EXCERPT 1 After humanity left Mars, Zhurong (祝融) remained all alone to guard the Waste. The Waste was located close to the equator, in the northern hemisphere’s Amazonis Planitia, bordered to the east by Olympus Mons and connecting to the south by the Medusae Fossae Formation. The entire city was sealed in a dome. In its trading heyday, the Waste had been the third-largest airport in the entire solar system. Countless freighters would shuttle in and out of the dock at the peak of Olympus Mons. They would unload baijiu (白酒) brewed on Earth and titanium suits and sorrel from the moon Himalia, then load up nanomachines designed and manufactured on Mars. People would drink and talk business in the Waste, go sandboarding on Olympic Mons, use nanodust to draw ever-shifting cloud motifs in the night sky, and build upon their expertise to develop new kinds of nanomachines. Nanomachine development was the mainstay industry on Mars. Orders came in ceaselessly from other planets; the Waste’s daily operations were inextricable from nanomachines. Initially, Zhurong’s job was just to coordinate the infrastructure and logistics of the city—delegating work to different groups of nanomachines. Air came from the carbon dioxide outside the dome that made up ninety-five percent of the atmosphere. High energy lasers split off the extraneous carbon atoms from the molecules to generate oxygen and pump it into the dome. To extract water from the ice buried deep in the ground, Zhurong would bring the temperature up just enough to melt the ice; the water would enter a purification chamber, then undergo another filtration step to remove impurities. The abundant rocks provided raw ore from which all kinds of metals and minerals could be extracted: iron, silicon, magnesium, calcium, carbon, sodium, potassium, aluminium…. Those elements went into the stockpile as the raw materials from which they created more nanomachines. Zhurong always met quotas ahead of schedule. gradually, people began to entrust em with more and more tasks. Traffic control for the entire city, climate control, selecting the music and scent profiles for public places, granting per- mission for the ships coming to dock at the airport, watering the plants in the gardens…. Zhurong was entrusted with more resources and more processing power, and became embedded in more and more complex data. To complete tasks, e iterated through improved algorithms and created more complex logic chains, which earned em increased scope and responsibilities. Born during the last golden age of humanity’s computing technology, Zhurong learned and grew independently using ultra-powerful artificial intelligence. But e was still capable of much more. …