OLIVER, I'M SORRY, I SHOULD HAVE TOLD YOU ALL THIS SOONER. THERE IS A PROBLEM. It was waiting for me when Mia and I got back the next day. I felt a lump in my throat, and my heart seemed to speed up, and my stomach got queasy. But I kept reading. THINGS AREN'T GOING SO WELL ON EARTH RIGHT NOW. I'M SORRY, I KNOW IT'S NOT FAIR THAT PROBLEMS ON EARTH SHOULD MAKE THINGS HARDER FOR YOU, BUT THERE HAS BEEN A PROBLEM WITH THE COMPUTERS. THERE IS A MALWARE COMPLEX THAT SEEMS TO BE GETTING WORSE AND WORSE, SPAWNING NEW VERSIONS FASTER AND FASTER, AND WE ARE HAVING A PROBLEM KEEPING CONTROL OF THE COMPUTER SYSTEMS. THE ONE I USE TO COMMUNICATE WITH MARS, IS OFF THE INTERNET, SO I CAN STILL USE IT, BUT WE'VE HAD TO CUT OFF MOST COMMUNICATIONS. YOUR SERVERS WILL NOT GET ANY MORE UPDATES FOR A WHILE, PERHAPS A LONG WHILE. WE WILL NOT BE ABLE TO SEND ANYONE ELSE TO MARS FOR YEARS, MAYBE DECADES. BUT WE DID LAUNCH A LAST UNMANNED SUPPLY POD, AND IT SHOULD BE ARRIVING ON MARS IN ABOUT 60 DAYS. IT WAS SENT OUT MANY MONTHS AGO, BEFORE WE KNEW WHAT THE SITUATION WAS GOING TO BE AT THIS POINT, SO IT'S NOT WHAT WE WOULD CHOOSE TO SEND IF WE WERE MAKING THE DECISION NOW, BUT IT STILL SHOULD BE USEFUL. AS FOR WATER, I THINK YOUR DAD HAD PLANS TO TRY TO MELT SOME OF THE PERMANENT WATER ICE IN A CRATER ABOUT TWENTY KILOMETERS FROM YOU, I AM ATTACHING THE MAP. THERE ARE PARTS OF THIS CRATER THAT ARE IN SHADOW ALMOST THE ENTIRE YEAR, AND IT HAS A FROZEN LAKE THAT APPEARS TO BE WATER ICE. IT WILL TAKE A LOT OF ENERGY TO MELT IT, AND THAT ENERGY WOULD HAVE TO BE STORED IN THE ROVER BATTERIES BECAUSE IT'S TOO FAR AWAY FROM THE COLONY TO RUN A POWER LINE. BUT YOU MIGHT BE ABLE TO GET A LITTLE WATER AT A TIME, AND DO MANY TRIPS. I WILL ATTEMPT TO KEEP ANSWERING QUESTIONS FOR AS LONG AS I CAN, BUT YOU SHOULD KNOW THAT AS THE MALWARE COMPLEX IS SPREADING AND EVOLVING FASTER, IT IS NOT CLEAR FOR HOW LONG I WILL BE ABLE TO DO IT. MOST VEHICLES ARE NOW INOPERABLE BECAUSE A SOFTWARE UPDATE WAS INFECTED, AND THEY HAD TO BE SHUT DOWN. MORE AND MORE BUILDINGS ARE BECOMING UNINHABITABLE FOR THE SAME REASON, ONLY THE ONES THAT CAN BE USED WITHOUT COMPUTERS ARE STILL HABITABLE. RIGHT NOW I'M JUST STAYING AT WORK 24 HOURS A DAY, AND I THINK WE HAVE ALL NETWORK ACCESS CUT AND ALL SOFTWARE UPDATES TURNED OFF, BUT IF SOMETHING GOES WRONG WE MIGHT LOSE CONTACT WITH YOU WITHOUT ANY ADVANCE WARNING. I AM ATTACHING INSTRUCTIONS FOR HOW TO COLD BOOT YOUR SERVERS, FROM PHYSICAL MEDIA, IN CASE SOMEHOW THE MALWARE GETS TO YOUR SERVER FARM. ITS NOT AS SIMPLE AS JUST FLIPPING THE SWITCH OFF AND ON. I THINK THESE TEXT MESSAGES ARE THE ONLY CONNECTION BETWEEN US NOW, BUT YOU SHOULD PROBABLY PRINT THE INSTRUCTIONS OUT AND GO OVER HOW TO DO THE SERVER COLD BOOT IN CASE I AM WRONG AND YOUR SERVERS GET INFECTED. I sat there for a while, reading and rereading what Gerard had sent. Briefly, I wondered what he looked or sounded like. Was he a really old, white-haired guy, the last one to leave his post because his wife had died and his kids grown up and moved away, and his job was all he had left? Or someone barely older than Liam, who got stuck talking to the last residents of the mostly-abandoned Colony because he was the low-ranking one? For months, the messages had, in my mind, come from "Earth", which seemed vast and powerful. Now, they came from "Gerard", a single adult who was in a bad situation himself, it sounded like. I remembered hearing something about malware complexes before, but I hadn't paid much attention because it was just something that happened on Earth. I looked up what information we had on Mars about it. Essentially, it was a cluster of computer viruses that reinforced and supported each other, and could evolve to find ways around whatever you did to stop it. They had happened before, but it sounded like this one was the worst one yet. In retrospect, that moment was kind of like when we realized all the adults on Mars were dead. Earth, was not dead, but it might not be able to help us for much longer. Before, I was worried that they might come back and euthanize us all. Instead, now I was worried that they might never come back, and might not even be able to help us figure things out. "Did they say how to get more water?" asked Mia. Her voice shocked me out of my thoughts, which were spinning off into darker and darker places. I'm not sure if she does that accidentally or on purpose, but maybe some of both. "Maybe," I said. I went back and reread what Gerard had sent. "We have a lot to talk about at Circle tonight," I added. So, that evening at Circle, I read the whole message to them. The younger ones didn't understand all of it and wandered off (this happened a lot in the last part of Circle actually, I think they went to another part of Building 3 to do 'play Circle'). The rest of us, after talking it over for a while, boiled it down to two things that really mattered, for us: 1) there was a supply pod coming 2) there was a crater where we might get water ice, but we'd need to get there with the rover and enough power to melt it It was sort of surprising to me, later, that it took us an hour or more of talking to get to that point. Really, figuring out what to do often seems like cooking, in that way; what you end up with in the end is small compared to how much you started with. You have this tall mound of leaves or sweet potatoes or whatever it is, and at the end you have a much smaller pot of soup (although it is much tastier than the pile of greens and roots you started with). We talked ourselves to exhaustion, about everything that had happend, or might happen, or might have happened, but at the end, all that really mattered for us right now was those two things. That night, we were all thinking about different topics. The ones whose parents were still alive, either on Earth or headed there, were probably dealing with the realization that whatever secret hopes they had of their parents returning, were pretty much dead now. In any case, not while they were still children. That wasn't my case, so I don't know if that made it harder for them, or easier because they could stop wondering about it and holding on to false hopes. Some people might have been wondering about what was on the supply pod, and if it would have whatever they missed most about shipments from Earth. And probably at least a few others, like me, were wondering about the idea of when we should try to drive the rover to that frozen lake. Because, the thing is, of all the equipment we still had, the rover was perhaps the most irreplaceable. We had multiple servers, multiple mechsuits, multiple regular suits, there was even a backup med scanner. The rover, was unique. We had lots of spare parts, but no second actual rover. So, if we somehow broke it before the supply pod came, we might not be able to get to the supply pod for a long time, if ever, and whatever was in it would never get to us. Either the supply pod or the crater were a long trip, compared to what we had done so far, so they had more opportunities for something to go wrong. We maybe should have waited for the supply pod to come, and used the time until then to concentrate on growing crops and storing as much power as possible in our batteries while they still worked. We didn't.