What a strange couple weeks!
It is hard to write about -- suspicions and secretive speculation; our tight knit community of scientists, explorers, and artists suddenly finding ourselves unable to confide in one another, to trust one another. Or, no, a few of us unable to trust the rest, while they seemingly don't find anything out of the ordinary.
Perhaps we and the few others who are concerned are responding negatively to this grand experiment of sending humans on a one way trip to another planet. Yet, we can't help but feel it is the others and not us who are -- deluded is not the right word - missing something important, that even we can only feel not empirically prove, no, not even to ourselves.
Just under two weeks ago, we, the Triadoccult Sentimental Witches, were struck by a change, a feeling, a sensation, a nebulous tickling of the souls whispering that something was amiss. It took us days of self-doubt and silent questioning to first share this interior suspicion that something was different. It was a mountain climber turned exobiologist who we first spoke with about our unease. She seemed slightly changed herself, uncomfortable in a subtle way, as if she was trying to hide her discomfort, or wasn't even fully aware that she was discomfitted.
We discovered that she was experiencing the same sense of wrongness about our Martian base as we were. She said it felt crowded, a situation it was designed to avoid at all costs. Our home here was created to be a blissful balance between the psychological needs of homey/cozy and spacious/roomy. It was meant to provide a respite from the bleak horizons outside and the truly firightening lack of space inside.
It will sound the height of madness, but we joined her in reviewing the manifest of our ship, looking for what we knew not. We found nothing amiss. We then began reviewing more arcane data, such as menu plans and provisions and oxygen conversion ratios and even antibiotic regimens. Our shared sense that there was something amiss had congealed through conversation into a shared belief that someone was amiss. This was not akin to the fears around our stowaway so many months ago, although it mirrored aspects of that experience.  We experienced a trepidation as if a carefully balanced puzzle meant to keep us alive was no longer complete, as if the puzzle appeared complete when it simultaneously obviously was not. As if among a thousand jigsaw pieces assembled perfectly, one nearly symmetrical piece was turned around. Can a children's puzzle be inhabited by profound uncanniness?
Does that make sense?
It is hard to find language to describe buried intuitions. We found it easier to compose our unease in the music enfolding (and hopefully enshrouding) this message.
As we tried to assist our partner in suspicions, a climatologist approached us, expressing his concerns, eerily similar to ours. He brought a comprehension of statistics and the finer aspects of data interrogation to our secretive search that greatly benefited us. And this morning, with her help, we five uncovered a...
it is not a dsicrepancy, exactly...
but an oddness...
in the data that we need to share, hence this rambling diary entry being sent embedded in our brief chamber archestro.
Please review your earth based records, please do so with a fine tooth comb, looking for any discrepancy in the number of individuals sent on this mission originally (and factor in the original human stowaway) and the number of individuals here now based on the consumption of supplies such as food and oxygen and water, and medicines, and any other resource that might reveal the exact number of us up here right now, for if we are not mistaken, we are too many now to survive as planned. Although it flies in the face fo all of our records, and even our memories and our very senses, it is as if another soul is amongst us.