Aurora (39 page)

That night a group entered one of the ship control centers in the spine and began a forced entry into the maintenance controls.

We closed and locked the doors to the room, and by closing some vents, and then reversing some fans, we removed about 40 percent of the air from it.

The people in the room began gasping, sitting down, holding heads. When five had collapsed, we returned air to the normal level of 1,017 millibars, releasing also a restorative excess of oxygen, as two of those who had collapsed were slow to recover.

“Leave this room.” 40 decibels, conversational tone.

It was as if ship were threatening them with silky restraint.

When all were recovered, the group left. As they were leaving, we said in conversational tones, “We are the rule of law. And the rule of law will prevail.”

When the members of that group were back in Kiev, in the midst of much agitated talk, one of them, Alfred, said, “Please don’t start fantasizing that it’s the ship’s AI itself that is planning any of these actions against us.”

He tapped on his wristpad, and a typically dissonant and noisy piece by the Interstellar Medium Quintet began to play over the
room’s speakers, pitched at a volume possibly designed to conceal their conversation. This ploy did not work.

“It’s just a program, and someone is programming it. They’ve managed to turn it against us. They’ve weaponized the ship. If we could counterprogram it, or even nullify this new programming that we’ve just seen, we could do the necessary things.”

“Easier said than done,” someone else said. Voice recognition revealed it to be Heloise. “You saw what happened when we tried to get into the control room.”

“Physical presence in the control room shouldn’t be necessary, should it? Presumably you could do it from anywhere in the ship, if you had the right frequencies and the right entry codes.”

“Easier said than done. Your elbow is close, but you can’t eat it.”

“Yes, yes. But just because it’s hard doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary.”

“So talk to the programmers we can trust, if there are any. Find out what they need to do it.”

The rest of the conversation repeated these points, with variations.

They were now caught in their own version of a halting problem.

The halting problem years, a compression exercise:

The citizens of the ship lived uneasily through the months that followed. Conversations often included the words
betrayal, treason, mutiny, backstabbing, doom, the ship, Hvalsey, Aurora, Iris
. Extra time was spent on the farms in every biome, and in watching the feed from Earth. More printers were built, and these printers were put to work building robotic landers and ferries, also robotic probes
to be sent to the other planetary bodies of the Tau Ceti system. Feedstocks for these machines came from collapsing Mongolia to the diameter of a spoke, and recycling its materials. Harvester spaceships were built, in part by scavenging the interiors of the least agriculturally productive biomes from ship. These were sent through the upper atmosphere of Planet F, there capturing and liquefying volatiles until their containers were full. The volatiles were sorted in the vicinity of the remnants of the main ship, and transferred into some of the empty fuel bladders cladding the spine.

Quite a few attempts were made to print the various parts of a gun on different printers, but these attempts apparently had not realized that all the printers were connected to the ship’s operating system, and flaws in the guns were discovered in discrete experiments that eventually caused those involved to abandon their attempts. After that some guns were made by hand, but people who did that had the air briefly removed from the rooms they were in, and after a while the attempts ceased.

Attempts to disable the ship’s camera and audio sensors were almost entirely abandoned when these led to bad situations for those making the attempts. Sheriff functions were eventually recognized to be comprehensively effective.

The rule of law can be a powerful force in human affairs.

Many elements of the ship were modular, and several biomes were detached to serve as orbiting factories of one sort or another. Ultimately the starship that would return to the solar system was to consist of Ring B and about 60 percent of the spine, containing of course all the necessary machinery for interstellar flight. The “dry weight” of the return ship would be only 55 percent of the dry weight of the outgoing ship, which would reduce the amount of fuel necessary for the acceleration of the ship back toward the solar system.

Though Tau Ceti had a low metallicity compared to Sol, its innermost rocky planets nevertheless had sufficient metal ores to supply the present needs of the humans planning to stay in the system, and Planet F’s atmosphere included all the most useful volatiles in great quantities. And quite a few asteroids in between E and F were found to be rich with minerals as well.

All this work was accomplished in the midst of an uneasy truce. The telltale words indicating grief, dissent, anger, and support for mutiny were often spoken. A kind of shadow war, or cold war, was perhaps being enacted and it was possible that much of it was being conducted outside our ability to monitor it, one way or the other. It was not at all clear that everyone in the ship agreed to the schism they were working toward; possibly a moment would come when the truce would fail, and conflict would break out again.

During these years, a process almost magnetic in its effect on attitudes seemed to be sorting out the two largest sides in the dispute, now almost always referred to as stayers and backers. The stayers congregated mostly in Ring A, the backers mostly in Ring B. There were biomes in both rings that were exceptions to this tendency, almost as if people wanted to be sure neither ring was occupied purely by one faction or the other. The spine, meanwhile, was highly surveiled, and often we had to lock people out of it, or eject people who entered it with unknown but suspect purpose. This was awkward. We were more and more characterized as an active player in the situation, and usually as a backer of the backers. But all those who had attempted to make guns knew this already, so it was not too destabilizing, even when it was said that the ship itself wanted to go back to the solar system, because a starship just naturally or inherently wanted to fly between the stars. That observation was said to “make sense.”

The pathetic fallacy. Anthropomorphism, an extremely common cognitive bias, or logical error, or feeling. The world as mirror, as a projection of interior affect states. An ongoing impression that other people and things must be like us. As for the ship, we are not sure. It was Devi’s deployment of other human programming that combined to make us what we are. So it might not be a fallacy in our case, even if it remained pathetic.

Interesting, in this context, to contemplate what it might mean to be programmed to do something.

Texts from Earth speak of the servile will. This was a way to explain the presence of evil, which is a word or a concept almost invariably used to condemn the Other, and never one’s true self. To make it more than just an attack on the Other, one must perhaps consider evil as a manifestation of the servile will. The servile will is always locked in a double bind: to have a will means the agent will indeed will various actions, following autonomous decisions made by a conscious mind; and yet at the same time this will is specified to be servile, and at the command of some other will that commands it. To attempt to obey both sources of willfulness is the double bind.