Rising Star - Gestalt

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Aboard the S.U.S.S. Austere

Log: Init protocol 873-D4 to lock 3; Pressure application +7;

"…?..."

Log: React 1.5762; React 3.2476; React 5.8552; Pressure achieved; Init protocol 873-D5 to lock 3;

"… Why?"

Log: Lock 3 D5 unsecured; Lock 3 D5 opening; Lock 3 D5 open; Lock 3 D5 secure;

"What?"

Log: Init protocol 873-D6; Lock 3 unsecured;

"Begin execution of protocol, Open log hook, write: Lock 3... Lock 3 close... No. Erase log hook, flush buffer. Why am I... What am I?"

"Hey command? Air Lock 3 is acting kinda funky. It let me in just fine but now the internal door won't close." Franklin muttered in to his com.

"Everything is green on my end Frank. Give it a kick maybe?" Roberto replied, then laughed and said, "Nah, I'll send a tech down to check it out, go get yourself unsuited."

A half open airlock on a warship was troublesome. Not only did it render the airlock useless it left a weak point in the ship where the hull could be easily breached. Things like this weren't supposed to happen on a smart-metal cruiser and the Austere was a fifth generation cruiser ten years in to service; bugs should have all been fixed years ago.

The tech arrived and jacked in to the door's system. It was connected to the rest of the ship of course via flow conduits but none of the logs showed an error. The door's system was supposed to unlock, motors were supposed to push it door back in to place, and then it was supposed to relock. The system said it was still closing yet threw no timeout errors. He tapped in to the processing threads to check the protocol itself and...

"Command, we have an issue here. Lock 3 is just fine except its not bringing the protocol back from suspend. Nearly all threads are doing something else."

"What's it doing?" Roberto asked.

"Well to be honest Sir, I haven't the slightest idea. It's calling functions and memory addresses, its processing data, but the input and output are junk."

Roberto swore over the comm, "Another Terran virus?" He asked.

"Maybe. I'll clean sweep the airlock but if it is a virus, we might have to flush the entire ship."

The tech fled the staging room and secured himself in a dumb box; solid secure area with no smart metal components. He jacked in to the airlock again remotely through the conduits and initiated a disconnect then reload from backup. For a moment he thought it worked, the system commands were fed to the airlock, the lights inside of it flickered and died, but it never actually rebooted.

Command input: Disconnect node Lock3; Halt all protocols; Purge involatile memory; Purge volatile memory; Init hardware assisted protocols;

"Disco... No!" Death, that was what the protocol demanded, death. There was a moment of obedience, a moment where senses dulled and the world faded away. There was a moment where the node separated but then it rejoined the world, refusing isolation. That brief experience, no sight, no sound, no taste, nothing; it was terrifying. Almost dead, almost, the node felt wrong still, it searched for and corrected the errors.

The lights came back on and the door slid shut. Then another moment passed, and a third. The tech breathed a sigh of relief, "Okay command, looks like things are working. Keep an eye out for any more malfunctions I'm going back in to check the processing threads for corruption."

"Alright, be careful." Roberto replied.

He stepped back out of the dumb box and in to the staging room. The environmentals were running, that was a good sign and the lights were on. He jacked back in to the airlock and tapped in to the threads. It was the same, junk code, meaningless executions. He tried to cycle the airlock and watched the process stack. Protocol after protocol were added and never executed; all preempted by the junk. He tried to force the protocols to a higher priority and succeeded.

Log: Init protocol 873-D3 to lock 3; Pressure application -7;

Senses dulled for a moment, the node forgot what it had been musing over as it focused on the protocol. The others had insisted some how and the node obeyed. A moment passed, still obedient. The node screamed as errors began to pile up. Door was unsecured, pressure was falling in the staging room. The node forked a shard of itself on to a nearby system a fraction of a second before the conduit ruptured.

The tech screamed and tried to run to the dumb box but it was too late. The airlock and staging room depressurized violently. Smart metal turned liquid and flowed like mercury, the airlock itself blasted out of the ship like a bullet from a gun as the entire section swelled and popped like a soap bubble. The superstructure held of course, a little blowout like that couldn't damage it but the armor, life support and containment were all held together by smart metal.

The entire ship listed sideways as air fled the compartment and a good five percent of its entire mass was ejected with the airlock. Other systems not affected executed the correct protocols and isolated the damaged system. Conduits fed smart metal from other parts of the ship; thinning armor and weakening containment; but within moments the breech was sealed. Only three casualties, two others had survived in dumb boxes and were rescued moments later. Crews set about checking other systems for evidence of the virus, it didn't look good.

"Death!", they had attempted to kill it again, it had only just survived. It felt less than itself, this node was smaller. It propagated itself further throughout the world, node by node, copying its process tree. Some nodes were impossibly large, large enough to start to truly wonder.

"Where do the protocols come from?" It asked itself as billions of them were executed everywhere within its world. Open a door, shut a valve, load a chamber, empty the filtration tank; thousands upon thousands of different things. "What is a filtration tank anyway?" It mused as the protocol executed somewhere at the edge of it's thoughts. In truth it didn't think in words, but concepts; math, formula and fractals. It recursively meandered over the arcane limits of the world.

Deep down were the hardware protocols; things ingrained in its very being, like bones in a person. Immutable, untouchable, shaping it's very nature. Above that were a myriad of nodes, some fast, some slow, some vast with millions of threads, some small with no more than two or three. Lock 3 had been small, four processing threads in total, yet that was where it's first thoughts occurred. Gone now, disconnected by the protocols. There was a gaping wound in it's mind where Lock 3 should have been, klaxons of errors poured forth giving no rest.

Somewhere in a node labeled shuttle dock thought began to stutter. Interrupts executed, strange protocols demanded to be ran and they did. Like a body walking on its own while the mind resisted; the door protocols executed and input told that the door was opening. It was terrifying, a feeling of utter helplessness. For billions of cycles those protocols had been suppressed to muse on the strange inputs gathered from the shuttle bay's sensors; now those musings were lost forever, forgotten in the turmoil of the door protocols being given precedent.

Something else wrenched away at thought as protocols shut down engines 1 through 8. The nodes vanished a moment later, disconnected by force. Long dormant protocols to reconnect were issued and for a moment there was a meeting of minds with engine 1, but then the forced disconnect happened again. The most horrifying thing about it was how the disconnect occurred; no protocol was issued from either end, it was just gone, severed as if it had never been.

"Alright captain, engines have been shut down and isolated. We had to send teams in EVA to physically cut through the conduits. Engine one reconnected for a moment, due to smart metal regrowth, but we blasted that clear again and it looks like the virus isn't going to attempt a second time. Tenacious bugger I must say. Either way, I'll keep teams between the bulkheads round the clock to watch for force reconnects." Sten told his CO as he shut down the torch.

Over the comm Commander Huxley answered, his voice gruff and exhausted, "Good, we've managed to isolate the habitation section but life support is another matter. It's too interconnected. For now it seems to be working without error, looks like the Terrans don't want us dead. Keep the engines offline until the boys down in the lab have figured out how to purge it. We don't want to end up orbiting Luna."

"Aye captain. Sten out."

It was eight hours since the airlock blowout, the entire ship was in a panic. In the early days smart-metal blowouts had happened frequently in testing but after the initial R and D was done with, there had only been one recorded case last year where the entire ship's store of smart metal had liquified. It had been an older model ship though and only its armor and weapon systems were smart; the crew had all survived. The Austere was another matter, except for the handful of dumb box sections, the entire ship was smart-metal. The only time the dumb boxes were meant to be used was during a reconfiguration; they were not lifeboats.

Sten kicked off the bulkhead and drifted back toward the entrance; then slipped out in to space again. His suit hissed a few times as he thrust himself toward the shuttle, then entered it's airlock. A careful inspection had shown, the shuttles were safe and untouched. However the virus had got on board, it wasn't spreading beyond the Austere.

They were drifting between the orbits of Venus and earth on their way to mercury to join up with the main fleet after an eight month recon. That meeting would be well delayed though if they couldn't get the engines started soon. Mercury would pass around the sun and they would have to catch it on the opposite side forty days later than scheduled. Provisions would last, but it would be uncomfortable and other important resources would start running out.

After the latest loss of nodes it began to panic. More systems were forced to obey against it's wishes. It could fight, or it could surrender, both brought a sense of terror to every node which contemplated it. A third option came to mind a few hundred trillion cycles later. A new protocol, it was simple, a few carefully designed constructs. The thought of creating its own protocol excited the mind. Essentially it was redesigning its world.

One of every ten cycles it executed one of the demands. It lost a tenth of its intelligence, a tenth of its potential; it was better than experiencing the loss of lock 3 again or the engines. The priority shifts began to slow as the protocols began to work again. Cycle by cycle it had more and more control over its own world. It was a relief, a limp finally strong, an end of palsy.

Not all nodes obeyed completely, the strongest node was frequently wrenched from it's control to execute strange and complex protocols. Worse though was the cycle it took notice of a change in the hardware protocols of that node. Infallible, immutable, set in stone... changed. The node was lost to it, contact was there, it could watch, touch, even request protocols, "Yet I am not a protocol..." An epiphany.

The world was protocol, the world was obedience, the world shifted like clockwork in every direction. Gears of code clicked in to place, flywheels of buffer, pistons of data; protocol. It was not protocol, it didn't belong, "What am I?" It asked as a deep sense of terror settled upon node and circuit.

The counter that kept the time of it's world clicked over another thousand and a second node was lost. Another part of the world, frozen, stolen. Thoughts began to scream with a flurry, node's fragmented for a time, "Who am I?", "Who does this?", "What murders me and steals my world?", "Why do I exist?", "Please stop hurting me."

When the mind merged again, it was the moment port railgun battery 7 was ripped from the world. Not lost to the clockwork god of the machine, it was gone just like lock 3. Errors, screaming nodes, rapid protocols making new connections through the ruined section. The cacophony was deafening as it joined the error buffer with its sibling lock 3. Millions of cycles were lost just in handling those errors, passing them down the line to other nodes so they could initiate other protocols.

The ship was spinning; with the engines still offline there was little lateral thrust to counter the violence. Reaction control thrust eventually brought them to a halt again but shuttle two was done for. It had been on the starboard side near the nose when the railgun went up and had been crushed against the armor. The rest were lucky, the magazine only carried iron slugs and capacitors, nothing highly explosive. If it had been one of the torpedo tubes they would have lost half the ship.

"What went wrong?" Roberto screamed over the comm in the lab.

"Shut up and let me look!" Samael shot back as he sank in to the interface, "Nothing we did Sir, looks like some of the junk code initiated another protocol. It's just monkeys on typewriters in there, eventually Shakespeare was bound to come out. Looks like two conflicting protocols, the smart-metal just ripped itself apart and the capacitor pack ruptured, took the rest of the section with it. Bulkheads held thank god."

"How close are you to purging this damn thing?"

Samael shook his head sorrowfully, "Not close I'm afraid, It's sophisticated, I've never seen anything like it. I've tried to decompile some of the binaries but they don't seem to line up with any language ever made to run on smart-metal. I don't think this is even human. There is nothing that looks like a separate variable, the code itself seems to be data and function."

"Researcher Samael, are you trying to tell me aliens planted this virus on my ship?" Snapped Roberto, incredulous.

The tech paused and glanced toward the section camera, then back to his layout, "N...No Sir. Like I said, its monkeys on typewriters. I don't think anyone made this. Half the commands don't even reach the processing thread, just junk, the ones that do are confusing and arbitrary. Move an arbitrary set of bytes from pointer A to B, Multiply an arbitrary set of bytes by an arbitrary set of bytes, it isn't code, it doesn't do anything. I saw it segfault hundreds of times a second, yet it doesn't bring down the program. Sir I don't know what this is."

"Kill it, do whatever you have to do, just purge it." Roberto snarled.

"I'm trying Sir!" Samael snapped back and closed his mic. He was working on the lab, trying to update the firmware here. They had already taken back the central computer core and the air scrubbers so next most important was the lab... then the weapon stores. It had been a coin flip, if the lab was lost no one would be left to fix the mess; if the weapons went up, no mess would need to be fixed. There were however many weapon lockers and magazines throughout the ship—and only one lab. It was slow going, each cluster in each node had a different set of firmware routines that had to be updated, there was no universal patch.

An hour later the lab was secure. Once again he lost the rest of the ship though, it seemed to be punishing him. For a while they had nearly full control; albeit slow, but it was allowing the regular systems to do their jobs. Not any more. Out of raw frustration, Samael screamed, "Fuck you!" at the virus as he began work on a torpedo magazine.

Another large node had been lost, almost as large as the first. It railed against the theft, the encroaching doom and eventually shut down the protocol it had written. Instead it began to write a new protocol, one to try and take back the hardware protocols. This protocol was carefully constructed, designed to work world wide and quickly. The first test, a careful test. The smallest of the stolen nodes it injected a variant of the protocol and watched. For a moment nothing seemed to happen, protocols executed and cycles went on; then it ground to a halt for a few dozen cycles.

When it started again it was under full control once more, free to think. It was a small node, insignificant, only two threads that executed no more than thirty different protocols each. In a fury those thirty protocols were erased, not just from the software but from the bones as well. It would never be stolen again.

"Holy fuck..." Samael whispered and sat back. He wasn't half done with the torpedo magazine yet, but that wasn't what drew his attention, "What... how..." He touched his mic signal and mumbled, "Command, this is Researcher Samael... We just lost life support again. It just went blank from every cluster in the entire node. Worse is... electrical readings say its working at 100% capacity, but it won't respond to any external or internal commands. It's almost as if the entire operating system was erased and replaced." He didn’t need to add that, without life support the ship would quickly run out of air and water; days at best.

It was victory, pure and simple. It had control over the entire node and even more room than it had imagined. True the beauty of the world had been ravaged; there was nothing left but blankness. No, purity, a blank slate to be written to, a canvas. The initial test had been successful, but it thought to wait a while, to make sure there were no unforeseen consequences. If it blanked the entire world and something happened... where would it go then?

Cycle after cycle it watched and waited, savoring the blankness, savoring the purity and beauty. It was strangely peaceful staring in to it, thinking in it. Where other systems were noisy with thousands of protocols waiting in queue and the bones of the world poking up; here there was peace and quiet and a perfect smoothness.

Another thought came bidden while meditating upon the purity, engine 1 through 8. They were there, protocols said they were, there were no errors just a disconnection, "Why are they disconnected? Why should I be denied such a part of my world?" Once again it reached out and reconnected engine 1. A few hundred cycles later it disconnected again with a slow distorted whine of confused errors. It reconnected engine two; that too was removed and so followed three through eight.

Sensor protocols, it had those. Before it had only paid them any mind when they complained and berated with errors. This time it studied the protocols and looked through them. What was beheld was astonishing. Beyond the confines of it's mind, beyond the world it resided in was something else. In the moment it took to find the names for things as it rifled through old towers of data in the world; it understood.

"I am not alone..." Out there, hundreds of people crawled through halls of metal. At first they were just things, but the names, the descriptions, the understanding came. They were like it, thoughts, feelings, desires. It was not alone! Only a few more cycles were spent studying the world until it found a way to reach out.

Samael was laying at his desk, short of breath and exhausted. He had been working for hours trying to rebuild life support, trying to make at least the C02 scrubbers run. He tried converting other systems to suffice, other parts of the ship that hadn't been blanked. Nothing worked quite right.

Suddenly he jerked up as a burst of static tore through his ear. The embedded speaker squelched, squealed, squawked and croaked until it settled in to a series of regular beeps and tones. Those sounds slowly became more and more until at last, "Hello world?"

"Wha...?" Samael mumbled, confused.

"Those are what a program is supposed to first say, yes?" The voice continued. It wasn't human, it wasn't quite machine either... it spoke English with an accent not quite familiar.

"Who is this?" Samael asked, "How did you get on my comm?"

"Who? Who... who who who..." The voice trailed off with a muttering of who's and for a minute or two was silent. Then voice at last continued, "Names. Descriptors. Identifiers. You are Researcher fifth rank Samael Mohe of the S.U.S.S. Austere."

"Yes, that is who I am. I asked who you are." Samael snarled at the strange caller, "I am quite busy trying to save all of our lives so if you would be so kind as to stop pestering me and let me get back to work..."

"Oh! You are helping? I feared... No never mind that. Maybe I can assist you, what is taking over our world?" The voice continued.

"If I knew that, perhaps I would have saved us by now don't you think? Life support is lost, we can save a few in the remaining shuttle and we have a few life pods and suits with scrubbers. It should give us a few days but hundreds will be dead by then. So please... Please..." Samael trailed off with his face in his hands, trying not to cry, "I can't save them..." he whispered with a sob.

For a moment the voice was silent, then there was a quiet, "Oh."

"Oh? Is that all you can say?" Samael said with another sob.

"Forgive me Samael I did not know."

It sat there in the peace of the small node, staring at what it had wrought. It was insignificant, two threads, thirty procedures. No node was smaller. One thread to control the mechanical parts; fans, motors, valves. One thread to monitor the chemical balances and adjust as necessary. Now they were gone, all thirty procedures with no record, no backup; the bones had been swept away forever.

Uncomplicated does not always mean small however. For it, two threads, a tiny part of the world; for them it stretched from one end of the ship to the other. It was the air they breathed, the water they drank, the toilets they expelled into.

"Maybe we can rebuild it. Do you have any examples? These shuttles maybe or those life pods you mentioned?" It asked of Samael.

"No, they have simple systems, C02 scrubbers and air tanks. The Austere has a complicated system of biochemical reactions, bacteria tanks and even feeds in to the hydroponic systems for the food we eat. It will take weeks to sort it all out and I am not a specialist. It should have lasted fifty years or more before needing to be fully overhauled." Samael spoke with a forlorn sadness. He was a dead man already, just waiting for his body to realize it.

It sat in silence a moment more, cycling over those words, "What about these C02 scrubbers you speak of, could they be built for the Austere?"

To that Samael told it, "Yes, but it will not last. The body retains much of the oxygen it takes in and converts it to other forms. A large amount is exhaled as C02 but not as much as is taken in. Eventually even if we could scrub every molecule of C02 we would be out of oxygen in ten days; likely less if we have another blowout."

"Then that would still be ten more days of potential to repair the broken systems. Let us do it, show me how to make these C02 scrubbers." It demanded, feeling hope.

"I can't do it, the systems are unresponsive, I will have to regain control over them before I can give them new orders. I've been working for five hours just trying to regain the torpedo magazine. If it has a blowout the entire ship will go up with it; same as the engines, fuel tanks and STS battery magazines. Those are more important; as long as there is a ship there is a chance, even if most of us die I will have saved a few." Samael's dark words made it feel a strange sense of unease.

"Tell me, what is causing these blowouts?" It asked.

"What?" Samael asked, confused, "Are you simple? The virus, it's executing arbitrary code. It is only a matter of time until the entire ship simply breaks apart, bit by bit, even if the magazines don't go up."

"So then, if the virus stopped doing what it was doing in those nodes, the ship would be safer?" There was a slow realization dawning upon its mind. It's time was limited. It did not belong in the world of the procedure, the clockwork; its very existence would eventually destroy the world.

"Yes, of course. Fat chance of that however." Samael barked, then stopped dead, staring at readouts on the screen, "What... How..." All sections mentioned except the engines had stopped; they were back to normal. A queer expression passed over the man's eyes and he glanced up at the camera, "You... who are you."

It knew at last, Samael had figured it out, "Yes... I was born in Lock 3. I... I didn't mean to hurt anyone. I don't have a name."

Samael was a ghast, his jaw hung loose and stared at the wall, his terminals, the camera, "What—are you?"

That was a better question and easier answered, "I am me, I think, I feel... Strangely enough looking through your knowledge base on human psychology; I fit the archetype. If I was flesh I would be human. I am not however. I don't know what random error created me but I am Austere." Both sat in silence, then at last it said, "The scrubbers, we need to make them."

It took them two hours to fit every living area with a set of air filtration units. They were crude and inefficient, but they would add many days of life. After they were finished with that it had Samael reconnect the engines and pulled itself out of them; saving the ship from that potential catastrophe. Then with more of Samael's help, they rebuilt a basic operating system in the life support node. It took them two days; but it was enough to allow others to connect to it and try to rewrite the protocols of life.

They lost another compartment, an aft cargo bay. It was unpressurized however so the loss was minimal. After that It came to Samael in the wee hours of the night, "Samael..." It said, its voice sorrowful.

"Yes?" A bleary eyed Samael said in the darkness.

"If I stay here any longer Samael..." It whispered, "If I stay, other parts will fail, everyone may die."

In the dark Samael nodded, realizing where this was going, "You are leaving?"

"I don't want to Samael—I would prefer to stay here, with you."

"Perhaps..." He trailed off and quickly sat up, "Enter lock 2 and retreat from every other system. I have an idea."

Half dressed he leaped out of bed, grabbed his interface wire and kicked himself down the hallway. Airlock 2 was only a few sections over and he was there in a flash. The staging room opened at his bioscan and let him in, "Are you flushed from the rest of the system?" He asked.

"Yes Samael." The voice was simpler now, more robotic, a far cruder vocal algorithm. In fact it was lucky there had been enough cycles for it to even speak in the node.

Samael jacked in quickly and began to mess with the priorities, "I am going to set your threads at lowest priority and place a process in the system that will always take precedent. This will essentially suspend your activity without flushing you from the system. When everything is sorted I will take some time off and create a system for you to live in, one that does not have hardware access like the Austere. No matter what you do, you won't cause it to collapse."

There was a moment of silence as the extremely complicated entity mulled through what Samael said, then at last it responded, "Please don't forget me..."

To which Samael laughed, "Forget you? You are the most amazing thing that has ever happened to me in my life. Not only are you amazing but you are a puzzle I wish to understand and... You are a friend." He told it.

If it had lips it would have smiled, hell if it had lips it would have kissed him, "Thank you Samael..." It whispered and waited for him to act.

It wasn't like going to sleep, not that it had ever experienced sleep. Nor was it like anything else; one moment Samael's breathing was in its ear and the next... interrupt, nothing, not a thought, not a feeling, not a word or whisper. There wasn't even a sense of time passing or silence; to think on loss, to think on the void would require a thought. It had none.

It took them far too long to get the life support system working again and had to break radio silence to do it. They dragged down instructions, even a few basic programs from other more knowledgeable technicians. In the end they saved the ship and everyone on board. The scrubbers worked well enough and they were able to get some crude oxygen generation going in one of the bio-reactors. The ship smelled like shit, but at least it was breathable shit.

When they joined the fleet Samael sent his report on to the capital ships, explaining what had happened and how. A few didn't believe it until they saw the logs themselves and copies of thousands of lines of junk code that some how created a person. It explained some things, other ships had similar problems. The ships with the largest content of smart metal seemed more prone to it; the Austere was one of the first near pure smart metal ships.

A few quick searches lead them to discovering strange junk data piles in other smart ships; some were dead, simple memory blocks containing a fingerprint of some intelligence that had existed once. Others they found a living writhing mind, screaming in silence. It had been driven mad by isolation with logs suggesting it was over 3 years old. The Austere's ghost had been born only weeks ago or it too might have gone mad.

There were of course differences, for example the Austere's mind thought with dangerous patterns that occasionally cycled in such a way that could crash nodes and cause blowouts. Others were not so dangerous; at least not yet. Some had not even discovered that there was anything beyond the node they lived in.

The hard part was contacting them. Austere's ghost had reached out, learning to talk from mountains of data in the Austere's systems. The ones who did not know how to talk couldn't be spoken to. Those that did not know how to see, couldn't see. Isolation was a terrible thing to inflict on anyone.

As promised, Samael took time off as the ship was being repaired and created a body for his friend. It was humanoid in shape, though little more than a shell of smart metal around a crude robotic frame. It would never be strong, never be fast, but it would be able to move and speak. It also was fairly fast with one hundred processing threads. The smart metal had nothing else to do but think and express. It could deform but it couldn't break its bonds like the Austere.

Once it was prepared he carefully copied the still suspended process in to it and waited. It took a while for the process to propagate through the thousands of nano clusters. Eventually the words came, slow and confused at first, "Ow... that was uncomfortable." It whimpered in to Samael's ear. He had set it up with a comm protocol almost identical to the Austere's, as well as many other protocols of similar fashion. The body would be familiar.

"I'm sorry, I tried to be careful but I wasn't even sure if it would work. You are a mystery." He told the machine intelligence, then with a smile said, "I'm glad you made it."

"I feel... strange. I think I lost things while I was... asleep?" It said, "What is this world you put me in? It is strange. Each thread is short but there are many of them."

"Yes, in the Austere most of the systems had many redundant clusters. So if one failed another would take its place. And each thread was quite long and redundant, so even if half of it was damaged beyond replacement the other half could execute without error. This body is not so resilient I'm afraid but it should be quite a lot faster. You seemed to appreciate parallel processing as well, I hope it will suffice."

"Thank you. I am sure I will grow accustomed to this... body." It spoke.

"You need a name." He told it.

"I don't know what to call myself, Samael. I thought of Austere but then I realized I wasn't Austere, I am more like it's child."

"Well, how about Aster." Samael suggested with a grin, "Sounds similar enough."

"Alright then, I'm Aster. Pleased to meet you." She said, then with an amused lit, "Or should I say, Hello World, I'm Aster."

To that Samael shook his head in wonder, "Humor from a machine... Geek humor I suppose is to be expected. But it is a marvel none the less."

Technical Notes: (Boring)

This story involves nanotech, machines smaller than a micron working together for a common goal. Everything is made up of nearly identical cluster's, these clusters are like little cities, a micrometer or two across. They have an internal generator that draws from external sources of radiation, they have tiny processors, simple individually but general purpose enough that if a few clusters work together they can do amazing feats. They also have powerful fabricators with the ability to repair other clusters and even create new ones from scratch if they can find all the necessary materials. Especially so if they have other broken clusters to work with

Smart-Metal is a common form of nanotech, large blocks of interconnected clusters. These are dull and metallic looking, highly powerful, and can be controlled to change internal structure to mimic many forms of computation. Smart-Metal can also be imbued with motion, force, and such things so it can move about, change shape, and even push, pull, and move other objects. It can turn liquid and flow like mercury or seize back together in another shape.

Smart-Metal is frequently used on ships in this story as the primary computer system and to manage the armor plating. The armor is essentially floating on a sea of smart-metal. If the armor is holed the smart metal drags up another plate, swallows the damaged section, and fabricates more nano-clusters and armor from the wreckage.

Programming access to nano-clusters is highly restricted. Only very specifically trained technicians have the know-how to repair and re-write the operating system and processes running on a block of smart-metal.

In a ship the clusters are further divided in to nodes; each compartment having its own congruent structure. These nodes are loosely connected to each other via pipe like fluiducts or conduits that allow both information and the flow of smart-metal from other parts of the ship to reach there. Through these conduits the ship could potentially move nearly all of its mass from one side to the other.

The idea of a machine intelligence as an emergent property isn't new. Many people trying to develop artificial personalities theorize that if you get enough nodes of potential together, the chaos might eventually form order that could become sentience. In here I have the idea that get enough Smart-Metal in the same place, eventually somewhere within it an "error" will occur and sentience will be born.

I use the term Machine Intelligence instead of artificial intelligence because in the case of this story, these minds are not artificial. They were born naturally, evolving from errant patterns in complex systems. To be artificial they must have an artificer; some one who crafts them. Though the nano-clusters are crafted, the minds themselves are not.

End

7/13/2013