A Rover's Story

As a A ROVER'S STORY begins, a robot named Resilience (Res) is being prepared for a mission to Mars. Res might be a robot, but he's beginning to have favorites among the team that's building him. He likes the way Rania codes and that Xander plays him music and calls him "buddy." The more he listens to Rania and Xander, the more Res finds himself developing emotions that can only be called humanlike. Emotions that Journey, another robot in the lab, thinks are downright silly and useless. Once Res is built and ready to go, he learns he'll not just be collecting, studying, and analyzing pieces of Mars' atmosphere, he'll be searching for missing Rovers from other missions. But to Res, the most important part of this mission will be finding a discovery so important that NASA will have to bring him back to Earth, something they've never been done for a Mars Rover. Res is delighted when he learns he won't be alone on the trip to Mars, he'll be accompanied by a chatty drone he names Fly. It's good, thinks Res, to have a friend along even if Fly has no idea what a friend might be. Once on Mars, it's months before Res finally gets the command to try and locate Courage, a Rover that disappeared during a dust storm. During the search, Fly goes down and, despite receiving code from NASA that tells him to not look for Fly, Res is determined to try and rescue his friend.