Fourteen Minutes Each Way, and a Colony Learns to Live in the Gap

VALLES MARINERIS — This message left the colony fourteen minutes ago, and by the time Earth reads it the answer will be fourteen minutes further still — a gulf that widens through the season as the planets draw apart. For the roughly 50,000 residents scattered along the canyon settlements, the delay is not an abstraction but a habit of mind. "You stop asking questions you need answered now," said Ines Okafor, a habitat systems engineer on the colony's water-reclamation crew, in a recorded exchange relayed to this desk. "You send everything as a decision, not a question." Life-support and reactor faults must be solved locally; the colony's charter assumes no help arrives inside half an hour. The population is holding near 50,000 — a figure the settlement authority expects to edge past later in the year. Earth watches on a lag, a planet reading yesterday's colony. The colonists, Okafor said, have simply stopped waiting to be watched.