Test 7

by David Newkirk

part 1

There is a belief dating to the dawn of humanity that Humankind must live in harmony with its environment. The science of Ecological Engineering asks, “Yes, but what environment?” It acknowledges that the environment selects for the survival of the fittest. But it asks why man must play by nature’s rules and not rules of Humankind’s choosing. It dares ask why man is obligated to ensure the survival of lesser species, randomly generated by Darwin’s dice, except to the extent that they serve humanity’s purpose.
— from the Preface to Studies in Ecological Engineering, Vorwald, Jurgen, ed. Cornell University Press, 2166

* * *

“How are we this morning, champ?” said the stocky man in the overly-crisp white U.N. medical uniform. “I’m Dr. McAllister.”

It took me a second to respond. The nightmare from last night was still bouncing around in my mind. Screaming, somewhere close. A voice: Make a choice, make a choice. The recollection made me shudder.

I wanted to answer that I didn’t win any competitions and had an actual name other than “Champ.” But that probably wouldn’t be productive. So instead, I said, “Better, I guess.”

The man in the uniform frowned and said, “You guess?”

He was still rubbing me the wrong way. Where do they get that much starch 263 light-years from Earth? Every med person who checked on me since the jump seemed to lack individuality, like someone’s idea of a generic medical person. A starched cutout.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “Better, but still a little foggy. I wake up and feel like I’m still on the ship. My sleep is off, and I get nightmares. I also get this weird déjà vu thing when I look outside. Looks a little like Iceland back on Earth, I guess.”

McAllister frowned more while he passed his hand across a tablet. A holographic display popped into the air above his hand. “Royce Vang, civilian, age 33, entomologist,” he began to rattle off. “Professor at Cape Breton University. Clean medical history. One hundred eighty-eight centimeters, seventy-two kilos. Citizen specialist, temporary conscription to Janus Biology 12 November. Jumped with the Cronus. Out of stasis 3 January. Clean medical scan post-jump.”

McAllister made eye contact and smiled. “You, sir, are a fine medical specimen, if I do say so myself. Literally six foot two, eyes of blue. I’m sorry you’re not feeling a hundred percent yet.”

“Thanks,” I said. For nothing. Shouldn’t he be prescribing me something instead of joking around?

McAllister broke eye contact, looking at the holographic display again. “Your first jump, according to this. So, what brings you to this... um, one-star vacation destination? Centauri gets three stars, you know. Well, counting Proxima, anyway.” He snorted a bit at that one.

Seriously, enough with the humor, I thought. More than enough. A specimen? That’s what I call bugs under glass. And my file had to say that I was here to evaluate a local pollinator. Simple, really: our alien friends may have deigned to say hello and goodbye just barely in time to prevent the couple billion of us still left from dying. But if the bees go, we’re screwed, and this forsaken rock may have a backup.

Whatever. He’s trying, at least. No point in adding him to the long list of people that I’ve pissed off.

“Yeah. I had to find somewhere that ‘bugged’ me more than Earth,” I said, emphasizing the “bugged.” Two could play at insipid humor.

“Well, your sense of humor is intact,” he said, now fully smiling. “My nine-year old back home would approve.”

“Look,” McAllister continued, making eye contact again, “the extra dimensions involved in interstellar travel and the human brain don’t always mix well. When they gave us the tech, our cut and run alien friends didn’t exactly stick around to answer questions. Transient neuropsychiatric symptoms aren’t uncommon. It’s the price you have to pay to flip off Einstein and go hundreds of light-years in days.” He paused, the frown now back. “The report says you had jump awareness?”

“Yeah, some. It felt like sleep paralysis. Or maybe a little like when a virtual reality game freezes up and you have to reboot. I thought I heard an alarm, once.”

“That’s not uncommon. About five percent of people report some awareness during the jump. Multi-day stasis is just a little iffy for the brain. Jump awareness correlates with post-jump confusion, lethargy, nightmares, exactly what you’re describing and not at all uncommon. It gets better.”

“Like when?” Now I was the one frowning. “I didn’t volunteer for this, you know.”

“Like maybe better after you get to go outside today. Medically you’re fine.” He paused. “You’re collecting and evaluating a local pollinator, it says. Your mission is tagged as high priority, so the base command would like to get you out there.”

The mention of my mission didn’t help anything. My mission. Uh-huh and whoop-de-doo. The U.N. might as well have phrased the draft notice that popped up in my feed something like “Dear Citizen. Drop everything that you’re doing. Ride a vomit-inducing rocket into low earth orbit. Meet a freshly minted jump ship. Trust technology that aliens, whom humanity had met precisely once for a total of about twenty minutes three decades ago, gave us. Don’t be one of the occasional ships that mysteriously show up weeks later than planned. Go collect alien bugs. Thanks for your service, citizen.”

With a downward swipe of the hand, McAllister dismissed the hologram. “Look, I get it. You’re not the first civilian that’s gotten uprooted and pulled out to a random rock for the greater good. But if we’re going to tame this planet — not to mention Earth — everyone has to do their part. So, I’m clearing you for full base access and surface activity. Do your job and head home with a cargo of bugs that some lab can clone a few billion times. Your file says you’re single. Think of it as one hell of a story to tell potential partners. O.K.?”

Maybe McAllister was right. I needed to lose the attitude. They sent me here because agriculture was struggling in the wrecked climate on Earth. Not only might I have a contribution, but I’d also have something to publish, for once.

“Don’t worry,” McAllister said. “You’ll have company out there.”

Great, I thought. They’ll probably order me around too.

* * *

The “coffee,” if that’s what it really was, helped. If nothing else, its warmth felt good as I looked out the main window. The pictures of Janus that I had seen didn’t adequately convey how different it looked from home. The local sun, which the base had named Bradbury, cast red light that colored the clouds a pinkish hue. Evolved to capture Bradbury’s reddish light, purple and blackish vegetation covered the slope down from the base. The soil was black, a remnant of some past volcanic activity that arose as Janus and Bradbury played gravitational tug of war. The close orbit to Bradbury meant that Janus still had a fair degree of geologic instability.

Who in their right mind would want to live here?

So much had changed. Thirty years ago, a ship, or something like a ship, had appeared at the Artemis base on Luna. They say that the holograms that you see don’t do it justice. It was there, and yet somehow not there, or maybe a little there, angles appearing and disappearing, shimmering. Every screen on the colony showed an insect-like face that had given the aliens the nickname of “the bugs.” Zettabytes of data appeared on the Artemis servers without apparent means of transfer. Then, a flash and an absence of thirty years and counting. The data contained a language-free, purely mathematical set of proofs of a new view of physics. It validated string theory but, at the same time, was to string theory as string theory was to kindergarten arithmetic. It had schematics for making machines that took shortcuts through higher spatial dimensions, other machines that kept humans alive during the jump, and A.I. that ran the ships. It mapped every solar system within 250 light-years, including twenty-three planets marked in shimmering green. It gave dying humanity hope.

But not unrestricted hope. Ominously, the map showed a precise black line at the end of the 250-light-year sphere, surrounded by bright red. We tried sending ships beyond that line. They hadn’t come back.

Three-year old me was mad that the news interrupted my cartoons. But the bug-like face of the alien stuck with me. I became fascinated with bugs. That made my parents happy, too; trying to fix the Plastic Age’s ecological damage was big business with promising careers. Billions had died as the bees teetered on extinction. We needed to show nature that it couldn’t push us around. So, at age seven, when I started preserving the insects that I found in the yard under a neat glass display, my dad tousled my hair and said, “My son the entomologist.” Little did I know then it would take me so far from home.

A new face interrupted my musing. The face said, “Royce? I’m Avry Laney. I think we met before stasis on the Cronus. I’ll be going out with you later. I spent a six-month rotation here and am back for seconds. This time for good, I hope. Maybe I can show you the ropes?”

I looked over. I vaguely remembered seeing her, but the boarding and stasis had been such a rush that we really hadn’t spoken. Attractive, I thought. No ring. The fact that she’d been pulled off-world implied intelligence and competence, and best of all, she wasn’t in military garb. A stray thought hit me “Kids, I had to go way out of town to meet your mom...” Quit. That’s not why you’re here.

“You’re here for the pollinators?” she asked. “The ones that pollinate what we call the purple corn?

“I am. As you probably know, when the corn comes on-cycle, the bug swarms. Someone in your team tagged it as a potential pollinator for back home, something we could use to pollinate some of the experimental fields in the areas that global warming turned arid. Maybe more durable than bees. I need to evaluate it, though. That’s why they wanted me here. See it in action and make a judgment before I tag and bag breeding colony for a to-go bag.”

“Interesting,” she said. “I wasn’t involved in that. I do know that the purple corn has some off-the-charts photosynthesis. We think that maybe some of the genes can be spliced into Earth plants for greenhouse gas remediation. A dense enough patch, you can almost breathe the air here at ground level. Not really my thing, though. I’m here to see if we can get Earth crops to take hold alongside the local flora in this thin atmosphere. This time, I guess you’d call me a farmer-settler.”

“Not me. I’m already ready to be done and head back home. No disrespect, but you can have this rock. It’s incredible to see, but not exactly what I would call my native environment. I’ll grab my bugs and split. I’ve got a real planet to show that humanity is the boss. You know, the one we grew up on?”

She paused for a moment. “Didn’t we try that in the twenty-first century? The whole Plastic Age thing? Sorry, but I’m not a fan of the whole ecological engineering thing. I think you have to respect the environment, not boss it around.”

“Agree to disagree,” I said. So much for off-world romance. I could almost feel the disapproval.

She frowned, crossed her arms, and looked at the oxygen units on the wall. “You know the drill outside, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, “we went over that on Earth. Ambient oxygen just a tad better than Mount Everest back home, so we need breathers. No contamination protocol, so everything else is for comfort. Winds are a bit on the warm side, 25 Centigrade or so?”

“Correct, although that’s here at the base. We’re on the edge of the dayside. It may be cooler where your bugs are. I’ll take you out. Satellite imagery shows a new purple cornfield that sprang up about twenty kilometers away, close to the frost line. I’ve got one of my fields of Earth crops from my first trip a few kilometers away that I’d like to check in on. We can do double duty; you can grab your sample, and I’ll check on my field on the way back. Two or three hours out there, tops. Meet you at the dock in an hour.”

Whatever. The sooner I was out of here, the better.

* * *

Proceed to part 2...