There
While the first versions of the Nu-bot (marketing-speak for “network unit robot”) were found to be of extremely limited use on Earth, Nu-2’s were an unprecedented success. Known affectionately as “nutes” to those who worked with them daily, they were almost unrecognizable as relatives of their ancestor, the palm-sized Nu-bot, but they did in fact operate on almost exactly the same code.
Each nute was a cube 2 meters to a side which, in their base configuration, contained a compute core, magneto-plasma thrusters, long and short-range electromagnetic and laser communications, a sensor package, and physical manipulators, all powered by a small radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). In short, they were mass-produced programmable nuclear-powered robots that could adapt to nearly any physical configuration, operating either solo (in a pinch) or, most commonly, as a flock.
While there were still remnants of early NASA cowboy culture in some space industries, due to several high-profile accidents most of modern space industry was now carefully choreographed to a level that made it seem almost mundane to outside observers. Nothing was farther from the truth, though. Like a conductor with a lifetime of experience deftly directing a grand symphony after months of rehearsal, MarsCorp had come to dominate in the roles of space traffic control and space fabrication, its Nu-2s whisking here and there among the orbiting factories, depots, and docking complexes of Mars, Earth, Earth’s moon, and various Lagrange points.
At first operating in a niche market of sub-contractual relationships with the heavy-lift space industries, providing services like debris tracking and collection, “automatic” docking, and route-planning, MarsCorp’s spotless safety and performance record stood in stark contrast to that of the other major players. As a result, their proof-of-concept projects grew into full supply chains while their startup staff of a few hundred spun out sleek offices around the globe, like dandelion seeds taking root.
Even a once-a-decade space accident could derail billions of investment dollars, tank stock valuations, and royally complicate any number of connected events (and there were always connected events).
Fuck up a docking ring because your stimmed-up pilot flinched on approach and, after the few minutes it took to relay this unfortunate news to Earth, thousands of human-hours would suddenly be reallocated to addressing the downstream consequences of the unplanned maneuver. Emergency meetings would be scheduled to shift vast Gantt charts, incident response teams would spring into action. Insurance carriers would avoid returning voicemails.
MarsCorp had demonstrated that, in fact, all of this moving-about in space (and there was now quite a lot of it) could be done safely and repeatably, to a customer’s exact specifications. All the major players in space industry had quickly lined up to subscribe to MarsCorp’s Nu-2 Orchestration System, inking long-term contracts worth billions in revenue for MarsCorp, and saving the customers from liability and the expense of developing their own in-house systems and teams.
While it was not required by any sort of law or regulation to utilize MarsCorp’s services, nearly everyone did, and for those who didn’t it was still seen as prudent to at least file your plans with them.
Companies had their own tech for getting heavy loads into and out of planetary gravity wells, and for the long journeys between them, but upon arrival would request a hand-off to MarsCorp’s system, Nu-2s sweeping in like a whorl of birds, their thrusters flashing blue in inscrutable patterns, to gently envelop and nudge spacecraft into docking complexes, some splitting off from the herd to expertly extract payloads and quickly ferry them to other waiting vessels while inserting new payloads for the return trip.
Other swarms flitted about the giant fabrication facilities hanging above the planet. Here, a group of nutes moving long plates out of smelters, others ferrying chunks of raw ore disappearing within. There, another group working to cut sheets and pipes, which would be grabbed by yet more nutes arriving at just the right moment for the pickup.
D — shuffled down the narrow habitat corridor to the hallway that would take him to the Orchestration ring. He was thankful to encounter no one else on the short walk, because the corridor was only wide enough to comfortably fit one person, and if you were unlucky enough to come upon someone going the other direction it would involve an awkward social dance of squeezing past each other sideways, bodies pressing together. Unspoken social codes on the Station dictated that the most polite option was for both to face the wall, scooting past wordlessly while avoiding eye contact.
D — arrived in the Orchestration ring and made his way down another narrow hallway lit in subdued blue, passing door after round door in pairs on either side. Each Orchestration pod (the Station carried 64 in total) was identical, and his cel had informed him the nearest vacancy was half a ring away.
The Station operated continuously, with no fewer than 60 pods active under normal circumstances. In each closed pod he passed, one Orchestrator would be managing any number of customer assignments. Most would be working together, video-chatting in groups of five to seven, sharing control of any number of nutes in nearby space. This was the other factor in MarsCorp’s enormous success: locating its Orchestrators close enough to the action for near real-time control.
To be sure, MarsCorp employed thousands of Earth-based employees designing and improving consensus and flocking algorithms, developing new manipulator capabilities for the nutes, creating fabrication strategies for novel space-based industries, and coming up with services or add-ons to sell to their customers. All of Mars control space, though, was the direct responsibility of The Station, with Earth teams following along on the significant delay imposed by the distances involved.
D — arrived at pod 17, its door open, the interior a warm red, and stepped inside. As the door slid smoothly closed he settled into the chair at the pod’s center, a comfortable ergonomic slingback, which could be adjusted to suit the Orchestrator, and activated the console. The red color faded out as the MarsCorp logo briefly appeared, quickly replaced by D — ’s personal interface, which wrapped completely around the pod’s inner display surface, the thin line of the door seam the only defect. The impression was of being perched in a crystal clear sphere of glass, floating somewhere above the surface of Mars in a chair from Ikea.
Readouts, overlays and command interfaces of all sorts were available, but D — preferred to start each session with only a live video feed, programmed to pull from any idling nute with a view of the planet. It helped him get his bearings. The planet loomed large before him, a phenomenal site that made him ache to someday visit its surface. Only a few hundred humans had made that journey. But he had work to do, and called up the saved interface from his last shift with a tap on the controls.
The planet faded out to be replaced by a maze of software development tools and diagnostic readouts. A simplified diagram of the solar system featured prominently, each thin orbit line decorated with labeling whose values were continually changing. Mars’ orbit was indicated in red (almost out of tradition at this point) Earth’s in blue. Both of these orbits were roughly circular, but it was to a more elliptical purple line that D — focused his attention, labeled 1627-Ivar. This purple line traced a path that dipped towards the Sun at the center until it almost joined with the blue line, and then swung back out towards green line representing Jupiter’s orbit. On the long, gently curved part of the purple line it intersected the red line.
Asteroids, as a category, are a varied bunch of rocks, ice and metals floating here and there in our solar system, and they vary in size from tiny specks to kilometers across. While some can be thought of as mostly-solid chunks of rock, like monolithic boulders, many are in fact swirling collections of dust and gravel all hanging out in the same location, gently bound together by their own weak gravity. All of them, though, sweep around the Sun in predictable orbits, with sub-classifications created to describe those that travel similar paths.
The Amor asteroid group contained some 8,000 asteroids whose orbits brought them past Mars regularly, and it was on two of these asteroids D — had been focusing his energy for the past two years of his life, first on Earth, then during the long journey to the Station, and now here, orbiting Mars, near the very spot where the red and purple lines crossed.
433-Eros had been swinging around the Sun for some unknown millions of years, but had come to be known to humans in 1898, the year of the first fatality in an automobile and the invention of the submarine. 1627-Ivar had been discovered just as the Great Depression began in 1929. Each of these behemoth asteroids were several kilometers wide, and they were tagged with labels on the Orchestration display: one swinging out towards Jupiter, the other on approach to Mars.
3 years later they would both be gone.
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