Auron Blake could reshape entire planets with his hyper-intelligent machines. But the problems of the Earth, scarred by a nuclear war and its aftermath, weren’t proving so easy to fix.
Auron Blake could fix planets. Earth, after the war, was the first one that fought back.
Auron placed the stone next to the radiation monitor.
“Five micro-sieverts per hour,” he muttered to himself. “What do you think, Freddie?”
Freddie whined and licked his lips, perhaps hoping food was involved.
“Here goes nothing,” said Auron, his voice shaking slightly. “Jor, run program five hundred and eight-two.”
The coils of the experimental matter interactor, a four-foot high device standing next to Auron’s desk, started to glow. The reading displayed on the radiation monitor began to fall.
“Yes!” shouted Auron. “Come on! Yes, you can do it!”
Then, quite suddenly, smoke began to arise from beneath the stone, and a bright tongue of flame rose from the table on which it sat.
Auron jumped back to avoid the sparks, the smell of burning wood and plastic filling his nostrils.
“No!” he shouted. “Why? Why? Jor, stop the program!”
The radiation monitor began to sound an alarm, indicating levels in excess of 20 micro-sieverts per hour. The lightbulb hanging delicately from the ceiling in an ornamental lampshade melted and fell out of its socket and onto the floor, as if attacked by a particularly demented poltergeist, leaving a faint trail of smoke in the air.
“I’ve already stopped it, Auron,” said Jor.
There was a sudden loud bang and flames shot to the ceiling. Freddie ran to the door.
“Extinguish the flames!” shouted Auron, running to let Freddie out. He intended to say some calming words to Freddie, but Freddie bolted out of the door before he could say anything.
The flames abruptly shrank and disappeared, and the smoke seemed to organise itself into columns that swarmed back into the table top.
Auron pulled the door shut.
“Jor, why is this happening? Do we need a bigger machine? Would that handle it?”
“Impossible to say, Auron. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, mate, but it’s almost lunchtime.”
The window suddenly shattered, covering the interactor in shards of glass.
“To Hell with lunch!” shouted Auron. “Clean up the mess! And produce recommendations for program five hundred and eight-three! And fix my desk.”
By 2pm, Auron was already on iteration five hundred and ninety-two of the decontamination program.
Viktor and Rosa finished their lunch quietly at the table, listening to the sounds emerging from the lab.
“I don’t know. Does he sound stable to you?”
“He’s been through a lot, Viktor.”
“So have we. So has everyone. The difference is, he’s about to become the most powerful man on Earth, if he isn’t already.”
From the lab, a repurposed bedroom, now filled with computers, mysterious cylinders and tanks of fine wires immersed in various liquids, came sounds of laughter—which at times veered towards crying—and shouts of “yes!” alternating with despairing “no”s.
“We have to make sure we support him, emotionally.” said Rosa, gazing at the door with a worried expression.
“I’m not sure emotional support is going to be sufficient.”
Rosa laid her hand on Viktor’s arm. He looked down at her hand, then into her eyes.
Rosa appeared now to be around thirty years old, although she was in reality sixty in purely chronological terms, but the haunted look in her eyes hadn’t quite subsided.
“He saved us.” said Rosa. “He can save the world. I believe it.”
Viktor harumphed.
He had grown thick black hair and a slightly unruly beard, which he now turned to stroking thoughtfully. Viktor, who had been a decrepit sixty-year-old on the verge of death due to radiation sickness only weeks earlier, now appeared only slightly older than Rosa.
From the floor, Freddie watched them attentively, hoping for further morsels of food, occasionally looking nervously over his shoulder at the sounds emerging from the lab.
Suddenly the laboratory door burst open.
“I’ve done everything I can,” Auron announced. “We begin tomorrow.”
“Listen, Auron,” said Viktor, “Rosa and I have been meaning to talk to you. There are some aspects of the situation here that you don’t understand.”
“What aspects?” said Auron.
“Sit down, Auron,” said Rosa.
Auron sat down at the table. Freddie ran to him and tried to lick his hand. Auron pushed him away gently and ruffled his neck.
“You have to understand, if you repair all the buildings, people will destroy them again. Almost immediately,” said Viktor.
“I can’t repair all the buildings,” said Auron. “I’ve looked into it. I mean, it can be done, technically; I’ve improved Jor and I’ve build a new interactor. They can divert energy from distant stars and use it to reassemble the buildings at the microscopic level. The problem is, people will get caught up in the process. Mangled, I mean. So I can’t do it. But I can provide them all with food and clean water, and energy. I think I can decrease the radiation levels.”
Viktor was staring down at the table morosely, but he forced himself to look Auron in the eye.
“The war changed people, Auron. I told you the first nuclear bomb destroyed Budapest completely. After that, everyone blamed everyone else. At first, the Americans blamed the Russians, and the Russians blamed the Americans. Then people began to divide into factions.”
“Whites, Reds and Greens,” said Rosa.
“Whites, Reds and Greens?” Auron repeated, faintly.
“They were just movements at first,” said Rosa.
“As the bombs continued to fall, everyone joined one movement or the other,” said Viktor. “They had to, to survive. These factions committed atrocities against each other. We’ve seen people flayed alive in the street,”
Rosa covered her mouth with her hand and cast her eyes downwards.
“Flayed alive?” said Auron incredulously.
Viktor nodded solemnly.
“And worse. I don’t want to think about it.”
“So what are you?” said Auron, looking from Viktor to Rosa and back again. “Red, Green or White?”
“We hid,” said Rosa, exploding with sudden emotion. “We used our knowledge of science to survive.”
“What are you trying to tell me?” said Auron. “Spit it out. I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Auron,” said Viktor, “if you give people food at this point, you’re throwing fuel on a burning fire.”
“That’s crazy,” said Auron.
He stood up suddenly, the chair falling away behind him and narrowly missing Freddie.
“I can at least stop the radiation,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “It’s killing people. The radiation’s so high just over there that you can’t go out without the right drugs.”
He waved in the direction of the ruined garden, bordered by a cracked and cratered street.
“Can you do it without killing more people in the process?” said Rosa.
Auron sat down again and put his head in his heads. Freddie laid his head on Auron’s leg sympathetically.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know for sure. I won’t know till we try it.”
There was a silence, during which Viktor poured Rosa more water.
She took the water and sipped it.
“We have an idea, Auron,” said Rosa quietly.
“Tell me,” said Auron.
“You already have a planet.” said Rosa, “Frith. There’s no-one on it. Improve Frith, open a portal, and take people there.”
“Hand-picked people,” said Viktor. “People who don’t want to kill each other.”
“You can’t be serious,” said Auron. “Frith is a Hell. I’m not going back there.”
“You can fix Frith, Auron,” said Rosa. “You can do it without the risk of making the situation on Earth even worse than it already is.”
Auron jumped up suddenly again, startling Freddie.
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!” he shouted. “I spent thirty years running from giant crabs! You don’t know what you’re talking about, neither of you!”
“We’re only saying, test out your systems on Frith before you try them on the Earth,” said Viktor, calmly, “where there are already people and the situation is already a lot better than it was two years ago.”
“Insanity!” shouted Auron, his voice cracking. “Pure insanity.”
He stormed back into the lab. Freddie followed him, his tail wagging, his affection for Auron overcoming his dislike of the continual fires and explosions that Auron accidentally created. Auron slammed the door shut behind Freddie.
Viktor and Rosa looked into each other’s eyes.
“Well, that went well,” said Viktor.
Rosa took his hand, their fingers intertwining, and squeezed it.
“It’ll take time. Let him digest it,” she said.
That night, Auron lay awake on his bed, talking to Jor, the pocket-sized device on the nightstand next to him, one arm draped over Freddie.
“I could construct a really enormous machine on Frith,” he said. “There’s space there, and no-one will mess with it.”
“As big as the Great Pyramid of Giza, mate,” said Jor. “Bigger even. The size of Mount Everest if you want.”
“We could kill all the crabs.”
“That would leave the cattle without predators. They’ll eat everything and turn the plains into desert.”
“I’m going to replace the cattle with normal cattle. Not those flat-faced monstrosities. And I’ll bring in wolves or lions or something. Something normal. The crabs are going.”
He laughed at the thought, and added, “Bye bye crabs!”
He fell silent for a while, then he said, “With a really big machine, I can resurrect Jer.”
“Maybe.” said Jor.
He thought for a while, planning an enormous pyramid in his mind. He’d place a vast Sirius device underneath it, large enough to handle Jer’s resurrection. Inside the pyramid itself, a huge matter interactor, able to monitor everything on the entire planet with the utmost precision.
“What about the vampires?” said Jor suddenly.
“Vampires? What are you talking about, vampires?”
“Those creatures. You called them vampires. The humanoids with the long teeth.”
“They’re going the same way as the crabs.”
“They’re probably at least half human.”
Auron shuddered.
“They may even have lived on the planet before you terraformed it,” Jor persisted.
“Highly unlikely,” said Auron, but he felt less certain than he sounded.
The following morning, Auron joined Viktor and Rosa for breakfast.
“What if I alter people’s brains?” he said. “Make them them calmer.”
Viktor and Rosa froze.
“You can’t do that, Auron.” said Rosa.
Auron sighed.
“No,” he said, taking a piece of toast. “I suppose not.”
He buttered the toast. The interactor in the kitchen was perfectly capable of synthesising the toast with butter already applied, but the three of them had collectively decided that some rituals from their old lives on the Earth had to be preserved, for their own sanity.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” said Auron.
Viktor and Rosa tensed.
“I’m going to fix up Frith and take people there,” he said. “Carefully-selected people.”
They relaxed.
“It’s the right decision, Auron,” said Viktor.
That night, Auron awoke suddenly, shouting, dreaming giant crabs had cut off his hands with their pincers. Freddie looked at him in the near-darkness, then went back to sleep. He was used to Auron’s night terrors.
Sandra Flemming broke down in tears when she saw the potato. She had dug it out of contaminated earth on her farm in Suffolk. It was riddled with grubs.
Her dog, Raika, whined and licked her face.
She was painfully thin but still retained some of her blonde hair, which was tied behind her head in a ponytail, although her scalp was covered in patches of skin that were almost bald.
“Never mind, Raika,” she said, tearfully. “It is what it is. There’s nothing else we can do. We’ll try to catch another rabbit.”
She scrambled to her feet and allowed her eyes to settle on the makeshift graves of her deceased parents.
“Ashes to ashes,” she said.
Raika sniffed at the potato, ate one of the grubs, then decided to leave it alone.
At first the noise was indistinguishable from the sound of the light breeze that rustled the malformed leaves on the trees, but it grew steadily and she turned and scanned the road in fear.
When she saw the vehicle she said, “Oh no,” and turned to run into the house.
Raika’s attention, on the other hand, was caught by something that may or may not have been a feral cat, or a squirel.
“Raika! Come here!” she hissed from the doorway, trying to calculate the exact volume that would draw Raika to her while not alerting the occupants of the vehicle to her presence.
“Raika!” she shouted desperately.
The vehicle passed behind the bush at the far side of the field, and she made use of the moment to run like a woman possessed towards Raika.
She caught the dog’s collar and pulled her towards the house.
“Hurry, Raika!” she whispered. “They’ll kill us!”
Soon she was inside the old farmhouse, which aside from a leaking roof and boarded-up windows, was still in one piece.
She ran to fetch a shotgun and began to load it. Her hands were shaking so badly that she dropped the second cartridge on the floor, but she swiftly retrieved it, repressing a strong urge to vomit, placed it in the loading port and snapped the gun together.
Faint rays of sunlight filtered between the boards over the windows, illuminating the dust in the kitchen air.
She stood aiming the gun at the door for several minutes, breathing unevenly, her heart pounding, until finally a knock at the door caused her to almost jump out of her skin.
She said nothing, remaining silent, but then Raika began to bark. There was another knock.
“I have a gun!” she shouted.
“That’s all right,” came the reply. “We just want to talk.”
“You’ve got ten seconds before I start shooting,” shouted Sandra in reply.
“Please don’t do that,” said the voice.
Sandra began to count down from ten.
“Do you mind if I come in?” the voice asked.
Sandra continued counting.
Then the lock on the door began to unlock itself. Sandra, weakened by starvation and radiation and in an ecstasy of fear, fainted.
When she awoke, three people were peering down at her: two men and a woman. They were dressed in black suits that looked like some sort of military issue, and she estimated their ages to be late twenties to early thirties.
Raika was lying with her head on Sandra’s stomach, growling quietly at the people, too tired to do anything else.
“Sorry to have startled you,” said one of the men. “I’m Auron. This is Viktor and Rosa. We have a proposition for you —”
“Auron, she needs a minute,” said Rosa, interrupting.
Rosa held a bottle of water to Sandra’s lips, but Sandra pushed it away.
“Who are you?” said Sandra, struggling to a sitting position.
“Well, that’s a long story,” said Auron. “The central fact is, though, that we’ve got food and a safe place to stay, and we’re putting together sort of a colony. Our computer systems identified you as someone who might be suitable.”
“We’ve set aside a house for you in Cambridge,” said Viktor. “The zone is safe. It’s protected by automatic weapons.”
“Cambridge?” said Sandra. “I’m not going there. It’s too radioactive.”
“We have drugs that will render you effectively immune to the radiation,” said Auron. “If you’d agree to come with us, we’ll bring you back here if you don’t like it there.”
“I’d have to bring my dog,” said Sandra warily.
Auron looked at Raika, a border collie, who had staggered upright and was now sniffing his leg where Freddie had rubbed against it.
“Of course,” said Auron. “I’ve got a dog too, as it happens. He’s in our car.”
“She’s like a female Freddie,” Rosa observed.
Soon they were on their way to Cambridge, Freddie and Raika jumping about and chasing each other around in the back of the vehicle.
“Where did you get this thing?” Sandra asked, marvelling at the elaborate controls inside the car.
“It’s all done using computers,” said Auron. “If you can call them computers. They’re analogue systems, actually more akin to a human brain, but much more powerful. You see, I began with a —”
“Auron was the first human being ever to build a computer that was able to design a better version of itself,” Viktor explained, interjecting.
“The AI singularity.” said Sandra.
“Yes, exactly,” said Auron, surprised.
“I keep up to date with computer stuff,” said Sandra. Then she corrected herself, adding, “I used to keep up to date.”
As they neared the little group of houses clustered around Auron’s farm, a disturbing sight met their eyes.
“They must have launched an attack,” said Rosa.
“Ten, at least,” said Viktor.
The corpses of ten or fifteen men in military uniforms lay strewn around the road, well past the gate Auron had set up with warning signs in multiple languages. They had burn marks on their chests where the automatic weapons had gunned them down.
“Jor, what happened?” said Auron.
The reply emerged from a pocket on his protective suit.
“They tried to break in. The rifles got them.”
“Those poor people,” said Sandra.
“They’re Greens,” said Viktor. “You can tell from their insignia. If they’d got to us, they would have killed us without mercy. Perhaps tortured us to find out if we have useful information.”
“Anyway,” said Auron, “this is your house here, if you want it.”
He pointed to a small, well-maintained house set back a little way from the road.
“Why are you doing this for me?” Sandra asked.
“I told you, we’re setting up a colony,” Auron replied. “It’s just that, well, it’s not ready yet. But it will be, soon. In the interim, you can stay here.”
“Where is this colony? Cambridge?”
“No it’s … it’s further away.”
Two weeks later, Auron had collected a total of twenty people. All of them, Sandra included, were recovering rapidly, although all bore psychological scars that could not so easily be healed.
Viktor and Rosa had moved out into another house fixed up and protected by Auron’s machines, and Auron sat alone in his laboratory, except for Freddie, and even Freddie increasingly divided his time between Auron and Raika.
“Jor,” he said, leaning back in his swivel chair, “would it be possible to somehow surround myself with powerful force fields that would prevent all kinds of crushing and stabbing injuries?”
“It’s possible,” said Jor. “You’d need to carry a small device. The fields could be made to follow your movements.”
“I’d want them to also prevent any unnatural movements. For example, I would want them to ensure my head can’t be twisted off, nor any of my limbs.”
“You’re not satisfied with your level of security?” Jor asked.
“It’s not that. I want to go and … do a bit of fighting, let’s say.”
“Who are you planning to fight, mate?”
“The giant crabs of Frith.”
“You can’t kill them all personally. There’s too many of them. It’d take you decades.”
“I don’t want to kill all of them personally. The thing is, I have to face them. It’s the only way to stop these nightmares.”
“I understand. Face your fears. It’s a good idea.”
“I want to have super-human strength. When I move, the fields surrounding my skin move, and they exert maybe ten times the force than my muscles can exert. That should be enough to tackle them. Can you do it?”
“It can be done.”
Once Jor had constructed the device using the various machines and interactors Auron now had standing around his laboratory room, Auron gathered Viktor, Rosa, and Sandra—with whom he’d come close to almost striking up a kind of friendship—in the garden outside the house.
“Watch this,” he said, and he picked a piece of brick up from the ground and squeezed it in his hand. It cracked and then crumbled.
“How did you do that?” said Viktor.
“This device here,” said Auron, tapping a small circular object strapped to his chest underneath his shirt. “Here, punch me. No—wait, you might injure yourself. Watch this.”
He screwed up his eyes and then, feverishly hoping nothing would go wrong, head-butted the side of the house. Shards of brick fell away.
“Blimey,” said Sandra.
“Can you give us all this power?” Viktor asked.
“Don’t see why not,” said Auron. “Anyway, I’m off to tackle some crabs. Just wanted to show you. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
Auron strode back into the house, leaving the three of them gawping after him.
“He scares me,” said Rosa.
“Well,” said Viktor, “I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of him.”
In the lab, Auron had Jor open a portal to Frith. In front of him, through the portal, stood a short strip of beach, and the ocean. He could feel ocean spray on his face, and the air smelt of seaweed and decaying shellfish.
He had left Freddie with Sandra, deciding that Freddie didn’t quite fit with his plans. He would show Freddie Frith soon enough.
“It’s definitely safe to go through it, right?” he asked Jor.
“Completely safe. No teething problems with the kind of computing power we’ve got now.”
“Whatever you do, do not let this portal close, you understand me?”
“Got it.”
Auron almost walked through the portal, but then hesitated.
“Anyway, as long as I’ve got you with me, I could reconstruct the portal from the other side in a few months, in the worst case. Even assuming I can’t find any of the stuff I left behind.”
He patted Jor in his pocket.
“Won’t be necessary, mate,” said Jor.
“Right.”
Auron stepped through the portal and onto Frith.
He turned round and saw the fence of the compound where he and Jer had lived for thirty years. It was still there, but partially destroyed by the crabs.
A curious mixture of emotions swept over him. A knife seemed to twist in his guts at the thought of all the times he’d spent idling away the hours in conversation with Jer. The memories weren’t exactly happy. Neither of them had ever been happy on Frith, and they had both exceeded their desire for each other’s company by a factor of several thousand, but Auron’s memories were, nevertheless, tinged with a painful variety of nostalgia.
At the same time, he experienced a curious sensation of being home again.
“After all,” he muttered to himself, “I have lived most of my life here.”
He walked up to the compound and stepped over a ruined section of fence. Now that he and Jer were no longer living there, the crabs had given up their incessant attempts to break into the compound, and the disturbing concentration of crabs around the fence had dispersed.
Beyond the fence, two of the three huts were still standing; only Jer’s had partially collapsed, for reason that were unclear.
Their possessions, for the most part crafted over decades from nothing but rocks and mud and sticks, were scattered around on the ground. In the laboratory hut, he found the remains of Virellon, the machine Jor had instructed him to create, the animal hide broken open and the gel inside smeared over the ground. The original incarnation of Jor, made from rock, clay and seawater, in a clay pot, had been broken in two. The primitive interactor was still there; the same machine that had killed Jer and enabled Auron to return to the Earth.
He pondered them morosely for a while, then he heard a familiar sound: the clattering of a giant furry grab.
He went outside and there it was, its strangely human eyes watching him steadily.
“Right then you bastard!” Auron shouted.
He strode towards it and it reflexively skittered backwards away from him. Auron stopped, and the crab stopped. Then it ran at him and fastened its pincer around his arm.
Auron’s heart beat liked a drum, to the point where he felt as though it was about to burst out of his chest. He seized the pincer and twisted it off, breaking off the moveable dactyl.
The crab didn’t back off. It grasped for his neck with its other pincer. He took hold of its other arm with one hand, and smashed through it with the other. The crab turned and ran, clattering frantically in short trills. Auron ran after it.
He wasn’t able to catch up with it.
“I should have given myself the ability to fly,” said Auron.
“It’s too fast,” said Jor.
“Can you see it?”
“Yeah, the big interactor can reach this far, no problem. Look out. Three o’clock.”
Auron turned to his right to see three more crabs running towards him, apparently enraged.
He ran at them, shouting.
He broke the pincer and one of the legs of the first crab, and smashed a hole in its head with his fist. The second crab, he kicked, sending it flying spectacularly through the air. But the third and largest crab caught him around his chest, lifted him into the air, and threw him backwards over itself.
That was the last thing he was consciously aware of for a while.
When he awoke, six crabs were picking at him, dragging him this way and that, frustrated by their inability to prise off his limbs and flesh.
He screamed in pure terror.
Then he began to lash out at them wildly. He smashed four of them into pieces and the remaining two ran off, one missing a leg.
“Dear God!” he said, then he suddenly felt faint and had to sit down.
“Jor, why did I lose consciousness?”
“One of them threw you and you hit your head on a rock.”
“But my head’s protected! There’s not a mark on it.”
He rubbed his hand gently all over his skull. He couldn’t feel anything amiss.
“Yeah, but the back of your brain hit the back of your skull with some force. You’re not a woodpecker. Your head can’t withstand that kind of deceleration.”
“Why didn’t you do anything?”
“I did. I took the liberty of repairing some broken blood capillaries. I know I’m not supposed to act without your orders but you were unconscious and you might have died if I hadn’t stepped in. It’s a risky business this far from the interactor.”
“Is my brain all right?”
“Lost a few thousand cells but it’ll be OK.”
He struggled to his feet again.
“Right, that’s it. Death to the lot of you!” He shook his fist at the crabs, who were already gathering for another attack. “Kill them, Jor. All of of them.”
“You want me to wipe out an entire species?”
Auron stared down at his pocket in amazement.
“Why are you questioning me now? I created them in the first place. By accident. They’re hideous abominations!”
“They keep the cattle under control. Without the crabs the cattle will turn the plains to desert.”
“I don’t care. I’ll introduce wolves or lions or something. Something normal. Not … massive furry crabs. Kill them.”
“As you wish.”
All the visible crabs, perhaps fifty of them, dropped onto the ground, their legs giving way.
“Clean them up. I don’t want the entire planet reeking of dead crab.”
Plumes of smoke rose from the bodies of the crabs, separated out into multiple thin streams, and dove towards the grassy plain and the forest, disappearing into the soil and the trees. Nothing was left behind; the crabs’ bodies disintegrated completely.
Auron laughed.
“He who laughs last, laughs longest.” he said. “Jor, can you construct a road? I want something scenic that winds for at least a hundred miles up into the mountains. Actually, make it circular. Let’s say, two hundred miles total. Can you do that without injuring me?”
“No problem,” said Jor. “I’ll fix it up at a safe distance away from you.”
A haze of blueish smoke began to rise from the ground, tracing a line towards the mountains in the distance.
“Can you somehow protect my brain from sharp acceleration? And the rest of my body. And I want to be immune to fire.”
“Not a problem,” said Jor.
“How long will it take?”
“It’s done.”
He laughed to himself again.
The line of smoke sank to the ground and vanished, revealing a long, twisting road.
“I want a car. Maybe a Lamborghini, but with more clearance under the wheels. And make it electric. I hate the sound of engines. I want to hear a nice electrical whooshing sound when I accelerate.”
A cloud of red smoke appeared with a soft pop above the start of the road, fifty metres away from where Auron stood, and resolved itself into something resembling a Lamborghini, but with wheels that stuck out to the side, leaving a substantial gap underneath it.
Auron walked over to it and opened the door.
“I didn’t put keys in it,” said Jor. “Fingerprint sensor. Touch it to start the motor.”
Auron touched his finger to a sensor by the steering wheel and was rewarded by a pleasant soft electrical sound, ascending in pitch till it reached a modest crescendo.
“I want a drink holder by my side with a beer in it,” said Auron. Then he added, muttering to himself, “I don’t even like beer.” Then to Jor, he said, “Make that a milkshake. Banana. Cold.”
A large glass of milkshake appeared in a holder by his side.
“Finally some fun on this planet,” said Auron, and he pressed the accelerator.
For an hour he zoomed around the road at breakneck speed, ascending into the mountains, then down again, then up into more mountains. Then he started to feel sick, and he stopped and got out.
He looked out over endless forest. In the far distance was a sliver of blue sparkling sea.
“I’m going to have to make that moon bigger,” he said to himself, looking at the tiny reddish moon.
A cool breeze blew pleasantly on his face. He reached inside the car and took out the milkshake.
“There’s no straw,” he said. “Give me a straw, Jor.”
A straw appeared, and he sucked the milkshake through it.
Then he dropped it in horror.
A thing the size of a cow with six legs that seemed to be a mixture of cockroach and parrot was lumbering towards him, making clicking sounds.
“What the Hell is that?” he said.
“Did you ever name it?” Jor asked.
“I’ve never seen it before,” Auron replied, scrambling to get back in the car in a great hurry.
He reversed rapidly away from the creature, which then ran into the forest, hooting.
Auron took the opportunity to drive past it. He accelerated so harshly that the car almost came off the road where the road turned sharply, but he managed to retain control and continued driving as fast as he could manage, hoping to get back to the portal as quickly as possible.
“Listen, Jor, can you move the portal? Bring it closer. I want off this planet. The entire place will have to be sterilised.”
“Sure, I can close the portal and re-open —”
“No, don’t close it!” Auron shouted. “Move it.”
“The portal can’t be moved. It can only be closed and then re-opened.”
“Never mind, I’ll drive there, then.”
For mile after mile he pushed the car as fast as he dared, following the twists and turns in the road with hands still shaking from his encounter with the horrifying creature.
When he came to a straight, open stretch of road almost out of the mountains and on the plain, he pushed the accelerator down and ran the car up to a hundred-and-eighty miles per hour.
Then he saw a twist in the road, considerably sooner than he had expected. He pushed the brakes and the car skidded and shot over an unprotected edge, hurtling into some trees.
The car was destroyed, but Auron was unhurt. He began to push pieces of metal out of the way, smashing through them as if they were cardboard.
Then the wreckage burst into flames and rapidly began to burn with a searing white heat, the heat quickly melting metal. He couldn’t see anything but bright white flame. When he inhaled, he felt noxious fumes entering his lungs and he began to cough and get dizzy.
Then he passed out.
When he awoke, everything was dark.
“You’re back with us,” Jor observed.
“I can’t see anything,” said Auron. “What’s happening?”
“The smoke from the fire destroyed your lungs and the light burned out your retinas. I took the liberty of repairing your lungs and moving you away from the wreckage.”
“I’m supposed to be immune to fire!”
“You said fire, not smoke or light.”
“I didn’t think of it. Fix my eyes!”
“There’s some risk if we try to do it from this distance, Auron. Better if I move the portal closer and we work on your eyes from your house.”
“You can’t move the portal without closing it first?”
“No.”
“I won’t have the portal closed. I can’t spend another thirty years on this planet. Especially now I know those parrot things are roaming about. Move me closer to the portal, then.”
“I can do it, but there’s also risk involved in that. At this range not even the largest interactor really has the sensitivity to deal safely with living organisms.”
“You already moved me out of the fire and fixed my brain and my lungs.”
“I took calculated risks to save your life. Did I do the right thing?”
“How far is it to the portal?”
“Thirty miles.”
“Thirty miles?” Auron repeated, horrified.
Jor was silent.
Auron rose to his feet, almost losing his balance due to not being able to see.
In a standing position, his eyes hurt. He rubbed them gingerly, but it didn’t help.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll walk. You’ll have to guide me. Where’s the road?”
Getting back to the road turned out to be the most difficult bit of the journey, since he had to scramble fifty metres over uneven terrain and around tangled bushes and trees. Finally he felt the road under his feet. Jor pointed him in the right direction and he began to walk.
He passed the time discussing his plans for the planet with Jor and how he might construct an improved safety system that could truly render him invincible. Every so often he got Jor to conjure up refreshments on the road ahead of him, far enough away that there was no danger of the interactor hurting him.
Ten hours later, he stepped back through the portal with enormous relief. Jor used the machines in Auron’s lab to repair Auron’s retinas, and he could see again.
Auron gazed back through the portal with a certain awe.
“Close it,” he said, “and make me a new weapon that I can carry around on my hip.”
Then he went to lie on his bed, and he fell asleep.
The following day he told Viktor about his problems on the planet.
“The problem is, you have unlimited physical power, but not unlimited foresight,” said Viktor. “Any decision you can make could have unforeseen consequences. But you can’t hand over your decisions to your machines. You’ve no way of truly knowing if they’re reliable.”
“Jor’s the closest I’ve got to something I can actually trust,” said Auron. “Jer and I spent weeks going over ethical dilemmas with him. But even Jer and I disagreed about the correct solutions to many of those dilemmas.”
“Because there is no solution to every possible ethical dilemma. There is no single set of principles that could solve every philosophical dilemma. In the end, it comes down to Gödel’s first Incompleteness Theorem. At root the problem is mathematical. Any consistent formal system that is powerful enough to describe basic arithmetic is incomplete. If we can’t solve all problems in arithmetic with any single set of axioms, we certainly can’t solve all ethical dilemmas with a single set of principles.”
Auron nodded.
“You’re right, but if there are humans I would trust to make all and every ethical decision, then I should be able to build a machine that I can also trust.”
“Are there such humans?”
Auron thought for a few moments.
“No,” he said. “OK, but I suppose what I’m saying is, I ought to be able to build a machine that has common sense. The closest I’ve got to that is Jor, and I don’t entirely trust him. No offence, Jor.”
“None taken, mate,” said Jor, from his pocket.
“I suggest we build your proposed world together,” said Viktor. “We decide every aspect of it. All of us. At least, you, me, Rosa and Sandra. First we make it like the Earth, but nicer. Then we go over every possible thing that could go wrong with it, with the help of the machines, and we do our best to foresee all problems.”
Auron was silent. He rubbed the side of his face, his eyes almost starting out of his head.
“You don’t want to give up control,” Viktor observed. “You don’t want to admit that you need other people. Put your ego to one side. This isn’t a one-man job.”
“All right,” said Auron, finally. “You’re right. We’ll do it.”
For three weeks they sat together every day in Auron’s living room, planning. They planned several towns, each with unique architecture and amazing locations; they planned flying cars, houses high on hillsides with landing pads, elaborate churches in case anyone wanted a church, complex systems of roads, trails and paths, maintained by autonomous robots.
Often they found themselves in agreement as to what would be required, but there were points upon which it was more difficult to arrive at a consensus.
“I’m going to have a massive central computer that will automatically repair any kind of damage anyone sustains,” said Auron, “whether from infection or injury or anything else.”
“So it’ll keep people alive no matter what happens to them?” Sandra asked.
“Exactly,” Auron confirmed.
“Auron, this is grossly invasive of privacy,” said Viktor.
“No it’s not,” Auron replied. “It’ll scan everyone in realtime, but no human will ever see the data.” He thought for a moment and added, “Except perhaps in emergencies. For instance, if someone goes missing.”
“I don’t want to be scanned everywhere I go,” said Rosa.
“What if someone get’s buried?” Sandra asked. “By an avalanche or something? Your system will keep them alive indefinitely in a living Hell.”
“She’s right,” said Viktor. “What if someone gets lost in a cave? Will the system prevent them dying of thirst and hunger? They could be wandering about for thousands of years.”
Rosa shuddered.
“Fair points,” said Auron thoughtfully.
“What if we have a kind of autonomous system? People have wristbands or rings or something; if someone sustains a serious injury, the system automatically transports them to a medical facility, if they’re wearing the wristband. For non-serious injuries, everyone has their own automatic doctor, like a radio set, but it can heal people, supervise childbirth and do all the things doctors can do. It has an off switch. If they don’t want it, they switch it off.”
“We can’t transport people so easily like that,” said Auron. “We can’t open a portal next to someone safely. Jor, what do you think?”
“With a more powerful system it would probably be possible, Auron,” said Jor.
“OK, then. The wristband contacts a central system, and only then does it arrange to somehow move people to the medical centre.”
“It needs to be voluntarily activated,” said Rosa.
“Unless they’re unconscious,” said Sandra, “then it can transport people without their permission.”
For days on end they discussed these and many other issues.
Food was another point of contention. Should the inhabitants of Frith all have their own machines that create food to order, or should farming be facilitated? For Auron, the answer was obviously food machines, but the others began to question whether people would find any meaning in a life where all their needs were catered to instantaneously.
In the end, Auron was insistent. Food machines would be installed.
As for animals, only creatures that already existed on the Earth would be duplicated on Frith. Large predators would be created only in small numbers; large herbivore populations would be limited via monitoring stations that would intervene in their reproduction to prevent them becoming too numerous.
Eventually the crucial elements of the new planet were all finalised.
There was no way to be sure that everything could be done in the form they had envisaged until the plan was actually put into operation.
“Jor,” said Auron. “Are you ready to implement our design?”
“Yes, Auron,” said Jor. Then, after a short pause, Jor added, “What would you like me to do with the vampires?”
“I told you destroy, all existing life,” said Auron.
“You want me to commit a genocide?”
“They’re monstrous abominations created by the original Sirius misfiring,” Auron replied.
“Technically we don’t know for sure that they weren’t on the planet already when you terraformed it.”
“What are they?” Viktor asked.
“They look a bit like people,” said Auron, “but they have enormous heads and skin like a toad, and they have a row of huge tubular teeth protruding from their upper jaws that they use to suck the blood out of things. At least, I think that’s what they do.”
“Do they have human DNA?” asked Viktor.
“No,” replied Jor.
“But that’s evidence that they already existed on Frith before the terraforming,” said Sandra.
“Not necessarily,” said Auron. “Sirius could have designed them from scratch.”
“You can’t just kill them all,” said Sandra.
“Jor,” said Auron, “how widespread are they?”
“They’re confined to an island the size of Germany,” said Jor. “That’s the bit where you lived for thirty years.”
“An island,” said Auron thoughtfully. “I had no idea. Very well then, we’ll leave that island alone and we’ll alter the rest.”
There are those who say the seeds of the destruction of Frith were already sown at that point. Some say Auron should have spent years planning Frith, not weeks. Some say he listened too much to those around him; others say he listened too little.
But there is another school of thought; there are those who argue that what Auron was trying to do, was simply impossible; that the Earth with its horrendous imperfections, is the best kind of a planet one can possibly expect when it has to be populated with human beings.
Perhaps suffering is the price of free will, and it’s a price most are willing to pay. But surely all attempts to alleviate suffering are not in vain. Surely not every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
It may of course be that, in the final analysis, the solution to the human condition is not, at its root, purely a question of technology.
We can’t blame Auron for trying, and those who now curse his name should take a little time to acquaint themselves with the history of Frith as it once was, in its prime.
