Impact: Earth: Hard Science Fiction Read online

  Impact: Earth

  Hard Science Fiction

  Brandon Q. Morris

  John C. Corner

  Contents

  Impact: Earth

  Author's Note

  Also by Brandon Q. Morris

  Excerpt: Impact: Titan

  Glossary of Acronyms

  Metric to English Conversions

  Impact: Earth

  Timeline

  2030 - 2050: Climate crisis. Only with great sacrifice and struggle is humankind able to slow the rapid increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) levels in the atmosphere. The sea levels rise by several meters, vast stretches of land become uninhabitable, and there is mass extinction in the animal kingdom, all of which lead to the greatest mass migration in history. Local wars break out.

  Nations of the Northern Hemisphere—the United States, the European Union countries, Russia, China, and Japan—form the ‘Prosperity Block’ and close their borders. In the Hunger Years of 2045 and 2046, more than 30 percent of the world’s population perishes due to global changes resulting from the climate catastrophe.

  2062: Resumption of space exploration by the leading industrial nations. The first lunar colony is founded in 2069 for the centennial celebration of the first moon landing. After that, a station is established on Mars.

  2075: The ‘Santa Maria Incident.’ After the total loss of the Mars freighter, Santa Maria, further colonization of the solar system is stopped.

  2080 - 2098: Increasing tensions between the wealthy nations of the Northern Hemisphere. The solar space exploration program stopped in favor of massive arms buildup. Military conflicts ensued in the ‘Hunger Belt’ worldwide.

  2098 - 2101: The Third World War erupts from a conflict between Russia and China and is ended by an intervention of the United States and the European Union on Russia’s behalf.

  2101 - 2299: The Two Hundred Year Peace. Reforestation efforts, the complete conversion to using renewable energy supplies, and the growing use of artificial intelligence combine to produce the first signs of Earth’s climate starting to recover. However, a new conflict in Asia ends this ‘Green Age.’

  2299 - 2305: Fourth, or Great World War, between Western and Eastern Alliances. The use of self-replicating robot swarms intensifies and accelerates military operations, leading to billions of civilian deaths. There is a massive exchange of nuclear weapons across Europe and Russia, leading to a nuclear winter.

  2305: Peace of Canberra, the founding of the USEU from the United States of America, the European Union, and Western Russia. UN resolution passed, banning the use of self-replicating AI weapon systems.

  2305—2312: Nuclear Winter. Temperatures fall rapidly, large parts of the world’s remaining population are forced to live in underground bunker settlements. The world’s population shrinks from seven billion to two billion.

  The ‘Terra Reforming’ program of the Olympus Corporation begins.

  1. Midsummer’s Day (-77 Days)

  DSI’s Psyche Complex, Main Belt –June 22, 2312, 13:45 Greenwich Mean Time

  Sara Renberg was floating in her room’s small private bathroom, which was currently filled with hot steam and bouncy jiggling water droplets. Light strips were flashing yellow, which told her the water was being suctioned out of the room, and warm dry air was being blown in. Sara waited patiently for a few minutes until the strips turned green, then opened the hatch and pulled herself into her private room using the handles on the walls.

  As head exogeologist over a team of four employees, Sara had a 40-square-foot room in the Psyche Asteroid Station. Her room was trimmed with bright gray plastic, equipped with a sleeping bag attached to an inclined surface, and included a lockable closet and a narrow fold-out table that could be fitted with clips and magnetic mounts.

  Sara slipped into dark gray work overalls emblazoned with the name ‘Deep Space Industries’ and hurried to place her silvery holo-application behind her ear. Her brain was immediately connected to Synthesis, the intersolar network of the Olympus Corporation. Her vision became clearer and visual contrast was enhanced. Carefully selected information began to flow into her mind.

  “Good afternoon, Sara. Welcome to Synthesis. You still have fifteen minutes before the start of your fourteen-hour shift. Local time in the main belt is 13:45, midday in Stockholm. Reminder: Today is Midsummer’s Day in Sweden. To do: Swarms C201 to C210 online, Swarm C211 in standby mode in difficult terrain. Advertisement: Happy Hour at Cafeteria Centro starting at 17:00 with Moon Trance Sounds.”

  Sara stopped the news loop and called up a new holo-screen with a casual wave of her hand. The new holo-screen materialized, shimmering in front of her. She carefully pushed off from the wall and let herself sink onto her sleeping surface. She waved for the holo to move closer and then selected Northern Europe, Settlement 44, Sub-Level 12, Shelter F. A series of message headers appeared.

  Sara scrolled through the list and found the processing confirmation for the message she had sent a few hours ago. At Psyche’s current location, it took almost 30 minutes for a message to reach Earth. This made conversations awkward, so Synthesis’s communications AI could use data from prepared messages and personality databases to simulate a direct, real-time connection.

  “It’s Sara!” The round face of her little sister, Agda, appeared. “Come quick!”

  “Trevlig midsommar!” exclaimed Sara.

  “Happy Midsummer’s Day to you, too!” Her father appeared to have even more gray hair. He turned around and called, “Siv! Where are you? Come on!”

  Her mother appeared, holding a small bouquet of flowers in her hand. “Trevlig midsommar! We’ve missed you, Sara! How are you?”

  Sara’s eyes filled with tears. “Good, Mor, thanks. I miss you, too. Where’s Christer?”

  “Your brother has volunteered for the Liquidators. He’s outside right now. He says the work’s stressful, but it makes him happy to be out there doing something.”

  “What?” Sara was surprised. “You all need to leave that to us! We’re sending new swarms every week. Cleanup work out in the open is much too dangerous for humans!”

  Her father shrugged. “Christer wanted to do it. You know what he’s like when he gets something in his head—”

  “You should’ve put your foot down and forbidden him,” her mother interjected. Then she turned back to face the holo-camera.

  “Do you remember before, Sara? When we’d celebrate Midsummer with your grandparents? You were still a little girl.”

  “Yeah.” Sara nodded. The bright night sky hanging above the islands, strawberries and pickled herring, birch leaves on the white table setting, the seven flowers that girls would pick to help them dream of their future partners. “I remember. It was always so nice.”

  “That’s all gone now. Christer showed me pictures, and it’s all so terrible. Black snow everywhere. Everything’s in ruins. How is anything supposed to be nice ever again?”

  “We’re all working on it, Mor. In a few years the sun will shine again, and we’ll all celebrate Midsummer together again.”

  “How is it in space? I hear it’s so dangerous out there! And you’re so far away!”

  “Don’t worry, Mor, I’m safe. Right now, I’m in my private room. It’s many stories underground inside a big asteroid, well-protected.”

  “Just like us!” Sara’s mother began to cry. “We’re all locked up here in bunkers. We’re not allowed outside. What kind of life is that?”

  “You’ve got to be patient. The radioactivity levels are still too high in Northern Europe. Our new swarm program just started! In the next few weeks, Olympus will be sending a millio
n more environmental drones to Earth. We’re on the right path!”

  “You’re doing a fantastic job, Sara. I saw a broadcast with your boss, Tyron Cross. We’re lucky there are people like him! He’s at least doing something about it all. All these politicians just talk and talk.”

  A red, blinking symbol appeared in the upper right corner of Sara’s holo-screen. “I’ve got to go. My shift’s about to start.”

  “We’re proud of you, Sara!”

  “I love you all!”

  The holo-screen disappeared. Sara got up carefully, glided into the middle of her room, and quickly looked in the mirror. She pulled her medium-length blond hair straight back and put it in a ponytail to keep it out of her face. Then she opened the door connecting her room to the central corridor.

  A great rush of noise and activity greeted her. Colleagues from all the different service departments were bustling through the corridor. They were on their way to their workstations, cafeterias and bars, or recreation and exercise sites in the station’s outer tunnel ring.

  Sara went through her task list while she made her way to her workstation in the central control room.

  While Sara strapped herself into her seat in front of her stationary service panel, the communications system booted up and arranged her task list for the upcoming shift. A series of reconnaissance swarms were waiting for instructions.

  With a quick wave of her hand, Sara swept the overview screen to one side and opened the communications menu. An overview of available AI units appeared. She selected the first swarm from the ‘Artemis’ exploration group and established a connection to Sister C1B0 from this family.

  {ARTEMIS C1B0; ONLINE}{SYSTEM CHECK; ZEUS 3.7; ZEUS CHILD SWARM; MODULES DEMETER AND HEPHAISTOS}

  {ARTEMIS; ONLINE}{“Good morning, Sara. Today you are celebrating Midsummer in your culture. I hope you have a happy day, and may you receive seven flowers that will bring you a pleasant dream of love and your future partner.”}

  {RENBERG}{“Thank you, Artemis C1B0. I have no plans to get married this year. I like the freedom too much.”}

  {ARTEMIS; ONLINE}{HUMOR}{“Freedom is a simple loop function, where all the variables are empty.”}{HUMOR END}

  Sara laughed. Starting with version 3.7 of the ‘Zeus’ operating system, the swarm intelligence was given the capability for cybernetic humor, but the attempts mostly came across as dry and flat.

  {RENBERG}{“I hope your loops are all filled with well-defined variables, Artemis sister. I feel good, myself.”}

  {RENBERG; INPUT; STATUS QUERY}{“How are things for you? All modules up and running?”}

  {ARTEMIS; OUTPUT; REPORT}{“I am doing quite well, Sara, all structures at one hundred percent.”}

  {ARTEMIS; ONLINE}{“What can I do for you?”}

  {RENBERG; INPUT; COMMAND}{“Time to go to the asteroid belt, Artemis sister. Exploration Quadrant 88D1AA.”}

  {ARTEMIS; LOAD COMPONENT}

  {ARTEMIS; INHERIT CONTROL STRUCTURES}

  {ARTEMIS; COMPILE}

  {ARTEMIS; ONLINE}{“Input received and understood. Everything looks good, Sara!”}

  {RENBERG; INPUT; COMMAND}{“Then you better start now, Artemis sister C1B0. Have a good trip and don’t worry about me.”}

  {ARTEMIS; EXECUTE}{“Command received. Execution initiated. I predict the seven flowers will bring you happiness, Sara.”}

  Sara smiled, shook her head, and opened the next communications window.

  Eight-and-a-half hours later, Sara pulled on her lightweight exercise clothes and made her way to the outer tunnel ring. With its diameter of almost 250 kilometers, Psyche offered a barely perceptible force of gravity. It took minutes for falling objects to reach the floor. It wasn’t a zero-gravity environment, like when Sara lived and worked on the asteroid, but the effects on the body and mind were comparable to what happened to people on spaceships.

  The underground section of the Psyche Station had a circular area. It had a 22-kilometer-long tunnel ring with an exercise tube that rotated at 660 kilometers per hour, thereby using centrifugal force to simulate Earth’s gravity.

  Sara floated patiently in a line of joggers until it was her turn to step into the starting lift. She concentrated on holding tightly to the handles and felt how the blood flowed into her legs—her body became more massive and her muscles tensed. After about two minutes of steadily increasing speed, the lift reached the necessary acceleration, and the red display showed a blinking number one—Earth’s gravity. The door slid open, and Sara was surrounded by a simulation of a sunny, hilly landscape with a running trail extending straight ahead through a field. Sara began to run, trying to fight away the slightly sickening feeling produced by the Coriolis effect.

  Even as a young girl, Sara had only ever had one goal—to get out of the bunker and away from the irradiated ruins that had been Europe before the war. She wanted to see the sun, the moon, and the stars, the twinkling band of the Milky Way. All of that had been hidden behind a dense, dark-gray blanket of clouds that had been hanging over an endless nuclear-snow wasteland since the end of the war. The moon and stars were sights that Sara had seen only in astronomical pictures from her educational apps—because the night sky on Earth had been utterly black since the nuclear catastrophe.

  Sara had wanted to become a space pilot for as long as she could remember. With that goal in mind, she had forced herself to persevere through an extended program of study for exogeologists and the demanding, rigorous selection program with ‘Deep Space Industries.’ In addition to her daily work in the central command room, she had then completed all the steps necessary for a class III pilot’s license.

  Unfortunately, so far all of her excursions into space had been limited to a simulator. For many years, space exploration—and almost everything else—had been conducted by automated systems and robots. ‘Man directs, a machine inspects and collects,’ as Sara had learned in school. Her workstation had ended up not on the bridge of a spaceship, as she had initially dreamed, and remembered from sci-fi series in her childhood. Instead, she worked among the gray bunker cubicles of the main control center, deep below the surface of the asteroid, 16 Psyche, where she assisted mining swarms in the main asteroid belt and monitored their mining programs.

  There were thousands of swarms out in the asteroid belt, collecting the resources needed for rebuilding Earth.

  An endless stream of transport ships flowed between Psyche and the factories on Mars, where the nanobots were manufactured. They were then formed into bricks in the final processing plants on the moon and finally synthesized into drones and brought to Earth.

  Sara had dedicated all her efforts to the mission, which required her to work in the smothering confines of a tunnel in a main-belt asteroid that was unfriendly to life. It was the greatest challenge and collective effort in the history of humankind—the reconstruction of Earth.

  Five kilometers. She swerved off the trail, the simulation of green fields disappeared, and she saw the closest lift a few meters away on the gray plastic wall of the tunnel.

  Sara checked her holo-messages. She had received one, a 3D image of seven wildflowers, sender identification “ARTEMIS C1B0”. She laughed and shook her head. What were those programmers thinking? Writing code in the geoexploration software that could come up with Midsummer’s Day flowers from its data fields?

  Sara smiled as she looked forward to taking another shower.

  2. The Pearl (-35 Days)

  Lunar Station in Mare Imbrium – August 5, 2312, 21:00 Greenwich Mean Time

  Like a pearl on black velvet, the Earth appeared high above the moon’s horizon. It shone milky white, the oceans and continents hidden behind the dense blanket of clouds that had shrouded the world since the nuclear winter after the Great War.

  Tyron Cross, CEO of the Intersolar Olympus Corporation, had already been standing lost in thought for several minutes in front of his suite’s panoramic window in the outer ring of the lunar base in Mare Imbrium. He looked at the white E
arth, which would start to wane in the next few days and slowly disappear into the blackness of space. How many more Earth phases would pass until their home planet would once again shine in all its beautiful, natural colors?

  Due to the destruction inflicted by the war, and the more than 300 massive nuclear bombs that were detonated, the previously almost-paradise-like homeland of humanity had been rendered nearly uninhabitable. Gigatons of dust were flung into the atmosphere, and the burning cities of Russia and Europe had added a similar amount of soot.

  Endless snowfields covered vast areas of the northern and southern hemispheres. A nuclear winter raged below the poisoned atmosphere. The ozone layer’s total obliteration forced humans who ventured out of the bunkers to wear protective clothing. The continuous cloud cover made solar energy harvesting impossible from Earth’s surface, and forced the survivors to dig up the last remaining fossil fuels.

  Now, seven years after the end of the war came the next bit of bad news. As more dust and soot were scrubbed from the atmosphere, the cleaner the air became, and the more the sunlight heated the surface, the more noticeable the massively increased levels of CO2 and CH4 became. There was now the threat of a climate whiplash effect, a post-nuclear summer that would go beyond anything any of the survivors could imagine.

  A soft gong sounded, and Tyron Cross turned around. Two secret-service agents entered the room. Behind them he could see the tall figure of Darold Dickson, president of the USEU.

  “Mr. President!” Cross took two champagne glasses from the platter held out to him by a skimpily dressed hostess and hurried to greet his visitor. “To Earth!”

  An elegant resonant chime sounded as glasses held by the world’s most powerful man and the solar system’s most prosperous businessman touched.