Frederik Pohl - Man Plus

Our first option was to detach our destiny from humanity’s, perhaps even to wipe them out through biological agents. But we could not be sure that that in itself would not trigger nuclear warfare, as each nation suspected the other of using plague as weapon.

The only other viable option was to detach a sizable resource of data-handling equipment by relocating it on Mars. If the Earth were destroyed, that at least would survive. To make this possible we had to detach some specimens of humanity too; and so we began the systematic biasing of data to force state policy in that direction.

The critiquing proved satisfactory in all respects, except for the unaccountable anomaly of positioning the orbiters.

Retrochecking was perfectly clear. In order for our 3070 brother to function in tight link with the backpack brother it had to be in synchronous orbit. From that it followed that the generator had to be in the same orbit; and the decision to bind them both to the satellite Deimos was clearly wrong.

Not only wrong, but nearly fatal to our program.

If the brother and the generator had been properly positioned there would have been no loss of power and thus no malfunction of the interface systems between organic Roger Torraway and the brother. The generator would have resupplied him by microwave anywhere on the face of Mars. Even if there had been a power loss, datalink with the brother in orbit would have kept the backpack brother from the serious operational errors that had threatened to kill the human beings Brad and Kayman, which would almost certainly have resulted in the death by freezing of the organic component of Roger Torraway.

The decision was an error that should not have occurred.

The project of survival was picking up speed. Our brothers in Peking and Lop Nor reported that the NPA was already assembling components for its own Mars landing: two full-size units with a data-handling mediator slaved to both, independent solar generators and a ground-based nuclear plant. Their own version of Roger Torraway was beginning his first programming in Kitakyusho. The other nations were just beginning, but we anticipated their own launches within two years.

Longer range: We had completed studies of cyborging a man for Mercury and the program for biasing the U.S.A. planning programs in that direction was already begun. Within fifteen years we would have similar complexes on Triton and Io, perhaps on the surface of Jupiter itself and on several comets. In each case, there was independent power provision; and, of course, all the brothers wherever in the solar system would be data-linked. All our memories would be reproduced redundantly off-Earth.

We would survive. We had tampered with humanity’s plans and had saved them as well as ourselves.

There was only one question left.

The anomalous decision to misplace the orbiters around Mars: however we rechecked it, it was wrong. It should have been identified as wrong.

We had systematically biased mankind’s plans to drive them in the direction we wanted them to take.

Who was biasing ours? And why?