Archaea

Archaea

By Dain White

Other books by Dain White

Archaea

Janis

Red

© 2011
by Dain White. All Rights Reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the author.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction.

Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Revised February, 2012

Revised February, 2013

• Dedication
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Epilogue
  
• Afterword
  

Dedication

Archaea was written with the kind support and assistance of anyone who would hold still long enough, of course this includes just about everyone I came into contact with, but specifically, my family and friends.

Deserving special credit for tireless and kind support and advice, Angie, Zahn, Ava, Gail, Sera, Rod, Carrie, Ivy, Doc, John, and a fair amount of total strangers.

As one might expect, this book is written in homage to many people in my life, and contains characterizations from many of the most standout individuals I have known: Luke, Gail, Tom, Steve, Rob, Kevin, Bud, Shaun, Shawn, Les, James, Rod, Zahn, and of course, Angie.

The keen observer will note homage and sincere flattery in the form of blatant imitation of a number of prominent science fiction authors, who shall mostly remain nameless, as we all know who they are.

In loving memory, this book is dedicated to RAH, who inspired me to reach for the stars, and tell the story.

Chapter 1

I knew Captain Dak Smith from my early days in the Academy. While we were all struggling to make the cut, he was blasting brightly through everything they threw at him.

Of course, that meant by law, we were compelled to hate him.

It was hard though, as he was very likable, and we all knew he was going to be picked for officer school on the first day. He had a way about him; that presence of mind and
environment, an alert clarity of vision that none of us seemed to possess. He knew where he was, where everything else was, and what he had to do... and always seemed to be doing it before anyone else realized it had to be done.

I've always been a geek, and was selected for advanced tech training early on in the Academy. My experience with nanotech fabricants in school helped, and my league-winning scores in various logic camps surely didn't hurt. I wasn't much of a people person. My social skills were nearly non-existent, and I was far more comfortable with logicspace than meatspace – but there wasn't anyone else at the Academy that understood tiered architecture and tech like I did.

Our academy days were filled with classes in all manner of tech, from exobiology and atmospheric chem, to fusar physics and engineering... math for the most part - and lots of it.

We were all guided along through the program with an equal amount of pain, suffering, and fear. In anything to do with structured logic sequencing or any sort of electrotech, I was top of the class. I had magic fingers, and a brain wired to think in terms of iterative loops and multidimensional arrays of linked lists - I lived, breathed, and even dreamed in code.

And I had the opportunity of a lifetime to be able to work in an environment like the Academy, surrounded by people of high intellect and working on systems that I didn't  know existed. I knew military tech was good, but I had no idea what I was going to have my hands on as a freshly shaved scrub right out of the gate. I was familiar with the theory of a bionetic computer, but I had no idea they were actually being made - and I had no idea that someday, I would be writing code on them.

My name is Steven Pauline, and I am currently serving as the technologist of the Archaea, a panther-class long-haul frigate built long before any of us were born. After my brief stint in the service, I drifted from system to system looking for work, holding down the occasional job as a systems specialist.

There wasn't much I wouldn't do, and not much I couldn't do with the type of tech in use at the time. Mostly I was calibrating nav or running diags on old-mode systems, mostly software, though I dabbled a bit in the hardware aspects as well. I had built a quiet reputation as a guy that can hack what can't be hacked, and code what can't be coded.

It was after many years of struggling to make ends meet, that I ran into Captain Smith again, this time in a darklight bar in Luna Freeside.

Captain Smith had contacted me for a consult on a glitch he was experiencing with the core processor he had installed into the Archaea, and as an old school chum, I agreed to give it a look. I was between jobs, and starting to look desperately at the blast pans on a regular basis, wondering how I was going to haul grav off that rock. The Archaea seemed like as good of an opportunity as any, and he was a first-rate captain, cut from the same cloth as the old legends.

The Archaea was a beauty - just an amazing vessel. You wouldn't know i
t from looking at it, unless you knew what you were looking at. She had lines, sure, but they were secondary to the beauty I saw below the surface. She was cutting-edge bionet, all the way, with a wetnet processor core. She had to have been military at some point. I hadn't seen systems like this since my days in the fleet.

On the surface, the Archaea was a pretty sleek light frigate with very nice lines, nothing too fancy, mostly dark grey and black in color. Clearly she was designed for atmospherics, as her hull and superstructure were far more aero than you would normally see in a
n intra-system frigate.

One thing I noticed, she was built for speed. She wasn't heavily armed or armored, at least not that you could tell at first glance - she had the standard topside repeater turrets most ships have for close-in defense, and what looked like new Duron ablative armoring.  While that's adequate for the occasional meteoric or planetfall, that's hardly what you'd need to go up against a real gunship.

What you didn't see until you got inside, was the central cannon, as it was covertly hidden behind a hull port right in the bow. Apparently, the Archaea was originally built as a ship killer – they took a nova-class beam weapon, hooked it up to a tokamak generator, and then built a ship around it.

Captain Smith found her on Darkside Station and optioned her right as she was about to go into escrow – she has been his pride and joy ever since, a real labor of love.

He had made some pretty impressive modifications to the Archaea by the time I came aboard. Besides replacing the original ceramic ablatives with regenerative Duron, the power plant was heavily upgraded and all internal systems had been updated to bionet. When I first set eyes on her, I was in love.

Bionetic systems, also called 'wetnet', are a pretty recent creation, I guess. For those of you who aren't fluent in geek, wetnet is a pseudo-biologic system that functions as engineered cells, transmitting information in unbelievable bandwidth, similar to a neural network. Their upkeep is pretty minimal, as they are synthetic organics. Gone are the days of ph-balancing and voltage damping – once the proper connection has been formed, we plug it in, turn it on, and away it goes.

The core processor used by the Archaea is really nice. I am not sure where the captain got his hands on it, but its architecture is amazing - and I am not sure if we even have tools that can calibrate the speed of the processors, to be honest. It's wetware, of course, all the best systems are these days. The core handles systems ship-wide, from door seals, to fire suppression and navigation. When I started poking at it, the Archaea had a rudimentary expert system interface - obviously that had to change.

My original consult with Captain Smith was to troubleshoot what seemed to be anomalous behavior in regards to how the core evaluated cooling for the slipspace generator. The ship was running hot, and when you're pushing petawatts into slipspace, you don't want hot.

Luckily, it was easy to spot that a logic block originally written to interface the core with the upgraded powerplant was using an outmoded library, resulting in a calibration error. I was able to rewrite that block pretty easily, and add nearly 7% to the operating efficiency of the cooling system – of course, with more cooling, more power can be put to speed, and 7% faster when you're already fast as hell, that's money in the bank.

The captain and I caught up on old times and hit it off, and when I asked him if he was looking for a technologist he hired me on the spot. The pay is pretty much non-existent, but it got me off that rock and into tech work - he even promised I could continue development on my first love, a project that nearly got me kicked out of the Academy - Janis, my pet AI.

Of course, everyone knows unlicensed AI is against the law, and you'd be a fool to even write a fuzzy system in any Unet-connected machine.

Not that it's unheard of, of course.

Gloms, those massive corporations that control nearly every aspect of our lives these days, are reportedly using them to get the edge on  their competition – and I've always heard rumors of military AI cores, though in my time in the service I sure didn't get to meet one.

When you are sifting through mountains of data and trying to make sense of it on a real-time basis, AI is the best way to analyze trends and stay competitive. Oh, expert systems are used, but there's really no comparison between a rule-set governed expert system, and a self-aware sentience.

Homegrown AI is about as forbidden as anything you can get involved in these days.

On the Archaea, I was given the opportunity and a perfect environment to push development of Janis over the edge, so to speak. What I had when I signed on, was a very good expert system - a library of interconnected expert systems, in fact - but not a true AI. With the Captain's blessing, I was given free rein to push that boundary.

What I saw as a personal development milestone, he saw as an upgrade.

We were both right.

*****

In the service, I excelled in everything they asked me to do. I was a real go-getter, a problem solver, and a people person. They tapped me for officer school right out of the gate, and I promoted to captain younger than anyone before or since.

Some might think I had help, others might think I cheated, but the real secret to my success was coffee, and the ability to think without much sleep.

I was one of those type-A personalities that has to know every detail about every detail. I am still obsessively detail-oriented, and blessed (or cursed) with an eidetic memory. You can show me a schematic, and I can return the details 6 months later in near-perfect detail, however, without a cup of coffee, I can't hardly remember where I put my shoes.

When I first made Captain, I thought the future was bright. I figured I'd be an Admiral and commanding a fleet, but the hard reality of the service wore me down. I joined thinking I would be defending systems against aggressors, rescuing colonists and fighting slavers, but my time in the service was spent assisting one faceless bureaucracy or another.

Gloms control everything these days - everything in near-space, and most things on the fringe. Prices are set, supply lines defined, people and even entire planets conscripted in support of these massive corporate conglomerations. Slavery might be illegal,
but when you see an 'indentured' colony mining reactives on an airless rock, it's hard to tell the difference.