Book 5: Chapter 9: Security Clampdown
Bill
May 2336
Ragnarök
Isighed and looked out over the surface of Ragnarök from my second-floor balcony with a deep sense of satisfaction. These days, I spent most of my free time physically on the planet, in manny form. No matter how you cut it, VR just didn’t compare to real when real was available.
As these thoughts went through my head, I had a moment of mental dislocation as I tried to remember where I was, physically. My manny was on Ragnarök, of course, but my ship with my cube inside was out in the Oort cloud. With everything remotely accessible, the sole reason my physical location mattered these days was that it was the only way in which I was truly vulnerable. Blow up my cube, and one of my backups shortly would be restoring itself in Ultima Thule into a new cube and Heaven vessel. According to the Skippies, that would still be me, but I wasn’t convinced.
I had tuned my manny to react as much like a baseline human as possible, including sensitivity to air quality, temperature, pressure, and humidity. That last item was a concern lately. Possibly, I had been just a little too successful in getting the plant life established. Ragnarök was almost all forest now, and every single tree was doing its level best to perspire. The result was like Miami in midsummer, but without the beaches.
But with the latest round of tweaks, I’d finally managed to enforce a level of homeostasis. And that meant I could start breeding up the larger animals from the zoology library. Within a decade, I expected to have as much as fifty percent of the biosphere of old Earth up and running on Ragnarök. And Charles and company continued to find samples of DNA on Earth from species not represented in the Svalbard archives and forward them to me.
The new tensor printers weren’t quite to the point of being able to resurrect an entire animal just from DNA, though. Or to be more accurate, they could reproduce one, but not alive. But we were close. Meanwhile, cloning worked where there was enough of a cell sample to start from.
I’d already published a charter for Ragnarök. The world would be held in perpetuity as an interstellar park and preserve. No colonization, no commercial development.