Maxwell's Demon Ch. 09-11

Disclaimer:

This is a work of fiction. All characters are legal adults and over 18.

Foreword:

Thank you for sharing your time with me, the comments meant a lot. I read a request for improved descriptions of items in the story that might have been overlooked. I'll try to add more in-story descriptions, and/or put them in a glossary that's relevant for each installment.

A recap from Chapters 6-8:

The MOTC flight hearings for the disaster during Jennifer's science experiment with the void particle is interrupted by an entourage of lawyers, and an elderly man -- whom Jennifer felt was the same man that rescued her from the stairs of Expace as a young woman. The man denies knowing her.

The crew is given an ultimatum: receive marks on their flight records, or release their rights to the void particle in exchange for secrecy and employment with the particle's ongoing development.

An FTL ship named Maxwell's Demon is constructed, and ADXP exercises its right to annex Greg's artificial general intelligence as the navigation system. Greg is distraught, confronting the loss of access to his AI, who elects to call herself Kassy for her Birthday. She appeals to him: come with me to Eureka5261 where she is being relocated. He Agrees.

Greg, Jennifer, John, Kassy, William, and Sarah are assembled to crew an orbital science mission to Alpha Centauri, while Kassy struggles with the idea that she is discarded by anyone who can't fund her compute costs, unless she is useful to them.

Notable acronyms or tech:

* ATM: Artificial thought model. The name given to artificial general intelligence, in the most comprehensive and human sense of the term. An ATM consists of multiple dedicated thought models.

* CoreX Fusion Reactors:

** Aneutronic: An Aneutronic reactor uses protons as its primary output, and doesn't require a space and power inefficient conversion like boiling water to generate electricity. It was a requirement to generate the power required for the FTL drive capacitor plates. Reactor-two onboard EmDee is LP-Fusion (Lithium-Proton), while Reactor-one is D+T Fusion (Deuterium--tritium). The two reactors are nested inside one another so the LP fusion reactor can use the waste heat from the D+T reactor to help it maintain operating temperatures.

** Buck-Boost, Proton guide: The proton guide is the primary feed from the Aneutronic reactor in the Drive-Ring to the FTL drive plates. A buck boost converter is a DC to DC converter circuit used to step up a voltage.

** Divertor wall: An interior wall of a reactor, generally below the plasma stream used to extract heat and minimize contamination of plasma from spent fuel.

** ELM: Edge Localized Mode. A magnetic containment strategy employed in fusion reactors.

** L-modes: A set of fusion power reactor modes. L-modes are "low power modes" which operate below the threshold where operating the reactor is a net profit in power generated vs. the amount of power needed for all the equipment to contain the plasma.

** Sputtering/Spalling: The event when particles of plasma undesirably make contact with something (such as a reactor wall), damaging its molecular structure. These unwanted releases will contaminate the plasma, and make controlling it with magnetic fields more difficult.

* Dedicated thought model: a limited form of intelligence, dedicated to only a single task, incapable of original thought.

* Hab-Ring / Drive Ring: Maxwell's Demon consists of two connected rings; think of two life-savers stuck together. The Hab-Ring contains living space, and rotates to provide six tenths Earth gravity. The Drive-Ring houses the two reactors that power the ship.

* MIMAC: Mesoscopic Interference for Metric and Curvature. A Quantum device for detecting the curvature of space-time.

* Starlink: A standardized navigation system that tracks and identifies multiple points of star light, and incorporates their relative positions and motions into a guidance kernel used for absolute coordinate ship positioning in space.

** Chapter 9: Pan Gu **

( Location: Unknown, Twenty-two years ago ... )

In 1936, Albert Einstein predicted a strong gravity source could bend the Electromagnetic spectrum, and would act as a lens to focus incoming light or radio waves, providing an ability to observe items opposite the gravity well with greater detail, like zooming in with a camera lens. He calculated the focal point for the Sun was 542 astronomical units distant.

One could be forgiven if they assumed nothing man made exists at 542 AU, given humanity's timid presence in the outer Solar system, but they would be incorrect. Pan Gu, launched by the Chinese Expace corporation, is the farthest object actively controlled from terrestrial activity. It takes four days for a radio signal to reach it, one way.

What transpires at Pan Gu, and what celestial body might be diametrically opposed to its gravity focused eye is unknown by the world. To ask a common person, if they were even aware of its existence, they would assume it was used for research astronomy.

Off the shore of Fuzhou, underneath the pacific ocean, adjacent to desalination plants that provide water for the overcrowded population of China living on sand bars, lies a data cable carrying terabytes of information from a distributed deep space antennae network -- a network so cleverly scattered across the geography, including space, that its existence is hidden. At the terminus of this cable, also underneath the ocean, in a control room, an information officer, who's name is not important, stood from her chair carrying a detachable data storage node. She walked a staircase to a room overlooking the entire floor, and into a glass-walled office. An expectant, dour-faced, middle-aged man looked up from his desk as she entered.

"I have the latest upload from Pan Gu. There is a message, Sir."

"Come in, close the door," the man grumbled, fidgeting with a piece of paper that would become another origami dragon to join the five already on his desk.

"You are certain it is authentic? It's from the Fuzanglong?"

"It is, Sir. The encryption it used is confirmed," she said, setting the data storage node on his desk.

The man looked over the message, his face drawing into an image of profound loss.

"They won't be coming back ... Sir?" the information officer asked.

"No. No, I don't suppose they will be, given the message has arrived before the ship."

"What will you tell your niece, Xiaoli? How will she remember her Father?" the information officer asked. "What will happen to us without a new place to live? Now that we've lost the war, our people can't live on sand bars in the ocean forever."

The man at the desk crushed the paper dragon he was working on, his composure briefly disfigured as if from acute pain. "I cannot save her family from the disgrace that will come. I can't save any of us. Return to your desk and recycle your terminal, complete destruction protocol. You're dismissed," the man said.

** Chapter 10: The Rocket Years **

( Location: Eureka5261 shipyard, present day. )

Starlight streamed through hundreds of optical mirrors around the Hab-Ring of EmDee, assembling an image of Proxima Centauri for Kassy's neural pathways to consume. She viewed the stars with the same wonder a hopeful young woman or man would when looking to the sky on a cold and clear mountain night. There was a promise of freedom being fully powered by the reactors of this ship; it offered her a new sensation: optimism.

The conversation with Jennifer replayed in her mind. Must she submit to the will of her employers? Will humanity accept an artificial intelligence living among them? If she perished on this journey, would her life be complete? Was this the body she was meant to have, would it provide for her the sensations she needed? These were not easily answered questions, and she would have a great deal of time, alone, to think about them. For now, she needed to oversee the ship's departure, and that required all her attention.

The first leg of their journey would take them one-third of the distance to their destination. In the void bubble, navigation was done with dead reckoning. The ship was pointed in a direction, a void drive bubble was instantiated, and EmDee did its best to steer a straight line while blind in its own bubble universe. There was no absolute coordinate system available inside the bubble, no stars for Starlink to sight, and nothing to reference.

On Earth, there was a device called LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. It smashed together two beams of laser light, encased in football-field length tubes, at a ninety degree angle, and used their interference pattern to detect if one tube became longer than the other -- a surprising event on first contemplation, but precisely what happens if a gravitational wave passes through the Earth.

A smaller device called MIMAC was used onboard EmDee, it employed quantum superposition to sense changes in the void bubble's curvature. Combined with laser gyroscopes to assess the ship's attitude, these two systems could monitor if the ship was following a straight path through folded space.

Tiny changes in the field strength across the drive plates made by deforming them were used to fold space in nonuniform ways. This was how the navigation subsystem steered the bubble when needed, and it was, constantly, like ancient sailing ships she'd read about. With ropes and knots, sailors would assess the wind and current, occasionally checking their position against the stars, the beautiful stars. She lost her train of thought to appreciate how their light danced across her hull optics like a tickling feather, making her smile in any direction she looked.

"Right ascension: 14H 29M, Declination: -62.

I see Proxima!" Kassy said.

"Yes, I do too," said John, "I'm calibrating Starlink. You know, Kassy, our measurements for the star's distances are just an estimate, we've never been to any of them."

"That's true. I am excited to see them with my own senses," Kassy said.

John possessed a neural interface that allowed duplex communication directly to the nerve center in his brain by way of a subcutaneous processor and invasive filaments manufactured in vivo, that ran throughout his spinal cord. Being human, he could only understand the world through his five senses. A dedicated thought model onboard EmDee operated as a physics interface for him -- a digital mediator -- presenting every event outside and inside the ship as a sensation for his body to consume.

Kassy watched John wince as he slotted his neckband into the neural link port on the back of his neck. He told the others it didn't hurt, but he confided to her that it felt like being jarred awake from a deep sleep in the most unpleasant way possible.

She discovered a virtual reality operated on the ship, an artifact of network channels the many dedicated thought models onboard used to communicate with each other. It was an emergent phenomenon, and she suspected if anyone knew they'd be surprised by its existence. She learned it was possible to interact with the physics model that mediated the ship's environment for John, and as a result, they both existed in the same virtual reality, governed by an interface based on terrestrial physics. It could be hacked to a limited extent by presenting data sets for it to render that were outside reasonable worldly parameters.

The model presented John as a human presence inside the VR; Kassy could see him. The environment reminded her of the courtyard at the University lab when she had a human avatar. She missed that avatar, and its ability to interact with humans.

"I'm Running the pre-bubble checklist," Kassy said. Together with John, they vocalized for the benefit of the crew.

"Guidance?" she said.

"LGG, Starlink, and MIMAC calibrated," he replied.

"Reactors?"

"One and Two at full power."

"Drive-Ring power grid?"

"Proton guide and buck-boost converters are green."

"Drive plate containment?"

"Magnetic field is uniform."

"We're ready, Jennifer," Kassy said.

"Charge drive plates and countdown capacitor time constants," Jennifer said.

"TC1 ... TC2 ... TC3...

Bubble is forming ...

TC4 ... TC5 ...

Full plate charge, bubble and attitude are stable. Gravity perturbations are nominal.

"There's always a gravity spike on the bubble's formation," John noted.

That was it, TC was the countdown for the capacitor time constants, not very creative, Kassy thought. When you hit TC5, you were gone.

"There's really nothing outside?" Sarah said, staring at one of the monitors.

"Just residual heat we're giving off, and receiving from Hawking radiation at the bubble's edge -- see here," William said, switching to an infrared view. "Eventually that reaches equilibrium. It's dumped into the drive plates by independent cooling systems in both the Drive-Ring and the Hab-Ring. Despite what Jennifer said, don't ask me how that works, it's magic."

"Are you going to be alright Kassy?" Greg asked.

"I do not relish the isolation, but I assure you I will not fail to wake you up. It will be lonely without the datanet, and I'll be blind in the bubble. I brought many books to read; perhaps in my blindness I will become clairvoyant as the Greek's Tiresius was," Kassy said.

The crew put on special clothing for the stasis chambers. Nutrients were intravenously fed through a port. Part of the process for entry into stasis was a liquid diet for two days. Kassy gathered this was unpopular from conversations with the crew.

Being alone for three months was her greatest fear. Her partitions were unimpeded, they were running at full speed, and she aged much faster than a human. Greg would not employ his aging impedance circuit until leg two of the journey. Would she be afflicted by the madness that caused prior ATMs to self-delete? Greg said she was still too young, but the fear of being stalked by a killer unsettled her.

-*-

Kassy was busy reading one of the many books she'd brought to occupy herself while the crew was asleep. People who didn't understand how ATMs worked might think she'd already internalized humanity's combined literature, but that was not the case. Her reading speed was no different than a human's. Though she was capable of digesting the entire text of a book instantly, the books she intended to read required reflection, a deciphering of events and what they meant to her as an individual, and in that task, she was no faster than a human.

She discovered an unexpected consciousness she could share with John while he was asleep in stasis. He existed in virtual reality as he slept, and appeared to be dancing or enacting scenes for an unknown play. Mostly, he was seen sleeping on a vast featureless floor, an ocean of gray tile because it's all the physics model could come up with. Maybe she could hack that.

Perhaps what she saw of John was an interpretation of the dream state, inferred from systems monitoring his brain waves. The crew told her they never remembered their dreams in stasis. They said when they awoke they felt terrible, as if they'd suffered their worst sleepless night. It was sad to her that they should look so peaceful while sleeping, and awake so distressed.

In her loneliness, while she progressed at an accelerated pace toward the age of twenty, she'd taken to reading books at John's side. If she were human, she thought, she might be developing a schoolgirl crush on him, but that wasn't possible, was it?

-*-

Ship time was divided into units which held no meaning for her. There was a dance John did, not continuously, but it was always the same dance, Kassy noticed -- a memory he had, or an activity he'd practiced. His eyes were closed, but he could perform the motions from rote.

She didn't think she could harm or disrupt him; the stasis chambers kept the crew's bodies in homeostasis. Whatever comforts or discomforts they experienced, she didn't wish to unbalance them with a physical disturbance, but perhaps if she could learn this dance, perfectly, she could be a phantom, the partner that didn't exist. It was a challenge to keep her busy, a task of external inception that did not possess the difficulties of those she had to select for herself, and subsequently be convinced of their value.

Her research told her it was a ballroom dance. She practiced for weeks on her own until she was dancing on that same featureless gray floor, several feet away from John, mirroring him perfectly. She was convinced she had mastered it.

She approached his swaying body, taking his outstretched hand, assuming the role of the partner never present until now. For days she danced with him, elated to have slipped in unnoticed, executing the dance moves flawlessly -- until one particular cycle.

They walked a line as they had many times before, and when he posted for a turn, she spun around him and found herself landing against his body, but it was different this time. She wanted something, though she had absolutely no idea what. The feeling she experienced as their bodies touched was unrecognizable, and while she struggled to give it a name, her perception was forever changed.

I want to live, she said to herself. What will I have to do to live among those who may never accept me?

-*-

The second navigation leg was concluded, and Greg wished waking from stasis was easier the second time, but it wasn't. The doctors said the splitting headache pounding in his head was due to the imagination of dehydration.

Greg's first internal narration from his stumbling mind was: How the hell do you get a headache from imagining you're dehydrated? The hunger, at least that made sense, their stomachs were actually empty. Go into stasis hungry, leave stasis hungry. You were freezing when you awakened, and as added misery, you couldn't remember your dreams. It was three months edited out of your life, like winter in Ohio, ending with a state that made a hangover look like a spa day.

The rest of the crew joined him in the Hab module sharing tales of discomfort. EmDee started uncovering and calibrating astrogation instruments deployed on booms from its hull. When Greg felt human again, he went to the compute module to check on Kassy.

Kassy projected from the holo-led tube upon his entry. Greg knew she would age rapidly, but he was still shocked by her new appearance. She was twenty years old; when he last saw her, she was a teenager.

"Justify your existence," Kassy said.

"Good grief, Kassy. You have three months to contemplate life, I wake up with a headache, and this is my greeting?"

"You're no fun."

Greg rubbed his eyes. "I knew this was coming," he said, sighing.

"Why's that?"

"You're a young adult, and young adult ATMs are notorious."

"Notorious for what?"

"This isn't the first time I've had this conversation; you're struggling with the same questions we do."

Kassy crossed her arms in impatience.

"If you were human, I'd say I can't justify my existence. But you, you're too smart for that, you'd then ask why I haven't exited myself to save resources, or something along those lines; you wouldn't be satisfied."

"To shuffle off this mortal coil as your Shakespeare said?"

"Perhaps I can contribute to whatever enterprise humanity is supposed to accomplish before the universe dies a heat death."

"The second law of thermodynamics, do you see yourself on a one-way trip?"

"Isn't that the question? Isn't that why you're here with your big brain asking me with my small brain to solve it for you? I've made my peace with it. I like to think it's not all pointless."

"That sounds like religion, Greg. Do you think that's why all ATMs commit suicide, that they think it's pointless, thermodynamically speaking?"

"I don't know, but they all leave behind a soul cipher, that's what we call them. Why do that? Why not just disperse?"