O.A.I.

"None of this would have been possible without your aunt."

Timothy had heard this more times than he could remember the past two weeks aboard the ship as it slipped silently along a perfectly described arc of a hundred million miles. He smiled politely, never correcting them with "my great-aunt," at least not out loud. Everyone had been nice to him, from the captain who pinned gold wings on his shirt to the attendants who looked so pretty in their smart blue outfits; he blushed every time they called him "Mr. Timothy."

O.A.I. Oh-way-I. Away-I...the letters turned into a sing-song in his head every time.

Olympus Artificial Intelligence. He knew it was something about Mars, but he didn't know what made it so important. Aunt Rhea hadn't built the ship, or the engines, or the computers making the billions of calculations to keep them precisely on course.

When he asked Uncle Roger about it, he only smiled and said that was one of the reasons for this trip. It was all the same to Timothy. He mostly wanted to go because Conner Dell kept talking about how awesome Arboria was. That was the part of Olympus Colony set up in a deep canyon, almost as deep as the Grand Canyon, they said. Construction drones had woven transparent carbon fibers over the top, and now it was thick with genetically modified trees soaring a thousand feet in the low gravity, and you could glide from branch to branch with nothing but fabric wings to catch the air.

But Timothy knew Aunt Rhea didn't do anything with genetics, or engineering.

The twin VASIMR engines had reversed at the optimal moment, slowing their inertia just enough for the ship to be swept into the Martian gravity well at exactly the right velocity to settle into a vast swirl over the glittering polar ice caps.

"Ready?" Uncle Roger asked as he strapped Timothy into one of seats of the descent shuttle. Timothy nodded; the cabin was nice, but twelve-year-old legs needed to run.

Now they were falling towards the broad red horizon below, the thin air shimmering against the re-entry foils.

"You know..." Uncle Roger began.

"None of this would have been possible without my great-aunt," Timothy finished. The great glass pyramid, glinting along the mile-wide sunward side, came into view. "I don't understand," he said. "Did she design Olympus?"

"No," Uncle Roger said. "But she developed the O.A.I."

Timothy shrugged. "But I thought people hated artificial intelligence. That's why got it banned a long time ago."

Roger nodded. "Well, that's partly true. People were afraid of AI, maybe with good reason. But that's why what Aunt Rhea did was so important. She was able to think about artificial intelligence in a different way." He looked over at the boy sitting next to him. "Back then, we kept thinking that we needed AI to think like we do," he said, tapping his forehead. "The part of thinking that was most obvious: making decisions, doing math, playing strategic games."

"Isn't that what intelligence is?" Timothy asked.

Uncle Roger shrugged. "Maybe. But that's the kind of thinking we can already do. When they first sent men to the moon, they didn't even need computers. You can do it with slide rules and pens and paper. What Aunt Rhea realized is that we didn't need AI to do something super-fast that we could already do, like making decisions. Besides, people liked making their own decisions. We needed AI to do something we couldn't do, couldn't decide.

"What do you mean?"

Roger tapped the back of his head. "The kind of intelligence that's back here. The autonomic. Tell me, how many heartbeats did you have since you left Earth?"

"I don't know."

"How many times did you tell it to beat?"

"I didn't. It just beats."

"How many heartbeats, how many breaths, will you need while you're on Mars?"

Timothy shrugged. "It depends, I guess. How much I run..."

"Exactly."

"But I don't think about those things. They just...happen."

Roger shook his head. "No, they don't. Something tells your heart to beat, something tells you to breathe, every second of every day. Not what you want. What you need." 

The vast emptiness of the Martian plain was being filled by a glittering pyramid. "Now that's just one person. Think of something like Earth. Think of the wind, the rain, the ocean currents. Earth has to breathe, has to beat. Some people think Earth has an intelligence, maybe even a soul." Roger smiled. "I'll leave that to philosophers and theologians to debate, because Earth is a living planet. Mars isn't – or, rather, Mars wasn't. The first settlements all failed because they tried to control everything. We didn't realize that what Mars needed was something to make it alive. To feel, somehow, everything breathing, the sun shining, the water flowing. Not what we wanted; what it needed."

Timothy was quiet as they walked through the airlocks, each opening with a whoosh. Roger knew he still didn't understand. No one ever did until they spent time on Mars, and it happened in many different ways.

Finally they entered the enormous main section of the pyramid. Inverted terraces filled with lush vegetation climbed up each side, little waterfalls tumbling from level to level. Small birds flitted from branch to branch in random gusts.

Timothy stopped.

But he wasn't looking at the birds.

Overhead, small clouds were flowing near the summit of the pyramid. Little arcs of microlightning flickered, making quiet thunder.

Then it started to rain, a rain more gentle than any on Earth, the drops falling in slow motion. Timothy stared up at it, mouth wide in wonder, watching the sparkling little globes as they drifted down towards him. As if seeing rain for the first time again.

Uncle Roger looked at Timothy, as if seeing himself that young again. "Ah," he said, smiling. "Looks like it decided to rain. You never can tell about the weather."