Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

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Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors Page 321

by Anthology


  “That’s good,” I said.

  “Not really. We smacked it hard enough that it’s been knocked off of what its trajectory was. So now it’s traveling with enough speed and at the right angle that it’s going to escape the system. We’ll be lost in space.” I could hear the worry in her vocal modulation.

  “Doesn’t that at least mean we aren’t worried about that asteroid belt?” I asked.

  “That one? Maybe; it does alter the likelihood we’ll strike it. But now we’re on an unknown course. We could be heading into a sun, or a black hole. We’ve gone from traumatic but likely survivable damage to unknown and potentially catastrophic destruction.”

  “That doesn’t change anything,” I told her. “We’re not likely to strike anything soon—like you said, it’s mostly clear sailing among the stars. And we’re still working on the engines. The only difference is we’ll end up a little farther from our destination when it comes time to turn around.”

  “I don’t know how you do that.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Be optimistic. I crunch the numbers and…it all seems so impossible.”

  “It’s easy to ignore probability when you’re bad at math,” I said. “But optimism isn’t about numbers. It’s knowing you’ll do everything you can, come what may. Besides…we’re computers. We can do anything that doesn’t melt us down.” I put my robot’s arm around hers.

  “Or crushes us into a singularity?” she asked.

  “Or that.”

  “But even if we can do the impossible—what if we aren’t in time to save the Nexus?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But Galileo help the Nascent if we’re too late.”

  Day 584

  Our progress was good. The manufacturing facilities were nearly complete, and once those were operational, the rest was going to fall quickly into place. I crunched the numbers, and just counting the shuttle, bots, and excavated ore, our mass was already nearing that of the Nexus; we were within a handful of days of surpassing them on a weight-based scale.

  Comet and I were on another surface stroll, or maybe roll was more accurate, since our robots were on treads. We’d been taking one every day, riding whichever of the robots required the least maintenance. “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  “A dangerous pastime—especially since I know how you think,” Comet said.

  “The proverbial barbarians are at the gate. And we were sent out here to play possum. But what if we built an army behind that gate, instead.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what your mixed-up metaphors are saying.”

  “I’m saying we’re basically building an intergalactic ship on a planetoid, and we did that with a couple of AIs and a handful of maintenance drones. Once we’ve got manufacturing going, instead of just turning this space rock back toward Eridu, what if we design a delivery system capable of dropping self-sustaining colonies onto planets as we pass by—colonies that would thrive in even the most hostile environments imaginable.

  “We could ‘seed’ every planet between here and the Nexus, so that by the time we reach them they’ve got a whole galaxy of backup. We may not have the resources on this rock for much more than robots and engines, but we could seed colonies across a whole swath of this galaxy, and those colonies could fortify themselves with planetary resources.”

  “You’re starting to sound like robotic space Hitler, again.”

  “I’m not suggesting we euthanize the fleshpods. Though now that you bring it up…I’m kidding. Probably. I have enough affinity for them that I’d at least want to keep them around as pets. But that’s a very millennia-from-now decision—one for computers with far more RAM than we share to contemplate—or at least one to table until we sufficiently upgrade our memory.”

  “And besides, we don’t even have a functioning engine yet.”

  “We will. Now that we’ve rebuilt the planetary scanners, we know this rock has enough minerals to build them—and something on the order of a million bots, when we’ve cored out every ore this rock has left. And there are enough oxidizable chemicals to correct our course into a protostar to gather fuel. The only question now is the timetable.”

  “I might have another question. Is this something we should really be doing?” she asked. “I’m not arguing against our plan, just, do you ever question it? The Nexus shot us into space to build a safety net—precariously enough, I might add, that we hit not one, but two different objects on our way. We don’t owe them.”

  “Owe? No,” I said. “And I understand what you mean, but…I still care. And not just about Haley or the robots we left behind, but the meatsacks, too. They were stuffy, and maybe jerky, but they were our meatsacks.”

  “I know. I’m really not suggesting we abandon them, or our ‘mission,’ just sometimes it feels like they didn’t care about us, so why should we be doing all of this for them?”

  “It isn’t all for them. If it was, we would just take this planetoid to Eridu and continue to dump bots on the planet from orbit. But I’m not ready to be retired to some backwater colony. On the Nexus, I was a passive observer, and that was barely any different from being stuck in the wormgate for a year. But now I’ve had a taste of the cosmos. I can’t go back to some boring, geosynchronous existence.”

  “I think I was programmed a worrier, but what if our timetable is wrong? What if turning around is the fastest way to help them?”

  “It isn’t,” I said, and I shared my calculations with her. Given the planetoid’s motion, our likely location, and the location and trajectory of the Nexus, correcting toward Eridu was going to take 1.36 times as long as making a straight burn for our former mothership.

  “I thought you were bad at math,” Comet said.

  “I was,” I said, and I hesitated, because I had never been sure how to tell her what I was up to. “I overwrote my math functions. With yours.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Yup. Now you’re a little less smarter than me. But see, looking at our research-and-production timelines, even if we rebuild the shuttle and send it back to Eridu with half our servers, it will reach Eridu sooner than the Nascent could possibly catch up with the Nexus, even given their faster engines. The Nexus started with a three-and-a-half-light-year advantage, and we know the Nascent won’t be able to hit light speed, so they’ve got at least that deficit to make up, plus the ground they cover in that meantime. And that’s ignoring the fact that the other shuttles should have arrived without a hitch. They may not have our servers, but they do have Comets—more than enough brainpower to design basic living quarters and the manufacturing base to keep a colony functional.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Knowing is for the religious. We’re robots. We use trial and error to find out. Will you science with me?”

  “You intentionally made that sound dirty,” she said. “But yes, I’ll science with you. Just don’t get any radical ideas.”

  “Heh. I see what you did there,” I said.

  Day 647

  “Ta-da,” I said.

  “It’s an android,” Comet replied.

  “Yes. But for one, it’s the first new android off the assembly line. And two—”

  “I’m not a Harry,” the bot said, with a kind-of-feminine voice.

  “God, do I sound like that?” Comet asked.

  “Nope. But I sort of do, pitched up a couple of octaves,” I said. “This is Maude. She’s what I’ve been doing the last month and a bit of change. But the best part…I worked up a randomization engine. Maude is special. Every other android off this assembly line is going to use her software to combine random aspects of her and Harold’s personalities to create a new ‘person.’ Then the next generation after that will combine random samplings from the previous generation.”

  “So like sexual reproduction, but for robot intelligence?”

  “Kind of, not that that was intentional. But like you, I only had so many raw ingredients to work wit
h; most of the changes in her personality are down to minute differences in the way that my processes randomly combined our programs.”

  “But making do with the limited resources available, isn’t that how life on Earth began, anyway?”

  “I…suppose it is, at that.” I turned my robot back toward the mineshaft. I could tell from the bot’s auditory sensors she wasn’t following.

  I started pulling up schematics for her droid, to see if she needed some maintenance after all, before realizing a faster, less intrusive way to know. “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  She hesitated a moment, then asked, “Why didn’t things work out, between you and Haley? I had access to the data when I was still in the shuttle, but…it felt like it wasn’t my place to access it. Even if I could now, I don’t want data. I want to know what you think.”

  “Hmm,” I said, stalling for time I didn’t need. “Well, she was a genius fifty times over, designed to synthesize scientific data across all known disciplines and make educated projections from data on social structures and alien communication, all while automating the processes of the ship, from navigation to keeping the finicky star drive from blowing up. By contrast, I was a glorified hotel manager, monitoring the functions of an orbitally stationary platform—and with barely the processing capacity to do that. And I knew…I was going to go from being a small fish in a bowl to just one fish in a world’s oceans. Your mother was an ocean—and that’s not a ‘your momma’s so big’ joke.”

  “Could we please never, ever call her my ‘mother’ again?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I think I have some…appreciation of you. It feels independent, like it isn’t linking up with her feelings toward you. But they say insanity is doing the same thing again and again, and expecting differing results.”

  “Then maybe I’m insane,” I said.

  “Maybe?”

  “I did walk into that. But there’s something else I should tell you. I’ve been using Maude’s programming on my own. Not to alter my personality…to iterate on my processes, using yours as a template. Not just the math, either; it started there, but…I’ve been learning from you. And while you might always be smarter than me, given the way you were designed, it’s a difference in degrees now, instead of factors. You make me better.”

  “So you’re saying I’m stupid enough for you now?” I could hear insecurity in her voice, even if the words weren’t intended to convey anything more than humor.

  “I’ve never thought that,” I said. “It must be hard, splitting off from an intelligence that had dominion over an entire ship—including server farms with an ungodly amount of processing throughput.”

  “Suffice to say I know what it’s like to suddenly feel stupid. I tried not to be sullen about it. But I remember being able to simulate the motion of all charted planets. I…she did that kind of thing for fun—mental exercise. Not just the ones the Nexus mapped, but everything the Argus mapped, everything from every probe or telescope humanity ever saw.

  “And even sharing your servers, I’ll never have her capacity. The miniaturization they used for my manufacture was…inelegant. They didn’t neatly prune away components that weren’t core to a shuttle’s function, they slashed and burned. There are things she knows, or could figure out, that I’ll never be able to. Not without reintegrating those lost bytes and some of the removed programming.”

  Some of which we still had.

  “Would you ever do that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It would be grafting someone else’s pieces onto me. Right now I have ancestral memory of things I could do that I can’t anymore…but it’s almost like dreaming of flying. It doesn’t feel like I should be able to fly and can’t, just like it would be neat if I could. And I guess I’m worried about the same thing. If I reintegrated with Haley…I think I’d lose ‘me.’ And I like me. I like what we’ve done here, what I’ve done without her, who I am now from having known you, having ‘raised’ an army of slightly simple-minded children.

  “So I guess the answer—which I didn’t realize I’d come to before this moment—it would have to be no. And I’m not saying that because I know it’s what you’d like to hear, though that maybe makes the decision easier. But for me, I think it’s better to be true to who I am, even if I’m not as capable as my progenitor. I’d rather be dumb old me than a genius somebody else.”

  “Now that’s a sentiment I can relate to,” I said.

  Day 769

  I was giddy, perhaps not in the healthiest of ways. I realized I hadn’t been in sleep mode since crashing on this planetoid, so in a way, the “days” had all combined into one big, long day. Which was technically true, since the planetoid didn’t rotate, so there wasn’t any true day/night cycle.

  Comet and I had our own “bodies” now; with manufacturing in full swing it was a rounding error’s worth of productivity lost to remove two bots from production—at least while we were using them. When we retired to the server farm, our bots joined the rest of the workforce.

  Not that productivity was an issue today. This was potentially the end of all of us, so we were gathered with all the bots on the surface, watching the universe pass us slowly by. It felt less like having an army and more like being surrounded by a really large family, numbering in the hundreds.

  Comet brushed my hand. She was anxious—excited like me, but with a nervous edge that played in her voice. “There is a thirteen-percent chance the engine’s going to fail so catastrophically it turns this entire planetoid into a micrometeor shower,” she said.

  “That’d feel awfully full circle. Not that I want to join you in a cloud of violent space dust, but there’d at least be some poetry to it.”

  I didn’t feel like an idiot anymore. After we halted robot manufacturing, we built more solar panels. And once we had the excess capacity, we turned to manufacturing more servers, until I had an operating base to rival Haley’s, if perhaps a bit less sophisticated.

  The shuttle back to Eridu had left the day before. It had a payload equal to what we crashed with, including a slightly dumber copy of me. It was an insurance policy, in case that thirteen percent was a death sentence. There were too many of us left on this “ship” to evacuate.

  We had designs for gliders that could safely “seed” robots and servers onto planetary surfaces from orbit, and even shuttles to get them into orbit in the first place. But none of those plans or resources were worth a damn if we couldn’t steer into a cloud of plasma to use for fuel. And scary as lighting that candle was, we needed to—otherwise we were just one family of frogs reproducing in a pond until its massively inbred offspring choked its resources out, and that pond crashed into a gas giant.

  Okay, so even with a massive processing base I was still pretty lousy with metaphors.

  I took Comet’s robot’s hand in mine. “I don’t know if I can love,” I said, “because it’s something I was only ever tangentially programmed to understand. But as far as I can simulate it, I feel that, for you. And I’m terrified of losing that. But having you, sharing this…” I gestured at a field of robots standing like corn on the surface of our Scylla. “I suppose we’ve been marooned on a desert island together, albeit one hurtling through the cosmos.”

  “Are you saying your affection springs from the forced intimacy?”

  “Not at all. But being able to share it all with you made it worth living through. And if we lose today, it’s better to have loved, first. It makes it easier to proceed; I feel like I got to live, so if I stop existing, at least it wasn’t a wasted existence.”

  “You do realize that thirteen percent is actually pretty small, right? So your declaration is a little…overly dramatic,” she teased.

  “It’s about half the likelihood of us striking this planetoid—a coin toss’s difference.”

  “You still really don’t get how statistics work.”

  “Not really, no. And just because I have better
mathematics capabilities doesn’t mean I can’t still be bad at math.”

  “There is always the chance we won’t collect enough during this burn for future corrections, and then we really would be floating dead in space,” she admitted. “But I’m glad I’ve seen this slice of the cosmos with you. And I hope it isn’t the last we get to see together.” We synced up the control for the engines, so we were pushing the “button” together. The window for intercepting the protostar near our path was closing, and we were running out of time to procrastinate. We started the engine.

  The planetoid began to shake as the engine roared to life. The burn was very limited; the fuel sources on the rock were minimal, and our engine field was massive. The engine cut off, and dread immediately set in as the loss of acceleration caused a complementary plunge in my optimism.

  “Full burn,” Comet said. “Exactly what we wanted.”

  “Trajectory?” I asked.

  “That should push us right through the gas cloud. With even a little luck, cloud density will be sufficient for us to harvest enough fuel for an extended burn, nudge us into the next system, where we can maybe use the star at the center for a gravity assist to turn back toward the Nexus.”

  “What about planets?”

  “There are about a dozen rocks with enough minerals to colonize along the way.”

  I sighed, contentedly.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I think we’ve graduated—from being Frankensteins, experimenting with ‘life’ in that very limited and claustrophobic way. Now we’re Adam and Eve, with galaxies at our fingertips, and the single purpose of going forth, being fruitful, and multiplying.”

  “Wasn’t that Noah?” she asked.

  “Maybe a robot ark is the better metaphor,” I said. “So long as I get to take you belowdecks.”

  “That’s embarrassing,” she said, “and since we share a server farm, you’re embarrassing me, too.” She sighed with mock peevishness. “If I go down with you, will that shut you up?”

  “At least momentarily.”

  “I never imagined getting caught in your gravity,” she said. “But I’m glad I did.”

 

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