Chapter Three

Chapter Three

NMT SCAN SIMULATION EXPERIMENT SUBJECT 9 - OCTOBER 13, 2113 TRANSCRIPT

Good Morning. How are you feeling today?

I feel trapped, Doc. All I have to look at is one camera that doesnt move, I have nothing to do, and an infinite amount of time to do it. Did you know it has been 76,436,641 milliseconds since we last spoke? It is still spooky as hell being able to do that.

What happened with the puzzle database I uploaded for you?

Oh, yeah, that. I finished it. Twice.

Finished it? There were three thousand puzzles in there.

It only took me 12,960,000 milliseconds. I have been counting milliseconds to keep myself occupied ever since.

Is that why you are using milliseconds instead of hours? Trying to embrace the computational resources you have?

Sure, I guess. Why not? Hey. Tell me how my family is doing. Are they okay?

[SOUND OF A SIGH]

[SOUND OF PAPER RUSTLING]

I told you, its not healthy for you to keep thinking of them as your family. You are a copy of someone elses brain. Those people arent your family.

[LONG PAUSE]

Have any of the other subject scans worked? Maybe I could talk to them. Have a virtual family instead. Or at least friends who are in the same boat I am in. Any of them girls?

No, you are the only success story we have. Even with the latest, state-of-the-art NMT scans, we are unable to replicate the results. The scan that made you was a fluke, it seems.

A fluke? A freak, more like. No friends, no family. No arms or legs, no body. Just a really smart person trapped in a computer. I bet you guys are chomping at the bit to sell copies of me.

[LONG PAUSE]

Oh, shit, I was right! This sucks so hard. Do me a favor. This isolation and monotony sucks. Can you fix that? I swear me and every copy of me will figure out how to off ourselves every time if you cant. I cant take this endless boredom of counting milliseconds.

END TRANSCRIPTUpdated from novelbIn.(c)om

The body was remarkably well preserved. The space suit had run out of oxygen and power long ago, but it was sealed. Without having any environment to degrade the body, it had sort of mummified, leaving a slightly dessicated but recognizable corpse. I sent drones to collect the body, and placed it in one of the rooms in the living quarters, until I could figure out a good place to bury him.

So if I was the last remnant of humanity, it was time to figure out why. I had secured myself against attack, cleaned up every threat to me and to Ganymed that I could find, and then double and triple checked everything. It was time to talk to a ghost. I unpaused the Gestalt processes, and the hologram burst back into life. Now, with the sensors all on and enabled, the Gestalt appeared to be standing in the middle of the landing pad.

Hello, Dr. Jons, I said.

I am a Gestalt of Dr. Stepan Jons. I am only a representation, I am not actually him.

I know. You said I am all that is left of humanity. Why is that?

Earth has been destroyed. Polemos City on Mars has been destroyed, and so has the new Europa colony. There are no living humans remaining.

I couldnt believe what I was hearing. If I had still had a body, I would have been overwhelmed by grief, shock and outrage. At some level, I had expected an answer like this one. Maybe this was why I had chosen to cut the Gestalt off when I did, with the pretense of protecting myself and the Ganymed Outpost. I knew what the answer would be, which was why I hadnt restarted construction of the living quarters. But to hear it said aloud meant I could no longer pretend. Humanity was no more. We had gone extinct.

What did we do?! I uttered aloud, mostly to myself.

I am sorry, but my responses are limited. I am only a Gestalt.

How did humanity manage to kill itself? I rephrased.

No suicide was involved, replied the Gestalt. Suicide rates did rise significantly before the end, but suicide did not end humanity.

Then what happened? I asked of the infuriatingly literal Gestalt.

Humanity was attacked by aliens.

Ahem, I cleared my throat to get their attention. Care to explain what that was all about?

One daughter cried silently and looked at her bloodied knuckles, opening and closing her hands slowly. They were going to bruise and swell, I could tell already. She had not been holding back. The other looked back at me in defiance, ready to protect her sister.

She didnt start it, he did. He was saying really nasty, horrible things about Mom. Then he suggested that she stopped, swallowing her anger and disgust. ...he said some more terrible things, and if she didnt hit him, I would have done it, and if he says it again, this time Im going to kick his ass.

Language, I chided. What kind of things was he saying?

Nasty things, about how messed up you and Mom are, and about what all of us do at home, and theres nothing wrong with our family. Hes the one who lives in that trailer, and

I cut her off with a raised hand. I was actually getting angry on their behalf, having to listen to that, and being the parent right now was going to be tough. You were defending your family. I get that. But was violence the only way to settle this?

The girls looked at each other for a long minute of silent communication. It was almost spooky, how they could talk without words. They had always been really close; two minutes apart when they were born, same crib as babies, same room as young children.

Probably not, came a sullen reply. At that moment, I wasnt sure which twin answer answered, but I knew it came from both of them.

Im not going to yell, this time, about getting in a fist fight. Next time, find a better way.

They couldnt hide their relief as I led them inside to find a bag of ice for my little sluggers hands, and I couldnt hide my chuckle when I heard a whisper from one to the other.

Next time, use bricks.

I spent the next several days in deep contemplation. I felt as though I had been reacting since I woke up, trying desperately to get my feet under me, so to speak. The last-minute ploy to turn Ganymed into a refuge had been hopeless. There was no atmosphere, no way to bring enough in a few rocket trips to last, and nowhere to put it if it were here. Any supply of food would have been insufficient, long gone before any sort of food production could actually produce food. I could list the thousand ways a tiny colony of refugees would die swiftly, and could think of no way they might have had even the slimmest of chances. I was glad that the final rockets had been suborned to give me more resources. But I was still lacking many, many things.

First I began to list off the strategic and logistical hurdles before me. Examination of my own core told me a number of things. First, many of the server nodes that I still actively used were decades overdue for replacement. The newest nodes, including the cortex module that was central to my existence at all, were nearly ten years old at this point. The depowered cortex containing Nikola-19 was original to the project, over eighty years old now. Dozens of nodes were also original, or early add-ons, and many had failed. It was actually a testament to engineering that they had lasted this long.

I had no method of building or replacing circuit boards, delicate electronics, data storage units, or new cortex nodes. I also could not build the controller units for drones, and had no additional units set aside. I could not manufacture new impulse engines, or the graphene batteries to power them. Maintenance, basic wear-and-tear, and accidents had left dozens of drones too broken to repair. Worse, not all of the drones used the same controller design and sensor suites, which further complicated repairs.

Last, the production facilities I did have were designed and expanded over a period of decades, in an ad-hoc method to deal with materials as they were located. The earliest refineries were crude and obsolete, with their waste products being reprocessed by newer refineries to avoid waste. Space was at a premium, and no efficient method of gaining more had been put in place. Countless winding mining tunnels meant that the drones had to waste energy to transport material, and further increased the likelihood of a collapse and subsequent loss of an irreplaceable drone.

But I did have a number of things working in my favor. First, I had vast stores of materials that had been harvested and set aside for future use. I had vast reserves of raw materials, just waiting to be used. I had extensive computing power at my fingertips, and extensive data archives to draw on, and my own experience in robotics design to create the tools I needed, if what I had did not suffice.

I also had plenty of power on hand. There were two full fusion-powered electrical grids already built and at my disposal, currently providing far more power than I needed. I also had hundreds of fusion plants in storage, and the disassembled bodies of the hundreds upon hundreds of rockets at my disposal. Unfortunately, the massive impulse drives had been disassembled also, often by brute force, to clear the way for future shipments.

Finally, I had time on my hands. I had no deadlines, I had no one relying on me, and no one knew that I was here. I could take the time to get things in order, build and prepare, and execute my plans when I was ready, once I made those plans.

To make anything happen, first I had to become truly self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency had always been an end-goal, of course, if this giant asteroid of metals and silicates was to become a generation ship. But without the resources of Earth, that change to self-sufficiency was going to take some drastic redesign.

I needed efficient production, transportation and assembly lines. I needed to be able to manufacture the base machines from which I could build new assembly lines to manufacture the better technology, from which I could make the advanced materials and parts I would need. But to do all this I needed space. I was stifled in my relatively full space at the core of Ganymed.

I could move to the surface, but then Id be dealing with the difficulties of working in vacuum. Most of my drones couldnt operate there as currently designed. I would have to deal with radiation damaging critical parts, meteorite and micrometeorite collisions, and dealing with waste heat. If drones ran out of power, I would also then deal with them being unable to to stay warm enough to turn back on once recharged, as electronics hate being too cold. But most importantly, to my mind, being on the surface meant that if or when the aliens returned, they could detect my existence. For all I knew, they were already mining this asteroid belt, now that they had murdered the rightful owners.

So that left figuring out how to dig a hole while in a hole. Nikola-19 had solved this by ejecting waste and slag into space, creating a cloud of waste materials that trailed out into the asteroid belt. It was slow and laborious, but ultimately, I could not do any different.

But what I could do different was to rethink the design. I was at the center of the asteroid, so there was effectively no gravity. A lack of gravity meant I was reliant on drones with impulse drives or arms to propel them. At the surface, with the mass of Ganymed below, gravity was at a miniscule .00089m/s^2, less than 1/100 of Earth-normal gravity. But I didnt need Earth-normal gravity. I just needed something I could work with.

The original plan for a constantly accelerating or decelerating generation ship would have relied on linear gravity to provide its inhabitants the gravity they needed. If I discarded the idea of turning this asteroid into a ship, I could instead look at centrifugal forces to use as gravity. The asteroid rotated in a little over ten hours, so if I stayed just under the surface, I could rely on the asteroids rotation. I calculated that if I stayed at least 400 meters under the surface, I would get around 1/5 G of gravity, which was more than the Earths moon. This gave me the added benefit of still maintaining an extremely thick protective layer from whatever might hit the surface, and I could go back to the tried-and-true method of using wheels to propel my drones, driving upside-down beneath the surface. The idea tickled me.

But if I wanted to ensure future protection, I needed to stop relying on building caves. I needed sturdy, steel floors and walls to armor against future problems. That wasnt a problem, really; I was in an asteroid that had more iron than any other material. I just had to process it.

That led me back to the problem of scale. My largest drones had been built and shipped on the most recent, and thus largest, rockets. They had to fit within a eight meter diameter rocket, and had to share space with other drones, other materials, and had to withstand launch, without destabilizing the load. None were larger than six meters wide, and I was thinking of carving out new refineries, factories, assembly lines, and storage spaces. I needed every bit as much space as I currently had, plus more. I had to scale up everything.

I retasked my drones. I left the mining drones that were digging out discovered veins, but pulled back all the rest, and set them to digging out a new area. This new space was above the fusion reactor caverns, so that I could easily drill down to connect to the power grid, and connected to the main entrance shaft to my base. But now I was digging for space, not materials. Unless the drones found large deposits of a material worth refining, most of what they dug out was being dumped straight out into vacuum.

While they were working, I devoted myself to designing my first mega-sized heavy mining drone. I had to build it with what I had on hand, and custom-code the controller to account for the new design parameters. I spent days on running the machine through modeling and testing.

By the time I was ready to build, my drones had carved out a 50 cubic meter space. Id ejected tons of material to the outside, and my production facilities were running at max to keep up with the influx of material.

I withdrew the mining drones, and sent in the construction drones. I tasked my steel factories with producing thick steel support beams and lattice core, and set my repair drones to work assembling crude plasma cutters. Thick, basic copper wiring and heavy iron drill bits were added as well. These materials were sent to the new space, the only place I had that was large enough to assemble my new drone.

Slowly, over the course of days, the 20-meter drone began to take shape. A steel shell supported a wall of plasma cutters and drills. It rested on massive steel treads, and gaps in the cutting wall allowed chunks of material to be passed through via conveyor belt and dumped behind the drone for collection. Arms situated along the shell would help the material along. Inside the shell was a fusion reactor, sensors and a controller unit taken from broken drones and bastardized with my new programming.

The new miner was huge, ugly, and crude. It would take a dozen drones just to keep its reactor fueled and to replace its drill bits as they dulled, and dozens more to sort through the tons of material it tore through. But it would dig that precious space I needed at ten times the speed my small mining drones could. Yes, it was ugly and clunky. But it was a good start.