by Brian Smith
Two of the four technicians were donning medium-weight electrically heated bodysuits and breathing masks that wouldn’t leave any exposed flesh whatsoever—it was almost –200 degrees Celsius outdoors. Any exposed flesh would snap-freeze, turning necrotic and brittle, and act as a heat sink, which would result in a fatal case of hypothermia: a death sentence.
A silly, boyish grin split Campbell’s face as he looked over at Shu with unbridled excitement. “Want to go outside and watch?” he asked. “I’m going outside!”
Shu smiled slightly, shaking her head. “I’ve spent plenty of time outdoors on Titan—the novelty’s worn off for me, Mr. MacDonald. I’ll monitor the placement and the node connection from here. Go ahead and enjoy yourself—just be careful to stay away from the treadbots—they aren’t that smart, and they’re a little single-minded in their purpose. They aren’t even as bright as the dimmest synths.”
“Synths would be ideal for this sort of work, but I guess the environment is too harsh, eh?” he replied, beginning to pull on his excursion gear.
“Maybe we can turn OURANIA loose on that problem after she designs your torchship,” Shu replied.
“OURANIA,” Campbell repeated, trying out the name out as someone might sample a sip of wine. “Ahh, yes: the Greek muse of astronomy?”
Shu smiled. “You’re well read, Mr. MacDonald.”
“Fitting, but I always thought of this new computer as male,” he reflected.
She sighed in mock exasperation. “Typical man.”
He laughed at that and commented that he was pleased she had already picked out a name.
“It’s something of a tradition in the supercomputer business,” she explained. “All the best supercomputers have clever ones.”
Campbell had one of the techs buddy-check his gear. Although this getup wasn’t the same as a full exosuit, it served a similar function. He opted to go with a full breathing rig—air tanks—instead of just taking a respirocyte injection. The latter would have released a cloud of artificial nanocells into his bloodstream, each one carrying four to six times the oxygen of his own red blood cells. A standard respirocyte injection would have allowed him to hold his breath for about four hours. That was useful as an emergency measure or for swimming, but he opted for the full rig since he needed to breathe to carry on a conversation. He noticed that both techs did the same, although all of them carried respirocyte injectors as an emergency backup. Buddy-checking gear for this type of excursion was conditioned behavior, as reflexively natural as breathing. Marsmen, Belters, anyone raised off-Earth in a habitat, learned it the way children on Earth were taught to look both ways before crossing the street—as a modern habit of survival.
Campbell locked out of the rover to watch the core placement up close, aided by the set of standard snoopers over his eyes. Snoopers were essentially mixed-reality visors that granted the wearer access to multiple vision modes, including thermal and low-light. They were miniaturized computers and communications devices as well, network capable, providing access to virtual- or augmented-reality tags and overlays or allowing wireless access to any sort of virtual simulation, entertainment, or news program, data stream, or similar application. Campbell’s snoopers were loaners—networked only to Janus Station as a security measure, possessing no recording functions, and unable to access any outside data stream. All of Janus Station’s internal systems were set up much the same way; the only line of communication with the outside solar system was through an isolated, nonnetworked maser-communication dish with a single-channel quantum-encrypted satellite uplink. The orbiting comm satellite itself was Janus Industries property—cybersecurity at Janus Station was as tight as the best experts could make it. Although expensive, there were “ocular snoopers” (vernacularly, just “oculars”) in the form of contact lenses available on the market which performed the same function as visor-style snoopers. He usually wore those, but they were prohibited on Janus Station due to their concealability, and anyone entering or leaving was thoroughly scanned for the presence of such devices. Campbell would have chosen visor-style snoopers while on Titan in any case—they helped with his disguise, much like a fake pair of spectacles to go with the change in hair color; the beard; and the conscious effort he made to bite back his native Scots burr. He rather enjoyed the subterfuge, although he often wondered if he was really fooling anyone.
Even with the high-quality Peltier plates heating his bodysuit, he still felt a numbing cold seep through the material as he casually bounce-walked across the barren moonscape toward the prepared pit where the computer core would be sunk. From the numerous vision options available to him, he chose one that virtually transformed infrared into a color scheme more in line with what bright daylight would look like on Titan. The sky was an obscuring orange haze, and the ground a mottled brownish regolith not very different from what he was used to seeing on Mars, although here obviously more influenced by stiff winds and even occasional liquid-methane rainfall.
Small AR data tags with the names of the two technicians attached themselves to the men when they were within his snoopers’ field of vision—a standard data overlay. A small, semitransparent Janus Industries logo sat in the upper left corner of his field of vision; right below that were data bars showing his air supply, suit temperature, external temperature, and air pressure, as well as the communications channels that were available for use. His snoopers also AR-tagged several more computer-core placement sites in the distance. The closest few were barely discernable as small mounds in the regolith, and this one would look the same when the work here was finished. If someone could map the array of nodes and connection lines from on high, it would look like a complex spiderweb centering on Janus Station itself. This was the 500th node site—the last one before OURANIA was finally brought online.
A brisk wind tugged at him, having more effect in the denser atmosphere and negligible gravity than it would on Earth. He watched the techs supervise the unloading of the core, its placement, and the final hookup. The first was handled by the robotic assistants under the close control of the techs, while they themselves saw to connecting the superconducting wire bundles to the core. They seemed to be in good spirits, cracking jokes while they worked briskly and efficiently. After 500 node placements, they had their routine down to a science.
“Easy there, sir,” one of the men transmitted when Campbell stumbled under a wind gust. “Don’t want you blowing away, now!”
“Don’t worry about me, lads,” he replied jovially—he was enjoying himself immensely. He had to admit that he was impressed with the crew at Janus Station in every regard; he’d hired the right people for this job, and it gave him a renewed confidence in the entire project. He watched the mining robot begin the task of covering the core dome with a protective layer of regolith after placement and hookup were complete; he felt a fresh thrill of excitement at the potential this supercomputer represented. One of the techs casually bounced over to stand next to him.
“It’s a warm one today, Mr. MacDonald! A balmy high of negative one-niner-seven!”
“Yeah, but it’s a dry heat!” Campbell quipped back. The tech laughed politely at his boss’s joke.
“We’re done, sir!” the tech added a moment later. “That’s really all there is to see, unless you want to climb a couple dunes for grins and giggles. No beaches or bikinis around here, though: the nearest methane lake is over a hundred klicks away!”
Campbell signaled he was ready to head back to the rover, and before long they were rolling back toward Janus Station.
***
Hours later, Campbell sat across the table from Shu in her personal suite, talking shop over dinner. Shu was of Chinese ethnicity, but, having been born and raised on Mars, she was taller than Campbell, topping out at a respectable six feet. Like many natives of low-gravity environments, she was so willowy-slender that to his eye she looked a little fragile. Her face was long, with high cheekbones, and, contrary to the habit of most who worked in low-gravity
environments, one of her self-indulgences was a bounteous mass of long black hair. Tonight, it was held back with a single jade-colored ribbon that lent her a girlish aspect. Like many Mars-born women, her height and bone structure gave her something of an elfin look, but she wore it well.
She glanced at Campbell warily over an expensive crystal wineglass as dinner wound down; she’d watched her boss with interest throughout the meal, anticipating disaster—he was clearly Earth-born despite how his bio read, and even though he resided on Mars he was in a much lower gravity field than he was used to. Nevertheless, he’d deliberately refrained from using covers and lids for his food and handled low-g dining like an expert: no overmuscling of movements or misjudgment of inertia; he hadn’t slopped a single drop of wine.
Shu considered the wisdom of voicing her suspicions about him, before deciding it was safe.
“I know who you really are,” she finally said, with just a hint of trepidation in her voice. She needn’t have worried; she had nothing to fear from William Campbell.
He nodded confidently, taking her admission in stride. “I’m not surprised, and I might even confess disappointment if you hadn’t figured it out. Even with the dark hair, the beard, and the snoopers, I still sort of still look like myself. At least to me,” he chuckled. “Here on Janus Station, it doesn’t really matter a bit. Does anyone else know?”
“Hard to say,” Shu replied. “Nobody has said anything to me, but, then, they probably wouldn’t anyway, would they? You don’t hire fools, after all. I doubt they’d even discuss it openly with each other.”
“Well, enough said about it, then. Dinner was good,” Campbell added. “I’ve tried to supply this station will all the amenities. You and your team deserve it, and I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen on this visit. Is there anything else you need or want?”
“Only a few minor luxuries,” Shu smiled. “I’ll give you a list before you go. In all seriousness, however, there’s the matter of personnel rotation. The centrifugal gymnasium helps, as do the hormone and drug treatments, but some of the staff have begun asking about returning to Mars, even if only temporarily. Not the security team—they’re on a standard rotation anyway. As you know, the longer you live in low gravity, the harder it is to adjust back. It’s a little easier for the native Marsmen than the Earth-born, but it still matters.”
“Give me a list of anyone wanting to rotate out and I’ll take care of it,” he promised. “They won’t be able to leave on my ship with me, for the reasons you just mentioned: Kevin MacDonald exists only in the data cloud when he’s not physically at Janus Station. I swear, the man’s damn near impossible to meet face to face!” Campbell grinned, eliciting a delighted little laugh from Shu. “In a day or so Kevin MacDonald will depart Chusuk Station, but it will be William Campbell who steps aboard his chartered torchship to burn down-well for Mars.”
“So. Given that my boss is actually a trustee of the Crandall Foundation, may I ask the obvious question?”
“You want to know if OURANIA is really a Crandall Foundation project?”
“Yes,” she said.
“It’s not,” Campbell conceded. “I’ve set this project up on my own, without the knowledge of the other board members. There’s no foundation sponsorship or funding involved, either aboveboard or below—I’ve funded the entire thing myself. I’ll probably bring the foundation board into the loop at some point, but what OURANIA really represents is an advanced engineering-design system for Aberdeen Astronautics—my own company. There’s no shadowy agenda on my part, Tian—what I’m after is exactly what I stated when I hired you: a viable interstellar torchship design, along with any other technological tidbits the computer can come up with. Of course, we’ll certainly find other problems for such an advanced computer to solve in due course, but a manned expedition to Alpha Centauri—Project Daedalus—is my first concern.”
Shu nodded, looking pleased as she folded her napkin and set it on the table, alongside her plate.
“Well, Mr. ‘MacDonald,’ I’ve got a surprise for you. If you’d care to escort me to the control center, we’re ready to bring OURANIA online.”
Campbell’s eyebrows went up. “Really? Already?”
“Once you sent word about your visit, I made sure we’d be ready. Shall we?”
The two made their way to the control center, where Shu confidently took a seat at her station. The scene suggested a torchship captain settling into her chair on the bridge of her ship, and Campbell supposed the situations were somewhat analogous. Various technicians in the control center and at other locations checked in, reporting readiness. It was obvious in hindsight that the final preparations had been completed while Shu distracted him with dinner, but all was in readiness now.
Then, quietly and with a minimum of fuss, OURANIA was powered up and brought to life. What surprised Campbell most about the whole process was how rapidly it went, and with how little fanfare.
“Hello, OURANIA,” Shu said. The warmth in her voice indicated that she already thought of the computer in an animistic way, right from its very beginning.
“Good evening, Dr. Shu,” OURANIA replied. The computer’s voice issued from loudspeakers located around the control center, probably a little louder than necessary, for dramatic effect. In keeping with the female nomenclature, Shu’s team had given the computer a feminine voice. It wasn’t overly distinctive or nuanced—merely even-toned and matter-of-fact. The computer’s speech and conversational tone upon startup were, to Campbell’s ear, indistinguishable from a human’s. That wasn’t uncommon in the late twenty-first century, but he noted it nonetheless.
“Report diagnostic status,” Shu ordered the computer.
“System fully functional,” OURANIA replied. “Output in node-links four, seventy-seven, and three fifty-six are suboptimal but nominal. All other nodes are functioning within target parameters. Databank partitions are formatted and optimized for data reception and analysis. System ready for tasking.”
“Very well,” Shu replied. “Send diagnostic data on suboptimal node-links to the maintenance director.”
“Acknowledged.”
Shu turned to Campbell. “A little anticlimactic, but I thought you’d like to see her switched on, all the same. What you’re sitting in the middle of right at this moment is the most advanced quantum computer human beings have ever built. At this moment, she’s also a completely blank slate. Without any network links to the outside, . . .”
Campbell nodded, looking around the room with just a hint of wariness. “Can she hear us?”
“Yes, but OURANIA is a blank slate, as I said. Right now she isn’t much more than her own operating system. Until we start supplying data for her to analyze and she develops a sense of context, what you and I discuss right now will have no meaning to her—it’s like having a conversation in front of an infant.”
“Is she recording us?”
“Not at this time, no.”
“Verra well,” he replied with a slight burr. “For obvious legal reasons, this machine will never be connected or networked to an external system. That was just one more reason to build it on Titan, eh? I brought several quantum data cores with me, loaded with enough data to get you started—sort of like the Library of Congress, squared. Additional data for OURANIA to digest can be downloaded from the Marsnet for physical transfer to OURANIA’s databanks—I repeat, physical transfer, not any sort of networked data-stream access. Under no circumstances is this system to be linked to the Marsnet, Ceresnet, or Vestanet, or even so much as Chusuk Station. No cloud-based networks or data streams of any kind—I want to make that very clear.”
“I understand, sir,” Shu replied. “You understand, of course, that the more data OURANIA has to work with—even data unrelated to engineering—the better she will be at what she does. Her data partitions alone can hold the sum total of human knowledge several times over. What we know as a species doesn’t take up even 500 exabytes of data. OURANIA can handle data loads two
orders of magnitude greater than that, with a commensurate processing ability to go along with it. Two orders of magnitude, Mr. MacDonald—do you understand the potential I’m talking about? This computer will be able to absorb, cross-reference, and correlate everything humanity knows, and then learn from it. If she can be given access to data on dynamic systems—things like the markets, traffic-control systems, engineering trends, even sports statistics, it all factors in. Even time-late data should provide boosts in analytic capability, if network links are forbidden. The point is to let her learn from what she sees, and she can remember literally everything we show her, no matter how mundane. Imagine getting the idea for double-hulled ocean tankers from seeing a coworker double-sleeve a coffee cup to capture a leak. OURANIA should eventually be capable of those sorts of intuitive leaps, and inspiration often comes from directions you least expect.”
Campbell felt a slight cold shiver along his spine—the sort usually followed by a remark about someone stepping on their grave. He forced a smile.
“We’ll get every possible scrap of data plugged into it sooner or later. What I want is a way to get human beings to Alpha Centauri and back within a forty-year-mission timeframe, and faster than that if we can engineer it. That’s your mandate, doctor.”
“What is the foundation’s sudden interest in Alpha Centauri? Is there something I should know?” she asked playfully.
It was no secret that the Galileo Optical Imager, the largest and most ambitious Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) yet built, had gone active the year before. The GOI was the astronomical equivalent of OURANIA, parked in Neptune’s L2 point out at the edge of the solar system. No results in the search for life-bearing exoplanets had been made public so far—but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been any.
Campbell shrugged noncommittally; Shu had no way of knowing, but he was an accomplished poker player.
“Well, there’s nowhere left in this solar system we haven’t been to, broadly speaking,” he explained. “Proxima notwithstanding, the Alpha Centauri binary is our nearest neighbor. It’s almost certainly the farthest place we’re going to reach in any kind of torchship, unless OURANIA pulls a real rabbit out of the hat.”