Space for Evolution

by Zurab Andguladze

  These reports also attempted to tell the machines’ creators that on this planet, the expedition had so far not discovered any natural phenomena or living creatures dangerous to earthly life. The conclusion of the last report informed its recipients that the colony was going to set about the next phase.

  Chapter 24

  For the machines, it didn’t matter which creature they had to reproduce—a plant or a person. So, in the fifteenth year of colonization, the LAI-5 created the first human fetus, causing it to begin to develop inside one of the thirty smaller chambers. Three months later, the remaining twenty-nine chambers were also transforming embryos into human bodies.

  Nine months later, over a period of three months, thirty babies came into the world, one after another—fourteen girls and sixteen boys. At the moment of their birth, it was clear that special creatures had appeared on the planet.

  Prior to this, both local and alien animals had given birth to their offspring in complete silence. All of them instinctively feared a predator at a time when they and their whelps were most vulnerable.

  On the contrary, this new resident, starting from its first second of life, showed that it differed from the others. This creature refused to be frightened of anything, and loudly announced its presence. Perhaps the apes finally transformed into humans when their children ceased to be born in silence and instead immediately began to claim that they were no less masters of this universe than anyone else.

  Despite such a significant event—the birth of a man beyond the borders of the solar system—no one in the whole cosmos felt the greatness of the moment. Humanity didn’t know about it: to learn about something happening at such a great distance, at the time of its fulfillment, would have been equal to receiving a call from heaven. On the new planet, animals, both local and alien, remained indifferent to the moment.

  The SOC-5 conducted the scheduled, though meaningless, communication session. It tried to tell mankind that an extrasolar human being now existed.

  Chapter 25

  At exactly the same time, on planet Earth, a girl was finally born in the family of Georg’s descendants. At the end of a great discussion, the members of the family chose a name for this long-awaited child. They carefully cultivated it from the family’s important history: first, their distant and famous ancestor Iason Azgo had saved the SQP project; second, the centuries-old project would come to an end in the generation of this newborn child. Third, Iason Azgo was originally from Colchis.

  And finally, the name ‘Iason’ is the Georgian version of the mythical name of Jason of Iolcos, who won the Golden Fleece from King Aeetes. So the girl was christened Medea, in honor of King Aeetes’s daughter.

  Chapter 26

  No one gave names to the peers of little Medea, the thirty infants born on a planet that would take one and a half million years for an early Apollo Moon rocket to reach.

  Instead, the machines identified the babies simply by numbers, assigned to each of them according to the order of their birth. Later, within three months of their birth, the RA-5 and the RB-5 transferred each infant from the bio-compartment to the nursery, the fourth and largest section of the lander. Here, on an area of one hundred and fifty square meters, there were thirty beds equipped with wireless sensors and partitioned off with curtains of thin, transparent plastic. Here the newborns had to live until they would reach the age of five.

  Two ordinary nannies couldn’t have taken care of thirty infants day and night, year after year; but two robots didn’t have to exist by the mortal restrictions of humans. Robots didn’t need rest, food, sleep or entertainment. Charged batteries were the only necessity. Since the radio-isotopic source still contained enough energy, the RA-5 and the RB-5 successfully cared for all thirty infants. Their jointed, machined hands, dressed in soft gloves, never tired of gently handling children.

  On the day when number Thirty was thirteen months old, the GPC-5 downloaded an advanced hunting program into the robots’ RAM, turning these automated caregivers into lethal protectors. This program activated all the devices at their disposal: an audio receiver, which, in contrast to the human ear, could “hear” infrared and ultrasonic radiation; an air analyzer as an olfactory organ; and a full-range infrared-to-ultraviolet electromagnetic field sensor. After that, when the night came, the RA-5 and the RB-5 left the sleeping toddlers in the care of the LAI-5 and ventured into the forest.

  During this threat-elimination campaign, these cyber-mechanical hunters destroyed all the animals that they met on their way. This time, the machines made no distinction between predators or herbivores, adults or cubs—they killed everything. The deathly operation lasted thirty nights, and it turned the neighborhood of the settlement into a death zone for local creatures. The animals that survived this massacre fled as far as possible from the place.

  The reason for this programmed action was a really important upcoming event: the time had come when the children would first leave their “Earthly” territory and take a walk on the surface of the planet which would soon become their own. This slaughter was supposed to completely eliminate any possibility of an animal attack on the children.

  The exoplanet colonization program worked in accordance with the old model. For on Earth, too, people cut down forests and crowded out the local flora and fauna to give living space to their domestic animals and cultivated plants.

  Although there was a difference, too: in this case, not only were some native plants and animals replaced by these foreign species, but one kind of life tried to expel another to make space for itself. Thus, the expedition was attempting to bio-form a new planet.

  Chapter 27

  The children’s first outing happened to be on a day that was temperate and windless. While still inside the nursery, the RA-5 and the RB-5 lined up the infants side by side. Then the robots went outside and called the children to them. The cyber-nannies stood on both sides of the stairs in place of a railing. Soon the tots were all gathered on the grass in front of the entrance to their habitat, looking around with their childish gaze.

  If they could, they would have described what they saw: the lander stood in a large, smooth meadow. Around it, at a distance of one hundred meters, one-story houses were in various stages of construction. To the south of these buildings, as well as to the west, a pasture extended for several acres. Far in the southwest section of this pasture, a small herd of cattle grazed contentedly. To the north of this pasture were several plantations with vegetable gardens, orchards, and plots of wheat, flax and cotton.

  In the east there was only a valley covered with grass, more unfinished houses, and between them a giant river. In addition, a trail extended to the end of the valley, and then it turned north along the plateau edge.

  Further on, beyond the settlement, an orange shrub would be visible, and then a forest of the same color behind it. They seemed to grow behind the line where autumn had already arrived.

  If the children had had the opportunity to look through binoculars, they would have seen another distinguishing feature of the local plants. Their leaves looked like a tennis racket, in which the vertical strings were removed, and the remaining horizontal ones were about two centimeters wide. The trunk of the plants was smooth, without bark, yellow color and covered with wide orange stripes.

  First, the children examined the descent vehicle and its supports, touching them many times. Then the group, protected by armed robots, moved towards the pasture. Seeing the kids, the dogs started to bark. Some children backed away in fear. The RA-5 gave the command Stop and the barking stopped. Apparently the dogs had taken the children for another kind of domestic animal.

  Looking from afar at the cows and sheep, the children returned to the lander, but didn’t stop there, continuing their journey to the river. Of course, they couldn’t directly approach the great and unhurried stream, as a long slope separated them. Therefore they only approached the edge of the plateau and looked down, constantly being in the field of view of the robots.

>   One girl, with short-cut hair like all the other children, running near the RB-5, stumbled over something and fell. She cried and began to rub her knee with her hand. The machine placed its manipulators in the armpits of the child, picked her up and examined her leg. After this inspection, the robot speech synthesizer measuredly and clearly said:

  “Number Four, there is no damage to your leg. The pain will pass soon.”

  With these words the robot put her back on the grass, stepped back and switched again to general overview. The baby continued to cry alone, but the machine paid as much attention to her as to the other children. It didn’t caress the child, didn’t hug, didn’t kiss, and didn’t try to calm her in any other way.

  Later, the RA-5 saw that another boy had run to the edge of the plateau and even stepped over it. The machine immediately approached her and said, “You cannot go there, Number Twelve.”

  The boy ignored the warning and continued to walk down the slope. The robot immediately caught up with him, took him, and returned back to the plateau. Then it grabbed the boy’s left wrist with one of its mechanical limbs, and pressed its second manipulator against the child’s tiny forearm. After this preparation, it released through the kid’s hand a current impulse with magnitude of five milliampere and duration of one second. The boy screamed shrilly and stared at the device in front of him with eyes widened in horror.

  While communicating with the robots, the children looked at the place where a human has a chest, because the machines had a speaker and a microphone there. And their head represented a spheroid, capable of turning ninety degrees in the horizontal plane and forty-five in the vertical. In this armored transparent box there were two all-round view cameras, able of moving independently of each other. Also, it contained almost all of their sensors.

  Their “brain” was situated inside their “stomach,” along with their batteries, and the limbs of the machines had the ability to change the distance between themselves, and also to lengthen and rotate, in addition to being similar to the limbs of human. Standing straight, if necessary, to increase stability, the machines could rest on a tail that could fold or extend. On rough terrain, they morphed into quadrupeds, lengthening their upper extremities.

  “Should I do it again, or will you never disobey me again, Number Twelve?” the robot asked the little one in a colorless voice emerging from its hull,

  In response, the stiffened child continued to just look at the machine, but as soon as it put its cold manipulators on his hand again, the boy spoke as clearly as possible, although actually distorting words, “Evy time I do you say.”

  “Do you understand that you cannot go there, or should I hurt you again, Number Twelve?” the cyber-mechanical mentor once again clarified their mutual understanding.

  “I wan no pain,” a child whimpered still being terrified, “I not go there.”

  The kids, of course, couldn’t comprehend it with their minds, but such absolutely unemotional, faceless treatment, where they never expected the display of any leniency, sympathy or forgiveness, was explaining to them on the level of their instincts that the punishment was absolutely inevitable. They must always behave according to common sense and the orders of the robots were a part of it.

  A long series of days and nights passed by, and despite that it didn’t matter to anything on the planet, and no one could understand the essence of this phenomenon, the GPC-5 recorded that two years have elapsed since the children’s very first walk.

  Along with growing up, the children demanded more attention. Gone were the days when it was enough to feed them, conduct hygienic procedures, and put them to bed. Now, at least one of the robots constantly served them. Almost without stopping, it answered an infinite number of questions asked by the thirty children. The machines had the opportunity to work together only at night. They were finishing building the houses where the children had been moved when the youngest of them was five years old.

  Each of the one-story buildings occupied about two hundred square meters. The robots had assembled them from planks, girders, and poles of different sizes, along with the wood of large plants. To produce the materials, they’d made a two-handed saw from the hull of a decelerating rocket. For the saw teeth, a metal strip was processed on a laser lathe in the techno-compartment. They mined clay to make roofing tiles in a quarry several kilometers north of the colony and not far from the riverbank.

  In addition, ten meters east of the lander, they erected a tower fifteen meters high and placed the fuel tank of another rocket on its top. In this tank, a fuel pump could suck water from a small rivulet beyond the northern corn field. Water itself came here through clay pipes that connected to the pump, using other pipes made of insulation taken from already-used equipment. For example, from part of the thirty chambers that had created the young humans.

  From the outside, a pipeline surrounded a living zone, and the used water flowed down to the river through it. At first, the children occupied only two houses, but as they grew older, they moved into the rest.

  Four apple trees—still the only Earth trees on the new planet—stood before the entrance to the lander. If one were to draw a square on the ground with sides ten meters long, these trees would stand exactly in its corners. When the children reached the age of six, the educational process began. School lessons were held in the shade of the apple trees, where a board stood in front of stools and tables. A canopy made from part of the last parachute protected the class from rain. If necessary, the group moved to the former nursery, which had become too cramped for the grown children. After classes and lunch, the children usually went to the farm where they learned manual labor.

  Chapter 28

  A boy and girl, both ten years old, sent three cows into the corral. There, the children tied two of the cows to a pillar, and because of a drizzling rain, they drew the third one under a thatched roof. The children then took an earthenware vessel from a wooden stand and prepared it for milking.

  “Look,” said the boy. “Those two lambs are head butting; they are playing.”

  Indeed, on the other side of the cattle pen, near a fence assembled from planks horizontally attached to poles, two rams retreated a few steps back before loudly crashing into each other’s foreheads.

  “Yes,” the girl replied.

  “Animals can play,” the boy continued. “Yet, we cannot. We are people.”

  “We have a task and an algorithm for its implementation,” the girl agreed. “Milk these cows before dark and drain all the milk into this large jug. Animals cannot perform tasks in accordance with an algorithm. They can only play, and it is useless.”

  “Yes,” said the boy. “We are not doing anything useless.”

  They just milked the cow, and then the strengthening rain prevented them from starting the next task. The two of them headed toward the lander, as the young pioneers always did when unable to work because of the weather. This time all the colonists had gathered in the former nursery, too, the transparent roof of which made the room open to the light of the rainy day. After the cots had been dismantled, the place had become a workshop for the manufacturing of fabric and clothes.

  The eldest colonist, the former number one, Ama—a name he’d given himself by the age of seven—had come up with what to do in here. When the children had learned how to write letters on their extendable screens with a stylus, the robots had introduced them to the rule of forming a name. The first character of the name of the eldest boy must be “A.” The boy next in age should take the letter “B,” and so on. Each gender must follow this order separately. Also, the second or third character of each name must be “m” for males and “f” for females. Other letters could be chosen at will.

  “Let us now create names for our planet, the day and night luminaries, and for the things around us,” Ama proposed.

  The children, sitting on heaps of cotton and leather, began to think.

  “Perhaps we could name them in the same way as in the system of our ancesto
rs, but with the number two. For example, Sun-2?” Memi made the first suggestion.

  “No,” objected Lif. "We are the fifth expedition, so everything on this planet should have the number five, like our equipment.”

  “To name with digits is not correct. It will be repetition, not invention. Our teachers taught us that we should always try to be inventive,” Mafkona reminded her comrades, pronouncing the words distinctly and at regular intervals, as each of them did, who had mastered human speech while listening to the speech synthesizers of the robots.

  “Well, let us approach this differently,” Pamo supported Mafkona. “Our planet is near the star Rho, in the constellation of the Corona Borealis. Maybe we can make up the names using these facts?”

  Ama looked through the transparent hatch, where the rain had weakened from large drops to drizzling again. He invited his comrades to leave the compartment. One by one, the children left and headed for the canopy, while voicing the appellations that came to their minds. Not immediately that day, but during the week, having tormented the GPC-5, they agreed on all the names among themselves.

  The kids used their ancestors’ method. They took two ancient Greek words, Neo and Gaia, which respectively mean “new” and “Earth,” and combined them. As a result, their planet was given the name Neia.

  The day star remained almost under its astronomical name Rho for two reasons. First, no other expedition had been headed for a star with the same identifier—Rho—in its system. Secondly, in another ancient language—Egyptian, as the GPC-5 informed them—the word Ra was precisely a designation of the Sun. Thus, their sun also received a fused name—Ro.