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2: Mission Spec

lsa Fridau paced in the laboratory, her gaze fixed outward on the brilliant starscape beyond the clear dome. “Elgin, where do we start? We know nothing about Ground Team’s work. It has no direct relationship to ours—”

The project director tossed his head, making a demonstration of his impatience. “Actually, it does. Granted, this disaster was not supposed to happen, but it was foreseen.”

The sixty-seven-year-old woman halted and gave her supervisor her sharpest stare. “Foreseen?”

Elgin shrugged, a graceful motion. “Mutation. Error. Entropy. You know this. You’ve been here since Decade 2. We’re fighting entropy. If there were ever a time to formulate the Higher Laws of Existence, now would be good.”

Ilsa felt her teeth grit together. She couldn’t afford that. She’d inoculated herself against bone loss, but she wasn’t young, and she wasn’t Moonborn. “Don’t talk down to me, you come-lately upstart! If there’s something privileged we need to know about this situation, you’d better start sharing it right now!”

“I have access to necessary files related to Ground Team’s work on the terraform project. But I need your full cooperation, Ilsa. You have the most knowledge and experience.”

He was truly a patronizing little whelp. She swallowed her anger and nodded, putting on a mask of calm. “Thank you for remembering that. What is it Terracorp needs us to know? What do we do?”

Elgin pressed his hands together, taking a deep breath and holding it for a second. Ilsa resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the melodrama. The man let out a long sigh, staring her intently in the eyes. “This may be difficult, since they’re your babies, so to speak. It involves the Moonborn.”

~~~~~~()~~~~~~

Wesley Liu lay on his back on a long, stainless steel table in the genetics lab. He stared out into the dark, star-spattered lunar night, the fragile real-paper book open on his chest, and theorized.

It was an old volume, a strange one. A treatise written in German on information theory. The 20th century scientist’s observations were intended to quantify the nature and function of information into an empirically-derived set of theses.

Fine and well. It was the scientist’s a priori framework that was truly striking in a Western mind of the Pre-Spiritus Era. The quirky old tome baldly concluded the existence of God.

Not so striking nowadays. Terracorp held a world monopoly on key technologies because of its cutting-edge integrated physico-spiritual polity. The god concept was assumed and accounted for in everything. Taken into account as a Law of the Universe. It had been the next big leap for science and civilization.

Part of that leap was the acknowledgment of the Law of Entropy and its universal rule. Having dispensed with such fundamentalist absolutism as atheism and pre-post-modern theism, it was acknowledged: unassisted evolution is impossible—nature’s demonstrated tendency is ever to degrade complexity, not build it. Terracorp’s official indoctrination courses warned young scientists and citizens alike about the evil of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. There is a devil, and Entropy is his name.

Hence the necessity of positing a god. A perfect source of infinite information and order. Everything demonstrating order, everything containing information, must have a prime cause. Not the personal, speaking god of the German information theorist and his “bible.” That untenable leap of certainty came with complications, restrictions, outdated superstitions about guilt and morality and the essence of humanity. A flawed ethnic book for an outdated primitive culture. For everyone’s health and safety, such absolutism was illegal. Instead, there was simply a figure eight on its side, and Cantor’s great saying: “I see it, but I do not believe it.”

For everything operating on laws, a theoretical Lawmaker. For everything operating on coded information, a theoretical Coder. A theoretical infinity.

No theory needed for this: Either there was no god, or Terracorp had deliberately destroyed the human race.

Footnotes

I don’t really like this section, but if it helps any, the volume Wes is reading is “In the Beginning Was Information” by Dr. Werner Gitt. I feel like the setup elements could be better. Oh, well. This part of the storyline will become something faster-paced in a few installments, and next week is all about some unexpected physical plotting.