Chapter 01: Together in Electric Dreams

“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.