I GUIDE SUNG-SOO through a rudimentary visengineering process to knock up a rough plan for the main structure of his new house. He chooses a dome structure with spokes, a lot like Mack’s, but with a deeper floor like mine. Of course, only a portion of my house’s layout is on the server: the sections that needed to be printed at the communal manufacturing center. The additions and changes I’ve made over the years are known only to me.
“I’ll take you to the place where we print out the main struts for construction,” I say to him as I save the file in the right place on the cloud. “We can talk about the next bits on the way.”
“Next bits?”
“Yeah—how you want to create the energy your house will use. Each one has to be fully self-sufficient and have a zero-waste footprint.”
He frowns with concentration. “The houses tread lightly, like my father talked about.”
The door out of Mack’s place opens and we wave good-bye to him. He seems relieved to be left at home.
“He used to say it was the best way to live,” Sung-Soo continued. “We shouldn’t take more than we needed and stay longer than we had to. Then we could be sure the food would be there the next time we stayed in that place.”
It doesn’t sound like Hak-Kun to me. But I knew him only as a pampered man, cosseted by technology in the way we all are here. I’m amazed he survived long enough to teach his son anything.
“We’re keen to live lightly here, yes,” I reply. “But not in the same sense as you’re used to. There are rules about energy production versus consumption, water collection and processing waste. Most of that is handled by the materials we make our walls from.”
“I want to be able to see the stars at night,” he says after a pause. “Can you make the walls so that I can see out but no one can see in?”
“I can, but not one hundred percent—you need special soils between the membranes to process the waste. But most of the ceiling could be made like that, if you’re happy to collect sunlight from cells around the edge of the house instead of across the roof. That’s how mine works, and why I can grow stuff on the outside.”
“But some of the plants on your house are dying.”
I shove my hands in my pockets. “Oh . . . well, that’s because I test new strains and new soil compositions on my house before rolling them out to the colony.” I give him as confident a smile as I can. “Sometimes they just don’t take. I’ll replace them soon.”
We walk through the colony to the side farthest from God’s city and there still isn’t a soul on the streets. I’m glad; I wouldn’t want anyone else to come and stick their nose in and bombard him with options. “Can I have fish in my windows like Mack does?”
“Of course. You could get some energy from the algae too.”
“Did his fish come from Earth?”
“No. We didn’t bring any of the animals down to the planet. We couldn’t predict their impact on the ecosystem.”
He looks up. “Bring them down . . . Was the ship you came here on somewhere up there?” He points up at the sky, now a pale blue in the early morning.
“It’s still up there. It’s called Atlas.”
“Could we go back up to it?”
“Theoretically.” I look back to where we’re heading. “We had to strip the shuttle for parts when the printer broke down, so that would have to be rebuilt.”
“Is that why you didn’t come and look for my father and the others? Because the shuttle was broken?”
I almost miss a step. “We thought they were dead,” I say quietly. “We used Atlas to look for you, with satellites we’d sent out to scan the planet before we came down. But by the time we found the crash site, there were no signs of life.”
It’s only partly true. Mack sabotaged the satellite data as it was received by Atlas. By the time anyone else in the colony had gotten themselves together enough after Planetfall to look for the missing pods, they were actually looking at old footage of the crash site. Mack updated the pictures only after he’d screened them first.
Sung-Soo is staring at me and I realize I’ve fallen silent. “At least you looked,” he says.
“We almost built something to go and search, but with nothing to go on, we couldn’t risk critical people—” I shut my mouth. After a moment I add, “I don’t want you to think we didn’t believe those we’d lost weren’t critical too—they were—it’s just that the early days were so hard. We needed every single person working at full capacity.”
Sung-Soo just nods. “If you’d known where we were, would you have come to get us?”
“Of course we would!” I clench my fists inside my pockets. Sadly, that isn’t a lie. Once things had settled down and everyone else had given up on the search and a formal memorial service was held, Mack had another look at the site. There were no signs of life—they must have moved on by then. But I know that if they’d stayed in the place they crashed, Mack would have built a craft and gone to get them. To kill them.
Would I have let him do that too?
“Why did their pods crash?”
His question makes me fear I’ll be sick, or at the very least give something away. “We don’t know exactly.” Did my voice tremble? Can he hear the lie slathered on top? “There was always a risk; the pod technology was relatively untested.”
We walk in silence for the rest of the journey. It must be so hard for him and I can’t think of anything to say that will make it better. There is nothing to say.
When we reach the communal printers, I’m grateful for the change in topic. He watches closely as I run a check on the largest printer and recalibrate it. “It’s not used so often now,” I explain. He waits as I send the files to it and begin the printing, unable to see anything without a chip of his own. “We can start off the foundation preparations while that first batch is printing. It’ll only take a few hours. The soil we take out will be put into the cavity between the wall membranes, after we’ve added in the correct biocultures and protocells to process the waste. There’s a few other bits and pieces that need to happen, to manage water and stuff, but I’ll take care of all that. It’ll only take a couple of days at the most.”
“Then I can live inside it?”
“Yep. And grow your furniture and stuff. Ready to pick a spot?”