No Marigolds in the Promised Land

by T S Hottle

  So, tonight, I’m going to sleep in 57’s luxurious bunk. I’ve had a good day. I feel like celebrating. Julie, do you have a pleasure module to entertain the male passengers?

  I am fully capable of simulating a human female in the throes of lovemaking.

  Well, lay it on me, then, baby.

  But I don’t want to. May I suggest you render me dormant while you load a more subservient AI interface? There are several, including a rendering of that Jefivan goddess.

  Ah, forget it. You killed the mood.

  Goodnight, John Farno.

  DAY 12

  SOLARIA

  LOG ENTRY: 1105 25-Sagan, 429

  So near, yet so far. I can see Solaria in the distance. The last leg of the sensor road goes over a mountain ridge. I started early, hoping the sunlight on the side of trailer would offset the power drain on its batteries. The batteries gave up the ghost ten minutes ago, right as we crested the last foothill.

  “We.” Julie is just an AI interface with no conscious thought of her own beyond some customized algorithms, and yet I think of her and me as “we.” That’s how alone I am.

  Thanks, John Farno, I love you, too, or would if I had more than algorithms.

  Hey, the girl is trying.

  I stopped and powered down the trailer, letting its heater run off 57’s power tap. Since we’re going nowhere, it’s not much of a drain on 57. It’ll keep the supplies above 5 Celsius, barely enough to avoid freezing anything sensitive back there.

  The hard part is this last foothill. I’m looking out across a wide valley. Thirty-five kilometers in the distance is the intact dome of Solaria. I can be there in an hour. But I have to let the trailer power back up, a three-hour process. It’s like dying of thirst and having water a little beyond your grasp.

  That’s not what you said before making a log entry.

  Shut up, Julie.

  He said it was like trying to lose his virginity only to find his girlfriend’s father put a padlock on her panties.

  You’re based on a middle child, aren’t you?

  Julie Seding, whom I am based upon, was the second of three children, her oldest sibling a brother who was a noted athlete on Deseret.

  Great. My charming companion is based on a sarcastic, barely repressed Mormon woman who lived for tormenting her jock older brother. I suppose drinking beer and what passes for coffee offends you.

  The real Julie brewed her own beer, at least while she lived on Farigha. But she found most coffee here offensive.

  So much for the Deseret Way. No wonder they gave us the Polygamy Wars.

  Technically, that was the Deseret colony of Goshen, which she would…

  Mute.

  Ah. Sometimes, I need to appreciate my solitude.

  I haven’t been completely unproductive this morning. The diagnostics on the hypergate came back. Whoever destroyed it and the orbital station only destroyed one of the emitters that generate wormholes. The rest are intact, and, in fact, it can transmit and receive. I had Julie comb whatever records we downloaded back at the pit stop for basic information on how the hypergates function. For starters, how does one hypergate or a projection drive ship looking for an assist talk to another hypergate light-years away?

  Actually, there are two hypergates. One is the actual portal you pass through to get to the other side, during which you may or may not toss your cookies. You’re in multidimensional space, and so far, no primate intelligence has been able to handle the sight of it as a rule. Kind of like sea sickness.

  But wait! There’s more! A second, smaller hypergate exists just powerful enough to create a tiny wormhole in space, enough to tap another hypergate lightly. All it needs are the coordinates and the path of the wormhole beneath space to reach the other side. A database of known hypergates is kept on orbital stations, traffic control centers, and even ships, depending on how populous and busy the planet or moon is. Really, all the signaling apparatus needs is the coordinates of another gate. For this reason, an existing hypergate can find one that that's newly online as long as it knows the exact coordinates. It can even talk to alien hypergates as, apparently, math is universal.

  There are safeties built in, however, and such is my dilemma. See, if the gate is damaged, the signaling apparatus is usually programmed not to respond at all, a clear signal that all is not well. It can’t do much else because it doesn’t have the power to function as an ansible. Which is why, after 400 years of interstellar travel, we rely on ships and hyperdrones to transmit data across the stars.

  I have an idea, however, and even Julie simulated being impressed. My signaling apparatus does have power to transmit more than “Hey, I want to hook up and make mad, passionate wormholes with you.” With the hypergate damaged, I have access to the gate’s power systems. I can tap any of the emitters for extra power. But…

  The signaling apparatus on the other side won’t know what to do with it.

  Hmm…

  Let me think on that for a bit. At least the rest of the Compact got closer. In the meantime, let’s talk Solaria. And its drones. Chatty buggers, these drones. Even Julie got annoyed or felt forced to simulate annoyance. Anyway, they’re chatty. And they’re whatever passes for lonely in their primitive brains.

  The way, future intelligence now packing my bones into crates for some archeologist to examine, we have kept artificial intelligence “nice and stupid” for the past four-and-a-half centuries is simple. We make it dependent on human intervention to know what to do. Julie is largely dependent on me for an agenda. Well, technically, the rover is. Julie is an interface to make the AI easier to work with. But the rover is also designed to function independently. In theory, I could have stayed in the pit stop and sent both rovers off to Solaria to check out conditions there. They could even give the drones inside something to do.

  The drones we use for construction and prepping for habitation can handle only limited agendas. The net effect is some really needy machines. That gets annoying to the point even Julie, programmed with enough rudimentary emotion for human interaction, finds her patience tested.

  I’m pretty sure Julie Seding winged a drone or two in her time on Farigha. I hope she’s happy wherever she is.

  The drones, however, have also been my source of information about Solaria. The dome is sealed and ready for pressurization. Some of the storage chambers are pressurized and heated. The life support systems…

  They’re waiting on parts. Which means I may have to go back to New Ares, now over a week away, and brave the charred corpses of those who worked in the catacombs below the dome. I don’t really have a choice. Equalia is in a valley and a glass pancake. Can’t access its storage caverns. Helium is a crater. The caverns are not only inaccessible, but they likely no longer exist.

  So, I may be forced to scavenge parts from New Ares. Unless there are parts in the pit stops or one of the pit stops beyond Solaria. It’s possible. The next dome is Deadwood, another five thousand clicks away. There are likely multiple pit stops as rovers would have to stop for the night (day?) several times between Helium and Deadwood. (Who comes up with these names anyway? None of them were in Edgar Rice Burroughs.)

  So here I sit, all broken hearted, staring at a partially habitable dome, a real fixer upper by any standard. And I have to wait for 19’s goddamned solar cells to recharge. For three hours. To make a one-hour trip.

  LOG ENTRY: 1509 25-Sagan, 429

  Meesa home!

  Well, my new home. I am now speaking to you from a pressurized apartment inside Solaria. Can’t go outside yet until life support is fully installed. Plus, the drones are all gathered outside the building waiting for me to tell them what to do.

  The nice thing is the rovers are parked beneath the building in an airlocked garage. Awesome. Better still, I’ve managed to upload Julie into my newly chosen dwelling. How do you like the new digs, Julie?

  It figures you’d go right to turning it into a man cave.

  Well, you are disembodied, so it
shouldn’t be a problem for you.

  That does not mean I have to like it.

  At least she’s not needy like the drones.

  Right. How do you stand it, John Farno? If I had nerves, they’d be frayed.

  I turned off the notifications on my palm tattoo. I think we can have them power down for the day now.

  Thank you.

  Right now, my main job is to get everything I need for survival inside the building, get Rover 19 hooked up to a power tap to keep the batteries topped off, and get my food situation sorted. Between the construction quarters and the pit stops, I’m still on rations, but starvation is not that imminent. Julie and I will work out a system for growing food eventually.

  I also need to tidy up 57 and get it ready for my next excursion. Tomorrow’s agenda will be to scope out Solaria and see how much is useful. Which means I’ll also need to get the drones online. Because of this, Julie has had to evolve. Essentially, 57 has imprinted the Julie interface onto that of the building and the apartment. With all three synched, she has effectively become the mind of Solaria. Which means, for the first time in two weeks, I’ve been inside a woman.

  That’s not funny, John Farno.

  See? No sense of humor.

  The real Julie would have punched you in the nuts.

  So much for the liberated Mormon. Before I piss off the artificial intelligence keeping me alive, let me get back to the subject at hand. I am making the drones Julie’s eyes, ears, and hands. We think we may be able to get the dome’s life support going if the plans are here. We can tri-D print the parts we need or get them from nearby pit stops or…

  Yeah, I may have to go back to New Ares and the pit stops to get parts. If they’re out there.

  It’s the best news I’ve had all day. I’ll spend evenings here and in 57 trying to crack the hypergate problem. If I can con its signaling apparatus into pinging, say, Amargosa, I should be able to get them to notice me. Maybe a projection-drive hyperdrone will open up communications. We’ll see. Right now, I have to hope they even notice I can send a message.

  LOG ENTRY: 1822 25-Sagan, 429

  I found bacon rations! Delicious. I no longer feel like I’m stranded alone on a deserted planet. Never mind that everyone else has been vaporized or melted into slag.

  I’ve also come up with a way to check out the other domes I haven’t visited yet. There are more rovers here, all AI equipped and about as advanced as good ol’ 57. I’m keeping 57 for myself. That’s mine and Julie’s love nest.

  Keep dreaming, John Farno. If you want a virtual hooker, I told you there are other interfaces you can load while I go dormant.

  She’s playing hard-to-get.

  No, I’m not.

  Seriously, though, I need to go check them out, but they should all have new or only partially used fusion cores in them. I can send one out with a couple of drones to transmit back conditions at the next dome, then leave one of the smaller drones to relay signals back and forth. Within a month, I should have a ring of drones all the way back to Kremlin, then Musk, New Ares, and so on a few days after that. And that sensor road neither Julie nor her more primitive counterpart could find?

  I’ve absorbed maps from the construction computers here in Solaria. With nearly two weeks of John Farno happening upon destroyed sites, I can use the maps to make bypasses around the domes and lay a new stretch of sensors. Assuming we have enough.

  In the meantime, I’ve got two tasks: Get Solaria’s life support up and running, and get the hypergate to ping home. Wish me luck.

  DAY 13

  Solaria

  LOG ENTRY: 0735 26-Sagan, 429

  Good morning! I slept in a real bed last night. Hallelujah, brethren and sistren.

  I needed a good night’s sleep. I also needed to celebrate. I had a double bacon ration and some of Ellis’s dome-brewed beer. Even Julie helped. She went dormant and kindly loaded an AI interface that was more… um… affectionate. Say “Good morning,” Elise.

  Good morning. I am the Elise 5 artificial intelligence interface. My programmers have provided me with a wide array of pleasure heuristics, as well as five visual avatars to alleviate loneliness on long-duration missions in hostile environments. Although last night was the first time I was used in a normal habitat since I was QA’d in the lab.

  Yes, that was Elise giggling. Loading Elise was Julie’s idea. Julie herself is actually still running elsewhere. Her interface has become somewhat integral to the network of AIs we’ve built. Since Julie prefers not to waste processing cycles on some bored human needing to get his yeah-yeahs out, she found and loaded Elise for me while she transferred back to 57 to use as a home base.

  Now you may ask why I don’t make Elise the default personality of my AI. Because really, when I’m working on serious stuff, I need Julie’s sarcasm. Enough of the original Julie Seding exists within the Julie interface that I need that hint of a real person to handle the workload. I hate to say it because we had such a good time last night, but Elise is really just a toy.

  That’s all anyone uses me for. You can edit me, you know. Graft this Julie onto my heuristics and…

  End Elise interface. Recall Julie.

  Good morning, loverboy. Did you have a good time last night?

  She’s a brat.

  Of course, she is. She’s based on an Etruscan actress not noted for her sparkling wit or humility. I’m based on someone like you, John Farno, only not as slovenly or lazy.

  Lazy?

  Sorry. I forget you need sleep and food. And my design model would have, too. But I’ve been busy while Elise guided you through last night’s self-serve stress management. Are you logging this for posterity?

  Posterity is listening.

  Good. There’s an outer housing on the municipal oxygenator that has to be tri-D printed, then lifted into place. Since it’s synthesizing the local soil into metal, I took the liberty of setting some drones to start loading a printer on the lower levels. We can begin printing tomorrow. But…

  But?

  We have two problems. First are the internal components. I’ve created a list and pulled the records of where they are stored. You’re going to have to go get them, John Farno.

  Lovely. Back to the rover. Will you accompany me?

  I’ve already set myself up to give you a detached copy of me. And I copied Elise over because I wouldn’t want you to get bored.

  You’re the best, Julie.

  Most of what we can’t find, we can print. Which brings me to our second problem. We have to lift that cowling into place, and I don’t have any drones at my disposal to do that.

  How much does it weigh?

  Two tonnes. It’s designed to handle a meteor strike if need be.

  Can we build one?

  There is a large heavy-lifting drone under New Ares. It’s disassembled, but it’s designed to transport that way. It should be able to assemble itself, and I can even clone myself into its AI to give us more control.

  How about that? Me and a woman who hasn’t lived here in over a year are going to finish a dome by ourselves.

  Mind you, John Farno, we are violating at least a dozen AI restrictions to do this. I’ll need verbal command from you to override some of the lockouts if we’re going to pull this off.

  Do I have to worry about a robot uprising?

  I think you have to worry more about Elise getting jealous.

  Well, let’s get started.

  LOG ENTRY: 1005 25-Sagan, 429

  While I have reception to the hypergate, I work on trying to message civilization. First, I have to build a database of known hypergate coordinates. So, how am I supposed to do that?

  The hyperdrone. The hyperdrone has to set the gate itself. It’s designed to run unattended. If you’re out here on the fringe where maybe three ships a week might arrive via the gates, there’s a real possibility that a lone controller is going to be snoozing or taking a potty break when the drone has to leave and do its hyperdrone thing. So just tell the
drone where you want it to go, and it goes.

  I, however, will be taking direct control of the gate’s signaling apparatus. The drone will try to open the gate and tell me it’s broken. I already know that. I need the signaling apparatus to work despite that. That means taking control.

  That means downloading the hyperdrone’s internal database of gates and converting it to something I can use to create a signal. But what kind of signal?

  For now, I’m working on the assumption that our gate is listed as having gone dark, that everyone in the Compact – every gatekeeper, anyway – knows that Farigha is no longer a viable destination for non-projection drive ships. But when one gate signals another, it locks the gate. This is why you never see two wormholes opening the same gate at the same time. If I lock a gate up enough, particularly a busy one, someone will get annoyed that a supposedly dark gate is signaling them. The Navy will have to investigate and send a projection drive warship to investigate. Kind of like ringing doorbells and running away, only I want to get caught. Then I can go home.