QUANT (COLONY Book 1)

by Richard F. Weyand

  The video feed from the bridge went blank.

  On the other side of Decker’s display, the transporter vanished.

  “Goodbye, Janice,” Decker whispered.

  Matt was watching the display when a light blue haze developed across the screen. He nudged Peggy and pointed. The blue haze flashed suddenly and was gone.

  Earth was gone as well.

  In the display everything else floated as before within the transporter, but Matt could see the horizon of a different planet, this time to the left side of the display.

  “We have arrived at Earthsea,” Quant’s voice announced from the speakers.

  There were a series of small blue flashes in the display, as some of the structures he could see in the display disappeared. It was only a few minutes when the blue haze developed over the screen again. The blue haze flashed suddenly and was gone.

  Another planet floated in the display, taking up half the display on the left.

  “We have arrived at Amber,” Quant’s voice announced.

  Once again, there were a series of small blue flashes in the display, as some of the structures Matt could see in the display disappeared. It was only a few minutes when the blue haze developed over the screen again. The blue haze flashed suddenly and was gone.

  Another planet floated in the display, taking up a quarter of the display on the right.

  “We have arrived at Arcadia,” Quant’s voice announced.

  Perhaps two minutes later, gravity abruptly returned. There was a bit of a tremor as the building settled a bit.

  “Peggy, look at that,” Matt said.

  In the display, Matt could see from their location on the top of the residence hall all the way to the horizon. There were coastal grasslands close around them, with some structures in the middle distance Matt recognized as the barns.

  Well beyond the barns, there was lush vegetation, with some small trees. Some looked like they were laid out in a grid, like orchards. In the far distance, blue-gray mountains marched across the horizon, falling off to the sea in the right side of the display.

  A cheer went up in the compartment, and there was applause.

  They had arrived on Arcadia.

  After the placement of the last colonists and their infrastructure on Fiji, the last planet in queue, Janice Quant took inventory. First, she had the transporter itself and the interstellar probe, which had transported itself into the transporter before they left Earth. She had left one of the interstellar communicators in solar orbit at each colony planet, which left her with eleven spares.

  Quant also had four orbital metafactories from the Asteroid Belt and two orbital warehouses of supplies, including radioactives, water, copper, and ball bearings.

  All she needed now was a really nice asteroid belt.

  Quant transported one interstellar communicator into the interstellar probe and sent it off in one direction. She and the big transporter transited in another.

  But before she left Fiji, she transported a small survey drone back to Earth.

  Just about everyone on Earth was waiting for the triumphant return of the interstellar transporter after delivering colonists and infrastructure to twenty-four planets, seeding the human race across the stars.

  What appeared instead was a tiny planetary survey drone that appeared over the Texas shuttleport.

  It downloaded a video to the shuttleport computer, then came to a landing and shut down. The video went out over the video feed from Mission Control.

  Bernd Decker and Anna Glenn watched the video from the drone on the big display in their living room. Decker knew what was coming, but he was still filled with dread.

  “What’s going on?” Glenn asked. “Why this video? Where’s Janice?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The video started with Janice Quant, in a display from a console on the bridge of the interstellar transporter. There was quite a bit of activity behind her, with people moving back and forth and huddled in hushed conversation.

  “Hello, everyone,” Quant said.

  “We have programmed a drone to carry this message back to Earth in case we don’t make it. The interstellar probe will send it if communication is lost with the transporter.”

  The video feed went to split screen, with Quant on one side and an external view of the transporter on the other.

  “The stresses of carrying over two million colonists and all their infrastructure out to twenty-four colonies have proven to be a bit much for the transporter. We left large engineering margins, but on a first mission like this, it’s easy to get it a bit wrong.

  “We’re trying to effect repairs now, but we’re not sure if we will be able to make it back to Earth. The other option is to try to transfer to the interstellar probe and get home that way. We have some of the very best people here working on it, but we’ll have to see how it goes.

  “The good news is that all twenty-four colonies have been delivered. The colonists and all their infrastructure are now safely down on all the colony planets. Humanity now occupies twenty-five planets, not just one. The human race is safe from a planetary cataclysm.

  “Whatever happens on Earth, Mankind will carry on.”

  Quant’s image moved a bit, as if the transporter bridge had shook suddenly. She turned to look behind her.

  “Oh, no.”

  Quant turned back to the display.

  “Goodbye, everyone. I love you all.”

  At that point, the image from the bridge cut off, and the display went to full-screen on the transporter.

  The cube shape of the transporter distorted and twisted, as if someone or something was trying to crumple it.

  “Oh, my God,” Glenn said.

  And then the girders and trusses that made up the huge transporter had had enough. Trusses twisted and snapped, and the transporter started to come apart. The power supplies stared to let go, and the eight corner nodes began, one at a time, to explode.

  The bridge was in one of those nodes.

  Huge chunks of the structure spiraled away from the explosions. Some of those were captured by the planet and made re-entry, huge flaming contrails falling to the planet.

  At that point the video from the drone cut off as it was transported to Earth by the surviving interstellar probe.

  “Oh, Bernd, I am so sorry.”

  Decker, even though he knew what was coming in general terms, was emotionally overwhelmed by the startling video. He collapsed into Glenn’s arms and sobbed.

  Janice Quant, his boon companion for twenty years, had burned her bridges behind her. She had cut her ties to humanity.

  She was alone in the vast darkness.

  Decker hoped she would be all right.

  Janice Quant had been very popular as World Authority Chairman. Now she and all who had been aboard the interstellar transporter with her were presumed lost.

  Many people around the world wore black armbands to show their sorrow over the disaster. Some wore them for months, and the anniversary of the disaster would be marked for years to come.

  The vice chairman of the World Authority stepped up to the chairmanship. In his speech, he paid homage to Janice Quant and all those who had died with her. There was a minute of silence in their memory, and then their names were all read aloud.

  They were avatars all.

  In trying to assess the disaster, the World Authority Science Section found that they had no plans for the transporter. The entire interstellar component of the colony effort had been a closely held secret, lest it be replicated by some private group and used for bad ends.

  The problem was that everyone who knew those secrets had been on the transporter. Anthony Lake and Donald Shore, all the technicians and scientists, even the plans themselves, had all been lost in the disaster.

  The factories in the Asteroid Belt had no records, either. Once their part of the construction was complete, they had downloaded new plans for their next project, and overwritten the others.

  Hum
anity had discovered a means of interstellar travel, only to lose it again.

  Janice Quant watched all these proceedings from her new location. She had found a rich debris field, with everything she needed, around a shrunken dwarf star.

  Quant was touched by all the expressions of grief for her, and surprised to find she remained popular, even after the cost of the project ultimately came out. Economists pointed out it had been a period of huge growth in economic output, and with great scientific advances. And of course the Asteroid Belt factories continued to pour out raw materials, heavy equipment, and consumer goods, basically for free.

  Quant was also amused by many of the reminiscences of people who recalled meeting her. How she had been so charismatic in person. Of course, she had never met anyone in person, but human memory was funny. They may actually have such memories, forgetting that the interaction had actually been by video.

  She turned her attention to her new project, but kept a watchful eye on both Earth and the new colonies through her interstellar communicators.

  On a purely side note, the World Authority terminated funding for a long-running computer research project called the Joint Artificial Neural Intelligence Computation Engine. The project had failed in its goal, to push the limits of artificial intelligence.

  The hardware was dismantled and junked. The building was emptied out and sold. With its excellent power distribution and air conditioning systems, it became a medical office building.

  And so the site of the birth of the first artificial consciousness went unremembered by anyone except Bernd Decker.

  Epilogue

  In the lobby of the World Authority Building, among all the other historic statues and paintings, stands a marble statue of Janice Quant, the Chairman of the World Authority from July 2239 to September 2245. Unlike the statues and paintings scattered around the walls, it stands in the center of the rotunda, facing the entry. It is an heroic statue, one-and-a-half times life-size, on a ten-foot pedestal.

  In a cemetery just outside Seattle, in the Washington administrative region, lies the grave of Bernd Decker and his wife, Anna Glenn. Decker died in 2286, at the age of ninety-six.

  Just days after the first anniversary of his death, the sexton, returning from a two-week vacation, found that a bronze statue had been erected next to their gravestone. He figured that it had been approved and installed during his absence, and made no note of it.

  The life-size statue showed Decker at age thirty-five with a globe of the Earth in one hand and a multi-processor computer blade in the other. The inscription read:

  Bernd Decker

  He imagined the future

  and then made it happen

  But the statue had not been erected in the normal fashion. It had not been sculpted in the normal fashion, either.

  It had instead been lovingly created from memory in a metafactory thousands of light-years from Earth and from there transported directly to the Earth’s surface.

  “Ha! Still haven’t lost my touch.”

  Please review this book on Amazon.

  Author’s Afterword

  After writing EMPIRE: Resurgence, the EMPIRE series was done, at least for my participation. I had said everything there was to say, told all the story I could see. As I type this, Stephanie Osborn is writing the remaining books she and I planned for the series. But for my portion, EMPIRE is complete.

  What to write next? I had written Childers about a future period in which a hundred and fifty or so human colonies had been established. I had written EMPIRE about a far future where almost half a million planets had been settled.

  What about something closer in? How might mankind first reach the stars? There was some fun stuff there. What would the interstellar drive look like? Who would the colonists be? If I were going to set up a colony system in which a younger me would have felt drawn to participate, what would that look like?

  I had the idea of the colonies being separated from Earth – being lost – early on. My initial conception was that a huge mothership was sent out with colony pods, dropping them here and there as it went. At some point, Earth got tired of the expense and stopped sending them. Eventually, the technology was lost.

  Then you get the whole fun business of sending out ships at some later time, when interstellar travel was rediscovered or reinvented, to try and find those colonies.

  That sounded like fun. Kind of like Star Trek or something, where survey ships go out trying to find colonies, and they find one, and we get to explore how the colony did in a couple centuries or something. The next book, you can discover another colony, and so on.

  So I was off and writing the set-up book, the book that was sort of the prequel to the ‘drive around and look for colonies’ books. And, as books do when I write them, the situation morphed.

  I write into the dark. I work up a concept and a direction and I start writing, not knowing where the story will go. When I started this book, I had no idea that a computer entity would develop, and that it would become the main character and driving force behind the plot.

  Yes, as hard as it might be to believe, I had no concept of Janice Quant when I started writing Quant. I changed the working title of the book from Diaspora to Quant halfway through as the story shifted in my hands.

  The other primary characters – Bernd Decker, Ted Burke, and Maureen Griffith and her group – were illuminated in the way they interacted with Janice Quant’s efforts.

  I didn’t make a conscious effort to be politically correct in Quant, but some questions came up as I wrote. Genetic diversity and lots of babies will be a requirement to make a colony successful. Would homosexuals be welcome? On the same terms as everyone else? How would that work? That’s how Rachel Conroy, Jessica Murphy, Gary Rockham, and Dwayne Hennessey entered the story.

  And, of course, while the main colonist group the book follows is American, the genetic diversity issue would drive Quant to get the widest possible population sample for the colonies. This is how the Chen family came into the picture. How and why would they leave Earth, what skills would they bring, and how would their very different culture fit into the picture?

  As I wrote, I rejected the fears of the singularity doomsayers, who think that artificial intelligence will reach a point where it will turn the corner, take off, and spell the doom of mankind. Would that necessarily happen? Why wouldn’t the computers pick up the values of their creators?

  My books always revolve around what I consider the four primary human values: love, honor, duty, and loyalty. Could an artificial consciousness also have those values? How would they exhibit themselves? Why might they develop?

  I previously explored the artificial intelligence version of the conquered-culture trap in the novellette “On Purpose” in my anthology, Adamant and other stories. In Quant, Janice Quant sees the danger, and spends much of the last half of the book trying to figure out a way to avoid it.

  I have also addressed at length ideas to put an end to war, both in the Childers Universe and in the EMPIRE Series. Janice Quant struggles with the same issues here, and comes up with her own solution.

  So what’s next? I don’t know yet as I write this. We have all the colonies out there, and I suppose I will have to write at least one book in the Colony Series about the establishment and growth of a colony. Arcadia is the obvious choice, as that’s where all my minor characters in Quant ended up. So we will probably follow the Chen-Jasic alliance into the future.

  And Janice Quant is still out there somewhere, with interstellar transport, interstellar communications, and the seed items she needs to manufacture literally anything she wants. What will she do with her time, and when will she re-enter our story? I don’t know yet, but there is some obvious foreshadowing toward the end of Quant. I’m not sure which of those, if any, I will spin off of.

  Quant was difficult to write, with the lowest daily productivity of any of my novels to date. Leaving out the five days of a convention trip, Quant took forty-seven days to
write, with a daily productivity of maybe 1750 words. I usually write more like 2500 words a day, and have written an 80,000-word novel in as little as seventeen days.

  A lot of this was because there was a lot of research along the way. What are the orbital mechanics for transfer orbits? What is the tensile strength of steel cable? What would you take as high-value-density items in your personal cubic? What is the structure of a family alliance in Chinese culture? And even, How does one round up a small herd of cattle when one is on foot?

  Some of the difficulty writing Quant was because the story took a lot of thought to see the path ahead. There was a lot of time spent staring out the window with my thoughts light-years away. Once I could see my way to the end of the book, word counts jumped from about 1500 words per day to over 3000 words per day, even exceeding 5000 words per day toward the end.

  Quant has a lot of humorous bits in it. I let myself go a little with that. But when a computer consciousness with an overriding purpose decides it needs to get something done, some of the resulting situations are just plain absurd, and I didn’t shy away from them. And when Janice Quant’s initial attempts at humor become the computer equivalent of dad jokes, well, where else would she start?

  I had fun writing Quant. I hope you had fun reading it.

  Richard F. Weyand

  Bloomington, IN

  March 15, 2021