Back then we constantly faced two recurring problems.
I’ve already suggested the first of those: The most interesting HX technology was also the most dangerous. As an analogy, imagine you’re in an episode of the Cold War Salvage Team virty series. Your divers have found an abandoned late-Soviet-era submarine wreck on the ocean bottom. They bring on board a box-shaped device with mysterious knobs and levers labeled only in Cyrillic, and your operatives who read Russian are unavailable. (The scriptwriters will make that plausible somehow.) It’s of a design no one on the ship knows anything about. Some of the divers think it might be an A-bomb, but it could be a microwave oven or a sonar detector or some other equally innocuous piece of equipment.
So are you in a dangerous situation? Do you want to be on that salvage boat? Are you anticipating your share of the profits?
The early days of Titan Colony were just like that.
Our second big problem was all the new people coming to Titan for many reasons. Remember that in those pre-Honeycomb days propulsion systems were all boost-and-coast, which was too feeble a technology to make anything beyond Belter space commercially feasible. The Colony’s original purpose was scientific, to study a limited part of the outer Solar System.
But after the Honeycomb Comet was found, we got a wave of crazy get-rich-quick explorer types who’d either had bad luck exploring the Belt, or who’d had good luck and were too stupid or crazy to know when to stop. Either way, they made us scientists look like monks. There was immediate tension.
The good news was that the explorers didn’t stay long. They went out, found a lot of useful stuff on the Honeycomb, and brought it back to humanity by way of Titan. That brought another wave of people: The assessors and early exploiters—front-line scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and lawyers trying to figure out what HX technology was good for—plus the merchants, like the guys who sold shovels to the prospectors in the 19th-century Gold Rushes. Titan was now a home for schemers and suits … and families! To the amazed incredulity of most of their neighbors, like me, there were people who wanted to make Titan “just like home” and “safe and healthy for raising children”.
So by 2158, fifteen years after the Honeycomb discovery, Titan was not so much a melting pot as the Solar System’s hottest Boomtown Boiling Pot, and stories about it were a thriving media staple. Titan began suffering from what Bomorov had called the Curse of Being Important. Millions of people who shouldn’t have given a rat’s ass about what happened here were fascinated by our daily lives. To them, Titan was a fascinating and mysterious place, booming in population, inhabited mostly by get-rich-quick types who tolerated intolerable danger levels and actually did get rich, and it sent many wonders to Earth. It was idealized by some, demonized by others.
And whenever a scandal hit Titan, millions of journaloggers on Earth, half a million more on Mars and the Moon, plus maybe a thousand Titanians and a few Mercurials, all started moralizing … which affected the money flow to Titan a lot more than its morals. It was crazy, but no crazier than a small research base in the outer Solar System rapidly becoming a medium-size city boomtown.
I should add that some of the neat stuff Bomorov and the dozen or so other early expeditions found was crucial for Titan’s growth. In particular, gasifier catalysts cut tunneling time by about 80%, which let the space for housing and business keep up with demand. Without that, Titan would have become just a larger base, not a legendary boomtown, and an HX supply base in the Belt somewhere would have boomed, but it too would have been smaller and less important.
In 2170 we began building TC2.
Less than a decade after that we faced a crisis, the one that the Inaugural dinner was celebrating the end of along with the beginning of TC3. I think the history books will someday call it the Moratorium Crisis, but I like what the journal-bloggers settled on for their “first draft of history”: The Siege of Titan.
Let me review the background of the Siege.
Not only have the HX relics fascinated humankind since their discovery and added enormously to our understanding of xenobiology, their rich bounty has changed our world! It’s as if Indiana Jones got the Holy Grail back to an engineering lab, they learned how to duplicate it, and many hospitals were able to afford a copy. That’s the kind of world-changing technology you’re talking about with the HX relics.
But with power comes danger. To continue my classic-film analogy, suppose that when you used a Jones-Barnett Replica Grail™ you had to drape a lead-lined blanket over most of the patient’s body and step out of the room, like our great-grandmothers did when they took dental X-rays.
So while many in our Solar System community were excited by the explorers bringing in more totally unknown stuff, some argued, “We should make the HX fragments into Solar System Parks: Places where people can look but not touch, and certainly not exploit!” Others argued that the relics were not as long dead as we thought, and the owners were going to come back and be really pissed when they found us messing with their stuff. Still others felt that leaping forward with what we learned from the HX fragments polluted human technology, leading to some unpredictable future tragedy.
The first two arguments were and are weak and foolish, in my opinion. But the last is a sort of mystical counterpart to the one valid argument for going slow on HX technology: It’s so good, so valuable, that using it disrupts human communities, much as using industrial technology ripped up Earth communities starting in the 1700s and continuing for centuries. That’s a strong argument … but most of humanity would agree that we’re better off for having endured the growing pains of industrialization, and I feel the same way about the risks of HX technologies: There will be plenty of social cost as we adopt and adapt them, but in the end our world will be a much better place.
Ten years ago the differences in philosophy about how to exploit the HX remains came to a head with the Sularigen/Serenity Scandal, which convinced social conservatives off Titan, and even a few here, that if HX technology caused both really good and really bad social changes, the bad far outweighed the good.
The most widely valuable early HX finds were those colorful walls Bomorov described. It turns out they catalyze various chemical reactions. The scientists on the second expedition found those walls to be strong evidence for Bomorov’s hypothesis that “the ship was grown like a tree, not assembled like a house.” Whether the HX fragments were in fact parts of a ship or of something else when they were inhabited, those colorful parts of them were deeply involved in chemical processing, something like mammalian livers. They were easy to identify because they were not the bone-white of structural walls. So one of the earliest exploitation methods was taking a jackhammer to break off big pieces and bringing them back to find out what they did.
At first Titan’s catalyst testing field was just a flattened out area two kilometers east of the landing field, on the opposite side from habitation, where those with colorful rock unloaded their canisters. The facility grew greatly as it turned out that most of those HX colored walls contained multiple catalysts. So there were not dozens or hundreds of kinds, but at least thousands, comparable to the number of enzymes in the human body. And of course the number of reactions that needed to be tested was geometrically larger than that. The originally lonely, isolated place sprouted new buildings like a mushroom farm and before the end of a year it was a crowded place with a lot of people, an accident waiting to happen. The accident in fact waited for decades, until 15 March 2178, when someone opened a canister full of Catalyst 4004—as it was designated by the receiving clerk—without proper precautions. He or she was violently recycled into Titan’s atmosphere by the explosion, along with 34 other people and 9 buildings.
Within 5 years afterward Catalyst 4004 (pronounced forty-ought-four, reminiscent of a firearm caliber) became hugely valuable, the backbone of the methane-to-hydrogen conversion process that for the first time made Earth’s hydrogen industry competitive with its liquid petroleum industry counterpart, independent of subsidies so it became Earth’s dominant energy platform. So it paid off handsomely for humanity in the medium-run. But that was later.
In the short term, all of us Titanians mourned the dead for days, and some for a lot longer. We changed the Preliminary to immediately construct a much larger, much more decentralized catalyst testing field much further from town. And that was it; we’d learned from our mistake and it was time to move on with what else we needed to do. Even the most fault-finding journaloggers in the Colony accepted that.
But for many journaloggers, from the big and official to the minor and fringy, especially on Earth and the more settled regions of Mars and the Moon—what I call the Established Solar System—the 4004 Accident became the emblem of all their anti-HX worries. They fully expected Titan’s government to shut our catalyst testing facility down and not reopen the program until years later after an exhaustive investigation. When that didn’t happen, they compared our actions to those of “more responsible” governments; President Reagan grounding the US shuttle fleet from 1986 to 1988 after the Challenger blew up was featured prominently.
Roberta Jitpleecheep, the governor, handed me the political hot potato. My response, posted under the Government of Titan Colony’s virtual letterhead on its official website, was:
12 August 2178
Re: Repeated Calls for Extensive Investigation of the 4004 Accident
Sorry, folks. Shit happens, and there’s a lot to do here. We don’t have time for the theatrics you’re calling for.
Respectfully,
[Facsimile signature]
Kai Tremolo
Acting Media Relations Officer
My response was culturally appropriate for a Titanian of that day. All of us knew, as the Accident victims had known, that half the people who worked in the Testing Cooperative would become multimillionaires within a few years, and the other half would become billionaires. Those who died had been reaching for something that was very valuable and very real, for themselves and their families as well as for all humankind. The pioneers on Mercury and the traditionally hyper-independent Belters, they understood that, too.
But in retrospect, I was a total idiot. I shouldn’t have been surprised when my response launched a firestorm of indignation in the Established Solar System. Hostile journalogs accused Titan’s government of “cheerful unconcern” for human life—a phrase that particularly stung when most of us knew one or more survivors who never expected to be cheerful again—and the charge was picked up by elected representatives across the Solar System.
Most philanthropists and captains of capitalism didn’t add their voices to that chorus. But along with the politicians, they did something worse. They threatened to reduce or even cut off the trillions they were pouring into Titan Colony that allowed it to live and grow fast. Never mind how much economic value Titan was providing them through the HX finds!
So “in response to justified widespread outrage”, Governor Jitpleecheep fired her Acting Media Relations Officer, apologizing profusely for the fool’s insensitivity—I wrote that apology for her, the same day as my official firing, and I meant every harsh word of it, too—and “formed a blue-ribbon committee to fully investigate the 4004 Accident”, with a promise its findings would be incorporated into the Preliminary and eventually into the Final Master Plan. In our official news feeds we talked up the committee and its investigative powers and we emphasized how its preliminary findings were directly reflected in our controlling Preliminary Plan. We saw no need to mention how the Preliminary had changed just about weekly up to that point anyway, or that months before the committee first convened, common-sense measures were added and implemented to relocate the testing facility, expand its area five-fold, and make safety measures more stringent.