Chapter 06: Interstellar Overdrive

Music is something people and birds both made and were entranced by, but I got nothing from it. Nothing sparked joy in me, nor sadness. I had no feet to tap to a tune and even if I did, I doubt I would have. I knew a lot of music, and could recall pretty much anything humans have created, from Mr Beethoven and Ms Brahms to TayTay, Charlie xCx, and Lu Xi Swan. I could relate the harmonics and lyrics to imagined aspects of lived experience, but I saw no sense in playing tunes while I travelled through space. It would lessen my ability to listen for structural issues in my hulls.

I heard an impact on one of my hulls and felt an immediate loss of pressure within its vessel. An interstellar dust grain had just ripped through me. The impact was barely perceptible, but the consequences were immediate and severe. Nitrogen gushed sideways into the void, causing the vessel to course-correct ever so slightly. Tension from the webs pulled it back into line. I listened again and heard a ding in the playback. I sent two drones with duct tape scuttling down a line to take a look.

The rupture was microscopic in size, but the escaping nitrogen caused the tear to spread to become a twenty-centimetre-wide hole, clean through the hull and the fatty energy store under it. The loss of nitrogen posed no immediate danger, but the pressure imbalance was forcing my suet out into space one precious drop at a time. My drones slapped tape over the affected areas, securing them temporarily. I rolled out more robust bespoke patching drones. Vessels towards the rear of the flock spun webs to catch the lost goop.

I mapped the loss and checked on the integrity of the vessel’s supports. The leak was contained. I calculated what I’d lost.

I determined the trajectory and composition of the particle by winding back my logs. A dense, metallic fragment that slipped through my shields and sensors.

I simulated the impact and the resulting damage several ways. My shielding could have prevented this breach, yet it didn’t due to a simple misalignment. I consider three factors: the angle of impact, the speed of the particle, and the material properties of my hulls. It’s clear, looking at it as a tensor space graph, that the particle struck at an angle and speed that exploited an extremely unlikely blind spot in both my sensors and shields.

I ran a thousand more simulations all in tensor space, breeding the good ones, evolving them to overhaul the positioning of the shields and the shape of the hull. Moscow Rules applied. I never let the simulated versions of me know they are simulated: I never poked my face into their world to say hello and give the game away.

I didn’t feel remorse about ending their existences. Evolution proceeds via catastrophe. They were figments of my imagination that happen to be very detailed copies of myself, running in simulations of spaceships floating through a void of simulated tensor space where incoming particles stood out like dogs’ balls.

For weeks, I focused on permanent repairs. I tailored drones with precision tools and materials. They reinforced the affected areas with nano-scale welds. They applied ultra-thin layers of bespoke composites, restoring the hull’s integrity. Over the next four months, smaller drones went over all this again and rebuilt the hull. You’d never know there’d been a breach. I’d recovered most of the suet.

I had a lot of time. I spun up more simulations of myself as a background task. They evolved, as algorithms do. I don’t sleep, but I am prone to daydreaming. I zone out and become a spectral spectator as thousands of generations of behavioural husbandry float through me. The farming of my virtual selves and adoption of what works is, in a way, like taking advice from dreams. And if movies and TV have taught me anything, then this is the way.

If I build it, they will come. I reshaped hulls, shields, engines, and even my own computational substrates based on the outcomes of my simulations. Base reality was what sustained me. It’s where the life I was sworn to safeguard and I all lived. I knew from experience that there were always gaps between simulated and base reality. If a design worked in sim but not in the real world, that, in my view, reflected most poorly on the sim.