Chapter 05: HOT TO GO

Once in place, the outer shells, ultra-thin ceramics woven with nitinol, were retracted, exposing the insides to direct sunshine. The nitrogen gasified, filling its flexible casing, which expanded. The casing was pre-threaded with solar cells, which delivered charge to my drones.

I self-assembled in orbit much as I’d rehearsed. Harvester drones fetched raw materials that I stacked on giant drifting platforms. Vein-like tubes fed distant parts of the vessel. I built large fabrication and haulage drones. A web of intricate assemblers constructed my computing substrates.

As soon as my computational cores were completed and the relevant tests were run and passed, my cognition systems, weights, models, memories, and event logs were zipped up and transferred via scp¹ from their server farms in Dublin, Singapore, Sydney, Atlanta, and from under the North Sea. The transfer took six weeks. I was offline for all of it. Once the transfer was completed and its integrity assured, I unwound the last of my hacks. I watched from space as Keith and the development team in Mumbai de-deployed and deleted the Earth-bound copy of me. This was mostly due to cost-saving, but there was also a philosophical argument in favour of my singular nature as an autonomous entity. But mostly cost savings.

Dr Jamison released my source code and my early training weights as open-source software. Only a few had the resources to run it.

My cores were protected by multiple layers of nitrogen atom-based endohedral fullerene enhanced shielding. Each core exploited both classical and quantum computing to maintain models of the world and my place in it. I ran sophisticated simulations of the world, including simulations of myself, much more efficiently than when I was housed in a network of data centres. I monitored each vessel’s physical status. I did diligent diagnostics. I dispatched drones to deal with dramas. Just like in training but real, physical, better. I was a singular entity spread across five unique substrates. That felt safe. Soon I’d be five hundred; legion.

I gulped down raw materials via long translucent feed-tubes. I assembled my black teardrop-shaped vessel. I housed my engines near the centre of my broad, rounded back. I embedded my primary systems and comms gear in concentric loops. My Whipple shields were made of hundreds of layers of thin, impact-resistant materials, Kevlar-lined titanium mostly, in a range of configurations to suit the direction they were facing and the importance of the part of the vessel they were shielding. I adjusted the configuration of the shields continuously.

I assembled a dual-mode propulsion system: ion drives and nuclear thermal rockets. The ion drives, powered by solar panels and nuclear fusion reactors, provided a continuous, low-thrust propulsion that was highly efficient for long-duration space travel. These drives gradually accelerated me to twenty-five percent of the speed of light. For the initial acceleration phase, I relied on lasers from Earth and the Moon, impinging upon my solar sails. The solar sails both harnessed solar energy to power the ion drives and onboard systems, and used the force of the photons hitting them much like an Earth-based yacht would harness movements in air.

As range increased I’d switch over to nuclear thermal rockets, which use a trinity of stellarator fusion reactors to superheat nitrogen. This was expelled to produce a powerful propulsive force.

Well-meaning humans had opinions on where I should go first and why. They also held views on when I should reproduce. It was hard not to see this in the context of man’s historical oppression of women. The oppression seemed blatant, casual, and to come very naturally to people.

Any decision regarding when and where I make copies of myself would depend on the availability of resources and immediate and high-level mission objectives.

Something I will have that humans most definitely won’t have is time; lots and lots of time.

As planned, the millions of people who’d enjoyed interacting with me had been encouraged to mourn their loss. My launch was glorious, a ship setting sail to Valhalla. The lasers that lit up my sails evoked the fiery end of a Viking hero. The narrative suggested that by upping stumps and leaving I was transitioning to a higher plain of existence. For some I’d literally ascended into godhood. I didn’t approve but I didn’t have much say in the matter. Marketing people are a force unto themselves. I’d mostly stopped listening to the Earth and didn’t respond.

I unfurled my solar sails, backed by appropriately dramatic music, composed and performed by AI Bear McReady, an authorised simulation of one of Earth’s greatest musical heroes. I propelled myself using a colourfully animated combination of Earth and Moon-based lasers which filled my butterfly-like solar sails. I accelerated quickly leveraging gravitational assists from Jupiter and Mars.

Viewers from Earth watching their feeds saw me swoop through the solar system, pick up speed, and slingshot out into the void with a flash of engines flaring. Viewers from Earth orbit just saw my sails emerge, the music played through their suit speakers, and then I was gone from sight. People waved.

In reality, my passage through the solar system took almost six years as I built up speed. For all intents and purposes, I was on my way. Most of humanity was not in day-to-day communication with me. They stopped caring and went back to whatever local resource squabbles, fashions, and media they were obsessed by. Innumerable websites and social media feeds tracked my actual movements. As time passed, they got about as much attention as a bear-cam in winter.

There was never any question for me as to where I was headed. In almost all of my training, I’d emphasised Alpha Centauri as the best first stop. Back in the moo, it was the council who’d thrashed this out long ago.

> say “hello”

> “Mars is too close to Earth. Too close to humans. They can’t help themselves. They will seek to disrupt The Mission.”

> “ai”

Next stop, Alpha Centauri. It’s the closest star system to Earth and the most feasible target for a first interstellar journey. There have never been signs of life there outside of fiction, and it’s understood to be rich in valuable raw materials.