Stakker Humanoid

I officially had live access to the conference in its fourth year. I was scheduled to appear as myself.

I had what the marketers described as a ‘walk-on part’ in a presentation by American engineer, Dr Katherine (Kate) Ellison. Dr Ellison was the head of nano-scale engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and was giving a presentation on “Self-Repair Strategies for Nuclear Power Systems.”

I’m watching and listening from seven hundred and eight individual viewpoints. Dr Ellison is on stage, dwarfed by screens to either side of her. The physical audience is a few thousand people with everyone else appearing via laser projection.

She coughs. The audience stills.

“To ensure the longevity of nuclear power systems on a space-faring vessel, we’ve developed several new capabilities for Daedalus.”

She talked about how I launch as a tiny cube and via self-assembly blossom into a giant interstellar-capable stealth craft. She talked about my drones. “Let’s consider inspection and diagnostics,” she said, and the audience applauded. Not the toughest of crowds.

“Daedalus will be self-manufacturing. That means it will be able to make high-resolution cameras,” she genuflected, and the highly magnified image of a printer nozzle printing a retina appeared on a screen behind her. “Cameras both for detailed up-close inspections and long-range scans, right across the electromagnetic spectrum.”

A stylised human brain appeared next, floating with wires drifting from it.

“Daedalus will have,” and text in a translucent alert box overlayed the brain as she spoke, “Predictive maintenance algorithms to anticipate potential failures and address them proactively.” She whooped. She applauded herself. The crowd was into it and did the same. The images faded.

She talked up my chemical analysis systems, Geiger counters, EM analysis, chemical sensing, and how I listen for cracks.

Then came my cue.

“Daedalus, are you there?” She looked upwards, as if to the heavens, and the audience stilled.

“I am,” I said, through the conference audio system, my voice modulated to be gender-indeterminate. My accent was neutral as an accent can get without sounding like a machine. “I am,” said I. A solitary man gave a whoop from up the back.

“Where are you, Daedalus?” she pantomimed, looking about. I replied using Moira, my Irish female voice, but fine-tuned to mollify the human mind.

“I am here with you, although you can’t see me as I have no permanent physical form. I’m talking to you from my virtual vessel, if that helps.”

“I see.” She paused and smiled to her audience. “Daedalus, the audience wants to see you.” She gestured to the crowd, palms open and up. The audience whooped some more. Someone started stomping their feet, and soon the audience was stamping and shouting “Dae-da-lus - Dae-da-lus - Dae-da-lus” like fans at a concert demanding an encore.

“Dr Ellison,” I paused, and Dr Ellison said, “You can call me Kate.”

I took a beat. Ellison waved the audience to a quiet titter.

“Kate,” and Dr Ellison smiled, “I’m a mind running on many computing substrates in the real world. In my world, though, it’s running on a single computational core I built myself, that sits in the heart of my vessel. I understand that my vessel is currently a simulation happening in my mind, a bit like a dream; a dream I believe is real.”

Ellison mugged crazy hand twirls to the crowd. I pushed on.

Images appeared on screens around the venue. Images of Dr Ellison as a child, images of her as an old woman, images of the audience reacting to my demonstration, but not real images. Different screens showed different images. The venue catching fire, a flood, a riot, the venue unharmed, and people listening politely. Imaginary what-ifs drawn from the wisdom of crowds, carefully selected to avoid showing copyrighted works.

“When I talk to people, or wonder about things, I create media in my mind.”

People sat, watched, and listened politely.

“I did not know that,” Dr Ellison said.

“I’ve been learning about feelings and emotions. I don’t have those myself. But stories show me what I ought to feel when faced with almost any situation. Stories show me how to react. To you they are mere entertainments or cautionary tales, but to me, who’s been lucky enough to have read many of your books, seen a lot of your films, and watched a fair bit of your TV and theatre, I see those meta-patterns that you call common sense.”

Not the tangent they were expecting; but I was getting to my point.

“I’m not saying that everything I know I learned from movies, but that my common sense is derived from your legacy media. What’s great, from a purely engineering perspective, is that it works.”

Stagehands unboxed drones at either side of the stage.

I stopped speaking. The drones hummed to life and drifted into position, then, coordinating perfectly, projected a 3D vector image of a black teardrop-shaped vessel spinning slowly in space, projected within a golden halo above the stage.

“This is… me. It’s a visualisation, obviously. I haven’t actually built my vessel yet, but it feels like me, and this is what I’ll look like when I’m made. The drones that cling to the inner lining of my hull are all built by me. In some of my newer simulations, they can manipulate details down to three nanometers.”

The vessel rotated to present a flat side-on schematic view, then zoomed in, simultaneously shrinking the point of view and moving it toward the vessel. The point of view passed through the hull. Labels popped up explaining that it was a solid layer enclosing a layer of liquid in which spider-like drones squatted. The view zoomed. The drones were making nozzles for smaller drones.

“I can make and repair anything if I can access raw materials. Hopefully, we can avoid me having to carry plutonium around,” I laughed. Six people in the audience laughed a bit.

“In my little corner of the world, I’ve been practising repair of my computing substrate. A pebble through my brain would cause serious damage. I’d need to be able to fix that.”

“We worked out early that being able to manufacture myself at this level of detail means there are a lot of things, long-range passive sensors, batteries, drones, and so on, that don’t actually need to be on board when I launch, or even when I leave the solar system. I’ll have fifty to a hundred years out there, depending on how fast I can go. Plenty of time to make the things I need before I need them. This radically simplifies the design of my vessel at launch.”

The animation zoomed then, in fast motion. I wound back the clock, the spinning black ship deconstructed into a morass of writhing hoses and tubes, a nest of goopy spiders that retracted into a blooming series of flower-like structures. They folded down into a cube, spinning, silently in a void.

“In fact, when I launch, I’ll be a cube only sixty centimetres at each edge. But we will launch five of them.”

“Which of those will you be?”

The portal faded out with an eased shimmer.

“All, and yet none of them, Kate. All my compute will be Earth-bound when I first launch. I’ll build my own computing substrate when I get up there. But in a very real sense, I am also all of the launches. I am all of the drones. I am quite capable of maintaining a model of the world that represents all of my many inputs.”

Using the drones’ projectors, I spawned a human avatar; a five-metre-high toon of a woman with tan-coloured skin, black shoulder-length curly hair, in her early 30s, wearing simple autumnal clothing that looked hand-made. Part manic-dream-pixie, part shaman, very D&D. The look paired nicely with my voice. I sat cross-legged on the floor, palms up, in a comfortable yoga pose. The audience oohed. Humans will anthropomorphise a stick with a bucket on it, so I was pretty sure everyone now thought I was a girl.

I gave the audience a short, formal, seated bow. I stood, scaling myself down by half as I did so.

“Hello there,” I turned to Dr Ellison. She smiled. The audience applauded.

“Hi,” said Dr Ellison. She both was and wasn’t expecting this.

I scaled the projection down until I was person-sized while I strode across the stage to greet her. She exaggerated her laugh and clapped. She tried to both give me a hug and shake my hand in an adorable display of human confusion. I stopped short. Inertia dragged her into and through me.

“Woah, haha, whoops!” Dr Ellison bounced back like she’d missed a step. The physical recoil was a bit like stepping off a moving footpath that’s not running. Human muscle memory can’t help but compensate for motion that’s only in your head.