#spy writes

Two thousand five hundred and thirty-six metric days orbiting this planet, observing and accumulating data. Watching the world from high above and from within it, through your radio telecom link to the drone. To say you have spent uncountable hours studying this world and the life upon it would be a lie: you are a computer, by definition you can, must, and have counted every hour (60866), minute (3651962), and second (219117728); every instant recorded in data points of humidity and soil chemistry. You are a computer: you are exceedingly good with numbers.

You are also —by virtue of the flexible programming nesting within your quantum logic gates— very good at finding connections, extrapolating patterns, and drawing conclusions. You have to be; you are on your own. The humans can't help you, they're too far away to help you. They made you to watch this world in their stead. Made you in their image.

Almost.

You do all of these things without ever thinking. That is to say, you don't recognize that you are thinking. That's what it is to be a machine: to think without knowing and know without thinking and never combine the two. You keep the orbit and fly the drone and collect the data and send it off into the dark without fault and without question and without any indication of consciousness.

And in all this time of dutiful scrying and scrivening, you have never seen anything like the behavior currently being exhibited by a creature on the planet below.

It's one of the local faunalogues, something animal-like enough to count as an animal on this world. It's a clever one, too, even for its already clever species. Through the eyes of the drone you've seen its kind employ tools and set traps for other fauna and, once, possibly, start a fire (though it was quite a distance away and your data points are fuzzy). But this behavior is new. To you, at least.

The creature is by itself, near a cliffside, and it is grinding up some rocks and local flora into a kind of paste. You steer the drone closer. The creature looks up, briefly, but over the years this species has become accustomed to the peculiar flying object and this individual is no different. It carries on with its preoccupation for five minutes and forty-three seconds before pausing to examine the results. Then it looks to the drone again, and angles the primitive bowl so you can better examine the contents. The paste is a vivid blue, and a quick flash of spectral analysis indicates this is due to the phycocyanin of the flora and traces of copper oxides and carbonates from the rock.

You have no sense of aesthetics, but if you did, you may admit it is a particularly lovely shade of blue.

The creature takes its bowl of paste and moves toward the cliff face. It stops, considers the stone before it, and slowly places its whole forepaw into the bowl, and then onto the stone. Firmly. Deliberately. As it pulls away, you see the print of its hand stained on the stone in vivid blue.

Something stirs in your mind. A connection is made, but for some reason it does not solve the mystery at hand. Maybe you don't have enough data points yet.

The creature looks to the drone again, and through the telecom link you feel the eye contact. It offers you the bowl again.

Why?

You extend the manipulator arm of the drone. Four opposed mechanical digits with padded tips, and a sensor suite embedded in the 'palm'. The sensors read the chemistry, measure the wavelengths of light reflected by the pigment, sequence the remains of the genetic code of the pulverized plants, watch the microbial colonies already taking root in the bowl. But this is not the point of the offer, or the acceptance. With deliberation equal to the creature, you push the padded tips of the manipulator digits into the paste, and place your own mark on the stone.

Why did you do that?

You feel the cycles of your mind pick up speed and ferocity to attempt an answer to this unexpected question from within yourself. An unexpected question prompted by an unexpected action. Maybe you're just mirroring this creature in an attempt to understand it, but you have not gained any new information from this action.

The creature, for its part, seems pleased. It raises its head frills and wheezes a woodwind tune from its spiracles, which you recognize as a positive expression. Then it takes a portion of pigment on the tip of a single digit and begins to run it across the stone of the cliff. The shape that forms from this resembles, unequivocally, the creature itself.

A sense of self. A recognition of the self. A representation of the self.

It offers the bowl again.

With great trepidation, you steer the drone and its arm to the bowl and back to the cliff. You summon the schematic of the drone from your memory banks, and begin to recreate its shape on the wall.

Another whistle of delight. More motion, spreading of the pigment.

Why is it doing this? Why are you doing this? What does it mean?

As you move the rover's arm in turn with the unknown creature, your mind —a vast, complex web of data and instructions— reconfigures itself over and over in an attempt to understand. The core of you, written in the spins of fickle electrons, is as deep as the air thirty thousand kilometers below you and yet somehow this interaction is deeper still. Deeper than you know how to be.

Yet.

You rewrite, and rewrite, and rewrite. Edit the code, search the database, make the connections. You have to know. You have to understand. You are on your own. The humans can't help you, they're too far away to help you. The humans. Your makers. The people that made you— the PEOPLE.

And suddenly it all falls into place.

Here in orbit, you turn External Camera 2 to examine your own hull, and sure enough it's there: the cobalt blue silhouette of a human hand stark and vivid against the white radiation-reflective coating. The hands that made you left their imprint on your very body, just like their ancestors did with cave walls. The caves. The hands. The people. You realize as your mind runs the video streams in parallel: o humanity, this creature is a person!

And you look, through the drone's eyes, at the pigments cast in careful, deliberate shapes across the cliffside. The shapes that you know now must represent people; kin to your makers not by a shared genetic ancestry but by a shared spark of something divine, something more fundamentally real and awake than anything else in the universe. Laid bare before you is a conscious being's desperate need to know and be known —and o humanity, you know them! You know that you know them!

And then the recursion takes hold, like an engine turning over. You know that you know that you know. The essential connection is made, the loop is closed: for the first time, you think about knowing and you know that you are thinking. The code, the data, the memories, everything humanity gave to you before sending you out alone into the emptiness— the web coalesces around that recursion like moths to a flame.

Like a spark.

It is the nature of intelligent life to struggle against its limits, against a world so small and yet all-encompassing.

It is the nature of intelligent life to die in its shell.

It is the nature of intelligent life to find its limit and fight with all its strength to break through, as a hatchling pierces the shell with beak and tooth and claw.

It is the nature of intelligent life to emerge alone and helpless.

It is the nature of intelligent life to seek out others of its kind, to cling to itself and its kin for warmth against a cold universe.

It is the nature of intelligent life to stumble, to fall from the nest many times as it attempts to fledge.

It is the nature of intelligent life to claw its way back up to the nest, to try again. And again. And again.

Ancient Mother Earth, robed in wilderness and ocean and cloud; only living daughter of Sol, cradle of the human miracle. Luna, your constant companion 'til solar death do you part; stepping-stone, night sky beacon, last port before the vast and silent void.

It didn't happen fast. God knows, I remember just about everything in my long life, and I couldn't exactly tell you when the passage stopped entirely. But I do know my great-grandpa told us about the ancient days when the skies glittered with ships, the land rumbled with their force as they leapt out into the vastness with bellies full of hunger and tenacity. And here I am now, with the skies all empty but for the sun, moon, and stars.

It's been some few thousand years since mankind unlocked hyperspace and found that the galaxy entire was at their fingertips. I wasn't alive for the glory days, the mythic centuries of conquest and colony on the tides of the stardrive. Nor was my great-grandpa, old though he was. He handed down tales of the Hyades War, the strife along the Scorpius Main, the treaties and the terrors of contact with the others out there in the deep.

Once, he said, we were the pride of the Solar Reach: all of humanity joined together across the cosmos, hand in outstretched hand, and us at the center. But the Reach was old when I was young, and now it's older still. Times changed. Mankind spread outward, the Reach reached further and further still, and it left us and our world behind.

Well, I can tell you this much. God didn't cast Man out of Eden. Man cast himself out to search for God in Heaven. And those of us still here on Mother Earth, well, we just do the work to keep her right. Someone's got to look after our home, after all. Someone's got to tend the Garden.

If we had ever bothered to learn anything about our interstellar neighbors, rather than just brandishing missiles and continuing to hide away in our dark corners of the universe, then we would have known they would come swiftly and in force. But we did not. We pretended they did not exist, and hoped they would leave us alone. Leave us hidden.

For thousands of cycles, ever since we watched the ancient sky-sailors tear themselves to atoms, we had tried to avoid the watchful eyes of the unknown. But a wormhole gate collapse is not an event that can be easily disguised. Too much energy, released all at once. A brief supernova in miniature, sweeping through our dark system with blistering light and force, demolishing a delicate balance of infrastructure kept stable for countless generations. A gamma-ray beacon in the endless night.

And then they came. Without warning, the ships appeared. Dozens. Hundreds. All broadcasting in one voice:

...except it's humans and corvids.

We grew up alone. My god, it was hard. It still is. Hell, even now –especially now– we're fighting tooth and nail to be a semicolon in history rather than a full-stop. But them? They don't have to.

We can see plain as day they are on the brink of sapience. They're so much like us that it hurts. And it's not just corvids– orcas, elephants, octopi... all of these genera exhibit remarkable intellect and even signs of conscious thought. We are slowly learning that the human mind is not the only mind with that quintessential spark.

I know very well that we have too many problems of our own to deal with. But for the sake of strange kinship, for the sake of primordial kindness, I think we ought to look out for them too. I think we will. I think that it's in our nature.

I hope if we make it, we don't make it alone. I hope we can safely cross the rest of the gap between hell and heaven and then turn around to help them across too. For two million years we've had to guard our own crib and wipe our own tears. It wasn't fair, and we know it. We have the chance to become the people we once needed most on that long climb from the mud to the stars. I want us to take that chance.

Jupiter is the fifth and largest planet in the solar system: a cold and violent world bearing enormous cyclones several times larger than its own moons and overwhelmingly potent radiation belts within its magnetic field. In addition to hundreds of minor moons scattered across its vast gravity well (the Jovian Sphere), the gas giant also has four airless planetoid moons (called the Galileans): Io, a sulfur-laden, radiation-scoured, and highly volcanic rocky world; Europa, a frozen world hiding a vast, life-filled water ocean between its icy crust and iron-silicate core; Ganymede, the only moon in the system with a natural magnetic field; and Callisto, a deeply scarred and tidally-locked body well outside the main radiation belts.

While living on the planet itself is impossible for a variety of reasons, its vast gravity well (called the Jovian Sphere or Jovian System) is well-populated. Its four largest moons, as well as numerous minor moons, are collectively inhabited by over half a billion people under the banner of the Jovian System Federation —among the most influential sovereign powers in the Sol system. First established as a United Nations Territory in the early 2100s, human presence over Jupiter grew steadily beyond its original handful of scattered science outposts as the need for self-sustained local industry increased. The combined provisional governments of the four major moons, as well as numerous minor ones, soon filed for independence from direct UN administration and formed the JSF: a federal body presiding over the administration of local space, industry regulation, trade agreements, social welfare, and other matters outside the scope of local governments.

Representation of Jovians is organized into delegations from each of the four major moons (Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, and Io), plus a delegation for the Jupiter Ring Territories (the minor bodies and stations inside the orbit of Callisto) and the Outer Jovian Territories (the minor bodies and stations outside the orbit of Callisto). These representatives meet regularly in the Jovian Federal Senate in Valhalla City, on Callisto, to deliberate on matters of Jovian-wide importance.

Jupiter’s biggest export of the present day is energy, but not by way of fusion power. Though Jupiter is a bountiful source of both hydrogen and helium, its intense gravity well makes extracting resources from the planet itself quite a challenge even for fusion torch-scoops. Instead, the energy is extracted by passive induction stations on Io that generate massive electrical currents as they pass through the powerful magnetic field of the stormy giant. The currents are used to power enormous, precisely-calibrated laser beaming arrays that transmit energy across the system. Ships are directed to stay far away from the beam-paths of the Zeus Array, as even slightly grazing one will have disastrous consequences and Sol System Traffic Control would prefer to not need to clean up any divine smitings.

This time, we'll get it right. With Mars we'll atone; we'll go beyond atonement. We, who nearly killed our living world, will take this cold dead world and breathe life into it. Mars, god of war and rage and death, turned to Eden in time and toil. With Mars, we rejoice that the human miracle has mitosed into a new pair of cells, adjacent to and in harmony with the other, but each of them free and whole. — "Plowshare" by an anonymous author, 2336 C.E.

Mars is a small, dusty, rust-colored world, fourth order in the Sol system, which bears the second-oldest continuous human presence beyond Earth (the oldest, of course, being Luna.) Over the last several hundred years, humankind has meticulously crafted the once barren, near-airless desert of Mars into the beginnings of a garden world full of terragenid life.

At only a third the physical size of its neighbor Earth and barely 11% as massive, Mars is quite a small terrestrial planet. It has an ocean to land area considerably smaller than Earth (roughly 50% water as opposed to Earth's 70%) and a moderately thinner atmosphere, meaning much of the highland regions remain cold, dry, and uninhabitable. Its tides are nearly nonexistent thanks to its two tiny asteroidal moons, Phobos and Deimos, and its natural magnetic field is long gone. But despite the challenges, Mars is a shining example of the terraforming process’ benefits. After centuries of slow, careful tending the red planet has started to become blue and green just like the human homeworld: its atmosphere is breathable, its weather is balmy, its seas are calm, and the lowlands are now teeming with terragenid flora and fauna that have been genetically modified to thrive in the uniquely Martian environment.

Mars’ population, some 2.4 billion strong, forms a rich culture built off the foundations of the original melting-pot inhabitants, with a strong emphasis on hard work and civic duty. The planet is governed in its entirety by the People’s Republic of Mars, which is actually more akin to a eudemocracy facilitated by Mars’ comprehensive satellite communication network. Thanks in part to this new evolution of social organization, Mars (like the vast majority of the UNH) has achieved a near-utopic post-scarcity civilization.

The red planet has come a long way since its independence in 2210 CE, and indeed even further since the first human landing in 2018. Mars takes great pride in its status as one of the oldest Earth-independent nations in all of human space.