Interstellar → Chris Beck

S O L 3 0

ON PLANET EARTH, the amount of time allotted into a single day is equivalent to the sum of twenty-four hours. Time on Earth is set in stone; it's always constant—never changing. It was different, however, for the Ares III crew as they moved through the vastness of outer space. Up in space, time wasn't quite measured nearly the same as it was on Earth, or the same at all.

According to Albert Einstein, the faster a person traveled, the slower that person moved through time. It's what's known as time dilation and is derived from Einstein's theory of special relativity. For an astronaut such as Maia Watney, traveling through space added extra time onto her everyday life, whereas she would not encounter the same experience were she to be back on Earth.

If Maia could, she would stop time exactly where it was if that meant she could be freed from the horrid shackles of her life, but that wasn't up to her. She believed the entire aspect of time to be completely ludicrous, and she had felt that way since SOL 18. It was now SOL 30, yet nothing had changed and the probability of seeking change was very slim for her.

With each thought of what happened that day swimming dangerously slow through her muddled mind, her heart seemed to break more and more. Everything about that day had been relatively calm and cheerful until she and Johanssen had received the second storm warning from NASA. Maia had anticipated the whole crew returning to the MAV together in one piece, but her expectations had unfortunately been too high.

That day would forever mark the most agonizing occurrence in Maia's lifetime, though. Her older brother—her only brother—was now gone. It was still hard for her to completely grasp the situation, and as the days passed it became even harder. She was lost without Mark, and the pain of his loss only grew deeper with each passing day. It was as if Mark had ripped Maia's heart clean from her chest when he was swept away. It was an unbearable pain, really, one that her body was hardly fit to withstand. She could do without it, but her theory was that the amount of love a person shared for someone else reflected the amount of seemingly inevitable pain that was sure to surface when that someone is lost. It was a very beautiful, yet a very horrid, symmetry.

She missed him—she missed him so much she couldn't physically stand it.

Mark had always been there for Maia growing up; he was never too far away from her. Even if he had been, he was never ever too far out of reach. She recalled times in which she simply called him for advice and he was there; she recalled times in which he would drop what he was doing just to come see her if she was having a bad day. The two became a packaged deal as they grew older. It was nearly impossible to see one Watney sibling without seeing the other, and Maia loved that their bond transitioned into NASA as well.

Maia let out a scoff as she thought of the organization. Only a week ago, they had requested that each member of the Ares III crew provide eulogies for Mark for the memorial service they were hosting. Maia was the only one out of the six of them that had yet to complete the request, but she couldn't bring herself to write a eulogy for her brother when she was still trying to process the agonizing pain of him being gone. She always believed she would be writing her brother's eulogy when he was closer to the age of ninety, not 41 years old.

The entire situation was frustrating for her. Not only was her pain the worst advocate of her refusal to write a eulogy, but she also couldn't think of anything to say. She had thought about asking her parents, but the idea of it disappeared just as quickly as it had appeared. The two of them were probably in just as much shock as she was. They had lost their only son, and had never been allowed the opportunity of a proper goodbye.

With a sigh of frustration, Maia balled the piece of stationary up and angrily threw it to the floor, followed by her pen. She had spent many days desperately trying to keep her composure for the sake of her very worrisome crew-mates, but with each passing day it only became harder for her to do so. The pain of losing Mark was overwhelming her to such a point that she couldn't keep it buried inside anymore. There was too much of it pushing through to the surface—so much that it was virtually impossible for her to even think of trying to conceal, so she stopped trying.