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.”