Notes: A whiteout occurs when the Earth is between Mars and the Sun and the amount of communication makes it impossible to communicate with Earth up to fourteen days (Sixteen Sols)

Log Entry: Sol 104

Now that NASA can talk to me, they won't shut the hell up. Which makes this recent radio silence from them a huge mystery.

I took apart Pathfinder and put it back together, running diagnostics on every little thing. Nothing should be wrong with it, but NASA doesn't answer any emails from me.

They have a room full of people trying to micromanage my crops, too, which means that they need the constant communication from my side and theirs. I mostly ignored them, but now I'm scrolling through their emails taking their advice. They're telling me, the best botanist on this fucking planet, how to grow potatoes.

In 10 sols, I'll have to harvest and reseed my potatoes. They're growing quite well. Turns out having a stable environment and the perfect amount of martian made water makes them huge. The ones I had for my first seed were barely the size of my palm, but the ones I'm planning to eat are huge!

I also have four hundred potato plants, and to reseed them I'll be taking the smaller of the potatoes and replanting them, uprooting the plant. The greens of the plants are safe to eat in low qualities, so I'll store them outside and eat one plant every seven sols. With that extra boost that'll get my calorie count up, but probably won't be enough to get me an extra couple sols. Think of it like a vitamin pill that could kill me if I take more than one. I'll get wicked stomachaches, but it'll be worth it in the end.

In the meantime, I send daily status reports to NASA even though they aren't answering. I figured that there might be something wrong with JPL or their own communications, or hell, maybe the orbits are just weird.

I'll do some digging with the code I used to hack the rover. Yay, I get to stare at pieces of code I barely understand for hours!

…

"This whiteout is driving me crazy," Venkat Kopoor sipped his coffee as he glanced over the most recent orbital path projection, which resulted in the whiteout ending in almost two weeks. "We just contacted him, and now we think we're ignoring him. We can't even get satellite pictures of the HAB to see what the hell he's doing!"

"The press is insane too. They keep asking me personally for a solution, like I'm the one that personally caused the blackout in the first place." Annie complained, finishing up her email and clicking send before slumping back in her seat.

"Whiteout. Not blackout."

"Whatever, the press is still crawling up my ass. They think it's dumb that we were so concentrated on bringing Watney home that we couldn't see the blackout coming until it hit us in the face."

"It was pretty shitty on our part."

Annie rubbed her forehead. "I'm getting more coffee. You want anything?"

"A diet coke."

Annie rolled her eyes, but didn't say anything. Venkat barely had a moment to himself before one of the JPL programmers knocked on the open doorframe.

"Jack," Venkat greeted. "What can I do for you?"

"We were thinking," Jack begun. "This whiteout isn't effecting the Hermes crew at all. They're out of the path of solar radiation. But they're also only seventy-three million kilometers away from Mars right now. We could relay the messages through Hermes and communicate though-'

"Out of the question," Venkat said. "The crew still doesn't know."

"Damnit man, why can't you tell them? Watney's probably going crazy without communication."

"And that's exactly why. He thinks that we abandoned him, again, and hearing us though a crew that left him behind on a desert planet might prompt him to say stuff he doesn't mean. Plus, they're statistically in more danger then Watney is. They're in space, he's on a planet with food."

"Then we'll wait this one out?"

"We'll have to."

Log Entry: Sol 108 (a)

I've read through all the databases for communication and I think I figured out the problem.

It's a little thing, barely a footnote in the databases but that's because it wasn't supposed to happen for our mission. Or during any mission. NASA plans these things carefully.

A whiteout last occurred to the MOM (Mars Orbital Spacecraft) spacecraft back in 201, nearly thirty years ago. Other whiteouts have occurred since then, but none that lasted as long or actually corresponded with missions or rovers.

A whiteout is when Earth is between the sun and Mars, and Earth has an active magnetic field. Meanwhile, Mars does not. Scientists aren't a hundred percent sure why, but it probably has something to do with the frozen core.

So the sun is throwing a lot of radiation at Earth, which is deflecting it amazingly well. But all that extra radiation is hitting Mars over and over, actually thinning the atmosphere at a small rate. It's so small of a difference that it doesn't effect me much, but it does disrupt communications.

It takes eleven light minutes for my emails to get to Earth, and another eleven minutes for them to respond. But this radiation is blowing my tiny little emails off into deep space, never to get picked up by Earth.

Shit.

Log Entry: Sol 108 (b)

I'm not actually as fucked as I first thought I was!

Reading over what (very little) information on whiteouts, it's not that bad. I'll have to not take as much EVAs as I've been doing the past few sols due to the slight excess radiation,, but no lost there. I just have to go out there every couple sols to clean off the solar array.

NASA's last message was six sols ago. Average whiteouts last about ten sols, but longer ones can last for sixteen. Either way, it's only a few days of communication, and I've been doing fine.

In the meantime, I've been preparing for the second harvest. Wish I had suspenders and a straw hat!

You know how NASA sent me seeds, but grasses and ferns? I almost dumped them because they were useless, but decided against it and put it in my personal storage. Glad I didn't, because I need something to distract me while I'm stressing, and you can only play Leather Goddesses of Phobos so many times (thanks Johanssen!)

I went through everyone's personal items. I know, I know, i'm a nosy guy, but hey if they didn't want me going though their stuff they shouldn't have left me on a desolate planet!

Just playing guys. There's a good chance they could read this one day.

What I really want to do now is grow a bunch of grasses. The grass they sent up here with us is long and sturdy, much like weeds. Why, you ask?

Well, Vogel has an entire college course on Nigerian Basket Weaving. This man is a mystery.

I'm gonna weave some baskets with fresh, home grown martian grass!

Log Entry: Sol 117

Fuck baskets. Eating grass is a way better use of my time. Munch munch!

Also the whiteout is over.