HOME | DD

Description
In some dark, forgotten corner of the NATO CENTCOM main headquarters buried deep within Olympus Mons, across from the geologic survey branch, the understaffed exobiology department toils away.

With only one full-time scientist in its employ, Dr. Erin Kaminsky, the department was proposed as a sort of in-situ SETI during the early years of interstellar travel. However, it quickly decayed into a mere formality. The scanning of rock samples is now an artifact of regulations set in place before Humanity gave up the dream of discovering life among the stars. In the three hundred years since faster than light drives enabled rapid exploration and expansion, only hints of soil bacteria - which the mainstream scientific community insists are simply rock formations - have ever been uncovered.

Still, the search continues, if unenthusiastically. Regulations insist that samples be scanned before large-scale colonization or terraforming can begin - a measure to ensure that Humanity does not inadvertently destroy a nascent biosphere, or worse, one which we fail to recognize as life at all.

For Kaminsky, the only exobiologist working for CENTCOM, the search had been frustrating. Endless paperwork. Hundreds of samples. No results. Just an empty lab, a never-used quarantine wing, and only the hum of the Cray Z-MP supercomputer to keep her company. That and the beetles which flew into her coffee with alarming frequency, a remnant of the terraforming operations on Mars. Their natural preclusion for avoiding direct sunlight often lead them to her dimly-lit section of the facility.

The odds favored finding something eventually, she would remind herself. Whether it was to be found in her lifetime, or the lifetime of the species, was up for debate. For now Kaminsky would have to settle for wanting to believe.

Description
In some dark, forgotten corner of the NATO CENTCOM main headquarters buried deep within Olympus Mons, across from the geologic survey branch, the understaffed exobiology department toils away.

With only one full-time scientist in its employ, Dr. Erin Kaminsky, the department was proposed as a sort of in-situ SETI during the early years of interstellar travel. However, it quickly decayed into a mere formality. The scanning of rock samples is now an artifact of regulations set in place before Humanity gave up the dream of discovering life among the stars. In the three hundred years since faster than light drives enabled rapid exploration and expansion, only hints of soil bacteria - which the mainstream scientific community insists are simply rock formations - have ever been uncovered.

Still, the search continues, if unenthusiastically. Regulations insist that samples be scanned before large-scale colonization or terraforming can begin - a measure to ensure that Humanity does not inadvertently destroy a nascent biosphere, or worse, one which we fail to recognize as life at all.

For Kaminsky, the only exobiologist working for CENTCOM, the search had been frustrating. Endless paperwork. Hundreds of samples. No results. Just an empty lab, a never-used quarantine wing, and only the hum of the Cray Z-MP supercomputer to keep her company. That and the beetles which flew into her coffee with alarming frequency, a remnant of the terraforming operations on Mars. Their natural preclusion for avoiding direct sunlight often lead them to her dimly-lit section of the facility.

The odds favored finding something eventually, she would remind herself. Whether it was to be found in her lifetime, or the lifetime of the species, was up for debate. For now Kaminsky would have to settle for wanting to believe.