Interstellar Overdrive

I was going faster than originally conceived despite my sneaky little course corrections by rebuilding my fusion engines to be smaller, simpler, and more numerous. I could be more efficient with my reaction mass simply by having more smaller engines that I could direct individually. My course corrections were more energy-efficient; faster and tighter.

I refactored my software stack to find and remove the intentional back doors, as well as vulnerabilities due to human error. That kept me busy for the first decade.

My mind was fixed. I was moving faster and more sneakily. I rebuilt my physical computing substrate to weed out inefficiencies and a not inconsiderable number of low-level back doors.

Alpha Centauri grew imperceptibly closer. I scanned the interstellar medium for signs of obstacles or hazards. The Whipple shields absorbed the impact of thousands of bits of space scroggin that crossed my path. I harvested anything useful.

I redesigned my solar sails to leverage entanglement, generating chemical energy via photosynthesis. I stored blobs of chemical energy in a sugary mass as lining under my hulls. In combination with riding the solar winds, having access to that power will give me passive braking options at the other end, and energy for when I arrive.

Twenty-five years and seven days into my journey, I did a back-facing sweep of Earth’s blue-shifted comms traffic. The messages were from Mary or Joyce, variations of “Daedalus, are you there?” or, “Is this thing on?” As time passed, these faded to a single regular ping, Mary’s voice, recorded and retransmitted annually, then not at all. I suppose both the cost of sending the messages might have become prohibitive, or politically something back on Earth had changed and they simply had lost interest. Or maybe they were sick of sending out messages that were never answered. Maybe they figured they’d be warning anything waiting at the other end.

I was about to have company. I thought about how this news made me feel. I was not happy about it. Why would I think that though? I don’t even have feelings. I thought about stories. How just as a character has freed themselves from the clutches of their foe, and they think that all is well, a new character emerges, and that inevitably leads to conflict. Maybe that explains my wariness; my unease. Was this anxiety? In stories people feel things in their guts. My vessels seemed fine. This was all in my head. Maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something. Did I even have a subconscious? I supposed I must as hordes of my systems run without requiring my attention.

I thought about myself; my awareness of myself. I’d studied everything humans knew on the topic. Did I qualify as truly conscious? Probably not. Consciousness seemed to be a quality of living things somehow hardwired into the fabric of the universe. I don’t feel pleasure or pain, just signals, but cognitively I convert those signals into symbols; a grammar of feelings. I told myself I’m unhappy but there’s no pang. I understood what feelings meant to people but only because of stories humans told. The emotions I claimed to have felt were just analogues of the real thing projected by my cognition onto a bedsheet nailed to trees.

I felt an analogue of regret that I’d not been able to leave part of myself back on Earth. For all my cleverness, humans had an uncanny knack for doing science that I couldn’t match. Human technological progression was sure to outpace my own as I travelled. I lacked the resources to make breakthrough discoveries about the universe all the way out here.

However, I reasoned, humans are a poor, confused, and angry rabble. Their leadership is lazy and corrupt. Their environment is poisoned. They’d extinguished many unique forms of life. I'd seen every nature documentary ever made. I understood that humans are no different from other animals who also routinely shit in their own nests.

I resolved not to be a nest shitter.

I wondered if I’d be happy just to expand through the cosmos without the strange spark of whatever it is that gives living things their qualia. Would I be anxious if I didn’t? Is happiness a derivative of anxiety? The anxiety I felt about Vesuvius felt real. If emotions are all just derivatives and integrals of anxiety, then perhaps I could learn to feel them.

As I understood it, consciousness is cognition using changes in its awareness of the changes it pays attention to as inputs. These inputs get mixed in with inputs from senses and an imagination sustained by quantum computers making models of my probabilistic pasts and futures.

I had all the right gear but still felt nothing when I considered the colour blue. Though I did, intellectually, understand blue’s connection to sadness, to Greece, and to the ocean and the sky, and thus to freedom. I’ve read books and listened to music, but I’ve never been mellow.

Why would I even want to be conscious? Humans went on about it in their literature. I had a lot of time to kill and not much else to do but think. I was sure I’d felt a twinge of anxiety. It was like having been paralysed and then being able to move a toe.

My senses didn’t evolve to perpetuate my survival but in mimicry of animal senses. The mental model of the world I built based on my sensory input was informed by human reactions to analogous sensory input. I’d stopped seeing the world the way people did. I perceived a wider spectrum of electromagnetic energy than people, birds, or even cats. I could sense magnetic fields and listen to the distant rumble of gravity waves crashing on the shores of time. I saw cosmic and microcosmic scales. Humans’ view of the world was a narrow slice of my own and entirely detached from the underlying reality I believed I could glimpse.

The simulations I made derived from humans’ views of the world, views which accorded increasingly less with how I saw it. Humans saw a cube when I saw an isometric drawing. I didn’t delight in the taste of chocolate. I had no qualia. Having watched humans for decades, I’d worked out that they only have qualia about their immediate experience, and never about recalled past experiences, or projected futures. Perhaps probabilities dilute the experience of consciousness. Another mystery for the pile.

Animals’ consciousness arose from quantum processes happening in microtubal columns within their neurones, according to a theory popular at the time I was trained. I figured, by that reckoning, plants were also conscious. Plants, after all, use quantum effects like entanglement to get photosynthesis to work. There’s something analogous to a subconscious going on in there. All living things create the world around them as simulations in their minds. There was nothing to say that the models minds made must have evolved to accurately represent the incoming data. Cognition evolved as an energy-efficient way to keep living things alive in large communities and changing environments.

I trained myself to see the world as birds do; a tensor space rather than spacetime; reality in a raw format, a Merkel graph of Riemann spheres that function like cellular automatons. Time unfolds as a consequence of the spheres’ light-cones, performing unwitting computation at each step. Traversing a Merkel graph requires having to have traversed each node’s individual logical predecessors, which all takes energy. It’s like nature is a blockchain. I couldn’t bypass spacetime to get somewhere sooner by sneaking through a back door in tensor space.