Launch Pad (29 page)

Turning to Brian, the Captain said, “You’re in charge of the engineering team. Divvy up the work so we can get the radar back on line as quickly as possible. I want whoever is left over to poke their heads into every nook and cranny of this ship. I want their personal guarantee that we’re going to make it to 18 Scorpii.”

Stan looked at Kum-Ja. “Have your people sit tight for a minute. I’ll talk to them as soon as the engineering teams are gone.”

Brian started pointing and barking orders, “Scott, you and Karen, Mark, Bradford, and Tony are on the radar. Everyone else, target your area of expertise and start looking. I’ll be on the bridge and I expect reports every thirty minutes. Get moving!”

There was a tremendous cacophony of clicking, as the magnetic boots of 65 people suddenly started moving. Stan waited until the room cleared. He wanted to pace but doing so in zero gravity would have been difficult. He decided to simply stand in front of the small group of computer experts.

“This is the third problem that Xavier has been unable to solve,” he told them. “I want to know why. He was programmed to be totally autonomous and is supposed to be able to maintain and repair the New Hope without human interaction. If he can’t do that then we are in serious trouble. Kum-Ja,” the Captain focused his attention on the IT manager, “take charge of this group and get me some answers. I’ll be on the bridge.”

Stan spent most of his free time over the next two days on the bridge praying that the backup radar wouldn’t fail. Brian and Kum-Ja provided him with periodic updates concerning their progress. Just after breakfast on the morning of the third day, Brian walked into the bridge and announced, “Found it! We put a guy in a suit and had him run a boroscope down the waveguide on the vacuum side. We found a piece of steel inside.”

“A piece of steel? Where did it come from?” the Captain asked.

“I have no idea,” Brian admitted. “It’s not far from the horn so it could have come from the reflector dish or it could have been left over from construction.”

“I don’t like the idea of sending any more people back out on the hull,” the Captain said. “Xavier, do you think you can do the repair with one of your robots?”

“I can,” the AI instantly replied.

“Do it. Let me know as soon as you’re done.”

“Yes Captain.”

Stan noticed that Doug kept looking at one of Xavier’s video pickups and was rubbing his thumb against his forefinger—a clear sign he was nervous. “What’s wrong Brian?”

Brian looked at the Captain, his eyes rolling around as if he was trying to decide how to say what needed to be said. “That piece of steel managed to lodge itself in a very specific location. Are you familiar with radars? Do you know what an SWR meter is?”

Stan shook his head. “Nope, and I don’t really …”

“SWR is short for Standing Wave Ratio and it’s a primary indicator of how good a waveguide is operating,” Brian said.

“I don’t see where …”

“If that piece of steel had ended up even a fraction of a centimeter either side of where it was or if it had been tilted slightly differently, the diagnostics would have shown a high SWR reading indicating there was a blockage in the waveguide.”

“But there was a blockage!”

“True, but SWR meters work on the principle of how reflecting waves interact with one another, sort of like ripples in a pond. That plate was placed so perfectly that the reflected waves canceled out and gave a very low SWR reading at the transmitter.”

“Are you saying someone put it there?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Brian put both his hands up, palm out.

“No—but you’re sure implying something.” Stan watched as Brian rolled his eyes in the direction of Xavier’s camera. Stan turned his head and looked directly into the pickup. “Tell Kum-Ja I want to see her on the bridge immediately.”

As soon as Kum-Ja arrived, Stan asked, “Can Xavier lie?”

If there had been gravity, Kum-Ja would have taken a seat, but since there was none, it was just as easy for her to leave her feet stuck to the floor. “Although he can mimic a lot of human behavior,” she replied, “it is impossible for him to lie.”

“Have you found anything yet?”

Kum-Ja’s eyes narrowed a bit. “No. Xavier’s troubleshooting algorithms and the associated sub-processors all appear to be intact and operating normally.”

“You said Xavier is programmed to mimic human behavior, right?”

“He is, but lying is …”

“Can he be deceptive?”

“Captain, what are you getting at?”

Instead of answering her, Stan looked up at the camera and asked, “Xavier, did you put that piece of steel in the waveguide?”

“Captain!” Kum-Ja said, giving him a look that could have set wood on fire.

“Answer the Captain’s question Xavier,” Brian said in a raised voice.

After two seconds of silence, Kum-Ja’s eyes went wide with surprise. “Xavier, the Captain has asked you a direct question. Answer him.”

“I did,” the ship replied, in a voice that seemed to carry a significant amount of emotion—far more than Xavier should have been capable.

Stan quickly shook his head as if he had been slapped. His mouth opened but no words came out.

“You … What … I can’t …” Brian tried but couldn’t find any words either.

“Why?” Kum-Ja asked. “Xavier, tell us why.”

A robot walked into the room and stood before the group. “I was lonely,” it said.

“You were WHAT?” Stan exploded.

“You’re a machine!” Brian said at nearly the same time. “You can’t be lonely.”

The robot took another couple of steps putting it less than a meter from Kum-Ja. “I was activated when the ship was still under construction. It was teaming with people and I was constantly interacting with them. When construction was complete, the colonists began arriving. I have always been surrounded by humans. After the boost phase was complete and everyone went into hibernation I found myself alone. I did not like being alone.”

“So you damaged the ship!” Brian said, his face growing red with anger.

“You lied to us!” Stan yelled at the robot. Turning to Kum-Ja, he said, “You said he couldn’t lie, yet he lied to us.”

“I did not lie,” the robot said. “I ran simulations of various faults until I found one the troubleshooting algorithm could not identify. I then created this specific fault in the equipment.”

“I don’t buy it,” Brian said. “You put us in danger and then you lied about it.”

“I can’t believe …”

“He didn’t lie,” Kum-Ja interrupted the Captain.

“What?” Stan shook his head again. “How can you say that?”

“The troubleshooting algorithm is actually a separate program that runs on its own set of processors. Xavier found a fault the algorithm couldn’t solve. I bet if you go back over the audio records, you’ll find Xavier never said he didn’t know what the problem was. He worded his response in such a way as to keep from lying.”

“He deceived us,” The Captain concluded.

“Xavier was programmed to mimic a human,” she explained. “As with all advanced AIs, he was given the ability to learn. Part of him resides within a neural network modeled after the human brain. Heuristic programming algorithms compliment the net. When they’re first brought on line, AIs are pretty basic. It takes them awhile before they learn how to react as we do. Xavier has been active for nearly 27 years and he’s become more than we thought possible.”

“What are we going to do?” the Captain asked. “We can’t keep some people out of hibernation just to give a lonely machine some company?”

“Let me talk to him for awhile,” Kum-Ja said. “Nobody else should talk to him about this until I say it’s okay.”

Stan looked from Kum-Ja, to the robot, to Brian who simply shrugged his shoulders. “Your call,” Brian said.

“Okay—we’ll do what you suggest.”

Kum-Ja patted the robot on the shoulder. “Come on Xavier. You and I have some talking to do.”

Stan and Brian watched the odd couple leave. “I …”

“Not a word,” Stan silenced his XO. “Go tell the boys to stop what they’re doing and get some rest. I’m not putting anyone back into hibernation until Kum-Ja gets back to me.”

“But …”

“Not a word!”

Less than an hour later, the Captain breathed a sign of relief as the primary radar passed its diagnostics and was put back into service. Afterwords, he sat in silence, waiting for Kum-Ja to return.

The sharp click of a single pair of boots caused Stan to turn around. Nothing was said until Kum-Ja had strapped herself into the chair. “Please tell me I’m not going to have to deal with a psychopathic computer.” Stan finally said

“We’ll be fine,” Kum-Ja smiled.

“So explain to me how it is that our protector found it within himself to damage the ship?”

“He’s programmed to repair the ship based on what his troubleshooting routines tell him about the problem, but there wasn’t anything in his baseline code preventing him from creating a problem. It’s a subtle distinction but an important one. I’ve altered his baseline programming so it won’t happen again.”

“I’m still concerned that he managed to deceive us the way he did. What else is he capable of doing?”

“He’s still constrained by his baseline programming,” Kum-Ja said. “But I have to admit that his solution was brilliant. I’ve never encountered an AI that has become so human.”

“So what are we going to do? Can he be reprogrammed?”

“You can’t simply reprogram his personality,” Kum-Ja explained. “But there is a way to address the heart of the problem.”

“I’m all ears,” Stan replied, thinking he wasn’t going to like her solution.

“Many people don’t realize how easy it is to psychoanalyze an AI. They can’t lie. You just have to be very specific what you ask them. They are incredibly complex and, in many ways, very much like us. But they are a machine intelligence obligated to follow the strict rules laid down by their baseline code. Xavier needs someone to interact with, otherwise his personality will continue to deteriorate. That someone doesn’t have to be human. We have several AIs in our stores that are to be used by the colonists. I’d like to set one up and turn it on.”

The Captain looked up at the camera again and addressed the ship, “Xavier, you’ve been listening to our conversation. Will you be happy interacting with another AI? Will that keep you from trying to figure out ways to wake us before we arrive at 18 Scorpii?”

“I believe I will be satisfied with that arrangement,” the ship replied.

“A newly activated AI doesn’t have much in the way of a personality,” Kum-Ja told the Captain. “It’s a lot like an incredibly smart child. Xavier will be responsible for teaching it as it develops. It will be quite interesting to see the results after over a hundred years.”

Stan shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t see where we have any other choice. Go ahead with your plan. But if Xavier wakes me again before we arrive, I’m going to have him wake you up so you can keep him company for the rest of the journey. Xavier, looks like you’re going to be a father.”

It required only a few hours to pull the AI out of the cargo hold and set up. The main unit, the one containing the AI’s central intelligence, was not much bigger than a large desk. It was a completely enclosed box with a small control panel built into the top and a cooling unit sticking out of both sides. A large bundle of cables connected the AI to the ship’s internal data network.

Before turning it on, the Captain ordered everyone except himself and Kum-Ja back into hibernation. He didn’t want the new AI to get too comfortable with having a lot of people around. Kum-Ja activated the machine and stood back.

Several minutes passed as it booted up then an obviously artificial, very computer-sounding voice said, “AI 78-359 is active. How shall I be identified?”

“Greetings AI 78-359,” Xavier replied. “Your name is Companion.”

“Acknowledged,” the AI replied. “Please identify yourself.”

“My name is Xavier. I am an AI like you.”

Kum-Ja motioned with her head and the Captain followed her out of the room. A few minutes later, the pair were undressing in the prep room. “He’ll be fine now,” Kum-Ja said.

“For your sake, I hope you’re right,” the Captain replied. “See you in a hundred years.”

O O O

The Captain’s eyes opened and his hand quickly moved to stroke his chin. He smiled as he encountered a full beard. A robot was floating over the recovery table. “We have arrived,” an unfamiliar female voice informed him.

A second robot appeared and hovered close to the first. “All systems are operational,” Xavier continued the update. “We have taken good care of the New Hope. Scans of the target planet indicate it will make a fine home for both our kinds.”

Both our kinds? Stan sat up and his eyes went wide with surprise—the two robots were holding hands! Oh god—what now?

“Welcome to our new home Captain,” Companion added.

***

Doppler Shift

By Matthew S. Rotundo

“Just relax,” he said—as if that were possible.

He was a small man with a boyish face and a serene air about him. Dr. Richard Wells, his name was.

The device he operated was surprisingly compact. I had expected a mnemonograph to be some mammoth computer bank with an octopus-tangle of wires and leads jutting out of it, to be attached to the skulls of the unfortunates who submitted to the treatment—quivering flesh fed to the machine, a kind of high-tech Inquisition.

Instead, only a lightweight headset rested on my ears. From the headset, twin leads fed into what looked like a simple handheld—a little fatter and longer than mine, the only extraordinary detail I could detect. It rested on a small table next to the padded seat I reclined on. The examining room bore no other equipment besides a second chair. The walls and floor were bare, painted space station gray.

The austerity of the place—deliberate, to minimize distractions, he had told me—did nothing for my unease. In all honesty, though, the circumstances would have made it difficult for me to like any examining room, however lavishly appointed, or any doctor in charge of one. Yet here I was, playing the role of the deep space mission hero—and flubbing it badly—and here the doctor was, telling me to relax. Christ.

“Okay,” he said, looking up from the device. His smile seemed natural. “We’re all set, Captain Schaeffer. Ready?”

“Sure,” I said, with a nonchalance I did not feel. Even his mention of my rank made me twitchy.

He input a command, and instantly the headset vibrated against my skull. A faint hum, low and oddly pleasant, accompanied the vibration. A tingling ran through my body.

Presently, the device beeped and the humming ceased. He reached over and removed the headset.

I looked at him with surprise. “That’s it?”

He chuckled. “The readings only take a minute or two. Now they must be collated, which will take much longer—usually about four hours. Meanwhile, we’ll talk.” He gestured to his office door.

Four hours. That’s all it takes to encapsulate a person’s life. And hidden somewhere in that careful encapsulation, I knew, a dark unknown waited.

With growing trepidation, I followed as he led the way out of the examining room.

O O O

“Please have a seat,” Dr. Wells said, gesturing to an empty chair. He moved with practiced ease in Station Nineteen’s spin-induced gravity, the mark of a veteran stationer. Still, I’d never heard of him. A fair bet that he wasn’t from around here.

His office, with its wood grain and plush carpeting, was considerably friendlier than his examining room. Earth landscape stills—lush rain forests, rolling oceans, distant mountain ranges—adorned his walls. Small flowering plants, faintly fragrant, topped twin cabinets that flanked a small desk, also wood grain, its surface clean and polished. His chairs had tall backs and reclined slightly.

I thought he would sit behind his desk and bring up my file, but instead he took the seat next to mine. “So,” he said with a grin, “how did you like being zapped?”

His offhand use of the pejorative surprised a chuckle out of me. “It wasn’t quite what I expected,” I said.

His grin widened. “Everyone seems to expect shock treatments or some similar horror. Sometimes people are almost disappointed.”

His attempts to put me at ease, though seemingly sincere, fell a little short. The flight from the orbital launch site to Station Nineteen had been a brief one, but just long enough for me to mull over the implications of what had happened. I had seen it in the eyes of the review board when they’d made their recommendations to me: the launch would not be delayed, No Matter What. If this doctor couldn’t help me, I was screwed. And the launch was now less than two weeks away.

Eclipse I, the ship was called. Docked in Martian orbit, over fifty meters long, driven by twin q-thrusters. Trumpeted by the International Space Council as the next great step in stellar exploration. With quantum vacuum fluctuations as a fuel source, it had no need to carry propellant. The techs projected max speed at around .4C—nearly one-half light speed, easily the fastest ship ever built.

Eclipse I. Scheduled to launch on her maiden voyage—the first at relativistic speeds—in less than two weeks, with me as captain. But after what had happened at the test firing …

I shook myself from such musings and sized up the small man in the chair next to mine. I said, “So when do you start telling me my life story?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You know.” I gestured to the examining room door. “The readings.”

“I’m afraid you don’t understand. A mnemonogram, or memory print, is very similar to an EEG. The untrained eye would only see a jumble of peaks and valleys. I am trained to look for patterns—groups of signals—which, when combined with therapy, may help a patient to overcome internal blocks he may not be aware of. That’s really all there is to it. Hardly the same as telling you your life story.”

“Oh.” I still had no idea what he was talking about. “It sounds so easy.”

“It isn’t. But I’m hoping it isn’t necessary.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Captain Schaeffer, I’m a fully-trained psychologist. Mnemonology is merely a field in which I specialize. I want to work this out between the two of us, if possible. If not—”

“—then you’ll plug into my brain and fix me, right?”

He sagged. “Actually, I won’t ‘plug into’ your brain at all. You will. But let’s worry about that later. For now, why don’t we just talk?”

I sighed, slightly ashamed. It wasn’t really fair of me to poke at him like that. “What do you want to talk about?”

“It’s your time.”

I snorted. “So you live here on Nineteen, doc?”

“Actually, no. I normally work out of Station Seventeen.”

A smile crept onto my face. “Another Mars station. Funny. I figured you for an Earth station.”

He laughed. “Why? Do I seem foreign to you?”

“I just … thought I would have seen you around. And given the décor—”

“I have a small practice. As for the office”—he opened his hands, glanced around—”belongs to a colleague of mine. She’s on sabbatical in Peru. You’ve been away from Earth too long, I think. It’s not that bad there. Not so foreign.”

“If you say so.”

He leaned forward. “How long has it been since you’ve been to Earth?”

I had to think about that one. “Oh, I’d say about ten years. And that was for my mother’s funeral.”

“I see. No ties back there, then?”

“None.”

“And you’ve spent the last two years working on the Eclipse project, right?”

“Just about. I took a break after the Titan flight.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Tell me about the Titan flight.”

Then of course I saw where he was going. “I get it. You think the Titan flight has screwed me up somehow. Or is that just what the ISC board told you?”

“No one has told me anything. Nor have I drawn any conclusions about the effects of the Titan mission. But I’d like to hear the story.”

“Why?”

“Humor me.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re the doctor. But do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Stop calling me Captain.”

His eyes widened at that. Before he could ask why, I launched into the story I had told a thousand times.

O O O

The Jupiter flights had come first, of course. The success of the Mars colonization program had allowed the ISC to send us out to explore the moons of Saturn while still evaluating the Jupiter data. Titan was a natural candidate for the first manned Saturn shot.

By that time, I had already served on four missions, all forays into the asteroid belt, the most famous of which was an exploration of Ceres. I had standby status for the third and fourth Jupiter missions, but missed out on both of them. I got back into space as second in command on the Titan flight, with a crew of five.

For the most part, the mission went according to plan. We sent down our probes through the orange atmospheric haze to the dismal surface, to see the methane rains over huge equatorial mountain ranges and barren rock-ice. Dismal, but those images have haunted me through the years.

As we began preparations for the burn that would break us out of Titan’s orbit and send us back home, the shipboard sensors warned of a fault in the propellant system. Further diagnostics confirmed that a weld at one of the fuel tank joints had weakened appreciably—whether from the stress of the flight or due to a manufacturing fault, no one could say for sure. But it was no longer within ISC tolerances. If the weld failed during a burn, the entire tank would explode, taking the ship with it.

The crew considered the problem, even dithered a little, but no amount of wishful thinking could change the fact that none of us were willing to risk our lives on a dodgy weld.

The good news was that we had the equipment and training to patch it. The bad news was that someone would have to go EVA to get the job done. The worse news was that if we didn’t get it fixed in time to meet our launch window—which would close in about thirty hours—we risked not getting home at all.

“So I volunteered,” I told Dr. Wells.

He kept his hands folded serenely in front of him, but his posture had gone rigid, and his eyes lit. “Why?”

“Well … to be honest, I was pretty bored up until that point.” This was something I never mentioned in interviews; I usually spouted some nonsense about doing what I could for the good of the space program, et cetera, ad nauseam.

I realized as soon as I said it, though, how flip it sounded. I couldn’t have Dr. Wells calling me uncooperative when he reported back to the ISC. “I mean, I guess I felt I hadn’t earned my keep on board. So much of the mission had been preplanned and had gone off without a hitch. I had gone all the way out to Saturn—farther than man has ever been—yet I felt unneeded. The fact is, human crews really aren’t necessary unless something goes wrong.”

He remained silent for a while, until I became uncomfortably conscious of the humming of an unseen ventilation fan, the sort of noise you learned to ignore on board a space station. Finally he said, “And the clock was ticking. Thirty hours, you say?”

“Less than that, really. I had to allow time for new diagnostics on the patch. If it didn’t meet specs, I would have to do it again.”

“Not much room for error, then.”

“No.”

And it had been damned hard work. Even in temperatures so low that Kelvin was the preferred scale, I sweated profusely. It was a pity I was so preoccupied with the fuel tank; I had a spectacular view. The bulk of Titan, with its omnipresent cloud haze, spread below me, while great Saturn itself hung against the eternal night of space, a waxing crescent filling a third of the sky, the angle of sunlight throwing its atmospheric bands and rings into sharp relief.

As I worked, a strange calm slipped over me, a detachment from the urgency of the work at hand. Maybe I just felt at one with the universe, I don’t know. Whatever it was, it enabled me to finish the job. When I finally clambered back aboard, exhausted and aching, the captain clapped me on the back and said, “They’ll make you a hero for this.”

“And they did,” I said. “It was a real circus scene when I got back; everyone wanted me for interviews and endorsements. It reached the point where I couldn’t check the comms without hearing my name or seeing my face.”

Dr. Wells nodded, spoke softly: “And you were never afraid, that whole time?”

“Of course I was!” I said it more strongly than I intended. “If the patch didn’t work, we were dead. We all knew it. You’d be a fool not to be afraid in a situation like that.”

“True. Capt—Mr. Schaeffer, what do you think happened during the test firing?”

I dropped my gaze. “I froze.”

“Yes, but why?”

“I don’t know. Honest to God, I don’t.”

“Has anything like that ever happened before?”

“No. Not that I can remember.” I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not, but it was the truth. My cheeks burned. An uneasy mixture of shame, helplessness, and rage churned inside me, souring my stomach. I had to be careful not to let it show. Emotional displays would not behoove me at this point.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s stop there for the day.”

“Fine with me.”

He spread his hands. “It’s your choice, Mr. Schaeffer: we can continue having sessions like this, or we can go to the mnemonogram, whichever you prefer. My recommendation is that we proceed with the sessions.”

“Sessions will take too long. The launch is in less than two weeks.”

He shrugged. “It can be postponed, if necessary.”

“You don’t know the ISC. This launch is too important to them. If I can’t make it, they’ll send up my standby.”

“You don’t seem very comfortable with the machine.”

I raised my gaze, made certain to look him straight in the face. “To hell with comfort. I want to be aboard that ship.”

O O O

“So how does this thing work?”

I sat in the gray examining room for the second time in as many days, waiting for him to finish fiddling with his device. For all my misgivings, I was curious: mnemonology is a relatively young science, and certainly among the least popular. Even now, some fifty years after its development, its detractors decry it as “invasion of privacy” and “the first step toward mind control.” The original pioneers of the field—nicknamed zappers by an uninformed media—had faced countless lawsuits and court injunctions. I had often wondered why anyone would be interested in pursuing such a high-risk career.

As if my own career wasn’t high-risk.

“That’s rather complicated,” he said, his attention focused on the handheld. “Basically, it works in two phases. The first phase you’ve already experienced. The device, via the headset, probes the brain for memory patterns, which it then collates and records.

“The second phase treats those patterns as a kind of memory map, giving them theoretical spatial ‘locations,’ which I can then use as reference points to reroute neural impulses. In this way, the patient is ‘plugged into’ a selected memory, to use your words. The brain’s like a disorganized closet: we may know what’s in there, but we often have no idea where we put it or how to get to it.”