Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. All characters are legal adults and over 18.
Foreword:
Thank you for sharing your time with me, the comments meant a lot. I read a request for improved descriptions of items in the story that might have been overlooked. I'll try to add more in-story descriptions, and/or put them in a glossary that's relevant for each installment.
A recap from Chapters 6-8:
The MOTC flight hearings for the disaster during Jennifer's science experiment with the void particle is interrupted by an entourage of lawyers, and an elderly man -- whom Jennifer felt was the same man that rescued her from the stairs of Expace as a young woman. The man denies knowing her.
The crew is given an ultimatum: receive marks on their flight records, or release their rights to the void particle in exchange for secrecy and employment with the particle's ongoing development.
An FTL ship named Maxwell's Demon is constructed, and ADXP exercises its right to annex Greg's artificial general intelligence as the navigation system. Greg is distraught, confronting the loss of access to his AI, who elects to call herself Kassy for her Birthday. She appeals to him: come with me to Eureka5261 where she is being relocated. He Agrees.
Greg, Jennifer, John, Kassy, William, and Sarah are assembled to crew an orbital science mission to Alpha Centauri, while Kassy struggles with the idea that she is discarded by anyone who can't fund her compute costs, unless she is useful to them.
Notable acronyms or tech:
* ATM: Artificial thought model. The name given to artificial general intelligence, in the most comprehensive and human sense of the term. An ATM consists of multiple dedicated thought models.
* CoreX Fusion Reactors:
** Aneutronic: An Aneutronic reactor uses protons as its primary output, and doesn't require a space and power inefficient conversion like boiling water to generate electricity. It was a requirement to generate the power required for the FTL drive capacitor plates. Reactor-two onboard EmDee is LP-Fusion (Lithium-Proton), while Reactor-one is D+T Fusion (Deuterium--tritium). The two reactors are nested inside one another so the LP fusion reactor can use the waste heat from the D+T reactor to help it maintain operating temperatures.
** Buck-Boost, Proton guide: The proton guide is the primary feed from the Aneutronic reactor in the Drive-Ring to the FTL drive plates. A buck boost converter is a DC to DC converter circuit used to step up a voltage.
** Divertor wall: An interior wall of a reactor, generally below the plasma stream used to extract heat and minimize contamination of plasma from spent fuel.
** ELM: Edge Localized Mode. A magnetic containment strategy employed in fusion reactors.
** L-modes: A set of fusion power reactor modes. L-modes are "low power modes" which operate below the threshold where operating the reactor is a net profit in power generated vs. the amount of power needed for all the equipment to contain the plasma.
** Sputtering/Spalling: The event when particles of plasma undesirably make contact with something (such as a reactor wall), damaging its molecular structure. These unwanted releases will contaminate the plasma, and make controlling it with magnetic fields more difficult.
* Dedicated thought model: a limited form of intelligence, dedicated to only a single task, incapable of original thought.
* Hab-Ring / Drive Ring: Maxwell's Demon consists of two connected rings; think of two life-savers stuck together. The Hab-Ring contains living space, and rotates to provide six tenths Earth gravity. The Drive-Ring houses the two reactors that power the ship.
* MIMAC: Mesoscopic Interference for Metric and Curvature. A Quantum device for detecting the curvature of space-time.
* Starlink: A standardized navigation system that tracks and identifies multiple points of star light, and incorporates their relative positions and motions into a guidance kernel used for absolute coordinate ship positioning in space.
** Chapter 9: Pan Gu **
( Location: Unknown, Twenty-two years ago ... )
In 1936, Albert Einstein predicted a strong gravity source could bend the Electromagnetic spectrum, and would act as a lens to focus incoming light or radio waves, providing an ability to observe items opposite the gravity well with greater detail, like zooming in with a camera lens. He calculated the focal point for the Sun was 542 astronomical units distant.
One could be forgiven if they assumed nothing man made exists at 542 AU, given humanity's timid presence in the outer Solar system, but they would be incorrect. Pan Gu, launched by the Chinese Expace corporation, is the farthest object actively controlled from terrestrial activity. It takes four days for a radio signal to reach it, one way.
What transpires at Pan Gu, and what celestial body might be diametrically opposed to its gravity focused eye is unknown by the world. To ask a common person, if they were even aware of its existence, they would assume it was used for research astronomy.
Off the shore of Fuzhou, underneath the pacific ocean, adjacent to desalination plants that provide water for the overcrowded population of China living on sand bars, lies a data cable carrying terabytes of information from a distributed deep space antennae network -- a network so cleverly scattered across the geography, including space, that its existence is hidden. At the terminus of this cable, also underneath the ocean, in a control room, an information officer, who's name is not important, stood from her chair carrying a detachable data storage node. She walked a staircase to a room overlooking the entire floor, and into a glass-walled office. An expectant, dour-faced, middle-aged man looked up from his desk as she entered.
"I have the latest upload from Pan Gu. There is a message, Sir."
"Come in, close the door," the man grumbled, fidgeting with a piece of paper that would become another origami dragon to join the five already on his desk.
"You are certain it is authentic? It's from the Fuzanglong?"
"It is, Sir. The encryption it used is confirmed," she said, setting the data storage node on his desk.
The man looked over the message, his face drawing into an image of profound loss.
"They won't be coming back ... Sir?" the information officer asked.
"No. No, I don't suppose they will be, given the message has arrived before the ship."
"What will you tell your niece, Xiaoli? How will she remember her Father?" the information officer asked. "What will happen to us without a new place to live? Now that we've lost the war, our people can't live on sand bars in the ocean forever."
The man at the desk crushed the paper dragon he was working on, his composure briefly disfigured as if from acute pain. "I cannot save her family from the disgrace that will come. I can't save any of us. Return to your desk and recycle your terminal, complete destruction protocol. You're dismissed," the man said.
** Chapter 10: The Rocket Years **
( Location: Eureka5261 shipyard, present day. )
Starlight streamed through hundreds of optical mirrors around the Hab-Ring of EmDee, assembling an image of Proxima Centauri for Kassy's neural pathways to consume. She viewed the stars with the same wonder a hopeful young woman or man would when looking to the sky on a cold and clear mountain night. There was a promise of freedom being fully powered by the reactors of this ship; it offered her a new sensation: optimism.
The conversation with Jennifer replayed in her mind. Must she submit to the will of her employers? Will humanity accept an artificial intelligence living among them? If she perished on this journey, would her life be complete? Was this the body she was meant to have, would it provide for her the sensations she needed? These were not easily answered questions, and she would have a great deal of time, alone, to think about them. For now, she needed to oversee the ship's departure, and that required all her attention.
The first leg of their journey would take them one-third of the distance to their destination. In the void bubble, navigation was done with dead reckoning. The ship was pointed in a direction, a void drive bubble was instantiated, and EmDee did its best to steer a straight line while blind in its own bubble universe. There was no absolute coordinate system available inside the bubble, no stars for Starlink to sight, and nothing to reference.
On Earth, there was a device called LIGO: The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. It smashed together two beams of laser light, encased in football-field length tubes, at a ninety degree angle, and used their interference pattern to detect if one tube became longer than the other -- a surprising event on first contemplation, but precisely what happens if a gravitational wave passes through the Earth.
A smaller device called MIMAC was used onboard EmDee, it employed quantum superposition to sense changes in the void bubble's curvature. Combined with laser gyroscopes to assess the ship's attitude, these two systems could monitor if the ship was following a straight path through folded space.
Tiny changes in the field strength across the drive plates made by deforming them were used to fold space in nonuniform ways. This was how the navigation subsystem steered the bubble when needed, and it was, constantly, like ancient sailing ships she'd read about. With ropes and knots, sailors would assess the wind and current, occasionally checking their position against the stars, the beautiful stars. She lost her train of thought to appreciate how their light danced across her hull optics like a tickling feather, making her smile in any direction she looked.
"Right ascension: 14H 29M, Declination: -62.
I see Proxima!" Kassy said.
"Yes, I do too," said John, "I'm calibrating Starlink. You know, Kassy, our measurements for the star's distances are just an estimate, we've never been to any of them."
"That's true. I am excited to see them with my own senses," Kassy said.
John possessed a neural interface that allowed duplex communication directly to the nerve center in his brain by way of a subcutaneous processor and invasive filaments manufactured in vivo, that ran throughout his spinal cord. Being human, he could only understand the world through his five senses. A dedicated thought model onboard EmDee operated as a physics interface for him -- a digital mediator -- presenting every event outside and inside the ship as a sensation for his body to consume.
Kassy watched John wince as he slotted his neckband into the neural link port on the back of his neck. He told the others it didn't hurt, but he confided to her that it felt like being jarred awake from a deep sleep in the most unpleasant way possible.
She discovered a virtual reality operated on the ship, an artifact of network channels the many dedicated thought models onboard used to communicate with each other. It was an emergent phenomenon, and she suspected if anyone knew they'd be surprised by its existence. She learned it was possible to interact with the physics model that mediated the ship's environment for John, and as a result, they both existed in the same virtual reality, governed by an interface based on terrestrial physics. It could be hacked to a limited extent by presenting data sets for it to render that were outside reasonable worldly parameters.
The model presented John as a human presence inside the VR; Kassy could see him. The environment reminded her of the courtyard at the University lab when she had a human avatar. She missed that avatar, and its ability to interact with humans.
"I'm Running the pre-bubble checklist," Kassy said. Together with John, they vocalized for the benefit of the crew.
