In the weeks following the disastrous cyclone, Grayson focused solely on rebuilding critical systems to restart his terraforming efforts.
Every day meant clearing debris, salvaging materials, and deploying autonomous drone swarms to quickly erect new structures in place of demolished labs and production facilities.
Grayson worked from sunrise to sunset directing the recovery, while Egg ran countless calculations on how to optimize the reconstruction. Their coordination paid off, and gradually order emerged from the chaos.
Temporary shelters and power came online first. Then the molecular assemblers were repaired to supply replacement parts for vital equipment. Soon sensor networks and communication systems were back up, giving Grayson eyes across the island again.
During lulls waiting on production, Grayson would walk the shoreline absorbed in thought. This setback was a lesson in the humbling power of the planet itself. He must work with nature's immense forces, not against them.
Finally, months of tireless grinding saw the facilities restored close to operational levels before the storm. Grayson was immensely proud inspecting the gleaming labs and versatile fabrication machines. Life could resume again.
"We're back, Egg. Let's learn from this and build smarter," Grayson said, wearing a smile for the first time in weeks. The worst was behind them now.
Egg replied, "I have re-run predictive models incorporating our experiences. We will be better prepared next time."
Grayson nodded. Setbacks were inevitable on the long road ahead. But step by step, they would make this planet whole again.
Now it was time to get back to the real work...
With the recovery complete, Grayson was eager to restart his key terraforming projects. He pulled up status reports and evaluations from before the storm.
Top priorities included rebooting the engineered coral reefs to restore aquatic habitats and coastal buffers. Planting modified vegetation to enrich soils was also high on the list.
Checking seed banks and gene samples, Grayson was relieved to find much of his pioneering work had survived either physically or in data archives. The storm had delayed progress, but not erased it.
Selecting a few robust modified kelp strains, Grayson dispatched undersea drones to begin re-seeding vital reef areas. Soon their grasping tendrils would help anchor developing coral structures and nourish ecosystems.
On land, Grayson prepared Propagation Quests for various plants via his interface. Target locations were selected based on soil scans showing greatest need for enrichment. Drones would be assigned planting duties and growth monitoring.
While waiting on samples in the gene lab, a notice popped up from Egg - "Grayson, you have unopened messages from your family." He felt a pang, realizing weeks had passed since contacting them last. The storm's aftermath had consumed all bandwidth.
"Let's take a break - open the most recent message please," Grayson said. Settling in his chair, he smiled as his parents' faces appeared. Their concern melted into relief at seeing him safe. For a few minutes, all was right again.
Three weeks later...
Grayson is carrying a bag of strange seeds. They are the blueprints for a plant never before seen on Earth. He has been scattering the seeds in likely spots based on the quest pathing in his vision.
[Quest: Scatter fruiting carboniferous fern seeds as the path in your HUD directs. Reward: the first step to a new carbon cycle.]
Grayson was actually scattering the MK2 seeds. He had scattered the MK1 last week. This time he altered the fern again to produce a sickly sweet sap and flowers to encourage attraction to pollinators. Also, this fern would do something very different with carbon.
This fern would draw calcium from limestone in the soil and combine it with carbon and oxygen from the air to produce calcium carbonate flakes on its stems. The flakes should fall off and accumulate, attracting mollusks like snails to make use of it for heavy shell production. He got the genetic information for this process from simple diatoms he accidentally pointed at when examining the sea for useful life. They were microscopic, but that didn't seem to trip up his sampling system.
This was an experiment and might go nowhere, or it could sequester massive amounts of CO2 in a way that nothing would benefit from breaking down. Grayson knew this wasn't the sexy part of the job, but Egg assured him that it was the top priority. Nothing else he could do would matter if the the atmospheric greenhouse effect were to continue to run away as it currently was doing.
Not for the first time, Grayson struggled with the sheer scope of his task. Could he possibly live to see it put a dent in anything? It all seemed impossible. He needed to devise a way to scale this process up a million fold at least. How could he even amass the supplies for that?
Maybe humans weren't a good idea to bring back to Mother Earth. Maybe thinking way outside the box was an option. If it didn't work, he would still have the kill switch bred right in to all his experiments. Not that Grayson would ever bring himself to use them if his plan had even partial success.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
That was going to have to wait for a larger land mass. Crafting his imagined creatures on these tiny islands would be a useless idea.
For now, having the majority of land-based plant species sequenced, Grayson prioritized the water plants. Kelp came first. He could imagine kelp forests turning slowly into pillars of chalk and spreading throughout the sea.
---
The Ring
"Charlotte!" Grayson's father Trevor called out as he watched a sped up version of some of his son's progress.
Looking up from her work, the 5'2" blonde, still maintaining a fantastic level of fitness in her 40's, asked, "What is it, my love? Has Grayson saved the world already?"
Trevor smiled, knowing he was a little too enthusiastic sometimes about his pride for his boy. He liked to joke that his hair left his scalp out of embarrassment for his enthusiasm. "He seems to be planning to reuse some old ideas from the ancient Earth. The diatom explosion during the Cambrian Era created the white cliffs of Dover, England and pulled enough carbon out of the air to start several of the ice ages. That took billions of years though. I think he's going to try supercharging the growth cycle. This should be funny."
"Oh don't laugh at him, dear. He doesn't know what the metabolic limits are yet. He can't have interacted with the system enough for it to quantify that much yet. Soon he could be molding life itself like a literal god." Charlotte cooed.
---
Galapogos
Grayson had been playing around with the system designer for a few months now. He wanted to see some results from his haphazard agricultural efforts to learn if his ideas were viable. He had a few dozen species in their eggs, cooking in the incubator.
Grayson had, by this time, stripped down most of the landing pod for materials and refilled his organic ditch several times. He now had 2 more printers and two more recyclers going. Grayson had even made an maser receiving dish so he could get more concentrated power from the Ring. After printing out his first few species, Egg had allowed him to contact Ring. He requested that a microwave laser (maser) be directed at his receiver.
Ring got much more power from her solar arrays since there was no atmosphere to scatter the pure energy from the Sun. Even with the losses of beaming down power, the efficiency was far higher due to the lasing and high frequency of the power source.
Ferns were starting to grow and develop all over the island. Some were already larger than Grayson's reach with his arms stretched wide. These ferns were going to be gigantic. The chalk ferns, as he had decided to name, them hadn't done as well. They did grow, but they had trouble taking up the calcium from surrounding rock.
"Maybe they need some help breaking down the rock," thought Grayson. He began tweaking some bacteria and fungi that already served this purpose for other substances. The designs were magnified dramatically in his AR vision so he could just reach out and interact with them as if he were merely molding clay. His subdermal haptics even gave him feedback as if he were feeling the different tissues of these microscopic designs.
Within two days, Grayson was walking his little experimental garden once again. He was injecting large capsules of bacteria filled liquids into the soil and occasionally scraping away some soil to dust fern roots with his new fungal spores.
The berry producing ferns were doing very well by now. Grayson even found them growing in places he didn't recall planting them. Checking his progress on the gamified view of the island superimposed in his vision, his path indeed had not crossed those areas.
Grayson saw a few hardy birds making regular trips to the new ferns testing the berries for ripeness or flavor. This was shocking as it hadn't been much more than a month since Grayson had planted the things. An inkling of worry started to enter his awareness. Maybe this plant was a little too good at living in these conditions.
Thinking there was nothing for it. Grayson decided to at least let the birds get a decent meal for a while as he tried other options that could live competitively with these super ferns. Life was hard down here. The land was so close to dead. A few weeks of tolerable temperatures would result in massive blooms of green like rain on a dry desert could cover it in wildflowers.
Any available source of nutrition was quickly capitalized on by every creature that could reach it. Grayson was tracking animals that seemed to have taken to hibernating from the Sun for most of the day and only coming out for sustenance during dawn and dusk. He was happy to see them adapting their behavior. They might live long enough to be a part of the new evolutionary explosion coming.
That behavior got Grayson thinking. He started designing a broad leaved plant that was highly reflective on most of it's surface and thrived on the waste of animals. Maybe he could grow reflective cover plants that would have a significant temperature difference beneath them to cater to these siesta behaviors. Could these work as salt water loving lily pads as well? It was worth a shot.
Grayson woke the next morning to a mild temperature of 95F degrees and decided to take a walk along the shore. Historically this would be a gentle stroll along a beach, but the shore these days was a rough hike along the upper reaches of cliffs. Ocean levels, Grayson had learned in school, were 30+ meters higher than they were in the 21st century.
While hiking along, exploring his surroundings more, Grayson happened to look out to one of the nearby islands. The Galapagos were a good sized archipelago of islands, after all. He noticed quite a lot of green on the next island over. Curious, Grayson tuned up his vision to apply a magnified view from the Ring superimposed and turned to overlay his natural vision. Sometimes it was really cool to have technological super powers.
The view he got took him aback a little bit. He was seeing enormous ferns, covered in yellow berries. His ferns. They had already been spread to a nearby island. Probably the work of birds. This was amazingly fast growth.
Looking down into the sea, Grayson could also make out tall white structures growing up from the ancient beach. There were abundant fish exploring this new fast growing reef already. Every so often a large fish would brush up against the chalky kelp and it would snap off and sink to the sea floor. When this happened a second break would occur at the very top of the kelp. Small clusters of air filled sacs would detach and float away on the ocean current.
"I don't remember designing a feature like that," Grayson exclaimed. "Egg, how did the chalk kelp already develop a mutation?"
Egg surmised, "it seems that some of the highly adaptive nature of your immune cells has been contributed to your designs, Sir. I am unsure if this was intentional. It's as if everything you currently have growing is made up entirely of stem cells. They are adapting in days to the conditions of their surroundings."
"That seems like a major issue to me." Grayson worried. "Should I call my parents yet?"
"I think this may qualify as a condition that would warrant that." Egg informed.