by Baen Books
Steady development in smartphone battery capacity and size had paved the way for the tiny twelve to fourteen hour lithium-ion battery nested in his back. The same was true of the dual micro-cameras that gave the homunculus crisp depth perception and picture, even in Titan's shrouded twilight.
Quantum entanglement communication—built on John Bell's experiments and tested from a satellite to Earth by the Chinese in 2017—had brought the ansible into the real world. It made instantaneous control of the homunculus possible, though the true breakthrough in quantum manipulation hadn't come until 2021 at CERN. That had earned two post-PhD researchers the title "Spin Doctors" in every major publication when they'd changed the spin of a pair of entangled electrons.
Gavin didn't wait twelve minutes, as the MarsX contractors had, to get an image from his avatar, or to send it a command. He was present—now—through the virtual reality goggles, surround-sound speakers, and the nest of tiny inflatable bubbles that rapidly expanded and contracted to provide haptic feedback in zero gravity.
The green qMail icon blinked twice in his visor.
He held his right thumb and index finger together to activate voice commands.
"Open qMail," he said quietly, and a stream of text overlaid the bottom of his view of the Kraken Mare's liquid methane.
Gavin, the message said, please come to Greenhouse 3 as soon as possible. We can't find Jonah. We think he might be in a ventilation duct. Please hurry. —Hope
That didn't sound good.
Gavin's hand moved up through the plastic bubbles to his left, and he felt the homunculus's hand grasp one of the airship's support cables as he pulled his tiny avatar to its feet.
"Add overlay," Gavin whispered, "—colony hub. Add building numbers. Add thermal signatures for humans."
Translucent blue lines shimmered around the plastic igloos two thousand feet below him. White numbers identified the nuclear plant, electrolysis facility, greenhouses, and homes. To the north, on Mayda Insula, a pair of blue outlines showed him the tidal generators that supplemented the colony's fast-breeder nuclear reactors.
Gavin turned his gaze back to the greenhouses. If he planned his glide right, he'd only have to put power to his wings for a few seconds before he touched down.
The tiny aluminum and carbon-fiber man leapt from the chassis that supported the lighter-than-air drone's camera and over-the-horizon communication hardware. Gavin tapped his left thumb and forefinger together, and the homunculus's wings opened.
He soared like a flying squirrel through the nitrogen-methane haze, S-turning left and right to match the shimmering blue optimal glide path in his visor. If he overshot too much, he'd have to swim out of the Kraken.
The flesh-and-blood colonists had tried flying when they'd first arrived. It was one of the great appeals of Titan—with a running start and some good hard flapping, a human could fly like an Earth-bird through the soupy atmosphere and low gravity.
The novelty wore off when they realized how many calories they had to eat after such workouts, and how few calories the greenhouses produced to supplement the monthly supply rockets.
There was, also, a limited amount of scenery to awe flying humans. Once they'd seen methane waves swelling under Saturn's tidal pull and a few cryovolcanoes spewing blocks of ice, they uploaded some videos to the interplanetary net's social media sites to impress people they'd never see at another high school reunion, and settled down to the hard work of colony growth.
It had grown—rapidly in fact—during Gavin's first three years in transit. Hydrocarbons like ethane (C2H6) and methane (CH4)—so plentiful in Titan's surface and atmosphere—were easily transformed into hollow-core, vacuum-insulated polyethylene (C2H4) plastic building blocks which could be joined with resin to form domes. These plastic In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) igloos rapidly replaced Titan2070's inflatable, less-insulated habitats.
The colonists had added two more greenhouses and had begun experimenting with gene-edited vegetables that wouldn't have survived Earth's cumbersome gravity. They'd bored a network of underground ventilation shafts as a contingency to the aboveground inflatable conduits, just in case the remnants of a micrometeor shower made it through the atmosphere.
Now, rather than flying humans, the fleet of semi-autonomous airships they'd built to map and study Titan circled the moon like zeppelin-Roombas, sometimes obscured in yellow-orange clouds, sometimes visible dropping tiny geo-samplers to the surface when the colonists found something that piqued their curiosity.
Gavin tapped his thumbs against his middle fingers to send battery power to his wings, which flapped on command. He decelerated rapidly before stepping onto the rocky surface outside the greenhouse.
In the ship's bubble box, plastic balls flexed rapidly against his feet, providing the sensation that he'd landed.
Good thing aluminum doesn't get brittle like steel or titanium in extreme cold, he thought. It's lighter too—better for flying.
He tapped his fingers for voice-command again while simultaneously folding his wings.
"Voice channel," he said. "Open comms—Greenhouse 3."
A chirp in his ear told him he'd been connected to the building's intercom.
"Hope," he said, "I'm outside."
The igloo's outer airlock door—also made of plastic—whirred open on servo motors. A safety circuit between the two doors kept one door locked if the other was open. Only intentional tampering would violate the igloo's climate control.
Air jets hissed in Gavin's ear as the pressure, temperature, and gas mixture equalized around his carbon-fiber skin. He turned to see if the meth picture was still up, which it was. Someone had taken an anti-drug poster from 2016, and written "ane" in black Sharpie to add a bit of humor to the airlock. "Meth(ane): Not even once," it said, above an addict's before and after pictures.
The inner door whirred open, and Gavin stepped into the greenhouse.
"Thanks for coming," Hope said. "I know you're busy building your—"
"No worries," Gavin said, with a dismissive wave. "Lori and I have two more years to make our home inhabitable. Once you figure out the brick-oven, assembly's pretty easy."
The homunculus leapt into the air and Gavin activated his wings to alight on a plastic workbench. Height disparities always made conversations awkward.
"Well, thanks just the same," Hope said. "The Earth-bound homunculus crew is on the far side of Titan still, researching a site for Hub 2. You're the only wee man within a week's travel."
"I don't understand why they wouldn't just build closer to Hub 1," Gavin said. "Resource pooling and all. You know how I feel about it. It makes rescue operations a bit easier too…"
"Yeah," Hope said. "Jonah's taken to crawling in the ventilation ducts the last week or so. I've tried to get him to stop, but it's hard to build decent child-proof gates out of polyethylene. Usually he comes out for meals, but I haven't seen him since yesterday."
"He's, what, six now?" Gavin asked.
Jonah had been the first "replacement colonist" allowed to be conceived onsite, after the death of the medical officer. Hope and her husband Scott had been overjoyed to be selected, even in the somber wake of Titan's first funeral.
When the Hub had achieved sustainability with backup power and surplus food, Gavin and Lori had purchased tickets on the next Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) to orbit from corporate headquarters. They left Earth's orbit in a robotically-assembled-in-orbit Goshawk Heavy Transport, with its counter-rotating toroid habitat sections and non-rotating, zero-G section.
Smaller, more frequent launches meant a steady operations schedule and supply chain for corporate, less risk in a single launch, and less resource strain per landing on Titan's colony. A crew of two was, in fact, nearly perfect from Titan2070's perspective.
"That's right," Hope said. "He's taller than any six-year-old on Earth, but way more curious. He gets into everything, and I can barely stop him reading to go to sleep at night. He's got a notebook full of fairytale sk
etches too—he's actually pretty good at drawing."
"Do you think he's embarrassed by something?" Gavin asked. "Maybe he's hiding. Has Scott—"
"We've looked everywhere for him, Gavin," she said. "Everywhere we can fit without tearing the ventilation apart. There are pry-marks on the floor hatch that goes underground, but I can't tell how old they are. He's either in the shafts, or he's—"
She didn't finish the sentence. Titan was more forgiving than Mars—its 1.5 bar surface pressure meant they didn't need the Martians' bulky pressurized suits—but a child without electrically-heated coveralls and closed-circuit air would certainly be dead by now.
"Okay," Gavin said. "I'll stay on this channel. Let me know if you find him while I'm inside, and I'll do the same if I find him holed up down there."
Gavin dropped from the table, fanning his wings halfway to the floor. He stepped to the vent, which Hope had opened. He wondered how long she'd yelled into the vent, praying for a response—how many times she'd tried to squeeze herself through the ninety-degree joints before calling for help.
He fluttered his wings again as he dropped into the darkness of the shaft, and landed on its floor, six feet below the surface.
"LED," Gavin commanded, and four tiny lights above and below his camera-eyes illuminated the horizontal shaft.
"Add overlay: underground ventilation."
Error M512 blinked in his visor. Overlay not found.
Dammit. I'm going to have to take notes so I don't get lost down here. Why wouldn't they put a virtual grid on the server when they dug the tunnels?
"Can you see where I am, Hope?" he asked through the radio.
"Let me check," she said. "No, sorry. The only locators anyone has are GPS-based, and our satellite constellation here is Gen 3. The ones around Earth are actually newer. There's no underground repeater system either."
Guess I'm on my own.
Gavin walked straight ahead in the dimly-lit tunnel, with its roof scant inches above his head. He found it hard to believe a kid would escape by crawling down here.
"Jonah?" he called, but there was a limit to how loud the homunculus would make his voice. The bots hadn't been designed for speeches or rock concerts, after all.
"Jonah?"
"Gavin?"
It was a woman's voice though, and not Hope's.
It took Gavin a second to realize it was Lori, and that he was hearing her voice through his own ears and not his synthetic ones.
Given how little she'd spoken to him in the last month, he excused himself for not recognizing her voice immediately.
Most long-duration spaceflight test groups experienced it—the emotional shutdown after months of confinement and sameness—so Gavin had poured himself into exploring while he waited for her to snap out of it. He was sure he'd get into a funk too at some point.
The homunculus stopped moving in the ventilation shaft.
"Hey, Lori," he said. "I'm—"
"You're not building," she said. "I know you love burning up battery power flying around or methane-surfing before shift, but we really, literally, won't have anywhere to live if we don't get this shelter built. I can't even get a ping-back for your location on the map."
In the ventilation shaft, the homunculus reached up to pull a non-existent helmet from its head. The shaft disappeared from Gavin's vision, replaced by the cramped interior of the Goshawk 7's command module. Communication and systems computer screens lined the four walls.
"Lori—"
"Gavin."
She stared at him, waiting for an answer.
"Jonah's missing," he said. "Hope thinks he might be in the ventilation."
"If he is," Lori said, "he'll come out when he gets hungry."
"What if he's stuck or something?"
"Not really our problem," Lori said. "Just like building our house isn't theirs. You know how this works—how it's supposed to work."
#
It had been Hope's idea, when Hub 1 was still in the draft stage. The problem of the sheer boredom and cabin fever of multi-year spaceflight had plagued scientists and science fiction writers for decades.
"So," Hope had said, "the current timeline goes: send robotic probes and workers, pilot them from Earth, then spend five years in boring transit, and start the rest of the work when we land. Right?"
Everyone else had nodded, not sure what she was getting at.
"What if we do the work while we're flying? Quantum communication makes instantaneous control a possibility. Take the burden of robotic work off of mission control, and give it to the colonists during the long transit. It'll save time and resources on arrival too, since we can tend a greenhouse before we even get there if we send bots with seeds. Once the main infrastructure is set up, every new crew will be responsible for building their own home before they arrive. We don't know how much iron we'll have—and we won't have trees until we terraform—but the plastic bricks Ben designed are pretty easy to work with."
A few eyebrows had risen. Ben, the chief engineer, had been sitting across from her. His eyes had retained their hard skepticism.
"What kind of robotic vehicles?" he'd asked. "If you're suggesting virtual reality, you're also basically suggesting sending the same payload twice. Launching that much mass is a high-dollar proposition."
Hope had smiled.
"For one," she'd said, "robots in stasis don't need to eat or breathe, so that's half your payload gone. Since they're inorganic, you don't have to worry about lift-off force crushing them. You can launch the bots with a rail gun or whatever. They'd get there fast, and with renewable energy."
Ben's head had wagged to the side, as he half-heartedly acknowledged her point.
"For two," she'd said, "we don't have to make them full-size. Send homunculi, one for each—"
"Homunculi?"
"Tiny, little men," Hope had said. "I'm borrowing the term from psychology, and the shrinks borrowed it from alchemy. The sensory homunculus rides around in your brain experiencing the world. Maybe it's just time to turn that inside out and let the homunculi do the walking."
"The thing that's going to fry your motherboards—" another voice had said. All eyes had turned to Milton, the resident theoretical physicist. Milton had retired and come back from retirement so many times that at this point no one was certain whether he was getting paid to come to meetings, or just researching space for his own amusement. "Well, not your motherboards, perhaps, but your grandchildren's—is when we build something a bit bigger than a Goshawk Heavy and push out for an interstellar transit at something approaching, say, fifty percent the speed of light.
"Perhaps we'll have sent Hope's homunculi ahead, as I hope we'll agree to in this case, and they reach Betelgeuse before we do. With instantaneous communication and time dilation—since you'll essentially be in two places at the same time—will you watch your tiny avatar move much faster than you, as you slog your way through the expanded time of a slower point of reference? Will it react to commands before you realize you've given them? What if we had an artificial neural processor in one plane, and humans in another? Could they think for a thousand years while their bodies only aged ten?"
Ben had laughed.
"Maybe we should worry about getting to Titan f—"
"Milton," Hope had said, "do you realize the next implication of what you're suggesting?"
The old man had fixed her with an expression of patient curiosity, knowing she was prone to leaps of reason that took others hours to catch up to.
"Not yet," he'd said, "but I'm all ears."
"We can get information from the inside of a black hole," she'd said.
Milton had blinked several times behind his glasses before pulling them from his eyes. He’d polished the lenses with a microfiber cloth, stared at the floor, and after some moments, laughed softly.
"It looks like I'll have my work cut out for me while you're launching your homunculi, my dear," he’d said finally. "This is—well—it's not a done deal, but the the
ory's sound. Our probe would still be crushed as it neared the center of the gravity well, but we'd certainly get more data than we could with existing methods."
"I'll admit that I don't get it," Gavin had said. "Why can't we study the inside of a black hole now?"
"Light can't escape the gravity well," Hope had said. "So neither can radio, or post cards, or anything else we use to communicate. Quantum entanglement is instantaneous though, so the—"
"Oooooooooh," Gavin had said slowly. "Never mind. I get it. Spooky action at a distance, and across relative planes."
"Yep."
Lori had elbowed Gavin at that point.
"I know it's easy to get excited," Lori had said, "and I really like the idea of being able to work while in flight versus, say, going into suspended animation or something, but—"
No one had asked, "but, what?"
Lori had a reputation for pragmatism and harsh reality, and Gavin guessed the others were half-scared to hear what she had to say.
"If we're building our homes while we're in transit," she'd said, "that means we're literally on our own on a new world until we start selling services back to corporate or the other colonists or whatever. It's like a straight-up frontier town, right? Rugged individualism and all that?"
"Well," Hope had said, "I mean in an emergency people are going to help each other. But yes, your log cabin is yours to build. Or plastic Lego-cabin. Whatever. The vent shafts, power connections, all that. You can rent greenhouse space in the mains or build your own."
"Okay," Lori had said. "I'm fine with that. It just seems like Ben and I are the only ones who realize this stuff costs our money and our sweat—that it's not just cool televised rocket blast-offs on a taxpayer subsidy."
#
"I do know how it's supposed to work," Gavin said. "Give me thirty minutes and I'll be at our build site, okay? We're ahead of schedule as it is."
"We're ahead on the habitat, Gavin," she said. "What if we have hang-ups with the greenhouse? I don't want to rent space to grow food. That wasn't in our budget."