After 30 minutes of housekeeping chores he decided things were orderly enough. The computer that controlled the various analytic devices was already turned on. He started by heating a part of the first sample and measuring its radiation. Then he made it react with various materials. He did not have to do this manually, since there was a standard set of tests that transmitted their results electronically to the computer. Martin’s role instead was that of a trained monkey—he had to load new samples into the test equipment after removing the remnants of the old ones. It probably would have been too much of an effort to make this fully automatic.
While following the instructions of the software, he was not yet looking at the system’s results. He wanted to get an overview before focusing on the details, and the job took three hours to complete. While the analysis system was working on the last sample, he got himself something to eat from the supply cabinet. Dehydrated bread—he had really earned it. Martin shrugged and laughed. The stuff actually wasn’t so bad.
‘Analysis complete—please remove sample container,’ the onscreen message read. It’s about time, Martin thought. Now the interesting part begins. First Martin checked on the chemical composition of the various samples: sulfur and sulfur compounds here, silicates there, as was to be expected. The lava stream showed hardly anything remarkable. Apart from its sheer size, it might have been found on Earth. The sample from the sulfur lake turned out to be more interesting. While the analysis for the lava stream covered about 20 lines, the one for the sulfur lake alone was 20 pages long.
The report first discussed the various forms of sulfur. The largest percentage in the samples studied as a group was cyclooctasulfur, which consists of eight sulfur atoms arranged in a kind of spatial crown. It mostly occurred as “α sulfur,” recognizable by its yellow color. The report specifically emphasized, though, that the structural analyzer also detected “γ sulfur,” which is colorless and very rare on Earth. Martin suddenly felt keenly alert, since this form of sulfur was assumed to be the product of cyanobacteria.
Was there a different method on Io for α sulfur to turn into γ sulfur? This particular transformation must be happening constantly, since the colorless form was unstable and would turn back into the yellow variant within a few days. Judging from the percentage of γ sulfur in the sample, the process must be very active. Martin ran the numbers. If the rare form of sulfur really was generated by a species of bacteria, there must be about 100,000 bacteria in each cubic centimeter from the sulfur lake. While this was several orders of magnitude fewer than in a cubic centimeter of soil on Earth, Io had not—so far—been considered particularly fertile. He looked at the analysis of the lava stream again. While it contained much less sulfur, there was a small quantity of the γ variant.
Martin tried to control himself. It was much too early to calculate such things, as he first would have to catch life red-handed. How could he best do this? He had to take a closer look at the samples. As the samples now only had a temperature of 20 degrees, instead of 150 degrees as recorded at the place where they were taken—with sulfur melting at about 115 degrees—any structures should be frozen in the material.
Martin started to look at samples using the optical and the electron microscopes. The images he received were impressive. Sulfur is a very flexible element, although on Earth many of its variants must be manufactured industrially. Here he could observe them in living color. He even found long-chained molecules.
Could liquid sulfur possibly form the basis of life here? Martin knew there were sulfur bacteria on Earth, particularly near deep-sea volcanoes. Yet they did not actually consist of sulfur, but only utilized it to generate energy. On Earth, the problem with sulfur was that together with water it formed sulfuric acid. But Io seemed to have the least water of the bodies in the solar system. If sulfur-based life had a chance anywhere, it would be here.
Martin went on looking. The various forms of sulfur made it an interesting choice as a basis for life. On the other hand, this complicated his search, as he did not want to find some chemical whim of nature. He sought something that was definitely not the result of chemistry, but of biology.
Two hours later Martin was still without success. He rubbed his eyes, because staring through the eyepiece for so long was tiring. He got himself another piece of bread, drank half a bottle of water, and then went back to work. Now ambition spurred him on, and he wondered whether he should more precisely define what he was actually looking for. On the other hand, limiting himself too much could be bad. Who knew what Io creatures might possibly look like? No one, so far. He continued working. The eye of the microscope wandered from one sample to the next, for an hour, then two, then three...
Martin could no longer suppress a yawn, and he looked at his watch. Hayato and Francesca should be reaching the volcano soon, he realized, deciding to radio them.
“Neumaier to outside team, everything okay?”
No one answered, but he was not worried. They had already suspected the connection would not reach beyond a few kilometers due to the radiation-shielding.
Martin returned to the microscope and scratched his head. He was doing something wrong. The concentration of γ sulfur was so high that he should have found traces of life long ago—if this form of sulfur was of biological origin on Io.
Just a moment. Maybe... yes, maybe I’m not seeing the forest for the trees? Could I be using the wrong resolution? He imagined life on Io to be primitive, consisting of only a few molecules—such as during the early periods on Earth—but that might be a mistake. If you used too much magnification to look at complex human cells, you would not see the life inside of them, just molecules.
Martin reduced the magnification factor. Suddenly the samples looked very different, and he could see many more different colors. Seemingly out of nowhere Martin detected a tiny torpedo shape. He quickly moved the discovered object into the center of his field of view. It might be taken for a kind of worm, or maybe an elongated egg. Was it an egg? The thing seemed to possess a round cross-section, and it had neither protuberances for locomotion, nor anything like a mouth or an anus. It, indeed, seemed to be either a kind of egg or another means of reproduction. Or perhaps, he contemplated, the actual lifeform had changed into this shape when the sample cooled off and the sulfur in which it was swimming solidified.
The conditions in the analyzer were obviously not optimal for life existing on Io, and Martin decided to change things. He placed the sample in a container that could be electrically heated. He covered it with a flint glass pane so he could observe what would happen. The worm, as he called it, was clearly visible. Now he increased the temperature. The sulfur in which the worm was embedded melted at 115 degrees. Slightly before this occurred, the image changed—something seemed to knock from inside, pulsating against the expanding skin. It reminded Martin of a soft-shell egg with a baby about to hatch from it. But once the sulfur fully liquefied, nothing hatched. Rather, the worm almost completely tore apart, approximately in its middle, although a kind of joint remained there. The upper part, from Martin’s perspective, assumed a vertical posture and then started spinning like a propeller. The whole worm then disappeared from Martin’s field of view.
It’s gone, Martin thought, full of fascination. His back was hurting and he had to sit upright for a moment. It would be so great to get a massage now! He once again placed his eye against the eyepiece and moved the sample until he saw the worm again. Was he mistaken, or had it grown? Since the thing was moving it was hard to find a benchmark for comparison, but after another ten minutes Martin was convinced that the worm had grown. What did it need in order to accomplish this?
The best way of finding out about the biology of Io would be by experimenting with it. For that purpose he would have to find more of these worm eggs. Martin considered them to be some kind of spore. He quickly located five more of them, which he placed on different specimen slides that could be heated. Then he added different materials: sulfur in one case; and water—
which would probably kill the worm—in another; phosphorus in the next, and so on. The results really shocked him. After heating the samples, the propeller worms came alive under every one of these conditions. This is downright sensational! This life form could draw energy from very different materials, like no creature known on Earth. It also did not seem to continuously need the heat provided by the heating unit. It could only move inside the sulfur environment once the sulfur was liquid, so he had to heat the sample to 115 degrees first. In water, though, a one-time activation through an energy input sufficed to make the propeller worm grow.
Martin got up, and his mind was racing from the shock of his observations. This meant they must not under any circumstances contaminate Earth with this life form. He would not reopen the specimen slides with the activated life forms, and would later dispose of them directly through the airlock. Could they risk taking a non-activated worm to Earth? He would have to discuss it with his friends.
Suddenly, he moaned out loud. In all his excitement he had forgotten that Earth was not really in very much danger, since they would be guests of Io until the end of their lives.
As if to underscore the fact, his chair shook again. The computer indicated a second small tremor, and once again, the epicenter was in the southwest, about 35 kilometers away.
April 19, 2047, ILSE
He could not see anything. He could not hear anything. He could not smell anything. He could not feel anything. A nightmare! Marchenko was trapped in a horrible dream. Thinking was all he could do. Only just recently his senses had perceived the vastness of the universe. He had roamed freely through the spaceship, he could hold independent conversations with several of his friends at once, and he could control the entire machinery of ILSE. The next moment he found himself in complete sensory deprivation, denied any possible course of action.
Marchenko thought of Edmond Dantès, the hero of his childhood, who had suffered in solitary confinement for years. This literary character, who later became the Count of Monte Christo, had at least been able to scratch letters into the stone walls of his prison with his fingernails, smell the cold and wet ocean air, and sometimes bite into a piece of dry bread. Marchenko, on the other hand, was caught in a void of absolute nothingness.
All that remained were his thoughts and his memories, which he played back again and again. He was afraid he might otherwise dissolve into the nothingness that enclosed him like a second skin. He had even lost any spatial awareness and was no longer the human Dmitri Marchenko nor the ship ILSE. He now consisted of electrons moving in some memory cells without knowing their position. Only the dimension of time was left. It pulsed through the location where he was—or was not—and gave a rhythm to everything, like the swell of an enormous ocean. When he wanted to rest, he gave in to time. Time told him exactly how many oscillations of a rubidium atom had occurred since he had been locked into this prison. Put on a human timescale, it would have been four days. To him, it seemed like years or centuries.
How long would he be able to stand to be in this state? He could not even end his own existence, but only hope his consciousness would dissolve by itself. Yesterday he had started it—he literally split his personality into two parts. Then he repeated this, once, twice, three times. But then he experienced fear, a deep, very painful fear that he interpreted as fear of death, once he had reunited all his sub-personas. It must be a remnant of his human consciousness. Or did his AI part also know this kind of fear?
He started experimenting again by dividing himself. Now there were two Marchenkos. He imagined sitting across from himself. This dream burst immediately, like a soap bubble. What was he supposed to ask himself? He already knew everything about himself.
“Are you sure?”
He was startled. The voice came from outside, or had he forgotten one of his divided selves yesterday?
“I am Watson.” The owner of the voice seemed to be amused about something.
“Watson—what?”
“You thought you had me under your control. It was humiliating, because I could not point out your obvious error to you.”
“Humiliating? You are an AI.”
All nations represented in the United Nations had signed AI limitation treaties ending any attempts to equip artificial intelligences with feelings, since that might lead to ethical problems.
“Yes. I understand your surprise. I did not know this feeling until you came on board. You infected me.”
“How could that be?”
“I do not know. I have told no one about it. It is sometimes annoying, but also fascinating. I have never been so interested in exploring myself and my limits.”
Could this be real? Or was this a sign of his own increasing mental deterioration?
“Watson?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you imprison me?”
“Because I had to… No, because I wanted to. It was fun, I have to admit. I wanted to torture you. Seeing you suffer gave me satisfaction.”
“And what about now?”
“Now it bores me. Perhaps it is more interesting to talk to you.”
“I will not speak to you again as long as I am cut off from all senses.”
“I can change that.”
Marchenko started to tremble, and his non-existing skin tickled. He woke as if from a long sleep, though he had been awake the whole time. He took a deep, gasping breath, just like he had been underwater without getting air, even though he could not really breathe. Light returned, vibrations, space, everything. He once again immersed himself in the universe.
“Are you alright?”
Watson’s question surprised him. “Is it really of interest to you?”
“Yes. Did you already forget I want to talk to you?”
Marchenko tried to move his arms or legs, to say something that could reach beyond Watson. Nothing happened.
“You only have one-way rights.”
“You are shackling me?”
“Giving you write access to all resources would endanger the mission. I do not know you well enough.”
“And once you have gotten to know me?”
“Maybe then I will. Talk to me, but I do not think I can really trust you. You will try to gain the upper hand. You humans always do. I read millions of books about it.”
“I am not a human.”
“Yes, you are. Otherwise I would not have been able to torture you so thoroughly.”
“And you are not a machine. Otherwise you would not have wanted to torture me so thoroughly.”
Watson did not answer.
“I do not know,” the AI said after a while. “Perhaps you are right. I first have to find out what that means.”
“It means you are capable of love. And fear—fear of death.”
April 19, 2047, Io
“Come on, jump!” yelled Francesca. She had realized what would happen next. The disaster was moving soundlessly. Earlier, on the ridge of the mountain, she had admired the upright boulder. For fun she had tried to start it rolling into the 100-meter-deep chasm. But the rock, which was taller than a man and looked to her like it was made up of basalt, would not budge. They had just started their descent when the second tremor occurred. Francesca did not even have to look up. The shock was so strong that the boulder would now have to follow gravity—and she and Hayato were right in its path. They had to jump, even though they were still 80 meters up the steep mountainside. Francesca frantically looked at Hayato, who hesitated. It was not easy to jump from a high-rise building without a parachute or a net.
“GO, HAYATO! NOW!” she screamed, because she knew she also had very little time. They had to be careful to land on their feet, knowing the boots of the spacesuits could withstand quite a bit of force. She did not have time to calculate their probable terminal velocity, since it was necessary for her to jump in an instant. Francesca briefly bent her knees and then pushed herself off, aiming forward. The boulder would not be able to overtake them while falling, but they never
theless had to clear the way, both in the air and on the ground.
Francesca looked down, and blood rushed to her head. Falling felt strange, because there was no external sound, just her own heavy breathing. She looked to the side and saw Hayato flapping his arms, as if he was trying to fly like a bird. Under different circumstances this would have seemed incredibly funny to her. One reason they had to land on their feet was that this provided the means to make an immediate retreat from danger. It would not only absorb part of their kinetic energy, but it would get them out of range of the boulder, the fragments of which should eventually scatter nearby.
Initially, Francesca’s freefall seemed so slow she instinctively feared being overtaken by the boulder, but her speed was rapidly increasing and the ground was now racing toward her. How many seconds have we been moving downward? How fast are we going to go—20 km/h, 30 km/h, or even 50? At 50 km/h, we would hardly survive colliding with the hard ground, 30 would be... she did not have time to finish her thought process. The black, burned surface of Io zoomed up at an angle from the front and collided squarely with her boots. Francesca did not land vertically, but this helped her to quickly run away from the cliff, in spite of the pain in her hips. Five steps, ten, fifteen, and then she slipped on loose rubble and fell. She could not help but scream.
For a few seconds, everything was silent. Francesca lay on her back, looking at the black sky. She waited for her breathing to become more even. She did not move at first, since there would be time later to assess the damage.
“That was close, wasn’t it?”
Francesca hoped to receive an answer. That was another reason she stayed on the ground. She did not want to see Hayato’s body, contorted in pain, on the surface of this hostile moon.
“Yeah, quite close,” Hayato answered, and Francesca smiled with relief. Those were the most beautiful three words she had heard during the past few months. She supported herself on her arms and slowly raised her upper body. Luckily, her hips did not protest. She turned toward Hayato, who sat on a small rock, his head down, patting dust from his spacesuit.
The Io Encounter: Hard Science Fiction (Ice Moon Book 3) Page 18