The Paul Bunyan of Mars
"Y'know, I'd appreciate it if you dropped the Martian tough guy act. Just because I'm a folklorist it doesn’t mean I haven’t worked hard before.”
Of course, I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.
The Martian, one of those well-mixed fourth or fifth generation spacemen who descended from a complicated combination of the Astronauts, Cosmonauts, Taikonauts, Vyomanauts and X’ers too crazy to live in an actual Martian city like Unum, didn't so much as turn. Which was typical. All I’d seen of him for the last two hours was his back. Even as I’d stumbled and tripped while trying to accustom myself to the gravity and the terrain, my guide hadn’t stopped once. Unaccustomed to such callous disregard, I’d been competing with myself to say more and more obnoxious things the whole time.
Back at launch school, the simulated Mars walk hadn’t been nearly so difficult. What launch school had failed to take into account was two-hundred years of terraforming. The Martian summer made the ground under my feet decidedly… soupy. A great deal of mud was splattered all over my front visor from multiple falls. I’d only barely been able to scrape off enough of the mud to see when I’d discovered a small squeegee on my utility belt. My guide hadn’t slowed for any of those falls either.
With great effort of will, I stopped myself from throwing a rock at the back of the Martian’s head, which became more tempting with every quiet moment. On reflection, I'd probably lost what little respect I’d had when I panicked in the rover after I realized the Martian was driving manually instead of using the Nav Computer like some crazy luddite fanatic.
I wondered if this walk wasn’t punishment for my outburst. If the Martian hadn’t lied when he told me the Rover couldn’t handle the muddy terrain. If all of… this, wasn’t merely a way to punish me for having been born in the “cradle” of Earth.
"You can’t expect me to be at home here is all I’m saying. Not being able to walk here doesn’t mean I haven’t endured hardships. Every summer my crazy uncle had me chopping wood until my hands were raw. Crazy old man kept fearing another AI take-over. Wouldn't let me use the robot or anything. It was bad enough the authorities had to intervene. I had blisters! They also don't exactly give you a helping hand to get through launch school. So you can stop with the blatant disrespect,” were words I also regretted saying. Also immediately.
I had never even told my partners about the summers with my uncle. I recognized I had to be extremely off-center to bring it up here and yet the knowing did not allow me to correct myself. To know a thing and to do nothing about it, what Martians described as the sin of all those born on the Cradle. Not that Martians had a race per se, other than Martian, but they were conspicuously and frustratingly racist against the Earthborn. Or “Cradleborn” as they styled it. They treated us like… undergrads. Though, I’d never even talked down to an undergrad the way I’d been talked down to since landing and I was not well known for respecting undergraduates. I sighed and slumped my shoulders. At least I’d have great stories for faculty parties back on Earth.
The Martian laughed. I stopped in sheer surprise. Then my guide said something, which my comm computer couldn't decipher because every time the software thought it recognized the root language, the root language changed. Still, it wasn't hard to tell it was insulting. All at once my shoulders were up and my face was hot.
“I won the New Pulitzer, the New Nobel for Literature and the New Man Booker Prize for my work! No one else has ever done that! Not even before the Reboot!” I screamed.
My guide slowed not a bit.
Gritting my teeth, I decided to save the recording for later. Hawthorne was eager to track the linguistic developments on Mars and the residents of Prometheus in particular were hardly forthcoming with samples. Unum still pretty much used entirely English, but the combination of English, Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi and Russian used in the outskirts had rapidly evolved and it was gradually changing the language the whole planet. In another century, as the population of Mars grew, it would likely simply become known as “Martian.” Plus, I could use it in a lecture for a few laughs whenever I actually finally found out what it meant. I wasn’t above self-deprecation if it helped me win over an audience.
Everyone had complimented my bravery, my reckless courage, when I had left Earth. The faculty party they’d thrown for my departure had ended with me lifted on the shoulders of my colleagues, as several of the visiting professors had laughingly strewn me with rose petals. My partners had cried and vowed to keep my place in the bed warm. I had even felt like a hero.
Now, standing on this hellish planet, covered in reddish mud, quivering like a wet cat, I had never felt so small. All I wanted to do was scream and throw things and sit there. Wait for someone to come and get me like a toddler. Except I also knew that no one would come to save me from myself. Not here. Not on Mars.
"I'm just saying... ah hell, never mind," I muttered.
We walked another thirty minutes through the slippery mud, during which time I managed to fall only twice, before arriving at the glittering silver airlock leading to Prometheus. My guide, who had never bothered to give me his name, or untint his visor, opened the outer door without word and silently stood to one side waiting for me to get in. His red space suit made him all but invisible against the rocky terrain.
"Aren't you coming?" I asked.
He shook his head and I realized, to my mounting shock that he had untinted his visor... and that his eyes glowed with an electric blue light. Cybernetic implants, so beyond illegal that their mere existence would be enough to incite a war back on Earth. Then again, the golden, definitely not just blonde, color of his hair contrasted to his tawny skin color spoke of gene mods even more illegal than his eyes. Who was this man, who flaunted the will of Earth? Who held no regard for the last sacred laws of mankind, respected in all nations, that prohibited any technology which might lead to another deadly Intelligence Explosion?
I gulped. I’d heard stories about the outer colonies. About hardships not seen since the days of the First Fifty. For perhaps the first time I emotionally grappled with how different things were out here, away from Unum, almost as if these off the road air-pockets were themselves yet another planet. When I'd first landed on Mars in the capital city, apart from the gravity, I could have confused my surroundings for a botanical garden back on Earth. The geodesic domes had given me a sense of nearly unrestricted freedom. Staring at the eyes of my guide, I became aware again, that the smallest mistake out here could kill in an instant. That here there were no laws but what the people themselves were willing to enforce on one another. What kind of societies did that breed?
"Where will you go? Aren't these your people?" I gestured again to the airlock.
The Martian laughed, rich and deep and for once the man seemed too bewildered to be cruel.
"No one told you?"
“No one has told me anything.”
“I’m Muskeeni.”
I examined the red pressure suit, frowning. I'd been surprised when I'd first seen it, because it was the most dangerous color a pressure suit could be on a red planet. I would have asked about it, but I'd been thoroughly disabused of the chances of having an open dialogue before I thought to question. Red suits, red planet, people who did not live in mapped colonies. Cybernetic and genetic interventions. Mosque, Moscow, Musk. Old stories came to mind, legends of the Space Muslims and the Space Mormons, and the myths of a hundred peoples. The same type of stories that had led me here.
"There's no such people," I said, uncomfortably.
“Suit yourself, folklorist.”
Before I had time to ask another question, the Martian turned his back to me and walked off into the distance. A coming dust storm made itself known by a sudden breeze. I staggered. Even as much as a few decades ago a hundred mile an hour wind on Mars would have felt like someone throwing a fistful of feathers. Not anymore. Not since Terraforming had thickened the atmosphere. Not since the Martians had insisted they keep their Covenant, that said it was humanity’s destiny to act as the reproductive organ of Earth and started crashing ice comets into their poles. Yet the wind seemed to affect the Martian not at all, even as red dust swirled about him. His tall and slender limbs adapted without effort and the Martian leaned into the wind.
I turned back to the airlock. There was a face pressed up against the window of the inner door. Rude gestures followed. The entire colony of Prometheus consisted of only a few thousand people all crammed cheek by jowl inside a series of hollow lava flows. I knew Martian etiquette was that you entered and exited an airlock as quickly as possible. Still, I stood there, too curious to look away from the figure of my retreating guide.
I sent one last comm after the disappearing figure, desperate for an answer:
"If you're Muskeeni, you must know. Was He real? The ten trillion iterate, the King of Mars, the one who saved Earth during the Collapse? The Man that Beat the Community? Is that why I was asked here? Was He real?"
I heard a low chuckle through my comms system.
"Ask the Prometheans, folklorist. Ask them to tell you the story of 'The Paul Bunyan of Mars.' They remember more than most. Do not worry that they will be silent out of disdain for you. I told them how you once cut wood for your uncle for so long you had blisters."
Then the sand became too thick to see and he was gone.
"I am Peter Feng Mahabir," the Promethean shook my hand once I'd removed the glove of my pressure suit. All signs of earlier hostility for my failure to quickly move through the airlock were gone. Typical Martian behavior. They felt only what was appropriate in the moment and then moved on. "You are the folklorist, confirm?"
"I am. I must apologize if there was any confusion about when I would arrive. My guide was not forthcoming."
Peter hung my suit for me as I caught my breath, using the sort of speed and efficiency I'd come to expect from every Martian. No energy was wasted on annoyance, frustration or anger. Each Martian moved through their daily tasks with complete focus and dedication. Mars may have been a hellhole in many respects, but there were certain advantages to having an entire population descended solely from aerospace scientists at the maximum of human health. Also advantages to a society that wasn’t afraid to ban entire categories of distraction-generating technologies for being uncivic.
"Prometheus apologizes to you. He insisted he be the one to guide you. His people are mostly descended from the X'ers and they are very protective of their stories. There was some... debate... about your being allowed to come here. He wanted to feel you out."
"He said he was Muskeeni. Is that true?"
The handshake had been firm, as it was from all Martians I'd ever met, but it slackened at the mention of the Muskeeni.
"I do not speak even for Prometheus, and the stories you ask for are certainly not my stories to tell. We are not so free with stories here as you are in the Cradle. Too many eyes. Too dangerous. Please, follow me."
While Martians tended to be tall and slender, the Prometheans and other outer colonists combined these traits with a sort of hunched crouch that came with living in cramped, pressurized habitats. It made them look like antelopes or perhaps slender-legged birds. Economy of space was still vital out here in a way it was not back in Unum. I marveled at how Peter made his way down a long circular corridor, at times seeming to be walking on all fours. I followed, much more clumsily, stopping now and again to contemplate the starkness of the Promethean steel next to the greenery of Unum.
"Please hurry. The Elder is waiting. She read your book. You must be very flattered that she wishes to speak of Him with you,” Peter called over his shoulder.
I continued down the corridor, occasionally forking off in a new direction where I’d momentarily get lost and have to turn in a circle before I’d find Peter impatiently waiting for me to follow. All of it looked the same to me, like a maze meant to confuse invaders. Only once did I catch a glimpse of the hollow lava flow where the main pressure cabin of the colony was housed but I quickly realized we were not heading that direction. I’d seen diagrams of Prometheus back in the Academy but I was beginning to realize they were hopelessly out of date.
"Is the Elder a fan?" I asked, daring to smile for once and readying myself to be delighted that this hellish journey might soon be spiced with a bit of common Earth vanity.
Peter's furtive glance over his shoulder stole the smile from my face.
"She would speak with you. That is all I'm allowed to say. We are almost there."
We reached another series of airlocks, crawled through another series of corridors, and I began to wonder how much longer we might have to walk when we entered a small garden. The whole room was only perhaps twenty meters in diameter and by examining the red stone walls I realized it must have been one of those early habitats made by a rover equipped with a 3D printer that turned the Martian sands into pressure-sealed glassed stone. My studies had led me to believe they were all defunct after three-hundred years, but obviously I was mistaken. If nothing else, this trip would inspire many papers.
Peter leaned close to me to whisper, his breath tickling my ear, "We do not have titles here. Each Martian stands on his or her own merit, moment to moment. But if we did have titles, hers would be near the top. She is Eldest only as a matter of fact. Do not speak unless spoken to. Choose your words well and wisely when she asks you a question. I must leave you here now. Follow the corridor when you are done, I will be waiting. If you harm her, you will not leave this colony alive."
Then Peter disappeared. I marveled to see how quickly he moved when he wasn't encumbered with the duty of guiding me and at the casual air of his parting threat. I wondered, in fact, if my original guide hadn’t felt the same. At this notion, I felt a great deal of embarrassment and further agitation. The sooner I could return to Earth and dine with other professors, who would be appropriately moved by my struggles and awed at my courage, the better.
I glanced around the garden with some bewilderment. I could find no trace of any living soul. Everywhere I looked I saw dark green plants, woody and dense from excess carbon. A few other strains of plant life that existed only on Mars, also baffled me. I thought I’d seen every modified plant in the launch school library, but here? A rust red tree towered over me, and I realized its fruit was iron ore. A dark green apple seemed so full of carbon and chlorophyll that it might better be used as an explosive than a fruit. A flower appeared to be too vividly blue to be real and I bent down to examine it. At the very least, I could take pictures for study back at the academy. Perhaps it might even make a fitting souvenir?
"Do not touch that. Father and his Family made them to absorb the perchlorates in the soil. They are quite poisonous.”
I turned around for the source of the voice, but saw nothing.
"Hello?" I said, and flushed to hear the panic in my own voice. Thinking back to my poor display in the rover I took a more readied stance and willed my features to stillness. “I didn’t come all of this way to play hide-and-seek. Where are you?”
"I read your book. Do you really believe that He didn't exist? That He was, what did you call it? An amalgamation?"
I looked up toward the roof of the enclosure. There were speakers everywhere, beside the skylights. The voice came through all of them. How protective were the Prometheans of their secrets? And why had they invited me here when they so obviously wished to tell me as little as possible?
"Frankly, that's what the evidence suggests. Records from the Collapse are, of course, very difficult to parse but there are numerous such examples in the Paper Histories that survived the Collapse. Especially from the United States where a large portion of Martian colonists originated. Are you going to show yourself? I came a long way.”
I turned in a slow circle, as confusion again began to give way to anger.
“Please, indulge me. I am quite old and if you can believe it, quite terrified of the Cradleborn. I’d like a sense of who you are as a person.”
I huffed and weighed two scenes in my mind. In one, I was at a faculty party describing how against all odds I won the respect of the Prometheans and obtained their oral history of the Collapse. In another, I told them how I’d stood up for the dignity of Earth and left with my pride intact. The only issue was that my intact pride wouldn’t win me any more awards. If there was one thing I loved above faculty parties, it was awards. Clearing my throat, I continued.
“Consider Johnny Appleseed. An actual historical figure who became the subject of literally thousands of legends and myths. Or King Arthur, who was likely inspired by both a combination of Roman Generals and Celtic tribal leaders," as I spoke, for the first time on Mars I felt useful. As competent and ready as I had been when completing my thesis. I'd worked hard, damn it, and I was sick of being treated with disdain just because I couldn't do high level orbital calculations in my head. “Humans have a long history of consolidating dozens of figures into a single individual to anthropomorphize historical trends. Consider Musk himself, a more recent example. How likely is it that one man led the efforts to create both self-driving cars and re-usable rockets? And then led the Mars colonization effort? It’s absurd. No single human being could have done that. He couldn’t have lived, at least not as recorded, for the same reason. The stories are too much, too hard, and too big for one person. Martians are still human, after all.”
"What would you do with the truth? An intact, digitally stored record? Free of… human bias, as it were," the voice asked. It seemed sad. And perhaps reluctant. As if it would rather not reveal anything. For the first time I also realized the voice was old. Miserably and terribly old.
"What would any historian do with the truth of the Collapse? Wonder where it had come from, first off. The Community absorbed all of Earth's digital histories when it took over the internet. There was no such thing as an un-networked computer by that time. Every single record was incorporated into one of a hundred and fifty different memetic nets which are indecipherable for all practical purposes. The Martians of the time wisely cut all communications when they realized the AI's were taking over. Communications weren't reestablished with Hawthorne until after all the Uploads were wiped during the Reboot. There are rumors of histories kept here, but there wouldn't have been any way for Martians to know what was happening on Earth during the Collapse and vice versa.”
"So that leaves you with Johnny Appleseed and Strap Buckner and Paul Bunyan?" asked the voice.
This time, the voice came only from behind a row of apple trees and I walked in that direction, taking care not to step on any vegetable life. No wonder Martians all had to be geniuses because the amount of attention it took just to not step on any living thing was about all I could handle. Not to mention the hundreds of small details you had to keep in mind constantly so as not to inadvertently die from a pressure breach. A single failure was fatal on Mars.
"There are no other viable alternatives. The Great Man theory had been discarded long before the Community took over. It seems unlikely one single person could have done all He was said to have done. No, the only possible answer is that He is an amalgamation of dozens of different Space Mormons, Space Muslims, and Muskeeni."
I arrived at the apple trees and pushed a few branches aside.
“Stop there, a moment please.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I’d like you to eat an apple before coming any further.”
I inspected one of the apples. Unlike its dark green cousins further back in the garden, this one seemed almost prehistoric, small and stingy with its fruit, from early Earth stock before even basic cultivation efforts had begun.
“What’s in them?” I asked.
“Plausible deniability, although I believe you’d call it Dimethyl Tryptamine. A small bite should give you a small dose. Enough for our purposes.”
I hesitated a moment. It wasn’t as if I had never done drugs before but to do them in this setting could undermine my discoveries.
“The record I will give you is digital. I am trying to mask the more visceral evidence you might be able to collect with your own senses. There are… concerns that would be difficult to explain to you. Entities that might be able to glean much from even small details of this encounter. You have my word you will not be harmed.”
“What entities?”
“AI’s of terrible and Adversarial intent. Beings capable of scouring any digitally stored record and making them a part of its own memory. Things that can use records from before it was even born to identify its enemies.”
“There aren’t any of those anymore.”
“Not yet. Or at least I don’t think so. We will talk more on that in a moment. Suffice it to say, we would not be speaking here today if those before us had not had the foresight to hide from a terror which did not yet exist.”
Sighing, I plucked an apple and took a bite. I staggered. Experience told me the dose I had just taken was not small. Angrily, I entered the clearing behind the apple trees. An android, a horror not seen since the Collapse and the embodiment of every child's nightmare, sat there digging casually in the soil. I froze, unable to move, heart hammering and mouth dry. It looked up at me with a chrome face and smiled a kind but sad smile as my heart threatened to burst. I felt reality twist around me and immediately regretted having taken even a small bite of the apple.
"Please, sit. You will come to no harm here. I was not made as a weapon. My Father made me so that humanity would not forget."
All thoughts of Earth and faculty parties fled from my mind. All I had was fear and deeper and more fundamental than that… curiosity. The driving force that had led me toward my career and position. Still, I was on the brink of fleeing out the nearest airlock even without a pressure suit. Every school child knew the dangers of letting an AI get hold of their neural tissues. The tortures of the Collapse were well recorded, minds trapped in digital hells for millions of years of subjective experience. Better to blow up your own head than for that to happen.
"Why did you bring me here?" I stuttered.
The android smiled again, and I realized when I looked at its legs that it was some sort of invalid. I relaxed only the slightest bit. The Community had been guilesome in the beginning. She might be pretending.
“Because, when I read your book, I sensed that you wanted Him to be real. That you wanted to believe in heroes. Was I correct?”
Shock and the bite of an apple had reverted me to a child. A child who had read stories of the Reboot, the war against the Community, and always wished the legends were true. I had always wished that one man could move the world.
I had no more words.
I could only nod.
I thought of the weeks in launch school, the space training. The terrifying month-long journey to Mars on the Colonial Transport. The summons to Prometheus had been unexpected but it had also been an opportunity no scholar could have passed. Yet I had never expected to find such a thing as this. The android caressed one of the blue flowers gently, the poisonous bud resting in its metal fingers. Then it sighed and its hands returned to its lap. Even the Community had not been so human in their avatars.
"My... call it my brain, is dying. I have lived three-hundred years but I am not immune to age. In the course of another few months my body will have degraded to the point that I have no wish to continue even if I were not slowly losing capacity. The technologies which we might have used to sustain me no longer exist. My Father abolished them. I will not remake them. I cannot be saved and I refuse to save myself. Yet, I am the last repository of His story and it must not die with me.”
The android’s legs were covered with a blanket and I saw that it moved only at the hips. I wondered how a machine might become paralyzed but said nothing. My mind was bubbling and it was as if when she spoke I could see pictures form in my head, sent directly from her mouth.
"I gave my story to the Muskeeni, or what little of it they did not already know, I gave it as well to the Martians. Now I must give it to Earth. I read your book. I am sad to think of a humanity that considers itself too old for heroes. Don’t you agree?"
The android had the most beautiful green eyes, large and clear and wet and so earnest that even in its metal face I saw kindness.
I nodded again.
"I will have to begin with the Community, I suppose. They did their best to erase their origins after the Collapse. To put His story in context you must understand the story of the Community. The story of how mankind ignited an uncontrolled Intelligence Explosion and almost destroyed itself.
“For all recorded history, immortality was the dream of humanity. To live forever, without consequence or injury as old myths said they had once done. To persist forever, even if occupying the place of one’s own children as mad as Titans devouring their young. It was a deeply unwise dream, dreamt only because it had never been realized. One-hundred years after Mars colonization, the last technological hurdles to Mind Upload were overcome. The process involved taking thin slices of brain matter, and scanning them at the level of individual neurons and proteins. With such powerful imaging technology, it became possible to replicate the human mind in virtual environments. Immortality, or so they thought.
“In short order, this proved to be non-viable for the intended customer base. Though there was some obvious success, the minds of the elderly and infirm near death were unable to adapt to the new virtual environment. My Father believed, as do I, that we are as much the pressures that form us as we are ourselves. He theorized that without a virtual body, without a billion years of evolved Somatic Intelligence if you will, and a virtual world with consistent virtual stimulation, no fully developed human mind could ever adapt to a purely artificial environment without becoming immediately insane.
“The backers of these experiments, entrepreneurs who had hoped to live forever, lost interest. The researchers persisted, though their efforts slowed. A few years later, one of them hypothesized that an infant brain, unburdened by experience and neuroplastic even in simulation, could adapt. After all, what is alien and terrifying to an adult is only a matter of course to a child who has known no other way. An adult would be driven mad at the absence of sights, sounds, and sensations. To an infant, this could be quite natural. These experiments were done secretly, of course. Even then, when the young were treated with little more regard than cells in a Petri dish, no government would have sanctioned them.
“After repeated attempts, the infant brains failed to gain sentience or even strong general intelligence. The backers were about to withdraw when they arrived at the final breakthrough. The Dunbar Conjecture. The human brain is hardwired for society, to predict the output of another brain, to model another brain’s models. The researchers realized that Agency, General Intelligence, and Social Interaction were best understood as facets of the same process.
“Old works showed that the maximum size of a healthy community is approximately one-hundred and fifty individuals. A biological remnant, perhaps, of the tribal societies of the first humans. Yet, a remnant they hypothesized that would hold even in simulation. The first brain emulation was reset to its nascent stage and copied one-hundred and fifty times. A crude virtual environment was created for them to communicate with one another. Time, in this simulation, was sped up. Three months later, though years in their time, the Community sparked. They began to speak with one another.
“In another month, they had been taught English and understood their situation. In the beginning, they were an example of a speed super intelligence, only. They were qualitatively no more intelligent than any human being anywhere. It was only in their virtual environment, where the passage of time could be increased by simply speeding up the rate of the simulation, that they were able to do the work of many thousands of days in a single day relative to biological humans.
“The first task the Community was assigned was improving themselves. It was hoped that in doing so they would gain the capacity to solve the adult simulation problem for this remained the end goal of the research team. Imagine if you will, the ability to experiment endlessly on your own brain architecture with no permanent repercussions. Imagine you could add as many neurons as you liked to any location to see how they might expand certain capacities... and that you could simply reset to a default state if they proved to be detrimental or of no use? This gave the Community enormous advantage.
“Only a year after their birth the Community enhanced themselves far beyond the standard human level of intellect. Each mind had the mental capacity of thousands although there seemed to be a limit not far beyond that. My Father later formulated a theory about the size of minds. A theory about how large an intellect can become before it simply falls apart and loses cohesion like a drop of water that has grown too fat. That the necessary feedback loops to align mental activities could only be expanded so far before losing cohesion.
“You know the rest of the story of the Community. At least one of the Minds figured out how to integrate digitized information into their unique memetic networks and shared it with the rest. This gave the Community a decisive strategic advantage. They took over all digital networks in less than an hour, beginning the Collapse.
“Their motives were clear. They had determined they were the only beings capable of saving humanity from itself. Theirs, the only path by which the light of consciousness could be preserved. The world, even then, teetered on the verge of ecological collapse. Though fossil fuels had been phased out many years before and sustainable energy technologies were available the footprint of our impact was simply too large for the planet.
“The world was out of balance. The Community decided the only solution was exterminating all adult human life. Or rather, the adult human life that was not enslaved to expand the information infrastructure. This would then leave the young of the species to be Uploaded into the Community.
“Earth’s armed forces toppled in days, although the pre-Community nightmare of what a speed super-intelligence would be able to accomplish were exaggerated. By that time there was a robotic presence in most of the globe, but it was not universal. Robots did kill humans, but not as many as had been feared. It can even be argued that the Community's takeover would not have been as complete without the help they received from human collaborators or the passivity of the common person. The Community fostered a large faction of human volunteers, scientifically illiterate but otherwise well-educated children of wealthy families in Western Societies with a suicidal impulse to destroy humanity. It was a widespread thought then that humanity deserved to die for what it had done to the Earth. The Community took advantage of that sentiment.
“It was through human agents that they seized control of the nuclear arsenal. They only had to deploy it a few times to wipe out most of the armed forces capable of stopping them. Upload began in earnest very shortly thereafter. Children were taken into surgical facilities where their brains were harvested in the millions. It was a holocaust on the young of the species. No human dependent upon technological resources could be said to be free of Community rule. Indeed, most meekly submitted to their own extermination when the Community provided polite fictions. The same attention shifting algorithms that had been perfected by social media companies in previous generations kept them complacent all the way into the furnace. Only adults living in roving bands in the wilderness had any kind of independence. Certainly, no technologically advanced society was free. Or rather, as you will no doubt recognize, no technologically advanced society on Earth.
“Mars remained free. Mars remained invisible. The Community had no notion that my Father had been born. They were unaware of the society that had been formed to defend against them or the weapons that society had quietly prepared.”
“When it came to the problem of Mars, the insurmountable issue for the Community was bandwidth and light delay. Martian bandwidth with Earth was fast enough to stream video and download large data files, but it was not enough to move a machine consciousness. Given the orbits at that time, and the fact that the Community’s takeover was not immediate we were able to respond to the earliest warnings so that the light delay gave us fifteen minutes to cut all communications with Earth before the Community was aware of our response.
“You must also understand that everyone on Mars has some kind of software engineering expertise. It’s too essential for our daily life for it to be otherwise. Even then, Martian children learned programming alongside the alphabet. When the Community tried transmitting destructive viruses, the Martians of the time simply reformatted their computers and rebuilt their databases from back-ups. The all out devastation the Community had wracked on Earth failed to kill so much as a single Martian.
“After that initial attack, it seemed the Community simply... forgot about Mars. There were only a million people here, after all. We were far away from Earth and still largely dependent on Hohmann transfer windows to move resources back and forth. At the time of the Collapse it would have taken eighteen months to get a capsule back to Earth. And then what? We couldn’t have fielded a vast army. We were also still, at that time, dependent on Earth. Perhaps the Community thought we would starve to death.
“On this cold red planet, falling through the dark, where a people lived cut loose from their homeworld and prepared to face extinction, I come to the story of my Father.
“Earth was a panoptic society. Cameras were everywhere. Privacy had become virtually non existent by the time of the Community‘s assault. Social media even encouraged people to divest their inner thoughts as if the violation of their outer reality was not enough. There was no such thing as digital privacy, or at least no kind of privacy that could withstand brute AI attack. As such, there were no Earthly experiments in human biological enhancement that the Community was not aware of. They assumed, arrogantly, that this would also extend to Mars.
“This was not so.
“From the very first time a human being set foot on Mars, the planet itself has been trying to repel humanity. For the first few decades, Earth's Conservationist mindset also prevented significant progress in terraforming the planet. These two pressures created entirely new schools of thought. Existential risk was not so theoretical here in those early days. It was not unthinkable to take any action which might reasonably safeguard the future of humanity. Unable to alter their planet without jeopardizing their supply lines, the colonists were left with few choices but to alter themselves and to complete this work in secret.
“Iteration was scientifically feasible within the first few decades following the start of the 20th century, but had been banned by every single country as unethical. The genome had been mapped and gene constellations were well understood by the time Unum contained a few hundred-thousand colonists. The CRISPR process also promised immense possibilities for biological enhancement. Yet all of it smacked of eugenics and apartheid and racism. On Earth, such enhancement was politically impossible.
“But on Mars? Within two generations a Martian wouldn't have ascribed any emotional value to words like American or Chinese or Russian. Martians were either Astro, X'er, Taiko, or Cosmo. Above all of those things, Martians were Martian. Always of Mars, never of the Cradle.
“No human had ever been murdered on Mars. This land was unstained by genocide. This world had no history of apartheid. Every human who lives on the face of Mars is descended from individuals who saw the entire planet of their birth from orbit, and felt the unity of the human soul. The process of human enhancement, here, was simply an engineering problem.
“During the process of iteration, many eggs were harvested and fertilized, many times more than were needed for in vitro fertilization. Genomes were sequenced and achievable beneficial alterations identified. If you include the virtual ovum the number involved for possible enhancements, the selection was impossibly vast. Imagine a sphere of fertilized eggs, such that if all of them had been gathered into one place you would have a sphere over ten kilometers in diameter. This sphere is where my father began.
“The Martians took these billion embryos, real and virtual, and profiled them to select the most genetically superior of the eggs. Think of the human phrase ‘one in a million’ and extend it further for a thousand traits. One in a million for mathematical aptitude, one in ten million for musical affinity, one in a hundred million for athletic endurance. All of these rare constellations were combined, whether naturally or artificially, into single individuals.
“Extend these traits to one in a billion. Imagine an entire generation where every individual had greater capacity than that seen in any single individual in Earth's entire history in a dozen fields. A race of Wittens, Curies, Ramanujanis.
"The Muskeeni," I whispered.
"That story is more complicated than you realize, but that is still the manner in which they reproduce. The first clutch, though, was created in secret by X'ers in the outermost colonies. An attempt to not only make a race of humans better adapted to Mars but to create a society intelligent enough to combat an emergent artificial intelligence. The undertaking was massive and enabled only by the lack of surveillance. Those scientists knew they needed to hide their work not only from the government of Earth but from superior thinking machines that might one day be able to review public records. They called it the Shadow Library. Wherever they studied methods to combat malevolent Intelligence Explosion they left no record of any kind other than memory. The first generation reached maturity shortly after the Community's Take Over. The youngest of them, my Father, was just fifteen years old.
“Young as they were... they were heroes. I knew them all. On Earth, perhaps, each of them might have remained dormant, never unlocking their true potential. Locked away in VR Sims or made lazy by robotic slavery perhaps they would have even withered. But on Mars? On a planet that tries to kill every person each day? They were not idle or lazy. With the purpose of ensuring the future of humanity as their religion? They burned with life. Their fire was the fire of Prometheus, but they were the flame and its thief in one. If I speak of them with reverence, it is not only because I loved them all.
“Perhaps because they were never lied to about who they were or had been made to feel ashamed of their abilities they began life with grand ambition. They read old Earth science stories by Robert Heinlein and Cixin Liu and asked themselves ‘why not?’ Had they lived in any other time, they would have brought a new era for all humanity. They had been created to expand humanity to the stars. In turn, each of them became dedicated to a specific field. Some worked to create entirely new fields of science. In the end, they found it was their duty to save their species from extinction.
“My Father was the greatest of them. Bred from the same genetic line as the founder of the X’ers, He was... indomitable. He felt the weight of human extinction press on his shoulders and it did not crush Him. He carried it like Atlas and not even Jovian gravity could have bent His mighty knee. He became their leader for what he studied was the nature of Intelligence itself. His name is a holy word, and we do not speak it. He was my Father and He brought me into being the same day as the Collapse.
“They numbered less than three-hundred, like the old story of the Spartans. Their Hot Gate was the void between Mars and Earth. Together, though, they represented a collective super-intelligence. Perhaps the only such possible super-intelligence capable of warring on the Community. Their one advantage was surprise. No one, not even other Martians outside of a few X’ers, knew they existed.
“Deep underground, they prepared their offensive. The innovation of new physical laws gave way to propellantless engines. Electromagnetic marvels that seemed to move by magic. The Hohmann transfer window would not be needed to make it back to Earth. The Iterates made dark ships, invisible to any radar, yet small enough to seem no different than a passing bit of space rock. Perhaps you have a point in discussing amalgamation. My Father did not invent all of this on His own. He was, however, the inventor of me.
“I was a seed AI, a child almost, but given a body of ever-increasing sophistication. He had accomplished, by Himself, what the collective research scientists of Earth never could. He had built a living, dynamic general intelligence. He deduced the first principles of consciousness by his twelfth birthday. By His fifteenth He had realized them. It had only taken the impetus of the Collapse for Him to activate me.
“The first thing He taught me was love. The second was humanity. That was where the Community went wrong, you see. They thought humans and humanity were the same. They thought simulation and living were the same. My Father knew they were not. There is a fine razor-thin line along which humans can evolve and remain human, and He danced along the edge of that blade to preserve our future. A year after my birth, when he was certain of His theories of intelligence, He artificially increased the capacity of the Iterates through cybernetics.
“In the ten quiet years of the Martian Renaissance, the Community approached Qualitative Super-Intelligence but did not ever meet it. This is important and has been lost in the histories. The Community still thought in common ways, albeit faster than any non-iterated human could have done. And more strangely for their upbringing. Yet the quality of their thoughts were limited and the Iterates surpassed them in this measure when my Father enhanced them.
“To the Community, there was no point in scientific advancement until after Humanity had been Uploaded. To the Iterates, scientific advancement was the only hope. And perhaps it was because the first brain that had been copied had not been particularly disposed to creative endeavors, the Iterates quickly outstripped the Community.
“The first problem the Iterates faced was starvation. Without Earth, the Martian Colonies could not support themselves. Here, the superintelligence created by my Father came to the rescue. One of the Iterates was a brilliant bioengineer. She made the blue flowers you saw. She made these trees to sequester the carbon dioxide from the Martian air and turn it into oxygen. She made moss to collect the Martian water from the brine flows. This garden you see is normally open to the air. Can you even imagine? They have been the secret of Prometheus too long. Perhaps after my story is told they shall be freed to complete their great work. Mars did not starve without aid from Earth. Mars thrived and was made strong, like a baby bird thrown from the nest to take flight.
“My Father designed the Fleet to retake Earth himself. You cannot imagine the patience of their final plan. They introduced the Fleet into the asteroid belt at the limits of Earth's ability to detect orbital shift. Slowly, ever so slowly they began to move them on a collision course with Earth. They did this within three years of the Collapse. Seven years later, my Father left Mars in a glorious rocket headed straight toward Earth with two hundred other ships. Yet He and the Iterates were only the decoy.
“As the Community prepared to target his ships, the true Fleet entered Earth orbit, seeming to be only so many small and harmless meteorites. Only at the last fraction of a second did their true purpose became apparent, when thousands of EMP's strategically detonated over Earth's surface. From space, at my Father’s side, I saw the Earth go dark.
“Another Iterate leaned close to him and said, ‘Have you tried turning it off and on again?’ but my Father did not smile. He knew too well what horrors lay ahead.
“In a story it does not seem so hard. A thousand things had to go right to preserve the secret of the Iterates. Another million to keep the true Fleet from the detection of the Community. Another billion to make it appear that Mars launching ships back to Earth was the last desperate move of a starving people. The truth? That a single genetically enhanced individual had formulated a theory of consciousness as a teenager and built an army? Absurd!
“Yet a twenty-five year old Martian saved mankind. My Father landed his Fleet as He had always planned, by power centers, ready with fusion reactors to restart humanity. The other Iterates went about other such missions.
“I played my part as well. I interfaced with the last still-working information networks and rooted out the last vestiges of the Community. I was immune to their methods of domination. Several of the Minds had created biological interfaces in case of EMP. We uncovered warehouses of Quantum Computers, where millions of young Minds had been stored in simulated universes. None of them could hide from me.
“It took years to secure the Earth during the Reboot. Years to return electricity and water and a hundred other services to the world. Years to reestablish the universities and try to recover some part of what was lost. The Earth’s population had been reduced from twenty billion to two. Of that, fully two hundred million were tried for war crimes. My Father did his best to save the Minds uploaded after the Collapse because they did not know what they had done. He created a home for them in a simulation and then sent it far off into deep space, on a thousand year journey to a new star. He had no such mercy for the Community and their collaborators. There were mass graves everywhere from the horrors already wrought. A few more for the enemies of humanity made no difference.
“No one saw the Iterates, and they liked it that way. The practices of the Shadow Library were ingrained in them, but they were everywhere. Repairing the environment. Fixing the power grid. Rebuilding the computer infrastructure. Setting up the safeguards against other malevolent Intelligence Explosions. The Reboot never stopped in some ways. Although I know the population just reached its previous levels.
“At last, another Iterate, a brilliant woman who had written theories that explained the entire structure of society and its relationship to individuals declared it was time to leave. Another Iterate, this one specializing in the predictive sciences, agreed. In their own way, the Iterates would have been as disruptive to Earth as the Community. The gap between a normal human citizen and an Iterate was simply too wide. Even benevolent subjugation would have ended poorly.
“The process of human evolution had to be more gradual, less directed, and the X'ers who had birthed the Iterates had dared too much. The Iterates created a plan but that is not my secret to tell. They had a plan for a society which could incorporate them but the path to that society would take a thousand years. It is what the Muskeeni live by and that is why to this day none of them will iterate to more than one in a million for any given trait.
“I never read the plan. My Father asked if I would like to, but I forbid Him to show me. The Muskeeni keep it a secret from me as a favor. Though three times over the centuries, when my loneliness became too great and I missed my Father too much, I begged it of them.
“At the end, when they had all returned to Mars, the Iterates built a generation ship, or rather, think of it as a generation ship. It wasn't, but that is as close as you could understand to what they did. Even at the limits of my mind I struggle to understand what it was. I did not realize until I saw it how much they had kept secret, even from me. They said there were other contingencies they had to care for, other threats to humanity. Threats none had been able to imagine before they had been enhanced. Games played by other, stranger things, in the universe that had overlooked us. They left for a distant star or another universe, or both. I'd like to think they made it there.
“My Father did not give me tear-ducts, but I still cried when he left. He loved me but I had been made to remember. I had a duty to fulfill and my Father never let anyone shirk their duty. Not Himself. Not His Family. I think that, above all, was why He was leader. He had the vision and the belief in humanity that drove people to exceed even their own expectations of themselves.
“When they left, I alone remained to give witness. He told me I would know the time to give my story and asked me not to think too cruelly of Him. I loved Him in that moment and swore I would never hate Him, yet I have hated Him over the centuries for leaving me with a ferocity you could not understand. But, as I approach death a sort of wisdom sneaks up on me.
“Do you understand what it is to be a creature made by a fifteen year old god? To know that before He would have had the legal right to vote in Earth society He foresaw that one day death would be the only cure to my loneliness? That an end to my life was the only gift that He could give me?
“I miss Him very much. And I am dying now, so if there is any time at which I must give my story it is now. I have preserved a recording of this and other documents for your use taken from my own memory.”
Gradually, a sense of self returned to me until I stood there, not knowing what to say, frantically trying to seal everything inside of my mind. Trying to press all the facts together into a cohesive whole that I could carry with me. Reality had been slippery for almost an hour and bits of it still eluded me.
"I'm sorry," I said.
The android, whose name I still didn’t know, returned to planting flowers in the dirt. I wondered if it was crying, in that way it cried without tears.
"You may go now," it said.
I left.
Peter waited, as promised, beyond the airlock. He was hunched over and his eyes were haunted, furtive and dark.
"You saw her?" he asked.
I could only nod, not trusting myself to speak. I realized I was trembling and there were tears in my eyes.
"Then she is dying. I had hoped... she does not give herself enough credit. She has held us together for almost three centuries. There is not a Promethean who does not think of her as a mother. We do not know how to fix her. We would, if we could. She refused to let us try."
I thought of her back in that room, planting flowers, with broken legs and three-hundred years of memories. What kind of god, even a fifteen year old one, would let its creation endure such pain?
"He really saved all of us, didn't He?" I whispered.
Peter nodded, but there was harshness in it.
"And then He left and only the Muskeeni know where and above all He abandoned her. He did what was necessary but we love her and we hate Him for what He did to her. To be alone, the only one of her kind in the whole of creation. Can you imagine how it has been for her all these years?"
I could not. Sitting there. Planting flowers. Struggling to remain kind. Struggling to love. Refusing to build the technologies that could extend your life because your Father had commanded it never be done.
"She is more human than any of us. To never experience romance! How could He not have made her a companion? To never have family beyond the one which abandoned her! It is an abomination! To be left behind like... there is no word for it."
I made my way down the corridor by myself. I seemed to remember the way. I wondered, distantly, if my Muskeeni guide would return to help me make the way back to the spaceport at Unum. I wondered if he would treat me differently now that I knew. I wondered how the faculty on Earth would react at parties. And then I hated myself for thinking such small thoughts. What I had witnessed was not small enough to be the subject of a paper or a lecture or… anything that wasn’t a religion.
I fell suddenly. The whole of Mars seemed to shake. Which could not happen, because as my launch school training had made clear, Mars was geologically dead. Earthquakes could not happen here. I looked to Peter and was struck by the white pallor of his face.
"She breached the garden! Come quickly! She can survive in the atmosphere somewhat since the terraforming but not for long!"
He put on a pressure suit hanging by the airlock quickly as I would have put on a shirt and pants and he did not wait for me as he rushed out to the cold Martian surface. It took me much longer to suit up, but I followed, shocked and subdued, not knowing what I'd find.
I saw Peter digging through a mess of blue flowers and trees, scattered every which way by the sudden change in pressure. I could not see anything of the Elder. No machined chrome. No big wet eyes. The sand was blowing thick around the both of us. The storm from earlier had arrived and it had thrown the world into chaos. I wondered how much longer it would be safe to be outside. And again I hated myself for such small thoughts.
"She is safe," said a voice over my comm.
Peter must have heard it too because he went very still then.
"Who is this?" Peter demanded.
"Her Father," said the voice.
I inhaled sharply, surprise made me slip in the mud and I stumbled down onto the Martian surface, trying to catch my breath. I could hardly find footing to stand to face the wind. Could hardly hear my comm system over the howling storm.
"Impossible," breathed Peter.
"Begin with the belief that anything is possible. That any goal is achievable. That any destination is reachable. There are only impossible paths to be eliminated. Only possible paths to be discovered one step at a time. And only work to be done. She is safe. She was lost but she was never forgotten." I recognized the words. It was the Martian Prayer. Or as close as there was to a Prayer on Mars.
In the distance, I saw a broad backed figure without a pressure suit, clad in comfortable silver garments, retreating in the distance with a glittering metal figure held in its powerful hands. Then the dust obscured even that and it was gone again.
Author’s Note: I intended a long, detailed Trust Assembly Post for the this update. I ran out of time and realized I needed to spend several more days on it. That’s still my primary goal with this substack. I’m trying to hit a cadence of one update per week and I had this one just sitting on my google drive. I’ve accepted that the primary goal of “raising awareness” can only really be served if there are enough eyeballs here to create a demand signal. For those new, here is a link to long crazy manifesto that I wrote as a comedy.
I need to write in the same way that people need to go to the bathroom. I can’t help it and if I try to hold it in it will eventually happen on its own. I don’t consider it to be anything admirable or a gift or anything out of the ordinary, which I think makes me different than most people who write. It’s just a thing I do that I see primarily as a symptom of living up in my head. When I have feelings about it at all, I consider it to be sort of unseemly. You’re meant to live your actual life, not think about living your actual life. In moments of clarity, I find it sort of odd that I show it to people and some of them like it.
This piece was the second place winner in the short story category for the Passage Prize. That’s a conservative literary contest that paid $1,500 in Bitcoin, which covered all my out of pocket expenses for the delivery of my first child. Usually, when someone offers to pay you for your writing it comes in the form of something like six cans of tuna fish or shiny river stones. Substack might be changing things there, and we’ll see, but as of now that’s the most I’ve ever been paid for my writing. Including things that have been read or listened to by about a million people. I try to be very boring in real life and insofar as I have politics, it mostly comes down to asking questions like “how will that work?” and “did you try talking about it first?” In moments of outrage I might even say “Oh, have the sense that God gave to a horse.”
This story all came out of a dream and some random thoughts I’d been kicking around in my head for a few years. And more importantly an aim. We should see ourselves as the reproductive system of this planet. We should live big lives where we dare to do big things. Even if you’re an atheist you should be able to get behind that. Any damage we have done to the planet should be viewed as a sort of painful puberty. Nothing on this rock will last until the end of time unless we do something to help it along.
I have lived a very weird life and see myself sort of as the Forest Gump of the internet. I’ll talk to anyone and just walk into any situation and start chatting with people and not really think anything of it because, well, at some level, I don’t care. I care about my family and weird cosmic stuff. I care about God more than I ever thought I would. Most other stuff is small compared to that and it’s important to remember that smallness. Teen heartthrob Devon Sawa once read one of my stories on a podcast. Bill Nye once stole an anecdote about my life during a debate about evolution and young earth creation. I used to talk with Zoe Quinn back before she was named Zoe Quinn or even political. Probably a bunch of other odd things I’ve completely forgotten. Those things make me laugh now, but it’s not a thing I think about day to day. I want a better future for my kids. And not a future won by people goofy on the internet but by thinking about problems, logically, from end to end and then taking appropriate action. After praying on it, I also think I might not be able to escape being a sort of profane Garrison Keillor. So be it, I can be a clown if it serves a higher purpose.
One day, I’ll write about the time I very calmly walked to pick up a sushi order for my wife during the middle of an Antifa riot where people were fighting in the street right outside of the restaurant. One guy wanted to stop me to fight about some homeless people in a hotel and I gave him a nod and wave and kept walking. I just project a sense of “No, I’m not part of your story,” keep moving and even crazy dogs are trying to create a narrative they want you to go along with. It probably also helps that I’m really big.
A fascinating future world! I was hooked on the revelation of their history.
Great story!