Mark Watney was staring intently at his hands as Venkat Kapoor entered his room Friday morning.

"Good morning, Mark!" Dr. Kapoor smiled. "You're sitting up today, that's great!"

"Hey, guys. Good morning. For my next feat, I will attempt to eat some solid food for breakfast." Mark grinned.

"Not til tomorrow, according to Dr. Beck." Venkat replied smoothly. "How are you feeling today? You're looking stronger."

"I feel very... heavy, still. But better. Teddy still in Chicago?"

"He should be meeting with your parents just about now, actually. We're anticipating that we can get them on the phone for you, before they get on the plane."

"I'd like to be able to talk with them as soon as they know. Will it be okay if we wind up taking a break from this, if we're not done for the day by then?"

"Of course, Mark." Venkat motioned that his device was recording, then motioned to Mark. "Let's continue with where we left off yesterday. You mentioned that your... rescuer? Had examined you. What happened next?"

"Well, not very much. At first. I was still in really bad shape. I slept for a long time. When I woke up, it was dark inside the cabin, and I could see her above me, in the ship's... kitchen area. It wasn't much of a kitchen, but that's what I called it, anyway. There was a see-through slat directly above me. I heard this musical sound, coming from somewhere right near my head. It was some sort of medical monitor.

"A musical sound?"

"Yes, it sounded like chords, being struck on a piano. It was kind of nice, after all the disco." Mark paused. "I think, by then, I'd probably been there for 6, maybe 8 hours. I'm not sure. Maybe it was telling her I was awake. She came and sat next to me, offered me a mug, covered bowl, thing full of something white to drink. It looked like soup." Mark wrinkled his nose at the memory.

"She motioned for me to drink it, but I was a little hesitant. She opened her mouth and spoke to me, for the first time. It sounded like the medical monitor-like music. Everything she said, sounded like a 4-piece quartet. It made absolutely no sense. Nice to listen to, but we had to go completely on context, at first."

"At first? Did you... eventually- try to learn her language?"

"Ha. No. I did try to learn to say her name, a few months later, after having heard her say it to me about a hundred times. But that was later, and even then, I was so bad at it that it made her laugh."

"Okay, so we're talking about a MUSICAL language, full of chords and impossible for a human to imitate? You eventually managed to learn one word-her name-and other than that?"

"We started with something like sign language. Like with the soup, that first day. She had obviously told me it was perfectly safe, go ahead and drink it. I knew that's what she meant; she had a bowl of it herself, and she took a drink, motioned for me to do the same." Mark grimaced. "It was awful. Tasted like stewed cardboard and stale soy milk. I didn't have any idea whether it was even safe for humans."

"I should say not."

"It did make me sick, at first, actually. Nauseated and bloated. But I was pretty far into starvation by then, so maybe that would have happened with anything I tried to eat. I don't know. Anyway. While we were eating, she started trying to get the basics of what had happened. She had a small... computer, thing. Round, about the size of a quarter. It would project things, upward, as she talked to it. She used it to pull up some star charts, and a diagram of Mars."

"She wanted to know what you were doing there."

"Yes, that was the general idea I got, as well. She pulled up a diagram of Earth, and pointed to it. I nodded my head, and that was our first real conversation. She picked up on Yes/No pretty quickly."

"So you built on that, expanding your vocabulary?"

"Right, we started with the small talk, who are you, where are you from? and moved on to me being skewered by an antenna, and hastily-constructed NASA vehicles that should have arrived but didn't."

Venkat hung his head. "Sorry, Mark. We tried."

Mark laughed. "I know, just giving you a hard time. Anyway, we talked, or tried to, until late that evening. She brought me another bowl of yuck to eat, and we just soldiered on, trying to hammer out some basic communications. Her language had a written component as well. Each sound, or word, had a different geometric symbol, which was then marked through and some sections would be colored in. It represented the different sounds, I guess. Nothing I could really make heads or tails of. But once we had agreed on a word, she'd make a video clip of me saying it in English, and then she'd write down what it meant in her language."

"You created a system, then."

"Well, she did. Really, at first we failed a lot more than we succeeded. But by late that second night, we were starting to get some very basic information flowing."

"And she offered to take you back to Earth."

"Well, no. Not right away. It was certainly what I was thinking. But I tried to be a charming and friendly, diplomatic type at the first. Didn't want to start asking for favors, right away."

Kapoor nodded.

"So by then, I needed to use the bathroom pretty badly. I was feeling quite a bit stronger, so I started to suit up and tried to make my way down to the airlock. She followed behind, and showed me how she operated it. She would speak to her small computer thing, she usually had it attached to her hand, and it would start the air cycle. She followed me back to the Hab."

"You invited the alien to come into the NASA Hab." It was a statement, but Mark could sense that Dr. Kapoor did not really approve.

"Well, I didn't want to be rude. She was curious. She's a scientist, too."

"She is?"

"Yes, stop interrupting. So she followed me around the Hab for awhile, while I tried to politely excuse myself to take care of business, as they say, but she wouldn't really take the hint. Finally I motioned for her to stay put, while I went in the toilet and shut the door. She opened it, while I was midstream, ha!"

Kapoor's eyes widened, and his eyebrows arched.

"Yea that was how we nailed down the word "embarrassed". First time I heard her laugh, too. Nice sound. It was kind of freaky, having someone else in the Hab with me, by then. It'd been a long time since I'd seen anyone. It was good to make a friend, weird as it was."

"I'm sure it was." Venkat mused.

"So after that, nothing else would do, but she had to go in there to inspect the toilet, while I showed her the schematics of how it worked. She was fascinated. She took pictures of everything, and we entered lots of new words into the communication application she was making, on her small computer."

"Her computer device-what were the capabilities of that, exactly? Could she use it to communicate with other..." Venkat trailed off.

"Uh, yea. She could send out messages, and get news from home. But it took a really long time to send and receive, so any information she received was never anything recent. It was all about things that had happened many years ago. So she didn't really seem to be too invested in it."

"I need something better to refer to her, you said you managed to learn her name?"

"Oh geez, don't make me try to say it for real. Man, I can't sing for shit. Actually, you can call her what I called her after awhile. It was as close as I could get, without actually singing it. Oh-ah-ee-ah. I called her Oaiea. She laughed about it, but she answers to it. So yeah."

Venkat's cellphone rang just then, as he was trying to internalize the name of an actual alien. An alien named Oaiea, following Watney around the NASA Hab. He shook his head.

"You going to answer that, Dr. Kapoor?"

Venkat snapped back to reality. He shook his head again. He prodded the ringing phone absent-mindedly.

"Kapoor, here." He listened for a minute, nodded to Watney, and handed him the phone. "It's your parents, Mark."