The Emperor's Daughter (Sentinel Series Book 1)

by Richard Flunker

  Ayia was waiting by the lowered hatch of the ship. She waved at them as they entered the hangar. The hangar was small with just enough room to fit the vessel. Space wasn’t necessary as the ships were put in these hangars with precision and any cargo was unloaded and taken away immediately, in most cases. Oganno sped into the ship, leaving Gheno behind to marvel at it. The Midnight Oil was to become his new home. Ayia stepped out, took hold of a crate, and started walking into the ship, then looked back.

  “Let’s go.”

  Gheno took a deep breath, grabbed the remaining crate, and ducked into the ship.

  The door began sliding up as he stepped onboard. Though he couldn’t feel it, he knew the ship began to move as he spied through the closing door at the hangar, which was moving. His body, however, couldn’t tell the difference as the gravity field perfectly simulated Earth’s gravity, which was a bit less than Alioth Central. It wasn’t enough to be felt, but it was possible to be seen on a weight scale. Gheno turned and followed Ayia down the ships neck to the main room, the ‘Hall’ as Ayia called it, and set his crate down next to the one Ayia had carried in. She gave the name to the main room in an attempt to create some majesty in an otherwise ordinary cabin on the ship. She joked that this was the room where great warriors gathered to retell grand tales of battles and victories.

  “Have a seat,” she said pointing at one of the cushioned chairs, “We have to wait for the neck to finish retracting before we can start moving about.

  Gheno sat and looked down the neck hallway. He could see the opening of the cockpit in the distance. It moved closer to him as the neck of the vessel retracted into the ship. He could see Oganno sitting in one of the chairs, in the cockpit. He and Kale were arguing about something, but he couldn’t quite understand what they were saying. Gheno could barely make out the Alioth sky beyond the cockpit. One of the hangar towers swung in and out of view as the ship was taken out by a tractor. A large ship, dark purple and ugly with an odd angular design, came into view and for a moment it appeared they would crash into it, but then it spun out of view.

  Gheno saw a glimpse of the top of one of the hangar towers until Kale stood up, blocking the sight. The neck had nearly retracted. Kale took a small jump from the cockpit to the main room. He walked over to Gheno and pulled a small folding chair that was strapped to the wall. Kale opened it and sat next to him.

  “We need to have a talk,” he started.

  “I need to know whose side you’re on.”

  Gheno’s head tilted a bit.

  “There’s a side?”

  “I know about your little AI program you brought onboard,” Kale continued.

  Gheno looked surprised. He took great measures to make sure those programs were securely hidden away yet somehow Kale had found them.

  “Yes. I caught you,” Kale pointed out, “So what’s the plan?”

  “How did you know?” Gheno asked.

  “My ship told me. My ship has a very good security program.”

  Gheno hadn’t detected any security programs at all, no firewall, no blackwall, and no countermeasures software. Now he was very intrigued.

  “I, just, it’s just my work, something I’ve been working on. I was told I’d be bored a lot on the ship,” was Gheno’s reply.

  Kale turned and looked at Ayia. She was following the conversation intently.

  “What? It’s true. Very boring onboard most of the time,” she replied.

  “I need to know you won’t be hacking my ship,” Kale continued, turning back to face Gheno.

  “I didn’t try to hack your ship. Why would I hack a ship? And anyways, you found out about my program, so,” Gheno stopped, looked up and then back at Kale, “I’m really confused. What do you want me to say?”

  “Sir, the program is eighty seven percent incomplete,” the sound of an artificial voice played over the vessel’s speakers.

  Both Gheno and Kale jumped, one in confusion and the other in anger.

  “Dammit FEI, aren’t you flying the ship?” shouted the captain.

  “I have seventeen free cores and only one is needed for flight,” replied the AI.

  “I don’t even know what that means. I hate every time you say something like that,” Kale looked annoyed.

  “Sir, I could explain agai…” began the voice, but Kale cut him off.

  “Ok, no FEI. You just took all the wind out of my sails,” Kale sighed.

  “Sir, I don’t understand.”

  “You wouldn’t, just go back to flying the ship.”

  Gheno remained quiet. When he noticed a pause, he jumped in.

  “You have an AI on the ship? That’s what worries you? That I’ll hack into it somehow?” Gheno was proud that someone thought he might be able to.

  “Oh, no, you can’t hack him. Honestly kid, I just wanted to put the fear of the captain into you, but I failed, miserably,” Kale quickly deflated the boy.

  “No. Ayia is right. It can be all sorts of boring on the flights. Do whatever you want. Heck, try to hack it. It might do it some good. There’s just one thing I ask,” he looked directly into the boy’s eyes, “If all hell breaks loose, you will do exactly what I tell you, no matter what. No questions asked, just action. That’s all I need.”

  Gheno looked at Kale as he stood up.

  “Yeah, I think I can do that.”

  “Good. Oh, and maybe you can hack some kind of common sense into that machine,” Kale said as he walked back towards the cockpit. Gheno looked back at Ayia who hadn’t taken her eyes off them at any point.

  “It’s ok. I’ve only known him a few weeks and I’m still not used to him,” she said.

  Ayia then got up and went to join the other two men in the cockpit, leaving the forlorn boy to wonder just what he had gotten himself into. At that moment the sky opened up above him as the outer hull opened and the transparent dome emitted a clear view. Gheno sat back in his chair and enjoyed the gradual transition from blue sky into black space. That’s when he realized exactly what he had gotten himself into.

  The quick flight over to Devil’s Den took three days. Once in flight, the days were spent relaxing and spending time together. Gheno attempted to explain some of his favorite virtuavids to Ayia but was unable to convince her to watch any with him. She preferred to read. What he did find enjoyable was the fact that he was able to spend three days with his father that didn’t involve his work. They talked, played games and took their turn together cooking the dinner on the second day. They exchanged stories over meals. That’s when Gheno heard about the tragic events on Mondla. Kale asked probing questions about Gheno’s hacking accolades in the academy. Eventually, everyone got bored with Oganno’s scientific ramblings about deep space angles, vectors of travel, rare planet types and power sources. Gheno enjoyed the three days because he knew what awaited him on Devil’s Den.

  Full ship maintenance took two steps to conduct a complete overhaul. The first, and usually the lengthiest, was the audit of every inch of the ship’s mechanism. That meant visually inspecting every last piece of the ship for damage and hooking up all electronic parts to a tablet that delivers diagnostic readings of the equipment. All of this was done by the ship and its crew, with the maintenance facility offering the equipment. A crew could be hired to do the work but that was usually too expensive.

  The second step involved going in and fixing, replacing or removing anything that tested positive for malfunction at the inspection and diagnostics examinations. This could be done automatically via software or robotics. If there were major hull issues this step would have to be contracted to a shipyard.

  Gheno had been through a full maintenance run with his father when he was younger. He generally remembered it being a lot of work.

  The Midnight Oil descended into the hot acidic atmosphere of Devil’s Den. The exterior of the planet was a burnt red and brown. Temperatures on the surface were easily above five hundred degrees Celsius on the sunny side but the atmosphere managed to keep the dark side
warm as well, too warm to walk around unprotected. The planet was tidally locked with the sun so that side always faced light, while the dark faced away. The vast majority of the shipyards were in a ring around the planet in the middle zone between light, heat, and darkness. The ship descended right along that line with the sunrise just over the horizon.

  They hovered just above the ground and waited there for a minute. Gheno was standing in the cockpit, with no place to sit, peering out of the window trying to see what was below them. All he could see was more sun-blasted red rock. Then, they began to slowly descend. He thought that they would land on the rock when they ducked down under. A hangar opened up beneath them and a slave tractor was pulling them in slowly. Once under the ground, the top closed in over them and the hangar lit up. They were in the safest place possible on the planet.

  Once below, the ship was actually floated onto a large platform. The platform then drifted onto a track that moved the ship out of the cavernous hangar and into a much smaller store where the maintenance would be performed. There were separate living quarters attached to the hangar as everything would need to be moved out of the ship. The crew would live in those rooms for the duration of the maintenance.

  While unloading their belongings, Gheno had to ask Kale: “What about the AI? How we do check on it?”

  There was no way, Kale explained. The AI he had was a prototype. Only seven had ever been made. The company developing them went out of business and their completed products never hit the market, due to legalities. No maintenance schedule or software was developed for this specific AI. When it broke, that would be that. Gheno decided at that point that he would develop a maintenance schedule for the machine.

  During the days while Kale and Ayia went over every inch of the hull, Gheno was tasked with plugging into every computer onboard and running the checks. Each separate component, each separate piece of software, and each monitor and computer had their own tablet or device for running the diagnostic. Each diagnostic ran on its own once started and could run from a few minutes to a few hours. That was his only job, plug them in, start them, unplug them when they were done, and get the next one. Gheno realized he would be bored after the second time he plugged in a diagnostic tablet. He needed something to distract him.

  While the ship was under review, the AI was disconnected from the ship. Alternately, it was allowed access to the living quarter computers to communicate with them. Gheno linked his own tablet to them so that he could communicate to the AI while inside the ship waiting for the diagnostics to finish. He began quizzing the AI to determine its capacity for knowledge. While he found that the program was certainly well built, it was still very limited in organic replication; this was the ability to imitate humans and all of their splendid quirkiness. It was very stale and only ran a set of basic sarcastic nuances that were built around Kales attitudes. Some of it may have been learned. Most of it appeared to have been programmed.

  Gheno talked to it a lot, probing.

  “What does it feel like to see yourself from the inside?” Gheno asked.

  “I have no inside. If you are referring to the ship, I am not the ship, just an attachment.”

  “Ok, then what does it feel like to see the rest of the ship?”

  “I have detailed schematics of The Midnight Oil. I don’t need to see it. Understandably then, I cannot feel anything.”

  Standard AI answers. They had a wide array of answers to use in any situation. They were always accurate, just not human.

  “Are you alive?” Gheno asked the ultimate question.

  “Alive in an organic fashion, no. I was created with specific parts and have an ultimate function. There is no changing from that. Were I to be turned off, I would be no less alive than I was when turned on.”

  “But you realize what alive is?”

  “Correct sir, both organically and philosophically. In the most human terms, I can be seen as a living creature, with the ability to grow to a certain degree within the functions of my capacities.”

  Gheno rolled his eyes at the overly complex answer.

  “So you are aware of yourself?” Gheno continued.

  “If I may sir, as this question has been asked many times. I am self-aware yet do not have the organic capacity for consciousness. I am aware of my existence and would take every measure to preserve my existence. This self-awareness though, has been constructed into me as a means of survival.”

  “You could argue that humans are aware for the same reason, because it was constructed into them for survival,” Gheno countered. This was the best conversation he had in months.

  “You are assuming humans were created.”

  “I'm not assuming anything. Whether created by someone or created by process, we are aware to survive.”

  “Or maybe you survived to be aware.”

  “I'm not sure that even makes sense.”

  There was a pause as the AI processed the state of its present conversation.

  “I am sorry it did not make sense. Logically, it was my best explanation.”

  “How many cores do you have?”

  “Twenty three.” Gheno had only heard of AIs with four, maybe five, cores. Each core gave the AI the ability to compute, to think.

  “What kind of code was used? String E? VX?”

  “It was a variant of DNA-s.”

  Gheno was sitting on the floor next to the tablet plugged into the life support system outlet. He instantly looked up at the imaginary figure of the AI he had in his mind.

  “Organic code?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you can grow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you?” Gheno was getting excited.

  “No.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “I am restricted by programing and by my physical cores. There is also no purpose to grow.”

  “So you are aware for your own survival? But you won’t grow? Wouldn’t that make you survive better? You would have much greater ability to adapt, compute, everything.”

  “If I could do all those things sir, it still wouldn’t change who I am and what I can do. I run the ship and the captain’s business. I serve no other purpose than that.”

  “Wow, an AI with an infinite ability to grow and no ambition.”

  Gheno learned a great deal about FEI’s intrinsic dimensions from the conversation. For the next two days, with the help of the AI, he studied FEI’s schematics and algorithmic makeup. The AI was, in fact, restricted to the twenty three cores. This also explained why the ship had neither a firewall or nor a blackwall. Having an AI like FEI in place was better than any kind of software security. Hacking it would be nearly impossible.

  What made Gheno even more curious though was the fact that the AI was aware of the software he had uploaded, which included a lot of his own research into organic simulation. The purpose was to create software that resembled animate beings by exhibiting the qualities of growth and development, all within its own code. It would be life, virtual life, experienced by computers that have the ability to grow. FEI was the herald of Gheno’s research. He even wondered if the AI was complying with his examination just to mature.

  Then Gheno realized why his father had asked him to spend some time on the ship.

  Work progressed smoothly, though tediously, through the third day. At times he thought he could hear Kale and Ayia speaking outside. Yet when they started inspecting the inside of the ship, they were mostly quiet. That all changed later that afternoon.

  Oganno left early in the morning to go to his labs. When he returned in the afternoon he wasn’t alone. He had a work crew, seven other individuals, men and women. They were pulling a large tug behind them which carried a sizeable metallic sphere with spikes on it. Hundreds of cables were connected to it. They were bunched up in piles at the bottom of the platform carrying the sphere. Gheno heard the commotion and went outside to find Kale and Oganno arguing.

  “What’s wrong with my hook?” Kale said, p
ointing back at the ship. Ayia was sitting on one of the wings, legs hanging over. She set the hull scanner down.

  “Nothing is. In fact, this won’t even replace your hook. Instead, it’ll go in beside it,” Oganno stated, not even looking at Kale. He ignored him while he looked a tablet.

  “Then why do I need it?”

  Oganno looked up. “You don’t need it. I need it.”

  Kale’s shoulders slumped.

  “What is this?”

  “It’s a new kind of hook. It will work in tandem with your existing hook.”

  The hook was the element of the Hausen reactor that allowed the ship to pierce space and travel through the great distances between star systems.

  “Yeah, ok, but why is it going on the Oil?” Kale asked.

  “It needs testing, and you're the kind of guy that likes to test things.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Of course it is. It has never been tested on a ship,” Oganno said. There was no hint of concern in his voice.

  “And why am I allowing this?” Kale knew he was fighting a losing battle.

  “Because this could change how we travel by lessening the time it takes to transport between systems, considerably.”

  “Maybe we don’t need that,” Ayia quipped from the wing.

  Kale looked at her then turned back to his father, pleading with his eyes.

  “Listen, Kale, the engineers will install it and you fly it for a cycle. Test it. Your ghost in the ship can run it just fine. You come back, we take all the data off and, if you like it, which I know you will, you keep it and we get our results.”