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5.2

22 November


H.S.F. Concordia

Moored to Transit Point Station

Low Earth Orbit



“I think you two are going to have to catch me up,” said Carol Beseman. Still wearing her pressure suit, she floated in one of the docking modules of Transit Point Station, having arrived with a shipment of dry goods and produce.

“I think I’d better stay in here a while,” she added, holding a hand to her stomach. She was one of those people who always needed a couple of hours to equilibrate after arriving in zero gee. Her helmet was already stowed on Concordia, along with the rest of her gear, but she hadn’t felt up to removing the suit quite yet. Miyuki was sympathetic, but could not really relate, having taken to space the same way she’d taken to water as a toddler: with an almost instinctive gusto.

“We’ve been thinking more about terraforming shortcuts,” Beseman said to his wife.

“I’d gathered that much,” Carol said, with remarkable patience considering she’d just arrived, and was already being bombarded with his work crap. Twelve hours ago, Miyuki knew, she was hosting a fundraiser at West Beseman House in Portland, and thirty-six hours before that she’d been in Iceland, trying to hammer out some trade agreements with the European Union, who were still balking at the sheer quantity of goods being imported through their borders by Enterprise City. “It’s not our fault your people want to buy our stuff,” she’d told them—a quote picked up by every tabloid and news service in the world. But of course it was more than that. Enterprise City was where everyone went to buy everything—a fact that had been raising eyebrows around the world for decades. Governments had long seen this as a threat, albeit one that was hard to quantify or pin down. Bad for small business! Waste of packaging! Waste of energy and infrastructure! EC should source local ingredients and labor, rather than shipping products all over the world! But lately those same governments had started moving from empty rhetoric to actual legislation, specifically written to disadvantage the Besemans. Because the Besemans were making too much money—in fact, pumping money out of every country in the world, in exchange for “crap no one needed.” Except they did, obviously, and Enterprise City was also the single largest philanthropic entity on the planet. If it gave just half a percent of its income to charity, that was still five billion dollars a year! But that was the old debate. The new, more urgent one, was that the Besemans were using that money to leave the Earth behind entirely. Unthinkable!

“You know what a von Neumann machine is?” Beseman asked her.

“The computing architecture?” Carol asked. Reasonably, Miyuki thought, because Quantum Von Neumann Complete, or QVNC, was the platform her husband had originally used to build their retail empire, and was still the backbone of their hyperweb services business.

“The self-replication architecture,” he said, positively radiant with excitement.

“Oh, dear,” Carol said, as if she knew what was coming. “Nanotechnology again?”

“Almost,” Beseman said.

“I need a drink of water and some Tums,” Carol protested. “Let me get my bearings, come inside, get some clothes on . . .”

Miyuki handed her a squeeze bottle of chilled water she’d been planning to drink herself, and then launched herself out into the corridor in search of Tums. By the time she got back, though, the Besemans were in animated conversation.

“What about the gray goo problem?” Carol wanted to know. “What’s to stop your replicators from eating the whole planet?”

Beseman seemed about to answer, but then looked up at Miyuki and made a gesture that said, “You explain this better than I do. Please, come here and take over.”

Handing four antacid tablets to Carol, Miyuki said, “I’m not sure what he’s told you, but we’re not talking about little machines. They don’t have arms, or legs, or wheels, or mouths. It’s more of a crystallization process, although admittedly the unit cells are quite complex. About the size of a free-culture ribosome.”

“Who came up with this?” Carol wanted to know.

“R&D department,” Miyuki said. Which didn’t exactly narrow it down, because R&D was a quarter of the Antilympus Project’s overall budget, and employed tens of thousands of people worldwide. And those budgets had lately gotten even fatter; when news got out that the project was actively manipulating the Martian atmosphere, donations tripled overnight (mostly earmarked for terraforming research), and remained at that high level. Let the United Nations whine all it wanted; the people of Earth had spoken with their wallets. They wanted a new planet, and were willing to buy it outright, now that Beseman was willing to sell it to them.

But the answer seemed to satisfy Carol, who said, “How long would it take these . . . crystals to consume the entire planet?”

“A long time,” Miyuki told her. “To coat the surface to a depth of one millimeter, about half a million years, if we don’t intervene. But the Martian atmosphere would be breathable long before that happened, because every unit cell replication frees up one CO2 molecule and ten oxygens. Oxygen molecules, I mean, not atoms.”

Carol hmmed and nodded at that, and then said, “Safeguards?”

“Numerous,” Miyuki assured her. “First of all, the unit cells—we don’t have a fancy name for them yet—aren’t capable of pulling CHON atoms out of organic material. They’re not pathogens, or even decomposers. They’re more like lichens: they’re powered by sunlight and they eat rocks, very slowly, liberating oxygen in the process. Unlike lichens, they can survive in hard vacuum and hard ultraviolet, which is critical for us. They can also eat dust particles, which is likely how they’ll spread, although our primary intention is local. If we spread these over the floor of Antilympus Crater, then within a few years we’ll have patches of greenish-white all over the place, with less soil mobility and an elevated local concentration of oxygen.”

“How elevated?”

“Half a millibar partial pressure, if R&D’s calculations are accurate. Less, when the wind blows through.”

Carol chewed that over for several seconds. Miyuki could see the calculations happening—the same ones she’d made herself when P.K. Rao first brought this proposal to her. Half a millibar of oxygen was a negligible fraction of a breathable atmosphere, and it would react furiously with the lithosphere, finding any free iron or other metals and rusting them. But the planet was already mostly rusted, so eventually the oxygen would start to build up. Slowly. From a near-term colonization standpoint, such a project was ridiculous, and would have no value beyond the purely symbolic. But what a symbol! If Antilympus had two ongoing projects to modify the Martian atmosphere, then the average man or woman in the street would start thinking they might actually be able to live on Mars someday—not in a dome or habitat tube, but in a house, under an open sky. It didn’t matter that that wasn’t true. It wouldn’t matter if Enterprise City and the Antilympus Project went on public record saying it wasn’t true. People would latch onto the idea, as enthusiastically as they’d latched onto the colony project itself, the moment the Besemans announced it. Who else could say they’d raised a trillion dollars in voluntary donations in a mere five years? Nobody.

“And how do you know it’s not a pathogen?” Carol wanted to know.

“They put a sterile mouse corpse in a beaker with the stuff, and nothing happened. So they put a live mouse in, and still nothing happened. Finally, the developers took a shower in the stuff, literally. Got it in their eyes and everything. That’s how confident they were.”

“And how long ago was that?”

“Five days.”

“And are they quarantined right now?”

“Yes, although they were planning on exiting tomorrow.”

“And they’re in some sort of containment facility?”

“Yes. They’re sleeping on the floor of a BSL-3 laboratory.” Biosafety level three, meaning the room was maintained at negative pressure, laminar flow at all times, and any exiting air had to pass through a 0.3-micron HEPA filter. Basically a giant fume hood, with antimicrobial coatings on every surface. The only higher level was BSL-4, for pathogens that could literally end civilization if they got loose. Setting up a BSL-4 required a lot of time and red tape, and attracted a lot of attention. And it would have been overkill for something like this.

It would not be quiet in that BSL lab by any stretch; those blowers were loud. Also, the piled-up foam mats the research team were sleeping on were of a special fluid-proof, non-particle-entrapping design that did not look comfortable. She had to admire their dedication.

Carol mulled that over a moment before saying, “My husband’s throttle is always stuck at full, and most of the time, you’re his enabler. Or vice-versa. But I sit on the board of directors, and they need to know somebody’s got a foot on the brake pedal. I’m sorry for their comfort, but let’s keep these eager beavers locked up for a full month. How many are there?”

“Five. Three women, two men. Playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons, apparently.”

“Okay,” Carol said, “I like the optics of that. We’ll send in pizza, and if they don’t mind a camera drone we’ll put them on their own publicity feed. Maybe set up a press conference.”

Looking at Beseman, she said, “With your permission, dear.”

“Please do,” Beseman said.

“They might not like the camera,” Miyuki said, her thoughts clearly running more prurient than Carol’s own.

“We’ll ask ’em,” Carol said. And then suddenly barfed.


After Carol took some medication and started to feel better, she changed out of her pressure suit and into her Antilympus coveralls. Then they all went down into Transit Point Station to visit with some of the crew, who knew Carol pretty well at this point. Without invitation, they entered the Traffic Control module down at the Earthward-facing end of the station’s towerlike structure.

“Mrs. Beseman,” said Geary Notbohm, looking up from a display screen with evident gladness. “Welcome aboard. Are you feeling better?”

“Thank you, Commander. I am.”

These were commonly exchanged words here on TPS, almost rote.

“Hello,” said Paul Young, the lead space traffic controller. Who did not look up from his screen, and who clasped a hand over his headset’s microphone when he spoke.

“Was your journey pleasant?” Geary asked.

“Never,” Carol said with a laugh.

Miyuki knew the feeling; even though Enterprise City ran some of the gentlest crew-launch profiles in the business, it was still a violent ride, topping out at 3.5 gee and with a lot of heavy vibration around the stage-separation events. EC also had only a handful of human-rated launch vehicles of their own, so a lot of crew transfers were through purchased tickets on the crew flights of Renz Ventures or Harvest Moon or even, God help you, Orlov Petrochemical. But Carol co-owned the EC launch vehicle fleet, or rather, shared a majority stake in the publicly traded company that owned the fleet, so as long as it didn’t conflict with critical operations, she could have an entire booster to herself if she wanted to. Which was exactly what she’d just done. Miyuki tended to ride with Beseman, often crammed in with six or eight other people, so that was a luxury she envied.

“I understand,” Geary said.

“I need quiet in here,” Paul complained. “I’ve got two flights incoming and one about to depart.”

“Of course,” Geary said, leading them all out into a neighboring module, currently configured as a simple corridor—its walls and floor and ceiling a bright enamel white, with black trim and brushed-steel fixtures. Most of the modules of TPS were configured that way most of the time. However, they could also, fairly efficiently, be unpacked into crew quarters or, with greater effort and planning, laboratories and light manufacturing space. The Antilympus Project had rented both things, many times, during the early phases of building the H.S.F. Concordia. Now of course they had their own space onboard the ship itself, and plenty of it, but it wasn’t that long ago Miyuki had operated these brushed-steel latches and levers to reconfigure stuff. She was oddly tempted to fiddle with them now.

To Beseman, Geary said, “I keep hearing rumors about ESL1 Shade Station.”

“Uh huh,” Beseman said.

“They are building something.”

“They’re always building something,” Beseman said.

Geary looked annoyed at that. He and Beseman were good friends at this point, so finally Beseman relented and said, “Neither of these two have heard it yet”—he nodded his head first toward Miyuki and then toward Carol—“but Igbal Renz is building a spaceship.”

“They are always building spaceships,” Notbohm said, his voice a bit snippy.

“This is different,” Beseman said.

“Different how?” Carol asked. And now she sounded annoyed as well, because she didn’t like Beseman keeping secrets from her. Nor did Miyuki herself, for that matter.

“He offered me a trillion dollars for Concordia,” Beseman said. “Cash, outright. I turned him down, of course, so then he offered me half a trillion for just the blueprints, including weekly updates as we actually finish construction.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Miyuki observed. A trillion dollars was in fact probably the entire cash reserve of Renz Ventures, whose entire value was probably not more than triple that.

“Yeah,” Beseman agreed.

“Are they going to Mars?” Carol asked, sounding mildly concerned.

“We don’t own the place,” Beseman said, “but no, I don’t think so. He said he was going to modify the cockpit and drive sections. There’d be no reason to do that if he was going to Mars.”

“So, where’s he going?” Carol asked.

“I don’t know,” Beseman said. Then, after a significant pause: “But it’s apparently very important to him.”

Carol and Geary both looked concerned at that, and Carol finally said, “Do you get the feeling things are slipping away from us? It used to be so simple, but things have gotten so . . . secretive. Even you.” And here she glared at Beseman.

“There are more players than there used to be,” Beseman said. “And more variables. Murders and skullduggery and invisibility cloaks. Igbal Renz has always been a nut, but he’s been a public nut. Now he’s holding his cards close. Even Killian’s acting shifty. He’s got confidential projects of his own, but I think there are people keeping secrets from him, too. And I expect he doesn’t like that. And Orlov—Jesus Christ. He straight-up has lost control.”

“What about us?” Carol asked. “Are we going to be carrying a hundred hidden agendas to Mars with us?”

Beseman sighed. “Probably. Hopefully not an actual murderer, but people are people. There’s no telling what’s going on inside some of them. We may own the equipment, but we don’t . . .”

“Own the hearts and minds?” Miyuki suggested.

“Not automatically, no. We’ve made a show of Mars being a democracy, but I’m thinking the whole project might need to be. Not just the people who go, or even just the candidates. Maybe everybody who’s involved, at any level.”

“Maybe now is the time to start,” Carol said. “Poll the top hundred about your . . . lichen crystals? My God, Miyuki, why don’t these things have a name?”

Miyuki laughed a little. “In their official reports, the development team has been calling them STROVs, which stands for Self-Templating Reductive Viroids. Informally, they call them ‘oxygen bugs,’ but I told them both of those were nonstarters.”

“How about ‘Lichenoids’?” Carol suggested.

“That’s less terrible,” Beseman said. “But you’re right: let’s let the candidates decide it for themselves. It’s their home we’re proposing to contaminate.”



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