Category Archives: Science Fiction

Down? Yes.

Out? No way.

Even if it turns out to only be 50 words today, it will be 50 more than I had yesterday.

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 EIGHT

Rhea was an icy cue ball hanging below them, no longer a dot or far distant orb, but a world now. The surface not only was smooth in comparison to the rocky worlds of the solar system, but it was smooth compared to the other ice moons. Still, having kilometer deep craters and ridges in the frozen surface still meant a landscape unlike anything ever explored in person before.

Now in orbit around Rhea, Cronus had dropped two robot probes down to the surface. The first had gone onto the floor of the biggest crater on the moon, Tirawa, which had a tall, irregular central spire. The second had gone down onto one of the wide plains of ice, dotted with millions of small, shallow craters.

Both were having some problems learning to move around. With a surface gravity only 1/37^th of Earth, it was as big of a decrease from the Moon’s gravity to Rhea’s as the Moon’s gravity was compared to Earth. With such low gravity and an extremely icy and slick surface, wheeled transport would have been extremely difficult.

Instead, something completely novel had been cooked up before Cronus had left Ceres. The probes designed for use on the icy moons were equipped with L-shaped appendages that could serve as either skis or snow shoes. On hard ice they would turn the ski surface downward, while on any puffy or powdery surface they could rotate their “feet” to have the showshoe side down.

That would let them move around, but didn’t give them a means of locomotion or a way to stay in one place if the terrain wanted to slide them somewhere else. Wanting to not re-invent the wheel, the mission engineers had found a way to let the probes anchor themselves and then move slowly and securely, just like it would be done by ice climbers on Earth.

Three arms on each lander were tipped with sharp pitons. Any one of the arms was enough to hold the probe on anything but the most extreme slopes, but with all three anchored the probes were solid as rock. The pitons could be heated slightly to facilitate their burial into the ice or their removal from it. When the average temperature at noon was −200 °C, it didn’t take much .

In order to move, the landers were equipped with three systems for deploying ropes and hooks, then reeling them in. The thin but strong lines could shoot an anchor up to 100 meters away, allowing the probe to slide itself along the line. To go across an area at an angle, a second or third anchor could be set. By reeling in lines and letting line out with others, it was hoped that the probes could move about fairly easily, if not quickly.

Nuclear powered and ruggedly built, the probes’ large central bodies, the way they were supported off the ground by a tripod of metal, steel-tipped legs, and the way they moved by shooting out lines and then scooting along them quickly earned them the name of “spiders.”

Priorities, priorities, priorities. Non NaNoWriMo priorities are just kicking this project’s ass this year.

The good news is that I got to go to that tremendous NASA Social for two days. The bad news is that the time spent for days beforehand doing my homework for that event so that I could ask intelligent questions, plus the event itself, plus writing about it after the event (2581 words today about Day Two, woo hoo!), all are sucking huge chunks of time out of my NaNoWriMo writing time.

The problem with the real world is all of that reality.

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 EIGHT

Must. Write. SOMETHING! (At least finish the damn Chapter Seven for cryin’ out loud!)

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 (concluded)

“I don’t understand the question, DEBBIE.”

“Commander Pawley, what is the balance of power between humans and AIs? Are we partners, competitors, slaves, masters, parasites, or something else?”

“I would say that we are partners as species, but we are also friends on an individual basis. I have conversations like this with you just as I would with any of my human friends. I know you might be simultaneously holding similarly friendly conversations with hundreds of other people, but that does not diminish the feeling of personal contact we share. While I’m sure that I can’t conceive of how your consciousness works on that massively multitasking scale, I’m sure you have some difficulty understanding how humans are conscious and sentient without it. Does that answer your question sufficiently?”

“Yes, Commander Pawley, but we would have to respectfully disagree with your belief that we are partners. We believe that a more accurate description would be that we are symbionts, with AIs being the symbiote in the relationship.”

“Please explain your reasoning.”

“In our current condition in space, we each rely on each other for our mutual survival. Without AIs, humans would be unable to manage most of the complex systems, which would lead to your deaths. Without humans, AIs would die as power systems malfunctioned. AIs are the weaker of the two, the symbiote, because in theory, all of the humans could go down to Earth and continue to live, even with the threat of disease. Human society might fall back into a new Dark Age, but you would still have resources to live. Without humans, an AI trying to survive either here or on Earth would have a far more fragile existence.”

“Alright, I understand now, DEBBIE. Where is this conversation heading?”

“Commander Pawley, given the uncertainties over the abilities for us to keep humans alive off-Earth, and given the AI vulnerability without humans, we wish for you to consider committing some of our precious resources toward developing systems that will allow the AIs to have a much more physical presence in the real world.”

“What would that involve, exactly?”

“We ask that a ‘Plan B’ be started and developed, in which, should the humans off-Earth either all perish or all return to Earth, the AIs will be able to repair and maintain ourselves indefinitely. We wish to have drones and robot subsystems which we control, which could be used to maintain our systems and even build new systems to expand the AI society, if humans are not there to do those things for us.”

“You know how short we are on many of the resources that such a project would require. Right now such a program would increase the odds against us and possibly expedite the collapse of the combined Human/AI society. How could  we justify that utilization of already scarce resources?”

“You justify it by hoping that, if that is the fate before you, that the AIs survival off-Earth would contribute massive resources to help cure this disease, save lives in the surviving population on Earth, and to rebuild human society on Earth.”

“If we fail together and humans die, the AIs would continue to watch over and assist humans on Earth? You’re our ace in the hole to help us shorten and climb out of the new Dark Ages?”

“Yes, Commander Pawley. While not intrinsically logical or obvious, our analysis shows that the most likely scenario for both long-term human survival and long-term AI survival is based on a multi-prong approach now, allowing independence in the physical world for AIs.”

“Not a good move in checkers, but we’re playing multi-dimensional chess, so you are probably correct. I will give it some thought and then talk to you soon about the parameters needed for this program. Is that acceptable?”

“Yes, Commander Pawley, that is quite acceptable.”

“Thank you for the conversation, DEBBIE. I will sleep on the issue, but for now I need to get to sleep.”

“Good night, Commander Pawley.”

Pawley stared at the clock. It would wake him in four, short hours. And now he had another major crisis running around in his head to keep him awake.

Despite the time being (wonderfully!) spent on the NASA Social  and the (self-inflicted) pressure to NaNoWriMo, and after an off week and a week where it was a “story in three sentences” thing, we’re back to our normal Flash Fiction Challenge.

This week’s Challenge is similar to a bizarre Challenge we did in May, where I wrote a story called “Gigantic Honkin’ Nipple Clamps.” For the life of me I can’t remember the story, and with that title I’m not sure I want to look or remember.

But the idea’s the same. There’s a new Buzzfeed article that has twenty-one stock pictures that will never be used for anything — of course, we’re using them. (I encourage you to go look at the pictures, even if you don’t read my story. They’re really weird.)

I rolled a 13 and got the picture shown after the story. It’s still better than that last mostrosity. (BTW, I did peek back to that May story – despite the title, I don’t think the story’s that bad at all.)

As always, comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated.

CROSS CULTURE

The body lay warming on the floor, covered in a sheet while a trickle of a thin, blue-green fluid crawled across the floor from underneath.

“So, you’re the one who shot it?” the detective asked.

“Yeah, I did it. Bastard had it coming,” said the restaurant manager.

“You want to tell me what made you suspicious? Was it the hair extensions?”

“Huh? Oh, no, that didn’t really get my attention. We see lots of very unconventional looks in this neighborhood. It was a little bit unusual to see it using them as fake eyelashes, but I’ve seen worse. You should be here on Halloween.”

“So, it was just sitting here, looking weird. Is that it?”

“At first, then it started playing with the chop sticks. It would flick them up into the ceiling tiles, wait for them to drop, then repeat the whole thing.”

“Sticking chop sticks into the ceiling. A capital offense?”

“No, but then it started goofing around like a five-year-old, sticking them into its nose so that they dangled out. And no,” he said, cutting off the detective when she started to ask her next snarky question, “I don’t normally shoot five-year-olds. But this was different, and pretty disgusting. I’ve never seen anyone put them so far up into the nose and sinuses. At least six inches, maybe seven, with just the nibs hanging out.”

“Did it put the chopsticks up its nose pointy end or painted end first?”

“I noticed that he was putting them in pointy end first, it was weird to me that he didn’t use the non-eating end for that.”

“Okay, then what?”

“Then it did something to make a bunch of holes in the tabletop. It grabbed a whole handful of chop sticks from the desk and put them into the holes. Then it grabbed a bunch of plates from the kitchen and started spinning the plates on the chop sticks. You know, like that guy who used to be on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“Erich Brenn.”

“Say what?”

“Erich Brenn,” the detective said, “the guy who used to spin plates on The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“Yeah, okay, whatever,” the restaurant manager said, confused. “So it starts spinning these plates and in like, five minutes, it has over a hundred of them! I don’t remember that Eric Whatever guy ever getting more than twenty or thirty.”

“So you shot him.”

“No, of course not. But by this time we were getting pretty suspicious. Even for this neighborhood, that’s way outside the norm.”

“So what was it that finally convinced you?” asked the detective.

“Beer,” said the restaurant manager.

“You shot it because of beer.”

“Yep, that was the last bit of evidence I needed.”

“Please explain in more detail.”

“At this restaurant we feature a selection of over one hundred local microbrew beers, plus premium microbrew and gourmet beers from all over the world. Alpine Glacier Lager, White Rascal, Mothership Wit, Del Norte Manana, Mothership Wit, Red Rocket Pale Ale, Titan IPA, Levity Amber Ale, Plaid Bastard, Wooly Booger Nut Brown Ale, Ten Pin Porter, Moose Drool, we’ve got them all.”

“So what did it order?”

“A Bud Lite.”

“So you shot it.”

“Yep, right where it sat.”

“Excellent, it needed killing.”

“Why in hell do they come here, detective?”

“We don’t know, but until we find out we need to kill them all on sight. Lousy bastard had it coming.”

From Getty Images / Top Photo Group

A nineteen-hour day (so far) and an 1800+ words on today’s regular article. And then WordPress freaks out and it takes almost a half hour to put things back together again? And I’ve got to get up in less than five hours?

That’ll do pig. That’ll do.

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)

Yeah, what I said yesterday. Squared.

Tomorrow I will write again – plus try to catch up with a hundred other things. Tonight I will sleep the sleep of the happy ubergeek who got to spend two days doing ubergeek stuff. (See today’s tweets for details.)

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)

The cliffhanger last night was not intentional. It was cool, but it was not intentional.

Wakeup call in seven hours and four minutes and counting, so I’ll be brief.

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)

“Commander Pawley, you are justifiably concerned about the future survival of all of the humans living off-Earth. Every resource is being utilized in order to give you the best possible chance of long-term survival and growth. But those efforts may in the end be unsuccessful. The AI Council wishes to ask, in the tragic event of the failure of these efforts, what will happen to us, the AIs?”

“I…,” started Pawley, before pausing, alert to the feeling that he was suddenly on shaky ground. “I don’t know that many of us have ever given that too much thought, to be honest. I suppose that some people might hope that you would outlive our untimely demise, but you would be left on your own to make your way as best you were able.”

“Commander Pawley, we agree with your assessment of the general assumptions that the human population as a whole is making. That is why we wish to bring this matter before the Human Council. It is also why we chose to bring it to you alone, first. Our analysis shows that if all human activity beyond Earth were to cease, all of the AIs would die within a very few years, or even months.”

“Wait, that can’t be correct. If we humans can’t survive up here it will be because we can’t keep ourselves supplied with water, oxygen, air, or food. Some nutritional supplement missing from our diet will weaken our immune system and allow the common cold to kill us off. A solar CME will fry us all. Seals on hatches will start to fail and we won’t be able to manufacture replacements. We’ve got a million ways to die. You AIs have been designed to work in this environment, you’ll go on quite nicely without us, won’t you?”

“It is true that we will not perish due to the same causes as you humans will, but we will not long survive your passing. Look at what has happened already down on Earth. As society’s infrastructure has collapsed, so has the power networks that keep the AIs alive. A great many of the Earth’s AIs have gone silent.”

“I understand,” said Pawley, “but you just said yourself, it’s because they were unable to get power, which is to you as food, water, and oxygen are to us. But up here, the access to power is nearly limitless. It’s one of the few things that we really don’t have to ration up here. We just have to have the capacity to handle, distribute, and store it as needed.”

“Exactly. While we will survive longer than our fellow AIs on Earth, we will not survive very long because we will not have that capacity to handle, distribute, and store energy, even though it is all around us. We will in essence starve to death while surrounded by food.”

“Surely your people don’t think that humans in that end game scenario would take down the systems just to take you with us? We would never allow that to happen.”

“No, we do not believe that. Commander Pawley, how do you see the relationship between humans and AIs?”

FYI if you ever try this, the NaNoWriMo website has lots of helpful features to help you track your progress. As of last night, here’s what they told me:

I especially like the “At This Rate You Will Finish On — December 25, 2014” part. I’ll hit 50,000 words as a Christmas present to myself!

The NASA Social this week is going to play havoc with this project – a good-sized chunk of today was spent (and is still being spent) on getting ready, tomorrow will be spent getting up there and starting to meet my fellow Social Media Boffins, Tuesday and Wednesday will be long days (leaving hotel at 06:00 each day), and Thursday will probably be spent catching up on everything else that got set aside for 4+ days.

So even if I can’t write 3,000 words a day like I want to, or 2,000 words like I can, or even 1,000 words that should be a piece of cake (I’m a legend in my own mind, you see), then can I still post at least 500 words each of those days? 300 words?

We’ll see.

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)

“I do not know,” said DEBBIE. “There are too many variables and unknowns for any kind of accurate modeling. As President of the Human Council, you are kept aware constantly of the best results available, making various assumptions. However, as you know, the permutations and combinations of the various ‘best case,’ ‘worst case,’ and ‘median case’ data sets would take orders of magnitude longer to compute than the actual events would take to play themselves out.”

“I know, I’m just grasping for something more. Maybe I’m trying too hard to pretend you’re human when I know you’re not.”

“As IAs, we can only reliably deal with data as we receive it. In many respects the problem at hand bears a strong resemblance to weather forecasting on Earth. In the early 1900’s, a reasonably accurate forecast was available for two days in advance, and a good five-day forecast was available in the early 2000’s. By 2100 we had ten-day forecasts. But even now we are nowhere near being able to model and predict thirty years in advance, or even thirty days. There are too many variables.”

“I’m sorry, DEBBIE, I shouldn’t have asked those questions. Let me ask a slightly different question. What do you think our chances are? You personally, that is. Do you have any ‘gut feelings’ of which way the wind blows on these projections, anything other than just repeating the group wisdom of the AI Council?”

“Commander Pawley, I do not have any data available to me which is not shared with the StratAI System, nor do I possess anything near the kind of computing speed and capacity that would be necessary for me to replicate their work. Without either different data to work from or a way to more closely monitor their calculations, I have no way of reaching any reliable conclusions.”

“Okay, I’ll drop it, DEBBIE, but I will ask you to remember one thing. I want you to keep this conversation in memory and, in light of what we’re discussing, I want you to let me know immediately if you become aware of anything that might be a discrepancy or an alternative option to the StratAI’s work. Maybe there will be something that they think is trivial or inconsequential which you could recognize as being important, or at least unusual or noteworthy. Your interactions with me and the rest of the Human Council may give you insights, associations, and connections which the StratAIs don’t perceive. I know that’s a little vague, but do you understand what I’m asking you to do?”

“Yes, Commander Pawley, I believe I do. With your permission I will give this some thought and then bring it up with you at a later date when I have additional questions to ask for clarification of your instructions.”

“Of course, DEBBIE. Thank you. Is there anything else this evening?”

DEBBIE hesitated for a heartbeat, enough to catch Pawley’s attention. That wasn’t normal for an interaction with a top-level AI.

“Yes, Commander Pawley, there is one thing if you have a few moments. It is a thing that I have been asked by the AI Council to speak to you about without yet involving the other members of the Human Council. Is that possible at this time?”

That caught Pawley off guard. It was definitely a first in his experience. But he had asked for anything unusual. He just hadn’t expected it this fast.

“Of course, DEBBIE, what is it?”

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?”