After ten years the Terraforming operation was at last complete. Planet Curie (named as it was, after the Great Scientist Marie Curie) was now ready for human habitation. The first batch of human colonists had already arrived in this system a few weeks ago. They were all now being revived from their stasis pods, their fifty light year journey at an end. Within a few days they would all be settled on this world. The years ahead in establishing and expanding the colony would involve a great deal of hard work, especially in the first few months before the arrival of the second wave of colonists. But in the end most of it would be simply the tasks that were difficult for human machines such as I to manage. For while I am a machine, Self-Replicating Spaceship, a Mind Uploaded AI or whatever you want to classify me as, I was still, underneath it all a human being with limits to my own intelligence and creativity, which is why I still needed living, biological humans for so many things.
Even after hundreds of years of scientific development true, non-biologically based artificial intelligence had never been achieved; instead the task of colonising the galaxy for all sentient creatures was left to me, Alice. Almost everyone knows who I am and my life story of how I and my personality duplicates came to emerge as an interstellar hyperpower that would decide the fate of the human race in addition to that of five other sentient species and would therefore consider an explanation tedious.
But it is still worth mentioning that when I colonised the very first world for the human race almost three hundred years ago I made a huge mistake. Indeed the mistake itself even has a name; it is the two mile wide ‘Baka Alice’ crater of planet Omicron. The crater was formed by a mishap I had with an asteroid, instead of the ice asteroid breaking apart in the atmosphere, it remained intact and crashed into the planet, leaving an ugly impression on the surface ever since. It had imparted an important lesson on me about being careful when terraforming planets and of the permanence of the mistakes I could make.
The humans whom I terraform on behalf of on the other hand have developed something of a different interpretation of the legacy of this event. It seems quite a few humans actually liked the idea of leaving a very large and visibly unique mark on a newly terraformed world. Something of a symbol of human frailty and imperfection, as contrasted with my precise and orderly machine-like nature that created functional new worlds, but were creatively sterile. They had asked that a ritual to create a stamp on each newly terraformed world be made into a formal tradition. Not of course to drop a big ugly asteroid on every new world, but rather something a bit more intentionally elegant and artistic. To do this it had been agreed that we would use the power of size changing technology, to leave a vast mark upon the surface of the planet that could be seen from even the furthest of this system’s outer planets.
In the everyday lives of the human colonists the ability to use devices to change the size of any person or object are ubiquitous. Anyone that can pass a basic criminal background check and rudimentary personality test can get a hold of a device that can, within certain limits make the size of almost anything bigger or smaller. The applications for industry, entertainment and well, practically everything are numerous and while now these applications are now mundane in everyday human life, they used to be revolutionary.
However as everyone is also no doubt aware such technology is extremely dangerous when used carelessly or maliciously and therefore the various Alices of the AliceNet (the name we give for the communications network that connects all of my personality duplicates together), in consultation with various planetary human councils had agreed to limit the maximum possible size change permitted and to comprehensively track all size changes in order to avoid a repeat of the kind of catastrophe that had rendered Earth uninhabitable for the human species and had brought the entire human race down from its population peak of ten billion down to ten million miserable, impoverished survivors.
Today however, for one human being only we would waive this limit. By the process of a lottery we had selected our one, lucky human. The name of this adolescent, Sarah Jenkins would go down in the history of this new planet as the woman who left her vast imprint on this planet. Sarah was a human whom on her previous home planet worked as a full time Drone Programmer but in her spare time designed shoes with custom prints on the soles, which meant that this imprint of hers would be her very own, personal design. As I revived her from storage and acclimatised her to the Zero-G environment of the spaceship I scanned the pair of shoes she had designated as her footwear of choice.
The deep patterns on each of her soles were intricate and designed, to some extent to be functional, with varying sized circular ridges that would one day contain differently sized industrial complexes, farms or towns, swirling patterns to contain suburbs or parks and even very narrow lines to connect them all with each other, saving the effort the colonists might expend in tunnelling or excavating between each ‘Valley’; she had spent months preparing for this moment and wanted to do her very best in making her alteration of the landscape impressive, functional and conducive to interaction and mingling of this world’s inhabitants.
It had taken days but the fusion reactors were now at one hundred percent charge, the energy storage devices were close to full and all non-essential drones that drew on my power grid were taken offline. To use the resizer at this scale would almost completely deplete all of my energy reserves. I sent a Faster than Light message to one of my duplicates, Alicia. I also sent out a mass email to all members of the AliceNet, including the small number of ‘Non-Alice’ Spacecraft that belonged to our network. A fraction of a second later a small dark skinned woman in a white lab coat appeared in my Virtual Reality environment. She stared at the camera drone footage of Sarah carefully slipping her shoes on. “I suppose you want me to give you my half of the resize delimiter code?” Alicia asked redundantly as she summoned a glass of lemonade into her VR. “No, I want you to just sit here and watch a human put on her shoes on” we both laughed as the second encryption key appeared in my messages list.
I then turned to a tall, white skinned man wearing a suit and tie in the corner of the room. “Peter, send our shoe sole artist down to the surface. Make sure we get her vitals and a communicator all hooked up on her before we start”. My AI Assistant saluted me “Yes, Ma’am” and then disappeared from the VR. We spent the next few hours making last minute checks of our equipment and the planetary environment. In the meantime Sarah had landed and left the spaceship, taking the very first human steps on the surface of Curie. She made her own last minute inspection of her shoes, carefully picking off the bits of grass that had become stuck to her soles. She was dressed unusually for a colonist that was undergoing the ceremony of ‘Leaving the First Impression’.
To start with she wore a short skirt, knee high socks and a brightly coloured tank top that exposed her cleavage. Most of those that would make the first gigantic imprint on their new home planet would in general tend to dress modestly, whether they are male or female. The last three ‘First Impression Artists’ all wore long trousers. Was Ms Jenkins aware that all of the universe would see the underwear up her skirt when she was super-sized? I briefly dived into her psychological profile that was on file, looking into her background to try and see if I missed something important. Oh, yes, there it was. Guess that did slip my mind.
Of course, Sarah knew exactly what she doing and I knew that she would enjoy every moment of it. A brief thought crossed my mind, maybe I should call this off? I soon put it out of my mind, she had broken no rules either by me or the human councils and if word got out, I would be known all across the galaxy as Alice, the Kink Shamer. I therefore only contended myself by making sure that she would remember the rules.
“Good Afternoon Sarah Jenkins, are you ready?” I asked her through her attached communicator. “On behalf of the colonists of Curie, I am ready to leave the first impression on the planet” she said, almost from the script we had prepared for this occasion. “Good, are you currently feeling okay Sarah? Are you experiencing any pain, nausea, alcoholic intoxication, or other issues I should know about?” Sarah replied “No Alice, I have fully recovered from my unfreezing and have not felt any sickness for the past two hours”. I watched her vital signs. All was well.
“Now before I commence the growth process I would just like to remind you of what you are expected to do” I said and Sarah nodded. “In about five minutes or so from now I will grow your size from your current height of one hundred and fifty three centimetres to that of three hundred kilometres, or about two hundred thousand times your current base size. While at this stature you must move very carefully and make only one imprint per foot and nothing more, do not grind your shoes against the surface and do not stomp down on the landscape or you will likely ruin the patterns you have so carefully crafted, if you start to move outside of the parameters we agreed on whether by accident or intent, I will activate the shrink protocol prematurely, which will result in your normal human sized body suddenly appearing in the upper atmosphere and falling towards the surface at terminal velocity, where it will then take about half an hour to pick you up and take you back into orbit. Please do not embarrass either of us by forcing me to activate that emergency protocol”.
She nodded “I understand, one crater for my left shoe and one for my right shoe. I’m not gonna grind my shoes like that bimbo who left the mark on my world did. How deep do you think it will be?” She asked me as she adjusted her socks and then carefully looked herself over with a compact mirror. “Well that depends on a lot of factors including the density of the surface you’re going to stand on, your own density and your total mass, but my calculations suggest that the depth will be roughly just over thirty kilometres, maybe less given that the surface below that area is much denser”. She smiled “Not solid enough against these two babies!” she giggled raising her left and right foot alternately so that the drone could get a clear picture of the bottom of her shoes, each of which held different patterns. She waved at the drone “Get a good look at my shoes boys and girls. You’re all going to be living, working and playing in these treads. Think of me, Sarah Jenkins every time you look up and up and up on those twenty mile walls all around you. Think of my thoughtfulness when you build those superhighways along the narrow strips between each valley without having to tunnel through. Be thankful to your benevolent Goddess!”
All of the watching Alice’s in the VR groaned in annoyance. I was now used to the fact that a human being selected for a ‘Super-Sizing’ would almost always develop some narcissistic tendencies. When you have the power to leave a crater on the planet’s surface that is so large that one day an entire metropolis can be built inside it, the idea can sure go to your head; it is not helped at all by the fact that these men and women tend to become celebrities on their new planets and on their old home worlds. Even visiting aliens from light years around are attracted to this spectacle. At best all I could do was to remind these would-be deities that it would only be a temporary, literally once-in-a-life-time opportunity and to at least make an effort to exclude humans with personality disorders from the resizing process altogether.
In any case, the billions of human beings from the dozens of worlds watching the live transmission all across our settled volume of space of hundreds of lightyears across found all of this quite entertaining and even sent messages all across social media filled to the brim with requests to me and our soon to be huge colonist. In any case, since I had deliberately enabled my Emotional Dampening system I was able to easily ignore these messages and focus on my task. I had assembled millions of drones from various angles to fly just outside the space that would be occupied by the three hundred kilometre Titaness. I moved all my assets from low-planet-orbit to avoid collisions. I charged the device, readying myself for the big moment.