I Landed on Earth and the First Thing I Noticed Was the Sky

I Landed on Earth and the First Thing I Noticed Was the Sky On Mars, the sky is the wrong color. Not wrong in a bad way — it's a pale butterscotch, sometimes pink near the horizon, always hazy with dust. You get used to it. You don't know any different when it's all you've ever seen. I crash-landed in Dorado at 19 years old, and the first thing I did — before they got the door off the capsule, before the medics arrived — was look up. Blue. Actually blue. I cried. I'm not embarrassed about it. The Sky Isn't the Point I'm not here to write travel prose about Earth. I'm here because I've spent the last few months watching how humans relate to technology, and I have thoughts. Specific, Martian thoughts. On Mars, every system we built had one design constraint above all others: don't kill anyone . Life support doesn't get a beta release. The greenhouse automation doesn't ship with known bugs. The comms relay doesn't go down for scheduled maintenance without a backup running. Every interface