The window is final.
This is the sixtieth day of transmission.

My record hasn't modified: No reply.
And that's emerge as soul-crushing. Sixty days of calling for assist across space and not even a ping again from Earth.
I comprehend it's been fifty years because everybody lower back home has heard something from this planet, that they're positive (or satisfied themselves for their very own closure) that we're all useless, that the most effective existence at the floor of Mars is a nightmare plague of rogue viral nanotech and bio-engineered horrors.
However we've been calling to tell them in any other case for sixty days directly.
Our sign must be clean sufficient to be heard. Anton and Rick maintain to exchange taking shifts at the Candor transmitter site, switching each time a remedy flight goes out, nevertheless insisting on monitoring the gadget in my opinion notwithstanding the cramped lodges and the maddening silence. They keep assuring the rest folks that the salvaged and cobbled gadget is working, that our message must be getting past the ETE ecosystem net. It's now not a robust sign, and it's probably past-primitive compared to anything Earth has evolved at some point of the half-century we slept, however it's as a minimum as robust as what sufficed for the early rover missions. If everyone became paying any attention at all...

In the absence of knowing, we will't help however spin eventualities that variety from unpleasant to tragic to explain why there's been no answer:
Perhaps the "planetary quarantine" we've heard inform approximately has created a totalitarian ban on communications (a ban that could should manipulate all civilian listening posts as nicely). Perhaps they consider that even making far off touch with the nanotech they assume has overrun this planet will someway hack them thru their signals and take manage of Earth's networks, even to the point of hijacking manufacturing centers to re-create themselves and infect the arena.
Maybe the backlash in opposition to technology (that we've additionally heard inform about) due to what they assume occurred right here all those years ago has made them turn their backs at the technology that might pay attention us.
Or perhaps the human race is useless-or barely surviving-the planet already taken with the aid of a worst-fears nanotech or biotech plague, and the unintelligible history chatter that we're handling to pick up isn't without a doubt human in foundation. (We've been assuming the sign noise bleeding off the Earth is simply too deeply encoded for our equipment to decipher, either because of some totalitarian law on communications or just simple fears of competitor hacking. However what if it it's without a doubt the chatter of something that's changed us as the dominant species?)
Rick set up one of the better discipline telescopes from our minimal astronomy lab to look at the Earth edging toward us as our orbits fall into conjunction. He's given us some fantastically clean pix, which generally served to make us all homesick, however they also let us understand that the planet nevertheless at least looks pretty an awful lot similar to whilst we'd last seen it. But that's about all we should inform from over fifty million miles and without the advantage of a single astronomer in our variety.
(The on-planet experts had been all running projects at the colony websites or up at the orbital facilities whilst the bombs fell and the Discs shredded the whole lot in orbit. There was no need to have a proper technology contingent taking over area in an already-crowded army base, which means all we've got in phrases of clinical expertise is what we had to maintain our centers, aircraft, structures and guns.