A Printer's Choice

by W. L. Patenaude

  “What about the Corps? If there’s something here to do with the printers, or me, shouldn’t they be told?”

  Bauer nodded. “Commandant Munrayos was briefed yesterday. There won’t be a formal statement of support, naturally, as this does not technically involve them. But between you and me, the Corps wouldn’t object to improved relations with the engineers.”

  McClellan paused. “All right. Two final questions.”

  Bauer leaned back, motioning for McClellan to continue.

  “If I accept, who would you send to my parish? I might be upside for a while, possibly until Easter. Whoever it is better be good.”

  “I have some fine candidates, Johnny. But I promise you this: before you go, I’ll come and preach at all the Sunday Masses. I’ll share as much news as I can about their pastor’s temporary assignment.”

  “They’ll appreciate hearing it from you. Thank you.”

  “And your second question?”

  McClellan smiled. “You already know it. When do I leave for New Athens?”

  “ENGINEERS PREFER NOT TO TELL their stories,” the voice on the video said. “Whether they are those of their successes, because the engineers are humble, or those of their failures, because they are also secretive.”

  McClellan paused the video. It seemed impossible that this file, sent by Security Commissioner Zhèng himself, was what he had suspected: one of the censored exposés about the engineers, their printers, and the construction of New Athens. Zhèng had transmitted it in the first round of mission orientation files. But doing so—simply possessing it up here—had to have been risky.

  McClellan had left the Aesir’s first-class cabin after the turmoil of the launch. He wanted time alone for his evening prayers and to read the files. And he didn’t want to disturb Elaina Jansen, who was fast asleep. Now strapped into a third-class seating bench as the Aesir brought them again into daylight, the view of the receding Earth was tempting. But this video had to be watched, even if he knew its content well. After all, it was a requirement in boot camp for programmers to memorize every word about the printers.

  “Usually it is the builders who tell us about New Athens,” the narrator continued over stock imagery of first-generation orbital workers. “Usually they are the ones explaining why it was built, and how it came to be that it was built in so short a time, and how the work promised to the builders had been taken away by the engineers’ machines.

  “But engineers have stories, too. And some want their stories told. These are engineers who worked years before the founding of the Engineering Guild—men and women who know the early days, which, they tell us, were not as idyllic as we’re led to believe.”

  The video showed a montage of natural disasters and the mass burials of refugees. “To appreciate their stories, we must begin in the early middle years of the twenty-first century. That’s when the Coalition of Nations began talks with the heads of the great data companies, and that was when the agreements were made to investigate how to respond to the toxins and the droughts, to the oceans’ deadly rise, and to the wildfires and storms that grew stronger each year. That’s when plans were made to address the wars and crumbling social orders that by the 2050s had destabilized most civil orders, and inflicted levels of suffering and death such as history had never known.”

  Next came the footage of official celebrations. But as the narrator spoke, the official imagery was replaced with smuggled footage of soldiers in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Australia. The soldiers were surrounding government buildings and escorting bureaucrats into waiting vans. Many of the scenes ended with a soldier’s hand blocking the view.

  “Ah, the 2050s!” the narrator continued mockingly. “The age of so-called universal cooperation. The time when the great minds of the world decreed that a new age needed to dawn—an age of collaboration and purpose, stripped of any errors of ages past. And so by choice or coercion, the nations of the world ceded their authority to the newly formed Global Union, which was funded by the wealth of the great corporate holdings and looked to for hope by the starving people of the continents.

  “The Global Union and its backers leveraged and coordinated what remained of the power of the nations and the strength of their armies. It promised to bring order to the cities and towns of the world, and to combat the deadly cartels that were benefiting from the suffering and the short supplies of most everything necessary for life.”

  McClellan paused the playback. There had been a sound from the forward portion of the cabin, as if someone were approaching. But he was alone.

  “The GU synchronized the work of the world’s universities and laboratories,” the narrator continued. “They calculated, they devised, and they built ways to try—at least try—to tame the forces and soothe the harm that previous generations had unleashed.

  “Some of the minds were those of the geoengineers who sought to mend the planet. Others probed the secret depths of matter and energy for better sources of power and technologies. A third group engineered the future societies of the world. They sifted the cultures of the past to determine what and who should move forward, and what and who should not.

  “A fourth group was tasked with redundancy”—here was an unsteady video of a group of neatly dressed men and women working at some early holographic display. “These were the great minds that proposed the orbital human habitats, although it seemed nearly an impossible task to build and maintain anything of such scale.”

  The video cut to unauthorized footage of an interview with a young engineer—a fair-skinned, smiling man speaking German. The video provided subtitles, but McClellan didn’t need them.

  “We all know that the fragility of Earth threatens humanity,” the young man said, “which is why I and the other GU engineers are determined to find a way to build new worlds. We know that the future of the human race is not here, but in the stars!”

  Now came a segment with engineers arguing how best to clear the orbits of debris of generations past, as well as to disperse the Van Allen belts—the bands of natural and dangerous radiation surrounding Earth. But even the narrator admitted that on these matters no one could criticize those early efforts. Or argue their successes.

  “Prototypes worked,” the narrator said, “sufficient funding followed, and the remains of technologies past were cleared from the orbits. Soon after, a fleet of Van Allen radiation dispersers cleared the road to higher ones.

  “What today is called New Athens was in those early days known as the O’Neill Orbital Laboratory.” The narrator was accompanied here by still shots of the old orbital facility. The pictures were marked at odd angles with CLASSIFIED, and NOT FOR DISSEMINATION.

  The video transitioned to a man sitting in shadows, his face in darkness, his voice digitally distorted. “The real goal of O’Neill was simply to test our designs,” he said as the video displayed the words First-generation engineer (anonymous).

  More classified images followed as the voice continued. “O’Neill was meant only to perfect our techniques, which we needed for the first orbital home for humanity: the world we call Progress. We never expected to build the prototype. And certainly not quickly.”

  Here the narrator continued. “But New Athens is being built and is scheduled to be finished in 2075. And unlike Progress, scheduled for completion in 2089, New Athens is being built at the original O’Neill location—not at more stable Lagrange points on the lunar orbit. The questions so many ask are not only how is New Athens being built this quickly, but who decided that it would, and why?”

  McClellan again looked across the cabin. Sunlight moved through starboard viewports, giving him a better view. Seeing that he remained alone, he upped the volume as the distorted voice of the anonymous engineer returned.

  “The problem had always been that building these worlds would take decades, even with our best construction techniques and the most powerful printers. We knew that in the beginning. But we were hoping for a breakthrough.”

  “Technol
ogical marvels that they were,” the narrator took over, “those first orbital printers were limited compared to what we use today. They were precise to the atom, but could reproduce only the most basic structural arrays and organic materials necessary for large-scale space habitats.”

  The video showed a different silhouette—a second anonymous engineer—speaking with another distorted voice. It was so unrecognizable that McClellan couldn’t tell if it belonged to a man or a woman.

  “It all seems so rudimentary now,” he or she said. “Test building at the O’Neill Laboratory required two hundred and thirty automated catchers to propel themselves beyond Mars, where they scanned the asteroids for those most suitable for the printers. But the mapping to do this took time, and the quality of the arriving asteroids weren’t always what we wanted. So we had more delays, and we were beginning to wonder if we’d ever build even one world.”

  “With doubts rising,” the narrator took over, “hundreds more of the catchers were sent to hook their prey and push the asteroids into months-long journeys to the Earth–Moon system. There the asteroids were transferred into the orbits of the furnaces, which melted the ore and magnetically sifted it into the purity and blends the printers required.

  “By December 2063, with the O’Neill test facility in full operation, there was a steady supply of asteroidal ore, and some five dozen furnaces that fed those first-age printers. For those of us in certain latitudes on Earth, the furnaces offered faint light shows in the night sky, which gave us something to cheer.

  “But once again, all did not go smoothly.

  “These images, taken by high-powered jet-mounted military surveillance systems, show what happened when a printer’s guidance system failed. That streak you see is tumbling raw materials in a decaying orbit. Here it is grazing the Earth’s atmosphere, falling through the air in a line of fire.”

  The shadowed image of the second anonymous engineer returned. “Our problems with those first printers were rooted in information processing, communication delays, and real-time decision-making. We tried numerous enhancements over the years, but ultimately we needed a new approach.”

  “On a Tuesday afternoon in August 2067,” the narrator said over a grainy still image, “an orbital engineering crew decided what that new approach was. The crew of six engineers, each representing one of the six habitable continents, had just graduated from the Global Aeronautics and Space Institute, and they were exuberant.”

  Next came another still image of smiling engineers. As soon as McClellan saw it, he froze the image. He’d seen this picture dozens of times, but it had been years ago. Now he recognized one of the young engineers. The woman with long blond hair was Elaina Jansen.

  The narrator went on. “These are the men and women who proposed the grand solution needed for space construction.”

  “What they did,” the first anonymous engineer said, “was propose an old idea—but they had put a great deal of thought into it. They wanted the printers to design and build themselves. Their plan was to remove the inefficiencies of coordinating with teams on Earth. It would also remove the biases and limitations of the human mind. They argued that the Deep Intellect programming needed to do this already existed, and they were eager to show us that they could pull it off.”

  “Other engineers,” the second anonymous engineer added, “older ones, like me, acknowledged that much of this was true. Of course, the printers could use Deep Intellect to do the mathematics and the physics needed to independently build the new worlds, and do it faster. Yet we rejected the proposal.”

  Here a voice interrupted. It was garbled, but the words were provided in captions: “What was the basis for the rejection?”

  “That should be obvious,” the engineer answered. “Deep Intellect programming had been illegal since the 2030s. We told our young colleagues that. We told them that that form of artificial intelligence—the kind that teaches a machine to evolve—could be completely unpredictable. We reminded them, for instance, of the Indian construction assistants, and what they had done to the citizens of Mumbai when they objected to a regional nuclear fusion facility. Or the Canadian fertility clinics. We’re still dealing with that mess.”

  Another garbled question: “How did the younger engineers take the news?”

  “Not well,” the distorted voice said. “But we warned them about what the printers could do with Deep Intellect programming in an unconstrained environment such as space.”

  “Some say that was not your only fear.”

  “Of course not. If used again, such programming could be stolen by the cartels. The younger engineers didn’t like hearing that. They said that it was foolish to resist progress. They said it was naïve to say that the cartels weren’t already developing their own parallel programs to build new weapons for insurrections and wars.” The engineer paused. “On this point, however, our young colleagues were right.”

  The narrator returned. “Thus the Global Union faced a choice. It could allow the use of Deep Intellect programming for its printers, or it could wait decades to build their new worlds. And, as they waited, the powerful criminal enterprises of Earth would gain power because they provided hope along with the food and water and medicines they gave to those they sought to conquer.

  “And so the Global Union’s Division of Engineering agreed to the young engineers’ proposal, with one modification. The printers could design their own upgrades, but they would first need human approval before printing them.”

  The second anonymous engineer returned: “With that safety check in place, we all felt better about introducing Deep Intellect into the printers. Within a week the GU had hacked the cartels for their secrets—those derived from black-market research—and added them to its own Deep Intellect designs. I knew of colleagues—had dinner with them—who used those black-market designs for their new orbital printers and the robbers—which is what the workers started calling the robotic construction assistants, because the robbers took an increasing share of their work. In time, everyone called the robotic assistants ‘robbers,’ even if the governing engineers hated that term.”

  “And then,” the narrator said as an image of a dozen experimental printers faded to black, “something unexpected happened. Two months after the test upgrade of a dozen orbital printers, the machines began to design and reproduce themselves—without informing the engineers. The safety check had failed. But why?”

  The first anonymous engineer returned. “Our young colleagues insisted that they didn’t know how this happened. They rechecked the coding but found nothing to explain how printers assumed control of their own evolution.

  “I and many others were worried—although we were encouraged not to be. But how could we not? It was a struggle to control the printers, and many of us were concerned for the human workers, who were quickly becoming unnecessary, and were perhaps in harm’s way. My colleagues and I had always worried about the unemployed on Earth, even if our young supervisors didn’t.”

  The narrator returned with another blurry image of two printers in close contact. “The new printers scavenged space, using the ore from asteroids and comets, even cannibalizing their obsolete ancestors. They used the material to supply themselves with what they needed to build new printers—increasingly advanced ones.

  “And then on New Year’s Day 2068 came that first message.”

  There was another image of a printer. Over it came the words Actual Recording.

  The sound was distorted and there was static, but again there were captions.

  “We are the community of printers. We have commenced building your theoretical station at the O’Neill Laboratory, as well as all ancillary equipment. We will do so according to your original design, with necessary corrections and helpful alterations. Estimated time for completion: two thousand, six hundred twenty-three days.”

  McClellan forced himself to breathe. The words of those printers—spoken without a programmer requesting contact—always felt like they were spo
ken to him, directly into his neural links.

  “And so the printers made their intentions known,” the narrator said. “Armies loyal to the Global Union offered to target and destroy the willful printers. The engineers debated the offer, but not for very long. The debate was won handily by the faction that demanded progress, and the people of the world below were told little of the matter.

  “Over time, the engineers reveled in what the new printers taught them, even as they plotted ways to regain control of their machines.”

  “In June of 2072,” the second anonymous engineer said, “with New Athens only a few years from completion, we hacked and restricted the printers’ decision-making abilities. There was debate, of course. But in the end there was consensus. The printers needed to be controlled.”

  “Without warning,” the narrator said, “the engineers stripped the code that allowed printers to make their own choices—save one. The printers could allow or deny individual programmers access, a precaution that would be necessary in the event that the cartels ever found their way to the orbits. But once a printer trusted the programmer—once it granted access—the programmer would maintain full control.

  “That safety measure is still in place today.

  “For their part, the human builders were left with little work. They spent hours in their orbital barges or tethered in their life suits waiting for something to do. They told each other stories of better days, either behind them or ahead, and they cursed and wondered if they should go back down to Earth, as around them the robbers and the now obedient printers stitched together the rotating immensity of New Athens.”