Zara's Flight: Book One of the Kato's War series

by Andrew C Broderick

  Randall stayed silent. James continued, “We need to get the best engineers together and get a task force on this immediately. And we’re still going to have to go to Orson with it. He needs to know now.”

  James and Randall knocked on Orson Tyler West’s office door. “Come in,” he said gruffly. The six-foot-four, shockingly redheaded man didn’t rise from his chair or even look away from his screen.

  “We have a problem,” Randall said, before repeating what he had told James.

  Orson was, predictably, furious. “Dammit, I knew we should have put this on the quality reports! Then I wouldn’t just be learning about it now.” He sighed. “We need to run damage control. It’s just a damn good thing it hasn’t hit the social networks yet. Get PR going on a campaign now to soften things and stress quality. There are three other companies who’ll gladly eat our lunch if we mess up.”

  “We’re going to get a task force on it now,” James said, as they were leaving Orson’s office. “Randall, you really flubbed this one. You’d better hope you still have a job.”

  Twenty engineers sat on cheap plastic chairs in a hastily convened circle in the basement of TAON’s headquarters. Harsh fluorescent lighting beat down on them; apparently the company had not thought it worth the expense of installing lumo-panels in the bowels of the building where, the engineers argued, the real work got done.

  They watched intently as a shapeless silver blob used ten tentacles at once to perform tasks concurrently, such as stacking small blocks, drawing precise lines in pencil, and fastening screws. They had been watching it for over an hour.

  James spoke up at last: “I’m not seeing any evidence of what they’re complaining about. It’s performing its tasks just fine. No visible shaking or tremors are occurring.” The others nodded.

  “Let’s leave it running longer,” Randall said. “We need to work this thing day and night until we figure out what’s going on. Are there any specifics you can nail down from the support calls, John?”

  John Dallinger, Chief Quality Engineer, shook his head. “Not a darn thing. It’s not specific to any environment, task, robot size, or anything. The problems are across the board, and intermittent.”

  Randall pursed his lips and sighed. “In other words, a nightmare to debug,” he said.

  John nodded sadly. “Uh huh.”

  “Seeing anything on the diagnostics, James?” Randall asked.

  James shook his head while staring intently at a large monitor. “Nothing. Power transmission is good, sensors are working, and the computing load is distributed evenly. The data buses are transmitting forty-five terabytes a second. Everything’s working.” There was silence in the room for several minutes.

  “I don’t think this is going to be a simple problem to solve,” James said. “We need to just leave it running.”

  After most of the engineers had left, James and John just stood, mesmerized, watching the robot continue its work.

  James stroked his beard as he mused. “What do you think the public thinks when they look at these things?” he asked. “That they’re just some amorphous blob of a magic material that always knows what to do?”

  John shrugged. “Not sure. I guess PR handles that one!”

  “I bet most of them don’t appreciate the immense complexity of even one of those tentacles,” James said. “The optimal distribution of different chains of modules to give it strength and dexterity, and the way the AI is distributed and localized to each part that needs it, all while still coordinating with the main CPU. The computing power required to process all the data from the sensors covering the skin is overwhelming.”

  “Much like the human body, I guess,” John said. “We still haven’t figured out all there is to know about it, by a long way. Some if it is frankly miraculous, and nobody appreciates how amazing it is until it starts to go wrong.”

  Chapter 13

  Kato floated in a corridor, nearly a meter wide, in the utility sphere on Eternity. It ran across the ship’s axis, all the way from one side to the other, and had a half-meter convex porthole at either end. Every inch of its interior was used for something: storage lockers, displays, switches, and emergency equipment—not that he would have much of a chance out here if anything went wrong.

  He was at the galley two meters from the end, which was an alcove about the size of a large cupboard, busily preparing what passed for dinner by attaching a hot water hose to the top of a dehydrated food packet. This diet, though varied in flavor, was very consistent in texture, and it was starting to get old. Number ninety-five out of billions, he thought.

  Once he had kneaded the mixture in the packet, he sipped at its contents: ham and apple pie—all in one. Oddly, the flavors worked. He pulled himself forward two meters and watched idly from the porthole as he ate. Grabbing a handhold and pulling himself right up so his hair was touching the glass, and looking as far back as he could, Kato could see Earth—it was now just a tiny, pale blue dot. The microscopic acceleration caused him to drift slowly to his right—toward the rear of the ship—and he had to steady himself.

  Kato loved all the nooks and crannies of the utility sphere: the shaft that went up from this corridor to the observation bubble, and down, towards the back of the ship. Other, smaller corridors led from those to other places in the sphere: food and water stores, equipment racks, the small exercise room, and his even smaller cabin deep inside the sphere. (It also contained what would be his final resting place: a cryogenic tomb, about the size of a large chest freezer.)

  He took an almost childish glee in the experience of the tight spaces and mazelike tunnels and, even though the ship could have been far more spacious, he wanted it this way. Psychologists had told Kato before he left that this was probably because in some ways he wanted to recreate the feeling of being in the womb. Maybe it’s true, he thought, but I still like it that way. Eternity was almost exclusively a utilitarian craft, not an interplanetary cruise ship—the one exception being the generously sized observation bubble.

  Once Kato had discarded the food packet, he checked the time and pushed himself away from the porthole, around the corner, and back up to the observation bubble. Once there, he took a deep breath and started recording a video to post to his blog: “Thank you again, to my legions of loyal fans. I had no idea that the mission of the Eternity, once derided as being some sort of space joyride, would touch so many lives and mean so much to you all. There are many more people than I ever thought that believe in either a higher power or extraterrestrial life. Believe me, if and when I encounter them, you will be the first to know! Until then, never stop dreaming or imagining, for that is this ship’s real mission.

  “Now, on to practical matters. I am in perfect health, and so is the ship. At week eleven, I became the furthest ever human being from Earth. Now, at week seventeen, I have just passed three hundred and eleven million kilometers straight-line distance and am doing a hundred and one kilometers per second.

  “The vessel continues to accelerate, but today marks a very important milestone: the point of no return. Right now, if I chose to, I could turn the ship around and use my remaining fuel to return to Earth. By the time you receive this, twenty-one minutes from now, that point will have passed. I am committed to the depths of space for the rest of my days.”

  Kato stopped recording. His mind flashed back through his life: growing up in Houston, grad school, his wedding day, Zara’s birth, and that awful day that Susan had been taken from him. Is my life all I wanted, or expected? He wondered. There’s no denying it’s been remarkable, but I just can’t totally shake a sense of inadequacy.

  Kato snapped out of his reverie and pressed send.

  Chapter 14

  James and John, plus eight engineers, pored intensely over the diagnostic readings on the monitor while watching a live video feed of the robot performing its duties on a factory floor in New Jersey.

  “You know what I think is happening?” James said. “I think there’s something up with
the nerve strands. You see the way the tentacles twitch every time a new command is issued, before they change shape?”

  “Yep,” John replied.

  “Well, that would match up with the symptoms we’re seeing, including the overall tremors of the whole unit. We’ve got to get that thing here ASAP. Ship them a replacement. We’ve got to set up an analog of its work environment here and examine it for as long as it takes to figure this out.”

  Two days later, the machine was working in the engineering area at TAON, none the wiser that it wasn’t putting together window air conditioning units in New Jersey.

  “Now we attach electrodes here, and here,” John joked, imitating Count Dracula.

  James smiled. “Get the diagnostics port attached, and let’s check this out.”

  Six hours later, all mirth had vanished. “We have to let everybody know about this now,” James said.

  A meeting with the executive team was hastily convened in the boardroom, four floors above. All eyes were on John as he stood at one side of the table with a cutaway model of a nerve strand projected in the air next to him. He began with the non-technical explanation for Orson’s benefit, acutely aware of the CEO’s fiery gaze boring into him.

  “As you know, all our products consist of chains of the five basic module types: actuator, nerve, sensor, power, and structure,” he began. “Now, what we found with robots of virtually any size is that the parts wear out and have to be replaced. Since we can’t remanufacture the whole thing every time it starts to degrade, we did the next best thing: put the factory inside the bot. It takes spent modules and recycles them by breaking them down into raw materials and then reconstructing them a molecule at a time.

  “How do we get spent modules to the recycler, you might ask? Every module strand now consists of three cores: two service cores and a conduit.” He pointed to the model. “At any time, one of the cores is in service, and the other is other is out of service, being recycled. Then, when that is complete, the recycled one is switched on and the other brought down to be replaced.

  “The conduit—here—is like an elevator. A tiny transporter moves up and down it, by magnetic induction, removing and replacing modules. In this way, all our products heal and replenish themselves, much like the human body—except that our cells are renewed in situ, instead of in one central place.

  “However, I digress. The gist of the problem is this: when the nerve modules are replaced, for some reason the end result is worse than it was before! So, the system is stuck in a loop, recycling one strand over and over, while the service strand continues to degrade. As a result, commands to the actuators, and data from the sensors, don’t always make it through.”

  A pin-drop silence ensued. He continued: “Our products effectively have a neurological disorder—hence the shaking, and the apparent onset of blindness.” Silence again as a pall was cast over the room.

  Orson spoke up: “What can we do about it? Will a software patch fix it?”

  “Negative,” James replied. “Only the main CPU’s software can be altered remotely. This would update the sub-CPUs further down the chains, but not the recyclers: they’re dumb units, hard-coded with the module blueprints. A big flexiform or shape-shifter has millions of them. Every part of every robot, both large ones like that and microscopic ones, is eventually going to fail.” The last sentence sent a shudder through the room, as though half a ton of lead ingots had been dropped onto a concrete floor.

  “Oh, my God,” Orson said at length. “This company is in deep, deep shit. We’ll have to replace every robot out there.” He was speechless for a few more seconds, then jumped to his feet. “It’ll bankrupt us!” he yelled. “Not to mention the damage to our reputation!” The 3D display went fuzzy for a second, as though momentarily scrambled by his rage. Maybe it was just acknowledging the gravity of the situation, in its own way. Nobody dared speak for half a minute.

  “How come we didn’t catch this before?” Randall asked gingerly.

  “That’s what we don’t know yet,” James replied angrily. “But I’m sure as hell gonna find out.”

  Kato felt like a mouse in the most high-tech wheel of all time as he jogged around the inside of the observation bubble. He had been going for one sweaty hour and felt great as endorphins flooded his system. The sphere was small enough that he had something close to his normal weight, as centrifugal force held him to its inner surface. Kato was twenty-two weeks—and 610 million kilometers—into his journey.

  A red alert box popped up on the display. Slowing down from a fast jog was difficult—he had to slow his movement gradually with respect to the sphere, or he would lose his footing and tumble around the inside due to his inertia. The difference between weight and mass became readily apparent.

  Eventually, Kato managed to stop, and float slowly to the display. The alert read: “Oxygen recycling efficiency has dropped by 1.5%.” His brow furrowed as he tried to make sense of what the cause might be. A few minutes’ thought brought no inspiration, so he rattled off a quick message to Mission Control about it, clicked OK on the alert, and resumed jogging. Over half a billion kilometers from home, Kato thought.

  Ten minutes later, the computer said, “Incoming message from James Harrell.”

  “Play,” Kato said. James’s face appeared in midair as Kato jogged around him. He could tell from James’s face that something was very wrong before he even uttered a word.

  “Kato, we have a major, major problem. Robots everywhere are breaking down. We’ve isolated it to recycled nerve modules, but we don’t know why it’s just starting to happen now—we haven’t changed the modules’ composition or the recycling mechanism in years. I’m sending you the data we’ve got—we need all the eyes we can get on it, and I couldn’t think of anyone better than you. Bye for now.” James’s face disappeared.

  Kato was too stunned to know what to think. A few minutes later, having slowed to a stop again, he floated before the computer interface with windows all around him. They showed the diagnostic data they had collected, videos of the robot testing, and other files. Food, water, and sleep were forgotten as Kato tried to make sense of what was going on.

  While Kato worked, a ticker on the right side of his main display showed the latest news: Japanese Economic Minister to visit Washington, Terrorism Threat at Winter Olympics, Q4 Jobs Report Disappointing, and so on. He had been working for twenty-four hours straight, his eyes half-closed with fatigue, when the next headline make him stop dead: TAON To Recall all Products.

  Kato clicked on the headline and saw an angry, red-faced Orson facing a mob of reporters outside the headquarters building, clearly taking a defensive position: “This is a temporary glitch and we’re recalling everything to be on the safe side. Replacements will be issued immediately. No further comment at this time.”

  Reporters jostled and all yelled questions at once, which mostly were variations on: “How long has TAON known about these problems? Why are they all failing at once? What isn’t TAON telling its customers?”

  Chapter 15

  It started with one or two sparks and then spread like wildfire. The world’s social media lit up, and the hashtag #TAONFAIL went viral as people complained of their businesses and lives being disrupted. Kato was completely bewildered as he watched this happening. The tidal wave kept building and took on a life of its own. He flicked on Earth News Network: “The top story this hour is the apparent failure of everything built by TAON…” He muted it and recorded a message to James: “What the heck is going on? Has everything failed? Please tell me—I need info now!”

  Thirty-two minutes later, the message from deep space arrived in James’ inbox, and he watched it. Kato’s tiredness and stress were apparent from his face. James sighed, collected his thoughts, and recorded the reply: “No, it hasn’t all failed, but it’s going to. The media is blowing it out of all proportion and it’s taken on a life of its own. It’s a total nightmare, whichever way you look at it.

  “I’ve been po
ring over the code for the module recyclers, and I think I’ve isolated the problem: every time nerve modules are regenerated, another ten thousand molecules of gallium arsenide is added to the usual mix. That’s why the signal pathway is being degraded. It’s been building up to higher and higher levels over time, but it’s only just reached critical levels—which is why we didn’t catch it before.”

  He paused, feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders. “It’s been happening for years,” he continued, “so the oldest robots are the first to be affected. Nobody yet knows when it started, but all TAON products will eventually fail.” He pressed send.

  Zara and Mikayla strolled along the Nile river waterfront in downtown Cairo. Zara had reconciled with Mikayla and Anna-Nicole, and taken a short vacation with the former. It was late evening and the place was full of tourists—mainly older people—of all different nationalities. Zara carefully examined the design of the Eco Tower on the other side of the river. Its three towers twisted around each other in an unearthly shape with a giant marble-like sphere suspended between them.

  “It looks like there’s nothing holding it up. How on earth did they build it?” Zara wondered aloud, her brow furrowed.

  Mikayla shrugged. “Dunno. This place has been leading architecture for thousands of years, though. The pyramids were amazing.”

  Zara nodded and smiled. “Yeah—it was a really weird feeling to be looking at something carved or painted by a hand that’s been dead for five thousand years.”

  “So, when you gonna get your life together, girl?” Mikayla teased.

  Zara shot her a sideways look. “Who says I don’t already have it together?” she replied, barely suppressing a grin.

  “That’s baloney, and you know it. You’re still sleepwalking through life.”

  “So, what should I be doing?”

  “Well, what do you want to do?”