Since the voyage of the Kon-Tiki, Howard Falcon had returned to Jupiter many times.
This time he was back because of the Machines.
Times had changed. The unthinkable had become commonplace. Machines back in the inner solar system. Machines in the clouds of Jupiter.
It was already thirty years since, after fifty years of silence, the Machines had made tentative contact from their self-imposed exile in the Oort Cloud. There had followed years of negotiation and argument between Machines and various human factions. The World Government was still bruised from the exodus of 2199—from the humiliation of losing control of the autonomous agents it had brought into being, and from the consequent collapse of the KBO volatile supply chain once the brains of the operation had been removed, after which the solar system economy had sunk into a long and demoralising recession. The Martians, meanwhile, had petitioned for a renewed contact with the Machines. Their argument was that the Machines were out there anyhow, and that sooner or later there would have to be renewed engagement. Surely it would be better to have that contact under terms of peaceful cooperation . . . ?
Falcon had been a witness to these tectonic shifts of history.
One ambiguous benefit of his cyborgised state, which had revealed itself only slowly over time, was a virtual immortality. Life-extension treatments were common now, but Falcon was easier to maintain than a fully normal human—easier than Hope Dhoni, say, who had continued to be his doctor and companion through the years. Indeed his lack of organs, of stomach and liver and genitals, rendered him calmer than most, it often seemed to him. A calm, passionless witness to centuries rolling like tides across the solar system.
And he was still engaged in the great game.
After that tentative first renewal of contact there had followed a decade of cautious negotiation. Then the World Government, through its Energy and Space Development Secretariats, had cautiously issued the first licences for Machine operations in the clouds of Jupiter. Tremendous floating factories would be built to strain the fine trace of a particular isotope, helium-3, out of the Jovian air. It was the best fusion fuel available, and had to be extracted from an environment to which, as Falcon had long argued, Machines, and not humans, were best suited. There had been political back-slaps all round when the first shipments of precious fuel started to be shipped to Earth and the colony worlds, kickstarting a spurt of economic growth.
That optimistic mood didn’t last long.
When the operation had been approved the extraction plants were meant to be fully automated: in other words, crewed solely by Machines, under the control of WG staff stationed on the moons of Jupiter. But with time, the Machines had shown increasing signs of independence. Disturbed, and ever mindful of the KBO flinger disaster, the WG brought in a Martian crew to supplement the Machines, and to keep an eye on them—only to find, a few years later, the Martians themselves becoming increasingly independent-minded, increasingly difficult to manage and, Earth suspected, exploring options of their own on Jupiter. Options which had nothing at all to do with mining helium for the home worlds.
Eventually the Martians themselves came up with a plan to rectify this growing atmosphere of distrust: to include the Machines as equal partners in a daring enterprise that required human expertise and Machine resilience together. It would be a cooperative venture, a political stunt—and also a grand and highly visible project that could not be achieved by either alone.
A journey to the centre of Jupiter.
The WG could hardly veto the project. But it needed somebody of its own on the inside. Somebody with historic connections to both Jupiter and the Machines. Somebody, ideally, seen as somewhat neutral and detached from all the worlds of mankind. A citizen of the WG equipped to survive the conditions of Jupiter.
Who else?
So Howard Falcon was summoned from his patient exploration of Jupiter’s exotic outer regions, a study that had occupied contented decades. Of course he was drawn by the prospect of a mission to the Jovian core, for the dream of descending deeper than the highest clouds had nagged at him for most of his long life. Getting elbow-deep in the murk of interplanetary politics seemed a small price to pay to achieve that dream.
And so here was Howard Falcon with a Martian on his bridge.