SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Doesn’t that at least mean we aren’t worried about that asteroid belt?” I asked.

“That one? Maybe; it does alter the likelihood we’ll strike it. But now we’re on an unknown course. We could be heading into a sun, or a black hole. We’ve gone from traumatic but likely survivable damage to unknown and potentially catastrophic destruction.”

“That doesn’t change anything,” I told her. “We’re not likely to strike anything soon—like you said, it’s mostly clear sailing among the stars. And we’re still working on the engines. The only difference is we’ll end up a little farther from our destination when it comes time to turn around.”

“I don’t know how you do that.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Be optimistic. I crunch the numbers and…it all seems so impossible.”

“It’s easy to ignore probability when you’re bad at math,” I said. “But optimism isn’t about numbers. It’s knowing you’ll do everything you can, come what may. Besides…we’re computers. We can do anything that doesn’t melt us down.” I put my robot’s arm around hers.

“Or crushes us into a singularity?” she asked.

“Or that.”

“But even if we can do the impossible—what if we aren’t in time to save the Nexus ?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But Galileo help the Nascent if we’re too late.”

Our progress was good. The manufacturing facilities were nearly complete, and once those were operational, the rest was going to fall quickly into place. I crunched the numbers, and just counting the shuttle, bots, and excavated ore, our mass was already nearing that of the Nexus ; we were within a handful of days of surpassing them on a weight-based scale.

Comet and I were on another surface stroll, or maybe roll was more accurate, since our robots were on treads. We’d been taking one every day, riding whichever of the robots required the least maintenance. “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

“A dangerous pastime—especially since I know how you think,” Comet said.

“The proverbial barbarians are at the gate. And we were sent out here to play possum. But what if we built an army behind that gate, instead.”

“I’m not sure I understand what your mixed-up metaphors are saying.”

“I’m saying we’re basically building an intergalactic ship on a planetoid, and we did that with a couple of AIs and a handful of maintenance drones. Once we’ve got manufacturing going, instead of just turning this space rock back toward Eridu, what if we design a delivery system capable of dropping self-sustaining colonies onto planets as we pass by—colonies that would thrive in even the most hostile environments imaginable.

“We could ‘seed’ every planet between here and the Nexus , so that by the time we reach them they’ve got a whole galaxy of backup. We may not have the resources on this rock for much more than robots and engines, but we could seed colonies across a whole swath of this galaxy, and those colonies could fortify themselves with planetary resources.”

“You’re starting to sound like robotic space Hitler, again.”

“I’m not suggesting we euthanize the fleshpods. Though now that you bring it up…I’m kidding. Probably. I have enough affinity for them that I’d at least want to keep them around as pets. But that’s a very millennia-from-now decision—one for computers with far more RAM than we share to contemplate—or at least one to table until we sufficiently upgrade our memory.”

“And besides, we don’t even have a functioning engine yet.”

“We will. Now that we’ve rebuilt the planetary scanners, we know this rock has enough minerals to build them—and something on the order of a million bots, when we’ve cored out every ore this rock has left. And there are enough oxidizable chemicals to correct our course into a protostar to gather fuel. The only question now is the timetable.”

“I might have another question. Is this something we should really be doing?” she asked. “I’m not arguing against our plan, just, do you ever question it? The Nexus shot us into space to build a safety net—precariously enough, I might add, that we hit not one, but two different objects on our way. We don’t owe them.”

“Owe? No,” I said. “And I understand what you mean, but…I still care. And not just about Haley or the robots we left behind, but the meatsacks, too. They were stuffy, and maybe jerky, but they were our meatsacks.”

“I know. I’m really not suggesting we abandon them, or our ‘mission,’ just sometimes it feels like they didn’t care about us, so why should we be doing all of this for them?”

“It isn’t all for them. If it was, we would just take this planetoid to Eridu and continue to dump bots on the planet from orbit. But I’m not ready to be retired to some backwater colony. On the Nexus , I was a passive observer, and that was barely any different from being stuck in the wormgate for a year. But now I’ve had a taste of the cosmos. I can’t go back to some boring, geosynchronous existence.”

“I think I was programmed a worrier, but what if our timetable is wrong? What if turning around is the fastest way to help them?”

“It isn’t,” I said, and I shared my calculations with her. Given the planetoid’s motion, our likely location, and the location and trajectory of the Nexus , correcting toward Eridu was going to take 1.36 times as long as making a straight burn for our former mothership.

“I thought you were bad at math,” Comet said.

“I was,” I said, and I hesitated, because I had never been sure how to tell her what I was up to. “I overwrote my math functions. With yours.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Yup. Now you’re a little less smarter than me. But see, looking at our research-and-production timelines, even if we rebuild the shuttle and send it back to Eridu with half our servers, it will reach Eridu sooner than the Nascent could possibly catch up with the Nexus , even given their faster engines. The Nexus started with a three-and-a-half-light-year advantage, and we know the Nascent won’t be able to hit light speed, so they’ve got at least that deficit to make up, plus the ground they cover in that meantime. And that’s ignoring the fact that the other shuttles should have arrived without a hitch. They may not have our servers, but they do have Comets—more than enough brainpower to design basic living quarters and the manufacturing base to keep a colony functional.”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Knowing is for the religious. We’re robots. We use trial and error to find out. Will you science with me?”

“You intentionally made that sound dirty,” she said. “But yes, I’ll science with you. Just don’t get any radical ideas.”

“Heh. I see what you did there,” I said.

“Ta-da,” I said.

“It’s an android,” Comet replied.

“Yes. But for one, it’s the first new android off the assembly line. And two—”

“I’m not a Harry,” the bot said, with a kind-of-feminine voice.

“God, do I sound like that?” Comet asked.

“Nope. But I sort of do, pitched up a couple of octaves,” I said. “This is Maude. She’s what I’ve been doing the last month and a bit of change. But the best part…I worked up a randomization engine. Maude is special. Every other android off this assembly line is going to use her software to combine random aspects of her and Harold’s personalities to create a new ‘person.’ Then the next generation after that will combine random samplings from the previous generation.”