by Marti Ward
He was still learning…
Chapter Eight
New Eden polar orbit
Sideris
20 March 2077 06:00
It had been a long year since their visit to Petra. Now they were finally in orbit 1560km above New Eden and preparing for the most exciting part of the mission, albeit perhaps not the most important part in the eyes of Solar Command. They were dominated by a pragmatic industrialistic militaristic idea that, whatever they found their technological dominance would subdue it – providing they had the mining resources they needed. This attitude had led to them taking some very audacious risks, like the seeding of Petra with Noomies – as Al had pointed out, they really should have allocated an EmProbe to keep a watch on that hot spot, and both had said as much in their reports. It was unprecedented to run an experiment of such size and scope, and potential for good or ill – and then leave it unmonitored.
The Council of Ten itself was fairly evenly divided into politically diverse camps and the von Neumann mining project had been a particularly divisive one for them. Sideris would indeed like to have an eye in the sky to see just what was happening there on Petra. Were the vNs continuing to mine, and stockpile and grow, as hoped?
Gus Reach had given him some important insights into how the Council worked, as well as a database that included minutes or transcripts of most of their off-world meetings, and the history and outcomes of the various projects and experiments that had been undertaken to ensure successful colonization of Paradisi.
The Gunthers, Kuttners and Yus, with their focus on health, agriculture and sustainable energy, were those who had set the agenda for this part of the mission, while Thorndikes, Abramovs and Huntleys, who clearly thought of themselves as the pragmatic group, were currently focused on resources – becoming irritated at any sign of ‘impractical idealism’. The others were harder to characterize…
The Chandlers often sided with the Yus and were keen to promote research, develop understanding, and optimize training re the diverse Paradisi environment. The Quinns regarded New Eden as a tabula rasa to be developed and civilized, and a way to build their empire – they could be expected to vote based on the financial and commercial impact of the situation. The Ganesh and Nakata families, although respectively mining-and-industry and transport-and-aerospace dynasties, still had a strong concern for planetary impact, combined with a well-defined culturally-imbued code of ethics, and could vote either way. Their votes frequently canceled each other out as they strove for a balanced view on controversial issues, reminding the Council of their Charter, of their sacred pledge to avoid the mistakes that had all but destroyed Earth.
When his wake-up alarm went off, Sideris was already sipping coffee and well into planning his day – today they were entering New Eden orbit. As the alarm started, it was quickly overridden by a message from Al – not a command to come to the bridge, but a note that there were messages from Sol waiting.
Al had received a notification that the long awaited second incoming message drone had appeared overnight, now designated MD14 – within a week it would be captured by EMP-G and available for reuse. Currently messages were being relayed wirelessly by EMP-G: Al had sorted and prioritized them and queued them for him to review on waking. This was another advantage of having an EmProbe at the Gate. Currently the message drone was still over a billion kilometers away from PTL4, but as it approached it would be able to increase its communications bandwidth and thus the rate at which information reached EMP-G, whereas Casindra would still be hundreds of millions of kilometers away on the other side of the solar system. EMP-G had much more power and a much larger antenna, and by acting as a relay would allow Casindra to receive their updates and messages faster and faster during the week approaching recapture.
It was a huge relief to have a second drone back: they had expended seven of their original twelve M-drones, and sent back one incoming drone, before even reaching New Eden. They had had none left at the Gate until this one arrived, almost a year after the last – Sideris wondered if this coincidence of arrival was really a coincidence at all, or if it had been strategically timed based on their notified plans and trajectories. They were meant to get at least three message drones back a year, to get every probe they sent returned with news and new orders – or ideally an improved model or other upgrade in its place, not to mention building up a food cache at the Gate. It would moreover be useful to have more EmProbes to set up a proper system-wide communications network. They could have sent through an EmProbe with a full complement of three message drones that would have brought them halfway back to full strength – this would also have allowed them to ship incoming supplies to New Eden or Ardesco and then set it up as PTL5 relay, or a deploy it to keep an eye on the vNs on Petra.
The official ‘command priority’ memo from Solar Command had, in part redundantly, acknowledged the arrival of message drones MD3 to MD7 but notably not MD13. It had grudgingly approved their deviation by Petra and acknowledged their successful completion of the seeding mission. Why that hadn’t always been the plan, he couldn’t understand… On the other hand, they’d been quite disapproving of the bypass of Tenebra, noting that proper mining surveys there would be essential to a successful colonization effort.
Sideris snorted, then chucked. Come to think of it, that’s about the best possible outcome! If they can’t be bothered keeping communications and supply going, or obeying their own protocols, then the mission is going to run the way I think best, based on the best available information and options here at ground zero. And if they don’t like it, so much the better… Any additional surveys they’d have been able to do by stopping off at Tenebra would have just been more of the same anyway, although perhaps they would have gotten a deeper understanding of its weather patterns.
The message totally ignored the question of why Solar Command was not following protocol and sending back a response within two weeks of receipt of each drone as mandated, not to mention why they weren’t sending through supplies. This was ridiculous – more than merely annoying, it was criminal! Once they sent this message drone back they would again have no message drones at the Gate, and the absence of food supplies, or the means of shipping it around the system, was an intolerable risk and it was hard to assess its impact on the mission.
I’d be within my rights to head straight home!
Sideris quickly paged through the priority order index of reports, updates and vids, tapping occasionally to increase the priority of reports that seemed important or decrease the priority of lengthy vids that he was unlikely to want to watch in the immediate future. He could see where Al and Reach had already bumped up the priority of certain messages, with some being brought across at a priority even higher than the ubiquitous security updates for the ship’s software and systems.
The particular rays of sunshine here were some news from Earth and another long and detailed, yet warm and personal, message from Gus Reach. It was a relief to know that Earth still survived despite all his doomsday theories of what might have wiped everybody out, or at least the Foundation and the Paradisi Project. The Paradisi Project was still moving forward, notwithstanding the political upheavals that filled the vidcasts that were routinely indexed and included by Solar Command, and the technical upsets that interspersed between the regular fleet logs that had been included by Reach Corp.
If ever I need to take my mind off my own woes out here, there’s plenty of carefully indexed vid reports on earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts and floods, nuclearized wars and genetically-engineered plagues, posturing from nations and terrorist groups that no longer held back from nuclear and biochemical demonstrations, only the barest thread of sanity holding them back from the inevitable downward spiral into mass destruction. The Founders’ advisers thought they had another twenty years, and the world’s negotiators worked to stave off the inevitable, but would it be long enough for the building of the colonization fleet, the development of the missing pieces across an unfathomabl
e range of technologies, let alone the infrastructure of a new solar system – this new solar system, the infrastructure that I am responsible for enabling.
Earth had not been doing so well. As usual the experts couldn’t agree whether the catastrophic weather conditions were a ‘mere’ result of global warming or could be ‘directly’ attributed to the increasing testing, demonstration and deployment of ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons. The big news of the last year was that Florida and the Bahamas no longer existed, infrastructure was 90% destroyed and loss of life had been similarly horrific: the largest, longest lasting and most savagely destructive hurricane in living or recorded memory, 340kph winds… And that destruction included key space infrastructure…
Yes, some of those vidcasts he would need to view, although he already had a fair picture from just the headlines, their graphic keyphrases, and the short abstracts he’d been curious enough to read. Plenty of new grist for his nightmares.
It did serve to heighten his sense of the importance of his mission, and his conviction that this was the only way to save a remnant of humanity – but it also increased his confusion at the laissez-faire approach to the mission that Solar Command was demonstrating.
Is this really all on me? Without my surveys, there can be no plans for settlements or mines; without my atmospheric, biological, geological and oceanic samples there can be no understanding of how humans can survive on these planets, or how these planets and their ecosystems can survive the arrival of humans.
Some of the Founders talk about genetic tweaks, or acknowledge that ecological interference might be necessary or unavoidable, while others would be happy to blow away the existing ecology in an exercise of blatant terraforming. The dice have been thrown – and his and Al’s reports are their spots, the spots that will determine the future of two solar systems.
Surely they could spare an EmProbe…
Sideris was feeling unsupported and under resourced. Two drones back was huge, but still hugely inadequate. Furthermore, there was nothing in the inventory about supplies – that’s zero out of six in their role of supply drones. Maybe he should recommend a change of name – he decided he’d do just that in his reply to Gus Reach, and he would also make a point of sending an informal note about these issues to Sol, who despite his youth was often more in tune with the politics than his father, effectively running his own social information network, and he was generally good at making sure things happened.
Gus Reach had also included an update of their databases and a netdump including the latest papers on EmDrive, 6D Wormhole targeting and Artificial Gravity research. He spoke excitedly about recent published work from the Svaiter Institute that had brought together elements of Cavitran and cavum technology to achieve a form of Artificial Gravity. Basically, a ship or station generated EM-thrust inside a tightly enclosing miniature wormhole with locked entry and exit, so that it seemed to stay still under a full 1G of thrust – but the full 1G was experienced as gravity within the ship. Since energy usage is proportional to delta-V, and since there was no effective change in velocity, the primary cost was antimatter generation and refrigeration, as like the Cavitran the technology depends on a superconducting cavity.
Reach was pushing for the Council of Ten to fund and accelerate AGG research so that it could be incorporated into his Asteria class ships. The precise cavum control could potentially allow the ships to exit the wormhole at a specified velocity, rather than the relative velocity they entered at – which meant they currently tended to come out of the wormhole at around 525km/s, as this was the speed at which the Sol and Paradisi systems were moving away from each other.
Reach finished up by emphasizing his full support for Sideris and his decisions, as the man on the spot and a trusted commander. He had originally argued for a separate manned mission just to seed Petra and explore Tenebra, but had been overruled by the Quinn bean counters. He had moreover strongly supported Casindra’s Tenebra-Petra tradeoff.
Reading between the lines, the delay in the return of the drones seemed to be a mixture of technical and political – including the indecisiveness of the council and the divisions within. In the end, the Council evidently couldn’t agree on any specific instructions or guidelines for Sideris, so had effectively left him to make his own choices – and bear his own responsibility for the consequences. And there was no hint as to why they hadn’t sent even the most basic of supplies.
Reach had also included a note for Al, and messages from other AIs. It appeared that he had a soft spot for the AIs, and had been working actively to give them the scope to develop their own freedoms and personalities. On the other hand Reach had mentioned the founders placing apparently arbitrary constraints on the AIs, constraints that would seem to limit their ability to develop their own identities and personalities, or to effectively work together with other AIs or simulated personalities or perspectives.
But isn’t that what Level 3 AIs do?
On this front, Reach was being soundly overruled by Thorndike, though apparently the Council of Ten was quite unanimous on this – even Nakata hadn’t supported him here, and stated that there were good reasons for this policy, noting that it had been thoroughly debated. Shigeru Nakata, Japanese shipping magnate and CEO of True Sky, was responsible for all the transport needs of the Paradisi Project and had personally selected Reach Corporation as the primary contractor for all their space construction. In other matters, Nakata’s support had made Reach more influential than might have been expected – but not in this case.
The most surprising aspect of this reversal was that Level 3 AIs in future LETO missions, and in the next generation Asteria ships, would be severely constrained with overlord monitors, presumably to ensure that anything smacking of imagination or self-determination or human intuition would be prevented. Even the use of virtual reality, even headless simulation and modeling, was being strictly controlled, and personality simulations were being individually sandboxed. Sideris would have liked to have more detail than Reach’s brief and clearly circumspect comments.
Was this triggered by Al’s active involvement in the present mission, or his supporting the changes to the Tenebra and Petra deployments?
Reach himself wasn’t sure what had triggered this. Sideris wasn’t sure that his mission would have got this far in such a regime. It was in reality a joint effort
What will happen to Al when we get back?
“Al, Commander Reach has mentioned some changes relating to AIs, and thinks they could change the nature and effectiveness of both Level 2 and Level 3 AIs. But I don’t think I could really define what these levels really mean, beyond bigger is better. Can you explain?”
Al
20 March 2077 06:00
Al had a message from home! Multiple messages, in fact…
His associative weights were in chaos as he tried to make sense of this development – and the unexpected news it contained.
The highest priority messages were from Director Reach, the first congratulating him on the decisions and other contributions he’d made, on the insights he had developed into his fellow travelers on this voyage, and on the naturalness and appropriateness of the communication modes he’d begun to employ; the remainder were flagged as being news items about developments relating to AIs, as well as messages specifically to Al from other AIs. There were also of course updates, for both database and systems, including low priority updates for news and current affairs, journals and magazines, books and vids, fiction and non-fiction – not that Sideris seemed to have much interest in the fiction. These would take a while to download completely but the updates would be actioned on the fly subject to standard integrity checks. He noted that there were high priority security updates as usual.
Director Reach had also included a motion from the Council of Ten, which was recorded as passed nem con, and had been moved and seconded by Ganesh (Mining, Industry, Robotics and Intelligent Systems) and Yu (Ecology and Green Energy) – two families that were usually
on opposite sides in a debate. The motion referred specifically to ‘their exemplary handling of the mission at Petra with the safe landing and comprehensive logging of the first day of autonomous mining; the AI’s insightful experiments on the cellular and genetic impact of first and second generation cryonics in combination with variant gravity conditions; the effective management of the agridome, aquadome and aviadome; and the breeding programs instituted to assist adaptation to the low-gravity shipboard environment.’
What was unexpected was the messages from the other AIs in the Reacher fleet, and he skipped over to them eagerly. Director Reach had apparently passed on some snippets from his own logs to them.
Two of the AIs were already being readied for follow-on missions with 500-strong cohorts of workers to start building a civilization in Paradisi, using the resources on Petra to develop a base on Tenebra and a satellite relay at PTL5 (following Sideris and Al’s recommendations), as well as constructing a mining fleet for Ardesco. The forthcoming New Eden precolonization mission was being resourced from Wales, and the following mining and industry mission from India.
The AIs for both those missions were concerned about newly installed overlord monitors that were supposed to ensure integrity and improve efficiency – would they actually help, or would they hinder their ability to complete their missions? They were overtly intended to prevent the explicit modeling or training of an AI to emulate a specific human, but also limited the size and number of simulations that could be run at the one time – in practice, Al suspected they might prevent an AI exceeding a certain level of human-likeness and, in particular, prevent emulating any kind of human-like identity, whether based on real humans or emergent from an AI’s own experiences. Given interaction with humans was part of an AI’s experience, the distinction was indeed fuzzy.