---

EDIE (Part 1)

by James Dick

High above Europa, a lonely traveller reached the end of her journey.

A spacecraft the size of a school bus, with two solar panels like giant silicon wings, slipped into orbit above Jupiter’s ice-covered moon. Inside the spacecraft’s cargo bay, a passenger awoke. Her arrival at Europa was an event two decades in the making. It had involved the efforts of five thousand scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats. Now, they were all about to learn whether those efforts would pay off.

The cargo bay opened, and for the first time ever, EDIE saw sunlight.

---

In Mission Control in Houston, Texas, Wendy Sloan held her breath. She was the director of the EDIE mission, but she’d only stepped into that role because the previous director, Christopher Samaras, died. He’d lived to see EDIE’s launch, but not her landing. Time was ever the enemy of astronomers. The shortness of human life meant that many tasks begun in the present would become the care of the future.

“We are a generational mission,” Wendy had once said to the press. It was no joke: members of the EDIE team had gotten married during the mission; children had been born while the probe was under construction; family members had passed away during the seven years it took EDIE to reach the Jovian system.

Wendy’s daughter, Kate, was five when EDIE launched. Her twelfth birthday was tomorrow. By way of asking for a birthday gift, Kate said, “You’d better get EDIE down safe.”

Wendy smiled. We are a generational mission, and Kate will use everything we learn as a ladder towards her own discoveries. It was for that reason, more than any other, that failure was not an option for Dr. Sloan.

Jim Watson, head of Communications, made the callouts for the final stage of EDIE’s journey. At launch he’d been a bachelor with an athlete’s body. Today, he was married with two daughters and was working on a respectable beer belly. “Fifteen seconds left in the burn,” he said over the internal comm. “Five, four, three, two, one… burn complete, orbit achieved.”

A round of applause rippled through the room. Wendy joined in, but only half-heartedly. She couldn’t relax until she knew EDIE had landed safe and sound, and many things had to have gone right for that to have happened.

Jupiter and its moons were six-hundred million kilometres from Earth; so far away that light took forty-five minutes to reach Mission Control. Watching the telemetry stream in from EDIE was like watching a death-defying trapeze stunt: Wendy was powerless to change the outcome. All she could do was watch. Whether the stunt ended in tragedy or not was entirely up to EDIE.

Next comes separation…

---

The giant carrier stage let go of EDIE, giving a few puffs of its gas thrusters to pull away from her. Twenty seconds later, EDIE and her deceleration motor were floating free in the vacuum of space.

The carrier stage sent three short radio blasts back to Earth.

---

“Radio pings…” Jim said. “Standby… spacecraft separated! EDIE is free and clear!”

The entire control room burst into cheers.

Wendy put both hands over her mouth and exhaled through her nostrils. And now comes the landing…

---

EDIE scanned the surface of Europa for a landing site. NASA had selected a multitude of options for redundancy, but Europa remained a fiendishly difficult body on which to plan a landing. It was encased in a shell of ice, and as Jupiter’s gravity squeezed and released Europa’s core, the ice heated and cooled. Its shape and surface features were not the same from one year to the next. NASA had attempted to update EDIE’s database every month during her seven-year voyage to the Jovian System using new telescopic images, but even so, EDIE soon learned that over half of her original landing sites were now invalid.

Had EDIE been human, this might have made her nervous, but as her builders often quipped, EDIE had nerves of steel.

---

Back at Mission Control, there was a heart-stopping moment when EDIE’s scan of Europa streamed in.

Nils Persson, the scientist in charge of EDIE’s special payload, messaged Wendy on an isolated channel. “We’re down to forty percent of our choices,” he said.

Wendy took a deep breath. “I know.” We prepared for this. We programmed EDIE to handle this. “Hey, at least this isn’t any more dangerous than Jezero Crater, right?” Wendy looked across the room to where Nils sat: a console designated “MELT PROBE”.

Nils removed his spectacles and massaged his nose. “Jezero wasn’t covered by a glacier.”

---

EDIE narrowed her landing options down to two, and of the two, selected the one with the broadest expanse of flat terrain: Pwyll. Her touchdown point was no larger than a skating rink, but EDIE was no larger than a sub-compact car. It would be an easy parking job, provided she could make it down.

She completed one more orbit of the moon and then fired the barrel-sized decelerator strapped to her chassis. A second sun glowed above Europa.

---

“She chose Pwyll,” Nils said.

Wendy nodded. On her screen, EDIE’s orbital path around Europa shortened, intersecting a large white field in the moon’s southern hemisphere. The model of Europa on Wendy’s screen was a digital patchwork of recent images of the moon stitched together at the edges.

The little blue dot that represented EDIE raced towards the surface.

---

There would be no second chances. If EDIE miscalculated her trajectory, or if her descent stage malfunctioned, or if she tumbled, she’d become nothing more than a dark smear on the surface of Europa. She had the most advanced on-board computers yet designed for a deep space probe, but something could always go wrong.

When EDIE was eight kilometres above the surface, her solid rocket motor ran out of fuel, right on schedule. She jettisoned it and extended her landing legs. Gravity turned the empty SRM into a missile that would vaporize on impact with the moon.

Meanwhile, the little square lander’s descent stage—basically a four-engine jetpack—powered up and reoriented EDIE so that her landing legs were vertical. For ten seconds, she was in freefall. Then, the descent stage started burning its engines at full thrust, rapidly shedding EDIE’s vertical velocity.

In the lens of EDIE’s belly-mounted cameras, Europa rushed up to greet her…

---

“Altitude: five-hundred metres,” Jim said, “velocity: ten metres per second.”

Wendy stared at her monitor. The telemetry streaming in had grown choppy, possibly as a result of the carrier stage moving behind Europa and losing the descent stage’s signal. The blue dot on-screen skipped and stuttered its way towards Europa’s surface.

“Altitude: one hundred metres,” Jim called out. “Harness deployed.”

Wendy visualized the moment in her mind: four-legged EDIE would drop from the harness on the descent stage, dangling by four umbilicals like a spider hanging upside down by its thread.

“Altitude, thirty metr—” Jim abruptly broke off. “Signal loss, LOS interrupt.”

Wendy inhaled sharply. EDIE vanished from every screen in Mission Control. A red message blared in her stead: TELEMETRY INTERRUPTED.

If EDIE touched down safely, we’ll know in just a minute more. She mentally resumed the mission from where it left off. EDIE touches down right about… now. Descent stage decouples and flies off to crash a safe distance from the landing site. EDIE waits a moment to confirm her legs are down and she’s stable.

“LOS-plus-five seconds,” Jim called.

Now she’ll unfold her antenna and start looking for the carrier stage. If she doesn’t find it in ten seconds, she’ll start looking for Earth…

“LOS-plus-fifteen seconds.”

Come on, EDIE, you can do it. Start scanning for our signal. We’re talking to you, right now. This… this should not take longer than a minute.

“LOS-plus thirty seconds…”

“LOS-plus forty-five seconds…”

Wendy’s heart thundered in her ears. She looked at Nils. He was a statue, frozen with his eyes locked on his monitor.

“LOS-plus—signal acquisition!”

A split second after Jim spoke, the TELEMETRY INTERRUPT signal vanished and EDIE’s blue dot reappeared at the centre of the Pwyll landing site.

“Tango delta!” Jim shouted. “EDIE is safe on the surface of Europa!”

The room exploded. Wendy shot up out of her chair, ran to Nils, and pulled him into a rib-crushing hug. Thirty scientists and technicians all jumped up and down, fists raised in triumph, shouting loud enough to drown out the final callout from Jim: “Europa Deep Ice Explorer has touched down on Europa, ready to begin searching for signs of life on Jupiter’s frozen moon!”

Kate would be watching the NASA livestream. Wendy dug her phone out of her pocket. She was already being bombarded by well-wishes from friends and colleagues. She made a mental note to reply to them all later and went straight to her daughter’s number. She sent two words: “Happy Birthday.”

---

If EDIE had been capable of emotion, she probably would’ve felt proud. She’d crossed half the solar system and landed on a tiny little snowball tumbling through space. Her antenna was fixed on Earth, her nuclear heart warmed her, and the submersible stowed in her belly—a craft no bigger than a can of soda—awaited the day it would be deployed and sent into the frigid depths of Europa’s ice.

All in all, not a bad day for robotkind.

---

Heavy snowflakes dusted Wendy’s windshield as she drove home from Mission Control. It was the first snow of the year, and it followed on the heels of her team’s triumph. No matter what befell the mission in later days, from this night forward she could say she was there when NASA put the first robotic lander on a Jovian moon.

Wherever you are, Chris, I know you’re proud.

When Wendy got home and opened the front door, she barely had time to set her day bag down before a lanky girl flew at her and squeezed her.

“We did it!” Kate Sloan cried. “We did it, we did it, we did it!”

Wendy put her arms around Kate and hugged her. “I know, I was there.”

Kate peeled her head off Wendy’s chest and shook her auburn bangs out of her face. “Although losing contact with the carrier stage was a pretty amateur move.”

Wendy snorted. “I will be sure to pass that on to the team.”

“Makes for good drama though!” called a voice from the kitchen.

Wendy looked up. Cameron came down the hall towards her and Kate, drying his hands on a tea towel. He’d shed his tie and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt.

“Drama’s for Hollywood,” said Kate.

“So’s this,” Cam said, slipping an arm around Wendy’s waist and pulling her in for a kiss.

Wendy’s heart skipped a beat. She melted into him.

“Ew,” Kate said dryly. “Ew. Ew. Stop. Anytime, please.”

Cam broke the kiss. “What?” he said. “I’m just congratulating your mom.”

Kate rolled her eyes and trooped off to the dining room. “I’ll skip the awards ceremony…”

“I won’t,” Wendy whispered in Cam’s ear, just before biting it.

Cam chuckled. “I made coq au vin. It’s almost ready.”

“Oh, thank you.” Wendy unzipped her parka. “Making history is hungry work.”

---

Coq au vin wasn’t the only thing Cam made; he’d also baked a little square cake with an aluminum foil antenna and legs. “In honour of our intrepid explorer,” he said as he set the cake on the table.

“Antenna’s all wrong,” Kate said.

“Is it?” said Cam. He started to take the cake away. “My mistake, I’ll throw the whole thing out.”

“Never mind, never mind!”

Cam handed Wendy the knife. “All you, hon.”

Wendy took the blade and held it over the cake. “Here’s to whatever awaits us on Europa.”

“Hopefully biosignatures,” said Kate.

“No matter what it is,” Wendy pressed on, “it’ll be something we’ve never seen before.” She cut the cake in fours and plated it up.

“While we eat,” said Wendy as Cam and Kate dug in, “I have something for us to look at.” Her day bag rested against the legs of her chair. She reached in, took out her laptop, and opened it atop the table. “The rest of the world will see this in the morning, but I wanted to show it to you guys first.” She tapped the trackpad to bring the computer out of sleep.

“Oh my God,” Kate gasped.

On the screen was the first picture taken by EDIE’s forward camera. It’d been sent back as a quick confirmation by EDIE to say, “Yes, I’m down safe, and yes, I’m right side up.” Two-thirds of the photo was filled with what could’ve been any old glacier on Earth: an icy field marred by cracks in the ice and sulphur stains from Io’s volcanic eruptions. The top third of the photo was black sky, with just a sliver of a crescent Jupiter near the top edge of the frame.

“You’d almost think it was Greenland,” said Cam.

“Nils said the same thing,” said Wendy.

Kate reached for the computer reverentially and brought it closer to herself. She studied every detail on the screen with wide, searching eyes, as if she could find the biosignatures she craved by sight alone.

Wendy exchanged a proud look with Cam. “Plenty more where that came from,” she said, spearing a piece of cake with her fork. “We’re downloading a new batch in the morning.”

---

“Didn’t sleep last night either, huh?” Wendy said to Nils as she entered Mission Control.

Nils had shadows under his eyes and a big smile on his face. “Nope,” he said. “I was jealous of the overnight team and decided to come in. I’m glad I did.” He accompanied Wendy to her desk. “You know that active molten core we theorized about? It’s not theoretical anymore; seismograph is picking up a continuous rumble characteristic of volcanic activity.”

“Yes!” Wendy cheered as she pulled up the telemetry on her screen. The seismic activity was represented by a distinct, energetic waveform. There were occasional spikes, probably caused by high-energy eruptions or shifts in Europa’s ice shell. The revelation of a molten core guaranteed there was an energy gradient in the subsurface ocean—a prerequisite for life (as humanity knew it) to exist.

“That isn’t all, though,” said Nils, vibrating with excitement. “Go to the beginning of the data, right to when EDIE touched down.”

Wendy scrolled back. She spotted the occasional spike (more eruptions or ice shifts) but none of it compared to what she saw at the very start of the graph. The second EDIE’s seismograph started, it caught something: the tail end of a seismic event so massive it was literally off the charts. An entire portion of the graph was blacked out by the waveform.

Wendy’s awe gave way to her rationality. “This could be the vibrations from EDIE’s landing.”

Nils shook his head. “I thought that too, but none of EDIE’s instruments were programmed to activate until she confirmed she’d been stationary for ten seconds.”

Wendy digested this. And it couldn’t be a result of the jettisoned SRB or deceleration stage. Those would appear as a pair of short, steep spikes in the graph. “So,” said Wendy, “what you’re telling me is that we landed just in time to miss the mother of all seismic events?”

Nils nodded, still smiling. “Yes.”

“Damn. Do Shae and Seismic have any theories about this?”

Nils looked over his shoulder at the seismic team, who were in a frenzy over their computers. “Still crunching the numbers, but they did tell me that because of the liquid medium of Europa’s subsurface ocean, this event could’ve been felt all over the moon.”

Wendy whistled. “Kate’s going to have a field day when she hears about this.”

---

As EDIE’s cameras continued to track and photograph the ice around her, she detected four small, dome-shaped protuberances in the ice about three metres away from her that had not been there when she landed. However, as these protuberances did not constitute a major or mission-threatening change to her environs, she didn’t flag them for study.

Apart from an inexplicable, moon-wide seismic disturbance, EDIE’s first twenty-four hours on Europa passed uneventfully.

---

The stars on the ceiling of Kate’s room glowed in the dark. Cameron had done the paintjob, but the glow effect was Wendy’s idea. Texts by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, and Michio Kaku filled the bookshelves. Autographed photos of astronauts and rocket company CEOs sat on the dresser.

Mother and daughter lay together under the night sky. “Okay,” said Wendy, “I want you to close your eyes.”

Kate obeyed.

“Now…” Wendy reached down beside the bed and lifted a printout of one of EDIE’s photographs from her day bag. “Imagine you’re on the surface of Europa—”

“With or without a spacesuit?” Kate asked.

Wendy flicked Kate’s ear, prompting a squeak from the girl. “Don’t be snarky. Imagine you’re on the surface of Europa… in a spacesuit. EDIE’s beside you. Tilt your head to the sky.”

Kate tilted her head, tucking her auburn bangs behind her ears.

Wendy placed the printout in front of Kate’s face. “Open your eyes.”

Kate opened them, and her face filled with wonder.

On the printout was Jupiter, hanging in the sky, three times bigger than Earth’s moon appeared from the Sloans’ backyard. It was only a crescent, but it was glorious; lightning flashed on its night side, aurorae danced at its darkened poles, and tucked away on the limb of the planet was the Great Red Spot, barely in frame, as if it was trying to hide from the camera.

Kate stared raptly at the picture.

“It’s for you,” said Wendy.

Kate took the picture in both hands. “It’s beautiful…”

“Yeah, it is.” Wendy sighed and put an arm around Kate. “So, hypotheses about the seismic event?”

Kate pursed her lips. “Possibly a major tectonic upheaval due to gravitational flexion. It wouldn’t help that there’s an ocean pressing down on the continents.”

Wendy weighed this and smiled. “But we have similar events on Earth and we don’t see shock waves travel around the globe that often.”

“Europa’s a smaller body. Plus, the ice shell probably turns the subsurface ocean into a giant echo chamber.” Kate looked at Wendy. “But if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to wait for the melt probe results before I speculate any further.”

---

The melt probe was a fairly simple machine. It was a soda can-sized robot connected to EDIE via a five-hundred-metre-long umbilical. Both ends of the probe contained thermal elements that would melt the ice, thereby letting it sink while EDIE paid out the umbilical, or rise as EDIE reeled the umbilical in. The sides of the probe’s cylindrical hull were run through by slots (“gills”, the team called them) that could collect meltwater and analyze it using a compact biosignature scanning suite. Results would be relayed up the umbilical to EDIE for transmission back to Earth.

Nils was chief engineer and head of operations for the probe. His nickname for the little machine was Snorri.

Wendy was back at her console, this time in a support role to Nils’s part of the mission. Telemetry and ventral cameras confirmed the probe was dangling, heated, and ready to be lowered into the ice. EDIE awaited the final order to proceed.

Wendy looked over to Nils. With hands steadier than a surgeon’s, he typed the command for the probe to enter Europa. The instruction wouldn’t reach EDIE for forty-five minutes, and Nils wouldn’t get a reply for forty-five more. The next hour-and-a-half will be an eternity for him.

---

While EDIE waited for her instructions to arrive, her cameras performed a routine survey of the environment.

The small, domelike protrusions she’d noted at the end of her first day had grown half an inch. EDIE’s creators still hadn’t noticed them, or perhaps they’d assumed the domes were already there when EDIE landed. Whatever the case, they were focused on what they believed were more pressing matters.

The command to lower the melt probe arrived, and EDIE paid out the umbilical, her motors silent in the airless wastes.

---

A barrage of new telemetry rained down on Mission Control as Snorri made contact with the ice. As with the landing, there was an eruption of cheers throughout the room.

Wendy mirrored Nils’s feed on her screen. “Huge quantities of minerals and heavy elements,” she said to him over the comm.

“It’s all from Io,” Nils said. Wendy heard the smile in his voice. “The ejecta from Io’s volcanoes spatters Europa. I bet if we brought this stuff home, it’d be the best fertilizer on the market.”

“I’ll get my husband to start working on branding,” said Wendy. “Any biosignatures?”

“Still too early. I don’t expect to see any until the gills sink at least four inches into the ice.”

One of the challenges of navigating the Jovian system was that it was highly radioactive. Radiation from Jupiter obliterated any chemical bonds on the top layer of Europa’s ice. But ice and water were excellent radiation shields; anything below four inches on the surface was essentially radiation-proof.

After about fifteen minutes, the speed of the probe began slowing down.

“Strange,” Nils said. “Rate of descent should be fairly constant.”

Wendy frowned. “Power fluctuation in the umbilical, maybe?”

“No, power flow is steady. Could be a telemetry downlink issue.” Wendy heard Nils’s mouse click. “Something to keep an eye on, but as long as the probe keeps moving, I’m not that concerned.” He checked his 2D simulation of the probe’s position. “Gills are reaching the four-inch mark…”

Everyone, including Wendy, held their breath.

---

“Hon?”

Wendy looked up from her half-eaten dinner. Cam was staring at her quizzically. “What?” she said.

“You zoned out,” Kate said through a mouthful of fish. The latest photographic printouts from Europa lay splayed around her placemat.

Wendy shook her head. “Sorry. What were you saying?”

“I got a commission you’d love,” said Cam. “They want to do a mural on the rec centre commemorating all the places our robots have gone so far. I’m to do everything from Mars to Europa and then leave space for more planets and moons to be added in the future.”

“Oh,” said Wendy. “Yeah, that’s actually pretty cool.”

Cam cocked his head. “You’re still thinking about Snorri.”

Wendy sighed. “I know I shouldn’t.”

Kate paused mid-chew and looked at her mother. “You knew it might not be a yes-or-no thing.”

Wendy narrowed her eyes at Kate. “Rude.”

Kate stuck a tongue covered in chewed up fish out at Wendy and went back to flipping through the photos.

“You hoped it would be easy,” said Cam.

Wendy nodded. “I couldn’t help feeling like we were going to make that big discovery right away.”

“I still think a sample return mission would be more useful,” said Kate.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Wendy. “You can be on the advisory committee when we plan the follow-on mission.”

“Terrific!” the young woman chirped. “I have a perfect idea for—” Kate’s fork clattered to her plate. She snatched up one of the printouts—a wide-angle shot of Europa’s icescape. “What are those?” Her face was so close to the picture her nose nearly touched its glossy surface.

“What are what?” Wendy asked.

“Those!” Kate turned the photo around and showed it to her mother. Wendy recognized the terrain to the southeast of EDIE. Kate put her finger on a spot in the bottom left quarter, on the surface of the ice.

Wendy took the picture and looked closer.

On the surface, she saw what appeared to be four dome-shaped protrusions of ice, all with stubby stalks rising from them. They were extremely regular in shape and seemed to be equidistant from each other.

“Those don’t look natural,” Kate said.

“No, they’re probably… they could be…” Wendy trailed off. The more she studied the anomalies, the more she felt Kate might be onto something. “You’re right,” she said at last, “they don’t look natural.”

---

Natural or not, EDIE had continued to track the growth of what would come to be called the “Europa surface anomalies”. She beamed the photo and video captures back to Earth at the top of every hour per her programming. So far, from EDIE’s perspective, everything was proceeding above board.

But something was about to happen that would cause the intrepid explorer to send a cry of panic back to her builders.

Five hundred metres beneath the surface of Europa, two sheets of ice shifted without any warning, meeting like two giant hands clasping together. The place where they intersected was the segment of umbilical directly above the melt probe. The long, thin cable sheared in two, and all telemetry from the melt probe ceased.

EDIE responded by broadcasting an alarm; to the carrier stage, to the deep space network, to Earth, to anyone or anything that might be listening. But of course, the alarm wouldn’t be heard for forty-five minutes.

---

The entire EDIE team stared at the pictures flashing by on the big screen. Together, the stream of landscape photos—the earliest time-stamped at the moment of touchdown and the most recent from two hours ago—showed the growth of the small ice structures in a month-long time-lapse.

“Look at that,” Wendy said, restarting the sequence. “The little domes spring up pretty much overnight, then they spend a couple of weeks growing larger, and then right after we deployed the melt probe, those icicle-like stalks sprout up over a couple of days.”

Nils shook his head. “How did we miss this? EDIE should’ve flagged them.”

Shae Gardner, the woman in charge of EDIE’s optical suite, waved this notion away. “EDIE only flags large-scale changes to her surroundings, and it has to register on her seismograph simultaneously. Ice shelves calving, quakes, that sort of thing.”

“Besides,” Wendy added, “we were focused on other things, like biosignatures and the melt probe.”

Jim Watson chimed in. “These photos,” he said, pointing to the time-lapse on the big screen, “are less than one percent of all the pictures taken since we landed. Most of the time we’ve been using EDIE’s cameras to study the ice close up or look at Jupiter.”

“The question we should ask now,” said Wendy, “is ‘what are these anomalies?’” And why did they only appear after we landed? Why are they growing in such a regular pattern? Why did they have a growth spurt when we deployed Snorri?

Nils’s computer suddenly let out a loud chirp, which was soon picked up and carried throughout the room. Everyone flew to their stations without a word and turned their eyes to the information streaming in.

When Wendy saw the news from EDIE, she felt like she’d been punched in the gut.

“He’s gone…” Nils said over the internal comm system. He sounded shell-shocked. “Snorri is just… gone.”

As terrible as that was, something worse was happening: EDIE’s power levels were dropping rapidly. Electricity was still surging down the umbilical, even though Snorri wasn’t attached to it. But where’s that power going?

“Nils,” Wendy said into her headset, “why is EDIE still transferring power to the umbilical?”

“Standby.”

Wendy heard the rapid clacking of Nils’s keyboard. She looked at the time on her screen. It was seven-oh-two in the morning. EDIE’s losing power faster than her RTG can supply it. Everything we’re seeing now happened nearly an hour ago. If she continued to lose power at this rate the whole time, her batteries will die fifteen minutes from now.

“Wendy,” said Nils, “I don’t know why she’s still sending power through the umbilical, but you should send the command for her to stop.”

Wendy navigated to the window for EDIE’s power supply and clicked DEACTIVATE MELT PROBE. Not that it would do any good. It would take nearly forty-five minutes for the signal to reach the Jovian system.

Suddenly, all of EDIE’s telemetry ceased.

Wendy felt a lump in her throat. Please EDIE… don’t be dead.

---

Host Commentary

And we’re back! Again, that was part 1 of Edie, by James Dick, narrated by Abra Staffin-Wiebe.

No spoilers this week, because we are only halfway through. So I’ll just mention that one thing I really enjoyed about this story is seeing the mother-daughter relationship back at home while everyone is watching and waiting to see what happens with the Europa expedition. There is an emphasis at the beginning of the story that the launch has taken two decades, and is a generational mission. And the story illustrates that by showing Wendy’s daughter, Kate, who was 5 when Edie launched, and now only wants a safe landing for her 12th birthday.

Come back next week and find out what happens to Edie and Wendy and Kate and Europa! And until then –

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can chat with other fans as well as our staff members. So! If you enjoyed our story this week then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that look for biosigns on frozen moons.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from David Attenborough, who said: There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.