Frozen Orbit
Page 16
“Not a bad idea,” Bledsoe said, and turned to Grady. “We’ve got one shot at getting this right. If their crops go bad after PNR because we had them do something stupid, then I don’t care if we hire Cheech and Chong if it keeps the crew alive. Are we clear?”
Grady waved his hands in surrender. “Fine. Now what?”
Owen pulled up the garden module’s layout on a tablet. “They’ve already tossed the original plan and set up the garden module on their own. One third leafy vegetables, one third beans, the rest are edible roots like carrots and potatoes. Can’t blame them, since the mission plan assumed they’d just grow supplements. Luxury items.”
“Space arugula. Sure. But now they’re taking it a little more seriously, aren’t they?”
“Just a little,” Owen said. “We caught a break having Keene aboard. Her parents are off-the-grid types so she’s learned a lot about living off the land.”
“Or the plumbing, in this case,” Bledsoe said. “She may prove to be a lot more useful than just for babysitting Templeton.”
“She was a good pick, Owen,” Grady conceded.
Owen accepted the compliment with a curt nod. Getting Grady Morrell to admit he might have just possibly ever been wrong about anything was enough. Best to not blow it by grinning like an idiot.
Jack set up his new turntable on a shelf in the galley deck, atop some vibration-isolating pads liberated from the onboard telescope’s spare parts kit. He lay the precious vinyl LPs flat in a drawer beneath. No sense giving his crewmates the opportunity to stack them vertically like some college kid: A sudden jink from the thrusters could send them flying. He adjusted the counterweight on the tone arm, a nice feature to have in low-g. After jacking the output cables into a nearby intercom panel, the galley was filled with melodies from bands that had peaked and broken up before he was even born.
It was the best reading environment he could create here. And it did feel a little bit like being back in the dorms. Jack flopped into a chair at their dining table and rested his chin in his hands, studying the worn folder of papers from Owen. Why send it now? Why hold back?
Jack tried to make himself think like a manager. Because it might not have been needed, of course. If they’d failed to intercept Cygnus, all of this would’ve gone sailing out halfway to Pluto on its own before circling back sunward. Maybe not lost forever, but its mysteries would’ve been well hidden for an awfully long time.
Again, why?
He bounced the stack of papers in his hands, gauging its heft. Even in their puny one-tenth gravity the thing was way beyond the limits set for their personal gear. Getting excess mass from the surface to orbit carried a dramatic penalty, on the order of ten-to-one in terms of propellant versus extra kilos. Owen must have desperately wanted him to have the originals. It had been good thinking, as translations from languages with such dissimilar roots often lost much of their original flavor. Sometimes a single word in Russian needed a whole paragraph in English just to get the idea across.
Some words were easier to translate than others. Особой важности, for instance. Translated, it said simply, “Particularly important.” It was a howling understatement: In reality, it was the Russian equivalent to Top Secret and was emblazoned across the top and bottom margins of each sheet. Some pages were covered with diagonal watermarks in angry red ink. Jack suspected its placement on Cygnus had a lot more to do with Russian preferences than Owen’s packing schedule. They’d just as soon not have anyone else ever see this. It would be interesting to find out why.
Like reading a mystery novel, none of the juiciest plot twists would be obvious until the end. Finding them within a thick stack of decades-old mission logs promised to be even less likely. But if Owen had been willing to eat the mass penalty to put these aboard, that meant he wasn’t convinced the government translators had picked up on everything. As tempting as it was to skip ahead, Jack knew he’d need the context those earlier reports promised to deliver. If the commander had become as erratic over time as some suspected, the clues might be in here somewhere. Or so he hoped, because this could all end up just being a snipe hunt.
There’d certainly be time enough to read it all. Jack sighed as he looked over the “Plan of the Day,” a too-thorough checklist of activities beamed up to them from Houston that was still remarkably thin compared to what they used to get on Station. Update the guidance software, swap out the air exchange filters just to make sure they all worked, and replace a balky valve in a coolant pump. That was it for him, the rest of it was all Traci’s pilot stuff.
He loaded the guidance package into a separate off-network computer and began running a validation routine, standard practice in case there was some glitch that might have escaped notice back on the ground. Until that was finished, he had time to read.
Arkangel Commander’s Log
23 Feb 1991
With nothing but open space between us and Pluto, we are at the end of our high-speed run and have shut down the pulse drive to begin the coasting phase of our mission. It has been considerably less noisy, the hum of air cyclers replacing the staccato rumble of our pulse drive. It has been like going on a holiday to float in freefall and let gravity do its work on our behalf.
Now that we are unburdened from the daily work of keeping up with this machine, life has settled into the kind of routine we had come to expect aboard Mir. Alexi and Gregoriy dug out our magnetic chessboard and have begun an ongoing match so intense that it threatens to become all-consuming. I may have to adjust their duty schedules in order to keep their minds focused!
While not engaging his comrade in single combat over the chessboard, Alexi has determined that our final velocity is 0.124 c, which came within a few thousandths of TsUP’s calculations.
As I ponder those figures and plot our trajectory amongst the various orbits of other bodies in the solar system, I am struck by how little the view outside has changed. It is a great nothingness. The stars are more numerous and vivid. Some distant nebulae can be discerned with the naked eye. And it is all remarkably unchanged, despite our great speed and distance from home. The positions of the planets change from day to day while the Sun grows fainter, but the rest of the universe remains static. Even if we were to push Arkangel to its theoretical limits and burn ever outward, our vantage point would not appreciably change within our lifetimes.
How does one contend with such a perspective? I am not yet sure my younger comrades appreciate this.
Jack wasn’t sure he could get his head around it either. The Jupiter encounter had been a whirlwind, his few chances to look at it spectacular, and now it lay far in their rear view after just a few days. In the meantime, deep space was unchanged. Star motion was perceptible only because their heading was constantly changing to keep Magellan pointed along the curve taking them to Pluto. Over a million miles an hour, and the universe looked the same in every direction. Always would, even at the end of the solar system. How could humans ever hope to comprehend something this vast? Had those cosmonauts even considered it before they lit off the first nuke beneath their tail?
“Are you done?” Traci asked.
“Huh?”
She poked at his tray. “You gonna eat that?”
He shook his head. “Not hungry, I guess.”
She grabbed the half sandwich he’d left and slid out from behind the table with both of their trays. Jack watched her bounce lightly over to the trash recycler, admiring the swells and dips of her petite curves beneath her flight suit. Low-g worked wonders on the female form. He frowned, reminding himself of the deal they’d cut during crew selection and looked around the galley for anything that might give them a different way to occupy their time. “Ever play chess?”
“Occasionally,” she said with a mischievous grin that suggested it had been a great deal more.
16
Mission Day 61
Velocity 747,444 m/s (1,671,985 mph)
Acceleration 0.0 m/s2 (0 g)
Arkangel C
ommander’s Log
4 Mar 1991
During the long free fall toward our destination, the onboard routine now feels no different than it did aboard Mir. Without the comfort of our home planet in the windows, our general mood is best described as subdued. It is a testament to the strength of the Soviet Man that this has only hardened our mutual bonds in the face of such extreme isolation. Alexi and Gregoriy’s lengthy chess match, for example: Where tensions might normally rise with each captured piece, in its place a mutual respect grows between them which I have not seen before.
Jack pondered his next move. Taking her knight was tempting, but he’d sacrifice a bishop in the bargain. It was an obvious play, and Traci had been a good half-dozen steps ahead of him. Tired of fretting over it, he slid his bishop across the board to capture her knight. She immediately countered, taking the bishop to expose his king.
“Check.”
Jack pushed away and gave the board an exaggerated stink-eye. “I don’t know why I’m even trying at this point,” he groaned. “How did I not see that coming?”
“Because you’re not thinking strategically. You’re barely thinking tactically. It’s not enough to know what each piece can do. You’re toast if you can’t orchestrate them. If you were to get good at this, we could make one game last the whole mission.”
“I know. Think three moves ahead, right?”
“Only if your opponent isn’t sure of what she’s doing. But that’s still just tactics. You know why they call this the ‘game of kings,’ don’t you?”
“Enlighten me.”
“Strategy. You have to see the end state and know how you’ll get there. Like a football coach has the whole game plan in his head before he calls the first play. A lot of books about basic game strategy were built into Daisy’s network,” she offered.
“I’ve never been too fond of the idea of getting whipped by a server farm. Losing to you is bad enough.”
“Getting beat is still the best way to learn,” Traci said. “You can lose to me, or to Daisy.”
Daisy skipped the perfunctory chime before interjecting: i would find that exercise quite stimulating.
“Not creepy at all there, HAL,” Jack snorted. There had been epic fights over how much artificial intelligence to build into Magellan’s brain, as if it were something that could be quantified. Artificial or otherwise, intelligence would not rest within whatever boundaries humans tried to build around it.
They had settled on partitioning the computers into “dumb” and “smart” cores, the former handling essential ship functions within precise parameters. The latter was Daisy’s “personality” interface, able to watch over its less-intelligent siblings and adapt their tasking as the situation called for. Even at that, it was prevented from taking certain actions without a crewmember’s express consent.
By commercial standards Daisy’s voice interface was laughably limited thanks to NASA’s insistence on a conservative approach. They had at last conceded to leave that feature open-ended for incremental improvements if the crew wanted them. In other words, it was teachable.
Jack had toyed with the idea of perfecting Daisy’s conversational English ever since they’d first exchanged perfunctory greetings. It did seem to be getting better over time—so was that actual “machine learning” or just some especially well-crafted algorithms filling in the variables? More to the point, what was the difference?
His earlier crypto work had married a natural talent for language with the intricate mathematics needed to scramble a message letter-by-letter and put it back together again. It left him perhaps uniquely suited for the task of teaching a smart machine to think for itself.
Jack was staring at the chessboard, lost in a dense forest of questions, when Traci decided to shake his tree. “You leaned awful hard on Daisy during that engine shutdown, right? Even Roy thinks it was the right call.”
“What?” His eyes snapped up to meet hers. “Oh . . . sure, but that was just integrating everything the diagnostics were already telling us.”
“Faster than any of us could have managed, for certain anyone in the FCR with the time lag. If Daisy hadn’t been able to synthesize all of that data into something useful, we’d be on our way back home right now.”
Jack set aside the nagging question of whether that would be such a bad thing. “Probably,” he said after a time. “At least when it came to troubleshooting. But the trajectory analysis was all straight-ahead math. We should expect it to run rings around us.”
“Crucially important math,” she reminded him, “where the wrong answer gets us killed.”
He took her captured bishop and dropped it back to the board, mesmerized by the ultraslow motion of microgravity. Could a bundle of silicon chips mimicking a human brain’s intricate neural network become just as entranced by something so random? Should that be one of the ways to test intelligence?
He was becoming determined to find out. “What’s the difference between knowledge and intelligence?”
Her eyes lit up. “Deep thoughts! Where’d that come from?”
“My innate curiosity,” he smiled. “You know—intelligence.”
“To ask the question is to answer it,” she said with feigned gravitas. “It’s the ability to recognize the gaps in your own understanding.”
“What about self-awareness? Is that the first question that gets asked?”
“Maybe,” she said, idly turning a zero-g mug in her hands as she contemplated the void beyond a nearby window. With Jupiter now between them and the Sun, the galaxy had exploded into view with a yawning depth she’d never appreciated before. The stars were so distant that it all looked deceptively two-dimensional to a puny human. “That might be it: ‘Who am I? Why am I even asking these questions?’ It may be the first coherent thought that enters your mind as an infant, and you don’t even recognize it because you can’t comprehend it.”
“So if we apply the Turing test to a thinking machine,” he ventured, “it might not even realize it’s being tested until it passed. And if it does realize it’s being tested then it’s smart enough to fool us into thinking it failed if it wanted to. And if its brain does work like ours, it might even want to fool us. How would we know the difference?”
She shook her head. “You got me, I’m just a pilot. Just promise me you won’t spend your free time turning Daisy into an amoral sociopath. Because that never turns out well in the movies.”
“That’s the history of man, isn’t it? We become just smart enough to royally screw everything up. Could we ever create an intelligence that’s smarter than we are—that is, smart enough to remain civilized?”
“I’d say you’re making some big assumptions about what it means to be civilized. That requires a common morality and inevitable compromises. Computers rely on logic: if this, then that. They don’t handle abstractions very well.”
“Same goes for some people I know,” Jack said.
She arched an eyebrow. “Anybody in particular?”
He fidgeted, not sure where to take this. “What about feelings? Is that a sign of intelligence? Because I know some really smart people who think it’s a detriment.”
“I know a lot of really smart people who frighten me if I think about it enough.” She wasn’t sure if he’d directed that at her, but Jack was asking himself the same thing. Were normal human feelings a handicap in their line of work, now that they were traveling farther than ever? How long could healthy people stay this isolated without being crippled by personality or relationship problems?
“The problem with a Turing test is our definitions of ‘artificial intelligence’ keep evolving as the machines get better at imitating us,” Jack said. “I once spent twenty minutes flirting with a customer service rep before I figured out she was a chatbot.”
Traci decided she didn’t want to know how that conversation must have sounded. “There may be times when we’d just as soon spend the rest of the mission talking to the computer than to each other.”
An unsolicited response and a reminder that Daisy was always listening. Weird. Jack turned to the nearby interface panel. “So you’re up for this?”
does this mean i may return to the conversation?
“It does.”
then certainly. i will participate in whatever tests you decide to pursue.
He looked back at Traci. “To do this right, we can’t have any direct contact,” he warned. “All of our conversations will have to be text.”
“Again, not a problem. The computer has better manners anyway.”
thank you for your confidence.
“As I was saying . . . ”
i’ll also make it a point to use contractions more naturally. its not my normal idiom.
“Yet you adapt well enough,” Jack noticed. “And it’s not polite to interrupt.”
interruption is a human trait which has some limited conversational advantages. for instance, if you feel strongly enough about something that—
“But you don’t feel anything.”
i do comprehend your frustration, however.
“How could you possibly comprehend that if you’re incapable of feeling?” Traci asked, feeling somewhat conflicted herself.
A microsecond’s pause. Was Daisy thinking about a response?
“incapable” may not be the correct term. perhaps we should consider another. jack's interruption forced an unanticipated redirection of cognitive paths within my neural network. this caused a brief lag in processor cycles while adapting to the next most probable task. this interference renders my performance less than optimal.
“So Jack pissed you off by getting in your way?” Traci asked wryly. “I think we’re off to a good start.”