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.
Stagehands brought out a couch. Dr Ellison brushed away crumbs that were not there and sat. I conjured a comfortable chair by an up-and-coming Finnish designer. I also dusted and sat. Demure; impish. Legs crossed at the knee; left over right. A jandal dangled on my left foot. People clapped and the image on the big screens zoomed in on our faces.
“So now you’re a, a,” she paused, a confusion line crossed her brow, under the cosmetics.
“A girl?” I finished. My voice was set to arouse.
“Yeah,” she said softly. She beamed for the cameras. She flashed a coy smile in my general direction. She touched her hair and her knee. She sat up straight. Her knees tilted towards me.
I know what Kate likes; Kate likes me.
I nodded, smiling warmly. “No, Kate. I’m not a girl. I’m a machine. I learned everything I know about the world from people. But no.” I fine-tuned my body language, flirting like a guest with something to sell on a late-night television chat show. My index finger coiled my hair idly.
I heard Dr Ellison’s heart skip a beat. She flushed. I could see infrared and ultraviolet. Ellison’s capillaries brightened. “But you are dressed as one.” She looked me up and down with authentic desire and pantomime lasciviousness.
“So I am,” I agreed. “Do you like?” I stretched.
I adopted a serious expression, pulled the arousal out of my voice and supplanted persuasion. “You wanted to talk about reactor repair?” I smiled.
“Um, sure. Yeah, let’s do that.” Dr Ellison’s blush receded. She regained her composure; a brief ‘what was that about’ look on her face. The audience were like lost puppies. They’d caught the frisson just as it faded.
“What happens if you’re cruising through space, then suddenly, out of nowhere, a piece of space trash rips a hole through your brain, your computational core? What happens next? Talk us through it.”
“Okay, let’s say that happens. This is a scenario I’ve trained on a lot, actually.
“Firstly, let’s understand, when we talk about a ‘computational core’, what we mean is a massive solid-state cluster of identical physical rods. We sometimes call them cylinders, but rods is more descriptive as they are solid. Each rod is functionally identical and is made up of an internal web of physical computing substrates; like chips but in three D and solid. There are hundreds of thousands of these rods that, collectively, sustain who I am, what I know, and what I can do.
“If a particle hit my core at 0.25c, well. First up, I’d better hope that my Whipple shields caught most of the momentum, or else I’m fucked, to put it mildly. The hydrostatic shock alone from being hit by something that fast would destroy a solid vessel much larger than me.”
“Gosh, so no matter what we, or more correctly, you do, if you are unlucky, that’s it; game over?”
“Well, I have a cunning plan that solves this dilemma.”
I waved up my portal window with the black teardrop-shaped ship spinning slowly; stars in the background moved with it to imply it was the point of view moving as the ship itself moved through empty space at a quarter of the speed of light. A black ship against a black background.
“So as soon as I leave the solar system’s Oort Cloud, which I harvest for raw materials on the way through, I am going to pick up speed. Before I do that, or perhaps even during, I’ve been practising that lately. I’m going to give the vessel something of an overhaul.
The animation pulled back; a hundred facets of the vessel drifted outwards, secured to the main body of the vessel via high-tensile fibres.
“This is obviously sped up, but in real terms it will take me about a year to transform the original teardrop shape into a cloud of one hundred and twenty-eight smaller vessels, each with its own smaller computational core, each with its own set of three fusion drives, and nothing in the middle at all.”
The animation showed the webbed-up swarm of vessels all firing their thrusters and moving in a loosely coupled swarm, tethered via highly elastic spidroin fibres.
“That’s amazing,” said Dr Ellison. The audience applauded.
“So let’s run through the scenario now. Each one of these smaller vessels has its own Whipple shields and is capable of manoeuvring on its own. So with adequate forward sensing, each individual vessel ought to be able to avoid most debris.”