by Niko Perren
‹Warrior,› the machine-controlled elf repeated. ‹We must…›
‹Delete elf,› said Jie. ‹Single player mode.› The elf froze, then blinked out of existence. There. That’s better. He sat down and tried to listen to the bird songs, but the distorted guitar sounds of the heavy metal theme music were too loud.
‹Found you!› The Count’s shrill voice was a nail on glass.
Jie leapt up, instinctively rolling for cover behind a tree. Dargool watched contemptuously from his horse, his guards arrayed closely behind him. ‹Thought you could run away from battle, did you?› he sneered.
Jie clenched his sword hilt. ‹I don’t want to fight today,› he said. ‹I’m just trying to enjoy the forest.›
‹Hand me the cup then,› said Dargool.
Jie tossed the cup and ducked back behind his tree. Dargool snatched it out of the air with a whiff of magic. ‹Bad mistake,› he said. He raised his yellow-clawed hand. With a fireball flash, the tree exploded into flame, throwing Jie to the ground. Smoldering triangular leaves rained down around him. Dargool rode off with the cup, laughing, his vile magic setting the forest ablaze. The game world’s sky grew black with smoke.
Part Three: Fire
Chapter 40
NATURE STATION PAX Gaia Coverage: Aug 28, 2050
It’s been a month since UNBio Director Tania Black shocked the world by announcing she was bypassing the UN and taking Pax Gaia directly to the public. And while nobody’s seen the final plan yet, everyone has an opinion. President Juarez calls it an irresponsible fantasy. Environmentalists call it our last chance to save Earth.
This weekend, our panel of experts gives you the real story. We’ll provide live coverage of the Pax Gaia Press Conference, and take you behind the scenes with customized regional analysis. What will Pax Gaia look like where you live? What will Pax Gaia mean for your family? And does Pax Gaia have any hope of succeeding?
Sponsored by GBOP, home of the Jie Burger. Enjoy life, to the fullest!
***
The shovel-nosed mining truck rolled backwards, stopping just short of the completed mass driver. The blazing sun poked out of a cleft between two neighboring hills, an accident of geography that filled the mass driver platform with a pool of low-angle light despite its location well below the Malipert summit. The first three electromagnets cast long shadows across the uneven ground. The rest of the barrel vanished into the shadow of a nearby ridge, reappearing only where the final guidance magnets poked into the sunshine 600 meters above.
Rajit climbed carefully onto the mining truck’s flat bed and hooked the crane’s winch cable through the Nanoglass factory’s lift point. He tugged the cable, then hopped down to safety. “Clear!”
The first Nanoglass factory! It’s here. It’s really here. At times, Jie had felt as if he’d be trapped forever, in this bleak netherworld where the sun never set, and the night never ended.
“Confirm clear.” The crane operator at Earthcon tightened the cable, and the gleaming silver Nanoglass factory swayed up off the mining truck’s bed.
“Moving the truck.” A different operator rolled the truck forward, leaving the factory penduluming above the dusty ground. Jie didn’t recognize all the voices anymore. Over the past two months increasingly sophisticated robots had been arriving from Earth, their distant operators taking over large parts of the construction. I bet there are over 100 people who work on the moon now. It’s just that most of them telecommute.
“One meter, bearing 210 degrees…” Sharon stepped back, guiding the suspended factory to the pad that had been prepared for it. “Jie. Sally. Can you stabilize it?”
Jie and Sally stepped in, dampening the factory’s movement with their gloved hands. From the outside it didn’t look like much: just a silver box the size of a small van, with ports for power lines and material supply hoses. But inside… Jie caressed the smooth metal surface. It’s beautiful.
“Jie, out of the way please,” said Sharon. “Earthcon. Sixty centimeters down.”
With a few more adjustments, Sharon guided the Nanoglass factory neatly onto the first of nine waiting pads. She walked around the perimeter, checking the alignment pins. “Position’s good, Earthcon. You can release the clamps.”
Once the crane was clear, Earthcon’s controllers jumped in, guiding the astronauts through the hookup procedure. “Jie, find the 30-centimeter flexible pipe located 4 meters in front of you.” An overlay appeared inside his helmet, highlighting the pipe on the surface ahead of him. He located it and put a hand on it. Sally did the same. “Good. Now lift the pipe and position it against the silicon input port on the Nanoglass factory.” More overlaps showed the correct alignment. He and Sally held the pipe in place, and Sharon, following instructions from a different controller, bolted it tight.
It took about an hour to hook the Nanoglass factory to its corresponding dust refinery. Then Rajit uncoiled a thick black power cable and plugged it into the wireless electrical receiver which caught the microwave power beam from the solar array.
“Jie, I think you should be the one to turn it on,” said Sharon.
Jie placed a hand on the switch. I almost don’t dare. What if it doesn’t work? He flipped the switch. “We’ll save the celebration for when the tiles come out.”
“We’ve got a connection,” said Earthcon. “Starting diagnostics.”
For five anxious minutes they waited.
“25317 of 25317 tests succeeded,” said Earthcon. “We’re ready to go!”
Jie felt an ominous sense of déjà vu. Don’t get too excited. That’s what they said about the nanolab, remember?
The mining truck’s movement lights pulsed, and it rolled to one of the dust piles that had recently started appearing. Like Earth-based refineries, the lunar refinery required finely crushed particles. But here, billions of years of meteor bombardment had already done the work. For weeks now, the remotely operated mining trucks had been screening dust out of the lunar regolith, leaving ever wider swathes of exposed rock on the surrounding hillsides.
The truck’s diamond-tipped scoop dug out a load, and it rolled away, dust dribbling. On one end of the refinery an open-mouthed hopper yawned, a hungry bird waiting for its meal. The truck dropped its cargo into the hopper. Rotating screws carried the dust into the refinery’s plasma chamber where lasers vaporized the material into a 1200-degree gas of iron, silicon, and impurities. The waste vent belched a plume of debris into the pristine valley below.
From the other side of the refinery purified materials started flowing into the Nanoglass factory. There, delicate machinery combined the raw elements, using the same recipe that Jie had struggled so long to perfect, but multiplied a million fold. Particles sprayed from the silver output port, not waste materials this time, but finished Nanoglass tiles, a mist of microscopic diamonds sparkling in the sunlight.
Jie stared in wonder at the shimmering curtains of color. In a hundred lifetimes, I would never have guessed Nanoglass could be so beautiful. “The tiles look like dragon tears,” he whispered.
“My God,” was all Sharon could say.
Jie dipped the sample analyzer into the vapor. Without an atmosphere to suspend the particles, his fingers created rippling interference patterns as tiles bounced off his gloves, colliding with their neighbors. He pushed his fingers in further, playing with the fringes of the cloud. Is this really the future of our planet? These tiny flakes? The idea of a 10-million square kilometer Nanoglass sheet seemed absurd. Like looking at DNA under a microscope and trying to see the elephant it encoded.
Without even thinking about it, Jie stepped into the spray, stretching his arms to embrace it. ‹Jie!› his controller squawked in alarm. Nanoglass tiles hissed off his helmet, like sand peppering a window in a dust storm. His arms cut swathes out of the cloud, sending waves of color raining to the ground like fallen stars.
He felt a hand grasp his, and he knew it was Sally’s. And then Sharon joined in, and even Rajit.
Music s
tarted. “Jump around,” sang his helmet. “Jump around. Jump up, jump up, and get down.” And they did. They celebrated to Sally’s turn-of-the-century rock music. They danced in a glass rainbow.
***
“We hate to shut down the party,” said Earthcon. “But safety is having a stroke. And there are a thousand engineers who can’t wait for you to hook up the rest of the system.” The music faded away and the flow of Nanoglass tiles stopped. The ground sparkled at Jie’s feet.
Under Earthcon’s direction, they hooked the Nanoglass factory’s output into the input port of the tile packer. The refinery fired up again, spewing another belch of waste material; already the impurities had stained the hillside below with a blue-green tint, glaringly out of place against the landscape’s monochromatic purity.
This is just one small corner of the moon. It’s not the same as what we’ve done to the earth. Not the same at all.
Sprayers in the tile packer laminated a fluorescent coat of molten iron over a crenulated ceramic cylinder. The astronauts’ suits glowed orange in the cooling iron’s light, as if they were standing around a campfire. Not that Jie had ever had a campfire. But he’d seen campfires, in Western movies. Sally pressed her helmet to his, and an echo of violins passed through the glass between them.
Once the metal on the mold had cooled sufficiently, a Haier Robotic Arm pressed three fingernail-sized guidance thrusters into position. The tiny devices were manufactured in the United States, and the first 100,000 had arrived two weeks ago. They provided just enough propulsion to fine-tune the payload’s flight through the shifting gravitational fields between the moon and L1. An equally small control unit with an integrated XPOS provided the brains.
The mechanical arm lifted the payload shell off its mold. It looked like a tin can, closed at the thruster end, intricately ribbed inside to provide rigidity against the 100G launch stresses. Metal triangles protruded from the shell’s open end like flower petals. The arm paused and a jet filled the can with Nanoglass tiles. Then the arm bent the triangles together, fully enclosing the payload. The shell vanished into the launcher at the mass driver’s base.
If this works, I’m only a few weeks from Earth. Hook up the other eight nanolabs, and hand off to the maintenance crew.
“The first payload is loaded,” said Earthcon. “Please move back to the safety position.”
They piled into the rover, and Sharon drove them to the top of the ridge, stopping just under the shadow line. While the individual parts of the mass driver had all been unit tested to death, this was the first end-to-end test with a real payload. For safety reasons, this launch would be at 10% power, but that would still leave the shell exiting the driver at 1000 kilometers per hour. Best to stay well back.
Jie scanned the ridge, trying to make out the mass driver in the darkness. Will we see anything?
“We’re in position,” said Sharon. “Fire when ready.”
“Copy that. The electromagnets are powering up. All systems green. We’re firing in five, four, three, two, one.”
The entire length of the mass driver seemed to leap up in a rippling sine wave of dust as the magnets fired in sequence, accelerating the payload up the hillside.
“Diǎo!” Jie exclaimed. “What just happened? Is everything OK?”
“Holy shit,” laughed Sharon. “It’s the iron particles in the regolith. The magnetic pulse lifted them right off the surface.”
Without the benefit of air to keep it suspended the dust was already falling, dropping like a curtain.
“XPOS telemetry shows the payload traveling 1030 kilometers per hour,” said Earthcon. Loud sounds of cheering came from the background.
“Can you save us some cake?” asked Sally. “Looks like we’ll get to come home soon.”
“We’ll put four slices in the freezer for you,” laughed Earthcon.
The next shot was at full power. The dust wave sprung up nearly instantaneously, much higher this time. And more dramatic. The electromagnets flung the tiny particles dozens of meters into the air, where they caught the low sunlight, creating a shimmering curtain of transient gray mist. The moon seemed to pulse under Jie’s feet.
“We have another clean launch. The payload is at lunar escape velocity, and is within 0.01% of expected trajectory. If guidance fine-tuning works correctly, it should reach the shield in six days.”
“What’s the path?” asked Rajit.
“Around Earth, back around the moon, and then to L1.”
“Incredible,” said Rajit. “The routing math is as beautiful as the machinery.”
“Seriously?” asked Jie. “Isn’t it just a brute-force computer algorithm?”
“No way!” exclaimed Rajit. “The search space of possible trajectories is way too big. Brute force algorithms take hours to find a single decent solution. And every launch is different: the sun, the earth, and the other planets are all moving relative to each other. Yet somehow the neural net pops out the answer in seconds. And it’s always right. Nobody understands how it works. We can look at the decision matrix, but it’s so complex that we have no way of analyzing it.” His voice became reverential. “It’s right up there with the machine proof of the Goldbach conjecture.”
“Can we ask computer to nudge a payload into White House?” asked Jie. “Pax Gaia could use a boost.”
But it was hard to be too upset about Tamed Earth. Not at this moment of victory. Not when they’d just sent the first load of Nanoglass tiles from the lunar surface. I’ve done my part. At least I can tell Cheng that. And Tania’s doing hers. In a few weeks, I’ll go home, and I’ll see Cheng again. And we can promote Pax Gaia together.
Chapter 41
TANIA POPPED A stim, then slumped amongst the coffee cups and omnis scattered across the conference room table. Outside, sun flooded the xeriscaped UNBio campus gardens. Wisps of thin clouds drifted off the mountains. Tania closed her eyes for a moment, shutting out the din of the Pax Gaia nerve center. Twenty-four hours until we release full text. And then it gets really busy.
“Tania… sorry…” The young programmer swallowed nervously. “The Australian team just uploaded a new version of the Tasmania reforestation plan.”
“Damn it!” snapped Tania. “I said no more changes!” She sighed. “Is it good?”
The programmer nodded. “Yeah, it’s very good.”
“Put it in, then,” she whispered. She stood up, raising her voice over the noise. “Please. Everyone. Pax Gaia is frozen. No more changes. We’ll open it up again after tomorrow’s press conference. But I can’t have the details wiggling underneath me.” The hubbub ebbed for a moment, then swelled back to a busy roar. Like herding cats.
One of the technical editors waved from his corner workstation. “Tania, can you check the wording on this?”
“I can’t proofread all 2000 pages,” Tania muttered. She pushed past a team studying African rainfall patterns and scanned the document. “I like the second version better: ‘protect the environment by providing better opportunities for people in sensitive areas.’”
“Tania…” Aaargghh. She tuned out the voice and stepped to the window. I’m surprised we've been allowed to get this far. No beatings. No intimidation. Other than a bit of nasty press, the Pax Gaia planning had gone unmolested. President Juarez hadn’t even protested Tania’s continued role as UNBio Director.
“Tania…” The girl – Zoe? – could barely restrain her excitement.
“Please. Thirty seconds of peace.” I’m getting bitchy. It may be time to cut back on the stims. “Sorry. What do you need?”
“Your omni was ringing. It’s Bill Witty! From the Witty Show!”
“OK, thanks.” Tania took the omni. “Bill? What’s up?”
“Look,” said Witty. He switched to video. Four astronauts, bright suits splashed with corporate logos, danced in a shimmering multicolored cloud, their bodies slicing ribbons of darkness through the flowing particles. Their rhythm was terrible, but the effect was as comic as it was s
tartling. A madcap image that could become an iconic moment for an entire generation.
Tania laughed. “That’s fantastic!”
“I’d think we should invite them on the show with you next week,” said Witty. “This video is going to go viral. We should ride the publicity to cap our first week of campaigning.”
Tania nodded. “I’ve got a conference call to the moon scheduled for later today to ask for an endorsement,” she said. “I’ll see what they say.”
Tania’s omni vibrated. Khan Tengri. “Sorry, Bill, gotta run.” She switched to the incoming call. “Khan. Are you as exhausted as I?”
Tengri nodded, grinning. His beard had lost its normal precision, but his eyes sparkled with an enthusiasm that reminded Tania of the old days, when he’d been her happy-go-lucky thesis advisor rather than this grizzled political veteran.
“I was up all night promoting Pax Gaia,” he said. “I’m getting lots of interest among the General Assembly. Unfortunately, everyone’s waiting for the first opinion polls before they commit publicly.”
“Cowards,” scoffed Tania. “Whatever happened to leaders who weren’t afraid to seize an opportunity?”
“They’re called dictators,” said Tengri. “Sad evidence of our base instincts.”
“Well, we expected caution,” said Tania. “That’s why we’re revealing our supporters in waves. Stay in the news. Spin up momentum for a week, and then go on Witty and talk to billions of people.”
“How many environmental groups has Ruth recruited?”
Tania waved away an approaching simulation programmer. “Fifteen hundred. We plan to announce three hundred a day.”
Tengri smiled. “I’ve got fifty-three governments, assuming our PR ramp-up gives Pax Gaia good opinion polls. Should we call it a draw?”
“Fifty-three!” Tania almost kissed the camera. “What’s your dark secret?”