Book 5: Chapter 54: Education
Icarus
August 2337
Roanoke
Isauntered casually along a tree-lined boulevard, admiring the flowers and various pieces of artwork. Okay, they weren’t really trees, although they filled a similar ecological niche. But the flowers were really flowers, and they seemed to have insect pollinators. Or something that filled that niche.
I sighed and decided to stop overanalyzing. This was an alien ecosystem, with its own evolutionary history. But so far, every biological environment the Bobs had examined followed the same general patterns. At the base of the ecosystem was something plantlike that converted energy to biomass. It didn’t have to be sunlight—even on Earth, entire fumarole-based ecologies had evolved around chemosynthesis—but the idea was the same.
Then something would evolve to eat the plants. Then something else would evolve to eat the plant eaters. Then something would evolve to parasitize everyone in sight. Viruses, microbes of every kind, fungi … Life followed certain patterns, probably simply because they were the paths of least resistance.
But because of all of this, I was enjoying a stroll down a tree-lined path on a totally alien planet.
“I can’t believe we haven’t done this before,” Dae said beside me. “The mannies are just so much more real than VR.”
“Mm, yeah, but we knew that from Howard’s blog, if nothing else. We’ve just never stopped long enough to smell the, uh … ” I made a helpless gesture at some nameless bed of flowers.