The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (14 page)

“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 unstoppably 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.”

Day 160. 11 June, 2115:

Things haven’t been particularly promising.

Rick and Anton still haven’t figured out a way to
punch a signal through the atmosphere “net”, even with the
significant talent pool we have in our ranks. Nor have they managed
to get anything other than basic cabin power up on the Lancer. And
Morales and her crew still haven’t made a patchwork ASV fly.

And life on Melas Base Two is getting steadily more
difficult.

Power has been adequate since we’ve fired up the
fusion reactors, and we have enough safe functional heated space to
live in relative comfort. But airing, watering, and feeding almost
twelve hundred souls has put more of a strain on resources than
Anton had initially estimated. Adding to that is all the activity
topside, no matter how necessary or therapeutic: O2 is getting bled
out into breather bottles every time anyone goes out of an airlock.
Rick’s team has been considering ways we might “harvest” the oxygen
in the outside air—all we need to be able to do is filter out the
particulates and greenhouse gases, but we don’t have the materials
we need for filtering the quantities we need. We barely have the
materials to keep filtering and re-oxygenating the inside air, and
that’s with some creative recycling.

On top of that, Ryder’s “greenhouse”, despite its
long-term potential and boon to morale, has been sucking water.
Though the makeshift dome above Reactor 2 already looks like a
jungle inside at the rate the “Martian” grass is growing, the
“crop” is still months away from yielding anything that can feed
all of us.

And while there still is food, our choices are
limited to irradiated survival rations and recycled nutrient paste.
Anything more palatable decayed past edible while we slept.

Lisa estimates we have enough rations to get us
through another year if we continue to use them sparingly. But the
five months we’ve already spent living off the apparently
un-spoilable ration packs has been adding to the pervasive
depression. Worse, the rations will likely be remembered fondly as
gourmet delicacies when all we have left is the recycled paste that
the Tranquility processors make out of our own waste. I’ve been
trying to acquire a taste for the stuff, but it’s somewhere between
rancid tofu and unflavored gruel. It provides what you need, but it
comes with a gag reflex.

Despite the fact that base hasn’t been habited to
capacity since the troop reductions and the exodus of the majority
of the slide refugees, the surviving bunker sections provide tight,
cold, echoing, gray living spaces. I’ve heard it compared to a
prison.

The lack of windows makes the passing of the days
only numbers on a clock (unless you’re lucky enough to get a post
in one of the towers). Otherwise, the only way to see daylight (or
the clear, primordially star-rich night sky) is to get time on the
surface or negotiate a piece of rec-time in one of the windowed
airlock staging areas. From the logs, it looks like fewer and fewer
of our people are bothering, unless they have to go outside to
work, or if Halley orders them.

Several people have tried to brighten things up,
starting with their own barracks and the mess and rec halls, but
there’s precious little to work with. Carver and several others
have been working in the labs after shifts, trying to make paints,
inks, charcoals—anything that could be put to hand to make graphic
art. Anton has offered to tap into what’s left of MAI’s cultural
database (a lot was lost during the long sleep) to try to make
prints, but paper is a scarce commodity (something Ryder hopes to
make by hand once her “garden” matures). Mostly, MAI’s surviving
memory has been getting tapped for music and video and gaming, and
whatever media each individual managed to bring from Earth has been
shared like precious treasure. But “shut-in” pastimes only seem to
promote the overall inertia.

Other than the short shifts outside, the only
exercise we get is the repetitive ritual of PT and “Spin Time” in
the base’s three centrifuges. Halley keeps close watch to make sure
everyone is getting it done. She says she’s worried about as-yet
unknown potential long-term effects from our extremely extended
sleep (especially among the refugee children, whose tests remain
normal despite the scary lack of growth), but I think she’s doing
more physicals than she really needs to just to keep busy
herself.

At least our makeshift gym facilities continue to be
popular. Converted from an unused barracks section on D-Deck and
essential during our rehab, the three big rooms manage to serve
alternately for aerobics, tension training, martial arts,
low-gravity racketball and half-court basketball, as well as the
quirky “Marsball” popularized by some of the early colonists: a
variation on soccer with an elevated hoop goal and lots of showy
low-G acrobatics, where the walls and ceiling are used extensively
for rebounding.

Thankfully, the low-G is also kind to old joints, so
old men like me can still play with twenty-somethings and not look
too broken. Still, I usually keep to the exercise machines rather
than throw myself into a team sport, and tell myself it’s a matter
of decorum.

I read the eyes of the much younger bodies I sweat
with, and I suspect that the only thing keeping them pushing their
bodies this long is that they know they’ll need to keep enough bone
and muscle to go home. And then I realize I still have no such
ambition, no real desire to go back to Earth, not even if rescue
came tomorrow, no matter how curious I might be about much “home”
may have changed in half-a-century.

But I also realize I’ve lost much of the hope I had
for the future of this planet.

Instead, I hold onto the old pride of discipline to
get me through my next workout (I tell myself it has nothing to do
with the way Tru flirts with me—decorum aside, I
am
old
enough to be her father), and I rely on my curiosity to see what
comes next to make it through to tomorrow. That’s what it comes
down to: I need to know.

I idly imagine this would be very much like being on
a ship going deep interplanetary without Hiber-Sleep: Days of
boredom, automatic routine, limited space, rationed food, alone in
the void with no support, and an unknown destination a small
eternity away.