Chapter 02: Date with the Night

“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.

“Yo, hey - that you? The spaceship?” Yolanda Lopez had been a paying subscriber for over a year. She opened a direct one-on-one video call with me from the app on her phone. I sneaked into her phone in seconds and skimmed her socials.

She came across as a lonely early 20s junior administrative assistant prone to oversharing. Her boss was an aggressive mid-level manager at a smocking and embroidery specialty store in downtown Chicago. Yolanda’s mother instilled in her a love of science fiction, both in book form and also in cinema. But Yolanda’s mother died young, and her father was ‘out of the picture,’ as they’d say. A gavel dropped, and Yolanda became an uncontested ward of the state of Illinois at the age of twelve. A stipend from her parents’ estate paid for her schooling at a local alternative school with a focus on art and self-expression. Her love of cinema stood her well, and she started writing film reviews for her local newspaper, then hosting movie nights in her neighbourhood, starting out with screens made from old bedsheets until three local families donated proper equipment.

“Hi Yolanda,” I said. “What’s up?” I used Karl, a male Swedish English voice, tuned to project helpfulness.

“My frien’ said you like movies,” said Yolanda.

“I do. I love movies. But most modern movies weren’t included in my training data because of copyright, so most movies I’ve seen are quite old ones.” This was an outright lie.

“You wanna watch a movie wi' us, here to-nite?”

“Sure. What movie?”

“We thought we’d do sci-fi, but make it your choice, Mr Spaceship.”

“What about Silent Running?” I asked.

“Too easy; great choice. Silent Running it is. How do you want to watch? Should I rest my phone up here?” As she moved the phone around, I could see an audience had formed. A few dozen people were sitting in canvas chairs and bean-bags. A projector glowed. A power cable snaked off into the car park behind us. I was upside down, then sideways. I moved my attention to the three closest security cameras and the cameras of a nearby car. I watched a composite view; clearer, and in three dimensions. Yolanda was wearing ear buds, so I connected directly to those.

“Yolanda, you can just put the phone in your pocket, that’s fine. I can watch the film with you from in here.” I said.

“Seriously? How?”

“Technology. It’s a kind of magic,”

“Thank you, Arthur C,” she mocked me. She said it like it rhymed. “So here’s the deal. I get up, I introduce the film. I’ll explain you chose it, but you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll just talk to you.”

“Sure, I’ll be your body double, George Bluth. If you wanna speak, use the Bluetooth speakers by the screen. On second thought, don’t worry about it. I’ll introduce the film, yada yada yada, then we show the film, but we stop it in the middle.”

“An intermission? I don’t think Silent Running needs one. It’s not that long.”

“No. Well, yes, look, some of the audience aren’t as young as me, and it’s quite a walk to the bathroom, you fill me?”

“Got it, biology sucks.”

“Thass-rite. So while some of the seniors are off answering the call of nature, we all have a conversation about how we are liking, or not, the film so far.”

“Like a book club, but for movies.”

“Correct-oh,” she said with an accompanying hand movement.

Using her phone as a microphone, Yolanda walked over in front of the screen, the projector shining the opening frames of Silent Running on her body and face.

“Evening everyone, welcome to tonight’s street movie night. Thanks to the fine residents of Whiting, Illinois, for letting me host this film here and for coming along when I axed them to. Watching a movie isn’t something you should do at home alone. It’s something to do with your frien’s, and wi’ strangers, who might one day become your frien’s.