The End Isn’t Yet - Challenge of the week

You can’t see the end from here. I guess that’s one of the joys of it. That blue marble doesn’t care how it’s played, it just keeps rolling. We, on the other hand, are fighting the apocalypse every day. This planet wants to kill us far more than our blue home ever did. There are endless dust cyclones - raging hurricanes wrapped tightly into the size of a tornado. Then, there are the equipment issues. You wouldn’t think you could drown on a planet as dusty and barren as this, but if your condensation recycler goes down, you’ll be breathing water before you know it.

At least we have our shelters. They are sturdily built, with a purpose that ignores luxury. In the months and years spent building them, you would think some expense could be spared, but I guess it’s too expensive to bring up a soft bar of soap and a heating pad. But hey, I won the lottery and got off that planet before the inevitable happened. Or at least, I thought I did.

Now I am assigned to the water unit. Our domiciles were built near the shadow line of a massive crater that was discovered to have ice locked up in the rocks under the soil. Well, we found enough to build this new ‘civilization’ nearby, but we recently discovered we only have 3 months of a supply left. My background in chemistry and water extraction techniques as a geologist set me up for a unique role here. It makes me wonder if the lottery was really random, or if they just picked people they knew they needed under the guise of a random selection..

Our last drill attempt yielded nothing. The soil is hard, compact, and very difficult to work with. Since I don’t have a lot of the same equipment I had back home, I couldn’t really explain why there was nothing there. Our autonomous rover also has sensitive searching equipment and water detection radar on it, but we set it to search on its own and it wandered off beyond our acceptable recovery range about a week ago. Someone should have paid more attention to its programming. Hopefully, it should be back in a few days with updated data from its auto discovery pathing. If it finds more water, we may have to pack up this entire place in three months and move. I am not sure that’s possible, but transporting water is very difficult due to the weight. Like I said, we are fighting against the apocalypse every day.