Mark Watney
Sol 498

I got bounced around a lot, but I'm a well-honed machine in times of crisis. As soon as the rover toppled, I curled into a ball and cowered. That's the kind of action hero I am.

As soon as I felt the sideways pressure, I knew I was fucked. I'd been through this before.

There was the split second, there always was, after your fate is sealed but before the disaster happens. When the scene is laid out before you in crystal clarity, your last moments alive.

This time, I didn't use it for much. My last thoughts were "I wonder if Mars will actually properly fucking kill me this time."

Then my world toppled over.

—

I came back to consciousness, groggy. The first thing I note is that I'm still not dead. There's a sort of grim victory in that fact. I know that I might be a dead man walking again, though, again, because in all likelihood the life support is fucked.

I sit up, dizzy from unconsciousness. I'm physically unhurt, except for the concussion I probably have. Nothing is in my abdomen and nothing is hissing, so I'm already better off than the last two times I was thrown bodily across the surface of Mars. Should I count the hydrazine explosion? You know what, I do. There's no cut on my forehead or ringing in my ears, either. This has been the best bodily throwing I've been through.

Another grim victory. I have a few hours to assess how I'm going to die and make a feeble attempt to stop it. No suicide attempt this time, I'm just going to skip right past it. Why? Because what the fuck else am I going to do, that's why. I've made it 498 Sols, I'm not going to let this piece of shit planet get what it wants now.

—

The pressure is still in the trailer, the balloon is popped out.

A rover flip was a disaster scenario in my head, but at every turn it's actually turning out all right. Much like most NASA eventualities, it's a lot scarier on paper than it is in reality.

—

Jesus Christ. Sleeping in the sideways rover was one of the least pleasant experiences I've had in my entire time in the rust bowl.

My back hurts like a bitch. I admit, by this point I've already been reduced to taking a Vicodin almost every day just to keep the pain to don't-kill-Mark levels. The pain of starvation, the pain of a likely-permanent back injury, the pain of crushing suicidal depression, they all run together. But today, I had to take a full two, and while that might make me a little stoned, I was in so much pain I wouldn't really be able to work if I weren't.

After a morning potato and Vicodin, I was feeling much better.

—

While I was working on righting the rover, I talked to myself.

I dug up my longest cable. It's the same one that powered the drill that destroyed Pathfinder. I call it my "lucky cable."

I think my bitterness is really beginning to get to me.

There's no one around to appreciate my jokes but me. Naming it my "lucky cable" is just for the benefit of this stupid, awful planet, as if it can actually hear me. Maybe it can. I don't give a fuck.

Jesus, I wasn't nearly this acerbic a year and a half ago.

"Yeah, dude, because a year and a half ago you were Mark Watney," I said to myself. "But look!" My voice is still acerbic. "You've adjusted to life as the only man on Mars."

I finish my sentence with a perverse smile. It makes my face sore. Jeez, I haven't moved my facial muscles in a while, the strain from that actually hurt.

If adjusting means talking to myself, hearing imaginary noises and responding to everything with suicide and sarcasm, and creepy amnesiac staring, then I'm not really sure it can be considered adjusting.

—

Mars is not Earth. It doesn't have a thick atmosphere to bend light and carry particles that reflect light around corners. It's damn near a vacuum here. Once the sun isn't visible, I'm in the dark.

It's the little things like this that really remind me that Mars is not Earth.

Ten or twenty meters away, I can see beautiful and bright sunlight illuminating the rusty surface of this dead planet. But just over here, it's a blackness so complete that I can't see the ground in front of me. It's as if the entire world ends where the sunlight does, blacked out by expo marker.

I have to feel my way back to the rover in this complete darkness, all the while staring at the bright light. I'm tempted to go reach my hand into it just to see my hand floating in space not attached to anything, but that would be a frivolous use of my time. That doesn't bother me so much, actually. But if I did that I might have some sort of existential thought, and it's when I start having existential thoughts that I begin to check out of my own body or lose hours of time, and I don't want to deal with that.

No, I just want to get to the rover and lay down.

—

Mark Watney
Sol 500

Then I sat for a moment, dumbstruck that my plan had actually worked.

Nothing ever breaks my way on this damn planet. Okay, that's a lie. Things only break my way on this planet when it's actually the line between life and death. And only after I blow myself up a few times, destroy an airlock, or my communications, or something that is permanently critical to my situation.

Also my back is literally on fire from that labor. I took a Vicodin before it started, but the pain is breaking through it. I need another. I know, it'll make me a little dumber, but one, I've got a good tolerance for it now, two, between the losing place while reading and being unable to do math I'm already pretty dumb, and three, I've got nothing on the schedule except for eating a potato, and I'm going to need to be a little high if I'm going to make it through eating another fucking potato.

—

Mark Watney
Sol 502

Oh my god, I forgot how good real food tastes.

In my head, I know it's pathetic that I consider this real food. But it is. This is gourmet cooking on Mars, and I've clearly lost my physical memory of anything that is not Mars. I have intellectual memories of not-Mars, but the only feelings I can have anymore are feelings about this featureless hellscape.

I've been reduced to the sum of what's happened to me.

For the first time, I wonder if I even want to escape.

—

Mark Watney
Sol 504

Holy shit, this is awesome! Holy shit! Holy shit!

I'm so incredibly glad to see that MAV, standing in the distance. It's a different crater and a different part of Mars, but all MAV's look the same, apparently.

Rescue hasn't really been real, all this time. It's been the remote possibility I've been working for all this time, but the empty MAV struts always stood in the distance, so wrong yet undeniable. They left without me and took the rocket with them, and that means I am stuck here on this planet, left me with nothing but empty landing struts to stare at.

Seeing that iron base with an actual spaceship on it gives me an unbelievable sense of hope. This MAV base isn't empty, there is a perfectly serviceable MAV right on it, ready for me to use. It's a way off this god forsaken wasteland.

Suddenly, Mars isn't a hellish death trap. I can practically see the arcing path it will take upon liftoff, with me inside it. I can't see past the atmosphere but I look into the sky like it's a doorway.

A hot and uncomfortable feeling swells my whole chest; I know it's hope but I must not be used to it because instead of good, I just feel extremely uncomfortable in my spacesuit, pressing against my chest like a panic attack.

God, it's too much, and I'd like to have a fucking freakout in the rover but instead I just breathe harshly and keep driving.

Okay calm. Calm.

—

Mark Watney
Sol 504

I'm completely unashamedly crying as I exit the rover and practically run at the MAV, falling into the dirt and scrambling toward it like it's the goalpost of the national championship.

I'm screaming at the top of my lungs and damn is my throat scratchy, I want some water but I don't care because I'VE MADE IT HOLY SHIT I'VE MADE IT.

To save my throat I decide to leap up in the 0.4g, and the fact that I get some impressive height makes me feel amazing. But lifting 50kg spacesuits into the air is hard, so I drop to a knee partially in exhaustion, still waving my arms like a madman.

I'm still screaming. I can't feel anything in my body, my ears are actually beginning to ring because the noise bounces off the glass of my helmet. I run at the landing strut again and I hug it when I reach it, feeling the connectors holding the MAV upright. It's fucking here!

I'm still jumping as I drop the ladder down, screaming my lungs out. I haven't processed anything yet, not really, the emotions vented directly into my screaming.

It's not until I'm in the MAV that I really process it. I collapse into one of the lower level seating racks, still wearing my EVA suit because it has no life support yet.

This is a pristine, new spaceship. It has six flight suits, fitted for the members of Ares IV. Sorry I'm going to have to pilfer one. And your entire MAV. Sorry not sorry.

I climb up into the control seat, and the sight of the flight room makes me cry. I sit down and cry, just abjectly cry, with my mouth hanging open and doubling over, even harder than when I got pathfinder connected. Because this is what I was supposed to see on Sol 6, the flight control room of a MAV that is going to take me far fucking away from this planet. This is what I thought I was never going to get to see.

I know that they're going to have to gut it to get me into orbit, but I don't care. Because I'm going into orbit. Right now I'm fucking excited about the prospect of dying in orbit, because then I'm not dying on this dusty barren rock. I don't want to give this planet the fucking satisfaction.

I'm still crying as I turn all the systems. The communication won't work quite yet, but I'm going to transfer life support so I can get some real shit done in here. So I'm not talking to NASA yet, but everything is booting up and doing it's checks.

I'm so excited to talk to NASA that I'm already climbing out again, even though my muscles are burning and I can barely catch my breath. I need that life support in here now, I want to launch into orbit now.

Suddenly I feel all the impatience I haven't been allowing myself to feel. I'm escaping Sol 549. Whatever happens, I am loading my sorry ass into this MAV and flinging myself into the upper martian atmosphere.

—

Mark Watney
Sol 504

I'm angry with their plan, but I'm not that angry.

I understand that this is just how it is. It needed to lose a lot of weight. I knew this was going to happen before I even set foot on. And yeah, it's fucking retarded, but everything that has happened on this entire fucked up mission has been fucking retarded. I'm accusing them of sending me into space in a ragtop, when I'm currently cooling nitrogen for my atmospheric regulator by running the hose through a patch of canvas in a cutout.

I just chose - I didn't have to, I just chose - to vandalize the Hab in order to make myself a bedroom for the trip. That increased my chances of explosion by at least 2%, both before I left and during the trip, because safety resin is really not something I should use as a daily fix for a pressure vessel, but I did it anyway. I exponentially increased my chances of death over the indignity of sleeping in the rover. I'm really in no position to criticize.

—

Mark Watney
Sol 504

So with the crops, I accused them of all being a bunch of agitated pigeons.

I must have been on my own for a long time, because this is way worse.

I'm having to control an urge to send them an 'unkind' message almost with every response. The transmission time is 14 minutes, I do not have time to be fucking around insulting people, and yet every fucking safety first message they send me just grates on my nerves. You're the ones who want to send me to space in a convertible, you don't have the high ground on safety anymore. Better yet, you're the ones who left me here in the first place.

But they're also the ones saving my sorry ass, so I should be nicer. And it's not like they left me here on purpose.

My mind flashes back to all those people on Houston. I want to be nice to them.

Don't worry guys, I'm coming.

—

Mark Watney
Sol 510

I wonder what day it is on Earth right now. I haven't calculated days, or the earth-date, in a long while. After the first holiday it was too fucking depressing.

—

Mark Watney
Sol 515

You know, I'm still hearing the murmuring around the corner, still checking out for long periods of time, still kind of losing it running around crying and hurting myself. It's just getting worse and worse and worse. If by the grace of an alien god I don't die during the ascent, will it still happen on the Hermes? Is this who I am now?

This is the second time I wonder if living is worth it, at all.