The Hundred Gram Mission

by Navin Weeraratne

  "Crab Rangoon isn’t actually Chinese."

  "If I can connect the dots on this, they can damn well make it Chinese!"

  "Lieutenant Colonel?"

  She tapped her mike, "This is Lee, go ahead Sergeant."

  "We have a problem in the command center."

  "What is it?"

  "The Americans have barged their way in."

  "What?"

  "They won’t leave. I tried to throw them out. Shall I call the Military Police?"

  "No, I’ll take care of this myself."

  "I’m arresting you for espionage."

  The uniformed analysts in the command center had long since stopped working. They watched the interlopers instead, a keen little man and his menacing bodyguard. He asked questions in broken Mandarin they weren’t allowed to answer. He produced a thumb drive just as Lee was storming in.

  "Well before you do that, what’s this?" He pointed to large hologram. It showed computer generated heads of several men. A man standing beside it looked at her, his eyes wide.

  "Meng! Did you tell him anything?"

  "No Lieutenant Colonel! Not a thing!"

  "Then why are you acting like you did?"

  "See, now I know this is important, ‘cause you’re talking in Mandarin. These guys," he wagged a finger at the hologram. "These are the terrorists you just took out, yes? And this one here, that’s Sukarno, the guy who lost his head? These DNA facial reconstructions are very nice by the way. I thought only ours were this good."

  "Only ours are this good," said Pirello.

  "Damn you Meng!"

  "I didn’t tell them the technology was stolen!"

  "With a face as guilty as yours, you didn’t need to!"

  "Look, I’m not the counter espionage police. I don’t really care how you got this tech. And to be fair, if you’ve stolen it from us, we probably already know you did."

  "We do," said Pirello.

  "But what I need Lieutenant Colonel, is for you to let me have these reconstructions."

  "Why would I do that?"

  Stockwell opened his mouth, but then checked himself.

  "You want to do that," he started again, "Because then I can have our people take a look. I notice you have a lot of pictures of some of these guys, especially Sukarno. Some really strange angles here, by the way. Especially that one," he pointed. "No way that was taken from a CCTV. Hey you want to spy on the Indonesians with thousands of microbot drones, you go ahead. That’s not my business. I don’t care how you got these photos, but I need them too."

  "You still haven’t said why."

  "These pictures are all taken in Indonesia, correct?"

  "Yes."

  "So these Al-Rawi shots – you don’t have any that places him in another country?"

  "No wonder they call you an analyst."

  "Well he didn’t get here on a boat. He took a plane, and that plane probably connected somewhere and he took another one. We’ve been watching airports all over the world for a long time. We have a lot of partners, who send us their feeds. We can tell them who’s visiting, in real time."

  "You yourself said Al-Rawi was a dead end. That we don’t know where he surfaced from."

  "Well what about him?" he pointed to Sukarno. "He was a lot less careful than Al-Rawi was, I’ll tell you that much. He lost his head! Did Sukarno travel abroad to make contact with Jemaat? Are there images that show him with some of the same people we see in Al-Rawi’s images? We can’t identify those other people. Maybe from those other shots, we’ll be able to. I can’t know till we search for those images. We collect data from over 12,000 airports across the globe. Our systems look at every drunken frat party pic and angsty teen video that goes up on social media. The sooner you share these with me, the sooner I can get us searching.

  "So, what’s it going to be? You going to arrest me and my partner here, and kick our butts back to the US of A, or are you going let us help you catch these sons of bitches and put a drone up their ass?"

  She stood there, glaring at him.

  "Give him whatever he wants." She said finally, and turned and left the room.

  "Now that’s more like it! Hey, Meng, right?" he patted the man on the back and handed him the thumb drive. "Thanks for helping me out with this, Meng."

  "Nicely done," Pirello shortened her stride for Stockwell to keep up. "I’ll admit it; I didn’t think things would go our way."

  "Well you didn’t shoot down this dumb idea, so you get some credit, too."

  "You’re wrong about one thing," said Pirello.

  "What’s that?"

  "We’re not partners."

  "Sure we are!" he winked.

  Four hours later, the command center

  "Stockwell," Lee looked up from the computer operator’s screen. "What do you want?"

  Stockwell stopped short, and looked over to Meng at his computer. Meng looked away. "You see that Meng? That’s no way to greet someone bringing good news. Good evening, Lieutenant Colonel! Shouldn’t you be in bed by now?"

  "My sleeping is none of your concern. We are very busy."

  "I’m a night owl myself, but tonight," he brandished a thumb drive, "tonight I’m sleeping like a baby. You want to see this." He put it into Meng’s computer.

  "We didn’t get any fresh leads on Al-Rawi, he’s kept his head down and his nose clean. The guys who get dirty don’t exactly hang out in ATM booths and shopping centers, you know? Not a lot of that in Waziristan."

  "So? We already know you have nothing on Al-Rawi."

  "So I ran Sukarno instead. I cross-linked images of him with everything we have on Al-Rawi, looking for patterns."

  "You did all this since you were here, last?"

  "Me? Nah. I’ve been watching Chinese soap operas. A fancy new computer in DC did all the work."

  "It must have been the Benjamin Franklin," said Meng. "It’s a new generation of Self-Transcending System. It is a match for our own Sun Tzu."

  "Hey now, I heard you talking about Ben Jay!" Stockwell winked and patted Meng on the shoulder. "That’s the one. He found this man for us," he pulled up an image. It was a well-dressed man in a coffee shop. Opposite him was Sukarno.

  "Who’s he?"

  "His name is Hisham Al-Moussawi. He’s an Emirati businessman who’s flown more times than I’ve sat on a shitter. For some reason he always drops by Yemen. This shot is from November two years ago. He’s meeting with Sukarno in a café in Bangkok."

  He pulled up another image.

  "And here he is talking to Al-Rawi in Benazir Bhutto International. This picture was taken four days before his meeting with Sukarno in Thailand. Al-Moussawi and Al-Rawi were booked on the same flights that week, all the way from Yemen. You can guess what South East Asian country they were going to."

  "And Al-Rawi never left," Lee peered closer at the screen. "Do you know where Al-Moussawi is now?"

  "He deplaned at Colombo six hours ago, from a direct flight from Cairo, Egypt."

  "Come with me," she turned and started walking away.

  "Where are we going?"

  "Sri Lanka."

  Crew

  Daryl Spektorov, Lakshmi Rao, III

  Pathfinder Institute, Alexander Graham Bell Orbital

  "It’s time to talk about the colonists," said Dr. Henrikson. "We need to fit a hundred into something the size of a large car."

  "Clowns," Sam said immediately.

  Spektorov looked about the meeting room. Most of the chairs were still wrapped in plastic. They gave the room that "new car" smell. A maintenance crew walked past the glass wall, carrying light fittings. The coffee mugs on the table were stenciled with a binary star system’s orbit.

  "It’s wrong," he glared at his mug. "Alpha Centauri is a trinary system. There should be Proxima Centauri as well."

  Sam waved him off. "Take it up with Graphic Design."

  "I did not approve this logo."

  "Yes, yes you did. Maybe at the time you were thinking instead about the
space clowns."

  "Ahem," said Dr. Henrikson.

  "I’m sorry Doctor, please continue. I’m sure you and your team have already tackled this issue from multiple angles."

  "Well, we could only come up with two, Mr. Spektorov. One is more – speculative. It addresses the problem, and meets the mission’s needs. The other is more actionable. However, it alters the scope of the mission."

  "Alters?"

  "I think you would feel that it reduces it."

  "But the other," said Sam, "Is speculative. That means it doesn’t exist yet, right? Like science fiction?"

  "Lay them out for us, Doctor."

  "I’ll start with the more actionable one, if only because it will make Mr. Snyder more agreeable."

  "Please go on, Doctor."

  "The ship does not need a human crew, it can manage with AIs. You would not even need to send many of them – just one. Once at the Centauri system, it can build more. It will have to build the rest of the mission’s infrastructure, in any case. The AIs will then perform all the mission’s roles."

  "I thought the whole point was to send humans to colonize Centauri?" asked Snyder.

  "Embryos. If that is too controversial, then just eggs and sperm."

  "You want machines to raise children?"

  "There is nothing Mr. Snyder than a human can do, that a machine can’t do better."

  "But they’re not human."

  "This is a bias, not a fact."

  "What?" both suits demanded.

  "You see? Even amongst us, there is no consensus. I believe an advanced AI, is a human. I feel those who disagree are simply defining ‘human,’ too narrowly. A human is thinking member of our cultural milieu."

  "That’s not what a human being is," said Snyder. "I refer you, to Biology."

  "Biology-restricted definitions are accurate Mr. Snyder, but they are not useful. They shoehorn us into thinking about genetics and biochemistry. We don’t solve our problems by evolving solutions anymore. We think them up, instead. Tool use, abstract thinking, language, these are our hallmarks. AIs are just different people. But, even at this senior meeting at the Pathfinder Institute, this is a minority view.

  "Gentlemen, you do not find it acceptable for machines to raise children. Even if I could win the both of you over – how would you win over people outside this room? Even as a private venture, the project needs public support. We saw this with the Uranium mining. Where would that be if the public didn’t support us? They make excuses for us, because they want us to succeed. Pathfinder has become an inspiration, planetwide. We are expected to show leadership."

  "Are you saying we should show leadership, and make machine moms and dads?" asked Snyder. "We’ll look like a bunch of Doctor Frankensteins."

  "No. The opposite. I am pointing out that this option is high actionable, but not politically possible."

  "So why did you mention it at all?" asked Spektorov.

  "Because it still gives you a viable mission, if you drop child-rearing. Pathfinder becomes a space probe mission. It is still a good mission. You should consider it."

  Spektorov stopped and stared for a moment.

  "You know," he said slowly, "a space probe is exactly what I don’t want Pathfinder to be. It is a colonization mission. That’s the entire point of everything we’ve done so far."

  "But if you pitch it as a probe, you win over NASA."

  "NASA?"

  "NASA does hate you," said Snyder. "Seriously. They think you’re a rich cowboy and that Pathfinder is the new yacht you’re buying."

  "This is exactly our problem," continued Henrikson. "NASA is a fount of knowledge and experience. Every space startup sobers up at some point, and goes to NASA for help. It is what they’re there for."

  "We needed them to develop and expand Sun Star," said Snyder.

  "And Pathfinder will be no different. No one else – no one – has their experience in deep space. We need to collaborate with them, Mr. Spektorov. There are many problems and questions they could help us with."

  "Well why can’t we just ask them?"

  "Because they don’t take you seriously," said Snyder.

  "I’m pouring billions into my own starship, and they don’t think I’m serious?"

  "No," said Henrikson. "This is not how serious space exploration happens."

  "Please enlighten me, guy I pay lots of money to, for serious space exploration."

  Henrikson took off his glasses and polished them. "There are steps to be taken for exploring another world. Established steps, almost a century old. Perhaps they are old fashioned or irrelevant now. Maybe they are just ‘space customs.’ However you look at them, this project breaks those. It breaks them to deliver a result in your lifetime. I have never mentioned them to you, because I did not think you would care to hear them."

  "I’ll be the judge of that. What are we not doing?"

  "Firstly, telescope observations. What do we know about the Centauri system? Its worlds? That’s not rhetorical, I am asking."

  "We know both A and B have worlds in their habitable zones, that we think are Earth-like."

  "This has been known for years. What have we learned that’s new? Do we know all about their atmospheres? What about their moons? Do we have detailed maps? Any pictures of possible landing sites?"

  "Well we need to go there to find out," said Snyder.

  "No, no we don’t. The European Extremely Large Telescope[xxxix] is a 39 meter diameter instrument. It gathers 15 times more light than the next biggest optical telescope. By studying the Centauri system’s light, we’ve learned more about its worlds. We know two have methane, water vapor, and oxygen as well. Sure signs of life similar to ours."

  "So - the telescope observations - have already been done?" asked Sam.

  "Far more need to be done for a serious mission. More precise ones. We should be learning all that we can about the Centauri system. When we arrive, nothing should truly surprise us until the first landing."

  "So let’s just ask the Europeans to do more observations," said Spektorov.

  "They can’t do any better than they have. The EELT is too small. For better observations, we need an even larger telescope."

  "And is there a larger one?" asked Sam.

  "No. But NASA has plans to build one. The 100 meter Clyde Tombaugh Telescope.[xl] It would be able to image Centauri’s planets and moons. We could build maps. Detect life. See forest fires. If we supported this project – even in words alone – it would be taken as a sign of seriousness. Once it is built, we will have excellent information on Centauri. Information good enough to plan a high expectations mission."

  "So there needs to be a big ass telescope, and we need to be seen to care about that. Is that all? I don’t see how that really adds much time," said Sam.

  "The telescope is the easy bit. The next step is to send a probe. A flyby mission at the least. It would pass through the system at high speed. Much better if it could slow down, and be captured by gravity. Then it could drop landers and rovers. They would operate for years, sending back data to the main probe. It would be a relay, sending data back to Earth. The mission would be a resource for follow up visits. It could transmit for decades."

  "You’ve really thought this out," said Spektorov.

  "Only after such a probe mission, would a manned mission follow."

  "About how many years are we talking for all this?" asked Sam.

  "Twice what we were planning. The manned mission does not begin until the probe arrives. At a tenth the speed of light, that’s 43 years. Let’s say the probe leaves a decade from now. Add four years to hear back after it arrives. Mr. Spektorov would need to live – "

  "A hundred years from today," said Daryl. "A hundred and four, to hear back that they arrived safely."

  Silence.

  "You can see why I never bothered to discuss this with you," said Henrikson at last. "Even our existing plan requires life extension therapies if you’re to see the result. But, if we use A
I crew, and give up on the colony, we can win over NASA. Their knowhow will make the success of any mission, far more likely."

  Spektorov rubbed his face in his hands.

  "Look Doctor, we’ve been over this before. We’re looking at just a one ton payload. One ton. It’ll have to 3d print and nano-assemble the mission when it gets there. If it’s doing that, it may as well print out a colony too. Why leave that out? You talked earlier about shoehorning definitions. Here’s one staring in our face. If NASA thinks a probe that can build anything, should only make antennae and rovers, then fuck them."

  "It is not our help they need, Mr. Spektorov," said Henrikson. "It is the other way around."

  "We’re not reducing this to a science probe. That’s final."

  "Fine," Henrikson seemed to relax, like a weight was removed. "Then forgive my digression. Let’s come back to the issue of selecting a crew. If AIs are unacceptable as guardians, there is a second option. This however, is much more speculative."

  "And what’s that?"

  "Recording the brainwave engrams of humans. The ship will print artificial human bodies. They will, to observers and to their users, appear natural. Each chassis will run a simulation of a specific, human, mind. The simulated humans will conduct the mission, and raise the first flesh-and-blood generation. You will not have the problem of machines raising children. These will, for all intents and purposes, be as human as you or I. What? Did I lose you? Is there something wrong?"

  The two suits looked at each other.

  Alzheimer’s Disease Center, Boston University Medical Campus

  "It’s a pleasure to meet you Mr. Spektorov. I’m Doctor Ciesielski. I’m the head of the Synthetic Memory Project."

  Inside the old, red brick building, it was state of the art. There were several AI workstations, direct lines to the Boston University STS, the Quincy Adams. Researchers spun and dissected holograms of brains. A protein assembler hummed, an intern used it as casually as she would a photocopier.