<div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/f/fa/Mars_test.jpg)</div><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Character name:</strong></td><td>Lt Colonel Louise Cotter</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Location:</strong> </td><td>Her Office</td></tr><tr><td><strong>With:</strong> </td><td>Alone</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Doing:</strong> </td><td>Maths!</td></tr></tbody></table><br/><hr/><br/>I arrived back in my office from the main dome (http://elliquiy.com/forums/index.php?topic=149004.msg6967794#msg6967794), and settled behind the desk. There was a lot to get through and a short time to get through it. I was the only person on the base so far with access to the security protocols of the mainframe AI. I quickly changed that so Laura did too, and Stephan. I set about structuring the access levels the way I wanted them, making sure that everyone had the access they needed but didn't have access to things they didn't need. A simple email or text to Laura's office would be enough to request additional accesses.<br/><br/>That done, I had a look at the work rosters for tomorrow. They looked good so I approved them and sent them back to Stephan with a note to be flexible over the coming few weeks as we still didn't know exactly how things would shape up.<br/><br/>And last of all, I pulled up my "Martian Calendar" project.<br/><br/>The Martian year is 668 Martian days long and as mentioned elsewhere, each day is a little over half an hour longer than on earth. We fixed that by making each second ever so slightly longer. Anyone not using the Mars Time Clock program in their implant would be persistently early for everything!<br/><br/>But of course, the fact remained that Martian days and Earth days were out of sync and so we couldn't use their calendar. For some reason no-one ion Earth had taken this issue seriously. I suppose naming the days just wasn't a high priority.<br/><br/>Months were going to be a problem. Phobos apparently went backwards, rising in the West and setting in the East due to it's low orbit - in fact it did orbit the same way as everything else, but as it was so low in the sky it was going faster than the planet's rotation and so unusually it's true direction of travel was apparent.<br/><br/>Deimos was more like a real moon, rising in the East and setting in the West every couple of days, but could I find any data on the phases of Deimos? Nope.<br/><br/>So I discarded the idea of a Deimian month. The idea was terrifying anyway... har har. Instead I had twenty four "months", the first of twenty seven days, then next five were twenty eight days, then twenty seven again, five at twenty eight, and so on. An amazingly simple pattern. Every other year was a leap year with the first month having twenty eight days. Every ten years, we would need a double leap year, and every thousand we would need to take a day off but I wasn't going to worry about that!<br/><br/>It was the names that were bugging me most. I wanted to name a month for<em>her</em>, but felt that was being selfish. The first man on Mars deserved a month, as did each of the famous unmanned probes.<br/><br/>I sighed and closed the program.