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Jake Smith had always been curious.

Ever since he was just a boy, for as far back as he could remember, he wanted to know everything about everything. He'd always wondered why things were the way they were and not some other way. He wanted things to make sense and to have some sort of rational explanation. He'd made it his goal even from a very young age to find answers to every possible question he might ever have.

The quest for those answers was the primary driver for him to excel throughout his education. It eventually led to him graduating in the top five percent from MIT with specializations in the fields of instrumentation, controls and robotics.

Shortly after his graduation he was approached by NASA and Caltech and landed what to him was the ultimate dream job, working at their Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. There he would be tasked with designing hardware that would ultimately be sent out into space.

Jake had always been interested in science fiction and in outer space since he was a kid. It informed every decision he'd made regarding his education and it guided his ambitions and was ultimately what led to him working for NASA. He felt that he wanted to be involved in any way he could in the process of pushing humanity outward and off of this suffocating rock it was stuck on before it was too late.

He wanted to know what else was out there. Exploration was a passion of his and always had been. It was the ultimate expression of curiosity. The Earth had already been explored quite thoroughly, so what better way to feed that passion than to explore, almost first hand, other planets entirely. If the human race ever wanted to be able to spread itself out to preserve its future, then it first needed to know exactly what it would find out there.

Jake knew he'd never be an astronaut. As cool as the thought of doing something like that was, it actually seemed just a bit too limiting to him. Ultimately, he wanted to go further than any astronaut would ever be able to go in his lifetime given the limits of the current technology and the prohibitive costs and risks involved in human space travel. Astronauts in this day and age were simply courageous pilots who rode on rockets to heights no greater than a couple of hundred miles, and then eventually came back down. He didn't have any urge to spend an extended stay in a glorified tin can orbiting the Earth. He realized early on that the best way to explore outer space for the foreseeable future would not be to do it in person, but rather through the use of machines as surrogates. Machines could go a lot further, a lot faster, and into much more hostile environments than humans currently could. He wanted to be one of the people who designed, built, and operated those machines. He always felt that the robots he built were an extension of himself, and he wanted one of his creations to be out there exploring for him so he could see an alien landscape through their electronic eyes.

His drive to improve his designs and to try to push the technology past its current limits was what ultimately caught NASA's eye. For his masters thesis in robotics engineering he'd created an autonomous six-wheeled platform that could traverse nearly any type of unusual terrain without ever having trouble finding its way through, over or around any obstacle. He'd also designed the power and propulsion systems with an eye towards using the power as efficiently as possible with the lowest possible current draw in order to use lighter batteries and increase the platform's range and maneuverability. When the engineers from JPL who'd been scouting for new talent saw it climbing up stairs, over low walls, rocky slopes and sand dunes, and either finding a way around or clambering over nearly anything that was thrown in its path without getting stuck, they knew they had to have him on the team that would work on their next rover mission. As such, as soon as he was hired, Jake was thrown into the team of engineers involved in the design of the power and propulsion systems of the Curiosity rover that was to be launched in late 2011, and would land on the surface of Mars in 2012.

For nearly four years past its designed primary mission end in 2014, the rover had been successfully roaming the surface of Mars, quite often under the guidance of programs written by Jake himself since he knew the propulsion system better than anyone else. In that time the machine was responsible for an amazing amount of science and taught the world a great deal about Earth's diminutive red neighbor.

Jake had been one of the primary engineers involved in the Curiosity project from its inception, right up until the night of July 23, 2018, when events would unfold that would change his life in ways he could never have foreseen, events that might ultimately alter the course of the entire human race and determine the fate of our planet.

While he sat at his desk in his darkened office late on that fateful night, waiting for telemetry he'd requested from the rover to make its way across the broad expanse of space, he thought back to the early years of the project, when the rover was still primarily a twinkle in the eyes of a great many engineers and scientists.

It had been the most exciting period of his life. He had only just settled into his new position at JPL, yet even though he was brand new, he was the one selected to work closely with the talented engineers at Aerojet Rocketdyne and Teledyne to work on the power system that would generate the electricity Curiosity would use to power itself for the entirety of its useful life.

He felt as if it was fate that he'd landed the position. That this was what his whole life had been leading up to. The rover was even named after him in a sense, or at least after his strongest character trait. Of course, Curiosity was in no way actually named after him, but he liked to imagine it that way. It felt to him like the robot was his baby and he'd nurtured it from conception, through birth, all throughout its productive life, and right up to its imminent demise, which could come in just days if Jake could not find a way to save it.

Even though the rover was not really named after him, it did in fact carry his name, though nobody besides him actually knew it.

He'd become close friends with many of the engineers he'd worked with in those early days and they'd had a lot of great times together. After one particularly celebratory drinking party near the end of their collaboration to design the radioisotope thermoelectric generator that would provide the rover's power, just before they did the final assembly of the reactor, Jake had dared the others to do something risky. He wanted them to program the lab's robotic milling machine to engrave all of their names on the inside of the reaction chamber of the RTG before they inserted the Plutonium-238 isotope that would be the source of the reactor's energy. Nobody would ever know they'd done it since obviously nobody would ever get so close to the radioactive core of the generator that they could read the names.

Try as he might he couldn't get the others to agree to do it. They weren't quite drunk enough, though Jake most certainly was. They loved their jobs and they were afraid of what would happen if anyone found out. Marking NASA's equipment with anyone's names was taboo and strictly against their policies. The rover was a multi-billion dollar piece of equipment, not a wall for someone's personal graffiti.

Jake was always a bit of a risk taker which, combined with his natural curiosity, could often become the source of trouble for him. He didn't see how he could possibly get in trouble for this, though. He felt this was a fairly harmless way to leave a personal mark on a piece of equipment he was immensely proud to have been a part of designing. The reaction chamber was sitting in a radiation proof room waiting for the fuel that would arrive the next day. Once the radioactive isotope was loaded into it using a robotic arm, the chamber would be sealed forever and no one would ever know he'd done it.

After all of the others had gone home he stumbled somewhat drunkenly back to the lab and quickly programmed the milling machine to etch his name in the core. He realized that he had some extra room to work with in there since the others were not signing their names, so in his inebriated state he smiled as he jokingly added a couple of extra words and had the machine etch the message "Jake Smith was here" on the pristine, polished chromium inner surface of the small reaction chamber. He then placed it back in the lead-lined room and went home.

The next day a robot was used to load the chamber with the radioactive fuel provided by the U.S. Department of Energy and the unit was sealed shut. Just as he'd expected, nobody had even gone near the chamber until after it was filled with the fuel, sealed, and made safe to be handled again. His little joke, which he somewhat regretted risking after he'd sobered up in the morning, had gone safely unnoticed.

The rover was eventually finished, loaded onto a massive rocket, and flung out into space to ultimately land on Mars to begin its work. Somewhere out there on an alien world was a big piece of equipment with the name Jake Smith carved on it. No matter what else he did in his life he knew he'd left behind a legacy of sorts that could never be wiped out. He was the first person ever to have his name written on something that would spend the rest of eternity on the surface of Mars, even if it was hidden deep inside the radioactive guts of a power source, where nobody would ever actually see it. It was in part the knowledge that it carried his name that kept Jake feeling so tightly connected to Curiosity throughout its mission as it roamed the surface of Mars.

Unfortunately, due to eventual wear on the moving parts of the robot due to exposure to the dusty Martian environment and degradation of its primary lithium based battery pack, the rover had finally neared, or possibly even reached, the end of its useful life. It had begun to show signs of failure early in the new year even while the team of technicians who operated it, which was led by Jake, were still celebrating the passing of 2017 and the birth of 2018. By early spring it had finally become unable to extend its mission any further. The natural decay of the eleven pounds of plutonium-238 dioxide radioisotope that powered the thermoelectric generator had eventually weakened its output to well below the 100 watt threshold that was necessary to power all of the scientific sensor packages it used to explore the planet. In addition to this, the constant use of the main bank of lithium batteries had finally weakened them to the point where they could not hold sufficient charge or output enough electric current to drive the rover's six large wheels effectively. Curiosity was essentially dead in its tracks.

At first there was still a bit of work the rover could accomplish even though it was unable to move, but over time, one after another, many of the rover's sensitive scientific packages had succumbed to the harsh environment. Its main camera was still functional, but other subsystems were partially or completely dead. In some cases it was simply the lack of power to overcome the resistance created by the six years of accumulation of fine dust that limited the movement of the various instruments needed to do the science.

It obviously wasn't possible to send someone out there with a vacuum cleaner or a duster to try to clean up the joints enough for the weakened motors to move them again, nor was there any way for anyone to refill the reaction chamber with new fuel so it's output could increase to full power again, but there might be another way to keep Curiosity alive and useful just a little while longer. Jake felt that if the rover's batteries could be reconfigured to dump more charge again like when they were new, the motors could overcome the additional resistance and there would be a chance to gain yet more valuable productivity out of the rover.

He had spent so many years working with the robot that he did not want to give up on it just yet. It had answered so many questions about the red planet, but there were still so many more answers it could provide if it could have a bit more time to do more productive work.

NASA was ready to declare the project successfully completed and shut Curiosity down for good. The rover had operated well beyond its designed lifespan, but Jake felt it could do just a bit more if given the chance. He begged them for one last chance to bring the rover around and extend its life just a little longer. They had agreed, but given the fact that there was little hope, and that most of the team that had been operating Curiosity were needed in the ramp up of the mission that would launch the next rover to Mars in 2020, Jake was left mostly to himself to try to push the rover's retirement date out just a bit further. He was given a month to try to make something happen, but after that he too would be needed on the next project.

Now the rover really was his baby. There was nobody but him working on it and it was up to him to save its life.

Jake sat at his cluttered desk in his cluttered office, poring over the lines of code that controlled the routines that rerouted power during emergencies to a backup battery pack. The backup battery was dedicated to the task of rebooting Curiosity in the event that its main systems crashed or lost power. Jake felt that it might be possible to reprogram the rover to use both packs, the primary and the backup, together as one larger pack that should be able to provide the amount of power necessary to drive the wheels again and bring the rover back to life.

The battery packs were lithium ion. They did not simply "age" but rather they wore down from repeated charge and discharge cycles. Since the main bank was constantly charged by the reactor, and subsequently discharged while the robot went about its work every day over the past six years, it had worn down considerably The backup bank, on the other hand, was only trickle charged to replace any microscopic amounts of capacity lost to parasitic draw from the natural reactions of the battery's chemistry that drained some of its electricity. There was never a serious load placed on that pack except for the few times the robot had run into trouble and the automated recovery system that ran off the backup batteries rebooted the rover and brought it back into operation. That was the backup pack's only function. As such, compared to the main bank, it was a fairly new set of batteries that had hardly been used at all and was still capable of delivering a very strong electric current. It wasn't as large as the main battery, but with the two working together in concert the rover might have almost as much stored charge available as it had in the early days.

Making this change to Curiosity had required Jake to write a fairly sophisticated program that would reshape the field programmable gate arrays of the power control systems. He would essentially be physically changing the circuitry that powered the robot and he would send the commands to do it over a weak remote radio link. The process was irreversible so he had to get it exactly right and he had only one shot to do it. If he could successfully remotely reconfigure the rover's power circuits to combine the two packs into one, then the only problem remaining would be the lower output from the reactor. That could not be corrected without removing the mostly spent fuel and refilling the chamber with fresh radioactive material, and that of course was impossible. Still, it would simply mean the rover would have to rest for much long periods each day than it used to in order to allow the reactor to accumulate the amount of charge in the batteries that Curiosity needed to operate, but it could at least continue to do some science in bursts every couple of days for another year or two.

Repurposing the backup battery was a somewhat dangerous undertaking because it would leave the rover unable to recover from any major dip in power that might occur that could cause its computer to hang or crash. The backup bank was connected through a dedicated path to the backplane of the rover's systems so that no matter what type of unexpected event happened to the primary power and drive system, they could still recover the rover enough to diagnose and possibly fix the problem by running it off the backup. With the two power packs combined into one path, should anything unforeseen occur that drained the power and caused the computer to crash, the rover would be unable to reboot and it would be completely dead forever. Still, since NASA was ready to declare the mission done and retire the rover, Jake had nothing to lose.

He'd been working on the computer program that would replace the power management system on the rover for weeks, going over every single possible point of failure multiple times. He was pretty sure it was ready, but he wanted to be even more sure than that. It was his one shot to get Curiosity back in full operation.

He'd been staring at the code for so long now that even when he closed his tired eyes he could still see the impression of the lines of text on the back of his eyelids. He needed a break.

He decided to give his eyes something else to look at for a while by running a few diagnostics and checking some of Curiosity's subsystems as he normally did every day to assess the overall health of the robot.

One of his favorite things to do over the course of the robot's life was to look over the new images taken by the rover's high resolution camera. Now that he was the sole operator he could do whatever he wanted with the camera. Of course, since the robot was unable to move from its present location there wasn't much he could do any longer, but at least he could work on getting a complete picture of where the robot was. He'd begun skewing the camera by ten degrees each day and taking a new picture. He didn't want to stress the system any more than necessary so he allowed himself just one new image each day just to ensure that the camera, robotic mast, and the systems needed to compress and transmit the images were all still working correctly. Over the course of 36 days he would have a collection of images that could be combined by some software he had into a complete 360 degree view around what might end up being the rover's final resting place. He would be able to use his VR headset to look around as if he were actually standing on the spot that Curiosity now occupied. It would be the closest he would ever come to standing on the surface of another world.

While he waited for today's image to be slowly transmitted by the weak radio across the wide gap of space, he looked at the results of the diagnostics he'd run earlier. There were no changes from the previous tests. The rover was no more or less healthy than it had been the day before. This was a good thing as it meant he had no new issues to deal with and he was still on track to make the attempt to revive the robot.

He leaned back into his chair, stretched his arms over his head, and yawned loudly. It had been a long day. It was actually getting quite late and as he looked at the clock and thought about how much more code he needed to go over before he would be finished, he decided he was just too tired to do it right and he should head home and pick it up again in the morning. One last push was all he'd need to be certain he was ready to implement the changes to the robot's power systems. By this time tomorrow night he would know if Curiosity would live to do yet more useful work, or if it would be put out to pasture for good.

He pushed away from the desk and rose from his chair and went to grab his jacket off the hook. He was just about to walk out the door when he heard the beep that indicated the transmission of today's image was complete. He glanced back at his computer monitor before heading out and what he saw nearly stopped his heart. It couldn't possibly be what it looked like. His tired eyes had to be playing tricks.

He quickly moved back to the desk and double-clicked the image to zoom it to fill the screen. He rolled the mouse wheel forward to zoom the image in further and panned it to the right.

It was unmistakable, but it simply couldn't be true. Next to the shadow of the rover created by the sun that shone from behind the machine and cast its light out across the Martian landscape ahead of the camera, was another shadow that did not belong there. To Jake, it looked exactly like the shadow of an upright figure. As if someone was standing just behind the rover and was looking out over the same vista the rover's camera was seeing. The sun was behind them and it cast their shadow out in front of the rover to be captured in the image. He could clearly make out a torso, one arm, and a head. The rest of the figure's shadow merged with the rover's so it was indistinguishable.

His heart began to race as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing. It just couldn't be what it seemed to be. It had to be some sort of aberration. There had to be a valid explanation for it.

He sat back down in his chair and brought up the logs from the diagnostics he'd just run. He carefully checked over all of the scientific equipment on the robot. He suspected that maybe the rover's main arm had deployed as a result of some glitch and was casting the strange shadow. The APXS and MAHLI science instruments at the end of the arm might cast a shadow that would resemble a head on a neck.

He realized even as he thought of that explanation that it just couldn't be. Those devices were angular and the arm they were attached to was slender. The shadow looked filled out and somewhat rounded like a person in a space suit might look. Even if it were the robot's arm and the turret on the end loaded with science packages that gave the semblance of a head and neck, it still wouldn't account for the shoulder and arm on the shadow. It just looked too much like the figure of a man to be caused by any piece of the spindly rover that was all angles and straight lines.

The diagnostic logs corroborated his doubts. The arm was still retracted in its resting position. It couldn't be responsible for the shadow. Other than the main camera mast, there was nothing else he could think of that would cast an unusual shadow, and he could clearly see the mast and camera shadow just to the left of the shadow of the figure, so it wasn't that either.

He searched his list of program scripts and found one that queries the robot specifically about the status of it's scientific equipment and runs more detailed diagnostics against the sensors that detect the equipment's positioning. He injected the script into the command stream and waited for the results to come back.

With Mars in its current position, which had it almost as close to the Earth as it ever gets, it takes about three minutes for a radio signal to reach it, and the same amount of time for the results to be transmitted back. This was the reason that even moving the rover from one place to the next is not done by a pilot holding a joystick. Rather, every string of moves the robot makes must be choreographed into a list of scripted programming commands that is delivered across the gap and then executed autonomously by the robot. The long wait for results was annoying at the best of times, but now it was excruciating.

While he waited for the telemetry, he once again queued a command for the mast camera to take another image from the exact same position to determine if the shadow was created by some sort of random noise or a temporary glitch in the image compression algorithms. If the shadow was a part of the robot it should look exactly the same since he hadn't repositioned any of Curiosity's equipment in any way since the earlier image was taken. He suspected it would look no different. Something on the rover must be casting that shadow but he couldn't for the life of him imagine what that something could be. He simply had to figure it out.

The results from the instrument query came back and they verified the earlier general diagnostic. The main arm's status was nominal and it was stowed in its normal rest position. The arm's sensors appeared to be functioning correctly so there was no reason to doubt the telemetry, but there was one more simple thing he could do, though it would drain more of the rover's power than he might like to. Once he received the latest image he'd just requested, if the image looked identical, which it should, he could reposition the mast and camera to take a "selfie" of the robot itself to see exactly what was casting the shadow.

After what seemed like a nearly interminable wait, he finally heard the beep and the image came up on the monitor.

His heart began to beat even faster. The shadow was gone!

What did it mean? Was it just some sort of noise in the previous image? He couldn't rationalize it that way. There was just no way random noise could magically arrange itself into such a well defined shape. It's true that the camera's focus was best beyond six feet or so, and the shadow was right next to the rover so the edges were just a bit fuzzy, but still, as he looked back at the previous image that had contained the shadow of the figure, he could see that it was fairly clearly defined and more or less unmistakable. How could there be such an obvious shadow of a man in one image, then none in the next, unless the man had moved?

He decided to go ahead with his next step and he quickly began to write the code to command the mast and camera to move into a more forward position with the camera turned 180 degrees to take an image of the rover itself and whatever might be behind it. He'd been wanting to keep every milliwatt of power stored in the main battery for his coming attempt to connect the backup battery into the main circuit because it would require a full reboot of the system. He wanted to be completely sure there was enough power to boot the computer back up so it could begin to recharge the new configuration. If there wasn't, since the backup batter would be merged with the main bank and for all intents and purposes would no longer exist, it couldn't be used to run the emergency recovery system and the rover might be lost forever.

Moving the mast and camera a full 180 degrees would use several times more power than simply taking the image, but he felt he had to take the risk. The downside is that with the generator's output so low, it would take almost a full day to recharge the amount of power he'd be consuming with all the extra images, the diagnostic procedures, and the repositioning of the masthead to look behind the rover. He might have to wait a little longer to make his attempt at recovering the rover if he really wanted to be on the safe side, but this was much more important. He had to do it.

He sent the commands and once again began the wait while Curiosity flipped its main camera around and took a picture of itself and the background and then dutifully sent it back to him.

He waited nervously for the image to come up on his screen. The compression algorithms that the rover used on its data before sending it were extremely efficient, but given the distance and the weakness of the radio link, the telemetry could only be transmitted at a very slow speed with a great deal of error correction mixed in to ensure no part of it would be lost. That was one of the reasons he was fairly certain the shadow couldn't have been caused by noise in the signal. The error correction was so robust it simply couldn't happen.

It took quite a bit more time than he would like, but at long last the computer beeped and the image formed on the screen. It was just as he expected. He could clearly see the main arm stowed in its normal resting position. It could not have generated the shadow he'd seen.

Much to his disappointment, he could see absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. There was nothing that could account for the odd shadow. He would have preferred to see something obvious that would end the mystery immediately.

He wasn't sure what to think. He couldn't account for the shadow, but he could at least verify that nothing on the rover itself was responsible. Nothing was in the right position to have cast the shadow and none of the robot's equipment had the right shape.

What did it mean? He supposed that if there was indeed a person out there who'd caused the shadow, they might well have moved away from the robot just as he'd surmised earlier, but the idea seemed more than a bit preposterous. Who could possibly be out there?

He wasn't sure what to do next. He should probably tell someone about this, but he wanted to be sure he knew what was going on first. Obviously it was insane to think anyone was actually out there on the surface of Mars with the rover, and his boss would think he was crazy if he even suggested it. There had to be a rational explanation and he had to try to figure it out.

He studied the latest image a bit more closely. There was really nothing odd about it that stood out. The rover was in a location of hard packed sand just at the edge of a field of rocks. It had gotten stuck there when the three wheels that were on the outer edge had broken through the crust and couldn't get traction in the loose sand beneath. There wasn't enough power being fed to the other wheels any longer to drag the rover up onto the rockier terrain. Any attempt they'd made to get it free only ended up with the rover's wheels that were gripping on the one side trying to turn it more towards the loose sand beyond the hard pack, and the wheels that were in the loose sand were digging themselves further in and driving themselves under the hard crust, so it was dangerous to even try any longer without sufficient power going to the outside wheels to actually help them break through the crust they were getting caught under.

He was convinced that if he connected the backup battery into the circuit with the main one and he gave the rover's motors a short but more powerful jolt, it would jump forward just enough to bring the wheels back up onto the hard pack so the robot could be maneuvered closer to the rocks where it would be less likely to break through again. If he could maneuver it into a better position it could begin to roam freely again, though still at a very low speed due to the low power output of the reactor. That was the whole reason he'd started to rewrite the power system's code to connect the two battery packs in the first place, to get that extra jolt he'd need to free the rover.

As he thought about Curiosity's predicament and his eyes traced the edge of the hard pack out past the rover, he noticed something that he hadn't seen at first. There were faint smudges in the looser sand off to the left.

He panned the image to the side and moved it out just a bit to get a bigger picture and the smudges resolved into what almost look like a repeating pattern of footprints moving away from the rover and off into the distance. Someone had left tracks!

Once again his heart began to beat rapidly in his chest. Was that really what he was seeing?

He tried to zoom the image in and focused on the area with the smudges more closely, but it was too blurry. He would need to angle the camera directly towards them, set it in its higher resolution mode, and take yet another image.

This time he gave less thought to how much of the robot's dwindling power he was using up. This was too important. He quickly sent the commands once again and waited impatiently for the next image.

It took much longer to receive the image since it was taken at a higher resolution, but the resulting picture showed quite clearly what looked like not one, but two sets of footprints that occasionally separated and merged back together as they crisscrossed. It looked as though one set of prints was coming towards the rover, and the other set was the same person heading back away from it again.

On close examination the shape of the foot looked a little odd. Not exactly like a space-booted human foot would look, but not entirely different. It was somewhat wider at the front than at the back like a human foot would look, but it was overall more rounded. It was shorter front to back and wider to the sides than a human foot. Though it was difficult to judge the scale from this angle, the print looked like the foot must be somewhat larger than a human's, and the spacing also suggested a longer gait. The alternating right foot, left foot pattern was unmistakable though, as was the fact that one set of tracks was oriented towards the rover and the other set was reversed. Someone who walked on two legs had walked up to the rover, and then walked away from it again!

He was blown away. There was no explanation he could come up with for the tracks. Obviously there were no manned missions to Mars yet from any country. The technology to make that happen was still likely more than a decade out and even that was only if they pushed very hard. So who the hell could have left those prints? Who was out there?

His curiosity took him over and he gave no further thought whatsoever to the status of the rover's charge level anymore. He quickly cobbled together a script of commands to take several images around the robot on the softer sand to its left, and one further out where the tracks were headed, then once again he waited.

When the first image arrived he saw a very detailed picture of the sand near the rover's wheels on the left side. He could clearly see the odd-shaped footprints going this way and that. Someone had walked around the rover as if they were curious about it and they had been examining it. The rover hadn't budged in any way while they were there, and there are absolutely no lights on it anywhere, so whoever was out there might have assumed it was dead old space junk and moved on when it didn't react to their presence.

Jake's heart raced while he looked over the images carefully and waited for the last one to arrive. When it finally came he studied it closely and saw quite clearly a long line of tracks heading off into the distance where they met the edge of a large outcropping of rocks. The tracks appeared to go around the outcropping to the other side. He noticed something that looked like a metallic glint just at the edge of the rock formation, but it was too far to get a clear image. It looked sort of like the corner of something artificial. Could it be a structure or a vehicle maybe?

His excitement continued to mount. He had to see what was there! There was no time to lose. Whoever or whatever it was might not be there for long. They'd already left when they saw the rover was dead. When they get back to their vehicle, if that's what it was he was seeing the edge of behind that rock outcropping, they might take off and be gone forever. He needed to try to get Curiosity moving, and he had to do it now! He knew it was a risk, but if it worked this could end up being the most important work Curiosity had done in its entire tenure on Mars. It might be able to provide the human race with the first real evidence of intelligent alien life!

His hands shook as he pulled up the code he'd been working so hard on for the past couple of weeks. He was fairly certain it was ready. All he'd been doing today was double checking the code to see if he could find any problems he hadn't spotted before. The risk was minimal since he'd already gone over it once and fixed the few problems he found.

He should probably clear what he was about to do with the higher ups, but he felt there just wasn't time. For all he knew seconds might count. He needed to try to get the rover around the edge of that rock formation so it could image the entire area and he needed to do it fast. He'd been handed autonomy over Curiosity anyhow. Granted, it was only within the purview of bringing the rover back to functional condition so that the science team could take over its operation again, but he was sure they would understand if he pushed it to a new location first, given what it was he might find on the other side of those rocks. He would likely only have a chance at finding anything if he wasted no time, or whoever was out there might move on to some other location.

He was sweating now as he hit the send button and waited while the program he'd been working so hard on was transmitted across the gap and written into Curiosity's memory to be executed by the main computer.

It would take the usual amount of time for the transmission to reach the robot, but it would take at least ten additional minutes for the systems to reconfigure, reboot, and then run all of the startup tests to ensure everything was still functional. Then there would be yet another delay as the results were transmitted back. Jake had never been an exceedingly patient man, but this was testing his limits more than anything he'd ever had to endure.

If he was successful he should receive automated diagnostics from the rover alerting him of the successful reboot and showing the health of all systems. With luck he should see nearly twice the charge capacity on the main bank compared to what he'd seen before, and he should see a warning of total failure of the backup batteries. The rover would no longer have any capacity for automatic recovery if anything went wrong, but if he was very careful and never allowed the charge to get too low, it should be fine.

He paced the length of his office back and forth at high speed while he waited for the results. He felt a deep knot of anxiety in his stomach. It seemed to be taking much longer than it should, but a quick glance at the clock showed it still wouldn't even have completed its reboot yet. He continued to pace until finally, at long last, he saw the telemetry from the self test begin to populate his screen with tables of test results.

He pored over the results and was thrilled to see that it had worked perfectly. All the remaining functioning systems were nominal, and the charge level on the main pack showed a little less than twice what it had shown in the last diagnostic. There was a warning of the complete failure of the backup battery and recovery system but that was as it should be since that battery was now merged with the main bank and for all intents and purposes it no longer existed. The robot finally had enough power with the packs combined to move itself again!

He quickly pulled up the next program he would send. It was a simple script the team had written some time ago when the robot had wedged a couple of its wheels in a narrow depression. The program simply jolted the six wheels forward with some force, then relaxed the current for a brief count, then jolted them again. It repeated a few times, then ended the loop with a longer, sustained surge of power to the wheels. The idea had been to rock the rover back and forth to use its own mass to build up momentum, and then give it one last bigger kick to lift it forward out of the depression. One of the team was a Canadian, and he said that's how they always got their vehicles unstuck when they'd dug themselves too deep into the hard packed snow on winter roads. It had worked perfectly with the robot then, and he hoped he'd have the same luck now. There would have been no hope of doing it without the additional current output from the backup batteries, but now there would be more than enough.

He transmitted the code and then held up both hands in front of him with his fingers crossed like a little boy trying hard to make his greatest wish come true.

His mind raced with thoughts of all the things that could go wrong, but he tried to deflect them with thoughts of what was going to happen next. He would free the robot and he would drive it around the rock outcropping and, with luck, he would get the first ever images of alien technology. Maybe even the alien itself! This was easily the single most exciting moment of his life to date!

He was thinking of the kudos he would be receiving tomorrow when he showed the world that intelligent alien life existed when several alarms went off on his telemetry program and he snapped back into the present.

He began to go over the system status and his heart sank. The logs showed a glitch in the drive system. The rover had been sitting still for too long and dust must have been building within the wheel joints. It had attempted to follow the commands in the script he'd sent but two of the six wheels had not responded. The rover attempted to compensate by driving the other wheels harder to complete the sequence, but one of the motor controllers had fused from the increased current and the wheel was now spinning out of control.

The rover was still stuck, and he had no way of shutting down the rogue wheel. It would continue to drain the power from the battery pack until it forced a shutdown of the whole system, but the emergency backup battery that would bring the robot back online no longer existed. The rover had no way to automatically recover.

Jake realized his mistake immediately. There had been no way to test the motors without digging the rover in deeper so it hadn't been part of his diagnostic routines. It wasn't really important for what he'd been trying to accomplish anyhow. His job was simply to get the power system back to full operational capacity. Any attempt to move the rover would be done as a collaboration of the whole team, not just him, so he hadn't really thought that part out thoroughly. If he'd taken the time to do things right he would have tested all of the wheel motors and their controller boards briefly before sending the script to try to free the robot, and he would have known his attempt to move it would fail. Curiosity would still be alive if he'd been more patient, but his own curiosity at seeing what lay beyond that rock outcropping had cost him his only chance to find out what it was.

The telemetry continued to pour in and more alarms were raised by the robot's systems as it detected the drop in its stored power. It began to automatically shut down one subsystem after another in an attempt to stay alive, but it had no way of cutting power to the wheel's motor with the burned out controller. In the end the robot would shut itself down fully and wait for its automated recovery system to reboot the main system, but thanks to Jake's reconfiguration of the power systems, that was no longer a possibility.

Eventually all of the telemetry stopped and he knew it must be because the battery pack had completely drained.

He tried several times to raise Curiosity but its link had been severed when its stored power dropped below the levels necessary to operate the transmitter. It would take a great deal of time for the weakened power generator to recharge the battery pack sufficiently to reactivate the telemetry system, but most likely the drive motor's servo controller was stuck on, and as soon as any power made its way into the battery pack, it would immediately be sucked away by the wheel's motor as it tried to spin up again. The motor would act like a short circuit that would keep the battery completely drained from now on.

Curiosity was dead for good, and it was Jake who'd killed it.

His heart was heavy, but he felt he couldn't put off taking responsibility for his actions, and he had to let someone know about what he'd discovered and why he'd done what he did. It was time to call his boss and wake him to deliver the bad news.

Needless to say, the reaction to what he'd done was not good. He was ordered to stay in his office while his boss contacted upper management and also arranged for other members of the team to be rousted and brought in to see if anything was salvageable.

Jake desperately tried to convince them of the importance of what he'd been trying to accomplish, but as he'd expected everyone just thought he was nuts. They decided he'd been driving himself too hard and he was making rash decisions while he was overtired. They insisted there had to be a rational explanation for what he thought he was seeing and they would certainly try to ascertain what it might be, but for the time being Jake was removed from the loop.

He wasn't immediately fired for his actions as he was afraid he might be, but he was ordered to take an enforced leave until such time as his ultimate fate would be decided.

It did not bode well for Jake's dream job. Things at NASA are generally done by committee and there's a reason for that. The more eyes there are on a process, the more chance there is that absolutely every possible angle would be covered and no mistakes would be made in the execution. He'd been given autonomy to get the rover's power systems back online, but that was it. He should have involved the entire team before attempting to move it, but in his rash haste he'd acted without the careful scrutiny needed to ensure nothing would go wrong. There was a good chance it would cost him his job, but he still felt he'd been at least somewhat justified in his actions. He really believed something was going on out there. He just wished he could convince the others of it.

Days went by with no word on his fate, when suddenly his cellphone rang with his boss's ring tone. With dread and trepidation he picked it up and answered, "Hello?"

"Jake, it's Rick. We need you down here, now. A car is on the way to get you. We're getting telemetry back from Curiosity again."

"The rover's back up and running?" Jake asked incredulously. He didn't see how that was possible, but maybe somehow providence had smiled on him and rescued him from his predicament.

"You know damn well it is. You've got some explaining to do. They'll be there to pick you up in a minute. You're in serious trouble. They'll escort you to your office when you get here. I'll be waiting."

Jake could tell Rick was not in the mood to say anymore just now, so all he said in reply was "Sure, OK."

He'd never heard his boss sound quite so angry at him before, but he was completely puzzled as to why. What did he mean that Jake should know damn well the rover was up and running? How could he know that when he'd been banished to his home days ago?

Shortly after he disconnected the call, the doorbell rang. Jake grabbed his jacket on the way out and found a dark colored SUV waiting out front with what looked like a government agent standing in front of it. Another agent was at the door. He flashed an FBI badge and ordered Jake to come with him.

He was helped into the back seat and the agent got in next to him and they took off.

"What's this about? What the hell is going on?" Jake asked.

"I'm not at liberty to discuss it with you. I'm not even sure of all the details," the agent replied, "Let's just say that everything NASA owns belongs to the United States government and tampering with it in ways that aren't permitted is a federal offense. You're in a bit of trouble."

"What do you mean, tampering? What the hell did I tamper with? I was just doing my job. You can't consider making a mistake to be intentional tampering!"

The agent said no more as they continued the trip in to JPL. When they arrived, Jake was hustled into the building and through the maze of hallways to his own office. Another agent was waiting there, as was Jake's boss, Rick, and a couple of other members from the team that operated Curiosity. His boss and the FBI agent looked quite serious, but the two men from his team had smiles on their faces and a sort of look of admiration like they thought he'd accomplished something pretty amazing.

"What the hell is going on? Why are you guys looking at me like that?" He turned to his boss and said, "Rick, care to explain why I was hauled in here by the FBI?"

Rick angrily replied, "You brought this on yourself. You could have destroyed Curiosity with your stupid gag. I don't know how the hell you accomplished it, but the higher ups are not getting the joke. It's never a great idea to piss off your boss, but it's suicide to piss off your boss's boss. The director of operations was the one who called the FBI. He wants you charged for messing around with billions of dollars worth of government equipment for your own amusement."

"What the fuck are you talking about? I made a mistake, that's all. How the hell is this a federal case all of a sudden?"

"So you still claim you accidentally killed Curiosity when you tried to move it? You still say you saw evidence of alien life and that's what drove you to it?"

"Of course! What the hell are you trying to say? I gave you the full explanation of what happened! You saw the goddamn pictures! I explained exactly why I did what I did!"

"Can you explain to me then why Curiosity is currently operating at full capacity? It's no longer stuck and was sitting on the rocky field next to the hard pack when it started transmitting again. There's more charge on the batteries now than there was even at the start of the mission six years ago, and the reactor is putting out more than double the power it was last week! You obviously were able to move it, a lot, or you could never have pulled off your little gag, though I can't for the life of me figure out how you had the time to do it all. You must have been working on this for weeks! On top of all that Your teammates here tell me that resistance tests even show that all of the joints are clean and moving freely again, all of the motors are functional, and even the systems that had failed over the last few months are all back up and running! The robot is in better shape than it was six years ago when it first reached the planet! How the hell did you manage all that?"

"Huh? I don't know what you're talking about! None of that's possible! Even if it was, I sure as hell had nothing to do with it. I swear to you, when I left it, the rover was completely dead. Even if I did somehow magically accomplish everything you say I did, then it seems to me I'd be owed a hell of a lot of praise if anything. How the hell does all of this justify having me arrested by the FBI?" Jake asked angrily.

"That happened because of what you did after all of that. I'll admit having you arrested is a bit of an extreme reaction and I tried to talk Randall out of it, but I'm forced to do what the director tells me to do if I want to keep my job, so it is what it is. I don't know how you managed to fake all of those footprints without leaving tracks from the rover itself, but they didn't like you trying to make it look like there were aliens on Mars. The science we do out there is important and we go out of our way to leave the planet as pristine as we found it wherever possible. The science team did not appreciate you messing up the surface and putting the rover at risk for your prank. They didn't appreciate you trying to get them to react to your discovery of 'alien life' on Mars when all you were doing was setting them up for the big finish."

"What the fuck are you talking about? How could I possibly fake those tracks? Why are you blaming me for this? I haven't even been here for the past few days. When I left this office the robot was still stuck and it had no power! If anything happened out there it was someone else that did it, not me!"

"Come on, Jake, fess up. Nobody knows that rover's drive systems like you do. I know damn well you could make that thing do every step of the Riverdance out there if you wanted to, as complicated as the program might be to make it happen. Besides, you made sure we would know it was you. That was the whole point of all this, wasn't it? You may as well drop the surprised act. The punch line's already been delivered. Your teammates here programmed Curiosity to drive over to where your fake tracks would lead us to see what was around that rock outcropping that you were so adamant we needed to check out. I'm not sure what type of reaction you were shooting for, but the upper brass got really pissed when they saw this..." Rick said as he turned the monitor on the desk towards Jake so he could see what it displayed.

Jake's stomach did a flip and he froze. The color drained completely from his face as he stared at the computer display. On it was an image from Mars with the telemetry water marks in the upper right corner that showed it was taken by Curiosity just over two hours ago. It looked as though the rover was now in a completely different position. Just as Rick said, it had been driven to the edge of the rock outcropping to take an image of what was on the other side of it..

Beyond the rocks was a large sand dune that covered the entire width of the image the rover had taken. A great many small rocks had been arranged on the side of the dune facing the camera. It was obvious that they'd been arranged intentionally so that it would be the first thing the rover would see when it came around the corner.

Jake had been ready to fall over when he saw the picture, but then he immediately began to wonder if maybe the joke was really on him. The image had to be fake. Was this all an elaborate gag to teach him a lesson for busting the rover? That had to be it. These guys weren't really FBI. His teammates weren't smiling with admiration for him, they were smirking at his predicament. The rover must still really be dead out there right where he left it. They made this fake photo just to punish him for it. It was all a joke on him. At least it meant that he was being welcomed back into the fold. He just needed to take his licks first.

He began to smile as he realized how thoroughly he'd been had. He admitted to himself that he deserved it and he accepted the fact they'd got him good, but his smile faded quickly as he looked around the room. Other than his teammates who still seemed somehow impressed with him and looked like they couldn't wait to get the full explanation of how he'd done it, the look on his boss's face and the faces of the federal officers was not the look of people playing a prank. They looked dead serious.

Rick's cellphone rang and he answered it and listened for a moment, then he said, "I'll make sure they wait."

As he put the phone back in his pocket he looked over at Jake and said, "That was the director of operations. He wanted to make sure he could have a word with you before the FBI haul you off. He's on his way now. I really wish you would have thought this through before you did it, Jake. You've fucked up your career beyond any hope of ever recovering. You were my best man and I had you pegged for the lead engineering position for the next rover mission when it ramped up fully. I guess I'll have to find someone else now."

Jake had known Rick for years. The man was a completely straight shooter to the point of not even usually getting any joke that was told to him. He didn't really grasp the concept of humor and he couldn't lie his way out of a wet paper bag if his life depended on it. He was being completely serious. This wasn't a prank at Jake's expense, it was all real! But how? How could it be?

He looked back at the monitor and his head began to spin with the implication of what he was seeing. Nobody knew he'd done what he did back in those early years before Curiosity had been sent off to Mars.

Though Jake obviously knew the source of the words, he couldn't possibly explain how they got there. Someone would have to have seen them and there was no reasonable way he could think of that it could have happened.

Spread across the surface of the side of a sand dune on a planet that in its current position would be just a bit more than 35 million miles away, hundreds of small rocks had been arranged to spell a message in letters that appeared to be about six feet tall. That short message said simply, "Jake Smith was here."