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 1/100th
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.
