The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN

by Michael Rizzo

Day 158. 9 June, 2115:

  “Worst case, what are we likely to be facing out there?”

  I know the question can’t really be answered with any certainty, but I need them to agree on something, or at least clarify all of their various theories so we can decide how to proceed once we do have the means. And I realize I must look melodramatic, standing at the Briefing Room slit windows, staring out across Melas Chasma as the winds blow dust and grit over the rolling terrain under a rosy sky.

  “Based on what the colony labs were working on when they were hit?” Rick cuts back with more than an edge of frustration, his fingers idly scrolling on the panel on the table in front of him. I’m sure he’s spent months—like the rest of us—mulling over this, spinning worst cases against more hopeful possibilities. The time since we’ve awoken has narrowed that list somewhat: eliminating both the worst and most encouraging by the simple fact that we’ve seen and heard nothing at all, at least until the Lancer showed up. But what we have learned because of its arrival brings us together again to speculate, hopefully productively instead of nihilistically.

  “What we knew the labs were working on,” Anton counters, tensely pivoting his chair side to side. He has reason to be frustrated: still failing in his dual projects of sending out a distress call and cracking into the operating systems of the Lancer. “The corporations didn’t exactly keep their required research reports up-to-date. Especially with the Shield going into orbit.”

  “And with the hottest work moved to the ETE stations for safety, it made accounting even harder,” Rick reinforces his fears.

  “Or hiding the scariest projects even easier,” Tru follows.

  “Can I have a best guess?” I press them, trying to stay objective, trying not to pace in the tight conference room. “Start with what scared the pro-Eco groups enough to lobby for putting missiles in orbit.”

  “DNA engineering goes wrong and creates a super-virus,” Matthew throws out one of the more common fears.

  “No,” Ryder denies. “Even the scariest biological can be contained mechanically. Especially on Mars because everything and everyone is pressure-sealed, sterilized, contained.”

  “That’s exactly why that kind of research flourished here,” Rick backs her. “Easy containment. Anything that broke out wouldn’t get far.”

  “Unless it was designed—or evolved—to eat through whatever we had containing it,” Tru counters with one of the more popular Eco fears.

  “Which is a much greater risk with nanotech than biologicals,” Anton takes it.

  “The Hunter-Killers,” Halley offers, sounding confident.

  “The anti-cancer bots?” Matthew asks for clarification. “I thought we liked those?”

  Tru’s eyes go hard, but she stays pointedly silent.

  “The ones that passed FDA were the best of the lot, the most stable and reliable,” Ryder gives him. I notice she chose her seat next to Rick. Now her hand is on the frame of his chair, but not touching him directly, not in front of the rest of us. “But the risks during R&D were huge: Programming nano-machines to enter through the bloodstream, to search out and destroy specific types of cancers, self-replicating off the waste components of what they kill…”

  “If the target programming goes wrong, the buggers might eat you instead,” Anton voices the most popular and most visceral fear, “and make lots more of themselves in the process to go eat everybody else.”

  “Then there were the fears of weaponization,” Rick recalls darkly. Tru nods. “Doing it on purpose: making a nano-culture that would target certain DNA sequences, like racial and ethnic ones. Genocide in a tube.”

  “Fiction,” Ryder protests. Rick shrugs, having experienced similar plans for atrocity while we were UNACT, wrapped up in the endless terror war back home.

  Tru looks like she’s regretting her inclusion in our little circle. She glances my way for an instant, maybe trying to see if I’m not comfortable with her presence. I give her a slight smile. She tries to return it, but looks stressed, afraid.

  “Anything they made for medical purposes always had the opposite potential,” Halley tries to reason. “Intentionally or accidentally. Even the Rebuilders—the same basic design as the cultures we use to keep our bones from breaking down—a flaw in their programming and they get in you and start building God knows.”

  “The scariest part is their targeting algorithm,” Anton focuses. “Every nano-culture must go through a ‘learning’ process in two parts. First is programming: when they’re given a purpose, mission instructions—find this, kill that, make this, patch that. Then comes problem solving, artificial intelligence: they have to enter the body, work cooperatively, find their way around—figure out how to do what they’ve been instructed to do. And figure out how to get the resources to do so—including raw materials to replicate—in the process.”

  “Most of the medical nano-machines are carbon-molecule constructs,” Rick explains. “That means a living body makes for ready building materials.”

  “Imagine if the programming went wrong in either stage,” Anton continues. “Nothing in your body’s immune system can fight a nano-bot, and they can literally use any part of you to make more of themselves—even the worst viruses can’t do that.”

  “And they can use what’s outside of your body as well, if things went really wrong,” Rick takes it. “Our best armor and materials are made of nano-carbon—they could convert that wholesale. Plastics and synthetics have carbon content—raw materials everywhere. Other nano-cultures use metals, silicates. They could theoretically scavenge anything, given the right instructions.”

  “Or incomplete or flawed instructions,” Lisa considers, regurgitating the common protest lines from the anti-nano groups. “A culture goes bad in just the worst way.”

  “But without any programming,” Halley reasons, “you could breach their containment and set them loose in a resource-rich environment, and they’d just sit there. Inert.”

  “Unless it happened when their programming wasn’t finished,” Anton returns. “It would be a hell of a coincidence to break containment just at the right phase of imprinting. But if it happened, very little could stop what happens next.”

  “Which is how we get around to needing to nuke the shit out of them,” Matthew concludes unhappily. “Would that actually work?”

  “No idea,” Rick tells him. “But exposure to strong EMR is their greatest vulnerability, which is why we use EMR in containment. Theoretically, the EMP from a nuclear detonation would fry them wholesale, wipe their programming and kill their power systems. Proximity to a blast would also likely disintegrate anything within the nuclear fireball, or at least destroy whatever the cultures were thriving in.”

  “But they thrive in carbon,” Matthew criticizes. “Don’t you tend to get a lot of that when you detonate a bomb?”

  “Assuming you had cultures that could weather the blast and the pulse, and then adapt their programming to the new conditions,” Rick allows. “Only one ‘bot has to survive to start a new colony.”

  “Still, there’s no reason to believe a rogue culture would just spread randomly across the planet,” Halley offers hope. “With Mars being dead, there’s not much carbon in the environment—another one of the reasons why Mars made a low-risk research site. And, if I’m remembering this right, the cultures that scavenge silicate and iron are Builders—they shouldn’t present a threat to living organisms.”

  “The worst-case is that the near-miss nukes cause lab breaches, contaminating colonies with something nasty and biological,” Rick warns. “We’ll need to proceed with extreme caution.”

  “Which also doesn’t bode well for anyone who might have survived,” I consider. “Odds are, even if their colony was uncontaminated, they would eventually go looking for other survivors, or at least supplies. Stumbling upon an aggressive culture could start an outbreak that could spread to other sites.”

  “If Earth actually saw survivors succumbing to something unstop
pably virulent, that could discourage anybody coming back here,” Matthew concludes, “at least without heavy precautions.”

  “Like our ‘ghost ship’?” I allow him.

  “Something bad happens to the crew you send despite all your best protocols,” Matthew suggests. “It tends to discourage repeat attempts.”

  “If they got contaminated, you’d think the ship would be compromised,” Lisa counters. “It’s pristine.”

  “Unless they all got caught outside,” Matthew guesses.

  “All of them?” Rick doesn’t buy. “You’d think they’d leave someone with the ship at all times.”

  “Unless they had to go try a rescue,” Lisa tries. “Or were trying to draw something or someone away from their ride home.”

  “No sign of a fight,” Anton considers.

  “Doesn’t mean there wasn’t one,” I tell him. Then: “Upside is: If they ran into violence, they ran into humans.”

  “Or Discs,” Matthew shoots down.

  “But if it was survivors, it means the possibility of nano-plague is either low or non-existent,” Lisa hopes.

  “It’s been fifty years,” Anton agrees. “A nano-plague would have eaten the planet by now.”

  “More important, it would mean that people managed to survive here—without rescue—for at least twenty years,” Tru finally chimes in, trying to find a more positive spin.

  “The Lancer isn’t designed to evac survivors,” Anton reminds us. “It doesn’t even have significant medical facilities to treat anyone. That tends to say they didn’t come looking for survivors. They more likely came looking for samples, nanotech or engineered DNA. Maybe for profit. Maybe looking for a defense, a way to come back here safely.”

  “So they had reason to believe nobody survived,” Matthew assumes. “Or they were purposefully trying to avoid them.”

  “Maybe they just didn’t want evacuees rushing them until they knew what they were dealing with,” Halley gives. “This could have been some kind of pre-rescue recon.”

  “Or maybe they thought all survivors had been long since evacuated,” Rick tries.

  “But if they did a proper evac, why are we still here?” Matthew returns.

  “Containment pods say they were looking for nanotech samples,” I stick to the basics. “The weaponry… It’s either expecting Discs or some other violent reception.”

  “Why would survivors attack a ship from home?” Ryder protests.

  “Depends on what it was up to,” I offer. I catch Tru’s eyes on me again.

  “It might not matter what it was up to,” Matthew contemplates. “Twenty years is a long time. Who knows what mood any survivors were in by then. Especially if the last thing Earth did was try to kill you.”