The Colony Ship Conestoga : The Complete Series: All Eight Books

by John Thornton

  “What about the data stick that we got working?” Jerome asked. “Can you connect with that?” Jerome started doing some stretching exercises with his hands and fingers.

  “I have repeatedly tried, but only receive back ‘repairs in progress’ and nothing else. I cannot conference with that data stick. I am not sure of the cause,” Sandie replied. “I am making conjectures on how to address that situation as well.”

  “I should have had more data sticks fixed at Reproduction and Fabrication,” Jerome said as he thought about the number of data sticks and readers which were not functional. “That was the only one we got repaired.”

  “There was no time,” Cammarry answered. “I am thankful you even brought that single data stick. Without it we would not have escaped.”

  “Yes, but all our history and information is on that, and the synthetic brain, Bodowa is linked into it. If an enemy were to gain access to all our background, I wonder what would happen?” Jerome pondered.

  At the far side of the goat room, where the double doors were located, there came a pounding.

  Jerome and Cammarry both jumped to their feet and reached to draw out their weapons. Noises at doors made them both anxious.

  Sandie’s soothing voice spoke to them from the com-links, “We have a visitor. Khin is outside our camp’s perimeter.”

  Jerome hustled across the goat room and beyond the hedge at its center. “Sandie, let him in.”

  The doors parted and Khin stood there with a huge grin on his face. “My friends the Wizards! You are back! I have brought you cheeses and meats!”

  Jerome laughed and laughed. “It is good to see you Khin. You brought us food!’

  Khin held up the cheeses and also he had the bodies of three rats slung from his belt. He laughed as he handed a round lump of dark yellow cheese to Jerome. “I have one for Wizard Cammarry as well.”

  Cammarry strolled over to where the two men stood. Khin handed her a cheese. “Khin? How did you know we were here? It has only been three days since we came back.”

  “Well not because you shook the whole world again.” Khin laughed and giggled. “You already know! The goat people talk. One tells another, another tells a third, and the third tells me. Also the Old One has ways to know things. I heard you were back from three different people! I am here to help you with repairs. The Old One says you need it.”

  “Repairs?” Jerome asked.

  Khin laughed and laughed. “Your spirit-ghost has been doing repairs. You know that! Wizards and their tests of knowledge.” He burst into laughter again.

  Cammarry turned away and took a few steps back toward the teleportation units they had. The sending and receiving pads were sitting side by side. She was unsure how she felt about it, or about seeing Khin, or about what the future would hold.

  “Who will repair the damage we did to that society in Habitat Alpha?” Cammarry muttered to herself.

  “I am still here, Cammarry,” Shadow whispered to her.

  “I know. Yes, I know,” Cammarry replied quietly. “I am still marooned with you.”

  “But repairs can be done,” Shadow whispered. “Repairs are mandated.”

  “What else will happen?” Cammarry looked hard and the technology around her. “Just what else will happen?”

  The End

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John Thornton and his wife, two dogs, and an ancient cat live on the Northern Plains of the USA. The ancient cat is often marooned on a bed, and uses his vocal communication link to cry out and not feel so alone. The best days are when some of John’s adult daughters and their husbands come to visit.

  Repairing the Conestoga

  Book 3: The Colony Ship Conestoga

  John Thornton

  Copyright © 2015 Automacube Enterprises LLC

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1515100249

  ISBN-10: 1515100243

  DEDICATION

  This book is for my wife and my daughters. I vividly remember all the wonderful times we had reading together. From Dr. Suess, to summer reading, to family devotions, to all the rest. Thanks for sharing my joy of reading, and most importantly, thank you each for being a special part of my life. I will love you immensely, intensely, and forever.

  CONTENTS

  This is a work of fiction. At least fiction as of 2015. Maybe one day it will be looked back upon as being a classic. Was it Mark Twain who said something like, “a classic is a book people praise but have never read”? Maybe we can ask Jerome as he is well read, and paraphrases quotations often. Now where is the com-link?

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Cover art by Jon Hrubesch

  1 The world shakes again

  The smell of burnt circuits permeated the alcove off the hanger bay, but there was no human there to smell it. The power systems faltered and lights flickered, but again, no human eyes were there to see. The sizzle and whirr of air filters clicked up a notch to compensate for the newly fried connecter junction, but no human ears heard those sounds.

  Instead, the issuer of the command, the artificial intelligence system Sandie, searched the nonphysicality with a probing hyper-cybernetic tendril. She was seeking an alternative pathway through the darkness and broken sections of the nonphysicality. Sandie used sensors to see, touch, hear, feel, and smell the physical milieu, all accessed via the nonphysicality. The nonphysicality was not intact, consistent, coherent, or reliable. Sandie the AI persisted. She found a possible solution, another in a long list of many potentials that had been tried. Most had failed, but a few yielded new information. She found another potential, and added that in the queue. She selected the alternative route with the best conjecture for success, only 23%, and initiated the attempt. The command was for the energy and power to flow and reach the destination she intended.

  Circuits sizzled and popped as they failed again.

  Sandie then rerouted the command and issued it another time. With this attempt the hundred-year-old, brittle and fragile, circuit inside the Colony Ship Conestoga did not crumble under Sandie’s command. It held firm as the energy and, more importantly, the coded information contained within it, surged through.

  “Eureka!” Sandie said to herself. Her artificial intelligence mind was not above self-praise when warranted. “Target reached!”

  Her target, a blue automacube, sat inertly on its six drive wheels. Its multi-jointed manipulation arm was folded down into the storage position where it lay on the top of the automacube’s boxy shape. Sandie had spotted the machine in the recharging cubby several days before. Without any energy signatures, the automacube was only visible by the slightest edge of it sticking beyond the cubby. Not all of the physical world of the Conestoga was perceivable to Sandie from the nonphysicality, but she was working diligently to expand her horizons and understand more of the old colony ship. It was during one of her many routine scans that she spotted the location of the engineering automacube.

  The newly formed coupling held and the energy and information flowed.

  Two small green lights lit on the back side of the automacube as the batteries it contained received energy for the first time in decades. Again there was a bit of a burning smell as power surged over dust covered parts. Sandie expertly and carefully trickled the energy into the automacube’s empty power banks, and allowed them to fill gently and judiciously. Sandie would have smiled broadly, if she had a mouth to do so. Her pleasure at the success was not diminished by her lack of a human fleshly body.

  “Machine Maintenance Command 643-90H-R511-LLP received,” the automacube automatically reported back to Sandie.

  Sandie mildly and cautiously probed the awakening systems within the blue automacube. She used access codes which would normally come from Machine Maintenance. It had proved to be a rather effective masquerade. Not foolproof or absolute, but effective at times. Nothing Sandie had uncovered on the Conestoga was working at 100%, expect for Sandie herself. She continued to assess the automacube as it was resurrect
ed from torpid inactivity, to a partially functional mechanical apparatus. Its battery system was reporting that ‘Recharging in Progress.’ Its log being rebuilt and Sandie uncovered the designation of the blue automacube. It was called, EA-452.”

  “Excellent!” Sandie said in her mind. “With the addition of EA-452, that makes six automacubes now available for repairs.”

  While the newly acquired blue automacube continued to rise from its previous lethargy, Sandie focused on some other parts of the mission she was overseeing.

  EA-118, a blue automacube very much like the one Sandie was reviving, was operating in a corridor near a bulkhead door. Beyond that bulkhead the corridor had previously been brutally opened to vacuum. Upon Sandie’s guidance, EA-118 had remotely inflated a sealant bubble inside of that section. That bubble had covered over the areas which had burst. Now EA-118 was acting on Sandie’s next command, again given by masquerading as Machine Maintenance. That command required the connection the automacube was now making. The pincers on the end of its manipulation arm were carefully working. They were tightening together several coiled links of permalloy. The machine had applied a gel to the permalloy which made that ultra-hard metal momentarily pliable, while it retained its coherence. The spun fibers of the permalloy would only be moldable for another ninety seconds, so the pincers worked rapidly and efficiently intertwining the sections.

  “Very good EA-118,” Sandie conveyed. “When that connection is hardened, ratchet the new cable 27 centimeters toward you to pull the liquefied repair patch into place.”

  EA-118 complied and the pincer tips of the manipulation arms began to slowly rotate, thus pulling the patch into place. Once the patch was in place, EA-118 would need to remain stationary and activate the sprayer application. That would spread thin layers of new permalloy to cover over and complete the patching process.

  Sandie also monitored another automacube, this one yellow, which was working in the location of this mission’s goal: a hanger bay. The hanger bay’s horizontal surfaces, like many such planes found in the needle ship portion of the Conestoga, were coated with a growth medium out of which small plants were surviving in abundance. However, the fungus-like plants, valuable as they were to the life cycle of the needle ship, were not part of Sandie’s repair plans for the hanger bay.

  Therefore, that yellow automacube, a transportation model designated TA-008, had been put to work. Although it was not designed for ship repairs, or horticultural work, Sandie had found a way to make it useful. By creative application of multiple instructions, Sandie had conjectured a way to get the job done. Sandie had convinced the yellow machine to push a pipe along the floor, scraping the growth medium and plants away and into a pile at one end of the hanger bay. It was tedious and inefficient work, but by having the automacube maneuver back and forth across the hanger bay while holding the 2.71 meter long section of pipe, the task was getting accomplished. The yellow automacube’s manipulation arm was not as versatile of a tool as the appendages on a blue engineering model, but it was able to press the broken pipe down against the floor with sufficient force. The pipe had been part of the wreckage scattered about the hanger bay. That wreckage had happened in some detonation in the distant past.

  Currently, TA-008 was the only functional automacube actually inside the hanger bay. Sandie had reached it through a nonphysicality link, and had used its perception equipment to assess the hanger bay. The hanger bay consisted of three stalls, but only the one where the yellow automacube was working had been adequately investigated. Sandie could tell, via a limited deck plan, that the hanger bay had the other two stalls, but what they contained was a mystery. One of many mysteries Sandie had encountered while directing the repairs to the Conestoga. Why the yellow automacube, a transport model, was even in the hanger bay was unknown, as its own log was corrupted and unrecoverable.

  Sandie’s goal was to find a secure physical route for humans to use to reach the hanger bay. TA-008’s makeshift broom/scraper was clearing the area near where Sandie planned on having a blue automacube force open a pressure door. When that door was opened, the blue automacube could probably better assess the other two compartments of the hanger bay. A necessary part of the plan depended upon EA-118’s efforts to re-pressurize the corridor. For that corridor led to the pressure door Sandie planned to open.

  “TA-008, continue operations. You are doing well,” Sandie conveyed. Sandie, the AI, had learned that the two models of automacube she had been able to connect to, the sole yellow and the five blues, needed ongoing encouragement, reassurance, and continued guidance. Both the yellow and several blues Sandie had working on the project had actually refused a few commands. The hundred-year-old systems of the automacubes were not malleable and teachable enough to comply with Sandie’s far superior intellect. They had rigid parameters, and were manufactured for specific duties. So no matter how she wheedled, cajoled, manipulated, or attempted to persuade them, they were bound by their inherent limitations. Sandie was adept at working within those limitations, but they did slow progress.

  Despite the very sluggish replies from the automacubes, the fractured nonphysicality, and the perception difficulties, she had learned and gained insights. Like a human working with a very young child, so too Sandie felt the vast difference in her cognitive abilities as compared to those of the automacubes. Sandie reminded herself that she was working with antique equipment, in a damaged state, under far less than ideal conditions. One thing she had learned, was that on the Conestoga, somewhere, there were at least ten various and different models of automacube. At least there had been at launch, according to the fragmented log records Sandie was compiling.

  Sandie had found one audio-visual news record covering the big event where the intact and newly built Conestoga was christened and dedicated. Studying a small section, only eight seconds, of that recording, by enhancement and analysis of the background, she learned about the ten kinds of automacubes. Sandie made a positive conjecture that the color of an automacube reflected its function, but she did not have a complete legend telling her what colors indicated what functions. Her working hypothesis was that blue were engineering automacubes, yellow were transport, red were security, and green were likely agricultural. The other color designations remained a mystery. So many mysteries were found while making repairs.

  Sandie surveyed the work of her team of automacubes, and sent another conveyance of encouragement and continued guidance.

  Sandie reviewed what was known. The launch of the Conestoga had been many decades ago, light years away, and perhaps even further distanced by events. At launch the Colony Ship Conestoga had been pristine, new, and functional. The huge ship had once been packed with diverse flora and fauna in eight unique and homeostatically balanced biological habitats. The ship had a competent human crew, habitat dwellers, and people in suspended animation. Sandie assumed that in addition to the human elements, it was essential to that fine organization that it have a fully-integrated nonphysicality, a functioning oversight by primary, secondary, and tertiary synthetic brains, and a complete complement of every model of automacube. Sandie had to remind herself that the Conestoga’s rough equivalent of an artificial intelligence system was called a synthetic brain, but the best on the Conestoga was still one-hundred years obsolete.

  However, much had happened since launch. Sandie only had limited evidence and fragmented pieces of that history, but she contemplated what may have happened. The known facts were general and nebulous. The Conestoga had been through the Cosmic Crinkle incident, a violent human insurrection, an apparently deliberate destruction of many synthetic brains, a rough establishment of orbit around an alien world, and a jettisoning of all eight biological habitats. Only one of those habitats had been located on the planet’s surface.

  Despite all the difficulties, Sandie persevered in attempting the repairs.

  EA-452’s power levels reached marginal, and the automacube powered up more of its onboard systems. The manipulation arm spun about,
testing its range of motion. The six drive wheels also turned on their individual steering so the automacube rolled from side to side slowly and then rotated around in 360 degrees, and then reversed direction and did another rotation.

  Sandie made a more solid link and coupling to EA-452, and uncovered another bit of information from its log record. The hanger bay which was being repaired was designated Pine 1407.

  “EA-452,” Sandie conveyed a command, using the codes from Machine Maintenance, “Proceed to location 76-45-009 of Pine 1407. Repair the pressure door and ingress to the hanger bay.” Sandie sent additional and detailed instructions for the repairs that automacube was to do. EA-452 was located at such a spot that it could best access the pressure door which was in question while EA-118 completed the patching process.