Come on, fire…
The droid drew closer and stopped, its laser welder just out of reach. Its optical sensors scanned Tatsuya intently.
“Tatsuya, Shiva’s reasoning is spiking again. What’s the droid doing?”
“Nothing. It’s just checking me out.”
Tatsuya had more than a passing familiarity with this droid. If the warning light on the welding unit changed from green to blue, it meant the laser was fully charged. Red meant discharge was imminent.
Suddenly the droid began moving its arms slowly in front of its sensors, as if it was examining them. After a few moments of this, Shiva seemed to reach a decision. It slowly extended the welding unit toward Tatsuya. Tatsuya moved his mirrors closer to the business end of the welder, but as he did so he brushed against another manipulator arm and knocked himself out of position.
Shit!
The droid’s sensors were tracking him, laser arm moving with them. The warning light turned blue. Tatsuya prepared to face death.
17
WHEN THE LIGHTS in the control room went off, Catherine thought for a moment that she might be about to die. But nothing happened. She was simply alone in the darkness with a dead console.
By “eliminate,” had Shiva meant from the system?
Apparently the answer was yes. When she hit the switch, the lights came on as usual. She manually entered her backup administrator ID and the console powered up normally. A quick check showed her primary ID was invalid. Catherine was no longer part of Shiva’s universe. But the AI had no objection to her backup ID.
Shiva had reacted poorly to the prospect of shutting down the observation program. If he deleted her backup password, she’d lose her only chance to take countermeasures. The next few seconds might be her last chance to act. She did so without hesitation. First she cut the power to the interferometry arrays on the North and West platforms and ran a quick status check on Chapman’s program. Sure enough, with no data coming from the arrays, Shiva detected no anomalous perturbations and had idled the SETI program. She quickly locked the program—and Chapman’s avatar—out of the system. The entire process took a few seconds; after a few seconds more the console showed the AI operating at its default parameters.
That’s all it took?
The ring itself could have been in dire danger with the wrong move, yet half a dozen commands was all it took to resolve the problem.
Did we learn anything from this after all? wondered Catherine. Was this a complex failure or a simple one?
18
THE SHUTTLE, jammed with the forty crew members from Amphisbaena, docked at North Platform. System Control took control of the maintenance droid. Tatsuya held on to one of the droid’s arms as it ferried him back to the station. Shiva, having recognized him as a physical presence, had been about to fire the droid’s laser, but Catherine’s intervention had prevented that. Now the droid was under human control.
Tatsuya decided to remain on Amphisbaena. Its systems were rebooting and returning to normal, but there was a lot of recovery work to do. He also welcomed the chance to avoid the hero’s welcome awaiting him on Ouroboros; it would only have embarrassed him.
Catherine stopped at North Platform just as the shuttle was arriving. Her team on West Platform reported Sati ready for verification testing, and Catherine knew that meant many busy days ahead. She was dead tired. Spending her sleep period on North Platform seemed the best option—if she returned to West Platform she’d be sure to plunge into the work waiting for her. Tatsuya’s voice, when it came up on her web, seemed to signal that they had put the problem behind them at last.
“So this whole thing was Shiva being convinced that anomalous ring oscillations were evidence of extraterrestrials? It’s ironic—Shiva wouldn’t have behaved the way he did if he’d understood human intelligence, but he assumed the vibrations he was detecting indicated nonhuman intelligence. By the way, did you ever figure out what was causing those residual oscillations?”
“I think that what Graham realized just before he died is that Shiva alone doesn’t have enough computing power to analyze every perturbation in a structure as large as the ring,” said Catherine. “That created the potential for Shiva to mistake one type of oscillation for another.”
“I guess that’s the price of genius—sometimes your theories get ahead of you. But once Sati’s online—”
“Something like this can’t happen again.”
“What I don’t understand is why the droid spent so much time observing me instead of shooting.”
“The answer to that will have to wait, but I think Shiva’s interaction with us led him to infer the existence of a world outside cyberspace, and he was trying to confirm that. That’s why he hesitated to attack you immediately. He was getting a lot of new data from the droid’s feedback circuits.”
“Whatever. At least it gave me a chance to come out of this alive.”
Catherine’s response was interrupted by a message from West Platform. “Catherine, we’ve been sifting through the raw data you sent—the interferometry data that Dr. Chapman’s program was accumulating.”
“Yes? What’s up?”
“Well, we let Sati have a go at it, just for fun. A lot of it was false positives—Shiva didn’t have the capacity to filter it all. It’s just…” “Just what?”
“Well, there’s this underlying pattern that’s left after we filter the data. We can’t explain it in terms of natural or man-made sources. We’re assuming it’s just another artifact.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“This one pattern doesn’t look anything like natural gravity waves. We’ve already corrected for sources at the galactic center.”
“So what is it? Intelligent signals from outside Sol System?”
“We think it’s a possibility, that’s all.”
“What do you think, Tatsuya?”
Tatsuya patched in a feed from one of Amphisbaena’s observation cameras. It was a visual of the glowing gas ring circling Kali. “Take a look.”
The ring of gas seemed to be shining less brightly than before, but it was still circling Kali, pulsating steadily.
“He always was a stubborn bastard. I think he’s having the last laugh.”
RECONFIGURING KALI’S ORBIT and constructing the accretion disk proceeded in parallel. Soon AADD would begin transforming the solar system with energy from the disk.
The first phase of this process would primarily be devoted to terraforming Mars, but AADD’s ambitions were far larger than that. They would transmit power from the disk throughout the solar system, making human habitation possible even on some of the smaller asteroids. And once the energy transmission system was complete, humanity would truly have slipped the bounds of gravity. With radiative cooling systems in place around Kali, the entire structure would be seven thousand kilometers across, roughly the diameter of Mars, and the gravity on its surface would be about the same as that on Mars. By the time the transmission system was complete, it would have grown larger than the planets themselves, to encompass the entire solar system, or at least its inner core.
Naturally, completing such a gigantic undertaking was impossible without mishap. A huge number of new basic technologies would be needed. Sometimes the experiments made in pursuit of such technologies had unexpected consequences. Until their origins were known, these remained riddles, seemingly products of chance.
THE RIDDLE OF
RAPUSHINUPURUKURU
A.D. 2144
MY FIRST IMPRESSION of the asteroid was that it looked bizarre. The flat side of the misshapen object was completely obscured by a honeycomb-mesh antenna. For hundreds of millions of years Rapushinupurukuru had moved in solitude along its own eccentric orbit. It had taken less than a month for the construction bot to build a structure that hid the entire surface from view.
Mass was needed to ensure stable energy transmission, and Rapushinupurukuru had been well chosen. Its eight hundred million tons of mass came in a s
hape that was ideal for construction of the microwave array; so ideal, in fact, that it was hard to believe it hadn’t been created eons ago for just this purpose.
Its shape was somehow neither natural nor artificial. One might say it was unnatural. Now this unnatural object rotated roughly every five minutes.
If everything had proceeded according to plan, Rapushinupurukuru would not be rotating at all. From where I was sitting, the only thing visible should have been a twenty-kilometer-wide hexagonal antenna. As built, the antenna consisted of 250 individual segments, but the asteroid’s rotation, slow as it was, generated enough centrifugal force to exceed the strength of the fragile joints holding the segments together. They had been designed for weightless conditions. The centrifugal forces at the edge of the antenna reached 0.45 G; there was no way the joints could hold.
More than two hundred segments had spiraled off into space. Now only the central section was left, a honeycomb section about a kilometer across, still big enough to hide the near side of the asteroid beneath it. The far side was naked gray rock, faintly iron-red from ion weathering, though the spectrum shift was hard to see with the naked eye. I’d first noticed it while browsing the image bank on my web.
Of course, Rapushinupurukuru didn’t have “near” or “far” sides. It was just convenient to call them that. The side with the mesh antenna was the near side. The far side showed no trace of human activity.
“I hate these things.” Barbara was squinting at her web’s readout through a bulky pair of data goggles. I was doing the same with mine. “How’s the analysis, Barbara? Any results?”
“I reran the calculations. Same as the first time.”
“Figures.” I was looking at the same data—everything Dragonslayer’s sensors could pick up, in fact—but given our different specialties, we were interested in different things. Our agent programs were filtering the data differently too. In all likelihood we weren’t even talking about the same thing.
We were in Dragonslayer’s core block. We didn’t need to occupy the same space to communicate, but the ship only carried twelve. Dispersing the crew to mitigate vulnerabilities in case of an accident wouldn’t eliminate much risk. Still, there was no bridge or central control station. Everyone had access to all the information they needed to execute their responsibilities via web.
“I thought this chunk of rock wasn’t revolving. What’s the deal with it starting now? Can you see anything, Seiya?”
Barbara and I were facing opposite directions. The core block was, structurally, the safest place on Dragonslayer. It was where everyone would head in an emergency. Most of the equipment was well shielded against radiation. It wasn’t exactly roomy with all twelve of us crammed in, but we could fit. It wouldn’t have been much use otherwise.
“What’s to see? It’s a standard S-type asteroid. She’s about as garden variety as they come.”
Rapushinupurukuru’s rotation was just revealing its far side. I thought it was kind of cool that even an object this small would have a horizon. It was roughly potato-shaped, twelve hundred meters on the long axis by six hundred by four hundred meters. A wedge with a regolith jacket, pulverized rock acquired over millions of years of tiny impacts.
“That’s not what I’m talking about.” Barbara’s face, upside down, was suddenly close to mine. In the weightlessness of the narrow space it was easier to get face-to-face this way than to swivel the jump seats. Still, I got the feeling she liked the acrobatics in the narrow confines of the ship. She always wore her red jumpsuit and kept her blond hair cropped just a few millimeters past skinhead length.
“I mean, the robot finishes the antenna array without a hitch, and then, before we can even finish testing, Rapu starts rotating. What I was asking was, did you see anything that pointed to a cause?”
Barbara was still wearing her goggles. I had no idea what she was looking at, but the image I sent her must have been totally off target. My agent talking to her agent wasn’t working so well.
“It might not be something we can extract from a visual,” I said. “But there is something strange. I don’t know if it’s connected to the rotation.” I sent the data to Barbara’s goggles.
“Strange like how? Particle contamination… what the fuck?”
“Yeah. Weird, huh? It’s a thin layer, but there’s some kind of material on the antenna mesh, probably regolith. No way that could’ve accumulated in the six months since Rapu started rotating.”
“Hmm… something must’ve kicked up a cloud of regolith. Maybe some kind of small impactor? Some of the particles would’ve been recaptured gravitationally. Collision-induced rotation. Simple explanation.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Dragonslayer’s captain floated in through the core hatch. Rebecca’s job was to shape the crew’s input into decisions, but we called her captain for convenience. Her long brown hair floated in a halo. She placed a fingertip against the wall, rotated 180 degrees, and settled into one of the jump seats. This kind of maneuver was simple for veteran astronauts; Rebecca was proud of her lack of bruises despite the generous expanses of skin she tended to expose for our benefit. She also insisted that leaving her hair to float free helped make her more aerodynamically stable. I kind of got the idea she was bullshitting us.
“Any impact with enough energy to shred the array and spin Rapu like a top would’ve left a crater somewhere. It might be no more than a few meters across, but our sensors wouldn’t have trouble picking it up.”
“You’re right, Captain.” Barbara nodded earnestly. For some reason she agreed with whatever Rebecca said but always criticized whatever I came up with—even if she had to make something up to do so. Not only that, but Barbara seemed to have gotten the idea that finding fault with others was something only I did. Well, I guess diversity of viewpoints is a good thing.
“Something else bothers me,” said Rebecca. “This particle contamination.”
“You mean its origin?” I answered.
“The origin, sure, but also the timing. I mean, look. Say a meteor—or something else—hits Rapu. It throws up a bunch of regolith. The impact starts Rapu revolving. Centrifugal force shreds the array but the central module stays intact. That means the impactor hit Rapu’s far side. So how did the regolith contaminate the array? It was twenty klicks away, which would’ve shielded the central module from contamination.”
“What if the impact itself destroyed the array?”
“Then how come the central module’s intact? Anyway, a hit big enough to destroy the array directly should’ve left traces, but we’re not seeing any. And there’s another problem—the telemetry data. What do you make of that? Can’t explain that away with a meteor strike.”
UNTIL RECENTLY, Rapushinupurukuru had been known as Asteroid 2143SF, meaning it was the sixth S-class object to be discovered last year, 2143. Its orbital elements were quickly determined and, once it became clear that it had an orbit unlike any known object of its type, a proper name seemed appropriate.
By now we’d pretty much mined all of humanity’s major myths and legends for names, so we’d been taking names from some of the more obscure cultures. Rapushinupurukuru was a dragon god of the ethnic Ainu of Hokkaido in the north of the Japanese archipelago. The name meant “feathered god with magical powers.” According to our database, Rapushinupurukuru’s realm was Lake Toya. The god was active in summer, dormant in winter. Since everyone living in Japan, regardless of where they came from, was referred to as Japanese, I seriously doubted anyone there had a clue that Rapushinupurukuru was the name of a legendary dragon. The fact that the name was in our database could indicate colonists with Ainu ancestry on Mars, or maybe one of the asteroids.
AADD had already moved Kali into orbit around Uranus. At the same time it had been moving ahead with construction of the facilities for the artificial accretion disk. Actually it would be more accurate to call the whole thing a Dyson sphere. Kali’s accretion disk threw off energy, mostly in the form of electromagnetic emissions;
this energy was trapped by the sphere surrounding the black hole. The energy could be distributed anywhere in the solar system via microwaves or laser, depending on where it needed to go.
The antenna on Rapushinupurukuru was meant to prove the distribution concept as well as the construction process, which was totally carried out by robot. Basically it went like this: Once the best site for the antenna was identified, the core relay module was anchored to the surface. Then piles were driven in around it and the central section of the microwave receiver was built overhead. This section was structurally the strongest part of the whole antenna. The rest of the antenna unfolded outward from the central section like flower petals. Each section was about a thousand meters across, with the whole antenna extending out about twenty kilometers. Each section was joined to the others by threadlike joints. Something this big and fragile could only be deployed in a weightless environment.
The designers had incorporated an unbelievably precise, dynamic leveling system. Any little tremor reaching the antenna was automatically offset, guaranteeing an absolutely flat surface—a single, gigantic antenna precise enough to put a signal into a hundred-meter circle at a distance of one AU. This level of accuracy was critical to the whole concept.
Rapushinupurukuru’s orbit was almost vertical to the plane of the ecliptic—its inclination was eighty-seven degrees. Perihelion was three AUs, aphelion thirty, and it took about sixty-seven years to orbit Sol. At first astronomers assumed it was a short-period comet, till observations showed it was composed mainly of the metal-silicate compounds typical of an S-type asteroid. In terms of planetary physics, it was a pretty interesting object given its orbit, but AADD had another reason for paying attention to this particular asteroid. Not only was it sharply inclined to the ecliptic plane, it also had a very high orbital eccentricity at 0.82. If Rapushinupurukuru could be used as a transmission node, delivery of energy to almost any part of the solar system would become practical. The high orbital eccentricity meant that energy could be relayed by pointing the array in a fixed direction. Of course, Rapushinupurukuru’s antenna could also be used to beam energy to the planets, but a more important goal was providing power to spacecraft traversing the solar system. With an external power supply, spacecraft could be made much simpler and yet travel faster. As long as the craft’s position was known at all times, power could be supplied with lasers, with guidance data piggybacked on the energy transmission. That would let us move cargo more efficiently, with automated bulk carriers.
The Ouroboros Wave Page 7
