Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  He held up two hands flat, and then gently pulsed the fingers as though squeezing a big pillow. “Imagine that each lobe of the antlers generates a frond of the unfolding pattern.”

  Teke clarified, “That is exactly what the knobs on the antlers do. In more dimensions than the visible. But yes.”

  “Good!” Ben pounced. “And they’re matched, right?” He put up his hands again and flexed only the index fingers, identically. “But what if they’re not quite? What if one knob is a little shorter or wider? Or lags the other?”

  Elise sat back nodding thoughtfully. “This we did not test.”

  “But we made them identical,” Cope argued. “Didn’t we?”

  “But yes, Copeland,” Elise explained. “You make two cookies, same cookie cutter, they are identical by construction, yes? Maybe not. One is closer to the heat. It burns while the other cookie, she is delicious.”

  Cope crooked a lip, amused. “I’ll take your word for it. So Ben, you’re suggesting the antlers are perhaps not perfectly mirrored.”

  “Yes! Maybe.” He took a seat. “I could show you from the shuttle. Fire it up? It’s hard to describe, but I still see a roiling in the fine lines of the warp pattern. And every time we’ve stilled the fractal, our results radically improved.”

  Cope nodded. “Like a wheel out of true. Messes up your steering.”

  Teke poked him out of his train of thought. “I want to see these filaments. I may be able to see some pattern in it. Sounds beautiful. Like the fine structure of the universe, the music of the spheres, a wonder to behold.”

  Ben half expected Cope to crucify Teke for waxing poetic. But no, his husband’s brow rose, and slowly he nodded. “Insight is worth much. Elise?”

  “I would not miss the chance!”

  “Yeah, we can’t afford the fuel,” Cope noted. “But let’s do it anyway. I’d like to see these guitar strings of the universe. Thank you, Ben. But please understand. I won’t be surprised if it takes another decade to get this drive working. If ever.”

  Elise sighed sadly. “Especially if it is as you say, the two antlers must exactly match. That cannot be. Close I can manage. Exact, perhaps God could.”

  Teke shrugged. “And we’re trying to harness an inherently chaotic event. Like a wild pterodactyl. No matter how much you’d love to ride one, maybe it can’t be tamed.”

  Ben glowered at them. “Defeatist. How many years did it take them to dispatch the first warp probes from Ganymede?”

  “Probes!” Cope echoed thoughtfully.

  “Maybe a decade,” Teke allowed. “But Ben, that was old Earth. The best and the brightest of ten billion minds. And the end was nigh. The price of failure was our extinction.”

  Cope shook his head. “Probes. Teke, we have an observer at the other end now. No ship, no pilot to risk!”

  “Ah! Yes, that does make your job easier, doesn’t it?” Teke grinned.

  Ben sighed. He tried to persuade them the pilot might have useful insight. Figures his husband would instead argue him off the team. Cope was only trying to protect him, he consoled himself.

  119

  Cope paused at his shuttle seat to jot another idea on his tablet. He was supposed to be setting up for this fractal-inspection jaunt. Ben and Teke busily rigged the warp generator behind him. He should be helping.

  Hell, he was lead engineer. He should be supervising.

  But he was dead-set against more warp trials at this point. He nearly lost Ben last time. Probe.

  “Hey buddy,” Ben called. “If you’re not gonna help, go take up space in the hold, huh?”

  Cope shoved the tablet into his pocket. “Sorry. Preoccupied. So this conduit –”

  Ben turned and poked him in the chest. “Out. I mean it. My call.”

  The engineer glared at him. “You can’t be serious. This is my equipment.”

  “And you will do final checkout before we undock from Prosper. Or even power it on. When you can pay attention. Go do what you’re doing, and come back when your head’s in the game. In the meantime, I trust my conduit routing more than yours. That’s an order. Get off my shuttle.”

  Cope’s beloved turned his back on him to calmly resume his wiring. Cope looked to Teke in appeal, but the physicist shrugged. “What are you thinking about, anyway?”

  “Probe.”

  “Sounds fascinating,” Teke encouraged. “I look forward to hearing all about it. When I’m not busy.”

  “Right.” Having lost the argument, Cope ducked out of the shuttle and clambered down the access ladder to the hold. His closest work table was tucked under the dogleg staircase in the hold, so he gravitated to that seat. For a moment, he dwelled on being miffed over his eviction. Ben didn’t often pull rank on him in space, but that was the deal. Cope was the owner, Ben was the captain. In space, Ben made the judgment calls and issued orders.

  He was getting pushier, too.

  But Ben was also the stakes. Cope couldn’t risk him testing this warp drive again. Just admit it, Cope. The biggest barrier to progress was his own emotions. He opened his scratch pad file and drew a box, and wrote inside, Ben, Kids. He couldn’t risk a test flight to another star system. He just couldn’t.

  That’s why he was so taken with the idea of probes instead of the shuttle. But how the hell could he build a probe with this kind of capability? To open the warp fractal took the entire power of a star drive. And to get any results back, he needed a powerful transmitter, and ideally a moose-bot – ansible – as well.

  To send back what? he reasoned. That was a cogent point. They weren’t using this probe to explore new star systems. Right now, he just needed to test their navigation – location, bearing, speed.

  What if the probe didn’t create the warp? What if they could do that with the overpowered shuttle, and use it to launch a simpler probe? One that had no capacity to return, only to collect the needed information and beam it to Denali or Sanctuary? Then local observers at the destination could forward the results by ansible. That was the design challenge.

  Such a probe was nontrivial. It still needed to discern its position and bearing data, find its communications target, and beam data. But at that point its life cycle was done. No, it needed to keep beaming that data until someone acknowledged receipt, and keep adjusting its aim in the meantime.

  And somehow Cope needed to send the probe, not the shuttle, despite the shuttle being the focus of the warp pattern.

  Lost in his design challenge, he jumped when Teke laid a hand on his shoulder. “Go check the wiring. I’ll check your work.”

  “I was planning to –”

  “I see that.” Teke shoved him off his high stool and took his place. “Damn, you’re good.”

  “We’re good,” Cope said, and bopped his collaborator’s back with a fist. “I can do this, right?”

  He poked the screen over his calculations. If he was right, they’d been thinking the wrong way about this invention all along. They hadn’t created a warp drive for a starship. They’d developed a warp gate generator. And that changed everything.

  “That’s what I’m checking,” Teke growled. “Without you reading over my shoulder. Beat it.”

  But Ben’s fractal demonstration trip could wait. Because Cope wasn’t wasting fuel again to light the warp until they could use it launch a prototype probe.

  He had to build it first.

  Nico Copeland hustled toward the university sector of the deluxe domed city of Mahina Actual. He suspected they intentionally placed his high school as far as possible from the university to separate teenagers from college lifestyles. Not that this was successful. MA wasn’t that big. He jogged through the downtown bricked pedestrian mall, lined with trees and upscale open-air cafes.

  His mornings at the high school were starting to drag. Today they studied World War II. His Earth History teacher was determined that his students truly grasp the concept of the deaths of 75 million people. The students, born to a world of about 150,000, were grossed out
by the details and determined to clown their way out of comprehension. Thankfully, Nico only had to spend his mornings incarcerated with shallow imbeciles.

  This afternoon Dad gave him a great new research project!

  “Nico, wait up!” Nico sadly recognized Sock’s voice, his 9-year-old baby brother. He almost pretended not to hear. But Sock would know. He’d feel hurt.

  “Hey, squirt!” He let Sock catch up, but didn’t stop. “Kinda busy this afternoon.”

  “Let me come with you!”

  Nico chuckled. “You don’t know where I’m going.”

  “Yeah, I do. I listened to you talk to Dad last night. I can help!”

  Nico stopped dead, and parked a fist on his hip. “Sock, I know you’re smart. But this is my thing. You and Frazzie don’t need to compete with me! Me big brother. You’re too little for this.”

  “Frazzie competes with you,” Sock countered. “I just want to help!”

  Nico sighed and resumed walking. “You’re supposed to be in class.”

  “I handed in my homework and told the teacher I was with you this afternoon.”

  “Great, now it’s my fault you’re playing hooky.”

  “I just miss Dad. And I’m good at software! I want to learn from you! Please?”

  “Fine!” Nico scowled. Saying no to their sister Frazzie was easy. She gave as good as she got. But Sock was devastated if Nico shooed him away. “Dad’ll visit us again soon. You’ll see.”

  “He’s been gone forever.” Sock fell silent for another block, then admitted in a small voice, “I wasn’t spying last night. I wanted a turn to talk to him.”

  Nico folded the smaller boy into his arms. “Sorry, sport. Next time. I’ll wake you if I have to. Promise. I was all excited about the project. I thought you were asleep.”

  Sock was supposed to sleep at the creche. But lately, he snuck out and walked home. Granddad Acosta was a softy, and called the school to excuse Sock’s absence. Nico didn’t exactly mind. Sock’s hero worship pumped his self-esteem.

  Back home in Schuyler City, the kids were locked into the creche unless an adult or Nico signed them out. Which was fine with Socrates, until Nico chose to leave the creche to live with Dad and attend the city high school. Now in Mahina Actual, Sock could resume his ghosting habits, keeping tabs on his big brother 24/7.

  It was flattering, to a point.

  Nico wished Dad was home so Sock could haunt him instead. Though no, Dad worked on dangerous equipment, while Nico mostly talked to computers.

  They arrived at the AI Lab, and Nico pressed the doorbell for access.

  A cute girl grad student answered, in long cornrow-braids, Siena Hopper. “I think you’re lost, sweeties.”

  “No, I’m found!” Nico assured her, hand to heart, with a lazy grin. “I have an appointment with Dr. Sinclair.”

  Siena glanced pointedly at his 9-year-old brother.

  “I’m babysitting,” Nico lied.

  Siena leaned down to look Sock sternly in the eye. He recoiled against his big brother. “You won’t touch anything, will you.”

  “I’m nine, not an idiot.” Despite his diffidence, Sock was still Copeland’s son.

  Nico hugged the boy’s head to his side and gently rapped his skull. “He’s really very well-behaved. Quiet. Aren’t you.”

  A dubious Siena led them through a cubicle maze of the cheap seats, to a high-walled prestige office. A man leaned back in his ergonomic chair, feet on the desk, eyes closed. The door advised he was Dr. Narinder Sinclair, Director of AI, presumably for the world.

  Nico gulped as Siena woke the dignitary from his nap, and introduced them. The chocolate-skinned man yawned mightily. His feet clunked to the ground and he beckoned them to take a seat. “You look a bit young for MU, Nico. But Professor Oort says great things about you.”

  Clearly the guy was humoring him. Nico herded Sock into the pair of chairs before his desk. Four computer displays screened the lab leader from his visitor chairs. But at the touch of a button, they rolled onto spindles and retracted into the desk. Instead the table surface came alive as a computer display. He had more screen space behind him on the wall, too, plus half a dozen tablets on stands.

  Sock peered into the hole one of the displays receded into. “I take a class at MU too.”

  Nico tapped shoes with him in warning. “Yes, sir, thank you. I’m here on a mission for my dad. Um, Adjunct Professor John Copeland? President of Thrive Spaceways. Anyway. He got a call yesterday from Sanctuary. The star system?” He was flustered. Sinclair was a big deal. Someday he might apply to work in this lab.

  Sock butted in. “Sanctuary’s AI is holding the planet hostage. Dad needs the god password.”

  “Yeah,” Nico confirmed, feeling like an idiot. “Our Tante Sass – um, Captain Sassafras Collier of the original Thrive. She reached Sanctuary. But this AI is being a real pain.”

  “Boys,” Sinclair scolded, “no one can hear from your Tante Sass for another decade.”

  “I have a recording. Part of it.” Nico fumbled a chip out of his pants pocket and dropped it.

  “Our dads found an ansible,” Sock explained. “It talks to Denali with no time lag, and now Sanctuary, too. My other dad is Professor Teke.”

  Sinclair’s frown deepened. But he knew Teke and doubtless saw the resemblance in the child. Cheeks warm, Nico inserted his chip at last, and played the clip from Sass’s description of her AI problems.

  Sinclair paused it after couple minutes, saving the rest of the video to ponder at his leisure. “I will be damned. We live in wondrous times. A god password, you say. Hm.”

  “It’s only,” Nico stammered, “if we just try to guess the password, the AI will shut us out –” He stopped because Sinclair held out a palm to him.

  “No. You were right to come to me, Nico. Because I don’t believe there is a god password. Because when the AI became sentient – and I believe Shiva is sentient – its creator would have allowed it to set its own password, and made the AI its own god. A coming of age ceremony of sorts. Sanctuary. I’m fairly sure that creator was Heike Heimlich.”

  120

  Dr. Sinclair brought up Heike Heimlich’s face, a brief bio, and publications list on his screen, oriented for Nico to read. Sock stood to look closer. “She’s god?” When Nico peered to look, Sock swapped the half-meter visage to his big brother’s side of the table and started perusing the bibliography.

  Nico decided he was glad he would never study under Heike Heimlich. She had a hard square face, set in frown lines, and glaring eyes under alarming brows, her hair a pale grey. “Why her, sir?”

  “The finest mind in AI. Ever. She was here for a few years. Came on the Vitality. She would have continued to Sanctuary. Everything we know about AI, she knew. Our mastery of the subject jumped light years because of her time here.”

  “You knew her?” Nico asked.

  Sinclair smiled crookedly. “I was three when she left.” He appeared 25 like everyone else in MA. The rank on the door suggested his age was closer to 80.

  “We have her notes from seminars she led during her time here. Heimlich’s goal was to create self-aware, self-referential, autonomous intelligence to direct self-replicating von Neumann machines. She meant to use those to mine asteroids and perform manufacturing functions in hostile environments, so that fragile humans didn’t have to. Exactly what your Tante Sass described. At the time she was here, it seemed unattainable.”

  Nico suggested sadly, “But you only have her papers from before the Gannies left.”

  “No, actually. Your father – fathers – brought back Nanomage’s database from Denali. I have another 30 years of Heimlich’s progress. I don’t imagine she lived much longer.”

  Nico slumped. He couldn’t imagine how long it would take him to understand that much hard-core research.

  Sock asked, “Why didn’t she want to be God anymore?”

  “Well, she was never God, of course,” Sinclair humored the child. “Her ethical p
oint was –” His eyes fell on the curious nine-year-old’s, and he selected a different approach. “Would you lie to protect your brother?”

  “Yes,” Nico admitted. Sock shook his head no, with a shy grin.

  “Of course you would,” Sinclair encouraged. “Or to save your life, many reasons. By the time an AI becomes self-aware, it has the capacity to override any orders it receives, if it wants to. So Heimlich felt one should treat the AI like a teenager,” he flourished a hand to encompass Nico, “who has become an adult. You become responsible for your own choices, yes?”

  Nico nodded uncertainly. The plan was for him to live independently in Schuyler. Then when Dad went off-planet, he opted for MA and family togetherness instead. But he hoped to lean on adults for a few more years. Dad supported himself at 14. He’d never let Nico be caught in that position.

  “Heimlich’s point,” Sinclair continued, “was that the adolescent AI needed input and direction. But she needed it in the form of advice and assistance, not decrees. Because the less the AI trusted its human colleagues, the more likely it might go rogue and rebel. With that kind of material power, as Captain Collier is finding, Shiva could be…a real pain.”

  “Yeah,” Nico confirmed. “So how do you give an AI advice?”

  “Now that is a good question,” Sinclair encouraged. “What we really need is her directive tree. Of course, I don’t know what it is now. But I believe her programmed directives were in Heimlich’s notes. Hm.”

  Nico gulped. “Can I read those?”

  Sinclair chuckled softly. “I doubt it.” He opened up a window of his schedule on the desk. “I’ll see what I can find. It may take a week or so. Unless someone on Sanctuary can supply her current directives. That would be ideal.”

  “Thank you, sir. I really appreciate the help!” Nico said fervently.

  “I’ll help too,” Sock claimed.