Archaea Read online

  "Are you saying the core can return results for a query before the query is made?" asked Shorty.

  "Yep, pretty much. Oh, I don't think it would be able to predict who will win the Crossa tournament on Vega 6, but if it's processing ballistics from gravimetric returns on incoming ordinance, it should be well suited to calculate intercepts for our repeaters. More importantly, it should be able to pre-act (as opposed to react) and launch a round downrange, before the incoming ordinance is even in the chamber. How far it will be able to pre-act to incoming data, I can't determine."

  There were a few moments of stunned silence around the table. I could see Gene and Shorty's gears turning furiously. I broke the silence first.

  "What ramifications will this predictive analysis engine have on Janis development, Pauli?"

  "Janis?" asked Shorty and Gene in unison - I realized they haven't been brought up to speed on our newest crew member.

  Pauli and I had many late-shift conversations at his station in the bridge of the Archaea. To me, the concept of a sentient program seemed like science fiction. It might be a worthwhile hobby or a challenging research project, but not something that would actually function.

  I clearly didn't understand enough about what makes Pauli tick. In the Academy, I remember him from classes we shared, and he was a nice enough kid. No one really disliked him, but I don't think many people really had the ability to understand him. I know I didn't, and I wasn't really considered to be a slouch, intellectually.

  Compared to Pauli's grasp of tech, however, I was a barely conscious primate, howling incoherently as I flung my space-poo at my classmates.

  He was definitely on his own level with tech. Sure, I had dimensional analysis and strategy, game theory and tactical awareness skills he couldn't imagine, and I have a better than average grasp of the technicals we work with – but he was a specialist, focused like the Archaea's main gun on one area of expertise.

  Still, I really didn't expect he was going to have much to report on Janis this early. I thought it was primarily conceptual at this point, just a long-term experiment. I should have known better, knowing Pauli.

  "Janis, stands for JANIS Artificial Neuronic Intelligence System", Pauli said to the stunned room.

  "Well, what does Janis stand for?" I asked. Both Gene and Shorty rolled their eyes at me while Pauli laughed. I clearly wasn't in on the joke.

  "It's recursive", said Gene. "All true geeks love recursion", he added. "It's a name that references itself, spiraling down into infinity."

  "I see..." I said, though clearly I wasn't geek enough.

  The most important part of being a good captain is remaining firmly in command at all times, however, so I whipped out the stern eyebrows Shackleton may have used when Worsley wanted to bring a kitten on the expedition, and fixed them all with my awe-inspiring steely gaze.

  "...but I don't think it's funny."

  Of course, they all laughed at me, but only with their eyes. They're a good crew.

  "Captain, have you considered the fact that recursion is only funny to those who consider it funny?", said Pauli, with a smirk. Shorty and Gene just about set land-speed chortle records.

  "Pauli, I may have been born yesterday, but it was pretty early in the morning. I think I understand recursion well enough to know why I think it's not funny to think about how funny it is. Maybe you should consider thinking before you make fun of your Captain, after all, he is a salty dog and recurses like a sailor," I blinded them in the high-beams of my infectious grin, “but we're not here to watch you get crushed by my venerable wit, Pauli. What are you planning to do with Janis on the Archaea?"

  "Well, in terms of what to do, I am not sure. I have implemented the core engine and it seems to be testing well, I have built in various other expert systems that use analysis and tokenization of incoming data to process information for patterns and learn (well, remember is probably a better term) changes in state - but I am not sure if we are at a point where Janis is more than an extremely fast, highly speculative expert system. Artificial Intelligence is something that is eluding me still - I haven't had the breakout moment I need yet."

  At that, I felt the room deflate a little as Gene and Shorty relaxed and sat back in their chairs. We all realized that as fantastic as it sounds, what Pauli has built for us is little more than a very expert system, and while the predictive analysis engine that powers 'Janis' is impressive and frankly, a little disturbing; it's not the godmind we were originally expecting.

  "Of course", continued Pauli "I haven't really explored the mechanisms that provide feedback between each node of the expert systems to other nodes. It may be that a self-awareness circuit could be created from a feedback loop as various subroutines compete for dominance over information. Time will tell, of course, as we feed Janis more information, who knows..."

  His words trailed off, and I could hear both Gene and Shorty squeak their chairs a little as they leaned back in over the table. Gene took a deep breath, and Shorty jumped in, guns blazing, "So Pauli, how much time will tell, exactly. Are we talking about years here? Months? Weeks? What sort of time frame are we looking at?"

  "Oh, I would guess hours", he added "Of course, I don't really know, and am not at all sure, but the core is faster than anyone can really quantify. For that sort of speed, an hour might be an eternity - hell, 10 seconds may be an eternity."

  "Pauli, how will you know when you've succeeded, if in fact you do?" I asked.

  "Well... it seems to me, that once the system boots into awareness, I might be able to identify aberrations in the logic output of the various subroutines as it writes itself to be more efficient."

  "Writes itself!?" we all ask, in chorus. I start thinking about various fail-safe systems that might help protect us from some terrible intellect loose in my ship.

  "Gene, I need total control over all systems hard-wired to the helm", I asked. "I am feeling an overwhelming urge to flip a switch right about now."

  "Captain, I'll have that switch in place instantly, if not sooner", Gene said, adding "Pauli, do you mean to tell us that your system may start mutating?"

  "Well, yeah. I expect that as the system becomes more aware, the primary purpose it will develop will be to extend and refine the systems I have in place now. I have many internal logic structures that are already mutating as they need to be more efficient. It's hard to explain, but much of the higher-level architecture of Janis is more like rulesets than actual code. The systems will follow those rules to mutate code as they need to accomplish a task. This way, you won't need to pre-program every possible scenario into Janis for her to be able to adapt to a change in data, or a request for information or control."

  "Pauli, tell me...are we going to die in an airless shell as your creation decides the energy requirement to feed and nourish our meat is better suited for fire-control?" asked Shorty - as usual, first to say what we were all thinking.

  "Of course not, Shorty", he replied. "You and I, and Gene... we'll be fine."

  "Hey Pauli..."

  "Yes Captain?"

  "You know, what you said just there, just then – you forgot to mention me."

  "Oh, yeah. You too. You'll probably be fine too."

  "No, now wait a minute... you sounded a lot more confident about you, Shorty and Gene..."

  "Well...none of us are in command."

  Chapter 3

  For our first real meeting, that went pretty well, though I desperately needed to get back to work in engineering and didn't want to worry too much about what will happen when...well, if 'Janis' wakes up.

  As much as I am interested in seeing what might happen, and curious to see what sort of capability that would give the Archaea - the thought that it could also give birth to some terrifying monster... well, it's a waste of time at this point to worry about it too much.

  My urgent need at this time is to certify the power levels on the tokamak, and make sure the upgraded power curves will be usable by the slipspace generators
. Those things are pretty persnickety, if you don't baby them and talk nice to them on a regular basis, they are prone to warping you somewhere you don't want to be. That's not an outcome I think the captain would appreciate, so I'll try to stay focused on not letting it happen.

  Slipspace is terrifying enough.

  Luckily, the Archaea has some of the nicest slipspace gear I've ever come across, and as most of it is modular, factory sealed technology, there's really not much to repair. Given enough power, it should work as advertised.

  I can remember growing up, reading about faster than light experiments of old Earth, and the rule of law handed down by Einstein regarding the absolute limit of the speed of light. Of course, that meant that just traveling around in this arm of the galaxy would take a few lifetimes at sub-light speed.

  Luckily, slipspace engineers figured out a loophole allowing movement far in excess of the speed of light, by using pseudomass and good old gravity to pull a chunk of normal space through spacetime, like a bubble of air moving through a tank of water.

  In a slipspace warp, a bubble of normal space is formed around the ship, and then that normal chunk of space is accelerated by a focused projection of pseudomass. The material inside the slipspace bubble is not moving in spacetime, as such – the atoms are just hanging out, relaxing – but the bubble around it is warping, falling 'down' towards the pseudomass projected to the front of the bubble.

  The speed of a ship in slipspace is theoretically only limited by the amount of power that can be converted to pseudomass. Luckily for us, the Archaea had a seriously overbuilt powerplant, harvested from the same destroyer from which I liberated the nexus core. Originally rated to provide flank speed requirements for a ship hundreds of times more massive, our current power output is many orders of magnitude greater than the original design specs.

  Yes, when I was a kid, my bike was probably faster than yours.

  So what sort of fate awaits us, when Dak orders me to firewall this beast? I am not sure. Theory defines the speed we should achieve, and my engineer's eye quantifies the structural integrity of the Archaea. I'd say somewhere between 'not moving', and 'flying into warping fragments of screaming bits', I will need to define the limit we will be referring to as one-hundred-percent maximum speed... and then subtract 10% from that for safety so when the captain screams how he needs even more speed (because he always does) I will have more to give.

  Speed is integral to our mission, which is to get from point A to point B faster than anything else out there. As much as I would like to say safety first, I know the captain will say 'Speed First!'

  Suprisingly, he hasn't yet asked me to paint that on the sides of the Archaea.

  Another issue will be one of survival. On the fringe, there's all manner of creepy-crawlie villainous scum just waiting in their modded and heavily armed runabouts for some fat independent to waddle on through their space.

  My goal is for them to think their gravimetric readings need recalibration, as they try to understand what just burned past them. We're going to be fast, for sure.

  Of course, slipspace is only one way this ship travels. Atmo ships like the Archaea use pseudomass tech to provide lifters for planetfall as well, and then there's standard reactive mass-drivers for inter-system navigation, achieving parking orbits, and the like. Reactives are expensive though in core space, and I can't imagine what we'll be facing on the fringe, so I would expect the captain will want to slipspace as much as possible.

  Now that I think of it, that may be one of his motives for allowing Pauli to build Janis. No one alive, not even Shorty, has the reaction speed necessary to pilot a slipspace jump inter-system. To try and shave as much time off a course as possible, we're always trying to find ways to cut the corner, to get to a slipspace point as early in-system as possible.

  An expert system using a predictive analysis engine might give the captain the edge he needs to find slipspace points even earlier.

  *****

  Maybe I was reacting emotionally. A weapons specialist is about as level-headed of a profession as it gets, and emotions really shouldn't be part of the process.

  All the same, I left the meeting with my head spinning, hardly able to organize my thoughts. I couldn't believe the captain allowed that techlord to launch something like that on this ship!

  I forced myself to calm down, to think clearly, consistently, and work the problems I have in front of me, and not worry about what might happen if Pauli's nightmare awakens.

  Forget the fact we'd be isolated in the vastness of cold, dark, empty space - forget even the fact that we would (if Gene did his job right) be hurtling along at speeds we could hardly imagine. What terrified me the most, was that we might also have a revenant intellect (that we might not be able to control or even understand) glimpsing (maybe staring) through quanta at future data we couldn't even conceptualize.

  And it would have control over my gun!

  Okay, so it's not mine, as such, and to be honest, it wasn't even a gun yet. It was all the parts and pieces of what could be a gun, all shiny and clean, tweaked and fretted over like the fine piece of machinery it was - but when it became a gun, it would be slaved into the fire-control routines of the core, and ultimately under the control of Pauli's project.

  What would we do, if it decided that firing that gun might run counter to some plan it may have hatched, from mutated logic or some strange loop added by bad code. Would we have control? Would we be able to trust this... program, with our existence?

  I needed to look into machining some pretty solid, mechanical controls and safeguards, something that the captain would be able to use as an interlock, or safety. For that matter, I should also remember to bring this up with Gene. He will definitely need a similar system for lockout on the Archaea's throttles.

  In the meantime, I needed to take a look at what we had left to test. We had some anomalous frequencies in our phase amplifiers the last time we ramped up, and I think I may have isolated the component to blame, but I needed to ramp up again with telltales running throughout the amps to make sure.

  One thing leads to another, a strange harmonic here, might cause an oscillation there, and before you know it, petawatts worth of coherent beam energy is bathing what remains of this sector of space. My primary goal was to not let this happen.

  My friends always wondered why I enjoyed this work, when it clearly terrifies me to the core of my being. I explained to them that the feeling of terror, the thrill of the unknown, the taste of uncontrollable panic – these are the things that make my job worth doing. It doesn't hurt to know that if anything were to go wrong, it would be over quite literally before I knew it.

  Of course, that was one aspect of Janis I really liked. If Janis were in charge of the various safeties and systems on this ship, Pauli thought it might be possible for her to know what was going wrong the instant beforehand, and 'pre-act' (as Pauli called it) to save us.

  On the other hand, if she did scram – how would we know it was to save us from being flash fried, and not simply because she didn't want to be a party to the destruction of some poor, defensless planetoid?

  I was probably more paranoid than usual, and definitely too emotional. I needed to keep my game face on, and work the problem at hand. Our port-side repeater turret was showing a torsional wobble tracking between azimuth 230 and 235, and it wasn't going to fix itself.

  I had barely begun the search for the necessary tools I needed to work on the turret armature, when Captain Smith floated aft from the bridge deck.

  "Shorty, I hate to bother you... but I've been thinking..." he trailed off and looked over at the windings on the phase amplifiers for a bit.

  "Captain?" I prodded, gently. It was clear to me that he was not sure how to phrase this, and I'd known him long enough to know that above all things, his manner and bearing as a mindful leader, infallible and considerate, is most important. He's not the type of person to say something he might regret.

  "Well, it's this
Janis issue, Shorty. I have been giving this a lot of thought lately, especially given the progress that Pauli appears to be making, and I am not at all sure I want something like that in charge of every aspect of our existence."

  "Captain, I was just thinking the same thing, and considering mechanical interlock safeties on the weapons systems. Gene will probably be thinking about similar systems on the tokamak and other critical systems in the engineering section", I added.

  "Well, that's definitely a good direction, but... Shorty, let's suppose this will work, and Janis turns out to be something we can't live without, and find ourselves not only trusting, but also relying on for our safety." As he spoke he was looking more and more serious.

  "I am thinking more in terms of total system failure, of course. The Archaea is a great ship, well built, solid as the day she came off the line - but we've modified her pretty extensively, and shoehorned some systems into her that are over-spec to an almost silly extent."

  "Almost silly?" I laughed. "You mean, like a nova-class main gun from a capital ship with a light frigate built around it? You mean a tokamak from a military destroyer built to power a ship many orders of magnitude more massive at flank speeds? Clearly, adding these things to a nexus core processor that may or may not be currently incubating a sentient program that can literally look into the future doesn't rate calling it 'almost silly', I think you can safely just call it silly. I won't judge you for it."

  Who was I to talk? Glancing behind him at the glassine refrigerant tubes that wrap this section of our main gun, smelling the ozone of the semi-charged phase amplifiers, and feeling the hum of the air scavengers working overtime to reduce the heat in my station, it was enough to make my knees weak. I know what I like, and I liked what I saw when I looked around this section, that's for sure.

  "Yeah, okay, fair enough. But we want to be able to make money, explore anywhere we want, protect ourselves if needed--"