea of 'cool down' to everyone, "and next time let's talk things over, ok guys?" He looked at Noah and Ava. Ava looked upset, angry even, because she had worked for days to get something done, and felt like it had been a great success but she was getting yelled at instead of thanks. Even Noah looked a bit sullen. Neither one looked like they were in the mood to agree to anything that anybody else said. "Ok Liam," I said for them, hoping this would suffice, "we'll talk things over beforehand next time." Nobody seemed exactly satisfied with me saying this, but Noah and Ava were willing to ignore it, and Elijah (and the others who were silently thinking like he was) were willing to ignore the fact that it was me, not Noah or Ava, who had said it. Nobody was happy, but nobody was yelling anymore, so it seemed like at least the situation wasn't escalating. And that, I thought at the time, would be that. Elijah, Noah, and Ava were all still grumpy while we ate dinner, but it basically seemed like we had gotten past the worst of it. Noah and Ava had taken a big risk, but it seemed to be working, so maybe things were going to be better soon. Elijah would calm down eventually. The next day, when I was in Building 5, I sent a message to Earth asking WHAT IS REASON GEOTHERMAL EQUIPMENT NOT USED? The timing of when I sent it, when whoever-it-was on Earth happened to see it, when they sent their answer, and when I happened to see their answer, meant that it was two days before I saw their response: WHEN USED INCORRECTLY CAN CAUSE SEISMIC INSTABILITY. Unfortunately, by that point, we had all figured that part out for ourselves.