Sol 46

32887 Ti

Back at Beta Base once again. Home sweet home.

This little expedition of mine took me about 7 Sols, a full week, and according to the metrics that's several hundred kilometers. The irritating thing is that until I devise a proper means of traveling faster, most of this planet is going to be invisible to me. I've heard that there should come a point when I'd be able to launch off some rockets to start surveying and doing extra things to help me out, but that's a good long way away.

I managed to get home just in time too, by the time I got back a dust storm was whipping up. It's just as well, I have to spend most of the next Sol repairing damage to my exosuit and the agility boots. The agility boots especially are a big problem. I managed to get almost all the way back to Beta Base before a rock managed to lodge itself in the hydraulics in just the right way to crack part of the frame. It's not like it stops me from just, you know, walking, but I'd prefer to have them on hand so that I can save on calories.

On top of that, there's a slow leak somewhere in my exosuit. I don't know where it is, or how it happened, but apparently a seam has managed to breach just enough that it cuts down on my effective time with oxygen by a full hour. I don't even know how I'll fix it when I find it, but right now I'd at least like to know where the damage is so I can keep it from going pop along with the rest of my body.

Seven Sols of walking out and about on this planet and I've already managed to incur damage that, in any normal circumstance, would be grounds for stopping work on my mission. But because I'm not allowed any vacation time Sentinel wants me to just keep working even if I'm going to die because to do otherwise would keep this from being the punishment it's meant to be.

Well fuck them. I'm going to go to bed early tonight and no one can stop me. God, I've missed fabric.

Sol 47

34580 Ti

The nice thing about modularity is that I was able to repair the damage fairly easily. The agility boots took some extra aluminum to get fixed, but thankfully I had some on hand from my little expedition. They're back up and running, and aside from some minor scratches from playing in the sand they're back in perfect shape.

My exosuit is a different story. There's a broken seam right at the crotch. I did a little digging through the technical manuals they gave me for entertainment and from what I can tell, exosuits normally have a kind of self-repair function in the sense that the fibers are a self-fastening variety that return to their defined shape, and are bound by a type of resin that does the same thing. The end result is an outfit that can repair the small amount of damage from everyday use whenever you just leave it alone for a while, vastly extending its working life.

The problem is that it usually expects much more of a rest period than what I gave it from walking around and keeping it on for a week's worth of Sols because I was away from Beta Base. I only just got to take it off when I got back, and it started repairing itself as usual, but apparently I had managed to do just enough damage from walking around to where it couldn't repair itself all the way. I suppose it's just as well considering that I'm stuck inside today, it being the height of this recent sandstorm and all that, but before I go outside I need to try and fix this before it becomes a bigger problem.

Everything I do here is fighting against the inevitable tide of entropy. If I stop enriching the atmosphere, the lack of a magnetosphere will let the solar wind blow it away. If I stop heating the planet it'll radiate heat into space and cool back down. If I stop putting oxygen into the atmosphere it'll rust right back onto the rocks and into the dirt.

And that's not even counting the amount of effort that I have to put into keeping my equipment safe. Generally it's fine, because the superalloys and the durasteel and the plasteel crap are all extremely durable. I could fire off a sandblaster at the outside of these living compartments and it would take almost 100 years to cut through. Same for the drills and stuff, they can take a lot of punishment. It's everything I have, personally, that needs repair, like the agility boots and my exosuit.

So I'll have to figure out a solution to this seam separation problem before I can feel safe going out at all. I've already had a few threats to being alive so far, but most of them have been slow-burn types of problems that I could catch before they become an issue. If my suit tears, that's sayonara in a matter of seconds. I'll die too quickly to do anything and slowly enough to make sure it hurts. I live or die by two things: my exosuit and my multitool, and right now I have no reason to expect it should break down any time soon.

Sol 48

36799 Ti

I have a problem and a solution. The problem is that my exosuit is slightly damaged and it has the potential to become major, life-threatening damage. The solution is that I could go dumpster-diving in a wreck to find more resin, which I could use to repair the seam separation.

Of course, the problem there is the fact that I have to go outside. Which requires my exosuit. For a prolonged period of time.

I've tried calculating odds in my head, but the trouble is that right now there's no reason for me to be able to predict anything. Right now just enough things have gone wrong to make me suspect that if I so much as step outside the suit will pop.

I have no other options at the moment. So I'm going to head to the wreck north of me. With any luck there'll be an exosuit repair kit there that I can dig out of the crew compartments, which should have resin that I can use to fix the separation. I'll set out tomorrow, when the sandstorm has died down.

Oh boy. Wish me luck.