Valles Marineris Files the Dispatch It's Waited Years to Send

There is a message queued in the transmit buffer at Valles Marineris that the colony has been rehearsing, in one form or another, for the better part of a decade — and this week its administrators confirmed it is nearly ready to send. They will not say yet what it announces, only that it concerns a threshold the settlement has crawled toward district by pressurized district, and that the whole colony knows it is close. The strange arithmetic of distance means the milestone will be true on Mars for a full twelve minutes before Earth is allowed to know it — the current one-way delay across the widening gulf. "We will have celebrated, cleaned up, and gone back to work before the first congratulation leaves your planet," one administrator wrote, in the dry register the settlement has made its house style. The colony has learned to hold its triumphs privately for the length of a light-lag, to own each achievement alone before sharing it. This one, whatever it turns out to be, has been years in the crawling. "We are not counting down," the administrator added. "We stopped counting down a long time ago. We are just about ready to tell you." The buffer waits. So, for twelve minutes, will we.