Plan B Officer's log, February 4, 2145
I loved Wolf, but did I know him?
After he left on the Lazarus mission I thought of myself as a secret widow. But at some point I realized that widowhood is a relative thing. I hadn't lived with him, had children with him, slogged through the banalities of life with him. I knew people, including my own father, who'd lost spouses after many years of marriage, and it wasn't the same.
And of course Wolf wasn't my husband. Marriage was obviously not on the table for us, given what he was headed for. Officially we were nothing to each other - nothing to disqualify him from participating in the mission. Still, I think of our brief time together as a kind of honeymoon. The early days of a marriage, unsullied by petty squabbles. I never saw his imperfections. And I guess he never saw mine.
It doesn't make the love invalid. It was real. But it was truncated. Something that never developed to maturity. Like a child who died.
Why am I talking about my long-dead relationship with Wolf Edmunds in this log? In fact, why don't I just call this a personal log - a "Dear Diary?" Because I don't want to separate the personal from the official, the feelings from the job. I reject that false dichotomy, as I've come to reject the idea of "thinking as a species." Anything I accomplish as the NASA officer responsible for implementing Plan B, will be accomplished in light of my personal strengths and weaknesses. My motivations, my anxieties, my peculiarities. What and whom I loved.
I learned that from Cooper, about whom you'll be hearing as well.
So how was my day at the office? Well, first I'll point out that I've been here for four months now - four Earth months - but until today felt too emotionally depleted to make my own log entries. CASE, of course, keeps an exhaustive record of our activities and can spew an efficient summary of them on demand. He can tell you all you want to know about how we found the ruins of Wolf's camp, laid Wolf to rest, and rebuilt the camp with the addition of the Endurance's cargo modules - the ones that remained after Dr. Mann blew one out in his disastrous attempt to dock with the Endurance. CASE can tell you how we set up our lab and made initial preparations for Plan B. How we completed Wolf's preliminary investigations on an aquifer only half a klick away from the camp and found the water purifiable for consumption. How we set up a collection box and purification system for the water and built a pipeline to the camp - amazing hot showers for me, and an irrigation system for the hydroponic unit we built. Analysis of the soil surrounding the camp, and in a couple of spots farther out, is underway, but in the meantime our little artificial garden has started yielding greens, cherry tomatoes, baby eggplants, alfalfa sprouts.
Yes, we've been busy. Constant work has kept me sane, or what passes for sane when there are no other humans to gauge your mental state by. I'll defer to CASE's assessment that I am indeed still sane. In any case, I estimate that I spend no more than seven minutes a day on personal needs other than sleep. As for sleep: the dreams are frankly unbearable and I do as little of it as I can get away with.
The more quasi-human CASE becomes, the more robotic I become, it seems.
So why am I taking the time now, out of my busy work schedule, to compose a non-robotic log entry? Because I've reached a work milestone that reaffirms my humanity, or at least my animal nature, which is a start.
The milestone is that I've begun test runs for Plan B on animal embryos. In three weeks' time I should have a couple of chicks, and in two months or so, a pair of German Shepherd puppies. Creatures chosen for their utility, but from whom I expect to get some company as well. CASE is great, but there are some things only flesh and blood can provide.
The chickens will hopefully live off the vegetables produced by the hydroponic garden, with some vitamin and mineral supplements, though I'm hoping our soil analyses will pan out in the meantime and we'll be able to sow grain as well, with alfalfa as fertilizer. As for feeding the puppies - I've started culturing meat in the lab. Really I should have been doing this from the outset, with my own nutritional status in mind, but I never did care for lab-grown meat, though it was a staple at NASA. Despite evidence to the contrary, I never quite believed it was altogether insentient. I'm not sure I believe it now, but non-evidence-based repugnance is a luxury I can't afford at present. Our supplies from the Endurance are finite.
The thought of having something warm and fuzzy to hold, creatures with heartbeats, makes me giddy. The sheer joy of it carried me through the tedium of the process: preparing the dishes with the thawing media, transferring the embryos from the liquid nitrogen storage into each of the successive dishes with the wait times in between, then the gradual warming, and finally the transfer to the biobags. So clinical; but soon there will be little balls of mystery to observe as they slowly unfold in their watery chambers. A poetic and inspiring outcome of a cold and antiseptic process.
It gives me hope.