Discovering New Mars

After hundreds of years of space exploration, we finally located signs of civilization out there. Mankind had had about 8 generations of space telescopes of increasing power, culminating with placing stations all over the far side of the moon to act as a virtual telescope almost as large as the moon itself. This scope swept across the plane of the Moon’s orbit for two weeks each lunar month and then shut off to recharge when the Sun’s light blinded it the other two weeks.

It was this scope that found it, an Earth-sized planet 135 light-years from Earth that bore unmistakable signs of not just life but significant industry. Because of its reddish color, people had taken to calling it New Mars. Early analysis showed it had an atmosphere similar to Earth’s, and lots of liquid water. Once a month the moon-scope faced New Mars and we collected one type of data after another. Trips to the moon to augment the scopes allowed it to gather types of data it had not originally been equipped for, back when its goal was only to locate the planet. Spectroscopic analysis made clear it had an atmosphere with the familiar gases: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water, with no obvious poisons.

Because mankind had longed for centuries to travel to another planet where we could live (the moon and our neighbor Mars not qualifying on that last condition), we planned an expedition. It was far from practical; the idea was just to send some people there on a one-way trip. They could report back, and nearly three centuries from now we’d hear what it was like. Maybe by then we’d have come up with some more practical means of traveling there. There were many risks, such as collisions with objects in space we couldn’t see, but there were plenty of volunteers and the global space travel organization chose candidates.

There were limitations on our ability to build near-light-speed ships; they could only be so big. Partly for this reason and partly for greater chance of survival, we were sending six ships, each holding ten astronauts selected for both a variety of skills for the mission and varied genetics, with four men and six women on each ship. If the mission was successful, and both conditions on the planet and the residents permitted it, they’d be expected to breed and populate the planet.

We built other support ships as well which would precede the people. The first probes were going to explore the planet, learn about the geography, climate, the distribution and density of people, the language, plant and animal life, and whatever else they could pack AI into the probes to do. Another set of ships which followed were garden stations. These would go into orbit around the planet, send drones into the atmosphere to retrieve water, and grow a variety of food plants that generations of space missions had shown were easy to grow in space.

Four years after we discovered New Mars, the manned ships were launched, one a week for six weeks, for their 150-year flight. For those on board, because they traveled close to the speed of light, the time would be much shorter, but it would still be many years. Because it was impractical to load the ships with enough food for the travelers to live normally during all that time, the travelers were going to be in suspended animation the whole way. We wanted them to still be able to have children after they arrived.

Arrival

I was on the third ship to leave Earth, and the first to arrive out of our six crewed ships. As I came out of stasis, I found my uniform, which was stored in a chamber designed to preserve it during the flight, and put it on.

I was on the end of a row of stasis chambers. Across from me, Melissa Canelli came out of her chamber at about the same time I did. The other two chambers I could see both had the red lights on indicating their occupants had not survived the journey, which worried me, but when I went down the rest of the row there was only one other dead.

The ships were far apart, but close enough to maintain fairly slow communication, which the ships did automatically for most of the trip while we were suspended. Upon our arrival, we read the logs. We lost communication with the first ship early on in the journey, and the second ten years ago. One of the following ships was still functional, but two others had also dropped off the radar in the middle of the trip. This was why we sent six separate ships, after all. I counted myself lucky for being on one of the two ships that made it, and one of the seven people who survived the stasis. The other ship reported their commanding officer did not survive, so I was, as ranking officer, in charge of the entire mission.

As we approached the planet, we got transmissions from the advance craft already there, enough of which had made it to do their job. It was a beautiful, largely water-covered planet very similar to Earth, if you ignored the red color of the water. It had 0.98 standard gravity, a day 23.5 hours long, and a 382-day year (about 374 Earth days). It had 22% land area, 90% of it at reasonably habitable temperatures, and all of that heavily developed. It had two moons, one large one, smaller than Earth’s moon and a little closer, orbiting in 27 days, and a pretty small one 4 times as far out.

And while we’d detected many signs of a civilization at least equal to 21st century Earth’s when we first detected New Mars and in the years we spent preparing, and plenty of signs of civilization when we got here, there was one thing missing: The people who built it. The reddish color of the water was some form of marine plant life which was abundant near the surface over both shallow and deep water. Except in the coldest parts, and small areas perhaps set aside as parks, the land was covered with buildings ranging from small houses to shopping malls. There were lots of solar cells including part of just about every roof, and wind turbines and other renewable energy resources. The worldwide density of the construction indicated they had more of common metals like iron and aluminum than Earth did, or they’d already done some serious asteroid or moon mining to find them. There were, however, no obvious signs of major space exploration around the planet.

It was just the people who were missing. There were a large number of what appeared to be maintenance robots, keeping the power generation systems running, but there were no life signs coming from them. There were plenty of wild animals, mostly small ones, but they didn’t show signs of intelligence we’d expect for building something like this. There were fleeting signals of something else, what appeared to be beings of a suitable size to be the people who built this, but we hadn’t spotted them yet. We had plenty of videos of the landing modules from our probes flying through their cities, but none showed any of the people who built all this.

There were statues and murals that showed some fairly humanoid looking bipedal beings. They were a bit stouter than humans, with prehensile tails which reached to the ground when they let them hang down. Judging by the typical sizes of these statues, they were about human-sized. We had records of written and spoken language, on signs and murals, and in audio broadcasts our satellites had recorded years before arrival, though all the broadcasts repeated on some schedule and we had already collected clear copies of all of them. The automated linguistics satellites had deciphered three separate major languages and prepared automatic translation systems for us to use, should we encounter any of the people, as well as what we believed to be five minor languages we did not have enough samples of to fully translate.

There were houses, lots and lots of houses. Readings suggested that there had been housing for approximately 12 billion human-sized beings. “Had been” because, unlike the power generation facilities, many of the houses were in various states of decay. Some whole neighborhoods had collapsed. Most of them seemed still fully functional, though empty. Those houses usually had half their roofs devoted to solar cells, the other half to rooftop gardens, probably meant for growing food, though they were untended and growing wild. It appeared the maintenance robots were keeping them from covering the solar cells, but otherwise not tending to them.

The Hunt for People

Some catastrophe had befallen the people here, and as our ship completed the last leg of its journey toward the planet, we set about discovering what it was. Atmospheric scans showed no elements there which would be toxic to us. It had a bit more oxygen and carbon dioxide and a bit less nitrogen than Earth did, and twice the argon. There was very little atmospheric sulfur, which agreed with the post-fossil-fuel power generation systems we found.

There was a healthy biosphere of microorganisms. There were none we thought would be harmful to us. And there were small animals which had not been harmed by what was there. They freely rummaged through the remains of the rooftop gardens on the houses that had collapsed, and less often on the standing houses.

There were no signs of unusual radioactivity as might be associated with nuclear warfare or a nuclear energy disaster. The destroyed houses didn’t appear to have suffered damage from conventional warfare, either. It was more like neglect and lack of maintenance. And there were no obvious signs of large-scale death. We saw occasional skeletons which could have been people’s bodies that the small animals had already picked clean for food. But there were far too few of these for them to have all died suddenly.

And there were those fleeting life signs that could have corresponded to the missing residents, but they never seemed to last for more than a minute. Were they living deep underground, coming up briefly to retrieve food? The scans run so far were strong enough to penetrate the buildings we saw here and one or two levels of basements (though few buildings had more than one basement level) and we simply weren’t seeing them, but if they were deeper we would have missed them.

After my ship docked with one of the functioning garden satellites and we got our first meal of real food after arriving, we made that our base of operations and sent its location to the other surviving ship as a rendezvous point. That ship was two weeks behind us. Eight of their people had survived the suspended animation, as had seven of ours, and we agreed to wait for them while continuing to observe. We sent our first report back to Earth, just giving the status of the ships and bringing them on alert to watch for our subsequent reports.

From this space-dock, we analyzed the data on the fleeting life signs and saw that they were concentrated in certain areas. Specific buildings, one or two per square kilometer, were generating these signs periodically, some more than others.

In response to the early data showing no people, one of the other ship’s crew suggested that the people could be in a kind of suspended animation. We scanned for fainter life signs that might have corresponded with that, and found none. Cryogenic freezing would have given a strong temperature signal which was also absent. And the signals we got didn’t seem weak, just transient.

The next bright idea came from the only other man besides me to survive from our ship, Anton Fredericks. He noted that there was a large power generation infrastructure that seemed to be functioning, and wondered where the power was going. The sensors on the drones the probes sent out weren’t equipped to check for power movements. We commanded one of the probes to collect several of its drones and bring them to us, and we were able to modify them to scan for significant power movements and sent them back down into a particular city we’d chosen for no reason other than that we had the most data on it.

This took some time, and it took more time to collect data on the power movements. First off, the power was indeed going underground. Their entire power grid was underground, with individual buildings connected at basement level and deeper trunk lines. But in addition to this we found sharp power drains occurring occasionally in the buildings with the fleeting life signs.

By this point, the other ship was arriving, and we stopped to welcome them aboard, and feed them. After their first meal, we summarized our findings, and together we agreed we needed to watch these buildings. The power drains gave us more specific points to watch than simply the entire building, so we picked the building in this city which had seen the power drains and fleeting life signs most often, and sent a couple video drones to try to get as close to where the drains were happening as they could get.

It was then sleeping shift for half of us, but the rest, four of our crew including myself and four of theirs, gathered in a room where we could watch the live video feeds from our drones. One drone entered a large gallery with a sign written in two of the three major languages. Our translation system displayed that it meant MAKE A WISH in both languages. The room contained about thirty statues loosely matching statues we had seen of the people elsewhere. But while most of the statues elsewhere were clothed, these were all totally naked. It showed the people were even more humanoid than we had thought, down to the sexual organs, though some of the statues appeared to possess both male and female organs. The sexual organs were prominent, with the males sporting erections and the females posed so as to make the sexual organs prominent. This made us wonder if we’d found an alien brothel.

And then it happened. A live person, green-skinned and matching the general appearance of the statues, appeared in a flash of light on one of the statues. It was a female, and she appeared to be in a sexual encounter with the male organ of that statue. She stepped off, went over to a different statue, engaged in sex with that one, and vanished in another flash.

Two of the women gasped out together, “What the fuck?!”

“That does appear to be the relevant question,” I responded, drawing laughs from some of the others. “I believe I saw a woman materialize in a sexual position with one of the statues, switch over to another statue, and vanish as quickly as she appeared.”

There was a chorus of agreement in the room.

Deanna Dixon, a woman from the other ship who was managing our connection to the drones, said, “I’ve saved the relevant bit of video permanently, and I am going to instruct the computer to watch for any similar events, save them as well, and alert us.”

“For that matter, have it save anything that looks significantly different from the empty room we have been watching the rest of the time,” another suggested.

Immediately after Dixon called out “Done” the alert went off, and we saw a male of the species similarly switch from one female statue to another. It was about fifteen minutes later when we saw a second man appear, and a few minutes after that a woman.

Fredericks asked, “So what do we have here, some kind of sex parlor? Are these people getting transported somewhere where they are having sex in the positions they put themselves into?”

“Matter transportation would account for the high energy drains,” a woman from the other ship responded.

“Maybe it’s virtual sex,” another woman suggested. “Rather than an immediate transport, they are stored in a computer where they have virtual sex for a time. When the session is up, they come back, and start another session. That would account for us not being able to detect the life signs except during these moments.”

I responded, “Oh, God! An entire civilization that has gotten themselves so addicted to virtual sex that it’s all they do. They built robots to do all their maintenance, so they didn’t have any actual work they had to do on their own.”

The others nodded and said various words of agreement.

Fredericks said, “At least, the robots do all the maintenance needed to keep the system going. They don’t seem to be keeping the people’s houses from falling apart, but I guess they are no longer using them, anyway.”

“So what do we do?” I continued. I wanted to survey ideas from my crewmates before jumping into a course of action.

Fredericks replied, “I think it’s imperative that we try to make contact. It’s possible they are so sex-addicted that they will ignore us and continue what they are doing, but I do think there’s a chance if we make contact that we can get someone to explain to us how they got into this state. It’s unlikely they will attack us, given that they come out of these encounters naked and carrying nothing, though it is possible we may encounter automated security systems.”

“I agree with that assessment. We either try to get their story or make a good effort to do so, and send a report back to Earth. Then, since there are plenty of good living quarters available, we take up residence.”

The others agreed as well, and a woman from my ship, Clara Callahan, added, “And we absolutely do not participate in anything these sex parlors offer, since they are obviously too addictive.”

Not everybody expressed their agreement, but there were no denials of the statement. There were two Ayes (one of them mine) and an Amen.

One of the previously silent ones from the other ship, Ping Guo, added, “If we can’t get anything from them, maybe we can find something in the homes they are no longer using.”

“That’s a good idea,” Nelson Jenry, a man from the other ship, commented.

Deanna Dixon said, “It looks like they have extensive computer systems. They might have history recorded in them.”

“Fine, we have some alternatives if we can’t get it from the horse’s mouth,” I acknowledged.

We agreed to wait until the end of the current sleep cycle, give the sleepers a chance to make other suggestions, and send a mixed team down. But they had no other ideas and agreed with what we had come up with.

The landing team would consist of 2 pilots and 4 explorers, split from our two sleeping shifts, so we didn’t have to withdraw if it took too long. Ultimately, if nothing went wrong, our entire team would go down and settle on the planet, but we needed to investigate before we fully committed. By the time they reached the surface, the people from my shift would be sleeping. We drew lots for slots. First we picked one pilot from each shift to be part of the landing party, and the other three pilots would remain in space. Then two explorers from among the rest of each sleeping shift. I ended up selected as an explorer.

The Horse’s Mouth

So I got onto the landing craft (we chose to use the one from the ship I arrived on) and before we landed I settled down to start my sleep cycle along with another explorer, Melissa Canelli. The pilot from my shift, Lakshmi Ramanujan, was going to stay awake as a backup until we landed, since landing was, after all, the most difficult piloting job, and then sleep. Clara Callahan, the first pilot, would monitor our exploration team from the landing craft until relieved by Ramanujan after her sleep, and Anton Fredericks and Sarah Carmichael would be the exploration team who would first seek out the natives.

When Canelli and I woke up, Callahan, still watching our team’s video feed, gave us a recap.

“It’s going OK. Our two explorers entered the building we had been observing via drone earlier. It took about 20 minutes before any of the people appeared, and the first one ignored our people and went into another fantasy. The second, a woman, came out about 10 minutes later, and Carmichael called out, ‘Excuse me!’ which was translated by her wearable device into both of the languages seen on the sign here. But the woman ran and hid from our duo, and after a few minutes went into another simulation. So it went for several more people. Finally we got a woman to help us. This one reacted to our explorers’ attempt to get her attention with ‘Eek! Aliens! Computer, end simulation!’ and a computerized voice responded that she was not in a simulation. But she stopped to listen to us, and since then, our explorers have been explaining how we discovered their world and traveled over what would normally be lifetimes to get here, and the resident has explained a little of her culture, such as it is, or was.”

So Canelli and I joined them. We had landed in one of the spaces we identified as possibly parks, and had to walk just under a kilometer to reach the large building within which was the simulator room where our team was. We found them in another room adjacent to the sex simulator room, one that had tables and chairs and perhaps was once meant to be a restaurant. Their chairs were a little lower than what we were used to and had an obvious hole for their tails, which our guest was using, but they worked fine for us to sit on.

“Oh, now there are four of you, and you all have clothes. I am getting self-conscious sitting here naked,” were the first of her words I heard translated by the device I wore.

Almost as soon as I sat down, she walked back into the other room, asking, “Computer, remind me which locker was mine and open it for me.” The computer gave her a number, and she retrieved something from the locker. She appeared sad as she brought it back to our group and put it on the table.

“These were my clothes, but they are useless now.” The translator was pretty good, able to pick up and convey the emphasis she put on the word equivalent to “were” in her language. The clothes were fused together in a lump, and the parts she was able to separate from the rest had obvious holes.

“How long have you been here?” Fredericks asked.

“I’ve completely lost track of time. Computer, how long has it been since I stored my clothes in the locker?”

The computer responded, “34 years, 6 months, 12 days.”

I asked, “How old were you when you went in?”

“22.”

“Is your appearance normal for someone from your world 56 years old?”

“Oh, we don’t age in the simulators. I’m aging now, but the small time we spend outside the simulators doesn’t add up to much. I’m 56 now, but I’m effectively still 22.”

“Interesting. So your people have no need to work, you can play forever, and you stay eternally young.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. When I turned 17 and was allowed in the sex simulators, at first I only went a little bit, and then a bit more, and once I was 20 sometimes for days at a time. After a while I decided life outside the simulators was boring, and there was nothing keeping me from staying here all the time, so I did.”

“Yes, we noticed that,” said Canelli. “It appears that everybody on your world has made that decision.”

“Everybody? No. Children aren’t allowed in, nor are the government officials.”

Canelli continued, “We have run detailed scans of your world. Unless your children have a significantly different form, we know exactly what your life signs look like, since they are not too different from our own. But the only life signs anywhere are fleeting ones around for a minute or two and then gone again, in facilities like this one.”

“What? Everybody is in the simulators? Computer, how many children are there in the world younger than 17?”

“Zero. The last known birth occurred 31 years, 11 months, and 8 days ago.”

“Computer, who is in charge of the government of the city?”

“Nobody. All government roles are vacant.”

“Computer, who and where is the nearest government official?”

“There are no registered government officials anywhere on the world.”

“Computer, how many living people are there on the world, including those currently in simulators?”

“Twelve billion, four hundred seventy nine million, twenty four thousand, six hundred eleven.”

“Computer, how many living people are there on the world who are not in a simulation or in a simulator room?”

“One.”

“Computer, am I the one you counted?”

“Yes.”

She pointed to the doorway between the simulator room and the room we sat in. “It counted me, because the simulator room ends there. And I guess it doesn’t recognize you as people.”

She slumped with her head resting on one hand. “OK, it’s hard to believe, but it looks like you are right. All my people decided to go into the simulators rather than face real life. Are the maintenance robots still active?”

She didn’t address this question to the computer, so when it did not answer, I did.

“Yes. We have seen many of them in action, keeping the solar and wind energy systems operating. There are some in other buildings, too, but they do not appear to be maintaining the individual houses. Some of those have collapsed.”

“It’s likely they were damaged by storms. The maintenance robots normally take care of all the buildings, but if a home is destroyed or seriously damaged during a storm, its resident has to request a repair, so that the robots prioritize repairs where they are wanted. Normally, government officials would request repair of damaged vacant homes once the occupied ones were taken care of. If all the people were in the simulators, they weren’t at their homes to request a repair, and if there are no government officials, they couldn’t do it either. Speaking of which, I am still bothered by being naked, so let me go back to my house and find some clothes. There should be some that have survived the time.”

Emperor of the World

She led us all to her home, which was a couple hundred meters from the building we had been in, but it was one of the destroyed buildings.

“Hmm,” the woman said. “I don’t imagine the others will care if I take their clothes, but their homes will be locked. But wait, there’s no government! I wonder...”

She led us back into the building we were in before.

“Computer, is the role of emperor vacant?”

“Yes.”

“Computer, I volunteer to be emperor.”

“Since there were no declared candidates in the last election for emperor, as of this moment, year 3479 month 8 day 12, you, Chen Dresta Balanjia, have become the emperor of the world, effective until the next election with candidates or until you resign or die.”

I chose not to worry about the fact that emperor was an elected position here. I treated it as a limitation of the translation; perhaps, in terms of power, the role was equal to an emperor.

“Well, I’m glad the system works. It’s always been possible for people to volunteer themselves into roles that were vacant after an election. Usually they aren’t accepted immediately; the nearest supervisor over that role has to approve of unelected volunteers. But I guess there is no supervisor for emperor. We learned how this system works in school. Once, when an entire town was destroyed by a storm and everybody in the government was killed, they had to reestablish the whole government that way, with the mayor being approved by the governor and then approving others under him. They also do that when establishing new cities. This is like that but restarting the entire government of the world. As emperor I should be able to enter any home whose occupants are away, and that’s all of them. My size is common, and one of the houses on this block should have clothes that fit. Then I can see about how else I can help you.”

Chen now led us to the group of houses nearest the sex parlor, and she went from house to house, unlocking each one and going inside briefly. It took her until the fifth house to find a dress that she came out wearing. But she stopped at the doorway.

“Come on in. My house was destroyed, and all my stuff is surely ruined, so I might as well make this one mine. There are clothes here that fit me. In fact... Computer, register this as my home.”

“Home registered.”

“You see, as emperor, I can exercise every government power including the one to assign housing, even for myself.”

Then we followed her inside, and there were couches and chairs not too different from what we had on Earth, except the back was held up by metal bars, leaving a gap between the padded parts of the back and the seat. We all sat down, including Chen, who put her tail into the gap as she sat down.

“Now, how can I help you?”

Everybody started speaking at once, but the others deferred to me as the ranking officer.

“Well, we’d like to know a lot about your history. Please start with how the sex simulators got started, as it could explain your current situation. Also, without going into too much graphic detail, what you experience in the simulators. We were afraid that if we went in we’d get just as addicted to them as your people seem to have done.”

“Well, the simulators have been around since well before I was born, but they got better over time. As I understand it, they started as a transportation system. You could travel instantly over long distances. Or very fast, anyway, but not completely instant. It takes some time to transmit your pattern. If you’re going to the next town, it’s pretty quick, but if you are going to the other side of the world, it takes an hour. And since it took a day to get to the other side of the world otherwise, that was the way it was mainly used at first.”

“Transportation via matter-to-energy-to-matter conversion?” I asked.

“Yes,” Chen replied, and then continued her story. “You actually experience that hour, though at first it was as a bland nothingness. Somebody figured out how to project entertainment programs into the virtual space your essence was in during this transmission, and at first it was just like the programs that people watched at home in those days.”

Fredericks interrupted, “Those programs are still running. Our advance craft found them broadcasting on a loop on many different frequencies, and these make up the bulk of how our translation systems learned your languages.”

Chen continued, “I’ll keep that in mind. Over time, the in-transportation entertainment got interactive, and they added sensory feedback, and then eventually people figured out how to make simulated sex using this feedback, and that was available as a premium option. But it was so popular they made sex simulators like the one you found me in, where you could experience virtual sex while not going anywhere. As I understand it, your pattern just goes around in loops under the building. There’s a transit hub in another part of the building you could use to go elsewhere; the larger sex sim rooms were built over them to take advantage of the already large computer systems in them.”

Carmichael asked, “Does it feel the same as real sex?”

“I’m told it feels just like real sex, but I’ve never actually had real sex. Hardly anybody did that by the time I started going into the simulators.”

“Do you need to eat?” Canelli asked.

“Yes, sort of. If I am going through simulators constantly, I might only be out of simulation for about 10 minutes a day, and that’s all the time that passes for my body. So I can go a month or so between eating, and then there are eating programs that actually feed your body pattern, and I just do one of those when I feel hungry. Likewise, you can call up a bathroom sim, do your business using your choice of body form, and your real body’s wastes will be eliminated. Apart from the eating and bathroom sims and a few other special ones designed to improve your real body, the sims are just sims, and anything you do in them does not affect your real body.”

“So they thought of everything. Made it so you never have to leave the simulators.”

“Yes. And as I understand it they were quite expensive when they started, but by the time I was old enough to be taught what the simulators were, they were free. I don’t know how that happened. Maybe you can ask the computer.”

Alien People

“The computer is accessible here, too?” one of the others asked.

“Yes. It’s basically available in every building, and even right outside the building so it can unlock the building by recognizing you, though locking and unlocking is really all you are allowed to do outside.”

“Computer, tell me the history about how the sex simulators went from an expensive luxury to free.”

There was no response.

“Computer, tell us the history about how the sex simulators went from an expensive luxury to free,” Chen echoed.

It started into the history, but Chen asked it to stop.

“Computer, how many people are in this building?”

“One.”

“Computer, how many life forms are in this building?”

“Five.”

“Computer, can I register the other life forms here as people?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like to be registered people on this world?” Chen asked us.

“Yes,” we responded in unison.

“OK, you figure out who goes first, and I’ll start you off. The computer will ask you some questions, and you don’t have to say ‘computer’ when you answer them. You do have to say that any other time for the computer to recognize you are making a request.”

We agreed to go in rank order. The two women on the landing team were of equal rank after me, and they played rock-paper-scissors to choose who went first, which led me to explain that game to Chen. When they were done, Chen started.

“Computer, register this life form as a person. He does not speak our language; accept commands from his speaking device as if they were given by him.”

The computer now spoke, “Applicant, which language would you prefer?”

This was repeated, apparently in all the languages we had discovered and the translator got it mostly right for all of them.

I responded, “English.”

“Language not recognized. Please choose from the available languages.

A list of languages appeared on the wall in front of us, which our translator showed as the names we had assigned the languages we discovered. Just those eight.

Chen explained, “This lets you choose which language the computer will respond to you in. But it doesn’t know your language. Your translator seems to work well for my speech, so just take the first one. Say one.”

“One.”

“Language 1 accepted. Please speak your name,” the computer said in the first language it had spoken at the start.

“Joseph Michael Walters”

“What is your nickname?”

“Joe”

“Gender?”

“Male”

“Birthplace?”

“Earth”

“Location not recognized. Please restate birthplace.”

“Off-world”

“Location not recognized.”

“Chen, what is the name of this city?”

What she said was translated as Bridgeport, and she had the computer take that as my birthplace.

“Birthplace Bridgeport accepted. Date of birth?”

“Hmm, it’s not measured in your calendar. And I was in suspended animation for 150 years that isn’t reflected in my apparent age, but I guess that happens to your people in the simulators, too. So I guess I should be 182 years old. Maybe 178, due to the slightly longer years here. What year did you say it was here?”

Chen shrugged. “Computer, what year is it?”

“3479”

So I did some quick mental math and responded, “OK. Computer, set my date of birth to year 3301, month 3, day 12.”

“Do you have any living relatives?”

I thought for a moment, recalling that any that I knew would be dead. There certainly weren’t any on this planet, and that meant that the computer wouldn’t know them as people. So I said, “No.”

“Registration complete.”

Chen continued the process to register the rest of our current team.

Now I repeated my request from earlier.

“Computer, tell us how the simulators went from an expensive luxury to free.”

The story went on for about half an hour, but the gist was that it was expensive because of the amount of electricity needed to power the sims. Imagine buying a ticket for a long-haul airplane flight to participate in sex sims for the hour that the transit took here. They had long ago exhausted the fossil fuels here and relied on solar and wind power, apparently never having developed nuclear power, or at least not having fusion and deciding the radioactive waste of fission power couldn’t be tolerated. So there was a big effort to build solar cells, and expand the offshore wind farms. For a generation, most new jobs were based on making the solar cells, whether mining to obtain materials, refining, manufacturing, or installing.

They had a global, high-capacity, superconducting electric grid and they did have some batteries to cover peaks in demand and slowdowns in generation, but solar from the side facing the sun at any given moment, together with wind power worldwide, powered the whole world, so they did not need the huge daily cycling batteries associated with the use of solar power on Earth. As more solar power systems were installed, electricity became cheaper and normal people could start to afford trips into the simulators, while rich people could start to live there all the time. This led to the development of eating and bathroom programs within the simulators.

Some solar and wind installation jobs were dangerous and put people at heights, and they paid people well to take the risks. The jobs to maintain those installations were equally dangerous, so they developed autonomous robots to do the maintenance jobs. Jobs building and repairing robots replaced the other manufacturing jobs, but many fewer people were needed, so people started working fewer hours. Eventually they built robots that could repair the other robots, and robots that could recycle damaged equipment and build new ones from them, and the entire system ran autonomously. Once the solar and wind networks were finished, the cost of electricity fell to nothing, as there was excess power available, and they made the simulators free.

In fact, they did away with money. When I asked for more about this, I found that the rooftop garden thing had been going on for generations. The population had long exceeded the capacity of farmland to grow enough food for people, and people had rooftop gardens to grow most of the food they needed. Once the labor of people was no longer needed due to robots being built for all sorts of manual labor, many people couldn’t earn money, and since they didn’t have to pay for electricity, didn’t have to pay for food, and most everything else was handled by a system of self-maintaining robots, the government simply did away with money. Some people still worked jobs, including caring for and educating children, and there were a small number of government jobs, mainly law enforcement and some oversight over the automated systems that ran everything.

So people played games, enjoyed entertainment (which was mostly old material, but there were hundreds of years of movies, music, books, etc. all available on demand on their version of the Internet; more than anybody could ever watch), and they used the simulators. Over time, though, people got bored of the other stuff, and everybody used the simulators. The children grew up, no more children were born, child care and teachers were no longer needed, and the people doing these jobs also ended up using the simulators. And the government officials, bored with days, weeks, and months with literally nothing that needed doing, also resigned, bypassing a rule that prohibited government overseers from going into the simulators. They were allowed to travel, but not to purposefully spend time in the simulators. The rule was supposed to ensure there was always some human oversight, but nobody envisioned the entire government resigning. By the time they did, there was nobody left to object except other government officials facing the same situation, who followed suit rather than protest.

I started writing my report to send back to Earth with these details. It was going to need a lot more, but this was useful.

One of our reminders went off, and we agreed to call in the rest of our crew. The group in space had completed a plan we had agreed upon, to move one of the ships to the other garden station and steer it to a position opposite the first one around the planet, ensuring that they had maximum visibility of the planet and access to send signals back to Earth at all hours. The reminder was that their orbital position after this maneuver was nearing a point from which they could land most quickly near us. Of course, they had been watching us and knew it was going well for us here, and they were ready to come down as soon as we gave the word, which we did. We also called in our two pilots from the first lander to join us.

When I explained to Chen that two more people already on the planet and 9 more coming from orbit would be joining us, she appointed the four of us as other government officials who would have the power she did to register people and reassign homes. The pilots arrived pretty quickly and we registered them.

We tried some of the food from Chen’s garden and it was fine. Better than space rations, and comparable to what we had been eating on the space station. We also learned there was a rainwater collection system on every house which filtered the water to provide drinking water. Water that was leftover after cooking was put into a system that filtered it again, using it to water the gardens when rain didn’t supply enough. Water that ran off the plants was allowed to soak down into the ground naturally.

In her kitchen, there was a small refrigerator. The Martians didn’t eat meat, and they made a calcium-rich drink from certain plants rather than drinking animal milk, except for infants breast-feeding, so they really only needed to preserve half-eaten fruits and certain harvested plants. There were a few black lumps of who-knows-what left in there that she cleaned out, though we didn’t see what she did with them.

Next, the six of us looked for homes with suitable clothing. We agreed the clothes we came in would only last so long and we needed to find local clothes if we didn’t want to eventually be going around naked.

Their clothes included shirts, pants in various lengths, and dresses. But we discovered quickly that their pants, all tight-fitting styles, had a roughly palm-sized hole in the rear for the tail. For us, it would mean a big stretch of our butt crack showing, unless it was covered with a dress. The dresses had a vent in the back for the tail, basically two pieces of fabric that overlapped, with a hole between them that they threaded the tail through vertically. This meant the hole closed flat like the space between two shirt buttons when we wore them with no tail. There were dresses for both men and women, easily distinguished by whether they had space for the breasts. Two of the men had tried putting on two pairs of pants, one backward, but they found that uncomfortable, and pretty soon everyone was in a dress and we gathered again in Chen’s house.

Chen explained, “Each of your homes has a bathroom, and you can dispose of any trash in there.”

She demonstrated, opening the door to hers and depositing some inedible bit from food we ate into a covered chute she pointed out to us, just inside the door.

Canelli spoke up, “I could use a bathroom now.”

Chen stepped out, gestured to indicate it was open for her, and Canelli pulled the door shut behind her. But a moment later she came back out.

“How do you actually use the bathroom here?”

She opened the door wide so that we could see inside, and the others of us moved around the room to look. There was a mirror, a countertop with a few items on it, and not much else we could see.

“The mirror is for grooming. When you are ready to go into the bathroom sim, touch the panel on the far wall.”

“Oh, it’s a sim?”

“Yes. All our bathrooms are sims. You can only access the bathroom sims here, not any other sims.”

I and all my crewmates let out sighs of relief. We were not going to have the temptation of sex sims in every home.

“It’s based on bathrooms we had a long time ago, before I was born. The first thing you will see is a choice of body. There are three choices, and you can think or say 1, 2, or 3 or press buttons in front of you. 1 is your own body, 2 is a generic male body, and 3 is a generic female body. Then you will be in the bathroom, naked, and there will be an oval toilet that you sit on and pee and poop. There is a bidet built into the toilet, and once you are sitting you will see two buttons. The first is to spray water to clean yourself, and the second is to spray air to dry the water. But you don’t have to use the bidet. The bathroom sim ensures you are clean when you leave. It will clean your clothes, too.”

Canelli went in and did her business, and the rest of us took a turn as well even if we didn’t really need it. When we were done, we compared stories. We had chosen all the body types among us. Naturally, the generics were generic New Martians (who we quickly decided to simply call Martians). We now knew Martians peed and pooped like humans, except the males did not use their penis, with the urethra instead opening at the outermost point of the scrotum.

When we asked about them, Chen explained, “The generics were originally put in to help disabled people. If it was difficult for you to use the bathroom because of your condition, you could choose a generic body which would have no difficulty.”

“Originally?” I asked.

“While the bathroom and eating programs change the contents of your body, they also figured out how to make sims that would modify the body itself, materializing you afterward with changes in your body that you specified, rather than just changing the contents and removing dirt on it and such. Most of the sims, including all the sex sims, explicitly don’t change your real body in any way, regardless of what you choose or do inside, but there are other sims that can fix just about anything that’s wrong with your body.”

“So you stopped having disabled people because they all got fixed in sims.”

“Exactly.”

Chen didn’t say more, but seemed to be hesitating and thinking about saying something.

“I’m going to guess it didn’t stop there.”

“Good guess. People made custom versions of the fix-your-body sim which ‘fixed’ things that most people wouldn’t consider wrong in the first place. There were people with extra arms, giant and tiny sizes, and some outright monsters, but they put a stop to that. Now you can only overwrite parts of your body with corresponding parts from the generic male and female bodies, which will be adjusted to match your size and skin tone, and if your size is far from the average you can bring it closer to average, and you can change skin tone, hair, and a few other bits of your appearance within the normal ranges.”

“So they are back to just fix-your-body sims.”

“Well, mostly. It’s possible to pull from either generic body, so you can draw from the other to give yourself a sex change.”

“Did a lot of people do that?”

“At first, yes. It was quite popular before the monsters, and nobody saw anything wrong with it so it was explicitly left as an available option. Later, when everybody was using the sims all the time, there was less of that, because you can take a different body within any given sex sim, though people still change sex to use the statues, like I did.”

“You changed? You were originally male?”

“Yes. But I preferred being female in the sex sims. I think women have it better. So I changed to female so I could jump on the erections of the statues to get into sims where I’m female with a male partner.”

“Does that immediately throw you into sex with what the statue represents?”

“Yes. The alternative is to touch a panel on any of the statues, similar to the one for entering the bathroom sims. When you do that, you first get a menu like in the bathroom sims, but with many more options. But sometimes I didn’t much care, and just wanted some sex, fast. I had to get all new clothes, but by the time I did that it was easy to get robot-made clothes.”

I noted for both my report and for our later usage that robots made their clothes, as Chen continued.

“There is essentially an unlimited amount of customization possible if you go through the menus before you enter the sex part. You can choose just about any body for yourself, including forms banned from the real world. You can add more or fewer limbs, otherwise impossible shapes or dimensions, and you can have either or both sexes. There are alien bodies with different skin colors; everybody on this world has green skin, though it varies just as yours do: from very pale green to very deep green and also varieties that have reddish sections. That is why I recognized you as aliens, because we have legends of visitors from other worlds with other colors of skin besides green and red.”

I interrupted, “That’s remarkable, because nobody on my world has naturally green skin, and one of the earliest and most persistent stories of aliens was about ‘little green men’ with green skin who supposedly came from a red planet near ours called Mars. There were never any real little green men, though; they were fictions that people made up and repeated. Your planet looks red to us from our home world because the solar cells absorb light and most of the reflected light is from the water, which is full of red plant life, so we called it New Mars even though we didn’t know it was actually populated by green people. But go on.”

“You can likewise choose any kind of body for your sexual partner(s). You can give them any kind of personality you want as well, from pliable and submissive, willing to accept any suggestion of what you want them to do, to one who will totally take control and tell you what to do, and from ones who need a lot of coaxing to get them to have sex to total nymphomaniacs who want nothing but sex. Oh, and I should mention that panels on the walls and pillars of the sex sim rooms let you enter non-sex sims, again with a menu to let you choose what you want.”

She stopped to make a query when she mentioned this.

“Computer, how many people are in simulations right now other than the sex sims, standard eating and drinking sims, sleep sims, and bathroom sims?”

“One million, one hundred forty one thousand, six hundred eight.”

I remarked, “They are obviously not very popular. 1.1 million out of 12 billion people in sims are doing something other than sex or handling their body’s necessities, about one hundredth of one percent. But they are used.”

At further prompting from Chen, the computer provided a run-down of the million. About a third were in some kind of sports sim. Almost as many were in hobby sims, like painting. About 20% were acting out interactive versions of this world’s popular fiction. Just over 10% were in tourism sims, viewing the famous places of this world, but rather than going there physically, they could take in everything virtually and switch locations instantly. 5% of the people were in the body experiment sim. Chen explained this let you experiment virtually with different body types, and you could save them as custom avatars for use in other sims. Just 5 people were exploring the real, permanent body modification sim. 271 were in other miscellaneous sims that didn’t fall into any of these categories.

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.

Pregnancy

So all that was really left at this point was to get the women pregnant. In this first round I could only speak for my two assigned women, but neither of them shied away from this duty. However, Lakshmi quickly got into a mood of “let’s get this over with.” She didn’t want to worry about enjoying it, just to get me to come inside her. She ended up not getting pregnant that first month. Sarah, on the other hand, was a sex fiend. When it was our turn, our sessions ran for one to two hours, sometimes with me coming inside her two or three times, and I couldn’t keep count of her apparent orgasms. And she showed up at my house to start on the 10th day after the red light, just in case she ovulated that early, and kept going until the 19th day.

It probably wasn’t surprising Sarah got pregnant. Lakshmi needed two more cycles. She was one of only two women to not be pregnant two months after we started the program. After the third month, every woman was confirmed pregnant. By this time, we were eating delicious food at every meal, we had a good command of the computers here, everybody had all new clothes in styles they liked, and the living was easy.

Some of the people who’d been appointed jobs didn’t have much remaining to do, but they found other things to do. Some people went into the various houses near us and took all the old, ruined clothes and hauled them over to the clothing factory. Also, all the pants with tail holes went there, even if not ruined by time. While we now had adequate clothes, we could always use more, so we just amassed a pile of to-be-recycled fabric there for when we needed something. Elsewhere in the building with the sex parlor, we found a space with racks like a clothing store, and Chen thought that was effectively what it once was. It was obvious that it hadn’t been maintained in about as long as most of the homes hadn’t been lived in. The few garments left were ruined, so we put them in the recycling and moved all the still-good clothes from the nearby vacant houses into the store, sorted by type, gender, and size, free for anybody to take. This let us all move into a block of adjacent houses like a neighborhood instead of just wherever we found fitting clothes.

I also wanted to explore how the sims could be adapted as childbirth sims. While we might not strictly speaking need them, all the women would appreciate any help they could get. Clara volunteered for this job, and Chen assigned her the government role Director of Sim Development which gave her essentially unlimited power over the sims. That was one of the few high-level government officials who was allowed in the sex sims, as it was expected she would sometimes need to test how things were operating and test new or questionable sims, but she also had control over the non-sex sims. One of her first changes was to make generic male and female human models that she made available as options in the bathroom sims, something everyone could test, and we all approved of them.

Three months later, Clara reported, “Chen helped me learn how to register a new type of sim, and how to access the sim designer, but I was on my own after that. I started with an empty sex sim with no partner, and with the user in a human body pregnant and ready to give birth. Then I experimented with body modifications meant to make birth easier. I had no choice at this point but to test it repeatedly in different configurations so I could properly compare them. I considered bringing in other volunteers, but the results were going to be subjective and difficult to compare experiences across different people. The only way to compare them properly was for me to do them all myself. Fortunately, after the first few, the births were pretty easy. I made one which was way too easy; the baby shot out like a rocket with a single push which might have injured the baby due to the impact. Then it was only a matter of finding a happy medium between that and the human norm. Here’s what I ended up with.”

She showed a video of a birth in the finished model. The body looked like a caricature of a wide-hipped woman, with the thighs at least 25 cm apart. The actual birth took only a tad over two minutes.

“After that, I extracted the changes between the original, realistic human woman and the final model, and made that into a body modification sim. To test that it would work, I did more testing in modified sex sims, taking several different bodies from the sex sims, applying the human female generic over them, making them pregnant, and applying the birthing body mod. Once again, I gave simulated birth using these different bodies. Having decided it all worked, I packaged it up as a bathroom sim mod.”

She brought up another video on a screen for all of us to watch.

“When a pregnant woman enters any bathroom now, she’ll have six options. Own body, generic male Martian, generic female Martian, generic male human, generic female human, and childbirth. In the childbirth sim, instead of the toilet there will be an inclined birthing chair. The body mods I designed will be applied to your real body, and you will sit in the chair and really give birth to your baby in a process that should take only 2 to 5 minutes. When you are done, pick up your baby and leave. The sim will remove the cord, placenta, all the fluids that come out during birth, and apply the same cleaning to your body and clothes and the baby that you get during bathroom visits, and restore the shape of your body before the mod. While I can’t test it for real until one of our pregnant mothers is ready to give birth, I’m confident the testing I have applied to the parts should give a good result, even if it doesn’t 100% match expectations.”

As the pregnancies progressed, our mothers were able to get the robots to construct beds, cloth diapers (based on a pattern modified to eliminate the tail hole), and other supplies they would want for the babies.

Laura, our director of breeding, was ironically the first to go into labor. Somebody helped her to the nearest bathroom and she called up the birth sim and went in. Five minutes later she emerged holding her child in her arms.

“I never gave birth before, but I’m pretty sure this was the easiest birth any human woman ever experienced. Thanks, Clara and Chen for helping set this up. Everything you designed worked the way you described.”

This also started our next duty: Childcare. Laura started the research into that area with the first obvious question, “What did you do about dirty diapers?”

Chen was unsure. “I never had kids of my own, and I don’t remember from when I was little.”

But she looked it up and came up with the answer: “When the diaper is soiled, take the baby with its dirty diaper into the bathroom sim. That sim was designed to remove poop and pee, wherever they ended up, and that includes clothing, which the cloth diapers count as. In dirty, out clean, as simple as that. We should have figured that out, given that that was how we cleaned our own clothes. Those sims removed other bodily secretions, dirt, food stains, and just about any problem that could befall clothes. We had long ago developed the routine of going into our bathroom before bed and then taking off our clothes and hanging them up.”

I guess this meant we really only needed one diaper per child, so the stacks we had made would probably last us through this entire generation of children.

At first it was just Laura, but two weeks later we had three babies, and the mothers decided on a new plan. There were some larger houses clearly meant for larger families, and the mothers moved into one of these together, and they switched back into sleeping in shifts, since of course babies slept when they felt like it. This let each woman sleep part of the day, take care of the children (which to a significant extent meant breast-feeding) part of the day, and take care of other duties, if any, for part of the day, or simply rest. Two weeks later, three more mothers gave birth within a week and they moved into another such house. The last four mothers straggled out their births over the next couple months, and moved into a house with room for four. Then men then moved into the single houses closest to this group. By the time the last of the first round of children were born, the first mothers had already had their first post-birth period and were certified ready to get pregnant again. In later generations we would wait, but we had to compress this generation because some of the women were as old as 33, physically, when we arrived, including Laura, who ended up with me in the second round.

Chen felt left out. To our surprise, Chen decided to use the body modification sim to replace her reproductive system with a human one, and not just an imitation one! The ships’ databases included the complete human genome, and we had the data about the DNA structures needed. The body modification sim was able to process that to make real human cells with human DNA, and we chose a set of genes for her from the genome which was considered safe while being optimally distinct from what we had.

However, there was an issue with rejection, and we ultimately decided the only way around that was for Chen to take a fully human body. She felt weird without a tail, but otherwise was able to make one close to her original sizes and continue wearing the same clothes. The final test was whether she could get pregnant and bear a human child successfully. We assigned her one of the men at random and she succeeded in getting pregnant around the same time as the others were doing so for the third time. Then we just had to wait.

During that time, even though it was still years away, we started trying to figure out how we were going to teach the children. We were going to have 4 grades with 10 or 11 children each, and the plan was to introduce one teacher for each grade, to be assisted by what we could get out of the computer. Their other duties would get shifted to other people, to the extent those jobs were stlll needed. Chen had already learned English to a 5-year-old’s level and volunteered to be a test student for lessons they set up.

When birthing time came, Chen had her child along with the rest of them, and he seemed perfectly healthy. But this gave us a dilemma. If this child grew up healthy, we could use the same technique to artificially make children using the complete spectrum of human DNA, not limited to just the genes of the crew who survived the trip to New Mars. But should we?

One woman said that since the women had all contributed to the effort by giving birth, the men should do so too. Literally every other woman shot that idea down. Some pointed out that the women who signed up for this mission did so knowing they would be asked to bear children if they arrived successfully on New Mars. The men had no such expectation. Others noted that if one or more men did go female for this, they wouldn’t be there for their turns servicing some of the women.

Still others pointed out that our effort to raise 40, and now with Chen 42 kids was already going to be a strain on all of us, and suggested we should not have any more. If we modified DNA at all, we should modify some of these children, or their children, wherever certain genes are detected in excess to avoid inbreeding when they had to start having children with their effective cousins two generations from now.

With all these arguments, and none of the men volunteering to become female to have children, and Chen happy to stop at 2, the idea of having more than 42 children in this generation by any means was dropped.

The Second Martian

The women had all borne their last children and we were at one of the now quite-large meal sessions with all the adults and half the children eating standard food, the one-year-olds eating pureed food, and the infants either breast-feeding or sleeping, but all 58 of us were there, filling the restaurant, when a man stepped out of the sim room and said something we didn’t understand since we had stopped using the translators at this point, carrying out both our business with the computer and conversations with Chen in English.

Chen responded to him in his language, and then when none of us said anything, she realized we didn’t understand and translated for us.

“He asked, ‘Who are all you weirdos?’ and I said ‘They are our guests from space and you are welcome to join us.’”

The man hadn’t made a response yet either, but by the time he did, one of my tech people had found and turned on a translator so we could all speak with him.

“So, you all are having real sex and making babies? Does that have anything to do with your skin being so pale?”

Clearly, this guy hadn’t figured it out yet, so I responded, “We are from another planet where all the people look like this, and we traveled two lifetimes to get here after we discovered your world through big telescopes. Except for her; she changed her body to look like us because she was lonely as the only one of your people here.”

He responded, “The only one? Where are all the others?”

“In the sims,” Chen responded.

“What? All of them? That was supposed to be forbidden for government officials.”

Chen replied, “Only overseers. And you are looking at the entirety of the government officials of the world now, at all levels.”

“For the whole world? Computer, how many government officials are there in the world now, excluding people in this room?”

“Zero.”

“Computer, how many of the people here are government officials? How many overseers who are prohibited from using sims?”

“Sixteen, five with roles that prohibit them from using adult entertainment sims.”

“How did this happen?”

Noting that he did not address the computer this time, Chen responded, “They all resigned. Our society automated everything, and made it so we could live every part of our lives in the sims. And so people did. And so the government officials who had nothing to do resigned and joined them.”

“So you all just volunteered for empty offices?”

“Exactly. I volunteered to be emperor because the post was empty and certain things couldn’t be done without government officials.”

“You volunteered to be the emperor? Computer, how long has this person in front of me been emperor of the world?”

“For the last four years, three months, seventeen days.”

“Computer, how long was the post of emperor vacant before she assumed the role?”

“Nine years, eight months, twenty-one days.”

“So Miss Emperor, what are you doing about the problem that our entire race is living their entire lives inside sims?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“They are happy and they are not needed.”

Even through his alien face, it was clear the man was flabbergasted at this response, and didn’t know what to say for a moment. Finally, he asked, “So what are you doing?”

“Acting as ambassador to the people of Earth, who have traveled an unimaginable distance to see our world in person.”

“But... our people!”

“Look, we’ve been eating almost all of our meals in this restaurant, in plain sight of people changing sims, every day for over four years now. Or at least the sixteen adults among us have, since the children aren’t that old yet. You are the first person in all that time out of over a thousand using this sim room to show any interest in us.”

“And how did you come to be with these people?”

Chen was speechless, apparently out of ways to explain things, so I spoke up. “When we first arrived, we found everything functioning but all the people missing. We discovered that people were switching sims periodically in this room, and we tried talking with them while they did so until we managed to get her to answer us. And she was as shocked as you are to discover the state of your world.”

Then Chen added, “And I am surprised you noticed us.”

“It’s hard not to notice a room full of aliens.”

“Maybe for you. Not for them. The people switching sims here have tried everything, including sex with aliens.”

“Oh, I wasn’t switching.”

“What? You were in one long-running sim?”

“Yes. Computer, how long was my last sim session?”

“Forty-seven years, eleven months, twenty-five days.”

“What the heck kind of sim was that?” Chen asked, clearly shocked one sim could go on that long.

“Custom paid sim. But my money should have run out long before that.”

“The government abolished money once the automatic electrical generation exceeded even the needs to keep the whole population in sims.”

“Oh, well that explains that.”

“So why did you leave your sim?”

“My buddy died and I was distraught.”

“Your buddy died? Level with me, what kind of custom sim was this that you were in?”

“It was the deluxe sex sim. You can change into any type of person or animal you want, have sex with literally anything, basically mold the world how you want.”

“The God sim.”

“Yes, that one. When normal sex got boring, I turned one of the prostitutes male and taught him how to double-penetrate women with me. But eventually that got boring, and I taught him how to do other things. Non-sexual things. And we were just living a good life in there and he just fell over and froze solid! Nothing I could do could bring him out of it.”

Chen explained to us briefly, in English, “That sim is even more expansive than the standard sex sim. You can change literally everything, not just you and your sex partner. You can have the computer create stuff in the scene around you, live, without pausing the simulation.”

And then, in her language directed at our new visitor, “So you were in the sex sim, but you weren’t even having sex.”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“What sort of other things were you doing?”

“Oh, everything. We played all kinds of games, we learned to play music together, we did everything you can imagine. But he just froze and the rest of the sim kept going around us.”

Clara, our Director of Sim Development, interjected, “You probably exceeded the capacity of the simulation’s memory buffer. It can access a pretty large amount of memory, but there is a limit. It’s well above what anybody is expected to ever need in even pretty complicated sims, but it is still a limit. Trying to live a whole virtual life in there and develop the AI into a virtual friend is probably enough to eventually reach the limit. And when that happened, since your buddy used the most memory, the computer shut him off to avoid having the whole simulation collapse.”

The newcomer said, “Well, I don’t think I have it in me right now to just try to start over. Well, if there was nobody here I’d get bored and go back into another sim, but right now I’m interested in you all.”

I responded, “I’ve explained how we discovered your world from far away, and traveled here to meet you, only to be disappointed to find that you are all hiding in sims, so we are glad to have been able to speak with two of you. You see that our bodies look a lot like yours except we don’t have tails. They work a lot like yours too.”

“Ah, that is what you said. You are from another world. This would be hard to believe if I didn’t see all your alien bodies here in front of me. Are you wearing our clothes?”

“Yes, since none of you were using your homes, their contents, and what the robots provide, we have taken a small part of that for ourselves.”

“I guess that makes sense, since the owners were not around for you to ask their permission. This world you came from, is it one of the other planets that circles our sun?”

“No. It is like that, but it circles another star out there in space, far away.”

“Another star? The stars are very far away. How did you travel so far? You did say that it took you lifetimes.”

“We were held in suspended animation in our ships. Like in your simulators, it means time didn’t pass for our bodies, but unlike your simulators, we were asleep and did not experience the time. We accelerated close to the speed of light, but even so, the journey took almost 150 of your years.”

“The speed of light. I haven’t heard anyone mention that since I was in school. Nobody ever figured out how to travel anywhere close to that fast, but doesn’t time get funny if you do?”

“Yes. It was more like 12 years on board the ship, half of that in the time it took to accelerate and decelerate, but because we didn’t have your simulators, nor enough room to store so much actual food on board, we spent the time suspended.”

It was interesting to learn that the Martians had at least discovered relativity and knew about it to the point that children might learn about it in school. We learned more from him about the way things were before the sex simulators became the way of life for Martians, but not too much, because he’d also gotten addicted to the sims at a young age. We eventually learned his name was Weld. As a member of one of the aristocratic families, he’d not only been able to get access to the sex simulators before they became free for everyone, but he had access to them before the usual minimum age of 17. By the time he was 21, he’d grown bored with them but even more bored with real life here, and started the custom sim he’d described for us.

“I’m surprised to see all the statues,” Weld explained.

Chen explained, “The statues were added around the time the sims became free for everybody. With lots of people wanting to get in, they wanted a way for people to get into sims faster. That’s also why we have the lockers. People needed to be naked to mount the statues, so they let those using sims store their clothes in one of these small square lockers. It was only expected to hold the clothes you wore into the place, so they didn’t have to be big.”

“Right; when I went in, the sim room was only a quarter of this size, and there were no lockers.”

“That makes sense. The sim preserved the clothes you were wearing, too, so they still look nice. My clothes disintegrated in a locker while I was in a sim, and I bet yours would have, too, if they hadn’t been preserved in sim-space.”

“Well, I’m interested in learning more about you all. I’d like to live near you if that’s possible.”

“Not in your family’s big fancy home?”

“No. I already know they aren’t going to be there. Maybe I’ll go get some of my clothes.”

“You should be aware a lot of our clothes also disintegrated within our homes. Maybe a third of the clothes were still wearable when I met this group, and some of those have fallen apart and been replaced in the last four years.”

“Hmm. Let’s go look.”

Chen and Weld left to go find his home. They came back a little while later with Weld carrying a few garments in his arms, and took them into one of the homes similar to the ones the men among my crew were living in, which Chen assigned to him.

Information Leak

Weld lived like one of us for a couple weeks, learning a lot about us and helping us learn a bit more about the time when most Martians lived in real life all the time. Then he grew bored, and started looking for his friends. Clara still had the sim director role, and helped him find them. One was in a different simulator room, but the others were in the room we had been using, and none of them were in long-term sims, so Weld got a stool and sat there waiting for them. One by one he found them, and the conversations he had with them all went about like this:

Weld: “Hey, Turra!”

Turra: “Hey, Weld! Long time no see!”

Weld: “Did you know aliens have taken over the world?”

Turra: “What, the aliens now available in the sims?”

Weld: “Yes, they look like that.”

Turra: “Well, it was nice of them to have given us more options. Bye!”

And Turra jumped into another sim. It didn’t matter if his friend was male or female. They all reacted the same way.

When we watched this particular recording, Laura asked the question, “Did we make humans available as an option in the sex sims? I know they are available in the bathroom sims.”

Clara replied, “It’s possible I did when making the birth sim, but I didn’t mean to.”

Weld, who had spent short periods in the modern sex sims to learn about the options now available, and naturally had also used the bathroom sims, confirmed for us that he had seen human options available in both types of sims.

Clara, Weld, and I went to a room together where we could investigate from one of the computer consoles. Clara, the most familiar with sim administration, led the effort. I was there to confirm her results, and Weld was mostly curious but volunteered to point out avatars he had seen.

“Computer, show me a list of all human and part-human avatars available in any type of sim.”

The result was a list about three screens long.

“Computer, show me the list in chronological order of creation, showing creator names, creation dates, and full permissions.”

It was longer now because of the extra data, but now we could make more sense from it. The first several entries were avatars Clara created during the development of the childbirth sim. They were labeled private, and the computer confirmed that only Clara would be able to use them or even know about their existence, apart from the kind of administrator access we were using. Since the government officials had resigned their posts, none of the Martians had this level of access, though Chen and I did.

The next three entries in the list were the generic human male, generic human female, and pregnant human models available in the bathroom sim, also created by Clara. The pregnant human was a different kind of avatar from the others; you never played it directly, but as a modification of your own body. It contained the modifications to allow pregnant women to give birth easier. The computer confirmed that these avatars were only usable in the bathroom and birth sims, as intended.

The other 70-some avatars were created by six other people, all Martians. Some of them were marked private, and only accessible to the creator, but each of the six had published some human avatars, including at least one male and one female each, so that everyone could see them. All of them were for the sex sims. A series of queries let us determine that they were all created by applying the generic humans to other existing Martian avatars. Essentially, what Chen had done to make herself human, others had done to make Martian sex sim avatars human. They hadn’t used the pregnant human, even though as an overlay type of avatar it was even easier to combine with other avatars, because Clara had only made it visible to pregnant humans, so the Martians didn’t know it existed.

Clara said, “I should have realized that by making the generic avatars world-readable in order to make them usable in the bathroom sims, they were also world-copiable. Chen copied them, but she’s the emperor and has global access. I hadn’t realized other normal Martians could copy them. But once they were in the bathroom sims, everybody knew about them.”

I asked, “Computer, how many sex sims have used one of these human avatars?”

“Fifty-seven billion, three hun...”

I tuned out the computer’s voice response as it read out the rest of the eleven-digit number. That was a lot, almost enough for every Martian to have used human sims five times. But most of these people were doing multiple sims a day, and they had been available for over 1000 days.

“Computer, out of all the sex sims run since the first of the sex sim avatars on your previous list was published, what percentage involved one of these avatars?”

“Zero point zero four three seven percent.”

Clara, who was good with mental math, said, “That is in line with the average person starting about ten sims a day.”

I continued, “Computer, what percentage of the sex sims run in the last day have involved one of these avatars?”

“Zero point zero five two two percent.”

“So they haven’t gotten significantly more popular over time. It took awhile for people to discover they existed, but once they did, likely the ones who liked them kept using them. Computer, what percentage of sex sim users have ever used one of these avatars in a sex sim?”

“Twelve point two zero one percent.”

“Almost an eighth of all Martians have tried it. Computer, what percentage of sex sim users have used one of these avatars in a sex sim in the last ten days?”

“Zero point one nine three percent.”

Clara exclaimed, “Wow, a lot less!”

I replied, “Yes. Most of them didn’t like it and went back to whatever they had been using, but about one in 500 Martians continued using humans in sex sims regularly. Since about one in 2000 recent sims have involved human avatars, it means this group uses human avatars in about one out of four sims for at least one partner. Computer, out of the 57 billion or so sex sims that involved at least one of these avatars, how many also involved avatars not on this list?”

“Forty two point nine one percent.”

“Almost half of the people using them are simming human-Martian sex. I guess I am not surprised. And I’m sorry,” Clara said.

We took this back to the whole group.

Clara addressed them, “I have to apologize to you about something. Not to any of you specifically, but to the human race, and you are their representatives here.”

There were a couple chuckles, but the group mostly looked serious and watched her intently to see what she was apologizing for.

“When I created the generic human bathroom sims, they became available to all the Martians who used the standard bathroom sims. This meant basically all of them, save for a few who spend such long periods in long-term sims that they never do, and a few who have custom bathroom sims and do not go through the selection menu of the standard one.”

“But we aren’t trying to hide from them,” someone said.

“Not just the Martians using this facility, though. For practical purposes, all twelve billion Martians learned humans exist.”

They looked, waiting for the real apology, knowing that this was nothing to apologize for.

“When I did this, I didn’t realize that Martians would be able to copy those generics, not to modify their own bodies as Chen did, but to modify the bodies of sex sim avatars.”

There were several gasps, and looks of realization across the whole group.

“Six Martians made modified sex sim avatars with human bodies and published them so that anyone using the sex sims could use them, either as their own avatar in the sex sims or as their partner. And the Martians have indeed been using them.”

A few people asked “How many?” and “How often?” and “Who?” and similar questions all at the same time.

“None of the perpetrators who made these copies are in this city. But Martians worldwide have used them. Approximately one in eight Martians has at some point used one of the human avatars. About one in five hundred Martians uses them regularly. So I have to apologize for the Martians getting to know us much more closely than we ever intended.”

The people were upset, but not too strongly, and they seemed to accept Clara’s apology.

“That said, they aren’t using any of us specifically. The generic avatars are based on a composite of all of us and data about the human race we brought with us. They are meant to be average humans in every way. So far, I haven’t done anything to stop this, because I wanted to ask the group first what, if anything, we should do.”

There were murmurs both of “Stop it” and of “Ignore it” and similar phrases. No clear agreement.

“As I see it we have two real options. One is to do nothing, let them keep using human avatars, which hasn’t seemed to have caused any real problems in the three years and change since the first of these avatars was published. The other option is to block all access to the human avatars created so far, and block copy access of the generic humans so that they can’t create more. And the reason I hesitate is that this may create about 24 million irate Martians, upset that they can no longer use human avatars in the sex sims.”

“They’ll imitate,” Chen said from the back of the room.

“What was that?” Clara asked.

“If you shut off access to the real humans, they’ll make imitation human avatars. Start with a Martian, remove the tail, change the skin color, make it a bit more slender, and you get something that looks believably human, but isn’t.”

Brenda chipped in, “That’s arguably worse. They could use that on their real bodies and they will look believably human, but they won’t be. Fortunately, they don’t seem interested in coming back into the real world, but if they did, they could come out in a body like that and we’d think they were human even though they aren’t. They could end up cross-breeding with us, which is almost certainly worse than anything they have actually done so far.”

Clara responded, “No. That wouldn’t happen. When Chen tried to give herself a human reproductive system in her Martian body, we studied Martians down to their DNA. They have DNA with the same four bases, but the genetic code, the mapping of base triads to amino acids, is entirely different. There is no chance Martian sperm could fertilize human eggs or vice versa. Even if you forced them together in a lab, the foreign DNA would transcribe as gibberish, and wouldn’t make anything useful. The cell would destroy itself before it could reproduce. This was why she had to turn her entire body human, because the two systems are entirely incompatible.”

A few people sounded relieved, but Mara asked, “They may not be interested in imitating us in the real world, but what’s to say they haven’t already created sim avatars which are really Martian but look like humans externally?”

Clara replied, “Good point. Computer, show me a list of sex sim avatars which are not based directly or indirectly on the generic human avatars, but which resemble humans in terms of skin color and not having a tail.”

The list had 21 pages. Everyone was shocked into silence for a few moments. Clara continued by having the computer sort the list by creation date; the first of these avatars showed up just two days after she released the human bathroom sims.

“Not only did they make imitation human avatars, but they made seven times as many of them as actual humans, and sooner, starting immediately after they encountered them as options in the bathroom sims. Computer, list all the people in the world who have any human DNA in their real bodies, apart from the people in this room.”

“There are no such people.”

“Computer, list all people born on this world whose current real bodies lack tails and have skin in human colors, but weren’t born with those properties.”

“Chen Dresta Balanjia. In total, one person.”

“Right, I didn’t exclude the people here this time. But that’s good. They haven’t done it. Should we prohibit that?”

There was a lot of discussion about it, and ultimately we decided not to ban it but to make it require permission from the sim director. It took Clara a while to figure out how to phrase it, to make it require permission for people born as Martians to change their real body to one containing human DNA or to one which resembles humans, with a lot of detail about what constitutes resembling humans, while letting them continue doing the things they have actually been doing. And Chen helped her confirm it worked, both in the usual case and after permission was granted.

Weld stuck around with us for about three more weeks after this incident before he decided that, like all his friends he was able to find, he didn’t care that aliens were in charge of his world, though unlike the others, he did so after seeing how we were not messing things up any worse than accidentally announcing to everybody that we were here and unintentionally letting them simulate sex in our bodies.

But the incident did have one lasting effect on us. At one meal soon after this, Lakshmi asked, “How long are we going to tolerate having to walk through the sex parlor with our kids to reach the restaurant where we eat all our meals?”

It was a good question. We had only done so because it was the first gathering place we had known here, the first place set up with enough tables and chairs for us to all eat together, and it happened to have a kitchen attached.

Some people were in favor of simply having construction robots close the doorway between the sex parlor and the restaurant and open another doorway into the restaurant on some other side. But there was another proposal to set up a school for teaching our children, which would include a cafeteria where we could all, children and adults alike, eat. It was an unconventional idea to have all the adults, teachers or otherwise, eating at the school, and even on days when classes weren’t being taught. But when it was pointed out we probably wanted to have at least four of us teaching classes, at least two preparing food for the kids, and the three of us who now gathered ingredients bringing those to the school, that was already a majority of our group.

Someone recalled having seen a building that might have worked as a school. Indeed, when we took Chen over there, she remembered it as her school, many years ago. And because it was still registered as a school in the system, the robots had been maintaining it, at least to ensure nothing was broken. A little cleaning was needed, but the school was easily large enough for several hundred children, and we were only going to have 42, so we only used a small fraction of the rooms, and we started using the school cafeteria for our meals and meetings, again using only a small portion of the space.

The Rule is Broken

Three years after the last children were born, after some of them had already started school, Sarah failed to show up when we expected her to for one of her shifts taking care of children. When we couldn’t find her, we asked the computer, which responded, “Sarah Carmichael is in a sex sim.”

We had another all-hands meeting to discuss this, and because it was about the sims, we met at the restaurant next to the sim parlor instead of the school cafeteria which had now become our primary meeting place. We had agreed, informally, that we weren’t going to enter the sex sims, yet here she was, in them for so long we had noticed her missing.

Clara requested, “Computer, show us all occasions when a human has entered a sex sim and how long they stayed in.”

The report was short. Several people had gone in a sex sim once early on, seemingly out of curiosity. Clara had gone into modified sex sims briefly several times when she was researching how to make the birthing sim. Chen went in a couple to test the availability of human avatars. Then nobody had until after the last of the children were born, and Sarah had gone in thirteen times for less than an hour each time, all within the last month, but this time she had been in a custom sex sim for about a whole day.

“A custom sim!” Laura exclaimed. “So it was something she planned. Computer, can you show us what she is doing in there?”

“Video of sex sims is protected information and may not be shown.”

Clara responded to that with, “Computer, is Sarah having sex in the sim?”

“No. Sarah is not engaged in sexual activity within her sim.”

“Hmm, what is she doing, then? Computer, show us on this screen what Sarah is doing in her sim. Sim director’s override.”

We were all shown a picture of a woman giving birth. The woman was based on our generic human female avatar.

Clara commented, “This avatar appears to have the birth mods. Computer, does the avatar of the mother in this sim contain elements copied from the avatar used in the human birthing sim? If so, how did Sarah obtain them?”

“Yes. Sarah made a private copy of the birth sim three years, four months, and 21 days ago, and extracted the avatar modification parameters and furniture from it 27 days ago when building this sim.”

“She copied it when she was pregnant. She apparently loved giving birth so much she made herself a sim to keep doing it. But why has she been in this sim for a full day?”

There were murmurs from a few others in response to this last question, but we all sat and watched, hoping it would answer the question. The woman gave birth, the baby stood up, and quickly the mother vanished, and the baby grew to adult size and became pregnant. The new mother sat on the birthing chair and prepared to start giving birth again.

The reactions in the room were varied, from “Why would she do that?” to sheer horror.

Deanna asked, “Computer, how many times has Sarah given birth in her current simulation?”

“None.”

Understanding the situation, I asked, “Computer, how many times has Sarah been born during her current simulation?”

“Fifty-seven times.”

Most of the people present gasped.

Clara said, “She’s probably stuck. In any case, I’m pulling her out. Computer, end Sarah’s simulation. Sim director’s override.”

Sarah materialized next to a column in the sim room next to us. She saw us all sitting there and hung her head low as she walked over to join us.

“Why?” I asked her.

“I’m sorry! Giving birth in the birth sim was the most pleasurable thing imaginable, and I did it a few times in my custom sim because I missed the feeling. I also wanted to feel what it would be like to be born, but I screwed up. The sim was set to automatically restart, but I didn’t realize I wouldn’t be able to stop it when I was the baby! Thank you for getting me out.”

I said, “Sarah, when we discovered the plight of these people, we agreed not to use the sex sims, for fear of getting addicted to them. While you weren’t having sex in the sims, you still violated my trust in you, not once, but fourteen times, and you found a second reason for us to avoid the sims. Clara, can you block Sarah from the sims?”

Clara said, “Computer, disallow Sarah Carmichael from entering any sims other than the standard bathroom sims until further notice. Sim director’s override.”

“Done. Sarah Carmichael is blocked from all sim access except standard bathroom sims.”

Clara continued, “Computer, how many other people are stuck in sims which are looping through the same cycle repeatedly?”

“There are many sims where repetitive actions are occurring, but none of them are stuck. They are under the control of the sim participants and no sims have repeated the same actions for more than one hour.”

The Next Generation

When the children were all in the equivalent of middle school or high school in the education program we had adapted for life on New Mars, when kids on Earth might have had sex ed, we introduced them all at once to the breeding program. It was still mostly usual sex ed including directives for abstinence (for now), except that we explained that we were hoping this group would produce 80 children which all of us (their generation and ours combined) would raise. However, they could start earlier than we did, and they would not have to have them all back-to-back like we did. Also, they’ll get to choose partners, except nobody was allowed to mate with a half-sibling. Each member of this group shared a parent with at most 11 others, 8 by father and 3 by mother, and that only for the ones fathered by the men who fathered Chen’s kids. Most of these groups were well-mixed in gender, so they had a variety of choices, and they would be allowed to have unprotected sex with any of their potential partners so long as they haven’t already had a child with that partner and so long as neither partner has already had too many children.

At first they seemed happy to participate, three of the boys even voluntarily changing to girls so that we could spread the childbearing load across 25 mothers rather than 22, so most only had to bear three children. The first sign of trouble was once they reached the age of 17 Martian years, and the pre-existing age limit no longer kept them out of the sims, we found missing kids in there several times.

After a lot of discussion, during which some of our group wanted to ban them from the sims entirely and others thought it was good to let them practice a limited amount, we agreed to let the 17-year-olds in the sims for no more than half an hour a day, and only with avatars representing their real bodies, and only with the generic human avatars as partners. This was another challenge for Clara to program into the system. She defined all of our kids as a special class of users for whom the sims cost money, and defined a new currency to use for that cost, gave them accounts that topped up automatically to 30 minutes worth of that currency at midnight, and applied the restrictions on avatars and sim partners to that user class. This gave us the possibility to give specific kids more currency to give them extra sim time, or take it away as a punishment.

We had also found that the Martians had, long ago, invented their own version of condoms very similar to the ones we were used to, and that the robots could make them if we brought them a particular plant as material to use in production. We had been using them to a small degree, for those who wanted to remain sexually active, and had made sure we had the plants on hand. We hadn’t previously given them to the kids, because we wanted them to have sex with breeding partners starting at age 18. But we rethought that decision and gave them condoms until they were 18, expecting them to find breeding partners after that. They took to the condoms quite well, and most of them stopped using sims entirely once they had condoms.

But there was one other thing. We expected some of them to develop into the next generation’s leaders, and none of them showed the least interest in doing so. They had cooperated in terms of the breeding program, and when given duties like gathering food or clearing unusable clothes out of more homes so that they could start using them, but none of them ever volunteered for anything, or did more than the minimum we required of them.

By the time the oldest kids were starting to turn 22 and all of them were out of high school, and we expected them to be taking on new roles as the parents and leaders for the third generation, we weren’t able to motivate them at all. Promising them extra sim time hadn’t worked; they weren’t even using the sim time they had, in most cases, having taken the opposite stance to the Martians in saying they had real sexual partners and didn’t need sim time. They had more children, and cared for them, as we did, but they still didn’t do more than we strictly required of them, and there was simply no leader material among the group.

When their children started reaching school age, they proved useless as teachers as well. Our group of 16 had to continue filling those roles. And with more of them and us still acting as parents to their parents as well, it meant we had a lot less influence over each one of them.

We were facing a crisis. We were being successful at growing the human race, but not in developing a society here among us. This was, we realized, the same problem the Martians had faced. On a world where there is no scarcity, how do you motivate anybody to go out and lead? Even the ones among the Martians who had that drive from before things got so easy had given up and joined in themselves.

Brenda was the one who suggested, “Make them decide their children’s future.”

I asked, “How so? We already tried having them act as teachers, and they simply didn’t care when they failed at it.”

“In the same way we set rules for them, allow them to set rules for their children, BUT!”

Brenda made a dramatic pause and then finished her sentence, “They have to agree on the rules among themselves.”

“So someone has to lead the group so they can come to a decision,” Clara observed.

“But what if they decide they don’t want any rules?” I asked.

Brenda said, “If they don’t make a decision, our rules for them remain in effect for the kids.”

“I still think they are likely to choose that,” I replied.

Nelson added, “Or just use their kids to bypass the rules we set for them.”

At the end of the next day’s lunch, I brought up the idea. “We are starting a new system. Just as we made the rules for you when you were kids, and have continued making rules for you as you have not been able to govern yourselves, we want to give you a new opportunity to set the rules for your children. You can make them more lax or more strict than the rules you lived under growing up. But even in letting you set rules, there have to be some rules; we have just three.”

Clara said, “Rule number one, you have to agree on the rules. One of you has to propose a set of rules and a majority of you, at least twenty-two of the forty-two of you, must vote in favor of the proposal.”

Brenda said, “Rule number two, you can’t choose to have no rules. If you vote for no rules, or you cannot agree on rules, your children will be governed by the same rules you lived under when you were their ages.”

Nelson said, “Rule number three, you cannot use your kids and/or the rules you set for them just to circumvent restrictions we put upon you.”

I concluded the presentation with, “Talk amongst yourselves and consider what rules you might want. After lunch tomorrow, when we send your kids back to school, you are to remain here and discuss the rules.”

This actually got them talking, though there wasn’t much agreement. After the next day’s lunch, there still wasn’t much agreement. For every potentially good rule like “Starting at age 7 they have to take their own fibers and recycled clothes to the factory and order their own clothes,” there was a disastrous proposal such as, “They should have unlimited sim time as soon as they are old enough to understand what a sim is.”

But it worked in that we got three of them to make serious proposals, work to try to get others to support their proposals, and then agree to work together to try to pass all three rules. One of those rules was the make-their-own-clothes rule, one was that there would be breaks in the school schedule with fun things for the kids to do, and one was that kids should have access to the non-sex hobby and recreation sims. Someone wanted to clarify that all the restrictions that they had to follow at the kids’ ages should still apply, except where these other rules contradicted them, and with that they were able to get thirty votes making these the new rules.

Once they’d come up with these rules, I pointed out the issues with them.

“The rule about ordering their own clothes implies they will get to choose what they wear, and that’s fine, in general, but we’re going to enforce a dress code at school, since we run the school. You never had to worry about that because we provided you with clothes and all the clothes met rules we considered decent.”

There were lots of murmured responses, and a couple who didn’t realize that the rule implied that the kids would get to choose their own clothes, but enough of the group to have passed the vote without those agreed that it did imply that. Nobody argued with having a school dress code.

“On the second, someone will have to design the fun activities for the kids. Since this was your proposal, we are leaving you with this duty, though I’m sure if you ask for help there are some among us who will.”

Apart from the realization that they had voted themselves some work, there were no real complaints for this one.

“And for the third, I don’t think there’s ever been a prohibition on minors using the non-sex recreation sims. Can you confirm, Clara?”

She asked, “Computer, how many sims not related to sex, body or avatar modification, bathroom, sleep, or eating have been initiated by people under the age of seventeen in the last twenty-six years?”

“Four.”

She brought up a list on a screen in that room, and naturally, because of the way she had phrased the question and the fact that there still had not been any Martian births since we had been here, all four of those had been by our children.

“See, three of you have already done that, one of you twice.”

The one who put forth the proposal for that rule, who was the one listed twice, pointed out, “The problem is that you can only access them from within the sex rooms, so we had to sneak in to do it.”

“Hmm, that is a problem,” I admitted.

Carla suggested, “It should be possible for us to install a sim room somewhere else. I mean, we have sims in every bathroom. I’ll look into it.”

A few days later, Carla announced at one of our meals, “I considered the possibility of making these non-sex sims available in all the bathrooms, but the problem with that is that the bathrooms are meant for very short-term sim usage. In the houses you are using as singles, the bathrooms only have a capacity of one session at a time, and in the ones where three or four mothers raised a group of kids together, the capacity is two. It’s fine if each person only spends a few minutes in there, but not if you spend two hours painting a picture.”

There were quite a few laughs, including from the schoolchildren.

“But I’ve put in a request for the robots to install a sim room at the school, one that will be accessible from outside so you can go there outside of school hours, with a ten session capacity. If they prove popular enough that this isn’t enough I’ll add another one. And sex sims won’t be allowed there. It’s a bit more involved than most of the requests we put in for the robots but it is among their standard functions. It should be available in a few days.”

This drew cheers and applause.

When the room was ready, there was a line waiting for access on the first day, so we imposed a one-hour limit on sessions. After the first day, though, there was never a line, and we removed the limit.

The more important thing, though, was we got our children involved. Not all of them participated in parenting or leadership activities, but we didn’t need that. It just needed to be a significant fraction, and some of the ones who didn’t join initially started participating after they saw the fun things a few of them had designed for the kids to do during school breaks. Some of the parents had fun doing those things, too. We even managed to get a couple of them to start teaching.

Our first generation, Chen and the 15 born on Earth, still had our own meetings once in a while. In one of these we drew up the school dress code, which included some bits that would never have appeared on Earth. “Clothing with tail holes may only be worn if the hole is made so it doesn’t expose the buttocks while there is no tail in it, or if the wearer has a tail going through the tail hole.” We didn’t have any Martians in our school but we considered it a possibility in the distant future, and if we didn’t, the rule didn’t hurt. Otherwise, it was the usual about body parts having to be covered from the shoulders to just above the knees, for skirts and dresses, or to the feet, for pants, and we didn’t prohibit boys from wearing skirts or dresses. We had imposed that Earth custom on our kids, and several of the boys had chosen to wear skirts once we allowed them to choose their own clothes, though whether they did so because they actually liked them or merely as an act of rebellion we didn’t know. But we considered it to be part of the motivation for them choosing the rule, and we honored it.

After a year of the kids having fun-breaks at school, having access to hobby sims, and the oldest ones starting to be able to choose their own clothes, at one of these meetings, Carla announced, “This is going well. I guess we won’t need the sim command center after all.”

“The what?” Melissa asked.

“Fearing that we were going to need to be the leaders for our human population here forever, I started a plan allow us to keep running things from within a sim where we don’t age.”

“Oh, God. No. Some of us might want to live forever, but not that way!”

“That’s why I’m dropping the plan. It was far from finished, anyway.”

By the time the oldest of the third generation were entering high school, and the youngest of that generation were just entering school, fully two-thirds of the second generation was involved in some aspect of parenting, teaching, or leadership. They’d made five other rule changes that they had voted on as a group, the most controversial of which came that year: Naked Day.

Our elder group had a serious talk about whether we needed to block this, but we decided to let it go through, though it was something that never could have happened on Earth. But here, it was voted for by a majority of the parents of the current schoolchildren, parents who had been raised not in sex-obsessed Earth culture, but in the portion of Earth culture that 15 of us had carried here. The Martian culture was pretty sex-obsessed too, but it was hidden away in sim rooms; while we hadn’t hidden those away from them entirely, it was less prominent.

It was explicitly not Sex Day; nobody was to touch anyone else in ways they wouldn’t if they were clothed, and we stated the touching rules explicitly a few days in advance. It was a clothing-optional day, on a school day, for the children of all ages to learn about the human body, learn not to be ashamed of the naked body, learn what makes boys and girls different, and learn why we covered it in the first place. Instead of being split into the usual age groups, part of the day consisted of a single large class for all 80 of the children. In part of the combined session we lined up boys of different ages and girls of different ages and used them to demonstrate the changes that occurred in puberty. Divided into two groups, those who had reached or were about to reach puberty in one group and the younger ones in another, they got some sex ed; the older group was told about the breeding program, including that it was ages 18 and up and none of them should be having unprotected sex yet, and the younger group got a less detailed and less explicit version.

It was an unqualified success. Kids of all ages enjoyed it, and not because they got to ogle naked people, but because they got to learn about things they felt had been hidden from them. Most of the second generation said they wished they’d had this when they were in school, even some who voted against the proposal. We decided to have Naked Day every three years, because that would allow enough time for significant changes in mind and body development for it to mean something different for them the next time through.

As the second Naked day approached, we prepared to officially starting handing control over to our children, starting with the breeding program.

“You are all familiar with the breeding program, having been participants in it some years ago, and now your children will have their turn. We are letting you set the rules. We need to keep expanding; there are still fewer than 150 humans on this world. But you can slow the pace of growth; the only real rule we are imposing on you is that there must be more than 80 children in the fourth generation. You can set that number as much higher than that as you are comfortable with.”

Several numbers were called out, but there was no agreement among them at this time, and once they agreed to disagree, I went on.

“We have ported the genetic software to the Martian computers so that you do not have to use the few surviving antiquated Earth computers. We don’t anticipate that you will need to do anything more with it than tell your children certain other children each may not mate with due to being too genetically similar. Half-siblings still may not mate; certain others may be excluded due to having inherited too many similar genes from common ancestors of my generation.”

There was no argument there.

“Finally, I have something to pass along not related to the breeding program. We’ve made a new rule that those over 65 Martian years of actual body age may retire, meaning they may choose to no longer have any official duties, and they have unrestricted use of the sims. The body age excludes time we spent in suspended animation getting here and time spent unaging in sims, and the computer can now report these body ages for all of us. Many of those born on Earth have already reached this age, and the ones who have not will do so within the next few years. This means my role as mayor and effective commander of the human settlement, Clara’s role as sim director, and others will become available for members of your generation to take over. We expect that those who do so will neither neglect or abuse the power those roles give, but use it to best propagate the human race of New Mars. And never forget that there are twelve billion effectively sleeping Martians in sims. Don’t wake them up!”

There were a few chuckles, but it was good to see that they took this seriously.

“I will remain available for one Martian year from the time my successor is chosen to train that successor, assuming I live. I cannot promise not to disappear into sims after that point.”

Then Clara stated, “I make the same promise, if and when a suitable successor is appointed. There’s quite a lot to do as sim director that’s not obvious, and it may be that you want to have a sim director and one or two deputy sim directors to handle it all. I will share details with anyone interested.”

I did exactly as I said, training a successor for one year, and then retiring into sims, but not the sex sims, at least, not most of the time. Clara scared off the few candidates who showed interest with the details of everything she’s been doing in recent years and everything she learned she did wrong in her early years in the role, and she did end up reviving the sim command center as a sim director’s sim, with the ability to monitor all the sims from within a sim, to enter other people’s sims, and more.

Clara came to visit me periodically, as I was one of the few people she could often visit who were not engaged in sex, and kept me updated on the state of things. Thirty years after retirement, Sarah was the only one besides us still alive; she’d gone the way of the Martians and permanently lived in sex sims, while the others had all let themselves die naturally.

“And you’re still sim director?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“How do you keep doing it?”

“By ever-increasing employment of technology. Basically, I’ve written programs to monitor all the things that needed doing, and used Martian AI to monitor those reports for anything out of the ordinary. I only have to be the enforcer to go deal with the situations that actually need dealing with.”

“Like people getting stuck in sim loops?”

“No, the AI can pick those out. There has only been one other one, a Martian, since we’ve gotten here, and the AI correctly threw him out of his sim into his sim room and let him try something different.”

“So what, then?”

“A sim room on another continent got damaged and the computer had to do an emergency expulsion of 700 Martians.”

“How did you deal with that?”

“I had a robot on the scene project a hologram of my avatar, speaking to them via the translator in their language, and apologizing for the mess and giving them some suggestions or reminders of what it is like to live in the real world. I called in 500 construction robots from up to 20 kilometers away to rebuild, and I had our emperor appoint one of them as mayor of that city so she could get them into houses temporarily. They’re all back in the sims now.”

“Sounds like you did a good job.”

“Many of them thanked me for it. They were understanding that real-world problems could cause the sims to fail, especially after decades of use.”

She shared stories like that periodically. But one day, Clara came to me and said, “We’re it.”

“What, our descendants got themselves all killed?”

“No, the other way around. We finally got a response from Earth. About a hundred years after we got here, Earth was hit by a massive meteor. The only survivors were in space, and there was only a single self-sufficient station with food crops. Those who could do so docked with it. They got our message and returned it, but they didn’t have the practical capability to continue the human race, and they were just living out their natural lives. Since that message was sent 135 years ago, they are certainly all gone now.”

“How about our people here?”

“There are over ten thousand of them now. They also have over three hundred Martians living with them, all committed to living lives outside the sims and continuing their race.”

“I guess that’s a success, then, for us.”

“For us, yes.”

“Rest in peace, Earth.”