by Brian Smith
“We’ll get started tonight, then” she smiled.
“That’ll be zuì yōuxiù de,” he replied, using the Chinese term for “most excellent.”
What he almost added was: And whatever you do, don’t let this damn thing wake up! But that sounded silly to him, so he didn’t say it.
Chapter 2
February 20, 2091 (Terran Calendar)
Crandall Foundation Annex, Crandall Academy
Daedalia Planum, Mars
The annual meeting of the Crandall Foundation board of trustees was something of a celebrated event on Mars. With rare exception the meeting was held at the foundation annex located at the Crandall Academy, which served as the foundation’s unofficial headquarters.
A large science-and-technology expo was always held coincident to the annual meeting, sponsored by the foundation, and open to the public, although the actual board meetings were closed-door sessions. New discoveries, RFPs, or big projects involving the foundation were announced during the meeting, generating the excitement and media buzz that went with them. As an “annual” meeting, because it was held on Mars, almost two Earth years passed between successive events.
Since moving to Mars in 2060, the Crandall Foundation routinely declared itself nonpolitical. This distinction was more important than ever because the foundation and its trustees were often painted as the closest thing there was to a Martian government independent of Earth. Such a government was something that a growing number of Marsmen wanted; for the expanding native population of the red planet, it was estimated that more than half would live out their entire lives without ever setting foot on Terra. They felt little or no affinity for America, China, or the myriad other nations in which most of them held legal citizenship—these were just names and little else. Many couldn’t properly label Earth’s land masses or oceans on a map without looking them up, much less the various national boundaries. There was a rising sentiment that it was high time for Mars to divorce itself from the nations of Earth and become self-governing. While the idea was considered a political cliché by some, others treated it as an evolution of interplanetary politics as inevitable as the American Revolution.
The national governments of Earth were watching Mars with a quiet but growing sense of alarm, but, despite the political bluster, there was no central Martian entity for people to rally around, and no significant moves were being made. The fact that the foundation’s board of trustees had repeatedly and flatly resisted calls to declare itself a Martian government provided some political stability and aided in maintaining the status quo. In the meantime, large orbital habitats like Halsey Naval Station and its Chinese counterpart sat out in the Martian L1 and L2 points, respectively, quietly keeping the peace and standing watch over Earth-based national interests.
It was a rare thing for all five members of the board of trustees to be assembled in one place at the same time; this almost never happened except during the annual meetings, although the trustees were commonly in remote contact with one another at other times. They were self-made individuals, having built hugely successful companies from the ground up or become spectacularly wealthy and famous in their professional fields of expertise. Commercial or scientific success was a prerequisite to sit on the board—that and a vision for the future of humanity which mirrored the late Raymond Crandall’s. Although they disavowed politics, they still wielded a combined economic power greater than that of all but the top dozen Terran nations. It was not inaccurate to say that when the board of trustees adopted a cause or course of action, the rest of the solar system tended to follow where they led. The foundation had become a power unto itself, political or not, and these self-made, independently wealthy captains of science and industry were its stewards. It was a role they considered sacred, and, given their individual levels of financial independence, they and their ideals couldn’t be corrupted for mere financial gain. They had been screened by their predecessors for just these traits, just as they would screen their successors in turn.
Trustee Bill Campbell sat in his modest but lavishly appointed suite at the annex, enjoying a glass of Earth-distilled single-malt while he browsed through the latest report from Dr. Shu on Janus Station. OURANIA was paying dividends, no doubt about it. The supercomputer had traded ideas with Aberdeen’s own engineering teams over the past year, slowly drafting a design for a torchship capable of carrying a human crew to Alpha Centauri and back. Of course, his own people had no idea that their “outside consultant” was a quantum supercomputer—what they wondered these days, and quite vocally, was why Campbell didn’t simply hire the consultants. The last few refinements of the design were almost solely OURANIA’s work, with very little input from his own engineers.
The problem now was that the computer’s engineering ability was compounding so rapidly that Campbell was afraid to commit resources and begin construction. OURANIA was already doing more than just designing the ship—it was engineering new technologies that would in turn be used to construct the shipyard facilities that would then build the ship. His big worry was that he’d spend a fortune putting together the shipyard facility itself, only to find it obsolete because OURANIA had come up with something even more radically advanced in the interim. Still, the fact that his plan was working was very exciting, and he was preparing a presentation to the board to outline his progress—on the new technologies and the ship, not OURANIA. Eighteen months after being switched on, the computer itself remained a closely held secret.
This latest report was intriguing in other respects as well. Apparently, OURANIA was starting to multitask in ways Shu claimed would be possible, but far sooner and in different technological directions than anyone anticipated. OURANIA had presented a proposal to Shu that Janus Industries—or a newly incorporated independent—acquire fresh real estate on Mars and begin construction on two new facilities. One facility was related to improved synth production, while the other was to be a materials-production facility working on a new, semiorganic “Q-gel” of OURANIA’s own formulation, a substance that in turn would be critical to producing the new synths.
The technical schematics for both facilities were fascinating all on their own: they represented new, emergent engineering concepts in robotics (also engineered by OURANIA), and they would be almost fully automated when put into production. Campbell looked over the list of projected applications OURANIA had provided for this new Q-gel formula, and his head started to spin when he realized he had the makings of entirely new startup industries—ones that could earn him second or even third fortunes even larger than the one he’d made with Aberdeen.
When queried as to how all this related to Project Daedalus, OURANIA’s reply was that it was all interconnected: the improved synths would provide workforce enhancements resulting in a major acceleration of the Project Daedalus timeline, as well as improved quality in the final product. If that wasn’t enough, OURANIA had blueprinted a method for financing it all: the computer had worked out the financials independently, based on a separate analysis of business trends in intrasystem trade which could be capitalized on for profit. In short, not only was OURANIA asking for new toys that would double or triple Campbell’s net worth, she was going to pay for them herself.
All things being equal, it was a hard request to say no to.
Campbell stopped and grinned to himself, thinking about what he was doing. Shu had referred to the computer as “she” from the moment it had been turned on, and now he was starting to do it, too.
Although he was pleased that his Janus idea was paying rich dividends, he was a little uncomfortable with the speed at which it was happening. Successive reports and requests from Titan left him with a growing sense that OURANIA was starting to move faster conceptually than her human and industrial counterparts could physically keep up with.
He began drafting a secure reply to Shu via his Kevin MacDonald persona, informing her that he’d get back to her after taking some time to study the proposals. On further reflection, he wo
uld have realized that he’d already mentally approved them—the added time was just so that he could wrap his head around it all. He was interrupted by the door chime; his AR overlay informed him that the visitor was Carter Drayson, chairman of the board. Campbell signaled the door to let him in.
Drayson was Earth-born like Campbell, and, like him, he had gotten to Mars as fast as he could and then made a fortune. He was a handsome man, athletically built and fit, even though he was into his early sixties. He had a tanned complexion, silver hair, and a bushy, equally silver mustache. He was rarely seen dressed in anything less than business formal, and the man had sort of a recruiting-poster aura and charisma. His firm leadership style and his skillful management of disparate personalities and tempers was the reason his peers had selected him as board chairman.
Drayson waved a hello at Campbell and headed to the sideboard to pour himself a scotch. An impeccably dressed lifelike synth valet standing nearby moved to assist, but Drayson casually waved it off, preferring to do for himself.
“Thought I’d drop by and fetch you on the way to my presentation,” Drayson grinned, taking an appreciative whiff of the whisky before downing half the portion in a single gulp. “You all are going to be floored.”
“Quit kissin’ the stone—you’re here to fetch my scotch, I expect,” Campbell replied with a chuckle.
His curiosity was piqued, however—Drayson didn’t make idle boasts. Campbell didn’t press him about it here, since he was about to see the presentation in a closed session. The trustees were always careful about discussing sensitive matters outside the secure boardroom; despite the best security efforts money could buy, there were very few places that even people at their level could be sure they weren’t being electronically spied on.
Drayson asked him if he’d seen the newsfeed that morning. Campbell hadn’t, so Drayson called it up on his oculars and sent it over to Campbell’s with a casual flick of his fingers. Both men also wore audio peripherals—eardots—microdot transceivers plugged just inside their ear canals. When wirelessly linked to the Marsnet or any other cloud-based data stream, the eardots also doubled as translators—everyone was panlingual these days, at least in that they could understand any language spoken at them. On Mars, the lingua franca seemed to be evolving into a uniquely hybrid mishmash of English, Russian, Japanese, and Mandarin.
Campbell looked at the newsfeed Drayson sent him and shook his head. On Earth, a band of midlevel politicos in the Trans-Oceanic Alliance were calling for a referendum on establishing a unified Terran government. So far, the CFR was laughing at them and the U.S. government was issuing a firm no, while on Mars the idea had sent the growing independence movement into a feeding frenzy.
“Idiots,” he muttered darkly, referring to the latter. “Don’t those bloody yahoos have anything better to do?”
“Apparently not,” Drayson replied dryly. “I mean, it’s not like there’s near-zero unemployment out here or anything like that,” he added sarcastically. “Can’t do a lot of rabble-rousing if you’re being paid top wages for a full day’s work!”
He jerked a thumb toward their synth valet. “At least guys like him aren’t rabble-rousers. Gotta hand ’em that, at least. Plus they work for cheap! Isn’t that right, valet?”
The synth nodded graciously. “I’m sure it is, Mr. Chairman,” the synth agreed amiably. The reply was almost indistinguishable from a human’s in terms of voice and inflection. It sounded friendly and genuine, but in the end it was all just programming—good software. Campbell chuckled and accused the synth of being a suckup, and the two men left for the meeting.
***
Thirty minutes later, Campbell sat spellbound along with the rest of the board as Drayson dropped his big surprise. The presenter was Dr. Eleyna Borodin, a no-nonsense woman who held dual Level-Five (doctoral-equivalent) credentials in astronomy and astrophysics. Tall and slim, she wore her dark blond hair in a convenient bob, eschewing cosmetics and making her presentation in a simple lab coat even though she stood before the assembled board of the Crandall Foundation. She was an employee of one of Drayson’s companies, specifically the one responsible for the Galileo Optical Imager. She was the lead astronomer and administrator for the array, and her team had captured the images that held everyone’s attention now.
The data comprised a series of optical shots taken a few weeks before. Although it wasn’t public knowledge, the GOI had long since pinpointed what looked to be a terrestrial, life-bearing planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A, known also as Rigil Kentaurus. Rigil Kent-4 showed every indication it might be habitable, and that was the discovery prompting Campbell’s decision to build OURANIA—in the hope of fulfilling the foundation’s RFP for an interstellar torchship.
Rigil Kent-4 was old news, however. What Dr. Borodin was showing them now was evidence of two more potentially habitable worlds: one at Alpha Centauri B and the second at 47 Ursae Majoris (47 Uma). The latter was a system located approximately forty-six light-years distant. Forty-seven Uma was a yellow-orange Sol analog, estimated to be 4.5 to 6.5 billion years old. Astronomers had found a gas giant orbiting the star at just over two astronomical units’ distance in 1996. Further study revealed a second gas giant farther out in the system, but detailed studies had been forced to wait until the first TPF arrays came online in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century.
Once astronomers were able to take a detailed look at the 47 Uma system, they weren’t disappointed. A terrestrial-sized planet with promising spectrographic lines was located on the inner edge of the habitable zone, approximately 1.07 AU from the primary. With four gas giants in the outer system to attract cosmic debris and shield the planet from celestial impacts, coupled with a stable, low-eccentricity orbit, the odds of this planet’s being able to evolve and sustain a habitable ecosphere were high. Now that the GOI was online, the first shots of this planet showed a blue-green world that, as far as the spectrographs indicated, boasted a remarkably Earth-like environment. However, at a distance approaching fifty light-years, 47 Uma was simply beyond mankind’s current reach.
That left the second amazing find: the planet at Alpha Centauri B. Up until this moment, Project Daedalus had been about getting human explorers to Rigil Kent-4. Now it appeared there was an added incentive to go there. Alpha Centauri B was a K1-type star that massed slightly less, and was slightly cooler, than its twin, Rigil Kent. Finding any planets at all around Alpha Centauri had proven challenging—there were three stars out there in proximity, all gravitationally influencing one another. Early methods for locating exoplanets involved measuring star “wobbles” induced by gravitational effects; that was made difficult given the fact that Alpha Centauri A and B orbited one another in a fairly elliptical path. Their distance from one another varied between 11 and 24 AU, with one orbital period taking eighty years to complete. The third star, a dim red dwarf named Proxima, was 10,000 AU closer to Sol than its two larger companions, and not visible to the naked eye. It still wasn’t certain whether Proxima was a near neighbor to Alpha Centauri A and B or whether it orbited the binary pair.
All the astronomical data was familiar to the board members, but Dr. Borodin highlighted it for them again, emphasizing the difficulties her team had overcome in achieving their latest find. Given the eccentric orbit of the binary pair, the range of stable planetary orbits around each individual star was narrow enough that it seemed a miracle there could be life-bearing planets present at all.
“Bozhe moi!” breathed trustee Dmitri Federov, shaking his head in wonder. Federov was founder, chairman, and CEO of Federov Propulsion Associates, the company most likely to design and build the fusion reactors and the torch drive for the Daedalus when the time came. He’d recently begun hinting to the board that he was on the trail of the next paradigm-changing evolution in propulsion technology—something completely different from a fusion torch. He hadn’t been forthcoming with any details yet, but the others were eager to learn what they could about any new propulsi
on technology.
“What a find!” Federov added. “How far is this second planet from Centauri B?”
“Not as far as you might expect,” Borodin replied. “Centauri B doesn’t burn as hot or bright as Rigil K, and the habitable zone is correspondingly closer. This second planet is about 0.8 AU out from the primary, in a very stable orbit. It may wind up being a little cool, but it’s right smack in the sweet spot. At the very least, it will rate a visit when we finally get there.”
“That’ll affect the projections for mission time,” remarked trustee Ty Forester, chairman and CEO of Barsoom Traders. He spoke slowly, with a tendency to compensate for a thick West Texas drawl by slightly overenunciating his words. “What we’re looking at now is a crew effectively surveying and exploring two planets rather than just one. We may need to factor in as much as two or three extra years on any mission profile.”
Federov sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers in front of him and smirking. Campbell thought he could almost see canary feathers showing at the corners of Federov’s mouth.
So did the fifth member of the board, Dr. Maria Vasquez, the oldest and most venerated of their number. She was an iron-haired, iron-willed lady almost ninety years of age, although she didn’t look a day over sixty. Improvements in gerontology and a life spent largely in Martian gravity, coupled with a largely vegetarian Martian diet, would extend her life expectancy well beyond twelve decades. Her fame didn’t come from her current title, President of Chryse Planitia University, but from her time as head of the university’s oncology department in the mid-2060s. It was her team that had published Mindy’s Cure, transforming cancer from a deadly scourge into but another victim of mankind’s ingenuity—just one more bad memory on a long list of ailments humanity no longer had to concern itself with. As “the woman who cured cancer,” she needed no introduction anywhere in the solar system, and she was the only member of the current board who was more scientist than entrepreneur.