since she first landed, and 15 years since we lost contact with her and she died. We knew the day was going to come at some point, but it didn’t make it any easier. We watched her progress, enjoyed her photos, and played music to wake her up. Now, here we were, on Mars and I had a plan. I wanted to find her, not just for myself, but for everyone who cared, everyone who cried at our loss, everyone who wondered where she was and what state of disrepair she was in.
I quietly influenced where we should land, my crew had no idea what I planned on doing. I wasn’t even sure if they remembered her. Sure, over the past 15 years there were many others like her… but they weren’t her. She was only supposed to live for 90 days and she survived for 15 years. She shared so much with us… pictures, data, and she even discovered water (in the form of ice of course), and she shared her life with us from millions of miles away. I was determined to find her, to show her… we still remember everything you did for us.
We landed between Sunderland Point and Spirit point, not far from where she was last known to be, it took a couple of weeks to set up camp and set up our land rover, but when everything was said and done… we were here. At nights, I would stare out the window at the moons, the huge sky of stars, and the vast dry dusty horizon, it was beautiful. This is what she saw every night before ‘going to sleep’, this is what she lived under, this is where she had lived for 15 years, this is where she lied in permanent slumber. Being able to share this beauty and experience with others was a gift… But she was alone her entire life on Mars and she was alone when she died, in a physical sense. We were there but we couldn’t be there with her. She deserved to come back, she may be unable to come back to working order or back to Earth… but she deserved to come back into the human hands that built her, and loved her for what she was and what she did. The hands that played her music every day to wake her from her coma and sent the final message of I’ll Be Seeing You in hopes that maybe, one day, we will see her again.
In the morning, I told the crew I was going out to explorer. They told me to be careful, to not stray too far from camp, and to come back before nightfall. Getting on the land rover and driving around was… amazing, weird… alien, yet it felt as if I were driving in a desert on Earth. The land was vast, the terrain was difficult, it took hours to thoroughly search the small area I had marked for day one. In the end, she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere I looked in the week that followed. I wanted to give up… but I couldn’t. She didn’t give up after 90 days, and neither will I. The search continued, I was asked questions by my crew about what I was doing. I wanted to tell them, but I was worried they would think I was stupid or would tell me to give up and that there was no hope in finding her, so… I told them I was mapping out the surrounding area, which in a sense is true. I was mapping out the area, just not for the reason they thought.
Days passed… then weeks… then months… with no luck. Not a single sign of her. But I still didn’t give up. I didn’t want to give up on my personal mission. It might sound weird, but I didn’t want to give up on her. I wanted her to be back with the people who cared and not at the hands of a merciless landscape. The sun was 3 hours from setting and I was on my way back from another failed exploration. Could she have moved? Could she have wandered aimlessly, searching for a way to communicate to us again, only to finally succumb to the dust storm? No… no that sounded stupid… right? But… no, it’s dumb to think such things. It makes no sense. I shook my head and looked off to my left, knowing the terrain by heart by now, I felt comfortable looking away for a time. I needed to clear my thoughts before getting back to base.
I idly hummed a song to myself, watching the land go by as I drove. I slammed on the breaks, almost causing the rover to tip over, but I swore I had just seen something. I tore my hands away from the steering wheel and slowly got out of the vehicle. I stepped alongside it, staring out to where I saw something reflect, and that’s when I saw the shine again. Taking a sharp inhale, I slowly walked over to the reflective object. It was covered in a heavy amount of dust, but some had blown off from a recent wind storm… I looked down at the large object if it weren’t for the storm, I would have never seen it… it just blended in with everything so well. I knelt down and dusted it off, the air caught in my lungs, and tears formed in my eyes.
It was her. It had to be her.
I desperately cleaned off everything I could and tried pulling at her to get her tires free from the 15 years of accumulated dust and dirt but she was stuck pretty hard. I crouched down to my knees and grabbed a rock, stabbing and digging at the dirt around her tires, and by the time I freed them… the sun was setting and it was getting cold. Running to the land rover, I dug around for rope to hitch her up to it. I hooked the rope to the rover and walked over to her, looking for the best way to tie her up and not break the fragile machinery. The only way I thought I could do this was by tying her up by her box body, the WEB. I was as careful as possible and even more careful as I towed her back to base. I was freezing cold by the time I saw base, the last bits of the sun just beginning to disappear. There were lights outside moving around, probably the crew doing last minute checks before heading to bed… That’s when a loud radio buzz came over my com before the captain’s voice yelled at me, asking where the hell I was, why I was so late coming back. The yelling continued until they showed their lights onto her, then there was a long silence that overcame them.
Once I parked the rover and got out, I fell down to my knees. I couldn’t feel my legs, I hadn’t moved them once on the way back. Everyone rushed over and helped me to the base to warm me up. I was setting into hypothermia, I couldn’t process anything anymore at that point. They threw so many questions at me, I just couldn’t understand anything they were saying, all that I thought about was, “at least she was found finally and she wasn’t alone. At least I’m not alone either…” before passing out. I thought I was dying… well… I guess, in a way, I was dying, but… since I wasn’t alone… since I had people around me who cared… they helped me. They saved me. When I came to some time later, a couple of days later, I was once again questioned on my reckless actions and what I had brought back to base. I told them everything. I told them how I searched for her every day, how I found her, why I wanted to find her, why I risked my stupid life to bring her back, who she was…
They didn’t believe me at first, so we took her to the garage with the land rover and began looking at her parts. We cleaned her out, checked all the hardware, and somehow… we were able to run diagnostics on her. She should have been a heap of junk on the Martian wasteland, but here she was… still in, mostly, one-piece and somewhat functional. We ignored everything for a while and just worked on her for a couple of days. Replacing a small part of her solar panels, shining light onto it, hoping for something… anything… but she didn’t wake up. We checked her body, checked everything we could… and retried again. We watched the computer eagerly, waiting for something, and there was something. There was a small bit of charge, we waited for hours but it hardly went up any.
She somehow charged to a small 5% and connected to our computer. We began receiving data slowly before she started to smoke, making us panic. One of the crew went to take the light away, but before he did… we received a message… or rather… she received our final message. I’ll Be Seeing You played for her while we sat there and watched…
And when the night is new
I’ll be looking at the moon
Then… she powered down for the last time. Nothing we did brought her back. But… it’s for the best… it was time to let her go. It was her time to go. She stayed fighting for so long… just long enough for someone to find her… so she could hear our last message to her. Our love song for her. Our good-bye song to her. We all started crying as soon as we realized she was gone for good. Even though she was ‘just a machine’, she still meant things to us. We humanized her, gave her a name, watched her explore and discover new things, watched her age, and now… with a final good-bye… we watched her die.
We humanize the most mundane and inanimate things, we love them and care about them as if they were alive… and when they die or get destroyed… we grieve for them. We grieve for the humanity we put onto them, we grieve for something that felt like somebody, and that’s ok. It’s ok to grieve or something that seems so… abnormal or stupid… it’s not stupid or abnormal in the end though. It’s only human to love such a thing so deeply that you humanize it and miss it when it’s gone. And it hurts if we feel we never had the proper good-bye with them.
Knowing that Oppy, Opportunity, died, despite many attempts to wake her up, and then get sent the final song I’ll Be Seeing You is… touching, comforting even, but it still makes me incredibly sad. She was long since passed when we sent the final message, I’m not even sure if she truly received the good-bye she oh so deserved, which makes me cry even more to think about.
We will be seeing you again one day.
