What If...? 2099UG #0

This is the site of the Mars One Colony: a self-contained environment slapped down on top of the wasteland that is the Martian landscape. Its planned primary function is to serve as a vehicle for various research efforts sharing a common goal, which is (put bluntly) to exploit the surrounding area and reap the benefits of any uncovered resources. The colony will benefit exclusively its mother megacorp. Everything and everyone in it is owned by Alchemax.

Officially, this entire colony is still only a theoretical project. Concrete plans have been made, dates for construction set, certainly. Even an extensive parade of cargo shipments have flown to Mars in the last few years to drop off the building materials, but still Mars One is essentially just an idea on paper, barely off the drawing boards.

Only I and a scant handful of others back on Earth know better...only we are aware of the mad, secret experiment that has transformed me into a deity of sorts, and at the same time relegated me to a role as a forgotten babysitter to a mammoth, mindless machine.

Furthermore, if all goes according to my unseen superiors' designs, no one else ever will know, either.

I have been squirreled away, alone, in a fully-equipped, reinforced bunker 500 feet below the surface of Mars. It contains almost as much space as the Alchemax Building itself, but my living space only amounts to that of a small flat. Probably not even an Uptown one.

Much of the remaining space is occupied by thousands of tons of covert-communications and computing hardware. In order for this dirty little secret of Alchemax R&D to remain a dirty little secret, whatever equipment I was to be provided with was smuggled, so to speak, to Mars bit by bit aboard the cargo ships carrying the goods, machinery, and raw materials meant for the construction of Mars One. Or at least the above-surface Mars One; none of the working joes dropping the shiploads of materials off and watching them being toted off by robot drones would ever have dreamed that a predetermined portion of their freight would disappear underground through carefully camouflaged elevator shafts.

The rest of the underground bunker is used as storage space for enough supplies to last one person decades: food, water, other survival needs. You see, I plan on being stationed here for a long, long time. Back home, Alchemax has seen to it that I no longer exist. Effectively, I'm a nonperson, as would befit someone assigned to a project known to fewer than a half-dozen people. The Mars One colony that all of Alchemax and the public know about will presumably be built right on top of me. Truth is, I don't believe I'll ever lay eyes on the surface of any planet again.

The miles of equipment is all designed to coordinate a vast network of statistical probability routines; its very vastness expands with every calculation. Building on a comprehensive, continuously updated database of seemingly infinitely detailed historical and factual information, covering the entire gamut of subjects -- from the most profound religious theory to second-by-second weather patterns above northern Africa to the precise number of rose-breasted nuthatches in Patterson, New Jersey on June 6, 1904 -- the supercomputer combines the existing data with its intricate system of probability mathematics (some of which was only recently postulated) to formulate credible predictions of occurrences that haven't taken place yet. To divine the future, if you will.

With every passing day, those predictions become more and more credible. Test runs of short-term predictions have achieved accuracy percentiles in the high 90's already, and the longer-term experiments are close on their heels.

The ultimate goal that my clandestine cadre of nameless Alchemax executives have in mind for this endeavor, the Underground Alternate Timeline Unifier project (or Project UATU, for short), is to create a device with a near-infinite capacity for foretelling, preparing for, and (if possible) directly influencing circumstances that may, in any way, affect the course of business for the corporation, so as to maximize Alchemax's expansion possibilities and simultaneously minimize the potential for error in human judgment. In a nutshell, they want to make a machine that can tell them where the hot markets will be, so they can get there first.

I look after the place. My superiors, who now call me simply the Surveyor (my former name is now a dangerous taboo on Earth...Odin forbid anyone should be reminded that I once existed), have imbued me with a new purpose: to monitor the results of the supercomputer's test runs and evaluate its progress toward 100% accuracy. If an end result to a hypothetical scenario comes through with little or no ambiguity in its sequence of events, that's good. If a short-term test's consequences actually come to pass on Earth, that's even better. If I get inconclusive, multiple, or (worse) incorrect results, that means I go find what's going wrong and fix it before my value to Project UATU is reassessed.

The last thing I asked before I left home was when I'd be back. I suppose I should have guessed the answer: I'd be recalled when the computer achieved 100% accuracy, of course. Given that 100% accuracy presupposes the mastery of a (literally) infinite scope of variables, I doubt I'll live to see the smile on Alchemax's collective face when the good news arrives at HQ. However, they had chosen their Surveyor well: I have no family or close friends, few acquaintances even at work, and my career has been unremarkable. What did I have to leave behind, and who would miss me? Opportunity of a lifetime, right? So here I sit.

Over the months since my assignment, as one might suppose, I've developed a need to be creative. After all, I do have a good chunk of time to kill. It didn't take long to realize that with such technology at my fingertips, I've got a chance to play Supreme Being, manipulating the destinies of people who may be hypothetical, but are real enough for my purposes.

Project UATU is a big machine, formulating millions of scenarios at once; it can afford to take on just one more, if only to keep a bored man occupied as he languishes in a hole in the ground on a barren, alien planet. An odd hobby, to be sure, but I can bask in the knowledge that I'm the only one in history to indulge in it.

Every once in a while, as the supercomputer's mind-boggling database is updated by the perpetual feed from back home, a tidbit catches my eye: a famous child is born, a costumed adventurer appears on the public scene, a new species of goose is discovered in the Colombian highlands. This is the stuff that dreams are made of. My dreams, that is. Suppose that goose developed a higher intelligence? Suppose the child was born looking like the goose? Suppose the adventurer kidnapped the goose-child and retired to Colombia? What sequence of events would unfold inside the machine?

This is my folly. I waste away on Mars, a would-be technomancer, buried alive and forgotten by all but a few power-hungry slavetraders, and with their little toys I grant myself my own limited version of godhood.

I am the Surveyor.