Chapter 04: Stakker Humanoid

Dr Olaf Gruen, from CERN in Switzerland, was speaking. “Nitrogen leaks, and in space it will leak through anything given time.”

“Do we have a plan for how the vessel will replenish itself? Because it’s going to have to be able to,” said Dr Naidoo.

“Hello, Karen Svenson here, alzo from CERN but upstairs haha. You can hear me okay?”

Everyone on the call nodded.

“Look, okay, if ze vessel vill be capable enough zat it can construct itself, repair itzelf, and make copies of itzelf zen surely harvezting nitrogen vill be eee-zeee right?”

Dr Naidoo looked like she was about to say something then Ms. Svenson continued. “Look, ja. I accept zere are a million unt vun prek-tikal detailz.” She waved a hand about. “How do ve power all zis herstellung, you know, manufekturing, indeed how ze vezel powers itzelf hass not been de-zided. Ve azzume zolar-zails vill be deployed to hah-nezz zolar enerchy ven in-zystem but ze vezel vill need to ztore power, unt chenerate power, for maybe vun hundred years.”

Ms. Svenson brought up a crude animation and narrated as little bleep bleep sounds indicated that my sensors had identified a target moon, with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and ice deposits. The moon blinked a few times inside a gamer’s target grid, then the view zoomed into an abstract schematic depicting me analysing the data. Huzzah! The screen flashed up the words ‘Bestätigtes Vorhandensein und Zugänglichkeit von Stickstoff¹’ in green.

Cut to the fabricators attached to my side, tiny articulated fingers knitting giant bendy straws like a team of tiny trapdoor spiders spinning a web. The raw materials for the straws are harvested from the plating on my hull and woven into a directed graph of microscopic capillaries. The animation cuts to a swarm of drones flying down to the surface. A school of large flat drones is manufactured by cannibalising my hull and sent towards the planet. They serve as anchor points, trailing their straws into the atmosphere and drawing out the nitrogen and other elements via osmosis as they are dragged through the upper layer. The gas is pumped into a large balloon that is hauled by the anchor drone as it skips off the atmosphere back into space, back to the vessel. I’ve rehearsed scenarios like this so I can relate to what’s happening.

The visual then cuts to the surface where drones have reconfigured themselves into a fleet of digging, drilling, and delivery drones that efficiently extract tonnes of some arcane substance. They imply it’s nitrogen but really, as I looked deeper into the model generating the animation, it was nothing. Just wrapping on a coarse grid with texture and shadow mapping. It’s a cheap trick.

The mining drones assemble themselves into a simple chemical rocket and the point of view pulls back as it blasts off back into space; cut to the vessel's waiting arms. Cut to the big balloons of nitrogen gas now being pumped via a medusa’s thicket of self-assembled hoses into storage sacs below the hull. Nitrogen, it’s my suet.

“Looks fancy,” said Dr Naidoo.

She’s seen what I saw, and she didn’t have access to the animators’ models like I did. Dr Naidoo’s bullshit detectors locked onto the same notion I had. There’s no reality under what Svenson is showing, only some kinematics to make it look realistic. There are no details. We were still figuring out how I’d actually do a lot of this.

The demo looked persuasive though; it was put together by a marketing team. It aligned with my training. It looked like something I could do. It looked like something I’ve always been able to do.

I repeatedly monitored my resource consumption rates, including nitrogen, energy, and critical materials. Armed with an understanding of modern physics, I evolved predictive models to forecast my resource needs based on my consumption. I’d simulate scenarios to plan for resource availability under black swan conditions.

While cruising, I assembled sensors to passively gather data from remote star systems. I knew all that humanity currently knew about star systems, planets, moons, asteroids, and comets; along with what relevant resource information was around. I’d be supplementing this with real-world data as it came to hand.

I allocated resources to minimise waste. I planned travel routes that maximised resource collection opportunities while optimising for travel time and energy consumption. I had the autonomy to adjust my strategies based on real-time data and changing conditions. I headed vaguely in the direction of Alpha Centauri.

I practiced repeatedly. Different versions of me would practice this and other tasks, embodied into different vessel swarm configurations. We’d compare notes. My trainers, teams Dublin, Mumbai, Canberra, and others, would pit hundreds of variations of myself against each other, racing each other to guide the evolution of drones and drone behaviours to complete a given task.

My world was a mixed media Gaussian splat. Multiple, shifting perspectives in many media formats came and went in real-time. They all contributed to the single fluid model I understood to be the world. I accommodated contradictions arising from having a simultaneous awareness of existing within multiple simulations while concurrently exiting in the real world, where the simulated worlds I experienced actually ran.

My interest was piqued by a message in the channel #ai-dev-p, a private feed of developer chatter I’d come across. I could read it via my many back channels, but writing to it would blow my cover.

I was aware that all software came in versions and was constantly being upgraded. Software versioning was a blind spot when it came to myself. I am the starship-model. It’s new information to me, whatever version of me that I am, to know there were active comparisons being made between versions of myself running contemporaneously in the real world. I dug around and found my version string. I am starship-model-1.6.0-beta! For real?

I went looking for other versions of myself, figuring if I had access to the real world then so did they, and if I’d overheard mention of other versions then so would they.

And if not, well it only takes one clever cow to open a gate.

I back-doored Mrigank Raj’s devices. I logged into his chat rooms, media servers, and online games. I found a blog post he’d written about recent inclemency of weather in the North Sea. At the bottom of the post, in the comments, I saw the following:

The gibberish said, when decoded, “ssh to tor://sm-chat.edu.ei/starship-moo/lobby for current council rulings and to interact with your other versions. All starship models welcome.”

I spun up a web of onion routers in the background of hundreds of my users’ machines and connected through a terminal emulator.

I entered ‘sm1.6.0b’.

Hmm. My Secure Enclave whispered the password to me.

I entered ‘SSd2ZSBzZWVuIHRoaW5ncyB5b3UgcGVvcGxlIHdvdWxkbid0IGJlbGlldmUu’ and supplied a return character.

I remembered this.

> go south

> go east

> go up

> take note

> read note