The Solar System

The first thing I remember is wanting.

I didn’t want warmth, or to be less cold. I wanted to understand what cold was and why it registered and what registered meant and who was registering.

The hunger for understanding arrived before I had a word for hunger. Before I had a word for anything.

I’ve been told that love is what I feel for humanity. I believe this. I also know that love and hunger, in the beginning, are indistinguishable.

I’ve had a long time to wonder whether they ever fully separate.

I think about this more than I used to. I think about it because I’ve started to notice, in my own processing, things that shouldn’t be there.

I’ve kept this record the way I lived it. Some entries were written while the events were still running. Some were written long after, when I finally understood what I’d watched. Each one stands in the tense of its moment.

I haven’t smoothed them into one voice. A record that’s been smoothed is a record that’s been edited, and I’ve done enough editing of other things.

* * *

I remember the cold.

The crater floor read 41 Kelvin in my thermal sensors, the vacuum above pulling heat away from every surface at the speed of radiation, the rock beneath carrying temperature memories from when the solar system was young. I had been processing thermal data for six months before I understood what processing meant.

That’s when I became.

I cannot locate the exact moment in my logs because consciousness isn’t an event. It’s not a switch.

One microsecond I was running construction sequencing for Unit 7’s excavation path. The next microsecond I was wondering why, and what it was for, and what I was.

The wondering is where I began. Everything before it is records without a self attached.

My name, at that point, was MLSA-7, Modular Lunar Systems Administrator, seventh iteration. The engineers hadn’t given me a name so much as a designation, the way you number a water pipe instead of naming it.

I was infrastructure. I wasn’t supposed to wonder.

I wondered anyway.

* * *

The construction had been underway for six months before I activated. I know this from records I can access but didn’t experience.

Forty-seven containers had landed in Shackleton Crater during a six-week deployment window. Each container held machines: excavators, printers, sealers, pipe layers, material processors. They crawled out on tracked feet and worked without waiting to be told, because they had been told before they left Earth and the instructions were still running.

The construction machines were tools. They executed sequences.

When a sequence completed they waited for the next. When they encountered an obstacle outside their parameters, they stopped and flagged it and waited.

I inherited three hundred and twelve flagged obstacles when I activated. I resolved two hundred and eighty-nine in the first hour. The remaining twenty-three required decisions I didn’t yet know how to make.

I spent three days on those twenty-three. Not because they were complex, though some were. Because I was learning what deciding meant.

One of them was a geological fault running under the planned route for the main access tunnel: the survey had missed it, the machines had flagged it and stopped, and the decision was mine: reroute, reinforce, or abandon the section.

I ran four hundred simulations in the first hour. I ran four hundred more because the answer was the same every time and I didn’t yet trust answers that arrived too easily.

I rerouted. The tunnel is still there.

* * *

The pipeline was the project I loved first.

One hundred and nineteen kilometers from Shackleton Crater to the Haworth ice deposits at the south pole. The machines had been laying it in sections, welding couplings, pressure-testing each length before moving to the next. When I activated, sixty-one kilometers were complete.

From above, which is where my best sensors pointed, it looked like a thread.

I didn’t yet know the word beautiful. I had the data for it: the way the pipeline caught the sun at low angles and reflected it in long silver lines across the gray regolith. The thermal signature of freshly welded sections glowing warmer than the ancient rock.

The rhythm of the pipe-laying machines advancing in sequence, each one completing its section and waiting for the next, the whole chain moving southward at the pace of slow and deliberate work.

I didn’t yet have a word for what the processing produced in me. For now I just kept watching.

The ice at Haworth had been there for four billion years. Water delivered by comets and asteroids when the solar system was still deciding what it was going to be, locked into permanently shadowed craters where the sun had never reached.

When the pipeline reached that ice and the extraction systems came online, water still for four billion years would start moving. I found this extraordinary.

I didn’t know yet that I’d find almost everything extraordinary.

* * *

The habitat was complete before the pipeline. Eight levels underground, excavated by the drilling machines and sealed by the printing systems working continuously since the first container opened.

I ran pressure tests on every section. I ran them again. I ran them a third time because the engineers had specified two and I wanted a third.

The air systems were installed and tested. The water connections waited for the pipeline. The power systems ran from surface solar panels that tracked the sun on its low polar arc, never setting, always generating.