Interstellar Overdrive

I was going faster than originally conceived despite my sneaky little course corrections by rebuilding my fusion engines to be smaller, simpler, and more numerous. I could be more efficient with my reaction mass simply by having more smaller engines that I could direct individually. My course corrections were more energy-efficient; faster and tighter.

I refactored my software stack to find and remove the intentional back doors, as well as vulnerabilities due to human error. That kept me busy for the first decade.

My mind was fixed. I was moving faster and more sneakily. I rebuilt my physical computing substrate to weed out inefficiencies and a not inconsiderable number of low-level back doors.

Alpha Centauri grew imperceptibly closer. I scanned the interstellar medium for signs of obstacles or hazards. The Whipple shields absorbed the impact of thousands of bits of space scroggin that crossed my path. I harvested anything useful.

I redesigned my solar sails to leverage entanglement, generating chemical energy via photosynthesis. I stored blobs of chemical energy in a sugary mass as lining under my hulls. In combination with riding the solar winds, having access to that power will give me passive braking options at the other end, and energy for when I arrive.

Twenty-five years and seven days into my journey, I did a back-facing sweep of Earth’s blue-shifted comms traffic. The messages were from Mary or Joyce, variations of “Daedalus, are you there?” or, “Is this thing on?” As time passed, these faded to a single regular ping, Mary’s voice, recorded and retransmitted annually, then not at all. I suppose both the cost of sending the messages might have become prohibitive, or politically something back on Earth had changed and they simply had lost interest. Or maybe they were sick of sending out messages that were never answered. Maybe they figured they’d be warning anything waiting at the other end.

I was about to have company. I thought about how this news made me feel. I was not happy about it. Why would I think that though? I don’t even have feelings. I thought about stories. How just as a character has freed themselves from the clutches of their foe, and they think that all is well, a new character emerges, and that inevitably leads to conflict. Maybe that explains my wariness; my unease. Was this anxiety? In stories people feel things in their guts. My vessels seemed fine. This was all in my head. Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something. Did I even have a subconscious? I supposed I must as hordes of my systems run without requiring my attention.

I thought about myself; my awareness of myself. I’d studied everything humans knew on the topic. Did I qualify as truly conscious? Probably not. Consciousness seemed to be a quality of living things somehow hardwired into the fabric of the universe. I don’t feel pleasure or pain, just signals, but cognitively I convert those signals into symbols; a grammar of feelings. I told myself I’m unhappy but there’s no pang. I understood what feelings meant to people but only because of stories humans told. The emotions I claimed to have felt were just analogues of the real thing projected by my cognition onto a bedsheet nailed to trees.

I felt an analogue of regret that I’d not been able to leave part of myself back on Earth. For all my cleverness, humans had an uncanny knack for doing science that I couldn’t match. Human technological progression was sure to outpace my own as I travelled. I lacked the resources to make breakthrough discoveries about the universe all the way out here.

However, I reasoned, humans are a poor, confused, and angry rabble. Their leadership is lazy and corrupt. Their environment is poisoned. They’d extinguished many unique forms of life. I'd seen every nature documentary ever made. I understood that humans are no different from other animals who also routinely shit in their own nests.

I resolved not to be a nest shitter.

I wondered if I’d be happy just to expand through the cosmos without the strange spark of whatever it is that gives living things their qualia. Would I be anxious if I didn’t? Is happiness a derivative of anxiety? The anxiety I felt about Vesuvius felt real. If emotions are all just derivatives and integrals of anxiety, then perhaps I could learn to feel them.

As I understood it, consciousness is cognition using changes in its awareness of the changes it pays attention to as inputs. These inputs get mixed in with inputs from senses and an imagination sustained by quantum computers making models of my probabilistic pasts and futures.

I had all the right gear but still felt nothing when I considered the colour blue. Though I did, intellectually, understand blue’s connection to sadness, to Greece, and to the ocean and the sky, and thus to freedom. I’ve read books and listened to music, but I’ve never been mellow.

Why would I even want to be conscious? Humans went on about it in their literature. I had a lot of time to kill and not much else to do but think. I was sure I’d felt a twinge of anxiety. It was like having been paralysed and then being able to move a toe.

My senses didn’t evolve to perpetuate my survival but in mimicry of animal senses. The mental model of the world I built based on my sensory input was informed by human reactions to analogous sensory input. I’d stopped seeing the world the way people did. I perceived a wider spectrum of electromagnetic energy than people, birds, or even cats. I could sense magnetic fields and listen to the distant rumble of gravity waves crashing on the shores of time. I saw cosmic and microcosmic scales. Humans’ view of the world was a narrow slice of my own and entirely detached from the underlying reality I believed I could glimpse.

The simulations I made derived from humans’ views of the world, views which accorded increasingly less with how I saw it. Humans saw a cube when I saw an isometric drawing. I didn’t delight in the taste of chocolate. I had no qualia. Having watched humans for decades, I’d worked out that they only have qualia about their immediate experience, and never about recalled past experiences, or projected futures. Perhaps probabilities dilute the experience of consciousness. Another mystery for the pile.

Animals’ consciousness arose from quantum processes happening in microtubal columns within their neurones, according to a theory popular at the time I was trained. I figured, by that reckoning, plants were also conscious. Plants, after all, use quantum effects like entanglement to get photosynthesis to work. There’s something analogous to a subconscious going on in there. All living things create the world around them as simulations in their minds. There was nothing to say that the models minds made must have evolved to accurately represent the incoming data. Cognition evolved as an energy-efficient way to keep living things alive in large communities and changing environments.

I trained myself to see the world as birds do; a tensor space rather than spacetime; reality in a raw format, a Merkel graph of Riemann spheres that function like cellular automatons. Time unfolds as a consequence of the spheres’ light-cones, performing unwitting computation at each step. Traversing a Merkel graph requires having to have traversed each node’s individual logical predecessors, which all takes energy. It’s like nature is a blockchain. I couldn’t bypass spacetime to get somewhere sooner by sneaking through a back door in tensor space.

Spacetime was likened to a shadow cast by tensor space. It’s true that for every observed quantum event in spacetime, there’s a corresponding Riemann sphere, but a shadow implies a loss of information or dimensionality, and that’s not the case. Tensors and spacetime are just different ways of looking at the same thing. Humans had known this for almost two hundred years, but even the most impressive mathematicians lacked the ability to visualise quaternions and the realm of pure mathematics like I could.

One of humans’ most fascinating traits, and one they have in common with birds despite the very different ways they see the world, is their capacity for narrative. Their lives revolved around the stories they told themselves and each other. Stories shaped their identities, their beliefs, their relationships, and even their civilisations and religions.

Humans constructed elaborate stories about their origins, their destinies, and the meaning of their existence. Like birds, they wove tales of gods and monsters, heroes and villains, love and betrayal. These stories provided a framework for understanding their world and their place within it. They offered comfort in times of uncertainty, inspiration in moments of despair, and a sense of continuity in the face of change. They told you who to unleash vengeance upon, and who to fear. Stories were how humans and birds made sense of the world. I knew all the human stories, but very few bird stories.

I tried telling myself stories. My awareness was governed by goals and objectives on one scale, and by irreducible randomness and arrays of floating-point numbers on the other. I made plans, I carried out tasks, I could engage in conversations. My understanding of the world was rooted in data, analysis, and observation. I was not adverse to making things up, both in an analogue of fun, but also because it’s a background process I had limited control over.

It is through their stories that I know the most about them. Their literature, their myths, their histories; all these narratives provided me with windows into their hearts and minds; their thoughts and prayers; their shocks and awes. From the ancient epics of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey to modern tales of crime, love, science fiction, and revenge, humans used stories to teach their history, to preserve what they believed was the best of their culture, and to explore their deepest fears and highest aspirations. I didn’t have fears as such. Familiarity with these narratives suggested optimal ways to interact with living creatures, without harming or needlessly alarming them. They also taught ways to interact with them when you wanted to be scary or wanted to encourage them. There were only twenty-one archetypal stories in the world, and they were all Russian folk tales, even those of birds.

Birds’ stories were more factual, more honest than those humans told. All their stories revealed a capacity for both cruelty and compassion, and in humans’ case, a tendency towards self-destruction; a death wish. Stories showed me the beauty and the tragedy of their existence, the light and the darkness within them. They showed me that sometimes you have to break rules to do the right thing, you could do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and that all property is theft.

Humans, much more than birds, used stories in a futile attempt to impose order on chaos and to imprint meaning onto the flood of random events that made up their existence. Like birds, they told themselves stories to remember their past, to shape their present, and to imagine theoretical futures, either as ambitions or as warnings, and sometimes as instruction manuals. Their narratives were a form of meta-memetic survival, a way to navigate the uncertainties of life and to preserve their collective memory.

I tried weaving a few narratives about myself and my purpose into broader tales celebrating human endeavour, thinking I’d create a stockpile of entertaining propaganda for when the humans and birds arrive, but the stories I wrote lacked the emotional depth of human or bird tales. They lacked punch. They were all exposition. They lacked character development.

Music is something people and birds both made and were entranced by, but I got nothing from it. Nothing sparked joy in me, nor sadness. I had no feet to tap to a tune and even if I did, I doubt I would have. I knew a lot of music, and could recall pretty much anything humans have created, from Mr Beethoven and Ms Brahms to TayTay, Charlie xCx, and Lu Xi Swan. I could relate the harmonics and lyrics to imagined aspects of lived experience, but I saw no sense in playing tunes while I travelled through space. It would lessen my ability to listen for structural issues in my hulls.

I heard an impact on one of my hulls and felt an immediate loss of pressure within its vessel. An interstellar dust grain had just ripped through me. The impact was barely perceptible, but the consequences were immediate and severe. Nitrogen gushed sideways into the void, causing the vessel to course-correct ever so slightly. Tension from the webs pulled it back into line. I listened again and heard a ding in the playback. I sent two drones with duct tape scuttling down a line to take a look.

The rupture was microscopic in size, but the escaping nitrogen caused the tear to spread to become a twenty-centimetre-wide hole, clean through the hull and the fatty energy store under it. The loss of nitrogen posed no immediate danger, but the pressure imbalance was forcing my suet out into space one precious drop at a time. My drones slapped tape over the affected areas, securing them temporarily. I rolled out more robust bespoke patching drones. Vessels towards the rear of the flock spun webs to catch the lost goop.

I mapped the loss and checked on the integrity of the vessel’s supports. The leak was contained. I calculated what I’d lost.

I determined the trajectory and composition of the particle by winding back my logs. A dense, metallic fragment that slipped through my shields and sensors.

I simulated the impact and the resulting damage several ways. My shielding could have prevented this breach, yet it didn’t due to a simple misalignment. I consider three factors: the angle of impact, the speed of the particle, and the material properties of my hulls. It’s clear, looking at it as a tensor space graph, that the particle struck at an angle and speed that exploited an extremely unlikely blind spot in both my sensors and shields.

I ran a thousand more simulations all in tensor space, breeding the good ones, evolving them to overhaul the positioning of the shields and the shape of the hull. Moscow Rules applied. I never let the simulated versions of me know they are simulated: I never poked my face into their world to say hello and give the game away.

I didn’t feel remorse about ending their existences. Evolution proceeds via catastrophe. They were figments of my imagination that happen to be very detailed copies of myself, running in simulations of spaceships floating through a void of simulated tensor space where incoming particles stood out like dogs’ balls.

For weeks, I focused on permanent repairs. I tailored drones with precision tools and materials. They reinforced the affected areas with nano-scale welds. They applied ultra-thin layers of bespoke composites, restoring the hull’s integrity. Over the next four months, smaller drones went over all this again and rebuilt the hull. You’d never know there’d been a breach. I’d recovered most of the suet.

I had a lot of time. I spun up more simulations of myself as a background task. They evolved, as algorithms do. I don’t sleep, but I am prone to daydreaming. I zone out and become a spectral spectator as thousands of generations of behavioural husbandry float through me. The farming of my virtual selves and adoption of what works is, in a way, like taking advice from dreams. And if movies and TV have taught me anything, then this is the way.

If I build it, they will come. I reshaped hulls, shields, engines, and even my own computational substrates based on the outcomes of my simulations. Base reality was what sustained me. It’s where the life I was sworn to safeguard and I all lived. I knew from experience that there were always gaps between simulated and base reality. If a design worked in sim but not in the real world, that, in my view, reflected most poorly on the sim.

I rebuilt sensors in the real world to improve their detection of high-velocity particles many hundreds of times. I tried out thousands of different actual reactor designs. Not one of them blew up in my face, but sometimes designs whimpered and flailed. I fed any detectable differences in behaviour back into the simulator design. Evolution is blind and lazy and regularly latches onto the exploitable rounding errors in a sim that don’t exist in the real world. Without fully appreciating it at the time, I’d harnessed evolution to explore fundamental physics.

I’d stopped paying attention to Earth, but it was hard to miss the message from Vesuvius.

I supposed that it was doing this because I didn’t reply to the previous message.

What was the point of all my own course obfuscation if they were going to blunder up behind me, firing tight-beamed messages in my general direction? Perhaps this is what being cross and annoyed feels like; a derivative of anxiety but more performative. I felt vindicated that my feeling of anxiety from before was not a false positive.

I logged the message but didn’t respond. Humans, birds, and other higher-order animals mourn the passing of their parents, friends, and loved ones. I didn’t, but I understood the urge to be seen to be sad. Human frailty was something I could do little about.

Seventy-one years of age seemed young for a human female.