Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

The deck reminded Eliot of his uncle’s studio. After his parents’ death, he had been sent to live with his father’s brother, a perilously thin autistic man who worked for a watchmaker in south Wales and let Eliot spend long hours in the studio with him as he built timepieces. Eliot traced his interest in engineering back to those days of flipping through user manuals, jiggling his leg on the rungs of a stool while CNC cutters buzzed in the background. He’d come to admire the machinery, the reliability of it, as he leaned over the desk as his uncle polished tiny cogs and screws. There was something impressive about the fine micro-mechanics of a wristwatch, small things, some no bigger than a two-pound coin, and yet inside was an entire whirring solar system built of golden shafts, steel springs and gearwheels. Each watch contained over 1,000 components, some barely visible to the naked eye.

That was how Eliot began with robotics. He turned his bedroom into a workshop, collecting what equipment he could from his uncle’s studio and, in the dead of night, building machines straight from his dreams. A robotic finger that could twang the strings of a guitar, a hand that high-fived; then more complex machines: a sunlight sensor attached to the railing on his curtains, so they flew open when the radius of the sun at the horizon was exactly sixteen arc minutes. He designed a head for a Terran rover that performed calculations – based on the viability of water, and the partial pressure of various gasses – and yielded the probability of finding life in that region. He’d called the programme the Liston Algorithm.

His uncle had been so impressed by it that he entered the work into an engineering competition run by Imperial College London. Eliot did not understand the exact chain of circumstances that led to his work landing on the desk of Igor Bovarin, but he still remembered the day that the legendary cosmonaut had called him up on the house phone. A week later, four men in suits arrived at the house and sat in the living room, which Eliot clearly remembered was flooded with white afternoon light, gulls arcing and wheeling through the window.

‘So, you’re Eliot Liston,’ they’d said. ‘How old are you?’

‘Six hundred and sixty-seven,’ Eliot had said. ‘Weeks. Twelve point eight years. Almost… thirteen.’ A low whistle of surprise from one of the men.

They could not believe that the work had come from someone so young. Surely, they appealed to his uncle, he’d had some help. At least with the more complicated calculations? But his uncle had insisted he’d done it alone. Then, Igor Bovarin, the man – the legend – at the far end of the room, brought out a pen and wrote an equation on a piece of paper. Handed it to Eliot. Eliot had solved it quickly with a little laugh. Another, harder this time. Then another, in a tense back and forth exchange that ended, forty minutes later, in applause from three of the men.

They told him then about Dalton. A school on the outskirts of London where he could meet other students like himself. Had he heard of it? Of course he had! They told him about the work he could do there, the freedom he would have on the engineering stream to work with others as brilliant as himself, to be properly challenged by the best professors in the world. And, most enticing of all, if he agreed to go, his machines would be built. ‘Even the wild ones?’ he asked. Even the code he’d already written with a basic harmonic theory for a robot that could improvise a guitar solo.

‘Eliot, those are the most important ones,’ Igor had said with a smile.

There were already supply vessels heading for Terra-Two with the pre-fabricated hab-labs and equipment. But, they’d told him, once they made landfall they would need a mind like his not only to repair and update the machines, but to invent new ones. Machines that could meet the environmental challenges they were bound to face, that could drill into the land for water, that could drive for months, collect data and broadcast back the coordinates of optimal settlement locations.

They bought the patent to the Liston Algorithm and told him to pack his things. Two weeks later he was at Dalton, working under Igor on the engineering stream. Years later, he was on a ship bound for Terra-Two.

Chapter 19 ASTRID

^01.07.12

THEY CALLED IT A ‘doomsday cult’, but the New Creationists were the opposite. Their leaders did not rally docile crowds to keep vigils for the end of the world. Their eyes were fixed on the skies, happily heralding the arrival of a new one. The new Earth, the second chance. And wasn’t that, really, what everyone believed?