by Kate Moretti
Maybe I’m just not good enough.
She kept her eyes clenched shut, her mind playing that cursed vid-screen message over and over again: SYSTEM OFFLINE. SYSTEM OFFLINE. Maybe it was her subconscious’ way of telling her that it was time to accept failure.
Well, I can’t shut my mind off. But at least I can shut off that stupid screen!
Removing her hands from her face, she opened her eyes and reached for the vid-screen’s power button.
Only this time, the message was no longer blinking. Now, it read something else: SYSTEM READY—INITIATE REBOOT
It took a moment for the information to register in Helen’s mind.
Could it be? Yes! It was! The system was calling for a reboot.
The chip repairs must have worked. But why the delay? Then it hit her: of course there would be a brief time lag while the motherboard linked up with the interface. She’d simply been too impatient to wait for it. Stupid. But no matter! The link was working now.
She quickly plugged her keyboard into the module, typed the command, and waited. After a brief moment of blankness, a new message popped up: CONNECTION REESTABLISHED.
Before she could even finish reading the words, the message disappeared, replaced by what looked to be a wide patch of red dirt.
Her heart nearly skipped a beat. She knew exactly what this image was. The rover’s front cameras had come back online. And now, thanks to a complex network of satellites and relays, she was staring at a live feed of the planet Mars.
Her first instinct was to shout for her dad to come quick, but she repressed that thought for the time being. The rover cameras were working again. That didn’t mean that the rover itself was functional. She needed to take a moment to assess the damage before she did anything else. And before she got her dad’s hopes up.
She typed a command into the module, and a simulated image of the rover appeared in the top right corner of the vid-screen. Next, the system began to run a full diagnostic.
Each unit was equipped with a series of internal sensors capable of scanning all its vital systems. Like nerve endings that registered pain, these sensors relayed information on any damages back to the operator. Once the scan was complete, the system could transfer the data back to the vid-screen image, highlighting areas that had sustained notable damage. At that point, she’d have a better idea of what she was dealing with. But waiting for the results was like standing in a courtroom while a jury rendered the verdict that would decide your fate.
Suddenly, a tiny bar on the vid-screen indicated that the diagnostic was almost complete. This was the moment of truth, because as much as Helen hated to admit it, a repaired command module would mean little if the unit itself was nothing more than a pile of junk on the Red Planet’s surface.
The waiting was killing her.
Come on already. Just show it.
The diagnostic finally came to a stop then took its time displaying its findings on the vid-screen image for her to see. When they came up, her eyes immediately went to them, her heart raced, and…
To her relief, the damage shown on the vid-screen, though significant, did not appear to be total. The machine looked… functional. But that wouldn’t be the end of it, she knew. They weren’t out of the woods just yet, and there were still plenty of issues that needed addressing. The longer that rover sat idle, the more vulnerable it became to the elements. She had to sort this out; the sooner, the better. And to do that, she would have to use every bit of tech skill she had.
She only hoped it was enough.
The rovers had been designed with human attributes in mind. Essentially, each had a human-shaped head, shoulders, arms, and torso on top of a box-like base, where six wheels made of heavy-duty polymers branched from a durable hydro-shock chassis. Some people had chosen to gussy up their units with sleek paint jobs or ornate robo-tattoos before sending them off from one sphere to the next. But in the end, they all came down to the same basic design: that of weird little robots built in man’s image, if only from the waist up. Helen had always had the feeling that the manufacturers would have given them legs if it weren’t for the fact that the Martian terrain made the very idea impractical. In this world of iron dust and unstable rocks, wheels were still king.
Fortunately for this unit, the wheels were also still intact.
Other systems weren’t so lucky.
There was a large gash cut into the chest plate, no doubt created by the tip of a Marauder’s drill. Still, the cut wasn’t too deep. Any deeper and it might have pierced the main circuit board, which would have killed the entire unit for sure. Luckily, the breach had triggered an automatic hibernation mode, which put the unit to sleep to save power. The Marauders must have either thought they’d killed it or didn’t care as they helped themselves to her dad’s cache.
The damage to the chest plate was bad, but not unfixable. There was another problem, though. The unit’s left arm was smashed and hanging on by just a few stray wires. Limp and useless, it would be very difficult to repair… remotely, anyway.
For now, though, the real priority was the hole in the chest plate. If too much Martian dust got inside, it could corrode the circuits and finish what the Marauders had started. The rover had been lucky so far—according to the diagnostic scan, only a small amount of dust had managed to make it in. Perhaps the Martian winds had been minimal in the three days since the unit went offline. But that could change at a moment’s notice. For all she knew, a storm might brew up at any second, pouring whips of dust into the breach and suffocating the system completely.
Helen needed to seal that gash immediately. But how? She was millions of miles away from the thing.
Tools.
Each mining unit was equipped with a trailer containing all the tools one needed to cut into the planet’s crust and extract the precious minerals within. The trailer should also have contained a patch-box she could use as a sort of rover first-aid kit.
If she could find it, she could seal the hole.
But she’d have to use the rover itself to locate the tools. The rover command module was fitted with a special joystick that allowed operators to control the unit, and luckily, that part hadn’t been damaged when her dad tossed the whole unit in the trash. Taking the joystick in her right hand, she ran her thumb over the swivel pad that controlled the cameras built into the rover’s head.
Fifty million miles away, the cameras panned to the left and to the right, scanning the Martian surface, searching for anything that wasn’t naturally of that world. At ninety degrees to the south, she found the trailer. It had been designed to be clipped to the rover’s rear end by a high-intensity magnet, which could then detach at the operator’s command. It looked as though her dad had taken the trailer off at some point before the attack.
It was essentially just a big box on wheels, and the Marauders had left it alone. Good thing, too. Had they taken it, Helen would have had no hope of fixing the rover.
Using the joystick, she ordered the rover to turn ninety degrees and move closer to the trailer.
Before proceeding, though, she paused for a moment, a thought coming to her. Up until this moment, she’d been so focused on her task that she hadn’t stopped to consider what she’d actually accomplished. She was now in control of a robot proxy on another planet—a privilege that not everyone could claim. It made her feel special, confident even. If she could get this far, if she could actually take a hands-on role in humanity’s outreach into the solar system, then could it be that she was only just scratching the surface of her capabilities?
Doing her best to suppress the thrill, she returned her attention to the trailer. This was serious business, and now, it was time to do what she’d set out to do: save this rover, and by doing so, save her family’s future. The patch-box was right where she expected to find it in the trailer—nestled among the hoses,
drill bits, and other mining paraphernalia. Reaching in with the rover’s good hand, she opened the box and found a tube of gel epoxy. Perfect.
Now came the hard part. She would need to pop the cap off the tube to get to the gel. Two hands would have been ideal: one to hold the tube and the other to pop the cap. Only having one available made the task a lot trickier, and the fingers weren’t exactly nimble. Working the joystick’s swivel pad gently, she kept her eyes glued to the vid-screen, watching as the robotic thumb and forefinger gingerly pinched the cap. Good. Just a little twisting motion and it should come off. Easy, right?
Not quite. The one-handed grip was tenuous at best. And the more she fumbled with it, the more she risked dropping it, maybe even tearing the seal and spilling it everywhere before it could be applied.
Come on, she thought. It’s only your entire future at stake. Just a little more and…
“Yes!”
The cap suddenly came off, falling to the dusty ground, and she worked the controls without wasting any time, strengthening the hand’s grip on the tube and using it to smear the full amount of gel over the breach. A smile of joy and victory graced her face as the diagnostic sensors reported back that the gel had hardened. Success! The breach was now sealed, and as long as it didn’t sustain any hard hits in that spot, the internal components would be safe.
For the foreseeable future.
All that remained now was the busted left arm. She didn’t think she could save it—that would take a miracle—but she could detach it from the unit to keep it from being in the way. So she rooted around in the box until she found a rivet-driver.
The arm was attached to a shoulder coupling by a series of rivets that would need to be unscrewed. Compared to the gel cap, the rivet-driver was easier to handle with one hand. Even so, it took some doing. Placing the tip of the driver to the head of each bolt was an exercise in patience, which, for her, was beginning to wear thin. In the back of her mind, she was also starting to worry that her luck was on the verge of running out. What if the Marauders returned before she was able to finish? The thought of losing it all when she was this close made her sick to her stomach.
But she kept at it, counseling herself to be patient. Three bolts down. Four. After she undid the fifth, the arm finally slipped away from the shoulder coupling, dropping to the dusty ground, where it would be a monument to interplanetary litter for the next thousand years.
She relaxed a bit.
Still, there was something about a one-armed rover that didn’t sit well with her. There had to be something she could do about that.
She panned the rover’s cameras into the tool trailer, wondering, and saw something that could work. One of the implements looked to have a coupling on it that just might fit into the now-empty shoulder socket. She remembered reading in her rover manuals that certain units were designed to allow appendage swapping—in which case they could be changed out for tools—to make it easier to work.
This unit was one of them, she suddenly remembered. And the tool she was looking at was known as a rock breaker. Once inserted into the shoulder coupling, a specially designed piston would allow it to work as a jackhammer of sorts, breaking through hard rock and crust.
Using the good arm, Helen took the breaker from the tool trailer and went to work attaching it to the shoulder. The apparatus was engineered to slide into the shoulder coupling and stay in place while she used the rivet-driver to tighten the new bolts. That was simple enough; by now, she’d gotten pretty handy with the driver, and it didn’t take long for her to secure the new appendage to the shoulder coupling.
Touching another pad on the joystick, she raised the breaker in the air and worked the piston, punching at the carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere with its hard pointed end.
Good. As for the rest of the unit…
On the vid-screen, the diagnostic scan no longer registered any damaged systems.
The unit was operational again.
“I did it,” she whispered.
She was about to scream the words again at the top of her lungs, but stopped herself. Despite her excitement, despite the sheer thrill she felt at having done the near impossible, she knew that it wasn’t yet time to celebrate. This whole ordeal was far from over. The rover was fixed, but that didn’t guarantee the family’s financial fate.
And now, she had another decision to make.
Do I tell Dad?
The question hung in her mind for a brief moment. Part of her wanted to share her success with him, to ease his worry and give him hope once again. But ultimately, she decided against it.
If she let him know that the unit was fixed, he would take control of it and maybe even get them in the same mess all over again. She couldn’t let that happen. The way she saw it, he’d given up on the rover the second he’d tossed the control module in the trash. This was her unit now, and she wasn’t about to give it up.
Working the joystick, she fixed the unit’s cameras on a straight course and began a steady roll over the surface of Mars.
Helen quickly remembered that there was a good reason her dad had chosen to hoard four caches instead of calling for a hover-scoop to pick them up individually.
The hover-scoops required plenty of energy to operate, and energy equaled cost. MARSCORP offset that cost by instituting a policy where miners could reap a higher profit if they reported multiple caches per scoop deployment. If a hover-scoop had to make a special trip to pick up just one cache, the payoff would be drastically reduced. Two caches got you a much better deal. Three, even more so. And with four, the profit return was even higher.
Had her dad played it safe and coded each cache as they were made, MARSCORP would have taken a larger energy toll each time, and he would have netted far less. So he’d chosen to go for the big four-cache score.
To do that, he would have had to tag each cache and then issue a special code on the final one to trigger the automated scoop deployment for all four. As it appeared, he had been tagging each cache as he went along and was just about to issue the final deployment code when the Marauders jumped him. Luckily, they were only able to help themselves to one of the four caches. The tags he’d placed on the other three were useless to the Marauders, who would have no way of tracking them on their own.
That meant that there were three more caches still out there, just waiting to be coded for another payday.
But there was one problem. When the unit went offline, the tag signatures had been automatically erased. Which mean that in order to get the three-cache score, she’d have to find and retag the remaining caches all over again.
If she could pull it off, her family’s financial problems would be history.
Luckily, her dad had recorded the coordinates for each in the rover’s internal GPS system. When she keyed in the request, a map appeared on the vid-screen, complete with blinking dots that represented the locations of each.
At least he did something right.
She regretted the thought the moment it came. Until this point, she’d been pretty hard on her dad. But now that she was in control of the rover unit, she realized that there was more to this than just money. There was something inherently exciting about the entire enterprise. Yes, she was sure that profit was a big part of his motivation, but the challenge of it all—the privilege of being a part of this new era of human interplanetary contact—would be equally worth the risk for him. She finally understood that. He hadn’t meant for this to happen. Once he’d gotten started, it had probably been difficult for him to think clearly. To see the risks. And when it was all said and done, he was just trying to do his best for the family.
Maybe it was time for her to cut him some slack.
With that thought in mind, she turned the rover toward the first set of coordinates, steering it around various rocks and crevices as it made its way to the near
est cache.
The rover reached it in just under an hour. On the vid-screen, the cache looked like nothing more than a simple lump of piled ore. But to her, it was money in the bank. Only now, she had an important choice to make. She could code it right away and call for a hover-scoop pick it up immediately… and automatically credit the funds to her dad’s account after the large tolls were taken out. Or she could tag it, find and tag the other two caches, and issue a onetime code for a triple pick up, thereby achieving a much higher payday—one that might even wipe their debt free once and for all.
Part of her wanted to take the safe route and get the small payday with each cache. But then what? MARSCORP’s high scoop tolls would more than ensure that she would have to continue mining, even after the remaining caches were tallied. She and her family would still be slaves to this thing. Their lives would be slightly better—thanks to the functioning rover—but their future would still be in question.
In the end, she couldn’t allow that to happen. Her goal, her desire, was to fix this operation so the family could get out from under the Martian rock once and for all. And that meant all three caches had to be tagged and coded for one big payoff—despite the risk.
Working the joystick, she rolled the unit up to the pile and hit it with a tracker tag, which she’d taken from the tag-storage compartment built into the unit’s base frame. Then, she paused.
Am I really going to do the exact same thing that Dad did? Am I making the same mistake that he made?
On the vid-screen, the locations of the two remaining caches blinked, and she grimaced.
