by Brian Smith
2066: Mindy’s Cure is published by the medical school of Chryse Planitia University on Mars. It is a sequence of nanotechnology and gene-repair therapies that eradicates cancer in all its forms. Named in honor of the memory of Melinda Crandall, Mindy’s Cure represents the achievement of one of the Crandall Foundation’s primary goals, and the final solution to one of the overarching problems affecting mankind’s off-Earth expansion and colonization.
The Crandall Academy is established on Mars as a private, for-profit professional trade school to train commercial-torchship engineering and deck officers. Within a decade, the Crandall Academy is recognized as the solar system’s gold standard for such training.
Due to chronic shortages of available human labor offplanet, advances in robotics have resulted in the development and large-scale production of “synthetics,” or “synths,” lifelike robots programmed to emulate certain human behaviors and perform a wide variety of tasks.
2070: Second-generation fusion torch drives result in operating efficiencies and accelerations suitable to opening the remainder of the solar system to human exploration and colonization.
2076: The United States of America celebrates its tricentennial. The nation has entered a second golden age driven by fusion technology and space ventures. On Earth, the nation has fully revitalized its infrastructure. Large-scale seawater desalination and pipeline projects are transforming large tracts of the Southwest desert into a green oasis, generating hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of additional agricultural and living space.
By this year, open-ocean mariculture experiments in the South Pacific are proving successful and giving rise to a dramatic increase in mariculture farming. Fusion power has given mankind an unlimited ability to produce fresh water, farmland, and foodstuffs to support the global population.
2078:The Crandall Foundation spearheads the design and construction of the Galileo Optical Imager (GOI), the largest and most sensitive multispectrum interferometry telescope ever conceived. Once completed in Neptune’s Lagrange-2 (L2) point, it is expected to be capable of identifying life-bearing, potentially habitable exoplanets out to distances of 120 light-years.
2085: The Crandall Foundation puts out a request for proposal (RFP) for a torchship design capable of making an interstellar round trip from the solar system to Alpha Centauri. This RFP comes in the form of a competition, with prize money and sponsorship for the party submitting the most viable design by 2100.
2090: One decade before the turn of the twenty-second century, mankind has established a permanent presence in every orbit from Venus to Neptune. The population of Luna exceeds 1.5 million, and of Mars over 6.5 million, with immigration continuing unabated. Several hundreds of thousands more human beings occupy various space habitats and research stations located throughout the solar system. A vibrant systemwide trade has emerged, with commercial torchships plying the routes between planets, stations, moons, and habitats. Space tourism and recreational activities are commonplace. Earth’s population stands at 11 billion, but mankind’s fusion-powered civilization is estimated to be capable of supporting more than twice that number.
Part I
OURANIA
2089–2091
Chapter 1
August 2089 (Terran Calendar)
Titan
Saturn’s sixth moon was known to be the garden spot of the Saturnian system long before mankind’s diaspora into the solar system began. When the first torchships finally arrived, Titan was the immediate destination of choice. It was the best real estate in the outer solar system for establishing ground-based stations and habitats, coupled with the added lure of longstanding scientific curiosity. Titan’s thick atmosphere and interesting chemistry made it a prime candidate for the presence of extraterrestrial life, even if only on the microbial level. No such life was discovered, but scientists continued to search. Yet for all its advantages, Titan was still far enough from the inner system to be sparsely inhabited. There was only one major habitat and spaceport under the direct control of Earth: Chusuk Station. It was a joint venture under the combined flags of the TOA and the CFR, administered by the Mars-based Crandall Foundation. Chusuk wasn’t the only station on Titan, but it was the largest and most heavily populated, averaging anywhere from three to five thousand inhabitants at any given time. The population of Titan’s other stations and habitants rarely topped a tenth of that. Almost all manned settlements were located under domes on the Saturn side of the tidally locked moon. The view of Saturn was a major attraction, and there was often enough dim light to see by. Titan’s atmosphere was almost twice as dense as Earth’s, with a surface pressure forty percent over the sea-level pressure on Earth. It was composed mostly of nitrogen, with three percent methane and traces of hydrogen and other hydrocarbons. The breakdown of methane in the upper reaches of the atmosphere resulted in the moon’s famous orange smog.
Other than Earth, Titan was the only celestial body in the solar system where a human could walk the surface without a pressurized exosuit. The temperatures were a little chilly, averaging –180 degrees Celsius, but with a breath mask and a heated bodysuit, it was survivable. In fact, the higher atmospheric pressure combined with a gravity only fourteen percent of Earth’s caused people to compare standing on Titan’s surface to standing on the bottom of a swimming pool on Earth. Walking on Titan’s surface was a common “bucket list” item for tourists, more of whom journeyed to the outer system every year. For the business minded, Titan was a great port for outer-system scientists, prospectors, and anyone else eager to take advantage of its location and environment. It was also a prime haven for activities that investors wanted to shield from the prying eyes of competitors or national governments. Titan’s distance from the inner system, and its relative isolation, equated to the lowest crime rate in the solar system—so close to zero that people simply claimed there was no crime. It was too far from anywhere else to be a profitable haven for claim jumpers, thieves, or pirates, and industrial espionage was very difficult to conduct in secret facilities that competitors were oblivious to. Even the hard-bitten miners prospecting Saturn’s rings and numerous moons seldom misbehaved in the confines of Chusuk Station—frontier justice administered by hard-nosed corporate-security types was a painful deterrent.
The Janus Industries facility on Titan wasn’t technically a secret—most locals had at least heard of it, and the station’s coordinates were charted. Janus Station even had its own landing field, although it was listed as “private” and not open to commercial traffic except in the event of an emergency. An emergency had happened only once, and the rumor was that the passengers and crew of the stricken vessel were kept in isolation until being flown out to Chusuk Station by Janus Industries security contractors. Their disabled vessel wasn’t repaired at Janus Field; it was disassembled, crated up, and shipped overland to Chusuk at the owner’s expense. The underlying message was clear enough, and modern corporations couldn’t be too careful—the technology industry in the solar system was sometimes literally cutthroat, and corporate espionage was a hazardous but lucrative career field unto itself. Janus Station was in a very remote spot, sequestered in the northeastern region of the Buzzell Planitia, on the “dark” side of Titan facing away from Saturn. The consensus among those who knew about it was that there was some sort of cutting-edge research and development going on there, and clearly it was jealously guarded.
That assumption was generally correct. Janus Station consisted mostly of a power station linked to a small facility manned by a few dozen researchers and technicians, along with a no-nonsense corporate-security team. The landing field wasn’t much more than a tarmac and a large receiving dock. The most valuable part of the complex was a largely automated manufacturing facility, which boasted the most advanced computer-engineering capabilities ever built—capabilities that very few people even knew existed. The man responsible for the construction of Janus Station intended to keep it that way.
***
Severa
l kilometers away from Janus Station, an industrial-grade rover trundled along on broad, tanklike treads. The vehicle was about forty meters long, fifteen wide, and roughly twenty high. It was a standard modular-based design in common use throughout the solar system and could be equipped for various tasks, with a crew cab large enough to support a half dozen people for a week. This rover was fitted out for payload hauling; with any visible light to see by, one could have seen the cargo clamped down to the specially designed bed: a dark, cylindrical mass, flat on the bottom end and domed on the top, approximately thirty meters long and ten wide. It was a computer core, fabricated onsite in the Janus Station plant. The rover was following a premapped path, tracking alongside an underground superconducting-cable bundle that had been laid down and buried the week before.
The mood inside the rover’s cab was normally one of boredom, tempered by caution against the sort of complacency that might cause damage to the cargo. Today it was different—in addition to the standard crew of four technicians that handled each core placement, the station administrator was on board along with her boss, who was making a rare visit all the way from the inner system.
Janus Station’s administrator and project lead was Dr. Shu Tian, a Mars-born alumnus of Chryse Planitia University. She knew her boss as Kevin MacDonald, the CEO of Janus Industries. MacDonald wasn’t his real name, but, then again, Janus Industries itself was an elaborate front. Off-Earth corporate ventures in the twenty-first century had a unique geopolitical aspect to them, due to the laws of the various national flags under which they existed and the requirements of the lunar and Martian treaties of 2042.
MacDonald’s real name was William Campbell; he was founder and chairman of Aberdeen Astronautics, one of the three largest shipbuilding conglomerates based on Mars. Aberdeen specialized in the construction of commercial-use fusion torchships. That wasn’t all: Campbell was also one of the five members of the board of trustees of the Crandall Foundation, which made him rather well known throughout the solar system, if not an outright celebrity. Like all the Crandall Foundation trustees, Campbell was a self-made man, tremendously wealthy, and thoroughly devoted to the principles and mission of the foundation. Aberdeen Astronautics was U.K. flagged, meaning that its facilities were in United Kingdom territory (on Mars) and subject to British regulatory statutes, as well as to those of the Trans-Oceanic Alliance to which Britain belonged. Janus Industries, on the other hand, was an independent: it fell under no national jurisdiction, and its only regulatory requirements were those imposed by the lunar and Martian treaties.
That gave rise to the logical question, why didn’t every corporation “go independent” and remove itself from the sticky burdens of government regulation and taxation? In a word, cost. Going independent meant staking a claim to unclaimed real estate and then building all the required infrastructure from the ground up. For anything off-Earth, that meant starting with power plants and then expanding on that base. It was possible to do, and many large corporations did it, but it was prohibitively expensive for most—far less economical than paying the taxes and having ready access to standing communities, along with goods and services already established. Off-Earth, nothing was free except unclaimed real estate itself. There was no free air, water, fuel, or anything else—it all had to be mined or made; transported; and bought and sold. Of course, staking out real estate and building infrastructure was only half the battle—after it was built it had to be maintained, supplied, and defended from bad actors short on ethics and long on criminal intent. The solar system was a vast frontier, more so than human minds could really conceptualize. Those engaging in corporatocracy had to make their own security arrangements—an added expense.
In addition, something of a stigma was attached to corporations that went independent. The underlying assumption was that independents were engaged in the unethical exploitation of people or resources, if not in outright malfeasance. Signing on with an independent could be risky for new hires: people could find themselves essentially trapped once they shipped out to some isolated station or habitat, living in the twenty-first-century equivalent of a “company town,” with their lifestyle, property allowances, and services dependent on the whims and good graces of management. Some independent corporations were well known and aboveboard, ethical, even generous in their treatment of employees; others less so. Shepherding a good reputation as an independent was arduous—a constant public-affairs effort easily sabotaged by disgruntled ex-employees or business competitors. Then, when all was said and done, nation-states still found ingenious ways to tax the finished product anyway, most often in the form of import tariffs. Consequently, most corporations found it easier to function by not going independent, or by going semi-independent, which was a compromise solution that included submitting to regular inspections to ensure that human beings weren’t being trafficked, illegally indentured, or suffering other violations of basic human rights.
A large part of Aberdeen Astronautics’s success in the torchship-construction industry stemmed from cutting-edge technological designs. Campbell had never been afraid to spend money to make money; he hired the best engineers and the best researchers and was always looking for the next incremental advantage that would enable Aberdeen-built torchships to edge out the competition. The problem, as he saw it from his perspective as a Crandall Foundation trustee, was this: current torchship technology was good enough to give mankind access to the solar system, but it wasn’t going to cut it for the next big paradigm change: the first interstellar trip to a nearby star. The only real candidate right now was the Alpha Centauri binary pair, a journey of 4.3 light-years. In theory the goal was achievable with current technology, but it would require an advanced, long-range design more complex than any in existence. A roundtrip journey would take most of the crew’s adult life span, making it an ambitious idea to begin with. Using a torchship to bridge even the shortest interstellar gap was far more daunting than, say, Columbus sailing for the New World in a single-deck carrack like the Santa Maria. What they needed to do, Campbell felt, was give their future Columbus a technological jump-start—like putting him in a nineteenth-century tea clipper at the very least. The Crandall Foundation had put out the RFP in 2085, challenging the “thinkers and tinkerers” of the solar system—everyone from the mad innovators in their basement labs to the captains of industry—to come up with a design that could make the trip. There was a substantial amount of prize money involved, along with the Crandall Foundation’s fund-matching programs to aid in building a viable design, and, not least, the chance to be immortalized in history. As a staunch advocate of the Crandall Foundation’s mission, Bill Campbell was less interested in being the winner himself than in seeing it all happen. Winning would just be the icing on the cake.
To design the torchship asked for in the RFP, Campbell saw the need for an AI-assisted design process. Not just any AI, but one so advanced, so capable, that it could outthink humans and come up with ideas that were beyond the abilities of the best engineers mankind had to offer. He believed that such an AI computer system could be designed and built, but after the AI debacle in the 2020s which nearly caused a full-scale nuclear war on Earth, R&D on such systems was illegal in any flagged territory. However, there was nothing in the lunar and Martian treaties specifically prohibiting advanced quantum-supercomputer R&D, and even if there had been, anyone would be hard pressed to locate and identify such an effort outside of a national territory—especially somewhere like the remote wilderness on the back side of Titan.
Janus Industries was the result.
Campbell originally hired an outside proxy to set up the company and oversee the construction of Janus Station and its production facilities, all without fully divulging what the project would entail. Once the infrastructure was built, the proxy’s contract was paid off. “Kevin MacDonald,” a native Marsman with no national citizenship, then appeared on the scene to take over as CEO of the new independent. He brought in Dr. Shu and her team to begin the task o
f designing and building a multinode quantum computer with integrated growth-and-learning algorithms. It was not their goal to produce any sort of self-aware AI, merely a computer so advanced as to be the next best thing. Scientists and philosophers still argued over whether a “living computer” was even possible, but the fact remained that the design they were building on Titan far exceeded what was legally allowed in other places—their computer’s processing and data-storage capacities would exceed those of a human brain not just by multiples, but by orders of magnitude. This necessitated setting up Janus as an independent corporation, unassociated with Aberdeen Astronautics, William Campbell, or any entity having national ties of any sort. Shu had signed on to the project eagerly with a full understanding of the company’s true goal: a machine that could design the first interstellar-capable torchship.
The rover reached its destination and trundled to a halt. Although it was dark outside, infrared cameras and augmented-reality (AR) overlays rendered a visual picture of the site. This would be the final core placement before bringing the supercomputer online. Once it was up and operating, it would be “fed” just about the sum total of human knowledge, particularly the science-and-engineering side of things. When it had collated that data and analyzed it, they’d task it with designing the torchship Campbell wanted.
Outside the rover, a large robotic miner (which looked like a monstrously overgrown post-hole digger) had finished the task of excavating the cylindrical pit into which the core would be inserted. MacDonald, né Campbell, watched the monitors with interest as a ramp lowered from the back of the rover’s bed and several robotic assistants on treads began the task of unclamping the core and moving it into place.
