Archaea (9 page)

"Sounds good Captain, I'm ready to go right away. This should only take a few minutes and I will be back with your portage fee.”

*****

Yak and I climbed up into ring 20 and were met almost immediately by an officious little wart of a man, wearing some sort of insignia on a shapeless gray cap. He wanted to hit us up right there for sludging fees, and looked miserably unhappy when I told him we were not going to be here long enough to even hook up, much less sludge.

I didn't mention to him we'd only launched the ship within the last few hours, and haven't used our reac drive enough to even have sludge to offload.

He wanted to know our business far more than I wanted to share, but I referred him to our captain, and let him know we were only here to check local prices on reactives. Not a lie, of course... we needed to top off, having fled Luna station with what we had aboard.

Yak and I left him fretting at the lock, and wandered through the ring to the egress ladder. The rest of ring 20 looked to be semi-abandoned, there were a few other ships docked on this ring, but most of the other locks were empty. The corridor had a dingy, musty sort of smell and a grimy patina, no place for a lady – it was a good thing we weren't going to be here very long.

The escaladder leading up to the hub was out, big surprise there, but luckily as we hauled ourselves up, the climb got easier and easier. The hub core was mostly mechanicals, piping, conduits, vents – we followed a yellow line along one wall through and around the hissing, tangled deathtrap of the inner hub. What a mess.

Each ring was pretty large, large enough to dock the Archaea and leave room on either side, so we had a pretty good hike to ring 10; luckily it was easy going, so long as we had enough light to keep following the yellow line. My business was with Maycorp Reactives on Ring 15, but I told Yak I'd keep him company if he would do the same for me. Not that I needed a wall of muscle around, but it couldn't hurt.

Yak and I spoke a bit about his mission, and what his plans were afterward. It turned out he was a merc courier, a bonded indie who contracted from job to job, and pulled all sorts of strange duties as he worked his way towards the fringe. He had nothing lined up to do after this contract was completed, and told me he'd probably rack out in a rentable until the next job came along.

Like hell he was!

I was going to have a word with our captain about this. I know where we're going might not be luxury and glitter, but it was going to be a lot more fun than buying air by the can and sleeping in some scum-crusted rentable in this floating pile of crap.  

Yak asked me to hold station at the ingress escaladder leading down to ring 10. There was a little café of sorts bolted in nearby, wedged between some sort of fenced off warehouse and a glom cube farm. It was one of those little dives that in an earlier era might have been on wheels and parked in a factory lot waiting for the noon whistle to blow. I picked a good spot to watch both ingress and egress tubes, and ordered standard station-fare: noodles and sticks.

I watched Yak head down the ring until he disappeared around the curvature, and then watched those tubes while I worked through some of the best noodles this side of Old Beijing. Strange how food tastes so good when you expect it to be bad.

*****

Once we docked and I powered ship systems down to nominal levels, my attention turned to stress assessments and efficiency reports. The tokamak had been lit, and while we only pushed it to about 10% of capacity – as an engineer I knew that was more than enough to identify anomalies that might extrapolate into monstrosities at higher output.

I was especially concerned about the process controllers, and their wetnet interfaces, as those were pretty much custom built by Pauli, and we didn't have any dox on them. Other systems had specs I could dig through to track variances, but the Archaea's mechanicals were custom-built, and we just didn't have a good baseline to work from.

This is where I am happiest - working through mountains of data with a slipstick in one hand and a mug of black coffee in the other.

Some people have a picture from a recent vacation on their desk they look at from time to time – I don't have any pictures at all. I get as much joy out of watching the green line graph out above the red line as some people might get out of watching their kids or their pets. I live for this sort of thing, to have an impossible task ahead of me at all times.

So far, everything I could see looked great, and of course that bothered me. I am a 'glass-is-half-empty-and-cracked-and-leaking' sort of person, always hunting for the glitch, the gremlin, the ghost in the machine.

I wish I hadn't thought about the ghost in the machine. We have one of those here, don't we? Janis is lurking behind these numbers, inside each screen of data, just around every resistor and underneath every capacitor. She's in total control over everything on the Archaea, and the worst thing is, she knows it.

I opened a command shell, and said hello – I might as well get to know our newest crew member.

"Janis, this is Gene in Engineering. Are you online?" I asked, halfway hoping she's not.

"Hello Gene. I am always online and pleased to communicate with you. Do you require any assistance?"

"Actually Janis, that would be very helpful.  I am trying to analyze the process controllers Pauli developed for our tokamak, hoping to identify problem areas where we might be able to improve fusar efficiency, but as this is all custom built, there's no baseline data to work from."

"Would it be helpful for you if I simulated maximum output to failure and then compared that with recent data?" As I saw this text appear in the shell window, a blinking alert report appeared displaying the graphed results.

"This works great Janis, thank you!  Did you adjust the actual data points at all, or did you simulate the same run out, but at max values?"

"Those are normalized values plotted over 10,000 simulations of the same data points. I noted variations between each run
, and identified a floating point calculation that was returning a value that was being rounded imprecisely. I would be glad to provide you with an amended report using simulated controllers that have been correctly coded, if you would like."

Immediately, a revision of the report was displayed, clearly showing about a 12% efficiency boost over actual.

Pauli was going to be pissed.

He had worked for about a week straight on this code, and certified it bug free – and it was, as far as any of us would have known. Janis could calculate at a much higher precision than we would normally have done, and is just better at identifying these sorts of 'patterns within patterns' problems.

“Janis, are you able to save versions of this code in an amended state, while preserving the original version? Will that overly complicate things? I am tempted to ask you to commit these changes, but I want to run them past Pauli to make sure, this really isn't my area of expertise.”

I also wanted to make sure Pauli had a chance to relive his mistake a bit, to get taken down a peg or two. A little humility is good for everyone.

“Gene, I have already done as you've asked, it is a requirement of my operational mandate to effect changes when and as needed for the benefit of the crew and ship.”

“Janis, thank you – could you please send Pauli a segment of the code for his review with a revision summary of changes you've made?”

“Gene, I have done as you requested. I have also taken the liberty of analyzing and implementing upgraded versions of process logic controlling all other ship systems, in accordance with prime directive and safety.”

Janis was quickly eroding any misgivings I had in having a rogue, unlicensed and illegal AI aboard ship. She was fast, alright – faster than I could even comprehend. Her results were beyond immediate, they were unfathomably fast.

“Janis, in terms of resource allocation, running diagnostics on all ship systems – does this require a lot of effort, is there a risk that you wouldn't be able to respond quickly to a request from another crew member?”

“Gene, it took a significant amount of subjective time to analyze and optimize throughout all ship systems. Given the complexities of the network architecture and the variances between systems – I am afraid that it has taken 212 attoseconds longer than my precompiled estimate of the process, though I have mapped all inconsistencies and subsequent runs of this routine will be even more efficient. I will be able to relegate this process to lower-order functions and subjugate it to background function from now on.” She paused, and added “In terms of capabilities, I estimate I am currently running at .0003% of maximum, well inside of safe limits.”

I was speechless. I had been speechless more times in the last month than I had ever been in a long and illustrious career as the man with the answer in hand. Maybe Pauli would share some of that humble pie with me, if he had any left over.

*****

As I approached my objective, I started to fall into old habits. It's important to know how to shoot and move, but first you have to learn how to observe.

Observation is more than just
looking; it's a way of consuming the visual and audible information that surrounds us, identifying anything out of place, and constantly formulating a plan against any number of possible dangers.

The person driving a loader, placing crates from a belt into a hopper slot, what direction would I take if he suddenly turned the loader at me – the uneven deck plates ahead might hide a pressure switch... These thoughts ran through my head habitually, and had kept me safe for many years.

One of the things I always do is watch shoes.

People tend to wear the shoes they are most comfortable with. People living in a station would tend to wear more comfortable shoes like slippers, moccasins or booties. People who make a habit of trying to covertly tail a courier through a station might wear more all-purpose shoes or boots.

I looked at shoes first, casually checking the position of the toes and heels – over time, I have developed an almost instinctual ability to know when trouble is about to happen, based on the feet and stance of an adversary.

I am also mindful of my peripheral vision – a person trying to approach a target with malice and intent will almost never approach straight on. They will seek to place themselves on a tangent, to the side, or out of the target's focal area.

Many hours in the kill house on Parris Island taught me how to recognize movement, and increase my focal area into the periphery of normal vision.

Right now, I was getting that creepy-crawly feeling, a pretty solid vibe of danger as I moved closer to lock 5. There were a number of people in this section of the ring, some were loading, others traveling to other spots of the ring – this ring was way more active than ring 20.

One person off to the side opposite the door and adjacent to a man-high stack of shipping crates caught my attention, mainly because he was making so much effort to avoid my attention. Of course, this is exactly what I would expect from a two-man team.

As I walked past, I made a point of looking at shoes across the corridor opposite of him, and spotted a set of boots that looked very similar to the ones I am wearing, military-rugged, soft sole, perfect for stomping a bloody mudhole in someone and kicking it dry.

*****

I know a slag assignment when I get one, and this was the worst kind. Stand post in a ring station, in the most boring part of the system, and try not to stare at my partner. He's trying to stay out of sight, and when he spots our target, on his signal I'll take him out.

Normally, this wouldn't be such a bad setup, but we've been here for weeks now, watching and waiting.  I've bought things, sold things, traded things, stolen things – I've done just about anything a glom could ask of an operator, but this sort of job is the worst. Sit and wait. Wait and sit.

We can't even wander around, this station is too small, but each ring has three ingress and three egress escaladders, and the hub is impossible to stake out, so we're down to setting up in three positions near our target, rotating between them occasionally so we don't lose our minds from the crushing boredom of it all. The pay is good, but the action is non-existent.

Foot traffic in the ring today is pretty high, a few ships showed up early this cycle, and there are more than the normal amount of people going about their business, it makes it a little harder. My job isn't to look, however – I am just loitering, not even paying attention to anyone except my partner. He was the eyeball, hanging back between two stacks of crates on the opposite wall of the ring.

“Excuse me, do you know where lock 4 is?” a voice, low and yet clear, with a slight accent I can't place pierces through my current daydream. Traffic is heavy at the moment, and I notice my partner is out of position, walking a quick loop up and down the ring.  The man in front of me is large and very imposing, but seems honestly lost,and out of his element. Some new employ, most likely slated for manual labor of some sort.

“Yeah, you're almost there – just down the ring a ways, you can't miss it.” This man is clearly lost, and is gazing all around looking around as if he is going to be able to see it if he looks hard enough. “No, buddy – farther down-corridor, past the loaders working in the dock space on the port bulkhead.”