The Clouds of Venus
Hard Science Fiction
Brandon Q. Morris
Contents
The Clouds of Venus
Author's Note by Brandon Q. Morris
Author's Note by Ashton McLee
Also by Brandon Q. Morris
A Guided Tour of Venus
Glossary of Acronyms
Metric to English Conversions
The Clouds of Venus
February 2, 2079, Havre Volcano
Slowly, Erik sank down. It was pitch dark, but that didn’t bother him. The combination radar-laser scanner in his head provided him an incredible picture of his surroundings. There was a hilly field below him, on which someone seemed to have distributed random boulders, with more boulders as he focused farther out. At a distance of 300 meters, there were so many that they were piled on top of each other.
Erik accelerated until the engine on his back was moving him at 20 kilometers per hour through the water.
“Hey—wait a minute!”
He turned around. Nuria, his colleague, sounded annoyed. What’s up with her this time?
She floated a little below him with her spotlight pointing toward the rocks.
“Why aren’t you keeping up with me?” he asked.
“I thought I saw a creature over there.”
Nuria was a biologist. He realized that she was interested in anything that might be alive in this undersea volcano, but that wasn’t her job at present. He didn’t want to spend the whole day at a depth of 1,200 meters.
“Did you see something?”
“Not sure... I didn’t know if I had time—”
“We don’t have time. We’re still a few kilometers from the caldera.”
“You’re right.” His colleague began moving again.
That stupid ‘creature’ of hers had cost them at least five minutes. Erik couldn’t understand how someone could be so selfish. As a geologist, he wanted to take a close look at the truck-sized stone chunks down there. He shook his head. No, I don’t. I’d rather lounge on my towel on the beach and drink a cold beer. Dream on, old Norseman, he thought.
“I’m here already.”
He hadn’t noticed that Nuria had caught up with him. He began moving. Even though he’d rather be in the air looking down, it was a pleasure to glide through the water. His body was shaped perfectly for hydrodynamics. If he wanted to swim even faster, he only needed to go into a prone position and activate his arms. The mechanical wrist joints then twirled his hands, and they became like propeller blades to push him through the water.
Slowly they grew closer to the huge crater. The Havre volcano had last erupted 27 years ago. As a geologist, Erik knew all the warning signals of an eruption. However, he noticed a strange feeling come over him as they were approaching the active volcano. He was reminded of a sleeping dragon. Hmm. What might happen if we were to step on its tail? he pondered.
He looked around from time to time. Nuria was only a few meters behind him. He hadn’t noticed until now that she was prone to being distracted by trivialities. Before today, however, they had only trained in places where there hadn’t been lifeforms to get in her way.
Erik switched to the infrared display on his visor and saw a bright stream of hot water rising from the caldera, the reason why they were there. The seawater, warmed in the depths of the crater, rose upward and cooler water flowed down, a cycle that will continue for thousands of years if not interrupted. Their goal was to reach the crater floor. The combination of heat and high pressure was the ideal test field—if they survived this, there were barely any obstacles left in the solar system apart from the surface of their mother star.
“How does it look?” he asked.
“Let’s go,” Nuria answered.
The crater was below them. In the visible spectrum, it was just as black as the environment. The radar showed the structure, reminiscent of a very deep, tapered pot. Viewed in the infrared it reminded Erik of a volcano on land, because the bubbling hot water in this area of the spectrum glowed like magma. It wasn’t as dangerous here, though, which was why they didn’t train ashore. A falling stone, which—on land—could kill them before they had time to react, could be seen and avoided while it was still falling through the water.
Nuria swam headfirst into the depths. As agreed, and following the mission instructions, she used only the engine, not her arms. He followed his colleague, both of them staying near the wall. There, the cold water flowed in and downward from their surroundings and pulled them along very efficiently. Erik kept checking the temperature of the rising water. It was already over 100 degrees.
“It’s pretty hot,” Nuria said.
She must be monitoring the rising temperatures, too. “That’s no big deal.”
“Shouldn’t it be bubbling more?”
“The pressure down here raises the boiling point of the water.”
“I see,” Nuria said as she veered off and swam toward the middle.
“What are you doing?” he shouted anxiously.
“A test.”
Her body had to already be in the rising current, but she moved as if she was paddling on the beach. The engine had an amazing performance capacity, matching the current without further assistance, and Erik calmed down again.
“Test passed,” he said as Nuria came back to him again. “Next time, let me know.”
“If you had read the plan, you would know that we’ve been ordered to make such tests.”
Point for Nuria, Erik thought. He hated to read lengthy plans in advance. He preferred to be surprised, something that had driven his mother and all his teachers to despair. However—or maybe because of it—he liked to reminisce about his school days in Norway.
“Still 300 meters,” Nuria said.
Erik looked down. There it was, the ‘sleeping dragon.’ The magma had to be a few meters below the surface. The wound that the volcano tore during its last outburst had only a thin scab that they must not scrape off. Nuria paused and remained about five meters above the bottom. Erik floated next to her and aimed his headlight down. There didn’t seem to be any sign of life anywhere—everything was brown, gray, and black. However, life on Earth is said to have originated in such places. Evolution had come a long way.
“850 degrees,” Nuria said.
“Excellent. All instruments nominal,” Erik said.
“All instruments nominal,” his colleague confirmed.
“And now what?”
“Now we just have to wait here for the scheduled time. And next time, I’ll tell you before we start a test.”
“So there’s nothing else on our list?”
“Nothing else. You can tell me a story from your younger days.”
“No thanks. Why don’t you tell me how you came to join our team? I always wanted to ask you that.” He knew Nuria was from Saudi Arabia, but not much else.
“It’s too long a story,” she said with a sigh.
They remained silent until they heard the beep of the alarm programmed by Nuria.
“Time to go up.”
Erik displayed the time in front of his right eye. He flinched when it popped into view because he still hadn’t gotten used to such data appearing in the midst of reality. Yes, it was time for them to go up. He was glad they could ascend without the pressure equalization and similar diver techniques. Otherwise he wouldn’t have time to go to his favorite spot on the beach today.
He noticed he was rising faster than Nuria. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“You forgot that we are supposed to measure the velocity of the flow.”
“But
you can do that much easier from the ship.”
“Here, yes, but not on Venus,” Nuria said.
To hell with the plan. Let her do it, he decided, accelerating upward. He reached the edge of the caldera in record time, but then he felt guilty. He was going to cause Nuria unnecessary trouble if he didn’t get his act together. They should have arrived at the same time. Erik looked around. Next to the abyss lay a large pumice stone. He swam back down and sat on it.
Crack! It was a horrifying noise.
Something under him had broken. The sound reached him as structure-borne noise. Erik recoiled in an attempt to move away, but something was holding his right arm. The rock had slipped into a void, and his arm had been caught at its edge.
“Nuria? I need some advice,” he said carefully. It was strange. He was less afraid of the consequences of his stupidity than of Nuria’s ranting.
She arrived next to him and tried to pull his arm out without success. “On the count of three,” she said.
On three they both turned their engines to the highest level. The boulder was moving.
“Stop! Stop!” Nuria ordered.
“What? Why? We can do it!”
“If we pull further in that direction, the entire block could fall into the caldera.”
Although pumice is light, a chunk this big weighed a few tons. And, what if it hit the thin magma crust? The sleeping dragon! Nuria was right, of course, and he was acting like an idiot—after all, he was the geologist. “But my arm?”
“We don’t have a choice,” Nuria said.
Crap. But she was right—there was no alternative. He opened the joint between his upper and lower arm segments. Now he was free again.
“Maybe we can pick it up later,” Nuria said.
It helped that she was trying to calm him down, even though the likelihood of recovering the piece of expensive electronics was pretty low.
Erik sighed. “Let’s go to the ship.”
He gave his body the start impulse, switched it over to autopilot.
He ripped off his helmet. He was sitting in the glass cockpit of the submarine parked at a depth of 100 meters. In a few minutes, the two autonomous vehicles, the AVs, would dock in the cargo hold. Then they could resurface. Erik wasn’t so happy anymore—due to the missing arm on his AV, he was expecting to be dismissed by the mission controller.
February 3, 2079, Havre Volcano
The Ocean Explorer powered through high waves. Erik had to hold onto the rail as he walked along the deck, ice-cold foam blasting against his face. Nobody had warned him about that before leaving! Midsummer in the South Pacific... he had imagined something completely different—coral reefs, blue sea, sunshine, and a bit of diving. Everybody envied him for being able to test his personal AV against the perfect backdrop.
Erik felt nausea coming on as he reached a structure on the deck. The boxy, blue and white construction looked like a foreign object on the ship, and that impression wasn’t a lie. It was a later installation by NASA on the ship that was owned by the NOAA Marine Authority. The structure didn’t have a hatch, but it had two doors. Erik grasped a door handle and hesitated. Whenever he had to go inside, his latent seasickness intensified rather than quieting. But that didn’t matter. He had to fulfill his mission, and it was his fault that this had happened to his AV.
He pressed the handle down, opened the door, and quickly slipped into the room. The light was so bright that it blinded him. He put his hand over his eyes.
“You’re finally coming?”
Of course. Nuria had gotten there first, as always, even though she’d been sitting at the breakfast table when he left, and he’d only needed a detour to the toilet. But why was she even here? Her AV had survived the test fully intact and without any problems! She could be lying in her bunk and studying for the next exam that they had to take next week, with all the other astronaut candidates, or ASCANs.
“What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to see you straighten your member.”
Someone laughed in the background. It must have been one of the ship’s regular sailors. Nuria’s English was perfect, but sometimes she expressed herself inappropriately.
“Did I say something wrong?” she asked loudly, turning around.
As she turned back, Erik saw the sparkle in her black eyes. The guy who’d laughed didn’t answer.
“You wanted to watch me?” Erik asked.
“If you’ll let me. Maybe you’ll need some help, too.”
“I can handle it myself,” he answered as he crouched down.
The AV was propped against the wall, sitting with its legs stretched out. It looked as if the figure, which had shoulders as broad as a slim adult human, had propped itself with the left arm. The right arm ended at the elbow.
Erik heard a man’s stern voice. “Well, now, take care of that poor thing.”
He started to get up to greet Colonel Massey, but the man gently pushed him back down.
“Get on with your job,” the training officer said.
“Yes, Sir,” Erik said.
He leaned against the wall and began to inspect the broken arm. The technicians had probably already examined his AV, but on Venus he would need to be able to repair the machine that sat on the floor in front of him, perhaps even while looking at it through the eyes of another AV.
He observed the head, which had a pronounced egg shape. Facetiously, the AVs were called ‘eggheads.’ The eyes were open, the mouth and nose naturally shaped. Psychologists strongly argued that the faces of the AVs should be as similar as possible to those of their human ‘interfacers,’ believing this would increase the humans’ commitment to their robot comrades. In his case, the similarity wasn’t overly striking except for the big nose, but he still had the creepy feeling of looking into the eyes of a copy of himself. However—and he found this reassuring—he found the eyes rather dead-looking compared to his own, even though the machine ‘lived’ and therefore was not completely broken.
During their training, Erik had already opened and examined all of the parts of an AV body. Although the design was based on human forms, the space inside the AV was used in a completely different way. There was an ostrich-egg-sized core in the belly of the machine, which had a plutonium-based energy source. The sensor systems went far beyond the senses of a human. The AVs could see in a wide spectral range, from gamma through microwave radiation.
The intelligence wasn’t limited to the head, it was distributed throughout the body. However, it was a very limited intelligence. Considering some of the most spectacular incidents in recent times, it didn’t seem a good idea to offer a mobile platform to an artificial intelligence. Instead, people like Nuria and Erik gave the machines their knowledge. For the remote control to be clean and prompt, the distance between the astronaut and his more robust double couldn’t be too great.
Erik raised the broken right arm. He jerked back because the head of the AV suddenly turned in his direction. “Man, don’t scare me like that. Who started that thing?”
Nobody replied.
Erik got on his knees and grabbed the machine by the neck. He had to find an invisible button on each side of the neck and maintain pressure on both buttons for 20 seconds to turn off the AV. At first glance, an ignorant onlooker might have thought he was strangling someone. The two buttons signaled with a vibration that the machine had shut down. Even in this condition, the body still had some capabilities. For example, the AV could control its joints so that it didn’t fall over under its own weight. Despite that feature, Erik came close to ending up under his own AV when it lost its balance, and, at around 150 kilograms, it could have been disastrous.
Finally, he could take care of the ‘injury’ to the AV. He raised the AV’s upper arm and looked at the damage to the exposed joint at its end. He noticed at once that it had been damaged in the accident. The surface had some scratches, two of the connectors that hooked into the forearm were bent, and a third connector was missing altogether.
Erik wondered if he should take the AV to the operating table in the middle of the room. Then he would be able to reach all of the AV’s parts more easily, and even get underneath it he needed to. But he couldn’t move it there alone, and he didn’t want to ask Nuria for help.
And it wasn’t really necessary. He’d be the laughing stock of the team if he couldn’t fix the AV while sitting here. He needed to replace the missing forearm and hand with one from the depot. Or... He looked around. There was an AV in another corner of the room, whose caregiver was currently sick in bed.
He decided to rely on the self-healing power of the machine and let it repair its own joint. The limbs were connected to a network of thin, flexible tubes that resembled blood vessels. Instead of blood flowing within them, however, there was an oily liquid that contained nanofabricators—tiny machines that could be programmed to produce almost anything if you provided them the necessary raw materials.
Nanofabricators had originated in Russia. But people had questioned what might happen if they began producing copies of themselves. That concern led to worldwide safety regulations stating they could only be used in highly secure environments, and these specific nanomachines could exist only in their special liquid.
For internal damage, the AV could introduce its tiny repairers via the vascular network, but to get them to the outside of the ‘wounded’ joint, Erik would have to improvise. So, he bent the AV’s right leg up from the hip joint and disconnected its lower leg at the knee. Then he reattached it to the thigh, but facing the opposite direction—so that the knee would bend backward.
“What’s that all about?” Nuria asked.
“You’ll see.”
Next, Erik removed its foot and set it aside. He got up, moved around to the other side of the AV, and dismounted that lower leg. Then he attached the left lower leg to the end of the right lower leg, at the joint he’d opened to remove the foot. Erik was ready to see if that was enough for what he needed. He angled the revised leg, which now consisted of one upper leg and two lower legs, to get the foot closer to the damaged joint.
The Clouds of Venus: Hard Science Fiction Page 1
