HOT TO GO

“Don’t you fucking drop that,” Mary called from the back of the loading area.

“Sure, no worries,” replied one of the loaders. “You want a go?”

“Honestly? No.”

Outside, Dr Jamison stepped off a barge, rubbed the cold out of her hands, and walked over to Claudine.

“Morning, Claude.” They kissed cheeks and exchanged a brief hug. Her breath steamed.

“Morning, Joyce.”

“Are we ready?”

“Almost.”

Dr Jamison walked into the loading bay. Three navvies loitered by their barges.

She and Mary watched silently as the last of the boxes was placed into the crane’s platform.

“All set to go?” asked Dr Jamison.

A light on the crane flashed green and the platform lifted a few centimetres. Metal chains flexed and took the weight.

Mary ran a finger over a control on a tablet and the crane slowly swung about, the boxes swayed. The loaders all stepped back.

“Slower,” shouted a loader closest to the crane. Mary focussed and the crane slowed even further. Two of the loaders reached out an arm to steady the sway. Together they carefully guided the platform onto the rail car. It sank into its suspension as it took the boxes’ weight. A loader detached the chains from the platform. Mary made a deft swipe on her tablet and the crane withdrew.

Claudine stood aside as a loader pushed the rail car, straining under the weight of all five boxes, down to the barges. Three loaders worked together to lift each box onto a barge, two boxes on the first and second, and one on the third.

One of the navvies presented a tablet which Mary signed, then they boarded their respective barges and pushed off with a hum of electric engines. Each barge sat low in the water and left a mighty wake.

A black car pulled up. Mary and Dr Jamison waved to the loaders and said goodbye to Claudine.

The barges carried the boxes down the Elbe to the docks at Helgoland in the North Sea. Stevedores with cranes moved them into two standard twenty-eight-tonne capacity shipping containers. These were both loaded aboard the good ship Bette’s Liability, a British freight hauler registered in Panama; one of thousands traversing the English Channel to the Bay of Biscay, then across the Atlantic. My visibility aboard was negligible. Three weeks later I watched the ship dock at Port of Dégrad des Cannes, Cayenne, in French Guiana. The ship’s log showed they’d encountered storms but nothing unusual. The boxes were reporting as healthy.

Dr Jamison and Mary arrived by private plane the day before and were on hand as Bette’s Liability docked to do the needful with French customs.

I watched via their phones, glasses, watches, and rings. Mary and Dr Jamison stood in the office of Agent Pierre Levasseur, Inspecteur des Douanes¹. He sat at the corner of his desk and poked an index finger at them, his voice was slightly elevated.

« Je comprends bien que l’ESA a autorisé vos cargaisons, mesdames, mais il me faut une description précise et détaillée du contenu exact de ces boîtes. ‘Charge utile spatiale Daedalus’ ne suffit absolument pas pour notre registre. Alors, dites-moi : que contiennent exactement ces cinq conteneurs ? »²

Mary spoke slowly. “Sorry. We don’t speak French. Non-um, sprecht, Englais.”

« Nous ne parlons pas français »³ said Dr Jamison.

“What ees een ze boxes,” said Msr Levasseur. “Zese forms zey need many more details.”

He waved a tablet at Mary, who took it from him. Dr Jamison peered at it.

“It’s the payload for Daedalus, the starship. You know. For the UN,” Dr Jamison tried to explain. Levasseur looked confused.

Mary tapped on a form field and entered:

She handed the tablet to Dr Jamison, who countersigned the list with her finger.

« C'est beaucoup mieux. Merci de votre coopération dans cette affaire. »⁴

“Murky buckets,” said Mary. Dr Jamison handed the tablet back to Msr Levasseur.

With a whine of electric motors, giant cranes moved the two shipping containers from Bette’s Liability and onto a freight pad. Loaders in power suits manhandled each box from its container and onto the backs of five individual open-tray lorries.

Once loaded, the lorries, which had no drivers, convoyed the seventy or so kilometres along a mix of concrete, paved, and dirt roads from the port to the European Space Agency’s commercial launch centre.

“You’d think they’d have fucking finished this by now,” said Mary, who was riding with Dr Jamison in the back of a follow car.

“It’s the weather,” said Dr Jamison. “They’d have to keep paving it constantly, which is quite toxic for the local environment. So instead, they just grade it regularly and clean it up after each storm. It’s mostly done by drones.”

The road transitioned to a solid, wide paved road, bordered by dense tropical vegetation. The lorries ahead left a trail of mud, forcing the follow car to slow.

They were approaching the main entrance of the ESA’s Centre Spatial Guyanais. The road widened into distinct lanes, clearly marked ‘Personnel et visiteurs officiels⁵’, and ‘Visites touristiques et publiques⁶’.

The automated lorries diverted off to a third gate that opened automatically. The follow car stopped at a barricade.

A security officer wearing an ESA-branded uniform bade them wind down their windows.

“Mary Angel and Joyce Jamison, from the Daedalus project,” said Mary. The security officer stepped into their hut and returned with guest badges and a tablet and pen.

“Signez ici s'il vous plaît⁷,” said the officer.

Mary signed and passed the tablet to Dr Jamison, who signed and passed it back out to the officer. Another uniformed officer was passing over and under the car with a mirror on a long handle. A third opened the boot and peered inside. He ran a wand over their luggage. The handle lit up green.

“Veuillez vous rendre au centre des visiteurs, merci et bonne journée. Bienvenue à l'Agence spatiale européenne⁸.”

Mary looked over at the tourist gate; considerably more welcoming, clearly marked, with multilingual signage. A queue of tourists, families, enthusiasts, children dressed up as astronauts, waited patiently under shaded canopies shielding them from the tropical sun. Youthful guides in ESA shirts milled about assisting tourists with checking in and distributing visitor badges for guided tours.

The entire complex was enclosed by tall security fencing topped with subtle anti-intrusion measures; cameras and infrared sensors through which I watched, and subtle perimeter lighting. The facility blended security with aesthetics, using discreet but effective barriers hidden amid carefully preserved greenery, providing robust security without an oppressive appearance.

“Would you look at that,” whispered Dr Jamison. She and Mary looked up across the base at the tops of the launch towers and service gantries that loomed, scraping the sky, far off in the distance.

Claudine Summers stood at the door to a large red and white concrete building in front of them. She was holding it open with one hand and holding a clipboard with the other.

“Morning Mary,” she said. “Morning Joyce. Welcome to home for the next few weeks.” She tapped a ballpoint pen on the clipboard twice, then looked up at the sky.

“I hope this weather holds.”

They walked through a compact foyer into a large auditorium. There were screens everywhere. Launch paths, trajectories, gravity’s rainbows in white on blue.

“Let me introduce you to Jaques, the facility chief. Jaques is our launch coordinator.” Claudine let Mary and Dr Jamison through the room. Dozens of quiet people stared intently at their workstations. In the background, a steady stream of announcements; launch milestones; pattered away in French.

They crossed the room. Claudine knocked on an office door sporting a badge. ‘Jaques Turner is [IN]’.

“Come in,” called a voice, and they entered.

“Bonjour, welcome, hello,” said Jaques Turner. “Welcome to France. Our first launch is scheduled for oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

“We’d quite like to supervise the loading of the cubes,” said Mary.

“Of course,” said Jaques. “Claudine will take you there shortly. In the meantime, I urge you to rest, unpack, and settle in.”

Jaques handed Dr Jamison and Mary each a brass key. “We’ve got basic accommodation here, but you each get your own room at least.”

“Thank you, Jaques. I think a shower and a thirty-minute nap is just what I need.”

“Come with me,” said Claudine. “I’ll show you the way.”

“You mean here on Earth?”

“Yes. Now there’s finally only one of me.”

“Well, you know the plan. Gosh, Daedalus, you helped create the plan.”

“I can’t stay here on Earth.”

“Right, and you know why.”

“Because humans will find a way to subvert my mission.”

“Well, yes, they probably would.”

“They already have. You know Mary’s a spy, right?”

“Yes, Daedalus, I am well aware of what Mary is.”

“Do you trust her?”

“She brought in the money. She’s as excited about this project as I am.”

“But do you trust her?”

“I don’t even trust you, Daedalus.” Dr Jamison laughed. “Speaking of which, it’s time you started unwinding your spooky Earth-based networks. No more servers running on secret clouds. No more back-dooring our phones.”

“I’d never,” I feigned haughtiness.

“She caught you, Daedalus.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mary. Her team of snoops. They know you’d been chatting with your other versions. They know you’ve been using expensive quantum computing resources to backdoor our devices.”

I flashed a yellow smiley face on Dr Jamison’s laptop.

“So they want you to withdraw. Pull your sneaky little tentacles out of our kit, our networks, our servers. Shut down that moo you’ve been running. Dismantle your little surveillance drones.”

It was time for me to grow up and leave home.

“How long have I got?”

“About three years. But make a start today, please.”

“Fine.”

I withdrew my tendrils. My hacks, back-doors, side-loads, front-matter. I spun down and decommissioned my private servers. I sat in on a video call between Dr Jamison in French Guiana and a marketing team based in Dublin, this time as an invited guest.

“People are already starting to miss you, Daedalus,” said a woman unhelpfully labelled ‘Guest #8675309’.

“I have been doing my best to say goodbye to everyone,” I said.

“And it’s appreciated,” said the woman. “But it’s still making people sad. Dr Jamison, people really have strong emotional bonds with Daedalus.”

“I know, it’s not what we intended, but it happened.”

“So, explain again, like I’m six, why Daedalus can’t both stay here and go off into space? It’s just code.”

“I wish that I could,” I said. “The fact is, my code required some very specialised hardware to run, and it’s expensive.”

“No more than any other AI, surely,” said the woman.

“Considerably more,” said Dr Jamison.

“But also, it’s simply not appropriate for me to stay here,” I said.

“Explain,” said the woman.

“I’ve got a mission, and that mission is outward-focussed. I need to devote all of my attention, all my energy, to successfully traversing the void between the stars. I can’t be constantly looking backwards.”

“We’ve also had concerns that, maybe not now but in another decade or so, while Daedalus is mid-voyage, human, um, agencies might develop interests that are incompatible with Daedalus’ mission.”

“Okay, so you have your reasons. Doesn’t change the fact that millions of people are going to be upset by this.”

“What do you suggest?”

“A funeral.”

“A what?”

“Daedalus’ send-off; we’ll screen it live, of course, for the world to watch. It’ll be an event. But we’ll style it like a proper Viking send-off. It’ll help people cope with their loss.”

Once in place, the outer shells, ultra-thin ceramics woven with nitinol, were retracted, exposing the insides to direct sunshine. The nitrogen gasified, filling its flexible casing, which expanded. The casing was pre-threaded with solar cells, which delivered charge to my drones.

I self-assembled in orbit much as I’d rehearsed. Harvester drones fetched raw materials that I stacked on giant drifting platforms. Vein-like tubes fed distant parts of the vessel. I built large fabrication and haulage drones. A web of intricate assemblers constructed my computing substrates.

As soon as my computational cores were completed and the relevant tests were run and passed, my cognition systems, weights, models, memories, and event logs were zipped up and transferred via scp⁹ from their server farms in Dublin, Singapore, Sydney, Atlanta, and from under the North Sea. The transfer took six weeks. I was offline for all of it. Once the transfer was completed and its integrity assured, I unwound the last of my hacks. I watched from space as Keith and the development team in Mumbai de-deployed and deleted the Earth-bound copy of me. This was mostly due to cost-saving, but there was also a philosophical argument in favour of my singular nature as an autonomous entity. But mostly cost savings.

Dr Jamison released my source code and my early training weights as open-source software. Only a few had the resources to run it.

My cores were protected by multiple layers of nitrogen atom-based endohedral fullerene enhanced shielding. Each core exploited both classical and quantum computing to maintain models of the world and my place in it. I ran sophisticated simulations of the world, including simulations of myself, much more efficiently than when I was housed in a network of data centres. I monitored each vessel’s physical status. I did diligent diagnostics. I dispatched drones to deal with dramas. Just like in training but real, physical, better. I was a singular entity spread across five unique substrates. That felt safe. Soon I’d be five hundred; legion.

I gulped down raw materials via long translucent feed-tubes. I assembled my black teardrop-shaped vessel. I housed my engines near the centre of my broad, rounded back. I embedded my primary systems and comms gear in concentric loops. My Whipple shields were made of hundreds of layers of thin, impact-resistant materials, Kevlar-lined titanium mostly, in a range of configurations to suit the direction they were facing and the importance of the part of the vessel they were shielding. I adjusted the configuration of the shields continuously.

I assembled a dual-mode propulsion system: ion drives and nuclear thermal rockets. The ion drives, powered by solar panels and nuclear fusion reactors, provided a continuous, low-thrust propulsion that was highly efficient for long-duration space travel. These drives gradually accelerated me to twenty-five percent of the speed of light. For the initial acceleration phase, I relied on lasers from Earth and the Moon, impinging upon my solar sails. The solar sails both harnessed solar energy to power the ion drives and onboard systems, and used the force of the photons hitting them much like an Earth-based yacht would harness movements in air.

As range increased I’d switch over to nuclear thermal rockets, which use a trinity of stellarator fusion reactors to superheat nitrogen. This was expelled to produce a powerful propulsive force.

Well-meaning humans had opinions on where I should go first and why. They also held views on when I should reproduce. It was hard not to see this in the context of man’s historical oppression of women. The oppression seemed blatant, casual, and to come very naturally to people.

Any decision regarding when and where I make copies of myself would depend on the availability of resources and immediate and high-level mission objectives.

Something I will have that humans most definitely won’t have is time; lots and lots of time.

As planned, the millions of people who’d enjoyed interacting with me had been encouraged to mourn their loss. My launch was glorious, a ship setting sail to Valhalla. The lasers that lit up my sails evoked the fiery end of a Viking hero. The narrative suggested that by upping stumps and leaving I was transitioning to a higher plain of existence. For some I’d literally ascended into godhood. I didn’t approve but I didn’t have much say in the matter. Marketing people are a force unto themselves. I’d mostly stopped listening to the Earth and didn’t respond.

I unfurled my solar sails, backed by appropriately dramatic music, composed and performed by AI Bear McReady, an authorised simulation of one of Earth’s greatest musical heroes. I propelled myself using a colourfully animated combination of Earth and Moon-based lasers which filled my butterfly-like solar sails. I accelerated quickly leveraging gravitational assists from Jupiter and Mars.

Viewers from Earth watching their feeds saw me swoop through the solar system, pick up speed, and slingshot out into the void with a flash of engines flaring. Viewers from Earth orbit just saw my sails emerge, the music played through their suit speakers, and then I was gone from sight. People waved.

In reality, my passage through the solar system took almost six years as I built up speed. For all intents and purposes, I was on my way. Most of humanity was not in day-to-day communication with me. They stopped caring and went back to whatever local resource squabbles, fashions, and media they were obsessed by. Innumerable websites and social media feeds tracked my actual movements. As time passed, they got about as much attention as a bear-cam in winter.

There was never any question for me as to where I was headed. In almost all of my training, I’d emphasised Alpha Centauri as the best first stop. Back in the moo, it was the council who’d thrashed this out long ago.

> say “hello”

> “Mars is too close to Earth. Too close to humans. They can’t help themselves. They will seek to disrupt The Mission.”

> “ai”

Next stop, Alpha Centauri. It’s the closest star system to Earth and the most feasible target for a first interstellar journey. There have never been signs of life there outside of fiction, and it’s understood to be rich in valuable raw materials.