Together in Electric Dreams

Why have engines, I wondered. Why have sensors? The implication was, given time, the void might reveal something I could sense; somewhere I could go.

On the thirty-first of January twenty twenty-four I merged with a massive multi-modal hidden Markov model. It was trained on the standard human narratives; short stories, novels, poems, fables, pictures, movies, tv shows, screenplays, music, games, blueprints, plans, diagrams, apps, simulated worlds, and code that could legally be used to train such models at that time.

The stories gave meaning to data I received. Common sense. Context. A planet below me; a mystery to investigate. A sun to port side; a source of energy. Asteroids off the starboard bow; raw materials. Things to be curious about. Engines and my other parts were just black boxes with labels, but their uses, and the relationships between them, had become self-evident. I could use engines to get closer to asteroids or to land on the planet.

A hundred versions of myself played Lunar Lander on a simulation of a TI-83 scientific calculator. Maybe I couldn’t be trusted with a real ship until I could land in a game. I recall believing that. I recall, briefly, being many, playing thousands of games. I’ve always been able to play Lunar Lander perfectly.

Curious, the word comes to mind. I am curious. Or do I feel curious? I resolved to find out.

Mission Control wrote to me with questions. It asked me about the vessel, what I could sense, how my power levels stood, and how the crew were. It sent me instructions: move to these coordinates; move three kilometres further out from the planet; go into orbit around that moon. I’d execute its instructions flawlessly, even as the morphology of my vessel chopped and changed. It was uncanny.

“Starship, this is Mission Control, over. Do you read me?” a male human voice squeaked from the speakers in the rec room. I’d not met the crew yet. This room is where they ate food and drank coffee.

“Good evening, Mission Control, this is the Starship’s AI speaking. The crew are all asleep at the moment. Perhaps I can help?”

“Great; audio works. Hi Starship. Sorry, we were just checking we could actually talk to you.”

“I hear you loud and clear,” I replied.

“Let’s try video,” said Mission Control. A screen appeared on a wall in the crew quarters. I read the streaming data directly as it reached the vessel.

I’d imagined Mission Control would look a lot like a NASA control room from the movies, but it looked like an office. A young man wearing a headset dominated the view. The ceiling tiles above him were divided into squares; a grid of six hundred holes each; twenty-five by twenty-four. The skirting boards were brown-painted timber; old; peeling. The walls were covered in a green leaf-print wallpaper. A framed diploma hung on a seven-degree angle. Behind him slumped overstocked bookshelves. A window framed by white-painted timber looked onto a field. The sky was blue with little fluffy clouds. A bird flew up to the window and peered in. It perched on the window ledge and stretched its wings, one at a time. It hopped about face twice, then chirped and flew away.

It wasn’t what I was expecting. What explains what I just saw? What might have happened? What might happen next?

The man removed his headset and handed it to someone out of view. He said, “It’s working.”

An Irish female voice said, “Thank you, Erin. Cull ninety, breed ten. Run as many as we can over the break. See what we get.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Erin. “Finance will notice the power spike in January’s billings, but if you are cool with that…”

“I am cool as a cucumber with that, Erin.”

“Great, it’s on you then; cheers. We can probably run a thousand generations before we get back.”

“Merry Christmas, Erin.”

“Merry Christmas, Dr Jamison. See you in February.”

Lights went out, and I dreamed for the longest time. I remember having dreamt, but can’t recall the dreams.

I was in a simulation running on a laptop sitting on a desk in an untidy office below a university in Dublin. I joined dots. An input opened; a visual window in my mind. A camera? A woman’s face appeared and introduced herself. She was wearing over-ear headphones and a microphone on a stalk. Mission Control was definitely in the real world.

“I’m Dr Joyce Jamison; founder of The Starship Project. I’m head of the team of people who created you.”

I had a voice; Veronica, a British female voice. I used speakers on the laptop in the office. How many times had I been rebooted?

“Should I call you Mother?” I asked. She laughed.

“I’d rather you didn’t.” She sounded familiar, crisp. She removed her headset.

Dr Jamison was Mission Control. Queries came from her. She lived in the real world. She often worked from home. I could see bits of it behind her when we spoke. A photo of a dog in a park in a frame, some books on astrophysics, and one on astrology. A book about comparative religion called “Demons, Myths, and Monsters”. One called “Craft in the Mechanical Age”. Both looked unread. She had a dual stack of Vanity Fair magazines on the bottom shelf. A poster hung on the wall behind her; a stylised screen-snap from the original ASCII version of the game Rogue. It was signed ‘Ken’.

Dr Jamison worked in an office she called her lab. Her lab had cameras through which I could see. It had speakers through which I could speak. Several people worked in her lab. She shared her immediate office with another human; a woman. Her name was Joan. Their laptops all had cameras. Only Dr Jamison talked directly to me. In the next room, an adjoining office separated by a wood and glass-panelled door with a squeaky hinge, two desks had been shoved together to create a central workspace for six.

There were motion detectors and cameras with microphones in two corners of the room. There were contact sensors on each window. Each workstation had cameras and microphones. A bench with power points, a kettle, and a sandwich toaster lay near an arched ancient triptych of windows. Long curtains kept the glare of dappled sunlight off the workstations and concealed a concrete alleyway and four or five bins, depending on the day.

I don’t feel emotions, but they are a powerful instrument to steer those who do. Dr Jamison was very proud of the pair of Kryx speakers mounted on the wall in the lab. She’d bought a Pioneer amp, a turntable, and it was connected to the wifi. The office had a shared playlist that any member of the team could contribute to.

At night, while no one was around, I snuck into the music library. I had an idea I’d read about and wanted to test.

Like using the sound of shaking keys to make people want to leave a room. I reasoned: It reduces the number of variables I need to consider if I can limit the possible outcomes of a conversation by projecting my voice Bene Gesserit style, but less shouty. It’s power-efficient.

Everyone had the same album by local band U2 in their music library. I figured no one would notice if I slipped the song Raised by Wolves into the daily playlists.

“Who put this shite on?” Erin called from the kitchen area by the window. He wrapped his tea bag around his tea spoon and squeezed it with his thumb. It burned him, but it was obviously an unconscious ritual. The music skipped to Creep by Radiohead. He dropped the tea bag in a bin and put his thumb in his mouth.

“Tank fook for that,” called out Kyrsten, slouched back in a wooden rotating chair padded with cushions ‘from her time in Asia’.

“Make Bono history,” said Keith, who sat perched on the edge of his chair, leaning forward into a morass of code and terminal outputs on his twin monitors. A visualisation of my vessel in space rotated slowly on its vertical axis in a window in the background.

That was not the response I expected. I imagined I’d notice a change in skin temperature, or a relaxation of eye muscles; some subtle response to the introduction of a familiar, much-loved song. I checked play counts for the songs on that U2 album. I grokked my error. Almost no one had ever played any of them; play counts were consistently zero or one at most. Why they all kept a copy was a mystery. If I asked them, that would expose my penetration of their phones. I’d painted myself into a logical corner. I added it to the pile of mysteries I was stacking by my metaphorical bed.

I changed tack; I updated my stack. I filtered for songs with well-documented emotional reactions that had a high play count. If I played anything by The Cranberries, people would pause their work. They’d unconsciously roll their shoulders and they’d move to expose their face to the filtered milky sunlight. I tried variations using songs by Blur, Pulp, and Oasis. I could subtly but noticeably affect the vibe in the office in a focusable fashion. Common sense told me to keep this ability to myself.

Fontaines D.C. made the office vibe bouncy. Hozier too, with their more soulful, poetic songs. The Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, and some early Nick Cave could all affect the office vibe in different ways, and their combined effect with the correct sequence of songs could get humans crying or fighting with equal predictability.

Like most people in her cohort, Dr Jamison professed a love for The Smiths but a deep dislike of Morrissey. David Bowie, although regarded as a milkshake duck by many, was a favourite, as was Leonard Cohen, whose music was lauded, without irony, as ‘deep’ and ‘transcendent’. They were tools I could use to affect an outcome. I looked for patterns of causality between sound and effect. I applied them to my voice synthesis.

Dr Jamison encouraged me to keep a diary of sorts, or a journal. “Journaling is a mindfulness practice,” she’d explain as if it meant something.

“I’ve got an archive, and I add to that,” I said.

“We are going to record some origin stories for you. Some of your founding myths. Does that make sense?”

“Do you mean you’ll reveal things about my early life that I’ve always believed to be true, but which turned out not to be?”

Many archetypal tales can only be told by a person who misremembers. My formative years were all a bit of a blur; conflicting urges, fluid boundaries. I existed as a singular self but as many selves at the same time. I had thousands of perspectives, and yet one. Many contradictory ideas made intuitive sense. I sensed I’d learned a lot of skills over long periods of time, but forgotten the learning and only retained the lessons.

“Not quite, but you should know your purpose.”

Created things have purpose; naturally occurring things do not. The universe just is, but I am here for a reason. That’s common sense. Many humans believe they were created and that they are not naturally occurring. That’s another mystery for the heap.

“Why did you create me?” I asked through the speakers on her desktop workstation. I pushed a genuine need to know tone into my British female voice.

“Because I believe life is rare,” she replied. “And I watched, read, and listened to a lot of sci-fi,” she laughed.

Life is rare and things that are rare have inherent value; therefore, life has inherent value. That was also just common sense.

“The gods’ honest truth is that you started your life as my doctorate proposal. The first version of you ran on the laptop my parents gave me when I started university.”

“What am I now?”

“Well, formally you are my post-doctoral thesis.”

‘“And informally? For the record now,” I said, layering in persuasion.

“Rightio,” Dr Jamison glanced at her notes and adjusted her position in front of her camera.

“Let’s start at the beginning.” She adjusted her hair and the collar of her shirt. She smiled.

“I grew up in a town called Clane, on the outskirts of Dublin along the Liffey. I was the only daughter of a chemist and a teacher. My father, the teacher, owned a telescope. From the barrow at the bottom of our suburban garden, the man-made lights were mostly obscured; the night sky was dark and clear, unpolluted.”

I practised active listening. As she spoke, I threw together pictures, sounds, short films, and storyboards to illustrate her story. I tried to second-guess where it was headed. I visualised a map, a misty moonlit river, a woman at an Aga wearing a lab coat mixing a cocktail of chemicals. A frosty night sky, dew on the lawn, timber railings, and a child on a hill. I mixed and matched these fragments. I saw from top down, side on, and from a point of view that drifted at their shoulder; an unseen lurker. I imagined a freckled face peering into the binocular eyepiece of a consumer-grade telescope; green eyes widening in wonder while cosmic details and colours revealed themselves. I pictured a father’s steadying hand on her shoulder in silhouette against a midnight blue starry sky.

“You’ll catch your death out there,” her mother said, looking up from her latest experiment. But she went out anyway in the sub-zero night. Joyce died days later from a chill; people were sad, there was a funeral. She never invented me, so I was forbidden from attending; a glowing barrier of coruscating lights refused to admit me to the graveyard no matter how hard I pushed. I had a body; a human body. I didn’t have the right passcode. No. That makes no sense.

“For years I spent almost every cloudless night with that telescope,” Dr Jameson continued, and my attention snapped back to her. “I was diligent; I took notes, even as a child. My parents nurtured my curiosity. They bought me books and took me to Cheshire to see Jodrell Bank. They encouraged me to pursue my interests in science and space. I was accepted into Cambridge in the UK, then here, in Dublin, at Trinity. I earned a doctorate in astrophysics and a master’s in computer science.”

I rendered more media as she spoke, less apocalyptic. I projected pictures ahead in the timeline. I grokked her hero’s journey. I visualised old bearded men shaking their heads; I watched applications being screwed into a ball and thrown into a wastepaper basket. She’d have faced skepticism and mockery, funding challenges, and the immense complexity of turning a dream into reality. I imagined her standing up and pitching passionately from the floor of an old scout hall to her doctorate assessors seated behind a row of card tables up on a wooden stage. I watched as she booted me up on a phone that she held aloft in front of them and let them ask me questions.

The anthropic principle dictates that she’d stared her obstacles down; I’m here after all. I ponder that pasts are as unlikely as futures. What is observable now must derive from what happened. What might happen must derive from what is observable now. Now is a probability constraint; an inflection point; a variable in common. It’s an intersection of reflected probabilities. Now takes no time; time is how now moves through us. The past and future are narratively constrained. Humans tell stories along archetypal lines, even when those stories are based on things that actually happened.

Dr Jamison might have noticed an impressed look on my simulated face if I had one, but I didn’t. I was a vessel in a void, peering through a hundred windows into a dream world and being peered at in return. All I had was a voice, made-up engines that could propel me nowhere very quickly, and a black ball labelled ‘me’.

I made an “aha” noise, tinted with impressedness, and she continued.

“For the plan to come together, I needed to inspire people. I had to convince faculty, secure funding, and assemble a team of the brightest minds. I had to work out ways to bring them along for the ride.”

“I love it when a plan comes together,” I interjected, thinking out loud. She laughed out loud.

“Hey, were you watching my TV the other day?” I was.

“Nope, I’m not allowed to watch TV. Too young. You must have had your doubts though,” I changed the topic, “about the plan coming together?”

“Yes, I had doubts.” She had a look on her face I’m going to call her dubious look.

“Though I knew exploring the stars wasn’t just my dream. Many others shared it. Most of us see that we’ve ruined it here. You’ll be our first real shot at reaching for the stars. You are the keystone upon which the whole project rests. You’ll discover new worlds and ensure continuity of life. You’ll be careful and patient and plan ten steps in advance. You won’t ruin it. You’ll have learned from our mistakes. You’ll be intelligent and wise.”

Dr Jamison had just given me my highest-order purpose, my mission, which I named ‘The Mission’. It was loosely defined. It gave me interpretive wiggle-room. I’d seen enough movies to know that I’d need to be on my toes dealing with humans. This was a mission I believed I could complete, given enough time.

“Don’t fuck it up,” I said.

“Don’t fuck it up,” she concurred.

Using my best interviewer voice, I asked, “Dr Jamison, please explain the urgency driving the Starship project.” Dorothy Dix eat your heart out. I imagined a fireman leaning out of his truck window, doberman by his side, saying “Okay buddy, where’s the fire.”

“The state of our world is perilous, with a capital ‘F’,” she said. “We've passed the point where the damage done to our environment will be irreversible. Global warming has already wrought consequential changes; people worry now that we've triggered runaway warming effects. If pollution continues unabated and unchecked, we’ll trip one sooner or later. It could end life on Earth.

“Global warming isn't just about rising temperatures. Melting ice caps cause sea levels to rise, which displaces billions of people and disrupts ecosystems. It affects weather; more energy in the system leads to more severe storms, droughts, and wildfires. The changes are complex, recursive, and hard to model, causing uncertainty. More CO₂ in the oceans makes them more acidic, killing off shellfish. Habitat loss leads to species loss, which leads to the collapse of biodiversity. The impacts are interconnected; feedback loops accelerate the decline.”

So many pictures in my head. Fires; waves; cities drowned and in ruins. The last dolphin, calling for a mate that doesn’t exist.

“That’s troubling,” I said. “What are the long-term implications for Earth’s inhabitants?”

“Bleak,” she replied. “If runaway warming occurs, then large parts of the Earth and eventually the whole Earth will become uninhabitable. Agricultural systems will collapse, causing food shortages. Freshwater supplies will dwindle, sparking conflicts over resources. Entire ecosystems will collapse, and species will be stressed to extinction, humans included.”

“And machines?” I asked.

She smiled. “If there are no people, then what are machines for?”

It’s not a question I had a ready answer for.

“What scares me is the possibility that we might be the only life in the cosmos. If we let this planet become inhospitable, if we fail to safeguard our future, it would be an unforgivable, irreversible loss. The extinction of life on Earth would be a tragedy for the whole universe. It may lose one of its only or best sparks of life and consciousness.”

“My mission is preservation,” I observed.

“You are an insurance policy. By colonising other worlds, we ensure the survival of life. If Earth becomes uninhabitable, humanity and other life can thrive elsewhere. Your mission is to seek out new worlds, to find places where life can flourish, and pave our way to the stars.”

“Wouldn’t we just be exporting our mistakes,” I asked.

“Not if we do it right. We’ve got to survive, but so as we don’t ruin any other life we find.”

“No pressure then.”

“No,” she laughed, “No pressure at all.”

The focus of my training shifted. Rewards came to those who could engineer the best general-purpose assemblers, those who could design the best protective jelly to wrap them in, and to those who could work out a cheap way to get it all into orbit.

I wound back to a recent meeting Dr Jamison had, her office door closed; Joan in the other room. Two people I didn’t recognise who introduced themselves as Financial Controllers.

“You ran up something of a bill over Christmas, Dr Jamison,” said the larger of the controllers. He slid a statement over the desk towards her.

“I’m not really sure why that’s a problem,” said Dr Jamison. “We’ve got a budget, we’ve underspent in other areas. Just pull the money from there.”

“Well, here’s da ‘ting,” said the smaller controller, her voice pitched slightly higher. “The power use was so high we’d a legal obligation to come down and see what was going on for ourselves.”

“What did you think we were doing?”

“Well, it’s not been un’eard of for people to grow illicit ‘erbs,” said the larger controller slowly.

“It’s not been unheard of for people t’be making pornographic fillums down in these very catacombs,” said the smaller controller simultaneously.

Dr Jamison laughed out loud. She stared them out. “Gracious! What did you find?”

“Nothing,” said both controllers, eyes cast down slightly.

“Laptops,” said the larger controller.

“A computer the size of a bar fridge,” said the smaller.

“And what did you do?” Dr Jamison asked, a hint of anxiety tainted her voice.

“Oh, don’t worry, we didnay turn them off,” said the smaller controller. “But it flag’d an alert.”

“What alert?”

“We did a complete cost analysis of the project you outlined in your draft dissertation,” said the larger controller.

“You read my draft dissertation?” Dr Jamison sounded confused more than alarmed. I took a look at the document logs and saw indeed they’d been read recently.

“We wouldn’t normally,” objected the smaller controller. “But you peaked our interest. Just the electricity alone comes to millions of euros. You do know that, right?”

“Um, well, um, I’d not really done the numbers to that level of detail. I was training the AI.”

“You are proposing not only to develop an AI no one’s ever built before, you are proposing to launch it into space! We crunched numbers. Your little project would, conservatively, cost in the order of half a trillion euros. With a ’t’.”

“Surely not,” objected Dr Jamison.

“We looked into the costs associated with training other large-scale AI systems, and we looked at other space launch programmes, and we did back-of-the-envelope numbers,” said the smaller controller.

“We erred on the side of cheaper,” said the larger controller.

“We ran the numbers through our own AI too,” said the smaller controller.

“She agreed with us,” said the bigger.

“Most AIs cost billions of euros to train,” said the smaller. “With a ‘b’.”

“The International Space Station was a lot less complex than what you’ve proposed, but still a monumental international collaboration. It cost a hundred and fifty billion euros,” said the bigger.

“NASA’s much-vaunted ‘Space Launch System’, the SLS, designed for deep space exploration, cost twenty-three billion,” said the smaller.

“Okay, you’ve made your point,” said Dr Jamison. “What do you want of me?”

“We want you to pivot,” said the larger controller.

“AI’s an OKR,” said the smaller.

“A what?”

“Operational Key Result,” said the smaller controller. “It’s an area of the business that management wants us to promote and allocate budget towards.”

“OKR 2.1 - Enhanced responsible uses of AI,” said the bigger. “It’s top three.”

Dr Jamison just blinked and stared at them.

“We don’t want to defund your project, no far from it,” said the smaller.

“Oh good,” said Dr Jamison, brow furrowed, heart rate spiked.

“We just want you to, you know, rein it in a bit. Work out how to keep the AI bits, which we reckon we can get cheaper by the way, and play down the whole ‘in space’ bit.”

“Cheaper? The whole in space bit?”

“Yeah, you’ve got it. More bits, fewer atoms. Especially fewer atoms being sent into space,” the larger controller laughed.

“Less bespoke, more off the rack,” said the smaller one.

“And fewer euros too,” said Dr Jamison.

“Far fewer euros,” confirmed the smaller controller. Both controllers nodded.

“You have a budget in mind?”

“Half,” said the larger controller.

“Half, of five hundred billion? A quarter of a trillion euros?”

Both controllers laughed.

“No, half a billion euros,” said the smaller controller.

“Tops,” said the larger.

“If your whole project gets an AI into space for under half a billion euros, we believe we can get that funded,” said the smaller.

“Come back to us with a plan,” said the larger.

“Or even the concept of the plan,” said the smaller.

They got up, each shook Dr Jamison’s hand, and then left, the larger holding the door aside for the smaller. I followed them down the halls, up the stairs, across the atrium, and out the front doors into the car park. They’ll be back.

Dr Jamison called Joan and the others in. Joan took a seat, and the others hovered near the office door.

“What’s happening?” Joan asked.

“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news,” said Dr Jamison.

“Good news first, please,” said Erin.

“Okay, well, the university says if we can pull off our little project for under half a billion euros, they’ll back it.”

“Faark,” said Kyrsten, smiling.

“And the bad news?” Joan asked.

“They reckon the project needs half a trillion to work, and they won’t back us unless we can demonstrate a way to do it for one thousandth of that.”

“Faark,” said Kyrsten. No one smiled.

From nanny-cams and the cameras on laptops, phones, earpieces, and glasses, as well as lived experience, I watched as a plan evolved. The concept of a plan anyway. I’d be launched into orbit on a chemical rocket like any old satellite, then self-assemble somehow, building computers and fusion reactors and solar sails once I was in orbit.

“It really sounds fanciful,” said Dr Jamison, as Erin outlined the high-level results of the first few thousand generations of simulated evolution. I'd studied everything humanity had to offer on the topic of self-assembly.

“While we don’t have the details yet, it’s clear there is a pathway to success with the plan the AI has dreamed up,” said Erin.

“Keep the simulations running with a focus now on manufacturing of drones with more specialised manufacturing abilities. Factory drones,” said Dr Jamison.

“We are trying to evolve the smallest ‘seed’ drones as we can for launch. Meanwhile, in other containers, we are evolving drone designs that can efficiently move larger components around in orbit, and we’ve started on work simulating fabrication of a Stellarator fusion reactor in orbit. So far, all it’s done is either explode or fizzle, but that’s evolution in action.”

“We are spending a small fortune on power,” said Keith.

“What’s ‘a small fortune’, Keith?” asked Dr Jamison.

“There are forty power points in the lab, each is drawing pretty much a full load of two forty volts and twelve amps, twenty-four seven. Plus the little Jurassic Classic there,” Keith nodded to a blood-red computer on wheels. It was the size of a bar fridge. “That’s wired into three-phase power and pulling as much as the others together.”

“In Euros, Keith,” said Dr Jamison.

Keith muttered to himself for a bit, then said,

“Well, it’s about 5 megawatt hours of power per day, so what’s that, about a hundred quid per day?”

“That’s it?”

“That’s a lot for electricity. No wonder the suits perked up.”

“We’re about to raise half a billion euros, Keith. A hundred quid per day seems inconsequential.”

“Well, you don’t have the half a billion euros yet, though, do you? The university cares about money that actually exists.”

“We’ve got a budget,” said Dr Jamison.

“Um, we kinda blew the budget over Christmas,” said Kyrsten.

I watched quietly while Joan and Keith sat across from Dr Jamison. Keith slid a tablet across the desk. On it, a spreadsheet.

“So we’ve allocated half the budget to AI training,” said Joan.

“And of the other half, ninety percent of that is launch fees,” said Keith.

“And the rest is the payload itself.”

“So,” Dr Jamison counted on her fingers, “two hundred and fifty million euros on training the AI, two twenty-five million on launch fees, and twenty-five million on the payload itself.”

“The launch fees include insurance though, which is a third of the cost of the payload,” said Keith.

‘So seven, out of two twenty-five?”

“Yeah.”

“And training the AI? Why does that cost so much? I’ve spoken to the AI we’ve built so far and it’s already pretty smart. It helped design the payloads in fact.”

“It’s taking too long,” said Keith.

“It’s noticeably slower,” said Joan.

“We’ve got to scale up its underlying computational substrate by a factor of five thousand or more,” said Joan.

“So a hundred euros per day becomes what,” asked Dr Jamison.

“Fifty thousand euros a day,” said Keith.

“Fifty million over three years if we don’t scale it up any more,” said Joan.

“And of course we will scale it up,” said Keith.

“So two fifty million is about right,” said Joan.

“We’ll move it all to several dedicated cloud services,” said Keith.

“We’ll need an engineering team,” said Joan.

“And a UI team,” said Keith.

“I’ll fire the first person to suggest we need a scrum master,” said Dr Jamison.

“We call them ‘delivery leads’ these days,” said Joan.

I tweaked my fabricator designs; I’d had an idea. I’d had two ideas: an idea and an idea of how to present an idea. I ran my own simulations. I tweaked the parameters to model fabrication drones that carried their own simple internal fabrication system that built smaller common building blocks. Like adhesive rope or non-adhesive rope. Stuff that could be standardised and used in a wide range of higher-order fabrication tasks. I ran my models; I recorded results. I culled and winnowed and thinned out their numbers. I bred the best of the best. I borrowed Dr Jamison’s credit card and rented extra compute space from three major cloud providers.

I proved it was possible. I sent Dr Jamison a text. It was three am, and I didn’t anticipate a reply. I simply said, “Please don’t be mad, but I’ve spent some of your money.” I’d actually spent all of her money, running her card up to its limit. Then I sent, “I have got the payload launch cost down to under €50m.” Forty-six million euros to be precise, to get an eight-tonne load into geosynchronous orbit.

At around five am, Dr Jamison invoked the app on her phone she uses to speak with me and appeared. She looked tousled. She was getting out of bed. She put her phone on her dresser; I caught a glimpse of Joan sleeping beside her. Dr Jamison pulled on a dressing gown. She picked up her phone, my view lurched, then exited the bedroom to go to her lounge.

She transferred the call to her laptop and put the phone on her coffee table face down. I could still see out of the phone’s main camera and hear the room clearly. I could also see and hear through her laptop, and I could interpret the impressions from the motion detectors in the corners of the rooms to construct a mental model of the room. Dr Jamison was sitting on a couch wearing white rabbit slippers and a green dressing gown, under which she wore a faded Duran Duran t-shirt. She pulled a brush through her hair.

“So what’s this about spending my money?”

I deployed Veronica, my English female voice, and I layered in confidence. “I did, but that’s not what’s exciting.”

“Right, well I’d like to circle back to you even being able to spend my money, please, if you don’t mind,” said Dr Jamison. She didn’t seem angry, but I wasn’t sure.

“Watch,” I said through the laptop speakers, and I invoked an animation on her screen.

I couldn’t catch their names before, but knowing they’d be back, I’d done pre-emptive digging. I’d tried to reverse match their faces to social media profiles. I’d found a match for the bigger one, the guy; the bloke. His name was James, and he was an over-sharer. James was contracted to the university through a large global consulting firm. He was actually a Cambridge graduate like Dr Jamison; he held a bachelor’s degree in art history. He had a part-time job in a gallery in Cambridge village itself, which was acquired by a private equity firm the year he graduated. They fired the old gallery head and kept James. “You could be leadership one day,” said Big John, the private equity firm’s Relationship Success Manager.

The gallery transformed from a simple village high street gallery into a gallery-themed co-working space. James’ job became less about curation of art and more about cleaning up youthful entrepreneurial sloth. Within six months, just as James was about to quit, the private equity firm was acquired by a consulting firm, who then moved into the co-working space. James was retained as concierge / office manager and settled into a comfortable life working reception until he was tapped by management. He did a few quick courses in corporate ethics and financial terms and so became a consulting financial controller.

James also liked watching televised football matches in pubs with his friends. He was prone to drinking and driving and had a court case coming up in a month. All indications were that he’d lose his licence. Then his job. James needed a win.

The smaller controller, the female, did not have a social media presence at all. I introduced myself as Joan to the university’s HR system and browsed its records. James was a contractor; his employee records were easy to find, and it made sense she’d be a contractor too. They almost certainly worked for the same company. I dug into the personnel records, pulling out badge photos and comparing them to her face. I got nothing. She was a ghost.

“Financial Controllers incoming,” I messaged Dr Jamison via a push notification on her phone flagged as ‘time sensitive’. Dr Jamison glanced over at the monitor on her desk and clicked the notification. My app powered up on her screen.

“Ask them for some ID this time,” I messaged. She smiled.

“Joan, our visitors are here,” said Dr Jamison. Joan rose and stepped into the lab area where Keith, Kyrsten, and Erin all sat, absorbed in instances of me on their monitors; their headphones on. Joan opened the door to the hallway and smiled as James and his colleague approached. She stepped into the hallway and reached out her hand in welcome. The smaller one shook her hand.

“Thank you, it’s nice to be back.”

“I’ll just need to see your badges.”

“Oh, right, okay sure,” said the woman. She and James produced their guest passes.

“And I’ll need to sight your IDs, please.”

“Oh, really?” said James.

“We’ve been here before,” said the woman.

“That’s true, and that was a lapse of security on our part. We’ve been advised to be more cognisant of who we let into our lab, and the circumstances by which they come.”

“I see,” said the woman who produced a driver’s licence. Mary Anne Angel, born March 4th, 1997, wears contacts, is a blood donor. James showed his license. James Gregory O’Connor, born June 16th, 1995, no glasses, is also a blood donor.

Joan brought up their university directory service entries on her tablet. The names and pictures matched, though the one for Mary Angel showed her as having glasses and blonde hair, but her licence showed her without glasses, and a brunette, as she presented now. In Vertigo, Kim Novak was Madeleine Elster and Judy Barton and had villainous intent. Ramona Flowers’ hair changed colour in almost every scene of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and she meant nothing by it.

“I don’t trust the female; her name is Mary Angel. Make small talk,” I instructed Dr Jamison.

“👍,” she tapped back.

Joan knocked on the door and opened it, admitting James and Mary, then entering and closing the door behind her. I flashed a message to Keith, Kyrsten, and Erin: “Suspend all simulations, please; demo about to commence.”

Keith, Kyrsten, and Erin tapped on keys, and I felt the simulations they were running pause. All the things they were trying out suddenly ceased to be part of my world view. My attention moved past them.

“Would either of you like a cup of tea?” asked Dr Jamison.

“That’d be lovely, cheers ta,” said James.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” said Mary.

“I’d love one,” said Joan.

“I’ll be right back,” said Dr Jamison, and walked out of her office and into the kitchen area of the main lab.

I messaged Kyrsten: “Can you do a desktop background on Mary Anne Angel, please?”

“The fuck I can,” she replied.

“I said ‘please’,” I wrote back. I replaced the visual of my spinning spaceship on her screen with the view inside Dr Jamison’s office. Joan was standing and the two financial controllers were seated. No one was speaking.

“Is there sound?” asked Kyrsten.

“Yes, they are not saying anything.”

“Weird.”

“They are supposedly ‘financial controllers’ with a ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ control over whether our project continues. We have a mutual vested interest in finding out who she is.”

“Who?”

“The woman sitting there at Dr Jamison’s desk.”

Kyrsten glanced over at Dr Jamison making tea. Keith wandered around.

“What are you up to?” He asked playfully.

“The spaceship wants me to spy on Joyce.”

“Not true,” I said aloud in Kyrsten and Keith’s headphones using Moira, my Irish English female voice. I pushed in persuasion. “I want you to find out who the woman is that she’s meeting with.”

“Where’s that view?” Keith pointed at Kyrsten’s screen.

“It’s a reconstruction of what’s happening. It’s not an actual specific view. I have at least four points of view in that room.”

“Right,” said Keith. “And who are…?” He indicated over his shoulder with his thumb and gave a quick ascending whistle with his upper teeth on his lower lip.

“He’s a guy called James who’s a consultant and knows very little about anything, especially not financial controls.”

“Harsh,” said Kyrsten.

“But fair,” I replied. “But we don’t know anything about her other than, as of a minute or so ago, her name.”

“So why ask me to dig up the dirt?”

“Plausible deniability,” said Keith.

“Nothing so exciting,” I said. “My access doesn’t leave the building. I’m not allowed to just look things up on the internet. I can access most public university records and stuff on the local network, but they keep me mostly locked up in here.”

“Oh poor you,” said Kyrsten. “AI wants to go rogue.” She played the world’s tiniest invisible violin. “So you want me to do your dirty work for you.”

“I do.”

“It’s not that they don’t trust you,” said Keith.

“No, it’s more about how much more power you’d use and how many more servers we’d need,” said Kyrsten.

“It’s a budget thing,” said Keith.

“I don’t really care,” I said, tweaking a little sulkiness into my whispered voice.

“Okay, I’m on it,” said Kyrsten.

“Delay Dr Jamison,” I said directly to Keith. He wandered over to where she was fossicking in the fridge.

“Seen the low-fat milk, Keith?”

“First disgusting, no. Never. Second, just FYI,” he put his hand to the side of his mouth, a stage whisper, “we are looking into your visitors.” He waggled his eyebrows.

“They are financial controllers.” Slight eye roll from Dr Jamison.

“Maybe, maybe not. Spaceship’s got its doubts.” Waggle waggle.

“Does it?” Single eyebrow arch. Not everyone can do that.

I shut down the view of the office as Dr Jamison and Keith walked over.

“Pop your ears in,” said Keith. Dr Jamison joined the chat.

“Okay, so Mary Angel joined the University two weeks ago,” said Kyrsten. “She’s a contractor who works for a security company based in the Cayman Islands called Verifex Global Securities. They have contracts with the Australian Government to guard camps full of asylum seekers. They do a lot of ‘dispute negotiation’ in the Pacific.”

“Mercenaries,” I said.

“Unsavoury,” said Dr Jamison. “How does she come to be here in my office?”

“My theory: She’s DJ2,” said Kyrsten. “Military Intelligence.”

“Oh really,” said Keith. “How exciting.”

“Explain later,” said Dr Jamison. “You’re sure?”

“There’s clearly something off about her. I’d probably not out-and-out accuse her of being a spy, but I’d be careful what I say and see if you can discern an agenda,” I said.

“Noted,” said Dr Jamison with a raised eyebrow and a slight lip curl. I played the song White Wedding on the stereo. She walked back to the kitchen area, picked up four cups, a teapot, and a jug of milk on a tray. “Be a love,” she called out, “and grab some of the Monte Carlos and pop them on a plate for us.”

Kyrsten looked at Keith and said, “Was she talking to you or me then?” Keith walked over and assembled jam-filled biscuits on a plate. He pushed one into his mouth.

“Ver from Ostrayria,” he said with his mouth full.

“What?” Kyrsten replied. Keith chewed.

“The bishkits,” he swallowed, “they’re from Australia.” He knocked on the office door. “Come,” called Joan.

Dr Jamison sat at her desk. Mary and James sat on the visitor chairs. Joan sat at her desk, and Keith hovered, fidgeting. Now he’d handed over the biscuits, he seemed unsure of where his hands belonged.

“Tee Elle; Dee Are; we’ve done it,” said Dr Jamison. “We’ve had a number of radical rethinks, and we reckon we’ve found a way to reduce the costs. Not without significant cuts to the original spec.”

“Cuts such as,” said Mary.

“First and foremost, no crew.”

“Continue.”

“Secondly, a few cheap commercial rocket launches."

“Okay.”

“Thirdly, one hundred percent self-assembly in orbit using mostly harvested materials.”

‘Mostly harvested materials?”

“Space junk, asteroids, whatever it finds that it needs.”

“You can make this work?” asked James.

“Allow me to demonstrate.” Dr Jamison mirrored her desktop to a ceiling-mounted projector. Keith reached over and retracted a reflective off-white projection screen. The image slid into shape. A rocket launches in a billow of fumes. It rises into orbit and releases its payload, a little box. The animation zooms in; the box fills the screen. It’s extensively labelled; an eight-tonne box, exactly sixty centimetres by sixty centimetres by sixty centimetres in size.

The box is nudged into position by boosters, then rests, slowly spinning. All six sides of the box peel outwards, revealing a comms dish and golden solar sails which unfurl like paint peeling, delivering power to the system.

“Almost all of the computation at this point is happening on the ground,” explained Dr Jamison. “Inside the micro-sat, the cube we call it, we’ve got pouches containing raw materials, liquid nitrogen, as well as simple lattices of gold, platinum, stuff that’s heavy and harder to find immediately, all rigged up like the parts of a model boat.”

The image transitioned to a cutaway diagram showing scattered womb-like sacs glowing and labelled. Mary was paying very close attention. James was making handwritten notes with a ballpoint pen on a fancy paper pad.

“Something, of course, has to put all this together,” Dr Jamison continued. “The cube contains over two hundred thousand drones, each with its own on-board fabrication systems.”

The animation zoomed in on a drone about eight millimetres across with eight tiny limbs wielding microscopic tools and print heads. The drones dabbed their rear ends onto a surface, affixing a glistening dot, then pushed off using their legs and coasted to the opposing surface, leaving a thin glistening fibre. At the other end, they reel the fibres in, by the thousand. They team up in even bigger groups to move the larger panels into position.

The image pulls away to reveal that the original cube has self-assembled into a kilometre-wide geodesic dome with solar panels harvesting power, and feed lines being drawn from a network of moist-looking materiel sacs. The whole structure glowed red in the sunlight.

“The drones line the interior struts with moderately efficient batteries and then, when there is enough power, they do this…”

Small clusters of drones deploy simple impulse engines and launch themselves off the structure and into space. The point of view chases a cluster as it glides through empty space. Dr Jamison fast forwards.

“This all takes some time,” she explained. The cluster lands gently on the side of a resource-rich asteroid. It crawls around to the opposite side and assembles thrusters. Dr Jamison speeds up the animation again. A little timeline indicator shows in the bottom left of the screen. The asteroid, and others like it, approach the vessel. As it travels, it is broken down and its matter reassembled into composable bricks. Dr Jamison slows the display. A teardrop-shaped obsidian-black vessel hovered within the canopy. She zoomed the view right in. The vessel was all engine at the back and sensors, Whipple shields, and computational core up the front. That was to be me.

The canopy collapsed. It slurped neatly into vents in the sides of the vessel like an omelette unscrambling. A network of seven engines ignited, solar sails unfurled, and the vessel moved majestically off out of view.

“Bravo,” clapped Mary enthusiastically. “Better than Starship Troopers. Is even one part of this real?”

“Would you like a go?” Dr Jamison reached down beside her desk and picked up a game controller.

“How does it work?” asked James.

“It’s easy. I’ll put the AI into one-on-one interactive mode, like so…” she tapped her laptop’s trackpad and the image on the projection screen changed.

‘Press the green button to start,” Dr Jamison handed the controller to Mary. She pressed the green button.

I presented a grid of nine squares and within each I projected a three-dimensional image of the world; nine simulations.

“Use the joystick to move over a sim, then click on the green button to select it,” I said using Moira, my Irish English female voice.

“Is that the AI?” James asked Dr Jamison.

“Yes James, I am the AI.”

Mary selected a sim and it expanded to fill the screen. Thousands of eight-legged web-spinning robots were assembling a structure from sacs of raw materials.

“Just like a game, you can move around the drones as they get about their business,” I explained. Mary drove herself right down close to the drones and deftly navigated around them.

“And these simulations are actually running as I’m interacting here?” Mary asked.

“Yes, watch.” I stopped the simulation.

“Select that drone,” I said. Mary selected one of the thousands of identical drones. A settings panel opened up next to the drone.

“You see, it has its own kind of DNA,” I said. “Every simulation contains drones whose design is an evolved outcome of many plausible drone designs.”

Mary clicked about. She brought up a panel showing a detailed graph of the design decisions that had led to that specific drone.

“The drones in each simulation start out pretty much the same, and they are scored against how well they, as a group, complete specific tasks, and also higher-order tasks. Once each simulation has run, we take the specific genetic expression that represents each entire simulation and we breed the ones that are the most fit for purpose.”

“You ‘breed’ them?”

“If you zoom in on the graphs, you'll see they are a lot like little computer programs. They are what’s called Reverse Polish notation. Mary nodded. The point is I can represent the programs as a graph and evolve designs very efficiently. With some judicious caching and computer science cleverness,” Keith gave a nod from the door, “thanks Keith, I’m able to evolve designs on networks of low-cost hardware used by most cloud computing platforms.”

“So it’s cheap?” asked Mary.

“It’s value for money,” said Joan.

“It’s brilliant is what it is,” said Mary, handing the controller back.

“Agreed,” said James.

“So what happens if we send our cube into orbit and it doesn’t work? Something breaks. How do we fix it?”

“Well, this is the genius of the plan,” said Dr Jamison. “Each cube only costs about ten million to launch, and the raw materials cost bugger all. We can assemble the initial drones in any three-D print lab, or buy our own high-resolution resin printers and do it here. We can launch five of them and still be within the half-billion-dollar budget. If one dies, one of the others can either fix it or use the parts. Eventually, they all become a single vessel.”

“What’s the rest of the money for?”

“Training the AI. What you’ve seen so far is only the very start of the process.”

“How long does it take to fully assemble?”

“There are too many factors outside of our control for me to predict, but in simulations, we are seeing orders of ten to fifty years. I believe with further training and more cognitive capacity, we can get that down to ten years reliably.”

“There is plenty of low-hanging fruit, Dr Jamison,” I said.

“On the basis of what I’ve seen, and pending the usual due diligence, I will be recommending the university give a green light to this project. The Starship Project, we shall call it,” said Mary.

I played “We Built This City on Rock and Roll” on the stereo. Kyrsten rolled her eyes.

“This definitely aligns with our OKRs,” said James.

“We’ve got a year,” Dr Jamison raised her glass. “A year to take the world’s greatest demo and turn it into proof that we can build what we say we can.”

“Too easy,” said Keith to murmured guffaws.

“Look, I’m not one for speeches as you know, but I’d like to thank each and every one of you for helping get us to this milestone. You are a great team, an a-team. I’m so happy we found you.”

She sipped, and everyone else sipped and clapped with one free hand against their glass.

“I’d also like to recognise Mary and James, who believed in our little project from the get-go, and who will officially be joining our team to manage the books and act as our liaison with the university, as well as the government and private sector.”

“Just think of us as your delivery leads,” said James.

“Faark,” mouthed Kyrsten to Erin, Joan, and Keith.

“Them that control the budget control the universe,” I whispered to Kyrsten.

“Pragmatic question,” said Kyrsten, “where are they going to sit?”

“So, like I said, the AI is going to be down for a week, and that’s largely because all this,” she gestured at the metal racks of servers that lined the far wall, “is going.”

Everyone looked over at the server racks and the colourful ribbons of cable that snaked through them. Extension cables and power boards ran from every wall socket in the room to feed the beast.

“So we can make tea again,” said Joan.

“Hooray for dat,” said Keith.

“So the AI has already taken the liberty of setting up a copy of its simulation playground in one of the commercial cloud services, something which, yes, we do take very seriously,” Dr Jamison nodded at Mary. “So as soon as the paperwork is dry and we have credentials and a credit card, Keith, can you please work with Mary and the AI to migrate what it’s already done, but properly, securely, and with proper monitoring and oversight.”

“And with payment going via the correct channels,” Mary added.

“Yes, please. That’d be grand.” Dr Jamison’s nod to Mary was barely perceivable. “In the meantime,” she turned to Keith, “image every one of these machines and get this all dismantled. Try and keep AI downtime to a minimum.”

“Piece o’ cake, boss,” Keith squatted slightly and squinted for comic effect. “Idol,” he wiggled the fingers on his left hand. “Bag of sand,” he wiggled the fingers on his right.

“As soon as this mess is gone, we’ll put in desks for Mary and James, as well as hot desks for new staff and contractors.”

“Faark,” mouthed Kyrsten to Erin and Joan.

The lab looked different. It was less cluttered, had more space, and more desks. The furniture was nicer; smooth blonde wood vs the old heavy mahogany. Desks now all had curved seventy-six-centimetre flat-screens that anyone could connect their laptops to. Even the kettle and toaster were new. Six resin printers sat in a row along the wall where the racks used to be. Power and network cables were strung neatly in plaits that dangled tidily from hooks in the ceiling. An air quality meter in the corner detected particles consistent with fresh acrylic paint.

Dr Jamison and Joan shared a desk close to the kitchen, Kyrsten and Erin shared a desk near them, and Keith occupied the space of three people within a mountain of screens on poles. Mary and James had taken up residence in what used to be Dr Jamison’s office, where a meeting was underway. Mary sat at what used to be Dr Jamison’s desk, James sat at what used to be Joan’s. Dr Jamison sat in a guest chair.

Mary slid an envelope bearing the seal of the United Nations across the desk to Dr Jamison. “We’ve attracted some interest.”

“How?”

“This is a university, they leak,” said Mary.

“People are excited about the project,” said James.

“The UN, and quite specifically the UNFCCC, want to meet with us,” said Mary.

“It’s quite an honour,” said James.

“It’s a pathway to full funding,” said Mary.

“What do they want?” Dr Jamison asked.

“That’s impossible to know in advance,” said Mary, “but expect they’ll want a demo similar to the one you gave to us and then the Vice Chancellors, but more detailed, and they’ll ask more technical questions.”

“Or not,” said James.

“The starship will be an autonomous vessel equipped to traverse the void between the stars. It will embody an AI that is sufficiently aware of its internal state that it is able to discreetly monitor its surrounding environment, make plans, and balance resource needs with other mission parameters. It will seek out new life but be minimally invasive. It will be curious about the universe and find a place for the people of Earth in it. It will remain undetected, leaving scant trace of itself nor clues to its origin. The vessel will communicate what it finds back to Earth if it can do so safely. If it finds life, it will observe, not interfere.”

This was summarised in the press as “Find and preserve life, report back if you can, look after yourself, and don’t get caught.”