Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“Nine hundred million likes,” said someone in the gallery, and there were titters of laughter.

“Order!” I shouted. “One more reference to Spacebook activity and I will have the offender removed and charged with contempt of court.”

I waited for any further comments. Nobody said anything.

“Control-Captain, I gather that the Harpy 1 probe returned useful images and data for about fifteen seconds during the flyby of Wells. It showed that the planet has polar caps, clouds, small seas, a magnetic field, a breathable atmosphere, and vegetation.”

“Yes.”

“Was that enough?”

“I don’t understand the question, Your Honor.”

“I’ll put a fictitious proposition to you. Just say you were the head of NASA, back in the Twentieth Century. Say that you had an extremely tight budget, but the first flyby of Mars had revealed ruined cities. Would you abandon the exploration of the rest of the solar system indefinitely, and concentrate on Mars?”

“I… no, I would not,” she said slowly. “Three moons of Jupiter turned out to have subterranean oceans that supported primitive life forms. That’s significant too.”

“You would not have known that at the time.”

“But I know it now. The Gliese system’s worlds may have wonderful secrets that we can’t even begin to dream of, and whatever the Harpies would have discovered about them would have been all that would ever be discovered unless we commit to interstellar exploration again.”

“The same may be said about Wells.”

“With respect, Your Honor, that is not a judgment that I would make.”

Secretly I sympathized with Jackson. The generation that followed hers—mine—had cancelled the interstellar program, and confined us to the solar system. Everything that we would ever see directly beyond our little corner in space would be through the cameras of the Argo and its fleet of Harpy probes.

“You may stand down, Control-Captain, that will be all.”

Several technical experts now testified and explained the situation on the Firewall. Aboard the shield there was a block of entangled circuitry linked to a block in Mission Control. Here signals could be exchanged, but at a bit rate so slow that even most computer historians were not aware that it had ever existed. A hundred and ten bits per second. It was not much better than Morse code, and dated to the 1950s.

An acknowledgment had been sent to the shield’s first message, but Ashcroft-virtual ignored all subsequent questions that were sent to it. Every hour it sent the same message, each time with a number appended: PERFORMING REPAIRS. STAND BY. 41. The value of the number was slowly increasing. It defined the amount of damage to Ashcroft-virtual.

The Firewall was very tough, but it had not been designed for prolonged and hyper-extreme deceleration. In spite of the shield’s insulation, the temperature must have reached hundreds of degrees Celsius internally. There was memory loss in the data and processor lattices, so Ashcroft-virtual would be rearranging the surviving data that defined itself, restoring whatever it could before going through the same trauma again at Centauri B. It had just six days to restore 59% of itself from contingency lattices.

Back on Earth, Ashcroft had by now admitted to conspiring with his virtual aboard the Argo to hijack the mission. I could not pass judgment on what he had done or sentence him, but I could allow him to explain himself on Spacebook. At the time of the Argo’s launch, the taxpayers of humanity had each paid eight thousand dollars a year for ten years to get it built and fueled. That was one percent of the average income. Many of them were still alive, and were seeing their money squandered. How many likes and dislikes would Ashcroft get?

“Marshal of Proceedings, bring Lieutenant Ashcroft to the stand.”

Ashcroft was led back. He was affecting a meticulously resigned expression known as the martyr face. He had admitted guilt, but he wanted the Spacebook voters to know that he had noble motives. A high score of likes was his only hope.

“Lieutenant Ashcroft, what do you say in response to the declaration from Control-Captain Jackson?” I asked.

“I don’t agree with her, Earth-like planets come first. It was always my intention to aerobrake the Argo’s shield through the atmospheres of the two Centauri stars, and put it into orbit around Wells.”

“Even though it was not designed for the purpose? Even though a four hundred trillion dollar mission would be wasted?”

“The mission has not been wasted. Humanity has had flybys of two stars, a planet and several asteroids. The Argo will fly on through another twenty light-years of space. Who knows what is out there to discover? That has not been lost.”

“Gliese has been lost.”

“And you have Wells in its place.”

“The Firewall is damaged, it may not survive the aerobrake through Centauri B. It’s not designed for extremes like that.”

“That doesn’t matter. A lot of leading edge work has been done with machines that were designed for something else. In the earliest years of the space age, the only rockets available for exploration were designed to carry bombs. In spite of that, they were also used to launch satellites, send probes to other worlds, and put the first humans into space. Machine usefulness is determined by machine capability, not what the machine was designed for.”

“So you gambled that the shield could take well over ten thousand Gs for two or three minutes?”

“Ten thousand Gs is no problem. Back in the early Twenty First Century the Japanese tested probes whose electronics could take eight thousand Gs and still function. The Argo’s shield and its equipment were built to handle more than that.”

“And the extreme temperatures?” I asked.

“The Argo was to pass very close to Centauri A, so the shield was designed to protect it from the expected temperatures. It was also over-engineered to cope with anything worse. It will survive Centauri B.”

By now Ashcroft had nine hundred million likes and six thousand dislikes. Here was absolute, admitted guilt welded to overwhelming public support. I was very relieved that I would only be a witness in his criminal trial.

“Lieutenant Ashcroft, I am obliged to inform you that you will certainly be charged with a crime involving the largest single damage bill in all of history,” I began.

“And he may get out of jail before the next ice age,” called someone in the gallery.

“Marshal, remove whoever said that from the public gallery, take them to the local authorities, and recommend a charge of contempt.”

There was a pause in proceedings while the offender was taken into custody. I looked down at my screen. The youth had got just over a hundred million likes in twelve seconds, but seven hundred million dislikes as well. Ashcroft certainly had massive public sympathy, in spite of what he had done.

“In six days the Firewall and Ashcroft-virtual will reach Centauri B,” I asked Ashcroft. “What will happen?”

“I can’t speak for my virtual any more.”

“Please explain.”

“Ashcroft-virtual is no longer me,” said Ashcroft. “The number transmitted from the Firewall every hour represents the amount of contiguous virtual memory stored in its lattice banks. The Centauri A flyby damaged a lot of physical storage, but because the virtual is stored by a scattered redundancy algorithm, a lot of it can be rebuilt.”

“A lot, but not all.”

“Yes. Priority was given to redundancy for motivations and recent memories. Childhood memories were kept in single copy. So far the restoration has reached 52%.”

“So your virtual has what would be called brain damage in humans.”