Model a thousand, a million, a billion quantum Mars; a slew of possibilities from Barsoom at one end of the probability spread to tripod fighting machines and delicate crystal cities at the other. Humped along the bell-shaped curve in the middle, the likelier, possible Marses. Simple school algebra will give you the best likely solution. Output, and let that be your reality. Terraforming by quantum leap. Nudges along the path to inhabitability. More than terraforming. Whole-universe-forming. The quantum machines, the AIs that have, in the private mindspaces where humans cannot go, given themselves the names and natures of angels, have always understood that reality is a construct of language. They know what the shamans knew; that words, whether in primal chant or machine code, have power over the physical universe.
And somewhere in that polyverse, lies that answer that makes the theory real, and, by the gods whose power they have usurped, the machines are going to have a go at it. But what kind of Mars? Whose dreams will frame it? An old cosmonaut, left on the pad like a jilted bride, who casually asked a foolish prophetic question of a plastic box. A young construction worker, who is shown the glory every day and every night has it taken away from him, whose mind is sent spinning across space by quantum computers. These, certainly, and others besides, millions of others, brought to this place that is white with the light of millions of universes, to speak their dreams and tell their stories.
“Well, I could as well argue you’re my illusion,” Antti Selkokari said to the young Indian man standing before him barefoot in an incongruous paper coverall. “After all, I can understand you and you can understand me, And where does that happen except in dreams? And you’re hardly dressed for the cold. You’d be dead after ten minutes in that, where I come from.”
“And what about you?” Ashwin Mehta argued. “An old man with a compass? Very allegorical.”
“All right, then,” Antti said. “We’ll agree that each is a figment of the other’s imagination. So, then, who imagined all these?”
Figures were advancing through the white fog on all sides. Men, women, children, all ages and races and stations, walking patiently, silently. Between them, Antti and Ashwin saw other figures emerging from indeterminacy. Beyond them, yet others. The two lost men stood at the center of a great congregation of people.
“Who are you?” Antti demanded, more bold than Ashwin in the face of a faceless mass. “Where is this place? What do you want?”
A woman stepped forward. She was small, dressed in a simple shift frock, barefoot, her hair badly cut, urchin crop. She had soft black eyes and when she spoke, both men heard her in their own tongues, with an American accent. She said, “In answer to your questions: first; my folk don’t really do names-we’re AIs-but if you want to call me something, call me Catherine. It’s as good as any. Second: that entirely depends on you, all, but at the moment it might help to think of yourselves as individuals accidentally caught up in an experimental superimposed quantum state. Or a convocation, if that helps. Third: your stories. Your visions. Your hopes. Your Marses.”
Silence across the white plain. The shabby little woman turned to the great mass of people.
“Hey! It’s your world. You all have a say in it. Say nothing, and that bit goes unsaid. Your works build it, your stories tell it. Listen: quantum reality is information, pure and simple. Language defines what’s real: it’s the same for AIs as it is for humans. Deep down, everything is a story. We’re all tales. Tell me. Tell me your stories. We’ve got a world to build, and build it right.”
Against reason, Antti found words bubbling up in his throat. They were not demands for explanations that made sense, to be shown the way home. They were heart words, old memories and passions surging up like water from a deep aquifer struck by a well. It was a story of Mars, and the story of his own life.
He told of the night with the crisp of autumn first on the air when his father lit a bonfire on the beach and his children, following the sparks up into the night sky, had seen one that did not fly and fade. “That is no spark,” he remembered his father saying. “That is another world. Its name is Mars.” Another world! As complete and self- contained and full as this. A childhood of frequent illnesses was self-educated with old People’s Encyclopedias. Short on the rest of the world, but long on the wonders of astronomy. Sitting up late, late to listen to the beep on the radio that was Sputnik calling Earth. Again, that hot summer day when his father came running from the house to call him in from football to see the pictures of the capitalists walking on the Moon.
“That was when I decided I wanted to be a cosmonaut,” Antti said. “The Americans had put their flag on the Moon, but Mars, Red Mars; that was always ours.”
As he spoke, he became aware of the young man Ashwin’s voice, telling his own story: a strange and mighty one, of a world very alien to his own, and all the other voices on this featureless white plain, telling their tales and dreams of that little red light in the night.
Antti told them of the Air Force, when it had been a thing of pride and honor, and the passion and energy of young men who drive themselves toward a single ambition. The trials, the tests, the skills, the physical rigors and disciplines, the sacramental hours alone in the training jet, up on the lonely edge of the world, only the stars above him. The tensor mathematics would have finished him had he not found the humility to go home to his father, a schoolteacher, and ask his help.
“And cosmonaut training!”
It was only after that Kazakhstan morning, when ATOM 12 died, that Antti Selkokari realized his entire life and energy had been focused on that red dot in the sky, like a laser sight. As he told of the hours in the centrifuge, the constant medical testing-his childhood sickness a permanent dread-the team-building exercises, the Kamchatka survival course, the hours in the underwater tank, the hours and hours in the mock-ups and simulators, doing it over and over and over and over until they could do it blindfolded; the hours and hours and hours at the desks in front of the blackboards, working it out again and again and again. The crew interviews; how he thought his heart would stop when the letter came with the crest of the space agency, yet his fingers had no hesitation ripping it open. He still could not remember what it said beyond the key words. Glad. Successful. Mars. Novy Mir. Report.
He told about Milena. How overjoyed she had been, how proud! A cosmonaut’s wife! They celebrated with Cuban cigars and good vodka. A party member’s daughter could get the good stuff. She came at him fast and hot that night: there was a child to be conceived. A keep-safe, in case. Space was big. Radiation hard. Mars far and cold. Unflinching how it had all fallen apart, afterward. The failure had not been his, but it is a sin women do not forgive.
That morning, always coming back to that morning. The cold; clear Kazakhstan light; the jokes in the back of the truck that died one by one as they drew nearer to the great white rocket. The frosting he had noticed on the rippled white skin as they rode up the elevator, helmets under their arms. The cameraman crouching beside the gantry, their nonchalant waves. Hi, we’re going to Mars! Vorontsev, Nitin, Rozdevshensky, Selkokari. The startled birds flapping across the steppe. The hatch dogging, screwing the umbilical into the LSU. The startled grunt on the intercom as Mission Commander Rozdevshensky was told something they could not hear and he could not quite believe. The dogs turning. The ray of golden morning light. Barsamian’s hand reaching in: come now, quick now, get unfastened there and come with me. The ride down in the elevator. The ride no one had ever thought to take. The van bouncing over the rutted dirt road to the control bunker, and the word from Kirilenko that the thing was poisoned, had always been poisoned, was nothing but a tool in Politburo maneuvers.
From his trip to Mars, Antti Selkokari brought back a Kazakh rug and a fabric badge with the names of the crew of Novy Mir. He brought them home to the wooden house by the Baltic that had been his father’s and, since his death, was now his, his alone. A party official invited himself for tea to tell Cosmonaut Selkokari Mars was dead, no one was going now or ever, never to mention Mars; forget Mars, but even then their authority was on the wane and Antti had nodded and signed the forms and consents and that night gone out on the pale sand beach to look up at that red dot in the sky. First loves are enduring loves.
As he spoke, Antti became aware that the other voices telling their tales of their Marses were fading; the figures, though still pressed close as far as he could see into the white, were becoming less distinct. They became whispers, shadows, until all that remained with any clarity was the Indian youth, confessing his hopes and dreams for the world he was building, a world for all the dispossessed; with trains! Trains! Antti smiled. The construction worker smiled back and, like the cat in that English children’s story he never liked, faded too, the white of the smile lingering. Back to his future, his universe, his incomplete solution to Mars. Now Antti was alone with the ragged little woman, the saint, the angel, the artificial intelligence.
“Will this do?” he asked. “It’s all I have.”
“This will do very well,” she said, turned, and was gone, too.
Antti was alone in the featureless white, and, as if held in abeyance, the cold rushed in.
