Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  “I’ve got no idea. You, maybe? The prediction markets have you in the lead.”

  “The contest is still wide open,” she said. “If I do badly on the last round, it could be you, or maybe Reinette Luz.”

  “Reinette? Not Rakesh?”

  “Not him. All he does is food.”

  We finished the potatoes, then I decided to bring up the subject we’d been avoiding. “When I met you, I think we were falling in love.”

  “I noticed that too,” she said. “But you’ve got meds for that.”

  I did something brave then. “When this is over, are you . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want to get together?”

  “Will you allow yourself to love me?” she asked.

  “Only one of us gets to join Deimos,” I pointed out.

  “You are cruel,” she said. “Did you know that? Are you even capable of understanding? I love you already. I’m not all pumped full of chemicals to regulate me. I’ve been wrestling with this devil’s choice since I saw you. If I win, I get to join Deimos, help my family back home—and lose you. If you win, I’ll wind up in exile somewhere, or betray my family so I can stay in Africa, and I’ll still lose you.”

  “What if neither of us wins?”

  “Then we’re two bright people who’ve already lost our fondest hopes. I suppose we could be unhappy together.”

  “Do you think they planned this?”

  “Perhaps. I think the Community has goals of its own, which not even the members understand. A rock full of clever people who’ve cut themselves off from the rest of humanity may not be best for the members, but it’s good for Deimos.”

  I hoped someone was listening when she said that. “I’ll see you tonight,” I told her, and went back to my own room.

  THEY USED A MODEST meeting room in the hotel to announce the final competition. We had assigned seats in color-coded pairs—two red, two green, two blue, and two gold. I was in one of the green chairs, and Sofia sat to my left in the other. Piers Tyana was at the head of the table. Although the entire Community was watching, it felt more private.

  Tyana started off with a speech about how wonderful we all were and how the experience of the competition would enrich us no matter who won. Finally he got to the important part.

  “This final round will test your ability to work with other people. The Deimos Community values creativity and initiative, but it is very important that all our members are able to cooperate.”

  The eight of us were smart. The pairs in matching seats looked at each other.

  “As you may have guessed, we have paired you up for this assignment. The pairing is not random—Micromegas has analyzed which pairs have the strongest emotional reactions to each other. We’ve chosen the most difficult people for you to work with.”

  The bastards, I thought. Match me up with a girl who is in love with me. Maximize the distraction for both of us.

  “And now your task. Deimos is a wonderful place, the gem of the solar system, but no world is perfect. We want you to add something. Identify a need or a lack, and create something to fill it. You have one sol to complete it. Any questions before we start the clock?”

  Sofia spoke up before anyone else. “Are there any restrictions on what we can do?”

  He nodded, looking pleased. “Not many. You can’t use any space or matter currently being used for some other purpose, and you can have a maximum of ten kilowatts sustained load. Otherwise, you have priority on fabricators, robots, and material processing for the next twenty-four hours. Be aware of the time limit: unfinished projects are failures.”

  Nobody had anything else to ask. I could see the other pairs already starting to brainstorm. I set up a private link to Sofia.

  “You’re the artist,” I sent. “Pick something that will impress them.”

  Her eyes were flicking around like crazy as she interacted with Micromegas, so I waited until she sent me a reply. “I think I’ve got something. Let’s go someplace we can speak privately.”

  We wound up back in the workspace area with full sound damping on. “I’ve been thinking about Deimos ever since I got off the Cycler,” she said. “Have you looked at the people here?”

  “What about them?”

  She opened a window showing Rue Arouet. “If you look, you can tell the Community members apart from the visitors. Do you see it?”

  “You mean their pop-ups?”

  “No, I mean the way they look, physically. It’s not phenotypes—they’re strong on genetic diversity here—and it’s not just the gravity. Contract workers and travelers get plenty of microgravity experience, but they don’t look like members.”

  “The clothes,” I guessed.

  “No. Look. That man’s wearing disposable coveralls, but I can tell he’s a member. Those two women over there are in very stylish outfits, but they’re not from here. Probably Earth.”

  “I see what you mean,” I said after a moment. “But I can’t put my finger on what I’m seeing.”

  “Confidence,” she said. “They don’t hurry, they don’t flinch. Whatever they’re doing is the most interesting and important thing going on anywhere. They’re all perfectly self-assured.”

  I looked at the people and finally I saw what she meant. The members moved in straight lines at their own pace. Visitors and contractors flowed around the members, like wind around rocks.

  “It’s their moon—it’s their whole solar system,” she said. “The rest of us are just visitors and hired help.” The idea seemed to bother her, much more than it bothered me.

  “I still don’t see how that gives us a project,” I pointed out.

  “They look inward. Except for the lounge at the elevator terminal and the viewing area at the spaceport, there aren’t any windows on Deimos. I want to give them eyes on the universe.”

  “An observatory?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Well, that’s . . . pretty easy,” I said. “A mirror, some stabilizing gear, off-the-shelf software. They must have scopes already. IR to spot hostiles, targeting devices for the defense systems, probably some eyes on Mars and Luna.”

  “Yes, but that’s all technical, inside-the-walls stuff. I mean a place where people can go to see the stars.”

  “I like it. We can split up the job. You design a viewing area and interface. I’ll build us a telescope.”

  With twenty-two hours left, we got to work. She found a nonstructural volume of ice near the Rue Lagado and got permission from Micromegas to hollow it out. While she and some bots did that, I picked a ten-meter crater on the far side of Deimos and set to work transforming it.

  It would have been simplest to just build a parabolic mirror and put it on a mounting, but I guess a little of Sofia’s visual aesthetic had rubbed off on me, so I wanted something cooler. I graded the little crater as a simple spherical curve and lined it with vacuum-rated smart matter with an optical mirror surface. I put a high-quality camera on an arm and programmed the smart matter to form a parabolic mirror opposite the camera wherever it moved. The result was a silver pool that reshaped itself instead of moving around.

  There were some trade-offs: it could only look at things within about sixty degrees of the zenith, but since Deimos circles Mars once a sol, you could look at most of the sky if you picked your time. The only blind spots were around Mars’s celestial poles, and those aren’t very interesting.

  It sounds simple, but the actual work took a lot of time. I had to suit up and go supervise the bots because the job was so unlike their usual work. For instance: the first time they tried to grade the crater, they started on the outer edge and worked inward, which meant they screwed it all up as soon as they tried to crawl out again. I also had problems sticking the smart matter to the surface, until I finally just had them fuse the top ten centimeters into glass.

  About sixteen hours into the project I was trying to write code for the mirror and supervise the bots building the camera arm at the same t
ime, all in my sweaty suit with the capacity indicator blinking on the urine bag.

  “How are you doing?” I asked Sofia.

  “Have a look.” She sent me an image of the viewing space she’d created. It was fairly intimate—a dozen seats under a dome-shaped screen. The overall aesthetic was based on Mughal architecture, as a nod to Jai Singh’s observatory at Jaipur, but with what I now know are art deco elements echoing North American planetariums.

  “Can you come up here? There’s some stuff I need you to do,” I told her.

  About an hour later she came bounding across the surface toward me. She moved well in her suit, which was important.

  “What do you need?” she asked as she made a soft landing a meter away from me.

  “If you can take over the motion control coding, I can go fix that stupid actuator,” I told her.

  “Sure,” she said, and then she looked up. “Ahh . . .”

  “What?”

  “The sky,” she said. We were in Mars’s shadow right then, so we stood on a black surface looking out at the universe. The band of the Milky Way stretched across our vision, and the stars looked close enough to reach out and touch. We watched in silence for a couple of minutes.

  Eventually she gave a regretful sigh. “I guess we need to get back to work.”

  “Right, yeah.” I dosed up on more stimulants and tackled the actuator.

  What happened next looked just like one of those complicated failure chains you see in most space accidents. Sofia didn’t know that the camera arm wasn’t at its default position when she loaded her code. I had allowed my safety line to get looped over the arm. And my anchor piton was in a crumbly bit of regolith. I’d set it all up very carefully.

  So when I replaced the faulty actuator and connected the power, the arm immediately swung itself to the neutral position, with the camera at ninety degrees above the mirror. It snatched me off my feet and ripped the piton out of the ground in one smooth motion.

  I felt the twang as the line went taut as it slung me into space, then a couple of seconds of free fall. When I reached the end of the line, I felt a slight jerk as the piton snagged on the arm. For a moment I thought it would hold, but then it slipped away and I was off to outer space, no strings attached.

  “Wu Ying! Are you okay?” Sofia called over the link.

  “How fast am I going?”

  Pause. “Six meters per second.”

  Escape velocity. I was now a moon of Mars. I’d have to call for rescue, unless someone helped me. “Sofia! I’ll call this in myself! Finish the scope!” Then I waited.

  Twenty seconds later something hit me. It was Sofia, of course. She’d used the arm to make a boosted leap after me, trailing her own safety line. She grabbed me around the knees, then pulled herself up until she could grab my safety harness.

  “Clip on!” she said. I snapped onto her line and threw my arms around her for good measure. A second later we felt an almighty yank as the line hit maximum extension—and held. Both of us let out our breath.

  © 2013, Haylee Bolinger / ASU

  I didn’t let go of her. “We’re on direct link. Nobody can hear. How much money do you have?”

  “What? I don’t know. It’s all in buildings and infrastructure.”

  “Enough to fund a tech project? Ten, twenty megawatt-hours?”

  “Why are you asking me now?”

  The ground was rising up toward us. I’d never been so glad to fall. “My big idea. Starships! I can do it; I just need backing. Forget the competition, forget Deimos. Do you trust me?”

  “Will you love me?” she asked.

  “Yes!”

  A second later we smacked down on the surface, bounced, and finally came to rest. I held on to her until we stopped tumbling. I could see the local network icon again at the corner of my vision. “Hello, Micromegas?” I said.

  “Do you need help?” asked the AI.

  “No, we’re fine.” I took a breath and looked at Sofia through two faceplates. “We quit.”

  REINETTE WON, BUT HARDLY anyone noticed. We sold the drama rights to pay our way to Earth—hibernating in a slow freight payload. Your grandparents were ready to kill us both when we came down the elevator, until Sofia and I showed them what we’d been working on.

  That’s the whole story, really. You should sleep now. We’ve all got a big day tomorrow.

  Alexokokok/Shutterstock, Inc. & Jupeart/Shutterstock, Inc. (stone asteroids & city)

  STORY NOTES—James L. Cambias

  I started thinking about the implications of rapid prototyping via things like 3-D printing and more advanced forms of “matter fabricators” combined with the continuing advance of expert systems. I think that pairing will be a huge boost to all forms of creativity. We’re approaching the point where the barriers between the mind and physical reality are vanishing: we have only to imagine something and we can build it.

  Regarding the setting: Physics suggests that if humans ever build a civilization encompassing the solar system, the Martian moon Deimos is the natural hub for traffic. Stake your claim now!

  RESPONSE TO “PERIAPSIS”—Alex MacDonald

  Alex MacDonald, an economist in the Civil and Commercial Space Division at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, responds to “Periapsis” at hieroglyph.asu.edu/deimos.

  FORUM DISCUSSION—Longer-Than-Lifetime Projects

  Stewart Brand, Joel Garreau, and other Hieroglyph community members join James L. Cambias in a conversation about ambitious projects that take longer than a human lifetime to complete at hieroglyph.asu.edu/deimos.

  THE MAN WHO SOLD THE STARS

  Gregory Benford

  Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.

  —Epicurus

  2016

  Harold Mann idled at a corner and watched an enormous guy come out of one of the adult movie houses and stride over to his Harley.

  Harold was on his second job—at fifteen, using a fake ID—driving a cab on South Jefferson Street of St. Louis. Business late on a sweltering night was slow. The big bearded guy’s bike was under a light post next to a Honda Hawk. The man in black leather pants and a black T-shirt shouted at the whole street, “Who parked this turd next to my bike?”

  He then grabbed the Honda Hawk, grunted as he lifted it, and threw it all the way across the street. It hit another Japanese bike, a yellow Kawasaki. The clanging smashup echoed in the moist night.

  Some gasoline dripped from the Kawasaki and the man walked over, puffing on a brown Sherman’s cigarette, and—dropped it. The gasoline whomped, sending flames licking across the sidewalk. The biker glared at Harold and walked up to the cab window. He pulled out a big Bowie knife, grinning. Harold looked straight ahead and heard the tapping on the window.

  “What ya think a dat?” He slurred the words and spat on the blacktop.

  Harold rolled down the window and looked into the scowling sweaty face. “I don’t think you threw that rice burner hard enough.”

  Glowering: “Yeah?”

  “Man’s got to throw long in this life.”

  The biker walked away laughing. The bikes burned. Harold finished his duty time, drove to the cab station, and quit. Maybe not my best line of work, he thought.

  Five months later he had turned sixteen and had another fake ID saying he was twenty-one. He pitched a smartware app to a start-up company in St. Louis, by walking in cold and asking to see the vice president. The app assisted robots with finding their footing and orientation while working in Low Earth Orbit. They could then assemble parts for the first orbital hotel.

  The key to the app was using the new composite carbon girders with holes punched every half meter. Robots could count on having a dual-pivot purchase no more than fifty centimeters away, to torque or support a mechanical advantage. This increased their mobility and mass-carrying capacity.

  The vice president was intrigued. While his engineers looked over the app he asked Harold for his credentials. He
gave them a certificate saying he had graduated from MIT with a degree in astronautics, remarking that it was the same program in which Buzz Aldrin had gotten his Ph.D. The e-certificate was authentic, though he had artfully hacked it to omit the detail that he had done the classes entirely online in three years without ever being in Boston.

  The start-up bought his app and he got a job. Within two years he was their CEO, and they issued an initial public offering. His share was nearly a million, since he had worked mostly for stock options.

  Driving home that night, he saw the same biker guy coming out of a bar. Harold pulled over and bought the guy a drink, never saying why.

  HE RECALLED HIS FIRST job as he watched the vids from the latest big satellite telescope. The deep resolution views were striking, and they brought back a moment when he was ten years old.

  He had rented beach chairs to tourists down at Orange Beach, Alabama. All day long he let nobody get past him without a friendly, insistent, “A chair to make you more comfortable? The sand’s hot. Just five bucks for the day.”

  The usual brush-off he eased by with, “Keeps you away from the sand flies, sir”—and that usually did the trick, especially if he had a woman with him. She would usually wrinkle her nose and badger the man into it.

  Decent money, and he was only ten. His father thought it was good training and Harold did, too—the Great Recession was not yet in the rearview mirror. The tourists officially had the chairs till sundown, but many stayed with their beer and got fried oysters from the stand down the way. He stayed late, reading used paperback science fiction novels under the fluorescents of the greasy burger stand. He was an addict; science fiction sold the sizzle of the science steak. Even when he got tired he remembered to be polite, smiling and using the yes sir a lot—and so he discovered tipping.

  Some just left the chairs strewn around, so he had to drag them back, two in each hand, to the shed. He had just finished stacking chairs and was turning to plod down to the bus stop to ride home when he turned toward the surf and saw them.

  Saw them truly, for the first time. The whole grand sprawl of jewels across the blue-black carpet, hovering above the salty tang of gulf waters like a commandment. The Milky Way spanned the sky, vanishing into the horizon, glows shimmering of emerald, ruby, and hard diamond whites.