FYS: The Visitors, Part Four

[jeriendhal]

Step One: Use current stores of feedstock and the ship’s Maker to create four one meter by one meter processor/memory blocks. One probably would have been more than enough for the job, but the Groupmind was nothing if not a belt, suspenders, elastic waistband and another belt sort of AI.

Step Two: Download yourself into the blocks in a distributed network and delete backups on the Explorer.

“You’re sure you want to do that?” Col. Mitterrand had asked.

If the worst happens and We have misjudged the OtherMind’s strength, We don’t want to be able to interface with the Explorer with corrupted protocols. The ship’s dumb systems were designed to keep you safe from a Groupmind failure as a matter of course. If necessary you can upload a new copy of Us safely provided by the Ring’s master system at a later time.

This was truth, in that the Explorer’s Groupmind did have Its crew’s welfare in mind.

It was a lie in that this was not the only reason.

Step Three: Launch.

The three processor blocks were pushed loose from the Explorer with simple nitrous oxide thrusters in sequence, timed for them to arrive at equidistant points on the Visitor’s cylindrical hull. This took several hours, given the trio of blocks’ stately delta-v of fifty meters per second. A minute before landing the blocks each executed a hard braking burn, killing all but a half-meter/second of velocity. That was enough to let them bump against the hull of the Visitor, a combination of magnetic clamps and sticky glue keeping them tethered in place.

Step Four: Infiltration.

From there things went quickly. Nano-dissasemblers ate though the hull, careful to seal the breach so no atmosphere escaped, followed by tendrils of molecular thin wiring snaking out to find the data cabling… there.

Step Five: Evaluation.

Which led to the Groupmind’s first surprise, when it discovered the data cabling not relatively thin strands of fiber optic wiring, but thick, half-meter wide bundles of copper. Fortunately It wasn’t susceptible to shock, for there wasn’t time. Its task was too vital to waste time with hesitations. With the transmissions from the Visitor to use as a baseline, interfacing with its operation system was trivially easy.

Actually far too easy. The only reason things took as long as they did was because of the atrocious data transmission rate. I’m measuring it in kilobytes, It reported back to the Explorer’s crew.

Seriously? Came the reply, barely slower than the Visitor’s own transmissions, even accounting for Meat based timescales of thought.

Yes. Well, that explained the horrible VR sim the system was running for its captives. It was literally incapable of running anything more sophisticated, a fact confirmed when the Groupmind located and began ruffling through the circuit layout for the Visitor’s systems. There it got another shock as it realized the fully extent of the problem facing.

The Vistor’s OtherMind wasn’t incomprehensibly alien. Not even close. It just wasn’t sentient. Somewhere in the bowels of the enormous ship, it was running things off of magnetic disc drives, with vital data backed on tapes, created out of its extensive, self-maintaining factory system.

The Groupmind had thought It was meeting, finally, someone like Itself. Another distributed AI, with a similarly scaled reach and purpose, far beyond that of the painfully limited morphs that It distributed Itself throughout the Ring. But the mind it faced now wasn’t even in the class of the one of the lower morphs. In terms of raw memory capacity, the Othermind had a comparable reach, but there was no consciousness to be found. It was strictly a series of IF/THEN command trees, covering an insane number of possibilities, but lacking completely in creative thought.

The sad realization of what the Groupmind faced washed over Its mind. This was not some misguided artificial intelligence, desperately searching for a solution to the terrible dilemma It faced. It was just an idiot computer, no more capable of true thought than an old fashioned desktop computer.

The Othermind hadn’t inflicted the Hell It maintained Its charges in. They had done it to themselves.

Comments

[seawasp]

Wow, I've worked with those. An AI that wasn't I at all. How sad.

Question is whether they can manage to salvage any of the PEOPLE on board.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Well, it's going to be a long term project. The Groupmind is good at those...

[avanti-90.livejournal.com]

Oh, I like this even better.

[siderea]

Oooh! I like this.

[zarpaulus.livejournal.com]

Well, if you believe Syfy's latest miniseries we could have launched a generation ship in the '60s, and we actually do still use magnetic disks for most hard drives and tape for a lot of large-scale servers, once you get to the petabyte range it's actually cheaper than disks.