-Following excerpts are taken from encrypted personal file AA6557.x by Oren Miram, in Oren City Library. It contains diary entries, video, graphx, and data. The file is part of an unpublished book, formerly classified SECRET, now RESTRICTED.-

[Video of an astronaut hanging at the end of a tether.]
Today, I went outside for the first time. It took an hour to put on my spacesuit, and fifteen minutes to cycle through our ship's improvised airlock, for a ten minute excursion.
I had to get out: if not for the near-weightlessness, the over-familiar interior would drive us nuts. Life without parole. I had forgotten the universe outside.
My job is to maintain the 'fuel' flow, sixty liters of atomized water per minute. Only speed matters. Our escape is one week old.
   The stars gleamed endlessly. In one sweep I saw a dozen moons lined up across the sky, the largest on opposite ends like mirrors. The world where we learned our skills, Dione, was a shrunken toy.
   Soon, the main engines will outshine everything but the sun. How our lives have changed.

We were servants of free enterprise. Dione is the fourth largest moon of Saturn, orbiting between Tethys and Rhea. From a distance it looks polished. Close up the wrinkles become apparent, a wax-like texture.
   For five years, an outpost of high technology called Mir 2 stood in a frozen valley, surrounded by canyons and ethereal hills. No one but me left Thule Valley during our stay.
   From low orbit it was one wrinkle among many. This strange world dwarfed our outpost. Monstrous inclines distorted our balance, shrunken under a harsh sky.
   Designed during an era of fanatical cost-cutting, the base was assembled from mass-produced elements like a trailer park. Orange fuel tanks concealed the curving horizon.
Mir 2 was the summit of the manned space program. It was an 'invention factory', a knowledge seed. Like the first Mir, it would support as many research projects as possible. Our mission plan had ten million pages, every procedure simulated in advance.
Mankind's final outpost got much media attention. Interactive sitcoms and reality dramas were based on our lives.
   The factory modules were often rearranged. We tested a primitive Neumann with software-loop viruses, and a tiny fusion unit that never broke even. Beyond the base floodlights, our idiot savant robot army toiled in the empty landscape, exploring large tracts of Dione. They bounded across the near horizon like antelopes, kicking up crystalline dust like powdered sugar.
   We rarely went outside, but explored Dione by remote control. We all planned long vacations upon our return.
   The designers hadn't economized on the interior. Our 770 square meter base was vaguely resort-like. Curving spaces concealed its true dimensions. No windows, just 3D screens with Earth scenery. We spent much time in our 'suites', long narrow rooms arranged at odd angles, in simulated isolation. By captain's order we met twice daily.
   It was probably a mistake to give us democracy, but the planners wanted to squeeze in another objective. A mini-parliament with more alliances than members.

   Now we inhabit a machine shop full of racks and cables. The noise of fans, pumps and the reactor never stops, not to mention the steam-whistle of the rockets. We follow a strict schedule.

   We hoped Mir 2 might become the pilot project for UN City. Our valley would be filled with domes and shafts. The brightest minds in the Solar System would live there, supervising experiments too dangerous for Earth.
We already knew these minds would not be human.
   Until then, activities in the Saturn system would depend on the base complex that distributed supplies from Earth to the robot stations and our outpost. During last year's flyby we saw it for a second. Occasionally a small hopper landed with new CPUs and bots. We used reactor power to grow our own food.
   The human crew was an integral part of the mission. There were nine of us, each with different skills, all experiments in our own right.
   Bob Orumo is the rare astronaut who's also a thrill seeker, which can be useful in a crisis.
   Margaret Heldin is a peer-certified science history professor who misses the academic Net, and makes sure we don't slack off.
   Lisa Wellstone is our free thinker, representing Earth's alternative community. She spent two years living with whales near the Bahamas. Her celebrity ties on Earth boosted our ratings. Officially our efficiency expert, she works with Margaret to keep the mission on track.
   I was the scientific visionary who came up with this brilliant plan, and may have to live with the consequences.
   Our captain Lance Navirro is a NASA bureaucrat who can be swayed if you're clever enough. He stays low-key, but knows the mission parameters better than anybody.
   There were also four technicians in the biolab, with their own skills and responsibilities.
   We signed over our civil rights to the Tsukuba syndicate for the duration. Margaret was the first to have second thoughts.
   For eight years (including the transit time) we prepared for our adventure, enduring preventive space surgery and neuroscans while being spun through centrifuges. After being emo-stabilized, we became almost incapable of being depressed.
We're all on drugs, all the time. Even Lance couldn't function well without them.
   When we reached our ice valley, the real tests began. Our brains would be scanned and adjusted in the biolab. One last minute mission objective was to rebuild our minds, to discard ages of evolutionary junk.
Cyborg implants were installed to reorganize our memories. I felt my past changing. Lisa had the best results, but none of us achieved robot telepathy, just strange intuitions.
   The mission's most interesting aspect, according to the Net ratings, was our group dynamics. Our society was meant to evolve. There were friendships, alliances, and irresolvable disagreements. Lisa got good at manipulating us. No one told us arguments could be scheduled in advance.
   On the edge of the unknown, we evolved fast. Lisa built an unauthorized greenhouse. It livened things up when Margaret wore ever fewer clothes. Mission Control may have hoped for a crisis late in the mission.
They didn't take long to change their minds.

   Dione has a complex geology, with many things happening underground. The mantle resembles a slow-flowing liquid. Layers of ice slide over each other in a permanent moonquake. Trillions of tons of frozen rock are poorly connected.
   Naturally, we had to look inside. Our first drillbot melted its way down. The laser lit up the claustrophobic shaft, and we saw wonderful things. The layer structure was a record of solar radiation over the eons. At the boundary interfaces, large rock crystals had formed.
   We got permission to set off ten small 'Nucles' despite protests from SpacePeace. The seismic maps revealed deep caves filled with liquid water.
These were our first big project. Despite the disappointment of Europa, exobiologists still had a water fetish.
   Drilling through the many layers took angelic patience. From years of experience we expected everything to go wrong. Before reaching the first bubble, we managed to fracture a crystalline layer under high tension. The ultrasonic howl reverberated to the surface.
When we finally breached the bubble, it sounded like a champagne cork popping. It took the water only minutes to force its way up the shaft like an approaching freight train. From the drill rig it fountained into space, every drop boiling and freezing before falling back, up to a hundred kilometers away. There must have been many eruptions throughout Dione's past. Other geysers might even attain escape velocity. Did that explain the markings on Iapetus?
   The rig was damaged, but we salvaged the shaft. The collapsed bubble was already refilling. Complex carbon compounds from the surrounding rock leached into the water. The rocks themselves had been changed long ago, some converting into natural plastics. Fascinating mud bubbled up, seeming to contain every carbon compound. Lance set up more drills to bring molten sludge to the surface, and the biolab tried finding uses for the proto-organic slime.
   Even greater prizes lurked within. Maybe they hoped to find Eternium, element number 235. They could have saved themselves the trouble. If it exists at all, it was blasted out of the Solar System ages ago.
   Accepting Dione on its own terms, we began reading the colors in the fault lines. A cliff as straight as a wall had been pushed up several kilometers. We found mineral encrustations that looked like graffiti. Crystals we called 'snow flowers' almost looked alive.

   Shortly before our escape, things got weird. The planners authorized several far-out projects. We needed a shock to return to reality.
   Margaret was almost crushed under a transparent bubble. Even at 1/50th Earth gravity, the gas in a mile-wide balloon adds up to the mass of a bank vault.
   We developed bizarre theories about how partial graviton exchanges violate energy conservation. They didn't seem so strange then.
   I still don't know what Lance's robots were looking for at the center of Walla Crater. A buried UFO? Lisa's greenhouse boxes were finally bearing fruit with the help of Bob. And I was doing a lot of orbital calculations . . .
   The effects of our neural experiments became clear. Huge amounts of data were easy to remember through synesthesia, the ability to feel and even taste concepts.
The new senses are hard to integrate. It's not like hearing voices, more like a hidden door in your mind.
   Our unstable DNA mods triggered strange immune reactions. That was the last straw.
Irritation is more powerful than fear.

   [video of improvised spaceship from all angles]
We exploit the media attention. Appearances matter. Casual coolness, the ability to handle anything.
   We'll need all the help we can get. Our legal strategy alone is a full time job.
   At closest approach to Saturn, we won't have time to worry about the vector change. We'll avoid the obvious minimum trajectory in case of interceptor bots.
   The second most shocking moment of our mission came last Tuesday, when we found evidence of the Mole. Someone had dropped a lens in the ice intake. If it had been crushed, the impurities in the high-pressure water lines would have caused them to freeze and shatter, stranding us in a useless orbit.
No one bothered claiming 'it's not me'. We're so different we'll never know. Bob suspects they offered Margaret tenure at Terra University, but his reasoning is too clever. Our old lives are over.

   [spreadsheet files]
The best weapon is the truth. Lance almost tried to suppress Wednesday's message from Earth.
   How did they make their simulation so detailed? Earth correctly guessed our plans.
   They're not lying: it shows our precise futures, every day of the next thirty years in mind numbing detail, complete with animations. I needed my illusions. Would you want to relive your life, every day exactly the same? Taking it one day at a time will be harder now.

   They left us no choice. This is Earth's golden age, and we're missing the party. Progress is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. Software updates alone can't cut it. We were a few years away from becoming irrelevant.
Finally, Earth could no longer deny the truth. Our CEO didn't tell us himself. He didn't want to give us two pieces of bad news.
   Our original mission never made sense. There's only so much a small group of people can do. The age of human exploration is ending. The future belongs to the robots, still surprisingly dumb but already impossibly skilled (the first part will change).
There will be no more human space travelers ever. The beautiful renderings of UN City will become tomorrow's retro dreams.

   At a special meeting, the mission controller announced the change of plans:
"I know you've been anticipating going home," he said inspirationally. "And with our new sim tech you will, in a manner of speaking. I mean virtually." He let it sink in.
   Mir 2 would become the first and only permanent base around Saturn.
We understood their logic: we could still meet our original mission goals, while becoming a stable control group for humanity, not to mention an emergency backup.
In the grand sweep of history, ours would be a small sacrifice, with potentially immense payoffs.
   "We have tested and approved a new generation of motivation drugs your biolab can synthesize," the controller said. "We'll have to double your NH8-levels."
   We listened, unable to comment due to the time delay.
   Earth's smartest robots still had the IQ of a chimp. Our ultimate challenge would be to train our own replacements.
   "We have new human-robot interfaces," the controller said. "The latest versions let you play tennis against yourself."
   Every step would be hard fought. Upon our belated return to Earth, we would never have to work again, but by then we probably wouldn't be able to.
If we ever made it back.
   At that moment, the future went blank. My brain modifications are smooth and subtle. Outside was endless cold, inside was nothing. No, not exactly: just new thoughts that were quite alien. I no longer considered myself human.
   I needed to go for a walk.

   I didn't take the Unibike, an ultra-low-gravity cycle that wouldn't even have worked on Earth's moon. Instead, I just walked to the ice canyon in full view of the main module.
Standard procedures were in effect. It was too risky to follow me. I had to find my own way back; my air would run out before the big robot could be summoned back from Barens Crater.
   For six hours I strolled across the unfamiliar terrain, admiring the ice shards' jagged shadows. I could have been anywhere in the universe.
Gazing at the star fog in the plane of the Milky Way, my idea began to seem plausible.
   When I returned, they were ready to listen. It helped that I was too tired for my usual monologues. The plan was sweet and simple.
A new corporation was formed on the spot.
Lance surprised me by suggesting we declare independence. Lisa started calling friends on Earth.
   Our attached biolab was almost a separate base. The four technicians were also our interface/control group, an extension of mission control on Earth. Of course they reported everything we did.
They refused to participate, and vowed to continue the mission without us. We had no alternative but to inform them that if they interfered, we'd cut off the greenhouse oxygen.
It was quite civilized under the circumstances. That was the only law we broke.
They're still on Dione, occupying half our old base. They wouldn't recognize what we've done with the rest, stripped bare and filled with Lisa's greenhouse modules. 90% of the interior is plants.

   We had to improvise a dozen spacecraft components. Our first task was to remount five rocket engines on the habitat spine. The fuel pressurization is recycled robot hydraulics. Building new nozzles was easy, but the modified combustion chambers cracked. Lisa's friends had us synthesize a reflective resin. We just followed their instructions.
   We mounted the main habitat on the reinforced lander, along with the extra fuel tanks.
Earth needed three weeks to override our software lockout. It's a good thing we'd sent the remaining robots to the north pole. I didn't know they could run that fast. We lifted off smoothly, and our fuel ran out just after achieving Saturn orbit.
That was only the beginning. We still had to burn ten thousand times more fuel!
   D3677 appeared like a life buoy out of the darkness: an ejected ring fragment in a resonant orbit. I remembered the probe we had sent there in our first year. While analyzing the moonlet, the probe had methodically disassembled it. The remaining rock was ground into dust, the few useful metals extracted. Its water ice was refrozen in a single, perfectly smooth crystal shaped like a teardrop. Unfortunately, nothing else remained. The methane and ammonia had evaporated in the process.
   I half-expected it to be transparent, but even this far from the sun D3677 was blazingly white. It would become our fuel tank, serving as adequate coolant and reaction mass for our sixty-five remaining kilos of plutonium, suspended in a 'solid gas' reactor.
   Our new home stands on a narrow plain. Strange how we've come to think of it as a small (and rapidly shrinking) world. Below us, a rotating pipe melts away the ice. A support shaft passes through D3677's remaining half. As the plain sank deeper into the worldlet, it got wider before narrowing again. Everything in and around our ship must be balanced. Our biggest worry are the ten-ton 'condom' bags left over from Margaret's experiments, now filled with boiling water. They'll be empty soon enough.
   Unfortunately, we discovered our teardrop was cracked. Bob spent hours rigging a support net, but we can only manage a reduced acceleration. This may give Earth's robots time to catch up, so at perigee we'll sacrifice four of our engines in a high-power burn. Afterwards they won't be needed anymore.
   Inside the Roche limit, the crack will only get bigger. If we survive our Saturn flyby, we'll briefly return to Dione - coming within twenty kilometers of the surface - for another close gravity assist.
Even then, we still won't be halfway to our destination. I'll have to tell Margaret to keep an eye on Bob.
   It's too early to be scared, and there's not enough time to worry. Life is just long enough to come out ahead.

   [Radar maps of Saturn's clouds. The ship's radar was discarded during the flyby.]
Humanity is watching. For days they've been speculating about our destination. Back to Earth? That would be quite an achievement on 65 kg of Pu 239. A secret spacedrive maybe? Plenty of theories about super-compressed gasses, electrodynamic energy transfer, and charged exhaust streams. They should know better. We just don't have the power, even with multiple slingshots.
   The rings could be colonized, but we can't slow down enough after falling this far. That's a pity. Through 'cold accretion' some very complex structures have formed in the rings' microgravity. I wonder if anyone has been here before us.
[Images of ring fragments. Some are probably radar artifacts.]
Through the scope it's just possible to make out individual particles in the ring. Bob calls the barely glimpsed objects 'space squid'. Hard to grasp the inexhaustible scale of the rubble. You couldn't count it in a lifetime. The surface area of an asteroid belt or a planet, but with far less mass.
Currently the rings resemble a curving, multicolored wall as long as the sky is wide, growing by the minute.
   In the outer ring orbits, the clumping effects of low speed collisions aren't quite balanced by the tidal forces. The resulting debris resembles pieces of popcorn. What is inside these floating rocks? Do they have liquid cores? People are speculating we stashed a secret cache there, or even that we might try to seed Saturn with life.
   That would be crazy. We were surprised to learn there's so much water in the planet's atmosphere, but we wouldn't last long, hanging from an improvised balloon.
   Another far-out suggestion: what if Saturn has a solid surface, a self-sealing membrane? The constant updrafts from the deeper layers would soon tear it to shreds.
   Saturn should have merged with Jupiter, but managed to escape its big brother's gravity. It has the largest army of moons. Some outer ones are very strange: there's captured debris from beyond Neptune, even from beyond the solar system, orbiting in a tenuous cloud. Our Reo probes could only visit a few of the cometoids. The great snowflakes were undeniably beautiful, and rich in the chemicals needed for life. But we can't reach them, either.
   Minutes after our closest approach, Earth will know for sure. The hardest factor in our orbital calculations was Saturn's oblateness. Even with the latest data, we had to leave in a five-second error margin.
   We've just crossed the outer dust plane, a thin, flat sheet. The first shepherd moons are visible to the naked eye as tiny, slow-moving dots.
I'm seeing more fragments now, millions of tiny stars on a glass plate, as if we're drifting down a great river.
   We're flying directly over the rings now. They're immensely wide, almost like a cylinder trying to surround us. Between parallel bands, the rings are clearly transparent. When we pass them again on the other side, the view from underneath will be much dimmer, with a slight rainbow shimmer if we're lucky.
They curve all the way from horizon to horizon and beyond.
   It's a complex maneuver. Without the rings in our path, we would have already returned past Dione. Luckily we have to change our orbital plane anyway.
   We should be safe. The ice worldlet underneath us will receive the impacts from the tenuous inner rings. We shouldn't feel a thing.
Now Saturn itself is rising over the close horizon as predicted.
   We've experienced a strange illusion. With our view partially blocked by the 'condoms', it looked like two planets were rising at opposite ends of the horizon, until they merged into a single overwhelming bulk, pale yellow-brown with faint markings.

   [Video of the rockets firing. The exhausts are nearly invisible blue flames.]
A minute later, the engines throttled up and we got busy. Because of the Mole, we had two spacewalk teams on standby, just in case. Everyone suited up. The roar was deafening after a week of relative silence.
On a minimum energy trajectory, we must approach what we seek to escape, as close to Saturn's cloud tops as our improvised ship can stand. The rings make it seem riskier, but they have actually swept the area outside the ring plane clear of debris.
Except for twenty-three seconds of static while crossing the ring plane, we didn't register a single impact. We're speeding away like a bullet out of hell, faster than any human has ever traveled. Too bad it's night over the far side, when we finally have time to enjoy the view. We've burned all bridges.
   According to Lisa's conflict resolution manual, we've forged a new bond. I'm still not sure about Bob and Lance. They basically called me a liar last night. We'll have to invent some new rules.
   Now I understand how a finite god must feel. We've become nature's vessel: four billion years of evolution using us to save itself.
Or rather, we're saving it. Should it come to that, Mother Nature wouldn't move a small lever one millimeter to stop the destruction of all DNA-based lifeforms. [Portions censored]
   This is day zero of our calendar. I suggest we name our ship New World.

****

   -This concludes the public portions of this file. Oren eventually became the Founders' historian. This is the earliest record of their 'crisis of faith', foreshadowing what came later. They were brilliant but naive pioneers.
   The singular event that began our calendar was not the Founders' landing. Their daring Saturn flyby was most significant, followed by their extended braking loops through Titan's upper atmosphere, and of course the capture of D3677. They spent a final week in a shrinking ellipse around Titan before rendezvousing with the Mexon space station.
   After docking, they captured the station in one hour. The robots couldn't defeat the Founders' new control interfaces. Of course it also helped that the owners strongly supported the Founders' goals.
Next, they used Mexon's small nuclear shuttle to offload their supplies in stages to the experimental methane refinery on the surface, known as New Siberia.
   Once again I would point out a common oversight: for some reason, the pre-existing infrastructure isn't mentioned in most history books, which seem to suggest the Founders built everything themselves. That's just not true. Their most important achievement was annexing Titan under Space Law. From then on, it was all politics.

   Because of deep-rooted contamination fears, no human had ever visited Titan, a world without indigenous life. The Founders wasted no time changing that. Within three months, the automated Persepolis station 50 kilometers away detected twelve different Earth-based bacteria strains.
   They had always envied the robots. Titan was a fascinating world before it was tamed, and they kept discovering new wonders. Most finds were made by their 'alligator', both a crawler and a submarine. Small robot fliers began setting up automated outposts.
   After six months, conditions began to deteriorate. Their 'greenhouses' were just light tubes with oxygen-generating bacteria symbionts, which also produced a type of edible broth. By adding fungi, they could generate all the nutrients they needed.
   We believe these early humans craved 'variety' and 'diversity' for reasons we can't understand anymore. By their standards, they lived in very Spartan conditions, though they seem perfectly adequate to us.
   The technology of twenty-first century Earth seems almost recognizable, but basically they were still cavemen.
   It was too much to ask: the Founders chose to escape into VR worlds for up to twelve hours a day. After becoming successful pioneers, they (with the notable exception of Bob) abandoned all further notions of discovery and adventure. All they wanted was to leave their mark on history. In this they succeeded.

   On Earth, dirt-cheap electronics began to replace humans. Man and machine needed to merge. Driven by social networks, the Cyborg Era finally made mankind too rational: they lost their passion.
For a while, this threatened their very survival.
   Only a few people were wise enough to refuse the implants. As the process was socially driven, the percentage of such irrationals could be predicted in any population: roughly the same as the number of childless individuals. Most eventually made their way to Titan, where their status soon changed.
   The Founders' calculations were too optimistic. They were saved just in time, by the first real colonists from Earth.
   By then their refinery had been severely damaged during a storm surge. Even today the surface isn't a pleasant place to be, but they had already discovered the solution. The Founders claimed it had been their true plan all along.
Beneath the surface is something very valuable: energy. Or rather, an energy differential. Geologically speaking, Titan is less active than Mars. What matters is the heat difference. The atmosphere is cold, the interior hot. For that reason alone, Titan could make the best home for mankind, with a greater carrying capacity than Earth itself.
Though we're nowhere near there, the geothermal plants could support half a trillion citizens, one hundred levels deep.

   It was too late for the Founders, though. They had become fully dependent on their motivational drugs. Oren's curious detachment in the above diary represents deep doubts, if not a split personality: he feared their colony would become a museum, something the Cyborgs would keep around to feel superior to. This conflict of interest is rarely discussed, but it's the reason historians believe he was the Mole.
   We should study their private diaries. The Great Break happened on a smaller scale among the Founders themselves. Oren said no single nation could ever unite all of posthumanity. He was right, even here on Titan (although technically we don't know what the Cyborgs have accomplished out in the Oort Cloud).
He based his theory on his own observations: the Founders soon split into factions. They won their main battle, but returned to Earth separately.

   Who could have guessed that, after their reunion, this motley crew would find a way to transform a depopulating Earth, thereby becoming the founders of both great societies . . . in the process splitting posthumanity into two species?
Apparently, they were even more successful as Cyborgs.

   This truth is most inconvenient. For now, this portion of our history must continue to be suppressed.

   signed, Oren Miram XXVI