by Chris Hechtl
“The engraving is either by hand or with a CNC machine. There are some cast parts. Interestingly, we haven't discerned many, if any, parts built with nanotech. Also, the mechanical parts are very efficient, but there are plenty of instances where they could have squeezed more efficiency out with judicious 3D modeling. One wonders if they use computer simulations,” Vulcan stated.
Seanex made a note. “Something for your virtual colleagues to check. Next …”
“Back to the ship design for a moment,” Geo said, waving a hand. He stopped and looked expectantly to Vulcan. “You mentioned arches, curves, even dome ceilings inside? I know they are strong for engineering but doesn't that cause problems with the structure? Not to mention building curves? That is complex engineering.”
“True. Something we're looking into,” Vulcan replied with a nod.
“I've had my hand in engineering ships too,” Seanex said as a thought occurred to him. All eyes fell on him as he sat back. “I've had my time with the Lagroose shipyard. I see your point. Arches and curves are complex shapes. Simple shapes and angles are easier to make and install. The fits are easier.”
Geo grimaced but acknowledged the point. In a ship large open spaces caused all sorts of engineering issues. Pillars and buttresses plus gussets solved some issues but not all of them. He wondered about the computer modeling.
“Can we make a physical model? Replicate their tech and build a small ship? See if our numbers match our simulations?” Geo asked hopefully.
“I don't know. I don't see the budget for it to be honest, Geo,” Seanex replied gently.
“Damn,” Geo replied mildly.
Seanex snorted. Geo was the sort of hands-on engineer who liked to get his students to puzzle out how to build something. His favorite was some sort of medieval contraption, one from either Europe or Asia that he trotted out during the homecoming fare or other events to show off to the student body and media. The things were popular enough for Seanex to continue funding them.
That and no one had been seriously hurt building or operating them … yet.
They slept in groups in domes as far as we can tell. There were only a few individual quarters, all domes too,” Geo stated. “I wonder if their planets all have domes?”
“We found no VR, and their use of video games are simplistic. Their databases are primitive as well,” Vulcan stated. “One would think if they were claustrophobic they would have created a virtual outlet for such fears.”
“One wonders how they got into space at all,” Geo murmured. “Few books, they don't seem to fantasize as we do. How did they even dream up flight let alone space flight?”
“Yes, ahem, we're still working on the psychology, but based on their actions in space to date, we have a hypothesis,” Sophia murmured.
Geo gave her a tell-me-more look.
“Based on their observed behavior and their bodies, plus stuff that was found in their databases, the psychologists believe that Taurens charge, strike, or bluff and back off if they are scared or hurt. They have a herd mentality as Vulcan pointed out with the translation of their name,” she said, indicating the A.I. “Based on what we know, they will try to run if they feel overwhelmed. And based on the gender, it is theorized that the males protect the herd and that they have some sort of social pecking order, but it isn't one we have figured out yet. It is quite possibly an Alpha to Omega hierarchy.”
“I see.”
Seanex nodded thoughtfully. Scientists and engineers both organic and inorganic of all fields had quickly determined to their surprise that Terran tech while much younger was far better than Tauren technology so far encountered. Even though, based on the radioisotopic scans, the Taurens had clearly been in space longer, it appeared that they did innovate but at a glacial pace. Most of their innovation was centered on mechanical and hardware. When they couldn't get any better performance out of the hardware, they accepted it and moved on. Even their electronics were primitive by comparison; there had been no sign of molecular electronics.
How did that fit into their psychology? Run at a problem until you couldn't solve it and then back off? Did that fit at all he wondered? He shook his head.
“I think A.I. consciousnesses, our adaptive software, gene engineering, and other fields are a big step up for our civilization,” Seanex said slowly.
“We definitely get more efficiency out of our technology. Even our mechanical systems are slightly better. They don't use simulations to try things out it seems,” Geo grumbled, clearly annoyed by that idea.
“I'll remind you, they could do that in a shipyard but with different systems. We are only seeing a small sampling of their species at the moment,” Vulcan pointed out.
“True,” Sophia murmured.
“Their environmental systems are crap. One wonders how they could survive for long periods of time in space at all,” Geo grumbled, rubbing his jaw.
“Understanding how and why we breathe, what we need, and how to clean up our waste are major factors in our own life support. And we always strive to make things better, even if by only a little bit. I'm curious as to what else we'll uncover with this species.”
“I am too. Moving on, I noticed the force emitter data is still out. Any ideas on when we'll get a clearer picture there?” Geo asked, turning to Vulcan.
Vulcan shook his head.
“Damn it …”
“It isn't for a want of trying. The problem is with the exterior shields; they were damaged and overwhelmed by the weapons fire. We do have their energy readings from the ships involved though.”
“Well, we can start there I suppose. Create a model by reverse engineering the data.”
“What about their internal gravity and inertial dampeners?” Sophia asked.
“Doctor Lorelei was tasked with looking into them.”
“She's a hyper physicist! Not an engineer!” Geo protested.
“The force equations were what the powers that be were interested in. She is also overseeing the dissection of the alien hyperdrive, hyper sensors, and related gear. I have her initial reports. Do you want to discuss them now …?” Vulcan paused as the door behind him opened.
“Pizza is here!” Connie said cheerily as she came in with a couple boxes of pizza and a couple TAs and interns.
“I think we can eat for a moment while you pull up the files for us poor organic brains to process,” Seanex said as his stomach rumbled.
Geo looked ready to protest but then he sniffed. “Is that … bell peppers, jalapeno, and anchovy?”
“Yes,” Connie said in mock disgust as she tried to find a place to land the pizza boxes. Seanex cleared a corner so she could slide them on and keep them reasonably stable with a thigh as the eager staff rushed forward.
“Gimme,” Geo said, hands out as he practically salivated. Connie snorted and juggled the boxes before she handed one over to him.
Seanex shook his head as he got up and found a relatively clean stack of napkins for just such an occasion. Connie did a good job of keeping them stocked he knew. He silently handed the napkins out as the staff snagged their own slices of pizza.
“Classes went well,” one of the TAs reported. “No problems, though we've got some questions running about structural engineering, Doc,” she said, turning to Geo. “I think some of the students are trying their own hands at reverse engineering the alien tech. It is a running hobby on practically every campus,” she said.
“Good for them,” Geo mumbled as he ate.
“You said you wanted to do the lecture tomorrow. Are you still up for it or has your schedule changed?” the TA asked.
“I'm game ….”
“Unless he chokes on the pizza,” Sophia teased as she daintily put a slice of Alfredo chicken pizza on a napkin and then brought her prize to her own lap. “I know the navy wants to know the force emitter numbers right off to know how powerful the enemy shields are and how fast they can push their ships. Doctor Hillman has been helping them with the computer modeling,�
� she reported.
“How is he doing?” Seanex asked. “I haven't seen him.
“His health is failing,” Sophia said sadly. A pall settled over the group for a moment as they all contemplated their own mortality as well as the mortality of their colleague.
“I'm sorry to hear that,” Seanex said sympathetically, his hunger momentarily forgotten.
“It is a part of any life cycle,” Sophia said. “He's working on another method of extending or changing it. He likes to quote the law of energy.”
“Which one?” a TA asked curiously.
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, just transformed,” Sophia replied as she picked at her slice of pizza. “The law of conservation of energy,” she said. “Fitting, considering what he's trying to do.”
“And what's that?” Geo asked, wrinkling his nose. He had sauce on his chin.
Sophia handed him a napkin. He caught it and wiped at his mouth.
“Transcendence,” Sophia answered quietly, turning to look squarely at Vulcan.
There was a small gasp from the staff as they realized what she was implying.
Chapter 5
Trevor Hillman was not a happy man, despite being over two centuries old. He'd never been a well man. He'd been born with many defects and problems, so much that he'd required life support in the form of cybernetics in order to have a good quality of life.
Over the decades, he'd upgraded and altered his body in order to take advantage of every advance in prosthetic science and engineering. Less than three years ago, he'd been fully functional even at his advanced age.
He had known however that he was on borrowed time. His body was aging, and without nanotechnology to sustain it, it was breaking down. To complicate matters, his body rejected any cloned tissue replacements and had started to encapsulate and reject his neural implants.
He missed eating real food. He still had his tongue, still had some taste buds, though some of the taste was gone since his sense of smell had retreated. That's what he hated about the feeding tube that was linked to his stomach. He'd gotten used to eating solid food over the years, being fed a paste directly into his stomach to avoid causing another near-death choking incident or having something stop in his esophagus or causing an infection sucked.
Getting it out afterward also sucked.
Every evening he went to bed fearing he wouldn't wake the following morning. He considered every day a gift; one he didn't want to squander.
He had begun to focus more and more of his attention on the Transference Project. The idea that an organic sentient being could transcend into the virtual one had been theorized for centuries. He wanted to make it a reality.
He had picked up and latched on to the Pinocchio story. The story went that a famous doctor who had worked for Pavilion Concepts in the field of robotics and prosthetics had lost his one and only son. He'd found a way to transfer the young man's brain to a robot body, but the android had gone insane, killed his father, and then gone on a rampage before it had been stopped by an EMP weapon.
There had been enough there in the story to be believable, starting with the fact that the doctor had been celebrated in his field and had reportedly died under mysterious circumstances at or near the same time as the story. The story details were a bit hazy however.
When he'd gone over the doctor's notes and the few files his investigators had managed to ferret out for him, he'd realized all over again that the inventor had been brilliant. Brilliant on the order of a mad scientist. It was a pity that none of his later records survived. The investigators were certain that someone had destroyed the final records or had taken them. They were unclear on who, but the obvious suspect was Pavilion Concepts.
Which didn't make sense. Had Pavilion done it they would have used the technology over the years, not buried it. He shook his head. No, someone else had to have been involved. Who was the big question. Since they hadn't turned up with the tech to exploit it, what had happened to them and the tech was another.
His conversations with Confederation security and investigations made a few interested in what had happened. But they weren't talking either.
The case was decades cold however, so there were no leads for the private investigators he had hired to work off of. One by one they'd apologetically admitted they had hit a dead end and the case was too cold to work.
He moved his powered walker through the labs slowly, almost painfully. He shouldn't use it. He should be in a chair or in a bed, but he'd be damned if he'd die in one. If his body failed for any reason, the walker would just stop anyway.
He checked on the various simulation projects that were cooking in the computer labs and then went back to the Transcendence Project.
It should by rights be called a transference project he thought. He agreed with Cassie however; he liked the Transcending idea over transferring. It sounded more mystical, more magical.
And frustratingly enough it was in a way. They still hadn't figured out how to get it to work successfully.
“Doc? Out and about for a stroll again?” Cassie asked, turning to him as he approached.
“You know me, gotta stretch the legs, work the muscles,” Trevor replied. “How goes it?”
“Still trying, Doc.” She turned to indicate the computer model. They had started with simple biological organisms like others had done over the centuries. They were up to more complex organisms now that they had a better understanding of the neural mapping. He'd tapped a few math grad students who had needed a grade boost to help write some of the algorithms involved to improve the process.
Some had worked out better than others.
They had been trying for several years to make a copy of his brain. So far, they'd overlaid the various results but only had a surface scan. It had helped the medics see the breakdown as his nerve endings stopped working with his cybernetics. They had come up with various treatment methods that had slowed but not halted the progression.
Unfortunately, the medics couldn't do an MRI because it would tear his cybernetics out of him. The same for a Gravity Resonance Imaging system. It had forced them to figure out other noninvasive scanning methods.
He was down to combining the various noninvasive methods to get a partial blueprint of his brain. Then they had translated the result into an artificial neural network. Work was still ongoing to find a coding method to do that in a timely manner. He shook his head as he realized all over again how daunting the task was. “There are billions and billions of neurons to map and transfer. It might not be possible,” Trevor said with a slight shake of his head.
“Don't say that,” Cassie said worriedly. “Doctor Maestro Geppetto did it!”
“We think. We don't have proof, Cassie. At this point it is just a story. Pavilion Concepts is playing games; they won't admit anything either way. The story goes that he transferred his son's mind into an android. The android body was destroyed. Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at him.
“After everything we know about that case, I have my sincere doubts,” Trevor said.
“Doubts?”
“I sincerely doubt you could transfer an entire mind into such a small platform. We can replicate a neural network in a series of chips sure, but that is a lot of electronics and other hardware. I'm not even certain an android body is even right for transference.” He shook his head. “I don't know,” he said as a bit of artificial vibration entered his tone as his vocal cords went out of sync. “Damn it …,” he said, voice going scratchy and sounding like a bad artificial recording. He reached up and rubbed his throat as he tried to access the implants to see what the hell had gone wrong.
Cassie bit her lip. “Keep the faith, Doc, keep the faith,” she murmured as she watched Trevor turn and trundle away with the soft sounds of servo whines and other mechanical sounds.
(@)()(@)
Captain Varbossa grimly watched the video feed from the engineers as they wrapped up the weapon and l
ocked it down. It was supposed to be a prototype, so it had a lot of additional sensors and redundant communication feeds to transmit any data they could get from it as it went off. He was doubtful they would get more than a microsecond of viable data, if anything at all.
He missed Kioshi. His cousin's sacrifice onboard Courage less than a year ago had inspired many in the family to take up a naval career. He crossed his arms as he watched the engineers and technicians clear the bay.
“We're set?”
“Aye aye, sir,” the bosun said.
“You are sure this time?” the captain demanded. He didn't like that they'd been twice delayed by teething issues.
“This time they say they are. One way or another we'll get it to work, sir. I made it clear they'll be keelhauled if they don't,” the bosun joked.
“Don't tempt me,” the captain growled as he made his way to the bridge.
He wasn't certain about the concept. Some of the engineers had made noises about shape charges and such. It was Greek to him; up until ten months ago, he had been a civilian ship's officer. He'd thought they had put the force emitters on the nose cone to give the thing shields in order to get it through the enemy fire to hit the target. Instead, the force emitters were behind the warhead to direct it to the target.
As if you really needed to direct a nuclear warhead he thought. There was that old saying about close enough only counting in horse shoes, hand grenades, as well as kinetic, and nuclear weapons after all.
By the time he got there, the tactical section was buttoned up and excited to get going. He nodded once to his TO. “All set?”
“We're more than ready, sir,” the Neochimp said.
The captain turned to the hot seat but disdained it to look at the image on the main viewer. There was an image of a derelict ship there, a battered privateer, one of the Liberty class freighters that had been hastily turned into a fighting ship. Now she was scrap.