From Valles Marineris, a Twelve-Minute Answer About the Heat

The dispatch from Valles Marineris arrived, as everything from Mars does now, a little under twelve minutes after it was sent — the one-way lag at this point in the two worlds' separation. In it, the colony's fifty thousand residents describe a strange spectatorship: following Earth's month-long heat dome through feeds that were already a quarter-hour old, unable to offer anything but attention. "We watched a crisis we couldn't touch, on a clock that was always behind," said colony coordinator Anouk Devrient, whose settlement runs its own closed-loop climate and has no weather to fear but plenty to remember. The lag will only widen as Earth and Mars draw apart through the autumn, pushing toward a quarter-hour and beyond by year's end. For a settlement built by people who left Earth's climate behind, the dome was a reminder that leaving is not the same as forgetting. "Half of us still have family under that dome," Devrient said. "Twelve minutes feels like a wall."