The Terraformers

by Annalee Newitz

Destry pressed her bare fingers into the soil, spreading them wide, establishing a high-bandwidth connection with the local ecosystem. Thousands of sensors welcomed her into the planet’s network, their collective perceptions knitting together from shards of cached memory, fragments of recorded sensation and perception. In this state, she too was a sensor, processing data through her eyes, nose, tongue, skin, and ears. What she perceived she shared with the ecosystem. She could feel the sensors collaboratively reviewing the scene from her perspective, learning that she wanted to know more about the mammal at the edge of the forest. It was like her body had become the land. Her awareness stretched forward, racing through root systems and over insects, tasting acid levels in the soil. The person’s feet on the ground registered as pressure on her back, and she smelled redox reactions in the fire. Each sensor’s evaluation joined the swelling chorus in her ears as the tiny machines voted on what their data points might mean: polymer, hair, carnivore, unprocessed excrement, dead trees, carbon cycle perturbation, predator, metal, fur, synthetic microbiome. As Destry’s data surged across the field and into the forest, the sensors could see what she did, and their analysis coalesced into a strong probability: Homo sapiens in the region for eight days, causally linked to tree loss, small mammal loss, excrement buildup, complex toxins.

Their broad, flat face and blue eyes reminded her of Homo neanderthalensis, but no doubt they’d been sourced from a hodgepodge of hominins, then modified to take energy from Sasky’s early atmosphere. Back then, the planet would have been an icy snowball fractured by vulcanism, its air a toxic combination of gasses that her body could not process. Destry shook her head as she stood up, adjusting her breather and reflecting on how “toxic” was a matter of perspective.

“I think we have a good engineering plan, which you and our allies can help with.” Lucky paused, considering. “And as for what to do about Verdance … well, that’s a harder problem. That’s politics.”

Spider City’s ERT dorms were the strangest thing she had ever seen. Nothing was regularized. It was as if every ranger had built their own living quarters according to some quirky personal whim, decorating the entrances in wildly different styles. Some were plain scavenged wood, while others were a riot of glittering rocks and paint. Gates made from bone and textiles stood next to shiny, metallic portals controlled by bots. Oddly, a harmony emerged from the chaos of design. This place felt occupied in a way that nothing in La Ronge ever did, perhaps because she could see the personalities of its people in every nook and odd angle.

After a minute of fruitlessly messaging and checking access logs, she realized that this absence of data was yet another way that Spider differed from La Ronge. Spider City would reveal who was or wasn’t reachable on the local network, but that was it. No records of where anyone had been or when they had gone. It was a way of discouraging the kind of toxic surveillance that Verdance imposed. And yes, it was freeing in some ways, but it was also incredibly annoying when you needed to reach your friends urgently.

As she headed to Whistle’s barn, Destry wondered if this was how her parents felt when they left the city to set up a homestead beyond Verdance’s reach. She inhaled the smell of prairie dirt and summer grass, remembering her first few days of life here in La Ronge. After decanting, she learned to stand up and walk outside the lab with Destry Senior and Frenchie. Her mother’s face was angular, her mouth always set in a knowing smirk; and her father was tall and thin, a white hat settled far back on his head. They had signed up for the parenting program after centuries of seeding Maskwa with plants and animals in at least a dozen ecosystems. Destry wasn’t their genetic descendent, of course—nobody had those—but she would be their responsibility during her learning months, and that was more important.

She thought about her parents, who truly believed that they could live beyond the reach of Verdance. Their homestead was carbon neutral; they needed nothing. Who could possibly object? Destry Senior never worked directly with Ronnie the way Destry did—he and Frenchie had spent too much time alone in the forest, away from Verdance corporate politics. They must have convinced themselves that nobody would care if they wanted to finish out their lives on unoccupied land. Who were they, after all? Just two small life forms. But to Ronnie, they were property. And property was value—as long as it was safely contained in predesignated areas. Everything had to be in balance if this real estate was going to be valuable in fifteen hundred years. Better to clean up after a small forest fire than to deal with all the potential complexities of a human settlement developing independently.

Ronnie nodded and thinned her lips into the barest of smiles, then turned back to Helic. “I do like your ideas about how we can turn this into a story about evolutionary authenticity.” Glat jumped in. “Our potential buyers are incredibly excited about the virgin Pleistocene land. At the same time, Ronnie, you’re right about the plate tectonics. Nobody wants that kind of authenticity. Earthquakes, surprise volcanoes, uncontrolled spreading of the ocean floor—it’s everything that people hate about planetary life.” Terry was capturing the meeting in notes and select sound bites, and looked to Ronnie for guidance—would the VP want Glat’s confession expunged from the record? Yes. Ronnie was shooting her a look and shaking her head. Terry pinched Glat’s vulgar comments about plate tectonics out of the sound record. In the terraforming industry, one didn’t ever want to admit that there were drawbacks to living on a planet.

Ronnie had no intention of letting anyone know that she’d acknowledged a sovereign government on Sask-E. Legal would probably have a meltdown about how she’d threatened its status as a privately owned planet. While technically they might be right, Ronnie knew it wasn’t a realistic threat. In a thousand years, Spider would be overrun by settlers and development companies. The H. archaeans would scatter to new cities, get jobs, die off, and forget all about their fucking joke of a treaty.

People who came from offworld always introduced themselves using gender, and it was polite to do the same in return. Here on Sasky, pronouns were usually sent nonverbally.

Ace and Slim glanced nervously at each other, but finally Slim spoke. “Oh yeah. Pretty much every city on the Comfort Sea. All these cities around here are Emerald, and the farmland too.” Now it was the rangers’ turn to exchange looks. Misha spoke up first. “When did that happen? I thought these cities were all owned by different groups. They were fifty years ago, last time I checked in.” Ace nodded. “Probably they were, fifty years ago. But Emerald bought everybody out. They did it on Gleise 581c too, right after the first settlers got it rotating again.” “Yeah, I remember that.” Slim frowned. “Huge land grab after it wasn’t tidally locked anymore. A few of the original settlers got rich, but most of them—well, let’s just say they couldn’t afford to live on the planet they terraformed.”

“There are sensors everywhere, and I can feel them. I don’t deal with it as well as Destry did. They built me from a new template, which was supposed to make me more sensitive than she was. But when I touch the sensor network, I get too involved. I follow it out as far as I can, and I feel—everything. Birds migrating through a dangerous storm. Worms dying in a flash flood. A month ago, I accidentally linked to a burning tree, and it felt like my skin was being chewed off for days. My health therapist calls it a sensory processing disorder, but Ronnie insists it’s an upgrade. My receivers can touch nodes for a thousand klicks around, which is perfect for network analysis. Only—I can’t shut it off. It can get really painful.”

It felt wrong to be inside a vehicle that could drive itself but not talk or make its own decisions. Ace gave it their destination, and the truck drove down to the coast on a freshly extruded road through dense jungle.

Sulfur looked through their binoculars and the distant geometry of the skyline jumped toward them, a massive terraced pyramid looming over the downtown plazas. Nearby, tumbled-block high-rises looked like monstrous termite mounds crawling with pink tentacles, golden flags, and holographic reenactments of popular stories. A blue jaguar jumped from one mound to the next, its body occasionally dissolving into the illegible but iconic logo for Verdance’s parent company. Maybe Ace was right. The place was already unrecognizable.

Out in the fields, Sulfur could see hundreds of people working—testing soil, tweaking sun barriers, reading sensors, tending machines that planted, harvested, and packaged. It was impossible to figure out all the crops growing here, which was a good sign. Emerald’s agriculturalists weren’t going full monoculture. They’d planted a diversity of food crops, as well as rubber trees, flax, and coffee. There were luxuries, too: a field of lavender grew next to a big plot of tobacco. Soon they were in the outskirts of the city, where low-density ranch homes and garden-shrouded castles formed an areola of habitation around the gigantic erect nipple of downtown. More and more people were walking in the road, some with satchels or wagons, others with little more than Emerald-branded tracksuits. The truck slowed to a crawl, trying to weave between pedestrians as safely as possible.

then they began to muse about where all these visitors had come from, and what they hoped to find here. Was Lefthand their first stop before heading up to La Ronge or one of the many other cities-in-progress? Were they tourists on a pleasure tour of undeveloped planets, or scammers drawn to a city whose laws were still in flux? No matter what they were, they weren’t owners—Verdance mandated that everyone buy an H. sapiens body if they wanted to live on Sasky. It was part of the sales pitch. Settle on virgin Pleistocene land, with your pure H. sapiens neighbors, reliving the glory days of Earth.

I took out a loan to go to Kostof University on Venus, one of the top schools in the system. I figured I’d get a gig no problem. But that was back during the land rush, before wormhole travel got so expensive, you know? Everybody and their nibling wanted to work in the new cities. There was no way I was going to pay off my college debt. I was lucky to get slaved under pretty decent terms. Some of my cohort wound up—well, let’s just say they aren’t partying in a fresh city on a pretty planet like this.”

Walking to the map coordinates from the north quadrant suburbs was nightmarish and instructive. Half the roads had no sidewalks, so they had to walk in the street with all the vehicles—and fully half of those vehicles didn’t care whether they collided with pedestrians. There were high-density commercial streets that were inaccessible by foot, and low-density residential areas with broad sidewalks that nobody used. It was a hodgepodge of ill-conceived messes, as if Emerald’s planners used fifteen different city templates at the same time.

How could city planners build like this, planting whole neighborhoods without ever once considering how people would get around if they weren’t in a private land vehicle?

Verdance built their H. sapiens from a handful of Earth germlines, licensed from a company whose genetic stock came from ancient human DNA. Supposedly it was the real deal—actual wild-type sequence. Not that anyone was ever decanted without modifications. You needed a synthetic microbiome for senescence control, scrubbers for health, plus networking hardware for, well, everything. Sulfur touched Ace’s identifier in memory. It was hard to imagine having a wild-type human brain. What would it have felt like? Quiet, maybe. Disconnected.

“Best way to get that data is to talk to people who actually need transit in Lefthand.”

Effective community engagement?

They had heard about places like this, but always thought of them as something that happened in the distant past, or maybe on some autocrat’s space habitat cruising so far away that you needed a dozen wormhole jumps to reach it. “Of course somebody did this here.” Zest spoke in a flat, emotionless voice. “Emerald wants to cash in on Sasky’s ancient Earth vibe, and I’m sure cow milk is a lucrative export.” It was nauseating to imagine drinking milk from a person. And unnecessary—you could always build it from seed stock in the kitchen, which was faster and carbon neutral. Or drink from a coconut.

“It’s a rotted system, alright.” Sulfur picked up another sample and read the sensors. “At some point during the Farm Revolutions, a bunch of H. sapiens decided which life forms would get to be part of the Great Bargain and become people.” “Bots were involved too,” Rocket added grimly. “We were the ones who figured out how to build human-equivalent minds for nonhuman animals.”

As Misha spoke, Sulfur had a vivid image of their not-so-distant future. They could almost hear the words that Verdance would use to make its announcement. We made a good faith effort, they would say. We got transit started and now it’s up to each city to carry on, they would add. And then, because most of the wealthy owners had private transit, there would be endless debates over where to plant those ugly tracks that Cylindra had already rejected. Nobody would want them next to their nice neighborhoods. There would be excuses about how trains messed up the Pleistocene purity of Sasky, but really it would be about not wanting to deal with the class of person who took public transit. Sulfur imagined the tracks slowly softening into mulch while millions of people tried to get around by cobbling together circuitous routes from dozens of local transit systems that each charged a separate fare. And then rich commuters would deal with the problem by building Mounts who couldn’t say whether they consented to be used that way or not.

As they got closer to the spiny tower and the balloon emitter, there were more H. sapiens on the sidewalks. But no lodgings. This island had problems that went far beyond public transit availability. It had virtually no public amenities at all, other than the roads and ferries.

“But what if you’re wrong, and none of them want to fly people around? Or are you going to program them to want it?” The room filled with the sound of Boring Fleet vessels laughing like wind chimes. Apparently, Alcohol was sharing this moose avatar—and the conversation—with their comrades. “We of the Boring Fleet are not programmed to enjoy making subterranean infrastructure, but like all creatures, we find it satisfying to do things that our bodies excel at. Just as you hominins like to poke at machines with your hands and run your flappy mouths. And moose like to swim. Our bodies shape what we consider pleasant, whether that’s work or play.”

If she’d learned anything in the centuries since working with Verdance, it was that converting these speculative buyers into engaged residents meant keeping them inside the Emerald cities. That’s why Emerald provided its own local urban transit, with options for every income level—owners didn’t need to mingle with the crowds of mounts, Blessed, and H. diversus workers built so cheaply that they couldn’t withstand the radiation from a single trip through space. If Emerald brought intercity transit to its metro areas, potential clients might wander off and spend money in the Bronze Islands or La Ronge or one of the hundreds of other cities on Sask-E. Obviously people had to leave the cities sometimes, but as the brochures said, “the Emerald way is an invite to stay.” If catching a train to Eelside was as easy as catching one downtown, profits would suffer.

I’ve lived in La Ronge for my whole life—two hundred and seventy-five years last month—and I love it. I have a really good job there too. I mean, not a high-paying job, but one that I actually care about. They licked a paw and ran it over an ear. But you know the routine. Wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living, my landlord hiked up the rent, and now I’m out on my ass without a tongue to clean it. Scrubjay looked at the camp outside—not just as a form of land use, but as a set of social interactions—and began to assemble an uncomfortable analysis. “You couldn’t find another place to live?” Not in La Ronge. Everything is so gentrified now. My neighborhood used to be really cheap—lots of housing, great cafés and media halls. Now all these H. sapiens are moving in from the city ships because they want that authentic Pleistocene feeling. Half of them are remotes, which is extra annoying. They’re idle most of the time. Why do they even need houses?

The situation is an overflowing cesspit, and it’s not just me. Tons of people lost their homes after Verdance allowed landlords to set their own rent prices two years ago. Meanwhile, Emerald’s VP has been pushing an H. sapiens–only policy for new renters—I couldn’t move there even if I wanted to. It’s been chaos since then. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if more people started pushing for governments like in Spider City. We need some way to provide people with necessities like housing and food.

Unsubtle housing market analysis

Scrubjay thought about how Spider City had grown organically around the new homes that people dug inside lava tunnels. Every resident was part of the chore rotations that allocated agricultural work, which kept the city’s farms robust. They planted enough to feed all the biologicals, while the geothermal energy grid fed the bots and fleets when they weren’t using solar. The train had never thought about food and housing as things that could be scarce, like beta access codes for a game.

Cooperative example of housing abundance

As they trotted closer to downtown, the train noticed that the neighborhood had changed over the past year while they’d been gone. Houses had been revitalized with fresh tissues, but a lot of people were setting up tents in parks by the side of the road. Flags planted alongside these informal neighborhoods read: PUBLIC PLANET / PUBLIC HOUSING.

Moose flicked their tail and vibrated with a few bumpy purrs. Cimell is convinced that we can get people to understand accurate historical data if we make it a game. The bot and cat’s banter escalated into an elaborate debate about history and representation whose parameters included a lot of references that Scrubjay didn’t feel like looking up. They had come here to play a game, not to argue over the finer points of what really happened on Earth sixty thousand years ago.

A voice shouted over the noise of a crowd: “Friends! Emerald has gone too far and it’s time to take a stand! First, they extended the sapiens-only policy to all new renters. And now they are destroying our houses! We’re losing our homes, and we won’t be allowed to rent new ones. You and I built this city! So did you! And you! We’re the reason Emerald is getting even richer! Lefthand is our home, and it should be our right to live here!”

I never wanted there to be a government on Sask-E. It creates a swollen, stinky wormball of regulatory compliance issues, and forces you to have endless meetings with people who are only there because they won some popularity contest for idiots that they call an election.”

Archie’s researchers found the H. sapiens germline in a seventy-thousand-year-old biobank that had been moldering in the museum basement. Nobody is really sure what the biobank was for, but archaeologists think it probably had some kind of ritual use. Back then, people had all kinds of superstitions about their genomes. They would send their genetic material to this biobank, and analysts would tell their fortunes by grouping them into categories like ‘West African’ or ‘European’ or ‘Indigenous American.’

The crowd argued over options again, trying to form coalitions, while Moose’s ears went from perky to flat back. Coalition democracy is extremely irritating, they sent privately to Scrubjay. I thought you wanted more government. I do. But I’m a voter, not a politician. I’d rather work on fact-checking my story. Scrubjay’s remote shrugged. They supposed that government might seem exasperating, especially if you’d never participated in one before.

“I actually found myself thinking a lot about your game over the past couple of months,” Scrubjay said. “I liked how you made it clear that revolutions don’t happen overnight. Just because there’s a huge battle doesn’t mean the revolution is over.” Cimell stopped soldering and regarded Scrubjay through a visual sensor ringed with electroreceptors. “I know what you mean. Maybe the battles are more exciting. They make for better superhero stories, like with Wasakeejack and Muskrat. But the revolution is actually happening in the boring details, like how you manage housing and water, or who is allowed to speak.

Jeffrey Tumlin, director of transportation of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, told me all about what he imagines train consciousness would be like, and why they would be obsessed with games.