Lira walked into Exodus's galley to see a lot of hunched shoulders and wrinkled foreheads. Half a dozen of her crewmates were seated around one of the dining tables, listening to a tablet recite the daily news briefing from mission control. From the body language she saw, it was not a good one.

She slid onto a stool at the end of the row, across from Uchenna. "What's going on?"

"We got off that rock just in time if you ask me," Bart said.

"Rising sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean have caused accelerated thawing of the Arctic permafrost and the release of what geologists have estimated is nearly forty gigatons of methane into the atmosphere so far this year, triggering extreme global temperature spikes," the recording said in a female voice that was entirely too matter-of-fact. Lira's stomach churned and she was glad she hadn't gotten around to warming up her lunch yet.

"Siberia is basically more fire than oxygen right now," said Natalia Rostov, one of the geologists, looking paler than usual. "They've never had air quality alerts as bad as right now."

Lira thought of her mother in Manila. It was only about twelve meters above sea level, and the heat and humidity had been creeping up more every year. Lira had tried to convince her mother to move to Houston when she got selected for this mission. There were more people there, more social supports, and it'd be easier to move further inland if necessary. But Althea Salonga was a stubborn woman and no amount of cajoling, arguing, or straight-up bribing could convince her.

("I’ve got a cute little house with a great lake view. You can take over the lease when I leave. VossCorp’s got it all paid up through the end of summer," Lira had tried.

"I have a house," her mother had pointed out, arms crossed over her chest. "It's paid off permanently."

"What about my car?" Lira had tried next. "It's a 2078, practically new. I got special financing through the company and VossCorp said I could transfer that lease too. It’s electric, you’ll love it."

"I don’t need a car, and I'm not leaving my home, Lira.")

So her mother was holed up in the little house Lira had grown up in, and her only child had left her – first to cross an ocean for a once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity, and then to hurtle sixty million kilometers through space to bring a rabbit colony to Mars. Probably never to return. No one on this shuttle had a return ticket, and with the level of doom and gloom in that news briefing, there might not be much to return to.

The methane hydrate situation wasn’t a surprise, of course. Lira had been following it for the last few years. She'd experienced its consequences first-hand when her exotics practice in Manila was flooded beyond repair. But she was a life sciences girl, not a chemist, and she didn't like to think too much about the possibility of an out-of-control feedback loop that could one day make the oceans on Earth literally boil with released methane.

Today was not a day for avoiding it, apparently.

"Well, we may be stuck breathing the same recycled air for the next six months," said one of the robotics engineers, whose name Lira could never remember. (Ted? Tom? Tim? One of those short American names, to go with his short American crew cut.) "But I'm grateful for it. Better than what they got down there."

There were a few grim nods and Bart said, "We were lucky to get on this flight. Things keep going like they are and it's gonna be hard to keep sending missions."

"How can they stop?" Uchenna asked. She’d set down her half-eaten chicken wrap.

"How can they keep going?" Bart countered, missing the sick look on Uchenna's face. "Who has money for Mars when crops are failing all over the world, low-level cities are flooding more every day, and heatwaves are killing people off by the millions?"

"That’s exactly why we have to keep sending people," Uchenna said.

"So long as VossCorp’s pockets are bottomless," Tim shrugged. "And so long as they still think it’s worth doing."

Lira hadn't taken her eyes off Uchenna. Her gaze was fixed on a drop of peanut sauce that had fallen from her wrap onto the stainless-steel table, a deep furrow etched in her brow. Tim never took the time to notice how his words were affecting other people – it hadn't taken Lira long to figure out that bullshitting was his favorite pastime, and it didn't matter the subject. He could be talking about why he was sure the Giants were destined for the Super Bowl this year, then turn right around and give a lecture on the many life-threatening hazards of life on Mars without missing a beat, and never once taking the pulse of his audience.

In other words, he wasn't a read-the-room guy.

Lira nudged Uchenna's foot under the table. "You okay?"

Uchenna looked up at her, blinking herself out of her rumination. "Yeah, fine."

"We all left people on Earth," Lira said, the familiar lump forming in her throat as she wondered what her mom was doing at that moment. She pushed the thought aside. Had to.

"I didn't," Tim said. "Divorced my wife, never had kids, free as a bird."

"Lucky her," Natalia shot back.

Uchenna swiveled away from the table. "I'm gonna go give the next group of rabbits their exercise time."

She stood and Lira called after her, "Want company?"

"No, thanks." It was so cold, it reminded Lira of the old Dr. Bello, the one she'd trained with, the humorless one back on Earth.

Today was day seven, a full week in space and three percent of the way to Mars, and it was starting to feel like Lira was sharing space with two different people with the same face.

Sometimes, Uchenna was full of good ideas, a team player. Other times, when they were in the module together working on their separate tasks, she would revert to the silent, efficient version of herself that Lira had gotten to know back in Houston. She stood at her computer station – her overlay still wasn’t working – and inputted data on the rabbits, but she left as soon as she was done, spending most of her time in the galley.

Lira hoped she wasn’t getting depressed, or if she was, that she’d say so. There were pills for that, no reason to suffer in silence.

But one thing she’d learned quickly – back on Earth as well as here – was you couldn’t force Uchenna Bello to do anything. She wouldn’t even make an official report about her broken overlay, kept putting it off and saying she’d deal with it when she didn’t have so much work to do.

Lira was considering going after her when Ted/Tom/Tim said loudly, "Well, for better or worse, we're Martians now. Who wants to take bets on how common it is to cheat at the Exchange?" 

On the Exodus, their assignments were simple and routine, their credits predictable. They’d sat through a three-hour presentation on how the colony AI and the Exchange worked, and it was clear this was a much-simplified version of what they had on Mars. 

"I've been thinking about it a lot and it wouldn't be hard," he went on. "For example, someone like me who oversees the robotic work… it'd be nothing to throw a few extra lines of code at them so whatever work they did got credited to me."

"I'd like to see you try it, Tim," Natalia said. "Everybody says Valence is unhackable, and it has access to all the data the colony generates. You really think it won’t know the difference between you and a robot?"

"No such thing as unhackable," he snorted. "It's an AI, not God."

"Isn't the whole point of the Exchange to make our work easier, not to find ways to cheat the system?" Lira asked. 

Valence's role was to parse the enormous amount of data produced by the colony and assign tasks based on the highest priority at any given moment, allocating human resources and supplies to whatever needed attention the most. As a reward for performing the most critical tasks, especially if they weren't in your typical line of duty, you received credits that could be exchanged for everything from fancier meals – rabbit meat would soon be on the menu – to retreats served up in immersive virtual reality rooms. 

"Yes, but we're humans," Tim pointed out. "Immediately looking for ways to cheat any system is just what we do."

"And here I thought going to Mars was supposed to be a fresh start for humanity," Natalia rolled her eyes.

Bart let out a harsh guffaw. "Now that's rich. People gonna people no matter where they are."