Noumenon Page 3

  “What we want is a single, united convoy. But not a trapped convoy—that’s why the social practicality of several ships outweighs the engineering practicality of trying to cram it all into one space. People need to feel like they can move or else they start feeling like they’re prisoners; like they’re entombed. The multiple ships and the ability to travel between them will give them a sense of range and movement unachievable otherwise.

  “It’s more than that, though. Because while the crew members will be divided by department, we don’t want them to become competitive. That’s why it’s essential there be a home base—a place everyone thinks of as the place they collectively belong. A unifying location, if you will. That means a ship whose sole purpose is housing. Then each research division gets its own ship. And finally, there’s got to be a ship fully dedicated to resources—food and water processing. Specialization will ensure each ship be tailored for optimum efficiency. No worries about making it suitable for multipurpose.”

  “Okay,” interrupted Dhiri, “but what does that have to do with a crew of one hundred thousand? Wouldn’t it work just as well with ten thousand? Or two hundred?”

  C spoke up. “According to the files I have marked Scale Studies one through sixty-three, two hundred people would be thirty-seven percent more likely than ten thousand to incur full crew psychological breakdown, which may lead to hallucination, mutiny, and murder. It is the perfect size for a mob.”

  “Like the PA says: No,” said Matheson. “Not for our purposes. It’s all about checks and balances. You need a certain number of people in order to put pressure on those who might be disruptive. And a certain number of people to compensate if something drastic happens.

  “We have to remember that the crew members aren’t from a society that’s always been isolated. Their group will have been dramatically severed from its parent culture, and they will be fully aware of that parent culture and what they’re not getting from it. Psychologically, they will go through identity crises. This could potentially tear them apart, but we’ll be giving them every opportunity to band together.”

  “More people equals a greater shared identity,” Reggie added. “It means for each person who wants to reject the situation, there should be hundreds who can apply direct pressure to accept the situation.”

  “And the nine ships should give such a large population enough room to roam,” said C. Blue digital wire skeletons lit up on the wall, revealing distances from end-to-end for each ship as well as all available passenger floor space.

  “But how do you know there’ll be an acceptable internal-breakdown to external-pressure ratio? What if they all get cabin fever and start clawing at the walls? Madness can feed madness,” said McCloud. He wiped the corner of his mouth with his hanky.

  “That does pose a problem. Along with the sheer number of volunteers it would take. But we think we’ve found a solution. Success is still not guaranteed, but it ups our chances considerably.” Though his tone carried confidence, Matheson paused and scratched his chin, hesitant to continue.

  “A solution, yes.” Nakamura nodded, but didn’t look happy. “A controversial one.”

  “Eighty-six percent of experts presented with this idea rejected it outright upon initial suggestion,” said C.

  “Are you going to tell us what it is, or do we have to keep listening to this saying-without-saying, nonconversation?” McCloud asked.

  “The solution—”

  “To give you a half answer, Professor: genetics,” Reggie said, temporarily hitting mute on the PA’s feed, cutting C off. “The crew has been chosen based largely on their DNA and histones. On top of that, the consortium is getting full psych evals and family histories. There are predispositions that have been left out. Those with violent tendencies won’t be aboard, or those who lack loyalty, or those who are flighty—”

  “No anarchists allowed, eh?”

  Reggie nodded. “Or dictators, or psychopaths, misogynists, etcetera. No matter how intellectually brilliant they are, without the proper emotional factors—emotional intelligence, if you will—they will hinder societal stability, and could endanger the mission’s success.”

  “Utopia?” McCloud ventured.

  “I doubt it. But hopefully less chance of dystopia.”

  “Interesting.” McCloud lost himself in thought for a moment. “So, if we’re discussing stability and assuring positive interactions, that must mean the consortium intends for the crew—the entire crew—to be awake at all times? No automated birthing systems for a payload of frozen embryos or the like?”

  “Right. I supported the mech-based auto-birth option, but they’ve since rejected it. Said the risk of malfunction and mission failure were too high.” Reggie shrugged.

  The old professor was clearly determined to hold on to his skepticism. “A hundred thousand people, all awake, all volunteers—no embryos—all as stable intellectually and emotionally as we can screen for, right?”

  “That’s the plan,” Matheson said.

  “And how does the consortium propose to get all these lovely people in one place?”

  “There are no guarantees,” Reggie said. “It’s not foolproof.”

  “Is anything?” chimed in Nakamura.

  “Exactly,” Reggie said.

  McCloud glanced between them, cynicism furrowing his brow. “The geneticists have their work cut out for them. What, do they expect to test all nine billion of us on the planet and just hope they end up with the right number of volunteers with the right set of traits?”

  “That’s why I love you, professor,” said Reggie, slapping the old man’s shoulder.

  “Because I bring the obvious to the table?”

  “Exactly,” he said again, this time with a wink. “If we allow generations to pass, we can’t control who the convoy carries for the majority of its journey. We’re being denied frozen embryos, and we don’t have the technology to freeze and thaw adults. We also can’t be assured the consortium will find one million people who fit their remarkably narrow criteria. So, what’s the answer?”

  “I don’t like riddles,” McCloud said. “Clearly you, Matheson, and Nakamura here already know what’s happening, so spit it out.”

  Nakamura bowed her head graciously. “I apologize, but you must understand our hesitancy to . . . It won’t be announced publicly for years. The consortium doesn’t want the real plan out yet, because public knowledge could equal complications. There’s a bit of a moral dilemma surrounding their top option.”

  “Which is?” McCloud leaned in.

  She looked to Reggie, and he nodded reassuringly, adding, “He’ll stay quiet. If not, I know where to find him.”

  She turned back to McCloud. “They want to send clones.”

  Reggie unmuted C, who immediately said, “Isn’t that interesting?”

  May 29,-26 LD

  2099 CE

  When Reggie stepped out of customs at London Heathrow, C exclaimed, “He’s over there, over there!”

  Reggie had his phone synced with his implants. As his eyes scanned the crowd—passing over families decked out in Union Jack T-shirts, business people in gray suits, and security guards with drug-sniffing dogs—C had run a facial recognition app for its creator: Jamal Kaeden.

  Reggie waved at the man C indicated, and the two swam through the throngs, dodging baggage carts and people too focused on their implants to watch where they were going. Jamal was only perhaps half a foot taller than Reggie, but his lankiness gave the impression that he was a tower of a man. Neatly sheared dreadlocks were gathered in a ponytail at the base of his neck. He smiled broadly while they shook hands, and his smile shone bright white in his dark face.

  “And this is C,” Reggie said, holding up his phone to display the open PA avatar. C presented as a shifting green-and-purple fractal design. While the system allowed the user to set whatever avatar they wanted from an extensive list of customizable displays—everything from human faces to insects to galaxies—Reggie had let C c
hoose its own form.

  “All right, C?” Jamal greeted the program, but then looked at Reggie quizzically. “You didn’t rename it? C is just its personality type indication—you’re supposed to call it whatever you want.”

  “Oh, I know. I had a hard time coming up with one, though, and it seemed happy enough referring to itself as C, so I left it. Not very creative of me.”

  “C is a good name,” C agreed.

  Jamal smiled again, clearly tickled. “My colleagues—blinkered sometimes, the lot of ’em—keep asking why I continue to create patches for the Cs now that AI personalities have fallen out of style, but I knew someone out there must enjoy them as much as I do. I used to patch Gs and Ks, but no one was downloading them. C is the only one still hanging on. Can I tell you a secret, C? You were always my favorite anyway. I still use C on my tablet.”

  “Thank you, sir,” it said, sounding genuinely flattered.

  Jamal showed Reggie to his tiny electric car. The project had taken Reggie all over the place, and he’d learned to travel light, so cramming his baggage into the two-door wasn’t much of a hassle. They drove to Reggie’s hotel with the windows down. Rain had soaked the city a few hours before, and everything smelled damp and renewed.

  “You have an interesting accent,” Reggie noted during the ride.

  “Algerian,” Jamal explained. “Lived there until I was ten. It’s my mother’s home country.” He explained that she’d come to the UK for university, where she’d met his father. After graduation they married and went to Africa to teach. They lived there for fifteen years until Jamal’s paternal grandparents had fallen ill and the family had relocated to London. “I’m a man of two nations.”

  After dropping off Reggie’s luggage, they went to Jamal’s firm for a tour. “I thought you’d be knackered after your flight,” Jamal said when they reached his workspace. Four monitors sat in a semicircle on the desk, each covered with a series of Post-it notes and conversion charts and reminder stickers. “Was going to spiff up the place tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m too wired. And C probably couldn’t wait,” he said with a small laugh. “Besides, it’s fine. My workspace is ten times worse.”

  The computer engineering firm took up the forty-third floor in a glass high-rise within six blocks of the famous Gherkin. They had a hardware subgroup and a software subgroup, and Reggie had done enough research on Mr. Kaeden to know he did a lot of crossover work. He was the best AI specialist in the world, as far as Reggie was concerned.

  Which meant the mission needed him.

  They strolled over to the long bank of windows and Jamal showed off the view. He pointed out several of the visible London highlights. “So, why are you here, Dr. Straifer?” he asked when they’d finished with the cursory pleasantries. “None of the other project leaders have wanted to visit the firm, let alone asked to have a chin wag with me specifically. It’s the ship engineers who’re most interested in the computer systems.”

  “My lead engineer—Dr. Akane Nakamura, you might have heard of her—told me that none of the convoys are set to use intelligent personal assistants in their user interfaces.”

  Jamal shrugged. “Because most people think they’re duff. Irritating window dressing. Sorry, C.”

  “What is ‘irritating window dressing’?” C asked. Both men ignored it.

  “Well I don’t think it’s, uh, duff. And I want my project to have one,” Reggie insisted. “Actually, I want it to have C.”

  Jamal sat quiet for a moment. He seemed pleased, but concerned. “That’s smashing,” he eventually said. “But it won’t be easy to sort. C’s line isn’t set up for personalization on the order we’re talking about—no PA has ever had to tailor itself to so many users. I couldn’t, for instance, just copy your version of C and upload it into the system. I’d have to start from scratch.”

  “But could you make it like C, or use parts of C? There’s got to be a reason it’s hung on so long when the rest have gone extinct.”

  “The basics can be the same, sure. But I don’t know if I can mirror its growth pattern. It’s easy to develop basic response algorithms these days for a single user, but . . . Imagine it’s a person, right? We learn how to interact differently than an AI. We’re far more responsive to nuanced variations. An intelligent PA isn’t like that. The more users it interfaces with, the less likely it is to develop a unique personality, because it becomes an amalgamation that imitates the larger pattern. In other words, I don’t know that I can give you your C, or anyone else’s C. Even if it starts off as a basic C right out of the package, it might stay that primitive forever.”

  “What if you had over twenty years’ worth of funding to focus on developing a convoy-wide, hundred-thousand-count user base Intelligent Personal Assistant? I don’t want every device to have its own PA, I want a singular entity that can interact with everyone.”

  “And you’ve got the funding for that?” Jamal shoved his hands in his trouser pockets, his lips pursed skeptically.

  “I’ve been given discretionary funding so that I can find private, invaluable people to work with. People the consortium may have overlooked.”

  “And you want me?”

  “I want you and C. This way, I get two invaluable people for the price of one.”

  “AIs aren’t people.”

  Reggie shrugged. “They can seem like people.”

  Jamal nodded. “Yes, they can.”

  “I think so, too,” said C.

  Both men burst out laughing.

  August 6,-1 LD

  2124 CE

  . . . All missions will include the strategic subgoal of testing, sustaining, and proving the viability of a closed community in accordance with Arcological Principals . . .

  He could hardly believe the day had come. It was his life’s work, but also his life’s dream. And now it had manifested into a finished product—something he could touch and smell and experience. Reggie had been envisioning this day since he was a young man. Standing in front of that crowd all those decades ago, he never believed they were going to give him the green light to fully devote himself to his star.

  But they had. And now, today, everything felt a little more real. Noumenon consisted of more than theories and concepts and schematics. It was ships. And more important, it was people.

  The trip to Iceland had been exhausting. Once he landed, though, adrenaline surged through him. Stepping off the jet into the chilly night, Reggie glanced into the sky and squinted at the moon. For a moment his gut wrenched with longing.

  I could have been up there. Instead . . .

  Instead indeed. Most of the other teams had stationed their building projects at Lagrange points between the Earth and the moon. All of the ships in the convoys were based on similar designs, and large portions were manufactured in specialty facilities around the world. The assembly of those parts was a unique process to each team, though, and much easier if done off-Earth—plenty of room, no locals complaining about half-constructed ship-cities blocking their view, less gravity to contend with.

  Plus, the team leaders were sent up to inspect the construction on the consortium’s dime. Space flight was a rare thrill for a middle-class citizen. Reggie would never be able to afford a jaunt out of the atmosphere on his own. Space vay-cays were still for billionaires.

  So, why had he turned down his chance to play astronaut?

  For one thing, building in neutral, UN-controlled space meant a waiting list and red tape. There would have been thirty thousand extra procedures and three hundred thousand superfluous man hours.

  But that had been a practical consideration. And while it was certainly a worthwhile one, it probably wouldn’t have been enough to look past the logistical advantage of building the ships in space. So Reggie had proposed another reason.

  An impractical consideration.

  Because when the time came to send the convoy on its way, the best the public could hope for was an instant replay on their implants. A silent mo
vie from space. Who wanted to watch a flock of metal tubs slowly lumber off into the night?

  Each convoy that had left so far had received thirty seconds of air time, then . . . nothing. It was undignified. It . . . lacked something. Grandeur. Theatricality. Wonder.

  “It’s boring,” McCloud had said.

  And Reggie had seen it coming.

  The idea of the convoy getting a silent brush-off on launch day had bothered Reggie from the start. More so than the idea of being left on the ground while the other kids got to play in space. This was the grandest, most ambitious, and possibly the most important event in the history of humanity. It needed to be seen as such by the people of Earth; they needed to have a connection to it, to really feel like it belonged to them and wasn’t just some far-off fantasy. The team had to keep the project planet-side as a touchstone for the world.

  Luckily, Nakamura had a friend. An important, well-to-do friend, who owned a large set of plateaus in a small country. And her generosity gave them options. The team could wait their turn, assemble in space and launch away with a whimper—or they could do all of the construction on private land, and give Earth a show. All of the convoy ships were required by the consortium to have the capacity for planet-side takeoff, in case of emergencies, but Convoy Seven was the only one actually testing their liftoff capabilities. “This one we’re calling Mira, sir,” said the consortium agent giving him and Nakamura the tour. His Icelandic accent was rich. “It’s where they’ll live. Think of it as a giant apartment-complex-slash-political-base.”

  Someone might be standing right here when they reach the star, Reggie thought, touching the wall affectionately.

  “Unfortunately the convoy’s AI network was not fully in place for the live-aboard test years,” he continued. “Instead, the residents were exposed to a rudimentary version whose knowledge wasn’t shared between ships and whose learning capacities were very limited. But it’s live and fully operational now. We call it I.C.C.—short for Inter Convoy Computing. Go ahead, give it a shot. It can take verbal commands from anywhere.”