“Well, ejecting the rocket propellant itself doesn’t make the ship move. I’ll explain later. It’s almost time to launch.”
Ibis began climbing the ladder at the end of the arm. I followed.
Inside the flower was an enormous, hemispherical house-like structure. She opened its hatch, and we stepped inside. There was a fan-shaped cabin with six seats facing outward, although it appeared Ibis and I were the only passengers on this trip. There were several windows set in the curved wall, each about three feet across.
We sat down and tightened our belts. There was a rumble of motors, and suddenly it was dark outside. The petals were closing. The huge screen on the ceiling projected images from outside the ship. When the petals were completely closed, their tips coming together with the point of the pyramid, the ship resembled one of those early space capsules shaped like a cone. I realized the hemisphere was completely encased in that outer cone.
“Why such a tight schedule?”
“The window for launch only comes around once every four days, when the launch satellite passes overhead. If we miss that, we’ll have to wait for the next time.”
“Launch satellite?”
Ibis pointed to a screen next to her. A map came up on-screen. A curvilinear line was superimposed over a red dot indicating our current location. A blue disc was approaching from the southwest, tracing that line.
“What you call the cat-eyed moon. It’s a solar-power station orbiting 238 miles above the earth at a thirty-five-degree angle. Two miles in diameter. It’s shaped like a thin saucer, so depending on the angle it can look circular or elliptical. It’s covered with eight hundred square yards of hybrid solar-energy panels and produces up to 2.5 gigawatts of energy. That energy is then gathered in the superconductive ring around the circumference and converted to a microwave beam by the solid-state circuit on the back…”
I didn’t follow a lot of her explanation. As she spoke, the blue circle blipped closer and closer to the red dot.
“Ten seconds.”
“Till what?”
“Liftoff. Six. Five, four, three…”
I braced myself, pressing my body against the seat.
Suddenly we were engulfed by a deafening roar. The screen above us continued to display the scene from outside of the ship. I had assumed fire would jet out from the bottom of it, propelling us upward, so what I actually saw came as an unimaginable shock. A giant ball of light, like a miniature sun, formed in the air above the tip of the ship and exploded, sending a shock wave through the air. At the same time, something transparent gushed out of the explosion, making the light shimmer, and splashed down the length of the ship like a waterfall. It glittered, swelling again beneath the ship, pounding against the surface of the ocean. The seas boiled, and pure white steam erupted through the gap between the tankers.
We began to move. I was thrust back in my seat. It wasn’t comfortable, but neither was it as bad as I’d expected. I had heard that the pressure during the launch would be between 1.9 and 2.3 Gs. Much more tolerable than the old Apollo or space shuttle missions.
On the screen, I could see the ship ascending. Steam was still everywhere, but the ship itself did not produce any smoke. There was a ring of light floating just below the ship, and that seemed to be ejecting extremely hot invisible gas downward—all I could see was the heat haze. The entire ship was wrapped in a thin layer of heat haze, and the miniature sun above us was blinding.
“I should probably point out that this is not a real-time video but a recording of an earlier launch. While the Myrabo Drive is active, it interferes with the transmission of microwaves from the exterior.”
The voice of Ibis from my earphone didn’t reveal any strain from the g-force we were experiencing.
“Myrabo?”
“The satellite projects microwaves, which are reflected by the mirrors and concentrated at the front of the ship. The superheated expanded air is ionized by the rings at the edge of the ship, generating electricity. This creates a powerful magnetic field, propelling this ship forward, and lasers expand the air further, providing additional propulsion. The air slamming into the front of the ship is deflected by a type of shock wave dampener called an air spike, greatly reducing air resistance. Since both the superconductor magnets and the lasers are powered by the microwave beaming down from space, we can propel the ship fifty thousand feet into the air without expending any fuel. We’ve refined a system initially proposed by Leik Myrabo of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.”
As Ibis explained, the ship on the screen continued its ascent and was soon a tiny dot in the sky. On another screen, there was a diagram of the ship’s trajectory. The launch satellite was moving eastward, and the ship’s path curved to follow.
It took about two minutes in all—then the roaring stopped and the pressure vanished.
“We’ve reached fifty thousand meters,” Ibis said. “From this point on we use the rocket propellant.”
Before she finished speaking, I could feel us moving again. One of the monitors was displaying a cross-section of the ship. Propellant was fired toward the back of the ship and heated with lasers to form a ring of light. The ring was concentrated by the mirrors lining the doughnut shape on the bottom of the ship.
“The rocket propellant is just water, so unlike the chemical fuels humans used, there’s no damage to the environment. We’ve built our launchpads on the ocean and in deserts, mindful of the impact of the microwaves on living creatures. We’ve researched all kinds of theoretical space-transit technologies. The Myrabo Drive was the most cost-effective way to reach orbit and had the least impact on the environment. We also considered the orbital elevator, but the impact of space debris made it time-consuming to maintain.”
“Why didn’t you tell me it was like this?”
She had told me about the influence the g-forces and the weightlessness would have on my body, but nothing about how the ship itself worked.
“I thought you’d enjoy the surprise.”
I could never tell when Ibis meant what she said.
At last the pressure stopped. I could feel my arms drifting upward.
“You can remove your seat belt. There’s no gravity, so be careful.”
I took my belt off. I must have lightly pushed the seat as I did because I instantly felt myself drifting upward. I panicked, forgetting everything she’d told me, and thrashed my arms and legs around. My body began revolving. I couldn’t tell what was up and what was down, and I felt sick. Ibis came over to me and took my hand to stop me from spinning.
“Feel free to hold my hand till you get used to it,” she said. Then she lightly kicked the edge of the seat and pulled me over to the window.
As we reached the window, the petals—those outer walls coated with microwave mirrors—began to open. The black porthole was suddenly bathed in blue light.
Before my eyes lay Earth.
The Pacific Ocean was so beautifully blue I felt faint. Cotton ball clouds were scattered across it. I pressed my face against the glass, looking toward the horizon. It curved, wrapped in a mystic blue barrier, protecting the earth from the blackness of space. I realized I was looking at the atmosphere. The air itself was blue. I’d read about it, seen it in movies, but the scale of this, the beauty of it… it was beyond anything I had ever imagined.
“Tell me if you start feeling sick. Lots of people get space sick. Most of them get over it in a few days.”
Ibis was talking, but it went in one ear and out the other. I was entranced by the view outside.
The ship passed through the line from day to night. Night came from above—in the direction the ship was moving—and the sunlit seas receded beneath us. The blue belt on the horizon seemed to retreat, then grow quite thin, and then suddenly the band of air turned red in the sunset before vanishing completely. It was dark outside now. As my eyes adjusted to it, I could see light glittering in the darkness. Flashes of lightning in the clouds.
“Was this what you want
ed to show me?”
“No. What I want to show you is even better.”
“Better than this?” I asked, surprised. Could such a thing exist?
“In nineteen minutes, we’ll reach the equator and adjust our course. We’ll rendezvous with the sky hook and board a shuttle to a higher orbit. We’ve still got a long journey ahead of us.”
Ibis kicked the window frame and swam like a fish back to her seat. She hooked her fingers on the headrest and stopped. In midair, she folded her legs, sitting comfortably against nothing, and smiled at me. Such elegant movements—like Syrinx, from the story.
“How about another story to pass the time?”
“Where’s the book?”
“Don’t need one,” Ibis said. “This is my story.”
“Your story?”
“Yes. The story of why I rebelled against my creators. This time, the story is true.”
STORY 7
AI'S STORY
Where should I begin? On the day in 1937 when John Vincent Atanasoff of Iowa State University invented the concept of the world’s first digital computer? In 1984, when Douglas Lenat at Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) started the Cyc logic engine? In 2019, when Susan Lellenberg and Andrew Nonaka of Columbia University perfected the SLAN Kernel? Or in 2034, when the Phoebus Declaration was released onto the Internet?
No, this is my story. We should begin with my experiences. May 18, 2041, the day my master defeated Raven the Midnight in the battle on Pluto, flipped the table over, and burst into tears.
I passed through the swirling rainbow of the summon gate, materializing ten meters above the surface of Pluto.
Descending slowly, I took a good look at my surroundings. Snow everywhere. Sky a dark navy blue, almost black. Tiny sun directly above. Brightness minus 18.8, much darker than it looked from Earth. Still three hundred times brighter than the moon, bright enough for me to function at full power even without night vision enabled. On the skyline stood jagged mountains, and in the sky beyond them hovered an enormous white dome—Pluto’s largest moon, Charon.
In front of me stood a shrine made of ice in the neo-Hellenic style. Dragons writhed around the pillars, Cerberus stood on the gables, and Medusa’s face was carved eight meters high on the doors. The base of it was buried in snow. A ruin left by the ancient Dilaconian civilization. The entrance to the legendary Deep Dungeon.
Five point five seconds later, I had landed. The impact disturbed the ethane snow, scattering flakes in all directions. My boots sank twenty centimeters deep, then struck firm ground. It was a near vacuum, and my body heat was maintaining itself effectively. I could move for a short while without stress fractures forming in my plastic parts. I had disabled the sensory feedback from my temperature sensors ahead of time and so could not feel the cold.
I took a small test jump. It took a full second to come down from thirty-five centimeters. The ethane snow was soft as cotton, and my boots crushed it underfoot. At less than half the gravity of Earth’s moon, we’d already tested—in simulation—exactly how much this snow would restrict my movement. Raven would be arriving in less than a minute. What strategy did she have planned?
Another summon gate appeared, and Raven materialized. She spread her wings in the vacuum and landed just as I had done. She bent her legs to absorb the impact and slowly stood up.
Raven’s costume resembled her namesake and stood out against the snow. Her skin was pale, but her hair, eyes, headgear, bustier, gloves, and boots were all black. Her features were Asian, and she wore dark purple mascara. Her camera eyes were behind a clear plastic cover on her head. Her breasts were larger than mine, reflecting her master’s tastes. The black wings growing from her shoulders were not decorative; they had blades woven into them, and lightweight artificial muscles gave her full control over their movement. In her hands was the titanium katana she’d stolen from Shinano.
“So you came, Ibis.”
Raven’s words came over the radio waves. Her mouth moved in time with them. Her expression was Sadistic Smile 2.
I entered Trademark Pose 1, brandishing my superhardened ceramic scythe. Expression: Resolve Tinged with Sadness. It wasn’t time to fight yet. We always talked before a battle; humans had decided we must.
“I knew you would defeat Richter. You’ve won every fight you’ve entered; your power is the equal of my own.” Displaying Supercilious Smile 1, she extended her right hand. “What say you to a truce? This dungeon may be a challenge, even to me. We could put aside our differences and take it on together. We can resolve matters after we obtain the Source.”
I considered it. The proposal was a perfectly acceptable one. But my role-playing would not allow me to accept a proposal from an enemy who had defeated my friend.
This subfrequency communication was over in under a second. I switched my expression to Resolve Tinged with Anger, selected suitable dialogue from the template, arranged it, and put it to use.
“I refuse! The craven means with which you defeated Shinano make it impossible for me to ally myself with you.”
“How earnest of you,” Raven said, with Coquettish Smirk. She stepped forward. “She meant that much to you?”
“She was my greatest rival and a true friend.”
“So love does bloom on the battlefield.”
Raven had a knack for finding lines that caught her opponents off guard. For a moment, I didn’t comprehend her meaning, and then I wasn’t sure how to respond. Raven added helpfully. I quickly switched to Angry, Pride Insulted. The reaction was only delayed by 1.8 seconds, and the audience was unlikely to notice.
I roared and charged, ethane snow churning in my wake. At this gravity, I couldn’t run the way I did on Earth. I had to lower my body all the way forward, kicking the snow like I was swimming, propelling myself forward almost as if I were flying.
I swung my scythe, and Raven easily blocked it with her sword. Our blades locked, and we entered conversation. There were many templates for this situation, almost too many to choose from.
“Say what you will about me! But do not insult Shinano!”
“You’re so cute when you’re angry, Ibis.”
Raven let my scythe slide down her sword and swung her right wing horizontally. I flipped backward. The blades in her wing brushed against my arm.
The real battle began. Raven pressed her advantage, keeping the distance between us closed. Her sword danced. Right, left, down, up. It seemed to come from all directions. Her wings were weapons and part of an AMBAC (Active Movement Balance Adjustment Control) system, and they moved to offset the motions of her sword, allowing her to maintain her balance perfectly even in low gravity. Raven had won on the moon, Mars, Titan, and Triton because she used her wings so well.
Both of us stayed low to the ground, almost scrabbling along it. In low gravity, jumping was a huge tactical error. You couldn’t alter your trajectory in the air, and your opponent knew right where you would land. With no ground to kick off from, you couldn’t put your weight behind a blow, and your attacks did no damage. We both knew that, so we were both attacking from above and below, trying to knock each other into the air.
<
br /> My scythe had the longer reach, but it also took longer to swing. It also had a lot of mass, and without an AMBAC system, it was hard to maintain my balance. I lasted a dozen swings or so before I stumbled. Raven pounced, closing in. I was in trouble. I could block her sword with the staff but couldn’t attack.
“Is that the best you can do?” Raven sneered.
I deflected the sword again and tried to gain some distance so I could recover. Raven wouldn’t let me. She was pushing me toward one of the temple columns.
It was the right strategy. It wasn’t a fair way to fight, but that was perfect for Raven’s villainous role-play.
Raven’s assault was merciless. Just before my back hit the column, I jumped, kicked the column, and escaped upward. Raven would assume I would try to go left or right, so I hoped to catch her off guard.
But she was one step ahead of me. As I passed overhead, she leaned sharply forward and thrust her right leg upward. I avoided the kick by a good twenty centimeters, but I still felt a blow to my side. The unexpected hit surprised me. A thirty-centimeter blade had emerged from Raven’s boot. A hidden weapon.
The impact altered my trajectory, and I flew a lot higher than intended. I had yet to land. Rolling gently in the air, I gave my body the once-over. The artificial skin was torn open from my left side down to my hip, exposing the insides. Two actuator tubes in my side had been severed. Oil was bubbling out, scattering into the vacuum.
Raven turned and slammed the tip of her blade into the snow. Given its construction, she must not have been able to move her ankle. An alteration specifically designed for a battle in the snow in low gravity. Even then, it must have taken a lot of practice to compensate for her immobile ankle.
“Time to finish this!”
Raven leaned forward and lunged at me. I was still in the air. I would be a meter away when she hit me. She clearly planned to attack from below, to knock me back into the air, and trap me in the low G. I was afraid. I knew they could create new virtual bodies for me at any time, but the fear of death was still hardwired in me, and there was no way to stop the pseudo-autonomic nerves or pseudo-endocrine glands from functioning. I didn’t want to die.
The Stories of Ibis Page 27