Step by dainty step, the platinum assistant crossed the void between the elevator and Triche’s desk. Stopping a short distance away, it stood rail-straight awaiting Triche’s acknowledgement. After a moment, Triche looked-up from her work.
“I have a message from Ms Temple, received moments ago.”
Triche responded in monotone, “Tell me.”
The assistant tilted its head downward as if to look directly at Triche and spoke in Katya Temple’s voice. “Triche. I understand your reluctance to launch our ThreadBand at the New Mars Conference. It makes sense to me that you would not want anything to detract from your brightest star, your most valuable possession. She is compelling—and irreplaceable. Without Commander Nasri as your exclusive ambassador from the Martian people, your programming empire would collapse. It must have been a disappointment for you to learn she had agreed to return to Mars on this next mission, as a member of the Logisen team.”
“Pause,” Triche ordered her assistant. She had heard nothing of the kind from Elizabeth. She mulled over the possibilities. Elizabeth desperately wanted to return to Mars, of that she was certain. But Elizabeth also was intelligent enough to appreciate the power that World Media bestowed on her. “Continue,” she directed, looking up at the eyeless face of her assistant.
“No NASA. No obligation to their PR effort. Endless ability to define life on her terms. And handsomely compensated under the personal auspices of our CEO, Julius Ross. I hope you will understand that as a well-compensated partner of Logisen, Commander Nasri’s first obligation would be to support our PR efforts rather than your programming. We do have plans to provide her with an extensive platform for her new reports, which we are tentatively calling Awakening, as in awakening the Martian city.”
“Pause,” Triche commanded in a soft, but determined tone. She studied the cold, expressionless face of her metal messenger as if she were observing Katya, herself. “Continue.”
Katya continued. “Of course we are still interested in launching ThreadBand at your conference, if you could reconsider. It would be a nice partnership: Commander Nasri, Logisen, and World Media. Under those conditions, I can see it being in our interests to maintain Nasri’s programming relationship with World Media. Everyone wins, don’t you think?”
Then there was silence. “Would you like to respond now?” asked her assistant.
Triche thought for a moment, then replied. “Not now. I will respond later. Go.” Then, as her assistant traversed the office, Triche stood and walked to the corner intersection of her office windows and gazed down on the streams of people.
...
Logisen had constructed an enormous clean room on the Kennedy Space Center Supplier Parkway in order to assemble a medical and chemical research lab that would be the nerve center of their work within the City of Spirits. Katya Temple and Senator Joe Crowley had just finished a tour of the lab and were being helped out of their coveralls and bubble helmets. Crowley looked through the window back into the clean room.
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“It boggles the mind how you can fit so much raw technological power into such a compact design. This module will provide one hundred times the analysis capability of Mars Habitat 3,” he smiled with farm boy enthusiasm.
Katya chuckled. “You left out the metallurgy and tooling. We’re planning to build as well as analyze. In fact, that’s why we have so urgently requested access to a headpiece.”
“I understand. You’re impatient to see the goods. But you have received a list of experiments the folks in the Mars Lab have been performing. That’s what they usually do.”
“Yes, we’ve received that from Commander Nasri’s team, but I’m sure you appreciate that nothing can replace hands-on exposure. We want to make sure we can fully probe the capabilities of the Martian devices and replicate them—unless we find more of them up there.”
“Yes, and let’s hope you do. Now tell me about the supplemental systems you’ve been able to include. I didn’t see those in the tour.”
Katya led Crowley out of the locker room and into a nearby conference room with a collaboration board. She called up a set of diagrams showing a four cubic meter box with what appeared to be a dome on top. “Meaning no insult to NASA, one of our biggest fears is the flow rate of your signal. Our Sentient Systems run at a much higher capacity than NASA can handle, and we anticipate that the AI in the City of Spirits will be larger still. So we have constructed an ultra-high-capacity transmitter/receiver to run our systems in parallel with NASA communications and telemetry.” She tapped the board to start an animation of the box being moved into the Logisen lab. “On the outbound transit, that system is stored securely inside our module. After it is on site, it can be dislocated from the module and deployed on the surface, leaving room inside for up to three mission specialists to work.”
“You anticipate needing a lot of processing power to get the City up and running?”
“More than that. We’re planning to tie the Sentient Systems AI on Earth to the infrastructure on Mars. And within a year after that, we plan to integrate the Martian AI with our AI on Earth. Our AI would be the command and control, of course.”
“Really?”
Katya felt the need to reinforce her point. “You want something that powerful to be in the most capable hands on Earth.”
When the Senator finally nodded agreement, she continued. “And, unlike Mars Habitat 3, we know ahead of time that there is an advanced civilization on Mars and impressive technology to be discovered and learned. We know there is a massive power source, highly efficient machinery for creating the atmosphere, advanced materials processing and, possibly, interstellar spacecraft. We are assuming that some technology will need to be brought back to Earth.” She tapped the board again to start an animation of the medical and chemical research components sliding out of the module, leaving an empty container. “That’s why the entire lab can become freestanding outside of the module once we establish an atmosphere in the City. We can return many valuable and interesting technologies, art, and artifacts for study or for display in museums and universities.”
Joe Crowley chuckled. The opportunities were just too numerous to ignore. “And with the second transit ship close to completion in lunar orbit, we’ll be able to move the whole State of Texas to Mars to help with the work.”
“Logisen will support you any way we can,” Katya smiled, reaching out to shake Crowley’s hand.