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  Since the dome’s total area was about the size of four Earth football fields, I never had to travel far. Besides the small, plastic minidomes of the scientists and techies, there were experimental labs and open areas where equipment was maintained. The main level of the dome held the minidomes and laboratories. One level up, a walkway about 10 feet wide circled the inside of the dome walls. People mostly used the walkway for jogging. Not me, of course. The techies had built a ramp for my wheelchair so I could access the second level and then the third and smallest level by a narrow catwalk.

  Centered at the top of the dome, this third level was only 15 feet wide. On its deck a powerful telescope perched beneath a round bubble of clear glass that stuck up from the black glass that formed the rest of the dome. From there, the massive telescope gave an incredible view of the solar system.

  This was my home, and I loved it. And it was even better now that I had a friend my age. A month ago Ashley Jordan had arrived on the most recent spaceship with her father, Dr. Shane Jordan, a quantum physicist. Like me, she was a science freak. Even better, she was fun to be around—even if she did ask strange questions. Something instead of nothing?

  “Something what?” I asked. “Nothing where? I thought we were going to work on calculus.”

  It was midafternoon. We sat in an open area near the gardens, with the giant curved ceiling of the dome stretching in all directions. It was quiet here, with only the occasional conversations of passing scientists or techies to interrupt us.

  “Calculus.” Ashley made a face, as if she’d tasted something awful. “More fun to daydream.” Pointing to her handheld computer, she continued, “And I was getting tired of the teacher. That monotone voice is enough to drive you crazy.”

  I nodded. I knew what she meant. I’d learned most of my school stuff through DVD-gigarom too. When I was little, I’d actually talked in a monotone for a while because I thought the voices on the computer were from real people.

  “So you began to daydream,” I said. “About nothing? Or something?”

  For years, I’d envied Earth kids because when they went to school, they could talk to someone. Now, finally, even though it was only a classroom of two, I was in school too. Even if the conversation didn’t make much sense.

  “This universe,” Ashley said, pointing upward through the ceiling of the dome. “Solar system. Mars. Earth. Sun. Why should all of this stuff be here? Why not nothing?”

  I peered closely at her. With her short black hair and a serious look on her face, she appeared older than 13. And because her dark brown, almond-shaped eyes could be very unreadable, it was sometimes difficult to figure out if she was joking.

  Like now. I waited for her to light up with a big grin, which, when it happened, would change her from mysterious to tomboyish.

  “Well?” she said impatiently. She pressed her lips together and squinted at me. “I’m waiting for an answer.”

  So she wasn’t joking.

  “Try to picture nothing,” Ashley said when all I did was scratch my head.

  “Sure,” I said. I thought for a second. “Done.”

  “No,” she said. “I disagree. You didn’t picture nothing.”

  I held up my hands in protest. “You can’t disagree! You don’t even know what I was thinking!”

  “Whatever you were thinking was wrong,” Ashley said. “You can’t picture nothing.”

  “But—”

  “You can picture an empty jar. Or maybe a big room with nothing in it. Or even all the space between the stars. But whenever you picture nothing, don’t you picture something that’s holding all that nothing?”

  “Well, maybe I—”

  “So why should there be something instead of nothing? You know, all the stuff that makes the stars and the planets. Why can’t there be nothing? And where did the something come from? Did it exist forever? But how can something exist forever? If first there was nothing, how did it suddenly become something? I mean, you don’t make rocks the size of a planet from empty air. Then think about all the stars and planets in the entire universe. Those came from nothing? Ha! And—”

  “Ashley!” I said. “You’re making me dizzy.”

  Finally she grinned. “I’m making myself dizzy.”

  “At least we agree on something.”

  She nodded, and her tiny silver cross earrings flashed. She reached up to touch them. “I think it’s cool to spend time wondering about God and why we’re put into this universe.”

  I returned her nod. It was cool. There are so many mysteries that science is far from figuring out, yet God knows about them. A person could spend a lifetime thinking about God and everything he’s done and never get bored.

  Ashley closed her handheld computer. “I’m done for the day. How about you?”

  I thought of what Rawling had asked me to do. How he’d made me promise not to tell anyone except my parents.

  “Me too,” I said. “At least with my schoolwork. We’ve done enough this week that we’re ahead, right?”

  Ashley nodded again. “Right. Let’s go see how Flip and Flop are doing.”

  Flip and Flop are the little koala-like animals that she and I had rescued from a genetics experiment gone wrong. And just in the nick of time too. It hadn’t taken long for the techies at the dome to adopt the friendly creatures as mascots.

  “Wish I could,” I said, “but I need to ask my parents something.”

  Ashley shrugged. “See you tonight, then? At the telescope?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I just hoped—after everything else Rawling had told me—that tonight wouldn’t be my last time to see Ashley … or anyone else, for that matter.

  CHAPTER 5

  An hour later, I sat at the computer in my room in the minidome I shared with my parents. Aside from my desk, there was a bed. Not much else. Under the dome, everybody wore the standard uniform—a navy blue jumpsuit—so I didn’t need a big closet. And because I was always in a wheelchair, I didn’t need a chair.

  My computer was what made the room alive for me. Through it I learned about Earth, played games, and listened to music, even if most of the songs were 10 years old because the adults picked the playlists. And when the solar system was clear of the electromagnetic particles from solar flares, I could even pick up some Internet transmissions. Although my body was in the prison of a wheelchair, my mind could go almost anywhere.

  Tonight, though, I wasn’t going to listen to music or read DVD-gigarom books. It had been a week or two since I’d written anything in my journal.

  I flicked on the power, and my computer booted up faster than I could count to five. I clicked the right spots, and my writing program opened up.

  I began to keyboard my thoughts into my computer journal.

  A short while ago, it looked like the entire Mars colony wasn’t going to survive because the dome’s oxygen level was dropping. At the time, I agreed to write a journal so people on Earth would know about those last days from the viewpoint of a kid instead of a scientist.

  We all survived, of course, and I decided to keep a journal about things that happen under the dome. Sometimes I’m too tired to get on my computer to write like this. Other times there doesn’t seem to be much to write about, so I spend time up at the telescope.

  But with what I’ve just learned from Rawling, it looks like I’d better not be lazy with my journal. Sometimes I pretend I’m writing a letter to myself, so that when I’m an old man, I can read these letters and remember what it was like to be the first person born on Mars. After all, everybody was surprised when my mother and father fell in love with each other on their eight-month journey to Mars 15 years ago. Once on the planet, they exchanged vows over a radio phone with a preacher on Earth. Then, an Earth year later, the director of the Mars Project, Blaine Steven, was even more shocked when my mom announced she was going to have a baby. It made things really complicated since ships arrive here only every three years, and cargo space is very, very expensive
. There was no room for baby items—or a motorized wheelchair.

  But you don’t have to feel sorry for me. Because of the operation on my spine that went wrong, I’m able to explore Mars and the universe in a way no human in history has ever been able to do—by controlling a robot body. The way it works is …

  I stopped my keyboarding and let my mind wander to all I was able to do as I controlled the robot body. As I thought about the robot body I named Bruce, I reached down to the small pouch hanging from the armrest of my wheelchair. Pulling out three red balls, I began to juggle, keeping all three in the air. Juggling didn’t take much concentration for me. Especially since the gravity was lower on Mars than on Earth.

  I kept the red balls in the air for another five minutes, remembering the first time I had sent the robot body outside the dome. Because Bruce delivered sights and sounds and sensations to my mind, it was almost like being outside in my very own body. Although the computer effects were very complicated, the theory was simple.

  I stopped juggling the red balls and began to describe it for my journal.

  In virtual reality, you put on a surround-sight helmet that gives you a 3-D view of a scene on a computer program. The helmet is wired, so when you turn your head, it directs the computer program to shift the scene as if you were there in real life. Sounds generated by the program reach your ears, making the scene seem even more real. Because you’re wearing a wired jacket and gloves, the arms and hands you see in your surround-sight picture move wherever you move your own arms and hands.

  But here’s what you might not have thought about when it comes to virtual reality: when you take off the surround-sight helmet and the jacket and gloves that are wired to a computer, you’re actually still in a virtual-reality suit. Your body.

  Rawling was the one who explained it best to me. You see, your brain doesn’t see anything. It doesn’t hear anything. It doesn’t smell anything. It doesn’t taste anything. It doesn’t feel anything. Instead, it takes all the information that’s delivered to it by your nerve endings from your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, or skin and translates that information.

  In other words, the body is like an amazing 24-hour-a-day virtual-reality suit that can power itself by eating food and heal itself when parts get cut or broken. It moves on two legs, has two arms to pick things up, and is equipped to give information through all five senses. Except instead of taking you through virtual reality, a made-up world, your body takes you through the real world.

  What if your brain could be wired directly into a robot? Then wouldn’t you be able to see, hear, and do everything the robot could?

  Well, that’s me. The first human to be able to control a robot as if it were an extension of the brain. It began with that operation when I was little and …

  I heard voices outside my room.

  My parents.

  I quickly saved all I’d written into my journal and rolled out to the common area of our minidome to greet them. I knew I had some work ahead of me to convince them I should be able to leave the dome with Rawling. And this time, not through a robot that I controlled.

  But as myself.

  I was excited—and scared.

  CHAPTER 6

  “A four-day trip away from the dome? That hasn’t been done in the last 10 years. And you’re saying Rawling wants to travel 200 miles?” My mother looked across at my father with concern on her face.

  The three of us sat in the center of our minidome—Mom and Dad in chairs and me, of course, in my wheelchair.

  Like every other minidome, ours had two office-bedrooms with a common living space in the middle. Because we only heated nutri tubes, we didn’t need a kitchen—only a microwave, which hung on the far wall. Another door at the back of the living space led to a small bathroom. It wasn’t much. From what I’ve read about Earth homes, our minidome had less space in it than two average bedrooms.

  “Rawling says we’ll take a platform buggy,” I answered. “He’ll double up on all the food and oxygen and water just in case anything goes wrong.”

  Naturally, Mom picked up on the one word a kid should never use when trying to convince his parents of anything.

  “Wrong?” she repeated with a quick turn of her head. “What does Rawling think might go wrong?”

  As a plant biologist, it was Mom’s job to genetically alter Earth plants so they could grow on Mars. Normally she was very businesslike. In fact, until a month ago, when Dad finally returned from a three-year trip to Earth and back, she’d always been satisfied with a hairstyle that didn’t take much fussing and gave her as much time as possible for her science. But now she was letting her hair grow longer and making sure it was done nicely. And that wasn’t all. I’d noticed more changes in her. With Dad here to complete our family, she was still every bit a no-nonsense scientist, but she seemed more relaxed and happy.

  Except when her son had just asked permission to leave the safety of the dome for the dangers of the surface of Mars.

  Dad coughed. “Assume the worst and hope for the best. That’s a great way to plan for travel. I’m sure Rawling is just taking precautions.”

  “Yes,” I said, glad to have someone on my side. Because Dad had been gone so long, he and I had just learned to be friends again.

  “So the bigger question,” Dad continued, “is why?”

  For me, looking at Dad was almost like looking in a mirror. If I hadn’t been in a wheelchair, people would notice I was growing to be as tall as he was. And we both had dark blond hair.

  Because I hadn’t said anything, Dad repeated his question. “Why does Rawling want to take you on a field trip a couple hundred miles away?”

  I cleared my throat. “It’s so far from the dome, I wouldn’t be able to stay connected to the robot if we tried doing it from here. Rawling needs to load the computer and transmitter on the platform buggy and keep it close enough to the robot so the signal stays strong.”

  Dad smiled. “Nice try.”

  “Huh?” I said innocently. He knew me pretty well for someone who had been away from Mars for so long.

  “All you did was answer the obvious. What we really want to know is why Rawling wants the robot out there so far from the dome. What does he want it to explore?”

  “Oh,” I said. “That.”

  Dad kept smiling. “And …”

  Rawling had given me permission to tell my parents. But only them. I’d been saving this information for the last. “Rawling asked me to ask you to keep this to yourselves.”

  Mom and Dad nodded, so I continued. “He thinks that there may be evidence of an alien civilization.”

  Their reaction was the same that mine had been. Stunned at the thought.

  “That’s big,” Dad said. “Real big.”

  Mom laughed. “The most staggering discovery in the history of humankind and all you can say is big?”

  “What would you say?” he asked, grinning back.

  She thought for a moment, opened her mouth to say something, changed her mind, and shut it again. Finally she spoke. “It’s big. Real big.”

  “Exactly,” Dad said to her, then turned to me. “It’s so big that the only way you can go is if I go too.”

  CHAPTER 7

  That night, as I’d promised Ashley, I went to the dome’s telescope. I went early because I loved to spend time alone looking at the Martian night sky.

  Earth has an atmosphere that makes the light of the stars twinkle as it moves through air, but from Mars it’s almost as clear as looking from a spaceship. The lights of the galaxies are like clusters of diamonds, and the powerful dome telescope made the view even more incredible, with millions of tiny bright lights stabbing through the dark of the solar system.

  Whenever I sat at the telescope, I reminded myself that I was looking backward through time. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. So if you were riding in a spaceship that moved at the speed of light, in one minute you’d cover over 11 million miles. In one hour you’d be 670 million miles fr
om your starting point. In one day you’d be over 16 billion miles away. The scary thing about the size of the universe is that the closest star to Earth is more than four light-years away, which means you’d have to travel at 186,000 miles per second for nearly 1,500 days to get there. (And some stars are millions of light-years away!)

  Why is looking through the telescope like looking backward in time?

  If you focus on a star a thousand light-years away, the light that hits your eyes left the star a thousand years ago. It might be in the middle of an explosion as you look at it, but you have no way of knowing for another thousand years until the light of that explosion travels billions and billions and billions of miles to reach you.

  In short, the farther you look out into the universe, the farther back in time you can see. To me, that’s one of the cool things about astronomy.

  I rolled into place at the eyepiece of the telescope, where the dome astronomer usually sat. I punched my password into the computer control pad.

  It prompted me for a location. The telescope computer was programmed with 100,000 different locations in the universe, as seen from Mars.

  Tonight I wanted to look no farther than the backyard of Mars. So I entered Amors asteroids into the computer.

  The electric telescope motors hummed as the machine automatically swung into place.

  Before I was able to lean into the eyepiece, Ashley stepped onto the deck. “Hey,” she said. I heard sadness in her voice. I wondered if it had anything to do with her mom and dad. She hadn’t talked about it much, but I knew her parents were divorced. “Whatcha looking for?”

  “Asteroids,” I said. “More specifically, the Amors belt.”

  Asteroids ranged from the size of a refrigerator to a football stadium to the 15 biggest asteroids, which were each about 150 miles across.

  “The Amors belt,” she said. “Asteroids in orbit between Mars and Earth.”