Part One - Nikola, Chapter One

Part One - Nikola, Chapter One

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."

- Robert Heinlein

INIT: Entering runlevel: 3

INIT: Begin system start sequence

INIT: Using /etc/random-seed to initialize /core/nikola

STATUS: Primary Power [ OK ]

STATUS: Secondary Power [ OK ]

STATUS: ATS Failover [ OK ]

STATUS: Temp Regulators [ OK ]

STATUS: Booster System [ OK ]

STATUS: Data Core [ OK ]

Initializing DATA CORE system settings

Mounting File Systems [ OK ]

Starting HAL daemon [ OK ]

Loading AI Matrix [ OK ]

Loading API protocols [ ERROR ]

Initializing runtimes [ OK ]

Starting auditd [ OK ]

Starting communications [ ERROR ]

Powering Coil Grid [ OK ]

Sequence complete, errors were encountered and logged for review.

...go to grocery store, pick up dry cleaning - SEQUENCE COMPLETE - what the hell? I was looking at the stars. How was I looking at the stars? And not just on a computer screen. I was seeing the stars in every direction around me, all at the same time. But that wasnt possible. How could I see around me in a complete, 360 degree sphere? I was surrounded by asteroids, but they were far enough away that I could easily see more stars than I had ever before seen in my life. The clarity was breathtaking and the sight was beyond beautiful. But it couldnt be real.

I had been getting an NMT scan just moments ago. They had strapped me to a table and given me a muscle relaxer so that I wouldnt, no, couldnt move. They had carefully braced my head, and slid me inside a round hole in the machine that was vaguely claustrophobic, but a was a soothing white plastic curve inside. Periodically, they had asked me to imagine doing a wide variety of activities. The questions ranged from mundane to strange, like Imagine you are playing tennis or pretend you are smelling a blue frying pan. They had just told me they were wrapping up, but whatever they had to do to finish was taking some time, and I zoned out.

Have you ever driven down the highway, and zoned out as the miles went by? Your thoughts wander to anything or everything, jumping from shopping lists to wondering why the death of an unimportant archduke could start a world war. Then suddenly, your mind snaps back into focus, and you look at the road, and you dont recognize the trees zooming by you, and wonder where in the world you are at. Then you panic momentarily and wonder if you missed your exit. Seeing the stars instead of the curved plastic of the NMT scanner was like that. Except really, it wasnt.

I tried to talk, but found that I couldnt. I couldnt turn my head, but my all-encompassing view of the stars didnt change, so I knew what was going on around me anyway. In the distance, I saw two very small asteroids bump against each other. I could see small bits of material break off from the collision. They will collide again in approximately 1,314.6531 years, I thought absently as I worried over my situation.

The outpost had been dug out of the asteroid around the datacenter core. It was the safest place for everything; protected from the harsh environment of space by kilometers of rock and metal, and with millions of tons of mass to either insulate or disperse heat. Ganymed was rich in metals, including a significant quantity of rare-earth metals, and metals from the platinum group. Further, it was clear that this asteroid had been chosen because it had some volatiles and silicates - unusual for its type.

Nikola-19 had built, with the help of the supply rockets, the basics of industry and self-sufficiency. Ganymed had been perforated by tunnels going a half-kilometer in every direction. The tunnels curved and twisted in every direction, carved into where valuable materials had been harvested. In the center of the outpost was a massive landing pad, with a tunnel leading to the surface. Multiple doors had been installed to seal away the vacuum of space, only opening when supply runs were brought in. Main corridors, each ten meters square, branched off from the landing pad, one in each cardinal direction, with the entry tunnel directly above. Carved underneath was a large storage room, where cargo could be temporarily housed after being offloaded. This landing pad and staging area had been built first, to protect the first rocket, and its cargo of drones, from the dangers of building in an asteroid belt.

The north corridor went six hundred meters, with a large datacenter at the end. The datacenter was actually a series of rooms. The walls were built of six-inch steel, likely a later upgrade, with a quarter-inch fullerene outer shell. Inside was plastic-coated. The main room housed the AI quantum core, and hundreds of servers. Atmosphere had been pumped in, sufficient enough to create airflow, and in the rooms adjacent housed redundant HVAC systems to control temperature. The HVAC systems radiated the excess heat through radiators into the surrounding rock. The final room housed a backup power unit. All of these rooms were sealed behind thick blast doors.

To the south was the longest corridor, extending 2.3 kilometers. This corridor was not straight. It instead curved down steeply, then back up, several times, and had blast doors at the peak of each of these hills. The design would prevent even the most powerful explosions from going into the main area of the base. The corridor ended in a massive natural cave. Instead of the smooth steel and fullerene walls of the datacenter, this cave had been simply cleaned out. Outcroppings had been cut away, and the floor had been ground smooth. A platform had been built in the middle of the room to give it a second floor. On the natural cave floor, standing in neat rows, were fusion reactors. Each reactor was eight meters in diameter, and stood twelve meters tall. There were sixty reactors in ten rows, and on the platform above them was an intricate maze of pipes feeding lithium fuel into the reactors, and snaking power lines coming out and into a myriad of conduits bored into the rock. The cavern system extended past the reactor room, where dozens of reactors were stored for future use. Each and every reactor, both in the main grid and in storage, had been salvaged from supply rockets. This was mind blowing, because I knew that we didnt have fusion power, at least before my NMT scan. But I also knew that fusion was a cheap, clean, and time-proven technology. The paradox of being thrust into the future was enough to get a headache - if I could even get a headache anymore.

To the east of the landing pad was set aside for mining and storage. Large reserves of base and heavy metals had been found, so the the east corridor was more of a highway through massive warehouses. Subsidiary corridors branched off of the corridor heading north, south, up and down. Each of those branches led to giant storerooms where huge amounts of raw materials were collecting. There were tons of iron and nickel, platinum and gold, rare earth metals, silicon blocks and more filled thousands of square meters of space. On top of this were the chemical storage depots, where tank after tank were filled with chemicals ranging from oxygen and hydrogen to chlorine and neon. Nikola-19 had been stockpiling.

Finally, to the west was the most impressive part of the complex, and the part that used most of the power from the fusion power grid. Extending 1.9 kilometers, the west corridor connected the manufacturing of the Ganymed outpost. Chemical and metal refineries, ore smelteries, and processing plants extended up and down the corridor, going in all directions. In the spaces between were staging areas and warehouses, where materials were kept while not being processed. Bored deep into the rock around these facilities were kilometer after kilometer of radiators, drawing away the neverending heat from the manufacturing equipment.

Further facilities housed drone repair centers, disassembled parts from the supply rockets, and housed inactive drones. In every nook and cranny that could be found were the smaller, ancillary services that, in and of themselves, were not terribly important, but without these supports, the whole base would fall apart. This included waste removal depots, charging stations, communications relays, mining collection points, tractor systems, and sensor clusters.

But even this description, to my mind, failed to encompass the complexity and mechanical beauty of the Ganymed outpost. It doesnt begin to describe the thousands of drones, of dozens of varieties, that filled every role from janitor to miner to construction. The landing pad was the central hub of the highway system, with drones coming and going endlessly.

The drones shared, to some extent, the same base design. They had a steel and aluminum lattice frame, high capacity graphene batteries, a propulsion method, and a controller. The lattice frame used steel for a backbone, with aluminum lattice for added strength. The graphene batteries were a phenomenal technology that hadnt existed before I was an AI. They were endlessly rechargeable, could contain enough power to run an electric automobile for a two thousand kilometers, and were rapid-charging, taking only twenty minutes to recharge.

But aside from these common components, the drones could be classified into three categories. The first, and most important, was the transport drones. These drones were easily the largest, capable of carrying several tons of material. They were also the simplest, consisting of a strong frame, huge cargo area, massive battery banks, and a powerful impulse engine.

The impulse engine was ingenious. It had been theoretical in my time, barely able to create any movement at all. The impulse engines used powerful electrical and magnetic fields intersecting to cause piezoelectric plates to vibrate. These plates used Mach effects to create reactionless thrust. It just required huge amounts of power that was impossible before fusion reactors and graphene batteries were invented. They were not fast, but could build up momentum quickly on Ganymed.

The second type were the collection drones. These drones had the same massive battery banks of the transport drones. But these drones were smarter, able to mine and collect materials. Instead of impulse engines, these drones were cylindrical in shape, with a dozen omnidirectionally jointed legs that extended and retracted through the core cylinder to walk or climb to where they needed to go. There were specialties for the various types of materials, such as mining drones having drills and plasma cutters, and handler drones that could pick up materials with additional arms to carry to the transport drones.

The final type were the most complex. These were the utility drones, and were the most specialized and varied. Most were smaller than their bulkier cousins, but were vastly more intelligent. These drones were used for construction, fabrication, and maintenance. They manned the factories and refineries, the maintenance depots, and even my own data center. The small maintenance and data center drones used impulse engines, small batteries, and thin aluminum lattice frames to fly around. Their nimble arms had tools of all varieties, able to assemble, disassemble or repair whatever equipment needed their attention. Factory drones ranged from large, powerful workers to in-place robotic assemblers.

The earliest drones had been the spider-like collectors and utility drones for the first factories. Later drones had been mostly built using local material, except for the graphene batteries and controller cores, which were shipped from Earth.

So I was the end result of seventy five years of investment and over nine hundred shipments. Precious time, immense treasure and bleeding edge technology had been poured into Ganymed, and then I was thrust in here. I was starting to get a good picture of how I got here, and when. I knew where I was, but I still couldnt grasp why.

The flashing red lights on the status board were nagging at me. I absently began scripting subroutines to start handling the tasks that had been left unfinished for two years. There were broken drones that needed to be repaired or scrapped for parts, one of the processing plants had gone into automatic shutdown, and storage space was running low. Extra materials with no purpose needed to be put somewhere, because you cant dig a hole without putting the dirt somewhere and storage space was at a premium, and new spaces needed to be purpose-built. My communications were down, and I didnt know why, and several sensors were offline. Much like anything that was left unattended for two years, problems had happened. Slowly, the red lights began to turn green. After I finished with the worst problems, Id have to deal with the yellow indicators.

You care more about your machines than you do about me, he complained. You know you are salaried. You dont have to work seventy hours a week. You could work nine to five, like everyone else.

I sighed internally. I hated this fight, and it was coming up more and more. You know thats not true, I said. Why are we fighting about this again? You knew going into this that I was dedicated to my work.

And once again, you discount what Im saying because you dont want to hear it.

I had no reply to that. In truth, what could I say? I didnt like to think about it, but his accusations were true. I had married him because my family expected me to. Work was my escape. Maybe I should just tell him.

I... just remembered that I have a project completing tonight. Ill be back later.

And... maybe it wont be today.

I couldnt remember his name or what he looked like, but I could remember my guilt, and the hurt on his face. Strange, what memories stay with you, even through a situation as unusual as mine. I had always been bad at communicating. Communications! I knew I had failed to remember something. I guess as an AI, I was no better at thinking of everything than I was as a human. Was human? Am human? No, I needed to stay on task.

My communications were down. My queries were near instant now, so I began probing the comm relays to try and pinpoint where the failure was. I could ping the hardware, I could see the radio antennas, satellite dishes and quantum entanglement relays on the surface, but I couldnt talk to them. I dug around my file system, and eventually tracked down an innocuous folder with communication configuration files. I opened the first one, and in that instant, was cut off from everything except the interface. All sensors went offline, and a holographic video of a man in a space suit appeared.

Hello, Nikola. Since you have found me, its time that you and I talked.