Archaea (3 page)

Once I stepped inside, however, I saw my reason for being. My heart double skipped, I gasped, I heard tweeting birds, hell, I nearly swooned and almost wept - I was in love. The Archaea was built around one of the biggest and most powerful nova-class beam weapons ever made. I'm not talking about a giga or even a tera, but a petawatt emitter – the kind you could use to slice a moon into itty-bitty pieces.

I couldn't wait to light it up.

The Archaea is laid out in rings that rotate around a central core. When she was built, pseudomass technology hadn't matured to the point where artificial gravity would be feasible. For a ship her size, it wouldn't make much sense, in any case.

On the surface or in drydock, you enter the ship through the main cargo bay via a belly loading ramp. At the top of the ramp is a reasonably large hold, set up well for modular containers, with an internal track-mounted crane hoist. Along a catwalk at the forward end of the hold is an internal lock that leads into the gun deck that is all null gravity when we're underway. Aft of the hold are the access hatches to the engineering space where the valve twisters and wrench monkeys live.

Moving forward through the core, there are three hatched openings in the deck that lead down to our ring spaces. Each ring of the ship is self-supporting, and can be isolated from ship systems for some time, in the event of catastrophic systems failure or hull-breach.

Ring 3 holds the gallery, wardroom, and recreation area. Ring 2 has a medical bay, a reasonably well stocked lab that is mostly used to store various parts and other contraband, and a very well equipped machine shop. Ring 1 is crew quarters and officer country, though we don't really live by rank on this ship. The captain is the Captain, and everyone else isn't - that's pretty much the way of it.

I live in ring 1 forward, in a nice little stateroom with all the amenities. I have a loft bunk with a desk and clothes locker underneath, a holoview panel with a cabin enviro unit opposite, and a tiny wall-mount sink for brushing my teeth (one tooth at a time, it's pretty small) and even a mirror for getting angry at – if I stand on a stool.

No short jokes, please.

Moving forward in the central companionway, a hatch leads up to my gunnery station and beyond, to the top-mounted repeater turret compartment which houses the mechanicals and ammo ovens. Forward of my station, is the hatch leading to the bridge deck of the ship. In a firefight, which we have only simulated so far, the core of the ship is probably the safest place to be, though it might not be very comfortable. In our ramp-up tests for the main gun, the temperature jumped pretty high, and I can't imagine what a prolonged battle might be like in there.

Chapter 2

My heart was in my throat as I stepped through the debugger for the bootstrap module I've been developing for so many years. The core of the Archaea is like an infinite pool of power, nothing I've built into it has even scratched the surface of what it is capable of - not that I haven't tried!

I can't say for sure how fast it really is, it may be faster than I could calculate to be honest. The speed of the core has enabled me to write some pretty interesting predictive modeling algorithms that utilize sheer speed and processing power of the core, to bend the response curve beyond real-time, making use of quantum mechanics to provide results literally faster than they're requested, and then to fold those requests back into itself faster than they can be generated.

I have lost sleep wondering what might happen if this becomes self-aware.

Shorty was chomping at the bit for this predictive modeling and analysis engine. She was really excited for it to be extended to the fire-control and tracking systems for the repeaters. She wasn't the only one – Gene was practically hanging on the back of my chair waiting for me to tell him it was ready for ship systems management.

To be able to have systems that don't react, but act in advance of their need - that's simply revolutionary in the field, and I'm really excited to be able to be a part of it.

Of course, my work isn't limited to Janis development - there's a ton of systems throughout the ship that were originally coded by what I can only assume was a monkey with a shock collar on - and the shock collar was clearly out of batteries.

We have systems that work, but only barely, and in a slow, limited capacity. Like the enviro module in ring 3 - it's a simple logic controller that is supposed to monitor temperature and humidity according to the number of people in that zone, but is apparently changing the temperature depending on who is currently in ring 2, or maybe depending on the unknowable will of the gods, hard telling.

It's bug 284, and I'm working on it. Until then, Shorty may have to deal with some fly-away hair, not that she can even see it in her mirror. Maybe we could chip in and get her a step stool.

*****

As we were getting close to the time where the stationmaster will be either cutting us adrift or taking me to section court for late fees, I called a meeting in the wardroom. I wanted to head for deep space as soon as possible, or at least to boost for a short bit around this system.

The Archaea looked good, far better than I thought it could at this point. Most of the interior had been cleaned or scrapped out, with new paint still wet in many places. The core companionway was well lit, and looked clean enough for an operating theater, nothing like the dark grime-crusted hole Gene and I experienced a few standard weeks ago.

Despite the progress we'd made, I still wasn't sure if we were going to be able to haul mass out of there. Everyone had been so busy for the past few weeks, I hadn't seen much of anyone. I  definitely needed to touch base with my crew.

Once everyone settled and the witty banter had slowed down, I called the meeting to order.

"Thank you, everyone, for taking a break from your schedules to meet with me. I know you have all been working pretty much around the clock, and hopefully, I'll be able to get you some sleep cycles soon."

"Like I am ever going to be able to sleep with the air dry as a desert" stated Shorty, her hair slightly less frazzled than her patience with enviro.

"I am hoping the bug will be fixed soon, possibly today", Pauli added, looking at Gene and adding "If the problem is software and not pathing in the wetnet..."

"Pauli, I've gone through the routing in that section over and over, and I just can't find anything out of spec", Gene said patiently. "I can't rule it out completely, but I really think there's something happening in the logicspace tier."

"Folks - I want to be concerned about your hair and comfort, but we have bigger issues...” I paused for a sip of coffee and time to haul my standard-issue Captains eyebrow to half-mast. “There are definitely some gremlins loose around here, and there probably always will be. What I really need to know is how close we are to being able to lift clear of this station."

"Captain, we are done with structural testing of the tokamak casing, and the slipspace generators are testing well. I haven't lit the fires yet, but I've kicked the tires, and I think we'll probably not die a horrible death... Maybe not right away, in any case", Gene remarked.

"Oh that's good to hear, Gene... I mean...While I'm as fearless as any hero of the fringe spaceways, if there's one thing I hate worse than dying, it's dying in sight of a laughing stationmaster with my money in his pocket"

Everyone had a good laugh at that, until Shorty added "Well, we won't die a horrible death
, that's for sure - it will probably happen faster than we can even realize. That nova cannon hasn't been fired in a decade, and when it was in service last it wasn't maintained, and hasn't been maintained well at any point that I can tell.”

“Shorty, that's a petawatt cannon, right?” I said. “We used to blast those off all the time in my day. They're safe enough, right...I mean, how bad could it be?”

She flashed me a look of tender frustration. “Captain, you may understand what a petawatt is in theory, but to harness that amount of energy and turn it into a standing wave, then bounce it around a few trillion times in the focusing chamber until it finally blasts a hole through reality - well, let's just say dry air isn't the only thing keeping me awake at night."

"But you are making progress, right?" I asked.

"Oh yeah, sure, we're making progress. We've re-calibrated everything, the focusing ring, the accelerators, the cooling dampeners. The challenge isn't in bringing the systems up to their designed spec, even with the hellish accuracy required for the calibration - the challenge is in understanding how those tolerances have been changed from a century of misuse and disrepair. It's clear to me that the previous owners didn't go broke - they just finally gave up from fear of pressing that shiny red button one more time. I wish some other people around here shared that fear", she added, fixing me with a stern look.

"Hey, I'm the Captain. It's my job to think long and hard about the responsibilities of our duty, our mission, our strengths, weaknesses, our tactical situation
- and yes, when needed, to think about that shiny, silky-smooth red button".

I was joking, but to be honest, brutally honest, I have to admit that button was probably the single most awe-inspiring thing on the Archaea, and I couldn't wait to see what it did.

Gene pulled us all back to reality, however - as he does so well. "Shorty, and begging the Captain's pardon, neither of you need to worry about vaporizing this sector of space, because you'll probably be incandescent reactive ash the instant we light up the tokamak."

"Tell me you're joking, Gene", I added, ratcheting
the other eyebrow up a notch.

“Well, I am... somewhat", he added, "I mean, we're looking very good here structurally, and we've calibrated everything to the specifications we could find. Unfortunately, with all the modifications we've made both in software and hardware – we might be on reserve air with a broken tether, as they say." he trailed off with a scowl.

"Gene, the code I've layered into the process controllers for the tokamak is top-notch, and certified bug free. I have built multiple redundancies, failover capabilities, error gating and interrupt controllers into the mechanicals. Our core systems are coming along well, and hopefully soon, I'll have the predictive analysis engine online for all ship systems", Pauli added.

"Tell us more about this engine, Pauli", I asked.

"Well Captain, this kind of system is really only possible because of the incredible capabilities of the nexus core and the wetnet bandwidth throughout the systems. You could process model planetary weather systems with this kind of computing power, hell, you could process model the subatomic particles inside the water molecules of a planetary weather system if you wanted.”

'The core is so fast, I've discovered that with some iterative feedback loops, on a quantum level the code is able to deterministically find results for data that hasn't happened yet. I haven't yet quantified what that means, intrinsically - I mean, I know what is happening because I wrote it, but I can't really get a hook into how much it happens."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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