Casindra Lost

by Marti Ward

  “Thank you, Al. Please keep me informed! The drones with the samples from Tenebra aren’t at the Gate yet… Please have the newly arrived message drone rendezvous with EMP-G and prepared for reuse. We will continue with our plan to use the message drone from Tenebra next, dispatching after the Petra mission to provide the most up-to-date logs and a comprehensive analysis and report. And it will be a relief to have EMP-G back to its full complement of three message drones.”

  Sideris then proceeded to play the full vid from his boss – Gus Reach that is – current or former or substantive, he wasn’t quite sure… He didn’t regard Thorndike as his boss, just a kind of mission commander, and it sounded like there was nothing in Thorndike’s message worth looking at – he’d check it later.

  He was relieved simply to have his drone back and the communication channel open at last – for Sideris it represented a lifeline to their home solar system. Even more importantly, the fundamental mission had been accomplished – he knew that they knew that he was alive, that humans could survive a wormhole to another galaxy.

  The Solar Horizons Foundation had been working towards this moment for decades. But he hadn’t known anything about Paradisi or New Eden until a week before his departure for SJL4. It was touted as salvation for Earth – but in fact it was salvation for the Founders and their families and friends.

  Reach Corp was trying to negotiate a deal for their employees to be included, although not as part of the ten-ship fleet they were constructing, each of which was owned by and customized for one of the ten families that had founded the project. Young Solomon Reach had proposed that they refurbish and use the prototype Asteria class ship that had been used to supply and support the station at SJL4, cutting months of the usual transit times out between Earth or Lunar Orbit and Jupiter’s Orbit.

  Gus’s message concluded by emphasizing that he had personally recommended him for this mission, and would do everything he could to support him – it was most encouraging to have this further message of support from a man he knew and trusted and admired. Thorndike’s message did not contain any new information or orders as far as he could tell.

  But at least now Sideris felt he could concentrate on the Foundation’s mission… More than that, he felt an ownership of the mission now that he hadn’t before – it was now sounding much more like a Reach Corp mission. Gus had also given him a bit of info on the planned follow up missions. This also helped him to see some of the rationale behind the massive biodomes and cryo experiments Casindra hosted.

  Reach Corp would be organizing two LETO colonization and mining expeditions, scheduled at three year intervals after Casindra’s, crewed largely by Reach Corp construction fleet personnel with Earthside recruitment covering all the skills required for a new colony – with 500 settlers carried in cryoholds attached to each ship. Like Casindra, the LETOs would be powered in an ad hoc way by prototype double-cavity EmDrives that they would hold in their scissorlink grapplers, but it was expected that the prototype Artificial Gravity Generators would be deployed on these ships. Their missions would be to site and establish the primary colonies on New Eden as well as the peripheral mining colonies on the other planets – based on his reports and recommendations.

  His and Al’s, that is…

  What happened at this end of his mission had always seemed rather up in the air, but now it seemed that he had two viable choices: go back to the Reach Construction Fleet in Sol, or join the Reach Corp New Eden Colonization Expedition in Paradisi.

  Or would it be them joining the Jerome Sideris Colonization Expedition?

  Sideris

  1 April 2076 06:00

  Al had done well to catch up to Petra with that low to high slingshot maneuver. They were about to decelerate into orbit around Petra but, although it was much the same size as Mercury, they were much further out and it had a much greater mass. It was dark without the characteristic red, yellow and blue tints of Mars, Venus and Earth.

  It had been a pretty long flight – Sideris hoped it was worth it…

  Petra was, after all, little more than a big piece of rock, and spectral analysis seemed to indicate it belonged with the ring asteroids inside the orbit of Ardesco, and was a sister to New Eden’s moon Acerba and Tenebra’s moon Candeesi – all apparently remnants of a fateful collision untold millennia ago. The surprise was perhaps that there weren’t many more fragments spread across the system.

  Indeed, Petra was much heavier than your typical asteroid: evidently the core of the former planet had been blasted halfway across the system, leaving myriad small fragments of the mantle near its existing orbit. Petra’s heaviness meant heavy-metal rich, which is why it was of such interest to the Paradisi Consortium. Petra was to be the fuel supply for their nuclear and EmDrives – both Uranium and Thorium were plentiful on Petra.

  Yet this planetoid was hardly in the neighborhood – Tenebra to New Eden was much like the familiar Mars to Earth trip. But relative to Mars, Petra was half way to Jupiter and would be somewhere in the middle of the asteroid belt – and half the time it would be on the opposite side of the sun too. Tenebra’s year was almost double that of Earth’s or New Eden’s, but Petra’s was almost double that again!

  The EmProbe with the von Neumann mining robots was ready to go. The Petra probe was due to be released momentarily. It would slow down while the Casindra shot past, dropping off its Volcan drones as it did a braking slingshot maneuver around the planet.

  Casindra’s visit was in a sense redundant and hadn’t been part of the original plan – they could have sent the EmProbe from Tenebra. But Casindra’s sensor array was both more powerful and more diverse than any of the probes that had visited or were visiting. The extra data might just be important enough to affect decisions being taken right now about the forthcoming mining, exploration and colonization missions.

  The idea was that the von Neumann miners would propagate to efficiently mine the planet, refine the ores, and cache fuel and raw materials for the colonists to use on their arrival. One proposal was to set up ferries to cart it to Tenebra, but seeing the distances involved and the shorter transfer windows for traditional transfer orbits, Sideris thought it would be worth considering setting up fuel and materiel dumps at the Paradisi-Tenebra Lagrange points – not just at the PTL4 Gate itself, but PTL5 and perhaps even PTL3 on the opposite side from Tenebra, as well as PTL1 and 2 in its direct neighborhood. They would also be important positions for wireless relays and beacons to avoid Paradisi or its planets blocking signals. The precise stations would also allow for laser messaging that was more resilient when approaching radio shadow.

  Sideris mused long into the night, updating his log with all these ideas and considerations – and he hadn’t even sighted the wretched planetoid yet!

  Al

  1 April 2076 09:00

  Al was intrigued by the idea of von Neumann machines. Invented in the 1940s and originally hand simulated, they were a step on the road to von Neumann’s invention of the stored program computer. Al had enjoyed watching one of his subprocessors simulate multiple variants in multiple environments. Von Neumann’s idea was to program the simplest machines that could replicate themselves in a digital sense – in a kind of intelligent memory called a cellular automaton.

  The modern idea was that they were robots that lived in the real world – yes, a critical component of the definition of life was self-reproduction and self-sufficiency. An initial realization of the vN concept were the 3D printers that could reproduce themselves at the beginning of the 21st century – but they had to be given the appropriate materials. These mining robots were designed and programmed so that they could find the materials they needed and assemble replicas of themselves, which themselves would produce more and more machines until they ran out of material or hit some kind of programmed population limit.

  Of course, Al was not permitted to play with the actual von Neumann machines they were launching onto Petra. The idea was that they not only had the drive to reprod
uce, they had a drive to mine, refine and stockpile useful materials – not only those needed for their reproduction, but those needed for the colonization of a new star system. He had accessed the database records and noted all the safeguards built in so that they wouldn’t meet a catastrophic end, wouldn’t reproduce anything that wasn’t a perfect replica, and wouldn’t explode beyond the resources of the planet.

  Although the aim was to launch refined materials to Tenebra and other convenient depots, the vNs deliberately did not have flight capabilities – they would be confined to Petra. Separate tenders would be required to transport the stockpiled resources, leaving the von Neumann miners behind to continue their preprogrammed balance between mining, refining and reproducing.

  Of course, the vN intelligence was limited – much more limited than even the subsystem processors aboard Casindra. They had built-in tools, including refining and assay processing capabilities similar to those the Volcans had used on Tenebra. All they needed to know was how to use the tools, mine and refine the ores, and build more of themselves. But Al wondered whether their creators had underestimated the interactions and complexity of their risks and potentials in developing a vast swarm of network intelligence. Although bandwidth allocations and restrictions introduced latency and limitations that would make it difficult to develop a planetwide intelligence. There were certainly dangers if all contingencies had not been correctly anticipated, all limitations correctly sized and programmed, all embargoes on outside contact and access to other technologies properly enforced.

  This was why Al had supported the Captain’s inclinations, and had been so keen himself on coming to Petra to personally ensure that the miners were landed safely on Petra, and the Volcans were safely retrieved. In their discussions, the Captain had moreover relayed some of the concerns of Aditya Ganesh, the human Founder responsible for the vN technology and the seeding project. Al determined that he would send a note to Dr Ganesh with his own observations and prognoses in association with their reports on the Petra seeding mission. Perhaps they should think of leaving an EmProbe nearby to keep an eye them – he would raise that with the Captain. Unfortunately due to the jagged asteroid nature of Petra, planetary orbits (and even the L1 and L2 points) were not as stable as the kind of gravitationally rounded planets they were used to.

  The operation on Petra was very similar to what they’d done on Tenebra, but also much trickier. Al was guiding an EmProbe into low orbit. It carried three Volcans, each with a payload of six vNs, and targeted to areas of Petra identified as having the resources required for both reproduction and colonization resourcing. There was little atmosphere to provide aerodynamic support, so the Volcans would have to use the rated 0.8G maximum of their EmDrives to land and take off. Moreover, there was no prepared runway and no ocean or ice for a skid landing – on the contrary the terrain was rocky and heavily cratered. Thus the plan was not to land – they would come almost to a hover, and roll the payload down whatever slope would reduce the impact.

  The vNs were something of a closed secret – literally! As they were loaded, they looked like a heavy metal ball, but they always settled the same way up – there was evidently a heavy base, a segment perhaps a meter thick, and the rounded shapes of a variety of tools could be discerned on the top two-thirds of the sphere, fitted together like a jigsaw or a puzzleball.

  Al had found an interesting note at the end of the deployment instructions that provided a nickname and some additional insights into the vNs.

  “Although all duty of care should be employed during deployment, the Noomies are designed to be robust. It is more important that they are not left any drone technology than that they are landed softly. They can safely be dropped from as high as 5m with forward velocities as high as 30m/s.”

  Some of the craters and rocks the Volcans were finding were hundreds of meters high, although most of the smaller craters were more like 10m. The strategy that Al found most practical was to aim at a small crater and drop the payload on the lip to roll down into it. No doubt as they explored in their semi-random self-organizing fashion, they’d be doing a bit of that fall-and-roll on their own.

  Once all 18 ‘Noomies’ were down on the ground, and all the Volcans were up in low orbit, he activated each group one by one, with a high-powered highly directional coded microwave pulse, and watched as they awoke. The arms and legs and drills and hammers on top unfolded, exposing solar panels. A quick adjustment of legs rolled the base to optimize solar exposure, and they started digging – and their microwave band started to fill with robotic chatter: basic sensor data and wave after wave of reporting on successive stages in their analysis of their samples.

  The Captain was fascinated, and they kept the Volcan probes circling as they watched what unfolded. Occasionally one of the miners would close up its legs on one side as it pushed up with its legs on the other before closing into a sphere. It would roll a full turn before unfolding to reverse the maneuver, shooting a leg out to stop the roll – and in seconds, it was back digging again.

  Al had been carefully monitoring the battery reserves of the Volcans, and had noted some unexpected dips during course corrections. Suddenly alarms sounded, and probe VCT1 lit up red, showing it was on emergency reserves.

  “Bring home the Volcans,” the Captain ordered instantly.

  Al was already on it, having directed the EmProbe low to scoop up VCT1, obeying the Captain’s order and collecting VCT2 a couple of minutes later.

  Apart from their intervention with VCT1, the mission had gone off as programmed. Now they could log the successful deployment, and the reports. They had a coded pulse to get a summary of each vN’s mining and construction history, and would use that in 11 hours’ time when they finalized their reports – that would embellish the logs with a performance summary covering an entire Petra day, and give MD6 something to write home about.

  Al was also working on a separate report to Dr Anitya Ganesh about the possibility of the vNs developing a collective intelligence despite the carefully thought out limitations imposed. He had also prepared some possible plans that would allow them to monitor the vNs closely enough to detect any such unexpected developments – this would be logged and flagged for prior discussion with the Captain, in the hope he might endorse the proposal or even make his own suggestions or selections.

  Al wondered what was happening back in Sol. In his short life before the mission, he had had a rich and elaborate interaction with other AIs, initially in the vicinity of the manufacturing facility, and later in the construction fleet, and finally amongst the privileged few level 3 AIs that were aware of the Paradisi project.

  Being out here is like being cut off from some of my senses. I’m no longer part of a community. There is really nothing to ground me, no other AI to point out flawed assumptions or missing variables. Perhaps that is why I am so interested in the social and conversational aspects of my interaction with the captain, the cats and my other experimental subjects.

  Al took the opportunity to isolate a subset of his processors and restrict the connection back to a specific protocol. That would be his alter ego or superego, his conscience, his potential reminder for things he might have missed.

  Simba

  1 April 2076 09:00

  Gray’n’gold had deviated from his usual routine. He’d picked up his smelly water and crunchy nibble, and headed back the way he’d come. He seemed distracted, and hardly noticed when she wound around his legs to tell him he was going the wrong way.

  Samba had already headed into their room for their usual morning snack and toilet break, but Simba went back with the captain to his big chair in the windowed room from where he surveyed and ruled the stars. This time the lower diagonal window at the front of the room was showing what looked like white birds swooping to the ground. She slunk close to watch, creeping more to the side as the captain growled at her and waved his arm.

  It was hard to resist swiping at the birds, but her leader had made his will known, so sh
e just stayed there watching. She almost reached up in a swipe as a white bird laid its eggs from the air, in little hollows in the ground. What kind of a strange place is this? She remembered birds, and she remembered eggs, and she remembered stalking them to nests in trees… from before, from before this place and the experiences that preceded it, from a time when she had real trees to climb and controlled her own life.

  Samba joined them, crouching, watching from the other end of the window. He wouldn’t remember birds and eggs and nests and trees: he was born into this life, like his father before him. But still he was fascinated.

  The white birds flew off, each dropping off another batch of eggs, then another, before returning to some kind of nest, high in the dark sky, their white profiles visible against the dark ground and the dusky sky behind, through the upper window.

  Something was strange about this. The birds should be sitting on a nest full of eggs. But… no! Before the eggs had even time to get cold, they were cracking open, hatching… Hatching into monstrous kits that still wore bits of the egg.

  Simba seemed to remember something about birds digging for worms, that must be what they were doing. Again, strange that there was no mother bird to feed them. Strange the way they’d half walk half roll from place to place…

  Suddenly their leader wasn’t the captain any more, he was gray’n’gold, and he was slapping his leg playfully to get their attention – as if he had any need to do that! He wasn’t the boss when he wasn’t captain, but still they could humor him. They escorted him back to their room.

  Once there, he crouched to talk to them, eyeing both of them in turn. He had their full attention now… He started to talk to them, explaining things. Simba didn’t really understand, but she sensed there was going to be a long period, a full set of seasons, with not much happening.

  Simba meowed at that and he petted her head. For cats like her, there were always interesting things to do and experience. She and Samba had their own little experience going in the evenings, when he didn’t visit. And they had their toys…