Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  Myrna has a strange double-moment now: on the one hand she’s feeling for Wekesa, who is still mourning. It’s concern for him and the darkness of his mind that makes her come here.

  At the same time, a long-dormant part of her is running inventory on the hacks you’d need to get this effect. VR ghosts aren’t unusual; this isn’t even a particularly offensive one, but it is the first she’s heard of to affect the Martian homesteaders. To make such a ghost, she’d have to break into Wekesa’s system (and she’s been keeping up her skills, she can imagine several ways to do this), then inject a worm to ransack his image files for a face common enough to use to stitch together a 3D avatar. Then the worm would open an external port and become the interface to this … walking propaganda piece.

  “It must be the Pristines,” she says. There’s a sizable movement aimed at leaving Mars untouched. It started back when they thought there might be life there. Now the movement just taps into people’s romantic longing for “untouched nature.”

  “It’s shocking that they gave it her face, Wekesa—though that might be an accident. I mean—sorry, I know it’s been hard for you to move on …”

  There’s a moment’s pause, then he laughs. “It’s not that. I figured it was some Pristiner trick. I’m not angry because it looks like her. I’m angry because what it says is true.”

  They leave the playpen, and sitting with his hands folded, Wekesa tells her the rest. “It pestered me. Followed me about for the next three days. And not just me. This … thing, has been chasing other homesteaders too.”

  She thinks of her cheerful morning crowd. “Nobody’s talking about it.”

  “They’re embarrassed to admit they’ve been hacked. Our contracts say we’re liable for security breaches.”

  “Aaah.”

  “Whatever this is, it takes on the form of the person you’ve got the most pictures of in your library. For some, it’s one of their kids. Others, a favorite movie star.”

  “It says it’s Kasei Valles? The place?”

  He nods. “Depends on where you are. There’s Sacra Fossae, Mawrth Vallis. Some of them just watch the homesteaders, squatting on a boulder like vultures. Others demand we leave.”

  “Why hasn’t anything been done?”

  Wekesa splays his hands and rolls his eyes. “The communications company says they’re harmless. The VR equivalent of spam. In fact, they said since the ghosts have assigned themselves to features in the landscape, like the hills and plains, that means those are taken now and nobody else can spam them. So … better these ghosts than something else.”

  Myrna knows this is bull. She could have written the code to do something like this—back when computer programmer was still a job description. She knows if you can get through to the VR interface, you might be able to do more. “But are they just virtual? I mean, are they just in your interface here at home, or are they on Mars too?” If you could upload a virus or worm to the actual bots on Mars … “Wekesa, has there been sabotage?”

  “There are rumors, of crawlers gone missing, things unbuilt in the night ….” He shakes his head. “But there are always rumors of ghosts on Mars. The point is, as long as the ghosts are just yelling at us, the company has no incentive to chase down the perpetrator.

  “The problem, Myrna, is that the ghost is right. We are draining the aquifer too fast. Before we’re even able to build the settlement, the resources to run it will be gone.”

  Myrna’s heard nothing about this either. “But the settlement plan—”

  “Is just a plan. There’s no one to enforce it. The U.N. treaty says nobody owns the land, but we do own what we take from it. What kind of behavior do you think that encourages?”

  “Huh. But the corporations can’t recoup their investments unless the settlements are built—”

  He’s nodding. “—And the politicians don’t want to guarantee their loans, because they see what’s happening to the resources but have no powers to set policy for land use. The governments are pulling their funding. Some homesteaders are rushing to sell raw materials while there are still buyers, while others build anything they can while the corporations are still paying. But the plan has turned into a race to the bottom. By the time they’re built, the settlements won’t be fit to live in because we’ll have stripped their hinterlands of the resources needed to run them. The corporations don’t care because they only need to show a profit in the next quarter. They’ve shifted from actually planning the settlements to selling the dream of Mars here at home …” He sighs heavily. “To people like me. And to TV and VR investors. In the short run that’s the only way they’ll make money. And there’s no long run for them.

  “Nobody’s saying it yet but … there will be no colonists.”

  “Wekesa, this is terrible! When did you—?”

  “We all bought into the dream,” he says with a shrug. “Literally. I think everybody believed in it, at first. But if the governments can’t own the land, they won’t play, and if the corporations can’t make a profit, neither will they. So we burn up the resources building cities that will never be lived in, until it’s all done. Mars will be the next Easter Island, covered in monuments, empty of people.”

  Myrna has no answer to that, so she falls back on reminding him to clean up his place, eat more regularly. “Think about the things you can control,” she says, but it’s a weak rebuttal to his depressing scenario.

  She has her rounds to complete, so she leaves Wekesa to his double jet lag. She’s going to need an extra hour of light therapy herself to make up for the darkness in his apartment. As she makes her other deliveries the face of Wekesa’s ex follows her, as if wagging its finger at her, too. She gets madder and madder.

  By the time dinnertime comes (at midnight local time), she’s made a decision. She opens the bakery and Hartney strolls in, her first customer, regular as clockwork. Before he’s had a chance to sit down, Myrna’s at him. “Give me her picture.”

  “What?” He blinks at her.

  “Your Martian ghost. I know you’ve got one. Everybody does, right?”

  He looks shifty, slides into a booth. “I dunno—”

  “I don’t even want to see her up close. Or him, or whatever form it’s taken. Long distance is fine. Blurred. I just need some screen grab of the thing.”

  Reluctantly, he meets her eye. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “For starters? Make a Wanted poster.”

  Though nobody will admit to giving it a serious look, Myrna’s included a sign-up URL on the poster that promises anonymity. The back end of her server shows 10 people registered on the first day, 20 by Day 3, and 100 shortly thereafter. The poster (and her bounty offer) has moved online and gone viral within the homesteader community.

  If Myrna can catch a ghost live, and not just on a recording, maybe she can trace it, shut down the source. To her surprise, Hartney is proving a valuable aide. It seems he’s realized that there’s more notoriety to be had in being a Martian rebel than just a Martian, and within days he’s tapped unexpected contacts to become a community advocate for “taking back the planet.”

  He tells Myrna what he wants to do over coffee. “Look, nobody can own space. That’s part of the 1967 treaty and everybody who’s up there right now is a signatory to it. We,” he waves at the bleary-eyed troops shoveling Myrna’s hash browns into their faces, “do whatever we do up there under the jurisdiction of our own governments, but those governments don’t own the land we’re working.”

  “I know,” she says. “I hate to say it, Hartney, but doesn’t that doom this whole venture from the start?”

  “Depends on what you think ‘ownership’ means,” he says, waggling his eyebrows. “It’s like the whole ‘sharing economy’ flap back in the twenties. Where the ride-sharing companies and the automakers tried to claim they owned idle time on any self-driving car?” She remembers the maneuver the car companies had tried: discounted leasing arrangements that gave them the right to use the car w
hen you weren’t. This was quickly becoming the only way to get a car, until the courts had intervened.

  “Even before that, John Deere said farmers didn’t really ‘own’ its tractors because of the proprietary software in them. And before that, file sharing. Yeah, it’s all about ownership, but that’s not nearly as straightforward a concept as we pretend it is.

  “Take our bots.” He steeples his hands and raises his eyes to heaven. “They’re our second selves. Our great hope for the future. Except we don’t own them. We’re all leasing-to-buy, because they cost millions. Hundreds of thousands to make, and the rest of the cost is the price of getting them to Mars. Still less than 1 percent the cost of sending a live human, but who’s counting? There are no live humans on Mars. So, we prospect, we dig, we build, we sell, but do we really own any of what we find if it can’t be returned to Earth? And do the companies that build the settlements ‘own’ them? Are they paying us with real money? It’s all economic activity taking place on a planet with no humans on it, and with no exports. It’s potential money, potential ownership, none of it’s real.”

  “But if there’s nothing to own …”

  “Then maybe the Pristines are right, and we should just leave it all alone.” He jabs a thumb at her poster. “But if you followed the news, which you don’t because you have a bakery to run—on Martian time no less—you’d know there’s pressure in Congress for us to back out of the Space Treaty. If we do, then all these ownership issues become so much clearer. The U.S. can claim Mars, or whatever part of it isn’t being pounced on by the Russians, the Chinese, Europe, and India. Then we’d parcel it up in the traditional way, auction off the pieces and voila! Problem solved.”

  “So why don’t we?”

  “Because doing so would piss off, oh …” He peers into space for a moment, calculating. “Just the Rest. Of. The. World. Every other signatory to the treaty. Not to mention that the instant it happens the big money kicks in. We homesteaders will get shoved aside in the rush. You and I could never make the minimum bid for even the tiniest ditch up there. It’ll be game over for all our kind.”

  “Then what can you do?”

  He shrugs. “Be what we say we are. Show the world that we really can build a shining city in the sky that’s just waiting for residents. It’ll be the single most valuable piece of real estate in history. Everyone will flock there. If nobody else is going to sit up and show leadership, then the homesteaders have to. All we have to do is keep it together long enough to complete the first neighborhood. That means not letting these ‘ghosts’ and other scare tactics get to us.”

  She thinks about that while she takes care of a couple of other customers. When Myrna comes back, Hartney’s getting up. Only now does she see that the slant of his shoulders has more dejection than exhaustion in it. She imagines Hartney’s apartment or house, windows blacked out like Wekesa’s and him, a larval Martian curled up in his VR rig, dreaming of a day when he steps onto the planet for real. His determination is a façade, she realizes; he knows the homesteaders are no more in a position to run Mars than the governments or the corporations. Secretly, he’s certain that either his day will never come, or that when it does he’ll be living in somebody else’s city. Somebody who started with billions and has now made trillions without lifting a finger.

  She walks him to the door. “It’s funny,” she says. “When I opened this place I had such grand plans. And then I lost money, more and more every month. I thought I was going to go bankrupt. Then I found you guys.”

  Hartney smiles, a little uncertainly. “You okay, Myrna?”

  “I’m fine.” But she’s not. She has buns and bread to bake, deliveries to make, but she can’t stop thinking about her customers and their situation.

  By the time it’s late afternoon for her, the streets are dark and silent except for the buzzing of her drones. Supper will be at 5:00 a.m. this time, but she’s used to the constant shifting. As long as you avoid sunlight and total darkness, keep focused on your inner clock and on staying in sync with the customers, you can almost—almost—normalize time.

  Still, these extreme time shifts can make Myrna feel like she’s been cast off the grand stage of Earthly life. Like Hartney, like Wekesa. She clings to them and her other customers. Only they understand what it’s like to become unstuck in time, to look in on this planet’s concerns as if you were an alien.

  She does pay attention to the news, but she observes it through the sepia lens of Martian time. The stars in Myrna’s night are streetlights and glowing windows—not those of time-shifters like her, but of ordinary people who don’t have to get up for work tomorrow because there is no work. Half the city is unemployed, living on the various social assistance, guaranteed income, or job-sharing programs that have replaced the old labor market. Resource-sharing Internet of Things bots have taken all the blue-collar jobs, and the Distributed Autonomous Corporations of the global processing blockchain have gobbled up all the white-collar ones. It was the global processing blockchain that took her own career, but she’s been lucky. She has the bakery. People still want the human touch for some things.

  All the people in those lit apartments need to belong to something. They’re trying to find some stake in the future, to participate, help build something bigger than themselves. It’s not about a job. It’s about belonging. They’ve been told they no longer belong on Earth.

  So they turn their eyes to the heavens. Golden cities rise on the plains of Mars; Cloud 9 spheres will fill the skies of Venus, and the oceans of Ceres, Ganymede, Europa, and Callisto await new navigators. The United Nations treaty guarantees a stake for all in these new worlds, for no nation can own another planet.

  There is a viable business model in there, but it’s Hartney’s nightmare. It starts with letting the homesteaders fail. Then, when they’ve “proven” that a cooperative space venture will never work, the governments will pull out of the treaty, declare sovereignty, and parcel up the planet. They’ll sell it off piecemeal to the highest bidders, and those bidders won’t be Hartney or Wekesa or the other homesteaders.

  Enclosure. She remembers reading about this tactic in university, how the British lords used it to grab all the commoners’ land. But this time it’s happening on a scale those commoners could never have dreamt of.

  At 3:00 a.m. she’s sprawled on her couch, binge-watching a cop drama where, bewilderingly, everybody’s awake in the daylight at the same time. Tired as she is, it takes her a second to realize that the phone that’s ringing is not on the TV, but on the side table next to her.

  She grabs it up. “Marvin’s Diner.”

  Wekesa says, “She’s back.”

  Wekesa has come home. The long, stately mesas of Kasei Valles stand guard on the horizon as Myrna steps into VR with him. The Martian plain is thatched with tracks, and vehicles sit frozen in mid-roll, dozens of them between here and the jumble of bright white and blue curves that will be the Martian town. It nestles under the uplands, empty of life yet strangely animated with its posing cranes and angled satellite dishes.

  “Here she comes,” says Wekesa. His ex’s ghost strides across the photo-still landscape. Her cold smile is directed at Myrna in real time, which means that this connection is local; the “ghost” is a process running on some Earthbound server. Myrna has signed in as root in Wekesa’s interface, and now starts the diagnostic programs he allowed her to install last time she was over. Once they’re running, she walks out to meet it. “Why are you here?”

  The ghost tilts its head. “You must leave this place.”

  “So you keep saying,” Myrna replies distractedly. She’s watching her packet sniffers track down the origin of the ghost’s feed. It doesn’t take long, and it’s not hard to do, though she can see why none of her boys have caught the ghost yet. The user-friendly, high-level tools they doubtless deployed to trap it aren’t good at diving deep into the communications protocols that it’s spoofing; it takes a live programmer to conduct that kind of art. Hartne
y and the others don’t really know their systems on the machine level.

  There are few people left who bother with such knowledge, just as there are few people nowadays who can fix their own car, or grow their own food.

  Now that she’s traced its origin, she can see that the ghost is little more than a chatbot. It’s being driven by a DAO, a Distributed Autonomous Organization written in Solidity and running on Ethereum in the peer-to-peer computing blockchain. Nobody owns it and no particular server is running it, it’s smeared out across the whole internet. Whoever wrote the ghosts’ routines didn’t buy much “gas” to run their algorithms, so the ghosts are pretty stupid.

  “Hartney talked to some Pristines,” she says to Wekesa. “They told him they made the ghosts, but they haven’t gone public about their stunt. I don’t think they did it. Apart from the hacks that got it past your firewalls, it’s a pretty amateurish production. Probably some hobbyist with Pristinist leanings.

  “So it’s nothing?” says Wekesa hopefully.

  They both know it is not nothing; simple it might be, but the ghost is a wake-up call to a deeper problem.

  The apparition says, “You must leave me. Leave Kasei Valles.” —And that’s a funny thing to say, Myrna suddenly realizes.

  She explores the Ethereum code some more. There have been no updates since the process started running; whoever made it started the ghost service and just walked away. Like Bitcoin, the ghosts own themselves now. There are plenty of DACs and DAOs just like that.

  “Well, this is interesting. The DAO creates accounts, one per physical resource on Mars. The code that runs each ghost identifies it as that resource. So, insofar as it has any identity at all, this one,” she nods at the impatient apparition, “really does think of itself as Kasei Valles.”

  “Thinks? So it’s an AI?”

  Myrna shakes her head. “Sorry, I put that the wrong way. It’s not sophisticated enough to be an AI. You can tell that just by watching it. A real AI that thought it was Kasei Valles would do more than just yell at you to leave. If this thing had any social capabilities at all, it would negotiate, it would try to bribe you or threaten you in some specific way. I mean, if it had any real brains it would use them to actually look after its own interests ….”