Well, that took much longer than I expected. On the other hand, I think it’s going to be one of my favorite articles for a while to come, so it was worth it, even if my NaNoWriMo 2014 is going to take yet another hit because of it.
While I normally put in a lot of internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.
CHAPTER SEVEN (continued)
Pawley didn’t try to fool himself into thinking that he was doing it for purely philosophical reasons, taking the high road into Hell if necessary rather than treat his fellow humans as slaves and pawns. The differences were minute and no one else needed to know, but Pawley was doing it because he was convinced that it was the best way to pull off the impossible.
So he spent all day every day talking, urging, cajoling, badgering, threatening, convincing, and negotiating. He was grateful for DEBBIE and the amount of scheduling, arranging, and prioritizing she could do.
They wouldn’t have had a prayer without the various AIs around the system. From the small, semi-sentient systems running life support and other systems in small stations to the massive, fully conscious, primary systems that helped to run the colonies and stations, the AIs took the routine detail work, system monitoring, and information processing to a level that would have required hundreds of thousands of humans to duplicate.
Tonight though, DEBBIE’s task was to keep him company as he tried to find the sleep that he knew that he needed. He didn’t want to start taking any pills to sleep. He feared that down that road there could be worse consequences than being exhausted tomorrow. So tonight he tried to relax by talking to his station AI.
“DEBBIE, private conversation, please.”
“Yes, Commander Pawley. What would you like to talk about?”
“This situation we’re in. Are we going to make it, or are we just delaying our inevitable deaths?”
“Death is always inevitable.”
“True, but you know that we have two different basic scenarios. In the first scenario, all of the humans in the stations and colonies die individually at random times from random events over the next hundred years or more, being replaced by new humans to continue onward into the far future. In the second scenario, our systems collapse and all of the humans die in huge groups simultaneously in the next year to ten years, leaving no humans alive off of Earth. Given those definitions, are we going to be successful in preventing the second scenario and bringing about the first?”
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 