Callisto 2.0, Susan English [i love reading .TXT] 📗

A little over a month after they had returned from their great adventure, Naomi and I took Hera and Asteria back to the clinic for another scan. I could tell the mice enjoyed being outside of the lab—their noses were working overtime, their eyes bright with curiosity.

“We should take them out more often,” I said to Naomi.

“You’re right. They’re loving the change of scenery.”

The scans showed no changes or anomalies—both mice were as healthy as ever.

Gamon recommended another scan in a few months, but she was convinced the warp voyage had not resulted in any physiological damage to the mice. And, from what Naomi and I could tell, they were more curious and alert than ever. The mission had been a resounding success.

◆◆◆

Olivia arrived that afternoon, and she quickly settled into life on the station. For the first couple of days, we ate lunch together, then I went back to my usual routine, eating energy bars at my desk.

“Olivia is wonderful!” Naomi told me one afternoon a few days later, when I stopped by her lab for a break and a cuddle with Aster. “She’s been joining us for our biology power lunches. She’s doing fascinating research on biological terraforming. Before, I knew nothing about the field. It’s actually very exciting.”

Olivia had described the direction of her research to me in great detail over lunch her first day back on Shambhala. She was positively euphoric. In her previous postdoc position, she was expected to assist the chief scientist in his work, with little opportunity to pursue her own ideas. She was ready to apply her knowledge in synthetic biology to create artificial organisms—bacteria and algae—which could catalyze the decomposition of planetary surfaces, extracting the base elements from the crust, and atmosphere if it existed, to produce, if the conditions were favorable, viable soil, ready for the introduction of the microbes necessary for healthy soil structure. She had also designed a carbon-based substrate similar to biochar, which would be used as a habitat for the soil microbes.

“Yeah,” I agreed, “she’s thrilled to be working on her own research.”

“Raven’s excited as well. She’s got an entire collection of soil bacteria, fungi, and archaea in suspended animation, all waiting to be released into a hospitable medium.

She wishes to try Olivia’s synthetic biochar. Can you imagine?” Naomi grinned. “With the technology Olivia is working on, true terraforming is a real possibility. We could terraform the Moon! No more living underground.”

“I hate to burst your bubble, but the Moon isn’t massive enough to have an 200

atmosphere.” I paused, realizing I had misspoken. “Okay, the Moon does have a really sparse atmosphere, but without a magnetic field to deflect the solar wind, any substantial atmosphere wouldn’t last, it would be blown out into space. And anyway, you need a more massive object to hold on to an atmosphere like we have on the Earth.

Though preferably minus the contamination.”

“Yes, please! We don’t want to reproduce Earth’s current atmosphere! Pre-industrialization, now that would be splendid. But today, forget it. My idea about the Moon was me dreaming, but imagine another planet, like one of the ones Elena found.”

“It’s true, with Olivia’s work, we could create a veritable garden of Eden, without all the religious undertones.”

“I love the Foundation!” said Naomi. “Not only can we dream, but, working together, we can make our dreams reality.”

“I keep pinching myself, even after eight months.”

“All thanks to Izumi and Diana.”

“They are amazing,” I agreed.

Naomi’s expression clouded. “How has Izumi seemed lately? You see her often in the gym, right?”

I thought about it. “She’s her usual cheerful self, but sometimes when I look at her, I can see there’s something going on under the surface. Whatever that mess was with Hiroki, I think it still must be going on.”

“I get the same feeling from Diana. We’ve been keeping the same gym hours, you know I enjoy working out at night, and, superficially, she seems fine, but ….”

“If only they would talk to us.” What could be going on? First those protests, then Amélie, and both Izumi and Diana pretending everything was fine, why? What were they protecting us from? Why wouldn’t they tell us anything?

“I’ve been mulling over it a fair bit,” said Naomi, “and I’m positive it has to be corporate espionage. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Though it would make more sense if the Foundation were an actual corporation.”

“I just wish we could do something to help.”

“Me, too.”

◆◆◆

On Olivia’s first Friday on the station as a crew member, I stopped by her lab, which was next to Elena’s and two doors down from physics, to check it out. When she saw me, her face broke into a huge smile.

“Hi Little Bear! Let me give you the big tour.”

Olivia had been working with the engineering team, designing her equipment, then manufacturing everything using the 3D printers. As Olivia showed me what they had created, I felt a renewed appreciation for the skill and creativity of the materials science 201

team, Tanya and Jordyn. They had designed the ceramics and other materials we had used to build the warp drive prototype, probe, and transport vessel, and now they were producing novel materials for the growth mediums for Olivia’s synthetic organisms.

“Look at all this,” she said, sweeping her arm out. “It’s better than my wildest dreams.

And I love being here with you,” she said, pulling me into a hug. “Like a dream come true,” she whispered, pressing her lips to the top of my head.

◆◆◆

At the social that night, Olivia and I sat together on one of the couches in the observation deck. I was feeling nostalgic, and for some reason the memory of one of our first official dates popped into my mind.

“Hey, Olivia, do you remember the night we went to that poetry slam at the math department?”

“Oh my god, I completely forgot about that! That one guy was so serious about his poem, the vector guy.” Olivia’s face broke into a wide grin. “It was impossible to keep a straight face.”

“Let me see if I can remember any of it,” I said.

“No! That was, what, six years ago? I just remember laughing so hard, I’m surprised I didn’t bust my gut.”

I thought for a minute, running the monologue through my mind. Olivia didn’t know it, but I had found a copy of the poem on the internet. I must have read it twenty times, giddy with the absurdity.

I stood, hooked my foot under the bar on the floor, and, in my most soulful voice, I recited: “The Existence Axiom, or Ode to a Vector Space.” Olivia looked up at me, mouth hanging open. I continued. “Oh, woe is me, a simple set of discontinuous non-differentiable functions and degenerate conic sections, determinant to discover a basis for my fundamental theorem—

an unbounded solution full of inverse transformations, to be sure.”

I took a deep breath. Olivia was staring at me. She finally remembered to close her mouth.

“I yearn for linear independence, for closure under addition and scalar multiplication, yet I feel the empty set is an element of me. I believe I am a subset, yet what proof have I? If only I could span infinity (with the usual operations, of course!). Dreary is my complex inner product space. A product of invertible matrices, perhaps?”

Olivia was still staring, eyes wide as saucers. I felt an almost uncontrollable giggle bubbling up from deep inside me, but I pushed it back down. Instead, I stared up at the ceiling, feigning dramatic pause, but in reality, searching my memory for the next lines.

How did it go? Yes! Now I remembered the complete poem! “A companion matrix is one non-trivial solution to my overdetermined linear system. Oh, to be a subspace. Yet I fear I am naught but a zero vector.” I filled my voice with sadness and despair. “I have no eigenvalues in this n-dimensional space, no rank. ”

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I brought my hand to my chest, forming a fist, then opened my palm upward, allowing my voice to carry the tiniest bit of hope. “Linear combination may be the solution.

But I dread the vacuousness, the nul ity, those smug complex numbers and their conjugates.” I made a disgusted face, then looked again at the ceiling, nodding my head and tilting my chin upward. “I must be determinant, orthogonal, never less than or equal to zero. Yes, a transformation is in order.”

I clapped my hands, and Olivia jumped. Making my voice cold and dead, I said, “And then, in reduced row echelon form, the proper values of the set’s existence emerged: A random iteration algorithm, nothing more. ” I lowered my head as my shoulders dropped.

By the time I came to the end, Olivia was bent over, holding her stomach, laughing so hard she could barely breathe. “I … can’t … believe … you … memorized … it!”

she said, doubled over with laughter.

“What?” I said, giving her my most innocent expression. “It was so special, our first poetry slam.” I put my fists on my hips and glared down at her. “I can’t believe you didn’t memorize it! Did our relationship mean nothing to you?”

Olivia laughed even harder, tears floating in the space around her face. “Stop! I can’t take it.”

“I even considered writing a poem for you in the same vein, I was going to call it