3
antarctica
The fat tires of the Mars Exploration Rover lurched over the jagged rock outcropping. The thin-walled vehicle bounced as it righted itself, straining against the wind.
Inside the pressurized compartment, Kent Woodward gripped the steering controls with one hand. “Vroom! Vroom!” he chuckled. “I wish this thing went faster than thirty klicks. Maybe the headwind is slowing us down.”
Beside him, Gunther Mosby muttered an expression of alarm in German, grabbed his spacesuit helmet, and pulled it back on. “What if this were the true Martian environment out there? You could get us both killed!”
Kent looked out the sturdy pane of the viewport. The vast, white landscape was scoured by snow and wind. A high haze in the sky masked most of the blue, leaving it indistinct from the Antarctic plain. Sharp lumps of brown rock dotted the monotony.
Kent tried to envision it as Mars, the lifeless nothingness of ochre dust, impossibly cold temperatures, and not enough air to breathe. But the illusion didn’t work. He saw only Earthbound terrain. “You’re going to infect yourself with a healthy neurosis, Gunny, if you keep dodging reality.”
Gunther blinked, as if running the words through his mind again. “Excuse me, Kent. I do not understand a ‘healthy neurosis.’ What is healthy about a neurosis? Is this an imagined problem about being too healthy?”
Kent shook his head and kept driving.
Gunther tried hard to control his sharp accent, which made him speak with such slow precision that it maddened Kent. He had quickly been able to turn Gunther’s preoccupation with speaking perfect English into a few jokes of his own.
The Mars practice mission had kept the six-person crew in low-Earth orbit for three months, simulating travel time in zero gravity. Then they had landed in Antarctica—the closest thing to Mars’s primal cold and desolation—for a six-hundred-day stay. They had set up the same inflatable habitation modules they would use on Mars, extracting water and methane fuel by breaking down atmospheric carbon dioxide with catalytic converters.
Even their communications via optical uplink to the main control centers was artificially delayed by ten to forty minutes, depending on the current distance of Mars from Earth. They were on a real training mission—they might as well have been on another planet. All six of them had been living under austere conditions for nearly a year now, and Kent looked for any break in the monotony he could find.
“You know, Gunny, if we’re successful with this practice mission, the only thing we have to look forward to is doing it all over again—only then for real.”
Gunther blinked at him. “Naturally.”
Kent sent the exploration rover crawling up a slope. Behind him he left wide tracks, like the first marks on a pristine landscape. He got a thrill out of that. It reminded him of the family vacation when he was ten years old, traveling from British Columbia across the western U.S. The most memorable part had been the Great Salt Desert in Utah, a vast expanse of featureless white alkali. All along the Interstate other people had lined up rocks to make arrows, circles, and their initials. Kent and his sister had spent half an hour gathering rocks to write their names on the blank slate of the desert. Seeing KENT W. spelled out like that gave him a feeling he had never been able to match, but it was cheapened by the fact that hundreds—thousands—of other people had done the same thing before.
Kent wanted to make his mark on the world in a way no one else had. He wanted to go where no man had gone before, as the cliché said.
Antarctica was the closest thing he had found yet. Mars would be the ultimate. He wanted to spell out his name in the red Martian sand for everybody to see. Then he would be fulfilled.
He guided the rover across the unbroken landscape, using the Doppler radar to lock in on where exactly he was going. With his background in exploration and expertise in geology, Kent had been the natural choice for exploring with one of the base camp’s two rovers. Gunther, with his combined specialty in medicine and aeronomy, was completely at a loss about what they were doing. Kent had once made the comment that his buddy couldn’t find north if he were standing on the south pole.
“If you please, Kent,” Gunther said, taking off his helmet again. “Could you tell me what our mission is today? You have been so secretive. I saw nothing interesting on the schedule.”
Kent cocked a smile. “Why, Gunny, we’re out cruising for girls! I thought you knew—didn’t you dress up?”
Gunther maintained his serious expression. “Does it have something to do with that flyover and package drop from this morning?”
Kent blinked in shock. Indeed, he had received a priority transmission to go meet a rapid-transport helicopter from McMurdo Sound. “Gunther! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gunther nodded to the interseat compartment. “Then what is in that canister?”
“What canister?” The sealed black container was roughly cylindrical, contained no markings whatsoever, and bore an encrypted interlock keypad. “Oh, that’s just a thermos of coffee.”
“Coffee?” Gunther said, playing along. “May I please have some?”
“No. It’s bad for your nerves. Just relax—Commander Grace sanctioned this.”
Gunther fell silent. Kent flashed a glance at him. The German’s pale skin had flushed in anger. “I am weary of not knowing what my partner is doing.”
Ah, so he was trying the guilt-trip ploy. Kent knew how to divert that. “Still need to work on your vernacular, Gunny. Nobody says the word ‘weary.’ It’s like something out of a Jane Austen novel. Old stuff. You should say, uh, horny. Yes! When you’re very tired, just say ‘I’m horny,’ and then people will get the point.”
Gunther nodded. He kept his voice low. Kent could barely hear his partner’s words over the rumble of the wide wheels and the hum of the methane engine. “Not knowing what is going on makes me very horny, Kent.”
When they reached the top of the rise, they looked down into a rocky depression. The wind howled outside, jetting snow across the opening. Tall crags shielded the area from three of the four sides. They could see the crushed snow path from the other direction. Kent had purposely gone around to the back to deceive Gunther as to their true destination. Now he circled the big outcroppings to reach the path.
In the center of the depression, surrounded by boulders like pillars from Stonehenge, stood three optical satellite telescopes. Glinting in the sun sat the dome and adjacent housing unit of the Nanotechnology Isolation Laboratory. The dome shone with metal and glass, looking completely out of place in the desolation.
Kent waited for his partner’s reaction. Gunther stood half out of the seat, his expression twisted with alarm and dismay. His skin flushed a deeper red. “We are not supposed to be going to that place. Mission profile states that it is off-limits except under extreme circumstances.”
“I’m just doing a little sightseeing.”
“You could jeopardize the Mars mission!”
Kent sighed with a you-caught-me expression. “Special orders. Straight from Director McConnell.” He tapped the black canister beside them. Gunther suddenly seemed to realize what the encrypted-lock cylinder must contain and writhed away from it as if it had suddenly changed into a cobra.
“Still feel like having some coffee, Gunny?” Kent asked.
“Do not joke!”
“The rest of this is classified, too. The wind is too high for the Navy helicopters to make the delivery. We’re the escorts.”
Gunther looked defeated and sighed. He bested his fear. “I wish I had not offered to come along. I do not like that place.”
Kent wiggled his dark eyebrows. “What’s the matter? Erika Trace is in there, and she’s the most available woman on this whole continent.”
Gunther Mosby seemed not to hear as he sealed his helmet, for whatever protection that would afford him against the canister samples. “At least they have showers,” he said.
Low-angled sunlight pooled through the passive solar heating plates of the Nanotechnology Isolation Laboratory. Dr. Jordan Parvu smiled to himself as he stared at the images of his four grandchildren. They rubbed their eyes and waved to him. Parvu had forgotten that it would be the middle of the night when he called his son, but Timothy had rushed to wake up the children. As busy as he was with his work and with the perpetual daylight here in Antarctica, Parvu sometimes forgot the natural daily rhythms of other people.
The NIL’s optical uplinks and the big viewing screen were supposedly used for teleconferencing, data transfer, and occasional telepresence experiments from other nanotechnology researchers across the globe. But no one would begrudge him an occasional personal call. His only assistant, Erika Trace, rarely used her own allotment.
Timothy seemed at a loss for words and didn’t know how to keep the conversation going. Parvu himself didn’t need to say much—just looking at his family made him feel warm inside.
Parvu could see an image of himself in Timothy’s face: the sharp nose, the thick hair that before long would turn to a uniform iron gray, the bushy eyebrows, dark eyes with a fan of laugh lines around them, deep brown skin, and bright teeth in a perfect smile.
“Where has your mother been?” Parvu said, “I tried to contact her a few times, but no one responds.”
Timothy’s expression drooped. “She’s in Africa for the whole month. We told you that last month, Dad. Tromping around the Olduvai Gorge again.”
“Ah yes. Please forgive me for forgetting.” Sinda spent half the year indulging her interest in anthropology and primitive cultures. They had been married for thirty-five years, and their love had passed into a comfortable and relaxed stage. They no longer needed to be together all the time, which allowed Sinda the liberty to travel to Africa, South America, and Australia. Parvu could spend a year in Antarctica with no great hardship.
Erika Trace burst into the teleconferencing room. “Jordan—I mean, Dr. Parvu,” she amended quickly, seeing him speaking to his family, “we’ve got company. One of the Mars rover vehicles.” The tone of her words mixed disapproval and anticipation. She wore her blond hair in a serviceable cut, long and plain with no particular attention to style. Her greenish eyes looked darker in the low sunlight.
“Ah, they must be bringing the samples from Dr. Compton-Reasor. Excuse me—” He turned back to Timothy and was surprised to find a disapproving expression on his son’s face. But Erika had never shown any sort of attraction toward him—thank goodness!—or even toward the Mars expedition trainees. Passion for her work consumed her. That sort of obsession shouldn’t come until later in life, Parvu thought, after one had spent time living. He hoped Erika learned that before she had wasted her youth.
“I must go now, my son, my grandchildren.”
“Wave goodbye now,” Timothy said. In unison, the four children flapped their hands and giggled. Parvu signed off. The blank screen always made him feel hollow.
Parvu and Erika departed through the set of double airlock doors to the outside living quarters. As he cycled through the second door, he felt the wind stream past him. The air pressure increased by twenty percent through each of the doors to eliminate any chance of nanotech migration.
Astronauts Woodward and Mosby entered the habitation section only moments after he and Erika had gone to wait for them. When Kent removed his helmet, he flashed a grin at Erika. “We’ve brought you a present!”
Parvu had a difficult time tuning his mind to the chitchat the two young men seemed to expect. Once he saw the black cylinder in Kent Woodward’s hand, he wanted to hurry back to the lab and start testing.
Parvu noticed that Gunther Mosby kept shifting his feet as if wanting very much to leave. Parvu wondered if Mosby worried more about contamination from the prototype nanotechnology machines, or about the deadly fail-safe sterilization procedures built into the NIL. Woodward, on the other hand, kept his attention on Erika, obviously smitten. Parvu tried to hide his smile.
Erika flipped her hair behind her ear, lifted her nose in a gesture of impatience, and took the sealed specimen container from Woodward. She gave him only a brief acknowledgment before turning to Parvu. “I’ll prepare the nanocore.”
Before Parvu could stall her, to get her to talk to these young men, Erika had left through the airlock.
Parvu rubbed his hands together and looked at Mosby and Woodward. Eagerness to analyze the new specimens made him fidget. They had been waiting for weeks. He wanted to contact Maia Compton-Reasor and her team at Stanford, then get in touch with Maurice Taylor’s team at MIT. Together, they would begin the first analysis. Combined research had been developing these new specimens for months, but they could not go forward with active automata except down here in the secure NIL.
But the astronauts seemed to be expecting something else.
Parvu breathed a sigh. They always had time for a shower. Even in Antarctica—the most isolated place on the planet—he still found himself playing the host.
“So, young men, would you be staying long enough for a shower?” Both of them nodded quickly.
After the two astronauts had left, Jordan Parvu scrubbed his hands, straightened the towels in the shower cubicle, and changed into warm slippers. He kept everything meticulously clean and neat, but at the moment getting into the central clean-room lab seemed much more important. Erika would be waiting.
He passed through the airlocks into the NIL dome itself. The entire outer third contained the teleconference room along with the main computers, power generators, file storage, a small cubicle containing the test animals, terminals, and working areas. Inside a thick, doubly insulated wall was the main clean-room area.
In the outer ring, Parvu could look through the observation windows at Erika. Garbed in her clean-room outfit, she prepared the black canister next to the cylindrical shaft of the nanocore that rose to the ceiling. She would have checked everything several times and made the initial optical linkup request with MIT and Stanford. Parvu would do the sample transfer himself.
As he entered the second set of airlock doors into the laboratory dome, he stopped to don a plastic cap, lint-free smock, and booties over his slippers. He pulled thin rubber gloves over his sweaty hands, then stepped on a pad of gray stickum before he passed into the lab room itself.
Erika bustled about. She was always so dedicated to him, to their projects. When she had met him, Erika had been one of Taylor’s students at MIT, with a background in physics and integrated-circuit fabrication techniques. In her, Parvu had discovered a kindred soul, and they worked well together. Erika had begged him to take her along when he left MIT to work for the Center for High-Technology Materials in Albuquerque. He wondered why he deserved such a devoted acolyte.
“Our astronaut friends have departed,” Parvu said.
She ignored his comment. “I’ve got everything ready. Taylor is out of reach, probably on his way into campus. They’ve summoned Dr. Compton-Reasor. She was asleep, I believe, but had left word to be called whenever we got in touch.”
“We will need Dr. Taylor’s code to activate the samples,” he said. He could tell by the tone in Erika’s voice that she had little respect for her former PhD adviser.
“He’s on his way.” She lowered her voice. “He always manages to be late, no matter what the situation is.”
“Just so,” Parvu said, then moved to help her.
She had mounted the sample canister to the access port on the transparent shaft of the nanocore. The seals were locked; all the fail-safe contacts had automatically engaged. If anyone tampered with the seals on the canister, the interior would be sterilized by an incinerating charge.
The nanotechnology samples inside were dormant. A code from Compton-Reasor would initialize them; a second code from Taylor would activate them. Only Parvu could open the seals to let the prototypes into the nanocore.
Rising to the depleted-uranium shield on the ceiling of the NIL dome, the transparent nanocore was filled with a clear resource solution. Within the core were microwaldoes, precision-guided lasers, stereo microscopes, electron microscopes, scanning x-ray microscopes, and a low-energy collimated particle beam. A strong electrostatic current ran on a conductive film just inside the nanocore walls as a barricade against the tiny machines.
The final defense against escaping samples came from capacitor banks beneath the dome; they powered the coaxial conductor running through the nanocore to a high-Z target on the roof. If the automata somehow breached all barriers, the capacitor banks would discharge, sending a magnetized plasma ring through the central conductor to slam against the uranium shield. An immense shower of x-rays would flood the entire NIL, sterilizing everything . . . and killing everyone inside.
Parvu had insisted on the defensive measures before agreeing to head the NIL work. All nanotech researchers around the world knew how threatening runaway self-replicating automata could be. Most of the public didn’t quite understand yet—which was fine with Parvu—yet he did not want to take any chances.
Oddly enough, Parvu had never thought his major supporter would be the United Space Agency, but when Celeste McConnell had pitched to him her incredible proposal for terraforming Mars, his imagination had ignited with the possibilities. He imagined generations of self-replicating automata seeded on the frigid surface of Mars, spreading out across the iron-rich sands.
Their programming would be simple, with no mission other than to liberate oxygen molecules in the rocks and to shut down when the partial pressure reached a pre-set level. Satellites transmitting an ABORT code could stop the oxygen production at any time, if human command-and-control made that decision.
Given the speed at which the oxygen nanominers could reproduce, Mars could theoretically have a breathable atmosphere in a week. A week! Parvu knew that there was another lab, nearly identical to this, waiting on the surface of the Moon if they were successful here . . . but it would be another two years until that became operational.
“Those two astronauts seem like nice young men, Erika,” he said. “Kent Woodward seems especially interested in you.”
She looked at him with an expression of such disbelief that it made Parvu feel like a child. “He’s just looking at me because he’s been in isolation for months.”
Before Parvu could chide her for her cynicism, the teleconference screen chimed and an image of Maia Compton-Reasor appeared. She was a squat African-American with sleepy eyes and hair cropped so close to her head it looked like felt. “Dr. Parvu? Dr. Parvu, are you there?”
Erika had disengaged the SEND half of the loop, and Parvu toggled it on. “We’re here. We’ve just received the samples. Sorry to wake you.”
She dismissed the comment with a wave. “I can sleep anytime. Are you ready?”
“Nearly so. We are still awaiting Dr. Taylor’s response.”
Compton-Reasor snorted. “We always have to wait for him.”
Erika fidgeted in the lab space. Parvu noticed she had slid to the side, out of the screen’s field of view. She never wanted to take the credit due her. He would have to insist that she begin acting like his partner instead of an assistant. She deserved that, whether she wanted it or not. He had already put her name as first author on a handful of journal articles, without telling her.
“I think you’ll find these are the most promising nanomachines yet,” Compton-Reasor said. “If this pans out, it opens a whole new line of development.”
For decades, researchers had been attempting ultra-small engineering—using scanning tunneling microscopes to build nanoframeworks, ballistic electron emission microscopy to etch templates for even smaller circuits, and collimated neutron beams to chisel out gears and rods less than a millionth of a meter across. Other researchers worked with protein engineering, trying to program organic machines.
In addition to the Stanford and MIT work, research efforts at Cambridge, Tokyo, and a European consortium in Belgium bought time in the NIL facilities. Parvu often felt himself in the position of the caretaker of a world-class telescope while visiting astronomers squabbled over observing time.
The Stanford team had designed a new organic and mechanical prototype, assembled in tandem with protein engineering and with micromechanical parts. Taylor’s team had developed software that could make these machines function as incredible analytical tools. Ideally, they would be able to take apart a sample, analyze it, then broadcast data—detailed to the molecular level—back to receiving computers.
With the new prototypes in hand, Parvu dreaded the thought of an hour of aimless chitchat with Compton-Reasor while waiting for Taylor to show up. Sensing this, Erika moved back beside Parvu. Before they could attempt to make small talk, Taylor responded. The receiving screen divided the imaging area in two and displayed Maurice Taylor’s flushed face looking more like that of a football player than an award-winning researcher. He wasted no time.
“Sorry I’m late. We had no idea when the package would arrive.” He fumbled at a keyboard off the boundary of the screen. “Well, Erika, nice to see you again. Jordan. Are you ready? I can transmit now.”
Compton-Reasor began a sharp response, but Parvu muted her half of the screen and nodded politely. “Yes, if you please. Everything else is prepared.”
Erika went over to the nanocore. Parvu waited until Taylor had sent his portion of the activation code. An embedded green light, previously hidden, glowed on the smooth side of the black canister.
“Very well, I will now open the environment to the nanocore.” He entered the encrypted key sequence to the self-destruct seals. The canister gave a dull click. Parvu knew that inside, the dormant machines had been flushed into the absolute isolation of the core. He resealed the lock and removed the empty canister. It would be bathed in x-rays and then slagged.
“Secure. Now, Dr. Compton-Reasor, would you do the honors please? The second half of the activation code.”
Erika leaned close, peering into the curved transparent wall of the nanocore. Parvu could tell by the stabilization readings that the microwaldoes were drifting in a slight current caused by the introduction of the new samples.
“It’s sent,” Compton-Reasor said. “Everything’s under way.”
It was all very anticlimactic. The new samples—so small that tens of millions of them could line up and still not cross a centimeter mark—could not be seen inside the resource solution. After days had passed, he and Erika might be able to discern a cloudiness in the fluid caused by so many tiny bodies.
“Congratulations, all around,” Compton-Reasor said. “I hope you and Ms. Trace have some champagne with you.”
“We’ll make do,” Parvu said, smiling.
“I’ll monitor the progress,” Erika said.
“Then I’m going back to bed,” Compton-Reasor said. She waved a dark hand and signed off.
“Let us know if anything happens,” Taylor said, then his image winked off.
The Nanotech Isolation Lab remained totally silent. Parvu thought he could hear Erika breathing. They were both smiling. Something about these new prototypes seemed promising. He had high hopes for the project, and for the terraforming of Mars.
Inside the nanocore, the tiny prototypes, newly awakened, began to self-replicate, using raw materials from the solution around them. Soon they would go about their work.