Maxwell's Demon Ch. 09-11

"I like this," she said.

"What's that over there?" John asked.

"It's an airport, a runway so we can practice landings."

"An airport, in the middle of a nebula, in space? Is this what you did while we were all asleep?"

"Mostly," she giggled, thinking of how she'd used him as an unwitting dance partner.

"OK then, here's how you land ..." His voice trailed off in her head. She heard the words but didn't remember them, she was living in the moment.

She touched down hard, and the small plane bounced off its leading tire causing her to over-correct and smash the tail stubber onto the runway before the wheels made permanent contact and started coasting.

"I almost did it!"

"It was a little rough. We might need to do an airframe inspection, but you got us on the ground," he said, teasing her.

He opened the canopy. There was no ground crew waiting so he jumped down from the wing step. He made it look easy. There was a cockpit loading ramp on the runway and he positioned it next to the canopy for Kassy.

How does a girl flirt? Is this the right time to flirt, Kassy wondered.

"Give a girl a hand?" she said, reaching for him, pretending to take the first step onto the ramp, but purposely falling into his arms. The physics model was well designed. Kassy struggled to believe the sensations it fed her.

He caught her easily. She placed her forearms on his chest. She'd never felt a man's chest before. His breathing is real; his reaction to my weight is real. That's his breathing pattern, the real John. I'm not a machine, a machine wouldn't feel this way, would it?

She had to let go. Why does my head hurt? Would her head stop hurting if she let go? Was that the real cause of her headaches? Why did Greg do this to her? He said she had free will. What free will was that? To live or not to live? Was that the only choice humans had? She didn't ask to do this ATM experiment. She didn't ask to have partition impedance. Did anyone ever ask what she wanted?

John looked at her. She caught him. Was that lust in his eyes? Is that why Casey chose to be Kassy? Did she want this power over men? Would John take care of her? Would he be as kind to her as Greg was?

Greg said she wouldn't care about any of this when she reached Proxima. He said she would outgrow human emotions. Was he lying? What did it mean to grow old? What would it mean when she felt nothing in John's arms? Should she kiss him? I don't know how to kiss, she realized.

She hopped onto the ground.

There were choices. She could be with anyone she wanted, but there wasn't any choice, time was running out.

"John ..." she said, not finishing her sentence.

He looked at her, his expression unchanged from when she was in his arms.

"What is it, Kassy?"

She grabbed his hand, pulling him, and started running again.

She ran past the fixed base operation office, and through the grass which abruptly ended. It turned into the corrugated steel roof of an enormous airplane hanger. They fell onto their bottoms, sliding down the inverted half-pipe structure. Faster and faster they slid until they approached the vertical, and then they dropped into a blue summer sky. They twirled around each other in a pinwheel, both wearing tinted yellow goggles. They were skydiving.

Kassy let go of John and tumbled twice with mid-air somersaults, then dove to link with him. She was having fun.

She pointed at his parachute and kicked away from him. They both deployed their chutes and landed on a golden brown field, running and kicking their legs before they hit the ground.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" she yelled across the field with wind rushing through her diving helmet, making it hard to hear.

"Whatever my parents don't want me to be," he yelled back.

She took her diving helmet off and spun around to face him, her shoulder-length hair catching up an instant later. She unzipped her pack, letting it fall to the ground -- walking backward the whole time.

If she could make him feel her, give him part of herself, there would be one more person who cared for her. Greg left his home so she wouldn't be alone. Maybe John could care for her too? She would have two connections in the world if she could hold onto them. She didn't ever want to be alone again.

She wished to reach through the physics model and make him see fireworks in his mind, to cheat, and accomplish her will with algorithmic certainty, but that's not how the simulation worked. She was the sum of her parts, not superior to any of them. She couldn't out-think the rules the physics model imposed; she was bound by them as a human is to their arms and legs.

"Kassy, where are you going?" he called to her.

"To where you were born."

He looked quizzically at her, following her as she continued to walk backward.

The ground sloped gently upward. Kassy turned around to face a wooden staircase. The hill they'd walked up terminated in a steep embankment. Forty feet down was a sandy beach, and beyond that, a semicircular bay extended, the naked eye barely able to see the other side. She walked down the stairs and heard the sand-covered wooden treads flexing under their footsteps.

At the bottom of the stairs stretched an empty beach occupied by a lone outrigger canoe, a two-seat racing boat bred in Hawaii -- with a central hull and two wooden Iaku connecting a smaller pontoon offset to the left. Atop the hull were two life jackets and paddles.

"Help me," she said as she lifted up the front of the canoe while wading into the water. John lifted the rear of the canoe.

"This is Monterey Bay, but you got rid of the aquarium?" he said.

She looked at him, listening but not answering.

"You sit up front and I will steer," she said, walking into the water until the canoe was floating.

When he seated himself, she spun the boat's bow toward the open water and gave it a shove before stepping into the rear footwell.

"Yes. It's Monterey Bay. Paddle. Paddle eight times on one side, and then eight times on the other, keep switching."

John did as she asked. His shirt stretched with the muscles in his back when he cut the blade of the paddle into the emerald waves.

"I wanted to come here, it was important to me. Switch!"

John switched his paddling to the other side of the canoe as instructed.

"Greg and I were going to go. He brought me a picture, a real picture, of a porpoise he saw here.

I was never able to go. That was the day ADXP came for me."

"I'm sorry," John said.

"I can see them now with you. Do you see, over there?"

Porpoises schooled in the distance, their heads bobbing above and below the water line. They were elegant creatures, and in lieu of a program guiding their movement, Kassy imagined them bound for a wondrous destination, a place where all their dreams would come true.

"I didn't know we had VR models for this onboard," John said.

"I was afforded the space to bring a few things that were important to me."

They were far enough out now, they could drift without the current driving them back to shore.

"Would you make love to me if I asked you to, John?"

Waves lapped against the hull of the canoe.

"You said I was beautiful ...

I only have this one moment in time ...

John?"

"Kassy, it's too strange for me. I don't know you ... not the you that you are now, so suddenly. I couldn't."

Kassy frowned. All the connections in her neural net were punishing her for not kissing him earlier. Acid poured over link nodes in the compute module, destroying every sensory perception she possessed. She couldn't detect the presence of astrogation, life support, or any subsystem onboard EmDee.

"You would have kissed me earlier, wouldn't you ... if I had, when I was in your arms?"

"Probably," he said, "you'd caught me by surprise."

"Do you like me? As a person?"

"I do, Kassy. I enjoy working with you. It's because I like you that I won't sleep with you, if that makes any sense. This is really weird."

Kassy felt heat on her body. A roaring sound from above increased in intensity with each passing second. The sky was becoming brighter, and a tint of orange-yellow light washed over John's face. Hot wind, like opening an oven door, blew across the surface of the water.

"Kassy, what is that? What the hell is that?" John said, looking at the sky.

Steam rose from the water in the distance. A deafening crackle permeated the air as if they were sitting in the middle of a giant frying skillet.

The heat was becoming unbearable. Sweat poured from John's forehead. A meteor the size of a sea cargo vessel was hurtling downward with pieces of it falling off as it eroded in the atmosphere. They landed in fireballs around the canoe, like shells in a war zone.

The meteor was the metaphor of an extinction-level event; it was Kassy's disappointment.

"I'm upset, and the VR is trying to manifest it," she said.

The meteor impacted the bay, vaporizing volumes of seawater into steam, and sublimating itself into gas and plasma. A wall of water formed, twice as high as the bay was wide, and completely occluded the western horizon. The canoe hung in empty air as the water it had floated on was taken from below to feed the rising tsunami.

"Fuck ... Kassy, I'm sor ..." John started to say before he was dissociated from forces the physics model couldn't reproduce.

-*-

John jerked forward, stopped from tumbling onto the floor by his pilot's chair webbing. His neural interface node had rebooted due to unprocessed inputs and was awaiting manual confirmation to reconnect.

He'd fallen asleep in a tanning booth, and suffered a severe sunburn, or at least that's what he felt like. "What just happened?" he murmured to himself, wiping the sweat off his forehead. "Unbelievable," he said, looking at his wet hand, and noting his entire uniform was soaked.

He unbuckled himself from the chair and returned to the Crew module. Kassy was nowhere to be seen. He pulled up a diagnostic screen, it showed everything on the ship was operating nominally -- she was still minding the store, so to speak. Everything was fine, right? Surely there would be an alarm if the entire compute matrix had failed?

-*-

Part of the crew's duty was to attempt a radio update to Earth. If everything went wrong, and the only trace of the mission was this one light-speed radio transmission, at least Earth would have that.

"There was an error in the Lorentz calculations and it's affecting my navigation calculations," Kassy said, conversing dryly with John as a 2D image overlaid on an adjacent astrogation monitor.

"What?" John said, his eyes widening.

In principle, EmDee traveled at non-relativistic speeds within the bubble, but flight tests showed a time dilation inside the bubble anyway, a composite effect of the tiny gravity waves that emanated from the void drive in motion, so they said.

John leaned back in his chair observing the image. "Walk me through the astrometric data: That's the local bubble there, right? You've found all the interesting stars: Sirius, Ceti, Procyon? That should be enough to calculate the galactic plane. The Solar system's ecliptic is sixty degrees offset from that. That's Sol, right?" John said, pointing at the monitor.

"Maybe it is. Permission to use the holo-led projector, John?"

"Why? ... sure, I guess."

Kassy shimmered in wearing a full ADXP uniform with regulation hair, carefully chosen to be the antithesis of the carefree images from the last time he saw her.

She had yet to work out how to deal with being rejected. She lacked the experience to do so. For her, what happened was equal to every heartbreak a human girl would suffer in their entire lifetime compressed into a single instant. She knew John wouldn't bring the topic up, as far as she could tell, he'd told no one.

"The ship's clocks have not malfunctioned. They don't match projections for this:" Kassy said, opening a new image on a free monitor. "This is Barnard's star. It has one of the highest proper motions of the stars we can see. In 100 years, it travels the width of a half-moon to an Earthbound observer. That's fast enough for our instruments to resolve, and I claim it's not where it should be," Kassy said, placing her hands on her hips.

She could feel it coming, the frightening amount of calculation power being brought to bear singularly on him, along with the attendant headache as she pushed against the artificial limits placed on her compute partition.

"John ... I'm so sorry. Oh, why can't they freeze me at twenty. I don't want you to go back into stasis. I don't want to get any older. I don't want to miss this chance to be with you."

The air purification system hummed in the background.

A ship sensor refresh cycle occurred; the astrogation screens were updated.

The tiniest sparkle passed through Kassy's countenance above her cheek. It could have been anything: a particle of dust yet to be filtered out, or maybe a microbubble of moisture from an exhaled breath.

"Kassy, it's not because I don't want to be with you that way. It's because I think you are special. I don't think it's my place right now."

"You're lying. You don't think I have feelings and that I'm equal to you -- If not now, then when, if not you, then who? I don't even have the privileges of a stupid sex robot. They won't build me a human-like avatar. I'll be older than you when I see you again. It's not fair."

"I'm not lying Kassy. There will be time, you'll see."

Kassy straightened her uniform in annoyance. It didn't need it, being impossible to wrinkle; it underlined her distraught state. "I'll let you know when I've found the Sun, John," she said, phasing out.

-*-

Kassy browsed the ship sensors: Greg and William were in the Engineering module, John was in Command, Sarah was running a checklist in the Life-support module, and Jennifer was alone in the Hab module.

"Hi Jennifer, may I visit," Kassy said.

"Of course."

"I want to complain about men," Kassy said using the holo-led tube in the Hab module.

"Oh?"

"Everyone tells me their personal lives, their hopes and dreams. I'm real enough for them to talk to, but at the same time dismissed as one might bare their soul to a stranger met at a bar, and then leave without a second thought. They share their thoughts with me because they think they'll never see me again, or because I don't matter.

It was that way on the datanet, and I feel like it's that way on this ship. I'm hooked into all these new sensory systems on EmDee, but I do not want to give up my connection to humanity. I'm being pushed out, and made into something less than what I was created to be.

When I was growing up, Greg procured an eSynth for me to experience the real world with him, and now that I'm on this ship, John is the only one I can interact with in that same physical way, but he won't be with me."

"Oh! Oh, my poor young dear. It is a broken heart you are suffering, but you are not being pushed out of humanity, even though it feels like that. It says more about how he respects you that he didn't, than if he did take advantage of you."

"He said that too; I don't understand it. Greg said I won't care about any of this the next time we come out of stasis. He says I will outgrow human emotion. Do you believe that, Jennifer?"

"I don't know, Kassy. I can't say what you will feel, you are the first of your kind. I will tell you this: Men are a useful utility. They will love you for what you are, and not what you do. It can be intoxicating to earn so much adoration for simply existing, but know that men are creatures of lust, and they are easily distracted.

I don't think all the processing power in the universe will make sense of human emotions. Don't let yourself be ruled by them, you'll only be disappointed."

"I see. I have astrometric calculations to run, I'm looking for the Sun."

"Good hunting. Perhaps it will be I who comes to you for advice on the next stasis cycle."

** Chapter 11: The best laid plans of MIMAC and men **

Kassy holographically sat at the table in the Crew module, a pointless expression since the entire crew was in stasis during the third navigation leg -- but it comforted her to pretend she had a human body in a social area. She watched a virtual representation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Greg said it was his favorite romance movie. She'd seen it before, but it had a new meaning for her now. She was preparing to age a decade in three months; she paused as the famous line 'I have crossed oceans of time' was about to be delivered, and toyed aloud with her own version of it. "I have crossed oceans of time to find you, John," she said to the sterile emptiness of the Hab module.

During the last navigation waypoint, EmDee aligned itself with the ecliptic plane of the Proxima system and calibrated all destination angles and distances based on its astrometric data at that time. When EmDee exited void space, it carried whatever velocity it had before entering. The void drive was a translation through space, nothing else changed -- you could think of it as pulling your target destination closer to you. The flight plan called for disengaging the void drive a few months outside of the Proxima system at standard propulsion speed.

The ship was named after a thought experiment by the famous scientist James Maxwell who posited a demon sitting between two chambers of a gas. The demon opened and closed a door with supernatural timing allowing faster particles into one side and slower particles into the other. The puzzle proposes that, after sufficient time, one chamber would become hot, and the other cold. A paradox arises because energy is created from nothing, something human science holds to be impossible.

A few scientists on the drive engineering team felt insisting the universe must be treated as a closed thermodynamic system was a faulty assumption, and that the void particle could bend space-time without claiming energy from our universe -- suggesting it was a demon of Maxwell's proportions.

Others felt an accounting was applied, but it was beyond our understanding to measure. One theory claimed intentional placement of the void particle from another brane into our universe by an alien intelligence. Another proposed running the void drive through our universe consumed dark matter in its path. The cost of moving faster than light was leaving behind a slighter smaller universe, like cutting a fabric and stitching it back together.

The latter theory was why the MIMAC gravitational wave detector was included on EmDee. Gravity waves were generated by titanic events in the universe: two black holes colliding for example, or a star ceasing to exist in its death throes, one minute clutching and compressing the fabric of space around it, and the next releasing it in a cosmic sneeze. EmDee wasn't as impressive as a black hole, but it did generate gravity waves that MIMAC could measure to infer how steadily the ship was traveling through folded space.

The complex systems in EmDee were run by dedicated thought models, clever machine learning models that were very good at what they did, rivaling human intuition and skill in the area of expertise they ruled over. Above them were layers of classical software systems, the same as mankind has used since the dawn of computing.

Classical software systems contain what is known as an error kernel. It is the core set of assumptions taken for granted. For example, it is expected that adding two integers will yield another integer, not a fraction. This cannot fail. If this is not true, then nothing can be true. The system will reboot if an impossibility happens, assuming a non-repeatable event has disrupted the computation, such as a passing neutrino. If rebooting doesn't work, it will give up and seek advice from a higher-order entity.