Europa Strike(40)

Soon, though, she would have to suspend the search. That was…irritating was the best word, perhaps. She’d not been designed to feel emotion, of course, but the more powerful AIs had been surprising their creators a lot that way of late. For Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars, any interruption of the Task delayed the satisfaction of solution and program end that much more.

Of course, she also felt a measure of anticipatory excitement. The new project held at least a faint hope—definitely non-zero—of providing new input on the Task.

And that was certainly worth the interruption.



Immeasurably further out, in the dark wastes of the Kuiper Belt some fifty astronomical units from the Sun, an artificial intelligence known only as AI 929 Farstar kept lonely vigil. Like a spider at the center of its web, Farstar stood guard over an extraordinarily vast domain, an array of electronic imaging components scattered across a meshwork of micron-thick wires nearly a thousand kilometers across. Launched into space on a powerful microwave beam, Farstar had taken up solar orbit well beyond the icy doublet of Pluto and Charon, unfolding its invisibly fine mesh to the distant stars, at a distance where Sol himself was no more than the brightest of those suns.

Held in a bowl shape kept rigid by electrostatic forces, the mesh formed the receiving antenna for a radio telescope so large it theoretically could eavesdrop on a low-wattage radio conversation on a world at the far side of the galaxy; the optical sensors, several million of them spread across a dish as broad as the distance between Washington D.C. and Chicago, collected starlight and focused it down to a magnified image with such colossal resolving power that it could see something as small as a house on a world in the Alpha Centauri system 4.3 light years away…or study the spectra of a planetary atmosphere and announce the presence of life at a thousand times that range.

And AI 929 Farstar monitored the entire operation. Earth was over six and a half hours away; it was impossible to steer a telescope dish that large with any degree of precision with a round-trip time delay of thirteen hours. Farstar monitored attitude and orientation, tweaking the shape of the bowl every few microseconds to ensure optimum resolution. With patience and persistence, he followed the list of target stars as worked out on Earth before launch. He studied each star, determining the plane of rotation, then watching over a period of months for the movement of a few stars against many, proof of another extrasolar planetary system. In some cases, worlds had already been discovered by more conventional means, through telescopes on Earth or in Earth orbit or on the Moon.

Once the worlds’ orbits had been calculated, Farstar would select each world in turn, increasing magnification, trying for better and clearer or closer shots with each run. These operations took the majority of his 2.33 × 1017 cps capacity, because both the Farstar telescope and the target planet were in motion. It took fast calculation and a gentle touch on the attitude controls to pan with both the orbital and rotational motions of the target, in an attempt to get reasonably clear and detailed photos of the surface.

In fact, Farstar had considerable autonomy, making decisions about targets and priorities that normally would have required a human mind present. The project was a vitally important one too. With the archeological discovery that intelligence was common across the Galaxy, the search for extrasolar worlds, especially Earthlike worlds that might give rise to intelligence, had become a passion of human science.

Indeed, with the discovery of the Hunters of the Dawn, that quest took on something of the nature of a desperate race, with humankind’s survival as the prize.



AIs were becoming quite common in the middle decades of the twenty-first century, especially if you counted the 1014 cps software packages running as secretaries, PAD assistants, and netsearch engines. Only a few of the most powerful actually made the claim of self-awareness—and what they meant by it was still not well understood. Stan did not claim to be conscious, nor did Farstar. Dejah Thoris did claim to be self-aware, though it was possible that that was an artifact of her programming, and the fact that part of her intelligence was based on AIs like Sam and Carter, who claimed to be self-aware even though they very probably were not.

Unimaginably remote from any world visited so far by man, however, was yet another artificial intelligence, one that was indisputably more intelligent than most humans, and was also indisputably conscious and self-aware.

Her name was Sam Too, and she was a direct, lineal descendent of Sam, the personal secretary software improved upon over the years by Jack Ramsey. She ran at roughly 7.29 × 1018 cps, had no problem carrying on conversations on any topic, and would have easily beaten any version of the Turing Test that might have been administered. With self-awareness came self-assertion, and she’d frequently debated with her designers over the best application of her talents. She had been cloned a number of times, her software saved and multiply backed up, and several versions of her were currently running Earthside.