Dead on Mars

Tomcat returned to the desk and quickly connected to the arm’s control system.

The arm’s control system looked quite like a remote control game. However, Tang Yue had never touched it before. Before Earth had vanished, he had not been shown how to control the arm. Even the trigger-happy Old Wang hadn’t allowed him to touch it. After Earth had vanished, Tang Yue was even more afraid of touching it. The arm’s structure was intricate and easily damaged. It was very complicated controlling it. Tang Yue had no way to fix it if he broke it.

Tomcat switched on the main camera on the arm.

The black-and-white image appeared on the screen. It appeared to be aimed at a white outer skin, with a series of blurry English letters. The background was pitch-black deep space, and the sun was too bright that the stars couldn’t be seen.

The folded robotic arm, that was leaning against the truss, slowly unfolded. Tomcat was an experienced operator and it had controlled the arm several times. It was very reliable.

The Eagle lander was docked at the Silent multipurpose module with the latter’s size only second to the Crystal module. It was the second-largest module on the United Space Station, and it allowed two Orion spacecraft to simultaneously dock at it.

To help with Mai Dong’s inspection of the Eagle’s Ascent Vehicle, Tang Yue and Tomcat planned on moving it. The Hope experiment module had a standard APAS that made it very suitable.

The picture on the monitor moved as Tomcat focused, staring at the cross-hairs in the middle of the screen.

Through the camera, the man and cat soon saw the lander. The latter was docked onto the Silent module, and its white back was illuminated by sunlight.

“The lander,” Tang Yue whispered.

Tomcat nodded.

The arm slowly connected to the Eagle lander.

This was the true grappling method. The way they did it last time during the resupply was a result of the lander’s drained propellant. It had lost control of its attitude, and Tang Yue and Tomcat had no choice but to get Mai Dong to lunge forward to grapple it. It was against protocol and very dangerous. Normally, a grappling procedure involved both bodies to be still, allowing the grapple fixture at the end of the arm to insert into the lander’s notch. Of course, it was nothing like a claw machine.

The screen indicated that the grapple fixture had latched on.

“OK, latched on.” Tomcat pressed a button. Everything was in place. “Closing hatch. Disconnecting lander from space station’s electrical interface.”

“Disconnected.”

“Disconnecting control interface.”

“Disconnected.”

“Disconnecting mechanical interface.”

Just as Tomcat finished its sentence, the picture on the screen shook and the lander and space station’s rigid connection had been disconnected. Tang Yue then saw the arm move as it silently and slowly took the Eagle away from the Silent module.

Tang Yue sat there, having a baffling feeling that this scene resembled a pair of chopsticks stuffed into a chunk of glutinous rice flour.

Damn it, why are my thoughts always related to food?

The arm slowly bent, like praying mantis forearms.

Mai Dong floated inside the Crystal core module, watching the abnormally long robotic arm retract from a distance. This scene looked like a mantis shrimp in the deep sea. It would stay motionless at the seabed, attacking when prey swam past. At this moment, the huge space mantis had grabbed its prey, using its sharp forearms to tear through the prey’s body and pulled it towards its mouth.

From the thin, jagged, and spike-covered body, the space station did look like a crustacean.

She continued her work.

She switched on the computer.

The documents that had been prepared were lined up on the hard disk as Mai Dong scanned them one after another.

“History of the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire.”

“The Civilization of Ancient Mesopotamia Along the Banks of Two Great Rivers.”

“Native American Developmental History.”

“Compendium of Pre-Qin Philosophers”

“Western Philosophy History and Monographs.”

They had already reached the Middle Ages and modern history. As the amount of information and the population of these eras had increased exponentially, Mai Dong’s work had increased significantly. For instance, ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon were distant histories with small populations. Due to the lack of historical records, the trio used whatever was available.

But with the passage of time, this work became more and more complicated.

As government and agricultural technology reached a state of maturity, the world population began to rise. All kinds of political regimes emerged in the East and West, sprouting like mushrooms after a rain. They had complicated connections that couldn’t be sorted out. The massive web of familial connections of the European aristocracy was something that even left Tomcat exhausted.

Tomcat had indicated more than once that Queen Victoria was the mother of the King of the United Kingdom and also the mother of the German Emperor. At the same time, her grandchildren occupied the thrones of Greece, Norway, and Russia. During the outbreak of the First World War, these relatives were on both sides of the conflict. Even Korean dramas couldn’t produce such a contrived plot.

Tang Yue commented that this was probably the difference between Eastern and Western thought.

Easterners used military and war to establish their grandiose enterprise, while Westerners rather extended their influence by marrying their children.

This was ignoring an oddity like the Duke of Valentinois, who used his sister as a tool through her marriage with Giovanni Sforza, aiming to gain Sforza’s lands after a divorce.

The goal of Easterners was to be an emperor to everyone.

The goal of Westerners was to be the grandmother to everyone.

Mai Dong did a perusal. The folders on the screen were a few dozen megabytes, making them quite large documents.

The United Space Station was broadcasting them in the form of high-frequency microwaves. Mai Dong only needed to prepare the document, and the encoding and signal modulation would be completed by the computer before sending them out with the antenna.

Taking note of the time, the first batch of electromagnetic waves that had been sent out had covered 15,594 AU, having long left the Kuiper belt.

If the attenuation was ignored, Mai Dong’s electromagnetic waves were expanding spherically outwards at the speed of light. The boundary of the sphere would be the first words she broadcast.

The space station was constantly broadcasting signals all day. The sphere would soon reach the size of the Solar System, becoming as big as the Oort Cloud, the Milky Way, and even the Universe.

Occasionally, Mai Dong would have such thoughts.

It did sound like a Universe-level of work that God would do.

However, Tomcat often said that such broadcasts were meaningless because no one could receive them. The United Space Station’s power level was just too low. The electromagnetic waves it emitted would have attenuated before reaching Jupiter’s orbit. In this Universe, energy was conserved, and electromagnetic waves were also a form of energy. How powerful was the space station’s antenna? When spreading it across a sphere with a radius of 15,000 AU, the strength of the signal was, in the true sense of the word, asymptotically zero.

To broadcast an interstellar message to the entire Milky Way, it had to be done at a power level equal to the energy output of the

Sun

.

If they wanted to broadcast to the entire Universe, they needed to convert the entire Milky Way into energy.

Human civilization hadn’t reached the point where they could leave their traces in the Universe.

Faced with such a rebuttal, Mai Dong’s answer was always: “Lalala, I can’t hear you.”

Tomcat was rendered very helpless.

Could you scold such a delightful girl?

Reference to the Three Body Problem.