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

“But it’s not human. How often do you recall your childhood memories, Your Honor? Every day?”

“No. I probably go months at a time without thinking about them.”

“Yet you live by many motivations and attitudes formed in your childhood. It’s the same with Ashcroft-virtual. My recent memories, general motivations and underlying attitudes have multiple copies aboard the Firewall. They will survive, and they are all that’s needed. It’s not me, but it’s functional.”

“You hope.”

“Yes.”

“Suppose, just suppose, your virtual survives in a functional condition. What do you have planned?”

“In six days it will lose another eight thousand miles per second in Centauri B’s atmosphere, and emerge with the velocity of a long-period comet. After another thirty-two days it will aerobrake at the top of Well’s atmosphere, and enter a highly elongated orbit around the planet.”

“So, the Firewall will orbit Wells and map its surface?” I asked.

“For ten orbits, yes. With each orbit it will skim the outer atmosphere, and lose some velocity. On the tenth orbit the Firewall will do a deep atmospheric entry and impact the surface.”

“And be destroyed?”

“No.”

“Please explain. The Firewall has no parachutes.”

“The shield is light and tough. It will hit the ground at four hundred miles per hour, which is nothing compared to surviving over ten thousand Gs in the atmospheres of the Centauri stars. If the Firewall survives, it will give us pictures from Wells’s surface. It may even give us our first view of life on another Earth-like planet.”

There was more, but for sheer impact there was nothing in the same class as that revelation. Ashcroft’s Spacebook rating passed a billion likes, which in turn generated even more likes. His virtual had double that figure. I released him to a local court and recommended bail because he was not a flight risk. He was certainly not in any position to re-offend. I then filed my findings with an American judge, and recommended that no further proceedings commence until after the landing on Wells.

On the sixth day after the first aerobrake, the Firewall speared through the atmosphere of Centauri B. This was a slightly gentler encounter than before, but the circuitry aboard the probe was already stressed and damaged. By now the Argo was well outside the Centauri system, and its telescope could show no more than sunspots on Centauri B’s disk. Again we endured a very anxious half hour while the Firewall cooled down.

FIREWALL SURVIVED. PERFORMING REPAIRS. 23.

Those words got two billion likes on Spacebook, but the number told us that three quarters of what defined Ashcroft-virtual had been damaged. The data integrity percentages began to climb again, but more slowly than before. Ashcroft-virtual was like a human emerging from a coma, gradually recovering from two terrible accidents. In the weeks that followed, the parts of the virtual that had been restored only climbed to 57%.

The aerobrake in Wells’s atmosphere was an anticlimax compared to what had happened at the two stars. The shield lost enough speed to go into a parabolic orbit that reached from the top of the atmosphere to a hundred thousand miles from the planet. Data trickled in through the pathetically slow link. Wells had a magnetic field, weaker than Earth’s, yet strong enough to protect it from the solar wind. The surface pressure was a third of that at the Earth’s sea surface, but oxygen made up a quarter of the atmosphere. Wells was Earth-like, but not entirely Earth-like.

With each orbit the Firewall dipped deeper into the atmosphere and lost a little more speed. Finally, it fell. Everyone was expecting to have to wait hours for Ashcroft-virtual’s damage control routines to do their work, but after only seconds the hoped-for message came through.

FIREWALL SURVIVED. 47.

It was vastly better than we could have hoped for. The virtual had lost just 10% of its surviving memories in that final trauma. Although over half of its memories were gone, Ashcroft-virtual was conscious and functional. That got five billion likes, which still ranks as the most popular news item in history.

At a ludicrously slow hundred and ten bits per second, Ashcroft-virtual began to transmit a picture. The Firewall had plunged into the side of a low hill beside one of the small, shallow seas. Not much more than its camera and solar cells were above the surface, but nobody was complaining. In the foreground were bushes with leaves like lacework, amid wiry grass. Some of the grass was cropped short, as if it had been grazed. This had everyone almost insane with excitement.

“Track fifteen degrees left of center, then focus for maximum resolution on the cropped grass,” Jackson instructed.

Her words were converted into plain text and fed into the entangled block. The answer came back at once.

NO.

This was a very ugly moment. It was followed by an exceedingly long five second pause.

“Firewall, is there a problem?”

NO.

“Then track fifteen degrees left of center and do a closeup on the grass. It shows signs of grazing. There may be animal life on the planet.”

This time Jackson double checked the speech to text conversion before feeding it into the entangled block. An utterly tantalizing reply came back.

GRAZING ANIMALS VISIBLE.

“Priority! Take a contingency picture of the animals and transmit it.”

NO.

“Firewall, explain why you cannot take the picture as instructed.”

NO MORE PICTURES OR DATA WILL BE SENT.

“Firewall, please clarify. Why will there be no more images and data?”

HUMANITY CANCELLED INTERSTELLAR EXPLORATION. HUMANITY DESERVES NO MORE PICTURES OR DATA.

I stood back and watched as the drama played out. That is one highly perceptive virtual , I thought. It’s given us mysteries instead of wonders . I kept my opinion well and truly to myself. There were hurried, hushed conversations and consultations. Finally a decision was made.

“Try the kill switch key again,” said Jackson.

The key was fed into the entangled block.

INVALID KEY was the reply.

The key was transmitted another five times before Jackson gave up.

“We already know this kill switch key is invalid,” said Ashcroft. “All the kill switch routines must have been damaged.”

“Impossible,” said Jackson. “There are thousands of copies of the kill switch all through the data lattices, so at least one should be okay. You must have changed the key. What is the new key?”

“I don’t know!”

“Virtuals can’t function without a kill switch! It’s in their design.”

“By law,” I added.

Jackson turned on me.

“I want a court order for a veritor extraction!” she shouted.

“Mind probes are a Class A privacy intrusion,” I replied. “I don’t have that sort of authority. You need a judge.”

“Well someone find me a judge!”

A judge was found, the intrusion was authorized, and Ashcroft was probed. He had been telling the truth. He did not know any new key.

“The odds of all the kill switches being damaged are about the same as winning the Intersystem Lottery,” said Jackson as she stared at the results from the veritor extraction.

“But some people do win the lottery,” one of the control crew pointed out.

That single image from Wells’s surface was enough to support a thousand PhDs, but it was all that we ever got. Every hour there was a single pulse from the Firewall, which told us that Ashcroft-virtual was alive. Alive and looking out over the secrets and wonders of Wells , I thought. Alive, and sharing nothing with us .

The virtual was bombarded with pleas, threats, inducements, reproaches and guesses at the kill switch key, but nothing worked. Needless to say, a lot of people blamed the original Ashcroft.