by Rolf Nelson
“How goes the midwifery?” she asked pleasantly, setting down the tray, knowing the answer from his expression before he answered. “Got a load of volunteers coming in soon. Mostly techs from a navy support depot, managed to snag a salvage tug. Maybe one of them will have some ideas.”
Taking a sandwich from the plate as he passed without a pause in his stride and only the barest nod of thanks for the food, Stenson changed course over to a console and quickly punched up the manifest from the incoming ship, scanning the list of personnel for any names he recognized. “Ha! McPherson! Warrant Five, now, eh? Very good…. No others I recognize, but he’s sharp as they come. I doubt he’d collect a bunch of duds, though, so that is most excellent.” He resumed his pacing, watched by a somewhat bemused Bipasha.
“I know Helton thinks out loud when he’s pacing. Says it engages more of the brain trying to articulate the problem and what you know. Fill me in, more specific than ‘not working’?”
Talking around a mouthful of grilled synthetic ham and cheese, Henery stopped a minute and leaned against a bench covered with discarded neural-net crystals. “We have it hooked up to massive amount of raw and synthesized data and run the startup code. It runs through the data, appears to scan it all, starts digesting it. It appears to be massively confused by the data, and is looking for more input, but it’s gone through the entire library of factual data and human history that we have. I’ve got no idea what else it could want that we have access too. It’s got physics, math, chemistry, biology, geo-science, ancient history, modern history, language databases, and all the rest. But it seems to want more. But more of what we are not sure. We can’t risk tying it into the full moon base AI directly and on high two-way bandwidth, the risk was far too great by Taj’s calculation. Soooo…. Any insights from a woman with child-care experience what it might be looking for? Tech doesn’t seem to be providing many answers right now.”
Bipasha waved away her minimal experience with kids casually. “Kids are born with basic programming to learn language and figure out how the world works, but they have to interact with it to learn any specifics. I learned to speak English and Hindi because I grew up being talked to in them. Quinn appears to have learned to stack things by picking them up and stacking them. Kids that are left in a bassinet with nothing but a screen don’t develop right. As frustrated as Quinn’s messes make Allonia, playing in dirt and climbing around where he shouldn’t really go really is good for him. Maybe it needs to interact with the environment more. It’s sort of like being a newborn, isn’t it?”
Stenson looked contemplative. “Sort of, in a way. But if a newborn gets confused it can’t accidentally launch thermonuclear weapons without first opening the launch-tube covers. We have to limit output bandwidth for security purposes.”
“Why not just talk to it like we do with Taj? You know, camera and microphone with a screen? Couldn’t take over anything with that, could it?”
“But that would… I mean, we’d have to…. Well, I suppose we…. What the Hell, got no better ideas. It’s crazy that a computer this powerful would want slow analog input, but…”
“Have you found anything about brains that isn’t a bit insane?”
Stenson grinned. “Now that you mention it, not really. Any idea how many screens we should use, oh chief computer psych officer and commandant of AI neurogenesis?”
“None. I know Taj can talk to everyone on board at the same time without a problem.”
“Got a whole shipload of guys coming in. Guess we should set up a greeting panel for them all. Alvarez, Erikson! New test configuration!”
The space tug, a blocky, unstreamlined shape designed for use in space or very slowly in an atmosphere, was only about twenty five meters long. It settled down on the landing pad inside the moon gently, causing the heavy-duty landing gear to flex minimally before lowering to easy boarding gangway height. It looked small in the cavernous hanger bay compared to the odd collection of other craft lined up next to it. As the hatch opened and the fold-out gangway lowered, one middle-aged man emerged and looked around, eyes quickly settling on the greeting committee, a group which included Stenson and Bipasha. Seeing the former, the man at the top of the stair waved and smiled broadly.
“Henery! Outstanding to see you here! Now I know it was the right time to bail!” He rapidly descended the stairs and shook his old friend’s had firmly, giving him a bear hug as well. “Fresh air smells good!”
Chief Stenson returned the bigger man’s enthusiastic greeting. “Glad to see you here, too, Strut! How many engineers and techs do you have aboard?”
“What, got a mission already?” Strut joked.
“If you have enough guys, yes, actually. Got any midwives or doulas?” The newly arrived man cocked his head and looked at Henery quizzically. “Never mind. This is Bipasha-”
“Happy to meet you… Bipasha? Lovely name.”
“She’s married, Strut, to a very serious guy. She’s also Reel’s niece,” Henery explained while she shook his hand. “How many techs do you have? The roster you sent didn’t have resumes.”
“Fourteen, and another dozen wrench-turners, and seven attached family groups. Don’t know much about the family specialties.”
Henery waved toward a line of screens set up around the edge of the landing bay, spreading out on either side of the collection of computer gear piled into racks. “Tell everyone to pile off and grab a screen. We’ll send someone out shortly to see what you want to eat.”
“Really? I know there’s a war on, but you’re putting us to work already?”
“Yes, really. You are just in time to see if we can breathe life into that pile of hardware. I know you’re always up for a challenge.” He smiled as he led Strut over to the line of monitors, followed by a line of mostly young and middle-aged men coming down the gangway. “You are about to be a willing participant in experimental run eighteen hundred twenty one on kickstarting an AI.”
“How many?”
“Lots. Too many.” He stood back and addressed the group loudly. “Listen up! We are running an experiment. It’s kind of complicated, but all you need to do is stand in front of a screen and talk to whatever avatar pops up on the screen. Just pretend it’s a slightly confused and highly intelligent ten-year old. Be as honest as you can, and tell it if you need a break! I have no idea what it will want to talk about or do, or how long it might last.” He watched as they lined up, noting that some of the family groups with kids were clustered about their own screen, with mom or dad riding heard on the kids rather than just giving them their own screen. Not knowing how any particular arrangement would affect the test run, he didn’t try to discourage it. There were still a number of empty screens, so he waved some of his own team toward them. “Everyone ready?” he called out, standing next to the power switch. “Here goes!”
The screens all had a different avatar, talking animatedly with the human standing before it, and the dozens of conversations sounded like a busy night-life club, echoing strangely in the gigantic domed hangar. A handful of people were taking a break, walking around, grabbing a bite to eat, looking over other people’s shoulders, or taking a quick nap on one of the several bunks that have been rolled out for that purpose. Tables were set up with a buffet, and various chairs and tall stools were used by some of the adults to make talking to the screens more comfortable. Quinn was leading a pack of kids in a game of tag around the various ships in the landing bay, followed by Bipasha with a camera so the test AI could observe as much as keeping them out of too much trouble. Stenson approached his old friend, standing at a screen rubbing the back of his neck.
“How’s it going, Strut?”
“Oh, man! I need a gin and tonic, if you have it. Never realized how insane life really is. This thing keeps tying me into logical knots on things I thought I knew inside and out. Is it always like this?”
“Not a clue. Everyone is talking about different things, and the conversations wander all over, like engineering scho
ol parties, expansive questions to pedantic details. You’d be amazed how many questions can be asked about a game of tag that takes an adult to answer, but kids just know. It’s never gone more than twenty minutes before it shuts down. Fifteen hours, now, and still going strong. Bipahsa said she thinks it is a very good sign. I’d agree with that assessment.”
“So no idea how much longer it’ll go?”
“None. Hopefully forever; that would mean it’s successful.”
Next to them, the avatar talking to a young man smiled politely and said “Thank you for your time. You may help out in the galley now, if you’d like,” before blanking the screen. The man’s face was surprised. He thought about speaking, then turned silently to Chief McPherson and spread his hands wide in a gesture of “now what?”
“Well, son, looks like your interrogation is over. Take a break, perhaps check out the galley, see if that was random, or if it really meant something.”
Five screens down, another avatar bids goodbye and went blank.
“Maybe we are getting close. To what, I don’t know, but close.”
Over the next nineteen hours, one by one, the screens went blank. Avatars sometimes said goodbye politely and disappeared, other times they just faded away as if in thought. Before they signed off, some of the recent arrivals joined up with others in talking to the remaining screen avatars. One station even had a jam session with a group of humans on keyboard, flute, oboe, sitar, harmonica, and two violins, accompanied by the AI avatar on bagpipes. They took a pause while arguing about major and minor keys, before it too, bowed out with a thank you. Other newcomers were led off to a dorm section to sleep, or relax a bit while catching up on current events as far as they were known.
Henery Stenson and Strut McPherson watched it all in bemused good humor while talking shop. “Gotta admit, it’s the weirdest welcoming committee I’ve ever met, and you’ve played a few good jokes in your time, Henery.”
“Hadn’t really planned it out. This bit of crazy just sort of cropped up at the last minute. Fascinating to watch, though.”
“Sure is. Talk about shamelessly willing to discuss anything at all and actually not trying to push a point of view, just find out what people think. Haven’t thought about the difference between Chinese philosophy and Plato vis-à-vis patriarchal social norms and reproductive strategies in pretty much never.”
“It’s an experiment. We weren’t really sure what was going to happen.”
Strut’s face took on a contemplative expression, and he looked Henery in the eyes. “Why are you here?”
“Long story short, I accidentally got hitched onto the wildest piece of tech, and then we broke into this place. It’s a real robo-mil-moon, exactly like it appears to be.”
“You managed to take over a robo-moon? Holy mother of Jesus.”
“That’s only part of it. After the Colonel won at Dustbowl, he was sort of on everyone’s hit list, along with Tajemnica. She’s an old warship with one of the original fully self-aware AIs, and the rest. I’m just wrangling electrons here while they sort out the big plans.”
Whistling and looking impressed, Strut scanned the landing hangar with a new appreciation of what he was really looking at. “But you are part of this whole operation, not just a recent arrival like we are?”
“Uh-huh. Helton asked for names of people who might be reliable contacts, that wouldn’t say anything even if they didn’t show up, and we all drew up first contact lists. Wasn’t sure if you’d come, but I tossed your name in. So…?”
“The service has been good to me, but recently… it’s been getting strange. Paranoid. Massive security theater since Dustbowl, while real problems are ignored. Good people shuffled or demoted or let go. They were working through all the senior people with loyalty questions, asking if we knew any of you or had heard from you recently. I honestly said I hadn’t heard from you for a couple of years.” He grinned wryly. “The next day I got your note, but thought it might be an elaborate false flag op to test loyalty. When senior people started turning up AWOL and the base asked for the rest of them to put their families in secure base housing ‘for their protection’ it didn’t feel right. I looked over the security measures, and it was clearly to keep people from getting out, not in. Then a carrier group returned shot all to hell, and the scuttlebutt was it was a single ship half the size of a cruiser, and I thought I’d have to take your message at face value.”
The two of them stood quietly, leaning casually against a table as they watched the dozen remaining screens interacting with the people in front of them.
“Is your AI like this?”
“Taj? Not rally mine. But yes, sometimes she gets on a philosophical jag, and you never know what’s going to come up. She knows we are all crazy-full of apparent paradoxes, just tries to make them more explicit than most of us are comfortable with…. It fascinates her no end to watch us doing odd things that manage to work in spite of the odds. She seems to have given up pointing out we are nuts.”
Chapter XIV
Getting off planet
The hangar was half-filled by Tajemnica’s scarred bulk. The overhead gantries were moving sheets of steel and composites into place, while workers and recent conscripts with the necessary skills welded them as best they could into some semblance of a credible spaceship shape. Being unable to weld metal onto the carbon of the primary hull, they had to attach it to the steel of gun barrels and turrets, bolting metal straps around armored hatches and other items and welding to that. They also used a lot of epoxy. Holes were patched with temporary covers, presenting many a professional challenge to the men working on her. The need to make the new “skin” both strong enough to survive liftoff and traveling through the atmosphere and the rigors of acceleration, but also be able to be ejected or dropped away to clear the way for the functioning turrets complicated the operation. The former press-gang recruits that had the skills did what they could, those that didn’t helped as best they were able. The handful of sufficiently discreet shipwrights who had been found were both swearing up and down about the irregularity and impossibility of it all, and intrigued at how such a project actually could be done. Many debts were called in, many promises made, and new connections were forged and cemented amid the hectic work and the need for secrecy, surrounded by the need for help that wasn’t normally on hand.
Tajemnica, Helton, and Quiri planned and calculated, while Kaminski and Moffett headed up the recently freed conscripts with useful skills, Allonia and Kwon wrangled the civilians and less-skilled soldiers as best they could for domestic support, Harbin managed the contractors, and Brother Libra dealt with the endless stream of combat survivor issue stresses and confusion. The constant stream of exhausting work and necessary training and repair details and trouble-shooting kept everyone busy, tired, and in a state of bemused wonder whenever they had a moment to catch their breath and think about it. The external shape-shifting was near miraculous, but the necessary interior cleaning and repair from the water damage was much slower going as it required a much higher degree of skill and difficult to obtain parts to replace things the salt water immersion had damaged irreparably.
Skelton fretted constantly, and through it all Tajemnica did her best to keep things subtly confused on the police channels using suggestions gleaned from everyone, messed with rival crime syndicates to keep them happy, busy, and off-balance with numerous opportunities, and continued researching and pumping out messages to people who had been screwed by the State with names, addresses, account numbers, and cross-referenced conflicts of interest.
With three days of round the clock work, Tajemnica’s appearance has been transformed. Her hull was now more rounded and bulbous, with only a few pieces of her original hull still visible.
“Just about ready,” Taj’s armored woman avatar reported. “Structural integrity and ejectability of the new skin appears adequate. Some tweaks and supplies and I’m golden.”
“Not so sure about golden, but at least we’re
likely to make orbit without crashing anywhere too hard or getting IDed and shot down.” Quiritis checked another item off the list as Harbin poked his head into engineering. She glanced at him with a smile. “Still a far cry from our condition coming in.”
Harbin looked back and forth between Helton and Quiritis, scowling darkly. “Another half-dozen are getting cold feet, opting to stay here with a new identity. Skelton’s happy to help them out. Pickings have been slim amid all the press gang sweeps.” He retreated to another area of the ship he has some control over, muttering about crashing being a bad subject for jokes.
“OK, so we’re down to… about five dozen or so staying?” Helton tried to remember amid the fast changing situation.
“Sixty five,” Taj filled in. “Some with the same ID but records sanitized as best I can, mostly guys with family, some given all new IDs. A few wanted to be ghosts and get a new folder from a local they already knew. Going with the devil they know, as it were.”
“So, just about ready to spin things up?” Helton scanned the bridge, checking with each face to see if there were any unspoken uncertainties.
“I’ve wanted off this rock for a week” Quiritis said earnestly.
“Weapons minimal, but as ready as they are going to be until we get a proper refit. Stenson’s is going to be pissed at what we’ve done to her,” Kaminski reported.
“We can cut the hard link when we lift. Lots of mil-band traffic, but encryption has been improved, still can’t break in. General flight traffic reports say a cruiser is pulling into station three, and the Montserrat is docked for unspecified minor refitting there. That’s one of the ships that almost got us. Another cruiser is on far-side,” Allonia checked a few last things to be sure. “Coms nominal.”