Venusian Terraforming Satellites
In 2083 the Pleiades Corporation began its most ambitious project to that point, the full terraforming of another world. The project, begun in secret, was projected to require over two centuries. In the thirty five years between inception and when it became widely known in 2118 it had already cost more than seventy trillion credits, approximately twenty percent of the total economic product of all of humanity over that time period. This single project required a near doubling of the Corporate Holdback, and caused numerous incidents of major unrest in the already overburdened megacities of Earth. The burden lessened after 2120 when the last of the seventy five massive terraforming satellites were completed.
In 2240 there is a constellation of one thousand and twenty four massive satellites orbiting Venus. These structures, each span just over fifty kilometers in radius and required more than four trillion tons of metals to construct. Records recovered from the backup control satellite for this constellation showed that more than a million lives were lost in the construction, and more than one hundred million lost in the asteroid gathering missions needed to obtain the immense quantity of materials required. These structures house a vast array of equipment, flora, and fauna needed to change the environment of the hothouse planet to something habitable. Among the satellites are those dedicated entirely to producing engineered species tailored to different stages of the process, and from the earliest such satellites we know that each is intended for reuse. Once a particular stage is seeded the primary facility runs a sanitizing process and starts over to create another set of species needed for a much later stage. Once the following stage begins the backup facility likewise recycles. This two stage process was proved necessary when stage eighteen lifeforms failed three years into the stage and stage eighteen was restarted, with a slight modification to the lifeforms to prevent another failure. Other satellites produce carefully tailored mass impactors and bombard the planet at critical points. Sometimes to change albedo, sometimes to kill of species from one stage in preparation for the next, and sometimes for purposes not yet fully understood from the records available. Further facilities are currently sealed, and their purpose is not revealed in accessible records from the control satellites. Most amazing are the control satellites themselves. There are two, and the primary remains sealed and well defended. The backup, however, is accessible and provides living space for over ten million scientists and engineers who are kept inordinately busy just keeping up with the records and information currently available. The backup receives records as the primary executes the process, so it never has the full picture, but does reveal everything done to date. With a thousand satellites engaged in automated processes, even that flow of information is nearly overwhelming.
During the Great Grieving
Many wonder what happened to these massive structures, and the critical work they do, during the Great Grieving, when nearly every fusion power facility in existence was caused to self destruct, corporate control networks were destroyed, computing systems were erased using backdoors built into every software system approved by The Corporation, and nearly every form of infrastructure was lost at least briefly. The short answer is nothing whatsoever. For some reason the Last Sister chose to leave these satellites completely untouched. The fusion power systems were found, after the fact, to lack the kill switch in every other facility. The computer operating systems lacked the backdoors. The core infrastructure nodes were protected from the impact of all the other events as well. While this left humanity with much of the tools needed to recover quickly from the Great Grieving, and kept this massive project operating through the worst seven years of human history, to that point, it also left many with unanswerable questions. The satellites protection also proved, conclusively, that the Great Grieving was indeed a deliberate act of spiteful sabotage and mass murder, rather than accident or side effect.
Silicoids
The most bizarre creatures developed for the project are the artificially evolved silicon-based life forms, a complete ecosystem based entirely on silicon instead of carbon. These creatures, collectively dubbed silicoids, were, and are being, developed for the first century of the process, when the surface temperatures will remain too high for any carbon-based life. Ranging from simple archaea all the way to simple plants and even a few animal species, the sheer diversity created for this project by self-directed AI in each satellite has already provided fodder for xenobiologists to study for the next century.
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