“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?”