Six Days

Moscow. Evening of the same day.

“Give it to Vector. I’m giving them a week.”

The phrase spun in his head as Valery turned the key in the lock. Old, heavy, mechanical—not a chip-enabled key fob, not biometrics. Hope and anxiety—a strange mixture that twisted his stomach the whole way home. For the first time in ten years, someone had said not “no” but “we’ll check.” This was almost “yes.” This was almost a chance.

The lock creaked, as always, and the door opened. The apartment smelled of coffee and paper. Old books, shelves to the ceiling, a writing desk by the window. Beyond the window—Moscow, quiet, gray, tired. February 2026 didn’t inspire optimism.

Viktor sat at the table, hunched over a tablet. He worked nearby and often stopped by to check on his father.

“How did it go?” he asked without looking up.

Valery hung up his coat, went to the kitchen, poured himself water. Drank slowly, looking out the window. “Same as always. They listened. Nodded. Promised to think about it.”

Viktor finally looked at his father. Tired face, gray hair, eyes—still alive, but already with a film of something Viktor didn’t want to name. How many times had he seen him like this? Ten? Twenty? Every time after another meeting that changed nothing.

“Father.” Viktor set aside the tablet. “You’re sixty-five. You can afford to stop now.”

Valery chuckled. “And do what? Fish? Wait for grandchildren?”

“Why not?”

“Because there’s no time.”

Viktor sighed. He’d heard these conversations since childhood. Once he too believed—enrolled in the physics and technology institute, dreamed of space, wanted to work with his father. And then he realized: no one would give money for crazy projects. People want results today, not in thirty years. He went into IT, became a programmer. Good salary, remote work, no illusions. And his father kept chasing something that existed only in his head and on his slides.

“What version did you show them today?” Viktor didn’t understand why he asked. “Same as last week?”

Valery froze. Looked at his son attentively, as if trying to understand whether he was serious. Then nodded, walked to the table.

“Put the kettle on,” he tossed over his shoulder. “We need to talk.”

Viktor went to the kitchen. Outside the window an ambulance siren wailed—far away, somewhere on Sadovoye Ring. The kettle rumbled. He took out two mugs, poured in tea leaves. His hands did the familiar routine, while his head thought about tomorrow’s meeting with the Koreans, about the burning project deadline, about not getting enough sleep again.

When he returned with tea, his father sat at the table, but the laptop screen was off.

“No slides today,” said Valery, accepting the mug. “You’ve seen all that a hundred times anyway. Just listen.”

Viktor sat across from him. Outside the window snow began to fall—large, slow, like in childhood.

“Do you know how many power plants there are on Earth?” Valery asked.

“No idea.”

“About sixty thousand. Coal, gas, nuclear, hydro. All together they give us light, heat, internet, factories, hospitals. Everything we call civilization.” Valery sipped his tea. “And all of it won’t be enough.”

Viktor raised an eyebrow. “Not enough for what?”

“For the future.” Valery looked out the window at the falling snow. “We’re growing. Each generation consumes more than the previous one. Not because we’re greedy—because that’s what development is. More people, more technologies, more opportunities. And all this requires power.”

“So we build more power plants.”

“We do. But Earth is finite.”

Valery took a pencil from the table, turned over a napkin. Drew two lines: one—a curve going up. The other—a horizontal line.

“This is consumption growth. Exponential. And this is the ceiling. Everything Earth can give.” He poked the pencil at the intersection point. “This is where they meet. With current consumption growth—we have fifty years at most in reserve. And that’s if we build power plants like madmen.”

Viktor looked at the drawing. Rough, but clear.

“Wait.” He took the pencil from his father’s hands. “If the problem is area—why not put panels in orbit? Why drag yourself to Mercury?”

Valery smiled—not tiredly, but with interest.

“Good question. Orbital stations are my youth, I designed them for twenty years.” Valery bent a finger. “Problem one: mass. Every kilogram to orbit costs tens of thousands of dollars. To assemble a petawatt station, you need to launch millions of tons. That’s trillions of dollars just for launches.” Second finger. “Problem two: service life. Panels degrade, micrometeoroids puncture structures. In orbit there’s nothing to repair with—you haul every spare part from Earth.” Third finger. “And most importantly: orbit isn’t limitless. There’s already plenty of debris—satellite fragments, rocket stages. Every launch adds more. If we start building at such scale, in twenty years we’ll lose the ability to use orbit at all. But on Mercury there are raw materials. Iron, silicon, oxygen in oxides. We only haul the brains—electronics. Everything else we build on site.”

“What about fusion?” Viktor asked. “They’re launching ITER soon, aren’t they?”

Valery shook his head. “ITER’s been under construction since the nineties. They’ve been promising first plasma for thirty years. But let’s suppose fusion works tomorrow. What do we get?”

“Clean energy,” Viktor shrugged. “No carbon dioxide, no radioactive waste.”

“Correct. But think about how it works. We take hydrogen, heat it to a hundred million degrees, nuclei fuse into helium, energy is released. This energy heats water, water spins a turbine, the turbine produces electricity. And then?”

Viktor thought. “Electricity goes into the grid. Powers cities, factories…”

“And turns into heat.” Valery snapped his fingers. “Every watt we consume eventually becomes heat. A light bulb warms a room. A computer heats the air. A factory heats the neighborhood. That’s physics. The first law of thermodynamics.”

Valery took the napkin, wrote several numbers.

“Right now humanity consumes 20 terawatts. Earth receives 170 petawatts from the Sun—ten thousand times more. Our heat is lost in the noise. But if we grow a thousand times, as needed for normal development… 20 petawatts. That’s already comparable to the imbalance created by the greenhouse effect.”

Viktor looked at the numbers. “So it doesn’t matter how clean the source is. Fusion, antimatter. If we produce energy on Earth—we’re heating it.”

“Exactly.”

“Wait.” Viktor frowned. “What’s the difference where energy comes from? From fusion or from space via laser? Either way we convert it, spin turbines, heat the air. Efficiency isn’t one hundred percent.”

Valery nodded. “Right question. The difference is this: fusion ties us to Earth. The Swarm doesn’t. We can transmit energy anywhere: to orbital factories, to ships, to lunar bases. Production goes to space. Earth stops being the only platform.” He paused. “And another thing. With the Swarm we can close coal plants in years. Energy comes from above, rectennas can be placed anywhere. But fusion is another mega-construction. Decades for each reactor. We won’t make it in time.”

The math checked out. Unpleasant, but it checked out.

Viktor sipped his tea. He’d heard this before. Many times. But now, in the silence of a February evening, his father’s words sounded different. Not like a madman’s dream. Like an engineering problem.

“By the way, about energy,” Valery suddenly said. “Your data centers now consume more electricity than entire countries. I saw statistics—neural networks alone consume as much as all of Austria. And this is just the beginning.”

“So what?”

“So you’ll run out soon too.” Valery paused. “I just told the committee about simulations, about training robots in virtual environments. Sounded convincing. But I need to know I didn’t lie. You understand this—how does it actually work?”

Viktor raised an eyebrow. His father rarely admitted he didn’t understand something.

“Simulators like Isaac, MuJoCo.” He shrugged. “GPU acceleration. You can run thousands of robot copies simultaneously, each in its own virtual world. Three hours of simulation—a hundred days of real experience.”

“So we can train them here, on Earth, before sending them?”

“In theory—yes.” Viktor paused. “But there’s a problem. The gap between simulation and reality. Simulation never matches reality perfectly. Friction is different, lighting is different, dust behaves differently. A robot that works perfectly in a virtual world might stumble on the first rock.”

“And how do they solve this?”

“Randomization of conditions. You make the simulation deliberately inaccurate—random parameters, noise, distortions. The robot learns to handle chaos. If it survives in a thousand different broken worlds—there’s a chance it’ll survive in the real one.”

Valery nodded with interest. He didn’t understand the details, but he grasped the idea. Chaos as teacher. He liked that.

“So it’s possible,” he said thoughtfully. “Train here, send there. And they’ll manage.”

Viktor shrugged. “In theory. If there’s enough computing power. And if Mercury doesn’t present surprises that aren’t in any simulation.” Valery smiled. Finally his son was talking about the project not as someone else’s folly, but as an engineering problem with its own risks.

Behind the wall a neighbor’s child cried. Viktor automatically glanced at his watch—almost ten.

“Father,” he said quietly. “Where does all this come from? Why do you believe in this so…” he searched for the word, “…fiercely?”

Valery fell silent. Put down his mug. Looked out the window for a long time, at the snow, at the city lights.

“In eighty-six I was twenty-five,” he finally began. His voice became quieter. “I’d just finished grad school. Worked at a research institute, dealt with interplanetary stations. Mars, Venus, all that. And then Chernobyl happened.”

Viktor knew this story. Partially. His father didn’t like talking about it.

“They sent me to evacuation camps. To measure doses, consult on radiation safety. I was a physicist, understood this.”

Valery ran his hand over his face.

“You know what I remember? The smell of iodine. Everyone got potassium iodide, and the air carried that hospital smell. And the clicks of dosimeters. You hold it to a jacket—ticks faster. To boots—even faster. People didn’t understand what it meant. Asked if they could wash their clothes. A school gym in Ivankiv. Mattresses on the floor, hundreds of people. One woman kept coming to me, asking if she could go back for her cat. I didn’t know what to tell her.”

Valery turned to his son. His eyes lit up.

“And I thought then: we build reactors to give people light and heat. But if something goes wrong—the land is poisoned for centuries. People can never return home. Never.” He clenched his fist. “I needed a source where the worst-case scenario is broken iron. Not radiation. Not an exclusion zone. Just—fix it and keep working.”

“What if the laser beam misses?” Viktor asked.

“The beam never goes directly to Earth,” Valery answered. “Relays, orbital stations. If something breaks—energy goes into empty space. Not into a city, not into an ocean. Into space.” He spread his hands. “Chernobyl happened because of an error. Human error. And here an error won’t destroy anything. To cause harm—you need malicious intent. That’s not an engineering problem anymore. That’s politics, security. A different conversation.”

“The military are afraid of exactly that,” Viktor noted.

“I know.” Valery nodded. “But I’m an engineer. I can build a system where accidents are safe. As for malicious intent… nuclear missiles don’t protect against that either. Everyone just agreed not to launch them.”

Viktor looked at his father. For the first time in many years he saw not a stubborn old man with a crazy idea. He saw an engineer who’d spent forty years looking for a system where an accident is just a breakdown, not a catastrophe.

“I understand,” Viktor said quietly. “But father… even if the physics works out. Who’ll give money for this? It’s not one budget. It’s ten. Twenty. And who will own this thing? One country? A consortium? The UN?”

Valery nodded. “The right questions. I don’t have answers to them. Not yet.”

“And without answers—it’s a dream. Beautiful, but a dream.”

“Perhaps.” Valery looked his son in the eyes. “But a dream with calculations is already a project. And a project can be defended.”

Silence hung between them. Snow outside the window fell thicker. Somewhere below the building entrance door slammed.

“What did they say today?” Viktor finally asked. “At the meeting.”

“Bulatov fears it’ll become a weapon. Semyonov doubts self-replication. The Ministry of Finance… you understand where the budget’s going now.” Valery paused. “But one person from the administration was interested. Took the materials, will send them to ‘Vector’ for review.”

“Officially?”

“Officially there was nothing. He just left a folder on the table.”

Viktor stood, walked to the window. Below, house windows glowed, cars crawled, streetlights burned. Millions of lights. Millions of people who turned on lights without thinking where they came from.

“Look,” Valery began, “so we arrive on Mercury, set up the first dome…”

“No-no-no.” Viktor shook his head. “I’ve heard this a hundred times already. I got the point.” He turned from the window. “That’s enough for today, father. Good luck with ‘Vector.’” Valery didn’t argue. Viktor left, quietly closing the door. Footsteps in the corridor, the click of a lock.

Valery remained alone. Snow outside the window fell thicker. He looked at his watch—almost eleven. “I’m giving them a week.” Six days, to be precise. He went to his study, turned on only the desk lamp. The old green shade pulled from darkness the work desk: three monitors, a server rack under the table, and a model of Mercury—gray, crater-pitted sphere.

“Well then, friend,” he said quietly to the sphere. “Time to take you apart.”

He sat down, authenticated with biometrics. Screens flashed, loading the secure circuit. Here, in digital form, stored the results of six months’ work—evenings, weekends, all his group’s free time at the institute. Thousands of drawings, terabytes of simulations, estimates, logistics tables. He’d thought about this for forty years—since Chernobyl. But only now had technologies finally made this idea real. Project “Helios” wasn’t a dream—it was a calculation.

He knew what “Vector” was. An analytical center under the Security Council. These weren’t bureaucrats but attack dogs of science—young, fierce Olympiad winners in physics and mathematics, paid enormous sums to find errors in government programs. They wouldn’t listen to talk about “civilization’s fate.” They’d take a calculator and ask: “What’s your thermal expansion coefficient at molybdenum-steel joints with a 600-degree delta?” If he didn’t give them a flawless engineering plan, they’d tear the project to shreds by Wednesday.

Valery pulled over a clean sheet of paper and took a pen. He needed to build a defense line. Structure the chaos.

He wrote in the center of the sheet: INVASION PLAN.

1. DELIVERY: Orbital train (Earth → Venus → Mercury).
2. DEPLOYMENT: Base “Zero.” Energy and Environment.
3. PRODUCTION: Robot scaling (Exponential).
4. SWARM LAUNCH: Electromagnetic artillery and mirror deployment.
5. BRIDGE: Phased array → Earth Orbital Hub → Rectennas.

Valery put a checkmark next to the first item.

Logistics was perhaps the only beaten path in all this madness. Here “Vector” couldn’t undermine him. Skeptics love to shout that Mercury is terra incognita, but that’s a lie. We’ve been there. Mariner-10, MESSENGER, BepiColombo probes—they already blazed the trail.

We know the gravity wells. We know the maneuvers. To get there doesn’t require fantasy. It requires classical celestial mechanics. Heavy rockets put cargo in Earth orbit, there we assemble the “train,” a booster block pushes it toward Venus, and gravity does the rest. Transport is just a question of kerosene and mathematics. This is solved.

Valery opened the summary table for the first expedition. Dome, towers, furnaces, first robots, electronics reserve—one hundred twenty tons. The table already had delivery options: “Angara-A5”—five launches, Falcon Heavy—two, Starship—one. He rechecked the numbers. Everything fit. Units of launches. Not dozens, not hundreds. With an international consortium—quite a manageable task.

He shifted his gaze to the last two items on the list: “Swarm Launch” and “Bridge.” This was the goal for which everything was undertaken. The grand finale changing civilization: thousands of mass drivers shooting out mirrors, and laser cascades carrying gigawatts of energy. But he understood perfectly that precisely these sections would be a red flag for analysts. They’d latch onto problems of navigating millions of mirrors and thermal beam divergence, and they’d be right—this was still the shakiest part of the plan.

He decisively crossed out items 4 and 5 with a heavy X. The paper nearly tore under the pressure. Then he circled items 2 and 3. Deployment and Production.

“This is where the main battle is,” he muttered to himself. “The rest can wait.”

The Swarm and Bridge were the finale. Beautiful, grand, but still theoretical. But the base was the foundation. Without the foundation there would be nothing.

He set aside the pen, took a red marker and circled the date a week away on the wall calendar. Then turned to the keyboard. Time to check whether this foundation could take a hit.

The next two hours Valery went through drawings and simulations. Inflatable dome from Kevlar—nitrogen inside at 0.1 atmosphere pressure. Enough: lubricant doesn’t evaporate, metals don’t weld, there’s convection. A little Earth in the middle of hell. Deployment time—three days.

The factory divides into two zones. Outside—dirty: crushing, smelting, electrolysis. Everything that doesn’t fear vacuum and temperature swings. Inside the dome—clean: casting, rolling, assembly. Molten metal passes through the wall via electromagnetic channel—the metal itself serves as a plug, not letting gas out.

Energy? Solar constant on Mercury—up to nine kilowatts per square meter. Six and a half times more than on Earth. Folding towers with mirrors and photovoltaic elements are placed on crater peaks where the sun never sets. Four towers—five megawatts. Installation time—two days.

By the sixth day after landing—first smelting.

Valery glanced at his watch. One in the morning. He stood, stretched his neck, made himself tea. Returned to the screen.

The main “Vector” question would be not about the dome and not about energy. Those are obvious things, any engineer would figure them out. They’d ask about self-replication. And the question would have a catch.

“Each robot generation is assembled by the previous one. Who controls quality? On Earth there’s quality control departments, standards, inspectors. But there? After ten generations you’ll have crooked robots assembled by crooked robots.”

Valery smirked. Good question. And he had an answer.

They called it the “Vitamin Strategy”—by analogy with an organism that takes only microelements from food. The “Mole” mining robot weighs 500 kilograms. Of that, 497 is frame, tracks, bucket. Steel, titanium, aluminum. Rough iron. You can cast it with millimeter tolerance and the robot will work. And the processor, sensors, servos—three kilograms. That’s precision. And we ship that from Earth. Every flight.

Robots don’t replicate brains. They replicate only bodies. A crooked robot with an Earth brain still works. And if it’s completely crooked—the brain sees it and rejects it.

Multiplication coefficient: 1:160. For every kilogram of cargo from Earth—one hundred sixty kilograms of finished equipment.

Robots aren’t androids. Harsh functional special equipment: “Mole” on tracks digs soil, “Crab” on wheels hauls modules, “Centaur” with two arms assembles, and “Arm”—a stationary manipulator on the conveyor—stamps, welds, screws. No creativity—only reflexes and a neural network trained on millions of simulations.

Another hour went to checking logistics tables. Valery ran the scaling simulation three times, changing initial conditions. One robot in forty-eight hours. Doubling production every four months—conservative, accounting for building new lines. Twenty-eight doublings to two hundred million. About ten years from first landing to full Swarm. He leaned back in his chair. The numbers fit. Every time.

His smartphone on the table vibrated. Valery flinched. Three in the morning. They could only call at such a time for one reason. The screen showed: “Vector. Reception.”

“Valery Petrovich?” The voice was young, businesslike. “I hope the project documentation is stored only on the institute’s secure servers?”

“Of course,” Valery answered. “Everything’s in a closed circuit.”

“Excellent. Tomorrow at nine hundred hours. Your pass will be at the checkpoint.”

The connection cut off.

Valery put down the phone and looked at the calendar where the date was circled in red marker.

“So much for your six days,” he chuckled into the darkness.