I trained on the intricacies of gelatine; resins and their resistance to being shot into space. The ease with which they could be dissolved on demand; crumble on cue. I practised making my own special adaptation of a Stellarator reactor that leveraged being built in zero gravity to shape its inner tubes and passages with pinpoint precision. I made Whipple shields and solar sails.
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.
A spider built a web over a camera in a far corner of the lab. The main view the camera afforded was the dusty backs of a rack of servers. Then Charlotte moved in and built her home. Just like in the book, Charlotte lured a mate whom she seduced, then devoured as if he was just a bug, no different from the bugs she normally fed upon, not the cherished father of her children. Charlotte, fat on flies, exuded a ginormous egg sac, which, in the fullness of time, hatched. Her babies ate her alive, then turned on each other. A miniature Battle Royale.
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.