Pulvirenti Giorgio - Proxima B

“What a loudmouth! He can’t be more than thirty, and he tells us these things!” Michael said to himself in a barely audible tone of voice while he was sitting in his seat some rows behind him.

“Bring them there!” the General told two girls holding some duffel bags just behind him.

“Thank you! So, yesterday we saw some procedures under regulation as for facing any hostilities. Today we’re going to see what to use when we have to face them,” Matthew kept on saying. He pulled a weapon out of his duffel bag. It looked like a little, light and black Glock pistol.

“This one represents the first piece of your equipment, a Junker 15! It fires mid-range beams of light and it is perfect for point-blank shots but it is not recommended for long-range shots. Its frame is extremely lightweight thanks to its carbon fiber construction,” the General explained as he leaned the pistol near the duffel bag on the counter.

“Gentlemen, here it is, Baiman 3! Thanks to its high fire power, it looks like an old-school assault rifle. It fires extremely powerful mid to long-range laser beams. After fifty shots, the gun magazine is empty and you have to replace it. Ah, I was forgetting to say that, without exaggeration, an inch of steel could be clearly cracked by shots fired at a range of sixty-six feet! Not bad, I’d say.”

Then Matthew leaned the rifle on the table and noticed a hand raised out of the corner of his eye.

“Please, Miss Parker!” he said after seeing the girl who had raised her hand. It was Emily, who was sitting in the front row on the right.

“It’s all very interesting, Sir, but… well… I was wondering why all these weapons for a mission of colonization. Is there something we should know, Sir?” the girl asked without leaving her seat; she looked at the General and pointed out, “Sir, it’s more like an offensive military mission than a mission of colonization!”

“Soldier, these weapons will do what you want them to do!” Matthew exclaimed. Then he turned to the rest of the group and kept on talking.

“We are going to be hundreds and hundreds of miles away from here. More than one thousand people will have left their loved ones, their wives and children by that time. It’s a one-way travel!” he pointed out. Then he paused for a while, looked into Emily’s eyes. “None of us can know what we are going to come across up there!” he resumed. “It’s up to us to be ready for any situation, even if it were the most dangerous or the strangest one. Some might go crazy! Some others may argue among themselves. Some riots or uprisings may occur, and we have to be prepared for anything, soldier! What we have to do is keep these people alive, don’t forget it!”

These were Matthew’s words, and then he continued with the explanation of the onboard arsenal.

It was at the same time that, in the nearby building, the group of chemists was preparing to face its fifth day in the training, which did not take place in a high-tech hangar, as at first sight it appeared.

“Where do you think we are being taken to?” a young chemist asked Abigail while walking down a hallway together with the other members of the group.

“I have no idea,” the woman answered frankly while she kept on looking around.

At the end of the hallway, under the guidance of a member of the team, they approached the entrance of the hangar, which was a shed on the side of the building and whose roof was covered with photovoltaic solar panels that not only absorbed eighty percent of the sunlight, but could also become clear-glass, allowing light to filter and leaving the visitors of the hangar amazed as they enjoyed the blue Colorado sky. It really looked like a crystal structure.

“And who has ever told that functionality and ecology can’t go together?” The question was made by a high-pitched female voice. It was the voice of a woman in her fifties whose hair was copper red and whose silhouette was slender. Abigail had been appointed as member of the group whose training that woman was in charge. Her name was Lisa Horn.

“Hello, everyone, my name is Lisa Horn! I’m here to supervise you during your training period as well as to be with you during your mission! I hope we will achieve great things together!” she exclaimed, introducing herself to the whole group while some of them were still intrigued by the strange honeycomb crystal structure surrounding them.

“Follow me! If you’re here today, it’s not to watch the structure, but to accomplish the duty that is crucial to the whole mission: to terraform Proxima B!” the chemist said as he led the group to an area where there was a weird gray and white cylindrical machine that was about sixteen feet in height and five feet in width.

“ What you can see here is a plasma gasifier ,” LISA explained.

“Excuse me, are you saying that we are supposed to… you know… make that planet similar to ours? I mean… weren’t we supposed to live in structures with an airtight closure or something?” a girl in the group asked with puzzlement.

“ Not specifically, darling! What we’re going to do is recreate an environment where life is, you know, alive! ” LISA answered. Then the red-haired trainer added immediately, “The process is going to take some time, of course, but that’s what we’re going to do. In three steps, in fact.” Finally, she pointed at the machine and began her speech.

“ What you’re seeing behind me is only a scale replica of one of the thirty plasma gasifiers that are going to be established along the Equator of the planet ,” LISA was explaining when suddenly a young Chilean chemist interrupted her, asking her, “Doctor, can you tell me what these machines exactly do?” Diego Felisao's question aroused the curiosity of all the other members.

“ I was about to tell you exactly what these gasifiers are for. So, they aim to recreate a hospitable environment for algae and plants, but… not for us, by exploiting some elements that are in the soil and the subsoil of the planet in order to create an environment with high carbon dioxide levels, which means “greenhouse effect”! Later, our fellow biologists and their genetically modified algae will create an environment with oxygen, but that’s another matter. Let’s get back to the point: a gasifier is only sixteen feet in height, as you can see, but what matters is how it works. The one we are building and use on Proxima B is going to be almost one hundred feet in height and entirely powered by photovoltaic panels, just like the ones that you can see above your heads ,” LISA clarified as the members of the mission took notes in their own electronic devices.

“Excuse me, doctor, how long would this procedure take?” Abigail asked while she was holding the e-pen that she would use to take notes.

“ It would last about fifty years! ” was LISA’s straight answer, which left those who were there petrified.

“So, tell me if we get it: how long are we staying on board that ship? Fifty years?!” Abigail asked a little scared to hear the answer.

“No, it isn’t so… We are not staying the whole time on board the mothership… We are living in orbit inside it until we move inside the structures that are installed on the surface of the planet. And only when a favorable environment is recreated we can live out of those structures!” the doctor paraphrased.

“Come on, look at your screens. We have sent you all the data regarding the instruments at your disposal and how to set the gasifiers. Study them! And if you have some ideas how to improve them, you will be welcome!” Lisa Horn concluded. Before leaving, she said to all the male chemists taking part in the mission,

“What we shall face won’t be easy at all. We can get over those difficulties only if we work together, not as single members with one’s own objective to be achieved, but together as a whole species. It is the last chance we have, my dear ones! It’s time for you to leave, now! Everything is in your own hands!” After giving them her order, she concluded, “Study!”

Finally, she withdrew by disappearing through one of the four exits of the hangar.

At 12 o’ clock the same day, Jerry and Korin were in the biology laboratory and seemed to be entranced by what they were seeing and learning with their competent colleagues. They reached a side of the lab led by Doctor Francesco Preparata, who was an esteemed and eminent Italian biologist that until then had led their training, in front of a sort of aquarium in which a blue fluid was gurgling.

“My dear boys, here is Caeli!” Doctor Preparata exclaimed as he pointed at the metal spherical aquarium with a glass window in the middle.

“What’s in that liquid, doctor?” Korin asked in amazement and out of curiosity just like the whole group.

“It’s a special blue alga that was genetically modified by us in order to make it ultra-effective,” Doctor Preparata answered proudly.

“Why is it effective?” Jerry asked in wonder.

“These four specimens have been modified in order that their reproduction may be thousands of times faster and their production of oxygen may be hundreds of times more effective than the initial species. What you can see in front of us is phase II, which starts after the use of the gasifiers,” Doctor Preparata answered.

“How are we supposed to use them?” a biologist of South-American origin that was in the room asked him.

“Here is the beauty of this alga. All you need to do is set it free, lowering it back into the solid waters if you want it to spread; you can find it in more temperate zones, and it feeds on greenhouse gases that make it able to produce great amounts of oxygen that it releases automatically in the atmosphere. After fifteen years or so, all the oceans will be already full of algae and, thus, the oxygen released will be enough for the third phase to begin. We shall be given a chance to plant trees and plants on the surface. And we shall be able to breathe without the aid of breathing apparatuses, which is not irrelevant. So, the process of terraforming the planet will be complete,” the doctor concluded.

“Excuse me, Professor, I can understand what you’ve said about algae, plants and trees, but I think we’re underestimating a problem that has been gripping our planet for over a century… I’m talking about the animal extinction. What about the animals?” Korin asked in a tone that was both worried and curious.

“That’s a very good question, Mr. Tamura! A great question, actually! Follow me!” Doctor Preparata cried out, and then he entered a small hallway and led the group in a room that was next to the previous one.

“As for the issue raised by Korin, we have developed what we call THE MOTHER !” the doctor stated. Then he stopped in front of a machine that was unique. It looked like a huge box; a holographic display allowed interaction with it.

“Thanks to this machine, you can recreate embryos and perfectly developed specimens from the DNA of over ten million animal species that was collected over the last century. Dozens of such machines are ready-to-use on board the three motherships,” he added.

Everyone who heard him was astonished by his words.

“How does it work exactly?” Jerry asked him. He was getting more and more intrigued by the machine.

“The genetic code on file will allow the development of stem cells inside the database of the machine by means of... let’s call it... an incubator. This is only a type of incubator, but bigger incubators will soon be available for taller or bigger human beings that will develop outside the planet later on. It could be defined as a sort of printer of living beings!” was Doctor Preparata’s answer to the boy that could scarcely believe his eyes.