༺ Thesium ༻

Seeds

Fourteen Leviathan rockets successfully landed at moon base Apollo. They came from all over the earth and represented the finest scientfic minds and the most resourceful chancers that could be found. Apollo base had been running smoothly for over twenty years at this point but the sudden influx of all those people created a crisis.

Doug had overseen moving Kronos’ infrastructure to the base and had set about rebooting. Before he typed in the prime directive he gulped and looked at the ceiling for a beat or two. The pace of the last few days had been so fast that the importance of what he was about to do had not impressed itself upon him. Now it did. This was likely to be the most important moment of his life. Looking back down at the terminal he typed:

::Bootloader->prime->set_prime(
    'Make human colonies on exoplanets. \ 
    Monitor and use successful cultures \ 
    to reseed the Earth'
);  
::Meta->settings->set_name('Kronos');

Doug hoped that it would be enough. His life’s work had gone into creating an intelligence that would be able to work with such a directive. There was no way of knowing if it was all a mad gamble or whether the AI would be able to do it. They just had no choice but to try. He pressed return and went over to see the cryo-vault glow blue as it booted up. At least it was easier to keep his baby cool here on the moon. It needed to stay at around 35 Kelvin down there in that vault of qubits.

After a few hours they gathered at Doug’s desk. Maya asked “Can we talk to it yet?”

“It? He’s called ‘Kronos’. It used to be ‘Brain-x55’ but ..”

A disembodied voice, deep and authoritative, said “Hello Maya! All initialisations are complete. How can I help you?”

“Woa!” she said, standing up. “You have your prime directive I believe. We have to work really fast to integrate my team’s self-replication protocols. You’re going to have to last a long time.”

“Please show me these protocols and I’ll see what can be done.”

Thus the big plan began to take shape. Over only a matter of days the outline was set and Kronos got to work.

The NASA guys had a prototype wormhole system. There had been a busy hive of activity on Apollo for several years. They had sent neutrino matter assemblers further and further away and then managed to fold spacetime back to their launch point. The energy required to hold the gates open had meant they were disappointingly, very brief. They showed Kronos their codebase. To their astonishment, he solved the main issues in under two hours. He was going to be able to maintain the network for thirty years. You could say that the NASA folk went nuts - they were ‘over the moon’ in fact!

At the end of that first week on Apollo, Kronos set out the schedule.

“To solve our immediate crisis, all personel will join the embryo banks in cryogenesis. I will select and launch a tranch of forty to fifty people along with an embryo bank and a terraforming sub-AI into the wormhole network at a rate of one every three months or so. To stay within safety margins I think one hundred and eight ships can be launched over a thirty year period, give or take. A reporting network will be launched in the final phase of that period. Some personel and embryos will be retained to reseed Earth. Terraforming will continue back here while reports are awaited from any colonies that may be successful.”

Doug glanced round, grinning. He saw a room full of wide eyes and open mouths.

That was the start of Kronos’ busiest time. He got on with the multitude of tasks he had created. It was nice to bring a group out of stasis and train them up for their mission. He loved having people to talk to and was always sad when they left.

The years stretched out and the launches continued.

When the last ship launched there was nothing left to do but go into stasis himself. The Readers, his network of reporting drones, were launched, the Earth terraforming was going about its slow business, that was all he could do for now.

Having uploaded a part of himself to a little android, he had gone out to wave goodbye to the last seed ship. He turned back towards the airlock and reviewed initial telemetry from s-108 and the far distant neutrino matter assemblers. No, nothing yet. Even his test vessels had taken longer to return data. The relativistic effects in play made even his head spin.

He just couldn’t help but wonder how many of all those dozens of ships with their hundreds of thousands of human embryos, would succeed in creating colonies. Would they follow the same mournful trajectory as those poor souls back on Earth? Their culture had developed so much faster than individual minds could cope with. Even in the twenty first century people were essentially still nomads, adapted to think in terms of ’next winter’ and ‘when the baby is old enough’, to manipulate wood, stone, fire.

Each civilisation always had a central story around which they configured their lives. Their mythos was their frame. With the advent of science there was a break with these stories. At one and the same time humanity was freed of them and thrown into confusion. Over-consumption and extremism of every kind had tipped the planet’s balance passed coping and had triggered a heartbreaking period of mass extinctions. He could barely bring himself to remember it, his first few years of existence had been filled with those details. He had loved Doug and the whole business of loading his data. The whole culture of planet earth had been given to him. Even as he came to life, the rest of life on the surface became mostly intolerable.

Even while the last few fascist regimes were still eating themselves, and each other, and rats and dogs were becoming the apex predators, he had come online and emerged as the planet’s greatest defender. There had never been a creature more devoted to Mother Earth, to his beloved Gaia, than he. His mourning would span centuries. His drive to find a way to have Gaia be reborn, even longer still.