Casindra Lost

by Marti Ward

  Al was not sure he would do so well with the cats as he had little basis for understanding their communications at this point, although he would apply his language processors to the monitoring of all their interactions, both with each other and with the Captain.

  Simba

  23 June 2075 06:20

  Simba was feeling strange – not exactly irritated, but nor was she her usual calm and collected self. She felt springier somehow… She’d hated being immersed in that big smooth-walled strange-smelling box, and she couldn’t understand how deeply she’d slept in that uncomfortable place. Although it was better than some of the previous smooth boxes she’d been put in, with all the claws and teeth and vines that attacked and trapped and subdued her.

  By the time she and Samba had woken up, there was no sign of water, although she’d had the sense of having almost drowned – she gave an involuntary shiver, but there was no water to shake off, though she felt dry and stiff. She didn’t like that box with its hard skydome. If she hadn’t done her usual sniff around first, she could have hurt herself trying to jump out of there.

  The humans had contrived lots of experiences for them before, but none quite so disconcerting as this one. She’d brushed by Samba as they explored the menacing enclosure, drawing comfort and at the same time exuding her own calming influence. She knew how these experiences worked – there was no point getting excited and making a fool of herself.

  This time the ending had been different. Instead of a human gently lifting them out of the experiential apparatus, a cold smooth cage-like entity had caught them in a net. Their instinctive struggling and scratching had not even succeeded in marking its cold hard skin. But at least they’d been released soon enough into a cage of familiar size and shape, and after recovering their composure and control, they’d slipped across stealthily to get their food and water before they were snatched away.

  But there was a human too – she felt a sense of presence that she’d never experienced from the usual white coats, more like what she felt from Samba. This human didn’t have that white coat either, but a gray coat with gold patches and stripes, but not as prettily arranged as her own patches. She’d caught glimpses of such coats before, but they’d always hurried past without showing interest. This one came close to look at the acrid marks the whitecoats made on her cage when she was mating or having her kittens – she’d had a couple of litters already, and she was hoping for another with Samba.

  She’d used the old territorial rub trick to get closer and see if she could spark some interaction… And she had sensed heightened interest and intent.

  But then a cold voice startled them out of nowhere, and without any further acknowledgement of her, and just a quick look around and a glare at the cold one, he’d left.

  But Simba could still sense him – she’d never felt that with any other human, and even with Samba they only shared this sense of belonging when they were close to each other, brushing by each other, sharing each other’s scent as they marked the boundaries of their domain.

  Chapter Two

  Wormhole – PTL4 approach

  Illustration of relative positions of planetary orbits, as well as SS Casindra’s exit point from the wormhole (Cavum Exit, later known as Sideris Gate) and the Paradisi-Tenebra Lagrange Points PTL1 to PTL5 (as with the Lagrangians associated with any pair of massive bodies in orbit, these are the five libration points where Paradisi and Tenebra gravitational and centrifugal forces cancel so that objects at those locations orbit Paradisi in lock step with Tenebra).

  Sideris

  3 July 2075 05:30

  Captain Sideris was already awake when the alarm started to play its gentle wakening theme, and he breathed in the smell of hot coffee and croissant that accompanied it. “Captain Sideris, please report to the bridge for wormhole exit,” the AI intoned a moment later. He ignored Al and picked up the coffee, cupping the mug in his hands for a moment before taking a sip. There was nothing to do but wait, and there was no point in racing to the bridge.

  As he left his cabin, he glanced down the passage towards the animal labs. He’d left the cats awake, and revived a couple of mice just to make things interesting for the exit. It had been an uneventful if lonely trip, but he’d spent some time with Simba and Samba each day, although Al was quite insistent he keep them in the lab for the entire wormhole transit. He mused that the main reason he’d been chosen to ‘command’ this mission was not his command or engineering skills, but his reputation as a loner. But there’s a difference between being a loner and being alone.

  Sideris was used to full days of meetings. Junior officers reporting regularly, interactions with other captains and engineers around the fleet, as well as the upward reporting to Gus Reach, often with his teenage son Sol present as he was groomed to take over the reins. Gus must be 75 now. Pity about my inability to remember names or birthdays – especially given the special rule-bending birthday present Gus and Sol had given him. Hopefully Gus will hang on till Sol has completed his accelerated aeronautical engineering and pilot-navigator training.

  Over the last year or so, Sideris had taken Sol under his wing, and there wasn’t really anybody he’d been closer to – and he was missing him. There were many other officers and direct reports that Sideris had trained and mentored – but those relationships had never moved into the social sphere. And Sideris couldn’t think of anything worse than sitting in a noisy smelly bar, unless it was being forced to make idle chitchat at some official function or cocktail party – where the background noise at least gave him an excuse not to try too hard with conversation and names and all that social nonsense.

  But that was what being alone really meant – there wasn’t that murmur of background conversation and information exchange that characterized a well run ship and a well coordinated fleet, and showed that everything was proceeding according to protocol.

  Sideris had also brushed up on his chess over the last couple of days, but Al kept pointing out his mistakes. At least he’d managed to beat him once, his “error” notwithstanding. Interesting that the AI had named itself so cleverly, and that Sideris was now thinking of ‘Al’ as a ‘he’ rather than an ‘it’.

  There had been no more calls from Al. No doubt he been monitoring his progress as he breakfasted, sponged down and dressed – at least he had a semblance of gravity for this trip, even if he hadn’t had the luxury of showers within the cavum.

  Sideris took the command seat and its console scrolled up around him. All green! Wormhole exit expected in… 24 minutes. He jiggled his foot as he idly fingered each indicator in turn, including looking in on the fish, the birds, the mice and the cats... Maybe having the cats around wasn’t such a good idea, if something went wrong... Anyway, no point in second guessing himself now; Al would have objected if there was any real risk to keeping the cats out of cryo – and this was after all part of the experiment. They were dozing now – it would be interesting to see if any of the animals noticed the entry to the new galaxy. He left the display with windows open on the mice, the pair of them racing side by side in the wheel, and the cats, the pair of them sleeping side by side with ears cocked toward the door.

  Al announced the 10-minute warning, the 5-minute warning, the 2-minute warning, the 1-minute warning… And he just sat, and sat, and waited, and waited, and jiggled and fiddled, his eyes flicking occasionally to the main screen with its cluster of stars developing a center that slowly brightened. Then there was a bright streak flashing out to starboard and now a sun on the right-hand view screen, and a starfield extending across the front and port screens. Paradisi System! And that, a brownish spot to the far right, must be Tenebra.

  Sideris could feel the adrenaline subsiding – arriving safely was almost an anticlimax. But he reminded himself that he was on his own, in another galaxy, with three years to perform a set of missions that according to standard procedures would normally take a couple of decades. But the Founder didn’t feel that Earth had that long – they wanted to
be established in Paradisi within 20 years.

  Perhaps ‘wanted’ was too weak a word – their best predictions were that the end of the world would come in around 20 years… Whether it was biological warfare, cyberterrorism, nuclear holocaust, global warming or antibiotic resistant epidemics, the tipping point for every single one of them was on track to arrive before the end of the century, vying for the privilege of heralding Armageddon.

  As far as Thorndike and Abramov were concerned, he’d already completed the most critical part of the mission – he’d established that a human could traverse a wormhole safely, that a human could survive the journey to another galaxy. If only he could get a message back to tell them!

  At this point, Sideris needed to assess whether everything in the Paradisi system was the way the probes had said it would be, and explore alternate schedules and trajectories to maximize information gain, minimize potential risk and ensure the way was clear for colonization. One of these risks was whether he should use cryosleep or face the long tedious journeys to the three Goldilocks planets and the gate location at Paradisi-Tenebra Lagrangian 4 – another related to how much he should use up their generous fuel reserves to speed up the orbital transits. Then there was the hotly debated question of a totally autonomous mining mission to the outlying planetoid Petra – a trip that alone would take around 4 years each way using minimum delta-V transfers, and would cost a lot of fuel to do much faster.

  Al’s voice interrupted his contemplation as his screens burst with stars, “Arrival in Paradisi system confirmed and all known planetary bodies have been located and triangulated. Wormhole collapse imminent! Arrival was within the expected error margins. We are 88 million kilometers from Paradisi-Tenebra Lagrange Point 4 and approaching at 539 kilometers per second – calculating precise transfer elliptic to allow us to match Paradisi-Tenebra orbital velocity at PTL4. All sensors are functioning within normal parameters. Transferring logs to Message Drone 3.”

  “Confirmed. Do not finalize Message Drone 3 until we are accurately on station at PTL4 and the extension to Ford-Svaiter mirror array and the automatons for Petra have been deployed, with sensor logs of these maneuvers uploaded.”

  “Acknowledged! Deceleration transit to PTL4 has been calculated at approximately 6.2 days.”

  “Execute! Advise and log precise elliptic transfer and arrival times when calculated. I want to be awake for them.” The AI would take off some speed early with maximum burn until temperatures reached critical limits – probably half a day – then settle into a duty cycle of a few hours on a few hours off until the speed had been brought down enough that they wouldn’t overshoot their window. He was in for a rough day, but by this time tomorrow, a steady fractional thrust should have been achieved and a precise trajectory laid in. On-shift crew (him when not sleeping) should be notified of thrust changes a minute in advance to allow taking a secure position before the jolt – the textbook analogy was being in a skyscraper lift as it went up and down. He wondered how the cats would cope.

  “Acknowledged,” returned Al as SS Casindra’s Cavitrans ramped up to their nominal 0.2G of reverse thrust and his command chair tilted back to compensate.

  As he got up to visit the cats, the difference was surprising. Even the small increase in gravity on top of the centrifugal effect was welcome, he thought, as he noted that he now felt he was walking downhill to see the cats.

  Al

  3 July 2075 05:40

  Al had noticed that Captain Sideris seemed grumpy when called earlier than his usual 6:00 start time. A quick look at his netdump seemed to indicate it was something to do with ‘beauty sleep’. He’d also noticed that the cats seemed irritable when disturbed when they were asleep – they were likely to make a half-hearted swipe at his robotic orderly.

  At other times, they would just pretend it wasn’t there, sometimes slinking deliberately, challengingly, past to a better vantage point not to watch it from.

  He had a preliminary calculation of arrival time already, but that put them arriving in the sleep cycle. Just decelerating a little bit slower and starting earlier would be enough. As an exercise, he worked out a temperature and fuel friendly trajectory that would match orbit into Paradisi-Tenebra Lagrange Point 4 at exactly 07:00. Of course, there were some unknowns – the amount and type of space dust and cosmic radiation had an impact on both the trajectory itself and the ability to dissipate the heat from the heavily loaded reactor. They had saved a few hours as they were able to drive the engines longer at the start due to the cooler environment of the wormhole which was evidently a consequence of lower cosmic radiation levels, and they could also cool faster with the low solar radiation this far from Paradisi.

  Captain Sideris had a reputation as a ‘loner’, and that was one reason why he was selected for this solo mission, but the netsearch about that concept didn’t quite seem to fit with his history as a successful commander and manager of a construction fleet. Al felt that the Captain’s desire to play chess with him, and engage him on conversations outside the mission parameters, indicated that he had social needs that a ‘loner’ wasn’t expected to have. Al himself was ‘enjoying’ the interaction – he had got to explore parts of the alpha-beta tree that were quite suboptimal according to standard Chess book games and strategies.

  It was also interesting that as they talked about why a move was ‘ill-advised’ they seemed to have very different ways of describing the same situations, seeing totally different patterns, and using totally different heuristics. Hardly had he commented on one ‘bad move’ than the Captain made an unexpected response that had been pruned from his search, and it took a few microseconds to allocate an unallocated core and get back on track – he wondered if the Captain would think of that as cheating, after all humans only had one brain. In any case, the question was irrelevant as he quickly found that the Captain could force a win – and indeed he did, although not in the fastest most forcing way.

  Al also had difficulty understanding the cats and the way the Captain interacted with them: another sign of needing social interaction. While it was part of the Captain’s job description to monitor all the animals, it seemed the choice of the cats to keep awake had been socially motivated. Al noted that netdump often referred to dogs as ‘man’s best friend’ – but nothing like that was said of cats. Certainly, the man was doing a better job ‘making friends’ with the cats than his robotic avatar was. But the Captain had not seemed to establish any kind of social relationships with the birds or insects or fish that he also visited. On the other hand, Al’s own relationship with the Captain seemed to take a step backward every time he gave the Captain an order, although the Captain was quite happy to give him orders.

  Part of Al’s job was to monitor the Captain and watch for any sign of physical or mental illness, and to assist in the diagnosis and treatment of any issues that arose with the Captain or the animals – and he had a massive specialist database on the biological, medical and psychological knowledge that he, or they, might need to draw on. He was finding the psychological database particularly difficult to process – there seemed to be a great many contradictions, and the science was mostly not as crisp and mathematical as he needed.

  Nonetheless, discussions of social isolation, social relationships with pets, psychological need to be making a contribution, etc. had led Al to make a number of decisions regarding his treatment of the Captain.

  He would permit the Captain to develop his relationship with the cats, and the mice or other animals for that matter, but would seek to document the process. He would limit his processing and memory capacity for chess to be comparable to the Captain’s and expand his AB-tree only during the playing time. He would also engage in ‘small talk’, seek to ‘draw out’ the Captain, and adopt ‘Socratic’ and ‘Motivational Interviewing’ strategies for ongoing mission planning and duty notifications. He would similarly try to replicate the Captain’s rapport with the cats by developing relationships with some of the other animals – the
birds and the fish seemed quite intelligent. The birds would quite happily sit on his robotic avatar’s head and shoulders when he put the food out, and the fish would quite happily swim through his hands or his legs – perhaps the more humanoid nature of the avatar he had in those labs, versus in the cat’s lab, was a factor.

  This was going to be an interesting experiment…

  Sideris

  9 July 2075 05:30

  Captain Sideris was already awake when the alarm started to play its gentle wakening theme, as he breathed in the smell of hot coffee and pastry that accompanied it.

  Interesting, he’d got to finish both his Danish and his coffee without Al interrupting. Al had changed since being in the wormhole. The chess games were more interesting, and Al was now more interested in understanding why he’d made a move than in telling him he should have done something different. Al was always happy to say what he would have done instead, but he couldn’t really give any intuition beyond talking about alpha and beta thresholds.

  Al had also stopped interfering in relation to the cats, and was adopting a cooperative rather than a commanding way of interacting with him in general. It would have been nice to understand what was going on here, but for the moment it was better to observe and enjoy the improved working relationship – it wouldn’t do to interrupt it. The chess game was a better way of understanding how Al thought, and their chitchat was easily directed out to the other things that Al was learning and doing. He’d also noticed him talking to the birds and the fish – that had surprised him until he noticed some of the parrots talking back!