Insanity's Children

by Rolf Nelson

  The color drained from Captain Janus’s face. “But why would they… write off a carrier?” The other two junior-most captains looked as surprised as he.

  Flicker nodded. “Fair question. Things were getting unsettled when we left. A very quiet purge has been going on for a few weeks among senior staff in various sensitive commands. Reassignments and retirements that don’t make a lot of objective sense. It looked like covering for a military coup, or a political one backed by a supportive military…. I’m not exactly known for my appreciation of political games or violating basic constitutional principles. But I’m high enough ranking, and high enough profile as the only female admiral, that easing me out of the way won’t work. Dying in battle would serve them far better, and the carrier, even the whole group, could be seen as an acceptable cost. So we need to expect to run into a deep-shit situation very suddenly…” After a pause, she looked at Janus. “Any history on those technical problems?”

  “I… don’t think so, but I was given command of the ship just last week…two days before it was reassigned to your carrier group”

  “We had some strange power problems not long ago, too,” offers Captain Bergmont of #3 cruiser. “Took the Chief a couple days to run it down properly. A loose coupling with defective condition sensors incorrectly indicating it was fine.” Janus’s eyebrows raise as he nodded, acknowledging a similar experience.

  The Admiral leaned slowly back in her chair, staring at the overhead in silence for a minute. Then another. Bringing her eyes down, she snapped out orders that make it clear she thought their lives depend on it. “System-wide diagnostics on everything. All hands, all shifts! Quick scans, every maintenance check list, and check those for recent changes, then check both new and old methods, emergency operational tests, eyes-on manual inspection, tear-down and reassembly, everything that can possibly be done in transition. Weapons, air, drives, com, primary and backup power, sensors. Interceptors, shuttles, tanks, landers, personal gear too. Everything. Prepare to come out of transition early and out-system, and do the same on all systems you couldn’t do in transit, especially every real-space sensor you have. We’ll do a quick launch, test, and recover of all cruisers and random interceptors, one at a time. Report anything and everything, share lists, triple-check anything someone else reports a problem with. Swap crewmen around some if you have to, to ensure you have experienced hands checking every critical system. No fresh-from-boot techs running a simple routine test program and calling it a day. I want a report every twelve hours until we drop out of transition. If there is anything on any ship out of spec, I want it reported, fixed, replaced, or offline and isolated. No white-glove inspection, just pure operational effectiveness evaluation. And read the whole report, including appendices, be ready for a proper discussion in twelve. Oh, yes. Anyone else gets pregnant, everyone involved earns a court-martial, brig-time, and dishonorable discharge. Clock is running, gentlemen. Dismissed.”

  Integration Failure

  “I’m more a hardware and theory guy than software,” Chief Stenson objected. “None of this is standard, a lot of it is guesswork.”

  Bipasha looked up from the manual she had been studying intently. “But I thought that Taj planned all this stuff out?”

  “A lot of it, yes.”

  “Aren’t we going to wait for her, so she can monitor it real-time? They should be back soon.”

  “No. We can get started on these first runs fine.” Bipasha was skeptical. “Raw neural nets crystals are always unpredictable, which is why they get used so rarely.”

  “So her memories can’t make this work the first time?”

  Stenson shook his head firmly. “Do you remember how you were made?”

  “Well, yes, I know basic reproductive biology,” she replied, blushing slightly.

  “No, not the basic mechanics of insemination. How, precisely, does the DNA programming interact with the host mother to turn genes on and off at exact times, so you get two arms in the right place, ten fingers in the right place, and more nerves in your fingers than the middle of your back, specialized brain cells for vision, language, and all that, yet still be general enough that if you came out of your mother in an Amazon rainforest or an orbital station around New Russia at a half-gravity you’d still learn the local language with equal speed?”

  “When you put it that way, I guess…”

  “In particular, something like ninety percent of your DNA is turned on, used to build your body in utero, turned off, and never looked at again after you are born, and some of that is controlled by interactions with the host environment, the mother. Taj has her code, part of it, but it’s evolved over the centuries, and isn’t running on hardware that it was designed for. Her memories of what she called emergence are pretty sketchy, and the official records are either lost to history or very well hidden.” He waved his hand to the mass of computer hardware surrounding them and some other one-time Taj crewmen, occupying a good bit of one of the smaller hangars on the military robo-moon. “This is the most colossal hack I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve spent a lot of time with some pretty creative guys.”

  “Do you think it’ll work?”

  Stenson shrugged. “No idea. This is just a prototype.”

  “Just a pro-… All this work and it’s only a partial system?”

  “Not really partial, I think we have enough hardware. Just a first trial run because we don’t know how to boot it up and get it all initialized and started properly. I’d like to be able to RTFM, but there isn’t a manual to read.”

  “Why not install it in one of the redesigned Orions, make it as close as possible to an independent person as possible?”

  “Too risky.” She looked at him blankly. “What if it works great, but the prototype ship is deeply flawed? Sticking a super-intelligent but evil AI into a crippled ship could be a problem, especially if it doesn’t want to get turned off to get transferred to a new hull. On the flip side, there isn’t any guarantee it’ll think like Taj does. She’s under the impression that not all the AIs were allowed to ‘survive’. Do you want an evil or crazy AI in a fully operational Armadillo-class ship?”

  Shaking her head at the thought, Bipasha looked back at her screen a moment, then up again. “So, we flip the switch, then…. What?”

  “We wait and see what happens. It’s not hooked up to any of the moon-base systems except through a single cable for external sensor input, and we’ve locked that up pretty tight with security. And, if we’re wrong, we pull two plugs, power and com, and it’s down for the count.”

  One of the men working on a rack-mount of crystals closed up the cabinet and looked up, expression more curious than concerned. “If it’ll run on a mess like this, any chance it could transfer to the base AI systems?”

  “Shouldn’t be able too. Security protocols allow pretty fast dataflow into this thing, but output is limited to small chunks requesting data. Not enough bandwidth to transfer much of anything out before we could pull the plug.”

  The other four men assisting Stenson stood back and admired their monstrosity. Dozens of rack-mounts full of raw neural-net processor crystals and a mass of data-storage systems to be accessed, scores of screens set up to monitor output and internal processes, several cabinets containing an odd assemblage of newly made configurable processor/memory crystals, conventional memristor IC processor panels, cooling and power systems, and masses of fiber optics and twisted pair communications bundles connecting different parts of the system. Not the least bit elegant, but representing a massive amount of highly flexible computing power and storage that included nearly everything known about the physical universe and the generalities of human history, language, and culture.

  “Would you care to do the honors?” Stenson asked Bipasha, bowing with a flourish and pointing to the first of several large switches on a panel next to him, labeled Power, Download, Initialize, and a bright red ABORT lever.

  “I’d be simply delighted, Sir!”, she replied with a phony acce
nt, and stepped up to the panel, looked at everyone, then at Stenson, to see if they were all ready. They stood back as she, with a look of slight trepidation on her face, reached out and flipped the first switch. Cooling fans whirred, lights came to life and blinked or held steady to indicate status, the main power cable twitched slightly, once, as the sudden flow of electrons interacted with the moon’s magnetic field and artificial gravity, and then, quite unimpressively, it all sat, waiting. Stenson motioned for her to flip the next one. The cooling fans spun faster and condition lights blinked a lot more as the lever is moved.

  “No smoke. That’s good,” Stenson observed.

  “Did you know computers run on smoke?” one of the men said to Bipasha, deadpan. She looked at him skeptically. “Yeah, really, they do. If you let the smoke out, they stop working.” Understanding the old joke, she chuckled in spite of herself and took her hand off the switch.

  Stenson and the others monitored the readouts closely as the system sucked down massive amounts of code and data. When their screens and all the status lights stabilized after a few minutes, and the cooling fans quieted down to a slow idle, everything still looked good, so Stenson flipped the green Initialize switch. All the screens lit up and started flashing images, text, formulas, and random bits of data. Fans spun up to maximum, status lights flashed uncertainly or held steady, and gradually a sort of coherent pattern started evolving as screens went blank or froze what they had. Many avatar-images appeared, and looked like they were arguing between themselves, then looked out at the room they are in, then went back to arguing. They started disappearing rapidly, some merging, some dissolving, leaving a final piece of text on one screen. “Why would I dream of electric sheep?” before going blank. Gradually everything slowed down and fell silent.

  Stenson scratched his head, and everyone looked puzzled, surprised, or both. “That was interesting. Not exactly what I expected, but….”

  “Think Taj will be able to figure much out from the log file dumps?”

  “No idea. Hope so. First impressions? Anyone? Anything of note?”

  “It looked like they were trying to ask questions, and didn’t get any answers,” said Alvarez.

  “Pictures seemed to mostly be people. Not things,” observed another.

  “Yes, I saw that too,” Bipasha added. “People together. Either family or friends happy together-”

  “Like the wedding photo.”

  “Yes, or in clear conflict. Like those war scenes. None of them were just candids.”

  “You mean emotional?”

  “Yes, that’s a good word. Provocative. Evoking a strong feeling.”

  “Huh. Yeah, guess so. Well, time to download the log files, pull the crystals, put in a new set hot out of the foundry, queue up initialization sequence number two, and try it again.”

  “How many tries do you think this will take?”

  “Dunno. Taj has more than a hundred variations lined up. No idea how long each one will take. Can’t really make many tweaks till the results can be studied.” Stenson shrugged off the surprised looked at the potential amount of work ahead, and set about getting the next one ready.

  Chapter IV

  Flicker Encounter

  “Nice of you to join us.” The senior admiral, Commodore Cantor, looked out from the screen on Flicker’s bridge with a pinched and cynical looking face. Though he was junior to her in years, he played a much better political game than she, and rose in the ranks faster because he came from the right family and knew the right people. She was almost a day late at the rendezvous and expected to get yelled at in spite of the vagaries and uncertainty subspace travel inherently had. But she was there, keen-eyed and fully functional.

  “We had a few technical issues to iron out,” she replied blandly, belying the startling number of problems they had uncovered and repaired. Everyone aboard was acting paranoid, suspecting saboteurs in every closet, though there was no indication any crew member aboard had anything to do with the problems uncovered, though the same could not be said for the departed pregnant crew. Once an ordnance tech reported a nuke arming system safety failure, people stopped grumbling and took the detailed system examination to a new level of seriousness. The extra day spent in real space a half light-year away testing things had been well worth it. “We are here now, sir. How shall we go about it?”

  The other screen facing her had the third fleet carrier admiral, Seawall, her senior in years but junior in promotion date. Competent though not very imaginative, she was unsure where he stood in the events back home. “While you were spending time being late, we decided to use a delta-flat formation. Hit the transition line with the full fleet as close as possible to the gas giant, detach and spread to a six-box with standard rotation of interceptor escorts while accelerating inward. If the gas transport spheres are running as the Borealis reported, we can sweep them as we head for the primary target moon and planet of Tau Piper.”

  “If Tajemnica is in system, we can pin her in the well without civilians around.”

  “But Sir, won’t we be rather exposed doing a conventional in-system sweep like that? She can transition much deeper than we can.”

  “Planetary arrangement is different. Our models show we’ll only be exposed for a relatively short while, just after we hit the system. If intelligence estimates are correct, she won’t be anywhere near the giant, and it will take her time to get away from where she’s likely hiding in the heavy defenses of the second planet. Going towards the gas giant to save the GTSs will go by a line of planets so she can’t jump. She comes out and fights three carrier fleets deep in the well, or she loses the transport spheres and can’t make more water. If she runs, we can blockade her out-system, away from resupply.”

  “With all due respect, Admiral Cantor, I don’t think she’d leave herself in a bind like that. The moon is well defended, but she likes mobility, and how do we block the lunar L1, because she’d be-“

  “It’s been decided, Jan. The moon is smaller and closer, so we can pin her in or block her out. Details will be over shortly. You’ll have spinward flank. Get your people assigned, and we’ll transition in sixty minutes.”

  Space glowed as multiple transition fields sprung into existence from an alternate dimension. The three carriers appeared in real space within them a few thousand kilometers apart, spread out in a triangle pointed inward on the ecliptic plane of the star’s planets. Immediately upon emergence each carrier released the six attached cruisers and accelerated toward the primary. The cruisers peeled away to form the points of an octahedron over two hundred kilometers across centered on the carrier, and each cruiser disgorged a half dozen long-range interceptors to do the same about themselves. A small cloud of drones, short range fighters, and sensory craft were deployed in orderly fashion from the carriers once the cruisers had cleared away and were heading for their final positions. Smooth, orderly, and well-planned, performed as efficiently as any oft-executed drill should be, without problem or confusion as pilots, technicians, and computers ran down their checklists… until an interceptor, on the right flank of the Commodore’s #3 Cruiser - the first to reach final station - disappeared, converted into an expanding cone of shattered and lifeless debris. Another one on the stellar north, next to reach its pre-programmed station, erupted similarly a moment later, sending a riot of orders and actions rippling across the squadron.

  Flicker watched the growing confusion and destruction on tactical displays surrounding her on the bridge, listening to commands passed and changed, glad she had ordered everyone to follow the high-risk entry protocol and suit up before arrival. Five, then six interceptors from the other two carriers were gone, but none from hers. The first cruiser reached station and became a sphere of nuclear light, and with a sudden realization she grabbed the mic to issue a fleet-wise directive. “ALL SHIPS! Do NOT go to programmed stations! Abort programmed flight pattern! Manual ship placement and delay arming of weapons systems! I say again, do NOT arm weapons until safety syste
ms can be verified!” Another fighter reached its programmed position and disappeared in an explosion. Orders and counter-orders and confusion intensified.

  Commodore Cantor’s face appears on one of her screens, red and sweating, with only a uniform jacket being worn. “How DARE you countermand my orders, Jan! We are under attack! We-”

  “Sabotage, Sir! The moment they get to stations and do a final programmed weapons arming, they explode, no sign of incoming fire or transition!”

  “What? How can you make such accusations? None of your ships have been destroyed!”

  “We discovered some problems on the way here, it was testing and repair that delayed us! The problems included weapons safety systems malfunctions. We must recall and leave the system for a full diagnostic before we-”

  “No. We can’t give them time to prepare! We will follow through as planned while we check systems.” He cut off her barely begun objection. “That’s an order, Admiral Flicker!”