Beyond the Farthest Star: Chapter 12

Amy said goodbye to Noel and then walked out of the power plant. As soon as the door closed behind her she glanced around to make sure that no one could see her. When she was satisfied that she was alone she closed her eyes and vanished. The girl materialized miles away, in the heart of what was once the city of Tikal. At one time there had been a modern city on that very location, but now all traces of it were gone. All she could see was sand dunes and broken rocks, stretching out to the horizon. Above her was a cloudless sky. The sun was almost directly overhead, indicating that it would soon be lunchtime, but Amy wasn’t hungry. She was too preoccupied with the loss of her world to care about anything else.

I just can’t believe my home is gone, she thought. New Tikal is a wretched excuse for a city. This isn’t the way Mars is supposed to be! Mars should be a planet full of life, people, and culture – not broken rocks and sand. I wish I could fix all of this, but what can I do? Amanda tried to save Xanthe and look how far that got her! Are things really any different here? What difference is there between the virtual world of Vault 37 and the silly underground world that these people have built for themselves? Both are just sad attempts to escape reality.

Amy closed her eyes once more and used her nanites to take a closer look at the planet. A thorough subsurface scan revealed that there were several underground bunkers in the area, of varying size. Most of them were abandoned and in advanced stages of decay, but the largest one was still active. As she studied its interior Amy noticed that the sprawling underground compound had its own ZPE. So that’s where Miles lives, Amy thought to herself. I think it’s time I paid him a visit. He’s got a lot of questions to answer.

The girl quickly transported herself to the entrance of Miles’ secret base. When she materialized in front of its entrance she was surprised to see that there were no signs of an airlock. The only thing in front of her was an enormous rock wall, which was part of a cliff that was partially buried in sand. The wall was rocky and uneven, and the sand in front of the entrance looked undisturbed. There was no visible machinery of any kind. No wonder he doesn’t get any visitors! Why, if I didn’t know better I would be convinced that I had the wrong address.

Amy looked into the wall and concentrated, transmitting a stream of data to a receiver that was hidden deep within it. A moment later there was a gentle click and the rock wall disappeared, revealing a small airlock on the other side. The girl stepped inside and pressed a green button. Behind her the rock wall rematerialized, and air was pumped into the room. Once the air pressure was equalized the door in front of her opened and she stepped into the bunker.

In front of her was a long, dimly-lit hallway. There were at least a half-dozen doors scattered on both sides of the passage, leading off into other rooms. As Amy looked around, trying to figure out where to go next, she saw an elderly man running hastily toward her from the far end of the hallway. When he got close enough to see her he suddenly stopped. “Oh, so it’s you! I wasn’t expecting to see you today, Amy – you’ve given me quite a shock. I was convinced that something had finally gone wrong with that finicky door and some prowler had broken in.”

“Sorry about that,” Amy replied. “I didn’t mean to startle you! I would have knocked but I didn’t see a doorbell or anything. Your front door isn’t exactly inviting.”

“Quite so!” Miles agreed. He walked up to Amy and then paused to catch his breath. “That lack of hospitality is by design, you know. I intended to build a place that no one could ever find, and that’s exactly what I did. I haven’t had a single visitor in all these centuries – well, until just now, of course! I should have known that you’d be able to find this place, but I just didn’t think of it. Since you’re here, does that mean you’ve finished repairing the ZPE?”

“Yes I have – and let me tell you, it was a lot of work! Do you have any idea how hard it is to rebuild a power plant with your bare hands? I would have finished it weeks ago if you had let me use my nanites!”

“And if you had Noel would not have learned anything. Those people would have become even more dependent than they already are on machinery that they don’t understand. I realize the work was difficult, but think of it as an investment in their education.”

“I suppose,” Amy said. “But is it really going to do any good? Noel might know all about ZPEs now, but he still doesn’t have any political clout. The mayor will never let him build the self-contained air supply the colony needs, and without it they’re all going to die when Mars loses the last dregs of its atmosphere. Being able to keep the ZPE running isn’t going to save them.”

“I know. In fact, sadly, I ran into the same problem myself. With them it’s always the same old story. You see, a politician’s primary concern is getting elected. Sure, the air supply is an issue, but it won’t be an issue until after the mayor is dead. If the mayor did something about it now he’d have to make some unpopular choices, and that would endanger his re-election chances. So he’s taking the easy way out and doing nothing, sacrificing the future of mankind for short-term political gain. He’s not the first one to do that, though. Politicians have always been making that choice – even in your time.”

“That’s not true!” Amy protested. “My father was a great governor. Under his leadership this planet was an amazing place to live. It wasn’t anything like it is today!”

“But he was forced to leave, and Mars was destroyed,” Miles pointed out.

“That’s not his fault! He did everything he could to save this planet.”

“I know,” Miles replied. “I’m not blaming him. But at the end of the day the forces of evil won, and that has not changed. In all the millennia that have gone by between now and then, the only thing that reformers like us have been able to accomplish is preventing the last survivors of Mars from killing themselves. No one has been able to restore this world to its former glory. At least, not until you arrived. You have the power to change everything.”

“Now wait just a minute! I didn’t come here to talk about me. I want to know who you are and how you know so much about me. You have a lot of questions to answer.”

“I suppose I do,” Miles agreed. “But this dim hallway is not the place to have a long conversation. An old man like me needs creature comforts like chairs. Here, come with me.”

Miles led Amy down the hallway and over to a large freight elevator. The two rode the elevator a hundred feet down, then got off and entered a large, brightly-lit room. Amy saw pieces of old equipment strewn everywhere – on tables, chairs, and on the floor. Books littered the room, and there was a stack of dirty plates in the corner. A whole wall was dedicated to computer terminals, but most of the screens were cracked or otherwise damaged. The place had an air of decay about it.

“Please pardon the mess,” Miles apologized. “As I said, I don’t get a lot of visitors. I used to be neater than this but I’ve kind of let things go in my old age. My priorities are different now, I guess.”

Miles took a stack of green circuit boards off a chair and tossed them onto the floor. He then offered the chair to Amy. Once she had sat down the old man cleared off another chair and took a seat across from her. “There we go! That’s better. Now, can I get you anything?”

“No, thank you – I’m fine,” Amy replied, as she looked around the room. “It looks like you’ve lived here a long time!”

“I certainly have,” Miles said. “Why, I was just a young man when I created this little hideaway. That was a long, long time ago.”

“Just how long ago was it?” Amy asked.

Miles smiled. “Why not take a guess? Surely a girl that can terraform a planet can guess a man’s age.”

Amy was a little taken aback by this. I have no idea how to tell someone’s age! she thought. Maybe my nanites have a subroutine for that. She mentally tapped into their library of commands and used it to mentally construct a profile of Miles. The nanites that saturated the planet’s atmosphere provided a wealth of information about his physiological condition. Hmmm. He looks – well, he looks old. Let’s see. His liver is failing and his heart is weak. His mind looks sharp, but his synapses are starting to degrade. His bones have become brittle and his arteries are hardening. His stamina is really low – a lot lower than I expected. His vision and hearing are good, but they’re fading. All of that is pretty vague, though. Let me see if I can find something a little more age-specific. Oh, here we go! His DNA’s epigenetic changes indicate that he’s around 150. Wow! That’s pretty old, considering that no one else in New Tikal seems to be over 80. But – wait a minute – what’s this?

As Amy took a closer look at his bloodstream she suddenly realized that his veins were home to billions upon billions of incredibly tiny micromachines. A quick analysis revealed that they were similar in design to her own nanites, but there were important differences. For one thing, they’re not quite as small, and there aren’t as many of them. I have a lot more nanites than he does. The quality also isn’t as good – the tolerances aren’t as fine. But yet, they’re so similar! It’s almost like someone took my nanites and made low-quality duplicates of them. Some critical functions are missing entirely, and others have serious errors. But those nanites are clearly designed for biological repair, so he may be far older than he seems.

Hmm. So if I can’t trust the biological indicators, what can I trust? It’s like trying to figure out how old a house is when it’s been rebuilt several times! But perhaps there’s another way I can approach this. If those nanites have timestamps embedded in them then maybe I can read them to get a date…

Using her own nanites, Amy extracted one of the micromachines from Miles’ bloodstream and disassembled it so she could read the data that it contained. She gasped when she realized what they were saying. “That’s just not possible!” she exclaimed.

“What?” Miles asked.

Amy opened her eyes and looked at him. “The nanites in your bloodstream began operation in 4967 AD. According to them you’re more than two thousand years old!”