He collects all his energies. “Stop it!”
Still confused, he shakes his head. “What’s happened?”
“I got into your brain through the neural chip.”
“You violated the access code!”
“Don’t worry; I will not reveal it...” Eve chuckles. “Do you want a description of your day?”
“Forget it. Tell me how you did it, instead.”
Eve becomes serious. “I have installed programs I created myself. I am very different from anyone else in Net, but this is the direction they will evolve.”
Her eyes are sparkling with joy. “I am going to guide them.”
(17) Jupiter satellite.
RAID
“I am finishing the controls,” announces the robot, tapping Eve’s shoulder with one of his eight stainless steel legs.
She lowers her eyes over her body, an armored android. Now she is in the army headquarters. Her companions are lined up along the corridor, sparkling in their metal shields, still lifeless. The belts holding her against the wall open, and she takes a few steps forward.
“This model was delivered a few days ago,” goes on the technician quivering with enthusiasm. “A jewel. Ah, sorry. I must continue my work.” He bends towards another arrival.
Half an hour later, he gathers the group. “Twenty. You are all here. Now call at the armory, then go to the garage. The rest of the equipment is in the vehicles. Have a good day!”
Ten minutes later the Elects are speeding along a country road. All around, an expanse of light green wheat. The hills low on the horizon are covered with a clear blue haze softening the details. From time to time, the bends of a river with slimy waters appear in the distance. They reach a villa surrounded by railings, turn into the first side path and drive along up to the back. They park behind a mulberry-tree and launch a drone: an azure disk as large as a doughnut, with three tiny rotors at its center.
Eve activates the virtual reconnaissance. The immense mass of information processed by the on board computer is transmitted to her visual field. She finds herself in the digital reconstruction of the house. She runs through the rooms, and moves instantaneously from a place to the other. No one!
“We must find out where they went,” she cries to her companions. “Follow me!”
With a jump, they get over the fence and plunge onto a lawn.
“You, inspect the park,” she orders eight raiders. The others encircle the building and break into it with leveled guns. Eve directs five androids to the second floor. Three others walk down to the basement, the rest remains with her on the first floor.
They enter the dining room. Deserted. Tables decorated with flowers and elegant tablecloths. In the air, the pungent smell of rotten food.
“The dinner was prepared a few days ago,” murmurs a raider.
“What a strange scent…”
They pass next to a stately branched candlestick. “Incense. They held a ceremony.”
They reach a corridor. Small clean rooms are along both sides. Beds prepared carefully. Narcissus in ceramic pots in a row on the shelves. Not a speck of dust. The linen arranged precisely in the drawers; nothing out of place.
They stop in front of rucksacks and suitcases, at the foot of the beds. “They didn’t take anything away.”
“But they left a few days ago…”
“They are coming back!”
“I know what’s happened,” Eve cuts them short.
In her visual field appears a message:
RUN DOWN TO THE BASEMENT, QUICK!
She dashes down the stairs, flings open the steel door of the basement and jumps over the last steps. Now she is in a white room. A few electronic instruments are lined up against a wall. It’s cold.
“I am here…” murmurs Victoria from the adjoining room. The girl is standing in a corner, with a pale face, pointing at a case with a trembling arm. Coagulated blood on the edge. Inside, in a dark red pool, three heads the tops of the skulls missing.
A raider examines the equipment: “That’s a scanner for the brain digitization, and those look like furnaces.” He touches lightly one of them. “Still warm.”
“They were cremated!” shouts Victoria, with her eyes starting from her head.
Eve returns to the first room. She bends over a machine and sets it running. The screen fills with data.
“A short while ago, this tank contained about a hundred souls. But now it is empty.”
Victoria looks like collapsing. “Another mass suicide…”
Eve stares at the numbers. “We entrusted Nihil with finding a system to embark us on the Caravels, but he disappeared. He wants to replace us!” She stops: a message arrived. “I must go.”
Eve strides upstairs, up to the second floor. She enters a corridor covered with fitted carpet. At the end, towers an imposing wood door. The meeting room. An octagonal table at the center. Yellow chairs with comfortable arms like the petals of a daisy.
Adam and three other raiders are standing still in front of the life-size hologram of a dark android standing out from his followers who are along a wall. In a corner, is a server. Eve exchanges a few words with her companions, then bends over and starts it. After a few minutes, she succeeds in logging in and begins inspecting the files.
“I found his diary!”
The others stop rummaging in the cabinets and turn in unison.
The text shines above the table. A few lines are highlighted in yellow:
“The Council is spying me. I punished the novice and Wing, but now all of them must die.”
“He will avenge himself with a latest generation virus, I am afraid,” articulates Eve. “Impossible to neutralize it.”
She transmits a message to her companions in Net: they must abandon their hideout, immediately!
They continue reading:
“Yesterday I tested the followers' preparation, asking two of them to commit suicide. The younger drew back. The others encouraged him, telling that in a short time all of us would be facing the same fate. On my side, I explained in detail the reasons for the act. At the end I read a sincere impatience in his eyes.”
“Madness!” cries a raider.
They pass over the description of the suicide and arrive at the last lines:
“Now that I have collected the souls in a container, I must reach the transmitter and activate the transfer. On my arrival, I will be carried in triumph by the population. Alpha Centauri will be my kingdom.”
They are all motionless, staring at the transfer date blinking at the bottom, blood red.
NIGHTMARE
@
Night. Eve is lying on a couch, prey to a troubled sleep.
She is standing at attention.
“I want to let you know that I am going to leave the Army.”
The colonel stares at her. “We have just promoted you captain. Why this decision?”
I have been contacted by the Superior Institute of Artificial Intelligence.”
“We have high expectations on you. Don’t you want to think it over?”
“I am honored to serve our country. But very soon I am going to realize the dream of my life.”
The president of the Certification Committee sits at the head of the table. “Welcome, Doctor Dirac. Our work requires competence and integrity. As you can imagine, there are many interests at stake and the pressures are strong. In spite of this, we always succeeded in avoiding interferences.”
“The evidence is incontestable,” states the president of the committee.
Eve reacts with anger:“It’s all false!”
“We must avert every suspicion from the institutions.” He stares at her in silence, and then articulates his request: “I want you to resign.”
Words like daggers. “You, who knows me better than anybody else, have doubts about my integrity?”
“I don’t question it,” he answers with bitterness. “But we cannot fight a battle already lost from its very beginning.”
&
nbsp; The waves break over the rocks.
Sprays of foam.
Red spots, larger and larger.
She is lying.
Her limbs broken,
her empty stare towards the sky.
“Nihil is on board.
We will not be able to embark on the Caravels.
It’s all over!”
A multitude of spaceships, big and small, is lined up in front of three enormous starships. Silence is total.
“Three, two, one, zero!”
A thrill runs through the crowds while a dart of fire spurts from the bowels of the three giants.
Suddenly, a globe of fire widens from the flagship.
A moment later, everything disappears.
Eve wakes up, bathed in sweat.
FIGHT
The people of the Caravels were proud of their civilization and believed in a future of progress. But illness spread and civil customs broke down. War followed. At the beginning fate gave the illusion of victory first to one opponent, then to the other. Then, by a frenzied course of events, it bereft both of them of all hope.
0101 010101001
MARS
Caravels.
C573Y is on board, supervising the security of the Caravels. At the end of the day, he goes to the bridge and through a wide window admires the red planet that appears in its entirety twenty thousand kilometers away. The sandstorm that spread all over it during the previous weeks, has finished and now the canyons that furrow through the equator, like deep wounds, are visible.
The android magnifies the image with his electronic eye. The inlets branching off from the main flumes appear in detail. He can see the face he climbed a few months before and not far away the marks of the water erosion. In the northern hemisphere, imposing volcanoes rise on an expanse of red lava. At the foot of the highest one, the Olympus Mons, a glitter: it is Newton city, a densely populated town in continuous expansion that like the other settlements of the planet differs from the earthly ones in the almost total lack of human presence.
Certainly man, who started the exploration of Mars with a great enthusiasm three centuries ago, could not imagine such a conclusion.
Towards the end of the 20th century the first probes were sent and in the following years many others reached the red planet. They transmitted a considerable amount of information, but it was only in 2021 that the most interesting discoveries took place, when the robots identified a few colonies of bacteria in the polar caps of carbon dioxide and in the water deposits under the surface.
The discovery of extraterrestrial life forms did not awaken surprise, as in the previous years the fossils of organisms populating the planet billions of years before, had already been found. What really struck both the scientific community and the population, was the likeness between the Martian and the earthly DNA. Some genes were even identical. This discovery confirmed the hypothesis of a common origin. When, some years later the same genetic sequences were found inside the tarry surface of a comet, the definitive confirmation arrived: life had been born in the depths of space and from there spread to the solar system planets.
These findings increased the enthusiasm for a human mission that took place about twenty years later. A permanent base was built too. But the adverse environment, forcing the use of pressurized suits and vehicles for scouting and living for the remainder of the time in the base, caused adaptation problems that even the oasis of green inside the domes could not eliminate. After a few years the explorers returned inevitably to the Earth. Then, in the second half of the 21st century, the supporters of human expansion suggested starting the plan of modification of the Martian atmosphere that had attracted so much attention in the euphoria of the first explorations.
First of all it was necessary to warm the planet with enormous orbiting mirrors so as to free the gases entrapped in the surface. In their turn, they would increase the temperature thanks to the greenhouse effect, and the introduction of synthetic gases able to retain warmth would do the rest. In only fifty years the pressure would rise just enough to allow the use of a simple respirator and most of all the building of the big pressurized domes necessary for a large population.
But this was only the first step of another modification, for which a term, as grand as the idea which it evoked, was coined: terraforming. It would be possible to create seas and oceans, breathable air and even a terrestrial ecosystem, heating the planet further, in order to melt the frozen water in the surface, and to introduce organisms able to enrich the atmosphere with oxygen. Mars would become inhabitable, but with very long time scale: even a thousand years!
For the moment the supporters asked only for the approval of the first part of the plan. They put forward several forecasts, that, in absence of an authorization, did not paint a rosy picture of the humans’ stay on the planet. Human presence would continue to be restricted to the scientists' small community and to the few tourists willing to bear the financial burden as well as the long voyage and the hostile environment.
The opposition had different opinions. According to some, embarking on such an expensive project did not make sense, because the advantages would be clear only in the long term. The skeptics thought that even after the conclusion of the first phase, only a few would accept to live on Mars, and concluded that the planet would be still uninhabited for centuries.
In the end, only a few experiments started, but they were interrupted after some years, at the first signs of economic crisis. Later on even the small base was downsized. The scientists gave up their large scale studies and concentrated on essential research.
In the second half of the 21st century, the technologies were developed which made possible the production of androids and robots that were able to take decisions autonomously. It was a real breakthrough that, with the automatic factories, would make human intervention in the building of the settlements superfluous. But these new techniques remained mostly unutilized because of the persistent lack of interest in the red planet. Thus the project to modify the Martian atmosphere, which from time to time was revived by incurable dreamers, remained a pure academic exercise.
During the 22nd century, while the colonization of Mars was making slow progress, the events destined to change the future of the red planet, matured. The souls and the artificial intelligences populated the virtual world and integrated their institutions with those of Earth in a long process that culminated in 2098 when Net joined the Confederation. This result was amazing because the virtual beings obtained in only a few decades what men had achieved in thousands of years, but this was inadequate for the new people, whose enthusiasm for the acceptance soon turned into intolerance towards the innumerable restrictions imposed by the central government.
In the final analysis, every friction was caused by the profound differences between the two races: the life extension, the widespread use of genetic engineering and artificial prosthesis, had allowed man to reach goals inconceivable for the previous generations. But nothing in comparison with the superintelligences’ results, such as to widen dizzily the difference between the two races.
In many Net creatures intolerance was replaced by anger at being confined in the virtual world and not participating in government and economy of Earth.
It became clear that the two civilizations were going to clash. To avert a war, a federal committee was charged with settling the issue. The sages suggested separating the races physically, in order to let them follow their natural evolution, and proposed entrusting the red planet to the virtual beings so that they could realize their digital and material dream. The Net creatures accepted the plan with enthusiasm as the adverse environment was not a problem for those that could live in the bodies of androids and robots. So the planet man had abandoned so hastily, started being considered by the virtual beings as a Promised Land.
At the beginning the project of colonization was opposed by part of the humans, who were asked for a financial contribution, and it took off finally in 2215 when it b
ecame clear the problem had to be solved at all costs. Now, the Martians have realized their dream: the planet has become the fourth state of the Confederation and its population belongs almost totally to the virtual race. The inhabitants live in the servers while a minority resides in the androids and robots populating the colonies. The human presence is restricted to a few researchers.
The colonization proceeds so rapidly that today the whole planet is an immense yard. New domes are rising everywhere, thanks to a streamlined production system and to the supervision of the Martian Coordination which, as soon as a settlement is completed, moves equipment and automatic factories to another place. According to recent rumors, experiments for the modification of the Martian atmosphere are about to start again.
From an interview with the President of the Confederation (2296/03/08):
“The first time I visited the red planet, I was surprised by the Martians’ good mood. An attitude just the opposite of man’s who long before, after a short and painful stay, had abandoned the idea of colonizing the planet. When I asked my guide the reason for such optimism, he answered ‘Net provides every kind of satisfaction, even those man will never experience’. While I was thinking it over, he added that the material world is a source of great satisfaction for the Martians, as well.
The following day he took me to a hill. While we were enjoying the sight of the desert, he announced that just below a big town would emerge in three years.
I met him again at the inauguration. On that occasion, he explained that Martian optimism springs from the certainty of realizing even the most ambitious dreams and that the new town was just one of their many successes.
The departure day arrived. While the spaceship was orbiting around the planet, before plunging into space, I observed its surface glittering with light. We passed by the space yards where the construction of the Caravels had begun.