The Ouroboros Wave

by Hayashi, Jyouji

  “So all this is consistent with Shiva trying to protect Ouroboros from oscillation?”

  “It could be. It’s just that the anti-resonance system isn’t new. Why has Shiva started behaving like this now, I wonder.”

  “What are you going to do? You’re not going to make it there. Should I send the train?”

  “We don’t have time. Stay calm, there are other options. Just get Sati activated as soon as you can.” Catherine lowered her visor and pressurized the suit. The truck’s life-support systems had just gone off-line. The air would soon be unbreathable. She extracted a tool from her utility pack and went to work removing the cover on the console and resetting the control jumpers. This put the truck under manual control.

  “There goes five minutes,” Catherine said to herself. She put the truck in motion again. There was no way Shiva could access it now. She quickly passed the speed limit again; this time the truck’s systems remained nominal.

  “Catherine! What’s going on?”

  “Nothing, I just outsmarted our AI. Something wrong?”

  “He’s reasoning like mad. He must be thinking of a way to stop you.”

  “That’s not possible. I’ve taken the truck off-line. I’m invisible.” The truck was within hailing distance of South Platform when Catherine heard a wail of panic.

  “Stop!”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “He’s activating the laser cannons!”

  “Good god!” But the truck was moving far too fast to be stopped quickly. Increasing speed, on the other hand, would make Shiva’s aim that much less accurate. It was her best bet for survival, but Catherine prepared for the worst. She assumed a fetal position on the floor of the cab.

  Then it hit her—Shiva didn’t have to know where the truck was. The lasers were equipped with onboard radar aiming. He could hand over control to the radar at the last moment and let the cannons think they were firing at a meteor.

  Where am I? Catherine began feverishly trying to guess when the truck would pass South Platform. Shiva didn’t know her precise location, which made it impossible for West Platform to confirm it either. She couldn’t see anything from the floor of the cab. All she could do was try to guess her location from the time display on her visor.

  He’ll hit me as soon as I poke my head up over the horizon.

  The distance to the horizon along the ring’s outer surface was only about two kilometers. Catherine would be in cannon range for less than a second, but for that instant her fate would hang in the balance.

  Suddenly the cab was filled with light, and Catherine was convinced her luck had run out. There was a high-pitched whine as air vented rapidly to space. Soon the sound stopped.

  Is that it? She lifted her head to peer out. There was a single hole, several inches across, in the front of the cab. It would have been fatal if the beam had struck her, but the location of the hole suggested Shiva hadn’t been targeting the passenger.

  “Catherine, I hope you’re alive.” It was SysInt.

  “Alive and kicking. There’s a nice big hole in the truck though. What happened? It looks like Shiva only fired once.”

  “So he did hit you. We tried to take control of the lasers, but he completely shut us out. We saw him fire.”

  Catherine noticed she was slowing down. The outrushing air had pulled the truck’s operating manual out of the rack behind the passenger seat and tossed it onto the speed control lever. She lifted the lever and the truck accelerated.

  “I think we’ve been on the wrong track all along. You said Shiva bypassed the subsystem and was controlling the lasers directly?”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  “Shiva isn’t capable of selecting targets.”

  “I don’t understand. You said there was a hole in the truck,” said SysInt.

  “It’s not that he grasps the reality of Amphisbaena or the truck as physical objects. For Shiva those are just symbols. He’s using symbols to attack symbols. That explains why he hasn’t been following through on his attacks. I think the same thing happened with Amphisbaena. The data relay on each habitat—that’s all Amphisbaena is to Shiva.”

  “But if Shiva is reacting to symbols, how did he target the station? That has to mean some kind of awareness of the physical world.”

  “Being dependent on symbol recognition doesn’t mean Shiva can’t target things in the real world. The relays on the station are just above the docking ports. Shiva is constantly tracking them, which means he can extract a targeting solution from real-time coordinates. That’s not recognition of three-dimensional space, though. We had another dummy Amphisbaena ID ready to swap into the system, but we haven’t used it. As far as Shiva is concerned, the attack rendered Amphisbaena nonexistent. The truck’s speed dropped after I was fired on, though that was just an accident. Shiva will think the truck’s been destroyed.” In point of fact, Catherine wasn’t sure about this, but she felt reason for optimism. Accounting for Shiva’s behavior in terms of faulty awareness was easier than assuming the AI had decided to attack its human masters.

  There was a pause. “Catherine, it looks like the angle of the laser strikes on Amphisbaena is consistent with an attack on the data relays. The shuttles were just in the way.”

  “See? That’s a major indication of why this started in the first place.”

  “But in that case, Shiva is a danger to us all,” said SysInt. “He doesn’t understand that humans are physically present on Amphisbaena.”

  8

  “CHIEF, SOUTH PLATFORMS’S SHUTTLE is ready when you are.”

  “Understood. Prep for evac. I’m almost there.”

  Tatsuya toggled off. After the laser attack he’d decided not to use a new ID to reestablish contact with Ouroboros Net. Clearly Shiva had some serious issues with Amphisbaena. For now the AI seemed to be deliberately ignoring them. As long as they weren’t under attack, it was best to leave things alone.

  The current problem was how to get to the logistics module across forty kilometers of Amphisbaena’s struts and bracing. It had been his idea, but he’d never imagined it would be this challenging. The gravity in the habitat was about the same as that on Mars—about a third of Earth’s—and as he worked his way toward Amphisbaena’s midpoint, the force generated by the station’s rotation would diminish. The beginning was supposed to be the hardest part.

  Tatsuya’s guess that it would be possible to cover such a distance was based on a vacation he’d spent as a young man climbing Olympus Mons, the highest mountain in the solar system. The volcano was twenty-seven kilometers high, but nearly six hundred wide. It was more of a plateau than a mountain, with a constant, gentle slope. Walking to the top in his suit had been exhausting and he’d had some close calls along the way. But he’d made it.

  Of course, Amphisbaena was not a mountain. But there was little difference between gravity at the base of Olympus Mons and at its summit. Even so, he’d managed to gain twenty-seven kilometers of altitude. With gravity dropping the closer he was to the center of Amphisbaena, this should be far easier. At least that was the concept.

  As it turned out, he wasn’t entirely wrong. He could feel his body getting lighter as he worked his way along. Still, it had taken him twenty kilometers of climbing just to reduce the gravity by half.

  “Kurokawa, can you hear me?”

  “I hear you, Chief.”

  “How far along are you?”

  “I think about halfway.”

  “About the same as me.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Chief?”

  “Sure.”

  “What gave you the idiotic idea we could climb forty klicks?”

  “Is that your only question?”

  “That’s it for right now.”

  The rest of their climb was punctuated with similar exchanges. Not long after the halfway point it was clear to Tatsuya that he was reaching his limit, because he was having trouble gripping the climbing hooks. The low gravity made it easy to recover if he
missed a hook, but after missing one five times, he knew he was out of his depth. This was getting dangerous. He found himself wishing the emergency docking port had been situated a bit more conveniently. He toggled his comm and said to no one in particular, “Ten-minute break.”

  The logistics module’s docking port had been built for cargo shuttles to use while the station was under construction—it wasn’t in routine use. For reasons Tatsuya could not recall, the port was oriented ninety degrees to Amphisbaena’s rotation, forcing spacecraft to roll in order to synchronize with the station beneath them prior to docking. Because this port had only been used during the construction phase, the designers had never thought to equip it with remote access capability. Someone had to prep it from inside. At a time like this, the design wasn’t very user friendly. Tatsuya spent his break cursing this lack of foresight.

  “Chief? Ten minutes.”

  “I know, I know.” Tatsuya started moving again. Later he realized from Kurokawa’s tone that he hadn’t just been reminding Tatsuya of the time. He’d been checking if his chief was still alive.

  Not far past the halfway point climbing became much easier. Tatsuya discovered that propelling himself tens of meters at a time was more efficient than proceeding hook by hook. It seemed Kurokawa had made the same discovery. The Coriolis effect was weaker here, and there was little drift to correct for. Soon he was able to cover a hundred meters in one go. He had to stay alert; were it not for his experience, he could easily have built up enough momentum to end up crashing into the hull of the module. But he and Kurokawa had EVA’d so many times that compensating for changing inertia was second nature.

  Tatsuya reached the hatch of the logistics module. It opened easily. Gravity was now close to zero. His body was exhausted, but he wasn’t feeling it much in the microgravity. He released the east lift’s latch, leaving the west lift for Kurokawa. They had both climbed here, each with a mission to fulfill.

  The emergency lift consisted of a plastic frame at the end of a carbon nanotube wire. Releasing the latch triggered a spring-loaded ejection mechanism. Slowly the lift began its forty-kilometer descent toward East Habitat.

  “Lift on its way, gentlemen. It’ll be with you shortly.” Tatsuya went to work prepping the docking port.

  9

  STOPPING THE TRUCK was no easy task—Catherine was moving far faster than a jet aircraft. The truck sped past the broad central boarding area of East Platform almost before she noticed. By the time she finally came to a stop, she was five kilometers past the platform.

  Catherine clambered from the truck, taking only a small tool pack, and started back toward the platform with carefully timed, leaping strides. She felt an overwhelming sense of isolation; the nearest human was three thousand kilometers away. The ring was only five meters wide. If she veered from this path, she would be outside the human world, a satellite of Kali.

  The stars moved visibly with the ring’s motion. Bounding across this dark gray ribbon suspended in the void, it was difficult to believe that the events of the past few days had actually happened. Instead she felt she’d always been here, circling the ring forever in utter solitude.

  Seeing the ruins of East Platform brought her back to reality. She reduced her pace to a slow walk, carefully bleeding off inertia to avoid stressing her knees. The structures on the outer surface of the ring had been ripped apart by the truck and the body of Graham Chapman. The structures on the inner surface had escaped damage. That was where she would find Shiva.

  Catherine went to the hatch closest to Shiva, lifted it, and climbed through the ring and into the inner core. Shiva’s console on the surface of the ring had been destroyed in the accident. But despite the inconvenience of having to input commands while suited up, she would have full access to the AI through the backup panel in the core.

  The structures inside the ring were unscathed. Even the lights were still on. Catherine made her way down the corridor to the control room without noticing anything unusual. The door was sealed, but as she approached, Shiva automatically started calling up biometric data from her web. He wanted to know the identity of his visitor.

  Thirty seconds later the door opened. Though it must have been her imagination, it seemed to Catherine that access was given grudgingly. She’d be unable to use her web from the control room to exchange data with the outside—another security measure. The only way to communicate with her team would be by voice, via her suit.

  To the right of the console was an umbilicus for suit power, circulating oxygen, and heating water. This was essential for extended work in the cold vacuum of the core, but Catherine left it alone. There was no guarantee that Shiva might not use the umbilicus for some other purpose. She was taking no chances.

  Inside the control room, Catherine was weightless. She harnessed herself to the console as if for a routine work session. A few moments later the console initiated a second verification sequence with her web.

  Under normal circumstances Catherine would have regarded this as unremarkable. Obviously, Shiva would want to know who was attempting to use his console. But his recent behavior had been anything but normal. She was struck by how much work and ingenuity were necessary to create and maintain a world where things functioned as expected. If AIs could be taught to think like humans, maybe none of this would be happening.

  ID verification was successful. The object known as Catherine Sinclaire was authorized for full system access. The console powered up and signaled ready.

  Catherine used the outsize keyboard to input data with gloved fingers. She avoided voice input to keep the interaction as basic as possible. Shiva’s response was immediate. Catherine winced. Graham, this is all your fault, isn’t it?

  The fact that Graham Chapman’s ID was still valid had to be the key to solving the problem. Instead of running a system analysis, she queried the status of Chapman’s agent. Sure enough, the program had assumed override control of Shiva’s top-level functions. Chapman had named it “Priority Observation Program.”

  So you’re the one who’s been screwing things up.

  The program had been loaded less than an hour before Chapman had become his creation’s first victim. Catherine next asked to view the program code, but the output was so long and involved that it was difficult to make an immediate judgment. Apparently the program was designed to make Shiva respond to some specific condition or event, but just glancing at the code didn’t yield much information. A proper analysis would have to wait for Sati.

  Still, Catherine wasn’t going to walk away empty-handed after almost being killed in the effort to get here. If the front door was locked, maybe she could find another way in. That was almost always possible with any large system.

  Graham, what is this program supposed to do? Is it a new resonance damper?

  She decided to take her first calculated risk: accessing Chapman’s avatar through her web. Most programs of this type allowed limited access for basic maintenance and profiling. All she had to do was ask the avatar to state its type and purpose.

  The avatar was configured for voice response only. Perhaps because of the program’s size, Chapman had dispensed with the usual talking head. That was just as well. Catherine was in no mood to talk to a simulation of a dead man.

  “This all goes back to my goal of analyzing that anomalous ring resonance,” the avatar said, apparently programmed by Chapman to be chatty. Somehow Catherine was not surprised. “I think I’m onto a solution, but I can’t prove it yet.”

  “So what are you using to verify this theory of yours?” asked Catherine.

  “As you know, the platform-to-platform ranging system for maintaining the ring’s position relative to Kali can double as a laser interferometer.”

  “And you’re using it to investigate resonance?”

  “Yes, but more importantly, for gravity wave observation. The operating principle is the same. Ouroboros happens to be the largest freestanding laser interferometer in the solar system. Properly used, it sh
ould yield very accurate observational data on gravity waves.”

  THE RING’S FOUR HABITATE PLATFORMS bracketed Kali from two directions, offset ninety degrees. Each platform pair—North/South, East/West—used lasers to continuously monitor the distance to the other side of the ring. Kali’s gravity shifted the wavelength of the laser before it reached the detector on the other side; how closely it passed by Kali determined the wavelength shift. By comparing the incoming wavelength against its own reference, each detector could gauge any drift relative to the black hole. Combining these results with data from the other platform pair made it possible to maintain Kali at the precise center of the ring.

  The whole system was a basic application of interferometry and was essential to maintain the stability of a structure like Ouroboros. A ring encircling a gravity source has no net gravitational interaction with that source and thus no stable orbital characteristics. Slight inputs of external energy—including G-forces from the station—could eventually cause Ouroboros to fall into Kali. Data from the lasers was ported to the ring’s attitude control system.

  The attitude control system was also part of the ring’s defense against vibrations caused by activity on the ring—a major problem with such a large structure in space. Despite its size, the ring was extremely delicate. Keeping it stable was no easy task. Ouroboros was equipped with systems to prevent vibrations from turning into destructive resonance. The ring could automatically change shape to dampen any vibration-induced resonance. Once Chandrasekhar Station was complete, systems to deal with these problems would be distributed and redundant, but still essential.

  “I DON’T BELIEVE IT. You made your pet project a system priority? That’s what you loaded into Shiva?” Catherine knew that Chapman had been investigating this problem just before his death, but she’d had no idea he’d been using interferometry to study gravity waves.