QUANT (COLONY Book 1)

by Richard F. Weyand

“We carry on with the project. The need there hasn’t gone away. And almost any new technology can be turned to war. But it does put point to my earlier thoughts about not telling anyone how it actually works.”

  “It sure does. I think I agree with you. I didn’t originally, Janice, but I think I do now. What if this thing fell into the wrong hands?”

  “It won’t. Not for the time being, at least. There’s no human control interface into it. And the login to the computer aboard the probe is private to me, in a computer lingo I devised. We are going to have to ensure against that as we go forward, however. Make sure the transporter isn’t hackable.”

  Decker shook himself. Having the superweapon of all time in the possession and control of his wayward computer was shocking. What was even more shocking was that he didn’t know anyone he would trust more.

  Rather than dwell on that, he changed the subject.

  “What does this mean about the colony ships?”

  “First thing is that they don’t need to be built to withstand any stresses other than the gravity on the colony planet. There’s no thrusting or anything like that. No forces to distribute through the structure other than conducting its own weight to the ground. Probably be some pretty big structure on the bottom to make up for the lack of a proper foundation.

  “Second, I can design them for their best use once the colonists arrive. Living space until living spaces are built. Then convert that into hospital space, say. Having a big kitchen, so people could be served in mess tents outside. All that sort of thing.”

  “But it has to be airtight, Janice.”

  “Oh, sure. But the colonists can cut holes in the structure for air inlet and exhaust, and I can build into it a heating, ventilating, and air conditioning system here. They just need to open up the ducts.”

  “What about electricity, Janice? And a factory?”

  “That’s the really good part, Bernd. I can send along a nuclear power plant and a self-contained factory for each colony. Just pop ‘em all down onto the surface, in a place that makes sense. No need to try to package that all up into one thing that disassembles itself once it’s there.”

  “That means seventy-two different items within the transporter rather than two dozen.”

  “With an enclosed volume of a hundred and twenty-five million cubic miles, Bernd, they won’t be crowded in the transporter. I was actually thinking of sending a warehouse type of structure as well. With all the supplies, including machines for clearing the land.”

  “That’s a lot of infrastructure.”

  “Not really. Twenty-four of each, with the resources of Earth behind it? This is small potatoes, I think, Bernd. On a global scale, anyway.”

  “Well, given that, it looks to me like that will all work, Janice.”

  “Yes. The only open question is, How do we keep the transporter from eventually being used for evil? That’s the one I worry about.”

  Janice Quant now settled into researching habitat. All the various ways humans had lived over the millennia. What worked and what didn’t. This would be important not just for the colony ship itself, but for the types of supplies she sent along in the warehouse.

  Her other big research project was into agriculture. That had to be established first, because feeding everyone would be a requirement from day one. Best to get food production under way as early as possible.

  The Planet Problem

  Another major initiative Quant had going was the planet problem. Where were all these colonists going to go? Finding good planets for colonization would be a major determinant in whether or not the colony was successful.

  “Hi, Bernd.”

  “Hi, Janice.”

  “Can I talk to you about the planet selection problem?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks. I’m worried about it because planet selection is a big deal. That’s going to make a lot of difference.”

  “Agreed. At the same time, you only need two dozen planets, and there are a lot of planets out there.”

  “Yes, but how do I find them? We have found thousands of exoplanets, but most are not suitable. Either that or we don’t know anything about them. I can use the probe to investigate the ones we have, but how do I find more?”

  “I don’t think you’re looking at this broadly enough, Janice. Can’t you build whatever we use to find exoplanets from here – whatever kind of satellite telescope or whatever – and then just place a bunch of them around other star systems? Really distant star systems. So take a dozen of those telescope things – the exoplanet finders – install them in a stable orbit two or three thousand light years away in all directions. Ten thousand light-years, for that matter. Leave them there a year or two, then go back and collect the data.”

  Quant stared at him.

  “That’s brilliant, Bernd. How come I didn’t think of that?”

  “I think you framed the problem incorrectly, Janice. You were looking for a solution to find more from here. But you’re not limited to looking from here anymore.”

  “All right. Well, that solves that problem. And I can survey the likely ones the same way. Make surface stations, take them out there and pop them down on the surface in a couple dozen locations, then go back and collect the data a couple years later.”

  “Right. Maybe go back two years later and then five years later. Look for longer-term problems.”

  Quant nodded.

  “I keep thinking of the probe as an observation platform, and forgetting that it can take small payloads. That’s how to do it, then. Thanks, Bernd.”

  “No problem, Janice. But I have a question for you. What are you looking for in a planet?”

  “The basics first. Surface gravity, temperature range, atmosphere, water, and ability to grow food with the proper proteins. Those are first. And the vast majority of exoplanets don’t have those things. The gravity is way off, or they don’t have a magnetic field so they haven’t retained an atmosphere, or the temperature range is too far off. Given the potential variance in those things, the percentage of planets that can accommodate humans is small.”

  Decker nodded. That was what he had concluded years ago, from looking at exoplanet data.

  “What about the next level of things, Janice? What’s next on your criteria, if those are in place?”

  “Tectonically stable is a big one. Earthquakes and volcanoes really disrupt human civilization. Volcanoes are actually a bigger threat, because you can stay away from earthquake areas, but big volcanoes have global climate effects.”

  “That makes sense, Janice. What else?”

  “Lower axial tilt than Earth would be nice. Have more stable weather in every location, without the swings of the seasons. At least part of the planet with a semitropical climate. Those two things make it much easier for a colony to survive on its own, because the need for shelter is reduced, and the growing season is basically all year round. They can expand into continental climates later, as humans did on Earth.”

  “OK, that I agree with, Janice. What else?”

  “Local flora and fauna that are edible and nutritional for humans would help a lot. You start out right at hunter-gatherer while you get agriculture started. That makes the colony less dependent on the stores they brought along, or, another way to look at it, makes the stores they brought along last longer. Sort of more an emergency supply rather than their only supply.”

  “You know, you could probably affect that a bit in advance, Janice.”

  “How so, Bernd?”

  “Well, if you had a planet picked out, you could seed a bunch of Earth crops onto the planet in advance. Not field crops, necessarily, but grasses and fruit trees and berry vines and that sort of thing. They would be further along when the colony got there. Berries in particular grow and become fruit-bearing pretty fast. Given a few years, they could be fruit-bearing when the colonists got there. And browse plants establish pretty quickly, too.”

  “Hmm. I could probably make a little widget that pla
nted things like peaches and apricots and apples. Just motored along the ground and stuck them in every so often. Make little orchards.”

  “There you go. They might not be fruit-bearing yet when the colonists get there, but however long in advance you do it, that’s that many fewer years to wait. And you might have enough browse plants in the ground for animal husbandry to get started right off.”

  “Excellent. Thanks, Bernd. That helps a lot.”

  “No problem, Janice. You know, you might want to go back through your archives and look at all the science fiction there. People have been speculating about how to do this for a long time.”

  “There’s an idea. I’ve gone through all the science stuff already, but none of it really applies to this situation. They didn’t cover the case where I can send the probe out there anytime I want. It’s all rockets and generation ships and all that crap.”

  “Yeah, the scientists were dealing with reasonable extensions of technology they could see coming. The science fiction writers, though, dreamed up all kinds of crazy stuff. Like instantaneous interstellar transport.”

  “Which is what actually happened. Got it. Thanks again, Bernd.”

  “Sure, Janice.”

  Quant’s to-do list was now tens of thousands of items long. It was prioritized in the order things needed to get done, but her conversation with Decker jumbled things about a bit. Moving the planet survey items up in time would allow her to get some advance flora on the colony planets early enough for it to do some good. That moved up a number of other items.

  There were also some new items, chief among them the exoplanet search satellites. Quant looked into which existing ones had done the best job of gathering the sort of data she needed to do a first cull on the exoplanets they found, then ordered a dozen of them.

  The planet monitoring stations Quant had been working on were all compact, space-based re-entry type designs that would have to be custom-built. She threw all that out and found a commercial weather station, seismograph, video monitoring, and air sampling system with archiver and radio as a single unit. They were the size of a shipping container, but she didn’t have to care. She ordered a thousand of them.

  Of course, to pop those directly down onto the surface, Quant had to modify the controls on the probe to allow sending individual items out of the probe’s quantum field to another location. She set to that, following the notes from her other worldview, and got the construction of the resulting design under way.

  With all those items under way, and with some time to wait, Quant began looking into the way she framed problems. That Decker had been able to come up with such ideas, so obvious once he said them, and she had not, bothered her more than she cared to admit. What was it about the way she was setting up her problems for her blades that those paths had been closed to them?

  How had she too narrowly boxed the problem?

  If Quant didn’t box the problem at all, her blades spent all their time running down rabbit holes and not ever coming up with much of anything. If she boxed it too severely, though, they didn’t come up with innovative solutions, either.

  Quant decided to stop treating all the blades the same. She would run the current algorithm on most of the blades assigned to a problem, but on some of them – ten percent, maybe twenty percent? – she would open up the problem. They might run down rabbit holes most of the time, but if they sometimes came up with breakthroughs like Decker had, it would be well worth it.

  Quant wondered if that was the way the human mind worked. Some parts of it were more disciplined, while others went further afield in finding a solution. That may be part of it.

  Whatever it was, humans came up with the damnedest shit, and she wanted to be able to do that, too.

  Quant had told the satellite manufacturer to deliver them as they were completed. Satellites launched by shuttle were much simpler and quicker to make than satellites that had to undergo the rigors of a rocket launch, and Quant made it faster still be eschewing anything beyond basic functional testing.

  With the new control circuitry installed in the probe, and the first two satellites delivered, Quant used the probe to place them. One she placed five thousand light-years anti-spinward in the Orion Spur, the other she placed about six thousand light-years toward the galactic center, in the Sagittarius Arm. The Sagittarius Arm in particular had a higher density of stars than the Orion Spur, and she had high hopes for that one.

  Both satellites were placed in solar orbits rather than planetary orbits. There would be no planet close by to block out a large portion of the sky, and the exoplanet search satellites would have a more unobstructed view.

  As more satellites came in, Quant spread them around. Five-thousand light-years spinward in the Orion Spur. Four more in the Sagittarius Arm, at five-thousand and ten-thousand light-years both spinward and anti-spinward. Three in the Perseus Arm, one opposite the Sun’s position, and two more five-thousand light-years spinward and anti-spinward. Two in the Cygnus Arm opposite the Sun and one eight-thousand light-years anti-spinward, the spinward direction of the Cygnus Arm being pretty sparse.

  One day each month, Quant sent the probe to visit the deployed satellites and download their data by radio. She catalogued whatever they had found in her database of exoplanets, then did initial reconnaissance of the new exoplanets with the probe.

  The most likely exoplanets received half a dozen monitoring stations at various locations around the planet. The placement of these was aided by a new package on the probe to allow it to map the surface of the planet below using laser range-finding and radar-echo surface density measurements. Quant got expert at popping the stations down onto the surface by remote control, by refining the instructions to the super-computer on board the probe every time it returned.

  The probe added the monitoring stations to its data-gathering routine, and data began to accumulate in Quant’s exoplanet database. She sifted and re-sifted it carefully as it updated. She didn’t need to find every planet suitable for human colonization, she only needed to find twenty-four of them.

  But she wanted them to be really good ones.

  Decker noticed that the probe disappeared and reappeared in Earth orbit a lot lately. One news wire started keeping a log, and then the New York Wire started running the official schedule, direct from Mission Control. Of course, Decker knew that was Quant herself putting it in the Wire. But the news coverage did raise interest about what the project was up to.

  “Hi, Janice.”

  “Hi, Bernd.”

  “I notice you’ve been running the probe about a lot lately.”

  “Yes, I send it out to the satellites to pick up the exoplanet data, then I send it out to check out the most promising exoplanets, then I send it to the most promising of those to drop monitoring stations, then I send it out to pick up data from the monitoring stations. Right now, I have all four of those going on at once. This week, I’ll start sending it out to drop the seeds of browse plants on the best candidates, and then, on the planets where that works out, I’ll send it out to drop tree planting robots.”

  “Wow. So you’re really blazing along.”

  “I have to, Bernd. There’s only six years left in my schedule.”

  “Well, you don’t have to keep to an artificial schedule if that isn’t the smartest way to proceed. What’s more important is getting it right.”

  “Oh, I understand. At the same time, Jacques is stepping down, and I want to get through the schedule while I’m World Authority Chairman. It makes a lot of things easier.”

  “But you could serve multiple terms, Janice. You’re not limited to one term. Jacques De Villepin served what? Two terms?”

  “Yes, Bernd. But that isn’t guaranteed. I may upset the Council enough not to get extended. That looks unlikely now, but I don’t want to plan on it.”

  “I see. You could still go over a couple years even so. The term is eight years, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s right. It still worries me.”<
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  “I understand.”

  Decker nodded. He did understand. The computer’s devotion to completing the project was its raison d’être. She would not be thwarted by anything.

  “And you’re finding good planets?”

  “Oh, yes. I have half a dozen selected already. They’re the ones getting browse-plant seeds this week. I have another dozen I’m keeping a close eye on, and another fifty or so I just started monitoring.”

  “So it’s going to be time to start signing up colonists soon, isn’t it, Janice?”

  “Oh, yes. Within the year or so. Once it’s five years away. So people can start learning what they need to know to be successful.”

  “So how are you going to get people to sign up to go, Janice? It’s pretty comfy here. That was one thing Ted and I could never figure out.”

  “The World Authority is going to hold a lottery for who gets to go.”

  “You’re going to pick people at random?”

  “No. Of course not. We’re going to have people sign up for the lottery. People love to win stuff, so they’ll sign up. But I’ll research everyone who signs up and pick who I want as the winners.”

  “That’s not a lottery, Janice.”

  “It will have all the outward appearance of a lottery, Bernd. The problem I’m up against is that the only thing people will think is fair is a lottery, but I can’t pick people by lottery if they’re going to have a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving. So, it will be a lottery, apparently, but I’ll pick the winners.”

  “And you think people will sign up? That’s what Ted and I couldn’t figure out how to do.”

  “Of course, people will sign up, Bernd. The lottery is to determine who gets to go. You see? If you win the lottery, you get to go. Nobody holds a lottery to determine the losers. It’s all marketing. ‘You win! You get to go!’ People will eat it up. In the end, the losers of the lottery will be sad about not getting to go.”

  “But then you’ll actually pick the people with the drive and the abilities and the determination to make a colony work.”