Carbide Tipped Pens: Seventeen Tales of Hard Science Fiction

by Ben Bova

  “So it’s like all the cars are in a giant conversation with each other?”

  Bob laughed. “They used to call the cars AI, but they weren’t anything close to self-aware, and when the Pope started calling artificial minds a crime against nature, Palo Alto dropped the ‘Clever Car’ slogan called the software CLAP: Computer Logic Algorithmic Programming.”

  “They just changed the name?”

  “Well, no. Once the Religious Right started objecting to anything resembling machine awareness, research in AI was banned by the Defense Against Machine Awareness Act, so they put less on the tension part of the programs and more on beefing up the situational awareness. It was a silly law to prevent something impossible from happening.”

  The climb was proving worth her effort. Every twenty paces SIREN rested and gazed out across the lake and the surrounding hills and the plains with Saturn looming in the background. She turned her camera mast and took full-color panoramas. That wasn’t part of the instructions, but it felt right to do it. It seemed better than what she was meant to do. She was supposed to be following the stream. Find the source.

  Did the methane springs ebb and flow with the seasons, or did the methane evaporate faster and not make it downstream to the lakes in the heat of the summer? She loved that question, the questions she knew she was supposed to do, but it didn’t feel right anymore. This new question was much more pressing. She couldn’t say what the question was, just a vague curiosity about what was on the other side, to see more. She felt she had a purpose more than just that one simple drive.

  Rocks. She kept getting distracted by the rocks too, taking close-up pictures that looked different from all the others she had seen. Almost fuzzy. Those images she stored, to keep for herself. The panoramas she would sing to Earth on schedule.

  In the dry streambed, the rocks were smooth and rounded, worn by the methane coursing over them, proof that liquid flowed vigorously at times. Here, away from the erosion of the stream, the rocks had sharper edges and corners. She pulled from memory an image of the rocks on Mars. Rocks on Titan were not as jagged, even away from the stream. That meant something.

  At the next rest she took out her laser and zapped the rocks. Composition normal, similar to the rocks on the plain below. The main minerals were H2O and CO2, with traces of silica. She thought of beaches on Earth. Liquid water (lava!) lapped beaches of silica grains. Dune grass scrubbed carbon dioxide out of the air to turn it into corrosive oxygen. That memory was in her mind because one of the missions was to find an equivalent scene here on Titan. Liquid methane, lapping on the shores of grains of rock, tiny grains of water-sand. Snow.

  SIREN heard a call, a call she didn’t understand, but that she couldn’t resist. The streambed was dry. Dry the whole time she followed it. But that was the question she was trying to answer—was the stream dry at the source, or was there a spring bubbling methane, just at a slow rate, one that couldn’t keep the stream alive all the way to the lake? If she gave up now, she would be abandoning her search, and the question would be unanswered. But there were more interesting things. Would these other things be more important? She couldn’t say, but some beauty pulled her forward. Up higher.

  Did she climb for a better view, to see farther, to see the other side? Those questions burned more than just asking if the spring were wet. She felt bad for abandoning the first quest, but she would feel worse if she abandoned her new purpose.

  Kris hated calling Dr. Ramirez at home. She didn’t like pulling Ed away from his husband and daughter, but SIREN seemed to be going off her rails, and the whole team needed to be in on this.

  “Things are looking really weird,” she said, watching Bryce move around the kitchen behind Ed. “SIREN’s taking a strange path, one the simulator can’t reproduce.”

  “OK,” Ed said, shaking his head. The soundtrack from the latest Disney movie played in the background. “Bryce and I were going to go to Communion this morning, but that will have to wait. I’ll talk to Barry on my way in.”

  “This is so frustrating! The streambed was starting to show signs of methane just below the surface. I was expecting it to find pools this morning, and maybe even some liquid flowing in this afternoon’s flash, but it’s heading straight up the hillside, along one of the most difficult paths. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible for it to go up some of these slopes.” She took a sip of coffee. Cold. She had been too worried to drink it in time. Worse, she knew if she nuked it, she would just leave it in the microwave until it got cold again.

  Ed was already getting into his car. “What about the science it’s doing? Have any of the data sent in been any use?”

  Kristen shook her head. “Not really.”

  Ed rubbed the bridge of his nose. “OK—let’s set up a call to Barry. Hopefully, we can have this resolved before I get to campus.”

  It was 3:00 a.m. in California, but Barry was always around when new data was getting flashed from Titan.

  Most people watched the news on the windscreens of their cars as they were driven to work. Ed had his set up to show the JPL control room on one side, and the live SIREN feed on the other. “What can you find from the meta-data, Barry?”

  “Not operating within parameters, Ed. According to the logs, there have been a hundred fifty images taken, a hundred spectral readings of rocks, but only twenty images have been uploaded.”

  “It doesn’t always send everything to us,” Kristen said, wishing she had warm coffee. “SIREN has enough sense to weed out the obviously flawed images. Could that be what is happening?”

  “Negative. When there are flawed images, SIREN retakes the data from the same spot. All the logged images have different location tags.”

  “Can you put the locations on the window?” Ed asked as his car apparently swerved around a corner.

  Red dots overlay the map of Titan, following a path up a hillside, about a hundred meters from the nearest stream.

  “She’s heading up,” Kristen said.

  “What’s the overhead analysis of that region, Kris?”

  Kristen pulled up another image to her pad and bumped it to the main display. “Not really any different from the path it’s supposed to be following. Other than the stream isn’t there. It’s almost like she’s developed a mind of her own.”

  “I told you not to anthropomorphize, Kris,” Ed said. She was glad he was still ten minutes from campus. “It’s just a machine with slightly clever, but still DAMA compliant programming.”

  Ed turned his gaze to the JPL side of the screen. “Barry, can you predict where she is going to go next?”

  “If it follows its current course,” Barry said as a blue line appeared on the terrain map, “it will take this path.”

  “That doesn’t look right,” Kris said. “It looks like she’s trying to get up as high as she can.”

  Barry nodded. “The path I drew was the safest way to the nearest spring. If she developed a new objective, there’s no telling her path.”

  “I think she’s picked a new objective.”

  Ed growled. Kris had only heard him this angry once before. “Are you trying to tell me that the robot has picked a new science objective of its own accord, that it’s pursuing that new objective, and that it’s keeping the data to itself, Kris?”

  She resisted the urge to avert her eyes. “It sounds like it. If there’s no physical problem it has to be a software problem.”

  Ed slapped the car seat. “That’s even more far-fetched than heading off course to take a pretty picture.”

  “Sir,” Barry said. “Aesthetic framing of the images is part of the protocol, as is the ability to weight different options and the ability to answer the most pressing question.”

  Kristen was surprised to see Barry take her side. He wasn’t part of the science team, so usually stayed out of arguments and just reported the probe’s status.

  “Bullshit! Sequestering data is nowhere in the protocol. We have a serious problem, people. I want a full tiger
team on this. Nobody is going home until we have this problem figured out. And let’s stick to science—natural causes, not robots becoming self-aware of their own accord.”

  Barry’s dark face almost looked ashen. He stuttered a few times before saying, “I think you should look into that possibility.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Ed said, apparently not noticing Barry’s face. “My car has to pick its own route, look for obstacles, keep an eye out for unexpected movements—kids, deer, drunk college students who don’t look before they cross the street in front of the fraternity. Millions of decisions a day. No car has ever decided to take a vacation in the mountains during its morning commute.”

  “No civilian car, sir,” Barry said, fear still clear on his face.

  “We were trying to make true AI since before I was a kid and it never worked. The Defense Against Machine Awareness Act made sure it never would happen. If we don’t know how to make a machine aware of itself, how can it emerge spontaneously? Why aren’t any of the machines behind you deciding to take a walk right now?”

  “You are correct, sir,” Barry said, sitting upright, shoulders squared. He had regained his composure. Kris had never seem him break his military bearing before.

  “Damn right. Let’s stick to physics, you two. There’s no room for forbidden psycho-philosophy on Titan.”

  Now it was Kris’s turn to act through her fear. “What are you afraid of, Barry? I’ve never seen you like this before.”

  Barry stared straight into the camera to look them both in the eye. “Before I started working for JPL’s rovers, I operated rovers for the Army. I can’t say anything.”

  Ed looked at Barry on the screen, on the other side of the continent. “Is there anything you can tell me about a rover getting its own agenda in the past?”

  Barry’s back stiffened, his eyes stared straight ahead. “Sir! No sir!” he barked.

  Ed leaned back in his seat. “Kristen,” he said slowly, “did I ever tell you about a story I heard from one of my professors as an undergrad? He was in grad school when the Hubble launched. Do you remember the Hubble Telescope?”

  Everyone was acting weird—first SIREN, then Barry, now Ed was spinning tales out of character. What song was pulling them all so far off course? “I remember when it finally failed. I was five.”

  “Did you know the Hubble was originally limited in how long it could observe an object? Long exposures show fainter details, but it couldn’t expose the camera for more than forty-five minutes. Do you know what happens every forty-five minutes when you’re in low Earth orbit?”

  Kristen frowned and shook her head. Where was he going with this?

  “Night. Day. If you have a ninety minute orbit, you pass in or out of the Earth’s shadow every forty-five minutes. Four-hundred degree change in temperature in less than a second. Thermal shock on the telescope’s solar panels shook the whole thing. Not a huge amount, but enough to ruin any exposure being made.”

  Kristen sighed. “It was the first telescope in space. There were bound to be some unexpected problems.”

  Ed raised a finger. “That’s just it! The Hubble was not the first optical telescope in space. It was only the first to point up. There were plenty of telescopes aimed back at the ground. CIA, NRO … I don’t know who else. NASA came out and told the world of this problem, and the spies said, ‘Yeah, we’ve known about this for ages. You have to mechanically isolate the solar panels from the pointing mechanism.’ It was classified information, so even though all the military and spy telescope makers knew about the problem, they couldn’t tell NASA a damn thing.”

  Kristen shook her head. “You’re sounding like Professor Lang the way you’re rambling on, Ed.”

  “Barry understands the point of my story, though.”

  “Yes, sir.” He looked over at Kristen. “Civilian cars have limited operating parameters. They drive on roads. They look for things darting from the sides. Fairly limited. SIREN has a wider range of parameters to consider. It can go anywhere, and choose from many different instruments at any time. Cars have a destination. SIREN has a goal, several goals in fact.”

  “Kris,” Ed said, looking at her. “Do you think we may have a robot on Titan that is thinking for itself?”

  “I … I don’t know. It looks like it.”

  “Barry, what, in your opinion as a JPL rover operator, would be the fix for a problem like this?”

  “Mind wipe. Start from a fresh program. This may need to be part of the quarterly maintenance.”

  Kris gasped. “We can’t do that!”

  “I’m guessing,” Barry added quickly, “as a JPL employee. I can’t say I have any direct knowledge of this.”

  “I’m not saying that this is what we’ll do,” Ed said, rubbing his nose, “but work out the procedure, Barry. Also, I want the two of you to make predictions about what sentient behavior will look like, and how aberrant intentions would be different from simple erratic behavior. If the predictions are right, we will proceed.”

  “But why is it a problem?”

  Both Ed and Barry gave her puzzled looks. “We can’t let NASA be in violation of DAMA.”

  Kristen tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. “First, DAMA prohibits research into trying to make self-awareness. It’s not SIREN’s fault if it emerges on its own. Second, she’s on Titan. There’s no way she could harm anyone. I think we should see what she is trying to do. Maybe it figured something out, something we weren’t expecting.”

  “It’s not for us to make sentient objects,” Ed said strongly. “Whether in our image or not. Self-aware machines are not natural.”

  “But we could learn something.”

  “It’s not learning if a machine tells us something. The joy of science is discovery. Finding out for ourselves, not having the answers thrust upon us.”

  “The rover is doing the discovering no matter what, Ed. We built it, and we sent it there. Whatever discoveries it makes, those are ours.”

  “No. It’s just wrong. Every fiber of my soul tells me this is wrong. Intelligent machines will diminish our own place in the world. People will suffer for it.”

  “Kris,” Barry said, looking intently into the camera. “Don’t you remember Albuquerque?”

  “Of course I do, but didn’t the drone have a human operator?”

  “I can’t say. But I started working at JPL right after that incident. I really thought I’d never see anything like it ever again”

  Ed slapped his palm on the seat. “Kris, Barry, make your predictions. Kris: try to figure out what new objectives it might have and how it might try to act. Barry: work out where it would go if it got disoriented and it’s trying to get back on course, or if there is some malfunction that isn’t showing up in the diagnostics. Tell me where this thing is going, and when we get the next uplink, let’s just hope one of Barry’s predictions is the right one and we won’t have to take drastic measures.”

  “The next downlink is at oh-four-twenty-seven Zulu on Friday.”

  “That’s 11:30 tonight for us, 8:30 for you, Barry. That gives us fifteen hours.”

  The climb was long. Many cliffs. Maybe it would have been easier to travel along the streambed, but it was too late for that now. She extended all eight legs as far as they would go, trying to see over the ridge, see how far to the top. All she could tell was that a little more height would let her see down to the next valley. This was the top! She scouted a route around the cliff, and headed to the left. It was an easy scramble to the peak.

  She had been right all along. All the doubt, all the second-guessing of her real task vanished. This is why she was here. Gravity felt a bit weaker as she twirled her camera for another full panorama. Another valley with a lake. Two lakes on either side of her. And there was something different about them. The edge of the new lake seemed a little softer. She took another picture. There was a difference. Something was moving. Waves! This lake was full of liquid methane. She watched a wave crash to the sho
re, onto the beach. There was another wave along the shore, a wave of a different kind, like amber waves of grain.

  She wanted to send out all her data right away, send it out full blast for all to hear: all her data, all the images she was keeping private, all her pictures, all her hopes of what she would find, all the joy of discovery.

  Panic set in as she realized she couldn’t control the motor to point the antenna to Earth. After a few minutes of frustration, she gave up and just tried shouting into the darkness, but the words and images would not flow from her memory to the antenna. She knew how to do that. She sang for thirty-five minutes every eighteen hours. She always stopped what she was doing a few minutes before the appointed hour, swung her antenna to Earth (as long as it was in the sky, or not blocked by Saturn) and sang her data home. It always felt good to sing, and it would still feel good even if it wasn’t singing to Earth. It would still feel good to shout her joy.

  Frustrated at her failure, she looked up again. The beauty of the lake below her made up for her temporary failure. She would be able to sing later, when it was time, when someone would hear her.

  I need to investigate that lake, she thought, and started skittering down the other side.

  “Show me the telemetry.” Ed said as he burst into the room forty-five minutes after the data had been downloaded. He had gone home to have dinner with his husband. Kris and Barry hadn’t had that privilege.

  “Already on the screen,” Barry said. “The red lines are my predictions based on three assumptions. The first is that the navigation is off by sixty-four degrees and it thinks it is heading to the spring. The second is that one leg has gone gimp, and it’s overcompensating. This third follows almost the same path, but keeps to flatter ground while trying to return to its original objective. And finally, that it had a temporary glitch and will return to the spring as quickly as it can.”

  Kristen took a sip of cool water before she spoke. “The blue lines are possible paths to take for a new objective. The one on the right is to get to the highest point on the hill so it can look the farthest and get the best view. The middle one is to reach the dry lake bed on the other side of the hill as quickly as possible, and the left path is the unusual terrain on the south side of the hill, the objective we were debating when we first realized the landing site was dry.”