《The Settlers of the Stars》


 Prologue

    ¡°G¡¯day. I¡¯m Keegan O¡¯Mali. Welcome to the O¡¯Mali report.¡± said the Australian reporter. ¡°I¡¯m here in the studio with Dr. Bart Kwan, head of the Celestial Survey Group. Thanks for coming.¡±


    ¡°It¡¯s my pleasure Keegan.¡± said the other man. The two were both a good bit older than what someone a few centuries earlier would have assumed. Keegan was in his sixties and Bart was in his eighties. Both, however, looked like they were in their low thirties.


    ¡°So rumor has it that the CSG is planning on getting into space colonization.¡±


    ¡°That is essentially true. We are working with a group of colonists with a scientific interest to explore a star system that has been of great interest to science, but little interest to colonists.¡±


    ¡°And what can you tell us about this system?¡± the host asked.


    ¡°Well, the Trappist One star System was discovered over two hundred and fifty years ago. The sun is a small red dwarf, 40.66 light-years away, and all of the planets are likely tidally locked.¡±


    ¡°I can see why no one would want to colonize it. Too far away, weak sun with a strange spectrum, and the planets don¡¯t even rotate, so they will always face the same way, which mostly rules out any kind of habitable world we are used to.¡±


    ¡°Yes, but the system also has several features which make it a very valuable source of scientific data. The first is that it has seven roughly earth sized planets, from just over the surface gravity of Earth to around six tenths the gravity of earth, making every one of them in the proper range for long term human habitation without the need for hyper-gravity or hypo-gravity treatment like on Mars. Several of these worlds are also in or near the habitable range of the star, so, while their year will be less than a week, they could have liquid water on their surface.¡±


    ¡°Which is extremely important for colonization.¡±


    ¡°And for life in general. Without liquid water you can¡¯t really live on the surface, and, as far as we know, there¡¯s no chance for life to exist there. The most you will have is a few extinct lifeforms from when there was water, like we found on Mars.¡±


    ¡°And your group is helping to fund a ship to there.¡±


    ¡°Exactly. Normally a ship to such a remote area would only be a survey ship. A group of scientists or a probe would be sent out at a good percentage of the speed of light and survey the system, sending the data back. We would then, if we found a good candidate, send a group of colony ships out there. We have currently sent probes or sleeper ships of scientists out to every star system within ten parsecs, over three hundred of them. But Trappist is about twelve and a half parsecs away, which means that there are still over two hundred star systems until it would normally get a probe. We think we can get a group of colonists there faster than a probe would get there under normal situations.¡±


    ¡°Why not just send your own probe? It would be cheaper and would arrive faster. Some of the newer probes can almost reach 60 thousand kps, about 20% of light speed. According to your press release, your colony ship will only travel at half of that.¡±


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    ¡°Yes, but you can¡¯t underestimate the amount of science that can be done by having people on the scene. Think of it this way. How much data did the first Mars rovers get about the red planet? Now how much did the first colonists gather once they were there? They were the ones that discovered the first true fossilized life. They were the ones that surveyed the planet. It was only because we had a proper industry there which could build the devices needed, and the fact that we had intelligent people their to run the industries and instruct the robots and use the devices, that we had detailed knowledge of the planet. The same thing happened when we first sent probes to the Centauri System, versus when the colonists first arrived at Proxima and started surveying. And now we can do that before a second mission would be able to return to the Trappist system.¡±


    ¡°So the CSG is funding the colony purely for the scientific data?¡±


    ¡°We are providing half of their funding, five billion credits. The other half will be provided by themselves and their members. They plan on doubling that amount before setting off, as they estimate that will be the minimum amount of funding they will need to get in order to succeed in their mission. In exchange for our funding, they have agreed to conduct certain surveys of every world in the system and send us back the data.¡±


    --


    Gordan McDowell turned off the broadcast. He had been hoping to retire to some space colony for over a century, but never found one he really liked. Most were simply people looking for more land. Nothing was necessarily wrong with that, but it tended to result in large numbers of low income, low skilled people moving into cramped cities that they didn¡¯t mind as they were an improvement, but which weren¡¯t up to the minimum standards he would want. He wasn¡¯t interested in being a rich executive in a penthouse in a some crowded city on another world.


    This one, however, was a scientific group that were colonizing the system rather than just leaving once they had the data they wanted. That meant that they would have decent living standards and would tend to build cities that maximized productivity and creativity rather than population density. And to make things even better, the System was so far beyond the systems that the rest of humanity had settled or were interested in that they would probably have centuries to develop their own civilization before the first colonists arrived. He would need to look into them.


    He, somewhat anachronistically, opened up the screen on his desk, revealing a keyboard. Few people on Earth still used keyboards and physical screens, much less mouses. But when he was younger, truly younger and not the fake youth of life extension technology, this was how computers functioned. Of course, now the computers were exponentially faster than they were at that time, but he was content with interfacing with them the old fashioned way rather than through VR or neural interface.


    He stayed up all night looking at the colony¡¯s proposal. Their mission statement, their colonial charter. All of it was available on their website. He even toured a version of their proposed ship in VR. Of course, it wasn¡¯t what the ship would look like exactly. They still hadn¡¯t purchased the ship, much less refit it to have all of the features they wanted. The basic concept was there, though. They would buy an old Hab cylinder, probably from a mining company, and add engines as well as all of the extra floors and equipment they would need to hold twenty thousand people and serve as a base from which they could expand once they were in another System.


    He wasn¡¯t really interested in being part of the crew on such a ship. He wanted to stop working and live off of his investments. Maybe he¡¯d even start a second family. It had been over a century since his wife had left him, and, though he had had many lovers since, none of them were the kind of woman he wanted to start a family with. That was one good thing about life extension. Anyone could have kids no longer how old they were, so no one was rushed to start a family. Birth control was the norm, usually by disconnecting or removing the organs. They could, of course, be replaced by cloned organs at any time, so there was little risk to doing so. Only accidental pregnancy was really stopped by such a procedure. Any hormone problems it might cause could be compensated for easily, often through cybernetics.


    In the part of their site that listed the different ways you could support the project, however, he found what he was looking for. When they left the Solar System they would leave behind half a billion credits in an account, earning interest. Forty years after their launch, that money would be used to purchase one of the probe ships that sent frozen scientists to other systems. They would then load all of their investors onboard, as well as all of the technical developments their group had gathered over the last forty years, and many of their members and would set off at around 11.5% the speed of light, arriving just ten years after the colony ship had. There the investors would receive properties roughly five times as valuable as what they donated to the group. For that reason, this ship would only be launched if they could raise at least a billion from private investors that wanted to go to the colony.


    The next morning he contacted his accountant. With all of the money he had saved over his life, there was no reason not to invest a few tens of millions into the colony. If the funding didn¡¯t work out, then he would only be out a little bit of money, but if it did he would have a fresh start on another world.

 Chapter 1: The Beginning

    The First Captain looked at the screen, the feed from the outside camera showing the moon beneath them. Earth was only a quarter million kilometers away, but in terms of cost of resources it might as well have been one of the Jovian moons. The entire settlement effort of his group was stressed for funding, so they couldn¡¯t afford to waste money getting supplies from Earth when lunar goods were 90% as good and less than half the cost.


    He was called the First Captain because of a peculiarity within the mission¡¯s charter. It held that, to prevent anyone from abusing any position of authority, all official positions which held power of decision over others were to be filled at random from a pool of all who were qualified and who wanted the position. Civilian endeavors were exempt from this, of course, but there was little in the way of civilian endeavors on a ship like this where every gram of matter was recycled the second it was no longer needed. A few service industries at most existed, and most of those had a parallel in the ship¡¯s crew, like how the ship had official hair dressers, but some people also cut hair when off duty.


    Furthermore, all people in positions of power must understand the roles of the people they were in power over so far as that power extended. A manager at a restaurant couldn¡¯t be trusted to oversee the kitchen unless they had worked in one, doing everything from cooking to washing dishes.


    For this reason, Captain Johanes currently had the secondary role of navigator. Any time he wasn¡¯t acting as Captain he was expected to plot one of a series of increasingly difficult paths for the ship with increasingly more restrictions on performance like maximum G forges experienced or maximum engine burn rate.


    They had know what the statistics of their ship would be for years, and those statistics had been worked into simulations which anyone on the ship could access. While he was currently at a physical control simulator, one could just as easily study in VR. Physical controls were needed, however, for the simple fact that they were easier to build and repair. The ship needed to be repaired and more ships would need to be built, if not here then at Trappist-1. And habitats which were built on planets would be based on the same technology which the ship used.


    This meant that the ship had to be built to be as robust as possible, using simple systems which could be made onboard if possible. Few components came in from off world and as the various factories were built onboard that number rapidly decreased. They would need to make everything themselves once they launched, after all. No human settlement could be reliant on shipments from other star systems, so they would have to learn to make do with only what they could make themselves. If they could only construct the primitive computer processors of the 1980s, then they would have to base their technology aboard the ship on those primitive processors. Luckily, though, they could currently make computer processors on par with the single board computers of the late 2020s, so they could at least run basic VR programs on their own hardware.


    In System colonies occasionally tried to rely on shipments for other worlds, of course. The data farms of Io, for example, ordered all of their processors and data storage from Mars, where the chips were more energy efficient than the Earth made models, thus further increasing their operating efficiency. That, however, only made the chips prohibitively expensive. The colony at Proxima Centauri, however, made everything on its own, other than a handful of luxury goods which were shipped in with the waves of colonists, and exported scientific data from the first extra-solar colony and the closest extra-solar location with alien life.


    People were the one thing that couldn¡¯t be sent as data. Any technology could be sent as an encrypted file, and factories opened in that location by agents or partners of the one that sent the data. The complete genome of all known alien lifeforms as well as all of the data on them and their environment, likewise could be transmitted via the massive transceiver array built in orbit of Sol, the various colonies, or their suns. Humans, on the other hand, weren¡¯t fully understood and therefore couldn¡¯t be fully transferred. Neural patterns could, of course, be recorded, and would be used to repair the memories of anyone that was brain damaged once the stem cells had replaced the damaged cells with new ones, but that only worked on an established mind. Each brain seemed to encode memories in a subtly different way which established itself in early childhood, and two different people, even identical twins, will have two different ways of encoding memories, like different fingerprints.


    This was known in the early development of the brain-machine interfaces. Attempts to transfer memories between identical twins almost always failed, and when they succeeded only vague details actually transferred. Similar attempts had been made once Mars was colonized, as they bucked tradition and allowed human cloning for reproductive purposes. Attempts to transfer a father or mother¡¯s memories into their genetically identical son or daughter were made, but they were even less successful than the experiments with twins. So the technology hit a wall which it couldn¡¯t move past, and true memory transfers never became possible. One day, perhaps, someone would discover a way to figure out exactly how each brain encoded memories, and that data could be used to make a clone who could accept the memories of the original, but that day was likely hundreds of years away. First Captain Johanes might even see it, as the travel time to the Trappist-1 system would take over four hundred years.


    Computers could, of course, interface with the brain in some ways, namely the various input and output circuits that were already built in. After all, an eye was virtually identical in function no matter who it came from, so, assuming you got the neural connections correct, you could transfer an eye from a donor to another person. Not that that was ever used in modern times. Tissue cloning was a well established medical field, and one could have replacement organs grown from their own cells or cloned cells at any point, then installed in the place of other tissue. It was the technology or interfacing the brain and computers via external senses that prosthetic limbs and VR technology relied on to give people realistic experiences with the technology in question.


    Johanes had a cable plugged into the back of his head. He wasn¡¯t, however, directly interfacing with the simulator. Instead, he was interfacing with a learning device called the Impressionator. While memory transfer was impossible, the brain was mapped out well enough that a concept could be directly impressed onto the brain as a whole, along with the most basic concepts associated with it. For example, a small child might have the concept of Addition impressed on their brain, then, after an adult explain the basic concept by ¡°adding¡± one toy to a group of two, the child might understand the concept well enough that questions like ¡°what is two plus two¡± might make sense to them. They will find themselves knowing the answer even if they don¡¯t know HOW they know the answer. It is this technology which gives everyone on board, and many people on the various colonies in the solar system, the ability to understand a large number of things on a practical level, but know none of the theory behind it and have no personal memories of the topic.


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    It wasn¡¯t widely used on other worlds because the people found the idea of knowing without knowing how you knew too unsettling, but on the Trappist Traveler it was a necessity because of their charter, at least as far as the senior staff were concerned. The others used it as well due to the prevailing idea that everyone should be competent at everything, even if you hated it. This meant that many of the crew were attempting to learn every job on the ship, and the number of people that were doing that was only increasing as they brought more people aboard.


    The ship could only hold some twenty thousand awake people, and before setting out most of them would be placed in cryonics, where all bodily functions would stop and they would technically be dead, but which would leave their body in a condition where it could be repaired even if they were frozen for a thousand years.


    Johanes¡¯s position of Captain was, of course, preliminary, as he wasn¡¯t yet qualified to do the job according to the group¡¯s charter, but that would be remedied before they launched. In fact, every position of power on the ship would need to have at least one qualified person who signed up for the role and was qualified to do it before they launched, and the general rules specified that at least three people be qualified and willing to fulfill every position on the ship for the sake of redundancy, and that every position of power be assigned for a random two to four year period. That is why he was called the First Captain, because no matter how much he might want to be captain, he would have at least two others who would also hold the position, taking turns with him while every officer underneath them was also randomly being replaced by at least two others.


    He finished programming the tricky maneuver between the two stars of Alpha Centauri and the slingshot around one of the planets and activated the simulation, watching the simulated ship follow the course out from between the two stars and on course for Proxima. He knew that the next one would have him do something similar, but be on a course to go into orbit of Proxima C, and decided to take a break before tackling it.


    He got up and made his way to the cafeteria. It was approximately 21:20 ship¡¯s time, and he knew that the last of the supper rush would be ending, but if he hurried he might be able to get a cup of coffee and slice of pie before they cleaned everything up and before he had to go back to his lessons. He only had three more to go, and once he finished he could move onto a more interesting field of study. Maybe he could try his hand at cloning meat in the grow lab. He hadn¡¯t learned to do that yet, but it sounded interesting.


    The ship had restaurants, of course. They got priority on all food that was produced, and the cafeteria got second priority, with everything that was left over going to the Food Preservation section so that it could be freeze dried. But they were in orbit, which meant that the Captain could spend his money on Luna, including shipping things in, so he went to the free cafeteria as much as he could rather than to the paid restaurants. And he preferred the media subscriptions that he could download all of his favorite shows from to eating out every day anyway. A ship like this didn¡¯t have a special dining area for the Captain or officers, after all, as that would just serve to separate the supervisors from the supervised. So he had the same choice as all the crew, even if he got paid five times what a standard recruit would.


    After getting his coffee and a slice of blueberry pie, the berries picked in one of the ship¡¯s parks, he found a seat across from another senior officer and sat down. He maneuvered around the tables as it felt natural to do, approaching slowly, getting close as he walked around them, then speeding up a bit as he walked away. When he got to the table she looked at him for a few seconds before realizing what he had done and reaching over to turn off the box on his waist. ¡°Sorry. Forgot to turn off my Impressionator. I was still thinking in terms of orbital mechanics.¡± She was eating ice cream, the cream for which was manufactured in a cloning facility from artificial mammory glands, which were grown from cow DNA the same way the meat from the hamburgers were grown. It was only slightly more difficult to grow a functioning gland compared to a semi-functional muscle.


    Dorian Clement was a tall woman from somewhere in the north eastern part of the United States district of Earth. She refused to tell anyone where exactly, or exactly how old she was. Thanks to life extension the last question didn¡¯t much matter. Like most of the adults onboard, the stem cell treatments and hormone injections kept her looking like she was in her early thirties. No one onboard looked to be more than forty, and that usually from hard living. Once they launched and the stress they were under greatly decreased most of the staff would look to be in their late twenties, with only a few in their mid thirties.


    He knew she was much older than that, however, as she had once told him that she had her first daughter at the age of sixty two. She had talked of at least four different children, and he knew she had grandchildren as well, though if her children waited like she did before having children of their own she could be well over a hundred years old, maybe even two hundred. But here in the late twenty third century that was the norm.


    ¡°So, I hear your youngest granddaughter is getting married. Some Martian?¡± he said, starting the conversation.


    She nodded. ¡°Yep. They¡¯ll be having the ceremony at a small temple on Deimos in nine days.¡± The Martians had created some sort of religion based around the veneration of the planet as a deity, one that they served by bringing life to it. The captain was sure that it was nonsense, but the religious rights of others had to be respected even if you didn¡¯t agree with their views.


    ¡°You didn¡¯t take off to go to the wedding?¡±


    She shrugged. ¡°I¡¯ve been to over three dozen weddings of my grandchildren, and over a dozen for the great grandkids. I¡¯ve had my fill of weddings.¡± She ate the last bite of icecream and pushed her bowl to the side. ¡°I do have something job related to talk about, though, Jerry.¡± She had been his first officer on three round trips to the Jovian moons so far, two hauling scientists and their families to Europa to study the primitive life there and one hauling frozen colonists to the mining cities of Ganymede. He had even recruited her for this mission because of that, even if he was currently assigned a different first officer, one that had served in the Space Forces and mostly hunted pirates in the asteroid belt. ¡°It¡¯s about the budget.¡±


    ¡°Since when were you interested in the budget?¡± he joked.


    She smirked. ¡°Well I was doing my Accountant training this morning and found out that Steve, the main guy in the accounting department, was getting a bit behind. So I volunteered to help him. Anyway, he was complaining about price increases and mentioned that hydrogen had went from 149 credits per ton to 157 credits per ton. That means that the fuel will cost us over 150 million more. And the budget is too tight to really handle it. That¡¯s why we haven¡¯t already filled up the tanks. They are already built, after all.¡±


    The ship would weigh something like half a million tons when it was finished and fully stocked, not counting fuel. The engine had an exhaust velocity of 15000 km/s. This meant that the ship would require over twenty seven megatons of hydrogen to get up to its cruising speed of 10% the speed of light and slow down from that speed when they got where they were going. They had little use for any excess fuel, as the ship¡¯s power came from solar panels while it was in orbit and would come from nuclear fission once they got out past Jupiter, where the sun was too dim to meet their needs. Fusion reactors that could fit into the ship and produce as much as the fission reactor just didn¡¯t exist yet, and fission power was far easier to repair. Besides, one didn¡¯t want to cut corners with something as important as fuel. That was why they hadn¡¯t recalculated the fuel reserves when the engineers promised a moderate increase in the exhaust velocity of a few percent. It was also why they were oversizing the tanks a bit and hauling thirty megatons instead. Better to arrive in the system with an extra megaton of fuel than enter the system with a ton too little. All of this meant that almost half of their budget would be taken up by fuel, though. And a price increase would only increase that percentage.


    ¡°You want me to call the vendor? They have an office in Shackleton City. I can try and negotiate for a bulk purchase rate.¡±


    ¡°You should probably leave that to the quartermaster. You might be good at handling people, but you are terrible with financial negotiations. I just thought you should know.¡± She got up to take the plastic dishes to the cleaning area. ¡°Well, I¡¯ll talk to you later. I¡¯m going to bed.¡±


    ¡°Good night, then. I have a few hours left to finish my navigation training.¡± He said goodbye and went back to his pie.

 Chapter 2: Fuel Problems

    Johanes knocked on the door of the quartermaster¡¯s office. ¡°Come in.¡± the man said, and he opened the door. Johanes walked in and the man quickly stood up and saluted. ¡°Captain¡± the man said while at attention.


    ¡°At ease.¡± Johanes responded. ¡°This isn¡¯t the military, and I was never in one. I just captained cargo and passenger ships.¡±


    ¡°Sorry, sir,¡± the man said, relaxing. ¡°Force of habit.¡± Jamal Dominiks was a former member of the Martian Planetary Militia, from Olympus City. It was there that he learned to be a ship¡¯s quartermaster, though he mostly worked ground side. While Mars wasn¡¯t at war, there was enough pirate and other criminal activity on the surface to keep them busy.


    ¡°That¡¯s fine.¡± said the captain. ¡°So, I hear that we¡¯re having a bit of an issue with fuel prices.¡±


    ¡°Yes, sir.¡± he said. ¡°The Jovian Mining Consortium has raised its prices on hydrogen deliveries to Luna three times since we arrived here. They just can¡¯t keep enough fuel in stock down there on the surface. The cities are turning it all into water as fast as they can bring it in, so they are trying to expand the atmo harvesters at Jupiter. That means buying new ships, since they can¡¯t make enough ships on their own, and sending them out to the gas giant, which costs a lot of money. If it wasn¡¯t for the fact that the new ships can just be tethered to returning fuel tankers with their more efficient engines the cost would be even higher from just the fuel used to send them out there.¡±


    Johanes nodded. ¡°Any chance we can work out some sort of bulk purchase deal with them? I¡¯m sure guaranteed sales will interest them.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ll be buying it anyway, but I can try. Maybe if we pay in advance, at least partially. That would let them get the ships they need faster and get us a discount. Might not be me that works out the deal, however.¡±


    ¡°Why? Isn¡¯t the quartermaster authorized to sign contracts? I might have to countersign such a large purchase, but¡­¡±


    ¡°Oh, it¡¯s not that. I actually only have a month left in this position. After that I¡¯ll be moving to one of the factories and making nuclear batteries.¡± One of the ways the ship was making money to buy the upgrades it needed was to purchase nuclear waste from Luna¡¯s many fission plants, after it had cooled down for a few years, of course, and separate the waste into its constituent elements. The material would then be turned into alpha, beta, or gamma voltaic devices, otherwise known as nuclear batteries. Because of how the reactors functioned, very little of the material had a half-life of more than three hundred years, so they could send more than 99% of the material back out to act as emergency power sources elsewhere in the solar system and only keeping the longest life ones for their own 400 year trip. Sure, the battery¡¯s output was low compared to modern batteries, even for the short half-life devices, but if there was a possibility that you would be stranded in space you would want a battery that produces a few hundred watts of power for decades in your emergency supplies. They were also in demand for the long range probes sent out to the kuiper belt and beyond to look for minerals. ¡°How about you, Captain? What¡¯s your next assignment?¡±


    ¡°Oh, I can¡¯t actually leave the role of captain.¡± he responded. ¡°There¡¯s only one more person on board that has captain experience, and he doesn¡¯t want it. He¡¯s too busy being a cargo shuttle pilot.¡±


    ¡°Do you mean General Fehim Theodoros?¡±


    ¡°So you know him?¡±


    ¡°I was on a mission with him. We were working with the Space Marines he was commanding and the Space Force to clear out a pirate asteroid colony out in the belt. He¡¯s great at strategy and managing his troops. Thanks to him we got out of there with only a handful of casualties.¡±


    ¡°And what happened to the Pirates?¡±


    ¡°Indentured to their own mines in place of their slaves, last I heard. The Space Force turned the base into a military refueling and resupply station, and have a prison complex to provide them with the materials they need to make resupply equipment.¡±


    ¡°That works, I guess.¡± he said. With lifespans being so long, prison sentences focused on rehabilitation and reintegration into society rather that sequestration. Still, the prisoners would probably be stuck there for decades before being released, due to the seriousness of their crimes. ¡°Assuming they actually have the fuel to sell.¡± Due to interplanetary convention, it was considered a crime to refuse to sell people starship fuel, as that would strand them in space, the only exceptions being in times of war and if the person was or was harboring a known fugitive. Due to that, even military outposts needed to be able to cover the fuel demands of civilian ships in the area.


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    ¡°No problem with that. Plenty of ice in the belt for hydrogen, and the pirates settled there because of the asteroid¡¯s large deposits of Thorium and Uranium.¡± The military mostly favored nuclear fission engines which accelerated hydrogen, despite their poor exhaust velocities, as they were much smaller and capable of producing several Gs of thrust if needed. And the one thing that separated the military from most civilians as far as engines were concerned was their love for high acceleration. Military ships almost always traveled long distances by burning at one gravity of acceleration in the beginning, flipping the ship over, and burning at one gravity of acceleration to decelerate. It was that fact which most limited their range.


    Two months later the captain was busy learning to grow a proper steak when he received a call from the bridge. A military fleet had arrived and was hailing them. The captain notified them that he was on his way, then left the clean area, removed his sterile equipment, and made his way to the bridge. Once there he answered the call. ¡°Sorry about the wait. I am Jeremiah Johanes, captain of the Trappist Traveler. How can I help you?¡±


    ¡°I¡¯m Captain Marcus Reilly of the USS Gettysburg. I was wondering if you have any fuel you can spare, as your ship is the largest one in orbit. We tried to refuel from the surface, but they say they are out of hydrogen. We were only able to refill our fissionables.¡±


    ¡°Yes, well, Luna has been experiencing fuel shortages of late. They had around five hundred kilotons a week ago, but then a company bought it all to turn into water. And that wouldn¡¯t be the first time. With the mass migration from Earth, the cities are just expanding so quickly that they are having a water shortage. Buying up all of the hydrogen to burn with the oxygen from their refineries is the fastest way to fix it. Unfortunately, though, our solution to that issue doesn¡¯t really help you. We signed a contract with the Jovian Mining Consortium to purchase hydrogen in advance for below market value, but the contract restricts us from reselling it.¡± It was actually well below market value. They had locked in a rate of one hundred and twenty five credits per ton, and the price on the general market had just increased to 162.


    ¡°Surely there¡¯s some way you can help us out.¡± said the other captain.


    ¡°Well, I do have one idea. How about this. I¡¯ll call you back in a few hours. I need to consult with my business attorney and quartermaster to see if it will work out, though.¡±


    The Space Force Captain nodded. ¡°Very well. I¡¯ll be waiting for your call.¡± He hung up.


    ¡°Strange that the US sent him out here without guaranteeing his fuel supply.¡± said one of the bridge crew. ¡°Shackleton is a US colony. They should know about the hydrogen shortage.¡± Judging by the woman¡¯s accent she was from the southern part of the United States.


    ¡°Unfortunately, that would be politics, and we don¡¯t get involved with politics.¡±


    ¡°Yes, sir.¡± she said. ¡°Would you like me to call the attorney and quartermaster for you?¡±


    ¡°Yes, please. Have them come to my office. We can talk about the situation there.¡±


    Five minutes later they sat in his office. Both of the other two were women, Jamal having been replaced a month ago. ¡°So, here¡¯s my plan.¡± the captain said after filling them in on the situation. ¡°What if we sell them the fuel that we bought before the contract? We can then just expand the contract to buy a bit more to replace it, and earn a bit more in the process.¡±


    The attorney nodded. ¡°That might be a possibility.¡± she said. ¡°I don¡¯t remember anywhere in the contract where it was specified that we couldn¡¯t use the fuel we already had as we pleased. I¡¯ll have to go over it again to make sure, though. Give me an hour to work with the search AI just to make sure.¡± The contract was over one hundred pages in length, with contingencies for just about everything that could happen, from micrometeorites damaging the shipment to the end user using the fuel to make chemical weapons, and everything in between. The use of AI in business and law had made it easier to write and read contracts, which had made them more and more complex over time. This bureaucracy meant that even something as simple as ¡°I¡¯ll pay you in advance for 30 megatons of hydrogen if you give me a discount¡± turned into a hundred page document full of stipulations on everything that could possibly happen, like a provision that it could be used for the construction of fission weapons if the system were invaded by aliens, even though humans were the only known sapient race. And it was that bureaucracy that was driving more people to other star systems, where things were much simpler because no one had time to spend several days studying contracts and minor laws.


    ¡°How about logistically?¡± the captain asked, turning to the quartermaster. ¡°Any problems transferring enough fuel to refill their entire fleet¡¯s hydrogen reserves?¡± He couldn¡¯t remember her name, but he seemed to remember that she used to manage supplies for a colony out in the oort cloud.


    ¡°No problems that I can see. It will mean some fuel loss, though. Assuming we connect everything properly, it shouldn¡¯t be more than a few hundred tons, maybe a kiloton, but the fuel hoses aren¡¯t as good at preserving our fuel reserves as the tanks are.¡± The tanks were triple walled, with pumps in each of the two gaps that would pump out and reliquify any hydrogen that leaked into their area as soon as the pressure in that area got above one pascal. This meant that they would lose less than a hundred kilos of fuel per day through leakage. Even at that, a four hundred and seven year trip would lose around 15 kilotons during the trip. The fuel lines didn¡¯t have the recovery system, which meant a loss of up to a ton of fuel per minute spent pumping. Their was simply no known way to reliable pump hydrogen with the extremely low losses the ship had when storing it.


    An hour and a half later the lawyer had gotten back to the captain. They could, indeed, sell the fuel from before the contract went into effect, though they might not be able to purchase replacement fuel at the decreased price. They had paid in advance for 30 megatons, for a total of 3.75 billion, and if they ran short on the amount of fuel they had because of this sell, they would have to buy more at market prices.


    Still, they had enough excess built into their contract to chance it. They had actually planned on sending the excess to a depot that the Trappist Colonization Group owned on the lunar surface anyway, the same one that all of the incoming cargo ships were currently using. It could be used in their cargo ship¡¯s fission engines as a reaction mass and to fuel the reactors at their surface bases under the contract. The captain had made sure that was possible before signing the contract, as they needed a way to store any extra fuel.


    Johanes contacted the military fleet the next time they had line of sight for direct communications and agreed to sell them up to 350 kilotons of fuel, almost all of the fuel that the ship had before they signed the contract. After a bit of price negotiation between the military quartermaster and the ship¡¯s quartermaster, they sold 327 kilotons of fuel for 220 per ton, earning a nice profit which would be cycled back into the budget.


    With the transfer complete around a day later, the military set course for Ceres, where they would no doubt have to buy more fuel before getting to work hunting down pirates.

 Chapter 3: Launch

    It took another year for all of the fuel shipments to arrive, and by that time all of the crew were fully trained for their roles. There were now two captains, as another member of the Colonization Group had completed his Captain training and come onboard. Theodoros had decided to join in as a captain as well, but he hadn¡¯t yet finished the Life Support branch of the training so he couldn¡¯t actually be assigned to Captain duties. It shouldn¡¯t take him more than a few years to finish his basic training, though.


    The ship had finished its upgrades a few months ago. Four 500 meter long engines had been attached to the outside of the ship, each attached at ninety degrees from each other around the 100 meter diameter of the ship. In between the engines were the fuel tanks, 300 megatons of raw liquid hydrogen from Jupiter, hauled to Luna 100 kilotons at a time with a fleet of tankers. The engines were fusion based, compressing a string of hydrogen at millions of degrees down their length so that it would come out the rear of the ship at over fifteen thousand kilometers per second. All of the extra tanks and engines made the ship far larger than it originally was, the ship now being over three kilometers across instead of the original one hundred meters and looking more like a pizza than a sausage, but over time the tanks would be emptied, then removed and recycled back into the metal they were made of.


    The ship itself was a non-rotating outer level which contained an inner 75 meter diameter section which rotated about four and a half times per minute, keeping a force of one standard Earth gravity on the outside ring of the interior. The interior, however, had ten three meter tall levels, each one decreasing the gravity by around eight percent until one got to the innermost level of the ship where the gravity was only 28% of normal. That layer was used for hydroponics, as plants didn¡¯t need much gravity to grow properly. Down the center of the ship ran a series of LED bulbs that reproduced the parts of the sun¡¯s spectrum that the plants most needed, and the area had higher than normal carbon dioxide levels, as that meant that the plants could grow faster.


    The layer below that was mostly factories. After all, while humans needed to oversee them, most factories functioned automatically, with humans only being needed to fix the issues that arose. And with a gravity comparable to Mars, many of the crew were already comfortable at that level.


    The rest of the ship was a mixture of all of the different offices and facilities that were necessary to run a ship of twenty thousand people. There were everything from stores to restaurants to office buildings. Most of the housing was on levels nine and ten, those being the two outermost levels and therefore the ones with the most similar gravity to Earth. Even if they had moved away from Earth, most humans still liked living at Earth-like gravity levels, and most ships functioned at that level out of habit. The fact that about half the crew came from Earth certainly helped with that.


    The outer shell of the ship was mostly storage, both in spare materials for the factories and in people. A frozen person only took up around two cubic meters of space, so the ship had taken on a group of almost two hundred thousand people over the last year, all of them having their neural pattern stored both in their pod and in the ship¡¯s computer. Around one hundred and sixty thousand of those people were refugees, having fled Earth because of political reasons, and seeking refuge in another star system. They had paid one thousand credits each, about what a starting position paid in one year, to be frozen and loaded onboard, earning the colony a mere one hundred and sixty million credits, but the funds had helped. They would be traveling as passengers. They would have no responsibilities onboard, and would simply wait out the journey on ice, only being woken up if an emergency occurred in which the ship needed their help. Anything which risked their life would be better handled with them being frozen, as that made them easier to move as well as made surgery and cloned replacement tissue easier to deal with. Not to mention that they wouldn¡¯t have to experience pain that way, as they would technically be dead.


    As Johanes had been the Captain for most of the ship¡¯s preparations, he had been given temporary command for the launch. In order to get up to their maximum speed of 10% of the speed of light they would be accelerating at 1% of Earth¡¯s gravity for almost ten years. At the end of the burn all of the empty external fuel tanks would be brought in for recycling and the ship would only be around 350 meters across, small enough that the forward shielding could cover it. In fact, all empty tanks would be moved forward until they could be recycled in order to help shield the rest of the tanks from impact.


    The ship had already left orbit of Luna, as the burn took too long to function as the kind of cinematic moment they wanted. They were currently drifting out of the system, out of the disk of the solar system. The Trappist System, after all, wasn¡¯t in that plane.


    When the time came the captain opened a broadcast to Earth, Luna, Mars, Ceres, and Ganymede, the main world of the Jovian system. They had notified the news crews ahead of time, and many news groups on each of those worlds were listening on the designated frequency for his speech. ¡°Today, on the seventeenth of July, 2268, the ship Trappist Traveler will begin its journey to the Trappist one star system. This will be the furthest that humans have ever traveled from the world of their origin, but it must be done, because humanity needs to know what is out there.


    If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    The system we head for is an anomaly, one of the coolest stars in the galaxy but with many worlds which might bear life, or might have at one point done so, as Mars once did. This trip will take us around four hundred and fifteen years, and it will take us several more years before we have built a transmitter powerful enough to send messages to of receive messages from Earth. But we will be building such a device, and using it we will send out all of the data we collect about the structure of that system and it worlds. You won¡¯t receive the signal until some time in 2723 at the earliest, but at that time humanity will have the answers to this mystery, and hopefully those clues will help it answer some mysteries of its own.


    But we won¡¯t just be conducting a survey of the system and leaving, like most science ships which carry people. We will be building a civilization, a forward base for humanity so that when the main wave of expansion reaches that point, perhaps some time in the early third millennium, there will be people out there to greet you, people with whom you can trade. An established society which can provide humanity everything they need to travel even further in search of even more answers to even more mysteries.¡±


    With that he closed the channel. Many people tried to contact the ship, from the hundreds of news agencies wanting to ask questions to the millions of fans wanting to wish them well. He ignored them. The ship¡¯s computer would record them all, of course, but they could be dealt with over the journey out of the system. For now, he had the ship angled to just off the location of the Trappist One star system, to where it would be in four hundred and fifteen years, and ordered the engines ignited. It took a few seconds for the superconducting magnets in the engines to properly condense and heat the small amount of hydrogen that was being fed to them, but soon the engine temperature started to increase and rapidly climb into the millions of degree range. They were off.


    Ships could still intercept them, of course. At their rate of acceleration almost any ship that was currently available on the market could plot an intercept course and meet them. It was unlikely that any would, though. None had any reason to do so. All of the passengers were loaded, as was all of the cargo. All relationship and family issues had been settled so that no one now had any stronger ties with the worlds of the Solar System than a simple video call might be needed for. And soon, even those video calls wouldn¡¯t even be possible, as they would be too far away from any inhabited world to have anything more than greatly delayed messages sent back and forth. Even now, it took several minutes for the messages to travel each way.


    There was no reason to wait on the bridge now. This maneuver would take years, after all. The crew would be left on the bridge, however, just in case something came up, being swapped out for another crew every eight hours until the maneuver was over. The bridge would then lie dormant except for a few course corrections for the next four hundred years, until they needed to return and start the deceleration burn.


    There were better ways to get up to speed than burning fuel, like solar sails or surfing the solar wind. The problem was that they required large amounts of hardware and provided very little thrust. To get a ship as heavy as this one up to even a small fraction of the speed of light using those methods would have required arrays of solar cells or magnetic fields hundreds of kilometers across. And they couldn¡¯t be certain that the system they were arriving at had the characteristics they needed to use them, nor would any solar winds have been mapped out. That meant that either they would have to send out an advanced ship to map these, which kind of defeated the purpose of going there and still wasn¡¯t a guarantee that they could stop, or get there through traditional means. Such means would also cost as much or more than the fuel and extra tanks, so when the ship was on a budget they weren¡¯t that attractive.


    Johanes returned to his office. While second Captain Yahya Wlodek was now officially in charge, the press would be expecting him to respond to their messages. And those questions would likely continue for several weeks if not months, until interest in the ship and its mission died down.


    They reached the Kuiper belt one hundred and ten days later and were through it thirty three days after that. They, of course, scanned everything they passed with enough resolution that they were barely able to keep up and send that information back to their sponsors. Some of the objects they passed contained large amounts of fairly rare materials, and even more had large amounts of fissile elements. There was no doubt in either captain¡¯s mind that soon after they left colonists would follow their course in order to claim those valuable rocks for themselves. The crew of the Trappist Traveler didn¡¯t care, though. They could do nothing with the asteroids, and, with thousands of kilometers separating even the closest ones, they weren¡¯t a threat to the ship.


    At a distance of about point one light years, only four years and five months into the journey, the signal from the solar system became too weak for full quality data transmissions and they had to start decreasing the quality. The signal was just too weak for the equipment onboard to pick it up reliably, so some of the bandwidth had to be used for error correction, and that fraction steadily increased until at less that half a lightyear away, near the end of the initial burn, the signal had to be cut out completely. From that point forward all scientific data they gathered would be saved to the ship¡¯s computer and transmitted once the Mega transceiver had been built in their target star system.


    By that point they had found it necessary to activate parts of the ship that were meant more for colonial operation than for shipboard operations; nurseries, natal and pre-natal medical facilities, and early childhood schools. Few people had brought children onboard with them, as that would require them to have full custody of the child with no possibility of the other parent(s) getting even partial custody in the future, or bringing all parents onboard, but after the launch many of the crew had chosen to start families. It had been assumed that the nearly universal use of long term birth control by the crew would delay that, that only a few children would be born during the journey. But now the ship had over a thousand children under ten years old and that number was rapidly increasing with every year that passed. And according to the ship¡¯s charter, they could make no rules limiting the reproductive rights of the crew.


    Johanes had thought about having a child of his own, of course, but he decided against it. Even if he could find a willing woman, any relationship would compromise his objectivity. He couldn¡¯t risk showing favoritism to one of the crew, and so he must remain single, content with only the occasional fling, usually in VR, where you never knew what the other person looked like or even if they were the type you were interested in. You only knew their avatar, and that was enough for the occasional rendezvous.

 Chapter 4: Arrival

    The deceleration burn took almost as long as the acceleration one, the difference only occurring because the system was currently moving slightly away from Sol, meaning they needed to lose slightly less speed than they had to gain in the beginning to match the velocity of the star system. They could have made the burn shorter by simply waiting and lighting the engines at a higher throttle level. The ship was now much lighter that when they first lit them back in Sol, so faster accelerations were now possible. But that would have left them with less time to scan the system ahead of time and affected the direction of gravity much more. So, instead, they executed the same burn they did before, with only a slight course correction planned for later once they figured out which world they should go into orbit of.


    Sensor data started pouring in and the technicians and scientists started pouring over it, hoping to be the first to find something significant. All of the captains were on the bridge, even though Johanes had lucked into being the one to be in charge at this point. Still, who was in charge would change several times between now and when they settled a planet, so that didn¡¯t matter so much.


    Over the last four hundred years the population of the ship had exploded. Most of the twenty thousand crew had at least one child, usually at least a few, so they now had over one hundred thousand additional people from when they set out. Johanes was one of the few that hadn¡¯t had a child, though the other two captains had several children each, The General having four and Wlodek having seven. This had resulted in most of the original crew now waiting out the journey in cryo while their descendants took over the various ship roles for a few decades before going into cryo themselves. Even the captains had spent a bit of time in cryo, with Johanes spending his last four times outside the captain roll in there.


    The cryo process was a bit slow, but not difficult. When you were placed into cryonics, you would be injected with a chemical that lowered the freezing point of all of the fluid in your cells as your brain was scanned to establish the pattern of your thoughts. Once the chemical had a chance to work its way throughout your body you would be sedated before your heart was stopped with an electrical pulse. After that your body temperature would be lowered to negative ten degrees Celsius and your frozen corpse, or ¡°corpsicle¡± as it was jokingly called, would be put in a pod along with a copy of your brain scan and medical record in case you needed to be awakened.


    Thawing out was only slightly more complicated. The doctors would print a copy of your DNA from your medical files and inject it into a human stem cell, or in some cases generic mammal stem cell that had its DNA destroyed. This cell would be allowed to divide until there were several thousand of them and then injected into your corpse once it was properly thawed. Damaged cells would be replaced by new ones that were genetically identical to your own, just biologically younger. Your heart would then be restarted and life support systems would be used if necessary until you were perfectly healthy but unconscious. At that point your brain would be reflashed with the copy of your brain that was on file. Strictly speaking, this was not necessary. You would still be you if you awoke without your brain being reflashed, but some of your memories might be faded or missing altogether. Any brain cells that died while you were frozen might have played a part in neural connections which held memories, so it order to make sure that no memories were lost you needed to have the new neurons be made to act like the ones they replaced, a process called ¡®neural flashing¡¯ or ¡®reflashing¡¯. After your brain was repaired the sedative and the cryofluids would be neutralized by other injections and you will be able to wake up after a few seconds.


    After awakening you might be a bit confused, as your brain¡¯s continuity of consciousness was disrupted similar to if you got passed-out drunk, but due to the reflashing you will return to the way you were in a few hours to a few days, the exact length of time being roughly proportional to the amount of time spent in cryosleep. Most crew had been through the procedure dozens of times and the worst thing that happened was that one woman forgot that she had a daughter on Earth for a few days after waking up, those memories having already been weakened by not seeing her for over 300 years.


    At the appropriate time the captain ordered that the ship be turned around so that the thrusters faced the new star system, after which the ship started its deceleration. All of the spare metals they had had been made into shielding which was placed at the rear of the ship. This plating covered everything except the nozzles of the thrusters, and anything that made their way into them would likely be vaporized before it could do any real damage. The shielding wasn¡¯t as good a the forward shielding the ship used while traveling through the stars, but it didn¡¯t have to be. While the background debris would be greater within a start system, by the time they got into one they would only have lost most of their speed, especially considering that the system was significantly smaller than the Sol System and therefore they would have much longer to decelerate.


    At this distance they could tell that the system seemed to have a large number of rocky objects from a distance of approximately 0.2 to 0.1 AU from the sun. Whether it should be considered this system¡¯s oort cloud of kuiper belt was debatable, but it surrounded the entire system in the plane of its ecliptic. The ship was coming in from outside that plane, so it didn¡¯t risk hitting any of them.


    Long range scans of the planets confirmed what was already known. The system contained seven worlds, each about the size of Earth. All were tidally locked to the star, but that was already the most likely case. For the sake of tradition they would be referred to by the designations Earth astronomers had given them almost seven hundred years ago, but once they had colonists on them they would likely receive proper names. One of the crew suggested naming the worlds something with the first letter the same as the designation, but it was decided that would be a matter for the colonies to decide once they were formed.


    This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.


    The innermost planet, planet B, had almost no atmosphere and likely would only be valuable for its mineral resources, much like Mercury and its mines in the solar system. The only trace of an atmosphere was also Mercury, in this case the element, at around 100 pascals of pressure. This greatly stabilized the temperature at a range of 115c to 135c as the liquid mercury pools on the surface evaporated to redistribute their heat on the cold side of the planet. There were only traces of hydrogen even on the cold side of the planet, so any significant quantities of water was unlikely. It was a large planet, however, with 111.6% Earth¡¯s size and 110.2% of its gravity.


    The next planet, C, had only nitrogen and argon with traces of oxygen and water vapor. The oxygen was probably left over from when the hydrogen had been blasted off of its surface by the sun. The atmospheric pressure was only about a tenth of Earth¡¯s, but the presence of those gasses in the atmosphere meant that one could easily make a breathable atmosphere within a habitat on the planet. The planet was only cool enough to consider that on the cold side, where the cold spot got down to around thirty seven Celsius. The average temperature swung by about thirty degrees from the average of sixty seven, with a high of ninety eight at the hot spot. The lack of any significant quantities of water on its surface, however, meant that, outside of massive condenser units, at most, it could support a few hundred thousand people from the small ponds at the colder parts of the planet, much like Shackleton on the moon with its small deposits hidden at the bottom of a crater. It was also larger than Earth, but not quite as large as Planet B, at 109.7% the size and only 108.6% the surface gravity.


    Planet D was much better. It had Nitrogen, and Argon in similar amounts, along with half a percent of oxygen and around 0.1% methane at about two atmospheres of pressure. The temperature range was much better as well, at an average of 13.1 degrees, making it at the right level for human habitation. While the temperature had about a fifty degree variance either way, from -40 at the cold spot to 55 on the hot spot, it was no worse than Earth¡¯s Antarctic and Sahara desert. There was also a moderate ocean on the cold side along with an ice cap, and several seas, lakes, and streams which got smaller as one neared the hot spot. With a surface gravity approximately 62.4% that of Earth and size of 77%, it was small and the gravity was a bit light, but the almost ideal temperature range caused by the currents in the upper atmosphere meant that it might one day support most of the system¡¯s inhabitants.


    Planet E was also fairly nice. Its sizes and gravity were much closer to Earth¡¯s, at 92% and 81.7% respectively, but the temperature range was too low. The half-pressure atmosphere of nitrogen and trace carbon dioxide meant that the planet had much larger temperature swings than planet D, at about eighty degrees on either side of the median of negative twenty two. This meant that its hot spot was actually hotter than D¡¯s at 58 degrees, and its cold spot was much colder at -100 or slightly less. It had slightly more water than D, though, with most of the cold side being covered completely in ice and the ice extending over a thousand kilometers into the sunlit areas before it melted to produce massive cold wetlands, seas and lakes. Around 40-50 degrees off of the hotspot the area was an almost ideal temperature in the twenties range, and it was here that a large number of rivers existed and most likely here that humans would focus on their settlement.


    Planet F was only preferable for its size and gravity, at 104.5% and 95.1% of Earth¡¯s. It had an atmosphere of 88% nitrogen, 11% CO2 and 1% argon at 80% of Earth standard, which meant that its atmosphere was the closest to Earth¡¯s. Those that wanted to look into terraforming the planet, however, soon came to the conclusion that it wouldn¡¯t make sense to do so. The planet was far too cold, and its temperature variation of only around 60 degrees from the average of -55.5 meant that even at the hotspot the temperature only got to four point three degrees. Furthermore, their were only a few minor islands showing through the ocean which covered the surface, and the only one close enough to the hot spot to live on was a 3 square kilometer area with a near constant temperature of one degree. It might, at best, hold a few cold weather plants and animals. That, combined with the fact that if the CO2 were converted to O2 to make the air breathable they would need to dump massive amounts of other greenhouse gasses into the air to bring the temperature back up above freezing meant that any ideas about terraforming would have to wait until a point in the future where they had access to far stronger greenhouse gasses than CO2. Maybe something a million or more times stronger would be necessary, if they wanted the atmosphere to remain mostly free of the gas.


    Planet G was colder still. It was slightly larger than F, at 1.129 times Earth¡¯s size and 1.035 times Earth¡¯s gravity, but it had an average temperature of only -76. The planet¡¯s thick atmosphere of nitrogen and hydrocarbons at over three times Earth¡¯s atmospheric pressure meant that the temperature only varied by around 35 degrees from the average, at -42 at the hot spot and -112 at the cold spot. There was considerable water on the surface, with it being an ice planet like F. Some crew suggested that there might be subsurface liquid water due to tidal heating and/or radioactive mineral deposits, like on Europa, but until the ship could send out a survey crew to look for such they wouldn¡¯t know.


    Planet H was near the edge of the system. It had a thick atmosphere of 99% hydrocarbons and 1% nitrogen, at over 22 atmospheres of pressure on the surface. It was much smaller than G at 77.5% the size and 57% the gravity of Earth, and appeared to be little more than a white ball of ice when the clouds of methane parted enough to allow a glimpse of the surface. There was almost no variation in temperature from the average of -101.5, with a temperature of -103 at the cold spot and -99.7 at the hot spot. The movement of the liquid and gaseous forms of methane acted as a heat pump to move the heat from where it evaporated in the hot areas to where in condensed in the cold areas. The ice was made of some hydrocarbons, but mostly water and carbon dioxide. There was no way to know how deep the surface was below the ice, so this world would, at most, serve as a hydrogen and water source for the inner planets.


    With the information gathered, the people began to debate on whether D or E should be the first settlement of humanity in the system. Johanes believed that both should be settled at the same time. It wouldn¡¯t make sense to immediately land on a planet immediately, after all. They would need to sit in the outer belt for a few years, manufacturing prefabricated buildings and space elevators for all seven planets. They could then place elevators at the cold spots of the hot planets, the hot spots of the cold planets, and the colony location of the temperate ones where people might actually want to live. Cargo ships would also need to be made so that the various worlds could trade with each other. They were quite close to each other, enough so that communication lag between worlds would be less than a minute even at the worst position of the planets, so communication wouldn¡¯t be difficult. After all, this system was more like a gas giant system than the Sol system in terms of distances.

 Chapter 5: Building a New Home

    The first several months after entering the system were spent searching for resources. The various cargo shuttles were taken out of storage, refueled, and fully checked over before being sent around the entire debris belt looking for valuable minerals. The colony ship went into orbit of the sun and deployed its solar panels, bringing in all of the now empty fuel tanks and processing them into the hulls of new ships. As the ship had massive amounts of excess steel, aluminum, and titanium from recycling all of the extra fuel tanks and armor plating, the new hulls would be made out of a material called Alumix, a titanium aluminum alloy that was invented on Luna but which never saw widespread use due to the difficulty of working with it. The crew had gotten used to using it, however, as it could be made in large quantities and filled many roles that other metals couldn¡¯t.


    After the journey into the system many engineers of numerous fields had been woken up so that they could design a new ship. With all of planets being around the same size, and so close to one another, they didn¡¯t have to design a very impressive ship. It only took a week to get finalized designs for the factories to start on, one which could travel between the various worlds and haul over one hundred tons of cargo with them.


    The new ship had an open cycle nuclear engine. While they couldn¡¯t be used on the surfaces of planets due to the radiation risk they would put any people in the area under, including in the future, carrying only half their mass in fuel would mean that they could make it to any other planet in the system in less than four days regardless of how poorly the planets were positioned. Their engine¡¯s exhaust velocity was only a mere 50 kilometers per second, but since all they would be doing is moving cargo between space elevators they didn¡¯t need to have the best performance. Stock engine designs from the Sol system could just be used as is, so no new technology needed to be designed. The survey ships which would be sent to the planet surfaces would be closed cycle, with much lower exhaust velocities, but they had old ships for that purpose and could swap out the engines in some of the new ships if need be.


    Eventually the survey ships found a small dwarf planet in the debris belt that was 1600 kilometers across, making it larger than Ceres in the Sol asteroid belt. While it didn¡¯t have the most or easiest to access minerals in the belt, it had a little bit of everything, so it was chosen to be the first manufacturing base in the system.


    A bowl shaped spinning habitat was built on the surface to simulate the gravity of Earth, with the bowl shape being necessary to adjust the direction of gravity along its surface. Four mag-lev train lines fanned out from the central base and went to all of the best nearby deposits. After six months the base had around five thousand inhabitants and a copy of every piece of manufacturing equipment on the colony ship. Drones went out to haul in resources, which were then brought into the colony and turned into equipment from prefabricated buildings and manufacturing equipment to space elevators.


    With over three hundred thousand people in cryonics there was no shortage of people to man the factories and refineries. Soon the colony had built four more rotating bowls and increased their population to twenty two thousand, outnumbering the number of crew that were operating on the ship.


    They also set up the Transceiver just outside the colony where all of the data could be sent back to Sol. The asteroid did rotate a bit, so more transceivers would need to be built around the asteroid to guarantee that at least one could pick up any transmission sent from Earth, but for now they could broadcast information back to Sol only part of the time.


    A few weeks after it was complete, on the first anniversary of their entrance into this system, the captains came together to give speeches about how this was a momentous occasion. Their speeches would be transmitted back to Earth along with all of the scientific data the colonists had gathered, and the colonists would continue to add to the data as they lived in this system and made more discoveries about it.


    Once the transmitter was up and sending all of their data back unencrypted to the solar system, everyone started focusing on the space elevators. By the time the signal got back to the Solar System it would be spread across the entire system, including most of the Kuiper belt colonies. After all, even the best lasers spread out some as it traveled. The data was also meant to be completely open to the public, so there was no point trying to hide the signal from others.


    It only took one month before the first space elevator was built and ready to be installed. The lower section was taken by most of the older cargo ships, who could safely land on planets, to a spot on the equator near the night/day line of planet D. Other, newer ships brought the parts for the upper section, including a rotating space habitat to the orbit and started its construction. They didn¡¯t need to build much to make it able to accept a cable connection with the surface, and soon they had finished the core, non-rotating part and started on the rotating ring that attached to the top of it. Any deviation from the equator in its placement would cause it to be unstable at the top as the cable tried to pull it into an impossible to follow orbit. When they were done with the station, it would be one hundred meters in diameter and the cars from the surface would be transferred into its center, where they would then be routed to their proper level for unloading. The non-rotating part would have storage for various cars, both pressurized for humans and non-pressurized for cargo.


    The bottom part wasn¡¯t quiet as complicated, but it would take longer as the build crews there were operating at planetary gravity and therefore had more severe mass restrictions on what they could move. The crew that were sent down took a few moments to celebrate being the first humans to step foot on this planet, the possible main world of the system, before they got started. It was a comfortable fifteen degrees down here, so they only needed to wear pressure helmets and suits to function there. They dug down to the rock below using automated bulldozers and set the eight pylons into the rock. Each pylon was an Alumix tower, built to hold the carbon nanotube wires while being anchored deep underground. For that reason they were very careful to make sure everything was square, even setting a concrete slab around the ground area once the hole had been filled with regolith. They then built the auxiliary building and the tracks for moving cars onto and off of the cable.


    Once the bottom station had been built a cable was dropped down from orbit and anchored in the top of the first tower. Seven more cables were then sent down in order and attached in their correct places on the tops of the two towers. No human was allowed to touch them due to how dangerous a stray strand of nanotube wire would be to the human, but VR piloted robots were almost as good, and they had hands made of super dense titanium-osmium alloy which the nanotube wires could barely scratch.


    Now that the elevator was complete they needed to test it. The ground crew loaded a pressurized car onto the line and sent it climbing to the station in orbit before they began to clean up the sight. After all, they had six more of these to install, and couldn¡¯t waste time on this planet, even if most of them would move here once the colony had been established.


    Six hours after the car had been sent up, it returned to the surface down the other line with a bottle of wine inside. The people on the surface and in orbit each threw a party to celebrate, and the next morning, as judged by standard ship time and not the unmoving sun, those on the ground returned to the Trappist Traveler to refuel and pick up another elevator.


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    The next elevator worked much like the last. A spot on planet E was picked out on the equator but slightly closer to the hot spot, where the temperature averaged twenty degrees. There was a large lake nearby, where the spot on D only had a moderate sized river. There the two groups repeated their action with even more speed, having now gone through the process once and being more familiar with it. Once both of the elevators were finished along with both of their space stations and a dozen cars each of the cargo and passenger type were loaded into the storage area, about a year after the message to Sol, the ship started asking for volunteers to live on the station. It was currently only big enough for five hundred people to live on it, but they had all of the factory and refining equipment the colonist ship had, so once they had enough people they could start colonizing the surface.


    The experts in the ship¡¯s Personnel division created a list of which roles would be most necessary on the space stations and the best qualified one thousand people were split into two equal sized groups. Captain Wlodek volunteered to be the captain of the Planet D space station, as he believed that to be the best planet, while Captain Theodoros volunteered to act as the captain of Planet E. Both men took their families with them. They had formed a rivalry over the last sixty or so years, and the two good colonization candidates gave them an opportunity to continue trying to outdo each other. As it seemed to be what was best for the colonies Johanes didn¡¯t object and on the second anniversary of the ship¡¯s entrance into the System the two ships set off for the two planets. They timed their arrivals to be at the same time, and one week after the anniversary the two planets received their first official colonists on their surfaces.


    With the three colonies now being able to trade with each other, all fifty of the new generation of ships were split up between the three locations, the two planets getting fifteen each and the asteroid colony getting twenty. Without any ships left, the Trappist Traveler spent the next three months building another seventy five. After all, there were five more worlds and giving each of them the same thing in the beginning only made sense. When the ships were finished they loaded up with the parts for the other elevators and set out to the other planets.


    First was planet F. As the one landmass in the unfrozen area wasn¡¯t on the equator a platform had been designed to act as the beginnings of a floating city. The ships that had gone down to the surface had to land on the island then construct a floating platform off the coast along with several boats. Once they were finished with both of those, the island already having the towers at its center, they used the boats to haul it to an equatorial position in the exact center of the hotspot and anchor it there. The ocean floor was over fifty kilometers deep at that location, and there appeared to be a vast ocean under the ice sheet, one which might hold life, but that would be a matter for the biologists one they were finished setting up the elevator.


    With the platform anchored to the ocean floor, attached to the ground via robotics subs which carried concrete down their with them, the wires were sent down. Building the platform had taken so long that the station was already complete, so after anchoring the two together and verifying that the elevators worked properly, everyone decided to take a break.


    While the five hundred colonists were selected for the new colony the two groups were given a vacation. Most of them chose to tour the four colonies, hoping to decide which one they would settle on once they were finished building elevators. The colonists suggested that Johanes be put in charge of Planet F¡¯s space station, as the other two captains had been given a planet of their own, but Johanes turned them down. For now, the ship would remain his home. He wanted to finish the colonization of the various worlds before he settled down anywhere.


    The first world soon picked a name. The original asteroid base chose the name of Hermes, the Greek messenger deity, as they were overseeing the transceiver that communicated with Sol. This got the other three worlds thinking about their own names.


    Once Planet F was settled and given its fifteen ships, with First Officer Dorian Clement acting as its Captain, the ship was ready to place elevators on the other worlds. Choosing their locations would be easy, though. The crew couldn¡¯t be expected to work outside when the temperature was far to hot or cold, so robots were sent down and the humans only traveled to the surface so that they could pilot the ship and guarantee that they kept a clean signal with the humanoid robots they were piloting. On B and C the elevators were placed at the cold spots, and on G and H the elevator would be built at the hot spots.


    It was suggested that they also place one at the cold spot of H so that they could build a data center there and maximize their power efficiency, but Johanes rejected the idea. If they gave H, arguably the worst planet, a second elevator, all of the worlds would want one, including the three main population centers. All three were building pressurized city areas on the surface, with F expanding the platform to build these locations. This made its expansion much slower, but meant that they didn¡¯t need to worry about soil conditions or elevation changes when building.


    By the end of year five, most of the people had been brought out of cryonics, and only a few thousand were left. About five percent of people had moved to Planet F, about fifty percent had moved to Planet D, and about forty three percent had moved to Planet E. The others were mostly people who remained behind at Hermes or had chosen to prospect or conduct research on one of the other worlds. Even the initial five hundred for each world had moved around, with H only having 379 people and B having only 57. All worlds, however well populated, had all of the manufacturing equipment of the Trappist Traveler, and many had even built specialized equipment to make even more advanced technology that the ship hadn¡¯t used.


    The last of the raw materials had been given to whichever world seemed to need them the most and all but a few kilotons of hydrogen fuel had been removed from the ship to fuel the cargo ships which now traveled around the system. Only a few hundred crew remained behind and when they were done thawing out the last of the colonists they would be leaving as well. The ship would need to be parked somewhere so that it could be preserved as a museum for people to visit. For that purpose, Hermes had dug out a pit which the ship could land in. All of their mining for the last year had focused on the area of the future museum and when they were finished they covered the walls and floors in reinforced concrete. After a month, all colonists had disembarked and the ship was running on a skeleton crew of only one hundred people.


    There had been talks of keeping a crew onboard, refueling, and launching for another promising system, with the ship becoming a gardener, seeding human life across the entire galaxy. That idea was tabled, however, because of its age and condition. Not that it wasn¡¯t space worthy, but it was over five hundred years old. Since it had been built, Sol had no doubt learned to build much better and more efficient ships. The opinion of most people was that the ship should become a museum and, in forty years, when they had received hundreds of years of tech upgrades from Sol, they could build a new ship that was even better. If, at that point, people wanted to head for another star system they could do so.


    The ship was landed in the museum area, burning at about four percent of earth¡¯s gravity against the world¡¯s only slightly greater gravity to minimize its speed. Soon it touched the bottom of the six hundred meter deep, seventy five meter radius pit and the ship was shut down, being placed on the backup power of a bank of nuclear batteries. They produced enough power to keep the internal batteries charged and spin the inner cylinder as long as you didn¡¯t try to accelerate too quickly, as well as kept the life support on.


    Johanes finally disembarked and went with a few dozen of his remaining crew to his new home of Freya. All of the worlds had been named after a deity or mythical figure whose name started with their letter designation. Freya, or planet F, was named after the Norse goddess of family. The Norse mythology had been chosen because the colonized area of the planet had a similar climate to the Norse area of Earth.


    Planet B had been named Beelzebub, due to it¡¯s extremely high heat and the hell imagery associated with that. Planet C had went a similar route, going with Greek instead of Judaic influence and naming their planets Cerberus. Planet D had likewise went with a Greek influenced name and chose Demeter, goddess of the Harvest, as they were hoping to be the breadbasket of the star system.


    Planet E had trouble choosing a name, as there weren¡¯t many major deities to choose from with a name starting in E, but eventually a characteristic of their society made one name stand out. Planet E had abandoned the idea of small, efficient housing like Planet D and the other worlds used, and instead promised people a higher quality of life if they moved there. This lead to them recruiting fewer people than Demeter, but the people they did recruit tended to be more skilled. These people were all having private domes built for them, but before they were finished they were being housed in domes which were larger, and therefore more expensive than the domes of Demeter, while having the same number of occupants. Planet E had invested all of the money it could raise into building automated factories and robots to do all of the labor of building new domes, and the speed at which they could make domes had just surpassed Demeter¡¯s rate even though the domes were larger and many contained grass or simple plants. For this reason they had named their world Euporie, after the Greek goddess of welfare and abundance.


    Planet G, with few names to choose from, picked Ganesha, the Hindu god of arts and science, as they were planning on devoting themselves to cultural and scientific development, especially in searching the frozen ocean for life.


    Planet H had chosen their name even before they colonized the world, but didn¡¯t make it official until after Demeter had chosen first. They were Hephaestus, as their only path forward was of scientific and technological development, using the massive data centers they were already constructing.

 Chapter Six: New Arrivals

    Gordan McDowell opened his eyes. The last thing he remembered was entering the cryonics facility and putting on the hospital outfit so that he could be frozen and sent to the waiting ship in orbit. It would carry another twenty thousand people, all of them investors or members of the project who had been left behind. The ship they would be loaded on would be small, barely a hundred kilotons not including fuel, and would travel just a bit faster than the Trappist Traveler at 11.5% of the speed of light. The Trappist Traveler had left the system forty years and eight months ago. The timing had been chosen due to that being the length of time it took light to reach the Solar System from Trappist One. Due to their slightly higher speed they would arrive only ten years after the other ship, giving the colonists enough time to make good on their promises to the investors.


    The colony¡¯s investments in the solar system had been used to purchase the ship they were on, the rest being left behind in case the colony needed anything from Earth. Those that still remained behind were able to get anything they needed for them, including people if the cost of sending a person was cheap enough. They had considered downloading all of the technology they could to take with them, and indeed had filled up the ship¡¯s computer with such files, but it was unlikely that it would be necessary. The solar system could broadcast all of the technology it had to the system whenever it wanted to, and by the time they arrived the technology would be four hundred years more advance than what they had instead of forty. Still, Earth might choose to wait to transmit until they received a signal from Trappist One, which would add an eighty one year, three month delay to the data, and in that case an extra forty years of technology would be useful.


    In the recent years Earth¡¯s policy seemed to be to expand its influence any way it could. It has even had some border skirmishes with the Jovian Mining Consortium, now a mega-corporation government in its own right, and some experts believed it would only be a matter of time before Solar War I began. So now was the perfect time to leave.


    ¡°Mister McDowell?¡± asked a woman¡¯s voice and he opened his eyes to look at her. He must have closed his eyes while remembering the past.


    ¡°Yes.¡± he said. ¡°Are you my nurse? Are you here to put me under for cryo freeze?¡±


    ¡°Actually, I¡¯m here to bring you out of cryofreeze. You have been frozen for three hundred and seventy five years.¡±


    Gordan felt dizzy and closed his eyes. ¡°So, I¡¯m in Trappist?¡±


    ¡°Yes, sir.¡± the woman said. ¡°You are at Hermes station. It¡¯s where the interstellar relay is located. Once you have recovered, we¡¯ll figure out where to send you.¡±


    ¡°My investments.¡± he said, trying to remember. He knew he was an investor, but couldn¡¯t remember how much. Millions? That sounded about right. Why couldn¡¯t he remember how much?


    ¡°You are listed as an investor, and as such were woken up before the colonists, but I don¡¯t have any other information. Once you have recovered you can talk with the Colony agent here and work out the details. We still use the Credit system here, where an entry level full time job earns you one thousand credits per year, so you should have been given an account with five times your investment in it. I just don¡¯t know the details.¡±


    Gordan tried to remember how much he had invested. After all, that determined his future in this system. Or was it about the money? Had he always been this greedy? ¡°Why don¡¯t I remember.¡±


    ¡°Oh, we had to flash your brain twice to get all of the memories to stick, but you should fully recover. Apparently, staying in cryo that long does a lot more damage to your memories than we knew when we left Sol.¡± Gordan nodded. He was tired and wanted to sleep. ¡°I¡¯ll let you rest now. Maybe when you wake up you¡¯ll have remembered most of the things you forgot.¡±


    Gordan¡¯s dreams were full of memories. Past lovers, children he had, his businesses and the advances they made in various technologies. That time he ran for office in the Canadian government. They all came flooding back to him, jumbled together like one big twisted ball of string. Upon waking he spent a few minutes sorting the memories out. Now he remembered who he was. His memories were in order now, and he could name all of his children and most of his lovers. The others would come back to him in time.


    He remembered all of his businesses and how they had worked. He was certain that he could build a business here as well. Now that he remembered the twenty million credits he had given the colony before its launch, he knew that he was entitled to one hundred million to rebuild here. What exactly that could buy, he wasn¡¯t sure. Even with the Credit system dictating how much people needed to be paid there were still variations in the standard of living. The one thousand credits a basic employee might earn in one city might earn him a shack and only the most basic food, while in another he could eat at decent restaurants a few times a week and had some creature comforts in his moderately sized apartment. He would need to learn the details of the economy in order to earn money by making what was in demand.


    He spent an extra twelve hours resting in his room, then got up and signed out. He was given a basic jumpsuit, communication device, and a pressure suit and told to go to the Colonization center to collect the details of his bank account so that he could have money. Most of the people that came here would be members of the group that launched the colony, and therefore donated the contents of their bank accounts to the colony group before being frozen. After all, they couldn¡¯t take it with them. The records of how much they donated was sent along with them and when they arrived here they were given a bank account with five times that amount in it, the funds coming from the colony¡¯s sales to civilians.


    Gordan, on the other hand, had given his company to one of his children along with splitting all of his possessions between them. He knew that the transfer might not work, so he didn¡¯t try to take more than his initial investment with him. If he could do it over, though, given what he knows now, that it would work, he would donate more to them. His children didn¡¯t need all of the shares of his company to still have a controlling interest, after all, and with enough starting capital he could build the largest company in the entire system.


    He stood in line for an hour before his name was called. It had been a while since he had to do that, as his assistant made sure that he didn¡¯t have to, so it was an interesting experience.


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    ¡°Name?¡± asked the banking woman in front of him.


    ¡°Gordan McDowell. I¡¯m an investor.¡±


    She nodded and looked him up. ¡°Ah yes, Mr. McDowell. Here you are. If you wouldn¡¯t mind placing the cap on your head.¡± she pointed to a helmet-like device on a stand on the counter. ¡°It will verify your brain pattern and give you access to your account.¡±


    He put it on and after a few seconds the helmet beeped.


    ¡°Good.¡± she said as he took it off and put it back on the stand. ¡°You certainly were an investor. One of the largest ones, I¡¯d wager.¡± She handed him a bracelet. ¡°This bracelet is tied to your account. For purchases of up to one hundred credits, it only requires scanning. For purchases of up to one thousand you will need to enter your security code. Anything over that requires biometric verification, but all of your data is already tied to the account so you can begin making purchases as soon as you have set a security code.¡±


    She held out a number pad and he typed in the six digit code he had used on earth.


    ¡°Thank you for investing in the colony, Mr. McDowell.¡± she said. ¡°You are now ready to go.¡± She called the next person and he stepped out of line.


    He scanned his bracelet with his phone and when the banking app on it asked for biometric identification he scanned his iris. The number ¡°100,000,000Cr¡± appeared on screen. Exactly five times the twenty million Credits he had donated on Earth to become an investor. Now that his finances were in order, he needed to do some shopping then find a new home.


    The first thing he did was go shopping. He purchased several new suits and placed them in a suitcase along with the free pressure suit and jumpsuit he had been given. He then sought to do something about his technology situation. While he was being measured for his suit the salesman mention a type of implant that could let you carry your phone inside of you, making it impossible to steal without extreme crime and violence. The fact that it could contact the security on any ship or settled world meant that it would be difficult to seize you and do that, even if the people were inclined to commit such a crime. The crime rate in this system was quite low by Solar System standards, likely because everyone lived in recorded areas at all times, but also helped by the fact that your body¡¯s sensors could be recorded using these implants, making every person a possible security camera.


    The implant in question had been invented on Hephaestus, the coldest world in the system but the one that was most concerned about inventing new technology. The implant used the interface technology from prosthetics, called a Neuro-comp, as it was a computer that interfaced with the brain. They had expanded its function so that it could do anything a cellular phone could do while directly interfacing with your brain rather than interfacing through a helmet using magnetic fields.


    The technology had actually been developed on Earth around a decade after they left the system, but was never more than a fad due to strong anti-transhumanist sentiments. By the time Gordan had boarded the ship, the only people who still had them were people who had bought them during the fad and never had them removed.


    In this System, however, the people had no prejudice against body modification through technology, so the fad had grown until there were many brands of MindPhones, as the advertisements called them, constantly competing for market share. He had purchased one of the better models that didn¡¯t seem too cutting-edge, as that might stand out and was likely overpriced, and had it installed at a nearby clinic. He didn¡¯t actually need the best one, and once the technology they had brought with them had been distributed he knew that the technology would be updated. By this time next year, a new model will have come out with triple the performance of last year¡¯s model, if not more.


    The one thing the Trappist version did better was include a small nuclear battery in the device, in his case a 500 mW betavoltaic one based off of Bismuth 207, thus having a half life of 32.9 years. This guaranteed that you never needed to charge the device for the next several decades. The material decayed into Lead 207, so while it could cause heavy metal poisoning if it got into the blood the ceramic casing of the battery could prevent that outside of catastrophic impact, at which point you would have greater problems than being slowly poisoned.


    He transferred his banking over to his new MindPhone and threw the other one in his luggage. Now he needed to find a place to go. The local tourist agency told him the basics of the system, including cultural data. Euporie seemed the best place to buy an estate, but he was unsure if it would make a good factory world. The system didn¡¯t really have the equivalent of an undeveloped or even developing nation to build factories in, so he would have to do some research before he found a place to set up. He would also need to figure out which type of business he wanted to start. There didn¡¯t appear to be any large scale shortages so that too would require significant market research.


    He searched the communication directory to find a real estate agency. It seemed that the system used a eight digit code system for their communications. The first digit was the world the target was on. The large asteroid he was currently on, named Hermes, was zero, Planet B was one, Planet C was two, etc. This used the numbers zero through seven, eight numbers for the eight worlds. One could send messages to any number, but only chat in real time with numbers on the planet with you or in orbit.


    The next digit was based on the quadrant the person was likely to be in. The center of the hot spot, which was on the equator, became the meeting point for quadrants zero through three. If you looked at the hotspot with the sun at your back, North and to your right was zero, the one below it was one, the one to the left of zero was two, and the one below it was three. The pattern continued on the cold, dark side of the planet with the even numbers on the north and the odd numbers on the south. The capital cities of planet D and E, where the elevator ended on the ground, were between quadrants zero and one, so most people planetside would have one of those two numbers as the second digit.


    The next six were reserved for the first million people to get a number. This would mean that the planet¡¯s population would need to reach the millions before they needed to add an extra digit. They would have went with one fewer digit, but with all of Planet D and Planet E¡¯s population concentrated in two quadrants they were already running out of the one hundred thousand numbers available for that quadrant.


    Having an eight or a nine for the first digit was special. Having an eight meant that you were based in space, and therefore weren¡¯t part of a main planet. This would be used when someone started colonizing the various asteroids in the system, but for now it was only used for the various trade, cargo, and passenger vessels that traveled around the system.


    Having a number that started with a nine meant that you had been given a temporary number by the immigration branch of Colony Services, and would need to have it replaced once you settled on a world. The number would be assigned to you until it needed to be recycled or you gave it up, but with ten million possible numbers it would be a long time before it would need to be recycled.


    Gordan dialed the number 00023057. A woman picked up. ¡°First Home Real Estate. Candice speaking.¡± she answered. She seemed young, he thought, too young to have been one of the original colonists.


    ¡°Yes, my name is Gordan McDowell. I just came in on the Terrance Proctor as an investor. I was hoping to talk to someone about buying an estate on Euporie.¡± The ship was named after the largest investor in the ship, Terrance Proctor. He was a trust fund brat that had managed to inherit a good portion of his father¡¯s stock in a pharmaceutical company, and as such had the 200 million he invested into the ship. According to the news interviews from before they boarded the ship, he was hoping to open up such a company here, but Gordan doubted he would manage it on his own. Terrance had never worked in the upper management of a company, much less actually ran one, so he would have to find a manager he trusted if he wanted to get his company off the ground fast enough to capture significant market share. He might have ten times as much money as Gordan, but had less than a tenth of his skill, so Gordan was confident he could survive if he got into the medical industry.


    ¡°Yes, Mr. McDowell. We have several listings for estates on that planet. If you would be willing to come by my office I can give you a virtual tour, or if you prefer remaining where you are I can send you a link to the VR tour and meet you in the simulation.¡±


    ¡®That must be a fairly popular option for it to be immediately offered.¡¯ he thought. On Earth, one had to request a VR tour be done remotely if you wanted it as such. ¡°That¡¯s not a problem. I can come by your office immediately.¡± he said. ¡°I¡¯ll have my MindPhone show me the way.¡± He pulled up the map program. It should only be a fifteen minute walk away.


    ¡°Very well then, Mr. McDowell. We will await your arrival.¡± With that she hung up.


    Gordan walked the kilometer or so to the office and found it in a block of office buildings, beside an accountant and a therapist. He went inside and asked for Candice, and a woman in her early twenties wearing a business dress came out to meet him. She had red hair below her shoulders, medium brown skin, and green eyes. He liked redheads. And it Had technically been 376 years since he had a lover. Maybe, once their meeting was over, he would ask her out to dinner.


    ¡°Hello, Mr. McDowell. I¡¯m Candice Khalid. Nice to meet you.¡± She held out her hand and he took it. ¡°So, if you would like to get started, there are private rooms in the back where we can view the houses.¡±

 Chapter 7: The Estate

    ¡°Is their anything in particular you are looking for?¡± Candice asked upon entering the room. She waved her hand and a menu opened to show the list of estates and homes in the system. She quickly designated that they must be estates on Euporie and most of the listings went away, leaving the number ¡®271¡¯ on the top bar.


    ¡°I was thinking something in the twenty to thirty million range. Large, preferably. I had a two hundred hectare estate on Earth and, while I¡¯m sure it would be far more expensive than that to get an equal sized estate here, a one hectare estate or bigger would be ideal.¡± The sizes of estates seemed to be in twenty five meter diameter increments, so that would mean at least a one hundred and twenty five meter estate. Though he would settle on a one hundred diameter estate if needed.


    ¡°We have several estates that size, but I¡¯m not sure about the price range. I believe the most expensive estate we offer is around twelve million. Most of the construction on Euporie is done by robots instead of people, so the price of real estate is lower than on the other worlds.¡± That was also different than on Earth. On Earth there were over twenty billion people and barely enough jobs for all of them. Replacing a good paying job like construction work with a robot for any but the most dangerous work would have caused people to hate you. That, coupled with the massive numbers of safety regulations the bureaucracy had created and the fact that humans work fewer hours meant that on Earth a nice building like he wanted would have cost over one hundred million.


    ¡°In that case, let¡¯s start at one million and go up from there.¡± She nodded and input the data, then showed him the list of estates that met his criteria of being at least a 125 meter dome and at least one million in price. There were 17 estates listed from five different companies. He picked the cheapest one. ¡°Let¡¯s see what the minimum I can get is then.¡± he said. She nodded and motion towards one of several recliners in the room that had standard VR helmets on them, then walked over to them. ¡°Actually, I have a new MindPhone. I was hoping to test out its features by using it for the first tour.¡±


    ¡°Do you mind telling me its model, so that I can check if it¡¯s compatible?¡± she asked.


    ¡°Simmons Industries Mark 4.¡± responded Gordan, and Candice nodded.


    ¡°Yes, that is good enough. I have a Simmons Mark 3 and it doesn¡¯t have any issues, so yours shouldn¡¯t have any issues.¡± She waved her hand and a link to a VR simulation appeared. ¡°Oh, I¡¯m sorry.¡± she said, looking embarrassed. ¡°I forgot to swap codes with you first. You probably have your device set to private to avoid random invites.¡±


    ¡°No, actually.¡± he said, shaking his head. ¡°I haven¡¯t given my number to anyone yet though.¡±


    ¡°People can still send you invites publicly, though. You¡¯ll want to change that so that you don¡¯t get spammed with ads.¡± He asked how to do that and she told him how. They then shook hands and she sent him half of an encryption key so that they could have conversations and verify identities. A literal handshake protocol. Once he had her key she sent the link again and they sat down in the recliners. Gordan leaned back and closed his eyes, then ordered his MindPhone to open the link.


    There was a weird sensation as his senses were tapped into in more detail than the phone had before and his external senses were replaced by virtual data feeds. Thankfully, he had already calibrated it for his brain so their wasn¡¯t any synesthesia like when you use a VR helmet and it needs to calibrate itself every time.


    He found himself standing in an airlock. There was a generic pressure suit on the wall beside him with his name on it. The simulation was apparently designed to make it look as if you had just entered the estate. The thing that surprised him the most about it was that, other than the fact that the exit door would be unable to move if he tried to leave due to the limits of the simulation, everything here was completely realistic. He could even rub his hand against the wall and it would feel like concrete, and could injure his avatar, complete with pain and bleeding, if he rubbed the sharp edge of an object. He remembered when ¡°VR¡± was just a set of glasses you put on your head while holding a controller in your hand. Even when he left the solar system, the VR system he had didn¡¯t have this level of detail. Either the VR devices in this system were designed to be more realistic than the ones in Sol, he didn¡¯t get the full experience because he used an older model of VR, or the MindPhone did a better job because it interfaced directly with his brain. He would guess it was a combination of the last two.


    Someone beside him breathed deeply. ¡°I love the smell of fresh buildings.¡± said Candice. ¡°Well, shall we begin?¡± She typed five zeros into the key pad on the airlock door and it unlocked. ¡°You can set the code to up to twenty digits, but for the simulation, we keep it simple. You can also set special codes for workers, delivery drivers, and other people so that you know when they enter and leave, and can block them at will. The door contains a nuclear battery, so the battery won¡¯t get too weak to function properly for decades, and will warn you it is running low before then. Once you purchase an estate you will be registered as the owner with the estate¡¯s server and have full control over everything in the estate. The server doesn¡¯t have external connectivity unless you or an authorized user give it access through another device, such as a technician connecting it to the planetary network in order to update the software, so it can¡¯t be hacked except by plugging into it, which requires access to the inside of the dome. The server also has two backups in case one is damaged, and also runs on nuclear batteries so that it will run even if the power is out.¡±


    She pushed the door open and the smell of fresh grass entered the airlock. There was a concrete walkway in front of the door which lead to a house, and the walkway was surrounded by a lawn and several other plants. ¡°This dome has a fairly basic landscaping package, which only includes one gardening robot to keep grass cut and manage the other plant life. Still, it can cut the grass and will bag the clippings so that they can be removed by the composting company.¡±


    ¡°So I don¡¯t have to deal with grass clippings?¡± he asked, stepping out of the airlock and she nodded and stepped out as well. ¡°I assume that also goes for food scraps and human waste?¡±


    ¡°Yes sir. Also animal waste if you have pets. The domestic robot inside will clean up after them and dispose of it and all of your trash. All of the organic material will make its way to one of the composting companies so that it can be reused to build up soil in other domes and the rest of the garbage with be sent to the recyclers to be turned into new material. We got really good at recycling during the trip.¡±


    ¡°If you are removing all of the plant clippings, won¡¯t that deplete the soil?¡±


    This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.


    ¡°No, sir. The soil is a mixture or compost and native regolith. On Euporie that regolith contains perchlorate salts, but they had to be washed out before mixing it with the compost. After that the gardening robot in charge of the dome will periodically test the soil and water the ground with the appropriate hydroponic chemicals to fix any nutritional issue.¡±


    Gordan nodded. A four legged robot with two arms walked around the edge of the house, carrying a bag of plant clippings. There were multiple attachments on its back that it could swap to when needed. ¡®Probably the gardening robot.¡¯ he thought. ¡°Then, shall we continue?¡±


    They followed the walkway past a storage building, where the robot and various yard supplies were kept to a moderate sized house. It had two stories with about 400 square meters of floor space across both floors. On top of having six bedrooms and three bathrooms, including the master bed/bath, the builder had designed it so that you rarely needed to leave home. There was a large pantry/food storage area, two independent distillation units for water processing, in case one was working when you needed to use it, and a reservoir for one hundred cubic meters of water. There were also three extra rooms, which different people configured to fill different roles. In Gordan¡¯s case one would probably become an office and another a library. It would have actual books if he could find someone to print them from the electronic copies, as well as a library computer with the entire databases of both ships if he could manage to find a server that could store that much. All of the data was publicly available, so getting it wouldn¡¯t be an issue.


    The house had been built so that the largest section of the roof was angled towards the sun, and the solar panels on the roof were connected to a bank of batteries in the basement that guaranteed that you could function for a week without sunlight. The dome was currently set to a 10hr night/14hr day cycle, so the dome would be shaded by applying a slight electric current to the transparent material, which would make it block 99% of the light that hit it. This was necessary to mimic nighttime, as most plants couldn¡¯t survive on the 24hr sun cycle that you got naturally on the planet.


    There were also tanks of CO2, Oxygen, and Nitrogen in case you wanted to run the life support system independently as well. These were filled via copper tubes which came via air supply lines from a plant in the city. While nitrogen wasn¡¯t a problem, as the air had plenty, the atmospheric separator plants had trouble producing enough CO2 for all of the plant life in the various domes. The domes were converting it into oxygen as fast as they could produce the gas, so there was a bit of a deficit. For that reason they were supplementing the supply by capturing the gas that the concrete plant was producing. This made the gas a bit more expensive than if it only came from the air separator plant, but greatly increased the amount of gas they could produce.


    Most domes would take in CO2, have the plants inside it convert the CO2 into Oxygen, filter out the Oxygen, and sell it back to the company at a slight profit. The profit wasn¡¯t enough that a standard dome could pay for itself, but there were people who were filling otherwise empty domes with algae grow tanks in order to pay off the dome.


    He did notice one thing which seemed a bit unusual to him. There was no wood and very little natural material anywhere on the estate. He could understand the wood, as they would have had to grow the trees themselves, but surely they could grow cotton to make proper sheets and curtains. All of the textiles in the house seemed to be made of synthetic materials and everything that looked wooden was a plastic facsimile.


    Other than that the furnishings were what your would expect for a house in the suburbs. Every room was fully furnished, so all that would be needed to move in was to buy clothes and some other personal effects. There was even a pool in the back in case you wanted to swim. The Domestic robot was vaguely human shaped, but obviously not human, looking more like a robot from a space opera he had seen as a child in the 1980s.


    When the tour was over they disconnected from the simulation and toured several other simulated properties. Gordan was a bit disappointed. Maybe he was old fashioned, but he liked natural materials and even in the twelve million dollar, two hundred and fifty meter estate there wasn¡¯t a single use of plant material. The closest he came was an actual leather sofa in one the most expensive ones. It wasn¡¯t made from an actual animal¡¯s skin, but had the skin grown in specific shapes in a lab, then tanned when it got to the correct size and shape. Other than that the larger and more expensive domes were just larger versions of the cheap one, but with more robots.


    ¡°So, have you made a decision?¡± Candice asked. Gordan thought for a few seconds, then nodded.


    ¡°I¡¯ll go with the cheapest one. The others were larger, yes, but they weren¡¯t really more luxurious.¡±


    Candice nodded. ¡°I have actually heard that complaint before. I assume you want more organic material in the house?¡±


    Gordan nodded. ¡°Everything just seemed so fake. Fake cotton in the bedsheets, fake wood in the table and on the porch. The third house had fake logs as a facade over the concrete walls so that it looked like a log cabin. I understand that actually wood would be expensive, but no cotton? No silk? Not even a wooden decoration in the house? The only natural parts of the house were the stones.¡±


    Candice nodded. ¡°Several other customers have mentioned that to me. The swimming pool is nice, but it just seems so artificial to them. Even when I was growing up on the Trappist Traveler there were wooden objects available and you could buy cotton clothing if you had enough credits. It was expensive, luxury goods, but it was available.¡±


    Gordan nodded and they went back to Candice¡¯s office to finish the paperwork. An hour later his data was sent to the company that built the dome on Euporie so that they could transfer the property to him. The real estate agency Candice worked for was obviously working on commission. ¡°Well, that concludes everything, Mr. McDowell. I¡¯ve set up an appointment with our branch agency on Euporie and they will finish the transfer there once you arrive. Thank you for your business and we look forward to working with you again.¡±


    ¡°But what if I want your help?¡± Gordan asked, teasing her a bit.


    ¡°I¡¯m sure the staff there is competent.¡± she responded.


    ¡°But I would prefer if you continued to assist me. What if I pay for your trip there and maybe give you enough to have some fun while you are there?¡± If she turned him down, he would let it go, but he had to try.


    She looked at him and thought for a few seconds. ¡°You know, I could use a vacation. And it¡¯s not like they can say I¡¯m slacking if I go with a client to finish the handover.¡±


    He smiled. ¡°Then, in that case, I will figure out which ship will next be heading for the planet so that we can board it.¡± He looked it up on his MindPhone. The next passenger ship would actually be an economy flight meant for the large number of colonists that just arrived, so he kept looking. The fourth ship to leave, a luxury yacht, had come to take investors and rich people from Hermes back with it. It left in six hours so, after verifying that Candice could be ready by then, he reserved them two rooms. He would have preferred to get one room, but he was certain Candice wouldn¡¯t accept that. He just needed to give it some time.


    Five and a half hours later they were let onboard a ship. It was connected via umbilical tube to a the space port, like an airplane but more airtight. Once onboard they were shown to their rooms. They were across the hall from each other. The rooms had their own private bathrooms and a bed. Because the ship didn¡¯t have the fuel to do a constant burn, the rooms were designed for space. The bed was a set of foam mattresses on the ground that that had a human-shaped cutout in the middle of it and were separated with a hinged lid. To sleep you would climb into the bottom half, the one with a head area, and close the other half on top of you. This would leave your head uncovered so that you could breath but hold you in place so that you didn¡¯t hurt yourself by moving around while you slept.


    The bathroom was a diaper shaped device attached to a suction hose which you could used to vacuum waste up as you released it. There was also a dispenser for wet wipes on the wall of the bathroom so that you could clean yourself off, including using them to bathe or wash your hands. These wipes were placed in an incinerator in the wall after use so that the ship could produce more CO2.


    Most people assume that a space ship would want to get rid of CO2, but this ship had strips of algae running down the hallway. The lights from them lit the hallways at night, and would be synchronized to the planetary night/day cycle when the ship was in spacedock. These algae strips processed more CO2 than the ship¡¯s crew produced, so the ship kept dry ice, frozen CO2, in storage in case they needed more. Whenever they went into spacedock they would sale any algae or oxygen they produced and refill their CO2 tanks. The tanks only used edible varieties of algae just in case they needed to be used as an emergency food source, so they were sold as food at their stops.


    The ship had a gymnasium that had resistance training equipment, so that everyone onboard could stay in shape, and they occasionally set up group activities, like sports, in the gym as it was the largest area on the ship. Anyone could access the ship¡¯s stores of entertainment files any time they wanted in VR, so they didn¡¯t need screens in every room. The thing that made it ¡®luxurious¡¯ was the shear power of the server, as it could run far larger and more detailed simulations than most VR equipment a person would normally have.

 Chapter 8: A New Dome

    The ship slowly floated from Hermes towards the space station that orbited Euporie. For the last four days Gordan and Candice had traveled towards the planet. There were several other crew on board, and three more passengers, a married couple and their sixteen year old son. The man, Tyrell Nirupama had been middle management in a video game company and had barely managed to gather enough funds to get over the investor threshold of one hundred thousand credits. Gordan and Candice ended up spending a lot of time together as well. They both spent time in the gym, as did the teenager, but when he started flirting with Candice only to be rejected, he stopped going.


    After the exercise in which Gordan struggled to keep up with her, they got protein shakes from the galley, a room with large amounts of food and beverage powders as well as some equipment. One of the crew was there on break and they started talking about what life was like on the planets. ¡°I¡¯ve only been to the planet¡¯s once before.¡± said Candice. ¡°Three years ago two of my friends and I went on vacation to the three habitable ones.¡± On Demeter they visited two parks, a fantasy themed amusement park and a water park. On Euporie they visited the Amphitheater, where they watched an opera and one of Shakespeare¡¯s plays. A man from Sydney Australia that had worked at the opera house built it five years ago, she explained, and it quickly became the symbol for culture on the planet. On Freyja they visited the aquarium and went diving. The area beneath the elevator had been enclosed to hold Earth plant and animal life, which served as both an aquarium and a source of food. Near the coast of the island they had seeded several plants and smaller fish. Some of the natives thought that this might disrupt the local ecosystem and lead to the earth life becoming an invasive species, but the fact that they needed to heat the area continuously to keep the ecosystem alive meant that the life couldn¡¯t survive outside of coastal areas humans placed them in.


    You would normally assume that the technician on a ship from Euporie lived on Euporie, but in actuality he lived on Demeter. While housing on Demeter was a bit more expensive based on the size of the house and the land area, the housing on Euporie was meant for single families or people. The housing on Demeter, on the other hand, was split into much smaller housing units, so a single person apartment cost far less. The cost on Euporie to buy a house was just too much for him, even if he could find a roommate. He would have to rent, which would make the cost even higher, so instead he got an apartment on Demeter. The housing there had domed shaped apartments that were divided into sub-units, so the cost of housing was much smaller than on Euporie. His schedule called for him to work for a few weeks, then take a month or so off, roughly twice what he worked. During that time he would return home, with the flight taking only a day or two each way.


    Demeter, he explained, was a farming and manufacturing planet. The population of Beelzebub and Cerberus weren¡¯t large enough to run their own factories, so they only manufactured what they needed and sent all of the extra material they mined to Demeter. There the minerals were turned into a large number of products that were needed all across the star system, though some of the rarer materials were shipped to other worlds when Demeter didn¡¯t need them.


    Demeter also had huge numbers of farms. The air would have most of the argon removed from it and be burned, producing water and carbon dioxide from the oxygen and methane. This would then be pumped into the domes around the planet. Extra carbon dioxide could always be produced by extracting all of the methane from the air and burning it in the smelters and foundries, where the water and carbon dioxide would be bottled and sent to the farms. As the air only contained trace amounts of CO2, plants couldn¡¯t grow on the surface, but around some of the smelters there was enough CO2 being leaked into the air that people had managed to get a few plants to grow. While some people were concerned about the air being flammable in the beginning of the planet¡¯s colonization, they soon learned that the level of methane was less than one twentieth what it would need to be to burn. If you extract most of the nitrogen or argon, however, it can ignite, thus making it a readily available fuel source for the planet.


    The conversation soon ended when the technician had to return to work, and Candice and Gordan were left alone. Gordan had several ideas about how to earn money now, and now had the opportunity to discuss them with Candice. The first method was to get into farming on Demeter. He had identified a shortage in the economy for certain plant based materials, namely cotton and wood, and expected that he could turn a profit if he could grow those products and manufacture things from them. Demeter would be a much better location for that than Euporie due to the lower cost of carbon dioxide in the long term, though the dome might cost him a bit more in the short term. He would have to do the math to see how long it would take him to turn a profit.


    The second idea was to get into housing. From the way the technician spoke, there was little luxury housing on Demeter and little affordable housing on Euporie. The lack of the first meant that even the richest people on the planet had to live in bunkers with only a few plants and open areas. The lack of the second meant that people were living on one planet while working on the other, living in company housing while at work and a place they actually liked while not at work. This ultimately meant that a lot of money and resources were being wasted moving people around and having multiple sets of houses. While this wasn¡¯t bad in the technician¡¯s case, as he was living on a space ship, for thousands of others it was the equivalent of living in an extended stay motel.


    As they talked the captain¡¯s voice came in over the speakers. ¡°We will arrive at the Euporie Gateway Station in one hour. All passengers, please gather your things and prepare to disembark.¡±


    Gordan and Candice went back to their rooms and gathered all of the belongings they brought with them, then met in the galley to wait the last half an hour or so. They played a variety of poker which used flat magnetic cards which stuck to the stainless steel table. The other three passengers joined them ten minutes later. The teenager suggested that they play for credits, but Candice turned him down and the others didn¡¯t push the matter. That was a good decision, as well, as he went on to win over eighty percent of the hands they played.


    Eventually they all felt the ship¡¯s gravity start to increase slightly as the nose of the ship was brought up and everything began to drift towards the floor. A few minutes later they felt the ship land and everyone stood up. The gravity was only around 20% of Earth Normal, but it would be enough. Rotating space stations often had landing areas near the center of them where ships could land without having to make high gravity maneuvers, thus saving on fuel. This station apparently followed that pattern.


    The two of them said goodbye to the family, exchanged contact numbers with the three, and left the ship through an umbilical that was attached to the side of the ship. There wasn¡¯t a customs office, as there were no truly restricted items. Guns were quite rare in the society, as they weren¡¯t needed aboard the ships which brought the people to this system and therefore grew out of style, and other weapons were even rarer, and therefore not searched for. Any lifeforms that caused problems could simply be killed by exchanging the air around it for the native air, so they didn¡¯t have to worry about invasive species. And there were enough cameras and security scanners in the area that any criminal that might want to try and hide, if such a criminal existed, would be caught immediately by the station¡¯s AI, which would then notify security. That meant that the only purpose for the terminal was to give them information that the passengers needed and to deal with luggage and any issues that arose, like the occasional complaint about poor service.


    The two asked for directions to the space elevator and were told how to get there. They boarded the next car that would leave in about thirty minutes to head for the surface, a trip which will take a little over two hours. As they would need privacy for such a discussion, Gordan called Candice¡¯s MindPhone and they continued their conversation about his possible real estate deals on the planet. She suggested that this wouldn¡¯t be the correct planet for the farming part of his plan, as that would require not just large quantities of carbon dioxide, but large numbers of workers. While he could probably use gardener robots to grow the plants, once the cotton was grown in a few months he would need to start a factory to process it into thread, then cloth, then maybe even clothing if the other clothing companies weren¡¯t interested in purchasing the cloth for their own factories. This would require human overseers for the robots, if not human workers, as well as human maintenance workers, as robots were only able to restore devices to preset states, not improvise new states when something needed to be changed.


    The wood production would also require humans, though more robots would be used due to how dangerous the harvesting and processing of wood is. Still, humans would need to oversee their activity and keep them in repair. Automated logging companies on Earth were notorious for malfunctioning as sawdust and pieces of bark got into the equipment and wore it down.


    The housing, on the other hand, would need to happen wherever the housing needed to be. While it wasn¡¯t the most economic to ship logs or bails of cotton, it was impossible to ship a dome in an assembled state. This meant either purchasing or claiming land and either hiring a construction company to make the domes or starting your own construction company. The later would be much more difficult, as you would have to build an organization from the ground up, including building supply lines.


    You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.


    Several other people had boarded the elevator car before it set off, and the Nirupama family even made it on about a minute before the doors closed. Unlike Gordan, they had brought things with them from Earth and wanted to make sure that the items would be sent to their rental home on the planet once they found one. The father was certain that he would quickly find a job, after all, and they had enough to rent an estate for several years if he didn¡¯t.


    The teenager, Farooq, had purchased a set of magnetic cards while his parents waited, so once the car started moving he pulled out the deck and asked if anyone else wanted to play poker. He had the few hundred credits his father had given him as spending money in his account, and soon had convinced several of the other people onboard, all non-investors, to play for credits. Gordan and Candice turned down the game.


    The car moved sideways along the track and connected to the cables. Once everything had connected properly and all of the safety checks were run once again, just in case, the ship started accelerating downward. It was actually upside down at this point, with the top of the car towards the surface and the bottom towards the station, but that orientation meant that it could accelerate at a comfortable one standard Earth gravity towards the surface, flip halfway, and decelerate at that same rate until they got towards the bottom. That would technically mean that they would be accelerating at almost twice the force of gravity for some of the end of the trip, but humans can easily handle that for short periods of time.


    About thirty minutes before the trip completed itself, Farooq had won almost two hundred credits from the others but was forced to end the game as the force of gravity became uncomfortably high for the people there. He had spent enough time in the gym that he was able to put up his cards and walk to his deceleration couch while the others struggled to get there. Most of the passengers put on the VR helmets installed in their seats and played VR games for the last thirty minutes of the journey so that they wouldn¡¯t have to experience the discomfort, knowing that the couch would keep them safe.


    When the car eventually came to a stop, the people in VR were notified and everyone got up and left the car. As the last of the people left a cleaning crew came onboard to make sure that it was clean before it was sent back up the line. There was often vomit onboard, sometimes trash, and rarely blood as people failed to balance in the increased gravity. Luckily, this time, there was none of that.


    Gordan and Candice entered the terminal room. Candice had already called for a car to take them to the real estate branch office, then the estate. The garage was pressurized with normal planetary air, but they purchased breather masks just in case. If they needed them, the masks would take oxygen from an attached tank, heat it to a normal temperature from its liquid state, and inject it into the air they were breathing. It would also scrub any CO2 that was in the air they exhaled, using the liquid oxygen to help cool it for storage. This would let them breath on the surface, though only for a few hours, even if the depressurization from a full atmosphere of pressure would be painful. After hanging their masks around their necks and strapping the tanks to their chests they entered the car and it set out for the office.


    The office was two kilometers away, and the estate was another three beyond that, two down the highway and one more down a side street. The automatic driving function of the car could easily handle it, though. Once at the small domed office building which housed the agency, they entered and the car parked itself in a nearby garage.


    ¡°Hello, I¡¯m Candice Khalid.¡± Candice said once they had entered the office and walked to the front desk. I¡¯m an agent of First Home Real Estate on Hermes. I¡¯m here to do a final showing of an estate for a client. Can I have all of the information for property 1793 so that I can do the transfer?¡± She showed her employee ID to the woman.


    ¡°The boss¡¯s daughter?¡± The woman asked. ¡°Yes, right away.¡± She quickly started typing on a holographic keyboard only she could see.


    ¡°Boss¡¯s daughter?¡± Gordan asked.


    ¡°Yes, my father started the company. Did I forget to mention that?¡± she asked.


    Gordan nodded, but before he could say anything the frightened employee butted in. ¡°Here you are, misses Khalid.¡± she said, motioning for a data transfer. Candice nodded and with a few hand motions verified that it was all there. ¡°Thank you.¡± she said. ¡°I¡¯ll send you the finished documents once they are signed.¡±


    The woman nodded and stood up, bowing. Candice bowed in return, then looked at Gordan. ¡°So, shall we go see your new estate?¡±


    The car went down the ten meter wide glass domed tunnel which served as a main road for the settlement. It had two three meter wide lanes down the middle and sidewalks on the side, in case anyone wanted to walk. Branching off of the road were the driveways of many domes of various sizes, presumably estates for the various people that lived here. All of them had plants growing inside. The thing that struck Gordan, however, was that the domes were the only place that there were plants. The surface contained none. This was probably because there was neither oxygen nor significant CO2 in the air to support other life. The gray and brown rock was a sharp contrast to the greens of the domes.


    Five minutes later the car pulled into a small garage attached to the estate. It required a code to enter, but Candice had received the code at the office. They got out and stepped into the airlock at the back. She entered the code and they were let inside. For the most part it looked just like the simulation. Many identical ones had been made in the area, so the simulation was a representation of the type of dome, not a perfect representation of the dome itself.


    They smelled real grass this time, though it hadn¡¯t been freshly mowed like in the simulation. The lawn was properly cared for, however. They followed the walkway to the front door. Candice opened the front door and Gordan entered, carrying his bags. Technically, Candice had brought hers as well, but left them in the car. She probably should have left them at the office, but had forgotten to take them out.


    Gordan set his bags down just inside the door to the living room and was greeted by a female robot. It was obvious that someone had attempted to make it woman-shaped, and not just generic human-shaped, but they had given it white silicon plastic skin and one could see the synthetic muscle fibers underneath if they looked hard enough. ¡°Hello.¡± said the robot. ¡°I am Domestic Automated Realistic Servant number thirty seven. You may call me Darsy, if that would be easier, or make up any name that you wish.¡± It grabbed the edges of its maid outfit¡¯s skirt and curtsied.


    ¡°I was expecting a more metallic robot.¡± said Gordan, a bit surprised.


    ¡°I can be replaced if you wish, perspective master, but the construction company purchased twenty five of my model and decided to use them instead of the older model when they built this estate.¡±


    ¡°Ah, that¡¯s fine, Darsy. My name is Gordan McDowell. I¡¯m hoping to buy this estate. This is Candice Khalid, the real estate agent.¡±


    Darsy looked at her for a few seconds. ¡°Oh, yes. You are from the Hermes branch of the company. I apologize. I did not have your file already downloaded, as I was expecting agents from the local branch.¡±


    ¡°That¡¯s fine.¡± she said. ¡°I¡¯m going to show Mr. McDowell around now, if that is alright.¡±


    ¡°Certainly, ma¡¯am. If you need anything, call me. I will be in my charging port.¡± She curtsied once more, then walked over to a seat in the corner of the living room and set down, closing her eyes.


    ¡°I guess they decided to give the humanoid ones a human-like charging port. It would be a bit creepy to see them standing in one place. Now she just looks like she¡¯s asleep in a recliner.¡±


    ¡°Yes,¡± said Candice. ¡°Interesting design choice. I don¡¯t really know much about robots, however. So, shall we tour the house?¡±


    They double checked that everything was as the simulation had shown it to be. Other than a bit of paint color difference on the walls and a few different patterns on the various bits of cloth, everything seemed to be identical. They even checked the life support and power equipment, just in case.


    After the tour was over, Gordan signed the papers with his biometrics and the estate was transferred to him as one million credits were transferred to the local branch of the real estate company. With that the codes to the locks were changed and he became the official owner of the house. ¡°Congratulations, Mr. McDowell.¡± said Candice. ¡°You are now the owner of a new estate.¡±


    ¡°Thank you.¡± he said. ¡°Would you like to celebrate the deal with me? The house did come with a fully stocked liquor cabinet. I doubt the whiskey has been aged more than a few years, but there might be something else that you¡¯ll like.¡±


    ¡°You know, I did see a few bottles of wine.¡± she responded. ¡°Would you like to taste the Merlot with me?¡± Gordan nodded and they went to pour themselves a glass.


    Several hours passed as they chatted, telling each other various stories. Gordan talked about the things he had seen on Earth, as she had never been there, and she talked about the various things on the three main planets. An hour after they began Darsy notified them that she had prepared supper for both of them and they went to eat.


    Three hours later Candice stood up. ¡°Well, it has been fun,¡± she said, ¡°but I need to get going. I still have to find a place to stay for the next few days.¡± Normally you would expect a person to be drunk after sharing two bottles of wine, but Darsy had provided them both with over the counter Sober pills several times at Gordan¡¯s request, so the vast majority of the alcohol had been filtered out of their blood. It was also several hours into the planet¡¯s standard night cycle.


    ¡°You know, you can just stay here.¡± Gordan said. ¡°I have six bedrooms, and your stuff is outside. I can have Darsy bring it in.¡±


    Candice smiled. ¡°Well, it would be a lot easier and I am really tired. I kind of want to just lie down.¡±


    ¡°You know, that¡¯s the one thing I didn¡¯t check during the inspection. I don¡¯t know what the beds are like. I might need to buy new mattresses.¡±


    ¡°Well, they should be able to adjust their firmness based on your preferences, but I¡¯ll certainly go with you to check.¡±


    They walked upstairs to the master bedroom and Gordan collapsed on the bed. ¡°Ah,¡± he sighed, the tension leaving his body. ¡°That feels great. You should see for yourself.¡±


    ¡°If you insist.¡± said Candice, then laid down beside him. ¡°You¡¯re right.¡± she said. ¡°That feels amazing.¡± They laid there for the next few minutes until Candice forced herself to sit up. ¡°I should probably go to my room. Darsy has probably brought my things in by now and assigned me one.¡±


    Gordan sat up as well. ¡°If that¡¯s what you want to do. There is one more thing you can help me with, though, if you are willing.¡±


    ¡°And what would that be?¡± she asked playfully.


    ¡°There is another way we could test the mattress.¡± he responded, smiling.


    ¡°Mr. McDowell,¡± she said in mock shock, ¡°You are over two hundred years older than me. That makes you an old man, and therefore that statement is inappropriate.¡±


    ¡°Closer to three hundred.¡± he said, ¡°But I assure you, wine isn¡¯t the only thing that gets better with age.¡±


    She smiled and a few seconds later started laughing before taking off her shoes. ¡°Well, I hope you can make good on that statement.¡±


    He took over an hour to show her how important experience was in certain performance arts.

 Chapter 9: New Business

    Gordan opened his eyes and looked over at Candice. She laid on her stomach and hugged a pillow. ¡°Hey.¡± he whispered and she sleepily opened her eyes.


    ¡°Hey, old man.¡± she said with a smile.


    ¡°I may be old, but you¡¯ve got to admit I¡¯m better than any young man you¡¯ve been with.¡±


    She turned over and sat up slightly, the sheet sliding off of her top half. ¡°Second, maybe third place.¡± she said, then giggled. ¡°Of course, first place is married now.¡±


    Gordan reached over and gently rubbed her chest. ¡°If you¡¯d be willing to give me a bonus round, I¡¯m sure I can make up the difference.¡± She smiled and he slid over and kissed her.


    An hour later Gordan got out of bed. Their clothes were laying on the top of the wardrobe, cleaned and neatly folded. Darsy must have come in while they slept and gathered their clothes to clean them. He had bought one other suit, but he put on the same one he wore yesterday.


    Candice stood up shakily and the took a step before her legs started to buckle. He grabbed her and helped her sit down on the bed. ¡°Sorry, I think I overdid it.¡± he said, wearing nothing but his boxers.


    ¡°Give me a minute to rest, and I¡¯ll give you another chance to try again.¡± she said.


    ¡°Maybe tonight. Not sure you could handle it right now, and we have work to do.¡±


    She nodded. ¡°You¡¯re right. Business before pleasure, no matter how much that pleasure is.¡±


    He smiled. ¡°Yeah. In general, that¡¯s a good idea. For now, though, lets get you dressed and get some food in you. Maybe a sports drink for each of us, with all the sweating we did. Then you can show me some more real estate on the planet.¡±


    She nodded. ¡°Sure. So, what do you want to look at first?¡±


    ¡°I should probably meet with some of the local construction companies first, just to sound things out, then we can go look at land. I would prefer to be able to just claim it, but I¡¯m sure the good land will probably be claimed already.¡±


    ¡°They only build roads to it if it¡¯s already been claimed, so unless you want to pay for a private road to be built to your land, you¡¯ll need to buy land that already has a road built to it, and is therefore already claimed.¡± She stood up and carefully put on her clothes. When she was done she rubbed her thigh. ¡°I think I pulled something last night, or maybe this morning.¡±


    Gordan knelt down and rubbed it and the knot in her leg started going away as she relaxed. ¡°Leg cramp.¡± he said. ¡°A pulled muscle wouldn¡¯t go away when you rubbed it. I take it you¡¯ve never used a muscle too much before?¡±


    She shrugged. ¡°Not really. I work out, but only so much every day. Never really push myself.¡±


    ¡°And mostly aerobic exercises, I¡¯d guess, judging by your stamina. Lots of running?¡±


    ¡°Is it obvious? I prefer swimming, but there isn¡¯t really a proper public pool on Hermes, even in the private gyms. Destabilizes the spin grav when you put that much mass in one place.¡±


    ¡°Well, I¡¯ve got a pretty large yard here. I could build one here, if you want.¡±


    ¡°Who said I want to live here?¡± she joked.


    ¡°You don¡¯t have to, I suppose. You could just stay in a hotel whenever you come to visit me.¡±


    ¡°And why would I want to do that?¡±


    ¡°Second place, remember?¡±


    She nodded and giggled. ¡°Fair enough. How about we see if your businesses will pan out before I ask my dad to transfer me to the local branch office?¡±


    ¡°Or you could just become my secretary. Historically, it¡¯s not uncommon for rich men to have their lover act as their secretary.¡±


    ¡°We¡¯ll see.¡± she said. ¡°But, like you said, business before pleasure.¡±


    They went downstairs and, after bacon and eggs with a coffee and a sports drink, they left for the real estate office. It had sat in the garage all night. Technically, it was being rented by the hour, so leaving it there had cost him, but not that much, especially when you considered how much money he had.


    At the real estate office he learned a bit about the details of real estate in the area. The first thing was that he only actually owned the dome and the land it sat on. If the construction company that owned the land wanted, they could put other domes in the gaps between domes as long as as they didn¡¯t touch his dome. The way they stacked the domes in alternate row meant that there was little room to do that, however.


    The second was that the cost of a bare dome was based on the square of its size. A one hundred and twenty five meter dome like his would cost about five hundred thousand, ten thousand of which was the cost of the land. A twenty five meter dome, one twenty fifth of the size, cost twenty thousand to build, and only four hundred for the land. His estate could have fit in a twenty five meter dome, but he wanted to have more land so he paid for the larger dome. That wouldn¡¯t be necessary for employ housing, though.


    The third was that the cost varied based on the style and which world it was on. Construction costs were 50% higher on Demeter due to the large amount of human labor involved and twice as high on Freyja because the land was an artificially constructed platform. You could build on the island for only a 50% higher cost due to the scarcity of land on the planet, but few people chose to do that because it meant that all of your goods would have to be shipped via boat to the elevator. The only land that had been sold on the island was a small amusement park where you could go diving and a few small estates. Making the domes entirely out of concrete without windows cut the cost in half, but that was only done for factories and warehouses, and because most people considered them ugly, on Euporie you would only be allowed to build them in industrial areas.


    Roads were relatively cheap to build. Each kilometer of road cost only one hundred thousand credits. Every five hundred meters along the road there would be an outside access hatch which would let people, robots, or vehicles leave the road for the surface. In every other location, however, you could attach a side tunnel for a branch road or property wherever you wanted, given that none were closer than ten meters from each other. One such road had already been built to a mountain town north of the city where several mines were located.


    The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.


    This meant that Gordan could buy or claim land anywhere he wanted and hire a construction company to build his domes. Several of them had given him prices 20% lower than you would buy a raw dome for, including life support tie ins and the life support equipment, but not any form of power generation. There was enough excess power generation in the city that you generally didn¡¯t need it. Gordan would want to build it anyway, though.


    Gordan and Candice searched the local automated survey area and found a large flat area beside a small salt water lake around three kilometers west of the city. The lake had apparently had a large basin around 23 million years ago, but the level had dropped considerably after that, and the rain had washed what salt was left behind back into the much smaller lake, concentrating it. The salinity in the lake was a bit lower than the ocean on Earth, but not by so much that Earth oceanic life couldn¡¯t live there. The local government asked for five thousand per hectare of land that was claimed, to register the land with the government, which was presumably why land cost what it did instead of being cheaper. He would have to pay that if he claimed any land, but that wasn¡¯t a big deal.


    He contacted the city to negotiate the fee. After getting in touch with the city development manager, Candice helped him to negotiate to purchase the sea for one tenth the normal cost. After all, you couldn¡¯t build houses on it unless you wanted to build small house boats or do like Freyja and build a floating platform. They also negotiated to cut the claiming cost of land in half if he claimed at least a square kilometer.


    So he made his claim. Nine square kilometers of land, in the middle of which was a four point three square kilometer sea. That made it four point seven square kilometers of land at two thousand five hundred per hectare and four point three square kilometers of lake, at five hundred per hectare. A hectare being one hundredth of a square kilometer, that meant four thousand seven hundred hectares of land and four thousand three hundred hectares of lake. That came to a cost of 13.9 million credits. He now, however, had all of the land he could possibly need.


    He named the plot ¡°McDowellburg¡± as he was essentially starting a subdivision and contacted the construction company. They would be quite busy for the next several months. Soon a month passed as all of his businesses were formed. First, he had the road built out to his property. Three kilometers to the lake, then a road which went around its perimeter that was five kilometers long. This cost an additional eight hundred thousand, taking his ninety million credit budget down to 75.3 million.


    Next was a desalination plant, a one hundred meter dome which cost another million credits, including the solar panels which surrounded it and provided his community with plenty of power. Thankfully thermal desalination was cheap, especially when you just needed to pump water into a dome that was heated by a constant sun. 74.3 million left.


    With his water supply secured he built an atmospheric scrubber so that they would have enough carbon dioxide. It should be able to produce around twenty tons per day, but was much cheaper than the atmospheric plants most worlds used. This cost five hundred thousand and only took up a twenty five meter dome¡¯s area. 73.8 million left.


    Next he set aside a nice area on the shore of the lake, one with a gentle slope and a wide beach. The largest dome that could be built was a two hundred and fifty meter one, so he had one built which went slightly into the lake, giving him over a hundred meters of beach front. Because he had the construction company leave the bottom open and connect it to the rock underneath instead of making an enclosed dome, inside he had the first area of his community that could support life. It might leak air slowly, but that didn¡¯t matter that much. He filled it to eighty percent with local air, and added twenty percent oxygen from the city. He then had it rain continuously inside the dome for a week to wash the perchlorates out of the soil before spraying hydroponic nutrients everywhere but the beach and lake and seeding grass. The water was then seeded with several aquatic plants and algae. This dome cost him two million with all of the other work included, but in his estimation it would become a major tourist attraction. After all, even on Freyja, where you could go diving, they didn¡¯t have a beach. 71.8 million left.


    Next, he needed houses and shops to attract people to the area. He built large domes for this purpose. After all, while the cost went up by the square of their radius, the internal area went up by the cube of the radius. He built three two hundred and fifty meter domes. They used considerably less transparent material than the beach dome, as the outside were all apartment buildings and only above the apartments was the glass needed. The center of all of these domes had a park and several small stores, and a one lane roundabout allowed cars to enter and turn around, parking in parking lots beside the road and the businesses. Still, with all of the internal construction the domes cost twice what the dome normally would at 3.2 million each. 62.2 million left.


    Part of his plan was to build a fishing industry here, so he spent another two million running aeration hoses under the lake and placing air, pH and salinity sensors in many locations around the lake. Once it was done he stared dumping half of his CO2 production into the lake as well as ten tons of oxygen per day. Oxygen was about half the cost of carbon dioxide at the moment, so he could sell five tons per day in order to buy ten tons of oxygen. He then seeded it with the same life that the beach had. Once the plant population was large enough he would only need to add carbon dioxide to keep it going, but for now he needed both gasses to keep the plants alive. 60.2 million left.


    The next month was spent hiring those same construction companies to build ten more two hundred and fifty meter domes. Seven of those domes were fully glass, and three were fully concrete. Inside five of the glass ones he planted cotton, and bought a robotic tractor to tend to all of them. The variety of cotton he chose took one hundred and fifty days to fully grow, so he had them planted thirty days apart. The seed itself hadn¡¯t been cloned yet, and therefore wasn¡¯t available for immediate purchase, so it cost him one hundred thousand to have enough seed created for the five domes to be seeded. They would yield approximately thirty tons of cotton per 30 day month.


    One of the concrete domes became a cotton mill, separating out the fibers and spinning it into thread. A second became a silk worm factory, raising the worms and spinning the silk into thread as well. The third was a clothing factory. It would take the thread from the other two and turn it into fabric, then clothing. That clothing would be shipped off to the city and other worlds. The domes were actually much larger than they needed, but once he developed a demand he would put in many more cotton fields and expand the operation.


    The last two glass domes were used to plant trees. To keep with the theme of Luxury that the world currently had, one dome had pineapple trees and the other coconut trees. Once they grew their fruit would be sold at the beach first, and the excess would be shipped to the city. Those two plants also hadn¡¯t been cloned before, so he paid another ten thousand for those seeds.


    The seven glass domes came to 1.6 million each, or 11.2 million in total. The factories cost an average of two million each, for an additional cost of six million. Then there was the cost of one hundred thousand for the tractor and one hundred and ten thousand for the seeds. All totaled, that was 17.41 million in cost. 42.79 million left.


    He was ready to start earning money now, though. At the end of three weeks he had enough people living in his housing, as it cost around half of what a normal place in the city would, that he was able to hire fifty people to work in his factories, overseeing the robots. Each of his apartments cost fifty credits per month, and each dome had two hundred apartments. All of the utilities were included with the rent, however. Such a low rent would let even the lowest income employed people rent a place to live. The housing would therefore take in thirty thousand per month once it was full.


    The clothing plant brought in over two hundred thousand per month and soon people started hearing about the beach, and came to McDowellburg just to relax. He spent another two hundred thousand, the first month¡¯s factory profits, on building shops and bars near the beach and it quickly became a tourist attraction. And when the algae became a bit much at the beach, he spent the next month¡¯s profits on getting shrimp, fish, and crabs to stock there.


    A month later, six months after he had started building there, he was ready to do a bit more expansion before going to Demeter to do the same thing there. First, he put in a second beach dome at the request of some of the tourists. The first one was constantly full, as it could only hold a few hundred people at a time. There were also complaints by adults who wanted to not be bothered by the children when they went to the beach. So Gordan made the second beach clothing optional, and required that you be at least eighteen to enter it. The first five meters of the dome¡¯s bottom was made of concrete, so that no one could look in, and he had the shops built when he built the rest of the dome. All in all the dome cost him 2.2 million, not including the pay for the ten employees that looked over it.


    He was now up to seventy employees, ten in each beach dome and fifty in the factories. The real estate company was currently managing the housing or he would have had to hire someone to manage that as well. As it was, however, Candice¡¯s company had earned over two hundred and fifty thousand in commissions already as mediators for the construction company and the housing.


    If he was going to continue to grow his company he would need to hire managers. He and Candice had handled everything so far, but they were reaching their limits as managing people wasn¡¯t their strongest area. If he wanted to hire managers, however, he would need larger housing. This was relatively simple to accomplish, though. The basic apartments had been built with two neighboring apartments mirroring each other, with the two apartment¡¯s bathroom, bedroom, and hall sharing a wall. He simply removed the wall in the hallway from the design and converted one of the bathrooms into a third bedroom. You could now have a three bedroom, one bath apartment for only twice what the normal apartment cost. This housing would no doubt attract families to the area, most of which had two adults, and therefore two potential workers. These two domes cost a total of 5.4 million credits. 37.39 million left.


    Two days after the new domes were finished, seven after the subdivision started being built, Gordan was getting out of the pool on his estate, preparing to leave for the space elevator in an hour, when Tyrell Nirupama called him. Tyrell explained that he had been managing a small team of developers on Euporie that were making VR games, but had heard that Gordan was building a company and wanted to apply for a management position. The development team had only contained thirty people, but he was hoping for something a little higher up, as his last job on Earth had him overseeing over three hundred people at a tech company. After some discussion Gordan agreed to hire him for five thousand a year. As he was only offered three thousand a year at his current job, he immediately put in his resignation. Gordan now had someone to oversee his company.


    He sent Candice ahead to look for land for their endeavor, and stayed behind for two days to teach Tyrell what he would need to know. He was introduced to all of the employees that were on shift at the time, and once he understood what everyone needed to do, Gordan let him take over. Tyrell would still need to get an Impressionator and learn the basics of cotton farming, silkworm raising, and textiles, but that wouldn¡¯t matter in the beginning.

 Chapter 10: A Second World

    Gordan stepped off of the space elevator, down a short hallway, into the hundred meter concrete dome it was connected to and stepped to the side, letting the others walk past him. While his flight out here had been first class, most of the people on the elevator had been locals or workers returning from their job on Euporie. This meant that the car had fifty people on it when it came down, and Gordan was on the ride with them for three hours. He didn¡¯t exactly hate crowds, but he could tell that the life support system wasn¡¯t designed to deal with so many people as the temperature rose by a few degrees above standard and the car quickly developed the smell of ¡®the city¡¯, large numbers of people in small confined areas. Still, the ride had been free, which is likely part of the problem. The paid ride, at only five credits, likely wouldn¡¯t have been crowded, as most of those people were probably just taking a day trip to the station. Still, Gordan had to resort to going into a VR simulation in order to deal with the crowding.


    After everyone was out of the car the cleaning crew entered. The car was considerably dirtier than the one that had taken him to the surface of Euporie. It was possible they used the dirtier cars for the free bulk movement of people and made you pay for the nice one. He would have to see if that was the case when he left the planet.


    As he stepped out of the welcome area and into the larger spaceport, he saw Candice. She had brought a car for him to ride in, but it was outside this dome, in the attached garage dome. Still, first things first. He walked over, pulled her close, and kissed her. They had, after all, been apart for almost five days. When he was done she showed him past the spaceport shops and into a garage. It too was a one hundred meter dome, but layered so that it could store hundreds of electric cars. They got inside the car, which would have been considered a basic luxury car on earth, but was the nicest she could find here, and ordered it to go to the local branch of the real estate office.


    It only took them two minutes to get there, including parking. Due to the much larger population density, much larger numbers of parking garages were needed, even with mass transport being popular on this world. They got out and walked down the west hallway to the door of the office building. Most of the buildings around here had a central parking garage with corridors that the various buildings would attach to. This allowed them to maximize the number of cars that could park in each group of buildings. Sometimes garages were also connected with walkways, in case someone had to park somewhere else, but this office building didn¡¯t seem to need that.


    They entered the rotating doors that acted as a crude airlock and took the central elevator up to the fourth floor, where the real estate office was located. After they were off the elevator, they went down the hallway to the office. It wasn¡¯t a large office section. There were only four smaller offices, and one of them was given over to a set of comfortable chairs and VR headsets so that people could go on virtual tours of the buildings before seeing them in person. The other three offices had real estate agents, though only one of the three agents actually sold property. The other two acted as property managers for the construction companies in the area, allowing them to earn money by renting out the buildings before they were sold.


    Candice introduced herself and, after they verified her identity, the two were allowed to use the VR room. Gordan checked on the various domes that were listed, but they all seemed like they were built with factories in mind. Every building for living in was built for maximum population density, with the only places that even had windows being the more expensive outer apartments. Every building meant for farming was layered, with hydroponics filling every level and all of the lighting being done artificially.


    While this was extremely space and land efficient, it meant that, unlike Euporie, the buildings couldn¡¯t be fully powered off of solar. Even with 100% of the buildings being covered in solar panels, which they didn¡¯t do, they wouldn¡¯t be able to bring in enough power to run the entire economy, and most buildings couldn¡¯t be self sufficient with their power production. This meant that this city had a trio of small modular nuclear reactors providing some of their power, as well as getting a few percent of their power from the waste heat of the smelters. While the smelters would usually be set up to run continuously and recycle all of the heat they could between batches, they occasionally needed to be cooled down so that they could could be cleaned or be set up to produce a different material. At those times, water would be cycled through tubes in the machine to produce steam. That steam would go to turbine stations in every industrial zone built for smelting, which would use the steam to produce electricity. With a large enough number of plants feeding them steam, and by having large amounts of steam storage, the turbines could run almost constantly, providing a few megawatts of base load power.


    Unfortunately, none of these building designs would work well for anything beside factories. Gordan didn¡¯t mind trying to optimize the building layout to maximize profits. The way in which the farming buildings were built meant that equipment like tractors would never be usable there. He had assumed that he could just build the same thing he had on Euporie and grow cotton directly under the sunlight. Instead, he had to do something a bit different.


    This building happened to have an office available for only one hundred per month, so he rented it. It was already equipped the same as the real estate office, with three normal offices and one VR office, so he didn¡¯t need to furnish it. Instead he created a job listing for a civil engineer, offering three hundred credits per month. Until he found one, he wouldn¡¯t be able to implement his farming idea, so, while the rate was three point six times what an entry level position would pay, he didn¡¯t think he was offering too much.


    The one thing he could implement, though, was high quality housing. At the Real Estate office they looked over the local land. There were two locations that caught Gordan¡¯s attention. About five kilometers north of the city was a fork in the river that fed the city. One fork went to the east side of the city, to the industrial district, and the other went to the west side, where most of the business and shopping was. This fork, however, formed an almost perfect 120 degree angle between the parts of the river. This meant that he could build a subdivision here which split the different functions into three groups, housing, farming, and shopping. If he decided to process the cotton into fabric here, that could be added to the farming district. The different sections would have natural, scenic barriers between them, and he could have bridges built over the river wherever he wanted the buildings to connect.


    The second one was to the south. Eleven kilometers south of the city, along the western bend of the river, were two mineral deposits which were unclaimed, magnetite and malachite. Iron and copper ores. Gordan had once run a mining company, so he was certain that he could do the same here. It would be different than his other investments, however, so it would require a different company be founded to handle the mines.


    He checked the price of those two metals. They were worth slightly more than on the other worlds, with the price of copper being ten percent higher than the next highest, and the price of iron being twenty three percent higher. Obviously, the shipments that were coming in from Beelzebub and Cerberus weren¡¯t keeping up with the demand. Still, that didn¡¯t mean that it would be economical to build a mine at that location.


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    Gordan contacted a survey company. They had both human and robotic survey groups available. With the surface not being inhabitable, anything outside the domes qualified as dangerous enough that the use of robotic labor was allowed under the local laws. Apparently, one of the first laws they passed was a ban on the use of robotic labor for safe jobs. This was a popular law on Earth, but was often overlooked due to the cost savings of robotic labor. Maybe the people here had decided to copy an Earth law. He might have to look into ways of exploiting that loophole to cut costs in the future. He sent robotic survey teams to both locations. He needed to know if the branch in the river was safe to build at and needed a more detailed mineral scan at the mining location.


    The next day he was in his rented office looking over the applications. There were many civil engineers interested in the job, even without the assurance of how long it would last. That pay rate was twenty percent higher than they were hoping for in a job, after all. Most of them made three thousand per year and that rate would put them at thirty six hundred per year. He sent a message to the five most promising candidates. He would hire at least two of them to work here. As they could do their work in VR, since it involved designing buildings and only rarely interacting with other people outside their research group, they didn¡¯t need an actual office. They could share one virtual environment.


    The next day he carried out five interviews, scheduled around when the five had time off of their current jobs. That night, while going over their responses, he realized why the people of this city were willing to put up with living in artificial caves and rarely seeing the sun. One of the applicants was from Luna, one from Mars, one from Ceres, one from Ganymede and one from Venus. None of them were from Earth, and when Gordan looked over the population data of the planet he knew why. Only three percent of the people on the planet were, and they were mostly from major cities where living like that was the norm. They were used to not seeing the sky, and as such, they didn¡¯t need their buildings to let them see outside. In contrast, about eighty percent of the non shipborn population of Euporie was from Earth, with another 15% being Martians or Venusians. They liked looking outside. While Mars and Venus didn¡¯t have the best views, there was a certain beauty to the vast landscapes which resembled the two inhabitable worlds of this system. The only other place which had major populations from those two worlds were Cerberus for Venusians and Freya for Martians, being more temperate versions of their homeworlds.


    Gordan selected three of the five people he interviewed and they agreed to start next Monday, four days from now. After quickly installing a highly realistic program that was commonly used in the industry, he took a few days off. Candice and he had rented an apartment near the office for two hundred and fifty per month. It was one of the few apartments available which could give you a good view of the outside, the apartment being at the peak of the dome and therefore mostly having transparent roofing. Around the edge was plenty of area where you could look out over the city, though the angle of the roof at that point was fairly steep, so there was a one meter tall wall around the outside of the apartment, behind which many of the buildings functions were hidden.


    They visited a few of the local attractions, including the amusement park Candice had visited over three years ago, but spent most of the time alone with each other in the apartment. It felt a bit strange to Gordan to not have a robotic maid, as he had gotten used to Darsy during all of the months he spent on Euporie, but here the law prohibited people from hiring robots for such a job. He could have hired a human to fill the role, but he didn¡¯t feel like risking revealing his and Candice¡¯s sexual escapades to another person. So they worked together to do the cleaning. It reminded Gordan of when he was younger, before he became rich, when he couldn¡¯t afford to hire anyone to clean for him so he did it himself even though he hated doing it. These days he still hated it, but doing it with Candice somehow made it more bearable, like they were just a young couple starting out in a new city.


    Monday he greeted the three people at the office and briefed them on what he needed them to design. First came the housing. He needed a standard building which could fill the role of luxury housing and be capable of being reconfigured into a family home. He showed them the two variations of the standard apartment dome he had built on Euporie. At first one of them complained that the job was more like architecture than civil engineering, but upon seeing the design he was interested enough that he no longer complained.


    Next came the farming dome. He had seen how farming was done here, and how he was doing it on Euporie, but he wanted something in between. For one, they didn¡¯t need all of the sun that hit the dome. Even with sunlight being dimmer than on Earth, with more of it in the infrared part of the spectrum than the visible part of the spectrum, they still didn¡¯t use 100% of the light that hit them. They also didn¡¯t need most of the spectrum, so if it could be cut out and used to produce useful light, that would work as well. Third was the that the sun never set. Most places dealt with this by simply shading the dome when the sunlight wasn¡¯t needed. That, however, meant that half the sunlight was being wasted.


    Gordan left the team working on those projects and went to his desk where he checked the survey data. The robots had returned yesterday, but he had put off looking at the data until now. The Northern sight was mostly stable, as long as you didn¡¯t get too near the bank of the river. The river appeared to have carved into the rock at that location, and most of the normally several meter thick regolith level had gotten blown into the river by the occasional gusts of wind resulting from the hot and cold sides trying to equalize their temperature. This resulted in the regolith only being between twenty and thirty centimeters deep. The rock in the area was sedimentary, however, so anything built near the edge of the river risked breaking off layers of rock. For that reason, any bridges would need to be anchored far from the edge and possibly with a pillar in the middle of the river. Other than that, the ground was mostly flat and uniform.


    The southern sight was also a bit different than expected. The purity of the minerals were within one percent of what the orbital survey said, but orbital scans couldn¡¯t estimate how large the deposits were. It seemed that the copper deposit was several times bigger than the magnetite deposit, having around ten megatons of the material as opposed to the one megaton of magnetite. That was a bit disappointing. The iron deposit might not even pay for itself. Iron was currently selling for five credits per ton. Assuming you could get around eight hundred kilotons of iron from the deposit, that would only be around four million credits. If it was the only deposit, the cost of setting up a mining operation would likely cost about that, making the mining operation dubious at best. But this location had copper. Even with it no longer being used for electrical wiring in most electronics, with graphene replacing it in most cases and room temperature superconductors acting as transmission lines, it still sold for eleven credits per ton at the lowest. The yield from Malachite was lower than magnetite, as the ore didn¡¯t just include oxygen, but water and carbon dioxide. That meant that the projected earnings from selling the copper, carbon dioxide, and water was possibly as high as sixty or seventy million.


    Furthermore, outside mines could be manned by robots instead of humans, cutting the costs of production. For this reason he started looking into the costs of various buildings associated with mining. First was the cost of the mining facility and storage. This could be done with a fairly standard one hundred meter dome, costing around five hundred thousand for a basic dome with loading/unloading equipment, robot repair and recharging areas, and places for the human maintenance staff.


    An ore processing facility would require a lot of heat, which meant a lot of air needed to be processed. A standard plant for this purpose should cost around one million, and be able to support two smelting/refining operations. The refining operations would also cost a million each. Due to the amount of material he was hoping to process, though, he was planning on building four smelters, thus requiring two air processors. All of these would require a turbine station and steam storage, another million credits, but he would be able to produce enough power to run all of his operations and still export a bit of power.


    Adding in another million for the road to connect it to the city and the cost of buying enough robots to keep the mines producing full time, and the operation would come to eight and a half million. If claiming land here cost the same as the standard rate on Euporie, that would add half a million per square kilometer. So, all in total, nine million credits. It would be a very long term investment, but they would only have to sell around 820 kilotons of copper to pay for the base cost and maybe 1500 kilotons to start turning a profit. With the ability to process around one hundred tons of ore per day per smelter, that turned it into a twenty and a half year investment until it earned a net profit, assuming they could process 400 tons per day and sell all that they produced. Quite a good investment, considering that his investments on Euporie would take longer to pay for themselves.


    For the next week Gordan made all of the arrangements to make this happen. He claimed the land, hired local contractors to build everything, and registered a new company, McDowell Mining. Together with McDowell Luxury Goods and McDowell Real Estate, it became the third business he had started. Three months later the mine would be ready to start earning money. 28.39 million left.