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For the rest of Jake's weekend off, he and Hunter did nothing more than enjoy each other's company. They played video games, and the tiger followed along when Jake went out for a run or to ride his bike. They enjoyed all of their meals together. Each was actually eating in his own space, but thanks to the drones, it seemed like they were sitting across the table from each other so they could chat while they ate.

The delivery drone with Jake's dirty socks and underwear finally arrived at the cat's base on the Sunday. Jake laughed as he watched the excited cat rush to collect his prize, then roll around on the floor with them pressed against his face as he reveled in the scent of his sweet pet. He was almost like a cat on catnip and was rubbing his face against the dirty clothes, rolling around, vocalizing with mewls and growls, and even salivating uncontrollably. He couldn't even take the time to bring Jake's dirty clothes back to his room to have Jake join him and help him enjoy himself via the sensor socks. He'd immediately pleasured himself right there on the floor of the drone hangar while he moaned and groaned and told Jake how amazingly appealing he smelled. Jake was thrilled that the beautiful cat liked it so much. They must have just the right chemistry because Jake felt the same way about Hunter's natural scents. They made his head spin.

The two of them were stuck together like glue now that they could inhabit each other's worlds and it was like they were a couple living together.

When the tiger would go to do his evening workout, Jake would go down into his basement where he kept his weight machines and elliptical trainer, treadmill and rowing machine and he would work out right along with the cat. They even showered together since the drones had no problem with water and each joined the other under the spray so it would seem like they were right next to each other.

They played a great deal with the sensor socks and tried to find as many interesting ways to use them as they could. Jake was fascinated with the technology and its ability to actively reconfigure its shape, and how it could even give him the sensations of heat or coolness, wetness, roughness or even the tiger's fur brushing against his cock. Hunter had told Jake he hadn't seen anything yet, and he would occasionally disconnect from Jake's feed for long periods throughout the following week to go off and work on a surprise he was preparing. Jake loved surprises, and the cat seemed to revel in his enjoyment when he sprung them. The tiger's technology was at times mind-blowing, so Jake had no doubt that whatever the cat was cooking up was going to be great.

On Monday Jake went back to work. For the week that followed, the cat would be with him for most of the time. The tiger had told Jake that most of his real work on Mars was complete for the time being, and he'd entered into a sort of monitoring phase where he wouldn't have much to do for a month or so, so he had a great deal of time on his hands. While Jake was at work, the cat would spend most of his time in Jake's hobby room with the drone hovering in front of Jake's desktop computer's monitor so the tiger could watch it while playing games.

The big cat's people hadn't had much time for things like video games over the past few centuries according to Hunter, so he was absolutely fascinated by them. He'd searched the internet to find the specs for Jake's wireless keyboard and mouse, and he programmed the little black wonder box that was controlling all of the communication and translation from Jake's end to hook into Jake's desktop computer through the peripherals so that the tiger could control it directly.

Jake's PC was setup for hardcore gaming. It had the latest most powerful video card he could buy. It had a high speed 2TB M.2 PCIe X4 solid state drive. It had liquid cooling with the latest overclocked Intel processor and as much high-speed RAM as he could cram into it. Jake had put a lot of effort into making the machine as powerful as possible because he enjoyed games a great deal. Once the cat was connected to it, he took a look at it and remarked how wonderfully 'quaint' it was. In terms of processing power, Hunter felt the PC was roughly the equivalent of one of the processors in his small tablet, which he said contains a hundred and twenty eight processors. Of course, his tablet contained the lowest level of computing power available to the tiger, so Jake could only imagine how much more powerful the cat's main computers must be.

At the very least, Jake's PC was well capable of doing the only thing the big cat was currently interested in doing with it, playing games. He explored Jake's Steam library constantly during the time that Jake was at work. He and Jake would stay connected of course, so Jake could have conversations with the cat while he sat at his desk at JPL, pretending to be waiting for the link from Curiosity to come back up. It was a pleasant way to spend the work day.

Of course, to Jake, even though he was in his office, it seemed as if he was actually sitting in the tiger's room on Mars with the cat, while to Hunter it was like he was sitting in Jake's hobby room on Earth, playing games at Jake's computer.

The cat would ask Jake questions about the various games he was trying out and how to do this or do that or get past that level and Jake would explain it to him. The tiger had become almost obsessed with playing Civilization 6. It became his favorite game. He told Jake that his culture had forgotten the ways of war over a thousand years ago, and to him it was fascinating to see how it was done. He gravitated towards playing as India most often, with Gandhi as the leader. He appreciated their philosophy of nonviolent resistance, though he would sometimes get frustrated as other civilizations ramped up their military and began to pester him relentlessly with their advanced weapons. He began to feel his chances would be better if Gandhi would just use nuclear weapons against everyone else and be done. Jake laughed and told him he should probably uninstall Civ 6 and install Civ 5 instead, because Gandhi was the master of nukes in that one.

The week finally passed and the two found themselves enjoying breakfast together once again on a Saturday morning and were chatting at the table.

"It is so wonderful to have you with me nearly all of the time now," Hunter remarked as he smiled at Jake, who appeared to be across the table from him as they ate.

"It sure is. I've never had this type of relationship with anyone before. We get to be together as much as we want. I would have thought I'd go crazy having someone sort of right there in my head almost all of the time, but I love it! I guess it's just because I love you so much. I can't get enough of you. Even 24 by 7 doesn't quite cut it."

The big cat grinned and said, "I love you too, my sweet man. I don't think I could ever impress upon you just how lonely it has been for me up until you made your appearance in my life. I am technically the only one of my entire race that is alive at this moment, and it will be at least another year before there are any others."

"Wow! How the heck did that come to pass? We've been having so much fun this past week, you never did get around to telling me the story of how you came to be there, or what exactly is going on with your people."

"Would you like to hear the whole story right now?"

"Yes, please. I'd love to hear it."

"It is a tale of woe. At least, how it began is, as are some of the recent events I suppose. My people evolved to intelligence very late in the life of our star system. By the time the first of us stood upright and began to question the universe and how it came to be and what our place in it was, our star had already begun it's late term expansion from being a yellow dwarf, like your own star, to a red giant, just as yours will become in approximately five billion years. Ours had already ended its phase as a main sequence star and its rapidly expanding helium core forced it to push its outer hydrogen shell even farther out at higher pressure and burning at hotter temperatures than ever before. That was the only reason our planet became habitable. It had previously been too far outside the habitable zone for liquid water to exist until the increased heat from our dying star changed that.

"For hundreds of millions of years life evolved on our planet, likely in many ways similarly to how it did on yours, until eventually we arose on it. At that time the star had begun to expand even faster, though we were not yet advanced enough to know it. The pressure at its helium core had become so great that the helium ignited in a powerful fusion process that triggered our star's next phase of rapid inflationary expansion.

"Over hundreds of thousands of years our intelligence grew to the point where we began to develop technologies advanced enough to look outward and learn about the universe and all it contained. We began to explore our own cosmic neighborhood and we learned more and more about our own star. We realized that our days were numbered, and that the number was already so small it required only four digits to write. At the rate the star was heating and expanding our planet would become uninhabitable again in just over a thousand years. The planet and every living thing on it would be incinerated by the heat of the star as it grew to monstrous proportions.

"The realization of our impending end changed our people completely. All conflict came to an end and all factions ceased to exist, to be replace with only us, the people. A race united as one with only one goal. To get our species to safety.

"Our level of technological advancement by that time was fairly close to where yours is now, but with all of our regional, political, religious, financial and racial differences set aside and all of our energies focused into the development of our technologies, the expansion of our knowledge began to outpace the expansion of our star and there was hope for our future. We came to realize we may actually be able to rescue our civilization by moving it to a new home. We knew we had little time, and that any undertaking to relocate sufficient numbers of our population to continue our existence as a species would require astronomical resources so we would have to take the most economical path available to us, or all would be lost.

"In all of our careful surveys of nearby star systems, only one seemed to hold any hope. This one. This was the only nearby system who's star was effectively in the prime of its life, and would be that way for billions of years before it would face the same fate as our own star. Our technology for remote observation was advanced enough that we could determine that there were three prospective planets in this system that were within the habitable zone of your star. The one you are on now, Earth, was the most obvious choice. We could not look at it closely enough to determine what life existed on it, but we had no doubt that life would exist. We knew that it had open water and land masses. We could even detect that the makeup of its atmosphere seemed like a good match for us. That, in the end, was the reason it became our last choice."

"What? The fact that it was perfect made it your last choice? Why?" Jake asked.

"As I mentioned, all conflict among our people had come to an end. The imminent demise of our planet and all of the life on it gave us a new appreciation for life in general and how precious and tenuous it is. We knew we could never bring ourselves to be the cause of any loss of life indigenous to any world we might consider taking up residence on, or to in any way upset its natural balance. The makeup of your atmosphere was a good match to our own and that told us that it must contain life and that life would be very similar to that on our own world resulting in the same mixture of gases. There must be plants that breathed carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen, just as on our world. There must be animals that breathed that oxygen to metabolize their higher energy needs who were giving back carbon dioxide. We couldn't know exactly what kind of life might be there, but we made the decision that we could not risk upsetting any existing balance for the sake of our own survival. We would in effect be an invasive species if we showed up and began to change the natural order that had grown in our absence. It would not be right to alter the course of development of life on another world, only to save our own lives. At least, not if it wasn't completely necessary."

"Your people are obviously a lot more noble and good than mine are, Hunter. I really hate to say it, but I have a strong feeling that if humans were in the same position as you, we'd simply set a course for your world and try to muscle our way right in."

The tiger said, "That is unfortunate. I don't get the impression that you yourself would be that way, but the fact that your people would be does not come as a complete surprise. I saw the part of your video where you were speaking with your 'boss' named Rick. I got the impression that your discussion was about the risk my people posed to yours, and how your people were preparing a response to any possible aggression on our parts."

"I'm sorry you had to see that. I thought briefly about cutting that from the video, but it actually made me feel sick to my stomach just to think of hiding it from you. I love you, Hunter, and I'll never hide anything I think you need to know. I left it in because its important that you know how my people are."

The tiger nodded and said, "Even as I watched it I wondered why you would have left it there for me to see, but I knew the answer right away. You were making that video for the sole purpose of showing me life on your world, so if you left that part in, it must have been something you felt I should know about how your world operates, even if it was something you did not feel was right. I could hear your anger at your boss and at your own people. He saw it too. I saw his reaction to your words and the change in his demeanor. I could also see something else, that he was changing his reaction to hide his true feelings. To placate you and make the problem between you go away, but in reality he believes in what he's doing and he stands by it. You are an honorable, wonderful man, Jake, I know that now more than ever, but your people are not all the same as you are, I suspect. My people left the ways of aggression behind nearly a thousand of your years ago. We have no weapons of any kind, nor any active defenses. We are no threat to your people, though I see now that yours may be a threat to us."

"Not all humans are aggressive, Hunter. There are a lot of us who would gladly welcome your people even right here onto our planet if it would help you out. Unfortunately, those who rise to power tend to be the more aggressive ones, and they drive the direction our people follow. The current leader of my country is an example. He is hellbent on evicting anyone who he feels does not belong here and will go to any lengths and any expense to try to keep them out. I think he'll be the one to cause you problems if anyone does. Even though you're all the way over there on Mars minding your own business, he would see you as invaders and is likely already working on the means of building a wall to keep you out, no matter how much it might cost. He has the type of grasping greed that would make him at least consider the possibility of not even letting your people come into our solar system at all if he could find a way to stop it. He'd see every single planet here as already belonging to us. I just want you to know we're not all like that."

The big cat put up a paw and said, "You don't need to explain, Jake. My people were once precisely as yours are now. I believe all intelligent people would likely go through the same phase. My people have been forced to 'grow up' in a hurry and we left those ways behind quite some time ago, but we haven't forgotten them altogether. We will be on our guard now that we know what your race is like."

Jake nodded and said, "That's in a sense why I wanted you to see that part of the video. So you would know that you do need to be on guard."

"Yes, I assumed that must be the case. It has helped me to come to trust you even more, though I trusted you already. In any case, back to the plight of my people. We had ruled out the Earth for the reason I mentioned. We looked closely at your planet called Venus. It was somewhat larger in mass than our planet, just as your planet is, but the difference would be in no way unbearable. It was also closer to your star which suggested a warmer world, which we would prefer. It didn't take us long to rule it out, though. While our technological advancements would allow us to make a great many changes to whatever gases might exist in the atmosphere of a prospective world, even to the point of adding any gas that might be needed, in vast quantities if needed, the one thing we could not do is actually _remove_the atmosphere. The pressure of the atmosphere on Venus was far too great and the only way to reduce it would be to somehow remove close to ninety percent of it. We could not conceive of any economical way of doing that in time to save our race.

"Another factor that helped to rule Venus out was its rotation. It takes approximately 224 of your days for Venus to make one orbit around your star, so a year on that planet is only a bit more than a third shorter than a year on yours, but it takes 243 of your days for Venus to rotate just once on its axis. That makes one day on Venus longer than one year. It would mean that only the side facing the sun could be made habitable at all if we wanted sunlight, yet that side would slowly shift around the planet as the years went by, meaning all life on it would have to be able to move around the planet or it would perish. Clearly that would not work. In addition to that, since the same side would face the sun all year long, the temperature could not properly be regulated and the greenhouse effect would make it far too hot to be habitable unless we lowered the concentration of carbon dioxide to lower the greenhouse effect, but that would not even leave sufficient quantities of the gas for the plants to live.

"The only way to correct the problem of a day on Venus being longer than a year would be to speed up the planet's rotation, and the change would be a radical once since in effect it would have to be made to rotate more than two hundred times faster. Again, we could not conceive of any way to safely alter its rotation, without radically altering its orbit, which might move it out of the habitable zone and too close to your star. In any case, the amount of energy that would be necessary to change its rotation to that high a degree would take a great deal of time to deliver, and once again we would not be able to do it in time to save our race. Venus was simply not an option.

"That left Mars as the only viable candidate, but, to our good fortune, it was an almost perfect candidate. Its lack of atmosphere would allow us to add precisely what we would need in order to engineer the atmosphere we would require. The period of its orbit and rotation are actually quite close to our own world, so a day would be nearly exactly the same length as we are accustomed to, which is nearly the exact same amount of time as a day on your Earth it so happens. It's orbit is also somewhat eccentric, just as our world's was, giving its seasons each different lengths than the others. In short, life on Mars, once made habitable, would be very close to how it was on our home world. The only difference is its size. Its gravity is somewhat lower than our world, though the gravity of your world is somewhat higher than ours. Still, that is a change we felt we could live with easily. I don't even notice the difference anymore to be honest, and several tests we did showed our animals would readily adapt with no issues.

"In the end, we really had no choice anyhow. The next closest star system to ours that had any hope was in fact more than twice the distance away than your star system and we felt we simply didn't have the time to procure all of the resources we would need for such a long trip before our system was turned to ash. We knew that even just to reach your system we would already need to consume nearly the entire mass of the belt of metallic asteroids in our planetary system, as well as most of the available energy that our world could possibly be made to produces. As it was, we were barely able to scrape together what we needed for the trip here, and barely enough time to bring it all together and send it on its way before our world came to an end. It was a race against the clock, and we had very little time.

"Once we'd decided where we would settle we planned what we would need and began the hard work of preparing everything, to the point of even inventing technologies we would need to make it work that did not yet exist. We built massive transport ships for our people, and other ships for the minimum amount of plants, animals, insects, and even bacterial life we felt was needed to most closely replicate our world on a new one. We had no way of keeping any of those lifeforms, including ourselves, alive during the entire length of the long journey, so one of the most difficult technologies we needed to develop was some form of suspended animation. We were eventually successful in designing what we needed and began to develop specific stasis fields for each of the types of life we would need to transport, which turned out to be a very large variety in the end. If the food we needed in order to survive had nothing to eat itself, we could not survive. As such we knew we would have to recreate our planet's food chain. Or at least enough links of it to be self sustaining.

"The entire undertaking was almost unimaginably massive, but we knew we had to do it, so we simply did. When at last we were ready and time was truly running out, we started by sending out ships with the engineers who would start the whole thing by turning Mars into the habitable world we would need. I was on one of those ships. Following those would come ships loaded with the bacteria the world would need. After those would come the life that would inhabit the oceans, since those would be ready first. After those would come the plants, and the insects they would need in order to reproduce. Following those would come the animals near the bottom of the food chain. After those would come the higher parts of the food chain. Some time after the last of those ships were launched, our people would begin to be sent out so that they would only arrive after everything else was in place."

"Wow! Absolutely incredible! The dedication it must have taken to do all of that!"

The tiger chuckled and said, "How much would you be willing to do to survive, Jake? How dedicated would you be to that task if your demise was imminent and you saw a possible way out? If you and your people were doomed and you knew it, but suddenly someone put a shovel in your hand and told you that all you needed to do to extend your life and the lives of all of your people was to take that mountain there, and move it over to there, wouldn't you just start digging? At the very least, being an engineer, you would set yourself to the task of inventing a shovel that could do the job. We did what was needed. We simply had no choice."

"But you did have a choice," Jake said, "You could have much more easily come to Earth and used your power to simply claim it and settle in and push us aside and eat our animals rather than try to recreate your whole food chain, yet you didn't do that. It speaks to the type of people you are."

"You mean the type of people we became. As I said, the people we once were would likely have had no problem doing just as you suggested. The people we became would prefer to perish than to bring about the end of other life forms on some other world to which we had no claim. We knew we had no right, so it was not even considered as a possible course of action."

"Still, you could have done it and been nearly guaranteed success, yet you took a huge gamble and went to incredible lengths to try to make a world, rather than just take one. I'm truly impressed with your people, Hunter. You put many of my people to shame. How long did that colossal undertaking take to prepare for?"

"It took centuries to build up the ships we needed and to produce the fuel necessary to drive them, then decades to begin to load them up with animals and finally people in stasis. Then the ships began to be sent out. Even given the monumental effort we'd put in to push our preparations as fast as we possibly could, the last of the ships loaded with our people left mere years before our world came to an end. We only had the resources and fuel to bring over a few million. Over a billion of my people were left behind to die on our home world as the temperature rose to levels that could no longer support any life at all and everything on it would burn. Before long the star will have expanded to the point where it actually completely swallowed their ashes. Besides the ships that are slowly making their way here across the void, there would be no evidence that my people or our world ever even existed. We simply vanished in a puff of smoke."

"I'm so sorry. It's such a scary thought to think your people are almost literally hanging by a thread. A thread of ships weaving their way through space. It's mind boggling to think of how much pressure you must be under. So, you said there were 'ships', plural, of engineers sent in advance. You also said you're the only one of your people technically alive at this moment and that the engineers were all sent out first. Are all of the other engineers still in stasis? Have they not arrived yet? Why are you all alone?"

"That was the more recent part of the tale of woe that I mentioned earlier. The best chance of success for our plan depended first and foremost on the survival of our planetary engineers. A great deal of effort was put in place to design automation for the whole process of preparing the planet and releasing the life forms onto it, but nothing ever goes completely perfectly and it was felt we needed people to oversee the process. If any problems arose, they would at least have a chance of engineering a solution. But first, the engineers themselves had to make it to the destination. We built ships with everything needed to begin the process of harvesting the asteroids and comets from the belts in your system using drones, and the engineers that were needed to make that happen, and all of that was sent in the vanguard of the armada.

"We left our world approximately one hundred and sixty of your years ago. We were all in stasis for the long trip. I myself awoke just over a year ago, along with all of the other engineers on the ship I was on. In order to improve our chances of success we employed simple redundancy and sent out three separate ships, each with the number of engineers and equipment needed to guarantee success if all went as planned. Due to energy and resource constraints, we simply couldn't afford any more than the three ships with their accompanying massive drone fleets, but we felt that that much redundancy would be a more than sufficient to protect our tails. Unfortunately, two of those ships didn't make it all the way to this planetary system. We learned their fate when we awoke. One of the ships was lost due to a breach in the containment of its antimatter power system. It was vaporized long before it even reached the halfway point. Another was lost right at the halfway point, when the ships turned to begin the process of decelerating.

"One of the main dangers of traveling such distances while accelerating constantly and reaching such incredible speeds, is that even the tiniest of particles becomes a projectile powerful enough to smash through several feet of solid depleted uranium. The longer the trip and the greater the speed, the greater the odds that such particles will be encountered, multiple times. We had no technology for any sort of energy shield and try as we might we could find no way to develop it, so we had to use standard ablative shielding that would simply be made thick enough to handle all of the collisions it would need to endure during the relativistic part of the trip when the ships were going so fast that they began to approach the speed of light. Over time those thick shields would wear away, converting the energy of the relativistic impacts to heat that would slowly melt away the shielding, but the idea was to make the shielding thick enough that it would last as long as needed until the ship turned around and presented its other side with fresh shields as it began the process of decelerating.

"Unfortunately, even with a fuel source as incredibly dense as antimatter, we still had to make a trade-off between weight and capacity, because the process of producing the antimatter is extremely expensive and takes a great deal of time and we already needed more of it than we would likely be able to produce before the demise of our planet. We needed to try to keep the mass of the ships down as much as possible in order to have enough fuel for the entire trip. One way to greatly reduce the overall mass of the ships was to limit the incredibly massive shielding required so that only the front and back of the ships were covered. It's needed at both ends because the ships would face one way for the first half of the trip while they accelerate constantly to reach the highest attainable speed, then they would turn 180 degrees to bring their massive thrusters around to begin to decelerate for the second half of the trip while ejecting the front shielding behind them in order to save even more mass since it would be no longer needed. That would mean the ships would be vulnerable during the brief period when they quickly flip around at the halfway point, but that vulnerability would not last long at all and the chances of an impact with a particle would be nearly non-existent. Leaving the sides without significant shielding was the only way to reduce the mass enough that we would have sufficient fuel for the trip.

"The logs of everything that is happening on each of our ships are transmitted constantly to all of the others so that if anything were to happen to the any one of them, the others would have a record of it. That's how we knew the fate of the first engineer ship that had suffered a breach of antimatter containment. We also learned when we awoke that the second of the three ships with the engineers in it was unfortunate enough to beat the odds and it collided with a small particle right at the moment when it was turning around and the side of the ship was exposed before the rear shields came around. The particle would weigh less than a gram at rest, but due to the incredible speed the ship was traveling, the relativistic mass of the particle was something closer to several kilograms, and it was like a massive relativistic bullet traveling at over two hundred million meters per second. The energy it imparted into the ship vaporized the majority of the central section. The ship was utterly destroyed."

"I'm so sorry. How many souls were on those two ships that were lost?" Jake asked.

"There were eight engineers on each of the three ships, so sixteen of us were lost. Since we'd designed all of our processes in advance to be as automated as we could possibly make them, we merely needed enough people to maintain the technology and deal with any unexpected problems. Eight was even more than we needed, really, but as I said, we wanted redundancy to ensure success. We felt that the odds of losing even one of the ships was fairly slim, and we needed only one of the three to make it in order to be able to complete our project, so we were certain we had protected our tails sufficiently. We were overconfident as it turned out."

"So eight survived?"

"Yes, eight survived on the last of the three ships. The one I was on. Unfortunately, due to a fault in our power distribution system, we lost most of our food that was being kept in stasis. My people are obligate carnivores as I told you before. We need meat, preferably living meat as I also mentioned, for food. We cannot survive without it. We had enough animals in stasis to bring one out as needed and kill it to feed ourselves as often as needed for the course of the two years that it would take to prepare Mars for habitation."

"Wait, hold on a minute, you said you came out a year ago. You're telling me it will only take you one year from now to get the planet ready? That's incredible!"

Hunter nodded, "Yes, approximately one more of your years. Two years in total from when we first awoke and the first comets began to make their way from the Kuiper belt until the first of the ships with my people on them arrive at a planet already finished and populated with the animals they will need to sustain them. The only really tricky part is getting the atmosphere and temperature exactly right, but because we were starting with a blank slate, it could go quite quickly. We came up with a design that would use readily available highly reactive gases to produce sufficient quantities of the more difficult to procure oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide needed to support life. There were huge quantities of methane and ammonia available in the comet belt near the outer part of your planetary system. We engineered bacteria that would readily convert those gases to all of the ones we needed which are quite a bit harder to come by otherwise. We needed to restart the magnetic field of the planet, which of course was quite an easy task, and then begin to deliver massive quantities of water, methane and ammonia to begin to thicken the atmosphere.

"The reason I have so much time to spend with you now is because I have at last finished launching the necessary quota of ice from the Kuiper belt so I no longer have that process to worry about. I have been monitoring the progress of the atmosphere and it is well within tolerance. Things are proceeding precisely as planned now and there will not be much more for me to do other than monitor for any possible problems along the way and deal with them as they arise until the next round of ships arrives. I have also finally placed the last of the atmosphere processors, too. The huge machines like the one I showed you in the video I made for you are loaded with the bacteria that will feed on those reactive gases we seeded the atmosphere with, and release the other gases like nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide as waste products. Over the course of the next several months the atmosphere will grow more and more toxic as the levels of methane and ammonia rise while the comets continue to arrive, but that will in turn trigger the explosive growth of the bacteria that will quite quickly produce the other gases while in turn consuming all of the methane and ammonia, and then die off when they run out of food, leaving the atmosphere precisely in the balance we need. The biomass of the dead bacteria that settle to the ground will begin to enrich the soil to support organic life. At that point the plants will arrive and then shortly after that the first of the animals, to begin to create the natural cycle that will maintain the atmosphere from then on."

"How many of those atmosphere processors would you need to change the atmosphere of a whole planet? The one I saw was huge, but pretty insignificant in size compared to the volume of a whole atmosphere," Jake said.

"Yes, you are correct. They are quite insignificant in size, but they are exceedingly efficient and quite powerful. There are thirty two of the processors scattered about the planet. Through constant operation they will in fact be able to churn the entire volume of the atmosphere completely at least once over the course of the year, but one pass would not be sufficient. It would take several passes, which of course would take several years, which we could not afford. The machines would not even really be needed if we had more time, they are simply there to ensure the process completes in a timely fashion.

"The next set of ships which will be arriving at this planet in about a month of your time are simply large containers full of the bacteria I was talking about before. Those ships will just be passing your own planet right about now, but they would have come from the sunward side so it is unlikely that your people would have spotted them yet. They would be nearly impossible to see until they passed by and began to reflect the sun's light back towards your telescopes as they continue on their way to Mars. When they arrive at this planet they will quite literally explode high up at the outer edge of the atmosphere in a very carefully crafted way that will aerosolize massive quantities of the bacteria high up in the thermosphere that will then spread out like a haze of the entire world. As the clouds of bacteria slowly settle through that outermost layer of the atmosphere, then through the mesosphere, then the stratosphere, then finally the troposphere, they will consume the volatile gases and reproduce at explosive rates, processing the air more and more effectively as they go. There are hundreds of those ships on the way with more than sufficient quantities of the bacteria to process the entire atmosphere of the planet, but the process is again quite slow.

"That method alone would also take more than a year, and we didn't have that amount of time available. Everything had to leave our planet within a certain time frame, and due to energy constraints it could only reach here within a certain time window. If we needed to slow down our population any more in order to give more time to finish engineering Mars, there would not be enough fuel on the ships to keep the population in stasis long enough, and they would perish. We could only produce so much antimatter to bring everything over that we needed and the stasis fields themselves consume the largest share of the energy pool. The whole thing was an intricate and delicate balancing act and it all had to come together in precisely the correct way with precisely the right timing or it would all fall apart. We could not conceive of any way to produce enough antimatter to give us more time to engineer Mars, so instead we had to find a way to get it ready faster.

"That's where the atmosphere processors come in. They will accelerate the process just enough to get it ready in time for the arrival of the first life forms on land that will need to breathe the air. Even without the machines the planet would eventually reach the balance we need, but our animals and then our population would arrive before the atmosphere was ready for them and they would all perish. We are relying on those machines to make it all ready in time, and as long as we are relying on machines, we needed engineers to stand by in case of any possible failures that needed to be repaired or corrected. Since everything else is already in motion and out of my hands until the first ships with life forms begin to arrive, my only responsibility now will be keeping those atmosphere processors running properly. They are now the one thing that everything else relies upon. If they fail, so will the entire project, and my people will not survive."

Jake said, "I still find it hard to imagine how you can have Mars ready for animals in such a short time. I saw what the planet still looks like in the video you made for me when you went out for a buggy ride to land one of the atmosphere processors and it's still so desolate. The animals will need plants to eat, and it takes time to grow those. I would think you'd need to plant seeds or seedlings, and then let them grow and proliferate for at least a few years before you could send in animals that would start chewing on them."

"Yes, you are correct. The plant life would need to be fully established before the animals could arrive to begin to consume it. We could not afford the few complete cycles of seasons it might take for that to happen. The process to get an entire ecosystem established is tenuous as well and we did not wish to risk failure of that most critical part, so we did it in advance. The ships that are carrying the plants to our new world are the most advanced of them all and our biggest undertaking and the largest consumers of our antimatter stores. They are essentially massive greenhouses that are somewhat larger in diameter even than one of your cities. Think of each one as a fully established section of all of the types of environments we needed to reproduce such as forests, plains, jungles and so on. There are thousands of them on the way. They were seeded with complete plant ecosystems, and all of the water and nutrients they needed to grow were constantly shuttled from our world to allow them to take root and establish the plants fully over the course of many years.

"It would be impossible for them to continue to grow successfully over the course of the 160 years it would take to transport them here, so the entire greenhouse ship is like a single stasis pod. Luckily the stasis field for plant matter is vastly less energy hungry than that for living animals or it would not have been possible to build those ships. Once they were ready to launch, the stasis fields were activated and all of the plants within entered suspended animation. When those massive ships begin to arrive in just over a month, they will simply set down in suitable locations for the types of ecosystems they carry, on open ground. The stasis fields will shut down and the domes will separate and lift off again, leaving the massive patch of fully established ecosystem exposed. By then the lowest parts of the atmosphere will have the correct balance of air and the patterns of rain will have been established so the plants can simply continue to grow just as they were before they went into stasis. They will have been already fully established and will begin to spread rapidly outward naturally from that point. They will be fully ready to feed the animals when they arrive and the ships carrying them will be directed to land in the appropriate ecosystems for each type of animal."

"Incredible!" Jake exclaimed, "I can't even wrap my head around the size of that undertaking. You make it all look so easy from this end, but the amount of effort it took to design it all and make it all happen back at your home world is simply unbelievable! To start with nothing but a plan, then design technologies, build ships, produce fuel, compute trajectories and accelerations and velocities while taking into account mass and fuel consumption, to design and program all of those machines, to fill all of those ships with plants and animals and people, and finally to take it all and very precisely chuck it all at Mars and have every single piece fall into place perfectly across all of that tremendous distance a hundred and sixty years later! I'm more impressed with you and your people than I think I could ever express! Amazing can't begin to describe you!"

"Thank you, Jake. Your praise is flattering. However, as I said, we had to do it or perish, so we did it, but, as I was saying, not all of the pieces fell into place perfectly."

"I think I interrupted you before," Jake said, "You were going to explain what happened to the other seven engineers that were on the ship with you. Why are you alone?"

"As I mentioned, we'd lost most of our food due to the fault in our power distribution system. The fault occurred just as we were arriving in your planetary system and the ship had begun to awaken us. Somehow, a sensor for the system that fed power to the stasis banks for our food animals detected a sudden drop in power, though we believe that drop never actually occurred. The system attempted to correct itself by increasing the power levels, but that in the end overloaded the pods and most of them were destroyed before we were able to get it back under control. Unfortunately, the power had increased in a runaway process that nearly consumed all of the remaining stored antimatter we had before the fault was shut down. It was lucky that it occurred as we awoke, otherwise the runaway process would have caused a breach in our antimatter containment that would have vaporized our ship, and the last of our planetary engineers would have all died, leaving no one to complete the job of preparing the planet. We would have lost our species as a result.

"The fault that caused our problem was located in some software that controlled the stasis fields. We believe it was the same fault that caused the antimatter breach of the first ship full of engineers that was lost, and it could have happened to all of our ships that had stasis fields, so we quickly sent a correction out to all of the power controllers to ensure it would not. We were lucky to survive the breakdown, but we did lose a large percentage of our fuel, and that created a major problem for us. Again, due to energy constraints for the whole project, each ship had only as much antimatter as it would need to complete its mission. We can produce more, but only at a very slow rate, and only in small quantities, enough to power our small drones and such. The stasis fields are highly inefficient and require exorbitant amounts of antimatter that we no longer had available. That was not in itself an issue for us, since we were no longer in stasis, but it meant we could not go back into stasis if we needed to.

"We were in an untenable predicament. We'd lost most of our food in that incident, and we had no means of procuring any more. It takes a great deal of time to breed the animals and raise them until they're ready to eat, time that we didn't have, and a great deal of plant matter to feed those animals, which would require a great deal of energy to grow, which was energy we no longer had. We had no way to produce more food, and no resources to engineer any way to do it, while still leaving enough resources to deal with getting Mars ready for our population. We calculated that we barely had enough food for one of us to live right through until the planet would be ready and the rest of the herds will arrive and be released into the wild here. Even two of us could not possibly stretch our food enough to survive. We carefully studied the possibility of simply putting seven of us back into stasis, and perhaps taking shifts so that only one of us would ever be active and need to eat. We ran every possible scenario of limiting our use of the drones and drone controllers and rationing our power use in every way we could find, but every scenario ended in all of our deaths, and the failure of our mission, thus the loss of our entire species. The stasis fields are very inefficient and require tremendous energy and there was absolutely no way we could do it with what we had left. It simply wasn't possible.

"The existence of our entire race depended on us, so we had to do whatever it would take to guarantee our success, but we did not have enough food to do it. We briefly discussed the possibility of borrowing food from your planet, but there were problems with that as well. For starters, we did not yet know if there were any animals on your planet that would even be suitable for us to eat. We had only just awakened and still knew absolutely nothing about your planet, and we had no equipment that was in a position to survey it. We were still out at the Kuiper belt when we were awakened and it would take almost another year before we finally reached Mars and could set ourselves up to begin sending probes to Earth to survey it. Long before we would even reach Mars, between the eight of us, we would have consumed all of the food we had left and we would have starved to death, yet there would still be more than a year to go before completion of the mission."

"Your drones are so fast. There was no way you could send some forward in a rush to reach Earth to try to find out if we had what you needed?" Jake asked.

"It was possible, yes, but pointless. We might have been able to send fast probes to determine if the planet had suitable food, but we would have had no way to bring that food back to us even if we found some, and as I said, we would starve to death long before we could get there ourselves. In fact, we would starve before we could even reach Mars, let alone cover the additional distance inward to reach Earth. Food from Earth simply wasn't an option. There was absolutely no way to make it work. Trust me, Jake, we had eight of our best engineers exploring every possible means of rescuing us from our predicament, but we found absolutely no way to do it. In the end, the lack of energy was our greatest problem. We were still way out in the Kuiper belt when we were awakened, as I mentioned before, so that we could drop off the large drone controllers that contained all of the drones that would begin throwing comets at Mars. We needed to start that process immediately in order to have them begin to arrive on time.

"The amount of energy it would take to somehow get all of that food up off of your planet and all the way back to us at the Kuiper belt was simply not available to us, nor was the time it would take to make that happen. Just as we would starve to death before we could possibly reach your planet for food, we would also starve to death long before any food could possibly reach us from your planet, even if it were somehow possible to get at it. The energy it would take to bring it to us would be well beyond our means as well. Because we were coming in from the outside of the planetary system, we had only enough energy to briefly stop once more at the asteroid belt to launch the rest of our drone platforms, and then proceed the rest of the way to land on Mars. If we hadn't lost so much antimatter we would not have been in such dire straights, but we had no way to produce sufficient quantities of it to help us out."

Jake said, "I read an article once about a proposal by one of NASA's teams about the feasibility of antimatter drive systems. They said it would take only about ten milligrams of it to bring an entire human mission to mars in about a month and a half. The problem is, it would take many decades to produce and likely many billions of dollars. In that sense it was simply not an option."

"Yes, antimatter is exceedingly difficult to produce and there is no way around that. We were faced with only one possible course of action if we wanted to ensure the survival of our species. Due to our food situation, only one of us could live to see the process through as far as possible, or we would all starve to death far too early to guarantee success. There was only enough food to last one of us for the two years it would take to see the project through. In the end the choice was indeed difficult, yet it was obvious. Seven needed to die so that one could remain and try to see the process through to the point where the planet would be in good enough shape for the automated drone ships bringing the plants, animals and the population in to do the rest. I was the one chosen to live. The others took their lives without hesitation. It was all they could do."

"Oh my God! That's horrific! What incredible courage it must have taken to make that sacrifice! I can't even imagine!"

The tiger looked sad as he nodded and said, "They were all courageous. They did not hesitate, as I said, nor would I have if I had not been the one chosen to remain. The resources and efforts of an entire race along with centuries of planning and work all came down to that one decision. If we didn't do what was needed right at that point, our colossal undertaking would fail utterly and it would have all been for nothing. Our race would have truly vanished from existence.

"We were all equally capable engineers, so there was no immediate reason to select one over the others, or we would have done it that way. In the end we simply drew lots, and I won the right to continue on for our people. The others did not want to even leave any burden for me to deal with, so they set themselves to the task of spacing all of the rotting carcasses of our dead food, then they proceeded to space themselves. It was a terrible day for me as I worked alongside them for the last time, knowing that random chance had determined I would live while all of them had to die, but we all knew what was at stake, so we did what was needed."

Tears welled in Jake's eyes as he thought of what his tiger had been through. "I feel so bad for you, Hunter. I wish I could be there right now to at least give you a hug. To have to bear the weight of all of that. It must be incredibly difficult for you!"

"It was very difficult indeed, until you came along. My load feels as though it has lightened tremendously now that you're in my life. Remember, this all took place over a year ago, so I've had much time to adjust, but the memories of it have been hard to take. I needed a distraction from those memories, and you have fit that need so incredibly well that I finally feel it is all behind me and I can be truly happy again. That is something that for the last year I was beginning to be convinced might never happen again. I would have likely been able to survive the next year that it will take to complete all of this, but with you in my life I no longer need to see it as survival. It will be more like actual worthwhile living. Your words of encouragement in the wonderful video you prepared for me have lifted my spirits to heights I thought they would never again attain and I thank you for that from the bottom of my heart."

"I'm happy that I could at least do that much for you," Jake said, "If you ever need a distraction from things I'd be happy to help with that."

The tiger's tablet beeped to alert him of something and he looked down at it, then he looked back up at Jake with a very wide grin on his face and said, "What perfect timing! The surprise I've been preparing for you is arriving at your location as we speak. You will shortly be able to give me that hug you said was on offer, and I look forward to it tremendously."