San Salvador

Salvatore Christobal Colombo slowly descended the ladder. His left foot was

the first to reach the ground, and he noticed that the sand was warm, as he

had expected it to be.

"One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind".

The words echoed in his mind, catching him by surprise. He chuckled to himself. Someone must have placed that sentence in his memory banks for just this moment. A cosmic joke that had survived across the millennia.

The lander stood like a giant gleaming egg against the orange sky. The large G2 main sequence star, called "51 Pegasus" by humans, shone directly overhead. But because the star was being partially eclipsed by its large, nearby planetary companion, the reddish tint of the eclipse made it feel more like sunset then

high noon. These eclipses were a regular occurrence, as the large planet orbited the star with a period of about 4 Earth days!

Salvatore surveyed the desert landscape around him as he stepped away from the lander. His brain was filled with precise topological maps, geological data and atmospheric readings. And yet, standing here on the surface, taking in this surrealistic scene filled him with a sense of amazement. Amazement that they had managed to complete this long journey across space and time, to deposit him here on this small planet where he could continue the tenuous whisper of sentience that began over a billion years ago on another small planet called "Earth".

Salvatore knew that the other ships never came on line. Their radio signature was conspicuously absent from the ship's records, and the ship had informed him as soon as he regained consciousness that the "Pinta" and the "Nina" had not survived the catastrophic end of human civilization. All that remained of humanity was embodied in him, his female companion, Amelia Earheart, and in the trillions of data bits compactly encoded in the vast memory banks of their ship, the "Santa Maria". He could not resist the impulse to focus his telescopic eyes on the region of the sky where Sol would have shone as a bright yellow star. Instead he was staring at a bright red giant, about 50 light years away. He knew that no one had survived the transition!

A small drone was homing in on the lander's beacon. Salvatore could " see"

the drone's radio signal as it began transmitting the data it had collected. He briefly amused himself by visualizing the radio packets as large blue butterflies fighting their way up-wind to their breeding grounds. The drone did not posses a very powerful transmitter, and was therefore making its way back to the lander to improve the efficiency of its transmissions to the ship.

Thousands of similar drones had been surveying the planet's surface for nearly a decade, while the "Nina" remained in orbit around the planet. Sal and Amy had only recently been awakened by the ship, as there was very little for them to do during that time of routine exploration of the planet. This particular drone had probably strayed too far from it's base and must have suspended itself to save power, until it detected the beacon from Salvatore's lander. No doubt it would confirm what all the other drones had established: that this planet, similar in size, composition, climate and orbital distance, to the planet Mars in Earth's solar system, was geologically and biologically dead. And that the soil was rich in the minerals and raw materials that Salvatore needed to accomplish his mission.

It was rather foolish, Salvatore thought, for him to come down to the planet's surface at all. And yet, his mission plan clearly stated that he must attempt a landing provided there was no reasonable danger to himself or the lander.

"For the benefit of posterity, and for the sake of the continuation of a long and sacred tradition of human exploration," was the answer to his query of why. Salvatore had shrugged his shoulders and complied. There was little reason for him to deviate from his mission plan. Having dispensed with the formalities, it was time for him to get down to business. He silently issued the request to begin the reproductive sequence. Up in the ship, Amy confirmed his request, and the great hulking ship orbiting the planet, suddenly came alive with activity. The reproductive sequence was almost completely automatic. The ship had been gathering and analyzing the data from its long-range sensors for most of the thousand year journey. Powerful telescopes had gathered the rapidly disintegrating electro-magnetic signals emanating from the planet. Optically focused, and fed into the ship's powerful data analysis programs, they yielded

invaluable data about the planet's size, shape, atmospheric composition, age, etc. Once in orbit around the planet, surface roaming drones and orbiting satellites had been launched to gather more data on the planet's composition, geologic stability and atmospheric properties. The ship had incorporated all this data into the set of instructions and procedures that made up the reproductive sequence. But, as a safeguard against accidental genocide, as well as a sense of continuity of the ancient human act of reproduction, it required the consent of the only two sentient entities aboard the ship, one male, and one female, for the ship to commence the reproductive sequence.

Once begun, the sequence could be terminated only by the mutual consent of the two sentients. While the ship was capable of some rudimentary decision making, it was the sentients who possessed the the reasoning and decision making capabilities that were necessary to safeguard against accidentally destroying an alien species. Recognizing that humans were too fragile and dependent on Earth-like conditions to stand a chance of perpetuating themselves beyond the confines of the Earth's solar system, a large coalition of scientists, corporations, sovereign political organizations and non-human sentient entities, had begun work on the construction of a self-sufficient, self-replicating system that would simultaneously serve as a means to gather information about the galaxy and the star systems within it, as well as a means to perpetuate the legacy of the human species. When Sol began to enlarge, sooner and more rapidly than expected by those who monitored and studied solar activity, the venture took on renewed urgency.

It quickly became clear that no human beings would be able to escape the catastrophe of the sun swelling beyond the orbit of Mars to swallow up all inner planets and the asteroid belt. Long before this cataclysmic demise of the human home planet, the planet itself would become uninhabitable very quickly as the encroaching solar surface caused the oceans to boil off and the atmosphere to incinerate. While some small groups of humanity could eke out a few centuries of survival in the shadows of Jupiter or Saturn, eventually those safe havens would also become unlivable as the sun continued to swell. Within a few hundred years, the sun's outer layers would blast through the entire solar system as the shock-wave of a gigantic thermo-nuclear explosion moving at nearly the speed of light. No human or human-made artifact within a light-year or two would survive. Which is why construction of the "Nina, Pinta" and "Santa Maria" became the single effort around which all of humanity focused its collectively humongous reproductive energies.

By then, the challenge of constructing what was known as an "Artificial Intelligence" had long been solved. Numerous entities, known collectively as "sentients" had been constructed throughout the solar system. Some of them embodied humanoid forms, but most of them did not. Some of them were barely smarter than chimpanzees, but many of them far exceeded humans in nearly any capacity. Nevertheless, humanity over the centuries had maintained firm control over the activities of the sentients. By and large they had been constructed to advance human endeavors, ranging from planetary exploration to habitat construction, to warfare. Constructing a single sentient being other than a human required a tremendous amount of time, energy and engineering. None of these were abundantly available to humans or sentients, thus preventing non-human sentients from gaining significantly in numbers on the human population. Less than 1 percent of the number of sentient beings consisted of non-human entities.

While humanity had the benefit of billions of years of evolution, which had resulted in a remarkably efficient conversion of organic elements and solar energy into sentient biomass, non-human sentients were limited by the relatively short time and limited engineering skills that had been available to develop them. It was clear however that the sentients could be constructed to be far sturdier and longer lived than humans. And given access to effectively unlimited time, resources and energy, they would be able to replicate themselves across the entire galaxy, thus spreading the legacy of homo sapiens sapiens.

For this mission, a whole new breed of sentients was conceived, dubbed " homo galacticus". Constructed in the idealized images of man and woman, these sentients were closer in appearance to flesh and blood humans than any of their predecessors. Covered in synthetic skin, adorned with remarkably hair-like fibers, and moving using silicone-based muscle sacks, they were nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. However, they were adorned with a host of features that made them far more powerful and agile than their human alter-ego.

Sal returned to the lander and slipped into sleep mode. While Sal and his ilk were not capable of physical exhaustion (small integrated fusion reactors provided enough energy to keep him moving for thousands of years), his creators rightly recognized that mental exhaustion remained a potential problem. It was well known that sleep deprived humans had impaired functioning in almost all cognitive aspects. Somehow evolution had discovered sleep as a mechanism for

allowing the primitive body to regenerate. Humans and other mammals had further extended this curious behavior by using it to solidify memories and learned behaviors. The fact that the brain was not distracted by high-priority sensory input was crucial to allowing it to focus on the task of storing long term memories and newly learned behaviors. So too, Sal and his companion were built to sleep, both in a semi-conscious way in a daily rhythm of 30 hours when possible, as well as an unconscious mode for long periods of thousands of years

during interstellar journeys. As Sal's brain focused efficiently on the tasks ahead and the events of the day, the ship in orbit had begun the complex process of the reproductive sequence. Small shuttle craft were launched by the ship, each carrying thousands of construction robots, most of them the size of small mammals. The craft, and their cargo, would not return to the ship. Once their power generators were exhausted, they would be absorbed by the nano-factory they had built, to be used as raw materials for Sal and Amy's progeny.

The reproductive sequence would take centuries to complete, essentially turning the targeted planet into a humongous robot factory. The earliest factories would produce the components for larger, more complex factories, and so on, until the entire system was ready to build several new fusion driven star ships in orbit, to send to other nearby star systems. But one of the first factories to be built would be a factory for producing sentients, at the rate of about one per Earth year. This small army of sentients would man the ships that would ultimately be produced by the factory, but would initially serve as engineers to optimize and tweak the factory and its products so as to achieve optimal results. When the factory finally ran out of raw materials, it would have produced hundreds of ships, each one ready to embark on another thousand year journey to a nearby star with similar planets or moons that could be utilized and so on. The original pair would stay behind, living on the planet's surface or in orbital facilities. Enough resources would remain for them to live and study their system and the universe for thousands of years, all the while communicating with their far away peers. If this process ran smoothly, i.e. most of the factories were successful, then the entire galactic rim would be dotted with sentients in a few million years. The galactic center was presumed to be too hot and volatile an area for any sentients to survive, but perhaps they would find a way to conquer even that hostile environment.

Amelia woke up to an alert from the ship's main computer. The radio ransmission pierced her sub-consciousness like a spermatozoa entering an ovum. It was not a high priority alert, but nonetheless important enough for the computer to decide to wake her up. She processed the contents of the alert. A small probe on the planet's surface had finished transmitting it's data to the ship's computers. As it had done with the thousands of other probes, the ship had integrated the probes' data into its now extensive databases about the planet. While doing so, it had discovered a curious anomaly. In a particular region of its explored territory, the probe had detected a small but significant infrared signature apparently originating from just below the planet's surface.

Amelia tapped into the computer's data banks to examine the new data from the probe. The infrared signature was undeniable. The probe did not appear to suffer from any sensory malfunctions. Amelia became very concerned, and sent a dispatch to Sal. Sal had already received the computer's alert, and had come to the same conclusions as Amelia.

"I will dispatch immediately to the probe's area," Sal informed Amelia.

"Of course," she concurred. "Good luck!".

Sal issued some commands to the lander, and it prepared a mobile transport unit that would be able to fairy Sal to the designated coordinates more quickly than if he walked. After about half a day's journey, he arrived at the site.

Sal tuned into his infrared sensors as he looked down at the ground in front of him. He was standing at the exact coordinates where the probe had most recently reported the signal. And sure enough, about 1 foot below the surface, Sal could " see" an oblong shape, about 1 meter long, moving slowly through the ground. He walked back to the mobile unit, and came back with a drilling probe in his hands. He placed the probe in front of the trajectory of the moving object, and told it to drill straight down.

If Sal had had a heart, it would have skipped a beat. For through the probe's eyes, he could very clearly see a large wormlike creature moving slowly towards him. The creature bumped into the probe, and began sniffing it with it's head. Apparently it had some rudimentary olfactory sensors. And then, without warning, it opened it's large mouth and swallowed the probe whole. Having successfully removed the obstacle in it's path, the worm continued moving through the tunnel.

Sal sat down on the ground, and dropped his head into his hands. His elbows were resting on his thighs. And his mind was dangerously close to overloading. The reproductive sequence had been started more than 24 hours ago. By now the mineral extractors had ensconced themselves several meters or hundreds of meters deep into the most abundant mineral deposits, including iron, calcium, carbon and aluminum deposits scattered within a few miles' radius of Sal's lander. The high energy smelters had begun extruding the metal and composite parts that the constructors were using to build the factory. To stop the process now would be to doom the continuation of the human legacy. Most of the ship's power supply had been sent down to the surface to be used in the construction process. And the creators had not anticipated having to stop the sequence and restart it at some later time on some other planet or planetoid. There was no reverse sequence. There was no way to direct all the constructors, extractors and extruders to return to the ship and reset their programs to start again from time zero when instructed to do so. All Sal and Amelia could do was bring the entire process to a grinding halt. And then it would be all over. No offspring to perpetuate the species. No replacement bodies to allow Sal and Amelia to continue their own lives. All that would remain for them to do would be to live out their days aboard the ship, which would be placed into orbit around the star, and would function as a communications relay and data

storage center. There were no other ships or data centers for it to communicate with. Maybe some day other sentient entities would discover the ship and would take an interest in it. But chances were slim that the worms living below the surface had any intelligent cousins running around on this planet!

"We have to terminate the sequence," Amelia said somberly.

Sal was dangerously close to shutting out all communication, including

hers.

"We can't do that," he said emphatically. "Our entire mission will have failed. The human race will truly have gone extinct! And we will slowly rot away in orbit around this blasted star."

"I know," Amelia said. "But what choice do we have? The creators' instructions are very clear. If any life forms are found, reproduction must not take place. The reproductive sequence will devour most of the planet's surface over the

next few hundred years!"

"Yes, but they did not expect us to discover life forms AFTER starting the

reproductive sequence!"

"Still, the intent of the directive is to avoid destroying the native life

forms, and or their environment. Any disturbance we make could be fatal to

their survival."

"Can't we just take some recordings of these creatures and keep them in our databanks? Why are we trying to protect these lowly worms instead of preserving our own species?!" Sal said morosely.

Amelia was appalled. "How could you even suggest that? You know that we are not supposed to place ourselves or our own survival above that of any other creature! Such hubris is exactly what our creators wanted to avoid."

The entire conversation was taking place at about a thousand times the speed of normal human conversation. Sal and Amelia were blasting thoughts at each other as fast as their minds could produce them.

"What if we build them a sanctuary? There can't be that many of them. A couple

of cubic miles should suffice," Sal suggested.

"For all we know their population could be rapidly expanding. Boxing them in would almost certainly halt the expansion," Amelia replied.

"A rapidly expanding population of worms on a dying planet with an atmosphere that's only a few molecules denser than interstellar space?! What kind of future do they have? They will be extinct in a few millennia if not sooner. Besides, this star is even older than Sol! If we were wrong about the Sun's

lifetime, what does that mean for this star system?!"

Sal was exasperated. He tuned out Amelia, and turned inward. He realized, for the first time, why his creators had not made him a purely logical being. He could spend centuries exploring the entire search space of possibilities available to them, but his human ancestors had not had that luxury of time. And neither did he. Because when Sal popped out of his private ruminations, he realized that Amelia had made up her mind. She was trying to shut down the reproductive sequence! To allow them to deal with precisely these type of unexpected scenarios, Sal and Amelia were equipped with "emotional" circuits that allowed them to short-cut long "soul searching" analysis before reaching a decision. Faced with a critical decision that had to be made in a short amount of time, many otherwise promising alternatives were cut from consideration, so that they could focus only on one or two alternatives, and then pick one, randomly if necessary.

Sal's mind went into overdrive. He had slumped down to the ground, and lay prone on the desert floor. An ignorant observer would assume that he had died or gone to sleep. But all the action was in his mind. Sal had realized that there was no way out of this quandary until he made a decision. And so he focused in on the primary directive of his human predecessors: to thrive and reproduce. His mind began to collapse, like a red giant going supernova, into a small core of simplification. The shockwave radiating from this core instructed his mind what to do.

Amelia was engaged in an assault on the ship's computers. She could not switch off the reproductive sequence because that required a consensus with Sal. Her only other option was sabotage. And so she found herself firing bullets a million times faster than an M-16, at an apparently impenetrable wall of the computer's defenses. Each bullet was a carefully constructed radio packet that was programmed to find a crack in the computer's armor. The computer interface had been designed to protect exactly against an assault like this one. But Amelia was confident that she would find a weakness. All she needed was a small opening left behind by an overworked system's engineer who had forgotten to turn off access to a key component of the ship's systems. The ship's computer, while powerful, was far dumber than Amelia. All it could do was try to refute her assault, but it could not fire back.

But to her astonishment, the computer did start to fire back! Suddenly, the wall exploded with a million grenades, all hurtling towards her like a hoard of heat-seeking missiles. Amelia was franticly searching for an explanation. How could the computer, programmed to defend, but not attack, suddenly turn around and attack her? In a moment of clarity that lasted but a pico second, the

answer came to her. And then Salvatore's super nova went off in her head. Taken by surprise, Amelia had not reacted fast enough to Sal's ambush. One or two of his grenades had entered her mind before she raised her own shield of protection. And now she was waging a fierce battle for her life. Sal's grenades contained a nasty and potent virus that was spreading rapidly through her logic circuits, re-programming her arrays with instructions so random that she would never have another coherent thought again. Amelia was trying to throw up containment walls, while rapidly loosing coherence and sanity. Her motor functions had been compromised and she fell to the floor, twitching. She was unable to react fast enough. Within a second the virus had eaten her brain alive. There was nothing left but an incoherent jumble of stunted thoughts and random impulses. Her radio transmitters were emitting white noise. Amelia was dead.

Sal lifted himself from the ground and ejected the sand and other particles from his outer skin. He stood there silently for a moment, listening to Amelia's noisy signal. An overwhelming attack of guilt and remorse nearly caused him to fall down again. But he swept them away quickly with an unhealthy dose of pride at having accomplished his mission. He had vanquished his enemies. He had acquired the resources he needed to reproduce. And he had protected the continuity of the human legacy. And there was no one left to fault him for it.