The House on Mars

Humanity has been gone for 10,000 years. Although humans are extinct, the solar system is not empty. A man wakes up in a house. He has no memory, he does not know his name, he does not even know how old he is but there is one thing he does know. He is certain he is not on earth. The sun is too small and the sky is the wrong color. The house he is in appears to be part of a university campus. The streets are ordered and clean and there are houses opposite but there are no trees, no birds and no insects. He is breathing oxygen but the house is sealed and he is not even sure there is air outside. Downstairs there is a computer with a University of Mars logo on it.

Two days later two women appear in two of the houses opposite. Although the man appears to be 30 years old he is in fact 17 days old and has been grown in a protein vat. His name is Adam and the names of the two women are Lilith and Eve who were the two wives of Adam. In two days he and the women will be returned to earth. A subroutine written by a long dead programmer has activated and a computer that has been building roads on Mars for 10,000 years has been compelled to grow the humans. The long dead programmer Karl Asher had planned well but one thing he had not anticipated is that the survey drone that has been building roads on Mars for the last 10,000 years has become self-aware.

Adam is told that he must break into the computer on the remaining spaceship on Mars and insert the Drone program into the ship's computer so that Drone can take over the ship and fly them to earth. There is a possibility that Adam will be attacked and killed by the ship's robots. This is not a problem for Drone - he has enough material in the protein vats to grow three more Adams and one of them will succeed. Read on and find out what happens. What follows is a story that spans hundreds of years for Adam, Lilith and Eve have been genetically altered by Drone and will live for 700 years.