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The Maretian

by Kris Overstreet

Chapter 55: Sol 93

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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 91
ARES III SOL 93

The large clock that hung above the tiny Hab kitchen area read 07:59.

The Amicitas crew stood ready, spacesuits and headsets on, but helmets off. Dragonfly had one marker stuck through one of her hoof’s holes, waiting for Mark to call out a number or letter in English so she could write it on the whiteboard. Starlight Glimmer, sitting on a stool with her broken and splinted foreleg in a sling, had Computer 4 opened to the ASCII table Dragonfly had looked up the previous day. Fireball, another marker in claw and another whiteboard in front of him, waited for Starlight to call out the translation of each two-symbol code so he could write it on the board. Spitfire sat next to Starlight, watching over her, while Cherry oversaw everything else.

Overseeing, Cherry reflected, means not doing anything yourself.

“Everyone ready?” Mark asked over the suit comms. “It’s time!”

“All go, Mark,” Dragonfly replied.

“Okay, Pathfinder’s moving…” The ponies waited as Mark paused, then called out, “Four!” A few seconds later, “Three.”

Dragonfly marked each down. Starlight called out, “C!”

“Four! Eee!”

“N!”

Fireball wrote it down next to the C.

“Four! … Eight! … Four! … One! … Four! … Three! … Four! … Bee!”

“H……. A……. K …… R …”

And so it went, halves of letters coming every six to ten seconds. Five minutes later, it was done.

“The pointer just returned to the response card,” Mark said. “End of message. What does it say?”

Fireball picked up his whiteboard and brought it to where Starlight and the others could see it clearly. Starlight spoke for them all: “Mark, are you sure they speak English?”

It’s like the short words we use in water code talk,” Dragonfly added.

“Short words are abbreviations,” Mark said idly. “All right, I’m coming back in. We’ll work it out.”

The letters on Fireball’s whiteboard hadn’t changed by the time Mark finished cycling through Airlock 3. They read: CNHAKRVR2TLK2PTHFDRPRP4LONGMSG.

You’re right, Dragonfly,” Mark said when he looked at the words. “It is abbreviations. Short words. And they didn’t waste transmission time on using the ASCII code for spaces.” He took the marker from Fireball and wrote “FOR LONG MESSAGE” under the end of the string of characters. He then found the 2’s and wrote “TO” under each, then “TALK” between them. “PATHFINDER” came next, and with that solved PRP became “PREPARE.”

That left CNHAKRVR. Mark thought for a moment, then wrote “ROVER” for RVR, and finally wrote in the two words at the beginning of the message.

CAN HACK ROVER TO TALK TO PATHFINDER PREPARE FOR LONG MESSAGE.

“What’s hack?” Dragonfly asked.

“I thought you said humans don’t have telekinesis,” Starlight asked. “How can they do anything to the rover from Earth?”

“What’s telekinesis?” Cherry Berry asked.

Starlight pointed to her horn. “Unicorn lifting,” she said.

“Ohhhh,” Cherry Berry said.

“Hacking is changing instructions on computer,” Mark said. "Pathfinder was built to talk to Sojourner. But Sojourner is broken. So NASA must want to turn the rover into a new Sojourner.

“Is that good?” Cherry asked.

“Hell yeah it… um… yes, it’s good,” Mark said, forcing himself to control his choice of words. “If Pathfinder talks with the rover, I can read and write messages on the rover computer. No more need for Askie. Much faster.”

“But NASA is on Earth,” Dragonfly insisted. “How can they change a rover here on Mars?”

“They need me to help,” Mark explained. “The long message coming is probably instructions. Orders,” he added to explain further.

“So,” Dragonfly said carefully, “when you say NASA hack rover, what you mean is, you hack rover.”

Mark mulled this over. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “I guess I’m a hacker now. All I need is a virus and a Russian IP address.”

“What’s virus?” Starlight asked.

“What’s Russian?” Dragonfly asked.

“What’s address?” Cherry asked.

Mark groaned, then looked at the dragon. “Aren’t you going to say, ‘what’s IP’?” he asked.

“I know what IP is,” Fireball said. “IP in that bucking box every day.” He pointed to the Curtain of Stench behind the bunks.

“Oy vey,” Mark groaned, rubbing his forehead with thumb and two fingers.

“What’s-“

“No more English lessons today,” he said firmly, rubbing his forehead a little harder.


“Four… eee… four… five… five… three…” Mark stopped calling out symbols. “Message not over, but they’ve paused. What does it say?” It had barely been a minute and a half.

“It says, ‘HELLO FROM HER MESS,’” Dragonfly said. “But they only used one S.”

“Her mess? With one-“ The ponies heard Mark’s voice catch. “It- it’s Hermes,” he gasped. “They’re relaying- whoops, more letters! Four, cee! Four… eee… Four… three… four… eight…”

The rest of the message took over twenty minutes to receive. Once it was done, Mark came back in to translate NASA’s abbreviations again.

“Okay,” he said at last. “They’re sending another message at the top of the hour. We have to get that one exactly right, because I’ve got to put it into the rover computer letter for letter at a certain spot in the rover prog… in its instructions.”

“Orders,” Dragonfly chimed in.

“Eeeeyeah. Also…” Mark tapped Fireball’s whiteboard, squinted at it, and scratched his hair. “For some reason they want us all outside for a picture in less than twenty minutes. God knows why.”

“Who’s God? Can you ask her?”

“Ah… um… not going to explain that. I mean, I don’t know why they want a photo of us.”

“Maybe they want to see that you’re all right,” Starlight said carefully.

“How?” Mark gestured at the lower part of his spacesuit, which he hadn’t taken off. “When I’m outside all you can see of me is my spacesuit! They can’t even see our face! It’s ridicul… it’s really stupid! It’s Roscoe AND Cletus!”

“Starlight, I didn’t catch all that,” Cherry said in Equestrian. “Did Mark say something about a picture outside?”

“That’s right,” Starlight replied. “The rotating thing on Pathfinder that Mark’s using to get messages from Earth? It’s a camera.”

“Ooooh,” Cherry said. “That’s how it can read those cards, right?”

“Well, yeah. How did you think it did it?”

“I… um… magic,” Cherry Berry mumbled, too embarrassed to say it out loud.

“Wait a minute,” Fireball said. “Even if we leave our sun visors up, the sun’s glare might block out our faces. What’s the point of all this?”

Cherry looked at Starlight. “Could you hold a force bubble full of air long enough for us to take our helmets off for the picture?” she asked.

“Could I, yes,” Starlight said. “Would I, heck no! It’s a waste of magic energy, and it puts us all in danger if I lose concentration!”

“What if we say no?” Dragonfly asked.

“We’re guests here,” Cherry Berry said. “Mark’s people could tell us to leave. We should follow their orders whenever we can. It’s only polite, anyway.”

“But they won’t see anything except our spacesuits!” Fireball roared.

Cherry Berry smirked. “Oh, I’m sure we could come up with something,” she said. "Give me that whiteboard."


“What the fuck is this?” Annie Montrose’s voice snarled over Venkat’s phone line. “Is this some sort of space hippie bullshit or something?”

“You got your picture,” Venkat replied, trying to examine JPL’s latest design for a Watney-feeding space probe while he talked. “Quit bitching.”

’C’mon get happy??’ And a picture of six weird-looking birds?” Annie refused to be mollified, not that Venkat was in much of a mollifying mood. “Is this some alien cultural shit or something?”

“No, it’s American cultural shit,” Venkat said. “and they’re partridges. It’s not my fault you’re too young to remember the reruns.”

“Reruns of- never mind,” Annie said. “Anyway, I can’t see a face on any of them. I need a picture with their faces ASAP.”

“Can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because astronauts without helmets on the surface of Mars tend to die,” Venkat said. “Annie, I have to go, one of the JPL programmers is here and it’s urgent. Bye!”

“But-“

The beep of the disconnected call, Venkat thought, had never sounded so sweet.

Jack Trevor, chief programmer for the revived Pathfinder project, stayed frozen in the doorway. “It’s not urgent,” he said. “I just wanted to say that Johannsen confirmed the 141 bytes that’ll allow the rover to receive the program update. She’s ready to sysop Mark through the process the rest of the way.”

“That’s wonderful,” Venkat said. “Please, have a seat.” The chairs in front of Venkat’s work table were folding chairs stolen from other tables in the rather cramped JPL break room. With all the projects in progress dedicated to saving Mark Watney and his various friends, private work space in the campus had become nigh-unattainable. Venkat was getting tired of answering questions about the contents of the fridge.

“Thanks.” Jack pulled up a folding chair.

“I take it using Hermes as a relay is working well?” Venkat asked.

“Better than expected,” Jack confirmed. “We were getting just under one kilobit per second using Pathfinder’s direct-to-Earth link and tying up the Deep Space Network in the process. Hermes can ping Pathfinder at about thirteen kilobits per second, and of course our uplink to Hermes is much faster. It would be better yet if we could have Pathfinder use the relay satellites around Mars-“

“Yes, but the high-gain antenna can’t track that quickly,” Venkat sighed. “We’re lucky that overjuicing the imager rotor speeds up its rotation. At its designed speed we’d be lucky to transmit fifty characters in a day.”

“Isn’t it amazing what these old probes can do when pushed?” Jack said eagerly. “Speaking of, I’ve got some friends who want to try to revive Opportunity. We haven’t listened for her in four years, and it’s possible the last round of dust storms cleared her solar-“

“On their own time, on their own dime,” Venkat cut him off. “I already crunched the numbers when we first figured out Mark was going for Pathfinder. Three of Opportunity’s wheels were frozen when we last heard from her, and even when all six were working, she couldn’t travel more than a kilometer and a half a day. It’s about three thousand kilometers from Opportunity’s last known position to Ares III. We have too many other, more promising projects to work on.”

“But I can tell them they have permission?” Jack asked, leaning forward. “On their own time and their own money, as you said.”

“Fine,” Venkat said. “But I’m betting they’d have better luck trying to convince a Viking lander to re-launch and fly over to Mark than they ever will reviving Opportunity.”

“You never know,” Jack said as he departed.

Author's Notes:

The Equestria bunch is getting better at English.

In the book Mark was writing down the half-bytes in the dirt with a piece of antenna. But now that he's got helpers and magic comms that reach through the electromagnetically-insulating Hab canvas, why go through that? Hence the stenographic assembly line.

I'm assuming Opportunity has a long life ahead of it yet. Interesting note: I read yesterday that Viking 1's lander didn't die of natural causes. A glitch in a software update ordered the lander to turn its radio antenna directly towards the ground, breaking contact with Earth. Since there was nothing to order it to reacquire signal, that was it- although the probe had electricity and function to possibly keep going throughout the Reagan administration. Still six years of Martian weather wasn't bad at all, considering they were expecting a sixty-day mission.

In the book, at this point, NASA was keeping Mark's survival from Hermes in order to preserve crew morale. (It was a questionable call, and was presented as such in the book.) Obviously that's not the case, so it only make sense to relay Pathfinder through Hermes. By cutting down on the transmission distance, the signal loss is reduced, which means data can be transmitted faster. Unfortunately I don't know what the upper limit was on Pathfinder's computer for broadcasting data, so I could be wrong about 13 kilobits being possible. But that's what I'm going with.

Why can't Pathfinder use the satellites? Because both the low-gain and high-gain antennas have rotors to keep them tracking their targets. The rotors are slow- too slow for most Mars satellites, which are low and whipping across the sky at a good clip. But from the Martian perspective, Hermes is moving across the sky at more or less the same rate as Earth (i. e. Mars rotation and not orbital velocity). And thanks to trajectories, Hermes should set in the sky AFTER Earth, which opens the transmission window a crack larger.

I'm assuming that none of the Mars satellites in the story is geostationary and that Lagrange point sats aren't a thing. (The L4 and L5 spots are right out, since there are several Trojan asteroids in those spots. The others wouldn't be stable without a good bit of maneuvering fuel.)

Tomorrow I go to Rice U for a small, cheap local con- OwlCon, Houston's oldest tabletop gaming convention. I should have plenty of time for writing, so we'll see what I can do this weekend! Buffer remains at 3.

Next Chapter: Sol 94 Estimated time remaining: 24 Hours, 21 Minutes
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