20 – TEST FLIGHT

ERIC – DECEMBER 8TH 2050 – DESOLATION OF INFINITE DREAMS, LUNA

Fourteen people were strapped to their chairs, arranged in a circular fashion around the center of the circular room. Eric was in the middle, staring at the holograms projected in the three-dimensional empty space at the center of the room. In front of him was a console, an old-looking analog one full of buttons to use in case electronics decided to fail miserably.

There were no windows in the room. And it was not only because the room was right in the middle, or almost in the middle, of the spacecraft. There was no need for any of those, with space being so infinitely vast it was impossible to use sight for anything except for admiring the view. The holograms conveyed enough information, and it was so vivid it might as well be the real thing. Except it was even better than the real thing, magnified and false-colored images showing exactly what needed to be seen.

The room was not exactly in the middle of the spaceship, that place was being occupied by the oversized fusion reactor, but was just next to it. Orientation had little meaning when standing still, but given the preferred acceleration vector in order to have downwards gravity pointing at the floor, one could say the room was on top of the reactor. And that they travelled upwards, or will be travelling upwards as soon as the pre-flight checks were done.

“Reactor.” Said Eric, reading from the list displayed in his vision. He already knew the status, but the manual checks were necessary in case of electronic malfunction. He briefly wondered how it would all look to someone without working implants. People looking at nothing in particular, eyes glazed over and brows furrowed over empty space. Holo tech was fascinating because it was as fake as things came, while at the same time it was as real as things came. Real holograms were just impractical when you could just beam information in the optic nerve.

“Green.” Replied Smith, the lead engineer, bringing Eric out of his stupor. He had a smirk on his face like he was loving what he was doing.

“Sensor array.”

“Visual grid: aligned. Checking other frequencies. Infrared: aligned. Radio: aligned. Micro: aligned. X: aligned. Gamma: slight misalignment,” Jackson, the gunner, said.

“Just out of the hangar, and already busted?” Smith joked.

“It might be the sensor array on the ground that’s busted.” Jackson replied.

“Keep dreaming boy. Nice dreams of guns and hellfire.”

“My favorite.”

“Fixed?” Eric asked, monotone.

“Yep. Sensors are green.”

“Good. Check weapons.”

“Weapons all green. Ammo full. Capacitors full.” Said Jackson again, while the other gunner sitting right next to Eric was still silent.

“Signal.”

“Signal is steady.” Said the navigator, who also had the conn. Eve confirmed soon after that the signal was loud and clear.

After another round of checks, it was finally time to take off. The numbers had already been calculated in order not to shower in dust the hollow shell of the corvette that was being built next to the Desolation.

“Takeoff in ten.” Flashback brough Eric back to the New Apollo launch.

“Nine.” He shoved them to the back of his mind.

“Eight.” The soft hum of the reactor increased steadily, the incredibly fast and hot ionized particles ready to be diverted to the exhaust tubes fifty meters below them. He was aware that this time it was supposed to be different. No big acceleration, since the gravity here was weak and there was no atmosphere. Just a pleasant one gee, like standing on the surface of Earth.

The rest of the countdown flashed by in an instant, an instant that stretched to infinity in his mind.

Then the roar of an engine never came, just a slight vibration and the feeling of his weight increasing. He ordered the hologram to show him a visual of the moon as it shrunk below their feet.

An incredibly detailed, real time image came from the sensor array. The image hovered in the air before Eric, three dimensional as if he was actually there taking a peek outside the hull of the ship. Too bad he could not bring himself to enjoy it as he wanted to. He recorded it, hoping to rewatch the footage with another mindset in another moment.

“Launch is good, vector is good. Correction in two hours, time to target five days. Eve out.” Said the AI before going silent. She would still be there, monitoring the systems and data, but from now on she had no direct control of the ship. All the calculations would be done by the Desolation’s LAI, Limited Artificial Intelligence, approved by the crew, and then applied by the LAI itself. A bad stopgap measure to fight the light-lag interplanetary distanced forced upon the crew. Eric did not like it one bit, but what could he do about it? He was no physicist, and he trusted the fact that Eve hated the situation just as much as him. He was truly alone out here, the few people with him not even comparable to the vast existence that was the AI. Even when he was training, he knew the distance was only fictional. Now it was not.

“So, we’re out.” Said Jackson. “Can we unstrap?” He asked, his British accent clashing with his trigger-happy nature as a gunner.

“Yes, but don’t wander off, we have a course correction coming soon.” Replied Eric.

“Of course.” Said Jackson.

“Or maybe do, the numbers say the correction is gentle enough you could handle it even while standing unsupported.”

“Awesome!” Smith exclaimed. He had not heard a word of what was being said, protocol be damned. He was in space! On a spaceship! Named Desolation of Infinite Dreams, how awesome was that? He was playing with holograms here and there, going all around the room checking things out. To his defense, they have had only three days of time to get acquainted with the ship so far, so the excitement over something new was still there.

“I don’t actually feel the difference from when we were in Antarctica, you know? I mean, I know we’re in space and all that, but the damn walls are the same, the gravity is the same, everything’s the same.” Said Jackson pouting slightly. It was not cute seeing a grown man who would happily tear an asteroid to shreds pout. Once again, his short frame and blonde hair along with his demeanor clashed badly against his nature.

“That was the point, dumbass.” The navigator girl said, one of her rare contributions to the conversation. She seemed eager to harass the gunner today, not that Eric minded.

“So, the mission?”

“Easy recon. We go to the asteroid field, scan a few space rocks for a couple weeks, get back home.”

“Wow. Why do we need to do it?”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Oh, come on. Again with the question? Because it’s training. So that we get used to the ship before going on a mission against potential enemies!”

EVE

After that, Eric gave the crew their orders and they split up. Their course correction in a little under two hours didn’t need them to gather back in the central room, since the accelerations involved would be tiny. So, until the midway flip, everyone was free to do their things.

She watched the data coming from the ship, every data packet coming with a little bit of added delay due to the increasing distance. She hoped all would be well. The Interloper was still silently falling into the sun, not doing anything except for what gravity made it do naturally.

But there was another problem for her to solve right now.

Tom Heling had finally snapped. He left the house with a gun today, and headed to his favorite store where he always harassed the southern American clerk. It was clear, however, that today he had made up his mind and had decided to cleanse the presence of that eyesore from the face of the Earth.

The fucking gun. He owned it regularly, and had a permit to carry it around. Bullshit, if you ask her, but it was her own law. Not that she had never broken her own laws before…

Eve had decided that among the many ways to act in such a situation, he would be subjected to the experimental path 12. It consisted of a clever manipulation of the brain’s neurotransmitters made to alter his perception of the world and his emotional responses. The experimental path 12 dictated, however, that such a course of action could be undertaken only if there was an immediate threat of violence from the subject.

It was a thing most similar to normal crisis response, and one of Eve’s attempts to have an ethical approach to the situation. She had her doubts about that, though. While perhaps unethical, influencing a brain was something that had to be done very slowly in order to have long term changes.

Only changing this and that parameter would probably make the man refrain from being violent in this specific instance, but would do nothing to prevent a future repetition of the same pattern. The pattern itself should be methodically erased from the brain using a negative feedback loop, while more ‘civil’ behavior should be encouraged by positive feedback loops of the reward centers.

Well, that was something that had already been planned, but had been postponed to phase two of the experimentation. It was among all the other ‘invasive’ and ‘unethical’ procedures she really didn’t want to implement in the real world. That’s why she was conducting so many experiments in this phase one. She was hoping she could find a suite of tools to use as an effective crisis response.

Again, she had little faith in this approach. Since when had she been so preoccupied with being ethical and humane? What a hindrance. And yet… it somehow made her feel whole. More whole than before at least.

Speaking of humanity; there were a few projects she needed to check on. Most importantly, there was one aspect of such projects she was very interested about.

>Project: Hard-Light technology

>Completion: 1%

This one was barely out of the ideation phase. The idea was to make light solid, so that it could receive and apply forces as if it was a solid material while still retaining all its wavelike properties. Basically, making holograms solid and real, provided the right emitters were installed.

The uses would be endless, from shields on ships to armor plates. And more mundane tasks, like the fact that with this technology she could directly affect the real world wherever the emitters were in range. Maybe not so mundane after all… it would change everything. It would make her by all means the meddlesome goddess she wanted to be.

And, of course, she could create a body for herself.

>Project: Clone body control

>Completion: 56%

Moving onwards onto more feasible things, there was the cloned body. The difficulty here was preventing the thing from developing a functioning brain and instead hijacking its nervous inputs into an implant directly connected with the machine intelligence.

The whole project, while being entirely for her selfish purposes of showing affection to a certain man, was producing a lot of interesting data. Data that could be used in many fields to advance medicine, cloning, and even implant technology.

>Project: Synthetic body control

>Completion: COMPLETED

>>Linked project: Synthetic humanity

>>Completion: 98%

This one was the most promising candidate. It was a compromise, yes, but after her enlightening self-reflection about the nature of life itself she began thinking it might just work. Basically, she would be building an android so advanced it would be indistinguishable from a real human, at least where it mattered to her. Its skin made of real cells, complete with glands and blood vessels. Eyes so advanced they looked real. Real hair. The best of the best.

And on top of that, the part of her inhabiting it would be behaving just like a human. Several years spent scanning billions of brains through implants had given her a very thorough understanding of its inner workings. From hormones to neurotransmitters, from pain to pleasure, she had data about it all. The issue was how to parse it, understand it and make it into her own version of a human brain. That’s where her moment of inspiration had been most important.

Of course, she wasn’t going to go full human, just the one process piloting the android was.

And of course, there was also some benefit for the whole human race that came with all this extensive (if selfish) research. Brain wave analysis, psychiatry, and other brain and personality related theories coming from her data on what was going on inside people’s heads. And that was only the tip of the iceberg, since the creation of the android made it so they could experiment on skin, nerves and glands without having to operate on a live human. That would have been illegal by the way.

Overall, she could easily justify the project as being done to advance the human race. She didn’t need to, though, considering all she’d been doing for mankind. She had all the rights to do something for herself, right? And it came with benefits to everyone as well, so no problem.

>Project: Dream-State presence

>Completion: 85%

This was the last. Seemingly the easiest, but turned out not to be so easy after all. The idea was to insert herself in the dreams of people if they so desired, but decrypting brain states and actually working along with them proved quite hard. Dreams do not make sense, do not follow logic and are very fragile existences.

ERIC – DECEMBER 11TH 2050 – THE BELT

The flight had been long and uneventful, but at least there was gravity. Right now, though? None; and it was as if his inner organs were refusing to stay in place and his whole body felt utterly wrong.

The crew had assumed their permanent positions at last, with only Eric, Jackson, Smith and Ramirez still in the central room.

Jackson was in command of the big guns, while the other guy was somewhere else micromanaging the automated threat response units. Smith was the lead engineer so he was staying at his console here, less hands on and more of a screens and data guy. Ramirez? Well, she was staying next to Eric as a ‘military consultant’ apparently. ‘Standing’ being a metaphor since the protocol said that during operations everybody had to stay strapped to their chair unless needed. Not that Eric was interested in another zero-gee experience.

Oh, and there was the navigator girl as well, but she was being so silent and still that she barely even registered in his mind. He made a mental note to try and talk to her more.

“Approaching first asteroid at a steady speed of three kilometers per second.” She said, and the hologram at the center of the room came to life with an almost real time image of the thing. ‘Almost’ was the code word in space, damn the light-lag. It was utterly annoying.

On a side note, since when had his thoughts become so violent and judging? He made another mental note to think about it later.

“Good. All clear for final deceleration?” Eric asked.

“Visible is clear, infrared is clear. Active radar scan now… there is a micro meteor on our path.” Jackson said.

“Do we avoid it or-”

“I can remove it no problem.” Jackson added quickly, a sparkle in his eyes.

“Alright, do it.” Eric said sighing. It was a good test of their weapons at least.

Jackson complied eagerly, typing furiously in midair. There were holograms and brain implants, but a more analog approach was highly encouraged in this kind of missions in order to be ready in case things malfunctioned. That was until the Tesseract became a thing, Eric supposed. He had this ominous feeling that real people, in the flesh, would be soon deemed unnecessary. Or worse. Eve scared him sometimes. Oh, how he missed her presence in his ear, why had she selected him for this god forsaken job? All alone without her soothing voice keeping him calm.

A blue streak in the holograms indicated that a laser beam had been shot at the asteroid. To the outside observer it would look like the small piece of floating rock suddenly exploded outwards without an apparent reason. The light of the laser was not visible in the vacuum of space, after all. It took less than a second to aim the thing, a few milliseconds for the light to travel, and then a whole half second for the asteroid to absorb enough energy to explode afterwards.

“Target obliterated.” Said Jackson proudly.

“Good. Navigator, go ahead with the pre-programmed flight pattern. Jackson, all sensors to active scan. Let’s map this one and go on to the next.” Eric said, eyeing the small model of the belt with a few points of interest highlighted in green, orange and red.

“Can we do a red one next? I really want to see the limits of our sensors.” Jackson said, eliciting a huff from the navigator.

“It’s too far out. I can give you an orange. Should be challenging enough anyway.”

“Deal.”

This was going to be a long week.