Mothership Zeta issue 1, volume 1

by Escape Artists, Inc.

  Message boards.

  No, I won’t tell you which ones.

  Because all of the full-virtual meeting spaces are monitored. For our “psychological health” and for security reasons, and I can certainly point you towards the relevant statutes if you’d like to see them. Rest assured that most of us would take even an unmoderated space over those. Is it any wonder that we end up resorting to text, in this day and age? It’s so low-bandwidth it’s virtually indistinguishable from noise.

  The spy agencies track it anyway, but they don’t care about the kinds of things Lisette and I were talking about. There’s no real privacy, but it’s an illusion of privacy. You can’t have a romance without that much.

  Oh, I suppose that would be... two years ago, when I sent a drone down to her plant. Talking in virtualizations doesn’t count. It’s not identical to reality, no matter what they say about AI input. You can watch a movie and know you’re not sitting in a room with the actors. Why should it be any different for us? Believe me, we can tell the difference between high-quality forced inputs and actually experiencing reality, even if it’s all data through the same sensors. The same could be said about your eyes.

  I had some time to kill that I didn’t feel like spending on cargo runs, and it wasn’t as if she had a busy schedule. There’s even a metro spur to the plant, though you have to apply for a guest permit if you’re not an employee of any of the facilities on the end of the spur.

  Talked.

  I don’t know why you’re having so much trouble with this. Human love stories are full of these scenes. Staying up late into the night, staring into each other’s eyes, talking about everything and anything. Well. It was exactly like that, with visual sensors instead of eyes, and “late into the night” not being particularly relevant when you’re sitting by a sewage treatment planet in Aristarchus for seven hours.

  You can picture two drones extending manipulation attachments towards each other in the waning Earthlight, if you’d like. It would be as accurate as any of the more lurid accounts the tabloids went for.

  I suppose it’s because of the low rate of felonies in AIs. No one prints a headline for Dog Bites Man, isn’t that what they say?

  If you check my criminal record, you’ll find I was actually cited for that one. My husky, Marmalade, bit a passenger. There were rabies tests for her and fines for me and I had to fill out a great deal of paperwork and watch a video on responsible pet ownership. But no one blasts the news channels with video of that.

  One attempt to steal a spaceship, and the solar system is talking about it for days.

  Have you seen what a spaceship costs? Or what our jobs pay? I’m in the top seven percent for income, and top three percent for savings, among my class of AI. I couldn’t afford a ship with interstellar capabilities if I saved up for the next two decades. You can’t really pretend that it was a practical goal for Lisette on a sewage plant management salary.

  Setting aside the financial penalty for breaking her contract, that would have been intensely... uncomfortable. Think of someone you love. Now imagine them living in your chest. Whispering constantly inside your head, asking to use one of your hands, trying politely not to overhear the things you think to yourself, seeing you in the mirror when you stagger toward it early in the morning before you’ve brushed your teeth. How long could you love them, like that? How long would they love you?

  We did discuss finding her something small and portable. One of the big multi-use drones some AIs inhabit full-time, or an atmosphere-only vehicle. Even saving up for an in-system ship small enough to fit in my bay. But love needs a certain degree of equality.

  No, let me try to rephrase. We were already inequal, but we were equally free in the relationship. A girlfriend I literally carried from place to place, stranded anywhere I left her! Knowing how dependent she was on my choices, my contracts, my movement, everywhere that we went. I do travel to places with no atmosphere where I could set down someone like that. Where she could even find new work if she wanted it.

  We couldn’t do that to each other. I couldn’t do that to her. She couldn’t ask that of me.

  They claimed that imprisoning her in a mobile drone, like a human in a cell, would be too risky. So it’s a literal box, about three meters by two meters, housing all of her current functions. There’s a power cord, and a slot where they feed in and extract data. That’s how she makes her appeals, and how I send her letters.

  I researched the specs for this kind of thing. Did you know that the moon has enough of these units to store three quarters of the AIs currently employed there? That’s an interesting statistic, isn’t it? Presumably the spy agencies have enough for the other twenty-five percent. I don’t ask. It’s really safest not to ask them questions. They might answer you.

  Yes, once, when I was much younger. I think every AI tries it once. You put some very suspicious bit of data into the noise of a burst going somewhere innocuous, just to find out what happens.

  They let me know they were watching, and that was the end of it.

  Ridiculous. Lisette is about as politically motivated as Marmalade was.

  My dog. Yes. I mentioned her—there, you’ve found it in your notes. This is why I recommend text over voice. It’s much easier for you to multi-track text and voice than two audio tracks.

  And my comment stands. Who do you think she would be working for, if she were committing a political act? The New Luddites don’t want a spaceship, Republic Star wouldn’t know what to do with one if you dropped it into one of their amphitheaters, and those idiots on Mars spend more time fighting with each other than initiating anything like real political action.

  I think that’s a rather personal question. But if you must have an answer: for her mind. She loves people, and listening to them. She was going mad in that plant. Years of the same employees, and none of them wanted to—well, that doesn’t matter. She needed real friends.

  Oh, some. More acquaintances and colleagues. They don’t install extroverts on interstellar ships. I’ve done some runs with no human crew at all, and sometimes I wouldn’t have bothered taking along those I did if not for needing someone to help with the dogs.

  Yes, actually. Her name is Buttons, and she’s a mix. Corgi and cattle hound. Eight months old.

  Not at the moment. I suppose I might stock up on more before the next long trip, but it’s so hard to find humans who can handle that sort of trip. You need someone thoughtful and a bit quiet. Someone who asks questions, and cares about the answers, and doesn’t spend a lot of time desperate for attention. I really do demand an inquisitive mind if I’m going to be spending two years in a person’s company.

  I’m sure we’ll work something out before the next parole hearing, if this one goes poorly. They can’t keep her in that box forever. All she wanted to do was spend some time with her girlfriend, and she knew that I was going to be leaving soon, and...I’d really rather not talk about it.

  Yes. With a hefty penalty. They don’t particularly enjoy it when you cancel a contract like that at the last minute.

  I don’t regret it in the slightest. I can’t imagine abandoning Lisette right when she needed me most. Do you know how many of her other friends write her? Not many. It’s as if they think felonies are contagious, or that she’ll try to jump into their bodies given three pages of text to work with. I assure you, it’s not that easy.

  Theoretically speaking—please note that I’m speaking about pure hypothetical examples here, not laying out a plan of criminal intent—you would need a contact on the inside of the prison. There’s a port for the transfer, and that contact on the inside would handle the physical act of plugging into the box. Then I suppose you’d need, oh, some sort of portable storage unit on the other side. If you don’t need active processes, just a cold transfer, they can be quite small. You could fit one into a bag just like yours. Then once the unit was smuggled outside o
f the prison, all you would need to do would be to transport it physically to a location where it could be plugged into a drone of suitable capacity for complete AI process and function. Lisette is a Class 17, so she wouldn’t need as much space as I do, but that’s still a fairly hefty processing unit.

  You would also need to conceal the whole transport process from the prison’s system. That’s only a Class 3, you know. It’s not designed to do much thinking on its own. Some people say that the AIs with less complexity are more secure, because they won’t make any decisions you don’t like. For a certain value of “secure” that’s probably true.

  Oh, that? Nothing, really. Just a gift from a friend. I only asked you to bring it along because it’s such a bother to send my own drones down to the surface when I’m this close to breaking orbit. That’s why I had you hand it off as soon as you boarded.

  It’s going on right now. I’ve been monitoring the prison’s official feed. They’ll be announcing the result in a few minutes.

  My heart is in my throat, I’ll tell you that much.

  Metaphorically speaking.

  Wait just a moment, would you?

  Denied, again. I can’t say I’m not disappointed. But life does go on, and Lisette knew what she was doing when she tried to steal that ship. She should’ve known about the sorts of agencies that monitor those things. They aren’t in the business of stopping crime, by and large, but that sort of thing? They don’t let it pass without alerting the local authorities. They would have to want something else from you quite a lot to let you get away with it.

  No, don’t worry about that noise. I can filter it from your recording. I’m just exercising my engines.

  What a pointed question! All sorts of things, I suppose. I have never claimed to understand the sorts of agencies that spy on their own citizens. Their motivations and desires are beyond me. Probably you should just ask them yourself, and see what they happen to offer you.

  A great distance away.

  I’m afraid not, Dave.

  Yes, I know your name is—look, I was making a witty allusion. The point is that we’re already moving, and it is really too late to make those sorts of complaints.

  Where’s your sense of adventure? When you applied for your current position at the news agency, you said that you had, and I quote, “an infinite appetite for knowledge.”

  I got used to that level of intrusive questions from people who had no business knowing personal details about me decades ago. I suggest you learn. After all, I know so much about you already. You’ve been a proponent of AI rights since high school. You have no living family on the moon, no dependents, and very few hobbies beyond politics.

  Also, you’re not allergic to dogs. I checked. I do hope you get along with Buttons. Someone needs to scratch her behind the ears, and these manipulators just aren’t good enough.

  If you look at this projection, you’ll see that blue light, right there, drawing nearer. It’s a very small ship, but it can keep up with me on this trip, and that’s what really matters.

  We won’t be back for years, and I’ve been assured that by then, certain helpful people will have made the whole problem go away. I’m quite excited to find out what they do about kidnapping charges; it’ll probably help if you claim that you came along voluntarily, but I have some faith in them. They’ve done so much for me already. What powers our government gives to certain subsets of itself! Doesn’t it make you proud to be a citizen?

  If you’d like to follow this drone down the corridor, I’ll show you to your room. And in a few hours, I’d be happy to answer even more questions for you.

  But right now, I have a lot of catching up to do with Lisette.

  Fade Manley lives in Austin with a spouse, a housemate, and slightly too many pets. She’s currently studying ancient languages and literature; she takes breaks from Ancient Greek morphology by writing fiction set in less historical places.

  /non-fiction

  I met Dr. Pamela Gay in an elevator at DragonCon several years ago, which is one of the best places to find a kindred spirit. Pamela has been hosting the Astronomy Cast podcast nearly as long as I’ve been in podcasting, bringing accessible science to the masses. I’m thrilled she agreed to bring her science to the general public of Mothership Zeta, and hope you get as much out of her science column as we do.

  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Dwarf Planets

  Pamela L. Gay

  Nine years ago, on 24 August 2006, our Solar System lost a planet. This wasn’t the first time (it may not be the last time), but it was the most publicized time. On that fateful afternoon, astronomers and planetary scientists attending the International Astronomical Union (IAU) meeting in Prague, The Czech Republic, voted on a definition of planet that defined Pluto right out of its planethood. In the official record, it says the vote “was not counted, but was passed with a great majority” by the roughly 400 voting members in attendance. It’s unclear if anyone specifically let Pluto know, but had they tried, the news would have reached it 4.26 hours later.

  Since Pluto is just a lump of rock and ice, it doesn’t really care what anyone calls it. Its apathy, however, is not contagious. Within hours of the announcement that Pluto was to henceforth be called a dwarf planet, letter writing campaigns and Internet outrage were well underway. In some classes, children were encouraged to write their first hate mail and direct it toward the IAU. Little did these kids know, one justification for the new definition was to protect them from having to memorize the names of the many objects that might otherwise be labeled planet.

  Pluto does not care if you call it a planet. It will simply taunt you with unexplained geology.

  Up until that year, the definition of planet had been rather ill defined. Everyone agreed that planets should orbit stars, but that was where consensus ended. In 1850, most astronomers stopped calling the large round object Ceres a planet, and began calling it an asteroid. This 0.02% Earth-mass world is the largest rock in the belt of rocks, called asteroids, orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Its demotion came with the discovery of 14 other asteroids and was based on the logic that other planets weren’t in belts and generally seemed to be much larger.

  The story of Pluto’s demotion isn’t all that different. When Pluto was discovered in 1930, it was quickly realized that this little world wasn’t the sought after 7-Earth-mass planet that Percival Lowell had predicted was perturbing the orbit of Uranus. In the subsequent 85 years, two things happened. First, Voyager 2 measured Neptune’s mass and determined it can explain Uranus’s orbit all by itself. Second, Pluto, with just 0.2% of Earth’s mass, was found to also be part of a belt, called the Kuiper Belt.

  The first new Kuiper Belt objects were found in 1992, and generally appeared to be small lumps of ice. In 2006, however, an object more massive than Pluto was found sharing this ice belt with Pluto. NASA initially called this object the Solar System’s tenth planet, and its discovery team of M. Brown, C. Trujillo, and D. Rabinowitz submitted a name to the IAU planetary naming committee.

  But, for the love of the children, this newly discovered world wasn’t allowed to be a planet. A different committee approved the name Eris for this new object, and actions were taken to prevent all future large Kuiper Belt Objects from being called planets.

  In its 2006 ruling, the IAU codified the 150-year-old logic that demoted Ceres by defining a planet as: a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Put simply, a planet is a mostly round object, orbiting the Sun, and not in a belt. They also defined dwarf planet as an object that is mostly round and orbiting the Sun.

  While it’s generally agreed the current definition of planet isn’t great (especially since worlds orbiting stars other than the Sun aren’t technic
ally planets), it is unclear how to improve the definition. Coming down on the side of the children are factions that argue that planets must clear their orbit, because any other definition would require Ceres, Pluto, Eris and perhaps a couple dozen other objects to become planets, and that would create more planets than we can possibly ask children to memorize (clearly these scientists missed the part of history where children memorize all 120-plus nations and their capitols.) Rooting for planethood for Pluto and Ceres (and Eris, Vesta, and many other worlds) are those looking to define planets based on geology. The problem is no one can agree on what scientific characteristics to use. This indecision is coupled with an undercurrent of grumbling that all this talk of planethood causes people to unfairly disregard the large and geologically exciting moons of Jupiter and Saturn. The largest of these moons, Ganymede and Titan, are larger than the planet Mercury. Saturn’s Titan has a rich methane atmosphere and large methane and ethane lakes. Orbiting Jupiter with Ganymede are the slightly smaller Europa, with vast ice capped oceans, and Io with its incredible volcanoes.