by Marti Ward
Sideris knew about this, of course, and missions had been planned around them for a century, but not in the seat of the pants way Al was managing – in a system where the ITN hadn’t even been mapped. The Lagrangians were theoretical constructs in a restricted three-body problem in which the ship or asteroid being considered in relation to two significant (and significantly different) masses was taken as a point of insignificant mass. But the reality was that there were many more than two bodies of significant mass in a solar system, and every weak gravity point was actually the intersection of weak stability boundaries, where a nanometer one way would pull you towards one object and a nanometer the other would pull you towards another object. Each orbit around a Lagrange Point is effectively an endpoint for an infinite number of such boundaries, defining a low cost transit tube to another Lagrange Point.
Sideris wondered which long dead wit had so aptly named such tubes Interplanetary Superhighways, or when taken together, the Interplanetary Transport Network.
During the first few days Sideris had occasionally regretted staying awake, but he had enjoyed learning about nanosilc and nanobots, and had come to understand their properties and capabilities – and had developed and modeled some innovations that he might be able to incorporate on the LETOs when he got back. He was used to building things, repairing things, making things work, fixing problems with whatever he had available, troubleshooting whenever anything went wrong in the LETO fleet or its construction sites. That was probably why they’d selected him – he was the only person that could be depended on to be able to fix any critical system on the ship. Until, that is, they upgraded it with a stack of nanosilc and nanobots, an irascible AI, and a zooful of flora and fauna – those things he had no experience with.
He’d have to talk with Al about whether there was any chance of diverting some of their resources to building or modifying something. He needed to come up with a project that would facilitate the mission here rather than just the construction jobs that were waiting for him back home. He wondered who old man Reach had appointed to look after the construction fleet in his absence.
Sideris had continued to play chess with Al, and had asked him about his strategies – not just for the game, but as he managed the ship and its living occupants, coordinating the satellite computers and their irregular reports of failures or anomalies, weighing up options and optimizing their course. He was particularly interested in how Al seemed to be developing new heuristics, including a new way of managing him… Yes, the Artificial Intelligence was managing the Natural Intelligence!
The story seemed to be that level 3 Al’s distributed subsumption architecture left most of the details to the level 2 and level 1 specialist processing units, but went beyond that in allocating different processors different strategies for solving the same problem, while yet other processors acted as filters, injecting hypotheses, focusing his awareness and attention, and filtering implications and inputs as well as outputs and conclusions. Somehow Al was more than just a bigger and better version of the AIs embedded in the many control systems he was familiar with throughout the space program – but he could find nothing specific on the design of the ‘Hybrid Neural Intelligence Matrix’ beyond the manufacturer’s claim that it was a fully distributed system whose intelligence didn’t reside anywhere in particular, but everywhere at once. HNIM3 models were touted as being able to integrate across all space-certified Automated Embedded Systems, as well as the most important classes of Parallel, Systolic, and Quantum Computer.
He and Al had not only interacted over the virtual chess board, but over a more complicated ‘board’ that covered the Paradisi planetary system, the Casindra’s systems, and the ships various animal passengers. Al had remonstrated quite severely with him about letting the cats out of their cage, fearing – can an AI fear? – yes, fearing that they would do damage to the sensitive experimental cryoequipment in the lab. That was the whole future of the project! It allowed animals (and eventually for the mass exodus, 100,000 people) to be put into a cryogenic state quickly and painlessly without a mass of injections and intravenous interventions (in Al-speak).
But the cats had never damaged anything. Even Al acknowledged that they seemed to have an instinct for what was safe, and what was possible, even under the varying 0.4 to 0.6G inertial forces that substituted for gravity. They could leap incredible distances here – and did regularly. They would sit, looking intensely, weighing up the possibilities, then make a decision, yes or no – much like Al, he mused. They had never made a bad landing, or so much as knocked a stylus off the desk. And yes, he had watched them extensively – he had motion-triggered recordings and screen alert to catch whatever they got up to. He had a screen dedicated to monitoring the various animal facilities, sometimes in a 9-up display, sometimes flipping through – showing scenes for a dwell time that varied according to level of activity.
The cats were not however the ones that captured the most dwell time – they tended to curl up and sleep for long periods both day and night, interspersed with brief bursts of activity. The mice on the other hand… they could show sustained activity for hours on end.
Sideris had enjoyed his lifetime of informal study of human behavior, although at first it had been a necessity just to survive the mix of emotional irrationality and logical rationality that composed each individual: that understanding had made him a good manager of the LETO construction fleet; that interest was extending to the cats in a major way.
But the expertise needed for the mission was not behavioral but biological: anthropological, bacteriological, botanical, entomological, zoological, … not even those really, but ecological, devolutionary and evolutionary genetics and phylogeny. Would humans be able to survive in this ecosystem? Or would they destroy it? Or would they need to destroy it and re-create it lest it destroy them? Or could they make some tiny modifications – probably not to an entire world’s biosphere, but to the animals and crops they introduced, or would they have to re-create the human genome itself. That was way above his paygrade – and outside of his expertise – but that is what Al was here for.
Al (or rather his robotic avatars) had been spending time in the aviadome, and birds were quite happy using him/them as a tree, as they flocked and jostled for the distribution of food. Over their chess games, Al had explained the ingenious mechanisms for sealing the insects and birds into their specially designed nests to avoid distress for 0g periods of up to 24 hours. This involved increasing O2 and CO2 levels (to 40% and 30% resp.) as atmospheric temperature was lowered to refrigerator temperatures (3°C). This drove them into their nests and induced at least partial anesthesia – the species were selected to tolerate this well, although additional species-dependent gas mixes were introduced, and nest temperatures optimized to ensure optimal hibernation.
The reptiles and amphibia had been handled similarly, and fish were even easier to manage: both salt and fresh water temperatures were lowered to 15°, and the O2 and CO2 levels were increased, although a special nanobubble oxygen stream was supplied to maintain hyperoxicity.
Al was becoming quite involved in genetic and conventional breeding experiments. He was actively controlling the breeding of the birds and fish, as well as providing Sideris with fresh chicken eggs. He had access to the full genome of every individual living thing on board, and had demonstrated that he could achieve both in vitro fertilization and overt cloning in the labs. Sideris found his logs were very stimulating reading – including from the point of view of Al’s own ethical and emotional make up. Al was reluctant to attempt overt genesplicing, although that was one of the skills that would almost certainly be needed to colonize a planet, particularly those like Ardesco and Tenebra that were on the periphery of the Goldilocks zone and were nothing like ‘just right’ for current human physiology.
It was strange that Al hadn’t been given direct training, guidance or orders before being sent on the mission. They both seemed so underprepared – the mission had been in planning
for years, but the crew (fancy thinking of Al as crew) had known they had been given the mission for about a week before being dispatched to the Ida, and then another week at Ida as Casindra had been fitted – he was glad he hadn’t made the trip to SJL4 in cryosuspension, although it might have been instructive to experience the second generation cryotechnology.
Sideris had also gotten to spend some time in the bird-free biodome, with Al guiding him on growing wheat, barley, rice, corn and feed crops – millet for the chooks was their first success. There were also established vertical gardens on nutrient film that could give him berries and tomatoes, and they also had shelf gardens providing kale and spinach and the like. He would never have thought that he’d become a farmer, but they’d quickly started to transition over from the supplies they’d brought. He was quite happy cooking with the millet, but was not so keen as Al to introduce grazing animals into the biodome.
Theoretically, he could leave all this to Al and his bots – but it was an important part of the mission, and it was more interesting than looking at a viewscreen full of slowly changing stars. Even though astronomy and astrophysics were two of his majors, the astronomical and system surveys were totally automated, and whereas the computers could do everything without his help, he had to rely on Al, or the automated navigation system, just to take a look outside and get some perspective on his journey.
For Sideris, there was no real world any more: every perspective was either a surreal swirl of stars or a simulated virtual reality, and the default was to make it seem as if he was driving a regular plane along the plane of the Paradisi system – when in fact the whole ship was spinning at 2rpm to maintain a semblance of gravity – all just aspects of his private virtual reality.
As the LETO bridge had no fenestella, he had no particular advantage over the people back home, who could see exactly what he saw from the bridge or almost anywhere else on the Casindra. But that was another advantage of his (usually twice) daily trips to the gym – the lifepod carried below Casindra did have VO2 fenestellae on all eight sloped slides – so he could see what was out there as the stars shifted over him like a half-speed second hand of an ancient clock.
On Earth it took 12 hours for the stars to shift the 180° they did each minute on a rotating LETO. It made some people space sick to have effective gravity and see that rapid motion. Sideris was the opposite. He tended to get light headed at the 0.5G on the main deck, but if he did start to feel dizzy he’d head down to the gym where the head-foot gravity difference reduced from almost 2% to under 1% for his 180cm frame. The construction crews were generally happiest on an unrotated ship – working inside or outside in their maglock space boots, and sleeping in magnetic polymer pajamas.
The cats seemed to take it all in their stride – not surprising considering that on all fours Simba was more like 22cm tall compared to his 180cm, and even at full stretch Simba couldn’t have reached a head height of more than 50cm, although Samba might be close to 60cm.
One entertaining activity he’d undertaken with Al had been designing a set of toys for the cats and the mice – but Al seemed to be more interested in the birds and the bees (in both senses). At Al’s surprising suggestion, he’d even 3D-fabbed high climbing frames for the bridge and vetbay – with the top platforms at 140 and 150cm, meaning that Sideris and the cats could look at each other eye to eye, as well as having a much more substantial scratching pole and some interesting ways for the cats to climb up or down.
In the case of the mice, both females had had litters, and Al had verified their genotyping and prepared a breeding program designed to maximize the resilience of the colony – as well as weed out those that didn’t do well in the space environment, with its reduced gravity and altered diurnal cycle. and radiation characteristics. Although he wasn’t a biologist, he’d enjoyed the discussion with Al as Al asked his advice about some of the alternatives he was considering.
For Al, the toys they were 3D-printing weren’t just toys, but part of a program of cognitive experiments that he was implementing with the mice. For now, Al was leaving the cats alone – they showed no interest in him or his avatars, and he none in them. Except that Al had made a couple of suggestions when they’d discussed why the cats weren’t breeding.
It turns out there is a seasonal component – they mate in spring-summer-autumn. So Al had now reprogrammed the environmental controls so that one no longer has eternal winter in Vetlab A, but a clear 12 monthly seasonal cycle all along the main deck. Yes, it seemed a good idea for the rest of the deck too – just plus or minus a few degrees, and some associated cycles of humidity and airspeed – much like in the biodomes. Casindra had moved into Spring!
Al had been confident the cats would breed in the new environment, but suggested putting the kittens into cryogenic suspension as soon as they were weaned. Testing the experimental cryobeds on infants was also an important contribution to the Paradisi project. With the older cryonic coffins, you were clinically dead in cryofreeze, but with the newer cryogenic cryobeds, your metabolism merely slowed, like with natural animal hibernation, to well under 1% – so that the six-month transition from Earth or Lunar orbit into Jupiter orbit was effectively just a very good night’s sleep…
Sideris made a brief update to his Captain’s log – probably word for word the same as yesterday’s. The main message was a negative one – still no message drone through the wormhole from Sol. He did have more detail in his personal notes and engineering log. But Al had contributed considerably more detail and discussion about his experiments to the logs. Of course, with no message drones waiting at the Gate, they actually had no way of sending logs back to Sol. So they’d made the huge decision to send one of their EmProbes to the Gate with three message drones loaded with up-to-date logs and blood and tissue samples from Al’s medical tests and on-board experiments.
Sending that EmProbe had been a disconcerting moment, but perhaps it was too soon to worry. Ida should have been able to send back message drones pretty much as they came through. They depended on this as they had only a limited number of drones, and had already probably wasted two M-drones within the cavum. But they had exactly four EmProbes and four planets to cover. So positioning an EMP with three MDs at the Gate reduced their capability of sending back planetary samples to 50% of the original capacity – they’d retain six MD on board after having started with twelve: two MDs sent in cavum, one MD on completing the gate mission, and now an EMP-and three MDs on the way back to the Gate so they could have some ongoing way of communicating if they continued to get no messages from Sol.
Solar Command had only had a 10% success rate with in-cavum launches, but were always (over)confident that their latest experimental modifications would enable reliable reversed transit of the wormhole. They had of course reassured him that there would be no problem for him opening a new cavum to send back messages, or bringing Casindra home himself, but so far he’d spent three of his twelve message drones without any evidence of one getting through. Admittedly, according to the records of all the unmanned missions, they’d only ever lost one message drone for a launch through an in-system gate, and none since they’d been operating with a 10-times-diameter mirror constraint. But whatever the problem, he had just launched one of the four EmProbes he had on Casindra, along with three of his remaining nine M-drones, on a tricky high fuelburn course to the Gate. In a way, he was more concerned that his arsenal was dwindling rapidly, than that there had been no messages arriving from home.
The protocol was that each M-drone received was sent back within two weeks of receipt or after expiry of the specified transmission window, or potentially a pre-prepared alternative sent in its place. Al had sent Message Drone 3 with logs and biomedical data/samples the moment the report on the gate upgrades had been uploaded. Since the cavum transit using the PTL4 mirror took 36 days, and the journey back with the hopefully doubled SJL_5 mirror should take only 18 days, he should have had an answer back within 10 to 12 weeks – it was three days lat
e if the SJL4 construction had been completed on schedule, but may not arrive for another couple of weeks if the upgrade hadn’t been undertaken on schedule… Nonetheless they still could have sent a drone through to say that the cavum MDs hadn’t got through, and at least replaced one of them.
Sideris was going over and over this in his head, and even talking it over with Al hadn’t helped – although Al was supportive of his guesses as to what might be going on. He didn’t think it was likely that Armageddon had happened in some form, and Earth or its inhabitants had somehow been destroyed. In that case, it was more likely that Ida would have started sending through a series of cobbled together evacuation missions with the Founders, scientists and engineers that were based there.
Most likely the delay was due to a construction delay relating to the upgrade of the SJL4 mirror – he didn’t even know who was running the construction effort and he itched with the frustration of not being there to sort it out. But at this stage, according to protocol and the upgrade schedule, he was supposed to presume that none of the first three message drones had made it. No matter that he felt certain the problem lay at the other end, with the mirror – and that could very well be the death of him: sending him out on an intergalactic mission, relying on a mirror being deconstructed and reconstructed under the direction of who knows what idiot. He, Jerome Sideris, was the one who should be there, at the construction sites, pulling it all together, making sure nothing went wrong.