“Hey!” Chen roared over the communications circuit. “We’re being swarmed by those damned drones! They’re fixing the cuts faster than we can make them!”
“Go to full power on the laser cutters,” the captain ordered him. “Get those cuts done fast so Sandra will calm down.”
Silence fell for a moment as the engineers in the control room tapped rapidly through screens. “Making good progress now,” Chen reported. “The cutter is frying some of the repair drones that get in the way, though.”
“Damage spreading rapidly in port aft main passageway!” Sandra sounded very urgent now. “Immediate action required.”
“Sandra, repairs are underway,” the captain repeated in a frustrated tone. “Take no action.”
Kevlin felt something, and glanced back to see that the hatch leading onto the bridge had opened. No one was there waiting to enter, though.
One of the crew noticed, too. “Sandra, reseal the hatch to the bridge.”
“Command understood. Complying,” Sandra replied, her voice its usual dead calm again.
The hatch didn’t close. “Sandra, reseal the hatch to the bridge,” the captain ordered this time.
“Command understood. Complying.”
“Captain?” Another engineer was staring at something on his display. “She’s doing instant resets again after acknowledging our orders. Every interior hatch and door on the ship is open.”
The captain stared at him, then spoke in a powerful voice. “Sandra. Close all doors. Command override Sigma Sigma Sigma.”
“Command understood. Complying.”
“It’s not closing,” Yasmina observed.
“Damn!” one of the crew exclaimed. “We had to give Sandra a reset capability so she could function autonomously, but she’s started using that to get around our commands.”
“She’s not using it,” Yasmina objected. “There’s no conscious thought involved. I’m sure it must be a defensive response operating below the level of consciousness. Her subsystems are telling her something has to be done so she’s working around obstacles to action.”
“Captain! Airlock doors are opening! Interior and exterior!”
The captain hesitated the barest fraction of a second before yelling and springing into action. “Into suits! Everyone into your suits and seal them! Chen! Ragosa! Seal your suits!”
The emergency suits were stored next to the seats, fortunately. Kevlin’s hands were shaking as he pulled on the suit, fumbling with fittings that should have been second nature after countless emergency drills on the station. A growing breeze was tugging at him as he struggled to get the chest seal in place.
“Strap in!” the captain was shouting. “As soon as you get the suit on, strap in and then get your helmet sealed!”
Kevlin dropped into his seat and pulled the harness across, clicking it into place just as the breeze grew to a gale of wind trying to suck him out through the hatch and ultimately out through the airlock. Wondering if he was really gasping for air already, Kevlin got the helmet down, trying not to panic as the suit automatically pressurized. Cool air flowed from the recirc unit and Kevlin slowly got his trembling under control. Shocked by a sudden realization, he looked over and saw Yasmina also strapped in, her own suit just finishing pressurizing. Ashamed that he had forgotten about her, forgotten about anything but his own fears, Kevlin looked away again.
“It’s okay,” he heard Yasmina over the suit’s circuit. “Perfectly natural reaction.”
Kevlin mumbled a reply, wishing she hadn’t been able to understand his embarrassment.
Other voices came over the circuit, the captain’s finally overriding them all. “I need an estimate as to why that happened. Anybody? Any ideas?”
It suddenly seemed so obvious. “Sandra is trying to get rid of us,” Kevlin stated.
Momentary silence followed that declaration, then the captain came on again in a deathly calm voice. “Explain that. There’s numerous safeguards built into the operating system that puts human safety at a premium. Sandra can’t attack humans.”
“She’s not attacking humans,” Kevlin explained, feeling more and more certain. “Her repair sub-system is attacking an infection. Don’t you see what you’ve been doing? You’ve been deliberately causing damage to her, on an escalating level. Her repair system has dealt with it at every stage, evolving the whole time. Well, it’s a simple leap from being reactive to the damage to reacting to what’s causing the damage. The cutting back there was the last straw. To Sandra’s repair system, we’re parasites at best and harmful infections at the worst. Sandra can’t override the actions of her repair system any more than we can without the help of targeted medications.”
“She tried to expel the parasites?” the captain asked. “What happens if that doesn’t work?”
“I’d imagine her repair system will go after the parasites directly. Her repair system is rapidly developing an immune component. I should have seen that coming. It’s a logical progression for any such system.”
The captain’s voice rang through the circuit. “Chen! Ragosa! Stop cutting and get back here!”
“But we’re almost through –“
“Stop cutting! We can see a new wave of repair drones headed your way! Get out of there fast!”
The wait for the two engineers to return seemed interminable. Chen and Ragosa were pulling themselves through the hatch when it started closing. They barely cleared it before it sealed. “We’ve lost all internal control,” someone reported in a desperate voice.
Kevlin saw the captain gazing around as if thinking through her next action. “Alright,” the captain announced. “I’m declaring an emergency. All nonessential personnel are to leave the ship. Get to the boat and stand off in it. We’ve lost comms to the chase ship, so bring them up to date.”
The captain and three other crew members remained seated, but six of the engineers unstrapped and began hauling themselves to the hatch, beckoning to Kevlin and Yasmina to follow them. Kevlin unstrapped as well, making a point of waiting until Yasmina had done the same and started after the engineers. Scared as he was, he wouldn’t race ahead of her.
Two of the engineers had braced themselves and were tugging at something. The hatch swung open reluctantly under the pressure of the emergency release.
The journey through the ship to the boat dock was strange. The passageway was deserted, yet to Kevlin it felt haunted. He couldn’t look at a bulkhead without thinking of Sandra’s pseudo-life functions pulsing behind them.
The engineers reached the access panel to the boat dock and wrestled its manual control until that opened reluctantly as well. The first one who started to enter the dock stopped and stared. “It’s gone.”
Kevlin shifted so he could just see over the engineer’s shoulder. The boat which should have filled the dock simply wasn’t there even though the outer hatch remained sealed. On the deck, a swarm of repair drones were picking at a diminishing pile of something.
One of the engineers laughed in a slightly hysterical way. “I was wondering where Sandra was getting the resources to build so much. She ate the boat.”
“Oh, God,” another engineer responded. He tried calling the captain, to no avail. “Back to the control room. Let’s go before those things try to recycle us.”
The captain gave them a startled glance when they returned, her face setting into grim lines as her engineers reported what they had seen. “That does it. I’m pulling Sandra’s plug. Once she’s off, well get aft and shut down the main power supply.” Unstrapping, the captain went to the aft bulkhead and lifted a cover to expose a large manual switch.
Kevlin gave Yasmina a questioning glance as the captain pulled the switch down. All of the lights went out and Kevlin’s virtual display vanished, leaving only the lights on the suits to illuminate the control room.
“The Frankenstein switch,” Yasmina answered Kevlin’s unspoken question. “Some people also call it the wooden stake or the silver bullet. Every artif
icial intelligence system has one built in that manually cuts all power. Just in case the AI starts singing ‘A Bicycle Built for Two.’”
“How many artificial intelligence systems have built in autonomous repair capability that can operate without power for a while?” Kevlin asked.
The captain heard, stared toward Kevlin, then placed one palm over the bulkhead next to the manual cut-off switch. “I can feel activity behind the bulkhead.”
“They’ve identified the cause of Sandra’s problem.” The lights came back on. “And they’ve fixed it. Captain, you’ve got a wonderfully effective simulation of a living organism here in terms of identifying injuries and taking corrective action. And it knows what keeps trying to hurt it, and that we just tried to shut down its brain.”
“Sandra can’t be sentient!”
“She’s not! It’s all happening at a level way below sentience!” Kevlin yelled. “Why should that be a surprise? Out of all the threats to human life, how many are sentient and how many are essentially mindless like bacteria?”
A momentary silence fell. “Can we stop the drones if they try to take us out?” someone wondered.
“What about the nanos? Sandra’s sub-systems have been modifying them right and left. The rate of evolution seems to be on a exponential curve.”
“If it’s like the evolution of living organisms, most of the modifications will be harmful or useless and die out,” Kevlin suggested. “Some of them might even threaten Sandra.”
“Most will die out? Or some might further harm the ship? That’s not all that reassuring, doctor. The seals on our suits are supposed to keep out nanos, but nothing’s perfect.” The captain gestured. “We’re abandoning ship. Everybody out. Back to the boat dock.”
Repair drones of various kinds were visible in the passageways this time as they pulled themselves through the ship. Kevlin stared as he saw several drones attack another and disable it. They had to veer to one side as a bulkhead bulged perilously toward them. In another area, drones were busy dismantling what Kevlin recognized as a cooling unit. “She needs that!” one of the crew protested. “Why would Sandra take apart an essential component?”
“Sandra isn’t,” Kevlin insisted. “Her sub-systems are doing it. Just like when humans run short of calcium and the body robs it from bones to keep the teeth strong. Part of the repair sub-system thinks some other part of Sandra needs those components more.”
The last remnants of the boat had vanished along with the drones which had digested it for Sandra. The captain and another engineer tugged at the emergency release on the outer hatch with no results. “I’ll have to blow it using the explosive bolts.” She yanked open a panel, pulled out a battery, connected leads to two attachments behind another panel, then pushed a button.
Faint echoes of the explosions reached Kevlin through his handhold on the ship as the hatch swung out. The captain turned to face them. “Push yourselves clear of the ship. We don’t dare wait here for rescue from the chase ship. Go!”
They went. Kevlin shoved off, looking back to see Sandra’s shape diminishing behind him, the captain’s suited figure going last out of the hatch. He heard her calling the chase ship on the distress frequency. “SOS. We need emergency pick up. Full macro and nano-scale decontamination required. Remain clear of Sandra. Repeat, remain clear of Sandra.”
Kevlin wondered how long the recirc unit would keep him alive. Full scale decontamination took a while. But then, he couldn’t argue with the captain’s order, either.
#
Yasmina joined him at the display, looking like she’d been vigorously scrubbed with sandpaper over every part of her body, every hair shaved clean. Kevlin knew he looked the same, and knew she also felt like her insides had been similarly sandpapered. He would probably shudder for the rest of his life whenever someone mentioned a full macro and nano decontamination.
She gestured at the image of Sandra. “What’s happening? Any guesses?” Sandra’s clean lines had been distorted by random bulges. Remote readouts showed system failures cascading through the ship.
“She’s dying,” Kevlin stated. “Pure and simple. Some of her repair functions evolved into harmful out-of-control infections. Other parts of her are attacking her. See this stuff? Any immune system risks getting too efficient. At that point it starts attacking itself. You can see where all the control system filaments in this part of Sandra are dead. I’ll bet her own repair system is destroying them.”
“Auto-immune diseases,” Yasmina observed in a shocked voice.
“Yeah. The testing process matched with learning routines and an ability to improve repair capabilities inevitably pushed Sandra into becoming better and better at identifying and fixing damage. Unfortunately, living organisms are obvious lessons that there’s no optimum point at which that stuff stops. It keeps trying to get better even after it gets so good at its job that it turns harmful.”
The captain had come to stand with them, her face sober. “It shouldn’t have happened. We knew everything there is to know about every one of the components on that ship.”
Another engineer shook his shaved head. “It’s a scientific principle that you can know everything there is to know about something, and still not be able to predict an outcome. We just proved it again.”
“Assuming you did know everything,” Kevlin snapped. “You tried to make a machine work like a living creature, with self-direction and self-repair capabilities. What made you think you could tell how it would act? Humans are the mature result of millions of years of evolution and we only function halfway well because of an enormous investment in cultural, organizational and medical systems designed to control our actions and compensate for our faults!”
“What’ll happen to Sandra?” Yasmina wondered.
The captain glanced at Kevlin. “Do you think she’ll be safe once the power dies and everything goes dark?”
“The macro stuff, probably. I don’t know about the nanos. It all depends if they evolved in the direction of viruses that can remain dormant for almost indefinite periods while awaiting conditions to reactivate.”
This time the captain grimaced. “We’ll have to junk her. There’s no telling how some of her internal components have evolved, so we’ll probably use an automated drone to show her onto a trajectory into the sun. We’ll have to severely limit or block evolution of nanos on the next model. Maybe not even use them. They’re too hard to track if they do start changing. But we can put limits on the macro drones, too. We’ll do better next time,” the captain vowed.
“That statement probably could’ve been carved on a substantial number of tombstones throughout human history.”
“Next time will be different,” the captain insisted.
“You’re right about that,” Kevlin agreed. “Next time I won’t be aboard.”
“Yes, you will.”
“No, I won’t. My contract clearly limits the duties to which I can be assigned.”
The captain smiled. “If you’re right, these ships will need medical expertise to identify, diagnose and treat problems. One of the potential duties listed in your contract is ship’s doctor. So congratulations. That’s what you’ll be. The ship’s doctor.”
Author's Note on Down the Rabbit Hole
One of the good things about attending conventions (and there are many good things) is that I get exposed to information that can help generate new stories. At one convention in Baltimore, I heard Dr. Catherine Asaro giving a talk about the latest research into hyper-velocity space travel and what physics currently told us regarding things like faster-than-light. One thing struck me after that talk. Our nervous system works at the speed of light. How well does it work if we’re moving faster than that? Years before I had read about how the human mind tricks us into thinking that we see things that we don’t. And then there’s that trick that dancers use to keep from falling over with dizziness when they’re spinning around over and over again. On top of that, Stan Schmidt, the editor of Analog, had
challenged me to come up with a reason why pilots of aircraft might not make the best spacecraft pilots. Put them all together, and there’s a story in there.
Down the Rabbit Hole
"We'd like you to pilot the next Prometheus probe, Commander Horton."
Commander Josh Horton fidgeted slightly despite the padding in his chair, his eyes darting around the conference room, resting for the briefest moment on the face of one NASA administrator before leaping to the next. Every face held the same forced cheerfulness, the same projection of an honor conferred, and the same more-or-less poorly hidden anxiety. "The next Prometheus probe?" he finally asked. "I didn't know there'd been a first."
"Well, you understand security, Commander, don't you? A successful test of a faster-than-light propulsion system would have incalculable significance for the human race. We certainly don't want to generate false hopes prior to a successful test."
"So the first probe wasn't successful?"
Administrator eyes shifted helplessly for a moment, then steadied. "No. At least, we don't think so. There's been no contact with any of the probes since they engaged their FTL devices -"
"Any of the probes?" Horton demanded. "There's been more than one failure?" Silence met his question. "Look, people, I deserve to know what's going on before you strap me into that can."
"Yes." The senior-most administrator nodded his head ruefully. "You do deserve that. There have been six Prometheus probes launched. None have returned. We have no idea why."
"Six?" Commander Horton's brain hazed momentarily, then he shook his head several times to clear it. "What, they blew up?"
"No!" The woman who'd answered looked around, embarrassed by her outburst, then repeated her reply firmly. "No. The only energy discharge noted was that predicted from the FTL transition. No other discharge. No debris. No events noted downrange."
"Downrange." Horton ran the word around his mouth for a moment. "Downrange can be measured in light-years, right? If something blew up when it came out of FTL you wouldn't see it for years, maybe."
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