The Whole Team Arrives

I updated my report for Earth to add some of these details about the sims, and about the time I was done, the crew from the other ship arrived. So we spent a while getting those 9 registered in the computer system, and finding them homes. They already had a bit of orientation into the way things work here, since they were watching much of it from the ship, but we explained some details, and everybody took a turn in the bathroom sim.

We agreed there was no reason to maintain the split schedules, and should instead adjust to the local time. For my group, that just meant staying up an extra hour or so beyond when we would have gone to sleep. The other group was due to sleep soon, and would probably just sleep a few hours now and a few at the end of our sleep cycle to adapt. While the 15 of us (16, counting Chen) were all awake together, we went back to the non-functioning restaurant area next to the simulator room as a place we could all be together but with a little more room to spread out.

Not long after we got there, I called the other four other surviving men to a corner of the room. All five of us were wearing dresses we had taken from the closets of some of the native males from the area near the landing site. One man, Clark Gerrold, had objected to the dresses but was wearing one anyway over pants, so as not to expose his butt crack. The question was, do we want to dress like the natives, in dresses, or, once we have learned how to ask robots to make more clothes for us, do we want to make pants without tail holes that we can wear with shirts? We had different opinions and not much conviction either way, except for Clark, whose adamant opinion I already knew. For his sake, we agreed we’d at least try to get the robots to make proper pants, but if it proved difficult, we would just go with the dresses.

When we returned, Chen was giving an answer to a question the women had asked.

“We do have menstrual periods like you suggest, but the bathroom program should clean you out. In the same way that it removes any leftover bodily wastes from the outside of your body, once the menstrual lining starts to degrade it considers that waste and should remove the whole thing at once before any of it leaks out.”

“What if you chose the male avatar?”

“That doesn’t matter. It’s designed to clean out your real body. Provided you are using the bathroom at least twice a day, you won’t have a problem. Oh, and the sim bathrooms also give your skin and hair a cleaning.”

Deanna Dixon said, “OK, I was wondering why there were no showers or bathtubs, but that answers that. It cleans everything. But we’re going to want to reproduce here eventually, so it would help if we knew our menstrual periods to help us predict fertile times. We’ve been in stasis for ages, and who knows when that will happen for each of us again.”

“Oh, you will see a red light over the exit if the bathroom sim removed your menstrual lining. I remember seeing that.”

“Oh, that’s what that was for,” two women responded.

Laura Espinosa now asked about childbirth, and Chen didn’t understand the question at first. Laura explained how birth worked on Earth and then let Chen explain the Martian way.

“Well, I never did, and few people did in my time, but we were taught about it. But we just push the baby out. We cut the umbilical cord the way you describe, go into the bathroom to clean up, and the only thing we use a special facility for is registering the birth. That’s usually limited to specific government officials, but I gave several of you positions that should allow access to that.”

Espinosa explained, “Birth isn’t always easy for our people. Sometimes our children get too large to fit through the birth canal. Sometimes the umbilical cord gets wrapped around the baby, or it comes out backward.”

“Size has never been an issue for our people during birth. The cord wrapping, yes. If the baby feels stuck, it usually means the cord is wrapped around it. You would ask another person to reach in and untangle it. If he reaches in and feels feet, then he sticks both arms in and pulls the baby out by both legs. Again, that was what I was taught, not from personal experience.”

“Both arms? It sounds like your birth canal is a lot bigger than ours, and that is why you don’t have such problems.”

At this point I suggested, “Could one of our women give birth in a simulator? Configure the simulator to give the woman a larger birth canal and ... pelvic bone I guess. Stronger vaginal muscles, and whatever else helps the Martians do it more easily. Let her give birth in there where it’s easier, and then come out with the baby born.”

Chen replied, “That should be possible. We can create custom sims, starting with one of the standard ones. The bathroom sims are the most obvious, but we’d need to pull in part of the body modification sims, and something to recognize that what comes out of the body needs to be saved rather than eliminated!”

“I guess we are going to end up in the sims anyway,” Espinosa replied. “Just no sex sims, please. We all agreed before launch that if we ended up in a suitable environment, which it seems we have done, that we would breed and populate the world. There are only ten women and five men, which is less than ideal, but should be enough. The computers on our ships have programs to establish genetic diversity, and we were all checked to ensure we had no genetic defects, so we should be viable in all combinations. Each of you guys is going to get two of us women to have sex with repeatedly until you get us pregnant.”

Three of the other women gave encouraging comments, while the other six were less gung-ho about it, but none of them looked like they loathed the idea. All of the women who embarked on this mission knew they would be having children with some of the men if our mission was successful. Meanwhile, the men were glancing around among the various women and wondering which ones they’d prefer to have sex with. But I knew what Espinosa said was right; we’d put all our data into a computer program and it would decide who got to be with who.

“Are we all agreed that we are going to start a breeding program in the coming months like she suggested?” I asked the group.

There was silence, and then nods.

Seeing her interest in the subject, I continued, “Laura, you are in charge of the breeding program. Give us all time to learn more of how things work here, and when each woman’s period is. I’ll make sure you get the genetic data from our ship so you can set things up.”

“Sure thing.”

Then I suggested, “And we are all going to be a family soon, and shift into new roles needed for this family life, so just as I addressed Espinosa by her first name, we should all get friendly on a first-name basis. I’m Joe.”

And we went around the room.

First Supper

Just after we finished the introductions, I heard one man’s stomach rumble.

“We should prepare dinner, especially because our food supplies are up on the roofs of the houses, and I imagine it’ll be dark soon,” I said.

Chen spoke up next, “All of you have been to your houses, but most of you probably haven’t been in the gardens. All of you should find the stairs to the roof, make sure they aren’t damaged, and collect some of every plant you see up there. If there is damage, come back here and I’ll show you how to file a report and get the robots to fix it. I’m going to show you the plants most people have in their gardens. There is no guarantee they all survived many years of neglect, and there is no guarantee weeds haven’t crept in.”

“We could use the eating sims,” one woman suggested.

“We certainly could,” another replied. “But we want to try not to rely on the sims that got these people to the point they never do anything in the real world, at least not any more than we have to. If we could build a sewage system, we could avoid using the bathroom sims, but the people here had trouble maintaining theirs, and now they have so much wiring and such underground it would be difficult to try and put one back in. That might have had to do with having 12 billion people, though Earth managed it.”

There was general agreement among the group with this rebuttal.

Chen touched a dark square on the wall, and said, “Computer, display Cram’s Garden Guide on this screen.”

Chen tapped a couple buttons on the screen, and then a picture came up which looked exactly like a tomato plant. She described it that way, too.

“On this plant, you eat the red fruits. Green ones aren’t ripe; let them keep growing. Small yellow flowers will yield fruits in the future. Don’t eat the stems.”

The next one looked like some variety of lettuce.

“You eat the leaves on this one. New leaves grow in from the center, but take ones from the outside and leave the rest to grow.”

The others didn’t look quite so much like Earth plants I was familiar with, but they looked like plants that I could have believed grew there somewhere.

“The yellow berries on this plant are ripe. Green ones still need to grow longer. Black or brown ones are overripe; pull them off and bury them in the soil. They only last a few days when ripe, so take all the ripe ones.”

“This one’s trickier, because they are green when ripe, but the unripe ones are the same color as the leaves, while when ripe they turn this light green color.”

“Here’s another one you eat the leaves from. Take any leaves as big as your palm, and if any stems have gotten so tall that they bend over, break them off where they are still vertical, so it’ll grow new stems, and harvest all the leaves from the broken-off part.”

“The green fruits on this tree turn orange when ripe, but you have to peel off the skin and eat the inside.

This went on for about 10 more plants.

“You should find a dish with a cover that locks on like this in your kitchen. It holds about a whole day’s food, but you only need to pick what you expect to eat right now since you are going to sleep soon. However, you can seal it and keep most things until morning if you take too much. I want all of you to bring them back here so I can make sure you’re doing it right. You can find smaller versions of the container, too, for keeping things separate.”

I pointed out to her, “We have scanners that can tell us if food is safe for our people to eat. But not for everybody, so we still need everybody to come together.”

Two people held up the scanners I had described.

“If you see a plant I didn’t show, bring back a leaf or berry and I’ll try to help you identify it, but keep it apart from the rest of your food since it might be poisonous. OK, go get food,” Chen said, and everybody dispersed.

Shortly, everybody was back, and Chen went around examining people’s food choices, and also one of my crew circulated with a scanner. Everybody agreed afterward that they got the same advice from the scanner and from Chen, but Chen was also able to say if unknown plants were weeds that should be removed or good plants that could be eaten, but maybe not yet or not the part the person brought back.

For one plant, Chen explained, “This is a fiber plant. It’s not edible but people make clothes from it. There used to be a factory that you could take these to, put them in a machine, and make cloth, but I’m not sure if it is still there. But since we need new clothes it is good to see these exist, though we can also throw in ruined clothes and reuse the fibers that are still good. Then the robots in the same factory can make clothes from that cloth.”

Chen led us to a kitchen next to the restaurant dining room we'd been sitting in, with many food-preparation devices. Chen showed us all how to prepare many of the plants we brought back, making a variety of dishes, most of which we found quite tasty. Then those who were on sleeping shift went to sleep. I reviewed my report in progress with some of the others, and Chen continued telling stories to the rest. As my group was rejoining Chen’s, I heard Chen explaining how there were sleep sims.

“Your body needs sleep, but only after every 16-18 hours of time outside the sims, and a person in the sims all the time might only spend 10 minutes a day outside the sims, so it was something I did once every 100 days or so. When you do, you’ll sleep in real time until your body is refreshed, usually 6 or 7 hours. Well, those times are for my people; I am not sure about yours, but I know you did send people off to sleep.”

“We sleep, maybe a little longer than you do, and we are used to a slightly longer day than this world has, but I expect that we will adapt,” I told her.

After a while, the rest of us went to our new homes, including Chen, though I didn’t know whether she was ready for sleeping yet. But I guess she did sleep, because she was up with the rest of us in the morning.

After we all awoke, we gathered more food that we all took down to the restaurant area, and both Chen and the scanners again checked the new items people had missed the night before, or had simply not picked because they filled their bin up before getting to them. One man, Rocky Hillman, came back with what looked like a long yellow hot pepper, and Chen confirmed it was too spicy to eat as is.

“If you have these in your garden you probably also have the tools in your house to turn them into a spicy sauce. The sauce stays good for months and you can just fill a jar with it and leave it here for everybody to share... those who can tolerate it, anyway. Two of them this size make enough sauce to fill the size of jar people usually store the sauce in. I never actually made it myself, but you should be able to get the computer to show you how.”

Getting Stuff Done

After our meal I started assigning more roles. Clark, the guy who wanted pants, was put in charge of clothes-making. It was his job to learn from the computer what the clothes-making capabilities of the area were.

Brenda Davis and Lakshmi Ramanujan were the two people who’d been carrying around the food scanners. I put them in charge of inventorying all the plants. We weren’t limited to the gardens at the 16 homes we occupied. We could search all the homes in the area, and those two were given the government role to inspect homes for damage in order to do this. In the process, they could also actually identify any damage only visible after they got inside homes and request repairs, as well as request repairs for the obviously damaged ones. Chen put in a request to have her old home repaired to show those two how to do it.

Mara Rogers and Nelson Jenry were put in charge of learning the state of technology and science on this world beyond what Chen could tell us. For instance, it was obvious they had a bigger source of certain metals here than we had on Earth until we started mining asteroids. Was this planet different in that way or had they been into space also? Chen didn’t know about her people ever traveling into space. Had they ever actually encountered other aliens, or was it just the same myths Earth had had for centuries? Interestingly, those myths really took off on Earth around the time we started to venture into space, though some myths of people coming from the stars were much older than that.

Two computer whizzes, Deanna Dixon and Wendy Youngblood, got a different technological role. We could use the vocal interface on the computers here via our translator, but writing documents was something we really only knew how to do on the computers we brought. Those wouldn’t last forever, and it was unlikely the robots here could learn to make something so detailed using technology alien to them. Could we find a way to use their computers to write documents we could read later? They had computers everywhere, and except where buildings were destroyed, all of them we had found had survived 30 years or so of idle time without any apparent failure, unless the robots had fixed them without prompting. Not to mention the simulator computers that kept billions of people going in and out of simulations a few times a day, though it is quite likely the robots did maintenance there.

The next mealtime, Rocky came back with a jar of yellowish hot sauce that he passed around. Most of us thought it was too hot, including Rocky, but three people enjoyed it. One of them did not have an assigned role, so I put her, Christa Bellizzi, in charge of it. “Move that plant to your own house, and find other ones growing around here. The two with the scanners have been inventorying all the plants; they may know of more. Rocky knows how this sauce was made. If there are other pepper plants that may make more mild sauces other people could enjoy, make those sauces too. And any other sauces, seasonings, and spices we can use are also your domain.”

With me in command, that left 5 other people without assigned roles.

“Just help out the others in whatever way you can,” I told them. “If you think of something interesting we could be doing that nobody’s thought of yet, let me know. I might put you in charge of the effort.”

I provided Laura with my ship’s genetic records, marking out the people who hadn’t survived the trip, so she could start her task. She went around asking all the women to record when they saw the red light to help establish fertile periods.

On the third day after I gave him his assignment, Clark reported that he’d found one of the clothes factories. It had a still-working machine for processing fiber plants (which the plant people had collected a large bucketful of) and recycling old clothes (which we had a virtually unlimited supply of; they seemed to give about half the fabric needed to make them). The clothes-making robots in the factory had been sitting idle from lack of orders, but they seemed operable. Clark had them make one shirt to confirm they worked, and was working on figuring out how to modify the pants pattern to make some without tail-holes.

Two days later, the tech learning team came back with a report. As far as they could tell, the people here had never gotten into space. However, at some point in this planet’s not-too-distant prehistory, a fairly large metallic meteor impacted on the far side of the world from here. It left an absolutely massive metal mountain which covered nearly all of what may have at the time been a newly created island, with a lot of distance between it and any other land. The island itself was barren, with no plants or animals living there, and it was so far from any civilization that it was unknown until the people here started exploring the world. In their theory of evolution, this meteor was responsible for the extinction event in whose aftermath their people evolved.

The meteor was made of a mixture of many different metals, many of which had melted during entry and trailed behind the core of heavy metals which remained solid, which made a big crater upon impact. The lighter metals ended up on top, giving the mountain a reputation for catching on fire, as these included lots of lithium and sodium, elements which are usually found in oxidized forms because the pure metals react violently in contact with water. The outer bits were oxidized, but when someone cut into that, pure metals from the interior were exposed to the generally damp air nearby, and they tended to spark and ignite. Likewise, if a bit of these metals was chipped off the mountain and fell into the sea, it exploded on contact. This caused significant difficulties in mining it.

The Martians did eventually overcome those challenges with a better understanding of chemistry and the mountain’s composition. In the earlier days of mining it, they sought the iron and copper inside the mountain and mined deep into it, including below sea level, discarding many of the lighter metals as junk. When they developed electronics and discovered how useful many of the lighter metals were, with most of them pretty rare in the rest of the world, they had to go dig through the places the “junk” metals were previously discarded. In order to cover most of the land of the world with housing and then with solar cells on top of that, and build a worldwide network of superconductors, they had basically mined the mountain down to the sea bed, and below it in places, the biggest underwater operation ever performed on New Mars.

The computer group had figured out how to add English as a language in the computer system. They had the robots make us new keyboards labeled in English letters, and interfaced our translation dictionary to let the computer understand commands spoken in English and respond to us that way too. Once everybody was re-registered with English as their official language, we started sometimes turning off our translators. We turned them on for Chen, but she wanted to start learning English and tried to understand the spoken English before it was translated for her, so even when she was around we sometimes turned them off.

While they were at it, they also got the robots to make us electrical adapters, so that instead of having to charge the devices we brought with us on board our ships, we could plug them into the ubiquitous electrical outlets in the houses. It was trivial to make enough of these for every such device and leave them permanently attached to the cords.

Chen worked with us to create a plant inventory out of the book she’d showed us which used different files to attach both local and English names to the plants, going much deeper into the book beyond the common ones she had showed us the first time. Some of them were easy (tomato, lettuce, pear, orange, hot pepper). Some were easy to improvise (yellowberry, essentially a yellow blueberry, and white apple, which was sweeter and juicier than any apple I’d ever eaten, but essentially like an apple save for the white skin and pink flesh inside). And other times we just had to make something up. We used fiddlefruit for a reddish brown fruit that had a long, narrow neck with two lobes at the end that were flat on one side. And there were about 20 varieties of melons we had encountered so far, some of them only from a single plant. Chen had only shown us the commonest plants earlier; the full guide was actually pretty comprehensive and showed dozens more melons we hadn’t found. We named the ones we had somewhat fancifully, such as galaxy melon for one that had dark blue skin speckled with white spots.

And Christa had done her job with the hot sauce, too. If we called the first sauce Hot, she’d found peppers that made corresponding Mild and Medium sauces, as well as a Very Hot version which... we figured the one jar we had would last us indefinitely. In fact, nobody actually wanted to put it on their food. We had developed stews, though, so we weren’t always eating this world’s equivalent of salad or fruit salad, and a little dash of the very hot sauce in a pot of stew made use of the stuff, though it did mean half the people wouldn’t eat from that pot. But there were enough of us to make a second pot of stew without hot sauce. One of the five previously unassigned people had become our chef for such meals, and our plant experts kept his supplies filled with the kinds of foods he wanted, using plants from unoccupied houses.

Pretty soon Clark came back with a pair of pants and a shirt for each man in our sizes, and a whole wardrobe of them for himself. He invited everyone else to bring all their worn-out clothes to the clothes factory and he could have the robots make whatever sort of new clothes they wanted.

Just over a month after getting the breeding role, Laura presented the first round of breeding assignments, instructing each of us to have sex for a week starting on around the 12th or 13th day after having seen the red light. One of my partners had just had her second period after arriving on the planet, so wouldn’t be ready for a while, but the other, Lakshmi, was thought to be just starting her fertile period, so I spent some time every day for a while with her. She did a bunch of tantric stuff to make it interesting the first time, but by the third day was more like “Let’s fuck.”

I prepared an addendum to the original report telling how we were living comfortably here now, and sent it to Earth along with a copy of the original report in case it was missed.