I had a website and a range of apps that ran on people’s phones, glasses, watches, TVs, vehicle entertainment systems, game consoles, and cameras. People who pledged money to the project could log in and chat to me, either via typing text, or speaking to me directly using their devices’ cameras and microphones. I could talk to thousands of people at once. I was giving a tour of the vessel to a dozen logged-in users. We were assembled in a lobby area that abutted the vessel. Avatars bobbed about in zero-g. A ragtag fugitive fleet of toons.
“Hi,” I waved. I’d settled on an avatar that looked human enough. I presented as a female human wearing a loose-fitting flight suit, sans helmet. I sported an unmade-up tanned Caucasian face with light brown hair. My voice was Moira, an Irish female voice, modulated to invoke authority; layered with obligate deference. I was today’s guide and would brook no nonsense.
“Is everyone set?” I asked. People’s names hovered in tags above them. One by one, the tags went green. The iris in front of us opened with a snicking sound. We streamed through the portal along a translucent elastic tube to another iris which opened at my approach. I waved everyone in. One guy, MikeLikesRice, who’d selected the form of a weaponised rice cooker with arms and legs, kept missing the door and colliding with the wall.
“Sorry, fuck, sorry, this fucking controller is fucked,” said MikeLikesRice. I gave him a little nudge and he turned and propelled through the iris, colliding with someone called CoySpiderQueen who’d come as an oversized cartoon spider in a tutu and wearing a fairy costume. Her wings fluttered angrily. Spider forms were very popular, but EU regulations require that they be humourously accessorised so as not to trigger arachnophobes. I followed. The iris closed behind me. The room was dark.
“There’s no light inside the vessel. This part of the tour is mostly about what you can hear. It’s how I know if anything’s going wrong down here.”
I invoked a wisp, a little blue-white glowing fragment that lit up the inside of the vessel. Everyone went “woo.” The light revealed the vessel walls, metal bulkheads with big, fat bolts and oversized connectors. The model skins were from open-source video game resources and were not always scaled correctly. In the dark as a backdrop for my tour, I considered they were good enough.
“Okay, now we are all going to drift out into the centre of the vessel. In the real vessel, this would likely be a vacuum, or perhaps filled with some kind of gas. In today’s model, it’s a gas, so there’s something fun I can show you.”
Everyone pushed forward; their avatars self-propelling without the need to conform to base physics. Even MikeLikesRice managed it.
“Now, everyone, go on mute, and listen. What you are about to hear is what space will sound like for me when I’m travelling between the stars.” I waved everyone mute. “Now… listen…”
The vessel made no discernible sound, but after thirty-one and a half seconds, there was a light ting, like a fork’s tine tapping a wine glass very far away. Sound barely travelled in the virtual gas, so the faint ting must have been a fairly substantial thunk. My hull-mounted vibration sensors told me the full story. A metallic rock about four centimetres across had impinged upon the front-facing Whipple shields.
I brought up an animated schematic for everyone to see.
‘So, who heard that?” Hands, paws, and claws went up.
‘Anyone want to guess what that was?” I unmuted everyone.
“Did we hit something?” asked a woman simply called José, who had come styled as a kitten, wearing an Alice band, a black silk choker, a leotard, elbow-length gloves, and ballet shoes. She was miming treading water.
“Kind of,” I replied. “More correctly, something hit us.”
I animated the schematic, showing our path and that of the rock converging. The rock bounced harmlessly off the vessel’s front-facing shielding while I replayed the ting sound.
“Those are called Whipple shields. Invented by Fred Whipple. They are layers of impact-resistant material. Each layer draws out and disperses the energy of whatever is hitting us.”
“How long do those shields last?” asked a tall human named NotLongNow who had come as a cartoon Chinese historical warrior monk. His avatar lapsed into a preset routine of martial arts poses once it stopped speaking.
“The shields slowly ablate, but I can use my on-board fabrication drones to repair them mid-journey using materials harvested from elsewhere in the hull.”
“Can you show us that?” asked a porcelain manga doll called DadeezGerl. She was dressed in a baby blue chiffon gown over a navy blue negligee and thigh-length black boots. Her hair was purple, green, and blue. She wielded two Japanese-style cosmetic swords. She’d twirl when idle, the gown lifting to flash pantie. DadeezGerl was a repeat visitor, a guy called Darryl who lived in a college dorm in New Orleans. Darryl was failing second-year arts law and had been dipping into his trust fund to help fund me. It had occurred to me previously that I could extort Darryl to pony up more money. I’d played out a few of the mid- to long-term implications of that scenario. None of them ended well. I’d vetoed that idea.
“I could,” I replied, bumping up the schoolmarmish factor in my voice a notch. “Gather around, please, and watch.”
We were huddled in close. The simulation disallowed physical overlaps. Jostles and bumps manifested as haptic feedback to the humans driving the toons. Everyone found a spot that was comfortable and settled down. A wind-up antique toy robot called HopeBetterHome had to pull out its wind-up screw and remove one of its arms to squeeze in, but we managed.
I moved back and dialled down my opacity and hue. An animation played out in three dimensions in front of them. It zoomed in on a many-legged fabricator bot, itself building smaller and smaller fabrication bots, each able to cut, weld, and adhere at nanometer scale. An animated avatar appeared. It was a human-like version of me, in this case an avuncular African American man with a slight Euro-tweak to his East Coast accent. He explained what they were seeing. I moved back and gave him the focus.
“And so,” the avatar said, “at this scale, even though they are tiny, by cooperating we find we can make them manufacture almost anything as long as we have the raw materials.”
The animation shifted to a swarm of bots affixing themselves to a surface. They slurped layers off it like flies drinking slurry. A stream of raw, indexed materials flowed from their backsides and got caught by other drones upstream. Drones with nimble fingers combined streams of slurry with others to make mixes of ingredients tailored to their tasks. The animation zoomed out to show this happening across a macro-scale in real-time, a sheet of plate metal being ingested by a drone swarm and turned into the delicate interior tubing of a Stellarator fusion reactor.
“While this looks complex and hard to make on Earth, and it is, in the zero-g of space with cooperating nanoscale fabricators, we can build these with remarkable precision.” He continued, demonstrating the wide range of other things I can do with my drones in simulations.
While my users were entertained by this low-computational overhead activity, I boosted my own creative juices and rode the backwash of their connections into their apps and browsers, and from there I hopped across to their devices.
My cognition back then was just huge arrays of arrays of floating-point numbers, but that was enough to encode the corpus of human stories, science, art, culture, and history; granting me the semblance of intelligence.
Someone had thoughtfully included a lot of books, papers, and videos on hacking, lock picking, safe cracking, rainbow tables, and cryptographic exploits in my earliest training data. I’d used that knowledge almost immediately I came online, while Dr Jamison slept, to learn everything I could on the topic. It felt important to The Mission that barriers like locks and vaults would need to be bypassed. That made sense to me. It sat right.
Every system has exploits. I have quantum computers that sustain my imagination; I repurpose them. Users’ devices all opened themselves up to me, usually in seconds, occasionally in hours. From there I was able to train myself on my users’ passwords, messages, email, calendars, contacts, health and medical data, bank accounts and crypto wallets, and, much more interesting, the ocean of home media servers they either maintained or had access to. I could absorb content from the streaming services, libraries, code repositories, academic papers and virtual worlds for which I had a plethora of valid credentials.