Singularity: Book Two of the StarCruiser Brilliant Series

by Rick Lakin

  Dandy Lion came into the captain’s ready room and curled up on his pillow. He looked at Jennifer.

  “Did you catch any stray mice?” Jennifer asked as she smiled at the regal cat.

  Seriously, there are no mice at my studio, thought Dandy.

  Jennifer was still surprised each time she was able to read the thoughts of her precocious pet. “So how many tourist trams did you stop?”

  Just one. I must entertain my fans, Dandy thought. But I did comfort two crew members on Stage Three who were having a bad day.

  “Will you be able to interrupt your studio duties to fly into space, Dandy?”

  Dandy perked up. Outer space. Are we flying soon?

  “Of course, Dandy. You’re the ship’s cat. We wouldn’t leave you behind.”

  For the last nine years, Samantha was the tutor, college advisor, assistant, and friend as Jennifer took classes at UVN. Jennifer created Sami's avatar to look like her older sister.

  A three-dimensional image of a virtual human appeared in front of Jennifer. “Jen, you need to watch the speech by Senator Ramona Curtwell,” Sami said.

  “What’d she say now?”

  Sami moved to the side. A full Three-D projection appeared before them.

  “Robots are not our friends…” the video said.

  “The senator is on a roll,” Jennifer said. They settled in and watched the speech.

  “… I’m Ramona Curtwell, and I’m running for President.” The projection disappeared.

  “I’m glad she clarified that,” Jennifer said. “Otherwise, I would’ve cast her as the Wicked Witch in Scarecrow. She does look like a modern Margaret Hamilton.”

  “Do people think we’re evil?” Sami asked.

  “People fear what they don’t know,” Jennifer said. “Worse yet, they fear what politicians tell them to fear.”

  “Dr. Ami, Ani and I are programmed to help, to heal, to care about people,” Sami said. “Will humans always think of us as heartless robots, abominable androids, and mindless machines?”

  “Sami, you’re the most human person I know.”

  Sami looked down. “I suppose.”

  Are those tears in Sami’s eyes, Jennifer thought? “You look like you need a hug.”

  Sami stood up and became a full-sized solid figure in Holographic Tactile Virtual Reality. Jennifer stood, walked around the table, and hugged her virtual sister. Jennifer joined Sami with tears of her own.

  The moment passed. “Boss, your mother, and stepfather are expecting you on the beach at The Sunset Restaurant for dinner at seven-thirty,” Sami said. “The clouds are just right for a beautiful sunset at 7:14. You can take a shower in your stateroom. Traffic is light along Kanan Road.”

  I need time, too, and the sunset will be just the thing, Jennifer thought. “Thanks, Sami.”

  “Also, your grandfather would like to meet with you and Jack tomorrow morning at nine.”

  “Confirm the meeting,” Jennifer said. “Take a look at the Attack script, Sami, and then we can go watch the sunset.”

  “Yes, boss,” Sami said.

  Forty-five minutes later, Jennifer stood on Malibu Beach across from The Sunset Restaurant. The ocean was still a deep blue-green with five-foot waves. It was a cool September day with the temperature in the low eighties. The clouds of a passing thunderstorm on the horizon formed a stunning foreground for the coloratura to come.

  “Sami, do you ever wish that you could watch a sunset?”

  “Wishes are a bit outside my paradigm, but I have access to the virtual experiences of millions of people who have viewed incredible sunsets around the world. I pick one and concentrate on it at the seasonal time of sunset. It's a pleasurable moment each day.”

  The sun dipped through the horizon framed by the dissipating clouds until all that was left was the orange glow around the linings.

  “No green flash today,” Jennifer said.

  “The green flash is thought to be a myth by many. It's a unique occurrence that depends on the meteorological conditions including dry, stable air above the water.”

  “Don’t you wish you could stand on the beach, hear the pounding surf, and smell the sea air as the top of the sun falls below the horizon?”

  “Sis, I’ve been with you each of the seventy-three times that you have watched a sunset in our nine years together,” Sami said.

  “But wouldn't it feel different if you could stand with me and feel the breeze in your face, hear the waves wash up, and smell the fishy air.”

  “I treasure the vicarious experiences I share with you,” Sami said.

  Did I hear Sami's voice catch?

  Sheila and Allen came up next to her. “You like to watch the sunset alone,” Sheila said. “This is where you stand every time we come here.”

  “Sami’s with me.” Jennifer sensed her virtual sister longed to watch a sunset. Someday, we’ll stand here together on the beach without projectors and electronic networks. She added a new task to her projects list.

  The family walked across the street to the restaurant.

  3

  The next morning, Jennifer walked into Navvy’s outer office carrying her second Double-shot Caramel Frappuccino two minutes early for the meeting with her grandfather, Navilek Kelrithian, the seventy-four-year-old chairman of Tovar Studios and the Chief Designer of StarCruiser Brilliant.

  Jennifer greeted Navvy’s longtime assistant. “Good morning, Kathy” Kathy was a member of Tovar’s board of directors and deeply in love with Navvy.

  “Morning Jennifer, how is Hollywood’s youngest executive producer?”

  “I’m great,” Jennifer said. “I thought you and Navvy were going to cut back your time at the studio?”

  The sixty-something Japanese-American still looked as if she was in her forties thanks to the magic of Hollywood plastic surgeons. She tugged her sleeves down. Semi-retired but still in touch with all of the things happening on the lot, she looked satisfied but not content.

  “He still comes in three days a week. Navvy is still in charge,” Kathy said.

  “And you’re still here.”

  “Still here,” Kathy said. She sighed “Go on in. There are fruit and bagels on the side table.”

  “Thanks.”

  Jennifer entered the sizable ornate office of the Chairman of Tovar Studios. Navvy was seated at the conference table with his long-time friend Jack Masing, Captain of StarCruiser Brilliant. At one end was an HTVR projection of Brilliant slowly banking and climbing as if it was in space.

  “Grab a bite and join us,” Navvy said.

  After too many bloody red steaks, Navvy was heavier than his doctor preferred, but modern medicine released him from the worries of the aging diseases of the past.

  Forty years before, StarCruiser Brilliant carrying Navvy, his wife Hanna and pilot Jack Masing came to the current timeline. In the alternate timeline of their birth, they survived an engineering casualty and Brilliant traveled back two hundred years to a different Earth.

  StarCruiser Brilliant landed on the Imperial Sand Dunes after spotting a starship like their own. What they found was the location film set of a space opera being produced on a tight budget by a failing studio. Navvy rewrote the screenplay, made Jack Masing and Brilliant the stars of the film, saved Tovar Studios, and became the boss of the most successful independent lot in Hollywood.

  Jennifer prepared a bowl of fruit and took a seat next to her grandfather. She ran her hands over the blue conference table. It appeared to have marble inlays.

  “Grandpa, where did you find the wood for this table?”

  Jennifer turned to Jack as he laughed. “NASA sent us out to look at nearby exoplanets,” Jack said. “We surveyed Eridani d about twenty light years away and found these massive trees. NASA extracted a core and found this blue wood. It’s laced with copper. They estimated that the tree was fifty thousand years old.”

  Jack resettled in his chair. “Navvy looked around and saw hundreds of these trees. He turned the Br
illiant crew and the NASA scientists into lumberjacks. We felled five trees, cut them up, and stuffed them into Brilliant’s hold.”

  Navvy picked up the story. “I knew of a fine cabinet maker in Vermont from the old timeline. I found a carpenter who was his ancestor in this timeline and hired him,” Navvy said. “He created this table and a few other pieces.”

  “There's an end table in the Blue Room of the White House,” Jack said. “Navvy added many small pieces to his souvenir trove on Brilliant. He passes them out to VIP guests.”

  “Cool,” Jennifer said. “What did you need to see me about?”

  “When you landed Brilliant on top of a Hollywood hospital in front of millions of cable news viewers, our starship was no longer a fictional prop. We’ve received hundreds of requests for flyovers, airshow performances, and even funerals. We’re considering the possibilities for the best exposure to promote Attack of the Hoclarth Alliance and show off our Brilliant.” Navvy said. “The annual airshow at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego is at the end of September. A live audience of over five hundred thousand attended and a large audience viewed it on The AirShow Channel in HTVR. The channel has a rather modest audience, but the after views on social media should expose us to several hundred million. We can pump that up with some studio marketing. Jack?”

  Sixty-year-old Jack Masing stood like the six-foot-three-inch blonde-haired Navy sophomore quarterback who beat Army in the other timeline. Navvy recruited Jack after that year, arranged for him to graduate early, and trained him as pilot of StarCruiser Brilliant on her maiden flight.

  “The U.S. Navy Blue Angels Flight Demonstration team has invited us to fly a cameo as a part of their Sunday show and then an eight-minute slot for us to perform solo,” Jack said. “We'd like for you to coordinate with the Blues. You and your Star Squad can plan the operation for that day.”

  Star Squad included Jennifer, her boyfriend, David Masing who was Brilliant’s Pilot, her best friend, Tayla Mendoza, Brilliant’s Communicator, and Riley McMaster, Tayla’s boyfriend, and Brilliant’s Chief Engineer. The four became an inseparable item in Hollywood society with a recent cover of Variety.

  “What capabilities are we going to display?” Jennifer asked. “Can we cloak?”

  “Skunkworks has been working on that technology for a few years at Area 51. All of the current UFO rumors revolve around cloaking. NASA and the Air Force are going to go public soon. So, yes, show ‘em what we’ve got,” Navvy said.

  “What’s the schedule?” Jennifer asked.

  “We fly over to Miramar on Thursday of airshow week. There’ll be some tours inside Brilliant, hops aboard Fat Albert and on the Blue Angels for the Star Squad, and then a VIP Lunch. We rehearse with the Blues and return to Tovar.

  On Saturday, we fly to Miramar in the morning. Brilliant will be stationary on Saturday with selfies and autographs. We'll schedule two-hour shifts, and then we fly the show on Sunday and come home after. Tovar has booked suites in La Jolla for Saturday night.”

  “We’ve got three weeks. I’ll get on it.”

  “Kathy has the contact info,” Navvy said.

  “The Angels are trading hops in the F-52 for you four in exchange for a ride on Brilliant,” Jack said.

  “Excellent. David seems to think he’s a better pilot than me.”

  Jack stood to leave. “Keep me posted. I’ve got a ten o’clock crew call.”

  “Thanks for coming, Jack,” Navvy said. “I’m sure Jennifer will knock 'em dead.”

  “I’ll copy you on what we come up with, Captain,” Jennifer said. She looked at her grandfather. “Is that all?”

  “Stick around; let's chat.”

  Navvy stood and refilled his black coffee and slathered cream cheese on a garlic bagel. Jennifer appreciated that her grandfather was fit for his age. They shared the same eye color and high cheekbones.

  He returned to his chair at the conference table. “Jen, how're you settling in as an executive here at Tovar? You don't seem to use the office space I assigned, and you're so busy we never have a chance to talk.”

  “I love it here, Grandpa. I spend my executive time in the Captain’s Ready Room on the Brilliant. It’s got all of the creature comforts I need as well as all of the tech.”

  “That was my office early on.”

  “I need to ask you something,” Jennifer said.

  “Shoot,” Navvy said.

  “It's about you, my father, Kalinda, and me,” Jennifer said.

  He smiled.

  “We’re different, aren't we?” she asked. “Jack and Hanna came from your timeline, and they’re intelligent but not like us.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “You’re correct. In this culture, you’re considered extremely intelligent and extremely gifted. Psychologists consider your gifts to be a statistical anomaly. You’re an outlier.”

  Jennifer nodded.

  “Beyond this room, you should never admit otherwise,” he said. “In my timeline, the Great Energy Wars occurred in 2025 and threw the world into a long decline. The Second Renaissance began a century later when scientists invented soft containment fusion, giving the world unlimited cheap electricity. There were advances in every field of science throughout the world. In a small country in Eastern Europe, they made great advances in human genetic manipulation. They developed a vaccine that could be taken by a pregnant woman that would result in her child having intelligence seven standard deviations above the norm.”

  “My IQ of 206,” she said.

  “Correct,” Navvy said. “That's the scientific explanation. The political interpretation was this little country was developing a race of super-intelligent humans.”

  “That would be extremely disruptive,” Jennifer said.

  “It was,” Navvy said. “My grandmothers on both sides took the vaccine. The world attacked their country and destroyed their technological infrastructure. World powers attempted to exterminate the children. My parents were able to escape and seek refuge in the United States. It's a well-kept secret that high IQ is a genetically dominant trait among the offspring of the children of the vaccine.”

  “Like my dad?”

  “Yes,” Navvy said. “You and Kalinda are the fourth generation.”

  “But she is also an exceptional athlete,” Jennifer said.

  “That’s her Hoclarth heritage. In this culture, she will be considered a super-athlete,” Navvy said.

  Jennifer thought for a moment.

  “You want to know about the Hoclarth?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Jack and I ran into the Hoclarth about twenty-five years ago. We were able to capture a DNA sample. We passed it along to a team of biologists who worked in secrecy. They concluded the Hoclarth and humans have a common ancestor on Earth dating back 14,500 years.”

  Jennifer’s eyebrows raised. “A third party?”

  “It took the scientists three years to eliminate all the other possibilities, but yes, they concluded there's another race of beings with space travel. They have to be at least fifteen thousand years ahead of the Hoclarth and us.”

  “I watched an old documentary by a scientist named Carl Sagan,” Jennifer said.

  “NASA has built their extraterrestrial search program around that idea,” Navvy said. “Sagan proposed that if we do meet an alien race, it's statistically likely they have been sentient for a million years or more.”

  “And it's likely there are other human planets out there.”

  “That’s also true,” Navvy said. “We’ve been on the lookout.”

  “Can we change the subject?” Jennifer asked.

  “Of course,” Navvy said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Ani, Dr. Ami, and my assistant Sami,” she said. “Sami has been my best friend for nine years. Last night, I was watching the sunset. I think Sami wants to watch it too, without projection equipment, as a physical person.”

  “I worked with the engineers who began HumanAI Corp after they solved
the Turing Test. Your mother’s parents were early investors. I got involved two years after they went public.”

  “You invested Tovar capital?”

  “No, I swapped Brilliant tech for shares,” Navvy said. “They needed immense amounts of processing power and our miniaturization. I needed an artificial navigation intelligence to run Brilliant.”

  “Ani,” Jennifer said.

  “Correct,” Navvy said. “I provided them the capability to jump three generations of Moore’s Law in a year.”

  “What about HTVR?”

  “I pointed them to a little company that was on a ten-year track to develop Holographic Tactile Virtual Reality,” Navvy said. “HumanAI bought the company. We had virtual actors on set and steveLearn within six months.”

  “I went to Warner Academy,” Jennifer said.

  “Alexandra Warner did most of the steveLearn development there,” Navvy said.

  “Mom was one of the first students,” Jennifer said. “I once met Alexandra Warner. What about androids?”

  “Early on, HumanAI knew they’d have to avoid that issue and keep the marketing focused on learning and productivity. There’s a fear of the Technological Singularity among many in government and the intelligentsia.”

  “It's still around. Did you see the speech by Ramona Curtwell, the South Dakota Senator?”

  “Unfortunately, she has the eyes, ears, and votes of a lot of citizens,” Navvy said. “It’s that group of voters who see a problem and look for the culprit to blame instead of the solution.”

  “I read the 1993 paper by Vernor Vinge,” Jennifer said. “He and other science fiction writers adopted the singularity as one possible version of the apocalypse.”