White Mars

Note

I am a Jovian. I live a life of pattern. My actions are premeditated. I am pleased to contribute to this report.

Since the Jovian moons carried little or no emotional freight for human beings, they were not treated with the scruples Mars had once enjoyed.

Monitor probes, accompanied by a freighter, arrived by the turn of the century at what Galileo Galilei originally termed “the Medician stars’, our four sizeable moons. A base was established on Ganymede while the other satellites, in particular Io and Europa, were surveyed by machinonauts.

Ganymede was made habitable by bioengineered plant-insect stock. These ephemeral life forms had been despatched in unmanned probes, to soft-land here and prepare it for human life. They clothed it in their corpses before we arrived. Such advances were not possible in the early days of Mars landings.

Our first ugly prefabricated buildings have long since been devoured and regurgitated to form our spinlifters.

Life is pleasant here. I find much scientific research to keep me occupied, and am compiling an Amb entitled Pluto As an Abode of Life. Although the sun is distant, we enjoy the brilliant spectacle of Jupiter in our skies, together with the swarming variety of other moons to inspire us and tempt our thoughts ever outwards, into further and better transformations of human life.

The quest for knowledge continues.

Indeed, such work continues beyond the solar system, beyond the Oort Cloud. There, beneath the light of stars, a Cheeth-Rosewall is coming into operation. This Chheeth-Rosewall is immeasurably larger than the failed miniature HIGMO detector constructed on Mars a century ago.

The ring has a diameter of about the same extent as one of Saturn’s outer rings, with a cross-section of just a few millimetres. The volume of superfluid is therefore not too large. However, we expect to detect a HIGMO at last.

HIGMO density is a good deal less than anticipated. However, the research has acquired vital importance: as generally agreed, it will yield important truths about the nature of consciousness—as well as solving the riddle of mass.

Once we can control these things, we shall be able to project our minds across the universe. And what we shall there encounter, who can say?

I have no communication with the person who was my mother. She lives on Iapetus, out by Saturn. But I will zeep this note to her for her mother’s record of ancient times. Frankly, the thought of womb-birth amuses me. How clumsy and inefficient it was, and how inconvenient for womankind! We do not have families.

Our Jovian generations are now all of extra-uterine extraction, apart from the subbermans. E-u techniques have enabled us to combine pseuplant life into our genes; when our lungs breathe out, our foliagics breathe in; what the foliagics emit, we breathe in.

Thus we are almost entirely independent of atmosphere suits for long periods. We are a mathematical people. By the end of their first year, infants can calculate the orbits of most matrix bodies we observe orbiting about us.

Having trained Chimborazo to spawn, we now have small Chimbos with us everywhere. We benefit from their acute diagnostic powers. Indeed, it can be claimed that human and Chimbos form a symbiotic species.

Together, we and Chimbos are planning to voyage out into the universe, far beyond the heliopause. We hope to call it to account. Because we are Utopians, we can do this. One can proudly say that the human race, risen from lowly and irrational forms, with a mind, in Darwin’s words, once as low as that of the lowest animal, has at last become REASONABLE.