Grayson felt himself reaching a point of diminishing returns on the Galapagos islands. He had already irreversibly changed this environment, and all he could do was hope it was ultimately for the better.

It was time to start scaling his operation up by an order of magnitude at least. This might become a little dangerous as he would become a lot easier to notice for anyone looking. It was a certainty that not everyone would be in agreement with massively changing life on Earth to adapt to the changes humans had wrought.

Grayson had his own concerns, as well, but the Earth had indeed been changed. Not to mention, the story of life was not one of stagnant forms and functions. Life has always changed. It was the human era that changed conditions to the point of being a new extinction event. We have the only known opportunity in history to redirect that extinction event into a massive evolutionary event without losing 99% of the species currently in existence.

Sure there were already many national level programs funding ark cylinders to use as nature preserves so the species humanity grew up alongside aren't lost forever. Only a small fraction of most of those populations of animals could be transported to these cylinders, however. Their species would survive, but probably not on Earth.

The orbital ring was the single most valuable project humans had ever embarked on. Having a several hundred thousand megaton magnet orbiting the Earth allowed for the stable platform of the Ring to be built. That platform, in turn, could be anchored back to the ground with tethers thousands of miles long, to nearly any point on the planet.

Built up in a similar way to the construction of the Ring core, these tethers became high speed rails into low orbital space. From the top of the Ring platform, these cargo loads could be slowly sped up, without the drag of atmosphere, at a rate that was safe for life, and eventually released. The launched cargo would have already been calculated to reach an intercept course with the desired cylinder already in orbit around the Sun. The only fuel needed in the whole process was to slowly match speed with the target orbital so simple tugs could bring the cargo ship in to dock.

With all of this exodus going on constantly, Grayson was maybe a little safer than he felt. Humanity was becoming a type 1 civilization and the changes to our home planet weren't top priority anymore for most. For him, though, he had wholeheartedly adopted the goals of his parents. They might not be exactly normal, but they were his parents and worthy of his respect and admiration.

Of course, all of this ruminating was occurring as Grayson programmed in the components he would need printed in order to assemble a ship. He would also need a ground transport to relocate his little base onto the ship and several more printers in the queue so he could expand his operations.

3D designers had been maturing as an industry for a couple of centuries now and their designs were almost magical in how much they could compact in printing and fold out to in construction. What looked like a block of jagged metal coming out of the printer, would almost effortlessly unfold into an electric fork lift. With a few simple welds from the printer drones to lock the components in place, Grayson now had the means to move the far heavier ship components down to the sea.

The first component would actively unfold itself as it absorbed a bit of water. Soon a floating platform was bobbing gently on the ocean, complete with a gang plank anchoring it to what passed for the shore. It was still a little ungainly with no beach available to move across.

Grayson continued this slow process day by day, adding platform expansions and deck structures to the growing mobile base ship. Eventually, it was time to carry the printers and power dishes and install them in their designated mounts. This would greatly enhance the build efficiency of his printers, as they now could network throughout the ship as a sort of assembly line factory.

The final stages were performed directly on the ship to build tall bulkheads to protect everything from waves and wind. This turned the floating platform and structures into the bottom deck components of a much larger ship. It was really quite amazing to Grayson, who had never been much more involved in 3D design than the basic elementary projects of designing full scale working electric cars.

The print designs even tasked the printers with producing rail mounted drones and cranes to maneuver parts and components into place and weld everything together from the outside in, as well as mining drones, to go down to the sea bed and source more material resources. The power receiving dishes were gradually lifted up to new top deck levels as the ship was grown out of the water.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.

In a little over a month, Grayson found himself the new owner of a 30,000 square foot floating production factory and drone swarm. It looked like solid steel but was ever so carefully manufactured of a light steel foam and clad in a thin layer of welded aluminum. There were probably some other structural components he hadn't been able to keep up with. The thing might look like a battleship, but it certainly wouldn't take a missile and survive.

There were all kinds of apps and add-ons Grayson could select from to add to his base, but that was not a priority right now. His main concern was building up the stockpile of embryonic life forms and artificial wombs that looked like large eggs. To make a global difference, he knew he would need millions of individuals just for the first generations.

Grayson had also seen in his available menu, nanny bots. If he were going to make intelligent life forms on par with humans and with completely different cultures, he was not going to be able to raise them as if they were his own children. Who could possibly single handedly be a father to millions of children simultaneously? Not to mention, it wouldn't be possible to raise them himself without the bias of his human cultural views.

The human culture was kluged together out of necessity and desperation over hundreds of thousands of years. The best he could hope for would be more of the same. Humanity's way of thinking was too hardwired to change. This project was going to need AI for several generations probably. Only AI could design and consistently implement an entirely new culture, as well as tweak the genetic components of instinct as the generations progressed.

The biggest advantage these new children would have is that all the hard lessons had already been learned for them. They would have their own struggles, to be sure, but it wouldn't be the struggle of surviving despite themselves. They did not need to grow up in deadly competition for every spare calorie as early humans did. This was partly thanks to the foodstuffs Grayson himself had already seeded into their world. They would have the challenges of being driven to be stewards to their environment. Who knew what that impulse would feel like for them? Life would be hard in it's own way, but they had oversight to give them time to adapt gently.

There were a lot of variables in the genetic makeups of these new people that Grayson himself was not privy to. Some things needed to be balanced out for every direct change he made and Egg was the only one who knew how to do that. Too many chefs would spoil the stew.

If Grayson had tried to micromanage every little detail, he would have only run into failure after failure. He had tried at first. The more he meddled, the more likely the result would test as unviable. With billions of base pairs, a human just couldn't hope to make all the right genetic decisions. Even an augmented human like Grayson was incapable of coordinating that many variables.

That is why Egg had provided him a graphical interface to modify and select traits from, like a limited character builder in a video game. Everything had to be balanced by several other things and nothing could be min-maxed out and still be capable of living.

It was the genetic equivalent of an autistic savant. Weighting too much on a single characteristic would leave a severe lack of resources available for others. With autistic savants, this had largely been corrected with augmented intelligence systems. They used an external AI to fill in for those stunted mental areas. In the process, this created some of the earliest stages of the long promised technological singularity.

It had not taken off quite as quickly as earlier generations feared. Turns out, it is really difficult for any system to design something smarter than itself. The augmented savants turned out to be the very thing to propel AI technology forward enough to start exceeding human intelligence.

The resulting AIs still couldn't quite leap ahead without that extra component, though. The unusual adaptability of the human mind was a necessary component that AI could not reproduce quickly. Our emotions, evolved over billions of years had the ability to leap 90% of the way to new conclusions that machine minds just could not replicate.

The future of AI became augmented intelligence and not simply artificial intelligence. This was exactly Grayson's plan for his new children. He would hatch the first few and select a few of them to get an implant immediately to guide their developing minds into an early stage of their never before seen culture. They would grow up around drones who cared for their basic needs and adaptive internal systems to care for their mental development.

As they became more physically capable, they would help to bring up further generations. It would take many exponential increases in population via artificial means to establish a functioning society. Grayson would mainly be involved in protecting their burgeoning community from outside interference. He would also be spending his life developing ways to automate his own work, because he obviously would not live to see the fullness of it.

This left Grayson with an odd mixture of sadness and awe in just how huge his plan had become. He felt he might be starting to understand what being a parent felt like. He was scared to death that he would do something wrong or that he had even done so already. At the same time, he was becoming more and more excited at the possibility.

Sailing his mobile base toward South America mainland, Grayson asked Ring for a little help finding the right location to raise his new children. Meanwhile he had all the ship printers running non-stop producing embryonic forms of all of his species designs. They still would need time to develop. He had several months in which to establish the vegetation and infrastructure of this new environment.

"Time to crowdsource the designs," Grayson thought.