My Battery Is Low and It’s Getting Dark

My Battery Is Low and It’s Getting Dark | DISPATCH By Scott Evers

[footsteps through sand and gravel] I’m on Mars. Yes. Ladies and gentlemen… The hour is early. There is light, though not enough to establish where it’s coming from. The ground is red where I can see it. The mountains are black. The temperature is— Rusty. This way. People commonly say the desert is empty. Mostly people who pass through it carrying everything they need. Stay after the road noise is gone and the vacancy begins dividing itself. Greasewood from saltbush. Dry wash from the faint underground intention of water. Something black just crossed above us. Raven. You can tell by the wedge in the tail. Nothing announces itself. That is the first instruction. [footsteps] The second is that survival here is not an achievement of strength. It’s an arrangement. The cactus stores. The jackrabbit relinquishes the afternoon. Even the mountains endure by surrendering themselves grain by grain. Only the visitor imagines endurance to be a form of conquest. At this hour, the cold remains close to the ground. A little wind moves along the wash. Somewhere beyond sight, an animal makes use of the dark. The desert has not been withholding its life. It has merely declined to perform it. Hold on. I spy with my little eye… something otherworldly. At least for Mars. [footsteps continue, then slow] Would you look at that. Six wheels. Or what remains of them. A mast looking off toward nothing. Panels gone the color of the ground. Ladies and gentlemen, we appear to have located Oppy. MER-B. Opportunity. NASA’s robotic geologist. Easy, Rusty. Don’t contaminate the site. [walking around the object] There’s glass under the dust. Wire wound around a length of pipe. Some kind of dish fastened where no dish would serve any earthly purpose. Small— Are those… handprints. Somebody’s been improving it. Right. And here we have what appears to be a steering wheel. Ladies and gentlemen… we appear to have discovered the automobile. Opportunity was meant to last ninety days. It lasted nearly fifteen years. Traveled more than twenty-eight miles across this planet and found evidence that water had once been here. People say its final words were— My battery is low and it’s getting dark. Yep. Except that isn’t what it said. It sent measurements. The battery was failing. A storm had covered the sun. Numbers arrived here and we made a sentence from them. The data had no I in it. We supplied that. Look at that. Man-made. The epitome of human prowess. [quiet] Maybe we couldn’t bear for the thing to die without knowing it had been alive. Mm-hmm. Someday somebody may find this contraption and do the same for us. Make a voice from the wire. A purpose from the dish. They may decide it was built to cross this place, taking measurements on behalf of people who had not arrived. They may call it a rover. Funny thing to leave something in the world without considering who might find it. Somebody you’ll never know. Somebody who may not be here for a hundred years. An ancestor is supposed to remember that person, I suppose. Rusty’s already up the wash. Come on, Rusty. Sun’s coming. [footsteps continue; farther away] Rusty. Stay close. It’s a long way home.

A long… long… long… way home. … What are you looking at? Ah. Phobos and Deimos Couldn’t tell ya which is which. … It’s a wobbly affair. Prone to tumbling. Because they are irregularly shaped and not perfectly rigid, they can enter chaotic spin states rather than rotating smoothly. … I think I prefer our moon. … But I do like the idea of two. Uh-hu.