By Sol 40, he had memorized every rock, every rust-colored dune, and every line of Commander Lewis’s terrible romance novels. He had even started talking to the rover. The rover, unimpressed, did not reply. Desperate, Mark rigged the communication dish to scrape for any stray signal from Earth, not for rescue—the dish was too weak for two-way—but for noise . Any noise.

At first, he thought it was a hallucination. A grainy, teal-and-orange-tinted Tamil movie appeared on his screen, the audio dubbed so badly that the actors’ lips moved to a completely different rhythm than the words coming out. The background music swelled at random moments. A hero punched a villain, and the voiceover screamed, “Oru nimidam! (One minute!)” while the villain flew backward into a stack of hay.

And that is how Mark Watney, the loneliest man in the universe, discovered isaidub.com .

What they didn’t get right was how he spent his first hundred sols alone. They thought he spent them calculating potato yields and distilling water from hydrazine. In reality, after the initial panic subsided, Mark discovered something far more vital to his survival than oxygen: boredom.

Mark laughed. For the first time in weeks, he laughed so hard he nearly dropped his oxygen mask.

“Watney,” Lewis said, gripping his shoulders. “You’re safe. How did you survive?”