Early looked askance. "I thought [i]you [/i]knew," said Early. "Because [i]I [/i]don't know. And if you don't know, then you'd better hope Mrs. Everest does because otherwise we've wasted the last few years."

He drummed his fingers on the desk. "Of course, not to say I haven't thought about the question - not least because of who I am. Back in the day when I was with NASA there was a project being run out of one a nearby department. Mars terraforming - a joke, it's impossible, it'd be easier to build a space station the size of Mars than make that rock habitable. But the people over there under Professor Singh were always into the weirdest shit - brain scanning octopuses, talking about mission-oriented artificial cultures, vocal-bound operational intelligence, artificial space colonization. BlackSun shut it all down with the privatization so as far as I know it never went anywhere. When I started Mrs. Everest grilled me about every detail I could remember about what they were doing, which wasn't a lot, and then put me in as head as research without asking anything else. My specific orders came from your predecessor and I figured they were on the same page. The way I figure it, Mrs. Everest found some piece of that old project that convinced her to resurrect it. What it all adds up to?"

He smiled. "Well. Remember how I said that building a space station the size of Mars was possible? This is some of the kind of stuff you'd need to do to build the things that could build that."