Prologue.
Year March 2, 2249 GEST (Geneva Earth Standard Time)
On the horizon the red sun dipped, creating a rippling banner of reds and purples where land and atmosphere met; overhead were four natural satellites. It was day eight of fifty-four in the third year of Janus’ mission; a leap year, as it turned out and he was excited. Finally he had observed enough of Kepler 186F’s cycle to experience its calendar; 121.334 days per orbit period and every three Keplar years required one extra day to even things out. There were four seasons, though Winter was seriously curtailed this close to the planet’s equator. Each rotational period was 59.96 Earth hours meaning the days were longer but the years wound up being shorter by a small amount. Frantically he beamed his findings to the meager satellite ring surrounding the planet and, in a short time, an autonomous “Arrow” craft would be fired towards Earth. As the Arrow was not limited by biological elements many of the cautions necessary to avoid complications when travelling at faster than the speed of light could be ignored and the Arrow, being little more than a Warp Drive, travelled faster than any starship. The Arrow was the smallest ship capable of sustaining a Alcubierre drive and while improvements in technology continued to shrink that size, the Arrow was nearly a quarter of the mass of a frigate.
Satisfied Janus rested as much as was possible for a being of metal and plastic. Rather he disconnected from the physical, mechanical parts of his apparatus and dialed back CPU operations by 95%. Artificial Intelligence did not sleep but the sheer boredom of existence without prolonged stimulation forced the Drone into a low power period, effectively blinding most of its sense. Any physical descriptor was a misnomer as he was a Drone mind; an artificial intelligence residing in a computer and capable of controlling any number of different bodies. His home was a dumpy, mostly immobile beast referred to the people that created him as a “Base Drone”. It had the appearance of two old style pickup trucks lashed together and weighed nearly as much.
As Janus’ CPU cooled he sent out audio signals, tiny chirps that the denizens of this world had never taken note of. Within seconds Janus’ tiny probes, atmospheric flying drones and crawling explorer drones, none of whom exceeded a third of a meter in any dimension, began swarming back. Wireless data exchange had been minimized and directed upwards only in an effort to avoid contaminating the environment. The Doctor had made him do that as there was no telling what life forms could be damaged by the radiation produced in such contactless communication.
Optical sensors scanned in every direction simultaneously as Janus counted the incoming Explorers. The Explorers, to Janus, were his “babies” although he didn’t understand the concept as organic life forms might. Like most Drones his concept of gender failed to register in any significant way and so, internally, he (or maybe she) was both mother and father to them. He took care of them, defended them as much as possible without violating the terms of their mission. Not that he had much choice, being a single parent and all.
One by one they docked and charged; delivering their data to Janus for analysis. Processor still cooling Janus nonetheless counted them repeatedly as each arrived to be sure all had returned and scanned each for contaminants or damage. Occasionally one of the locals would attack an explorer and, although not entirely helpless, they would not defend themselves so as to not affect the local ecosystem. These would then emit an audio signal and a nearby Explorer would activate wireless as the attack took place, in case power loss should occur, and data would be collected detailing the organic creature’s capabilities as a predator or guardian depending on the nature of the conflict. Significant data such as bite or the force of physical blows from the various insectoid species had been gathered that way. One way or another they would always return for repairs and Janus would clean out the remnants of whatever insect had tried to injure or eat them with great sadness for the Doctor had been explicit that he should not harm the planet’s creatures.
The worst damage so far had been an overload that had partially fried a smaller drone. Janus had examined it carefully as there was nothing more horrifying to a Drone than the idea of losing power. Drones did not sleep, and while consciousness might be dialed back it was always on. The loss of consciousness was the end. Something might be rebuilt of the Drone’s memories, but it was something different. Full power loss was death.
And so the count went on. After a reasonable amount of time, three hours Janus became aware that one of his little explorers, a crawler, had not returned. Analyzing the surveys, a meager few Petabytes of data, Janus could find no given signal in the memories of her other children. This was unusual; yes, a second query in the collected databanks from the last 7,275.18664 hours confirmed that this had not happened before. Although the command line concerning her little Explorers told Janus that they were expendable he, like most Drones, was quite capable of forming his own opinions about things. Thus, to Janus, as the reclamation of the Drone should have negligible cost its recovery was the obvious option. A second upload to the satellite so soon after the first was likewise unusual and should be considered unreasonable but, then, worried parents often were.
Straining against the rocks into which he was rooted Janus confirmed how difficult it would be to personally go in search of the Explorer, identity confirmed as number 27, and so he decided that the Explorers must go out again without a full charge. The Drones required power and the thick jungle canopy prevented simple Solar power collection so Janus had decided to use geothermal. The Doctor had been concerned that a nuclear reactor might have irradiated the local creatures even with its minimal footprint. Quickly charging graphene battery cells was against standard mission protocols but charging it once this quickly would not significantly reduce the life of the battery and charge time would be reduced to a few minutes instead of hours.
Confirmation from the satellite told Janus that this occurrence would be reported with the next Arrow flight, some 10 days hence when the next Arrow from Earth arrived with further instructions. So far the mission had remained unchanged from its initial configuration, but Janus did not worry about that. Janus instead fretted, his previously cooling processor heating up prodigiously; he pushed through nearly an Exabyte of data while reviewing 27’s explorations to predict likely locations for the tiny drone should he be disabled somewhere.
Janus’ calculations completed just as the Explorers’ tiny cells completed their burst charge and they were quickly redeployed. Moving out quickly on tiny legs, wheels and rotors they never once questioned why their mother had rearranged their cycle so drastically. Compared to the supercomputer mainframe that comprised Janus’ near human intelligence, they were like obedient little gerbils and about as smart.
It wasn’t just that his tiny crawler had gone missing but that no creature encountered thus far had proven capable of doing real harm to them. These base animals, arthropodic in nature, had chitinous natural weapons that did little to the high-tech mesh comprising a drone body. Anything large enough to cause harm, by Janus’ calculations, simply ignored the Explorers or were so slow as to be no threat.
Waiting was torture but grew easier as Janus waited, forcing his processor to slow to a load of less than 5%; just enough to keep visual and audio signals streaming in and quickly return to a wake state should the need arise. Full awareness more didn’t just strain Janus physically through heat and stress but also made the wait longer as the faster a processor worked the slower time would go.
Something shuddered just beneath Janus’ chassis, the rocky soil loosening around one of his anchors. Retracting the foot he clumsily lurched in an effort to remain fully level. For just a moment Janus scanned, mild curiosity distracting him from the stress of a missing child. Looking down he imagined the missing crawler emerging, having burrowed all the way back home. Sensor grid coming back online he visually scanned the little hole where the anchor had been but detected little. Intrigued, Janus activated his full array of sensors and he quickly obtained X-Ray imagery, a Sonogram and several other forms of reading physical dimensions and determined that a large biological element had appeared from a new chamber just beneath the position Janus had occupied now for 3 years local time. Fascinated he chirped, using the same audio signals understood by his Explorers in an effort to communicate with this creature that, unlike every other life form, had both noticed Janus’ massive, camouflaged Base Drone body and identified it as something worth examining.
Unfortunately, as the thought entered his mind suddenly his radar system picked up a second interesting object. Given the astronomical survey that was conducted when Janus was deployed and the periodic updates from the Arrows, the one-tonne asteroid that tore through the atmosphere was a complete surprise. It skirted, unnoticed, through the satellite network that was too sparse to begin with and lacking a warning from those Janus was completely unaware of the threat. When it impacted the resulting shockwave was enough to shatter the drone into shards. Ultimately the end came so quickly that no communications were possible and no one would know for weeks that the mission had failed. They’d know nothing except that Janus had gone dark...