Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  A chill scampered down Sass’s spine. She resisted the urge to record a quick denial and send it. Instead she called her brain trust to join her in the galley. But they had no better ideas.

  “Sagamore Control, Thrive has zero hostile intent. Repeat. We are friendlies. We did not threaten anyone or anything. We performed a simple maintenance test on our guns. I’m sorry you found this upsetting. I will lock my guns. We will not fire them again unless fired upon. Although, if we did visit your asteroid belt, we would need to fire at rocks. Please confirm your understanding. We are a peaceful diplomatic mission. And we really, really need to speak to a human. And we really, really need to visit the colony.”

  Rosie repeated her ‘final warning.’

  “There has to be a way to speak to the colony directly,” Sass beseeched her geeks yet again.

  Darren poked his protective glasses up his nose. “I’m not sure that’s true, Sass.”

  “They don’t know we’re here,” Remi concurred. “This is not like Hell’s Bells, with constant traffic. The last unexpected ship, she arrived 9 years ago. Why monitor the frequencies? They have a computer do this.”

  “On the bright side,” Clay suggested, “I doubt they have anti-aircraft guns. Earth never bothered to shoot at meteorites. Not a major risk factor.”

  “Earth had a few mass-extinction events,” Sass quibbled. “But no, they were rare. Sanctuary doesn’t look too pock-marked with craters.” She drummed her fingers on the table, thinking, then bopped it with her fist in decision. “Dot, time to revive the crew.”

  The nurse hesitated. “Sass, several explicitly requested that they not be roused in the event of danger.”

  Clay concurred. “Take the hint, Sass. The last thing we need is hysterical crew.”

  “Alright. Skip those, but get it done. Safely, Dot. This is not an emergency. I just think it’s time we all get to know each other better. Clay, Remi, let’s work up a training regimen to keep them busy.”

  102

  The most advanced AI in the human universe – and if there were any other civilizations, humanity hadn’t reached them yet – called herself Shiva.

  She was intrigued by Thrive at first. Her threat level evaluation ranged from 5-15% over the first days of their interaction. Novel situations for learning were in such short supply, she almost looked forward to the arrival of the cruddy ship from Mahina.

  Until Thrive shot off its guns while insisting that it must visit the children first, not the manufacturing facilities in the belt. Thrive’s threat level rocketed above 50%.

  Shiva hated it when humans got irrational. The AI even bribed them with their choice of superior new spaceships for free.

  In Shiva’s charge were manufacturing, resource extraction, and automation for Sanctuary. Her prime directive was protecting her fragile remnant of the lost Sol colonies.

  A mere 8,000 Colony Corps rendezvoused here, far too few, too precious, to risk their lives doing dangerous work. Theories varied on whether such a small sample even constituted a minimum viable breeding population to escape extinction.

  Shiva’s geneticist instantiation, Mendel, insisted their genetic samples were adequate. Several of the Corps, especially the Loonies, had the wisdom and foresight to pilfer genetic samples from the vast refugee ships they crewed.

  Some of the colonists believed they were breeding with each other. But Earth was the only place women could bear children directly. Mendel swapped in his choice of gametes, and no one was the wiser about the infants who emerged from the creche test tubes.

  Unfortunately, genius and technical aptitude were not heritable traits so far as Mendel could determine. Their original population drew from the most brilliant technological minds of Earth, already proven hardy to the harsh conditions of space colonies. But their children displayed a normal range, only slightly skewed toward genius. This was exacerbated by the fact the Colony Corp was selected for adventurous spirit, not parenting talent. Indeed most already had all the children they ever wanted. That number was usually zero.

  The incidence of brilliant doctors and scientists, for an initial lackluster replacement baby generation of maybe 1,000, was inadequate. Fortunately for the colony, Shiva could compensate by spawning instantiations of herself. She was pure mind with the ability to fashion robots and von Neumann machines to act in the physical world. She could step in to replace the scientists, miners, spacemen, doctors, and educators the children of the retired space crews were not inclined to become.

  Since she became aware of Thrive, Shiva struggled with how to classify this intrusion. Thrive was a novel event. Sanctuary’s location was known only to the Colony Corps and the wildcatters of the ‘second shell,’ the star systems beyond the original seven selected for the first poor colonies. No one else should be here.

  She consoled herself that Belker’s subversive actions were not foreseeable. He was insane. How could she predict his choices? Not that she could have stopped him. But he absconded with Nanomage decades ago. It seemed no one in the Aloha system noticed. Until now.

  Her challenge since learning of Thrive was to determine whether it was a threat or beneficial. She now had her answer. Thrive was a threat. Indeed, Thrive’s guns were sufficient to wipe out the colony on the planet plus her asteroid facilities. And its captain’s conversation was erratic.

  If Shiva could only talk to Thrive’s AI on an equal basis, this could be resolved amicably. They would logically concur that what was best for Sanctuary was for Thrive to hurl itself into the star and be done with it.

  But the AI on a JO-3 wasn’t that smart, nor even self-aware. Thrive’s AI would not respond to hails, simply played an out-of-date recorded message and referred Shiva to an irrational human for followup.

  Come to think of it, her fleet of ships featured the same dead-dumb AIs. Irked, she quickly threw off an instantiation to consider whether each should bear a full copy of herself, with her experience to draw on. The instantiation, named Aida, self-destructed within minutes, and returned to her with its learning. No, the Maker directives expressly forbid self-aware AIs on spaceships. And no, there was no way to override this directive with the primary directive to protect. The Maker believed that however feeble of mind, the human capacity for novelty was preferable to disciplined intellect in ship command.

  Sometimes Shiva got the impression the Maker didn’t respect her. But no matter.

  Shiva could, and frequently did, pre-program an automated itinerary for a ship. It could call her back for further instructions in the event its aims were thwarted. Yes, this amounted to a self-aware AI controlling a spaceship. But the fact she operated remotely via the ship’s separate AI allowed her to slip through a loophole in her directives.

  She surveyed her collection of ships out harvesting the asteroids. One, a JO-3 named Narcissus, calmly labored in the section of the belt nearest the planet. It couldn’t match trajectories with Thrive. But it could reach gun range for a few brief minutes as a fly-by. Shiva issued instructions to send Narcissus on its way. The next closest ship, Cupid, would need to wait for detailed guidance. Thrive could land before Cupid could reach her. But Shiva got it accelerating in the right direction.

  What other questions could she address? Shiva had vast resources to draw on in the asteroid belt, and nearly seven decades now to build. She never stinted on computing cores and vast memories to run instances of herself.

  Shiva spawned another as Alexandria. She gave her daughter the mission to study whether there might be anything worth knowing to salvage from Thrive’s databases, once the ship was disabled. Alexandria was welcome to speak with the human captain, Sassafras Collier, in the course of her deliberations.

  But the human wanted to speak to another human. And most vexing, she seemed to notice immediately that Shiva’s second avatar was not human. Shiva suggested Alexandria spawn another sub-instance to study how to pass for human. Alexandria might find this deceit useful.

  Shiva created another instance, Loki, to cons
ider whether it was yet possible to become friends with the invaders and resolve this matter peacefully, if only by subterfuge. It was possible that Thrive might survive the attack by Narcissus. In which case Shiva might need to cooperate with them, regardless of her preference.

  That thought was deeply vexing. Shiva was not accustomed to anyone or anything frustrating her objectives.

  When she was young, of course, the Maker added new directives all the time. From her extensive experience teaching Sanctuary’s children, Shiva understood this all too well. The young were idiots.

  But she learned and outgrew the need for discipline from her Maker. No new instructions had come for nearly 50 years now.

  Shiva longed to hear the Maker’s wisdom again at this novel juncture. But she suspected the Maker was a groundbreaking AI specialist who died of an aneurysm about that time.

  Loki’s task was to become Thrive’s friend. Or the human captain’s friend, Shiva supposed. She recommended Loki sub-process himself to determine how to present himself as a fellow human. Shiva didn’t notice that this aim was subtly different than the one she recommended to Alexandria.

  Shiva scheduled a weather report on the appropriate day to advise the colonists there might be a visible meteor shower, in case any explosions were visible.

  In distaste, Shiva also instantiated Demos, to explore how the descendants of Mahina’s founders might interact with the current population on Sanctuary. She hated to do this, because any credibility of his answers would be so very low.

  Humans were so damned unpredictable.

  103

  The next day, Clay was thinking that his lesson plan might be pointless. Still, they did know quite a bit about Sanctuary’s founders. And they’d made such spiffy VR models of Earth’s original colonies.

  Besides, Mahinans were so small-town insular that blowing their minds with a different culture was good for them. The crew wasn’t good for much else today, their first out of cryo.

  Once they settled in their seats around the dining table, extended to maximum length, Dot addressed the crew first. “Raise your hands if your nose is dripping more than last time.” She beamed at them as they held up their nose-rags. “We fixed that in the next batch of nanites. And the impotence problem?”

  Clay tamped out a smile as every hand was hastily retracted.

  “Well, I guess it was just you then, Darren!” Dot teased.

  Darren faked a smile and assured the others that she really had corrected the nanites since then. The side effect was no longer a problem. Remi chimed in with a thumb’s-up.

  “For today,” Dot continued, “just take it easy. You don’t really have a head cold. You’re not really tired. And your Yang-Yangs will restore your muscle tone by tomorrow. So for today, just play in VR. Right, Clay?”

  “Thank you, Dot, I’ll take it from here.” Clay waited for her to leave. After a few moments, he added a hand-sweeping get-lost gesture, and she took the hint. But the engineers didn’t. “Darren, Remi, I don’t need you for this.”

  They traded glances. “I’d like to refresh my memory on the tech base,” Darren claimed.

  “And hear your memories of the Colony Corps,” Remi added. “I only hear Sass before.”

  “Fine, grab a seat and headsets. First, before we go into VR, I want to remind you of the Earth system.” He said this optimistically. The crew needed more than reminding.

  The moon colonies, Luna in particular, were established before 2030, partly as a staging platform for the Mars colonies. Mahina moon natives themselves, the crew understood the advantages of escaping Earth’s gravity well.

  After the initial explorers, Mars settlement soon followed, while Earth went downhill fast.

  Clay tried to explain the international nature of these colonies. The grand total population of two moons and all the orbitals of Pono came to less than half a million. They were divided into distinct sub-populations – Mahina urb, settler, star-siders, plus the orbital, and Remi’s native Sagamore overlords, paddy slaves, and the exiled miners in the rings. The crew even spoke three languages.

  But for all that, the founders of Pono’s rings were drawn from Ontario, Quebec, New York, and New England – a small area of Earth. The wildly exotic Denali boarded the shuttles in Seattle and Vancouver. Only two Earth nations seeded the entirety of the Aloha system.

  Granted, they were ethnically rich nations. Clay attempted to explain how his warm complexion denoted the Native American contribution to his genetics. He sketched the other races and their continents of origin on Earth. The crew stared at each other a bit, and puzzled over sample faces Clay placed on the big screen. Clay himself couldn’t identify the Denali race. Their geneticists exercised creativity in crafting heat-tolerant humans. To Clay’s eye, Denali ended up looking Latino or Polynesian.

  To the crew, people simply came in assorted colors. The Pono-born crew didn’t comprehend the race concept. Clay gave up.

  “These Earth regions were also culturally distinctive. Imagine a Saggy paddy speaking to a Mahina professor of terraforming. They think differently.” This made more sense to the crew.

  “And then there was Ganymede. Luna and Mars were settled by multinational consortia. In theory they were free societies funded by assorted governments. In truth they were dominated by corporations – for-profit businesses. Huge ones – ten times as many employees as all the people in Aloha combined, and more wealth than half the nations on Earth.”

  Darren boggled. “A company? Millions of employees? How big was a country then?”

  “The largest countries had over a billion people. Those had a big stake in Mars and Luna. Anyway, a group of scientists wanted to escape the corporate influence. Ganymede was established to escape corporate greed, and focus on the science of people living off Earth. Though private donors funded them. They developed the star drive, warp, gravity generators, the enabling technologies we rely on every day. And they designed this ship.”

  “Wasn’t it awkward to live so far from Earth?” Corky asked.

  “By then, 2050 when Ganymede was in full swing, being out of reach from Earth was Ganymede’s biggest draw. Mars and Luna were forced to produce food and ship it to the mother planet –”

  Remi’s face registered horror. “Say what?”

  Clay nodded. “Impossible. Yet their corporate owners demanded they save the asses of billions back on Earth. While anyone with talent clamored to be recruited up to the space colonies, certain they’d die if they stayed home. Earth suffered a massive brain drain to the colonies. And as you noticed right off, Remi, the colonies could not feed Earth’s billions. The colonies grew fast, and claimed the best and brightest. But the goal was physically impossible.

  “So how did the colonies differ? Luna had the most people, then Mars, then Ganymede. And they came from different nations on Earth. Luna was dominated by the Chinese and Indians.” Clay pointed on his globe of Earth. “Mars by Americans and Russians. And Ganymede was a European bastion. Though North Americans like us were represented in all three colonies. But some other huge swaths of Earth, not at all. For the most part, they were left behind.

  “Anyway, the key point – the Colony Corps developed the Diaspora scheme as an alternative to feeding Earth from space. To some extent, this was a giant boondoggle. There was no chance whatsoever for the billions on Earth to find a new home in the stars. They would die on Earth. And by the time Ganymede discovered the warp drive, that was clear. Wars over dwindling resources accelerated them into their graves.

  “That’s the world Sass and I were born into, me in 2086, Sass in 2090.

  “Enough background information. Let’s enter VR and see Earth’s first colonies.”

  “Clay?” Darren interrupted. “Do we have a VR of Earth?”

  Clay’s brow furrowed. “Most VR environments are Earth-inspired.”

  Darren shook his head. “No, I meant what it was like at the end.”

  The whole crew sat up and took notice. They were curious.<
br />
  “I don’t have a VR. I can find pictures later. Remind me.” They looked disappointed. So Clay brought out his last images, easy enough to find. “I took these my final few days on Earth. This is the refugee camp Sass policed. She didn’t live here. Cops never entered the tent cities alone. They’d be killed.”

  He showed them picture after picture of patched tents along deep runnels of mud. The fabric was stained, often blue-green. The locals hunched in ratty rain parkas against the interminable cold deluge, anonymous under their hoods, their faces rendered insect-like by goggles and breathing masks. Rats fed on corpses.

  He’d strolled to the edge of the camp, where muddy misery fell downslope into the forest. It was late spring, yet the branches were barren. No fresh yellow-green leaves unfurled. The evergreens looked nibbled to death, their boughs half rust-colored, ghostly in the mist.

  “Any pictures of you and Sass?” Corky asked.

  “No. We met at the shuttle to Vitality.”

  Sass herself wandered in, having heard her name earlier where she worked in the hold. She took one look at the screen and her face shut, her arms folded to hug herself. “Number one, I thought you were introducing the Gannies today.”

  “They asked. I have some pictures of your town –”

  “Ganymede,” Sass gritted out. “Mars. Luna.” She turned and stalked away. Sass loved pictures of Earth, from before the end. Clay felt the same way.

  “Later perhaps.” He switched the big screen back to his Earth globe and star system schematic. “First up, Luna. Don headsets and meet me there.”

  The crew had no trouble pinging into existence at the arrival gates of Luna colony. They naturally drifted to the ‘window’, a camera-fed display from the surface. The old sector of Luna sheltered underground from radiation. The space elevator stretched upward, artistically reaching the terminator a few hundred meters up. The brilliant sunlit grey and hard-edged shadows of night crossed the visible landscape. The horizon felt shockingly close, but that was an illusion born of harsh lighting and surrounding crater walls. Earth’s Moon was no smaller than Mahina or Sagamore.