The December Protocol

by Devin Hanson

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Partial transcript of a lecture given by Dr. Annette Everard at the Berkeley College of Sciences, January 8th, 2112.

  “A human female is born with roughly two million eggs. Every month of life prior to puberty, eleven thousand, give or take, of those eggs die off. By the time a woman reaches puberty, the count is reduced to something between three and four hundred thousand eggs. After puberty, the natural processes of the body eliminate another thousand eggs every month until the supply is gone and menopause begins. It is the post-puberty eggs that we use in the Helix Rebuild.

  “Interestingly, the normal degradation of the woman’s egg count halts once the Helix Rebuild treatments start. If a young woman starts her treatments upon the first ovulation, she can expect to live a healthy life free of tumors, cancer, autoimmune diseases, et cetera, for another thirty thousand years.”

  Getting permits was amazingly simple on Mars, Marcus thought to himself. All anyone really seemed to care about was where the water was coming from. When he spoke of his intention to start a distillery, the official response had been reserved excitement.

  Marcus had the water. He had done that part of the calculations over and over again. How much water was needed to grow the crops. How much water was needed to break down the starches. How much water was needed to ferment the sugars.

  The missing variables in the equation were the return end. How many credits could he make per bottle of vodka? How much water would be lost per bottle produced? Would he turn a profit? More importantly, would he return enough of a profit to afford the Womack treatments?

  Once he started the treatments, he couldn’t miss a single one. The human body was capable of amazing regenerative power, and the Womack process unlocked that potential. Failure to provide the fuel to keep the regenerative cycle going led the body to scavenge from itself. Once he started, only monthly treatments would keep his body from consuming itself.

  Marcus had been a man of means on Earth. His parents had died early, leaving him a fortune in inherited property and valuables. If the Womack Process had been legal on Earth, he easily could have afforded the treatments there.

  His cancer diagnosis had changed everything. He’d had stage three lung cancer by the time the doctors discovered it. Treatment on Earth was impossible. He had to go off-planet to find a cure. He could have gone to Venus, where the Matriarchs had continued their research into the secrets of genetics and cell manipulation that had been outlawed on Earth. That proposition was uncertain of success. The Matriarchs were usually unwilling to accept medical pilgrims, as their society had no room for those not part of the existing hierarchy.

  That left Mars and the Womack Process. If he got the treatment to cure his cancer, he would never be able to return to Earth, as the round trip was longer than a month, and he would die before he was able to get the treatment again.

  So he had put all of his worldly wealth into buying a ticket to Mars and bringing with him as much water as he could possibly afford.

  Marcus thumbed the fingerprint scanner on the door and felt a surge of excitement when it beeped in acceptance and the portal irised open. He stepped into the small chamber that was revealed and watched the portal screw shut behind him. His ears popped as machinery cycled the air in the chamber, then the inner portal irised open.

  Humidity hit him with almost palpable force and his eyes scrunched tight against the blaze of light. The general Martian living environments didn’t use particularly bright lights, and the sudden exposure to the brilliant growlights in the room beyond stabbed at his eyes.

  Part of what made his eyes hurt was the brilliant fuchsia hue of the grow lights. Back on Earth, he had joked that walking into the female section of a department store was physically painful due to the sheer quantity of pink on display. This was similar, only more so. The pink drove nails into his eyes. Gradually, his eyes grew accustomed to the bright light and he was able to look around the room without flinching.

  The room was Vastitas Cluster’s hydroponic farm. Or rather, it was just one of the rooms dedicated to growing the spices that went into flavoring the food. This room seemed to be dedicated to growing pepper plants. Vaguely, Marcus remembered reading somewhere that fruiting plants needed the high-spectrum fuchsia lighting. Row after row of plants were laid out in various stages of maturity. One of the plants nearest him was heavy with golden orange habanero peppers; another was thick with still-maturing cayenne.

  Marcus walked along the perimeter of the room, taking in the machinery. To his surprise, it was remarkably mundane. There were hydroponic farms on Earth that had much more sophisticated systems. Each pepper plant was in its own bucket of expanded clay pebbles, with a water line running to it and a return pipe attached beneath. He recognized the growing method: two or three times a day, the buckets would be flushed with nutrient-laden water. In between cycles, the roots were allowed to breathe and air out to prevent them from rotting.

  It might be a simple method, but the results were undeniable. The plants were some of the healthiest he had ever seen.

  As Marcus walked, he saw no humans. The plants were being tended by automated systems. At one point, he saw a harvester robot, a crab-like machine with disturbingly articulated grippers that moved slowly along a row, clipping free brilliantly-colored ripe peppers.

  Further down the rows, he found a substantial piece of machinery that extended up through the ceiling. Following the piping with his eyes, Marcus figured out that a blower pushed air up and louvers redistributed it around the room. Putting his hand up in front of one of the louvers, he found the air return was frigid cold and felt dry against his skin. The air must be going through a heat exchanger at the surface and precipitating the moisture out of the air. It made sense. Without a system to dehumidify the grow rooms, the condensate would be running down the walls and rotting the plants.

  “You must be Marcus Truman.”

  Marcus pulled his eyes away from the ductwork and found a woman approaching him. She had the pale skin and pink eyes of a wujin. Her white hair was pulled up in a loose knot on top of her head. Unlike every woman he had met since arriving at Mars, this woman was shorter than he was.

  Marcus held out his hand, trying not to stare. It was the first wujin he had met close up. “Are you Dr. Bannister? I was instructed to come here and meet with her.”

  “I am. But please, call me Andrea. You’re recently arrived on Mars?” She shook his hand, her fingers rough with calluses.

  “Thank you. Is it obvious?”

  “You’re still tan,” Andrea smiled. “It’s a subtle thing, but different from the sun beds we use on Mars to keep healthy. I’m told you’re here to purchase produce shares?”

  “I’ll be honest,” Marcus admitted, “I only partially understood why I was sent here. I was hoping for a better explanation.”

  “Of course. You’re not from here.”

  “Sorry. I know you’re probably busy…”

  “Not at all. The machines do most of the work around here anyway. Why don’t we start with what you want to grow?”

  “Potatoes,” he said then hesitated. “Actually, potatoes are just what I figured would be best. Things are so different here than what we think on Earth.”

  “Potatoes.” Dr. Bannister nodded. “You want to start a distillery?”

  Marcus nodded, a little put out at how fast she had guessed.

  “Potatoes use a lot of water,” she said pointedly.

  “I have water,” Marcus assured her. “I know potatoes aren’t the most efficient way to produce alcohol, but they seemed the most foolproof.”

  “You’re not wrong. Corn and grains are ideal on Earth because the direct sunlight makes them grow quickly. In a hydroponic environment, potatoes are far more productive. Other potential crops, like sugar beet or sugarcane take even longer to grow.”

  “I thought as much. Even on Earth, hydroponics don’t attempt to grow those.”

  “Oh, don’
t get me wrong,” she said with a laugh, “we could grow them. The issue is time. Most of the crops grown here are very productive. With sugarcane, you’d get one harvest every six months. Potatoes, you get one every six weeks. While you might get more alcohol out of an equal weight of sugarcane, you will get more alcohol per square foot with potatoes.”

  “I’m guessing the same thing goes for grain?”

  “You got it. We do grow small grain crops every once in a while. People with the credits to pay for it enjoy bread, but not enough people are that wealthy here in Vastitas to make it a regular crop.”

  “I’ve relieved to hear that. If it’s something we can arrange, I would also like to grow a small barley crop for their enzymes.”

  “If you’ve got water, I’m sure we can come to an arrangement. Why don’t I show you around the place? We can discuss crop sizes and water requirements.”

  “I would like that. I do have a question, though, about water. Water is expensive, at a hundred credits a gallon. But I ate a bowl of soup earlier that had to have had at least a cup of water in it, yet I was only charged a few credits. I don’t understand.”

  Dr. Bannister chuckled. “You aren’t the first to wonder about that. The answer is that the cluster is a closed system. There is enough water contained within the system for the existing life. New water added to the system is worth a hundred credits per gallon, but water already within the system can be extracted from the air or drawn from reservoirs for next to nothing. When you propose to grow a crop of potatoes, the water they bind up has to come from somewhere. In a closed system, unregulated plant growth can actually be quite dangerous.

  “On a small scale, imagine a single person living in a pod. He has ten gallons of water for his use. Since he can recycle the water endlessly, that is more than enough. But if he then grows a crop of potato plants, the plants quickly take up that ten gallons of water and bind it into their leaves, stems and roots. Suddenly the man no longer has any water to drink and he dies.

  “In the cluster, we are dealing with the same principle, just on a much larger scale. While it is true that your crop of potatoes would only make the smallest dent in the overall water volume, balance must be maintained. However, once you pay the water price, you can grow the same amount of potatoes indefinitely as the water is now inside the system.”

  “Who keeps track of it all? That seems like an awfully complex thing to remember who has permission to use how much water.”

  Dr. Bannister shrugged. “The cluster’s government keeps track of it. The actual process, once we have decided what crops you want grown, is that I send in a request to grow, for example, two tons of potatoes, and attach my calculations for the water deficit. Then you hand over the required water to the Water Management Bureau, and they make a new entry: Marcus Truman, eight hundred gallons of water. Your water will get filtered to make sure there aren’t any pathogens from Earth in it, then dumped into the cluster’s cisterns.”

  “Then I process the potatoes and wind up with a quantity of alcohol, at which point the water is freed back into the system.”

  “And the process starts all over again. Technically minus the volume of water within the alcohol, but unless you export to other clusters, that doesn’t matter, since the water remains within the system.”

  “I suppose you need to verify that the potatoes are completely used up before you can start a new crop for me?”

  “I just need a written notification that your processing is complete. In practice, there’s enough free water in the system that it won’t matter, but the Water Management Bureau likes to charge fines if it discovers you’ve been hoarding water.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Marcus asked, “is why alcohol is so expensive here and imported from Earth? You’d think someone would have started a distilling business before me.”

  “There are distilleries, just not in Vastitas. Remember, each cluster is a closed system. To export to another cluster a gallon of alcohol at twenty percent alcohol by volume, that’s eighty credits in water alone, without counting the cost of manufacture and profit. Alcohol brewed on Mars is too expensive to be consumed casually outside the cluster where it was produced. And since it’s a product that caters to the financial elite, they prefer to go the extra mile and drink imports from Earth.”

  “That sounds like personal experience talking,” Marcus smiled.

  “I do well by myself,” Dr. Bannister returned the smile. “And I do like a drink now and then. That said, I think you’ll find distilling to be a rewarding business. There hasn’t been anyone in Vastitas yet with the extra water and interest to start up a distillery.”

  “Is it lack of credits, or lack of water that prevents people from distilling?”

  “It’s lack of water,” she clarified. “All the credits on Mars won’t get you a plant grown if you don’t have the water to do it. The ice miners at the poles generate the majority of Mars’ water supply, but they sell almost entirely to the cluster governments. In order to store up enough water, someone would have to buy water shares, finance a mining expedition, or go and mine it himself.”

  “I suppose that makes sense. In regards to setting up the crops, I imagine you have a fee you charge.”

  “I do have to make a living,” she agreed. “But if you have enough water to start a brewery, I don’t think you’ll find it burdensome. There is an initial set up fee, and after that, I charge by weight of produce delivered.”

  “That sounds reasonable.”

  “Most find it so. And here we are.” Dr. Bannister stopped outside another iris doorway and unlocked it with a swipe of a finger, and they walked through into a new grow area. Unlike the hydroponic setup of the previous room, the new room had a soil floor.

  “I didn’t know there was soil on Mars,” Marcus said.

  “There’s not. But what is soil, except for broken down biological matter? We keep all the non-edible plant matter and compost it with nitrogen byproducts. A bit of pulverized Martian rock to provide trace elements and the result is a garden bed like you see before you.”

  “It must have taken a long time to build up this much soil. How deep does it go?”

  “Ten inches, or thereabouts. It didn’t take me as much time as you might think. Barely fifty years.”

  “Your predecessor started it?”

  “What? No, I commissioned the cavern to be cut out when Vastitas was dug.”

  “But… I thought…”

  “Oh.” Dr. Bannister laughed to herself and shook her head. “I forget that you’re from Earth. How old do you think I look?”

  Marcus took in the doctor’s white hair, her incongruously young face beneath, and what little he knew of the Womack Process. “Forty?”

  “Hmph. Well, I suppose I should take that as a compliment. I’m nearly two hundred years old, Marcus. Don’t look at me like that. I’m hardly the oldest person alive.”

  “Sorry.” Marcus turned his gaze to the cavern. “There are a lot of things to learn on Mars. I’m surprised you don’t have anything growing in here.”

  “This is my grain room. It’s fallow now and is ready for a new crop: your potatoes.”

  Marcus looked out over the cavern. There were widely spaced lamps illuminating the space, but there was also a grid hanging from the ceiling supporting dormant lighting fixtures. He tried to imagine the ground covered with potato plants, their roots heavy with tubers. How many tons of potatoes could be grown in this room in six weeks?

  He tried to work the calculations, but didn’t have any idea where to start. He had one large still that had a thousand-gallon capacity. How many potatoes could he use before he had to buy more stills? Dr. Bannister said it would take six weeks to grow a crop of potatoes. If he staggered the production so he got one load of potatoes a week, he’d have to divide his water into six parts.

  As if she was following the thought process inside Marcus’ head, Dr. Bannister asked, “How much water do you have?”

  “I fi
lled one large shipping container with it. Twenty thousand gallons of water.”

  Dr. Bannister raised one pale eyebrow. “That’s…” her eyes slotted to the side as she did the mental math. “Eighty tons? Plus a few. That must have been expensive to get into orbit.”

  “All of my wealth,” Marcus admitted.

  “You must have been quite wealthy on Earth, then.”

  Marcus nodded. This wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. “My parents were,” he answered shortly. “I simply kept their investments going.”

  “Well.” Dr. Bannister nodded to herself. “Okay. That’s far more water than I can use here. Have you deposited your water with the Bureau?”

  Marcus shook his head.

  “When we’re done here, you might want to look into that. The safest place for water is in the cisterns. Nobody can steal it from there. Onto more interesting matters!” She rubbed her hands. “I presume you brought seeds?”

  “I did. Bringing whole potatoes to Mars would have been a waste of weight.”

  “And it would be questionable if they would even germinate after sitting in storage for a few days. What variety did you bring?”

  “I brought several, as I wasn’t sure which would grow best here.”

  Dr. Bannister nodded approvingly. “That was wise. I can grow most things, but you never know if a variety will thrive on Mars. Variations in soil chemistry, water quality, lighting, et cetera, all can make a plant grow explosively or shrivel up. We’ll plant some of each variety and determine the most successful after harvest.

  “You know…” she smiled at Marcus, calculation in her eyes. “Regarding the extra water, it wouldn’t hurt to invest it with me. There are crops that are grown rarely, if ever, because of the water cost. Do you have any idea how much fresh fruit is worth on Mars? I’m talking apples, Marcus. Oranges, even. Your distillery plan is a good one; you should follow through with that. But consider my offer. We could split the return. It would be a long-term investment as fruit trees take years to start producing, but the credits it would bring could out-strip your distillery.”