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Alan Denham gazed upon the solar system with eyes more sensitive than any human’s – than any other human’s, he reminded himself. Just because his body was now a hundred-plus-meter-long Meme-grown scout ship inhabited by the recording of his mind did not mean he wasn’t human. Hell, if he wasn’t human, what did you call all that mind-blowing sex he and Rae just had?
Different, that’s what, but better. The best he’d ever had, even better than with Linde, because now he knew what love was.
Cliché, Skull, Denham told himself, but clichés are there for a reason – they are shorthand for essential truths, and really, it’s not as if I’m writing a term paper here and my prose will get graded.
The wonders of the universe opened to him, yet he was, as usual, drawn inward to his son Ezekiel. As his avatar was elsewhere, he manifested an internal eye and speaker, slowly so as not to startle the boy: a tyke of perhaps four in body and emotions, and much older in intellect, though born barely a year ago.
Zeke didn’t miss the surveillance. He spotted the staring orb right away and waved. “Hi, Daddy!”
“Hi, Zeke. What are you working on there?”
“Math’matics. Times tables.”
“What number are you up to?”
“Hunnerd an’ forty-four.”
“Twelve times twelve? I thought you did that long ago.”
“No, Daddy, hunnerd an’ forty-four times other numbers.”
“Ah. Good for you. Never know when you won’t have a computer around.”
“You can always do it for me, right?” Ezekiel held up the tablet with the teaching program. “Even if this breaks, your brain is bigger than all of us. Of ours, I mean.”
“I suppose it is.”
“Daddy, let’s play a wargame. I wanna play Stellar Conquest.”
“Sadly, son, I have something I have to do for your mother.”
“The private thing?” He cocked an eyebrow at the spy-eye. “But she left on the shuttle.”
“Not with your mother, for your mother. You just like to ask that question because you hate not knowing. When you’re older your mother and I will explain all that to you.”
“But I want to know now.”
Alan thought for a moment. “Here, I have something for you.” Concentrating, he extruded a barbell made of dense biomass, weighing perhaps forty kilos. “Pick that up.”
Ezekiel, always eager to please, stood up and grasped it with both of his chubby hands and lifted. He failed utterly. “Turn off the gravity.”
“That wouldn’t be fair, would it? You wouldn’t actually be lifting it on your own; that would be just a cheat.”
“But it’s too heavy for me.”
“Yes, and so is the knowledge you’re asking for. You have to grow some more.”
Ezekiel sat down and scrunched up his face with thought. “So giving it to me now is like turning off the gravity?”
Alan laughed, and the sound echoed throughout his inner body. “Such a smart kid you are. I love you Zeke, but I have to go now and do work things. Just call me if you really need me.”
Leaving Zeke there, Alan moved his attention to the nursery, where four children lay in four miniature cocoons, biomachines that saw to all of their physical needs, and fed them selected memory molecules from time to time even as they whirled their tiny minds within virtual worlds. He checked the system status and made sure they were doing fine, and reminded himself to go in avatar form later to hold them, rock them, sing to them.
Afterward, he withdrew his attention to his cockpit.
That’s how he named the control room of the ship. It used to contain three Meme and all the biodevices they needed. The young vessel it directed had not grown intelligent enough to do more than follow orders or react to obvious stimuli. Now its mind was mostly subsumed in Alan’s and though he could run the whole thing without putting his consciousness here or there, he found it kept him more human to do so.
Settling his avatar into a man-shaped chair, he ran his fingers over the consoles, even though the controls were also part of him. If he’d had to explain it to someone, the best he could have done was to liken it to playing a musical instrument, wherein all the senses engaged and the machine and the man became one.
Or perhaps there was no point in trying to describe it at all.
Vacation’s over, Skull, with nothing really resolved...I’ll have to push more later, he thought as he gently started the fusion engine in the rear of the ship. At some point I may just have to tell her I know what she did to me and damn the consequences, but we’ve both been telling these lies to each other for so long that the truth is going to sting quite a lot. He – and she too, he felt sure – kept putting off the inevitable emotional showdown.
Maybe if he put it off long enough, they’d never need it.
Artificial gravity built into his ship-body ensured the occupants felt hardly a pull, even at an easy thirty Gs acceleration. Alan Denham the ship surged forward, a spaceborne greyhound at an easy lope.
A few hours later he sidled up to the first asteroid on the list, a medium-sized hunk of mostly iron five hundred meters in diameter. Extruding a pre-grown fusion-engine pod, he slapped it on the spot closest to its center of mass and waited a few minutes for it to bind to the surface with biological nanofibers. Downloading instructions into its primitive brain, he moved off and triggered it.
At very low thrust, a highly efficient one hundredth of a G, it began to move along a path that would eventually insert it into Earth orbit, to join the other two dozen there. As it approached the planet, Orbital Control would take over and make any adjustments needed.
Only a year, and already humanity has leaped forward decades by using these Meme biotech fusion motors. As if Greek galleys had been given outboards, the hybrid lift-ships were ugly but they functioned, shuttling people and materials from the surface to orbit and back again as easily as airliners flew from city to city.
Speaking of materials...the next rock is mine. The Alan Denham approached the one he had picked out, a chunk rich with a nice balance of volatiles, water ice and minerals, about twenty meters long and ten wide. Lining up on one narrow end, he caused an intake, a mouth really, to open in the nose of himself, and began to swallow like a snake with a rabbit.
Several hours later the materials were broken up and distributed in cavities, to begin their processing as food. Gestating a fusion engine was a slow and complex thing even for such a wondrous organic machine as he, but every motor represented another ship that could fly, and Earth desperately needed vehicles to do the endless tasks of its nascent space fleet.
Denham could make almost anything inside his body, given enough time for his nanobiologicals to build it molecule by molecule – but at the moment high-efficiency motors were the most vital. That would change, eventually, as Earth science and manufacturing ginned up to produce mechanical copies, but for that, it needed orbital factories – platforms and materials – and that’s what the asteroids were for. Soon there would be hundreds of them parked around Earth and the Moon, and after that...well, there was no reason to keep everything right there. Venus and Mars and free-floating asteroid bases could be developed, and then the moons of Jupiter and Saturn might be colonized.
If humanity survived.
With fusion ships Ceres the dwarf planet, or super-asteroid if one preferred, would become the arsenal of Earth. At least, that was the plan he had heard about, listening in to Earth’s radio traffic. Almost a thousand kilometers in diameter, it contained all the raw materials needed to build whatever Earth’s technology could design...whatever they could make in time.
Aye, there’s the rub, he thought. Time. Eight years or less until the Destroyer gets here, but we have to be ready earlier, because we have to presume they will find out we kicked their asses before that. Maybe they will speed up, or maybe they will slow down and wait for reinforcements, but in any case we’re under the gun here.
Even as he digested his food he sent himself toward the next target, timing his arrival by the readiness of the new engine he would birth.
