She shifted in her seat and continued.
“Anyway, I went through med school and went back. From there I worked with my parents, then I moved on to rejuvenation therapy.”
Veronika leaned forward. “Do you mean …?”
Silvia nodded. “This is our breakthrough. We found a way to do it. Not only can we extend human life, now we can turn it backward. We can make people young again.”
“How long … how many …?” Josh asked.
Silvia smiled. “No one knows. It works, but we don’t know of any limits to the process.”
“So we could live forever?” Josh asked, shaking his head. “Really?”
Silvia shrugged. “Perhaps. It’s not quite like that. Even though we can make your flesh young again, there are still other problems … your hip joints can still wear out, for example. That’s why we call it rejuvenation therapy, it’s not just the anti-aging drugs, we also need to make other adjustments, such as replacing worn joints.” She looked at Veronika. “I know you can already do it, but the technology has improved a lot. Rejuvenation is the breakthrough, but so much else has improved too. There is almost nothing we can’t do to improve the human body now, even repairing damaged brains.”
Veronika tilted her head. “Really?”
“Really. We can map people’s brains and rebuild damaged parts from these maps, if we need to.”
Veronika stared at her. “Are they still the same people?”
Silvia shrugged. “It seems so, and they are normal, not vegetables.”
“What else,” Josh asked. “What else is new?”
“Machines. Those nanites everyone always talked about but never delivered? We have those for the rejuvenation therapies. To clear blocked arteries, that kind of thing.” She tapped her arm. “We can regrow lost limbs. Artificial bones that are stronger than the real thing. All kinds of small modifications to improve blood clotting, blood oxygen levels, and other ways to improve performance.”
“Rejuvenation will be useful for a small colony like ours,” David said.
“Dude!” Josh said, his eyes sparkling. “It’s not just useful, we get to live forever!”
“A long time,” Silvia said. “Not forever.”
“It will seem like forever, believe me,” Veronika said, looking at Josh and rolling her eyes. The others grinned, well used to Josh when he waxed enthusiastic, and Veronika’s inevitable response.
“It will help us all survive,” David said, “and that’s what matters to me.”
“You know how to do this, right?” Josh asked Silvia.
“Of course,” she replied. “I have all the data.”
“Where?” Nathalie asked. “I’ve never seen you with a data pad.”
Silvia frowned and exchanged a glance with Ernie. “That might be something else new.”
Nathalie raised an eyebrow.
“We carry our data with us,” Silvia said, tapping her head. “In here.”
“You mean …?”
Silvia nodded. “We all have data implants.”
Nathalie sat back, mouth open. “But how do you access it?”
Silvia shrugged. “Well, either directly or through the net.”
“The net?” Josh said. “You mean you … you are part of the network?”
“Of course. We all are, right Ernie?”
Ernie coughed. “Well, I didn’t want to make a big deal about it …”
“Holy shit!” Josh said. He exchanged a look with the others, acknowledging what they all realized – their new friends’ outward appearance concealed some unexpected differences.
“Is … is there anything else?” Veronika asked, turning to Silvia.
“That wasn’t enough?” she asked with a smile.
“Of course! But …”
“You think there must be more, right?”
Veronika nodded.
“I don’t know where to start. Tailored drugs – we hardly ever take them off the shelf now, except for common things like painkillers. Everyone carries their full genome around with them,” she tapped her head again, “and we have little chem lab units to tailor drugs on demand. We can make almost any body part on demand, as you could already with your tissue fabricators, but now we don’t just replace parts, we improve on them. Replacement eyes without a blind spot, tougher bones, stronger hearts, more efficient lungs.”
“Do people ever upgrade because they can?” John asked.
Josh grinned. “Why, has Nathalie been complaining again?”
John rolled his eyes. “Jeez, I was just asking.”
Silvia smiled. “Well, it’s a good question.”
John crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows at Josh, making him grin.
“A few did, those with access to the technology. In fact, with body part replacement therapy and advanced plastic surgical techniques, it became possible for people to change themselves … to improve on nature.”
Nathalie exchanged a glance with Veronika. “A lot of the Inspiration’s passengers were wealthy, and yet …”
“… didn’t look as if they’d done it?” Silvia asked.
“No,” Nathalie replied.
“Only a few could get it.”
“Like Harper?” David asked.
Silvia nodded. “Like him.”
“Did he use it?” Heidi asked. “I mean, he looked quite ordinary and he didn’t look … young.”
Silvia shrugged. “I’m not sure he cared about such things. He had plenty of time to get rejuvenated, he was in his forties.”
“So, is that it?” Veronika asked.
“Still want more?” Silvia asked with mock surprise. “I think I’ve covered the radical changes. Total replacement of any body part, even parts of your brain, and you can live forever. What more could you want?”
“But there is more, isn’t there?”
Silvia nodded. “Yes, but we’re into details now. Medical imaging that lets us see into the body almost like the skin becomes transparent, in real time. Augmented reality senses so you always know which way is north and can see sounds … it goes on.”
She turned and smiled at Ernie. “But we can talk about these another time. I think Ernie may have a story to tell too.”
Everyone turned to Ernie, who looked like Santa Claus about to hand out presents. “So, what would you like to know?”
“Tell us about the warp drive,” John said with a grin, but he sounded half-serious.
Ernie shook his head. “Sorry, mate. No warp drive.”
Everyone, including David, looked disappointed.
“I guess that figures,” John said. “If you had one, you would’ve used it to get here, wouldn’t you?”
Ernie nodded. “Yeah, I guess we would. You should talk to Zhang Wei, though. He says it’s not impossible, just beyond our means to do yet.”
John exchanged a glance with Heidi, who spoke next. “So what is new?”
“Well,” said Ernie, pushing his cap back and scratching his head, “the big breakthroughs before you guys set off would be the quantum drive and the stasis field, right?”
“Right,” John and Heidi said together.
“The bad news is, nothing like them has happened since. Nothing really, radically new, at least not that I know of. The good news is everything we do know about has got better – a lot better.”
“Such as?” John asked.
“Smart building materials for one, which have come about because fabricator technology has improved so much. We can now fabricate materials built from the molecular level up. We can make compound substances like spaceship hulls that are ceramics on one side and metal on the other. We can bake electronics right in. In fact, just about anything can be layered into the materials we build walls out of, like the walls you saw in the Inspiration.”
“The walls like big screens that gripped when we pulled on them,” David said, remembering.
“Yeah, them. They’ve got a layer of light-emitting pixels buried under the surface and the ma
terial can change its roughness at will. In fact, that is really what I meant by smart building materials. Not only can we build everything in to the walls, the materials can dynamically change as we need them to. Their shape and what they do, all can be changed.”
John rubbed his chin. “So … when we want to build something like a shuttle …”
“Completely different, in a good way. That’s the key thing, the fabs. The difference they make is enormous.”
“How exactly?” David asked.
“Well, think about it this way. A person can only do so much with their bare hands. But give them a hand tool and they can do the work of ten people, right?”
David nodded.
“And give them a power tool, and they can do the work of a hundred. Give them the tools you guys have already, and maybe it’s a thousand.”
He paused for dramatic effect. “Well, with these new fabs, one person can do the work of tens of thousands. Not only can they make stuff, they make stuff that makes more stuff. They do this using pre-built designs that can be combined in a bunch of different ways.”
Heidi frowned. “So we can tell them to make shuttles built out of smart materials we can just fit together? How is this different from what we already do?”
Ernie grinned. “Well, now we can turn out a shuttle in one piece.”
That shut everyone one up for a minute.
“Bullshit!” John said. “I don’t believe it.”
Ernie nodded his head. “It’s true. We can feed raw materials in one end and a shuttle will come out of the other. But that’s not all.”
John and Heidi exchanged a look as if to say, “What could top that?”
“The whole point of all this is to build machines to bootstrap up from raw materials, because Edward had a specific purpose in mind.”
“Asteroids,” David said.
Ernie grinned. “That’s it, or part of it. David’s right, that’s one thing we can do. Drop a package of starter machines on an asteroid, and they can pull the raw materials out of the asteroid to make more machines. Once they’re done, they can turn the asteroid into just about anything else if the right elements are there.”
David jumped to his feet, and they saw something in his eyes that had been missing since Grace had been torn from his life.
They saw hope.
“If we do that and drop a starter package on Doom … could they move it?”
Ernie nodded, smiling. “Oh yes, but it would be a waste.”
David cocked his head to one side. “Explain.”
“Well,” Ernie said. “You would have all these fabricators stuck on an asteroid that looks as if it’s got lots of metals and volatiles. We can nudge it away from Serendipity, but there will be lots of material left over. A lot of material. It would be a waste not to build something out of it.”
David stared at Ernie, his eyes glowing. “What do you suggest?”
“Starships.”
“We can do that?”
“Oh yes. We did it, back in the asteroid belt.”
“There’s another ship?”
“Not a starship, an interplanetary ship. And not just one, many. Harper Industries did this over and over until we got the design right. They designed starships to follow, but …”
“But we destroyed Earth instead,” Nigel said.
Ernie lowered his eyes. “Yes, yes we did. We really did.”
“So how long will it take?” David asked, his eyes on Ernie. “To get a starter package to the asteroid and move it?”
Ernie licked his lips and shot a quick glance at Heidi and John. They would understand just what kind of undertaking it would be. “Well, it’s one of those things where a lot of groundwork is required. We can’t just make the package, first we have to use your fabricators to make new fabricators to make the fabricators we need. It’s a kind of bootstrapping thing, we can’t go straight from where we are now to making that technology.”
David looked at John and Heidi, who nodded.
“He’s right,” John said. “But once we’ve got the fabs set up, we’ll be able to do anything, right?”
“Yeah,” Ernie replied.
“So, how long will it take?” David asked again.
Ernie scratched his head. “Give or take … we could be at the point where we can fabricate a starter package in, say, three months?”
David frowned. He looked at Nathalie, who shook her head.
“Unless we have a way of applying a lot of thrust,” she said, “we will need to start moving it by then.” She looked at Ernie. “But you are not talking about delivering the package in three months, you are talking about building it. We still have to get it there, don’t we?”
Ernie crossed his arms. “Yes. Yes, we need to get it there. Also –” David looked up then, and Ernie saw more bad news wouldn’t be welcome. “The starter package is called that because that’s what it is – a start. It’ll take time for it to make the thrusters to move the asteroid. More to make anything else.”
“How long?” David asked, his voice quiet.
Ernie shrugged. “A month? I’ve never seen this done, so I don’t know for sure. Maybe less.”
Nathalie spoke up. “It will be upon us before we can move it.” She gripped the table to stop her hands trembling as the news sank in. She looked around at everyone, eyes wide.
“I don’t think we can stop it.”
Everyone came. Even so, David couldn’t help but notice that this time, there was plenty of room in the pavilion, unlike during Carla’s trial. Many carried obvious signs of the battle concluded in such dramatic fashion only a few weeks earlier.
Haven had become a much quieter place. The morning chorus from their remaining birds sounded subdued, as if the survivors honored their dead.
The engineers had completed a new dome to seal the breach. The war had left a legacy of light to what used to be the dark side of the wild lands.
Haven was healing, and they could look forward to a peaceful future at last. But first, one more thing needed to be done; one more wound needed to heal before they could move on.
The five survivors of Carla’s attempted coup stood before David. Carla hadn’t survived the collapse of the ceiling, but Franz had, as had Silvia Ramirez, Sheldon Owen, and three others. They pardoned Silvia because of her non-combatant role and contribution to the community since. Living with her shame would be her punishment.
They had found the others guilty of crimes against the state, which had been their way of describing what they had done. It had been hard to place them in context in a settlement without formal laws. Were they soldiers on the losing side of a civil war? Or were they, as some would have it, murderers? What punishment fitted their crimes? Should they try to integrate them back into their society, or banish them? Should they pay the ultimate price?
Silence fell as David stood. In his role of judge, it fell to him to decide. He had debated the subject with the council, but found no clear consensus, other than nobody thought they should be executed.
“We’re not barbarians,” Heidi had said. “We cannot do this.”
David’s hands twitched as he remembered his recent executive decisions. Roberto. Jake. Carla. And that wasn’t even counting the people crushed by the rock fall triggered by his hand. He was the barbarian in the room.
But he knew she wasn’t thinking of that. She was thinking of their new society, the one that should not condone a state killing its own citizens.
“Banishment, then,” he’d said. “We build a settlement on a remote island and place them there to live out the rest of their lives.”
Heidi had pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Don’t forget, we can have many lives now. If we deny them rejuvenation therapy, are we not killing them by withholding a duty of care?”
The others had exchanged uneasy glances and David had sighed. He felt he walked in a moral quicksand, a world shaded gray. He preferred his world to be black or white. They hadn’t reached a cons
ensus that evening, or any other.
And so it fell to him, now.
“People of Haven. In front of us are five people who have worked against the common good of us all. They have shown they cannot be trusted to work with us to create a society we can all be proud of. Action is required to prevent them from harming anyone ever again.”
He looked at the five defendants. Four had their heads bowed. Franz returned his gaze, chin held high. “My decision has not been an easy one. I am convinced these five people must be removed from our society in order for us to thrive and prosper, and my judgment will reflect that.”
Almost as one, four heads jerked up to join Franz, and David saw fear and defeat in their eyes.
“But I do not want to live in a society that kills its own people, no matter what they’ve done.”
A collective sigh washed over the room, from audience and defendants alike. “Nor do I think we should discard these people and prevent them from contributing to our society, should they repudiate what they have done and commit to living a life that obeys our laws.”
Five sets of eyes widened as they realized the implications of David’s judgment.
“And so I ask you,” he said, looking at each of them in turn. “Do you commit to becoming a useful, law-abiding member of our community here on Serendipity?”
Silence, then nods and affirmations.
“Yes.”
“I do.”
One by one they affirmed they would. Franz held out the longest, but even he agreed. “I do.”
David nodded. He didn’t doubt they would, given the alternative. Had Carla still been alive, it may have been different. But without her to motivate them with fear, what else could they do?
“This is my judgment, then. In our society as it is now, you cannot be trusted. We are few and you represent almost five percent of our population. We cannot trust you not to harm us again.” His expression sent a shiver down their spines. “This will not be the case in our future. Then we will be many, and five people will have less opportunity to cause lasting damage. My judgment is, you are to be sedated and committed to a stasis chamber, there to be held for one hundred Earth years. Once that time has passed, you will be revived and integrated back into our society.”
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