Vander Guthrie from the Global Ecosystems Analyzer facility in Oklahoma materialized out of the air. He looked as awkward as ever, his hair’s sky-blue tint ridiculous, and he grinned nervously at me. And he carried a little toy robot that he set on the tabletop. The robot rolled experimentally back and forth, friction sparks emanating from its plastic belly. In a tinny space voice it proclaimed, “A little slippery, but I think I can cope.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Tom groused. “Dad, what is this, a freak show?”

“Gea is supporting us. It’s significant, Tom.”

“It’s ridiculous, is what it is. What am I doing here?”

I longed to touch his hand. “If not for you none of us would be here. Just take it easy and follow your heart.”

Tom snorted, but sat still.

On his other side, Sonia caught my eye and smiled faintly. He’ll be OK. I was grateful for the wordless message, and glad she was there, sane and calm. Sanity and calmness do seem to be in short supply in my bloodline.

Ruud Makaay, sleek and competent as ever, pinged the water glass in front of him with his fingernail. “May I call us to order? Thank you all for being here, one way or another…”

Our purpose, he said, was to review the work done so far on fleshing out the hydrate-stabilizer scheme, and to decide on next steps.

Tom was immediately suspicious, even hostile. “Next steps? Such as you taking the whole thing over so you can get rich drilling fucking great holes in the North Pole?”

I said quickly, “Tom, take it easy. The EI people are helping us out here.”

“Oh, sure. ”

If Makaay was perturbed by this unpromising opening he didn’t show it. “We’re here to review the work we’ve done on a problem we all accept as serious. So for now let’s build on what we have in common, rather than focus on our differences. Can we agree on that much?”

The Gea robot rolled back and forth. I wondered what she made of all this interpersonal, typically human bullshit. And yet, I supposed, she depended absolutely on people, with all our imperfections, to get things done; she had to put up with us.

Shelley took the cue. “Shall I start?” She stood, walked to the head of the table, and with waves of her hands began to conjure up VR images of complicated bits of engineering, gleaming and flawless. The core of it was a device shaped something like a bullet, with a complicated tracery of flanges and ducts engraved on its nose. At its heart I saw a spark, a soul in the machinery.

Shelley produced a variety of representations of this thing, some transparent, cutaway, or exploded. “We call this a mole,” she said. “It’s the cornerstone of our design. But each mole will be small, no larger than a clenched fist…”

To stabilize the hydrate strata it would be necessary to thread it with coolant pipes, just as in our original back-of-the-envelope sketch. The teams Shelley had gathered to flesh out the idea were adhering to that basic design. And they were still assuming that liquid nitrogen, drawn down as a gas from the air and then cooled and liquefied, would be the working fluid. You’d pass the nitrogen through the underground pipes where it would evaporate back to a gas, in the process drawing in heat from the hydrate layers, and then it would be passed out of the pipes for recondensing. That way you would effectively pump heat out of the ground.

But to stabilize a band of hydrates that passed right around the pole of the planet we would need hundreds of thousands of kilometers of pipe. It just wasn’t practical to fabricate and implant so much.

“Which is where the mole comes in,” Shelley said. “It will be like a self-propelled drill bit.” The flanged nose on the most solid representation whirred, its function obvious. “And it will lay tunnels, not pipes. It will simply burrow its way through the ground, just like a mole. But the tunnel it digs out won’t be allowed to collapse.” She indicated a range of little devices attached to the side of the mole. “We will shore up the tunnel as we go, using local materials. The precise technique will depend on what we find down there, which is going to vary according to the local geology… The walls of the tunnel will themselves be smart, of course, and capable of some limited self-repair, though in case of major breaches such as through seismic movement we can always send down more moles.

“We will send in hundreds of moles, thousands maybe. Each mole will make most of its own decisions down there, learning as it goes. But we can communicate with it through the pipe it leaves behind. We’re also experimenting with sonar and electromagnetic pulses, so the moles can communicate with each other even without a direct connection.”

Sonia said, “So they will hear each other digging away in the rock. A whole community, tunneling,

tunneling.”

“That’s the idea,” Shelley said. The overall design was straightforward. The moles wouldn’t be going terribly deep, and wouldn’t face challenging temperatures or pressures; the materials technology we needed was well within the envelope of experience of the mining industry. “And the smartness, of course, is trivial.”

Makaay asked, “And what about power?”

Shelley nodded at me. “That’s where Michael’s expertise comes in.” She tapped that glowing spark at the heart of her conceptual mole. “This is a Higgs-energy reactor, the most concentrated energy source we have. The mole’s heart will be a cube the size of a sugar lump, which will deliver it enough energy to tunnel through ten thousand kilometers — that’s our design goal, we may achieve more.”

Tom turned to me. “You can build such things, the sugar lumps?”

I said, “We can take them off the shelf, almost. We’ve been working toward such devices for a long time, Tom. For a while we’ve been good at making very small, very smart gadgets. So if you can make a power source equally compact you have a powerful technology…”

Now that power supplies were catching up with miniaturization, the agencies and companies I consulted for were developing, among other things, miniature robotic engineers designed to go places humans couldn’t, such as to check out undersea pipes and cables, or the interiors of antiquated nuclear reactors. The space community was designing a new generation of unmanned exploratory robots, swarms of them the size of oranges or smaller, which could be scattered on the surface of Mars, or in the clouds of Venus or Jupiter, or sent swimming in the ice-cloaked seas of Europa. These tiny probes would work for years, individually and cooperatively, smart enough even to design their own science programs on the spot. Even on Earth tiny distributed sentiences were even making new kinds of science possible. You could spray smart motes around a forest, let them self-organize, and begin to gather data, in three dimensions and real time, on the detailed behavior of macro-climates and macro-ecologies across a significant volume. All of this would be enabled by Higgs technology, by grains of an energy field that had once caused the universe itself to expand, each providing years of power.

Tom seemed impressed despite himself. Perhaps he did have some engineer’s genes in him after all.

With most components coming off the shelf, Ruud Makaay thought it would be possible to have some kind of field trial up and running within mere weeks. Earth Inc. took on immense projects, but it was a nimble organization, it seemed, capable of reacting quickly.

The discussion descended into technicalities.

Vander, prompted by Gea, pressed Shelley with some tough questions.

Shelley handled most of it, though we had to flag some issues to resolve later. Most of the problems Vander and Gea raised came from the fact that the design was still at a conceptual level, and Shelley just didn’t have the depth of detail yet. I couldn’t see that any showstoppers emerged, however.