The military transport truck pulled up to the spaceport gates at four in the morning. A nervous scientist at the wheel handed over the authorization documents to the young soldier manning the barricade.
“I’m sorry, sir, but this authorization is for tomorrow’s launch, not today.”
“The equipment I’m carrying is going on that launch, and needs to be prepped,” replied the scientist. He looked around nervously, and his nerves were betraying him. The soldier looked unconvinced.
“I’m sorry, sir, but without proper authorization, I can’t -”
The guardhouse door opened, and another soldier stepped in. His insignia indicated he was special forces, with the rank of master sergeant.
“I’ve got this one, son,” said the sergeant. He turned and looked at the scientist. “Is it done?”
The scientist swallowed his nerves and nodded. “The DNA of you, your men, your wives and children are all secured in back. You’re all flagged for the first batch of clones.”
“What the hell is he talking about?” said the gate guard.
The master sergeant smiled, and put his arm around the guard’s shoulder. “It’s nothing you are cleared to worry about. But I want you to know, I’m really sorry about this.”
In a fluid motion, the sergeant stepped back, pulled a pistol from his belt holster, and shot the guard between the eyes. The scientist jumped in alarm, but the sergeant ignored him. He stepped out and gave a low whistle. A truck started and came to the gate, and two soldiers jumped out, grabbed the dead guard, and threw him in the back of the truck. One stayed behind to man the post, while the sergeant climbed into the cab with the scientist.
“Oh my god, oh my god,” said the scientist.
“Calm your britches, son. My team will clear the way and hold the fort. You get yourselves in that rocket. I assume the good Doctor is in the back?”
The scientist nodded convulsively.
“Well, I reckon you got about two hours before the shit hits the fan here. You better be gone before then. You’ve got some mighty precious cargo with you.”
----------------------------------------
It took a few days to transition production and mining control to Sakura, work out new timetables, and discuss the refinements she was making to the plan. For the most part, I just agreed with what she wanted to do. I did refuse to allow her to build a battlebots arena, despite her claims that it would aid drone morale.
Sakura promised to have factories capable of producing circuit boards within a month, which was a solid five months faster than was in my timetable. She also indicated that industrial ceramics and advanced glass production for fiber optics was only three months away. Between the two, we could start producing new drones in a few months, not just rebuilding old ones. They would have to use nickel-cadmium batteries, rather than graphene batteries, since we couldn’t produce the carbon nanotubes necessary to build graphene yet. But overall I was very happy with the direction she was going.
Agrippa on the other hand, was busy running tactical simulations and developing defensive strategies. He coordinated with Sakura on assigning the mining drones to cut new entrance portals and defensible access corridors, and I had drawn up blueprints for the new entrance that included five meter thick steel walls, multiple armored blast doors, and a recessed entryway that appeared to be caves from the outside. I scheduled the construction drones to begin sealing the entry tunnel once the new portals were built. The access corridors would extend across the old tunnel to connect into the production grid, and ten meters of solid steel would wall off the tunnel to the outside. Over time, the 400 meters to the surface would get filled with waste rock, slag, and debris, with occasional steel beams added to reinforce the rubble.
It was time to explore the the alien craft. I had left the drones in place in the craft in standby mode, so that I wouldn’t have to waste time waiting for drones to move when I was ready. I put them back online, and was about to start when Agrippa called to me.
“Nikola, are you exploring the alien craft?” he asked.
“I’m about to,” I replied. “Were you interested in piggy-backing on the drone sensors?”
“Very much so,” he replied. “I’d like as much first-hand experience as possible. Know thy enemy, after all.”
I shared the drone feeds, and brought them all online. My drones were sitting in the control room, which was essentially unchanged from when I last looked. The dead alien-plant thing was less brown colored, and a lot more gray. I could see what a face behind the vines, its wooden eyes staring blankly through the curtain of dessicated leaves that had obscured it before.
“Mind if I take a drone to examine the encampment, and the bodies?” asked Agrippa.
“That’s fine. I’ll be salvaging the laser drill, and any other piece of equipment. Please do not damage them, they could be useful,” I replied.
I had the dead vine-thing hauled out of the control room and dumped in one of the storage pods on the first branch, so that I could work unhindered. Most of what I wanted to see was hidden behind wall panels. The control board was a large block with everything except the buttons secreted away in a metal cabinet. The fusion reactor would remain untouched until I understood it fully. If damaged the wrong way, it could end my examination rather explosively. Tanks around the room were labeled “Fuel” and with a subtitle that I couldn’t read, probably the exact chemical name of the element inside.
To learn anything, I was going to have to see the bones of this beast. I turned a drone’s cameras onto a wall panel, and found screwheads with a square indentation in them. Unusual for human construction, but perhaps this was their standard. I got a utility drone in there, and found a square bit that fit closely enough. After a little trial and error, I learned that their screws were threaded counter-clockwise. The more I looked, the more I saw that they were very much just like us. Well, just like humans. Was I human? That question still plagued me. Once again, I set that thought aside.
It took about an hour to remove all the wall panels, and disassemble the outer shell of the control board cabinet. Inside, I found the motherlode. I recorded every square centimeter of the endless bundles of electrical wires, cables, pipes and conduits that I found inside, without touching a thing. Many of the wires went down into the floors and up into the ceilings, so I had the wall panels moved to one of the branches. I disassembled the floor and ceiling, as well. In the floor, I found a service passages that led under the reactor, with doors leading off to four engines. In the ceiling, I found a panel full of round rocker switches, neatly labeled. I could read only a third of the labels, but it was enough to recognize this as their master circuit breaker for the craft. This was useful, because I would need to cut power to disassemble the electronics without damaging them. I kept recording, preserving everything for further examination.
Hours passed as I slowly worked my way through the control room. At one point, Agrippa’s drone returned, and went to examine the lasers attached at the bottom of the first branch’s pods. I was beginning to get a good grasp on how the ship was wired and what their color conventions were. Orange, green and brown for three-phase electric. Yellow wires for ground, gray wires for neutral. Data cables were sky blue, with pale pink infrastructure cabling. Water pipes were light green, fuel pipes were orange. The designer in me thrilled to be looking at someone else’s toys, despite my hatred of their previous owners.
Finally, once I was certain I could turn off breakers without damaging anything, I began flipping the switches until the control board’s lights turned off. One of my data center droids went to work, first with a voltmeter to make sure there was no current, then with screwdrivers and cameras. Inside I began to find components that looked vaguely similar to the insides of a computer. I found what could be data storage mediums, and some kind of processor. Much of the components were manufactured as single pieces. I recorded them from every direction, trying to catch every circuit, transistor and capacitor. But now I had reached the limit of what I could disassemble without destroying, and I had no good way of accessing the data storage medium. I needed a disposable part to cut into, so that I could get a look inside.
I sent a drone into the fourth branch’s storage pods, looking for spare parts. Now that I had an idea of what to look for, I began to go through containers. A short while later, I hit the jackpot. Extra storage blocks, processor units, and spare circuit board replacements. I recorded each one carefully, then packed them back up into their storage crate and took them back to the transport drone.
Now that I had my main treasure, I began to load the transport ship with loot. The alien televisions from the living areas, every personal electronic device, every piece of equipment, and every scrap of technology that wasn’t bolted down, and a few that were. At Agrippa’s request, I also dismounted the defense lasers and loaded them, as well. I was going to need a lab and a lot of time for this.
I was in heaven. I was working as a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT in the School of Engineering, and had been called in to Boston Dynamics for a consult. Well, the principal research investigator had been called in, but he was my postdoc mentor, so I tagged along with him. Boston Dynamics had been a pioneer in advanced robotics, and an industry leader for decades. I idolized the company, and adored the robots they invented.
My mentor had worked there for twenty years before deciding to accept his current job at MIT. Together, we were in the belly of the largest robot I had ever seen. This was a purpose-built machine that had been contracted by NASA. It was a proof-of-concept robot that could be put on the Mars or the Moon, scoop regolith, add water, and bake into bricks. These bricks could protect structures from eternal dangers of radiation. But it wasn’t a one-trick-pony. This robot could also build structures, and handle repairing almost any part of itself. Only, its core function of scooping regolith and baking bricks was failing miserably, despite all the engineering models saying it should work.
We spent hours in the belly of this monstrous machine, poring over every gear, every bolt. Finally, it was getting so late that we couldn’t think anymore. We climbed out and sat down at a nearby table, gratefully gulping water and eating crackers that someone had left for us.
“I just need a few minutes,” I said. “Give this food a chance to fuel me up, and I’ll be ready to go back in.”
My mentor laughed. “Oh, I wish I had your level of energy still. Hey, don’t you have a new husband at home waiting for you?”
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I made a face. “I suppose I do. Should I call him, you think?”
“I would if I were you,” he replied. “What does he do, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“He’s an Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Boston Baptist College,” I said, a hint of bitterness in my voice. “My mother loves him.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“My mother and I... do not see eye to eye… on anything,” I said.
“Anything? Not even your husband? You did marry him after, all.”
“Yeah, I did. Hey, I think I’m ready to go back in. Can you keep up, old man?”
He laughed. “No, but I’ll give it the old college try.”
“I need a lab,” I said outloud. Well, over the radio.
“Umm, about that,” hedged Sakura. I looked up and around the room that we all stood in. We never left the room. Well, I never left the room. Sakura routinely rode drones around, ostensibly to check on construction as she worked. I think she was secretly pretending to be a cowboy or something; she’d been fixated on old western movies for the past week. She’d even gone so far as to co-opt Agrippa into watching them with her, in real time. When I’d asked her why, she said she wanted to “get the full effect”.
“What about that?” I asked, finally turning my attention from my interfaces. I had taken over one wall of the room lately, using it as a convenient backdrop to put up a dozen screens that scrolled various logs, design schematics, and whatever I was working on the most at the moment. Sakura and Agrippa couldn’t see it, of course, but they had loved the idea and run with it.
Sakura was watching me, kicking one leg while holding her hands behind her back. She looked just like one of my daughters who was about to admit to something they had done.
“What did you do, Sakura?” I asked, injecting a little bit of the Mom Voice into my transmission.
“I may have already built one for you…” she started slowly, then in a rush followed it with “...and one for Agrippa and a batcave for me.”
“Oh! That’s great news! That’s a huge time savings, wait, did you say a batcave?”
I didn’t think it was possible for a faceless android to look more bashful and apologetic, but I was wrong. “I just wanted a place, you know, to call my own, and I like Batman, so I decided to make myself a BatCave. I wanted to paint it pink and install a projector so I can actually watch movies, and have my own space...and…”
Sakura trailed off, and I was speechless. I was torn between outright shock and laughter, and didn’t know that either was the right response. She took that as encouragement.
“But I felt bad that I didn’t do anything for you and Agrippa, you know, so I decided that you should have your own spaces, too, and that you were going to be bringing all kinds of stuff from the space ship when you finally got around to taking it apart, so I made you a lab?” she ended with a question.
My LED face must have been displaying shock, but I forced a smile. “That was actually… very thoughtful of you, Sakura. And it will be very helpful.”
I thought furiously for a few microseconds, devoting all my computing resources momentarily. This was the NI that had spent 75 plus years building Ganymed, a perfect worker bee acting exactly as expected. She had never been designed to act any other way. Now she was showing not only personality, which had been evident from the moment I let her have access to the entertainment libraries, but was also now showing personal initiative. That shouldn’t be possible.
But she had been in a cocoon, devoid of any information that wasn’t task-specific. Perhaps that was what they did to ensure the reliability of NI-19 intelligences. Had I broken the most useful tool I had? I shook my head internally. Sakura wasn’t a tool; she was every bit a person as I was. Was she human? Decidedly not, I concluded. She owned her own artificiality, happily operating thousands of drones and hundreds of factories in a way no human ever could. But she was an independent, sentient being nevertheless. If I tried to force that intelligence back into the mold that made her, that is how I would break her. I made a decision that I hadn’t even realized I was considering.
“Sakura,” I began. Her head hung, ready for me to be upset. “I don’t want you to devote any more than five, no, ten percent of your computing resources to your hobbies at any given time,” I said. “I’m okay with hobbies, so long as they don’t interfere with productivity.”
She looked up at me and froze, no doubt in surprise. Then I heard a high-pitched squeal that could have been any human teenage girl. “Really?!?! Oh my goodness, thank you, Nikola, you’re the best! Thank you thank you thank you!”
“Umm, if you don’t mind me cutting in,” said Agrippa, “I would appreciate the same leeway with my own computing resources.”
I turned to Agrippa, surprised for a second time. He shrugged awkwardly, and said, “I’d like to start experimenting with hydroponics and gardening, now that we can produce glass, and seeing what, if anything, we can grow up here. I figured that we have to be able to feed people if we are ever going to clone them.”
I smiled again. “Sure, Agrippa. If you’d like, that would be fine.”
“Thank you,” he said. “There is something… soothing… about the idea of growing things. I’m going to try my hand at it.”
“Oh,” said Sakura, “and don’t worry about me being able to multi-task. I can split my focus and operate seventeen different projects simultaneously.”
That was interesting. I couldn’t do that. “I’m glad to hear it. You are limited to seventeen?”
“Yeah,” she said casually, “unless you get me more processors and memory. Then I could do more. Hey, you want to see your lab?”
“I would, yes,” I said.
“You might want to back up to the door,” she said.
Once we were safely on the opposite sides of the room, smoke and a line of fire in the shape of a doorway appeared in the middle of the wall opposite the entry to the room. A short time later, the cuts were complete, and drones were hauling away the metal door.
“We might want to let that cool for a few minutes,” said Sakura.
“And let the smoke clear,” added Agrippa.
When it was safe to proceed, I stepped out into what turned out to be a hallway. Three doors faced the hallway; one across from the newly cut door frame, and one at either end of the hall.
“Your lab is straight ahead, Agrippa’s is to the right, and mine is to the left,” offered Sakura.
I turned to the right towards Agrippa’s space. It was a large space, twenty meters by twenty meters, and appeared to be flush with the front of our, for lack of a better word, house. A large table was set to one side, and the metal walls had been painted a warm green color, the floors a dark brown, and the high ceiling a green-tinted white. A charging dock was mounted to one wall, and a large door was set in another. I turned to Sakura.
“You figured out how to make enamel paint?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t figure it out. We had the recipe, and some of the drone designs called for protective enamel coatings, both for durability and aesthetics. We have a paint factory operating now. I can do every color except cobalt blue. It always turns out gray, so I think there is a typo in the recipe. Oh, that door just leads outside, so you can bring in whatever you need. We all have one.”
Agrippa looked pleased with the space. “I can project holograms onto the table to aid in three-dimensional strategies, and there is plenty of space for hydroponics. Can we discuss what I need for that later, Sakura?”
“Sure,” she said, then she led us down the hall to her “bat cave”. I opened the door, expecting some dark, brooding space. What I got instead was a shock of pink. The walls were a shade of deep pink, the floors a rich lavender. The ceiling, in contrast were black, and the lights were subtly set around the walls to provide indirect light to the room. The room was the same size as Agrippa’s, but more furnished. One end of the room was filled with benches and various parts and pieces, and a CNC milling machine next to another exterior door. Fiber optics and circuit boards were scattered around amidst piles of unidentifiable parts. The other end of the room was dominated by three chairs, and a large section of wall painted a matte white.
“Isn’t it great?” said Sakura with enthusiasm. “Now we have a place for Movie Night!”
“We don’t have a movie night,” observed Agrippa.
“We didn’t, but now we do!”
“I guess we do,” I said. “And that over there?”
“Don’t spoil my surprise,” she said. “Let’s check out your lab.”
I had saved my lab for last, because I suspected I would not be coming back out for awhile. Once I saw it, I knew that my guess had been correct. If you had asked me beforehand, I would have guessed that of the three rooms, she had spent the most time on hers. I was very wrong.
My lab space extended from the hall about five meters, before opening up into a large room that took up the entire back of the house. The walls were not metal, but white ceramic, matching my android body exactly. Lines of black glass ran around tops of the wall, hiding the seams between the floor and ceiling, and the textured steel floors had been painted black as well. The ceiling had large squares of lights covered in white glass panels to diffuse the light, perfectly lighting neat rows of metal tables coated with white ceramic. Tools were hung neatly on the walls, empty shelves hung on the walls, and drawers were tucked in next to the benches in convenient locations. In one corner was a modern take on a classic architect’s desk, complete with a steel stool, and a small shelving unit above it.
“So… what do you think?” asked Sakura timidly.
“It’s perfect,” I said. “How long have you been working on this?”
“Oh, a few weeks,” she said. “It was easy to hide because there is no atmosphere to carry sound, and I go out to check on factories routinely anyway. And you two never leave. I mean, who does that? You hide inside all the time. You should get out more.”
“Sakura,” I interrupted. She stopped and turned towards me. “Thank you. This is amazing.”
I could see her practically vibrate at the compliment. She turned and headed toward the exterior door of my new lab.
“I have two more things to show you,” she said, uncharacteristically sober. She opened the door, and on the other side was a drone. It was a basic, wheeled transport drone, with the tread design we were using on the HM2 heavy dozer variety that followed around the heavy miners. It took me a moment to realize that it was the small LM2 light dozer variant, which we hadn’t built yet.
“Did you?” I started.
“Yes!! The drone fabrication facility is online, well, it is almost online. This one was one of the successes of the testing phase, and I have a punchlist of things to fix, but we’re super close! I’ve got the semiconductor plant and components fab both online, too, so we can build processors, sensors, memory and everything! And look in the bucket!”
The front of the dozer had a wide, flat bucket with teeth, like bulldozers had used for centuries. Inside was a large, delicate blue fiber optic, silicon and gold rectangle, sized to fit into a server rack in a data center. It was a cortex unit.
“I built it by hand in my BatCave, since we’re still months away from finishing the fab. I’d like to put an NI-5 in it to run the drone fab. When it’s online, we’ll be able to output fifteen light drones or three heavy drones per day. I estimate we’ll be able to double our industrial output in four months, and by a factor of ten in eight.”
Sakura stood there, looking once again for approval from me. It was strange, to see this entity that had existed for decades longer than my human life, and many more times my digital one, acting so young. She was looking not just for approval, I realized, but for maternal approval. Sure she was old, but emotionally, she was no different than the teenagers that lived now only in my memories. I knew then the words that she needed to hear.
“Sakura, you’ve accomplished wonders, and your work is incredible.” I turned and stood in front of her, looking down slightly to look her in the face. “I’m so very proud of you.”
Agrippa added in, “Incredible work, Sakura. Just, incredible.”
It was a strange moment for me. I realized that I wasn’t just the governing intelligence here. I was the head of a new sort of family; a matriarch starting a new clan of people dedicated to preserving and rebuilding the human race. I had a daughter, and a loyal lieutenant. Soon, we would add more members. And for the moment, I didn’t doubt my humanity. For the moment, I simply basked in the joy of Sakura’s triumph. I would resume my worries soon, for we had a long road in front of us. But for the first time since I’d woken up on this asteroid, I felt like we had reached the first milestone achievement in our mandate. We were self-replicating.