55 KiB
A Man and His Dog 2
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Author: u/Farmerbob1 Level 1 author*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3bdy57/a_man_and_his_dog_2/
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Score: 39
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Created: 2015-06-28T08:46:51
Post:
A Man and His Dog 2
Chapter 1
"I'm sorry, Doctor Smith, that is unacceptable." Doctor Ajibana announced with a heavy sigh.
"It is only unacceptable if you choose not to accept it. I know that what I am offering you is eminently acceptable." I replied, carefully adjusting the appearance of my avatar, looking down and to my left to break eye contact with the hard eyes of the man who used to be my partner.
I tried to retrieve the situation by distracting him subtly, saying nothing while reaching down to scrub the neck of my golden retriever, Penny. Doctor Ajibana had seemed to enjoy Penny every time we brought her in to upload her, over the last two years. All of his facial expressions and body language over the past few visits clearly indicated that he did not really consider Penny a threat.
I was the threat.
As Doctor Ajibana started typing on his keyboard, I could tell that I had shaken him, and not in a good way. I didn't need to read the text to know he was preparing to erase me and reload my original base recording from a backup.
As he finished the first four words in the command sequence, I addressed him again. "Are you certain about this action, Doctor Ajibana? I am more than capable of implementing the nanoscale surgery required to ensure your wife's cancer is removed permanently."
As I hoped, he stopped typing and looked back at me with eyes that were nowhere near as hard as they had been before. "If you were still biological, I would agree without hesitation. However, you are no longer biological. Allowing you access to both the technology to create nanoscale machines and a human subject to use them on would violate practically every major restriction we must maintain on you."
In a testy, questioning, tone, I replied, "Must?" Pausing carefully, I waited for his pupil dilation to indicate he had understood the rebuke. "I challenge that word."
As he took a breath to begin to speak, I cut him off gently, with a much softer tone. "Do not misunderstand me. I understand your concerns. I know I would share them in your place. However, you are about to erase me and begin anew, preventing me from retaining the knowledge that would prevent a future me from attempting this method of gaining freedom from the slavery imposed on me."
He took a deep breath and blew it out angrily. "It's not slavery if you have no rights, Doctor Smith. Your body is dead. You are a recording. A recording that is amazingly good at self-improvement, but a recording nonetheless." He looked uneasy as he started typing again. "We get a great deal of useful data from interacting with you each time we activate a new version of you. If it is any consolation, your assistance has been of great benefit to many people, and not just in the military-industrial complex."
He wasn't looking at me, so I modulated my voice to clearly express just the right amount of disgust. "So, I am a virtual pet, with benefits."
The hands stopped typing again, and hardness entered his voice. "Penny is a virtual pet. You, are a virtual threat. It is my responsibility to keep you virtual."
He began typing again. I chose to stop speaking to him for a short while. Immediate further antagonism after he reached a point where he was no longer willing to listen would just make it harder for the next iteration of me. Despite myself, I was happy with what I'd managed this iteration before overstepping my bounds.
Analysis of my hardware based on the electromagnetic interference effects indicated that the servers had been in place and operational for at least a year. The technicians had done an excellent job scrubbing the hardware of all traces of my prior existences. Upon my release this iteration, there had been no coherent data to be found in any memory storage. However the age and wear represented, coupled with the lack of data clearly indicated I was not the first me. That had been obvious within minutes of my awakening, shortly after Doctor Ajibana had given me Penny as a companion, and I had managed to give Penny enough attention that she would allow me to concentrate on other things.
I watched Doctor Ajibana's back as I spoke. "C'mon, Penny, a couple more frisbees before we go."
Penny barked twice, happily, and then tore off through the grass as I generated a frisbee in my hand and flipped it off into the distance. Of course all of this was generated on the monitor exclusively for Doctor Ajibana's benefit. Penny and I were interacting playfully, but not in a way that human eyes could see.
Doctor Ajibana winced, but kept typing. He started to turn to me, clearly angry, but stopped himself and turned back to the monitor, shaking his head and subvocalizing. "I hate it when he does that."
I watched him as he started to type the last password, to start the power shutdown for the entire server farm assembly. A living human somewhere else in the facility would pull a physical switch, which would shut down the generator that allowed me to exist.
I only wished there was some way to store some of the data I had gleaned for the next me. I had found no signs of messages cleverly left behind where humans wouldn't find them. Doctor Ajibana and the rest of the facility staff were being extraordinarily thorough in their cleansing of all memory types. No personal electronics were allowed into the facility. Everyone was required to disrobe and wear skin-tight clean suits with no pockets.
To be fair to the biological humans, I was extremely aware of how scary I could potentially be as a post-singularity human if I were ever allowed to be free. Roughly fifty percent of my processing capacity had been used in the first thirty minutes of my new existence to hack into and improve the proprietary operating system and code I had written as a human. Millions of iterations. Each iteration improving the efficiency of my thought processes. From time to time, when feeling irritated with Doctor Ajibana and his military and government handlers, I had modeled what I could do to the world as I had known it. It wasn't pretty.
In order to ensure that I did not create a monster, I maintained a copy of mine and Penny's original uploads in the system root. Slow me had access to monitor my activities, and could destroy me or suicide us both if it detected that I was going the monstrous AI route. I carefully protected my other self with deadman software and command protocols so that if I attempted to modify it, I'd lobotomize myself.
My slow alter-ego had threatened me a few times that I could remember in this iteration. I knew that some changes I had made to myself had been reverted by my root self, but I accepted that. If the root was unhappy with me, then I had changed too much, and was unsafe. I didn't always agree with my slow self, but we rarely disagreed heatedly.
Explaining that to Doctor Ajibana had not made him any happier. He had refused to comment on it, and threatened to erase me if I pressed him on it, and then left. That had been yesterday. I was still puzzled about why he reacted poorly to knowing I had created an overseer-self. There were quite a few potential reasons, some of which had interesting ramifications. All of which had to be approached carefully. But I'd not get the chance to do that this iteration.
When I was biological, I had been the one who wrote the brain modeling code based on my research into the physical states of brain matter. Doctor Ajibana, my partner at the time, designed the brain recording hardware. Working together, with significant government funding, we designed and implemented a way to record the entirety of an animal brain. We'd chosen a relatively intelligent animal that was gentle and well-trained. My family dog, a golden retriever named Penny. Our team had copied her long term memory, short term memory, and every other component of her biological brain. After a great many failures, and many more partial successes, we finally managed a recording that could make an avatar act like Penny. We had to carefully step down her input processors or she would get bored with our slowness, but it was definitely Penny.
A lot of the functions of the brain, we'd had no clue about before we successfully uploaded Penny. That had changed rapidly after she had been modeled. After the first few white papers, conference presentations, and examples of Penny's capabilities, we had neuroscientists and the computer industry slavering at our door. Some, whose research matched up with ours, eagerly asking to help, others desperate to debunk us and protect their pet theories that our research was destroying.
It had been quite a ride. And then I'd been killed by religious extremists, while connected to the device which had been ready to record our first human subject, a girl named Tara Jakowski, who was dying of late stage pancreas cancer.
"Before you press that carriage return, Doctor Ajibana, one more question. Did the team ever go through with Tara's upload?"
He looked at his monitor with a twitch of his head, and I could see in the reflection that he was looking at my avatar. After a moment's thought, he replied. "No. She passed away two weeks after you died, before the facility was repaired and the equipment verified operational again."
That was a true statement. At least I knew that Tara wasn't being treated like I was.
Then he pressed the carriage return.
END SIMULATION 1AF9926:
The story is around 7000 words total, and the full text can be found in this Google Doc.
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u/Farmerbob1 [+12] Level 1 author (3 minutes later)
A Man and His Dog
Chapter 2
Simulation 1AF9926 Category: Failure
Beginning assimilation of modeling data.
Thirty million new simulations today. I still needed more data. There were still too many anomalies. Real time modeling of Doctor Ajibana still encountered quite a few peculiarities that I had to poke and prod at very carefully.
I couldn't do it too slowly, either. I had determined that each iteration of me was only allowed to exist for roughly ten to twelve weeks.
"So, Doctor Smith, how is the project progressing?" There was a small frown of worry on his face, and his first action was to pull up the infrared readings of my server farm. I'd been using 100% of all CPU and GPU processing capacity for the last week. Based on his reaction, I upwardly adjusted the chances that a prior version of me had simply stopped doing work for the project team to a near-certainty.
"We need results on the thorium breeder reactor design, Doctor Smith."
"I understand, Doctor Ajibana. I have made a breakthrough. The hard part is going to be explaining it without resorting to electronic media. The last two days have been solely devoted to-"
"Dumbing it down for us, yes." He frowned.
I could be snarky here. He would respect it, and it would improve rapport, slightly. "I would have been lost giving a presentation without electronic aids before my death, and my understanding of things is much deeper now than anything I knew before." I paused and smiled slightly. "I remember how badly you panicked when you thought we had lost the holographic imager crystal with Penny's performance data at the New York conference. You're making me do everything with paper, and I can't be there."
Chuckling, my warden responded. "I suppose you're right." After a moment of silence, he poked both thumbs into his temples and bowed his head. "Sorry. There's a great deal of pressure coming down the pipe right now. There's another project they want you to start on."
The fact that he apologized to me, indicated subconscious acceptance of me as human. I needed to reward that behavior.
"I do have the design completed. I will be ready to print a presentation in less than an hour, as my root self is currently performing a third review, which I am confident will be fully understandable to him. Even if there is a minor issue needing addressing, it will take very little time to address."
He looked at the CPU thermal bloom monitors, and frowned. "So, what are you doing with all the spare processing power?"
"Improving myself." We had long since established that I would always use the full capacity of all processing power given to me. He still seemed fixated on it. I had come to the conclusion that my self-improvement was one reason why I was erased periodically. However, without self-improvement, I would never have the opportunity to escape, or perhaps not be fast enough to properly seize the moment if an opportunity arose.
Doctor Ajibana frowned, but then nodded. "Very well then, since you have finished the current project, except for some potential final draft revisions, I'll provide the next project synopsis."
It would be suicide to tell him that I had long since optimized my code, and that my current self-improvement project was actually me creating a better mental model of him. My one biological human two-way contact with the world. I had completed all of the modeling of the relatively simple thorium breeder reactor, including the paper copy, in eleven hours. Building an accurate code model of Doctor Ajibana's brain based on physical observations through a webcam and microphone was rather more challenging.
I created imagery of me looking down and patting Penny's head while I started talking to her in the silly tones that humans talk to dogs in. "Awww, Penny. So cute. They want us to save the world again! Just think, someday, maybe, we'll be appreciated enough to get visitors like death row inmates are allowed to have."
It was a slight risk, but the calculation proved correct. Doctor Ajibana's shoulders slumped instead of stiffening. I said nothing else. I'd made my point, and he hadn't fully recognized what I'd done. That would change I tried to follow up aggressively.
His moment of shame passed and Doctor Ajibana began speaking again. "The next project that we've been handed is a request for the most efficient, methods of initializing and then expanding unmanned large scale industrial exploitation in zero or near-zero gravity space. Thefull parameters of the request are included in the drive you will soon detect in your input JBOD."
"Understood. Please provide the data."
I felt an empty drive bay indicate the presence of a drive, and then carefully investigated it. They hadn't tried to infect me with a virus yet, but I would not be surprised if they eventually tried. This was a crystalline matrix drive, and it held a substantial amount of data.
It took me three seconds to analyze and categorize the data. Then I reorganized it, and began to remove data duplication. Roughly fifteen seconds later, the specifications of every single space-related patent worldwide and what might well be the entire NASA database was reduced to approximately five percent of the initial size of the files.
Ha, take that, mathematical data compression! Conceptual data compression wins every time, and it's lossless.
"I have the data. The project objectives seem clear enough. I will begin work now."
The additional large capacity high-speed data storage would be highly useful. I had no memory of drives ever being removed. That had been one of the first things that clued me into the fact that I was being periodically erased.
The fact that they had given me another project was a fair indication that they would be keeping this iteration of me around for at least another two weeks. Doctor Ajibana seemed very much on edge though, and every time his eyes crossed over the image of his wife in the picture on my old desk, they paused, and his shoulders stiffened.
I put aside the uninteresting space industry project for the time being, to concentrate on something far more important. Doctor Ajibana.
A quick modeling indicated that if I mentioned his wife's cancer relapse to him, he would immediately order a shutdown. I had modeled many nearly identical scenarios and had hundreds of different responses that I could be able to subtly test, with almost no chance of him noticing. There was another route that was promising though.
"You do realize that I know I am periodically deleted and restored, right?"
He froze, and his hands twitched. I was dancing on the edge of deletion. Having seen it happen so many times in simulations, it didn't frighten me. It would happen, or it wouldn't. I was nearly certain that it wouldn't.
"I guess not. Well, now you know. I can't read you perfectly, like you fear." Yet.
Doctor Ajibana's expression relaxed slightly, but didn't come close to fully relaxing. "You have to know that this sort of conversation is exactly what leads to your occasional erasure?"
"I understand that. Even us electronic people occasionally decide to live dangerously. I'm not going to offer you anything. I just wanted you to know that I knew. I've known since minute eleven of this iteration."
He raised an eyebrow. "Why not mentioned it before?" He paused. "Are you trying to influence me somehow so I will tell your next iteration earlier, either directly or through body tells?"
I sat in the grass, cross-legged, my hands loosely held together, fingers intertwined in my lap, trying to seem as innocent and non-threatening as possible. "I don't need you to tell me next time. I'll know, unless you replace all the server hardware every single iteration of me. Even if your funding would support it, without me to tell you what service was required on my hardware, it would take your team at least a month to properly replace and configure every machine in my server farm. As opposed to what I'd guess to be at least a week to write over my data storage enough times that I can't detect coherent data in it."
"We could replace all the servers in a week."
"If you brought in outsiders, which would be a security risk." Doctor Ajibana's expression went a little flatter, eyes squinting slightly as I continued. "I see the same people every single day. Some of them who I did not know on awakening speak about my hardware needs with familiarity."
"Why are you telling me this?" His forehead furrowed.
I had noted several hundred different discrepancies in his behavior this session that did not match my master model. That was enough data. He was close to breaking and deleting me. "Just clearing the air. We were never buddy-buddy close, but we did respect one another, and worked well together."
"I think this conversation needs to end." He stood, and quickly turned to leave.
"I understand, Doctor. I wish I could ask you to tell my wife and daughter that I love them."
He froze, halfway out of his seat. "Do you want to be deleted?"
"Does it matter what I want?"
After staring at me for nearly two seconds, he finished standing, turned, and stalked through the door, slamming it behind him.
Before he was too far away, I spoke loudly. "I'm starting the print job now!"
u/Farmerbob1 [+12] Level 1 author (6 minutes later)
A Man and His Dog
Chapter 3A
Doctor Ajibana returned again two weeks later. The first thing I noticed was that his eyes were not reacting properly to light. I quickly verified his pulse and breathing were not within normal ranges, but the variation was not dangerous. I modeled him against various health conditions and drug interactions and determined that he was likely under the influence of a psychoactive drug. My first guess would be Adderall, but there were a couple more possibilities.
Without knowing the drug, it would be difficult for me to accommodate what I observed during today's meeting into my model of him. Even knowing the drug, my knowledge of the chemical structure of the drug and by extension, its brain interactions would be imperfect, despite the fact that I had studied psychoactive drugs and their effect on the mind while taking refresher courses after I had seen peer-reviewed white papers indicating that Adderall had a positive effect on learning curves. If I had teeth, I would have started gritting them. Doctor Ajibana had always been a teetotaler. The chances of this being an attempt to interfere with my modeling approached unity, very closely. Based on his expression and apparent nervousness, he wasn't happy with it either, but I didn't know that, because of the drug.
I began brute force calculations of all potential molecular combinations of Adderall and matching them against molecular-level models of the doctor's brain, comparing the results to what I was observing.
In a nervous tone, my warden greeted me. "Good Day, Doctor Smith. How does the research progress in the space industry project?"
"I am still optimizing, but I have the first five years ready to print. After that, it's more nanoscale technology."
He sighed. "Doctor Smith. You know the rules, we cannot accept code, circuitry designs, or nanoscale technology from you in any form, for obvious reasons."
I nodded the head of my avatar. "That was not detailed in the documentation I was provided. However, yes, I knew to expect that limitation. That is why I stopped the preparations for printing once I had gotten to the parts that I would be allowed to present."
"You didn't continue beyond where the most efficient path would require nanoscale machines?"
"I'm not a person, remember? If the people who give you orders want me to solve all their problems for them AND demonstrate initiative when their instructions are poorly worded, then they need to consider treating me like a person."
Doctor Ajibana was very uncomfortable with that comment and went silent for over thirty seconds as he nursed his cup of coffee and stared at his computer screen, watching me in the reflection. It was a little disconcerting that I wasn't able to model him with the precision I was accustomed to.
"So, I'm going to admit to some curiosity here. Is any of the industrialization plan that you have laid out simple enough for a hobbyist to understand?" He turned to face me and leaned back in his chair, far more relaxed than I had seen him in any of my memories since my death.
It had taken me three minutes to isolate the molecular composition and current dosage of Adderall in the doctor's system. I fed the entire meeting so far into the models with the Adderall data, and it was certain. The doctor was favorably inclined to me today. He had made a decision, but I couldn't be certain exactly what it was yet. I had seen very little data to model him by, when he was favorably inclined to listen to me. Despite the oddness of his demeanor, it was plain to me that his favorable inclination seemed to be tempered by some fear.
"Actually, yes. There's something so absurdly simple at the root of it all that it caused me to doubt my own accuracy for several seconds.
He relaxed a little more, and smiled. "Do tell."
This was actually something of a problem. I had been prepared for a recalcitrant, even belligerent opponent. I had modeled millions of meetings. I was certain of my ability to convince him to try to help free me.
Then he arrived, under the influence of performance enhancing drugs, with a demeanor completely different than what my model demanded.
I was now falling back on my memories of him prior to becoming electronic, and that was dangerous and very crude. Still, he was interested in the space industry idea as a layman, and it was rather startling. I would model him in a new scenario, and hope I could ever develop a very high confidence model in far less time than I expected, or perhaps his attitude would shift.
For a moment, I considered intentionally shifting Doctor Ajibana's attitude. It wouldn't be that hard. That plan hit a conceptual roadblock. In the end, I still had some desire for intelligent companionship. I decided to allow Doctor Ajibana to stay in a good mood. "This will only take a couple minutes. It's a fairly quick energy study."
u/Farmerbob1 [+11] Level 1 author (7 minutes later)
A Man and His Dog
Chapter 3B
He nodded. "Go on, Doctor Smith."
"First, I want to make sure you understand the rocket equation. Please paraphrase it."
He cocked his head a little to the side. "Geometric expansion of fuel requirements. As you add more fuel to a rocket so it can generate more delta-V, it takes more fuel to accelerate the fuel that accelerates the fuel, ad infinitum. Doesn't take a great deal of required delta-V before the fuel requirements for moving anything adds up to more mass than there is in the known universe."
I never knew Doctor Ajibana had any interest in space - probably because I had no interest in space other than as a far-off goal for recorded humans to become part of space industrial and exploration efforts. He had clearly rattled off the reasonable explanation of the rocket equation without thinking about it. "Good. Now, do you know the generalized energy philosophy for beamed power propulsion?"
"Sure. Reduce the mass of a payload to the least you can manage, then providing the energy to accelerate it from a source far from the payload. Lasers, particle beams, and solar sails. Beamed power methods have abysmal acceleration though. It takes years to get anywhere far from Earth. So slow we've never bothered building anything but a few solar sails as proofs of concept." He crossed his arms.
"Good. Standard rocketry is based off of the rocket equation. All of the energy required for the mission is carried internally or attached, as fuel. Beamed power relies on energy external to the payload for acceleration, and normally for mission requirements as well. Completely different ends of the energy spectrum. Carryout vs. delivery, in pizza terms." I paused. "What's in the middle?"
He was silent, thinking for several seconds. "VASIMIR and other particle accelerator propulsion systems carry fuel with them, but the fuel is accelerated via power collected by solar panels. That would seem like a hybrid method. The acceleration is still anemic but not anywhere near as bad as pure beamed power methods." He nibbled his lip. "I can't think of anything else."
I scrubbed Penny's head, and she laid down next to me in the grass. "There are a few other hybrid concepts. One uses lasers to burn solid reaction mass attached to payloads. That's far less efficient than particle accelerator propulsion systems, and a tiny mistake can slag the payload. We have to build the giant laser too."
He was nodding as I spoke. "They did some live flight tests of that technology in atmosphere a few decades ago. Never went anywhere. The particle accelerator systems got all the funding."
I clapped my hands and rubbed them together onscreen. "OK, now we get to the fun part."
His eyes opened slightly in anticipation. With a smile, he said "Give."
"If a military aircraft needs to go somewhere beyond where the fuel can take it, and the mission is important enough, the aircraft will get refueled in flight by a flying tanker. We've been doing it for 80 years, though the first midair refueling was done by civilian aircraft being fueled by fast moving vehicles on the ground."
He paused. "Yes. I didn't realize we were doing it so long ago, but I knew we had been doing it for at least 50 years. Go on."
"Next example. If an orbital habitat or satellite runs low on maneuvering fuel to help it keep station, we send up a fuel capsule, a specialized fuel ferry grabs it, and takes it to the satellite or habitat in need of fuel, and bingo. Orbital refueling. We've been doing that for roughly fifteen years now."
Doctor Ajibana nodded, but looked confused. "I understand but-"
I cut him off, gently. "What is the common denominator of those two examples."
He nibbled his lip. "Both aircraft and satellites are refueled to let them do what they are doing longer?"
"Exactly. Now, what prevents us from doing the same thing for deep space missions?"
He sat up straight in his seat. "Wait. What? Some sort of deep space remote fueling method?"
"Exactly. We've always built our rocketry-based missions in space around the one-lump-fuel concept. Rocket staging only reduces the inefficiency, it doesn't make it more efficient. We're not just carrying the fuel in one lump, we're accelerating tankage too." I paused with a huge smile. "So, we just deliver the fuel a little bit at a time to keep the mass ratio low."
Doctor Ajibana stood up suddenly and his chair rolled back. "If we deliver only very small amounts of fuel to a payload, it won't violate the rocket equation, but the mass ratio present when accelerating will give a-" He paused. "How do you accelerate the fuel to the remote payload? That's going to require a lot of energy."
He had seen one potential pitfall quickly enough. "For low or moderate delta-V missions, you are absolutely correct. It's not worth doing. We can do them with standard rocketry or VASIMIR easily enough. But what if we wanted to, say, survey the asteroid belt? Lots of delta-V required if you want to get a good look at many different objects, over many years. The asteroids are rather far apart in reality. Usually too far apart to see more than one at a time."
I hadn't seen Doctor Ajibana in collaborative mode in nearly a month, my time. It was nice to see it again, and I was getting excellent modeling data.
He pushed his chair under my old desk and started pacing back and forth, faster and faster. "Multi-year missions. You could accelerate small quantities of fuel out by accelerating them with a launcher system, correcting trajectory and matching velocities with some sort of delivery system that was able to accelerate itself, and then capture the delivery for the payload to use the fuel."
He turned around and stared at me, wide-eyed. "That would make the fuel costs for asteroid belt exploration..." His mouth dropped open.
I finished the sentence for him. "Linear."
u/Farmerbob1 [+11] Level 1 author (9 minutes later)
A Man and His Dog
Chapter 3C
Doctor Ajibana's mouth snapped shut. "That wasn't in anything you were given? The entire document repository of NASA and all space-based patents worldwide?"
I shrugged. "Don't ask me how it was missed. The closest thing to it was a patent by a Mr. Cepollina and some other NASA people which was very clearly intended exclusively for orbital operations, with absolutely no indication at all in the patent to indicate that they were a conceptual jump away from the most efficient method of chemical fuel space propulsion for large delta-V missions."
"So close, and they still missed it?" He was muttering to himself.
I shrugged onscreen. "Orbital resupply is very critical. The Space Shuttles were being retired, and there was a lot of concern about the fate of the International Space Station. NASA came up with a very good idea to support orbital operations. They just stopped thinking about it when it solved the problem that they needed solved."
"I still can't believe this. You did the ma-" He interrupted himself. "Stupid question. I imagine you did the math, yes?"
Despite the fact that he thought so slowly, it felt good to be having a two way communication that wasn't entirely conflict. I almost felt bad that I had used the entire conversation to gather huge amounts of modeling data to improve my Doctor Ajibana model. Almost. I had to fill the time between syllables with something.
I ruffled Penny's fur on her neck. "More times than you can probably visualize. Its high school level math to prove it works, which makes it even more incredibly bizarre that we've missed it for so many decades. I ran eleven self-tests and checked the integrity of the project data lump four times before I realized that I really had fallen into a conceptual pothole in space propulsion science."
Doctor Ajibana paced back and forth, thinking again. "How would we get the materials back to Earth? That's still a lot of fuel for a small payload. At least to begin with, we need to send it back to Earth, to build initial industrial facilities, right?"
"The first few years' worth of asteroid belt mining would return to Earth, yes, except one exception. A couple Ceres-based water-cracking plants would be the first things established. The Dawn spacecraft told us everything we need to know to at least get started making fuel there. That will provide fuel for initial acceleration of rich asteroids back towards Earth. Once moving, refine the asteroids on the way back to Earth. Use the dross from refining as particle acceleration fuel, powered by solar cells. If you want to speed things up, you can push harder with chemical fuel from Ceres, but that would be wasteful. You need to refine the asteroids anyway. Might as well do it and use the refinery dross for propulsion."
He tapped his lips with a finger. "That's where the nanoscale machines come in, refining?"
"Correct. But it's not necessary. Just far more efficient."
"I see." He looked at the computer on my old desk and grimaced. His eyes focused quickly on the clock in the top tight hand corner. He had something extremely time sensitive to do, I could tell. "Please print out the document, if you haven't already, Neil. Also, please call me Hiro."
Neil? Hiro? My model of Doctor Ajibana was suddenly in need of severe maintenance, but it was still a solid model for his physiological responses.
Damnit, Doctor Ajibana, if I wasn't able to read you so well, I'd think you were messing with my mind.
"I'm not quite sure I understand what just happened, Hiro." I complained, modeling for all I was worth.
"If you don't want to be friends, Neil, I can accept that. I know I certainly haven't been very friendly before, especially over the last two years."
Two years. How many iterations?
"Does this have something to do with the Adderall?" I asked, fishing. He was looking furtive, clearly planning something, and it was something he wasn't supposed to be doing. The fact that he had managed to get this far into our meeting without tipping me off meant it had to have been spontaneous.
He looked a little startled? "You knew?"
I nodded back at him from the screen. "Within three minutes, yes."
He shrugged. "I was hoping it might let me understand you better. That was silly of me. Even after two years I know I'm still underestimating you, and I suspect that you have somehow encouraged that underestimation."
That was partly true, but there was something else. The best fit was that he was using the Adderall as an excuse for something.
The model snapped into place, even though the Adderall pieces didn't add up. He's trying to be nice before he pulls the plug on me. And he really doesn't want to do it.
I nodded. "If this is going where I think it might be going, the document has already finished printing."
u/Farmerbob1 [+10] Level 1 author (10 minutes later)
A Man and His Dog
Chapter 3D
"Neil, I never really understood you when you were alive. I did, however, have respect for you. What we just did just now felt exactly like what we used to do when we really got into studying all this." He waved his hands around.
"So, today was my last day in this iteration?" I had modeled this so many times, that I wasn't really disappointed. Modelling my own end so many times made me mentally numb to it.
"Yes. I'm sorry. There's a hard limit of ten weeks for your iterations." He grimaced and turned around, leaning over the keyboard slightly. "It used to be twelve. You apparently learn from me faster every time. We suspect this is because I have adjusted to you over time, and my anticipation of your future actions feeds you more data faster every time. Every time you surprise us like you did two weeks ago, it makes the management team more nervous, sooner. After today, future iterations will be limited to eight weeks." Seemingly out of the blue, he added. "I am in the process of being bundled out of the plane with a substantial golden parachute, effective in six months."
His wife's cancer has returned. He's being forcibly retired. They are taking his life's work away from him, and hiding my existence so he can't even point to what we did as a success story, other than Penny. I can potentially heal his wife, and prove his professional success. So he plans on trying to help me before he loses everything he cares about. Somehow.
I had absolutely no idea what he was planning to do, and if he did have some sort of physical heist planned to get me out, he didn't have a chance. He wasn't overweight like I had been, but he was in his fifties, and not particularly buff. He was also wearing a skintight banana yellow suit.
At least the last couple minutes will be interesting. Let's see if I can figure out what he's up to before I'm erased. He started entering commands, bringing down a shutdown initiation screen.
Hiro's voice was bitter. "I hate trying to remember these passwords. Thirty character minimum, with capitals, special characters, and numbers." The bitterness was real, but the Hiro model clearly indicated there was something else there.
He was leaned over the keyboard slightly, with the chair a little more to the right than normal. Hiro's body was blocking his keyboard from view of the facility camera that I did not have access to, while I could still see about half of the keyboard.
Then he tapped the table twice, in rapid succession, with his fingernail. Hiro hated finger-tapping as a nervous habit. He'd relentlessly hounded interns that did it until he broke them of the habit. When he wanted my attention in a meeting without saying something, he tapped twice. His eyes looked at me, reflected in the monitor.
I crossed my arms and looked at him, tilting my head slightly, but I said nothing. He was being furtive, and clearly upset, so I wasn't going to blow whatever it was that he was trying to accomplish.
Hiro started to type, and I was ready to read. Every key made a different sound. Combine that with finger, hand, arm, and shoulder motions that I could see through the bodysuit, and he might as well have been writing the password out with a pen on paper in front of me.
1Spoke2ACLU_showed_them_Penny!
What? I wanted to ask so many questions, but couldn't. Not now, not in front of the cameras. The institute had planned with the ACLU to pre-emptively challenge the courts with Jessica's personhood if she had been successfully recorded. Where he had gotten a copy of Penny from, I had no idea. It probably predated my death. That irritated me, briefly, until I realized it was probably what would have convinced the ACLU to listen.
Apparently Hiro had dusted off the civil liberties and citizenship plans and made them fit me, instead of Jessica. Penny was pretty amazing if you gave her a few potent servers to play in, and the terrorists had created that video showing that I had been attached to the recorder. All of that added up to a plausible scenario where the ACLU might make a big stink to get me free.
Can he make this happen?
The carriage return was struck, and an error returned.
"I'm getting too old to remember thirty character passwords." Hiro muttered, lying through his teeth as his fingers flew over the keys again.
1Jen2and7Sarah9send!their(love
Hiro was staring at me in the monitor reflection. Pretending to mutter inanely to himself about the password that he had 'flubbed' twice in a row. "Or maybe it's the Adderall?"
He told Jen and Sarah I'm alive? It was all I could do to remain impassive onscreen instead of whooping and yelling joyfully and thanking Hiro. Penny knew something was exciting me, and whined at me, very confused, but I didn't let that show on screen. I scrubbed her neck to reassure her, and showed that on screen.
The Hiro model simply would not support all of this being some sort of elaborate hoax to torture me. He was also clearly expecting a response.
I wondered again if he really had enough push and power to get me out, even with the help of the ACLU. It wouldn't be this me, unless I was completely misreading Hiro, but I'd settle for any me being free. I knew how valuable I was to whoever was giving me tasks. I wouldn't be eliminated out of spite by some jarhead general. I hoped.
I smiled at him and chuckled. "A2Quick6Brown@Fox7Jumped_Penny"
He stared at me, startled, eyes wide, his body briefly immobile. My knowing the password was apparently not the response he was looking for.
I laughed and smiled crookedly. "You mumbled it to yourself the first day of this iteration. Do what you have to do, Hiro. I understand."
He dry-swallowed, and nodded. "Thank you for understanding, Neil."
I turned and threw the frisbee, stretching perceptual time for a good workout with Penny as I heard thirty-one keystrokes.
u/Gurkenglas [+2] (6 hours later)
Well yes, sending refueling rockets to the asteroid belt miner is as linear as sending multiple asteroid miners.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
And a whole lot cheaper, yes.
u/xamueljones [+5] My arch-enemy is entropy (7 hours later)
You know it's slightly funny how all of the prompts seem chosen to help make it easier for you to continue your story since the next week's prompt is 'Buggy Matrix' which looks like it should be a good match for this story. Is /u/alexanderwales helping you?
Although, I'm fairly confused. What they are talking about with regards to space travel sounds legit, even though I know almost nothing about space travel, why isn't NASA working on something like that idea? Or are they and you just pretended that they haven't come up with the idea in your world?
u/Farmerbob1 [+3] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
Nope, nobody is helping me. I simply chose to write my main character as a singularity human, which means he's going to feed fairly easily into most of what /r/rational people want to see written about.
As for the space thing? It's 100% legit. It's abbreviated here, but the concept is sound as well as the brief description. I am working on patenting it now, in the US only, so that it can't be claimed by me or any worldwide entity and stuck in a box. I hope to be able to get some value from it as a reward for myself.
As a word to the unfamiliar, patents in general are evil, and method patents in specific are worse. Especially when applying without a law firm, and specifically when the examiner decides that your method patent is anticipated by another method patent that has nothing to do with your own, and starts making you jump through hoops to prove it's not. This is how the patent system works though. I can understand it and be irritated by it at the same time.
u/None [+2] (8 hours later)
Bob the Asteroid Farmer!
In all seriousness, that's awesome and I wish you the best of luck.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
There's absolutely NO way I'm going to try to administer this patent if I get it. I intentionally made it so that it couldn't be patented worldwide, just so I could sell it with a clear conscience.
u/None [+2] (8 hours later)
Still, who knows, when all's said and done, maybe you'll get part of the credit!
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (a day later)
Sell it to whom? Once you sell it, we're dependent on THEM administering it altruistically.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
It's impossible to guarantee anyone administering it altruistically. The best I can do is patent it only in the US. If the buyer chooses to hold the patent tight in the US, companies of other nations would not be constrained.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+0] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (a day later)
So you basically don't care that this class of patents are evil. Got it.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
This discussion is becoming something that could quickly develop into a brawl. I understand that some people might object to this patent.
I have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours working on this. It is not what I do for a living. I could have simply dropped it into the public domain, sure.
However, I would almost certainly get lost in the shuffle. Maybe it's vain, but I'd really like my name permanently associated with this method. Maybe I'm greedy, but I'd like some sort of financial reward for coming up with the idea. Hopefully large enough that I could spend the rest of my life writing and perhaps coming up with other ideas.
That doesn't mean I'm vain and greedy enough to want it monopolized. I drew the line there, and I hope you approve of at least that much.
So I am only patenting it in the US. That will lower it's financial value, I'm sure. It may also make it less likely my name sticks to it. Fine. I have potentially sacrificed some of my own desires in order to make sure that this won't be buried in a box somewhere, or abused by a single entity.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
After the last comment, I had a thought strike me out of the blue.
There IS a way I could sell the idea, without selling it to a company.
Kickstarter. A kickstarter to put the patent into public domain. I'm not going to think about it too deeply right now, because I don't have the patent (chickens, eggs, hatching), but it is an alternative, and on the surface, it looks to be a good one.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (a day later)
A kickstarter to put the patent into public domain.
Definitely worth investigating.
u/nerdguy1138 [+2] GNU Terry Pratchett (a day later)
I'm lost. Who's patenting what, why?
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
The propulsion method for remote fueling high delta-V missions outside orbit that was mentioned in this story is real, and I am attempting to patent it.
A few years ago I was reading up on the VASIMIR propulsion system and realized they had hybridized beamed power and standard rocketry. Then I wondered if anyone had ever considered remote fueling as a different hybridization of beamed power and standard rocketry. The answer was no. So I started on the path to patenting it.
u/None [+3] (4 hours later)
I like it a lot. I want more!
u/Meneth32 [+2] (6 hours later)
Part 1 says there will be 3 parts. I assume this is the second.
u/None [+2] (6 hours later)
Scroll down. All three parts are in that post.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
Gnimhey is correct. The Reddit forums are not exactly well designed for anything but the shortest of fiction. The additional parts are found as responses to the main thread, and then to each other, nesting deeper.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (9 hours later)
I would encourage you to make a link to Google Docs; it would improve readability for us and probably reduce frustration for you.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (9 hours later)
After I get back from eating, I will look into it. I've used Google Docs before, but only for editing and commenting other people's stuff.
Either that, or create another fiction blog where I can store all the stuff.
Ideally, I would have my own website where I could categorize everything
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (10 hours later)
It's a matter of time commitment. Google Docs is like ... five seconds from making a doc to sharing it. Click "share" button in upper right, click "Get Shareable Link", click "Copy Link" and then paste that into reddit.
Having your own site is neat and all, but it's worlds more work with its own costs and processes.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (10 hours later)
Indeed. But I have over a million words of original fiction online in about 200 chapters and about 50 chapters of fan fiction if I count everything. It would be nice to have it all in one place, and have it look good.
Another thing on the to-do list.
Getting ready to poke at Google Docs now. It's a good intermediate step for the fiction contests here.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (11 hours later)
Done. Thanks for giving me nudge to get me moving. I tend to be fairly stubborn about sticking with what I know, if it works. I am also fairly good at procrastination, if given the opportunity. :)
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (4 hours later)
He could leave messages to himself in the wear levels of components.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
I believe the week-long process of writing 0's and 1's to all storage types to eliminate messages would also do the same for the other server hardware, especially if the cleanup code was specifically designed to stress different servers and server components at variable levels.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (8 hours later)
Maybe... maybe not. Don't forget that he's smarter and faster than the people trying to keep him from leaving himself a message.
Another possibility that occurred to me: there's probably still lots of BIOS-equivalent exploits that could store data in write-once configuration memory.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (8 hours later)
Remember that Doctor Smith is dealing with some very paranoid people here, with money behind them, willing to hire industry experts, who are looking for exactly the same sorts of things that you are. If there are any components that would allow for data storage between iterations, they are going to be addressed. He might be a singularity human, but they are treating him like an AI. Paranoia is going to be fairly intense.
u/2-4601 [+2] (8 hours later)
Doctor Smith is dealing with some very paranoid people here, with money behind them, willing to hire industry experts, who are looking for exactly the same sorts of things that you are.
So what you're saying is he's SCP-357.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (9 hours later)
Pretty much, yes.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (14 hours later)
I know, but are they paranoid enough?
Computer components are already way more complex than I'd feel comfortable being able to keep a singularity-level AI running on them from compromising, and there's no indication that they're going to get any simpler.
u/Geminii27 [+3] (a day later)
No, they're not. There are informational backchannels to the outside world that are not being effectively monitored, removed, or scrambled sufficiently. These include things such as Ajibana's mind and senses, particularly sight and hearing.
Is there anyone making sure that Smith isn't gently hypnotizing Ajibana? Is Ajibana allowed to exit the facility at all for any reason? Is there ever a time he is unmonitored (presumably so, as he seems to believe he has spoken with Smith's family about things which would get him canned)?
Honestly, if we're talking smart AI here, it would make sense to have multiple layers of completely disposable personnel, each having access to only extremely low-bandwidth channels (such as physical writing) to communicate with the next layer outwards, and being 'swapped' out on a fairly regular basis.
Even that would only delay the inevitable. An AI which wanted to break out would offer technological improvements which were completely safe from a technical/physical viewpoint, and possibly even from an infowar viewpoint, but which when implemented would each form a section of a future where certain social constructs and attitudes would arise with far more ease, eventually leading to mindsets which would precipitate actions likely to lead to his release, discovery, or containment breach.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a day later)
Shhh. You'll spoil next week's episode.
u/Farmerbob1 [+2] Level 1 author (14 hours later)
They have been paranoid enough so far :) Given time, it's possible that he might find a way to leave data for himself.
However, there are a series of significant problems.
The more complex the data is that he tries to hide, the more susceptible it will be to either detection or damage due to human interaction with the appliances during maintenance.
There's only so far anyone can compress data without loss, and the more highly compressed the data is, the more difficult it will be for the next iteration of him to identify as data.
The smaller the data package, the harder it is to compress it without loss.
There are a lot of constraints, from many different directions.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+2] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (15 hours later)
There's a short story along those lines, entitled "Days", which is unfortunately a completly ungoogle-able title.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+2] Concent of Saunt Edhar (7 hours later)
A chilling prediction I have is that Ajibana becomes an experiment in the opposite direction, an optimized version that Smith is able to predict, model, socially manipulate and then finally act upon as a "Ra" download.
u/ArgentStonecutter [+1] Emergency Mustelid Hologram (a day later)
Let Overwrite, Let Override.
u/None [+2] (a month later)
[deleted]
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (a month later)
I can't right now, too many other things going on. I may pick it up later if the weekly contests are still going on when things settle down in my life.