So after we got back to Building 3 and got out of the rover, everyone had pretty much cried themselves dry. Well actually we were all pretty soggy but you know what I mean. We were quiet, and everybody was a bit stunned. Except Olivia, of course, who never really seems to be shocked by anything, for some reason. Which is odd, because the fact that her eyes bug out just a little makes her look perpetually surprised, but actually she is the one who never seems to be thrown off by anything that happens.
"Liam," she said, "can you help me make sure all the little ones' suits are put away properly? We need to make sure they stay in good shape, we're going to be using them a lot I think."
Liam nodded, and started to help out the youngest, and so Emma and Noah and Ava and I did also. Charlotte was in no shape to help anyone else, obviously, and everyone else was younger than her. I noticed we pretty quickly started to pay attention to where we were in the order of things by age, and if someone older than us wasn't helping out with something we figured we didn't have to.
It helped that Olivia had said we were going to be using the suits again, because it stated as a fact, without saying it exactly, that we weren't just going to give up now that there were no adults left. The younger ones probably just assumed that the older kids knew what they were doing, but I was close enough to their age to guess that even Olivia and Liam had no idea what to do next, really. Then it occurred to me that maybe, the adults hadn't really known what to do next as much as I had always assumed. Again, once the thought occurred to me it was obvious that it was true, that they had been more or less faking their confidence, or the Colony would not be such a mess. But then I wondered if this was just something about the people in the Mars Colony, or if even adults back on Earth were like that. In the shows we got from Earth, there seemed to be lots of scheming and planning going on, but that was all fiction, and really the more I thought about what little I had read about Earth news, it seemed like maybe not everything was going according to any plan back there, either. Maybe nobody knows what they're supposed to be doing, I thought, and everyone is just faking being an adult. I still think that sometimes.
When we were done putting away the suits we sat down there in the entryway and waited for Olivia and Liam to tell us what was next. They stood really close together and talked to each other in a low voice, but I could guess that their conversation went something like: what should we do? I don't know, what do you think? I don't know, there's a lot of things that need doing. Let's write them all down in a list and talk about it together. But, it took a lot longer than that, so they must have said some of it more than once.
Probably this was at least in part because there wasn't anywhere obvious to write, since there weren't any whiteboards in Building 3, or anything similar. I think there were in the newer buildings, but even there some of them were electronic and you couldn't write on them without power, and a lot of the newer buildings had no power ever since the Electrocution. I guess I'm going to have to tell you about the Electrocution eventually, but we'll get to it. Fortunately the older buildings like Building 3 still had power, but we had no whiteboards, electronic or otherwise. We eventually made do with paint on a window. It wasn't a perfect system, because the paint was harder to remove when you needed to erase it, and once it got dark outside it was harder to read. But it was better than just talking about it, because if you just talk about what needs doing it all gets overwhelming and feels desperate, but if you can make a list then you can just work on what's at the top, without a nagging voice in your head worrying about the rest. It's on the list, we'll get to it, you can tell that little voice. It also helps to keep from forgetting things, of course.
So the list we made that day was something like this (my comments in brackets):
1) find the leaks in building 3 and fix them [we knew from the meter readings that Building 3 was slowly leaking both air and water somehow]
2) find the schedule for planting new plants [Building 3 was the building where we grew sweet potatoes, carrots, onions, kale, dandelions, basil, garlic, and lettuce. There were seeds from a bunch of other kinds of plants, but those were the kinds that had already been grown in the Colony]
3) see if the computer files had anything about how the sewage system in Building 2 worked
4) figure out which of the other buildings still had power
5) see if we can send a message to Earth, or maybe to the ship from Mars headed back to Earth, and ask them what to do
6) figure out how to do the battery swap on the solar farm drone [they were robots that dusted off the solar panels outside, and some of them had returned to base for a battery swap]
7) check if any of the buildings' water reserve tanks still had any water in them
8) find out how to turn the plants in Building 3 into actual food we could eat, and start doing it
9) find out how the treated soil from Building 2 got made, and how to get it back to Building 3 where we needed it to plant new crops
10) start using the laundromat in Building 6 to clean our clothes [before we became so stinky we couldn't stand ourselves]
There were a bunch of other things that got said, but Liam would sometimes kind of instantly develop a hearing problem. Like, when Lucas said, "figure out how the server farm in Building 12 works!" I don't think any of us knew much about how the servers worked, but Lucas thought he knew. It occurred to me that if Lucas ever got to Building 12, he might try to "fix" something, and that could really screw things up. The servers were currently working, and we really didn't want them to stop any time soon, so the less done to mess with them the better. Liam also conveniently didn't hear suggestions about retrieving toys from other buildings, or favorite clothes, or building a spaceship to go to Earth, or asking the ship headed to Earth to turn around and come back (since it would be even more depressing when they said 'no').
He also pretended not to hear Charlotte when she quietly said, "Find my mom and dad," but I'm pretty sure everyone was pretending to be deaf at that exact moment, not just Liam. I don't think even Charlotte meant that we should actually do that, since the most likely spot was underneath a pile of rubble that we couldn't safely move, but I don't blame her for saying it. She also said it kind of quietly, looking off in a different direction from the list everyone else was looking at, so I don't think she even intended for it to be heard, she just couldn't stop herself from saying it.
After the list was made, it was time to assign names. They ended up putting people in age order, which meant Olivia got (1), Liam got (2), and so on. I was (5), the one about trying to send a message to Earth somehow. We all got assigned one of the younger ones to go with us. They were just going to write them down from top to bottom in age order again, but I realized that would put me with Lucas.
"We should put the youngest kids with the oldest, so Harper should go with Olivia," I said as quick and loud as I could. Everyone agreed, and that meant I got stuck with Mia instead of Lucas. I tried not to be too obvious about my relief. I didn't know Mia very well, but I knew that if I were trying to figure out something technical with Lucas there, I would end up getting too frustrated and angry to think. The only one who figured out why I had made my suggestion, I think, was Ava, who turned and glared at me, because this meant she got stuck with Lucas instead of me. Hey, maybe Lucas knew something about how to take a battery out of the solar farm drone.
But, in any case, at least we all knew what we were going to do in the morning, or at least try to do. We went into the main chamber of Building 3, where the actual plants grow, and decided to all sleep there. The air was a little bit fresher, and Olivia said something about our body heat helping the climate control to keep the temperature above freezing at night, but mostly I think we also just wanted to be in that spot because it had the most life in it. Most of the Colony felt dead, now, but Building 3 still felt alive, because of all the plants growing there.
And that became our routine for the next several weeks. We would wake up when the sunlight made us wake up (because Building 3 was mostly transparent, so that the plants could get as much natural light as possible). We would stumble into the room with the "to-do" list on the window that Liam called the War Room, and then figure out how to try to do what was on that list with our name by it. Sometimes people needed help coming up with ideas, or they were just frustrated and tired, and they needed to rant about it and get some sympathy. But the days when something actually got completed, and we could mark something off the list, were pretty awesome, because it meant something good had actually happened. I told Noah my idea of the "Monster", that was all of the things going wrong put into one beast, and he said that whenever we finished something on the list we were chopping one tentacle off the beast.
Although it turned out to be a hydra, that thing that grows back two heads when you chop one off, unless you seal it with fire. So fixing a problem in the way that keeps it fixed for good, we called "seal it with fire". It was a while before we had much fire to work with.