OLIVER: Start with your name and age.

LUCAS: Lucas, 4 years old, 7 in Earth years.

OLIVER: What did your parents do?

LUCAS: When?

OLIVER: When, they, were on Mars.

LUCAS: A lot of different stuff.

OLIVER: I mean, what job did they work at.

LUCAS: Oh.  They worked in Building 12.

OLIVER: The server farm?

LUCAS: Yeah.

OLIVER: Did you ever see them at work?

LUCAS: Yeah.  But it was hard to understand.  They would sit in front of a screen, and sometimes type things.

OLIVER: Did they ever talk about what they were doing?

LUCAS: Sometimes.  I didn't understand it very much back then.

OLIVER: What's your first memory of other kids?

LUCAS: I think it was when Mia had her 2nd Martian birthday party.

OLIVER: What do you remember about it?

LUCAS: There was cake, which was this bready stuff except sweet, and they had a candle.  That's a thing made of wax, where you...

OLIVER: Yeah, one of those burning things?

LUCAS: ...have a small piece of string, and you light the string with flame...

OLIVER: Cool, I know what a candle is, what else do you remember?

LUCAS: ...and it actually burns the wax, because the heat of the flame melts the wax, and then the wax burns, so it's not just the string part in the middle that burns but also the wax.  It was an old way of making light, back on Earth.

OLIVER: Right, got it.  Do you remember anything else?

LUCAS: I remember Isabella was kind of scared of the flame, but Benjamin and I kept wanting to mess with it.  Mia was supposed to blow it out, but Isabella ran away because she thought it was going to spray fire everywhere.  I had read that you could pass your finger right through the flame, if you did it fast enough, so I showed Benjamin, and that really made Isabella nervous.  Eventually my mom told me to stop scaring Isabella, and then we sang a birthday song for Mia and then she blew out the candle.  Isabella liked the singing.  Benjamin wanted to give Mia a birthday hug, and Mia was ok with that, but then Benjamin wanted to give everyone else a hug, and not everyone wanted one.

OLIVER: Benjamin does seem to love giving people hugs.

LUCAS: I don't really get that.  But, whatever.

OLIVER: Do you have any other early memories?

LUCAS: I remember at a New Year's party where I saw Olivia with a chick in her hand.  She was showing it to Emma and Charlotte and Mia, and I wanted to hold it but she wouldn't let me.  She said I could just pet it while she held it, and I said I didn't want to pet it, I wanted to see if it could fly yet, like if you dropped it would it be able to fly.  The other kids didn't like that idea.

OLIVER: Yeah I suppose that would seem pretty mean, wouldn't it?

LUCAS: Well chicks that age can't fly on Earth, but Earth has 3 times our gravity.  So, I was wondering if, since we have air pressure inside our buildings equal to Earth's atmosphere, but there's only one third the gravity, maybe it would mean that chicks could fly earlier in life.  But they didn't let me try it.

OLIVER: Hmmm...that's interesting.  I guess we'll never know, since we don't have any more chickens.

LUCAS: There are eggs, though.

OLIVER: What?

LUCAS: They put eggs into cold storage before they shut down Building 17.  It's in the director's log files.  It's the same method they used in order to send eggs to Mars in the first place.  We could pull them out and put them in the incubators, and 43% of them would hatch, on average.

OLIVER: Oh.  Wow.  Hey, do you have any questions you want me to ask Earth?

LUCAS: Not really.

OLIVER: Really?  I thought you would have lots of questions.

LUCAS: I don't need you to ask anything.

OLIVER: Oh.  Well, ok then.  Anything else you want to say?

LUCAS: I think that's it.  We should visit the server farm in Building 12 soon.

OLIVER: Yeah, I think we need to hold off on that for a while, Lucas.  Those things are hard to predict, and we need them to keep working for a while.

LUCAS: Ok, but soon, right?

OLIVER: We'll see.  Say, I maybe have a question for you.

LUCAS: What?

OLIVER: Do you, um, do you think we're going to live?  I mean I know we're living now, but do you think we're going to be able to stay alive, for a while anyway?

LUCAS: What do you mean?  Isn't that what we've been doing already?