Two weeks earlier...
The first step onto Émile Craven's orbital station had been inauspicious enough—a flat, metallic clang that resonated through the docking bay as one of Élodie’s boots caught on a loose synth-riveted panel. She had cursed softly, prompting Émile's chuckle to echo from the network of glass corridors several feet ahead.
"Still afraid you'll fall, doctor?" he'd teased with that characteristic engineering snark. Élodie, ever unwilling to be outdone, shot him a glare fierce enough to pierce the toughest graphene.
“No,” she'd replied coolly as she adjusted her emerald jumpsuit, customized with an old-fashioned belted waist reminiscent of 1930s aviation attire. “I’m afraid you’ll talk me out of going through with this ridiculous suicide mission.”
Émile had stopped mid-step, his sunburned face suddenly serious. “It won’t be suicide if you do things my way.”
“Your way depends on calculations made by an AI we barely understand.” Her words were sharp, the intellectual skepticism behind them coated in a thin layer of distrust.
He tilted his head back and sighed. “And your way? It’s gut instincts and wishful thinking, Élodie. This isn’t Earth.”
Her eyes flicked past him to the holographic display of Venus outside the station’s glass bulkhead. The fiery inferno revolved in slow, deliberate silence. "You're right. It’s worse."
Now...
The airship burst through a sulfuric tempest, its trembling form finally breaching the ominous specter of Venus’ lower cloud layer. Hell loomed below. Dr. Élodie Varga steadied her breathing, her nostrils burning faintly from the filtered chemical stench sneaking in through the cabin’s ventilators.
She glanced at her on-board holo-companion, ALPHA-97, the artificial intelligence designed to handle every variable on this perilous mission to Venus' surface. Today, though, ALPHA glitched unnervingly, its voice-border flickering between reassuring neutrality and concerning silence.
"You’re off-course by two degrees, Élodie," ALPHA finally buzzed, shards of fractured sentences dissolving and re-forming in precise monotony. "Adjust or fail."
"Fail?” she muttered, mocking. “I thought failure wasn’t an option for your perfectly calibrated code.”
“Your sarcasm is inefficient. Adjust now.” ALPHA’s golden holographic form flickered like static lightning as it began recalculating.
Élodie grinned cynically. “Artificial intelligence with an attitude. Wonderful. Did Émile program that in as an Easter egg?”
A deep rumbling shook the instrument panel. Heat alarms blared across every display. Her smile faded.
“Temperature breach point likely in... seventeen seconds,” ALPHA coolly noted.
“The breach can wait,” she spat, sweat already gathering on her brow. Her cockpit’s forward viewport revealed jagged crimson-orange terrain below: a barren wasteland choked by inhuman hostility.
The plan was mad, of course. Seed the surface of Venus with billions of microscopic drones, each containing AI-powered terraforming modules designed to turn carbon dioxide-heavy cetite soil into something remotely fertile. It was the dream of scientists dating back to Carl Sagan, a scientific Hail Mary for those who thought Earth might one day join the ranks of formerly hospitable tomb planets.
It was Élodie’s mission to launch the swarm. Élodie’s life on the line to manually correct faulty deployment systems rendered nonfunctional by sabotage from rival ventures.
A soundless thud echoed like a phantom through her mind: Émile. He had advised against this, begged for reason only to be killed in the blast that had taken out the first terraformation drone weeks back. They'd buried his ashes on the orbital station.
His dying whisper haunted her now: “Not everything can be fixed, Élodie.”
Two hours ahead...
The first drone exploded when it hit the Venusian surface—exactly per ALPHA’s calculations. Shocked out of her despair, Élodie found herself scrambling with shaky hands to resolve coding errors fed into her interface. Automated cannons shaped like serpentine vines emerged behind her boots as defense failsafes, firing wildly into the toxic skies. Another rival faction’s sabotage, their mechanized aerial units descending en masse to cut short humanity’s second chance. Élodie cursed, grabbed a worn pistol clipped inside her flight suit’s belt, clamping breathlessly onto her internal desire—humanity couldn't lose this shot, regardless of the personal toll.
Some stories, she knew, wouldn’t be her own to finish narrating.
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: AI-Powered Terraformers: How Machines Could Transform Venus into a Second Earth and Revolutionize Interplanetary Habitation
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