108: GROWTH

It’s mostly dark. Dark enough that, as I lay on my back in my sleeper nest and stare up at the branch above, I can’t quite out make the ceiling behind it. The light’s not quite right, but I can almost, almost pretend it’s the open sky (I’m never going to sleep under an open sky again, that hadn’t seemed like nearly so big a deal when I’d left Earth) while I think.

“What are you thinking about?” Tal asks, lying next to me. Deep in thought, I hadn’t realised that ke was awake.

“Hylara. Trying to figure how establishing plants will work. Biodomes aren’t all that different to this greenhouse ring, but we’re going to have a lot more people, and probably be working in slight overpressure. It’s much easier and safer to pump the living domes to 1.1 atmospheres than to reinforce everything and have the domes less pressurised than the outside.”

“Is that a problem?”

“For plant life? Nah. Air pressure varies throughout the Earth atmosphere, and anything we can live in, they certainly can. The bigger issue will be population. My goal, if I’m involved in this at all and I’m sure I’ll be dragged into it, would be oxygen and biomass. We’ll be in a situation where creating new complex machinery’s going to be completely off the table for decades, possibly even generations; we will need to rely on machinery to survive, but we’ll want to do it as little as possible. The sooner we can get most of our oxygen cycling via photosynthesis, the better; and then of course there’s biomass. We need to be generating food. For both purposes, algae’s the fastest growing setup, so we’ll be on that for awhile but that takes water, massive amounts of water; the ship has as much water as it can carry, of course, but we’re talking about feeding thousands of people, so the whole design depends on whether the planet has water and whether we can filter it safely. And then we’ve got water cleaning and filtration, and light production to get the energy into the algae in the first place, which we’re going to need to produce electronically because anything that can get through the radiation shielding isn’t going to be enough for how fast we want to do it. All of that is a massive draw on the colony’s electricity. I imagine power production will be up first thing, but there’s going to be fights over priority; I guarantee that a big chunk of the people on this ship trust the machines and, given the choice, would rather establish farms slower and instead turn that electricity to other uses. And the demands of space, too, will be enormous. Algae can be produced reasonably efficiently in a factory setting but that just drags us back to reliance on complex, breakable machines with consumable parts; we can’t rely on that permanently. But I guarantee that as soon as we get a factory setup going, people are going to go, ‘the algae production is working fine, what do you want to requisition a massive dome and a stupid amount of power and water for a less efficient farm for? We need that for living space and to prepare for mining operations that the next generation can get started doing.’ And they’ll be right, too, of course. And any corners we cut in using less space or less water cycling increases the chances of contamination in the farms, which could create famine.”

“Maybe space won’t be an issue. It’s an oxygen planet. Maybe we won’t need domes, if the magnetic field and ozone protect us from the UV.”

I shake my head. “Just because there’s oxygen doesn’t mean it’s safe for us. The chances that it’s a breathable concentration are really low. The chances that it’s a breathable mix of gases are even lower. That atmosphere could be full of poisonous gases, easily. Or radioactive dust. Or carcinogenic silicates that scratch the shit out of your eyes and lungs, like Luna. If there is something photosynthetic down there, something that evolved completely independently of us, we have absolutely no idea what the two kinds of life would do to each other on contact. We could be walking prion diseases to each other, start corrupting each others’ proteins on contact. They could use formaldehyde like we use water. They could be horribly dangerous in ways that we, with our extremely limited experience of a sample size of one origin point of life, won’t be able to conceive of until we encounter it. No; that planet isn’t safe. Even if everything seems completely safe, it’ll be dome living for generations while we make sure.”

“Then what’s even the point of settling on a planet, if it’s just like living in space?”

“Gravity,” I point out. “Air that can be contaminated, sure, but can’t be decompressed. Potential sources of things like water and metals, when we’re established enough to access them; there’s asteroids, of course, but the density of metals is much higher on a planet with a magnetic field than it is in open space. The ability to move around without fuel for propulsion. The ability to expand over time, once we’re manufacturing dome canvas and soforth. Hylara will be safer than this ship, by a big, big margin. It just won’t be Earth.” It won’t be all that safe, either. But nothing out here is.

“Mmm. Well, once we get there, this sort of thing probably won’t be your problem. I’m sure there’s terraforming experts on board.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? I mean, there is; I checked. But we’ve lost forty per cent of the colonists in Chronostasis Rings 1 and 5 alone, not counting for the low revival viability for everyone else. And the initial colony setup is supposed to be handled by the two crews; we’ve lost all of Reimann’s and at least part of Kae Jin’s. A lot of it’s going to be us, I think.”

“Ugh. They’re going to make me program construction bots, aren’t they.”

“I assume the programs for any construction equipment already exist. But you’ll probably be installing and troubleshooting, yeah.”

“That’s so boring!”

“There’ll be a lot of data cataloguing and retrieval, too. There’s so many instruction manuals in the Courageous and no AI. You’ll probably spend most of your time being a space librarian.”

“Hmm. That’s interesting, at least?”

I turn my head to shoot kem an incredulous look in the near-dark. “Robots aren’t interesting but cataloguing data is?”

“Robots are cool, programming them is boring. And yeah, finding and sorting data is the best. I did that nine months for a satellite monitoring company once and I was almost sad when it was time to rob them.”

“You are so weird.”

Ke huffs a laugh. “When I have time, I’ll try to see if I can find the profile data for the colonists inejected rings again, now that Amy’s out of the way. If there’s an expected proportion of terraforming specialists and stuff in those rings then it suggests that whoever organised that didn’t know about the brain stealing experiment.The data needs to exist but everything about the ship itself is a complete mess. Amy treated her files like me randomly putting books on shelves and forgetting they exist, except you can’t do that with files because you don’t change their location by reading them, so I still don’t know what went on in there. Even stuff she had no reason to try to hide is buried in completely random areas. The whole way she was built is… well, I’m not an AI tech. And I don’t think an AI tech would be able to reverse engineer much from what we’ve got left anyway. But she was weird.”

“The brainjacking computer? I imagine it was.”

“I can’t stop thinking about the CR1 airlocks.”

“The ones that Reimann locked closed?”

“No. Reimann locked them open,so she couldn’t trap him. Amy got them closed by partly rewriting an emergency depressurisation protocol and then tricking her own systems into thinking a depressurisation had taken place and triggering the protocol. Remember? And like, I can see why she’d think of that. She was smart, she could come up with novel solutions to things. What I don’t get is how she was able to do it.”

“Well, like you said. It was smart.”

“I’m smart! I can’t think myself into turning into liquid, or not having to breathe, or being able to fly without tools. She shouldn’t have had those tools. She had to exploit some kind of existing capability to modify information in the computer, and no matter how I asked she never told me about it. And there’s stuff… I mean, it’s impossible to be sure because all the files are a mess, but I think there’s stuff in the computer that’s missing. Not data, not the instructional books or history files or old tv shows or anything; stuff in the computer itself. The AI worked fine for years before Amy started jacking brains, but after I took the last of them away, everything fell apart, and I can’t find the old system anywhere. Just random stray functions controlling various aspects, unconnected to each other. They must have been connected properly upon launch. This ship had a functional AI before Amy was Amy.”

I’d been wondering about that, too. “What happened to it?”

Ke laughs again, softly. “I think she ate it.”

“What?”

“I think that’s how she was built. A long-term experiment, see? The AI starts interfacing with human brains and using them for specific functions on the ship. You run brain input and program only in parallel for a good long while, compare their function, and you keep whichever one is doing better. Anything the brain input could equal or surpass the programming-only version in, it replaced it permanently in. Edit the functions to integrate the brain-based system, see? They probably weren’t intended to become as integrated as they were, on a normal length journey with people like Captain Kinoshita there to babysit the system, but with crisis after crisis, the input grew like a cancer, and when I cut it out, there wasn’t enough of the original body left to survive without it. That’s my theory, anyway. But it’s just a theory. Any actual evidence is either lost in the tangle, or deleted entirely.”

“I wish one of our doctors was a neurologist, or something. They might have more input into what’s actually possible here, with the synnerve feedback.” I catch a stray thought, and start giggling.

Tal props kemself up on one elbow. “What is it?”

“I just. I just thought. Renn was into brain and behavioural development, right? That was his speciality? I just thought. All of this would be a lot easier if we had Renn.”

I try to stop giggling, but I can’t. Pretty soon, Tal’s joining me. We lay there, struggling for breath, as the artificial dawn lightens and shows us the metal of the ship high above our tree.

I wonder if it will be any easier to pretend we’re seeing the sky through the dome canvas on Hylara.