CHAPTER 25
ICARUS
SECRET ASTEROID
Icarus flicked a short message to Trillion asking her to join him in a secret area of his spacecraft.
He was in a laboratory working on something he didn’t want Atlas to know about—at least not yet.
He wanted to speak to Trillion about his planned visit to the Atua home world; when he’d first told her about wanting to explore their planet in secret, she’d been receptive, especially when he told her he wanted to understand if they were really evil. Icarus wanted to understand the rationale for the Atua’s behavior. He was surprised by how onboard with that decision Trillion was. But then it made sense once Trillion explained how she wished she’d understood the Dottiens before deciding to wage war with them. She had grown as a person and had a better appreciation for aliens being completely different from humans. She was adamant they shouldn’t anthropomorphize these aliens—they should truly understand them.
Icarus surveyed the room; in one corner there was a miniature fabricator specifically designs for printing organic material, the design of which was mostly taken from the treasure trove of information stored in Angelique’s databases.
In the other corner was a rocket ship that looked like an asteroid. It legitimately looked like a hunk of rock. It was small too.
Trillion teleported and just stared. “Is that you Icarus?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why do you look like one of those penguins?”
Icarus was about to answer when he realized he was inhabiting a new avatar design. He was testing out his new organic Atua alien body. He’d designed it based on recordings and images the team had gathered when meeting them. It was his best guess of what another creature would look like. “Oh, I guess I can’t tease out the surprise anymore.”
Trillion looked confused. “What surprise?”
“I’m visiting the Atua people,” Icarus blurted out. “This is a test model to see if I could create a body that was real flesh and bone.” Icarus poked his arm to show it was soft. “This is real tissue, not circuitry and wires.”
Trillion walked around Icarus. He was about a meter tall. “How’d do you know it’s accurate? Did Ariana get DNA samples or something?”
Icarus shook his head. “It’s based on Earth biology. But I assume I can change it later once I have more sample data from the planet.”
“How do you plan on getting a sample of the Atua? You can’t just abduct one of their people … Can you?”
Icarus pointed at the asteroid in the corner of the room. It was about forty meters wide—quite a big object. “I’m going to hide a fabricator and all the equipment I need in here. Enter the system as if I’m a small asteroid.”
Trillion looked at the asteroid. Then at Icarus. Then at the asteroid again. “It’s too big.”
“What do you mean too big?”
“I don’t know much about these aliens, but surely they’re going to notice an asteroid that big drifting toward their system.”
“It’s the smallest I can make the thing and fit everything I need for the mission.”
“Have you spoken to Atlas?”
Icarus shook his head. He hadn’t spoken to him yet because he was sure Atlas would think it was a bad idea. “I didn’t want him to talk me out of it.”
Trillion laughed. “He knows; he told me he thinks you’re visiting the planet.”
Icarus felt slightly better at hearing that. “Really?”
Trillion nodded.
Icarus sent off a mental command to Atlas asking him to join them in the room. “While we wait for him, I have a favor to ask.”
Trillion eyed him suspiciously. “Go on.”
“One of your eggs, those probes you send to other star systems, is in a system about two light-years away from the Atua planet. Can I move myself there?”
“Of course,” Trillion said confused. “It’ll take you a while to get there though. Aren’t you farther from the system than me?”
“I’m going to teleport my matrix there.” Icarus paused to let those words sink in. He hoped she understood what that meant. Technically they could teleport their matrices from system to system instantly. But their matrices were always in one location. Teleporting his matrix meant creating a copy of himself in that other location.
“Um, matrices don’t work like that,” Trillion said. “That’s just creating a clone of yourself and putting them there.”
“I’ve read a lot of books about this,” Icarus said. “It’s about continuity of experience. If I turn myself off where I am now and turn myself on at the new location, then from my perspective all I did was teleport there.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to destroy one of the copies of yourself.”
Icarus had thought through Trillion’s question already. It was a question he’d asked himself. Was it possible to maintain continuity across both space and time? He racked his brain to try and come up with an appropriate analogy. The Ship of Theseus came to mind. “Imagine you had a ship,” Icarus said.
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Trillion rolled her eyes and manifested a glass of wine in her hands. “Are you going to explain the Ship of Theseus to me? I know the thought experiment about replacing all the pieces of a ship until there are no original pieces of the ship left. But that’s different.”
“How is it different?” Icarus asked.
“You’re a living and thinking human. Not an object with a name.”
Icarus had to agree; something did feel different about an object and a human, but surely they had to be the same thing. “Okay, let’s think about it a different way. Do you agree that, when we were living breathing humans, our bodies were constantly replacing cells?”
Trillion nodded.
“Okay, great, and do you agree that one hundred percent of the cells in your body when you were human were replaced by the time you turned twenty?”
Trillion scratched the back of her head, then nodded. “That sounds about right. I’m not sure if it happens that quickly, but I agree with the idea that eventually all the cells in your body get replaced.”
“So that’s my point. Naturally a human body replaces all the cells, one at a time, slowly. It creates a copy of that cell and replaces it with a new one. By cloning my matrix every atom at a time and moving those atoms to another star system, I’ll essentially be doing the same thing.”
“But you can’t do that with a human body. You can’t take a cell out of the body and move it to a new location to reconstruct it there.”
“That’s where the sailing-ship analogy comes in. If you took apart all the pieces of that ship, relocated them to another location, and put them back together again, that would still be the ship of Theseus.”
“No it’s not because there’s two versions of you. What would happen if both versions of you were turned on at the exact same time? Who would be the real you?”
“Well, this is just me,” Icarus said. “But I believe the version I would consider the original me would be the one turned on first, the one with the longest unbroken awareness. That’s why my plan is to turn myself off here while I’m in the other system. Then when I’m ready to come back, I’m going to use Angelique’s merging process to combine all my memories back together in my original matrix.”
“So, there’ll only ever be one of you moving around at a time?”
Icarus nodded.
“Why not do something like the Ange’s Angel program? Why not clone yourself, then merge back together?”
Icarus liked these lines of questions from Trillion. She was testing the limits of his thinking. The truth was he didn’t want multiple versions of himself running around. The idea that he could clone himself, then have both of his clones spend so long apart that they experienced personality drift scared him. He wasn’t sure he wanted two versions of him that were similarish but not the same. He liked his solution to it all. It meant only one version of Icarus ever existed at a single time. “I don’t want there to be two of me out there.”
Atlas teleported into the room.
Icarus used this opportunity to switch the subject; he wasn’t yet confident enough to have the same conversation about teleporting his matrix with Atlas. “We have a question for you.”
“Go on,” Atlas replied.
“Well, maybe two questions. Firstly, is that asteroid-shaped spaceship too big to sneak onto an alien planet?”
Atlas walked about the asteroid. “Probably. If I saw something that big coming toward Neuropa, I’d notice it. Does it have to be that big?”
Icarus moved his head up and down. Then side to side. “It’s the smallest I can make it and still fit a fabricator inside of it. Unless you know of a way to make a smaller fabricator?”
Atlas bit his lower lip as he thought about it, walking in a circle around the asteroid. “I assume you want a fully functioning fabricator, too? So you can produce anything you need.”
Icarus nodded. This was exactly the conundrum he was in.
Atlas posed the question to Icarus: “Do you know why fabricators are so big? Do you know why, even as our technology gets better, these things aren’t getting much smaller?”
Icarus shook his head.
Atlas looked at Trillion, who shrugged. “Because you haven’t tried to make it smaller?” she asked.
“No,” Atlas replied. “It needs to be capable of producing everything imaginable. There’s a fundamental limit to how small you can make some of the machinery in there.” Atlas bit his lower lip. He started to mumble to himself. “But what if we didn’t need to produce everything? What if we only needed to produce a fabricator?”
Atlas began looking around the room frantically. Icarus could tell he was looking for a piece of paper to write notes. Icarus manifested a piece of paper into his hands and handed it to him.
Atlas began sketching notes and writing equations, then working them out. His piece of paper quickly became full of notes, and he had to turn it over to the other side.
Icarus created a stack of blank paper next to Atlas on the table.
He enjoyed watching the old man work—literal genius. Icarus wondered how much more technology and science they would have already if Atlas cloned himself. Each clone could experiment and expand human knowledge faster. Then he had a thought: maybe that was what Angelique did with her many worlds.
If Atlas and Einstein were unique—one in a billion—then on a world with twenty billion people, there are twenty people just as capable as Atlas.
Icarus wondered whether it was better to have a hundred clones of Atlas or a planet with one hundred billion people.
Icarus’s thoughts were interrupted when Atlas shared his findings. “I’ve worked it out.” Atlas pointed to a piece of paper. “You don’t need a full-size fabricator if the only thing you want to create is a fabricator. We could reduce the size by about ninety percent with this plan.”
Icarus took hold of the paper. He scanned the details; there were several calculations on it and a diagram. “How will this tiny printer create a full-size fabricator?”
“Easy,” Atlas said. “We print it in pieces and then combine them all together. It would be like bootstrapping. First, you’d print out a larger fabricator in four components. Then print some ANTs to fit all the pieces together. Then once that’s built, you can use the bigger fabricator to print out the components on an even larger one. And after four cycles of that, you’ll have the components to manufacture a full-size fabricator capable of doing everything you need.”
“You can’t make matter out of nothing. Where are you getting the material to do all of this?” Trillion asked.
“I thought about that,” Atlas said, turning over the paper. “If we sent several other asteroids with raw resources—fabricator pallets that look like rocks—we’d just need some ANTs to go and collect those.”
“How long would this whole process take?” Icarus asked.
“Maybe six months. But the great thing about this plan is you could land in the water.” Atlas pulled up an image of the alien world they’d identified. “Most of the Atua people are congregated in coastal cities. If they’re anything like humans on Earth, they’re not going to notice a small meteor shower landing in the middle of the ocean away from everyone. Especially if they’re small rocks like I’m suggesting.”
Icarus nodded in appreciation. Atlas had solved his biggest problem: getting onto the planet without being caught. There was still a risk that his fake asteroid was randomly intercepted by the Atua people. But as Atlas had pointed out, small asteroids hit the surface of Earth every day. It wasn’t an unnatural occurrence.
“Icarus,” Atlas said. “Don’t rush this, if you’re going to visit the planet. You need to place the asteroid on a realistic trajectory. If you were sneaking onto Earth, you’d have to make it look like it came from the asteroid belt in the system. Same with the Atua’s planet. If you’re going to do this, you need to do it right.”
Trillion nodded in agreement. “We want you safe, Icarus. We want you to come back to us with everything you learned about the planet and the aliens.”
In that very moment, Icarus felt appreciated. He also liked that he had friends that were so open to him trying such a dangerous mission. “Thanks, guys, I’m definitely coming back.”