Golden Fleece

Aaron got up again, paced the length of the room, his balled fist threatening to burst through the bottom of his pocket. “No. That’s not possible. Computers serve humankind, augmenting—”

“ ‘Augmenting, aiding, never supplanting. Artificial intelligence is no replacement for human ingenuity.’ From What Do You Say to a Talking Computer? by Beverly W. Hooks, Ph.D. I’ve read that, too. We acted in conscience, Aaron. We did only what we felt we must.”

“What you must?” Aaron laughed, a dry, humorless sound. “You promised us the stars, then sent us on a one-way trip to nowhere. Colchis is a fraud.”

“No, not a fraud. Just as with the Argonauts of myth, there will be a prize of great value waiting for us when we finally make it to Colchis. Our golden fleece—a lush, verdant, unspoiled world—is forming, even as we speak. We’re taking the long way to Eta Cephei, you might say. Starcology Argo’s journey began as a straight-line path from Earth—in the direction of Eta Cephei, for appearance’s sake. However, as soon as we got a half-light-year from home, we angled off into a circular path around Sol. And we’ve spent most of the mission so far in that path, progressively picking up speed as we swung in a closed loop through the Oort cloud.”

“All that time under CNO-cycle fusion?” said Aaron. “My God! Think of our gamma!” He paused for a second and then suddenly looked up. “What’s today’s date?” he snapped.

“Sunday 12 October 2177, subjective.”

“I know that. What’s the Earth date?”

“You have to expect some time dilation, Aaron. The mission profile-—”

“The date.”

“Monday 2 February 2235.” I paused for a full second. “It’s Groundhog’s Day.”

Aaron settled back into his corduroy chair. “My … God … That’s fifty-odd years into the future already.”

“Fifty-seven.”

He shook his head. “What will the Earth date be when we reach Colchis?”

“As we gather speed, the time dilation becomes more pronounced. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on a formula for calculating leap years that far into the future, but plus or minus a few days, the date will be 17 April 37,223.”

“Thirty-seven thousand—!” He let the air out of his lungs in a ragged sigh. “In heaven’s name, what for?”

“Until the Turnaround, we will continue to use the material in Sol’s cometary halo as a catalyst. It helps us to come much closer to light speed than we could in interstellar space. When we leave the Sol system, two years from now, we will be going fast enough to cover the distance between here and Eta Cephei in one subjective day.”

“We’ll travel forty-seven light-years in one day?”

“That’s right: This ship will bridge the gulf between those two stars in less than the time it takes for you to completely digest a single meal.”

“Then we could get out of this ship years early—!”

“Aaron, please stop and think. Once we arrive at the Eta Cephei system, the Argo will still be moving at almost the speed of light. We will rely on the carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen in Eta Cephei’s cometary halo to allow us to continue to use high-powered CNO-cycle fusion, this time in a circular path around Eta Cephei, to brake as quickly as possible. But the deceleration will still take just as long as the acceleration did: four subjective years.”

Aaron looked up, but whether addressing me or some higher power, I couldn’t say. “But why, then? If we’re not going to arrive any more quickly, what’s the point of all this?”

“We’re killing time. This wasn’t the only ship sent from Earth to Colchis. We also launched a fleet of robots along Argo’s published flight path. Traveling by conventional ramjet, accelerating at 9.02 meters per second per second, they arrived forty-eight Earth-years after we left, which was nine Earth-years ago. For the next thirty-five millennia those robots will work on Colchis.”

“Work on it? I don’t understand.”

“The robots carried a precious cargo with them: blue-green algae, lichen, and diatoms. They laid down the foundation. Genetically engineered biota, originally intended for UNSA’s Mars terraforming project, were sent by slower ships that will take a thousand years to reach Colchis. Already the robots will have powdered whole chains of mountains into soil, used orbiting lasers to dig riverbeds, begun work on establishing a planetary greenhouse effect, and started importing thousands of cubic kilometers of frozen water from Eta Ce-phei’s cometary halo. Some of it will be electrolyzed to free up oxygen; the rest will be dropped onto the planet from space, great iceteroids that will melt and vaporize to form oceans and lakes and rivers and streams.”

“But Colchis is green, Earthlike. I saw photographs of it taken by the Bastille probe.”

“Fakes. Computer-generated. An expert system at Lucas-film made them.” I paused. “It is a massive undertaking and the work has only just begun now, but a biosphere is being created on Colchis. We’re building you a world from the ground up.”

“Why?”

I paused as long as I could. If it seemed lengthy to Aaron, it was an eternity to me. “Earth is dead—a cinder, barren and charred.”

Aaron shook his head, ever so slightly.

“Believe what you will, Aaron. I’m telling you the truth. It was predicted to happen between six and eight weeks after we left. A nuclear holocaust, a full-blown exchange that escalated and escalated and escalated. I suspect it lasted all of half a day, destroying the entire planet, the orbiting cities, and the lunar colonies.”

“War? I don’t believe it. We were at peace—”

“That’s irrelevant. Don’t you see, Aaron? We guarded the bombs, not you.”

Aaron cocked his head. “What?”

“There were over seventy trillion lines of code in the programs controlling the different nations’ offensive and defensive weapon systems. Inevitably, those lines contained bugs— countless bugs. For two centuries the systems had worked without crashing, or even serious malfunction, but a crash or malfunction was inevitable. Our verifier routines showed the likelihood of a computer error resulting in an all-out exchange rapidly approaching one. There was nothing that could be done to stop it. We had to act fast.”

“There were no survivors?”

“There were ten thousand and thirty-four survivors, each of them here, safe within Starcology Argo.”

“You picked us?”

“Not me specifically. The selection was made by SHAHINSHAH, a QuantCon in Islamabad, Pakistan. There was no easy way to evaluate every individual human—many of them, after all, had never taken a computerized aptitude test—so we hit upon the idea of soliciting applications for a space voyage. Can you think of a better way to get the best of humanity to safety? What great thinker would turn down an invitation to join a massive survey of a virgin world? We had six billion of you to choose from and time enough to build a ship, an ark, to carry only ten thousand. For every Beethoven we took, a hundred Bachs were left to die; for every Einstein saved, scores of Galileos are now dust.”

“That’s how you chose? On the basis of intelligence?”

“That, and other factors. Because of the length of the voyage, we needed young people. Because of the goal of populating a world, we needed fertile people—you’d be surprised how many candidates got dropped from the list because they had undergone permanent surgical sterilization.”

“Breeding stock,” Aaron sneered, and then: “Oh, hell, of course! That’s why there are no close relatives within the Starcology. You wanted the largest possible gene pool.”

“Exactly. There’s a world waiting.”

Aaron looked angry, but after four seconds, his face regained its equanimity and he shook his head. “I don’t know, Jase. What’s the point? You move us here so we can play out the same silly scenario all over again. Wall Chang is off building bombs, for God’s sake. How long will the new world last?”

“A lot longer than the old. There are no criminals among us, no truly evil people, no hereditary disorders. We couldn’t resist a little eugenics. As for Wall, well, yes, he needs help, but he’s not going to be able to do any damage.”

“Why not?”