Keid, p.6
KEID, page 6
“We all know,” Dale said, “that we don’t do any real science while sitting in a conference room.” He looked around the table, taking in each participant, while ignoring Max, who had decided to join the meeting. “I think this time will be different. Both groups are investigating the same object. What any one of us discovers probably will have relevance to something someone else is doing.
“While I know you are keeping the database updated, not everything ends up there. So, we meet and talk here. For the next few minutes, I want each of you to seek out your counterpart on the other team and compare notes. Especially, talk about specific things you found interesting, but that didn’t reach the threshold for a database entry.”
For the next half hour, team members mingled, chatted, and sipped fresh coffee. This was always Max’s favorite time as he wandered from person to person, rubbing legs and emitting an occasional mew. He communed with his old friends and found several new ones.
While people moved around, chatting here and there, eBrad suddenly spoke up. “Listen up, People. I have something you all should hear.”
Everyone stopped talking and turned their attention to eBrad’s holoimage.
“I’ve been watching Max wander around almost randomly, but directing his attention to people he knows while stopping from time to time to meet someone new. Max is not part of our research—it’s entirely beyond his mental capacity. And yet, he is actually playing a role here. When you,” he pointed at a female member of his team, “leaned down to pet Max, you,” he pointed at a male member of Daphne’s team, “leaned down to meet him for the first time. You both ended up talking with each other—something that might not have happened otherwise. And that got me to thinking about the role argon might play. It may not be reactive, but it influences by its presence. As you return to your labs, keep this in mind. It may lead you to new insights.”
“It’s time to get inside a bot to trace out its internal electronics, Chị ơi,” Brad told Sally. From the day they met in the theoretical physics department of Colorado School of Mines, Sally and Brad had been an item. She was a diminutive and fragile import from Vietnam, and he was a bear-like Polish American giant from Chicago. Between them, they had advanced theoretical physics more than anyone in recent history. He affectionately called Sally by the Vietnamese term of endearment, Chị ơi, meaning Little Sister.
“Let me enter first,” eBrad told eSally, “in case something malicious resides there.”
“Gallant of you,” Sally said, “but do you really think there might be something inside? This is one of probably trillions of similar devices. Either all of them are malicious, or none of them are.” Her eyes twinkled as she kidded the upload of the man she loved. At times, she found it difficult to distinguish between her flesh-and-blood partner and his identical-looking electronic upload. When Brad took her in his huge arms, however, all doubt disappeared.
“Let’s send in several tensors,” eSally said, “to get the lay of the land. Then you or I can make a personal visit.”
Once Engineering had perfected a Nanocosm for waldo construction, making another waldo was a matter of supplying raw materials and fifteen minutes. Sally and Brad had two waldos on their lab bench inside an evacuated chamber identical to the one in Engineering, and a third attached to the open bench top.
“We’ll start with an inactive unit,” eBrad said.
Brad secured an inert bot with the bench-top waldo. “Want me to crack it open?” he asked.
“That’s the only way we know how to get inside right now.”
Brad pushed a fine wire into the open bot back until he met resistance. “Okay, see if you can follow the wire inside.”
eBrad generated a search tensor and sent it along the fine wire, following its progress through its feedback signals. The tensor reached the wire’s end, but found nothing to latch onto. The wire ended at a smooth wall.
Thinking that the electronics might be encapsulated, eBrad said, “I will make the wire hot. You push it gently. Let’s see if it will penetrate the wall that way.”
As the wire heated and Brad pushed it with his waldo, it slowly penetrated the wall surface until several minutes later it came up against something solid.
“Hold everything,” eBrad said. “I’ve got an electrical contact.”
The tensor slipped across the contact into the bot’s central circuitry.
“There’s a lot of stuff here I recognize, and things I don’t,” eBrad said. “I’m gonna have to look at this directly. A tensor just doesn’t produce fine enough resolution.”
eBrad removed the tensor and inserted a part of himself down the wire into the bot’s inner works. He found himself in a large hall with doors on all sides, dozens of them. He split himself into smaller branches and passed through each door. Each door appeared to lead to a bot function, but eBrad had no way of discovering the function or how it worked. Everything was static, frozen at the moment the bot went inert.
At the bottom of the bot just ahead of the jet engine, eBrad found a connection to the outside, a tiny conductive graphene plate that was sensitive to specific digital carriers. This appeared to be how individual bots received their instructions.
Many subjective hours later, eBrad pulled himself out of the bot. For his companions in the lab, only a few minutes had passed.
“I need a live bot,” eBrad said. “Otherwise, I can’t determine the purpose for most of the things I saw.”
Sally removed the outer chamber and inserted a small graphene disk into the wall of the inner chamber. “This will allow you to enter and maintain contact to keep your backup current, so if something happens to you in there, you can pick up where you left off,” she said.
Sally and Brad slipped their hands into their waldo controllers and gently removed a viable bot from the stasis sphere. Sally held it bottom side up, while Brad stretched a wire between the inner chamber conducting disk and the microscopic disk near the back end of the bot’s underside.
“Okay, eBrad, we’re ready for you,” Brad said.
eBrad checked the connection from the inner chamber disk. It was solid. He moved down the wire to the tiny plate on the bot’s belly. Also solid. He moved small parts of himself into the bot, checking things carefully as he moved inward. He moved slowly and deliberately, checking out every connection and function he encountered. He reached the large hallway lined with doors twenty minutes later.
Fast-flowing streams of data filled the chamber, moving between doors, sometimes splitting, sometimes merging. He ducked into a stream, letting it take him through a door into an area that generated function—what, was not obvious, but it was definitely doing something.
eBrad pulled himself out of the bot, through the connecting wire and back into Andromeda.
“Wow!” he said with wonder. “It’s like a whole world inside there.”
He addressed eSally. “You and I need to generate a whole series of small tensors that can scatter throughout a bot to discover every function.”
eBrad looked at Sally and Brad. “Give us a few minutes to set this up. Then we’ll work together to make it happen.”
eSally and eBrad took several subjective hours generating and programming two dozen tensors each. They designed the tensors to enter the bot, travel to the hall, and select a specific door. Once a tensor had followed a stream through a door to its operating destination, it probed every aspect of the operation, sending the data back to its respective upload.
Sally and Brad waited patiently for the fifteen actual minutes eSally and eBrad took to set up their tensors. They verified the bot remained immobilized.
“Okay,” Sally said. “We’re ready for your tensors.”
There was no outward difference. The bot remained immobile on its back. Its legs continued to writhe. Inside the bot, the little packets of energy all the uploads called tensors did their work. They got their name from Thorpe back when he was the original upload, the Icicle that started it all. Because Thorpe was a mathematician and engineer, when he awakened as an electronic upload from his cryogenic preservation, he interpreted things from a mathematical perspective. He found he could manipulate and control the energy packets that seemed to him like mathematical tensors. The name stuck.
“How long will this take?” Sally asked.
“We have no idea,” eSally answered. “The complexity inside that bot is staggering—literally beyond anything we have ever seen.”
“We’ll map it out and figure it out eventually,” eBrad said, “but it’s going to be awhile.”
Daphne did not have the luxury of something to enter literally and investigate. Instead, she and her team focused on what they called the Max Syndrome, after eDale’s observation that Max acted as a catalyst in bringing together people with parts of the solution who might not otherwise get together.
Daphne kept abreast of what Sally and Brad with their uploads were doing. While the tensors were still investigating, she visited their lab.
“Is there a way,” she asked, “once your tensors have completed their task, of inserting a charged molecule into the electronic mix?”
“There might be,” Sally said. “What molecule with what charge?”
“We have discovered a way to squeeze an argon atom between the atoms in a water molecule. It’s a tricky process, and the resulting argon compound is unstable, but we can keep it viable for a few minutes. It carries a charge of one because of the separation of the two hydrogen atoms and the oxygen. When the argon atom finally squirts out like a watermelon seed, the remaining water molecule loses its charge.”
“Let’s set it up for tomorrow morning. The tensors should have finished by then.”
The next morning, Daphne’s people brought their argon-squeezing apparatus into Sally’s and Brad’s lab. Sally set up an active receptor bot while Brad arranged the wiring to accommodate moving a charged molecule.
eBrad eased the argon compound down the wire and coaxed it through the conducting plate into the bot circuitry. He got as far as the hall before the argon squeezed out from between the two hydrogens and the oxygen to fly freely through the hall. To his surprise, the water molecule simply disappeared, following a data stream, while the argon atom continued to bounce around the hall.
eBrad withdrew and arranged to shepherd a larger number of argon compound molecules down the wire and into the bot. This time, when his charges arrived in the hall, the water molecules again disappeared, but the larger number of argon atoms bounced around so fiercely that they diverted several data streams and killed the bot.
eBrad withdrew again and explained what he had observed. “We introduced the argon through the use of a charged argon compound. Let’s feed argon into a bot’s maw and see what happens.”
Setting this run up was somewhat more complicated. Sally and Brad produced a viable bot from the stasis sphere and immobilized it on its back. They also inserted a very tiny nanotube cylinder into the bot’s maw, hooking the other tube end to an argon flask.
eBrad arranged to enter the bot and be in the hall when Sally introduced argon into the bot’s maw. eSally entangled herself with eBrad so she could relay his comments to the others. She informed Sally that eBrad was in the hall. Sally cracked the argon valve. The bot went inactive.
eBrad reported it took less than a second for the argon from the flask to enter the hall, where it disrupted everything.
The Chief Engineer and his team continued to investigate how a microbot could consume virtually anything, ending up with Q-carbon and with graphene and carbyne formed into carbynophene, and solid rocket fuel that could produce five minutes of propulsion at 0.1 g.
Ustrun Strozid split his research team into two groups. Bolaik Taclit led the team looking into carbon generation. Kidlit Mazop led the team investigating fuel. Both these Asterian research engineers had extensive mini black hole generating experience, and Strozid’s gut told him the answers to both questions lay hidden in mini black hole technology.
Taclit spent his first few hours revisiting everything the argon and bot electronics teams had covered. One item jumped out at him. The argon team had produced an argon compound by forcing an argon atom between the two hydrogens and single oxygen in a water molecule. He called Daphne on his internal Link.
“What held the argon atom in place inside the water molecule?” he asked.
“Pressure,” she said, and gave him the numbers.
“That’s it?”
“We temporarily pulled the water molecule apart without severing the bonds, lined up the argon atom between them, and let it snap shut. The pressure held the argon atom in place for a relatively long time.”
“What about heat? Did the compound generate much heat?”
“A great deal,” Daphne said. “We siphoned it off to keep the compound from decomposing.”
“Do you think we could do that with deuterium—fusing it to helium, and then fusing the helium to carbon?”
“Probably not,” Daphne said. “You’re talking temperatures like those at the center of a star. A carbynophene bot cannot withstand that.” She went silent, thinking. “What do you know about LANRs—Lattice Assisted Nuclear Reactions?”
“Not a lot,” Taclit said. “We Asterians concentrated on mini black hole technology. We knew nothing about LANRs until you Humans came along. Basically, you guys adopted our mini black hole technology and abandoned your LANRs.”
“Back in the twentieth century, Earth scientists started researching nuclear reactions near room temperature. They called it cold fusion. That research evolved into LANRs.” Daphne said. “Here’s the thing. LANRs fuse deuterium into helium without high pressure and heat. We never took the technology beyond that. I can think of no theoretical reason why one could not fuse helium to carbon in a LANR.”
Kidlit Mazop asked a simple question of his team. “What is the theoretically most proficient solid rocket fuel?”
After a few hours of researching the literature by his people, he received an answer: Metallic hydrogen.
His next question was about what solid oxidizer was best. The answer came out of the past—twenty-first century Earth: Ammonium dinitramide or ADN.
He pulled his team together. “Our problem has defined itself. How does a bot manufacture metallic hydrogen and ADN, and how does it form them into a solid fuel pellet?”
Within several weeks, Taclit’s team had a working LANR that produced carbon from deuterium. They still needed to scale it down to microbot size, and come up with a way to convert the carbon to graphene, carbyne, and Q-carbon. A month after that, they had their answer.
Mazop’s team found a way to reverse the LANR process, producing deuterium from anything, anything at all. They passed this process to Taclit’s team to complete their goal of converting anything into carbon and then graphene, carbynophene, and Q-carbon.
Using an adaptation of the Daphne team approach, Mazop’s people learned how to compress hydrogen into metallic hydrogen. They created ADN using Taclit’s LANR process and found a way to combine metallic hydrogen and ADN into minuscule solid fuel pellets that produced the proper thrust for the right time.
The only remaining microbot question was why the bots had a built-in susceptibility to argon. The answer to that question would come later in their investigation of the Dyson Sphere.
Phoenix Starship Andromeda—Bridge
Thorpe sat in the Captain’s Chair, something he had done a great deal of late, ever since the microbots had first attacked Andromeda. His teams had done well. They now understood how the bots worked, how they moved, and even how they navigated, although they still didn’t know the source of the instructions, except that they had to emanate from the Dyson Sphere.
Brad called him on his internal Link. “Can you come to our lab for a few minutes?”
“Mother, what is the range of the nearest bot swarm?” Thorpe asked.
“One thousand kilometers, heading toward us. The swarm will be here in fifty-six minutes.”
“If I’m not back in forty-five minutes, jump out five thousand kilometers, but ensure there are no close swarms at the destination.”
Thorpe stepped through a portal to Sally’s and Brad’s lab. An evacuated chamber sat on their bench. A stasis sphere, two inactive bots, two waldos, and three chunks of something Thorpe could not identify were inside the evacuated chamber. The entire thing was encased in a safety chamber filled with air. A box about the size of a printed book lay on the bench next to the safety chamber.
“What’s all the excitement?” Thorpe wanted to know.
“We made an interesting discovery,” Sally told him. “Watch.”
Using their waldos, they removed a viable bot from the sphere and set it on the evacuated chamber floor. Instead of attacking everything inside the chamber, it just sat quietly, waiting.
“Now, watch this,” Brad said.
Suddenly, the bot moved to one of the carcasses and consumed it. Then it stopped moving. After a few seconds, it moved to one of the chunks and consumed it. Almost immediately, it regurgitated a new bot. The new bot consumed the second chunk and went to a corner of the chamber where it commenced laying down what Thorpe thought might be a strip of carbynophene.
“Obviously, you’re controlling them,” Thorpe said.
“With my Link through this box,” Brad said. “eSally and eBrad mapped out the internal electronics—which door controls what function. Together, we worked out the coding of the individual data packets and created this box to transmit them. Something in the Dyson Sphere controls individual swarms—that’s the basic resolution.”
“You guys have done it again,” Thorpe said. “You’ve been at the inception of nearly every major advance we have made since we hired you out of Colorado School of Mines, what seems like so long ago. How soon until we can control nearby swarms?”
