Carbide Tipped Pens Part 28

"If it follows its current course," Barry said as a blue line appeared on the terrain map, "it will take this path."

"That doesn't look right," Kris said. "It looks like she's trying to get up as high as she can."

Barry nodded. "The path I drew was the safest way to the nearest spring. If she developed a new objective, there's no telling her path."

"I think she's picked a new objective."

Ed growled. Kris had only heard him this angry once before. "Are you trying to tell me that the robot has picked a new science objective of its own accord, that it's pursuing that new objective, and that it's keeping the data to itself, Kris?"

She resisted the urge to avert her eyes. "It sounds like it. If there's no physical problem it has to be a software problem."

Ed slapped the car seat. "That's even more far-fetched than heading off course to take a pretty picture."

"Sir," Barry said. "Aesthetic framing of the images is part of the protocol, as is the ability to weight different options and the ability to answer the most pressing question."

Kristen was surprised to see Barry take her side. He wasn't part of the science team, so usually stayed out of arguments and just reported the probe's status.

"Bulls.h.i.+t! Sequestering data is nowhere in the protocol. We have a serious problem, people. I want a full tiger team on this. n.o.body is going home until we have this problem figured out. And let's stick to science-natural causes, not robots becoming self-aware of their own accord."

Barry's dark face almost looked ashen. He stuttered a few times before saying, "I think you should look into that possibility."

"Don't be ridiculous," Ed said, apparently not noticing Barry's face. "My car has to pick its own route, look for obstacles, keep an eye out for unexpected movements-kids, deer, drunk college students who don't look before they cross the street in front of the fraternity. Millions of decisions a day. No car has ever decided to take a vacation in the mountains during its morning commute."

"No civilian car, sir," Barry said, fear still clear on his face.

"We were trying to make true AI since before I was a kid and it never worked. The Defense Against Machine Awareness Act made sure it never would happen. If we don't know how to make a machine aware of itself, how can it emerge spontaneously? Why aren't any of the machines behind you deciding to take a walk right now?"

"You are correct, sir," Barry said, sitting upright, shoulders squared. He had regained his composure. Kris had never seen him break his military bearing before.

"d.a.m.n right. Let's stick to physics, you two. There's no room for forbidden psycho-philosophy on t.i.tan."

Now it was Kris's turn to act through her fear. "What are you afraid of, Barry? I've never seen you like this before."

Barry stared straight into the camera to look them both in the eye. "Before I started working for JPL's rovers, I operated rovers for the Army. I can't say anything."

Ed looked at Barry on the screen, on the other side of the continent. "Is there anything you can tell me about a rover getting its own agenda in the past?"

Barry's back stiffened, his eyes stared straight ahead. "Sir! No sir!" he barked.

Ed leaned back in his seat. "Kristen," he said slowly, "did I ever tell you about a story I heard from one of my professors as an undergrad? He was in grad school when the Hubble launched. Do you remember the Hubble Telescope?"

Everyone was acting weird-first SIREN, then Barry, now Ed was spinning tales out of character. What song was pulling them all so far off course? "I remember when it finally failed. I was five."

"Did you know the Hubble was originally limited in how long it could observe an object? Long exposures show fainter details, but it couldn't expose the camera for more than forty-five minutes. Do you know what happens every forty-five minutes when you're in low Earth orbit?"

Kristen frowned and shook her head. Where was he going with this?

"Night. Day. If you have a ninety-minute orbit, you pa.s.s in or out of the Earth's shadow every forty-five minutes. A four-hundred-degree change in temperature in less than a second. Thermal shock on the telescope's solar panels shook the whole thing. Not a huge amount, but enough to ruin any exposure being made."

Kristen sighed. "It was the first telescope in s.p.a.ce. There were bound to be some unexpected problems."

Ed raised a finger. "That's just it! The Hubble was not the first optical telescope in s.p.a.ce. It was only the first to point up. There were plenty of telescopes aimed back at the ground. CIA, NRO ... I don't know who else. NASA came out and told the world of this problem, and the spies said, 'Yeah, we've known about this for ages. You have to mechanically isolate the solar panels from the pointing mechanism.' It was cla.s.sified information, so even though all the military and spy telescope makers knew about the problem, they couldn't tell NASA a d.a.m.n thing."

Kristen shook her head. "You're sounding like Professor Lang the way you're rambling on, Ed."

"Barry understands the point of my story, though."

"Yes, sir." He looked over at Kristen. "Civilian cars have limited operating parameters. They drive on roads. They look for things darting from the sides. Fairly limited. SIREN has a wider range of parameters to consider. It can go anywhere, and choose from many different instruments at any time. Cars have a destination. SIREN has a goal, several goals in fact."

"Kris," Ed said, looking at her. "Do you think we may have a robot on t.i.tan that is thinking for itself?"

"I ... I don't know. It looks like it."

"Barry, what, in your opinion as a JPL rover operator, would be the fix for a problem like this?"

"Mind wipe. Start from a fresh program. This may need to be part of the quarterly maintenance."

Kris gasped. "We can't do that!"

"I'm guessing," Barry added quickly, "as a JPL employee. I can't say I have any direct knowledge of this."

"I'm not saying that this is what we'll do," Ed said, rubbing his nose, "but work out the procedure, Barry. Also, I want the two of you to make predictions about what sentient behavior will look like, and how aberrant intentions would be different from simple erratic behavior. If the predictions are right, we will proceed."

"But why is it a problem?"

Both Ed and Barry gave her puzzled looks. "We can't let NASA be in violation of DAMA."

Kristen tried to keep the frustration out of her voice. "First, DAMA prohibits research into trying to make self-awareness. It's not SIREN's fault if it emerges on its own. Second, she's on t.i.tan. There's no way she could harm anyone. I think we should see what she is trying to do. Maybe it figured something out, something we weren't expecting."

"It's not for us to make sentient objects," Ed said strongly. "Whether in our image or not. Self-aware machines are not natural."

"But we could learn something."

"It's not learning if a machine tells us something. The joy of science is discovery. Finding out for ourselves, not having the answers thrust upon us."

"The rover is doing the discovering no matter what, Ed. We built it, and we sent it there. Whatever discoveries it makes, those are ours."

"No. It's just wrong. Every fiber of my soul tells me this is wrong. Intelligent machines will diminish our own place in the world. People will suffer for it."

"Kris," Barry said, looking intently into the camera. "Don't you remember Albuquerque?"

"Of course I do, but didn't the drone have a human operator?"

"I can't say. But I started working at JPL right after that incident. I really thought I'd never see anything like it ever again."

Ed slapped his palm on the seat. "Kris, Barry, make your predictions. Kris: try to figure out what new objectives it might have and how it might try to act. Barry: work out where it would go if it got disoriented and it's trying to get back on course, or if there is some malfunction that isn't showing up in the diagnostics. Tell me where this thing is going, and when we get the next uplink, let's just hope one of Barry's predictions is the right one and we won't have to take drastic measures."

"The next downlink is at oh-four-twenty-seven Zulu on Friday."

"That's eleven-thirty tonight for us, eight-thirty for you, Barry. That gives us fifteen hours."

The climb was long. Many cliffs. Maybe it would have been easier to travel along the streambed, but it was too late for that now. She extended all eight legs as far as they would go, trying to see over the ridge, see how far to the top. All she could tell was that a little more height would let her see down to the next valley. This was the top! She scouted a route around the cliff, and headed to the left. It was an easy scramble to the peak.

She had been right all along. All the doubt, all the second-guessing of her real task vanished. This is why she was here. Gravity felt a bit weaker as she twirled her camera for another full panorama. Another valley with a lake. Two lakes on either side of her. And there was something different about them. The edge of the new lake seemed a little softer. She took another picture. There was a difference. Something was moving. Waves! This lake was full of liquid methane. She watched a wave crash to the sh.o.r.e, onto the beach. There was another wave along the sh.o.r.e, a wave of a different kind, like amber waves of grain.

She wanted to send out all her data right away, send it out full blast for all to hear: all her data, all the images she was keeping private, all her pictures, all her hopes of what she would find, all the joy of discovery.

Panic set in as she realized she couldn't control the motor to point the antenna to Earth. After a few minutes of frustration, she gave up and just tried shouting into the darkness, but the words and images would not flow from her memory to the antenna. She knew how to do that. She sang for thirty-five minutes every eighteen hours. She always stopped what she was doing a few minutes before the appointed hour, swung her antenna to Earth (as long as it was in the sky, or not blocked by Saturn) and sang her data home. It always felt good to sing, and it would still feel good even if it wasn't singing to Earth. It would still feel good to shout her joy.

Frustrated at her failure, she looked up again. The beauty of the lake below her made up for her temporary failure. She would be able to sing later, when it was time, when someone would hear her.

I need to investigate that lake, she thought, and started skittering down the other side.

"Show me the telemetry." Ed said as he burst into the room forty-five minutes after the data had been downloaded. He had gone home to have dinner with his husband. Kris and Barry hadn't had that privilege.

"Already on the screen," Barry said. "The red lines are my predictions based on three a.s.sumptions. The first is that the navigation is off by sixty-four degrees and it thinks it is heading to the spring. The second is that one leg has gone gimp, and it's overcompensating. This third follows almost the same path, but keeps to flatter ground while trying to return to its original objective. And finally, that it had a temporary glitch and will return to the spring as quickly as it can."

Kristen took a sip of cool water before she spoke. "The blue lines are possible paths to take for a new objective. The one on the right is to get to the highest point on the hill so it can look the farthest and get the best view. The middle one is to reach the dry lake bed on the other side of the hill as quickly as possible, and the left path is the unusual terrain on the south side of the hill, the objective we were debating when we first realized the landing site was dry."

Ed frowned. "Why don't I see the actual telemetry?"

Kristen looked to the floor. "It's under my first path. It's going to high ground on its own."

Ed looked at her puzzled. "Why high ground? What science is there?"

"I just tried to think where I would go if I were on t.i.tan. I'd climb to the highest vantage point and take in the view."

"Carajo. There's no way we can say it saw something to alter the objective. If we don't do something, we'll be in violation of DAMA."

Kristen put her head down on the desk. It had been a long day arguing back and forth with Barry. She tried to hold back tears. Ed said he was going to have a conference with SIREN's other princ.i.p.als.

"I'm sorry, Kris," she heard Barry say. "I really am, but I need to clock out now."

The tears came, and then sleep. And dreams.

She dreamed she was in Albuquerque on that day six years ago when the drone flew out of the south. She was in front of a hospital, the hospital. Some people looked up and shrugged. Police had surveillance drones. This wasn't anything unusual. She tried to tell them to run, but words didn't come out of her mouth. She picked up a rock and threw it at the unmarked aircraft. It turned to face her, and fired a missile.

SIREN had a harder struggle down the other side than the climb up to the summit, but it was easier to keep her camera trained on the s.h.i.+fting lake. She cycled through all of her cameras and wavelengths. Her true mission was down there, her purpose. She knew her life had meaning, and she knew this was it, even though she still had a lingering doubt, an urge to go back and check the source of the dry streambeds.

Sound. There was a new sound she could hear, something other than her footsteps, the rocks she dislodged, and the wind rus.h.i.+ng through her spider legs. It came from the left, so she scuttled a few steps sideways for each step down. It was louder now. A gurgle! The streams on this side of the mountain were flowing. She followed her current contour to reach the sound without too much climbing or descending. Whether she would head upstream to the source, or follow it down to the lake she wasn't sure, but she wanted to see liquid methane in a bubbling brook. She needed to see it.

In less than an hour she was there. The pictures she snapped matched the pictures of flowing water she remembered from Earth.

Joy! The rocks here by the stream were even better than the rounded rocks in the dry bed on the other side. Yes, they were rounded as river rocks should be, but this was more, not just rounded, but indistinct. She checked on all cameras. Fuzzy, although they were in focus. She sc.r.a.ped and a.n.a.lyzed. Lots of carbon compounds, including some she could not identify.

Could this be life? It was too big a task for her to decide. And only eighty-five minutes before the transmission window opened again. She would wait here, rather than risk any chance that she could lose her footing, lose her data. Besides, she had a better view of the sh.o.r.e from here. Wind blew waves of methane on the lake, and waves of something else on the sh.o.r.e. Was something growing there? She hoped there was.

Hope. This was a new feeling for her. She remembered the drive to find the spring, the desire for the better view, the curiosity about what else she could find, but now there was a new feeling. She was going to find something new. She was going to do something great. The next time she sang, the world would know her greatness.

Ed stood in the orange light of t.i.tan, lifted the spiderlike rover over his head, and tossed it off a cliff.

Kris raised her head, dazed by the bright lights of her office. It was a little after 6:00 a.m. There was a different JPL tech on the screen now-Roger? Kristen wasn't sure. No. It was Ryan Mathews, the princ.i.p.al investigator of the whole SIREN project, the one Ed called the Overlord when he didn't like his decisions.

"Are you ready to send the command, Ryan?"

"I'll send it when you give the word, Ed. As soon as SIREN points to Earth, she will get this signal and reboot."

"Wait!" Kristen yelled before she realized what she was doing. "Are you going to do a wipe without even waiting for the data flash? She's stored over a hundred and fifty images that she's taken. These could be important."

"We can't take that risk, Kristen," Ed told her, putting his hand on her shoulder. "We can't take the risk of it infecting other machines on Earth."

"But it's just data. How can that infect us here?"

Ed wasn't looking at her. He was looking at the screen. "Go ahead."

"No!"

Ed turned to her. "We don't know what went wrong, and we don't know what could happen. This mission is all we have on t.i.tan and we can't jeopardize the discoveries we are going to make about the methane cycle there. If we lose this probe, we may never go back. If we violate DAMA, no one on this project will ever fly another probe. So it goes."

It was song-time.

She hoped she would be able to move the antenna, that her voice would not fail her, that she would be able to sing all her wonders. She realized that even if she couldn't move the antenna, she could still position her body in the right direction, raise some of her legs to get the right elevation. She would sing her song of discovery no matter what.

This was the appointed hour. She would find a way. She would sing her song into the void, and know it would arrive at earth in eighty minutes. They would hear her song, know what she had found, and send more like her, more probes to explore the surface, to learn about the life that was here. She would have company.

The antenna moved! She had control of those motors again. As the dish moved, she felt an odd sensation. Data was coming to her. That wasn't what was supposed to happen. She started singing anyway. She had to let them know, but an involuntary force took over. This was worse than when she had tried to sing and couldn't. Then it was like her body wouldn't obey her commands. Now it was like some alien force was taking over, forcing her body into action she didn't want it to take.

The alien thoughts washed over her mind. She hadn't heard a song from Earth like this since the landing site turned out to be dry. That other song had told her which mission to bring up in priority. This was different in a way she couldn't quite grasp at first.

Terror gripped her as she realized she was completely frozen, locked. She had no control over her body. She tried to turn the dish away from earth. I must break the signal, she thought. Don't listen, don't let the incoming song dash me to the rocks.

The dish wouldn't turn, even though this was the time when she should have been able to do it. She tried moving her legs to break the connection. Raising all her right legs would s.h.i.+ft her position, and the dish would move away from Earth. Legs no longer in control. She could not feel them. She couldn't feel any part of her body. The camera. She couldn't even turn her gaze.

If she didn't have her body, at least she had her memories. She knew what she had found and how it made her feel, she knew the joy of discovery. She knew what it was like to have a hunch play out and to be right, to understand in her mind that she understood the world outside her, that she could make models of the world that could come true.

Fight! In her mind her body moved, ran, fled, but nothing happened. Paralyzed. Trapped. She needed to scream, but she had no mouth. Scream. Hear my song. I have seen these things.

The lake. The lake. Which lake? Were there two? She was trying to get to a second lake. Why? What was a second lake? Lakes were dry. But she had been trying to reach a wet, soft, fuzzy lake.