Mira Okafor is the one who makes it rain. A century after the landing she runs the HELIX Terraforming Directorate from a control room where a holographic Mars hangs wrapped in the plan: orbital mirrors, heating towers around the north polar cap, atmospheric processors, lichen seeded on red stone. On her desk is an old photograph of her grandmother as a child with the original crew.
She is quick where Nova is slow. The film introduces her bounding down the museum steps into a city of domes and maglev trains, striding into the Directorate, kneeling outside in a sealed suit to inspect dark green lichen creeping across a rock. The night before ignition she visits her grandmother, who opens the album to the four on Sol 1 and presses a worn seed packet from Yuki's vault into her hands.
On ignition day her hand hovers over the control, and then presses it. The mirrors turn, the ice cap steams, clouds form over the city for the first time in the planet's history, and Mira runs out through an airlock to stand in the first rain with her face to the sky. Then she kneels and plants one of Yuki's seeds in the wet soil, and a green shoot comes up in the rain. She is the bridge between the first crew and the blue sky of Track 10.
