Containment

by Christian Cantrell

  "Yun tells me that you'll be ready to go home soon."

  I HOPE SO.

  "So do I. Have you had any trouble with the BCI?"

  A LITTLE AT FIRST, BUT NOT ANYMORE.

  "Good. That's an extremely rare talent you have."

  ALL IT TAKES IS A LIFETIME OF PRACTICE.

  Priyanka smiled. He glanced down at his notes, then refolded the paper. Arik could tell that Priyanka was ready to transition from pleasantries to the actual purpose of his visit.

  "Arik, before you can go home, I need to ask you some questions."

  OK.

  "Do you remember anything about the accident?"

  NO.

  "What's the last thing you do remember?"

  MY MEMORY ISN'T LINEAR. IT'S MORE LIKE AN APPLE WITH WORM HOLES IN IT.

  "Interesting. In that case, why don't you tell me what you don't remember?"

  I DON'T REMEMBER MY ENVIRONMENT SUIT MALFUNCTIONING. AND I DON'T REMEMBER WHY I WAS OUTSIDE.

  "But you remember going outside?"

  PARTIALLY.

  "Do you remember ever being outside before?"

  NO, BUT I BELIEVE I HAVE BEEN OUTSIDE MANY TIMES.

  "Why?"

  BECAUSE I DON'T REMEMBER FEELING NERVOUS.

  "Has anyone told you what you were doing outside?"

  YES.

  "What?"

  I WAS DISPOSING OF AN EXPERIMENT.

  "What was the experiment?"

  I DON'T REMEMBER. I KNOW IT WAS RELATED TO MY INVESTIGATION INTO THE FEASIBILITY OF TERRAFORMING VENUS.

  "Do you believe that terraforming Venus is possible?"

  IT'S PROBABLY POSSIBLE, BUT NOT PRACTICAL.

  "Explain that, please."

  IT'S THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE TO REPLACE THE EXISTING VENUSIAN ATMOSPHERE WITH ONE THAT WOULD SUPPORT LIFE GIVEN THE PROPER EQUIPMENT AND ENOUGH TIME, BUT THERE'S CURRENTLY NO KNOWN PRACTICAL TECHNIQUE FOR DOING SO.

  "But at one time you must have believed it was practical."

  I DON'T REMEMBER. I CAN ONLY ASSUME I BELIEVED IT WAS WORTH INVESTIGATING.

  "Why don't you believe that it's practical anymore?"

  I READ THE RESULTS OF MY EXPERIMENTS.

  "What do they indicate?"

  GROWING GENETICALLY MODIFIED FLORA IN INDIGENOUS SOIL IS CURRENTLY THE ONLY PRACTICAL TECHNIQUE FOR TERRAFORMING VENUS, HOWEVER THE VENUSIAN SOIL IS STERILE.

  "Does it surprise you that the Venusian soil is sterile?"

  NO. THAT'S WHAT I WOULD HAVE HYPOTHESIZED.

  "Why would you have formed that hypothesis?"

  WE KNOW THAT THE VENUSIAN ATMOSPHERE IS FAR TOO HARSH TO SUPPORT OR PERMIT ANY FORM OF LIFE. EVEN THE MOST ROBUST MICROBIAL LIFE AS WE UNDERSTAND IT CAN'T SURVIVE HERE.

  Priyanka nodded his head. He seemed satisfied with Arik's answers. Arik hadn't yet put all the pieces together, but it was clear to him that Priyanka and several others were not happy about the fact that he had been outside. Arik wondered if there was something he should be trying to hide.

  "Can you tell me what AP is, Arik?"

  ARTIFICIAL PHOTOSYNTHESIS.

  "What do you think of artificial photosynthesis?"

  IT'S A DIFFICULT PROBLEM.

  "Would you say that it is a challenge?"

  YES.

  "Do you believe it is a challenge worthy of your attention?"

  YES.

  "Do you believe that AP is possible?"

  IT IS POSSIBLE. THE QUESTION IS WHETHER IT IS PRACTICAL.

  "Ok. Do you believe that it's practical?"

  YES.

  "Do you believe that AP is more important than terraforming?"

  YES. I DON'T BELIEVE TERRAFORMING IS CURRENTLY PRACTICAL.

  "Do you recall that your job at the Environment Department is to solve AP?"

  YES.

  "Do you feel like you're ready to return to work?"

  YES.

  "Good." Priyanka folded his piece of paper in half again, and pushed it down into his breast pocket. "I have one more very important question for you, Arik. Can you explain to me why AP is so important?"

  THE ENVIRONMENT DEPARTMENT IS ALREADY PRODUCING OXYGEN BEYOND ITS INTENDED CAPACITY. WE CURRENTLY CAN'T SUPPORT ANY MORE HUMAN LIFE ON VENUS.

  "Why can't we just get tanks of compressed air from Earth?"

  WE NEED TO REDUCE OUR DEPENDENCY ON EARTH AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE.

  "That's right," Priyanka said. He pushed himself up out of his chair, then smiled. "Well, your memory seems perfectly fine to me. I will recommend that you return to work as soon as possible." He started to move toward the door, but caught himself. "Oh, your father told me the news about Cadie. Congratulations." He watched Arik steadily. "I hope you're not concerned. Sometimes all we need to hasten a breakthrough in our work is for something to lend it a bit of urgency."

  Arik's response did not appear. Priyanka looked at the wall for a moment, then back at Arik. Arik forced a smile, then did Priyanka the favor of snapping open the door.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The History of V1, Part 2:

  Earth Crisis

  The climate crisis on Earth eventually became known as the "Earth Crisis" in order to encompass the prodigious pollution and other environmental problems that had co-evolved alongside climate change. Grassroots movements successfully penetrated most political institutions, but world leaders found themselves in impossible situations; just about every option available to them for addressing the Earth Crisis had serious repercussions on the world's economy. The age of skepticism had long past — there was hardly anyone alive who didn't have first-hand experience with the hardships of living on a hopelessly polluted planet, and news organizations concerned themselves with little else — but it was nearly impossible for an elected official to pass laws and enforce the kinds of sanctions that could have dramatic and measurable effects. There were a few decades of "phased reductions" and "economic incentives" that had so many exemptions and loopholes that everyone knew they never had any real hope of delivering actual results.

  But then two things happened that made managing the Earth Crisis both technologically and economically feasible. The first was nuclear fusion, the process of combining atomic particles as distinct from nuclear fission, the process of dividing them. Nuclear fusion occurs naturally in stars as gravitational forces become strong enough to fuse hydrogen atoms, and it also occurs unnaturally in thermonuclear weapons when the energy from a smaller fission bomb is used to ignite a much more massive fusion reaction.

  Despite its association with nuclear warfare, fusion is a much safer process than fission. Fusion reactions require such precise conditions that they are inherently self regulating; should anything at all go wrong, the process simply ceases with very little risk of a runaway reaction. Fusion also produces far less radioactive waste than fission which means less reprocessing of spent fuel, and a lower security risk. But the trick with nuclear fusion is starting and maintaining a reaction in a controlled way that, over time, generates more energy than is required to maintain it. Artificially recreating conditions typically only found in the cores of stars is extremely resource-intensive which means that until the fusion reaction is self-sustaining, there is actually a significant net loss of energy.

  But once methods for safely and efficiently starting and maintaining reactions were perfected, nuclear fusion power plants began sprouting up like shopping malls all over the industrialized world. The process was then made millions of times more efficient by two discoveries: the first enabled nuclear waste to be reprocessed back into usable fuel, and the second was the discovery of a technique for capturing the energy released by a fusion reaction directly as opposed to using that energy to boil water in order to produce steam which was then used to turn turbines. Over the course of just a few decades, incredible amounts of cheap, pollution-free energy was available almost everywhere in the world.

  As a perfect and timely companion to ubiquitous nuclear fusion power, the Nobel Prize winning concept of "End of Life Pla
ns," or ELPs, was adopted by most of the industrialized world. ELPs were simply instructions included with absolutely everything bought or sold that explained what should be done with the item and its packaging in order to discard it. There were, of course, strict guidelines as to what constituted a valid ELP, and strict oversight of those guidelines. Legitimate ELPs included things like returning the item to the manufacturer where it could be refurbished, dropping the item off at a local ELP station which specialized in recycling its components, or, if the material were benign enough, the right colored bin to toss it into.

  Consumer adherence to ELPs was also strictly enforced. Anyone caught violating an item's ELP faced fines or community service, and sometimes even very imaginative forms of public punishment involving bright green jumpsuits or yard signs with short shameful slogans. No item could be bought, sold, or imported without a valid and approved ELP which meant that even countries that weren't particularly interested in saving the world needed to comply in order to have access to markets that did. Consumers started selecting products based on the attractiveness of their ELPs which meant that as much thought and engineering had to go into the disposing of a product as producing it. Products that weren't easily recyclable, reusable, returnable, renewable, compostable, convertible, or biodegradable languished on shelves beside their more eco-friendly counterparts. People wanted to feel as good about getting rid of something as they did about acquiring it.

  It was initially feared that ELPs would ruin the already-fragile world economy. The theory was that raising costs associated with research and development would cause the prices of goods to increase beyond what the market could bear. In reality, however, ELPs ushered in an entirely new era of sustainable economic growth and prosperity. Even the sharpest and best paid economists underestimated the guilt that the media had gradually installed in consumers for buying goods that were designed to exist in landfills for centuries, but only function for anywhere from a few seconds up to maybe a year. It was true that prices rose, but temporarily; costs were more than offset by the dynamics of guilt-free consumption, and by manufacturers' ability to refurbish and resell end-of-lifed goods. Entirely new industries sprang up around ELP stations. Manufacturing costs gradually decreased as more recycled components were used and fewer raw materials had to be purchased and converted. Many manufacturers transitioned into what became known as re-manufacturers. The quality of products even increased so that their components could be reused in future versions. It was common for electronics manufacturers to build very fast processors for their devices, but underclock them so that when they found their way back into their factories through their ELPs, the chips' constraints could simply be removed, and the entire device resold as the next generation, new and improved. ELPs allowed even the biggest and most powerful of multinational corporations to participate in sustainable and responsible manufacturing practices while still feeling like they were being suitably devious.

  The costs associated with manufacturing, packaging, and shipping goods was further reduced by On-demand Automated Manufacturing Plants. ODAMPs were initially described as being similar in concept to printers. A printer could produce any conceivable image no matter how complex provided it had just a few basic colors and the correct instructions. Similarly, ODAMPs could produce, package, and ship thousands of different and even highly customized products given nothing but schematics, specifications, and the necessary raw materials.

  ODAMPs were extremely simple in theory, however in practice, they constituted the most complex manmade systems ever conceived of and built. A typical ODAMP encompassed dozens of square kilometers of factory space which was filled with thousands of highly diversified robots and pieces of equipment along with hundreds of metric tons of raw materials. Once an ODAMP went online, the only subsequent interaction humans had with the factory was delivering new shipments of raw materials and picking up items ready to be shipped. Everything else was performed by highly adaptive, self-sufficient, self-organizing machines. The entire process of scheduling and coordinating the production of items was completely automated, including receiving and confirming orders, locating appropriate schematics and specifications, converting raw materials as needed, constructing individual components, and finally, assembling and packaging final products — all as quickly and efficiently as possible. ODAMPs even prepared shipping schedules and routing instructions before placing items on a loading dock to be picked up and hauled away.

  Even the creators of ODAMPs had only a very dim notion of what actually went on inside the massive unlit electronic hives.

  ODAMPs resulted in an almost unimaginable level of manufacturing efficiency. Just a few dozen ODAMPs manufactured over 90% of the products in the world, and not a single product was manufactured that wasn't needed. ODAMPs were eventually even able to perform diagnostics and repairs that human labor costs had previously made impractical, and over time, each ODAMP was upgraded so that it had the ability to accept almost anything as a raw material — even truckloads of end-of-lifed items. Every manufactured good had the potential to eventually become almost anything else through an ODAMP, and almost nothing was wasted. And, of course, the entire process was powered by nearly unlimited and completely pollution-free energy.

  But even with the cessation of almost all greenhouse gas emissions and pollution, enough carbon dioxide and methane had already been released into the air and dissolved into the oceans that even the most optimistic predictions still showed Earth's mean temperature continuing to rise for hundreds of years. With unlimited clean energy, however, it became possible to split infrared-absorbing molecules in the atmosphere into their more benign constituents without actually creating more waste than you were converting. Clean Air Catalyst Machines were able to remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere at rates far faster than Mother Nature herself could have ever achieved, thereby clearing the way for far simpler and cheaper innovations like Ice Paper.

  Ice Paper was invented by an undergraduate college student who figured out that the upward facing surface area of all the cars in the world was almost exactly equal to the surface area of the Arctic and Antarctic polar ice caps which had long since melted. Rather than writing an academic paper on the concept (which he was certain his professors would scoff at since they hadn't thought of it themselves), he dropped out of school and invented Ice Paper. Thanks to his girlfriend (who was studying political science before dropping out herself), Ice Paper was soon required by international law to cover every hood, roof, trailer, and trunk in the world, almost entirely replenishing the Earth's ability to reflect solar radiation back out into space in the span of only a few years. By associating radiation reflection with cars, concentrations of Ice Paper were inherently proportional to the amount of industrialization and urbanization in a given region which actually made it even more effective and efficient than the polar ice caps could ever have been.

  With a flourishing global economy and the cleanest, healthiest environment the world had seen since before the Industrial Revolution, the Earth Crisis was officially declared "averted," and it was time once again to turn humanity's attention toward exploration and outward expansion — or as the politicians never tired of repeating, to "get serious about space." The challenges of the previous 160 years had promoted an unprecedented level of global cooperation that carried over into the new space program, and led directly to the formation of the Global Space Agency.

  The GSA's headquarters were established at the precise juncture of China, Pakistan, and India in a region known as Aksai Chin. Logistically, the site made perfect sense because it was almost entirely uninhabited, received almost no precipitation to delay launches thanks to the ability of the Himalayan mountains to intercept moisture, and was an entirely flat desert of salt which made it easy to build on (the extreme cold was a concern initially until the Russians convinced the Site Selection Committee that launching in subfreezing temperatures was not only safe, but exhilarating). Politically, the site was a symbol of the world
's ability to put centuries-old disputes aside for the benefit of all of mankind.

  The GSA needed to warm up a little before tackling the big missions, so they completed the Moon Base (which was never considered an actual colony because although it was constantly manned, there were no permanent settlers), repaired and upgraded the Moon telescope, built and deployed the ISS II (which this time looked like a proper space station with segments that rotated to create centrifugal gravity and large windowed observation decks), and even completed several manned missions to Mars. With a success rate of 99%, with unprecedented public support, and with mankind riding the biggest wave of economic, scientific, and cultural prosperity in history, the human race had earned the right to expand into the rest of the solar system.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Water Pressure

  The day before Arik started work at the Life Pod, he got an audio message from one of his former teachers. Her voice was characteristically dignified and elegant with its usual undertone of assertiveness.

  "Hello, Arik. Rosemary Grace here. I just heard about your assignment to the Life Pod. Congratulations. As much as I was hoping we'd get you, I knew that wasn't possible. All the best talent must go in to solving the air problem right now, as you know. For now, that's our top priority.

  "I know you're preoccupied with beginning your new career, but I want you to do something for me. I'd like you to stop by my office tomorrow morning on your way into work. I have a couple of things I'd like to discuss with you. It'll only take a few minutes. Consider it your final homework assignment. See you soon."

  Rosemary worked for Arik's father in the Water Treatment Department. She was an environmental and hydraulic engineer by trade, but she taught Gen V about much more than just computational fluid mechanics, flow dynamics, and particle image velocimetry. Those were things that computers were good at, she told them. The next generation of scientists and engineers needed to get better at the things computers weren't good at: creativity, intuition, resourcefulness, and perhaps most importantly, curiosity. Half of each lesson was hard science, but the other half was not so much about learning anything in particular as it was about learning how to learn — how to think both critically and creatively in order to solve seemingly impossible problems. Her lessons were some of the most inspiring, engaging, and challenging material Arik had ever encountered.