5

Kosmo chuckles to himself. "That's just about true enough for me to pretend to be flattered. If I wasn't paying for my ride, I'd absolutely be a burden," he says. He turns down the volume on his vocalizer and leans in, taking his feet off the slab. "You know, I fancy our odds better this time around. I wouldn't want this to be another Mars."

The Mars colony had been a disaster on every level and set back the space settlement movement two decades. The planet is still littered with depressurized domes and frozen bodies.

"Europa is better for life."

"We've studied their failings."

"You can't think it's too risky if you're coming along."

Next

"Mark my words, hell is coming to every part of Earth within the next decade. This is our last chance to escape," Kosmo says, his dark prognostications at odds with the chirping of his autotuned voice. Kosmo turns to the door. "Oh! Here they all come," he says.

The room fills up with various stakeholders in the mission. Scientists, engineers, administrators, and colonists-to-be. The last month has been like this. Hundreds of myriad details to organize around what and whom to bring. You're reaching the final stages of the planning phase now.

Kosmo gives an autotuned cough and the room quietens. "Let's see what's on the agenda today…Protests, animals, the therapist, then breaking for lunch." He turns to you for a moment. "After lunch, we'll go sort the botanist twin hire and then we'll all meet back up for the supply rocket tour in the afternoon. First, the issue of the opposition."

He brings up a handful of images on the tablet. A rally at the National Mall, petitions to the G81 summit, sabotage at one of the rocket supplier's plants, and the disappearance of Manley Thompson, one of the would-be colonists.

"Not everyone is happy about us going to Europa," says Kosmo.

"We've got some surplus budget for media that we could use to do something," says the U.E. astronaut Virginia Rein.

"Let's save the money. We'll want it later."

"We should redouble our P.R. efforts."

"We need to find out who's behind the attacks."

Next

"Protests are one thing," you say, "but we need to get to the bottom of the terrorist attacks."

"The authorities are already involved in the respective territories," says Rein.

Kosmo fiddles with his collar. "The police don't always know their noodles from their nutsacks," says Kosmo. "We can pay for some real investigators on the case."

"Make it so!"

Next

."Now let's start with making a decision about the animals," says Kosmo. "We can all agree it's been put off long enough."

Immediately the room bursts into a chatter of competing positions.

"We should have rats at the very least, for experiments!" says Professor Li, a geneticist at the Zoaco Corporation's Canadian university, U.o.Z. A very small, wrinkled woman, she takes up twice the space with her bombastic manner.

"No. No rats," interjects Marcel Temaru. He's the oceanographer for the mission, a big broad-shouldered man of Polynesian heritage. "We'll be compromising any native life forms enough just by being there."

"Come on," Kosmo replies. "Kelp might be fine for Libers but the rest of us don't want to live on just vegetables! Let's bring some fish."

"Hmm, with fish we could have aquaponics which would help immensely with growing plants," muses Temaru before frowning. "But no! Fish would be even worse. Imagine if they got out into Europa's ocean?"

"Freshwater fish wouldn't last five minutes…" says Kosmo.

"True," says Temaru, "but this is our opportunity to break away from Earth's culture of dominating other creatures. No experiments and no meat eating."

"We can just eat vat meat, it's not that complicated," says Professor Li, waving her hand dismissively.

Temaru frowns. "That's not quite—"

"—if we're not bringing fish or rats," interrupts Virginia Rein, "we should at least bring a companion animal. Someone to share the stars with us. We should bring cats!"

"Dogs wouldn't like being stuck inside, but cats are a real possibility," Kosmo muses. "No chance of them escaping to the ocean either. That said, rats make fine companion pets too…." He starts scrolling through his tablet, sketching out a feasibility plan.

"But cats need to eat meat!" says Temaru.

"Vat meat!" says Professor Li, gesticulating pointedly.

"So as we discussed before, we've only got space and resources for one kind of animal and even then we'd be sacrificing some of the fabricators," Kosmo says, looking up from his tablet. "What do you reckon, President? What kind of ark is this?"

We're not risking Europa's biosphere by taking any animals.

Let's take fish we can eat.

We should take decorative fish to help the aquaponics.

Let's take rats for experimentation.

We'll take rats as companion animals.

Let's bring cats! Everyone likes cats.

Next

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