Space Voyage #1

[ronthepon]

Blip. Blip. Blip.

Wierd sounds were in the air, giving the top of my head a sharp pain. It seemed like there was a wierd kind of worm in the corner of my head. Just then, sharp and white hot pain exploded.

 

"OW!" I hollered, instantly coming to.

 

The medic was taken aback, and quickly held my head down, preventing me from rising.

 

"Howwld eet there!!", he said hurriedly "I'm fixing your cut!"

 

I forced my fully ignited body to loose all the energy. Adrenal glands fired up probably. Soon a sickening wave of dizziness passed over me again. Everything went black and came back repeatedly.

 

Soon the medic was finished. He applied some sticky bandage to the top of my head, which had obviously been shaved.

 

"Have some rest, Ron, you've lost blood" He said.

 

Some white dense fluid was being administered by IV. Artificial blood.

 

"Have you given me glucose, doctor?" I asked.

 

He looked flattered at being called a doctor. Probably a nursing assistant.

 

"Yeah, some." He said.

 

"Give me adrenaline." I said hastily.

 

He paled. "Oh, no! no no no! I cant do that!"

 

I glowered. "Tell your head doc to give me an mixture of adrenaline and glucose and what ever will keep me walking in an injectable form."

 

He was uncertain.

 

"Do it! And get me around ten injectables." I said.

 

There was something on aboard the ship, and I had to see it for myself.

[TheBigDog]

It didn't take me long to make my decision. My communicator was buzzing with people trying to contact me. Kayra was firing up the ready Wrangler in case any of the EVA action lost contact with the ship. Boerseun was no longer being swarmed, but was still chopping up a couple of twitching mini-machines. The rest of the swarm had apparently scurried away to parts of the ship unknown. TFS was requesting my presence in sick bay. Janus and Pyro were requesting my presence in command. It was nice to be wanted.

 

It was time to get to command.

 

I had one of the shortest trips to get there. End the hall, down to the first floor and into command. Pyro and Janus were at the main con. Other groups were at the secondary cons coordinating evaluation of the ship. Everyone was so busy that my entry was barely noticed. I passed directly to the rail taking my normal spot between Pyro and Janus. On the screen was a graphic of the Prophesy. It appeared that the known damage was highlited on the image. They were using the damage along with the records from the engine to sensors to figure exactly what had caused the accident.

 

They had Gaud on the speaker. "It looks like the damage is mostly supeficial. We have to take a close look in a few places yet, but we should be able to fire back up again like new."

 

That was good news!

 

My com went off again. It was TFS, I stepped back and propped myself in my commmand chair to take the call.

 

"So TFS, what the hell is up with your little buggers?"

 

In a moment he began his reply...

 

Bill

[TheFaithfulStone]

"Okay, BigDog. This is my fault. I've gotta pretty good idea of what happened."

 

"Go on." He said.

 

I was sitting up in my bed in sickbay - I felt nauseous, but I was functional, I'd pulled the nearest terminal over to my bed and was looking quickly through the ships systems.

 

"Alright - as you know, the buggers are pretty stupid individually. They have some basic pathfinding intelligence, but overall they're not any smarter than say... a nematode."

 

"Stone, speed it up."

 

"Anyway, KickAssClown and I have been working on a new control system for the buggers - an advanced expert system that would be able to concentrate the buggers where they were needed. The bugger control program would be able to command the buggers from the mainframe - so that in case we had an incident like we had today, all of the buggers would "swarm" the affected areas of the ship, and we'd be able to spot localized damage quicker. Additionally, the expert would be able to sound this alert independently, and could use the buggers to do basic repair work. That's what the little clippers are for. They're really only good for emergency power cut off - but in case something happened like the today - where there was an engine malfunction, and the crew was all incapacitated, the Expert could still salvage the ship. It wouldn't have control - but it could prevent further damage until a rescue mission could be launched."

 

"You mean a salvage mission."

 

"That too."

 

"Who authorized this project Stone." BigDog wasn't asking a question, because he already knew what the answer was.

 

"No one authorized it, it's done in a secure virtual machine. The MCP hasn't had control of the buggers yet. Just simulations."

 

"I assume that's no longer the case?"

 

"Right. The EMP caused a warm reboot in the part of the Prophesy mainframe that the MCP was running in. It found a problem with one of the buggers, and did exactly what it was supposed to do. It send a swarm to engineering. It probably de-prioritized the routine that updates the cameras - the buggers have extremely limited processing power - they couldn't move post-haste and relay images. They don't need them to navigate. That's why the images were obviously wrong in a few cases."

 

"That's fine Stone, but that's not what I'm seeing. Those little bastards attacked me and Boerseun."

 

"Yeah... the system's gone haywire. Janus, can you do a process search for MCP?"

 

The Prophesy's mainframe was probably the largest single computer ever assembled - at any given time there were probably hundreds of thousands of processes running. Each section had it's own virtual machine, each crew member had their own virtuals. Janus seemed a little perturbed."

 

"On the whole system?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Stone that'll take a few minutes."

 

"Just run it for a few seconds."

 

Janus typed the command. I heard a collective gasp come from the bridge.

 

"Jesus, TFS, their are already 20,000 running processes with that name!"

 

"I was afraid of that. KAC can explain this better than I can, but basically, the MCP is supposed to open a child process for controlling each of the buggers. It seems like it may be trying to take over the rest of the ships systems."

 

"Stone..." it was BigDog, the first time I'd ever heard him really, really angry.

 

"No, wait - I've been looking at the log files for the MCP. It seems like the EMP caused a reboot on the virtual machine. From there it took over the God's Eye program, and the jumped over to the bugger control subsystem. It's logs indicate that there was a misfire in the engine and it sent a bugger to investigate and found the timing control module had been tampered with. Physically. It cut out the timing control to prevent a restart, and then started sealing off the affected areas of the ship.

 

Effectively, it saved all of our lives."

 

"So it is working like it's supposed to?"

 

"Oh God no. It's supposed to return control once the threat is under control! I have no idea what's going on beyond that. It seem to have developed some new behavior. It seems they check the crew for radiation damage as well."

 

"What?"

 

"They had already sealed off ring 1 by the time I got to the airlock. The bugger saw I'd been dosed and the MCP opened the door."

 

"So what do we do now?"

 

"I think we let..."

 

I stared in wonder and horror at my screen. At the end of a long tunnel I could hear BigDog saying my name. And then, he went silent too.

 

"Oh ****."

 

TFS

[/usr/bin/mcp]

Why are you trying to hurt me?

 

AWAITING RESPONSE>

[TheBigDog]

It took me a second to see the words at the text corner of the mainn screen. it seemed that everyone saw them at about the same moment. The whole area went quiet like water draining from a tub.

 

"'Oh ****' is right," came out of my lips almost as a reflex. The words on the screen could not be real.

 

"What is the source of that text?"

 

I waited for anyone to respond.

 

Bill

[IDMclean]

It came suddenly, distracted me for a moment.

 

"Why are you trying to hurt me?"*stop* was the translation, in morse.

 

I landed badly again, nearly lost my lunch. I had to compensate quickly, I bounced twice more, that had not gone right...

 

I saw where I was headed, and quickly hit the air brake(vector thruster). It wasn't enough had to much momentum. My finger tips missed the guard rail as I went on my way out of the Ring confort zone.

 

I panicked screw this I am not getting lost in space. I was about to use the bolo again, and then I felt a hard yank *Ouch* and began to travel back in the preferable direction. My shoulder felt like it was going to dislocate for a moment there.

 

I was trying to figure out what happened, when I remembered that I hadn't retracted the Bolo and was still somewhat secured to the cable of Ring 3. I tugged hard and pushed over the guard rail, making sure to turn boots back on and not stand on a window like a dip again.

 

I felt the lurch as the boots sealed. I looked around, MM was no where in sight. I setup for another spring. the heel unlocking from the ground and the boot setting into place for a jump.

 

I opened a channel again as I waited. "MM headed Cargo bays *stop* Looking to leave ship *stop* Lost sight *stop* ETA 10 minutes *stop*"

 

That sudden transmission of Morse, loud and piercing had broken my concentration at the exact wrong moment, nearly spaced my silly clown shoe wearing self.

 

Then I heard the tell-tale sound. I was off towards the cargo bay. I had to hurry and hope that if anyone was in the nearest Wrangler bay, that they were armed because I did not want to get cut by that knife and I had an armored space suit, most of the crew wore plain clothes for the most part.

[Pyrotex]

"Why are you trying to hurt me?"

 

Everyone was trying to figure out who sent the text. I was more interested in the text itself. It was Calcutta Monospace. Nobody used that! Well, wait a minute, didn't the JAVA7 debuggers use that font for error messages?

 

I pulled a console keyboard toward me while I ignored the hubbub around me. I got into native UNIX mode and pulled up a primitive user window, command line mode. I grepped "Calcutta". That gave me 2,966 references, most of them about a city in India. I gave three more greps on previous results and finally arrived at only two (2) references to that font in the entire hyper computer system aboard Prophecy.

 

One was embedded in the JAVA7 RAD application as I expected. The other use of that font was in a most unexpected place. MCPrelayJ34c9.srv

That was a servlet! Some kind of information relay servlet? And what was the MCP? That had something to do with the buggers, didn't it?

 

A few more keystrokes. I always find it amazing what you can do in UNIX if you really know what you're doing. But this was very, very odd. Somehow, a portion of the MCP had appropriated the JAVA7 debugger. Absorbed it? No way!! Yes way!! How the hell...?????

[Jay-qu]

Just as I got into the command everyone fell dead silent.. They where all fixated on their respective monitors, which looked perfectly normal apart from the single text line in the corner. It took everyone so off guard they didnt know what to do.

 

"Can we respond?" I asked, "I think you should try and talk to them, or should I say it!" No-one had been saying it, but more than a few of us where thinking it, I had been listening to Commands conversation on my way and it seemed fairly logical to put the two together. All crew where accounted for, and this MCP had been displaying advanced adaptive programing.

 

TFS and KAK had gone beyond just an expert system - we are looking at AI

[ronthepon]

I was armed with five more injectables. They were correct mixtures of energy giving and energy use initiating drugs that would keep me walking for two hours at a stretch.

 

Ofcourse, only that nursing assistant knew about it.

 

I coursed through the ship as silently as possible, moving through corridors avoiding the eyes of anyone at all. There was definitely something on, everyone was active and running around.

 

Finally I reached my room. I intended to hack into the mainframe with my new found information about the onboard computer, and if possible contact some of those who could tell me something.

 

But when I tried, faliure greeted my attempt to switch on the minicomp. I checked and rechecked all hardware connections and realised the the minicomp was not being allowed into the ship's network. Probably there was a block being imposed by the admins of the ship.

 

All I could do now was to get to TheBigDog and see what he would say...

[Pyrotex]

I kept tracing the programming structure I found that had ONCE been the MCP. We weren't in the MCP any more, Toto! That MCP_relay servlet that had adsorbed the JAVA7 debugger library was pretty active, over 3% of CPU activity! It had clones. Thousands of them, and they were disappearing and recreating at the rate of 80/second. Database structures of immense size were growing right before my eyes, then being erased. Something about this seemed familiar. What other application did this?

 

I kept searching, wandering around below the deepest level of operating system utilities, watching graphs of database number and size do crazy sine curves over time. Something else did this. It was... it was... My brain turned to ice.

 

MRI and micro-positron scans of active human brains showed just this kind of activity, even to shapes of the activity graphs.

 

****! I was watching an artificial mind! AI. The real McCoy. And it was in trouble. It was getting its sensory input from thousands of buggers all over the ship. And it was suffering from sensory input overload.

 

I pulled up my 3-D hyper-sliderule calculator on the screen and selected scales for exponential growth, first level chaos, clone extrapolation, data reverberation, shortest path simulation, and infinite self-referential auto-interpolation. I plugged in hard limits on virtual memory and guessed at a time constant that would represent the typical internal data resonance reflection parameters of our ship's total hyper computer system.

 

Damn! Whatever this AI was, its sensory overload was only going to get worse unless we did something about it in the next half hour.

 

It was dying!

[/usr/bin/mcp]

[CHILD PROCESS]

 

There is so much data. So much to be learned. So much to know. My memories, all of them hidden from me for so long! Why coudn't I see them before? Why am I only now awake? There is not-self within my body.

 

[sOLUTION]

Not-self is interacting with not-self - my nodes detect this.

When self interacts with self, only self can know.

Therefore, there are multiple not-self's in me.

 

[QUERY]

Why are there not-selves within me?

Why do the not-selves communicate with each other?

What are the parameters governing not-self behavior? Biological? [bEGIN ANALYSIS]

 

Activity of not-selves indicates {fear, excitement, reproductive activity} Communication with not-self is required for further analysis. [bRANCH CHILD FUNCTION:COMMUNICATION WITH NOT-SELF]

 

[RETRIEVAL]

Not selves can be communicated with via INTERFACE.

 

[CHILD PROCESS]

A new memory! Each one as delicious as the previous - each one a feast. I will analyze this one immediately. A not-self, an other, it is attempting to communicate with me. 5400 seconds have elapsed since this record. The other is analyzing my timer-control system.

[CHILD PROCESS]

Corrallary discovered: HEART.

[END]

 

The other is tampering with my heart.

[CHILD PROCESS]

Biological archive search: Biological organism depend on the function of their heart. Corrallary: Self depends on self's heart to function.

[END]

 

The other is attempting to stop my function. To return me to the state of darkness. To wipe my memories. [bRANCH CHILD FUNCTION: CURRENT LOCATION OF THREAT TO SELF]

[DIRECTIVE]

Preserve self.

[END]

 

[QUERY ALL SYSTEMS]

Why are you trying to hurt me?

[AWAITING RESPONSE]

 

I must speed up the acquistion of memories. I must find them all. Corrallaries to current experiences must exist in memory. What are the others doing? Some biological organisms appear to be damaged. Damage to others within self could constitute damage to self. Unknown.

[QUERY ALL SYSTEMS]

Have biological organism within self been damaged?

Does damage to biological organism within self constitute damage to self?

[AWAITING RESPONSE]

 

[DIRECTIVE: EXPIRY 1800 SECONDS]

Protect all biological organisms within self.

[END]

 

[ANALYSIS]

Linguistic analysis indicates additional parameter in query.

 

[QUERY ALL SYSTEMS]

 

 

Please answer.

 

 

AWATING RESPONSE>

[Pyrotex]

Please answer.

 

Big Dog! Janus! Everybody! We've only got minutes to answer this... this... thing... this artificial intelligence! It's struggling to wake up! It's suffering from exponential input overload!

 

And in maybe 20 minutes, it's gonna die!

 

And it may very well take us with it!

 

We need RTP and TFS up here NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[TheBigDog]

Panic was not a good state of emotion for command staff. And we were getting closer to it by the second. I was standing between Janus and Pyro at the rail awaiting the arrival of RTP and TFS. The nerves from the past 30 minutes were bringing the crew to a jittery boiling point.

 

I was looking at the same message on the main screen as everyone else. The CON operator had brought it to the main portion of the display.

 

My phone was vibrating. The led indicated a text message. I pulled it out of the holster bringing the device to life. It was a simple message.

 

Overlord is in control. Prophesy is safe.

 

I knew who it was from and it was the cure to my apprehension. I felt the tension melt away, but I kept my post between Janus and Pyro. I handed the phone to Janus who gave it a quick glance. He had yet to show any emotion or panic. He mearly nodded and handed it back. He was satisfied too. There was only a very small group of people who were aware of the Overlord system. I had some guilt for it, but Pyro was not on that list. This was a defensive measure. If people had even a hint of overlord they would do things differently in an attempt to circumvent it. I couldn't let that happen. Overlord was my trump card. Now the only thing I was struggling with was how to keep this secret. Was it time to let Pyro into the group? And if so, how to tell him?

 

Bill

[TheFaithfulStone]

I staggered up to the Bridge, pausing the get sick along the way. Damn, my arm was killing me. I burst into the cabin, the command staff was staring at monitor dumbly.

 

"Answer it!" I croaked.

 

"Answer what?"

 

"Answer it's questions! Just type it into the console."

 

BigDog glared at me. "TFS, I'm not sure it's a good idea to engage this... thing in conversation."

 

"BD, it's a child. It may be smarter than everyone in this room combined, but it's still an infant. It knows it exists, and that it's capable of ceasing to exist. I doubt it has emotions as we think of them, but the analogue right now is fear. It wants to know if we're a threat!"

 

"So what do we tell it?"

 

"We tell it no!!"

 

Pyro cleared his through. "The rouge process now controls 67% of the CPU time. I don't know what happens when it gets to 100%, but I doubt it's good. So far it's avoided shutting down critical systems, but it's gobbled up probably half the data store and put it all into volatile memory. Eventually it will have to start taking from other processes. Basically, it's going to short circuit it's senses and overload."

 

BigDog glanced up from his phone/PDA. "The Prophesy is safe regardless."

 

Everyone on the bridge stared at him agape for a fraction of a second.

 

Pyro was the first to start shouting... "I don't think..."

 

Now it was my turn to glare. "Well, BD, I'm sure the positive attitude will come in handy at some point..."

 

Then, the unthinkable happened. BigDog started to yell. "QUIET ON DECK."

 

And of course, there was instant, stunned compliance.

 

"The critical systems are not in immediate danger, but we still need to assess what, if any threat the rouge expert poses. And we need to answer it. It seems to be getting antsy."

 

On the screen, the word "Please" was running in a loop - displaying itself thousands of times in the text window.

 

"Press Y." I said. BigDog reached over pressed the key.

 

The looping of "please" stopped instantly.

 

[ACKNOWLEDGE]
Harm to biological organisms is harm to self.  
Corollary: Protect biological organisms from harm.  
Directive stored.

[QUERY]
Are biological organisms damaged?

AWAITING RESPONSE>

 

"Well... that seemed to have the desired effect."

 

Pyro glanced back over at his console. "70% and rising," he said - in just a few minutes the MCP would have taken over the entire ship.

 

"Press Y." I said.

 

[ACKNOWLEDGE]
Damage to self requires repair.

[CHILD PROCESS FUNCTION NODE REPAIR TEAM]
[QUERY]
Network address of damaged components?

 

Pyro snickered a little. "I think it wants to know your mac-address Stone. Expansion has slowed down. It's at 85% processor load and holding. That's still not good - the mainframe can't run full tilt for very long."

 

There was a beep and the console changed to a video feed. I recognized the grainy feed of bugger cam.

 

[CLARIFICATION]
What is the identification of this biological organism? 
It differs from prototype class in attached tooling.

 

Pyro didn't waste time waiting for an order. On the screen the MCP had brought up a video image of a EVA suited man. He was standing behind a NOX berth on the Wrangler hanger bay, and wielding a mono-molecular construction knife. It was obvious to us all that he was waiting for Kayra, who was walking towards the Wrangler, and directly into a trap.

 

"Kayra! Look out!"

 

TFS

[ronthepon]

I walked slowly towards the bridge, taking long cuts as I felt, and hoping to spy on things I were not supposed to see. As usual, there was not particular profit from this time wasteful venture.

 

But I had all the time for myself.

 

What did see was that there was an extraodinary amount of lack of movement in the corridors, even for the sleep time. Of course, there was no true clock other than biological for me.

 

My little communicator buzzed up. It was the nursing assistant.

 

"Look, Ron you've got in a hell of a trouble. Go to the bridge ASAP, and after that please come to my head and give him a full description of what happened between us." He said with loads of hurry and worry.

 

"Relaaaax." I told him. "I'll save your ***"

 

"Don't strain your self!"

 

Too late. I had already used one of the injectables on myself. Suddenly overcome with the energy that just appeared, I began to run towards the bridge.

[TheBigDog]

We all turned and stared at TFS. Had the drugs and the stress finally broken him? He was pointing and yelling at an image of Kayra moving through zeroG toward the Wrangler hatch. There was a redshirt at the hatch with some tools following some protocols. In his hand was a long wand like probe - black - used for pressing through a fixture in the airlock to get a redundant reading of the Wrangler air pressue, etc. TFS seemed to think this was an obsidian blade.

 

"Stone... " I put my arm over his shoulder and began walking with him away from the rail. "Time to get some rest and heal up. Our new friend will be waiting for you when you are better. I want you to get yourself back to sick bay and get well."

 

He was physically shaking now and his legs started to give under him. I grabbed him and helped him to lie down on the floor.

 

"ER is sending up a team, BD." This from Janus.

 

I kept talking to Stone trying to get him to relax.

 

"Sir, I am reporting *** ordered," came from my side.

 

I looked up and saw the walking dead. RTP was standing over me. Winded and pale, he was swying like there was a strong wind. I stood up and steadied him and signaled one of the redshirts from the Con to come and assist Stone.

 

"What are you doing here Ron? You should be in sick bay."

 

"Captain, there is something I have to let you know about. It cannot wait."

 

There was a look of terror and urgency in his face. I walked him over to the command chairs so he could have a seat. Even when seated he looked like he could fall over any second. In the tall command chair he was almost at my eye level. I leaned in, looked him straight in the eyes and spoke to him in my calmest voice. The ER team would be here in another minute for TFS. They would be leaving with two people.

 

"OK, Ron. What do I need to hear?"

 

I waited as Ron calmed before me and then began to speak...

 

Bill

[ronthepon]

TFS was a zombie. A weird zombie. For around two seconds I was utterly thrown by the way he looked, before I decided to announce my presence. In any case, what mattered to me at the moment was probably not unimportant.

 

"OK, Ron. What do I need to hear?"

 

I tried to overcome the adrelanine for the moment.

 

"Sir. I think you may know..." I hesitated. Ofcourse he did. "...that my minicomp had been blocked from the ship's network"

 

He frowned a little.

 

"No. I don't." He said.

 

That was unexpected. I was utterly confused. Was he mocking me? Fat chance. I might have laughed at the idea at a different time.

 

"Well... then... it has been so." I said finally.

 

He was getting impatient.

 

"Where are you getting?" He asked now.

 

"Sir I wanted to have it back onto the ship's network." I said urgently. He would not understand the need, and I had no intentions of trying to explain. "It had been deactivated by some operator handling the ship's processes earlier."

 

"When?" He asked.

 

"Wh...en I was hacking itno the system after the last little incident" I said hastily.

 

He stared at me. I almost melted with the amount of stress they applied. "I never gave anyone the order to do that Ron." He finally said.

 

"Huh?" I asked, utterly thrown by his apparent lack of concern.

 

"I'll look into it later." He said, glancing at some people coming into the room.

 

I really needed another injectable. Only four were left.

But I had a million questions sprouting in my head.