LOG ENTRY: SOL 63

  I found it, but Mars didn't make it easy. Pathfinder was buried under a thick slab of frozen iron oxide that felt more like concrete than dust. I spent six hours out there with a manual sample shovel, my paws cramped inside the pressurized gloves, digging until my tail was sore and my oxygen alarm was chirping at me to go home.

  ?It looked like a piece of junk, honestly—a four-sided pyramid of solar panels and a tiny, six-wheeled crab of a rover named Sojourner. I had to winch the lander onto the back of the Sliding Sled, nearly tipping the rover twice on the uneven basalt slopes. Back at the Hab, the real nightmare began. I spent forty-eight hours straight bypass-soldering the 1990s-era silicon into the Hab's modern communication array. My whiskers were twitching with every spark. If the ASAN brass knew I was using a multi-million-dollar habitat to jump-start a museum piece, they’d revoke my engineering degree before I could say "fish."

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  ?I finally got the high-gain antenna to track. I didn't send a manifesto. I sent a single line of code in Morse, a rhythmic tapping that felt like a heartbeat: "STILL KICKING. NEED WATER. SEND FISH."