Casindra Lost

by Marti Ward

  But he hadn’t got to tell Sideris about his game theoretic analysis of their situation with Solar Command: the nature of the Nash equilibrium that they were currently facing – and which flew in the face of the Captain’s argument about equal gaps. But Al decided to hold his peace for now. The Captain needed time to cool down. At the moment he, or at least his ears, seemed to work much like the Cavitrans – twelve seconds to heat up to red hot, and then twelve hours to cool down to nominal levels.

  Maybe his ears would be cool enough to listen by this evening.

  Chapter Seven

  New Eden elliptic

  New Eden (Ddaera), as mapped by SS Casindra, with major continental and oceanic regions, as named by the Founders. The Ddaeran distances are in daith and the equatorial circumference of Ddaera is 1000 daith, a daith corresponding to a day’s journey by a messenger on foot or horseback (about 25 miles or 40 kilometers). The small islands in the south of the Azurean Sea were named by Captain Jerome Sideris after The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas, AD1844).

  Sideris

  30 October 2076 08:00

  Captain Sideris was not feeling very much like the captain of the SS Casindra at present. His orders provided that he send a message drone every 12 to 14 weeks in the absence of communication from Sol. His AI was very insistent on obeying the protocol to the letter, and had appeared to be at the point of mutiny – actually preparing and scheduling to send off the only remaining message drone at the Gate, without his authorization and despite specific orders not to do so.

  Eventually they had reached a compromise – a compromise with a machine! Sideris had wanted to wait till the half way point on their route from PTL5 to New Eden, so that at least they had something different to report apart from results from the latest blood tests – and so that Casindra would reach New Eden by the time a similarly delayed return message was sent. He didn’t know whether to be angry or frustrated or shocked – or even frightened. He suspected his anger and frustration shouldn’t be directed at Al, but at Solar Command.

  They had just reached that halfway point and transitioned onto the elliptic that would bring them into New Eden orbit in just under 20 weeks, ready to start the real mission: Was New Eden able to be colonized? Were there convenient colonization sites? What needed to happen to make New Eden safe both for humans and from humans?

  But did Earth even exist anymore? Had the Paradisi conspiracy been discovered by the media and dismantled by the Earth governments? Had the station at SJL4 been destroyed? Had the LETO construction fleet been wiped out by a solar flare? Sideris didn’t know what to think…

  Al had accepted the point that Solar Command hadn’t been conforming to protocol, and had proposed a compromise – he was getting good at that. Al had calculated an early transition onto a New Eden elliptic, scheduling it for 6:00 this morning as his usual concession to Sideris and his beauty sleep. This allowed him to report the completed transition today, with a message drone less than a week late compared to Solar Command being months late: they had started with twelve M-drones, and this would be the eighth Casindra had sent, yet they’d received just one back to reuse.

  Al had also agreed that they could wait till New Eden to send the next, in the absence of a message in the meantime – even though that would be weeks late. Of course, they didn’t have much choice as they had nothing left at the Gate, and their resources were already stretched as it was: at the PTL4 Gate they had EMP-G with its empty docks; EMP-A was heading to Ardesco with two Volcans and an MD; EMP-T was due to rendezvous with them with two Volcans at the end of their time in New Eden – although Al had come up with a diversion plan that could instead get it to Ardesco shortly after EMP-A; while EMP-NE was being kept with Casindra for their own security and the integrity of the New Eden mission. Sending EMP-NE to the Gate now would both throw away their lifeline and impact the success of the New Eden mission – and if EMP-T didn’t make it to an Ardesco or New Eden rendezvous, they would have no way of returning the physical samples to Sol other than cutting short the mission and returning themselves.

  For EMP-T, the safe standard course would be to continue with the rendezvous at New Eden, but Al was confident that a course adjustment in four weeks’ time would bring it onto an Ardesco elliptic that would achieve rendezvous with EMP-A just nine days after its arrival, doubling the number of Volcans available for planetary survey there. He was tempted to think this decision didn’t matter, as it wasn’t on the critical path. But he suspected his objectiveness was being compromised by worry about the communication issues, the lack of message drones, the dearth of information from Sol.

  Of course, it was better for the exploration mission to have more exploration done earlier, and for exploration at New Eden and Ardesco to be able to proceed in parallel. And Al couldn’t give him any real indication of differences in risk – basically Al thought the increase in risk to the probes and drones was negligible, while the risks of the overall mission were in fact reduced. Although there was a chance of critical communications being disrupted by a solar flare or other unpredictable factor, Al had argued that could be virtually eliminated by having the changed orders sent and acknowledged well in advance, and although risks of compromise of EMP-T by such ion or radiation burst more than doubled with the closer transit to Paradisi, the overall risk remained well under 1% that they would lose EMP-T.

  The mission as originally specified had redundancy and safeguards built in at every level, giving it a better than 99% chance of achieving all its mission goals. But the safeguards have all been undermined. Now they are down to the wire. There is no more slack. There is no room for any kind of real emergency. All because Solar ‘couldn’t Command its way out of the bathroom’ wouldn’t send back his drones. Now his instincts, not to mention his nightmares, said that it was time for something to go seriously wrong, and his gut said that chances were now 99% that they would not be able to return all the specified samples, and that he’d be very lucky to get out of Paradisi with his life.

  Sideris

  31 October 2076 08:00

  Having nothing else much to do for the last few months, Sideris had taken a leaf out of Al’s book and had read some psychology, linguistics and neuroscience texts, as well as searching the database for information on points where he wanted a bit more depth or was trying to connect them with his current situation.

  With Al looking after the ship and monitoring the system logs, all he really had to do was monitor Al’s log – and that usually took him all of half an hour each morning. After that, he would spend another half hour wandering around redundantly checking all the bridge displays and systems – all of which were monitored by Al, if not updated with direct input from Al. Then he would return to the command chair and spend the rest of the shift sending himself crazy with worry, looking for anything that would take his mind away from the litany of disasters and idiocies he was cataloguing that might explain the lack of messages from home.

  Simba seemed very sensitive to his moods, and once he had stopped actively exploring the ship’s control and status interfaces, she would push her head into his hands, or place her front paws on his leg and her chin his knee to gaze into his face. As soon as he made eye contact, she would take that as a sign of approval to jump up on his lap.

  Samba was the opposite. He would suddenly just jump into his lap – but any kind of eye contact before that happened would make him stop, back off, even curl up and go to sleep where he was. Sometimes, though, when Sideris was thinking hard about some problem, or their current dilemma, it seemed as if Samba would just suddenly appear in his lap. Sideris would wake from whatever introverted state he was in to find a sleeping Samba keeping him warm.

  Could it be that the cats had been affected by the wormhole? Or maybe the cats were just cats and he was the one that had changed. He felt more instinctively connected to the cats than he’d ever felt with any human. He wasn’t one to get caught up in emotional outpourings, and indeed had to train himself out of his n
atural insensitivity. It had taken him years to learn to read the more subtle changes in voice pattern, body language and facial expressions, and develop quick heuristic responses that would give people back the kind of response they expected. He suspected Al was going through much the same kind of process with him.

  Whatever the reason, Sideris found the contact with the cats surprisingly encouraging, even comforting. Simba almost seemed to know what he was thinking and feeling. It reminded him of some his teachers and mentors, his Masters supervisor in particular… She would tend to look at him wisely in just the same way, encouraging him more with silence and occasional nods than actual words. And those few words, such as they were, were usually little more than prompts down the problem solving path. Often when Simba looked into his eyes as he discussed a problem with her, he could virtually hear his old supervisor’s voice: So what does that lead you to conclude? Do you see any alternatives? If that isn’t the solution you want, maybe you’re solving the wrong problem!

  Whereas Al was running experiments of many kinds for the scientists back home, Sideris had decided he wanted to formally explore the strange behavior of the cats and mice that had experienced the wormhole. He didn’t know much about cats and had never owned a pet of any sort, but somehow these cats were not what he expected, Simba in particular seemed to show unusual intelligence and empathy, but that might be simply his lack of experience dealing with animals.

  His reading had made abundantly clear that doing behavioral experiments is tricky at the best of times, and he was stuck up here – on his own – with limited expertise, limited company and limited availability of subjects. For any scientific experiment, you need a specific hypothesis, clear predictions and plenty of subjects.

  His initial broad hypothesis was that somehow the cats had developed a degree of empathy, with each other and with him, that went beyond usual expectations. The specific hypothesis came from his reading – a neurochemical called oxytocin seemed to be responsible for mediating empathy. Higher levels of oxytocin might account for higher levels of empathy. An alternate explanation was that higher sensitivity to oxytocin might account for higher empathy. A third alternative could be that he was imagining it… But then Al was too!

  Assuming that he wasn’t imagining things, and given that all the cryolab tests had shown that there was no physical alteration in the cats, either genetically or anatomically, the specific testable hypothesis that had emerged was a physiological one: that there would be higher oxytocin levels than usual.

  The big problem was that he didn’t have any controls.

  So he had started engaging with Al on his empathy theory. Al had been studying the mice he’d brought out of cryo, but there were still quite a few in cryo – balanced across the traditional intravenous fixation and vitrification approach to cryonic freezing and the newer gas-mediated form of cryogenic suspension. The original mice Al had revived had been selected with a balance across the two methods too, while the cats had both undergone the 2nd generation version – and had indeed shared a cryobed for several days while they were loaded aboard.

  Sideris also determined to do some research into the nature of the new cryoprocess and the differences versus the old.

  Al

  31 October 2076 08:18

  Al was delighted that the Captain was in a good mood despite the dispatch of the final message drone they had at the Gate, even more so that he had approached him for help and advice. He had of course been aware of the self-education program in Cognitive Science over the last few months, and his interest in the behavior of the cats and the wormhole mice cohort.

  Al agreed that the cats seemed to be demonstrating high levels of understanding and empathy, although he hadn’t had any prior history with cats to be certain about how unusual this might be. He wasn’t sure, however, what to think of the way the Captain was increasingly treating them as people rather than animals or subjects. He doubted that the Captain would have the objectivity to run a proper experiment with them.

  From another perspective, perhaps the cats were going down a similar path with the Captain… They seemed to be ‘drawing him out of his shell’, and in some senses actually helping with his solitary responsibilities of command. It was unhealthy for the Captain to be totally on his own without any human company, and totally reprehensible that Solar Command was giving such a low priority to getting the promised message through.

  Al had no basis for comparisons either, in relation to his mice, or the fish and birds, but he had been noting clear signs of intelligence, and awareness of what was going around him as his avatars performed their regular feeding and testing duties, and he was exploring building a relationship with them – just as he was with the Captain for that matter.

  Nonetheless, he had independently come to the conclusion that the animals on this ship, the cats and the mice in particular, were not behaving in the typical ways he could see in the vids, the databases or the netdump. Although he couldn’t quite put his… digit… on what was different with his mice, the special relationship the cats had with the Captain seemed to be especially pertinent... He had deliberately avoided interfering with the Captain’s relationship with the cats, although he had carefully logged every interaction in the respective logs on his research subject. But working together, they might be able to determine what was happening here.

  Unfortunately, the Captain had not developed a sufficiently well thought out experimental paradigm – they didn’t have the subjects to waste on many similar experiments that just tested things they hadn’t thought of the first time. They would have to undertake a single multifactor exploratory study. Fortunately, Al already had a range of control groups as a result of the experiments the Gunther scientists had commended him on.

  The first part of the experiment was essentially non-invasive, with a quick bit of checking verified that oxytocin was a sensible marker to focus on. Al had kept blood and tissue samples from all the animals he’d interacted with over the last year – including the mice and the cats. Each of the message probes had carried back a set of samples, and now with the Gunther message he had the results of their independent analysis too.

  Nonetheless, he’d thought the experiment interesting enough to now test all the samples for levels of oxytocin as well as a whole range of neurotransmitters, plus other markers for a wide range of mental health conditions – and he’d managed to find baselines for most of them for a range of lab animals, including the breed of mice he had access to, along with some quite extensive genetic studies of calico cats.

  In terms of bringing out more mice as controls, Al had wanted a clearer picture of what they were going to do with them and how having a control was going to contribute to the study. The Captain was looking for evidence of a change. Al was more interested in looking for evidence of a cause – it would be nice to be a bit more specific than ‘being on the Casindra’.

  Al had taken the opportunity to look up some cross-references that had been triggered by his searches on oxytocin or had become salient in his associative net as he started to receive the results of the new blood analyses. Sideris himself showed the strongest increase in oxytocin during the wormhole, although his initial levels had been lowest relative to norm – and they had been stable since then. The original mice colony showed the least increase, probably because they’d been revived mid-cavum, rather than being awake for the whole trip through the cavum like the Captain and the cats.

  Two interesting avenues for further investigation had appeared – but Al didn’t think he would share either of them with the Captain at this point.

  The first interesting crossover related to oxytocin’s role in mating preparedness and sexual behavior. It seemed there was an agonist-antagonist relationship with some of the sex hormones that induced ovulation and prepared the womb for implantation. The calico’s delayed pregnancy may have been a result of more stimulation being needed to produce the greater quantity of hormones necessary to overcome the augmented oxytocin antag
onist. He hadn’t noticed any problems with any of the mice breeding though.

  The second item of interest related to a flag Al’s cross-referencing had shown up on the Captain’s confidential psychological evaluation. There were several interesting remarks…

  A key factor in his selection for this mission was his ability to focus and get the job done, meeting deadlines and solving problems in the face of adversity, without panicking or getting distracted.

  One interesting cross-reference arose as a result of oxytocin being indicated as a factor in autism, and being used in some experimental treatments. This led to him being given access to confidential psych reports on Sideris including comments like ‘loner’, ‘borderline autistic’, ‘on the spectrum’, ‘preferred not to have to engage in social contact’, ‘shy and easily embarrassed’, ‘bull-headed and hard to dissuade from a decision once made’, and, at the end of the last one, that he ‘would be an ideal candidate for an extended solo mission’.

  Al was now mostly at home with all the weird and wonderful metaphors, the different perspectives, and the different ways of measuring what was essentially the same thing. Many of the reports he scanned got the units wrong in places, and indeed many of the units represented concepts that had definitions that differed quite markedly from the way they were used and understood by the average person. But he could see that there were advantages as well as disadvantages in the different ways of looking at things. There had been several occasions where Sideris’s subjective human perspective saw things that Al couldn’t imagine having recognized himself.