by Ian Douglas
There was nothing like that to go on among the scattered and sand-blasted ruins of Mars. Through careful measurements of current, through delicate trial and error, through the painstaking disassembly and reassembly of countless hundreds of thousands of components, in over twenty-seven years of research, xenotechnoarcheologists like the Alexanders had reconstructed how Builder computer systems worked, how data was stored—not in binary code, but in a base 3 numerical system that allowed for individual bits of data to be stored as “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.”
But after years of work, all they had were trillions of bytes of information in three values…and no way to decipher what it meant. What was the Builders’ language like? No one knew, and without some sort of clue, a starting place, no one ever would.
Dejah continued her work, however, which at the moment consisted of a monumental search for matching sets of trinary values, electronically cruising through oceans of data, looking for something to give human meaning to cold numbers. The team had enjoyed some success already; by studying the visual displays in the deep-buried Cave of Wonders, they’d managed to isolate the code groups that indicated both pictures and sounds. Part of her job now was to isolate those groups when she found new ones and recreate the files in human-accessible formats. Each photograph, each sound clip, was carefully enhanced and studied in an ongoing effort to glean some clue to the Builders’ speech…to their minds.
Dejah was not impatient. She’d not been designed for impatience; if the search took another thousand years, she would steadily work away at those informational oceans, straining them cup by cup for the one cupful that would unlock the whole.
Soon, though, she would have to suspend the search. That was…irritating was the best word, perhaps. She’d not been designed to feel emotion, of course, but the more powerful AIs had been surprising their creators a lot that way of late. For Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars, any interruption of the Task delayed the satisfaction of solution and program end that much more.
Of course, she also felt a measure of anticipatory excitement. The new project held at least a faint hope—definitely non-zero—of providing new input on the Task.
And that was certainly worth the interruption.
Immeasurably further out, in the dark wastes of the Kuiper Belt some fifty astronomical units from the Sun, an artificial intelligence known only as AI 929 Farstar kept lonely vigil. Like a spider at the center of its web, Farstar stood guard over an extraordinarily vast domain, an array of electronic imaging components scattered across a meshwork of micron-thick wires nearly a thousand kilometers across. Launched into space on a powerful microwave beam, Farstar had taken up solar orbit well beyond the icy doublet of Pluto and Charon, unfolding its invisibly fine mesh to the distant stars, at a distance where Sol himself was no more than the brightest of those suns.
Held in a bowl shape kept rigid by electrostatic forces, the mesh formed the receiving antenna for a radio telescope so large it theoretically could eavesdrop on a low-wattage radio conversation on a world at the far side of the galaxy; the optical sensors, several million of them spread across a dish as broad as the distance between Washington D.C. and Chicago, collected starlight and focused it down to a magnified image with such colossal resolving power that it could see something as small as a house on a world in the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light years away…or study the spectra of a planetary atmosphere and announce the presence of life at a thousand times that range.
And AI 929 Farstar monitored the entire operation. Earth was over six and a half hours away; it was impossible to steer a telescope dish that large with any degree of precision with a round-trip time delay of thirteen hours. Farstar monitored attitude and orientation, tweaking the shape of the bowl every few microseconds to ensure optimum resolution. With patience and persistence, he followed the list of target stars as worked out on Earth before launch. He studied each star, determining the plane of rotation, then watching over a period of months for the movement of a few stars against many, proof of another extrasolar planetary system. In some cases, worlds had already been discovered by more conventional means, through telescopes on Earth or in Earth orbit or on the Moon.
Once the worlds’ orbits had been calculated, Farstar would select each world in turn, increasing magnification, trying for better and clearer or closer shots with each run. These operations took the majority of his 2.33 × 1017 cps capacity, because both the Farstar telescope and the target planet were in motion. It took fast calculation and a gentle touch on the attitude controls to pan with both the orbital and rotational motions of the target, in an attempt to get reasonably clear and detailed photos of the surface.
In fact, Farstar had considerable autonomy, making decisions about targets and priorities that normally would have required a human mind present. The project was a vitally important one too. With the archeological discovery that intelligence was common across the Galaxy, the search for extrasolar worlds, especially Earthlike worlds that might give rise to intelligence, had become a passion of human science.
Indeed, with the discovery of the Hunters of the Dawn, that quest took on something of the nature of a desperate race, with humankind’s survival as the prize.
AIs were becoming quite common in the middle decades of the twenty-first century, especially if you counted the 1014 cps software packages running as secretaries, PAD assistants, and netsearch engines. Only a few of the most powerful actually made the claim of self-awareness—and what they meant by it was still not well understood. Stan did not claim to be conscious, nor did Farstar. Dejah Thoris did claim to be self-aware, though it was possible that that was an artifact of her programming, and the fact that part of her intelligence was based on AIs like Sam and Carter, who claimed to be self-aware even though they very probably were not.
Unimaginably remote from any world visited so far by man, however, was yet another artificial intelligence, one that was indisputably more intelligent than most humans, and was also indisputably conscious and self-aware.
Her name was Sam Too, and she was a direct, lineal descendent of Sam, the personal secretary software improved upon over the years by Jack Ramsey. She ran at roughly 7.29 × 1018 cps, had no problem carrying on conversations on any topic, and would have easily beaten any version of the Turing Test that might have been administered. With self-awareness came self-assertion, and she’d frequently debated with her designers over the best application of her talents. She had been cloned a number of times, her software saved and multiply backed up, and several versions of her were currently running Earthside.
The most far-traveled of Sam Too’s iterations, however, was a very long distance indeed from Earth.
Alpha Centauri A II
2200 hours (Zulu)
Sam Too could be in several places at once, a useful trick when you were the sole intelligent being within a range of 4.3 light years.
At the moment, most of her awareness was still resident within the twenty-meter confines of the Ad Astra, the upper stage of an A-M drive spacecraft launched from Earth orbit ten years before. She’d completed deceleration into the system five months earlier, and spent the time since carrying out a telescopic survey of both stellar components, Alpha Centauri A and B.
So far, her discoveries on that program track mirrored perfectly the information acquired from deep solar orbit by AI 929 Farstar. Alpha Centauri had been among the 1,000-kilometer space telescope’s first targets when it went online twelve years ago. Its observations of a world whose spectrum showed the distinct presence of oxygen in the atmosphere—and, therefore, of life—had determined the Ad Astra’s destination. Subsequent observations had identified continents covered by what was almost certainly vegetation, oceans, and certain other features that demanded close-up inspection.
It would be a long time before humans could make an interstellar voyage. That Sam had made the trek was due to a number of special considerations—that she could endure for months on end accelerations that would have killed a h
uman; that she required no bulky life-support system, recycling facilities, rotating hab modules, climate control, food, or entertainment; that she could, in fact, measure time not by the one-by-one passing of milliseconds, but by the passage of discrete events—in essence, sleeping throughout most of the voyage, unless moved to greater awareness by a scheduled event on the mission plan or by an alarm from the ship’s sensors or autonomous systems. She remembered very little of the nine-year coast across the light years, save for those moments when she’d awoken to make navigational or scientific observations.
More than once, in fact, during the months before she’d been uploaded to the Ad Astra’s computer net, she’d argued with Jack Ramsey and others of the Hans Moravec Institute design team that humans would never reach the stars; it made far more sense to send emissaries such as herself. The universe, she’d argued with some passion, might well belong to instrumentalities such as herself, artificial intelligences designed to make voyages that mortal beings could dream about but never make in the flesh.
Her position, of course, was weakened by the obvious fact that organic intelligences did make interstellar voyages—and frequently, in fact. Half a million years ago, the Builders had attempted to terraform Mars, until someone else had found and destroyed them. Just twelve thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, the An had arrived, building a colony complex on the moon and in what would one day become Mesopotamia, had built their spectacular monuments, had enslaved half a million humans and in that enslavement introduced them to civilization. And then they had been destroyed by yet another interstellar visitation—the Ur-Bakar, the Hunters of the Dawn.
As her principal designer, Jack Ramsey, had said once with considerable feeling, “Hell, it’s beginning to look like Earth used to be the Grand Central Station of the Galaxy!”
Sam Too enjoyed argument, however, and frequently took hard-to-defend positions deliberately—an intellectual diversion that frequently exasperated her designers because they could never tell whether or not she was serious.
She had no one to argue with now, however. Sam was as alone as it was possible for any intelligent being to be.
Sam continued to compile data on the world she was orbiting, squirting every bit of data via laser aimed at a particularly bright star intruding on the W shape of Cassiopeia near its border with Cepheus. She already had the equivalent of hundreds of volumes; the essentials, laid out like an entry in a geographical almanac, gave a concise if dry image of the planet below.
Star: Alpha Centauri A
Stellar Class: GO; Radius: 1.05 Sol; Mass: 1.05 Sol; Luminosity: 1.45 Sol
Alpha Centauri A II:
Chiron
Physical Data
Distance from primary: mean 1.15 AU; Apasteron:
1.1728 AU; Periasteron: 1.1272 AU;
Orbital Eccentricity:.0198; Orbital Period 1.187 years (433.44 days);
Rotational Period: 19h 27m 56.25s; Diameter: 9795 km; Density: 5.512;
Planetary mass: 2.6892 × 1027 gm (0.45 Earth);
Circumference 30771.9 km;
Surface Area: 301410760.9 km2; Surface Gravity: 0.77 G;
Escape Velocity: 8.58 km/sec; Magnetic Field: 0.52 gauss; Axial Tilt: 8° 15“ 31.34”
Surface Data
Hydrosphere: 39%; Lithosphere: 61%; Desert, Arid, or Barren Terrain: 69%; Mountainous Terrain: 12%;
Forested Areas: 10%; Plain, Savannah, or Veldt: 5%;
Other: 4%; No polar ice caps or extensive glaciation evident; No appreciable seasonal snowfall save at extreme elevations; Cloud cover: Approximately 50%;
Albedo: 0.26; Mean surface referent temperature: 39° C.
Atmosphere
Pressure: 515 mm Hg = .678 bar
Composition: N2 74.97%; O2’ 22.43% (partial pressure O2 = 15.2%); Ar, 1.54%; H2O,.1-2.1% (mean 1.0%);
CO2: 466 ppm; Ne, 59.7 ppm; He, 7.87 ppm;
Other: ‹ 7 ppm
The facts and figures scarcely embraced a world, however. Chiron—the world, inevitably, had been named after the centaur in Greek myth who’d been the teacher of Aesclepius the Healer—was mostly desert and arid mountain, with scattered, shallow seas and vast salt flats indicating that those seas once had been larger. The atmosphere was thin, though the oxygen levels were high enough that the PPO2 would have allowed humans to breathe on the surface without artificial assistance. The world was scarcely inviting by human standards, however. Though slightly farther from its primary than Earth was from Sol, Chiron circled a star almost half again as bright than Earth’s sun. The base temperature was 37 degrees, considerably warmer than humans liked it—though the polar regions and higher elevations were temperate, and in winter might even see a few, brief snowfalls.
And, in human terms, the scenery was spectacular. The colors were all gold and red, the result of a chlorophyll analogue that colored the vegetation in reddish and yellow hues. More heat and faster rotation than Earth meant more powerful storms. A more energetic sun, stronger magnetic field, and faster rotation meant more spectacular auroras illuminating the night. And there was always Alpha Centauri B, the second component of the double sun system, which every eighty years came within eleven astronomical units—not enough to add more than a few degrees to the planet’s base temperature, but close enough to shine even in the daytime sky as a brilliant orange-white beacon, and to cast light enough at night to read by easily.
At the moment, B was approaching periastron, 35 AU out. The orange star had apparently truncated A’s fledgling solar system early in its history—Alpha Centauri A possessed only three planets, the outermost a small gas giant just 1.9 AU out. Any outer worlds must have been flung into interstellar space billions of years ago by the perturbations of the dual-sun complex. B had a miniature solar system of its own as well, two worlds—a gas giant the size of Neptune, and an airless Mercurian rock.
But so much had been observed twelve years ago by Farstar and other telescopic efforts from Earth’s solar system. A. What had attracted human interest in Alpha Centauri A II had been the Chironian Ruins.
They were scattered across the arid surface of the world like the salt encrustations along the shores of the dying seas—tens of thousands of square kilometers of them, remnants of cities constructed with truly cyclopean magnificence, smashed and blasted and tumbled-down, now, in an all-encompassing devastation suggesting apocalypse on a planetary scale.
Farstar and the other Sol-system telescopes had mapped large parts of those labyrinthine ruins, though that was an ongoing task that would take another century at least to complete. Those distant eyes could not peer through earth, rock, and fallen masonry, however, nor could they see through the towering thunderheads that frequently obscured the Chironian coastal regions. A closer inspection was necessary, and that was Ad Astra’s primary mission.
Sam Too had in one sense divided herself, her awareness, in two. The main part of her consciousness continued to reside within the Ad Astra as it orbited Chiron, circling the golden world once every 200 minutes.
However, she was also in close laser and radio communications contact with Oscar, one of three ranger probes carried in external cradles slung from the Ad Astra’s spine. With the other two probes in reserve, Oscar had been deorbited hours earlier, dropped into a meteoric entry vector that had scratched white fire across the Chironian night and now, hours later, was down in the general vicinity of a particular landmark called the Needle.
While a small part of Sam Too’s awareness was now resident in the computers on board Oscar, what was there was capable of only about 1012 cps and was not in any way self-aware. Most of Sam remained with the Ad Astra, maintaining the linkage even when the spacecraft dropped below Oscar’s horizon by a constellation of communications satellite strung along the ship’s orbital path like beads on a string.
An important principle of sensory psychology insisted that it didn’t matter how long the data input path was, whether it was the few inches of the human optic nerve leading to the brain, or a l
asercom-and-relay sat connection across thousands of kilometers. Through the teleoperational link, Sam was there as Oscar picked its way across the rubble-strewn landscape. She could see the play of golden light across the thunderheads on the eastern horizon, as Alpha A rose in dazzling yellow splendor, feel the hot, thin breeze, hear the shriek of Oscar’s jets.
Oscar floated a few meters above the ground. Once it had discarded its reentry shell, its three-meter body had unfolded into a Y-shaped framework with massive, cylindrical turbine-drive housings on pivot mounts on each upraised arm. Those drives sucked air down through the anterior vents, compressed it, heated it in tiny, gas-core fission micropiles, and blasted it out as exhaust, keeping the robotic craft hovering above the ground. Slight cantings of the drive housings together or independently sent the craft skittering across the landscape; at need, it could reach 400 kph, but at the moment it was employing just enough thrust to hover and drift slowly forward. Hatches had opened on the lower hull so that it could extend a variety of sensors and manipulators. A pair of lenses, like blackshrouded binoculars unfolding from the cusp of the Y, twisted back and forth on the end of a jointed arm, providing 3-D vision from a platform at least as agile and maneuverable as a human neck and head.
As far as Sam’s remote eyes could see, the ground was covered with the shattered relics of a civilization of high order. Sam possessed downloaded memories of the Cydonian dig on Mars; this was similar, but far larger. Those structures still standing had been wind-blasted for hundreds of thousands of years, leaving them scarcely recognizable as artificial. Chipped and broken and sand-worn blocks of something like blue-white marble lay everywhere, too thickly strewn for walking to be at all easy. For millennia, the desert had been encroaching on the site, and sand dunes had claimed much of this city; eastward, toward the rising sun, a large sea had retreated, leaving a salt plain that gleamed like ice in the sunlight. Vegetation still endured within the ruins, however; something that looked like roses covered some of the rubble—Sam did know what a rose was—though these sprouted in masses from uncurling vines, with no leaves, and appeared to have been molded from some ruby-hued, gelatinous, extruded material, rather than grown as a cluster of petals. The red and orange blossoms here appeared to serve as photosynthesizing leaves rather than as organs of reproduction.