Chapter Text

Shadow Girl of Mars

BONUS

Communication and Cooperation

Mars I

Nara Shikako

She sealed the small vial of water into a freshly drawn storage seal.

Let the man poke and prod at it for a short while.

Then, she resealed it, pouring the water right back, and placed the vial back into its place.

Mark hurried to examine the water with the equipment he had prepared.

At this point, she was reasonably sure he was recording everything.

“Water,” she said. Double checked their co-written volume conversion chart, just to be sure. “One cubic deci-meter.”

Then she pointed at the small pile of her seals stacked on a different table, where she had laid out all of her seals with potentially useful supplies in them. Indicated the first pile.

“Water,” she repeated. Tapped close to the top of their conversion table. “ Five cubic kilo-meters. ”

“No.” He even shook his head in denial, and started chattering in Aengrih too fast for her to follow.

“Five cubic kilo-meters. ” She took a step towards the whiteboard, took the toxic-smelling black marker and wrote out the number - and its conversion into decimeters. With all twelve zeroes. “Yes.”

His response was to throw up hands into the air.

NASA I

Theodore Sanders

“No,” Teddy replied calmly. “I can’t authorize your satellite time request.”

“Didn’t you read Annie’s email yet?” Dr. Venkat Kapoor sighed, going for another angle to try to convince the administrator of NASA. “We’ve already got some conspiracy theories floating out there about that dot. We’re gonna need to get higher resolution pictures eventually, and better do that before anyone in the mainstream press catches wind of it.”

“I haven’t... what ‘dot’?” Teddy Sanders leaned slightly to the side, grabbed onto his laptop and pulled it up, looking for the inbox. His email had a constant stream of new emails ever since they announced about the abort of Ares 3 and the death of Mark Watney.  “I thought she was handling things alright, considering...”

He fell silent, reading the email and then frowned even more, opening the attachment. “What?”

“One of our SatCom technicians included a note about this along with the shots of Hermes leaving the Martian orbit. But we used them in the press release without taking it into account,” Dr. Kapoor noted. “It wasn’t a first priority message, so it got lost between departments, with how everything else has been going on.”

“That looks like just a digital compression artifact,” Teddy leaned toward the monitor. There, an image of Hermes taken by one of the satellites included a side-view of mars, and some user on the internet had zoomed in on a section of mars that was unhelpfully including Acidalia Planitia. Circled, there was a tiny, one-pixel wide dark dot.

NASA HIDES THE TRUTH, was plastered right above it in huge, blocky letters.

“That was what I thought too,” Venkat replied. “But... Ms. Park checked the other images we have, and it’s consistently there. With the resolution we have of the landing site in that shot, it would be impossible to see the hab, so whatever that is, has to be at least a kilometer in diameter, maybe two. Ms. Park says it’s somewhere within fifty kilometers of the Ares 3 site. Maybe the storm uncovered some new coloration bedrock. I don’t know what it is, but we need to check it out. That’s why I want my satellite time.”

Teddy tapped his fingers on his mahogany desk. “You’re right, it's a phenomenon too close to our area of interest to ignore it, but if we take pictures of it and don’t include any of the Ares 3 landing site... The press is gonna eat us alive, and they’ve been rabid since day one.”  Teddy let out a painful sigh. “We’re a public domain organization. We’re gonna have to release all of the images, and that will end up with an image of Mark Watney’s body, somewhere within twenty meters of the HAB. Maybe partially buried in sand, but still very visible, and with a comm antenna sticking out of his chest. Any images we take will show that.”

Venkat stared. “Is this why you denied my previous imagery requests?”

“Venk, come on-”

“Really, Teddy?” Dr. Kapoor said. “You think that not taking the pictures will end up in a bigger PR problem? The press isn’t gonna let this go, either way. It’s better to get it out of the way now, even if it adds some fuel to the fire.”

“I thought we could wait much longer.” Sanders leaned back in his chair. “Run your proposal by me again. Maybe we can use it, too.”

“There’s almost an entire mission’s worth of supplies up there. If we plan Ares 6 to reuse the same location, we could save a lot of supplies, get it going at a fraction of the cost. We need the images to know the extent of damage the storm did, but we might be looking at cutting down fourteen presupply probes to probably three or four... But also consider this - sympathy for Watney’s family is really high. Ares 6 could bring the body back. We don’t say it’s the purpose of the mission, but we could make it clear that it would be part of it. If we frame it that way...” Venkat paused and watched.

Teddy rubbed his chin, thinking, but didn’t say anything.

“We get the pictures of the rock formation unearthed by the storm, we prevent the press from grabbing onto the conspiracy theory, and we rally them behind getting the body back. We’d get more support in Congress too,” Dr Kapoor pushed once more.

“Alright,” Teddy gave in. “We can do that.”

Mars II

Mark Watney

His new roommate and boss (he had no illusions on who exactly was calling the shots here, even ignoring the blood contract), was almost as big of a nerd as he was.

That was probably a good thing. It did mean they clashed occasionally and wanted to double check each other’s work.

Shikako also seemed to prefer working with paper, of which there somehow was a nigh-infinite supply. Mark kept taking photos of all of her notes made during their communications.

Now that the Shadow Entity - Shikako - was clearly in it for a long haul, she’d taken to drawing up plans and tore like a hurricane into his plans, tearing them to pieces.

Their priorities were very much different.

She had some long-term complex shadow-math assignment, which had clearly been put on pause, but never forgotten, since he would catch her constantly taking small notes in a notebook dedicated to it, especially during periods where they were supposed to be resting. Mark was somewhat surprised that Shikako also slept, but so far she’d done so very rarely and only for a couple hours at a time.

She had clearly approved of his maintenance efforts. Even went to assist him on a couple of EVAs, surveying the Ares 3 site and their situation. The language barrier was still there, but she understood clearing dust and sand off equipment, and even did some magical shadow trick to remove the dust with an impossible gust of wind, doing the work in minutes instead of it taking hours.

She also had found him a few pieces of the satellite dish. That one took her an hour long EVA where he had lost her from his view at one point, but she returned with three large metal pieces of the dish. Not really salvageable, but he stashed it inside the HAB anyway. Maybe something could be done about it later.

However, when he attempted to explain his rudimentary plans for getting the martian soil inside to start planting the potatoes and shadow-rice, he met unexpected difficulties. Oh, with the amounts of water Shikako claimed to have, his only real constraint was space, and with soil doubling he would have soon converted every possible surface of the hab into farmable land, pretty quickly at that. Especially with her help.

And yet, Shikako blocked his attempts at bringing in more soil than than for a little barebones planter taking up the space of a single sleeping cot.

Then, she sat down with him to make yet another conversion table (up to that point, they had five - distance, time, mathematical notations, weight and volume), this time for food nutrition and calorie content, and required daily calorie intake.

Shikako checked his calculations rigorously. Mark was annoyed as hell at being treated like this, but swallowed his pride and let her do it. There was nothing wrong with his calculations. Still, Shikako challenged his lowest calorie requirement numbers, citing her medical training and the amount of work they would have to do. He agreed, reluctantly, even if that made their situation worse by a few days. He has suspicions about the calorie intake numbers Shikako offered for herself, too, but there was no way of challenging those without being a exenobiologist learned in Shadow Entity nutrition. 

After that, they discussed his main roadblock. Space. Promised to solve it, as if it was easy.

Mark argued for a bigger farm inside the HAB anyway, and while she agreed to arrange redundant farms, she was clearly not on board with living and working on top of the farm, if she could avoid it.

He tried a few more approaches but was shot down. Her response was to move everything underground, or into artificial domes. As if mass-scale construction in two weeks she asked for was in any way viable.

In the end, Mark was convinced to pause the full conversion of the HAB into the farm, resigning to try again in two weeks.

That would set them back a little, since he couldn’t start planting shadow-rice in the numbers he wanted to, but if Shikako came through as promised with a space for a farm… somewhere…

Her numbers were annoyingly solid, and the setback would be minimal.

She’d also wanted him to plan for planting more shadow-wheat, even when the numbers massively favored potatoes and rice, and he wasn’t even gonna bother with shadow-wheat inside the HAB.

And then they worked on what Shikako considered her first priority. 

Communication.

Shikako was half-way to reproducing an IPA sounds chart from scratch when Mark found one on his computer’s database. He’d also started a digital dictionary, which, unlike her paper notes, was perfectly searchable.

He considered it a fitting payback for ruining his farm plans. She pretended it didn’t bother her any, but he was getting better at reading her expressions.

NASA II

Annie Montrose

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Annie Montrose said as her opener.

Teddy glared across his immaculate mahogany desk at his director of media relations. “Not helping, Annie.”

“How... What do I even tell them?” she pushed back. “How sure you really want me out there, saying ‘there’s some truth to the conspiracy theories’? It’s already a shitshow out there! And where do I even begin with Mark? How sure are you of all this?” 

“We’re sure that something is going on,” Venkat cut in. “But the satellite images caught two of our suits outside. The only sensible theory is that Mark has survived, and has decided to bring out another suit outside, for some unknown reason. Anything else is pure speculation.”

“Fuck!” Annie said.

Teddy lined up a folder on his desk to match the mouse pad. “We’re gonna need a lot more data. Both on the new anomaly and the Ares III site.”

“Great, but what do I tell them?” Annie pushed. “My job is to spin the shitburger you give me in a positive light, but you’re the one who decides what exactly goes into it!”

Teddy turned his attention to the fourth attendee of the meeting. Mindy Park was sitting in one of the guest chairs, trying to stay out of the way. “Miss Park,” he said. “Your observational skills have given us warning that we didn’t heed once, so I want to hear your thoughts on this.”

“Sir?” Mindy jolted when he addressed her.

“Do we have anything we can use to be more certain of what is going on with Mark?”

“Well,” Mindy said, “we’re already trying to maximize satellite coverage for Ares 3 and the, er... Site Zeta, as a secondary priority. Even then, we have limited angles to work with, most of our images are going to be directly overhead. Without any side angles, we can’t fully confirm what position the second suit is in, since it just shows up as a dot in the images, and so far we haven’t been able to tell from the shadows cast, either. But we know both suits have moved between different shots.

“So that brings us to the two main theories we have,” she continued, voice growing firmer and more self-assured as she spoke. “One, Mark has survived the incident and is, for some reason, dragging a second suit everywhere he goes, propping it up to keep him company while he works on cleaning the solar panels and digging out the rovers. Or two, there’s someone else there with him or even two someones, which, while impossible, is the best theory to explain the way both suits shifted locations between our shots.

“Mark seems to have cleared the rovers of dust in minutes, which is much faster than it should have taken him, and there wouldn’t have been time to go back to the location of the second suit and reposition it. The movements of the second suit never match the direction of the wind, so it can’t be tumbling on its own. In fact, we’re unable to tell which suit Mark is actually using, from what little data we got until now. The familiarity with NASA equipment suggests that Mark is one of the figures, but it is not yet conclusive evidence.”

“Fuck,” Annie swore for a third time. “And the Site Zeta?”

“It is almost certainly artificial in nature. It contains black writing on raised circular platforms,” Mindy replied. “The largest platform  is one and a half kilometers in diameter, with three smaller circles surrounding it, each at least twenty meters wide. And it’s all elevated, since it casts a visible shadow in sunlight. So that means that either the surrounding surface decreased in elevation, or that it was somehow raised up from the ground - or built. Neither option fits what a sandstorm could have done.

“Analyzing the shadows cast by the platforms we know that the surface of each one is absolutely flat. There are no shadows on the surfaces, confirming it. The symbols and lines don’t have a meaning understandable for us, but they recognizably contain text, or something text-like. The distance from Ares 3 to Site Zeta is too big to have been traveled by a Rover, so there’s no conceivable way Mark could have had a hand in it, either.”

“None of our technicians can make any heads or tails of the words we can read with the resolution,” Venkat piped in. “There’s some larger seemingly Latin letters there, but we can’t be sure if that’s just confirmation bias. None of the words seem recognizable, and the smaller writing is unreadable. We’ve run a few algorithms to try and clear up the image, but they might as well be creating fiction. Our satellite resolution is too low for this.”

“We’re gonna look foolish whatever we do or say,” Teddy said, resigned. “Offer a small bounty for anyone who’d give us any meaningful translation or insight concerning Site Zeta.”

“Maybe we can stall for time,” Venkat suggested. “Mention that until we get more data, an insane billionaire is as likely an explanation as aliens, but-”

“No. Don’t mention aliens.” Teddy cut in. “We don’t need to feed that line of thinking. Site Zeta is gonna do that for us as is. At best, confirm that we’re exploring multiple possibilities.”

“Thanks for that.” Annie sighed. “When do you want to go public? Wanna use the full 24 hours we can hold the picture while I hammer out a statement?”

“Definitely,” Teddy agreed. “Put something together, get more pictures of the site - and hold those back too, until we have something more to go on, while I’ll head to Chicago.”

“Why Chicago?” Annie asked.

“That’s where Watney’s parents live,” Teddy said. “I owe them a personal explanation before it breaks on the news. Especially if we can’t be fully certain one of the suits is used by Mark. Before that, get me a plan on how we proceed from here.” His last request was aimed at Venkat.

“We’ll work on the communication issue,” Venkat quickly replied. “From the pic, it’s clear the comm array is ruined. We will need another way to talk. Once we do that, we can assess and make plans.”

“Alright, get on it,” Teddy said. “Take anyone you want from any department. Use as much overtime as you want. Find a way to talk to him. Or them. That’s your main job right now. Prepare at least some preliminary ideas for when I come back tomorrow.”

Mars III

Nara Shikako

Shikako took some measure of satisfaction at Mark ’s confusion, as they disembarked the Rover.

She had told and even drawn out most of her plans, step by step, but he’d been, once again reluctant to just take her word for it. Instead of attempting to explain for a fourth time, she had decided to show it off.

Now, Mark was distracted by the spare spear she had chosen to use to indicate the spot. She didn’t actually need it, she could sense her own sealwork underground well enough to lead him to it.

Upon her request, he’d brought a sample shovel and a largest airtight sample box he had in the HAB.

She tapped his suit once, and when his attention turned to her, she snatched the box from him and grabbed onto his hand at the same time. “Don’t worry, ” she transmitted through the comms, delighting in how similar to an apology Aengrih words sounded to her.

“Worry about what? ” he asked.

“This. ” Shikako used some basic Earth Release to pull both of them underground quickly.

She had gone slightly over-careful, so the trip down took a few seconds, and the communicators didn’t work the whole way down.

Mark had tensed inside his own suit, but kept the grip strong.

They emerged from the wall exactly where she wanted them to, and she gently let Mark go as his feets touched the surface.

The cavern was large. She might have gone a little overboard with that bit too. It was dimly lit, by the seals she placed earlier, and now by the built-in flashlights inside their suits.

“Shit, ” he said in Aengrih, taking it all in. Added a few more curse words, too.

Shikako could have done without learning the word for shit in Aengrih this early in their language lessons, but Mark’s early plans for growing potatoes and rice had ruined that for her.

It had taken a couple of days to narrow down on the specific vocabulary needs. Mark ’s computers were wonderful and contained a lot of information by themselves. Coupled with a logistical analysis handbook on farmland in Konoha’s outskirts she had found between her book, she had formed a plan to break down the communication barrier as much as possible.

She needed to understand the specific problems to be able to offer solutions, and to communicate the limits of sealing when it came to transporting anything.

“I take it all back, ” he finally said. “An underground farm? Good idea. ”

“Yes, ” she said. “ Big. I need plants. More. ”

He took a few steps, looking over the smooth, air-tight walls and the two huge stone pillars in the middle, holding it all up.

“This is my third prototype,” she explained, showing off the prototype cavern. The word prototype was one of the more complex words Shikako had learned already. It was important for the way she was approaching this problem. “Bad air. Too little Oxygen. Suit on.”

“What happened to the other two? ” He asked, leaning closer to examine one of the light seals.

“First one was small. Trial. Second broke, ” she admitted. There was a reason she was making the prototypes a few kilometers away from the HAB. “This much better. ”

He looked suddenly nervous. Asked a few hurried questions.

“Slower,” she reminded him. “This one strong, good. Tested.”

“Why broke?”

“Wanted - airtight,” Shikako tried to explain. She had never once tried to seal a large amount of earth from the inside like this. “Too big to keep in shape. Not when sudden space with no air. Made walls stronger. Added bad air. This holds well. Tested. Calculated. Tested again. You suggest tests too. I test more.” 

Mark nodded.

Her solution to fix the collapsing issue was quite simple - make a seal that replaced the earth with air stored inside beforehand. For this prototype she simply nabbed a bunch of Marhian atmosphere. And she made the walls much stronger too. Either should have worked, if her math was right. 

“If you agree it's good,” Shikako said. “Next one - not prototype. Closer. Maybe stairs, airlock.”

He took a short stroll along the wall.

“Careful, ” Shikako warned. “A pit that way.”

“A pit ?” he asked, looking around, and quickly noticing the edge and the drop into the rudimentary pool of water Shikako had poured to test the seal she used to approximate Kakashi’s water breathing trick.

“Pit for water. In a real one, put a barrier,” Shikako added. “Or... smaller. Missing a word.”

“Wall? Fint? Gouridmall?”

Even though Shikako could guess at what Mark was saying, she still didn’t know the last two words yet. She would bring them up next lesson. “ Maybe. Half-wall. Fint? Not important now. ”

“Got it. What’s important? ”

“The farm. ” Shikako said. Getting a farm with lots of living plants going, provided Mark was as good of a botanist as he claimed to be, would give her a stable source of natural energy. With that, Sage Mode might become a possibility, and then... “ Have list. Four main issues. Maybe more later. ”

“Let’s hear it. ” Mark said, curious, ready to brainstorm. Shikako liked his ideas - sometimes he’d suggest ways to deal with things she didn’t think of. And his insights were often great. If only he didn’t insist on triple checking her calculations with the computer…

“Oxygen, heat, sunlight, soil. ” Shikako counted on her fingers. “Oxygen is easiest. Bring air over from HAB or make here. I get oxygen from water - slow. Sunlight and heat is easy for now but... need better solution. Maintenance too often.” Or, in other words, too chakra intensive to be practical. Long term light seals increased the chakra cost exponentially and it became impractical very quickly, and short term ones needed constant visits to fiddle with them again. “Maybe your lights? Talk math and solution later; in HAB. Fourth most important. Need you. ”

Mark nodded. “ What’s wrong with soil? Can’t make the bottom soft? ”

Shikako knew that her companion was a very skilled botanist, but growing things in Marhian soil was still a risky proposition. And, as she understood from the man - very much untested on any scale larger than the little cot-size planted he was tending to. Shikako had an alternative idea. “I show an option. Need your opinion. Move back, that way.”

There was a reason she had made the ceiling so high, after all.

Mark, who seemed to be forming a wrong impression that when she asked for some space he needed to run, started jogging towards the indicated direction. Shikako sighed. There probably wasn’t any point in trying to explain that it wasn’t dangerous.

She withdrew one of the sealing tags.

They had talked about her supplies multiple times by now, and Mark hadn’t seen enough proof about some of her bigger items. He had stopped asking questions about them, but Shikako didn’t know if he believed her fully. He did make a digital list for NASA.

“The hill ,” she said via comms and unsealed it.

There was no way to do it by portions, so this was to be the best option she had, just drop it somewhere all at once. The whole hillside, grass, shrubs and trees and everything else that was on it. It certainly looked impressive, all green and live-looking, however deceptive.

A piece of home, placed in an underground cave under an inhospitable planet.. Even if she’d nabbed it in the Land of Lightning.

None of the plants had a drop of natural energy to produce, as putting them into the seal space effectively killed them. She had no idea what that would do to the viability of the soil, since it might have also murdered any and all useful bacteria. The air of the cavern wasn’t breathable for humans, but it wouldn’t matter for the dead plantlife anyway.

But… that’s why she brought a botanist to look into it all. Maybe there was still something salvageable from this. Some seeds, hidden in the ground? The soil itself. Or, maybe just biomass for compost, provided Mark could re-introduce relevant bacteria to decompose it.

“Mark ?” she asked. “Your turn. ”

The man was silent, staring.

“Give you more light ,” she said, and moved to one of the seals responsible for light and heat, and upped the output, pouring more chakra into it.

Her chakra recovery, aside from the fact that she couldn’t rely on the sage mode to increase it, was somewhat stable. As long as she didn’t risk reducing her calorie intake too much. She still had enough in her to take them and the sample box back to the Rover... and if it came to it, a handful more solder pills sealed away.

“What do you think?” she asked once more. “Mark? I tell before. All dead. Need to check if viable soil. Take samples. I can seal small bits, too.”

Mark just stood there and didn’t move.

She jogged up to him and waved her hand before his face.

“What. ” Mark said, finally. “What the actual...”

Mars IV

Nara Shikako

Reforging the satellite dish with Chakra wasn’t viable in the short term. She didn’t know enough about the electronic components and alloys required, nor was she good with repairing or molding metals. Maybe, one day, with more vocabulary and better understanding of parts; when she got around to reading the manuals in Aengrih and was more certain how she should do this.

There were other ways to solve the issue. Mark had no way to send or receive messages with his people on Aereh. Shikako was sure there had to be a way her seals would help.

Mark had already rejected two of her ideas. Even if she came to him with good, mathematically sound explanations. She forgot to account for the atmospheric dispersion, and had overestimated the ability of Aereh to point a precise laser at a seal from earth.

All those faults in her solutions had made her a little grumpy.

Which was exactly why his next follow up question to her latest proposal cheered her right up.

“A lot,” She replied. Today was an English-day. They alternated every other day, to keep as much practice as possible in both. With constant practice they put in during regular communication, on top of her insistence to hold daily two-hour lessons, their language skills were improving by leaps and bounds. She might have been too obsessed with that part, but she wanted as little misunderstandings as possible.

One of her long-term goals was to see if Mark could get one of the computers to crunch her triangulation problems. It wasn’t a first priority since she needed Sage Mode to even have a chance of making it through alive. Miscommunication with that problem could kill her en-route, or drop her in a wrong reality. One without a helpful base to hunker in, nor a botanist ready to grow her enough of a garden to get the Sage Mode going. 

“Enough for anything you might want,” she said.

“Can you give me… numbers?” He insisted.

She did. 

He put them into one of his computers and crunched them again. It did give them a nice, accurate graph, which she could only approximate before. Useful.

“I’ve never tried the upper range, anything I put into it above the er… fifty-seven units of Nara faces massively diminishing returns,” she hurried to add, pointing at the specific place of the plotted curve on his screen. 

Mark still struggled with the concept of chakra, but it didn’t stop him from introducing measurement units to use in calculations. She had some medical books, even some leftover data from Kakashi’s ‘Project: Miracle’, and some measuring seals. She reluctantly offered the medical term from Fire Country's language, but it was hard for Mark to pronounce, and the man pounced on her offer to just name it something else in his language. Of course, to annoy her, he named the chakra measurement units after her clan, since it actually was a word he could easily say. And it was short, thus convenient.

At least she talked him out of ‘Shadow-Ninjas’.

“And I won’t even try anything past a hundred-twenty, it would knock me out for days, and I wouldn’t be able to charge the lights on the farm for that time.”

“Sacred shit. That’s way too much. Let’s not do any of these,” Mark said, then taped at a specific point in the chart, much lower. “Here. This should be more than enough, and you could repeat it multiple times.”

“If they’re already watching, it might be an overkill,” Shikako pointed out. “But sure, we can do that, easy. Any specific frequency you want me to use? Fibonacci?”

“Sure, let’s go with a classic,” Mark grinned. “Just… much further away from the HAB!”

It wasn’t actually as dangerous as Mark thought it could be, but with the amounts of chakra involved it was still better to play it safer.

“No problem,” she replied, matching his grin. He was speaking her language, after all. “I’ll get right on it!”

NASA III

Dr. Venkat Kapoor

“Tell me again. What am I looking at?” Venkat asked, sitting in SatCom, watching the follow up images as they continued to come in from multiple satellites. “What the hell did Mark do?”

“We don’t know yet,” Mindy Park replied, not too helpful. “It’s either a string of spontaneous volcanic eruptions or a series of nuclear detonations… Strong enough to flare out all of our close up imaging.”

“Can’t be nuclear. We haven’t seen him touch the RTG burial site, and he doesn’t have the experience or materials for anything like this, if it even were possible at this scale,” Venkat pointed out nervously.

A few more images rolled in.

“It’s still going off, at regular intervals. Almost guaranteed to be artificial. Damage to the ground looks minimal. Might not be actual explosions, just flashes?” Mindy commented. “And look, we got both suit dots outside, on top of the rover! They’re just watching the fireworks! It has to be them!”

By this point, there had been multiple pieces of photographic evidence of two suits being used in tandem, in ways that couldn’t have conceivably been done by a single person, and the press had been pressing them for answers they just didn’t have.

Venkat swore a few more times. “Are these bright enough to be visible via commercial telescopes?”

“Probably? That very much might have been their goal,” Mindy said. “If they didn’t know we were already watching, that’s a guaranteed way to catch our attention. Ours and everyone else's.”

“Someone, call Sanders and Montrose up,” Venkat commanded. He knew that while it was late, neither was probably sleeping. The shitstom about an unknown second user of the spacesuit wasn’t stopping any time soon. Watney can’t have done this, so it had to be the unknown entity causing the explosions.

“Sir,” Mindy chirped again, getting his attention. “I think there’s an actual message… Might be morse code.”

“The explosions?”

“No. Look.”

Between two pictures taken by a satellite, a bunch of pillars had appeared from absolutely nowhere, starting from the rover and going towards the HAB. They were arranged in rows, and Each threw either a long or a short shadow. Spaced out perfectly evenly, with inhuman precision.

Multiple lines.

Venkat wanted to ask for a translation, but Mindy had already found a reference chart and was typing away.

It took them a short while to get the whole message. It was over a thousand pillars long, all almost human-sized. A thousand symbols in morse code wasn’t that long of a message, but it took up an impressive amount of space with just larger and smaller pillars.

Alive Sol 31. Hit by antenna. Freak accident. Not crew’s fault.

Rescued by E.T. Stranded this dimension. 

Lang barrier ½ solved. Building vocab.

Combined rations end Sol 405. Farm underground. Taters, ET rice, ET wheat.

Might make Ares 4.

Exploring diff comms. Try pulsing light next sol, same time. No good rcv opt yet.

Sorry for boom. Lonely.

Watney

Nara

“Extra-dimensional aliens. Annie’s gonna love this,” Venkat said, words dripping with thick sarcasm. “Might as well have been aliens from another dimension!”