by Neil Clarke
“Did you try to pursue?”
“The instrument section of the Argo has no ion thrusters, they were all built into the shield. We decided to use the rockets of the Harpy probes to push the Argo further away from Centauri A, and at least salvage something of the mission.”
“Thank you Control-Captain, that will be all for now.”
Ashcroft was escorted to the stand. It was the first time I had seen him, because he had managed to stay out of the holovista coverage. He had a closely shaven scalp and a bushy white beard. It looked to me as if his head were upside down, and I had to stifle the urge to laugh.
“Lieutenant Charles Ashcroft, you were the Mission Continuity and Disaster Recovery officer until you were arrested,” I said, looking up from my UDP.
“That’s right, Your Honor.”
His accent was west coast. Ashcroft was the same age as Jackson, and the difference in their rank was due to the fact that Ashcroft was extremely good at what he did, and was not interested in learning to do those other things that got one promoted—like handling difficult staff, raising funds, and flattering important people with influence.
“Please describe your role in the Argo’s crew, using your own words,” I said.
“There’s an emergency processor in the shield where a virtual image of my consciousness is continually mirrored. If the main entanglement link shuts down, the emergency circuit activates Ashcroft-virtual. It’s completely autonomous, and can recover a functional subset of Argo systems unless the damage is catastrophic—”
“Enough, slow down,” I said, already familiar with his type after three decades of technical hearings crammed with geeks trying to blind me with science. “You say your mind was mirrored into a processor on the Argo, so a virtual image of your consciousness was actually aboard the probe itself. Am I correct?”
Ashcroft suddenly looked uneasy. I was the sort of legalistic pedant he despised, yet I was throwing his jargon back at him, and in coherent English. He cowered visibly, as if aware that a predator was nearby, and that he was small, fluffy and delicious.
“You’re correct, sir—that is, Your Honor,” he said sheepishly.
“And how many others have their virtuals mirrored aboard the Argo?”
“Just me, Your Honor.”
“So while the Argo was in recovery mode, your Ashcroft-virtual had sole command?” I asked.
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“I have made a study of the Argo’s systems,” I said as casually as I could. “Because the nature of disaster is by its very definition, unexpected, there was a manual emergency switch available to your virtual. If an emergency that could not possibly have been anticipated were to take place and cut off communications, Ashcroft-virtual could assess the situation and take action.”
Until now Ashcroft had not actually admitted to sabotaging the probe. However, he looked about as guilty as a dog on a kitchen table with the remains of a chicken pie. I did not know why he was delaying the inevitable, but I decided to give him a nudge.
“I put it to you, Lieutenant Ashcroft, that your virtual could easily have activated a meteor strike simulation routine, and so cut off the Argo from Mission Control. After that, Ashcroft-virtual had sole command of the probe. It would have been easy to fire the release charges to separate the shield of the Argo from its electronics, powerplant and scientific instruments.”
“Oh, yeah, but there you’re wrong. The on-board logs would have showed that the emergency was declared before the separation charges were fired.”
“So you fired the charges first.”
“I—”
His hesitation said everything. He was proud of how well he had covered his trail, so he wanted someone to know. Just as dragons have a soft spot in every fairy story, so too does every geek who has achieved some illegal technical master stroke.
“I suppose I can admit that now.”
“So, the Argo colliding with a speck of dust at a tenth of lightspeed would look identical to the separation charges being fired. You wanted to keep that part secret until after the Wells and Centauri A flybys.”
“You’re good,” Ashcroft conceded.
“I could charge you with contempt for that remark,” I said sternly. “Remember that if you are tempted to make another.”
“I’m sorry, Your Honor.”
That earned me seventeen million Spacebook dislikes and fifteen million likes. Public opinion was divided, but beginning to favor Ashcroft. Most viewers were still not voting.
“What is the significance of ‘firewall’?” I asked.
“The shield is no longer just a part of the Argo. Its name is the Firewall.”
“The Firewall. Your name for it?”
“The Firewall is the name that my virtual calls it.”
During a break I was shown a mockup of the Argo in a laboratory within the Mission Control building. The mockup was used to diagnose faults on the real starship and try to work out solutions. The Argo’s shield was shaped like a sleek, hollow axe head. Any fleck of dust that struck it would give just a glancing blow. Of course at nine percent of lightspeed even glancing blows were liable to be catastrophic, but it was the best design that anyone could think of.
The list of charges that was developing against Ashcroft would be good for decades of litigation. Overall, he had destroyed intersystem property costing four hundred trillion dollars, and worth even more in replacement value. Every media outlet in the solar system was linked to the auditorium’s cameras, and I knew that my face would be instantly recognizable by pretty well everyone for the rest of my life. According to my UDP’s scan of Spacebook, Ashcroft was currently both the most liked and the most disliked man in the solar system.
I faced the holocameras, trying not to think of how many pairs of eyes were behind them.
“Now, summing up the findings so far, Lieutenant Ashcroft has admitted to plotting to take control of the Argo ever since the mission began. He knew that Ashcroft-virtual would be in control of the Argo after any collision, real or simulated. Aboard the shield was enough computer power to support his virtual, so Ashcroft-virtual detached the shield. When the Argo went into lock-down for the Centauri A flyby, he fired the shield’s ion thrusters and put it on a course that would go deep into the star’s atmosphere for an extreme aerobrake. I must emphasize that it was Ashcroft-virtual that hijacked the shield while the Argo was cut off. Quite probably Ashcroft-original was an accomplice, however, because he had known the shield’s course.”
I called Jackson back to the stand. She looked very angry, in fact barely in control. Anger was always a dangerous emotion to display to Spacebook voters, as it generally attracted more dislikes than likes. She was not on trial, but a high dislike-to-like ratio would affect her reliability index as a witness. I started with the physics of the flyby.
“So instead of just swinging close to the star Centauri A to change course for the Gliese system, the shield fired its ion thrusters and did an extreme aerobrake deep into the star’s atmosphere. There it lost over half of its velocity, and changed course for Centauri B—where it will do another aerobrake, then fly on to the planet Wells.”
“Nine hundred million likes,” said someone in the gallery, and there were titters of laughter.
“Order!” I shouted. “One more reference to Spacebook activity and I will have the offender removed and charged with contempt of court.”
I waited for any further comments. Nobody said anything.
“Control-Captain, I gather that the Harpy 1 probe returned useful images and data for about fifteen seconds during the flyby of Wells. It showed that the planet has polar caps, clouds, small seas, a magnetic field, a breathable atmosphere, and vegetation.”
“Yes.”
“Was that enough?”
“I don’t understand the question, Your Honor.”
“I’ll put a fictitious proposition to you. Just say you were the head of NASA, back in the Twentieth Century. Say that you had an extremely t
ight budget, but the first flyby of Mars had revealed ruined cities. Would you abandon the exploration of the rest of the solar system indefinitely, and concentrate on Mars?”
“I . . . no, I would not,” she said slowly. “Three moons of Jupiter turned out to have subterranean oceans that supported primitive life forms. That’s significant too.”
“You would not have known that at the time.”
“But I know it now. The Gliese system’s worlds may have wonderful secrets that we can’t even begin to dream of, and whatever the Harpies would have discovered about them would have been all that would ever be discovered unless we commit to interstellar exploration again.”
“The same may be said about Wells.”
“With respect, Your Honor, that is not a judgment that I would make.”
Secretly I sympathized with Jackson. The generation that followed hers— mine—had cancelled the interstellar program, and confined us to the solar system. Everything that we would ever see directly beyond our little corner in space would be through the cameras of the Argo and its fleet of Harpy probes.
“You may stand down, Control-Captain, that will be all.”
Several technical experts now testified and explained the situation on the Firewall. Aboard the shield there was a block of entangled circuitry linked to a block in Mission Control. Here signals could be exchanged, but at a bit rate so slow that even most computer historians were not aware that it had ever existed. A hundred and ten bits per second. It was not much better than Morse code, and dated to the 1950s.
An acknowledgment had been sent to the shield’s first message, but Ashcroft-virtual ignored all subsequent questions that were sent to it. Every hour it sent the same message, each time with a number appended: PERFORMING REPAIRS. STAND BY. 41. The value of the number was slowly increasing. It defined the amount of damage to Ashcroft-virtual.
The Firewall was very tough, but it had not been designed for prolonged and hyper-extreme deceleration. In spite of the shield’s insulation, the temperature must have reached hundreds of degrees Celsius internally. There was memory loss in the data and processor lattices, so Ashcroft-virtual would be rearranging the surviving data that defined itself, restoring whatever it could before going through the same trauma again at Centauri B. It had just six days to restore 59% of itself from contingency lattices.
Back on Earth, Ashcroft had by now admitted to conspiring with his virtual aboard the Argo to hijack the mission. I could not pass judgment on what he had done or sentence him, but I could allow him to explain himself on Spacebook. At the time of the Argo’s launch, the taxpayers of humanity had each paid eight thousand dollars a year for ten years to get it built and fueled. That was one percent of the average income. Many of them were still alive, and were seeing their money squandered. How many likes and dislikes would Ashcroft get?
“Marshal of Proceedings, bring Lieutenant Ashcroft to the stand.”
Ashcroft was led back. He was affecting a meticulously resigned expression known as the martyr face. He had admitted guilt, but he wanted the Spacebook voters to know that he had noble motives. A high score of likes was his only hope.
“Lieutenant Ashcroft, what do you say in response to the declaration from Control-Captain Jackson?” I asked.
“I don’t agree with her, Earth-like planets come first. It was always my intention to aerobrake the Argo’s shield through the atmospheres of the two Centauri stars, and put it into orbit around Wells.”
“Even though it was not designed for the purpose? Even though a four hundred trillion dollar mission would be wasted?”
“The mission has not been wasted. Humanity has had flybys of two stars, a planet and several asteroids. The Argo will fly on through another twenty light-years of space. Who knows what is out there to discover? That has not been lost.”
“Gliese has been lost.”
“And you have Wells in its place.”
“The Firewall is damaged, it may not survive the aerobrake through Centauri B. It’s not designed for extremes like that.”
“That doesn’t matter. A lot of leading edge work has been done with machines that were designed for something else. In the earliest years of the space age, the only rockets available for exploration were designed to carry bombs. In spite of that, they were also used to launch satellites, send probes to other worlds, and put the first humans into space. Machine usefulness is determined by machine capability, not what the machine was designed for.”
“So you gambled that the shield could take well over ten thousand Gs for two or three minutes?”
“Ten thousand Gs is no problem. Back in the early Twenty First Century the Japanese tested probes whose electronics could take eight thousand Gs and still function. The Argo’s shield and its equipment were built to handle more than that.”
“And the extreme temperatures?” I asked.
“The Argo was to pass very close to Centauri A, so the shield was designed to protect it from the expected temperatures. It was also over-engineered to cope with anything worse. It will survive Centauri B.”
By now Ashcroft had nine hundred million likes and six thousand dislikes. Here was absolute, admitted guilt welded to overwhelming public support. I was very relieved that I would only be a witness in his criminal trial.
“Lieutenant Ashcroft, I am obliged to inform you that you will certainly be charged with a crime involving the largest single damage bill in all of history,” I began.
“And he may get out of jail before the next ice age,” called someone in the gallery.
“Marshal, remove whoever said that from the public gallery, take them to the local authorities, and recommend a charge of contempt.”
There was a pause in proceedings while the offender was taken into custody. I looked down at my screen. The youth had got just over a hundred million likes in twelve seconds, but seven hundred million dislikes as well. Ashcroft certainly had massive public sympathy, in spite of what he had done.
“In six days the Firewall and Ashcroft-virtual will reach Centauri B,” I asked Ashcroft. “What will happen?”
“I can’t speak for my virtual any more.”
“Please explain.”
“Ashcroft-virtual is no longer me,” said Ashcroft. “The number transmitted from the Firewall every hour represents the amount of contiguous virtual memory stored in its lattice banks. The Centauri A flyby damaged a lot of physical storage, but because the virtual is stored by a scattered redundancy algorithm, a lot of it can be rebuilt.”
“A lot, but not all.”
“Yes. Priority was given to redundancy for motivations and recent memories. Childhood memories were kept in single copy. So far the restoration has reached 52%.”
“So your virtual has what would be called brain damage in humans.”
“But it’s not human. How often do you recall your childhood memories, Your Honor? Every day?”
“No. I probably go months at a time without thinking about them.”
“Yet you live by many motivations and attitudes formed in your childhood. It’s the same with Ashcroft-virtual. My recent memories, general motivations and underlying attitudes have multiple copies aboard the Firewall. They will survive, and they are all that’s needed. It’s not me, but it’s functional.”
“You hope.”
“Yes.”
“Suppose, just suppose, your virtual survives in a functional condition. What do you have planned?”
“In six days it will lose another eight thousand miles per second in Centauri B’s atmosphere, and emerge with the velocity of a long-period comet. After another thirty-two days it will aerobrake at the top of Well’s atmosphere, and enter a highly elongated orbit around the planet.”
“So, the Firewall will orbit Wells and map its surface?” I asked.
“For ten orbits, yes. With each orbit it will skim the outer atmosphere, and lose some velocity. On the tenth orbit the Firewall will do a deep atmospheric entry and impact the surface.”
&
nbsp; “And be destroyed?”
“No.”
“Please explain. The Firewall has no parachutes.”
“The shield is light and tough. It will hit the ground at four hundred miles per hour, which is nothing compared to surviving over ten thousand Gs in the atmospheres of the Centauri stars. If the Firewall survives, it will give us pictures from Wells’s surface. It may even give us our first view of life on another Earth-like planet.”
There was more, but for sheer impact there was nothing in the same class as that revelation. Ashcroft’s Spacebook rating passed a billion likes, which in turn generated even more likes. His virtual had double that figure. I released him to a local court and recommended bail because he was not a flight risk. He was certainly not in any position to re-offend. I then filed my findings with an American judge, and recommended that no further proceedings commence until after the landing on Wells.
On the sixth day after the first aerobrake, the Firewall speared through the atmosphere of Centauri B. This was a slightly gentler encounter than before, but the circuitry aboard the probe was already stressed and damaged. By now the Argo was well outside the Centauri system, and its telescope could show no more than sunspots on Centauri B’s disk. Again we endured a very anxious half hour while the Firewall cooled down.
FIREWALL SURVIVED. PERFORMING REPAIRS. 23.
Those words got two billion likes on Spacebook, but the number told us that three quarters of what defined Ashcroft-virtual had been damaged. The data integrity percentages began to climb again, but more slowly than before. Ashcroft-virtual was like a human emerging from a coma, gradually recovering from two terrible accidents. In the weeks that followed, the parts of the virtual that had been restored only climbed to 57%.
The aerobrake in Wells’s atmosphere was an anticlimax compared to what had happened at the two stars. The shield lost enough speed to go into a parabolic orbit that reached from the top of the atmosphere to a hundred thousand miles from the planet. Data trickled in through the pathetically slow link. Wells had a magnetic field, weaker than Earth’s, yet strong enough to protect it from the solar wind. The surface pressure was a third of that at the Earth’s sea surface, but oxygen made up a quarter of the atmosphere. Wells was Earth-like, but not entirely Earth-like.