“Maybe the Hunters were looking for Earthlike worlds,” Paul suggested.
“Maybe. Or maybe they thought they’d be less conspicuous on Mars,” Teri added.
“Building whopping great atmosphere-plant pyramids and starting to terraform an entire planet is hardly a good way to stay inconspicuous,” Paul said. “Then again…the evidence available suggests they were here for quite a long time, several thousand years at least. Maybe they got tired of living underground. Maybe they thought the Hunters had given up and gone somewhere else.”
“If they were machine intelligences,” Teri said, “they didn’t need to terraform Mars, did they?”
“Christ!” David said. “You’re right!”
“They were doing it for the humans they’d brought from Earth,” Jack said. “How does this sound? A few AIs escaped from the fall of Chiron or wherever. They hid out on Mars for a few thousand years, and probably made frequent hops over to Earth, where they were genetically tinkering with some of the beetle-browed locals. Maybe they hoped to rebuild the civilization they’d lost. Maybe they were just in the market for cheap labor, and had plenty of time to experiment with. They brought a few thousand of the new-breed hominids to Mars, though, and started terraforming the world to give them a place to live.”
“But terraforming was going to take a long time,” David put in. He was getting excited now. “Hundreds of years at the very least, maybe thousands. And we know from the evidence here that though they did warm Mars briefly, half a million years back, enough to recreate the Boreal Sea, they never generated a thick atmosphere over the whole planet. There was a shirt-sleeve environment here at Cydonia, contained, somehow, maybe by some kind of technomagic force field, but the planetary atmosphere never got thicker than point one bar or so. By that time, they must have thought the bad guys had overlooked them.”
“But they hadn’t,” Jack said, nodding. “Or it just took them a while to find them. The Hunters showed up and eliminated the Mars outpost. It didn’t take much. Destroy the Ship, power generators, and the atmosphere plants. The human workers would have asphyxiated almost at once. The Builders might have survived for a time, but without the Ship and without their work force…” He shrugged.
“The Hunters probably visited Earth to pick off any Builder outposts there,” Paul added. “But they must not have thought the hominid species there to be very promising.”
“Maybe they hadn’t counted on the Builders gene-engineering a new species,” Teri said. “There couldn’t have been very many of them. But they were enough of an improvement over Homo erectus that they survived and proliferated.”
“A delightful fantasy,” David said after a moment. “We still need hard evidence…but I must say the scenario fits the observed facts. What I’m not sure I buy is the idea that the Builders were AIs. It leaves us with an unpleasant tautology. Who built the Builders?”
“I’m not sure that’s really an issue, sir,” Jack said. “An AI race of Builders could have been around for a long time, even in galactic terms. Their organic predecessors could have been long extinct, especially considering the fact that the galaxy is beginning to look like a rather dangerous place to try and raise a burgeoning young civilization.”
“We’re already beginning to look at ways to download the human mind into computers,” Paul said. “Maybe the floaters are just the bodies, the machine bodies of the original Builders.”
“If I may make a comment,” Sam said from the screen, “there is nothing inherently implausible about a race of artificial intelligences arising from more primitive forms and evolving in the same fashion as biological species. In the long run, it may be that there is no significant difference between evolution from carbon-based single cells and proteins, and evolution from silicon-based microprocessors. Both can acquire considerable sophistication through the forces of natural selection alone.”
“You know,” David said quietly, “it’s just possible we’ve cracked the secret of the Builders at last. Thanks to you, Sam. I think we need to get this off to Earth immediately. After that—”
Jack’s PAD chirped. He opened it, and Sam’s voice—the original Sam—came from the speaker. “Jack?” she said. “Code One.”
The intrusion was so abrupt, so completely unexpected, that Jack didn’t understand immediately. “W-what?”
“Code One,” Sam repeated. “Triple-N news reports are carrying the story. Two American spacecraft have been deliberately destroyed by a Chinese warship, the Kennedy, on high guard patrol, and the Roosevelt, at Europa. The president of the United States has just asked both the Congress and the CWS Council to declare that a state of war exists between the Confederation’s member states and the republic of Greater China.