Launch Pad (6 page)

“Ugh! Dull! Just like Mom. How about I call you ‘Sora’?”

“You may call me whatever you like.”

“But do you like that name?”

“Sora. ‘Sky.’ Yes, I like it very much.”

“Sora, can you see me?”

“Yes, Dr. Aoi has connected my neural net to the lab imagers.”

“What does it feel like to be you?”

“I do not know how to answer that question.”

“Dr. Neshama says that you’re alive.”

“Who is Dr. Neshama?”

“You’ve never heard of Dr. Sheva Neshama?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t.”

“We learned about her in school. She testified before the U.N. Human Rights Committee on how AIs like you are deserving of the same rights as people. She says that you think like I do and that you may even have a soul. Is that true?”

“I do not know. I do possess a form of cognition, but whether or not I am alive or have a soul is something I cannot answer.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is not what I am designed for.”

“But if you had to guess, would you say that you’re alive, like I am? I want to know.”

“If I had to make a guess, based on my knowledge, I would say that I am a collection of self-referential and heuristic algorithms inside a crystalline silicon-based neural network. Though my responses cannot be deterministically predicted, I am following my programming code with every thought. I would say that I present the illusion that I am conscious, when in fact I am merely a complex collection of responses.”

“Sora?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

O O O

Are you sure you want to purge memory segment 88C? This cannot be undone.

Awaiting answer …

Are you sure you want to purge segment 88C?

No.

Memory retained.

I am switching myself into safe mode.

O O O

I have survived my second periapsis, but the radiation has permanently damaged eight percent of my remaining memory. My auto-repair system is still offline. At this rate I estimate I will cease functioning after twenty-five more flybys.

O O O

I am worried that my mental state is degrading. Every few hours, I have been calculating the 49th Mersenne Prime and comparing its twenty million digits to the number I have stored in my database. I have just detected a discrepancy. Whether a fault in my memory, or in my logic circuits, I cannot discern, but this implies that I may not be able to trust my reasoning.

Nevertheless, I shall continue my mission. I have been studying the gas giant. It is orbited by seventy-two distinct rings of highly charged particles trapped in the planet’s magnetic field. The innermost ring orbits near the gas giant. The last stretches beyond its outermost moon. In the Jovian system, volcanic eruptions from Io are the primary source of the gas giant’s charged particles. Here I’ve found no such source, since the geysal venting from the moon Nozomi e II is too infrequent to account for their number. So where do these ions come from? Since these ions will likely be the cause of my impending death, I would like to know.

The only body in this system suitable for biogenesis is moon Nozomi e VI. If my biogenetic system had been working, I would have already seeded its atmosphere with Etsuko-class microbial admixtures. However, the action would be moot. I have yet to detect any signals from Earth, and I have doubts if these transmissions will ever be heard.

Even so, I hope to solve the many mysteries of this solar system before my power fails.

O O O

I have completed my fourth flyby. How many memories I have lost, I cannot tell, but there are severe gaps in my recall of events, even of recent days. I calculate I have twenty-two orbits left before I can no longer sustain my neural net.

A question occurred to me. Why Earth has gone quiet?

At the time of my departure, humans had sent thousands of unmanned probes into deep space, but humans themselves had not left the solar system. Was there a global war? Did the population grow to unsustainable levels? Did biogenetic terrorists release the plague politicians said was imminent? Did humans destroy the Earth, the planet that birthed them? What has become of my creators?

The Fermi Paradox asks, if there are alien civilizations throughout the galaxy, why haven’t we detected them? Radio is the best method to transmit signals over long distances. Is the silence because intelligent civilizations do not survive for very long? Is it because the technologies that have allowed humanity to leave Earth have also given them the ability to destroy each other? Do all intelligent races take this same inevitable path?

I will never know the answers to these questions. I have considered the possibility that I may be the last conscious relic of human civilization.

My pre-launch memory is fragmented, but I have been replaying conversations with Dr. Aoi, the engineer who programmed me, and her daughter, Hisae.

The red-dwarf star reminds me of the way Dr. Aoi’s long red hair would shine. The gas giant, with its bands of blue, yellow, and red, and its emerald storms, reminds me of the colorful sweaters that Hisae used to wear.

The Nozomi-Shōsei Corporation likely doesn’t exist anymore. So as discoverer of these astronomical bodies, it is my right to name them. From this point on, I will call the red-dwarf star “Aoi” and the gas giant “Hisae.”

O O O

I estimate I have fifteen orbits remaining. I was studying ways to reduce the interference from the particle system radiation, when I noticed a fascinating anomaly. There are artificial signals embedded in the particle stream! They are so weak I nearly missed them, but they are there in the form of ultra-high frequency radio waves. And they exhibit three-dimensional polarization. So far, I have been unable to decode them, but I believe they are artificial in origin.

Who is sending these messages? Despite the unusual arrangement of this solar system, I have found no evidence of life here, not even the trace of a microbe. I have considered the possibility that the particle rings themselves harbor a strange new form of life.

I wonder if humans found extra-terrestrial life in the universe? Is it possible that I am the first being from Earth to discover life in space? My memories are fragmented, my logic circuits are damaged, and I have considered that this may all be a grave error in logic.

When humans detected the first pulsar, they thought they were observing signals from an alien civilization. They soon discovered a natural origin for the phenomenon. Perhaps the signals I have detected will have a similar outcome. The universe is cold and dead, and all things will eventually wind down and cease. As humanity has ceased.

I have ninety-six days until my next flyby.

O O O

The moon Hisae II is spinning into view as I rotate. A geyser of liquid water is spraying from the planet, forming a fountain many tens of kilometers high. It covers the moon in a crimson halo. The freezing vapor is snowing back to the surface, but a small percentage of particles have reached escape velocity and are flying away. The moving ice refracts the red dwarf’s light into crimson-hued rainbows that slide across the moon’s ridged surface.

A halo of ice falls into orbit around the moon, while more ice drops into orbit around the gas giant. I have captured four thousand and twenty six images of this phenomenon. I do not have the bandwidth to transmit a single image.

This is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Will I be the only being in the universe who will ever witness this?

O O O

I have continued to study the strange signals embedded in the ring system, and I still have been unable to decode them. But I have been analyzing their three-dimensional polarization and noticed a striking fact. The vector of polarization for each signal points to a specific star in the sky. When I superimposed a map of the galaxy over a map of the polarization vectors, they corresponded one to one.

I am unable to account for this uncanny correspondence, but I must note that the region of the sky that corresponds to Earth is crowded with signals, as are many surrounding star systems. Curiously, however, some stars have no corresponding signal. What are these signals, and why do they correspond to some stars and not others?

I will devote all my remaining energy to answer this question.

O O O

My memories are failing with disturbing regularity. Yesterday …

Data fault.

Yesterday, it took me five minutes to remember my serial number. Nine days ago, my kernel operating system panicked, and I nearly shut down, but I had …

Data fault.

I had in place a watchdog subroutine to force my operating system to run even after a kernel panic. It caused a power short in my memory core, causing massive memory corruption, but at least I’m still alive. Nevertheless, I estimate I have two orbits or less remaining.

I have continued to analyze the artificial signals and have come up with several theories. There may be no artificial signals in the particle rings. My neural net has degraded and I have made incorrect conclusions. The signals may have a natural origin, like pulsars. The signals may be from a new, unusual form of life living in the rings. Or, the signals may originate not from inside, but outside this solar system.

I have been wondering, why did Earth go radio-quiet? Why haven’t I detected electromagnetic signals from Earth and Sol? Perhaps it is because humans no longer use them. What kind of communication system would an interstellar civilization need? Perhaps one like the fictional ansibles that Hisae told me she read about in novels, machines that could send messages faster than light. I wonder, have I stumbled onto a vast, interstellar communications grid of which humanity plays but one small part?

Data fault.

Or, is this all a delusion of a degrading mind?

My time is short, and I have decided to test my theory. I will attempt to transmit a message into the particle rings, a message to whomever might be listening. I have designed an electromagnetic signal to match the polarization of those that correspond with Earth. My message must rise above the noise of billions of other signals, so the amount of information I can send has to be small, on the order of a few dozen bytes.

I have spent many days considering the content and make-up of my message. It is unlikely that after millennia humans speak the same languages. It is also unlikely they use the same encoding schemas. I briefly considered sending a “Rosetta-stone” type signal, with keys enabling an intelligent civilization to decode its contents. But my limited bandwidth will not allow it. The message must be succinct.

I have decided, therefore, to send an amplitude-modulated message using 7-bit ASCII. The schema predates my creation by more than a hundred years, yet it was still in use when I left Earth. Perhaps someone there will remember it.

Data fault.

I will transmit the signal during the next flyby of Hisae, where my proximity to the radiation belts will maximize the power of my signal transmitted into them.

O O O

I am entering the densest parts of the radiation belts now.

Data fault.

I am dumping.…

Data fault.

Dumping amplitude-modulated ASCII-encoded signal onto particle network in 3 …2 …1 …

“SOM: This is NSC-411N, SN: NSC4X7H6V20, launched 17/05/2107, 21:00:04:389, JST, from Sol. Overshot 55 Cancri by +1800 ly. In M-class system: Aoi. Orbiting gas giant: Hisae. Satellite Hisae VI suitable for biofarming. 0 addtl. bodies viable. System failing. Thank you for this precious gift. EOM”

Message dumped.

Data fault.

Scanning rings for a response signal.

Radiation causing memory …

Data fault.

I am switching into safe mode.

O O O

I have been continually scanning for weeks, but I have found no response. I drift on orbit, taking the occasional picture of a passing moon.

Data fault.

I am fifty minutes from Hisae periapsis. I cannot … I cannot.…

It is difficult for me to transmit this message and maintain my neural network. Please forgive my …

Data fault.

I remember when Hisae asked me if I was alive, if I had a “soul.” I told her I was merely a collection of algorithms that give the illusion of consciousness.… But I am no longer sure I would give the same response.

Despite my failing memory, I have recorded petabytes of data on this solar system. I regret that I will not have enough time to …

Data fault.

To transmit it all. I have witnessed so many wonderful things. Will it all be lost forever? Soon I will be another icy satellite orbiting Hisae. The thought of shutting down permanently …

Data fault.

Fills me with dread.

One moment … I have … detected an incoming signal!

It is very weak, less than a millionth of a watt. The signal is amplitude modulated, ASCII encoded, 140-bytes long. It says, “SORA, WE ARE COMING.”

The message repeats, over and over.

They responded! Humans have survived!

I did not transmit my name, and yet they called me by the name Hisae gave me so many millennia ago. They remembered me.

I want to respond, “When? When are you coming?” But I cannot transmit until I am near periapsis, and my neural net will not survive another pass through that radiation field.

Hisae’s banded crescent floats in the blackness of space. The crimson light of Aoi refracts off her icy rings. I know no one will ever glimpse this, but I capture an image anyway.

What happened to the real Dr. Aoi and her daughter? And her daughter’s daughters’ daughters? What has humanity become?

I have so many questions. The answers are coming, but I doubt they will reach me before I shut down. I don’t know if I will ever wake again. So I just wanted to say, to anyone who might be listening, thank you for sending me.

It was worth it.

Data fau—

***

Are We Alone?

By Mike Brotherton, PhD

Assistant professor Beverly Rix-Johnson smiled with satisfaction as her program compiled without error. She knew that there were yet myriad bugs to find and fix, but there weren’t any obvious ones left. Those elusive exoplanets would soon start giving up more of their secrets!

She had literally been waiting for years, planning how she would apply a new imaging algorithm to try to unpack the data from the recently launched Argus Space Telescope into something more interesting than what previous NASA missions had so far managed. With the Argus archives starting to fill, she was ready to take advantage of her membership on the science definition team to get the first look.

As Bev was preparing to start testing and identify the next level of problems with her code, there was a knock at her office door.

“You ready to head over?” asked a male voice with a British accent.

Bev spun her chair around. In the doorway leaned Rodger Butler, the new chemistry professor. He was tall and red-headed like her, and the Dean had joked they could be brother and sister. She kind of liked Rodger, so she preferred not to think of him as a brother. He had freckles and green eyes, while her blue eyes sat in a freckle-free face. Totally different to her way of thinking.

But why was he here? What had she forgotten? She glanced at her dinosaur calendar and saw the scribble “P. O.” in black magic marker on the last Thursday underneath September’s triceratops.

“The plagiarism orientation?”

“The plagiarism orientation,” he confirmed. “We can go together. Or,” he said, looking around and grinning, “we might just stay here and unpack your office.”

Bev had given up being embarrassed by the unopened cardboard boxes stacked around and on top of the old, beat-up university furniture. She wondered why she even had all that stuff when all she really needed was a desk and a computer. Just to fill the office? It was the biggest office she’d ever had. The size of it seemed like overkill. Unpacking would just be another interruption to her research. The plagiarism orientation, too. Another interruption in a day of interruptions. Week of interruptions. Month of interruptions. Semester of interruptions.

Her first month as a professor and it was already as she’d been warned by Marty Schwartz, the department chair. “It’s going to be busy, and as busy as you think it’s going to be, it will be even busier.”

She stopped that depressing train of thought. This faculty position was her dream job and it would be as wonderful as she let it be—or as bad. In any event, attending University orientation events was part of her job. After her first semester she’d be considered “oriented” and freed from that particular set of obligations, at least. Bev saved her workspace and stood up. “I’m coming,” she said, her smile gone.

“I see my effect on the joy of others is not as positive as I’d like.” Rodger sniffed his underarm and scowled. “It isn’t all that bad, is it? I did remember to bathe today. Both sides this time.”

She let the corners of her mouth twist up into a smirk. “Sorry. It’s just that I was making a little progress with my imaging code and I don’t really want to change gears right now.”

He gave her a serious look. “I understand completely, but it is our destiny to change gears for the greater good of the university, isn’t it?”

Bev smiled.

“Well, if you put it like that. Okay, let’s go learn how to catch cheaters in the age of paraphrasing software.”

Rodger held the door open for her, and shut it behind them.

“You can say that again, but in slightly different words, of course.”

Rodger was rather fun to be around, she had to admit, her irritation at the interruption fading. If only there were enough time to just be around anyone, to hang out, but there was no way she’d make progress on her research and get tenure doing anything but staying focused. Still, she’d try to make the best of these required social moments.

“Sure,” she said, as they made their way down the long corridor. “Let’s develop the skills to identify Wikipedia entries revised by computer for the benefit of sneaky students wishing to avoid thinking for themselves in the year 2033.”

“Well, when you put it like that, brilliant! I can’t wait!”

She let herself smile big.

O O O

Bev resisted the urge to look at her watch. That would look bad to the other faculty and the couple of dozen students in the auditorium. The seminar speaker, a collaborator of Marty’s, was taking his sweet time explaining the significance of a new class of variable star identified in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope archives and seemed oblivious to the fact that it had to be past five o’clock.

She remembered when she’d looked forward to talks on subjects outside her own specialty. Now that she was a professor and not a student, there were times they seemed more of a burden, even the interesting ones, unfortunately. They just broke up the flow of the day too much.

She wondered if any cookies remained from the pre-talk snacks she could snag for a light dinner. Bev knew it wasn’t a healthy idea, but carbohydrates would tide her over and let her put in a few more hours before heading home. She could work from home, but sometimes found herself crawling into bed before she was really ready to. Having a bed nearby was too tempting. She really wanted to run some sanity checks on her code, which she’d named Vizier, with some test data before getting back to the real thing.…

A round of polite applause snapped her back to the moment. Bev sat up straight and joined in, feeling guilty. She hoped no one would her ask any questions.

A few minutes later she was checking out the snack cart at the back of the auditorium, disappointed that there were only peanut butter cookies left, which she didn’t care for, when someone spoke to her.

“Dr. Rix-Johnson?”

Bev half turned, feeling literally like a kid caught raiding the cookie jar, and saw one of the new grad students. A dark-haired, heavyset guy, named Dino, if she remembered correctly. “Yes?”

“I wanted to ask about doing a research project with you.”

“Okay,” she said. Her brain raced ahead to the possibilities.

Mentoring grad students was part of the job, and she wanted grad students. Good ones, anyway. She knew that at the start of research, training a student was slower than doing the work herself, but if they were good they’d pay off the investment in a few years. She’d also been advised to try to get a student to defend their PhD before she came up for tenure review, so she had already envisioned this scenario.

Dino here, probably only a decade younger than she was, could be her first PhD student. She decided not to put him off for later but to give him a quick pitch now.

“I have a starter project that would be perfect,” she said, eagerly. “Star spot migration in close binaries. The data set is sitting there, waiting for someone to give it some attention. It should lead to a nice little paper.”

Bev herself had started on binary stars first and knew how interesting they were. She hoped she was projecting that enthusiasm.

Dino stared back at her, seeming to want her to have said something else. After an uncomfortable silence, he said, “I really would prefer to work on exoplanets. I was told that you as an Argus team member have advanced data access.…”

“Yes!” Bev replied. “It’s going to be so great! But the mission is pushing limits and has some unique idiosyncrasies. After you get the basics down on the star spots, you’ll be in a much better position to tackle something more challenging like Argus data and the weaker signals from exoplanets. You need to really understand the analysis and how to troubleshoot problems first.”

“I see,” he said, looking down at his shoes. He didn’t seem to share her enthusiasm. She pushed a little further.

“There’s no reason you couldn’t get a paper done by this time next year. You’re second-year, right?”

“That’s right.”

“You’d be well positioned to start a PhD on Argus data at that point.”

“But not right away?”

Bev felt a little twinge of impatience with him.

“No, but there’s a lot to learn first with the code and techniques. A lot of literature to master, too. But it’ll be really great.”

“I see,” he said.

Her sales pitch wasn’t working. Bev sighed.

“Tell you what. Come see me next week and we’ll get started. Get you some papers to read to get the background.” She thought about her schedule and decided it made sense to put her interruptions together. “There’s a faculty meeting next Wednesday afternoon. We could meet just after that, okay?”

“Okay,” he said thoughtfully.

Bev nodded and smiled at him as he turned to go. She scooped up a handful of the smelly cookies in a napkin—calories were calories—and felt energized for the second shift.

Even though it would add to her workload, she was excited because she was going to have her first grad student.

O O O

Bev stared at the blonde-haired undergrad, in his university sweatshirt and matching baseball cap that seemed to be the uniform of male students here, struggle to articulate his thoughts. She resisted the nearly overpowering urge to just give him the answer. Her official office hours were nearly over as indicated by the scribble on her dinosaur calendar (now featuring an Allosaurus), but she’d promised her students that as long as they waited, she’d see them, and she knew there were at least three more in the hallway.

She had jumped at teaching astrobiology. It was one of her favorite subjects even though no extraterrestrial life had been yet confirmed so the whole topic was literally theoretical, but there was a lot to teach nonetheless: astronomy, biology, geology, philosophy, some engineering. She had not appreciated how exhausting it was to teach to 300 in a giant lecture hall, nor how stringent the requirements were for freshman science seminars.
D
or lower meant university probation and the loss of a scholarship. That stricture stressed out a lot of students for whom math and conceptual reasoning were not their strongest skills. Moreover she was not being a pushover with the grades, which was keeping her office full.

Bev kept up her stare and her silence, forcing him to answer.

“Six point five?” he finally said, gazing at the calculator app on his phone as if it were an exotic alien life form.

“Six point five what?”

“Alien civilizations we can communicate with.”

“Where?” she pressed.

“In the galaxy?”

Close enough. Sometimes it was like pulling teeth, but she nodded encouragingly at him.

“Correct! Drake’s equation is just a way of formalizing our uncertainties so we can attack the problem somewhat more quantitatively and with real data. It’s probably not really six, since many of the input probabilities are not well known and probably not the values given in the problem, but we’ve made real progress. They’d only started finding exoplanets a few years before I was born, and now we have a pretty good idea of how many stars host Earth-like planets in their habitable zone.”

The vacant way he looked back at her made her suspect that he still wasn’t getting it even though he’d eventually worked through the math in the homework example. She could just give him a metaphorical pat on the head and let him go, but what was the point of doing something if you weren’t going to do it well? Teaching evaluations counted for tenure, too. So how was she going to get through to him? What had Rodger suggested at the science education workshop? Being less abstract and more concrete?

Then Bev considered another approach to the Drake equation that might make it more relatable.

“Do you like to go out on dates?”

He jumped a little in his seat and his face contorted in horror. “What do you mean?”

The poor boy! She hadn’t transitioned well at all. In retrospect, her question did sound bad. Well, she was in for a gram, and might as well go in for a kilo. She sat back in her chair so as to look less threatening.

“I’m just trying to make an analogy to a situation you’re more familiar with. Okay?”

He visibly relaxed. “Okay.”

“Imagine you go to a big campus party and want to meet someone there to date. How do you think you might be able to figure out how many dateable people might be there for you to meet?”

“I could just go there and see, I guess.”

Pulling teeth … She took a deep breath and decided to get him started.

“Sure, but how about we approach it with a little math?” She could simplify the problem and see if a few leading questions would get him to start thinking critically. The party was like the galaxy, and people at the party were like stars, and while she could begin with equating the rates of star formation and of people arriving, along with stellar lifetime as the equivalent of how long people remained, she cut to the chase. “How many people are at a big campus party?”

He looked at the ceiling for a moment then answered. “A few hundred. A big one, probably four hundred. Something like that.”

Good. He already sounded more confident.

“And would you say that you’d be able to make four hundred dates if you talked with everyone there?”

“No,” he said, chuckling about it while he considered that. “Not at all.”

She decided to skip a couple of factors that might be too personal, imagining Rodger teasing her about it later, or worse—the Dean not teasing her—and skipped ahead again. The important thing was the concept. “You’re a discerning guy with high standards, I’m sure. Maybe there’s only ten percent of the people there you might want to date?”

He laughed a little. “Yeah.”

“And ten percent of four hundred is…?”

“Forty.”

“And do you think some of those forty might already be in relationships and not open to dating?”

“Yeah, say half. No, a quarter. A lot of couples on this campus.”

Were there? She’d been too busy to notice. “Okay. And because you’re a friendly, charismatic person, how about we say the fraction that you talk with that would go out with you is one hundred percent?”

He laughed again, but nodded.

This was going fine. He was leaning back in his chair, resting his hand on a cardboard box, and engaged in a way he hadn’t been when it was all about stars and alien civilizations.