Chapter 29 - Red Planet Redemption

A few days later the orbiter of New Worlds Exploration had parked itself into orbit around Mars. Lü Zhi addressed the meeting. "On most projects of this nature there are two scorecards. One for the public and one for internal use. I am pleased to see a perfect result on both scorecards... What is it John."

"Message from Trevor. He believes the remote spectrophotometer is malfunctioning as its reporting one third atmospheric pressure on the ground."

"Don't we have a spare one of those to verify."

"We do but we have to eject the first one to bring the second one online. There is always a possibility that the second one not working, leaving us with none."

Lü Zhi considered the message she got a few days earlier. "Can the first one be ejected so that it crashes into Mars and ascertain the density of Mars' atmosphere by the length of time it takes to reach the ground."

"Not accurately, but if you want a second method ballpark confirmation of the first method then yes, stroke of brilliance."

"Proceed."

She turned her attention back to the meeting. "Assuming confirmation this is good news. But can anyone tell me how we get to this stage and have such a big surprise?"

John offered a possible explanation. "Several things come to mind. If you claim that Mars has a very thin atmosphere its easier to convince everyone that it's dead. If the Earth is the only planet with life then the government is in charge of everything. If life is everywhere then the government is only in charge of a pale blue dot. Secondly NASA may have covered it up fearing that if life gets discovered then public funds may well dry up. But whatever the reason we believed it because this is what we have all been told and never had need to question it.

But, now that we know better, you know those ground photos of Mars. Well the sky is quite bright. In an extremely thin atmosphere you would expect it to be a lot darker. Then the Spirit rover got mud on its wheel back in 2010, another indicator that the atmosphere is greater than 1% of Earths. On the other side of the coin however both NASA and the ESA have supplied us with a great deal of scientific leg work that has been invaluable to the progress we have made so far. For now we do need to be on our toes. As we overtake NASA we will be doing all of our research and this kind of problem will self resolve."

"I guess it also makes talk of terraforming Mars a little less bat shit crazy.", added Simon.

"Does this set us back in anyway?", asked Lü Zhi.

"No.", John replied, "It means that all our equipment has been tested to a higher standard than necessary. You could argue that we have spent a few more million than what we have needed to, but since Mars is a stepping stone anyway we would have had to have spent it sooner or later. This of course raises another motivation for NASA's atmosphere, Mars captures the public imagination so funds under the Mars project are really being used for asteroid and interplanetary moon mining. But that's just speculation."

"Some of my exploration vehicles will need their designs reworking.", added Simon, "They will need to be more streamlined so they don't get blown away by the wind. Not a lot of work really, doesn't affect critical time path. The radar dish would also need to be recessed into the body of the vehicle with a sliding door for protection."

"What are these vehicles looking for?", asked Karl.

"Deep sand and ice. Its the reverse of mining. Instead of finding a big lump of rock and drilling to make a habitat we find sand and glue it together with John's magic potion.", Simon answered.

"Well that's it for today people. Once again congratulations on a most successful mission."

Lü Zhi got on to George. "Did you trace that message."

"Yes. Then things got really interesting. Firstly there really is an Imogen MacBeth from Albany Western Australia. ASIO considered her a person of interest because she had a massive IQ jump around the age of 7. No one knows why so they gave up on it. Had a psychotic self harming episode but since then is improving her old mans business for him. He's expanding rapidly and is a builder. I heard you were looking for one."

Lü Zhi thought hard. The logical option would be to send some trusted agent to meet her. She caught Brett from the corner of her eye. "Forvik update". Brett smiled, "Stuart has agreed to our terms provided we backfill our operations once we have completed our operations there. Just this second received the signed agreement. Contractually it's all go. I've told Simon."

Well that had gone rather smoothly she thought. She had fears of time lost through haggling. An email came through on her phone informing her that the second spectrophotometer was working and confirmed the first reading of atmospheric pressure and the timing of descent of the first spectrophotometer also indicated a similar pressure. All operations of the company were going smoothly and better than expected with nothing requiring her attention for the next few days. There was the New York tech expo coming up but with the thought of at least 80% of attendees dead when the volcano erupts it just didn't seem relevant. She followed on her gut feel and instructed her receptionist to arrange a meeting with Imogen.

"Daniel, are your folks home"

"No why"

"I'm coming over. Something big has happened."

Imogen was one of those 'something big is always happening' type of people thought Daniel but with two exceptions. The 'bigs' did happen and big kept on getting bigger. A few minutes later he heard her moped pull up out the front. He opened the door "what's up?"

"Got a reply, an invite from the email you sent...", she saw a confused look on his face, "...the one to New Worlds Exploration."

"Bullshit, no way."

"Yes way. Are we alone for the next few hours?"

"Probably but it's not like we communicate."

"Ok, lets go to your room. You'll need to be sitting down for this."

They seated, facing each other. "Fuck Imogen are these people pissed with us."

"No. Let me start at the beginning. If someone were possessed by a demon how would you know?"

"Don't they make strange creepy noises and have their limbs in funny positions."

"No, that's Hollywood."

"Ok, what about ranting against God and shit like that."

"You're not even close", Imogen told him, "it is extremely difficult to tell. You see here's the problem. We have all got human bodies and we all know how we got here, but how did our minds, our spirit, get into our bodies. How do you know that the spirit matched the species. Was the spirit existing or did the spirit come into existence as the nervous system grew. What if I told you that these possibilities are not mutually exclusive."

"Apart from being totally confused. Ok, maybe this is a dumb question, but if what you're saying is true then what is the big deal. I mean we're all here, lets work out the grand gift of life together."

Imogen smiled, "Have you ever watched the movie 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. It's about these plants that sends out tendrils to sleeping humans, kills them in the process of duplicating their bodies and upon waking they are of a different character. Ok, so its one thing to destroy an existing mind, but if there is no mind in the host to start with then what is the problem. It sure feels wrong doesn't it."

Daniel nodded. Imogen continued. "Well humans are a social species, if some of those biological humans have non human minds then they are going to see humanity as being different from themselves, that the rest of the world is there for them to use as required, much like humans use chickens and other domesticated animals. Like, oh dear this is beginning to sound like the illuminati already.

Now I'm going to get into the really big concepts. The universe is jam packed full of life, I mean the fucking shit is everywhere. But nearly all of it is microbial. Now taking this planet, not only has multicellular life existed for only a fraction of the time that life has but even now, when you look on the tree of life, multi cellular life only forms a tiny fraction of that. Now here is the really big thing you don't know. Intelligence is almost as common as the microbes. You see bacteria and archaea can communicate via chemicals or by naturally occurring protein based nanowires.