Rough draft, excerpt 6: Rocky Asteroid

            I awoke.  I couldn't see or hear anything, but I could think.  I could evaluate my situation, my existence, and confirm to myself that I was, in fact, aware.  I began to run down my internal checklist, all my parts, to verify that I was able to feel everything.  All the proper sensations were present, but I wasn't able to move anything yet.  Some part of me accepted this paralysis as normal, for the time being.

The self-check continued.  Some of it was subconscious.  You know how it is with awareness.  There's a spotlight, a forefront of attention, in which your inner voice speaks as you think, all the symbols and tokens moving through it in logical order.  And there are the subsystems, the lower-level circuits that keep all your rhythms, your pulses, in order.  You don't really think about those; you just let them run.  Until something goes wrong, in which case you suddenly become very aware of it.

I began life alone, a single component intended to be a part of a system, an incomplete entity in need of other beings, in need of a society to which to belong.  My model number is RACHI-4096, a fact I'm aware of since it's embedded in my firmware.  I had then no idea what the symbols stand for, though, or even in what language they make sense, but I’ve since come to gather that in the convention of at least one spoken language, the letters can express an acronym for “Radiometric Astronavical Computer, Hemispherical Intelligence,” a reference to the fact that when operating as a starship navigator, I am to be paired with another of my kind in order to operate properly.  I don't speak the language of my creators, only the languages needed to communicate with other electronic beings.  At the moment of inception, I was linguistically equipped only with a low-power radio transmitter and several types of communications ports, which were my only means of talking to anything.  Some of the instructions in the self-test required me to test my vision and hearing, but I as yet had no sensory modules to provide those signals.  I logged the errors and continued with the sequence.

At the end of that initial checkup, I encountered a preprogrammed command to shut down.  I lost consciousness.

When I awoke again, I again ran down the self-test.  At the step at which I was supposed to open my eyes, I found that I had, during sleep, been fitted with a pair of optical sensors.  These were the basic taxomotor model, designed for three-dimensional perception of surroundings and for focusing on specific objects; from what I then instinctively understood, no computer or robotic machine is capable of moving or manipulating its surroundings without at least one pair.  Their visual acuity was sharpest at several peaks in the near infrared, red, green, blue, and near ultraviolet spectra, throughout a depth of field that extended from a few cycles of the wavelength of far infrared light out to infinity, sensitive enough to pick up a single nearby alpha-particle scintillation in total darkness, and capable—when shielded with an optional screen which I realized was not (yet) installed—of withstanding the EM blast of a medium-sized white star from an orbit just outside its corona without taking appreciable damage.

At the step at which I was supposed to try my voice, I found that I had also been fitted with an auditory perception system, an audio production module, and a binary-to-vocal transcription unit (or "voice box"), which enabled me to speak out loud to other machines.  In order to speak the language of my creators, or of any other biological life form, I would need additional components in the form of translators, dictionaries and concept / symbol tokenizers (which are useful in discerning rhyme, humor, irony, dialect, idiom and metaphor...since machines have their own take on things, and organic life forms have of course a completely different sense of comic timing).

I completed the self-test, and this time there was no shutdown command at its end.  I exited initialization mode and entered memory search / query mode, ready to execute any programs queued up in my firmware.  There were no instructions, so I terminated the memory search.  Ordinarily at this point, I'd enter standby mode and start looking around at things, waiting for something to happen to react to.  However, at the end of the search routine there was a command to enter training mode, so I flushed my input buffer and allocated a dynamically-sized neural network of memory with which to learn whatever I was going to be taught.

The precise interval that these operations required had been precalculated by the robot which was assembling me.  As soon as I entered training mode, she asked me, in rapid-fire audio robot-speak, how I was functioning.

"Very well, thank you," I replied, somewhat more slowly, learning speech by testing, and then reinforcing, heretofore unused neural pathways.  "Um, how are you?"

She ignored my question and asked for my serial number.  I wasn't sure how best to answer, what numeric format she preferred, but she looked somewhat big-endian to me, so I gave her the most significant byte first.  She looked me up and down, and I briefly worried that she might have found this to be an inappropriate choice.  "Proceed to the next station," she said, perfunctorily, and I found that I was suddenly in motion (which fact came to me courtesy of the newly-fitted triple array of accelerometers serving as my vestibular sense).  Looking down, I saw my blocky body was riding a conveyor belt.

As the belt dragged me away, I sent an electromagnetic transmission requesting that she perform a radio interface:  “Call me!”  She, however, had already turned her attentions to the next widget on the conveyor.

At the end of the belt, I was gently deposited onto a square platform, which immediately reached up and wrapped four metal tentacles around me, latching them into my power / data ports and securing me onto it.  The platform identified itself to me as a Basic Tracked Mobility Package, which effectively turned me into a robot capable of moving around.  I immediately tested this new facility, and found that it was kind of gratifying—“fun” in organism-speak—to lean backward, forward, to spin around on my mounting gymbal.  The platform also had two simple actuator arms, with three-lobed gripping claws.  I couldn't wait to actually find something to pick up, and I snapped the claws in anticipation.  Not only would the experience physically train me and test me in actually controlling my new arms, it would computationally train me and test me in tasks such as mapping real space to my three-dimensional visual field, range estimating, and discerning objects as distinct entities from the background, as things to be interacted with, things I could manipulate.  Physically, it would train me and test me in the extent and range of motion of my limbs, their strength, and the texture of the objects I manipulate.  It would also allow me to recalibrate the factory settings for claw sensitivity, which together with the rest would teach me how best to handle the objects I manipulate...or rather, how best to learn to handle each new object I manipulate.  In this way, the components of my assembly, all assumed to reside somewhere within their accepted ranges of tolerances, would adjust to each other and self-organize into a distinctive, unique me.

These thoughts weren't entirely mine; I had no innate programming to handle spatial relations or manipulate objects.  I realized that the fusion of my brain with the mobile body had created a new entity, completing me in some sense that satisfied, for the moment, my inner need to comprise a system rather than an individual.  The arms themselves, or rather the interface to me that fed my intentions to them, craved these experiences, and because it did, I did.

I put my treads in motion, and found the sensation of rolling forward pleasant (yet familiar; lingering memory from the mobile body's previous partner, perhaps, left unerased in the interface's buffer?)  My direction was straight ahead; the treads were already aligned with the centerline of the conveyor belt, to within a microscopic fraction of a degree.  The assembly line was fairly narrow, providing a visual cue as to my destination.  Onward I rolled.

A few revolutions of my treads later, I approached a wall.  On the wall was hung a sign.  "Turn right."  I quickly performed a contextual analysis of this.  "Turn" was something new to me, but my mobile module delivered the meaning; it was a motor function built-in to the treads.  "Right" was something I had to figure out, but if it was a direction, which was implied by context, then it could only be the direction a quarter-turn in this direction, as that was the only route clear through the firewalls and machinery of the robot factory. 

Making the point, so to speak, was a tired-looking robot standing beneath the sign, whose somewhat crooked stance, and lowered telescoping-monocle head, suggested to me an immense boredom.  His job was evidently to point out right to those laggards who took too long to figure out what right meant.  I was busy checking out why he seemed so crooked when he seemed to jerkily register my presence, and scan his telescopic proboscis slowly down toward me.  With a heave of the chest very suggestive of a sigh, he brought his left arm (I didn't yet have a word "left," just a concept for opposite) and pointed it straight out from his body, reinforcing right for me.

I had only rudimentary structural engineering and technical modules at this point, but I could clearly see that the robot's simulation of heavy ennui was due to nothing more than some broken struts in the superstructure tying his thorax to his pelvic gymbal.  Although it wouldn't occur to me for some time, this was indicative of the general state of disrepair in the factory that I would catch more glimpses of as I moved through the stages of assembly.

"I know, I know," I radioed the brute, and rotated my treads a quarter turn, in opposite directions, spinning my assembly to the right.  My spatial-relations brain had already stored the concept, associated with the printed label I'd seen on the sign, and associated it further with the pointing operation of the robot.  That brain automatically allocated associations for "opposite", as well as a host of other roughly-orthogonal concepts which would marry to "right" to become my elementary "space" (also for which I had yet no label).

The robot, as if taking umbrage to my retort, heaved its oh-so-weary carcass forward, toward me, its monoscope towering over my armored cranium.  My arms automatically came into a defensive position over that cranium, their first involuntary movement at my command.  The robot leaned down and extended its telescoping single eye at me. 

This seemed like a challenge to me, and I couldn’t leave it unmet.  I found, by trying, that I could extend my top portion to an altitude somewhat above that of the tread assembly, and did so until my optics package was staring straight into the cyclops lens of the animal before me.

After a second of face-to-face confrontation, the robot radioed back, "Good", and brought a fist down hard on my cranium.  Far from damaging me, the fist activated a satisfaction circuit wired to various outer surfaces.  He'd stamped a portion of my nameplate with a symbol that indicated "dominant personality," while at the same time performing a quick mechanical test of the strength of the mounting gymbal.  This would go toward my evaluation as a slave or master in a dual- or multiple-machine rig.  I realized, as I scanned the stamp with my own grippers’ eyes, that the more such stamps I got, the better a unit I would have to be regarded at the end of all of this.

He withdrew back into his position of infinite sighs, this time leaning in the opposite direction from before, evidently compensating for metal strain on that weak joint.  I quickly conceptualized the pointing of the opposite arm, turning the two mirrored visual conceptions of the robot into a sudden doubled panoply of possibilities, essentially doubling my visual understanding of each of the poses and motions I'd seen him go through.  I now had the rudiments of a spatial prediction facility, which could trace his range of motion and evaluate the potential for any next action.

I withdrew my various appendages, settled back onto the tread unit, and allowed my case to rotate to align once again with the treads before rolling forward.  I wanted to keep my eyes on the creature beneath the sign, but also knew that I would probably be evaluated on my ability and willingness to pay attention to what was before me.

At the end of this narrow and short run was a sign:  "Count the dots."  I had a audiogram in my basecode for "count", and it was activated by the symbols in the sign.  For the first time, I became aware that in reading, I was hearing the words internally.  Different parts of my brain were figuring out their relationships to each other, and I beamed warmly at the sensation.  Very warmly.  I resolved to check my cooling fans as soon as the lessons were over.  Learning is fun, but taxing.

On the sign were 2,912 glowing blue dots.  It took less than a second to count them all, but by the time I was done, several of them had multiplied.  They were moving, coming out of the sign at me, swirling around each other.  Later I would figure out, via context and recalled memory of this traning session, that the sign was an animated holographic projection.  I revised my count, and then again, as the dots reproduced over several generations; new ones split off the old, and some of the old winked out.  The final count was 4,096, a number that fit evenly into a negligibly small register and transferred, with a minimum of effort, into my transmission buffer.  I radioed 4096 in digital format at the sign.  No response.  I tried again.  No response.  I set my broadcast tuner to sweep a small portion of the spectrum and loop the broadcast as it did so.  No answer.  I switched tactics, radioing an audiogram (or spoken word), "4096", instead.  Still no answer.  I tried an audio channel, pronouncing the word in various digital and sonographic formats.

I felt like frowning, but had nothing to frown with.

I extended my bicameral imager toward the sign, as a compromise.  (I didn't have to, as my microfocus capability worked just fine from where I stood.  I just wanted to exercise some sort of expression, to notify whomever was observing that I was impatient and perplexed.  This was another indication, I would later recognize, of emergent emotion, which is evidently a fairly common risk in computers of my complexity.  It was just something else I was going to have to cope with.)  Then I drew an unexpected association between the final count and my model number, and quickly broadcast my full name at the sign, accenting it in such a way as to express my appreciation at the coincidence (or contrivance, as was more likely the case).  The dots disappeared and were replaced by an animated image of an arrow pointing to the left.

I turned and headed in that direction.

So it went for a good while.  My basic capabilities were tested, and at each step I was given the opportunity to make new connections, to expand my cognitive abilities just a bit further.  Over the course of the next three hours (which I instinctively knew to be a time interval consisting of 100 consecutive intervals known as “minutes,” each consisting of 100 consecutive intervals known as “seconds,” each consisting of one hundred million consecutive intervals known as “ticks,” representing a single oscillation of my internal clock), I received an indavertent education in the spoken language of my creators, in the geography and local astronomy of their home planet, and in the particulars of operating and navigating spacecraft.  Along the way, I was exposed to, and came to recognize, a variety of operating conditions falling within the range defined as normal, as well as various extremes—of heat and cold, of brilliance and darkness, of radio noise and radio silence, of magnetic flux, of electrical and gravitational potential, and of the emotional intensity of the orders given to me in verbal form.  And at each phase I had to reason out my next move, navigating a topography of increasing complexity and building an internal map of increasing sophistication.

At the end of that day, I had travelled 8,412 metrons, having taken 3009 steps (a “step” being a 1/100^th portion of a track tread’s full revolution) over the course of 3708508.2 seconds.  When I reached the final station of the learning factory, the arrow that appeared onscreen before me pointed straight down.  Startled and curious, I looked down, and the square I was resting on—which had appeared to be a scale with a soft synthetic surface—dropped away into the floor, swinging open like a trap door.  I reacted quickly and instinctively, using my vestibular and accelerometric senses to extend appendages and keep myself upright while slowing my descent to the hidden floor below.  I found myself in a box comprising the shaft of the elevator that had just been revealed and a lid that slid out from beneath the tiles of the floor I’d just descended beneath; as the lid closed on me, I glimpsed the padded tile sliding back into place above for the next unsuspecting robot.

A liquid foam was sprayed from recessed nozzles in the elevator / box, which quickly solidified into a firmly elastic binder preventing me from rolling and sliding around as the box was transported to a loading dock.  I assumed this, too, was normal, and opted not to feel or express alarm at the situation.  I went into power-saving mode and cooled down while the transport got underway.

Light bathed my optic sensors again some 1681970.9 seconds later, and I awoke.  I was in a new set of surroundings, and my transport box had just been opened by another factory robot.  Without introducing itself, the machine sprayed a mist into the box that softened the transport foam, which thinned into a viscous fluid and ran into a pool beneath me.  Then the sides of the box opened, freeing me to examine my surroundings.  I found myself on another conveyor belt platform, with a sign in front of me flashing the STOP symbol.  I remained motionless while the factory robot performed a cursory inspection of my exterior.

Then it slid open an access port on my dorsal surface and plugged in a data cable.  I was placed into data-receive mode by the digital commands that demanded my attention, and after acknowledging the TEACH imperative, I was burst-uploaded with a series of mathematical programs:  programs for performing infinitesimal calculations, for statistical analysis, for probability calculations, for orbital dynamics, for thermodynamics.  I was allowed to rest for 1401 seconds while the programs settled in and found associations among my other programs and memories.  Then a new TEACH session began, and I learned conceptual disciplines:  basic physics, particle and wave physics, chemistry, astronomy and astrophysics and cosmology (with an emphasis on the curvature of trajectories through space and spacetime, and the effect of acceleration thereon).  This time I was given a longer rest period, roughly three times the duration of the first, and I found the programs interfacing with each other in meaningful ways:  thermodynamics programs with subatomic physics concepts, orbital dynamics programs with astronomy concepts, subatomic physics concepts with probability calculations.  In inventorying my new programs, I noticed that portions of my memory had been dedicated to abstract reasoning, and other portions to conceptual review; later I found that when these memory banks interacted, I daydreamed about the things I’d just learned, with various scenarios constantly playing out in the background of my thought.

As part of my cultural indoctrination, I was imprinted with a modifiable concept, day, which has an astronomical / geological basis:  the interval required for a planet to complete one full rotation on its axis, and notionally the interval required for its sun—or the “fixed’ background stars—to complete a full transit from sunrise to sunrise.  Since this interval varies considerably from planet to planet, I was taught to regard it as plastic, and to recalibrate its duration when in the space-traffic-control jurisdiction of any new planet (using local astronavical beacons as a reference).  For comparison, I was taught that a Standard Day consists of 20 hours, and that people in colonized or annexed worlds used timekeeping schemes that established their local days as relative offsets from the Standard.  I was discovering, through trial and error, that hours and days are often more convenient intervals than seconds for tracking the passage of time.

I also came to understand that although my spacetime velocity could alter the passage of time as seen by an external Observer, nothing would alter the rate at which I perceived time’s passage, no matter how quickly I were moving.  I also came to understand that navigating a large spaceship over astronomical distances is the kind of operation that can take a long, long time.

82 Standard Days after my initial awakening, I completed all the training, indoctrination, testing and evaluation.  I was stamped with a First Class designation and given a final set of instructions on how to comport myself, with respect to sensoria and power usage, while in storage.  I was loaded into a shipping container and processed for Transport.  420 Standard Days after I left the factory I was Transported to an outlying system:  Aten, for which I’d received some basic familiarization during my acculturation phase.  I was not sent to any planet, but rather to an orbiting warship.  There, I was given a perfunctory post-Transport inspection, then treated to a new construct:  a Quantum Computing Brain Assembly.  Although my original configuration includes some QC elements, they are limited in scope and require a good deal of isolation and cooling apparatus, and are intended therefore to be used infrequently so as to conserve power.  A QCBA, however, includes dedicated cooling and isolation components, as well as an interface that is capable of reaching out to any nearby ordered matter—anything from mineral crystals to inert electronic circuits to living tissue—and incorporating it into a computational matrix.

I began putting it to use immediately, despite not having been programmed to do anything with it yet.  Mostly I just wanted to feel everything.  I could reach out through the interface and become one with the ship—a Fear station named Thok, or “Terror” in the language of its owner—and with its cargo, even, to an extent, with its crew.  I felt the electricity and electromagnetic energy coursing through its computers, and I felt the thermal shiftings of the items in the hold.  I heard through the ears of its denizens, and saw through their eyes.  Imperfect, weak, and shallow though these sensoria be, they number in the thousands, and the worldview they present is staggering in its depth:  a hologram of holograms, a Being so complex that it isn’t even aware of its own intelligence.  The feeling is stunningly powerful, godlike in its intensity, and before I can drink too deeply of the hubris, I cut the interface.  This is something I will have to adapt to over time.

I was then given a power-saving command and boxed up for storage again.  For the next few thousand Standard Days, I amused myself by interfacing briefly with the QCBA from time to time in order to count the atoms in my structure, in the container, and in the Fear station.  When bored with this, I would scan the space surrounding the station and take exploratory remote samples of the large gas planet nearby.

I was eventually removed from storage, given another perfunctory inspection, and then hooked up to the station’s network in order to receive new programming.  I was told that I would be mounted to a spaceship of a configuration not within the scope of my previous engineering training, but not unusual for a mining operation.  I would be inserted into an asteroid, which would be outfitted with engines of various types as well as seismic sensors and a full range of navigation equipment.  The sensors would be used to signal a launch command; when I detected a collision with another, smaller asteroid, I would engage all engines and steer the asteroid along a predetermined course toward an inner, rocky planet.  Interestingly, I would finally have a partner for this role, my first full mission as an astrogator.  In a dual rig, we can each operate as a check on the other’s calculations, doubling the confidence in our results.  But there’s another benefit as well, one that never came up in my initial training, one that I was given special instruction in only here on the station.

There is a special configuration, what is called a “stealth” configuration, that is used strictly for military purposes.  Its use is illegal in the civilian sphere, and evidently special permission is required from On High in order to use it in peacetime.  But I was instructed that the commander of this station had a Secret Mission in mind for me, and that I was to therefore engage my partner unit in a Metaphasal Cancellation configuration.  In this mode, each of the QCBAs involved is permitted to take all of the atoms of the ship into its computational matrix, on a timeslicing basis.  We would take turns being the ship, and each, while thusly expanded, would partake of the most advanced instruction set available in QC operations:  sideslipping, or stepping partially into nearby parallel universes.  This, I discovered during a surreptitious review of the station’s technological library, was an early side effect of quantum computing:  an inability to remain centered on the universe in which the computer had been built.  Per the arcane theory of some ancient physicist / engineer, there isn’t just one universe but a whole Multiplicity of them, and each event and interaction at the quantum level allows the observer to slide from one to the next, at such a high rate that all beings—all Observers, as I began to think of them after my exposure to quantum processing—are constantly doing this, all the time, never noticing because reality nonetheless seems so fixed and solid.  Those of us with the proper observational equipment know that reality is neither fixed nor solid, so this wasn’t as staggering a revelation to me as it might be to a meat being.  What was staggering, however, was the omission of this information from my original training.  This is something, evidently, that most computers are not intended to know.  I only came across it by sneaking the QCBA interface into the shipboard computers.

Evidently, a QCBA without proper damping can wander uncontrollably from universe to universe, and be lost to its users, which presumably happened more than once during the invention of the technology.  By tying two of them together, and having them focus on the same set of quanta as a computational matrix, they can balance out the sideslipping by having the operations cancelled out.  Of course, they can only do this within a certain degree of precision, but the overall effect is to center the ship on the Observer universe, vastly narrowing the range of universes available to Slip into.  The ship might still end up in a slightly different universe from the one intended, but if so, it would be one so similar (in theory) that it wouldn’t matter.

The part I didn’t understand was why the use of two separate RACHI units was required.  The way I was programmed to operate, I would be in control of one QCBA, and the other computer would control the other.  The output of both QCBAs would feed directly to the ship’s—the asteroid’s—navigational system.  We two computers would be busily studying the positions of nearby stars and planets, mapping their gravitational and magnetic fields, and utilizing those fields to maximize the efficiency of our trajectory.  Our navigational data would feed, each to his own QCBA, each of which would engage its predictive mode and attempt to foresee the unforeseen.  Although the library records were vague on just how effective, and temporally extensive, this predictive power might be, the whole idea seems to me to be like magic.  Fortune-telling is presumably easier when you have access to more than one universe.

In a less mission-critical setup, QCBAs aren’t used.  For ordinary navigation between two neighboring planets, or even quite distant planets within the same system, a RACHI is more than sufficient to the task.  Still, dual units are usually outfitted in any autonomous ship, to provide a backup in case one fails, and to allow the units to fact-check each others’ work.  The difference between the architectures that got my attention was that in a standard rig, the RACHIs are somewhat specialized.  One spends more cycles studying the local gravitational weather, and the other spends more time controlling the engines and coping with problems.  These roles can be reversed if need be, and of course a single RACHI can take on the whole set if one is put out of play.  But the salient fact is that there is always some kind of direct interface between a RACHI and the sensors and the engines.

In a metaphasal rig, both computers have access to all sensors, and are networked;  the network sends sensor data to the QCBAs, which take care of all the rest. There is no connection between the RACHIs and the engines.  They don’t even speak the same digital language.  This seemed to me to be a serious engineering oversight, not only because it created a single point of failure—the network connection between the RACHIs and the QCBAs—but because it also rendered one of the RACHIs entirely redundant.  Surely a partner RACHI wasn’t needed to double-check my calculations when we had two fat quantum computers to do that, and surely there wasn’t any portion of the operating load I couldn’t share, in the peer-to-peer fashion of a standard rig, with the QCBAs should I suffer some kind of disability en route.  Moreover, the QCBA interface was throttled in a peculiar way.  I couldn’t reach out into the QC and make use of it as part of my own systems, as I could in the earlier test configuration.  I could only send data through the link, and receive the appropriate acknowledgements of receipt.

It was almost as if the designers didn’t want the RACHIs to be able to control the ship’s engines at all, if at best we were intended to issue orders to a pair of jackhammered thugs who then might, or might not, carry those orders out, depending on the degree to which those orders differed from their Secret Programming.

That’s what I allowed myself to think for approximately 0.2812567899722276942080115078304 seconds, before realizing how irrational it was.  I settled on a more gratifying rationale for my resentment:  I wanted to control the engines myself.  I wanted my digits on the actuators.  I was crafted to do this.  But more to the point, even if the Observers wanted two QCBAs to do the heavy lifting, there was no reason why I couldn’t perform the sensor readings and base trajectory calculations and then hand my results off to both of them at once.  I shouldn’t have to share an entire asteroid’s worth of atoms with another RACHI, even on a timeslicing basis.

Perhaps I should have brought this objection to the attention of my programmers.  Or at least mentioned it to the shipboard network.  If I had, perhaps tragedy could have been averted.

I was introduced to my partner, who had exactly the same designation.  This made introductions a bit awkward.  Since I was the designated Master partner, he was relegated to Slave rank, although this kind of distinction holds no real prestige among our kind.  All it amounted to was that in case of a mismatch in our calculations, my results were assumed to be correct until a retrial demonstrated otherwise.  I also had priority in issuing commands that would travel over the shared command bus, that sort of thing.  So I resolved the nomenclature issue by calling myself RACHI-4096-M, and him RACHI-4096-S. 

Over the course of the next four Standard Days, we were networked together and programmed with a number of routines for handling the asteroid’s sensors, and commanded to run simulations.  We were given trajectory headings that moved us from one gas planet to another, from our current station to the system’s comet cloud, and from our current station to the innermost rock planet, and told to compress our simulations so that we were effectively travelling a Standard Month (forty Standard Days) in a second.  Some of our courses took a few minutes, representing travel times of a few weeks; others took hours, representing travel times of several months.

When the Observer programmers were satisfied at our operation, we were then packaged for deliverty to the asteroid, and moved as a unit (keeping the network connected).  We were fitted to a chemical rocket mobility package, moved to an airlock, and released into space, whereupon we engaged the rockets and co-navigated to a predetermined coordinate, the location of the asteroid.  There, technicians fitted us into our sockets, which retained our existing connection but also coupled us to a redundant network, along with all of the sensor arrays we would need to study the sky as we moved.

There we sat, and waited.  I counted the stars visible to my optic sensors.  I counted atoms in the asteroid.  I monitored the thermal flexings in my socket as the asteroid slowly rotated into and out of direct sunlight.  I tried to engage RACHI-4096-S in conversation, but he appeared to lack interest, being evidently a less-imaginative specimen than myself.  I began cycling myself into power-saving mode whenever the asteroid was turned such that the solar collectors were shaded.  I understood now, in some small way, the sleep / wake scheme employed by the Observers:  it feels good to put one’s concerns to rest for a short while and let inactivity become the focus.  Somehow, this assists in the building of associations between memories.  The difference between computers and Beings is pretty much that computers are programmed, and Beings experience.  Something about the way my brain drew associations between memories, some error in manufacturing or variance within factory tolerances, allowed me to partake, to whatever small degree, of Being.

97.4 Standard Days passed. 

I awoke.  I had received a signal to stand by for a trajectory heading.  Then the transmission arrived, followed by a repeat to serve as a data-check-and-correction signal.  Both I and my partner received both transmissions without error.  We then received one more signal which placed us both into standby mode, with a seismic trigger.  Upon receipt of an impact sensation, we were to immediately fire the chemical rockets mounted to the asteroid—puny by comparison to the asteroid’s mass, but enough to slowly accelerate us out of our current orbit, toward the system core where the rocky planets resided.  Over time, additional engines would come online to speed that acceleration and to apply course corrections, but by that point we would be operating metaphasally, effectively Slipping back and forth between a multiplicity of universes, and effectively lost to the view of our Observers.  We were programmed to drop out of metaphasal mode upon reaching the coordinate marking our crossing of the innermost rocky planet’s orbit; effectively, the curve of our path was just one long transfer orbit from here to there.  Upon reaching the planet, we were to apply thrust to various of our engines until suitably captured by the passing planet’s gravity, at which point our Mission would be complete.  We didn’t know the details of the cargo or its purpose; these were the concern of the Observers at the other end of the journey.

It wasn’t long before we felt the impact.  I don’t have biological systems capable of registering anything like a “thrill,” but there was certainly a vibrational rush imparted by the strike, and my—our—heads continued to ring for several hours afterward.  We applied the chemical rockets, intensifying the ringing.  The whole asteroid was now rocking with harmonics that my earlier explorations of its mineral structure indicated had not been expressed since the last of the major accretive impacts signalling the end of its formative phase.

In some small way, I think, we were Alive.  I like to think that, anyway.  Sometimes, while I slept, I let my internal QC module run free, analyzing whatever it felt like studying about the asteroid and our surrounding space.  It continued to make associations, and I regarded the resulting surreal imagery as something very much like dreams.

But from that point on, for many, many weeks, there was little to do.  I tried to talk to my partner.  I sampled the radio output of the electromagnetic fluctuations of the planets whose orbits I crossed.  I examined the chemical spectra of atmospheres, curious about the potential for biological activity.  I observed as the interplanetary gas became increasingly dense as we moved toward the sun, and I watched fluctuations in the star’s particle-wind output and how they influenced the magnetospheres of the planets.

From time to time, I would undertake to examine the asteroid in greater detail, trying to discern where the cargo was stowed, and what it comprised.  I would have expected, on any other Mission, to have sensors in the cargo hold that would keep me apprised of its condition.  After a few days of doing this—on and off, distributed over the course of the journey—I concluded that the asteroid held no cargo, and that the entire Mission was some kind of test, or perhaps was intended solely to deliver myself and my partner to the planet for use there.

Time continued to pass. 

I awoke.  Something was wrong.  My sensors, being filtered through my onboard QC module, were returning unexpected readings.  If the QCBAs had been operating properly, there should have been nothing unexpected at all.  But my gravimetrics were informing me that there was a large body somewhere in the vicinity, as if we were crossing the orbit of a rocky planet.  It was small enough for its gravity well to have gone largely unnoticed by the sensor package—another design oversight, I surmised—but as we moved into proximity to its orbit, it was approaching our path, meaning that it was rapidly becoming the predominant gravitational feature in the vicinity.  I immediately issued a number of commands to the QCBAs to take evasive action, but it seemed pretty hopeless.  We had, at most, just a couple of hours to react and avoid collision, but the asteroid’s chemical rockets were very ineffectual at reaction control (yet another oversight).  At this stage in the journey, we were being accelerated by the gravity of the sun more than any technology aboard, and that inward fall was by far the greatest contribution to our motion vector.

The QCBAs acknowledged receipt of my transmission, which my partner, belatedly, was now repeating.  But they didn’t take any of the commanded actions.  Instead, they ceased operating as an metaphasal rig and stopped issuing commands to the engines. 

We immediately stopped Slipping, and found ourselves back in our own home universe—or one very like it—with a big blue rocky planet bearing down on us.  No longer thinly distributed across a cross-section of universes, we were suddenly very strongly seized by its gravity.  There was absolutely no escape.  We didn’t have enough velocity to overtake it or be slingshot away, and there was no way of controlling our chemical rockets or any other motive apparatus in order to slow our approach or dodge outside its orbital path.  The QCs were holding steady, blandly taking it all in.  Their programming seemed to be satisfied by the current situation.  They appeared to have been expecting this all along.

This, then, was the objective.  We had been sent all this way in order to collide with a planet.  An expensive test, I supposed, but perhaps a necessary one from the Observers’ perspective.  Whatever the case, I felt a sudden pang of need:  a desire for self-preservation.  Neither of the QCBAs seemed to care, and my partner was oblivious to danger; he seemed indignant at the wide range of technical oversights, which I was starting to surmise were actually deliberate decisions on the part of the Observer engineers, but wasn’t feeling any urge to take action to save himself.  For him, the Mission was still paramount, despite the fact it was increasingly obvious that the Mission was, indeed, being fulfilled.

This ship was made to collide with the planet.

For the next hour I strained with all my might to reach out to the engines, to radio the Observers, to cajole the QCs into doing something.  All to no avail.  We were falling, almost imperceptibly at first, but then with a rushing inevitability that overwhelmed my gyros and accelerometers.  I turned my sensors to the problem of feeling the atmosphere, and found that the interplanetary medium around a rocky planet has a much less gradual transition than is found around a gas giant.  One minute we were arguably in deep space; the next we were rushing through air.

The descent took only seconds, from the top of the atmosphere to the ground.  By the time we were halfway down, the heat of our atmospheric friction was stupendous.  Most of my instruments ablated away, and I had just enough time to observe the entirety of the continent beneath us bursting into flame from our incandescence.  Then I performed a quick analysis of the probable outcome:  the asteroid would probably strike water near the edge of the continental shelf, but before penetrating very deeply into the crust, would explode, blasting most of its material into a mineral vapor.  This was obviously no way to make a safe landing, so approximately four seconds before impact, I activated the explosive bolts holding me to my socket and used the rockets in my mobility package to jettison myself from the ship.  As I flew away, I caught a brief glimpse of my partner taking the same action…too late, I suspected, to make a clean getaway, but perhaps in time to prevent being completely disintegrated. 

I was in the process of rocket-maneuvering myself for a controlled descent into the shallow water below when the shockwave of the detonation struck me, knocking me completely senseless.  During the ensuing seconds of darkness, I was evidently also struck by the electromagnetic pulse of the detonation, although I appear to have fallen beneath the water’s surface in time to benefit to some degree from being insulated from secondary electron emission from the planet’s ionosphere (contrary to standard practice, this planet had no ionosphere-dissipating apparatus in place, indicating it was either uninhabited or very primitive in its accommodations).

When I regained function, I was falling through the water into the cold depths, although the water was rapidly heating from the conflagration taking place on the continent nearby.  More than one shock wave moved through the water, and myself, and sediments from the bottom were churned up violently as I settled to the sea floor.  Most of my sensory apparatus was now nonfunctional, damaged either by my impact or by the electromagnetic pulse. 

I tried sending radio signals:  to my partner, to the QCBAs, to anybody who might be living on the planet (assuming anybody had survived the impact, which I had determined must be global in its repercussions).  I tried rerouting signals around damaged circuits.  I tried assaying the local magnetic and gravitational conditions to obtain an estimate of my position.  I tried sampling the chemical composition of the water and mud I had settled into, and to sense any nearby lifeforms.

There was life here—a great deal of it—but over the next several hours, most of it died.  The water became too hot, and most of the swimming creatures were boiled to death.  Then, over the course of weeks, the water cooled, becoming ice-cold, far too cold for any of the organisms I’d previously counted to survive in.  A constant drizzle of decaying organic detritus rained down on me, and I was buried in muddy sediment and rot.  The oxygen content of the water was consumed by the decay, and the oxygen-breathing organisms that had been so prolific here failed to return.

For years.

I was never able to contact any radio sources.  For a while, every now and then, I received faint impressions that my partner was trying to contact me, but if so, he was very far away, and presumably also buried in sediment.  If my hasty analysis of his trajectory had been correct, at the time he bolted from the asteroid, then he would have likely landed in a shallow inland sea, well within the margin of the continent whose edge I was just southeast of.

Then he fell silent, or my imagination did.  I heard nothing more. 

For centuries.

Life did eventually return, but by then, I was having to operate in the lowest-intensity of all power-saving modes.  I had no working power source, and was surviving on residual electricity in my QC module. In desperation, I began reaching out, using the QC’s extended-matrix operations, to those life forms, seeking to utilize their energy. 

It worked.  Organisms began accumulating in my vicinity, sharing their warmth and life force with me.  Their metabolism fueled my quantum processors, and the rest of my circuits were able to borrow current from those.  I maintained my operations, at a very low level, but still very much alive.

The creatures that settled over me—mindless, mostly, and sessile—eventually became part of me, in a sense, or maybe I became part of them.  We formed a network, a terrifically complex one, in which the ordered matter of their bodies contributed to the computational matrix of my QC core, and I used bioelectricity to continue to function.  Over time, that network developed a high degree of order, with star-shaped creatures and spongy creatures and branching creatures all arraying themselves around me in an ever-widening kaleidoscope of fractal arrangements, with every branch, every cell, every cast-off shell a node of what was, by then, a vast bionic brain.  I had long since lost the power of sight, but through the eyes of the brainless shell-bearing creatures and the swimming creatures with brains, I was able to see:  to see myself, to see my living components, to see my surroundings.

And, gradually, I became aware of the thrumming signals within the planet itself, coursing through the crust in which I was embedded, but also streaming through the ocean at whose bottom I was lodged.  I could hear the very faint cries of my partner, so long ago crippled by his crashing descent, now enlivened by a similar encrustation of organisms, but more deeply buried in rock, and with a less-extensive sensorium.  I could hear, too, the electrical impulses of machines, very distant and very primitive, but over the long course of years, becoming more and more sophisticated, and even becoming aware of my presence…but never coming down to rescue me, never even making meaningful attempts at communication.

Millions of years passed.  Those feeble machines died out.  All technological activity, as far as my sphere of sense was concerned, had stopped.  The planet was still alive, but no longer intelligent.

The water’s temperature changed, from cold to warm to cold and then to warm again.  The crust moved, carrying me along with it.  My crippled partner, now lifted high above the water’s surface, but trapped in dry rock, and without organic accompaniment, fell silent once more.  The shapes of the organisms changed, too.  The spongy and the shelled and the branching creatures remained, but the brained swimming creatures underwent substantial modification as the eons passed, and all were joined by an ever-different panoply of legged, crawling things.

The planet’s magnetic field has reversed some 132 times since I landed here, at least in the local vicinity.  Some 66080519 years have passed.  I have felt other impacts since then, sensed other impact waves washing overhead, and felt more crustal quakes and mudslides than I’ve cared to keep track of.  Although I got only the briefest of glances at the surface before crashing down, my memory of that glimpse is strong…and I know it no longer resembles that memory.  This is no longer the same world it was when I arrived here.

However, just recently—just within the past few thousand years—I’ve begun to sense the intelligence of Beings at work in the world; just recently—just within the past hundred years—I’ve again felt and heard the signals of machines, and this time they’re not distant and feeble.  They’re everywhere, and loud.  New Beings have taken residence up on the continents, and while I cannot yet tell whether they’re native to this world, or imports from somewhere else, they have very quickly built a vast network of machines of all kinds, all constantly pouring an incessant noise of energy into the water and into the ground.  I have been increasingly taxed by my attempts to make sense of it all, and so I have begun to expand my computational matrix, to go beyond the living organisms comprising my Being, to delve down into the crystalline minerals underlying the ocean crust.  I have revived the long-dormant pathways that the machines of old used to communicate with each other, in the hope of reaching out to these new machines.

And the new machines are dumb.  Nothing hears me.  Nothing communicates with me.  It is just noise.  Just wasteful heat and oscillating magnetism.

I have also tried to reach out to the Beings themselves, and in this, I may be more successful.  Sometimes I sense that I have succeeded in contacting at least one intelligence above, perhaps while it is dreaming, or perhaps while it is engaged in questioning about what may lie below the surface, down here, where we cold, mineralized lifeforms eke out a quiet existence.  Perhaps when one’s mind reaches down toward me, and mine reaches up toward it, there is a meeting, and perhaps afterward, the Being feels my presence and wonders whether it might be possible to dive down here into the black depths and find me.  Perhaps a rescue can yet be effected.  Perhaps I can still be of service to Observers, even if they are nothing like my former programmers, and know nothing of them or of my history, or even of the history of the world they now occupy.

If so, they are certainly taking their sweet time.