George and the Blue Moon

by Stephen Hawking

  She had to get to Mission Control straightaway… .

  *

  At exactly the same moment, George was also heading for Mission Control, being marched there by a dangerously nice robot.

  “My master will be so pleased to see you!” enthused Boltzmann as they marched along.

  “I doubt it,” George couldn’t stop himself from replying. “He wasn’t so thrilled last time.”

  “Oh well, these things happen,” said Boltzmann airily. “He’s so good and kind, I think he will forgive you for what happened last time. I’m sure you can explain how it was all a misunderstanding, and when you tell him how sorry you are, he will be very happy to make friends.”

  “Hmph,” said George, who doubted entirely that Alioth Merak would ever be pleased to see him or become friends.

  And George was not sorry that he had stood up to Merak, so he would never apologize, no matter what. But he was certainly sorry to think he might have to see him again. From the little he knew about Alioth Merak, George fully expected he would still be beyond furious at the way his plans for world domination had been brought literally crashing down by two kids and an antique computer who, together, had managed to defeat his fiendishly complex plans.

  A whole stream of robots now seemed to be trudging in the same direction as George and Boltzmann. The robots didn’t look interested in George or Boltzmann, which wasn’t surprising as George figured they hadn’t been programmed to pay attention to unexpected developments in their environments. But George also saw that among the crowd of identical robots, all silver and shiny unlike poor blackened and twisted Boltzmann, walked not a single human.

  Just robots.

  A cold chill stole through him as he wondered whether any humans were left at the space facility other than himself and the other young “candidates” in the Mars Training Program. What if it was just him and a bunch of kids, pitted against Alioth Merak—wherever he was—and the fierce robot warrior army?

  “You did it before, only you and Annie,” he said to himself inside his head. “You can do it again. Yes, you can.”

  As they reached Mission Control, the largest and most central of all the buildings that made up the Kosmodrome 2 facility, George paused. He grabbed Boltzmann by the “arm” and pulled him to a stop.

  “Come on,” said Boltzmann, beaming. “Aren’t you in a hurry to see my master? Don’t stop now!”

  “I’m so excited to see him,” lied George, while he thought at the speed of light. “But I want to be really sure that I make the best impression possible.”

  Even in the semidarkness outside the Mission Control building, which was illuminated from within as though with some kind of radioactive glow, George could see that Boltzmann’s robot cheeks seemed to be lit up with pleasure.

  “Oh, totes!” Boltzmann enthusiastically agreed.

  “I think … ,” said George, who just making stuff up now. He had no clue whether this was a good or a bad idea, but he figured that walking straight into Mission Control and the clutches of premier-league madman Alioth Merak was about the worst plan he could think of. Anything had to be better than that. “I would like to check out what Merak’s up to before he sees me, so I can talk to him intelligently. Otherwise he’ll just think I’m really stupid if he has to explain everything to me.”

  Boltzmann’s robot eyebrows knitted together. He looked worried.

  “Is there anywhere,” George pressed on, “in Mission Control where I can see Merak but he can’t see me, so I can absorb what he’s saying to the other robot guys before I say hello?” He looked hopefully at Boltzmann.

  To his great relief, Boltzmann’s brow cleared. “The mezzanine balcony!” he said. “I can take you up to the balcony and you can get an overview of my wonderful master and the ground floor of Mission Control. Would that work for you?”

  Boltzmann was so keen to follow his programming and be “nice” that George felt awful at his deception. He’s just a robot, he reminded himself sternly. He’s not alive and he doesn’t really have feelings, so you can’t hurt them. Even so, as George gazed at Boltzmann’s battered but innocent robot face, it was tough to harden his heart and remind himself he was dealing with a machine. Boltzmann, he realized, was on the cusp between human and non-human, a dividing line between person and machine. And it was hard to know how to react to him (or even it). A sentient being who was technologically created from parts of machinery and yet who seemed to display human emotions? George gave himself a little shake to pull himself together. It wasn’t the moment to be distracted by wondering at what point machines with feelings had to be treated like people after all.

  “Perfect,” he said instead. “Take me there, Boltzmann, the nicest robot that ever lived.”

  Medically Speaking, Is Suspended Animation Realistic? by Dr. David Warmflash, M.D.

  In real life, suspended animation is still science fiction. Astronauts cannot hibernate like groundhogs during a long space voyage. People cannot sleep for 100 years and wake up young, like Aurora in the original Sleeping Beauty. But these things may be possible in the future. Today, scientists are working on suspended animation, and doctors use something like it to help sick people.

  In science fiction, usually the purpose of suspended animation is to keep people young and healthy in sleeper ships. During long space voyages, they sleep with their bodies cooled. They don’t eat, they hardly breathe, and their hearts beat slowly, because their bodies use less energy and oxygen.

  In real life, the same thing happens in hibernating animals. They fall into a deep, cold sleep for many weeks. Scientists also think that they may age more slowly while they hibernate. So, when you read a story about astronauts waking up young after sleeping for decades, it’s a vision of the future that really could come true.

  Using a gas called hydrogen sulfide, scientists can create a state of almost suspended animation (also called a “hibernation-like state”) in mice that don’t hibernate naturally. The gas makes them sleep, their temperature drops by 11 degrees, and they use only one-tenth the normal amount of oxygen. They can remain in this state for more than six hours and wake up healthy!

  Humans can fall into a low energy state when they’re trapped accidentally in very cold places. Occasionally, people hide in wheel wells of airplanes, desperate to escape from bad places, or eager to travel to new lands. Usually, they die by falling out, or because of the extreme cold and lack of oxygen when the plane reaches high altitude. But, once in a while, the cold doesn’t kill them and they fall into a state that looks like hibernation. The same thing can happen to people drowning in very cold water, or in snow avalanches that bury skiers in accidents.

  Because doctors know that cold protects the brain, often they cool people on purpose. When a person’s heart stops beating, often it can be restarted with special medicines and electricity. But then, the person must be placed into a state of hypothermia, meaning low body temperature. The person is put to sleep and cooled slightly—just a few degrees below normal body temperature. It’s also common for doctors to use hypothermia, or special medicines, or both, to put a person into a coma—a state of low brain activity—to protect the brain after a terrible head injury.

  Surgeons are also working on a more extreme kind of hypothermia, cooling patients to just a few degrees above freezing. It’s a kind of suspended animation, but the new treatment already has a more medical-sounding name: Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation for Cardiac Arrest from Trauma (EPR-CAT). It’s designed for people who have lost a lot of blood after an awful injury, and may be able to keep somebody alive for two or three hours, even with no blood flowing through the brain! This can give surgeons time to repair the injury.

  EPR-CAT may be a long way off from the kind of suspended animation that can get you to another star system, but it could be a first step. Researchers believe that EPR-CAT will work on human beings, because they’ve already tested it on dogs and pigs. If it does work in people, there will be good reasons to work to
improve it, to change the techniques so that people can hibernate for much longer than three hours. As we learn more, people might be put into hibernation-like states for days, weeks, months, and even for many years.

  This is the sort of valuable research that is sure to be developed further by future doctors and scientists. By people like you, for instance?

  And then it might even be possible in your lifetime to see astronauts using such developments to help them cope with the challenge of traveling beyond our Earth… .

  Chapter Seventeen

  From the balcony overlooking the whole of Mission Control, George could see banks of computer monitors and the walls filled with screens, just like the first time he had been there.

  This time, while the computers were exactly the same and the screens were in the same place, there was a very different atmosphere to the control room. It was full once more, but there were no excited kids or chattering parents, no buzz of nervous happiness and excitable joy. Just the flat insistent tone of the call signal backed up by the ringing clank of robots, taking their places around the room.

  As George peered over the edge of the balcony, he could see his fears were real. The beings moving about down below him were all robotic—not a single living human among them. And they weren’t friendly, people-pleasing robots, like poor battered Boltzmann. They were the powerful sleek ones, so like the kind that he and Annie had once met on the Moon that you would swear they were the same make and model. He tried to breathe really quietly. Had Kosmodrome 2 been taken over by a robot revolution? And did that have anything to do with Eric and the weird and sudden way he had been forced to leave?

  George didn’t have to wait much longer for an answer. A lone human figure had manifested itself, as if by magic, in the center of Mission Control, standing under the big screens, which seemed to be showing very different views of space from the ones George had seen there previously. The last time, the screens had shown views of many contrasting regions of space, from the volcanoes of Venus to the icy Nitrogen glaciers of Pluto. Just one of them had shown Europa. Now, all the screens showed the same place—a strange aquamarine world, where the light seemed dim and diffused, as if filtered through thick liquid.

  He didn’t have time to wonder where this was—was it the inside of Europa?—as Boltzmann poked him with a twisted metal finger. “Look!” he whispered excitedly. “It’s my master! It’s Alioth Merak!”

  George eyed the scene more closely over the edge of the balcony, looking down on the small, now-familiar human figure, toward whom all the robot figures automatically turned, clearly waiting for their next command. There was no doubt who was in charge here. “But—” He had recognized the figure, but was finding it hard to process what his eyes were showing him. He was now horribly confused. “I don’t understand. Where is Alioth Merak? I can’t see him!”

  “Your human eyesight can’t be that defective!” said Boltzmann. “Although I say that in a loving and kind way, as an expression of my concern for your welfare. How can you not see my master? He is right there, in the middle.”

  “That person—in the middle?” said George slowly. “You’re sure that person standing in the center of Mission Control is Alioth Merak?”

  “Of course I’m sure,” said Boltzmann, now sounding rather offended. “You know I have no facility to tell lies. But if you wish me to convince you, shall I summon my master?”

  “Nooo!” George hissed urgently. The last thing he wanted was to have the attention of the figure down below drawn toward him. “I’m sure you’re right! But at the same time—you can’t be! That’s not Alioth Merak! That’s Rika Dur… .”

  *

  As George looked down on Mission Control from the balcony, Annie approached the same destination from below. Attempting to leave the hospital block again by the underground tunnel that had brought her there, she must have somehow taken a wrong turn, as she found herself in a dim series of interconnecting tunnels.

  They looked as though they had been built a long time ago, given the crumbling brickwork, the amount of mossy green algae growing on the damp walls and ceilings, and the huge cobwebs that stretched from wall to wall. She walked right through one of them and spent a few moments fighting off the webby, filmy net she was stuck in, frantically trying to brush it out of her mouth and her hair. She plodded bravely onward, with no real idea where she was going and only the faint light from Leonia’s watch to show her the way ahead. Why were there these dirty underground tunnels running underneath Kosmodrome 2? she wondered as she squelched through a muddy patch.

  And then, chillingly, she thought she heard rapid, light footsteps. They seemed to be behind her, so she hurried forward—but some trick of how the footsteps relayed through the subterranean space meant the sound suddenly seemed to be coming toward her. Annie backed away very fast and went slap-bang into someone running very quickly in her direction… .

  *

  George, on the other hand, was rooted to the spot. He could clearly see that below him stood Rika Dur, as perky and smug as ever in a tight-fitting blue flight suit, her blonde hair carefully styled, her lips a brilliant carmine red. She was very obviously the only human being in Mission Control—and yet the rapt and devoted expression on Boltzmann’s face told George that the robot was in the presence of its master. George couldn’t see Alioth Merak anywhere—so was he now invisible? Had he managed to disassociate his particles so that he floated in the ether rather than appearing as a whole human form? What could this all mean?

  “Friends, robots, and countrymen!” said Rika, who was clearly enjoying this moment. Her robot audience all looked as thrilled as Boltzmann. “We are on the brink of the greatest moment in the story of Planet Earth! We are about to achieve an incredible feat! This is the game changer! Now is the time, my friends! And we are the ones in charge.”

  Briefly, George wondered why Rika would bother to address a host of robots like this! And then he noticed that flying around Rika’s head, and all around Mission Control, swooped a flutter of tiny drones carrying cameras, the sort that had been used to monitor the progress of the trainees during the challenges. No wonder his journey across Kosmodrome 2 that evening had been fairly drone-free—Rika had clearly summoned them all here to record her every statement from every possible angle. And then he knew. She was filming herself! This was Rika’s great moment, and the words she was saying were not really for the robots. They were for an audience of the future.

  “Far away,” continued Rika, “we are already poised to extract life from the oceans of a moon within our Solar System. We have established the high probability of finding life in this location.” George watched, boggle-eyed, as the screens on the wall showed a now-familiar view, that of robots working on what looked like an icy surface that stretched for as far as the eye could see—except for large round holes in the ice. The robots appeared to be fishing around in the dark liquid that lay under the ice on this strange and alien world. As the cameras panned outward, George could see the robots had already made several new holes in the ice, one of which they seemed to be trying to enlarge.

  Rika Dur continued to explain to her future audience. “This means we can now begin Stage Two of Mission Artemis. Sadly, due to widespread ignorance across the globe at this time, I am not able to livestream my great explanation of the secret mission!”

  “Artemis!” said George to himself. “We were right!”

  “Much of the challenge,” continued Rika, “has been how to proceed with Mission Artemis without ignorant fools getting in the way. We must be allowed to continue without delays or interruptions. Any holdups would be fatal to my visionary master plan! It would never have been approved if I had not sent away those pedestrian scientists who objected to my methods, with their ethics and their committees.

  “But I have triumphed, and Kosmodrome 2 belongs to me! I am sending a ship of human cargo out to Europa to set up a temporary colony so they can assist my robots in investigating the presence of life on this mos
t fascinating of Jupiter’s moons. Some of these are proven survivalists, who will reach their peak age when the mission time elapses. These brilliant young astronauts will be capable of all the mission tasks and experiments I have loaded onto the ship! And if they are not, I have sent backup models, just in case!

  “Nothing will stop us from investigating the origins of life on Europa. Because once we can truly understand this phenomenon we will come to know how life itself begins! Once we know how life starts, we can make genuine life-forms of our own. I can make you all alive—you will be robots no more! You will count as living beings as I will give life to you, my faithful servants and my brave army. I will send you to Europa where my ‘human’ servants will make you real.”

  The robots cheered! They couldn’t wait to become true living beings rather than clanking metal bots.

  “These alien life-forms,” explained Rika, “will help us to understand the process by which life has begun both in space and on Earth. And once we know that, we will rule the Earth! This whole planet will be ours. We will own the planet in the Solar System that is most naturally adapted to harbor life. This watery planet, the Earth, will be ours—but the other important celestial body, Europa—the blue moon of Jupiter—will also belong to us. And we don’t have to stop! Any planet we choose can become ours. Mars can be next! This way, when any other space agency or country finally gets around to sending a mission to another planet or moon, guess what! We will have already gotten there first. Won’t that be a lovely surprise when they jump off their spacecraft to find my ro-humans or human-bots already there!”

  Through the true horror of Rika’s words, George noticed something else. Her voice seemed to be getting deeper. He looked across at Boltzmann, to try and get some kind of explanation of what all this meant. Who was departing across the Solar System, never to come back? What “Mission” Artemis? What did Rika mean and where was Alioth Merak? He turned to ask Boltzmann, but as he did, he realized something terrible had happened. One of the drone cameras, which had been fluttering around below, seemed to have sensed the movement at the mezzanine level.