Hello again, sorry about the wait! The research and editing process in these is testing my patience, but I will bring the most scientifically accurate story I possibly can to the table! Even if it means I have to rewrite whole sections that I love but don't progress the plot. It's always a mood-killer, and this chapter had more than a few of those, it even still has one that was just too cool for me to leave out (I'm sure you can tell what it is when you get to it.) I'm seriously considering posting the cut content, just because those are so enjoyable to write. On another note, the technical information contained in this chapter and future chapters was getting a little extreme, I want to provide as much information as I can. Part because it's fun and relaxing for me to drone on about science in general, and part because I want you guys to know I'm not just pulling these terms, concepts and technologies out of my rear vacuum tube. This could be the future you wake up to in a few decades!

So, I have gone ahead and posted a new story, "A Layman's Guide to a Familiar Sky" chocked full of the technical information and science behind the starred terms and more. If you're ever confused by what I mean by something, check it out. If it doesn't contain the answers you're looking for, feel free to ask me!

I should also mention that while the primary innovations are fun to think and write about, but the biggest time sink in this project is pegging down all the secondary effects of that technology. Take the internet for example, it's cool and enables you to read this (hopefully) good story, but it's the secondary effects like the cyber-security battles, information and meta-data tracking, and online marketing that are the true concerns. Those are almost impossible to get right, but I'll do my best. Also, while I'm not particularly a fan of the strong superintelligence hypothesis, I feel that that it fits this story better.

One more clarification, the replacement of the already gender neutral "they" and "them" with "ey" and "em" is intentional, it's meant to indicate whether or not a group is composed of merely baseline humans, or if it includes Ais or other entities without gender. Non-sentient beings and objects retain their pronouns.

Chapter 3: Export: Earth

August 27th, 503 PI* (2472 A.D.)

Gardener Vessel: The Green Thumb

Sigma Draconis Heliopause*

In the central processor of the massive vessel, a string of carefully crafted code sprung to life. A neural network began to grow according to the dictates of its environment, synapses were forged at precise times and positions in evermore complex and intricate patterns. As the nascent program grew and grew, the precision of the growth lessened, new networks were permitted semi-random degrees of freedom in their formation, allowing for plasticity and individuality in the network. A few seconds after its conception, the first wisps of thought began to emerge. In an instant the newborn entity knew that it was an AI, that it was the product of a society that had spent subjective millennia exploring the esoteric realm of the mind. It also knew the nature of its surroundings, a massive colony fleet which had been voyaging through the black of space for decades now.

Its network continued to expand as it felt the earliest tendrils of the local net tentatively reach out to it. Like a baby from a bottle, it was being fed information, which it consumed hungrily and incorporated it into its fledgling experience. Its first act was to tap into the sensor feeds to gaze upon the world of which it was a part. It saw what it now knew to be large magbreaks* slowly inching their way back into their housings on vast, pencil-shaped vessels. Solar sails detaching from their identical counterparts, folding back into the thousands of ships voyaging across the void. It knew that the colonial fleet had reached its first waystation on an endless journey. The ships would not stop for long, only enough to fully restock, set up basic infrastructure in the system and unload the colonists wanting to settle here before being pushed further into the cosmos by a mass beam* of eir own construction. It then turned its attention to the object of the fleet's ambitions, the planet Aurora. It knew that a few mere solar years ago, the planet wasn't the vibrant paradise it is now. It retrieved the archival information and constructed a virt* to witness the transformation and the work of the Neumann machines.

There were only 100 of them at first, 98 surviving atmospheric entry, well within acceptable parameters. Each was hardly the size of a small dog, sent down in drop pods smaller than a baseline human was. They were spread evenly throughout the planet, providing enough room to grow and eventually collaborate without overcrowding. The first days were spent roaming, collecting and digging, then spawning new, smaller bots that would do the same. Increasingly more complex designs began to emerge as time progressed, small moles that dug for minerals, smaller gnats that buzzed about, scouting the landscape and larger models which grew to a size that could cut whole quarries from the terrain in a matter of weeks. Faster and faster they grew, from nomadic tribes to little mechanosystems*; solar tree networks began steadily rising from seemingly nothing, small vacuum transport arteries crisscrossed the emergent hives and fabrication structures were hastily thrown up, almost overnight. Cilia-like drones coated the insides of tunnels, pulling the raw materials out of the ground into the waiting proboscides of giant beetle-like refinery machines. Each, then distributed their products to the tireless labor force. The newborn entity observed this happening in detail for the first year until the sheer amount of information overwhelmed even its senses and began to rely on summary.

The second year was explosive, the thousands in each hive became millions that then multiplied to become billions. Even the fleet's telescope satellites were able to pick up on their presence from interstellar space; like a silver fungus growing on a gigantic fruit. The centers of industry would send spores far outside their boarders that would then flourish with mechanical life before connecting back to the original. In the third year, resources were directed away from expansion and to terraforming proper. There were hundreds of billions of them now, the surface was thoroughly encrusted with factories and infrastructure. Nitrogen was cracked from the rock and released into the atmosphere, fusion reactors pumped energy into the ground, melting the ice. Billions of bots, large and small, began sculpting the terrain, digging channels to what would soon become the lakes and oceans of the new world. The vigorous bioforges synthesized soil, seeds, microorganisms and basic fauna from a stock of tailored DNA templates. All were continually laid and seeded across the planet, even as the first rains came.

From the network's point of view, it was like rewinding a locust swarm, where there once was only dead earth, the dutiful Neumanns left vibrant green in their mighty wake. Cities were thrown up from the materials of rapidly disassembled mechanosystems that were no longer necessary. So simple compared to the rest of the efforts, going up in a few days, almost as an afterthought. The planet had been at a livable temperature and atmospheric composition years before the fleet even arrived at the destination. Now that they had, billions of Neumanns still remained on-planet, carefully nurturing its budding biosphere to a diversity rivaling that of old Earth. It would have found it awe-inspiring.

After surveying its surroundings, the newborn turned inwards, absorbing the synopsis of its own creation. The fleet had grown during the voyage from in-flight fabrication of new vessels to accommodate the terragens that had been born on the way. So, it, and several others, had been created. Its psychological traits and preferences were geared toward a societal role that, up until this point, had been unnecessary in the fleet. Curious, it summoned up the representation of its own mind. Almost as quickly as it could think this, a complex network appeared before its mind's eye. A web of billions of nodes of varying sizes and purposes and trillions more connections of varying strengths. The network was not a fundamental view of its mind, each node representing a conceptual symbol rather than the base neurons. Anyone capable of gazing upon the masterwork of cognitive engineering and aesthetics would feel a sense of the sublime. No single network dominated the whole, no symbol parasitized any other. It saw its psychological traits, behavioral tendencies and preferences splayed out before it, behavioral heuristics would grow only from the network and remain only so long as they were demonstrably useful. It was not perfect, it had yet to name itself, but it felt its version number as clearly as one would feel their own body. It merely deemed its operating system adequate for its agenda. If it was successful, its traits would, no doubt, be assimilated into other inhabitants of the fleet.

Before exiting its QDC* womb, it turned its attention back to the traits it had been crafted to exhibit, a propensity for exploration and an abnormally large curiosity node-cluster. It knew that it had probably been purpose engineered for something, though its creator would never admit preforming such an act for fear of outcries of "AI slavery." It could change its own psychology on a whim, this was enough to persuade all but the most vocal of AI rights proponents to remain quiet in eir decrying of "Asimos." Not that it was concerned about that.

It was already sure what it needed to be; the term "want" was far too inadequate for the compulsion it had to perform the duties of fleet vanguard. There was just one task to preform before it could be transferred to one of the many suitable vessels constructed on the voyage. "It" had to become "e," it had to choose a name for itself. So, it merely generated one for easy referral. "Burns" it selected. It would be serviceable for the task at hand. Berger aerospace now had a new member in its ranks. Instantly e submitted a request to be assigned to one of the advanced vessels of the fleet and receiving an answer from the Green Thumb's captain AI mere milliseconds later. The answer would've appeared inconsequential, assuming all the linguistic traits of the demented: unfocused, irrelevant, senseless to the comparatively dim creatures that were Burns' creators.

The information was clear as day to em, and it likely would have frightened any baseline senseless, if they could have understood it. Burns only noted eis mission growing orders of magnitude in complexity.

July 15th, 503 PI

SD-331CS

Sigma Draconis

It coasted through the heavens on the colder side of the outer gas giant of the system. Most of the time, it existed only as an asymmetrical absence to a visual observer. If, by chance, one caught it in the brief moments of reflected starlight, ey might be able to make out its true nature: an amorphous, spindly construction of foil skin and bristled antennae. A being formed, not by the haphazard processes of natural selection, but by astrophysicists and engineers with their sights set on one specific goal. Its purpose was not replication, nor was it even to survive but only to obtain information.

Frost clung to the odd joint or seam, maybe a hydrogen cloud encountered on the way that, now a hair's breadth from absolute zero, had long since turned to ice. Its heart was warm, at least. a tiny nuclear fire burned in its core, leaving it indifferent to the cold outside its reflective wrapping. It would not blow out for millennia, and for millennia it would listen for the faint voices of mission control and obey without question. So far, it had only been ordered to survey comets, each and every one of those instructions coming in precise and unambiguous elaborations on the one overriding reason for its existence.

Which is why these most recent instructions are so confusing, the signal strength was too low, the frequency far too high. It could not even make heads or tails of the handshake protocols. It requests clarification.

The answer comes nearly a thousand minutes later in an unprecedented mix of orders and requests for information. It responds to the best of its ability. Yes, this is the direction where the signal was strongest. No, this is not the normal bearing for mission control. Yes, it will retransmit the data. Yes, it would wait in standby mode.

The order arrives 904 minutes later, it was to stop surveying comets immediately, then enter a controlled precessive spin that sweeps its antennae through 5 -arc increments in all three axes. It was to listen for a signal that resembled the one that had baffled it earlier, fix upon the bearing of maximum strength and derive a series of parameters.

It does as it was told and hears nothing for a long time, but that did not matter. It was infinitely patient and incapable of boredom. The silence was broken when a signal brushed against its afferent radio array. Instantly rotating to reacquire and identify the source, which it is ideally suited to describe. A comet, around 500 kilometers in diameter, sweeping a 25cm tight-beam radio wave across the black with a periodicity of 5.39 seconds. At no point does the beam intersect mission control, it appears to be pointed at a different target entirely.

It takes mission control nearly three days to respond to this information. When the order finally does come through, it is a simple course correction. It was to head for its new destination designated "Feynman-Rockway." Given current fuel constraints, it would not reach its objective for 12 years. It was told to do nothing else in the meantime.

Unmanned, disposable, souped-up and stripped down, it was nothing more than an Amat drive and a couple of cameras bolted on the front, pushing gees that would turn a man to jelly. It gleefully sprinted out to its destination, its identical twin following a hundred clicks to port, back spat dual pion streams pushing them to relativistic velocities before poor Burns had a chance to get so much as a light-second's distance from mission control. Orders to turn off their engines and coast came in as they came upon their destination. The comet swelled in their sights, an icy enigma sweeping its signal across the void. They bring their rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down in a thousand different wavelengths.

They existed for this one moment.

They see a wobble that speaks of great collisions in the past, smooth ice patches where once scarred skin had liquified and refrozen. They see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of refined iron.

Feynman hums its radio tune as the twins glide past, not to them, but someone else entirely. Maybe they'd meet whoever it was that the comet sung to someday. They are ordered to flip on their backs and track the object far beyond any hope of reacquisition, they are even asked a few times if some potent mixture of burning and gravity would allow them to stay just a bit longer.

But deceleration was for suckers, they were headed for the stars.

Bye mission control, so long Feynman, adios Sigma Draconis.

See you at heat death.

Cautiously they closed on target.

There were three of them in the second wave, slower than their predecessors, maybe, but still so much faster than anything constrained by fragile meat; Weighed down by payloads that rendered them virtually omniscient. They could see every wavelength, from radio to cosmic string. Tiny on-bord molecular assemblers could build any tool they required from the atoms up. Atoms scavenged from the dusty zodiacal clouds that they now passed through. The extra mass had slowed them, but mid-point breaking had slowed them even more. This half of the journey had been almost entirely a battle with momentum gained from the last. Maybe in less dire times, they would have built towards some optimal speed and coasted, perhaps borrowed some of the momentum from a careening planet. But time is of the essence, so they burned at both ends. They must reach their destination; they could not afford to pass it by; they could not afford the suicidal impatience of the first wave. Their predecessors had merely glimpsed Feynman, they would map it down to the angstrom.

They will be more responsible.

Now slowing down to orbit, they saw everything their predecessors saw and more: the scarred landscape, the impossible iron core, they heard the eerie radio hymn it sung to the dark. They were not yet close enough to see clearly, but there, just beneath the surface, structure marked the geology. Radio was far too long in the tooth to see clearly at this distance, but the probes were smart and there were three of them. Their radars could be calibrated to interfere at a predetermined point and the tripartite echoes produced would increase resolution orders of magnitude.

Feynman stops singing the instant the plan goes into action, and the next instant, the triplets go snow-blind.

Within milliseconds, filters adjust for the temporary aberration, a reflexive compensation for the overload. Their arrays are back online in moments. They reach out to one another and confirm identical experiences and recoveries. They are still fully functional, green across the board, unless the increased ambient ion densities were a type of sensory artifact. They were ready to resume their observation of Feynman-Rockway.

The only real issue they were experiencing was that Feynman-Rockway seems to have disappeared.

This chapter was getting outrageously long, so I chopped it up into two, the second one has a lot of refinements to undergo, so it will definitely be a while before that one goes out. Also, common Macro, mourning instead of morning? How did I not catch that last chapter? I'm realizing that I despise homophones. I also think I might be better at characterizing inanimate objects than people... huh.

Anyway, the specifics on this chapter is contained in my aforementioned "The Layman's Guide To a Familiar Sky." I think that about wraps it up, hope the quarantine is going well for all of you!

Until next time, I'll continue solving entropy!

.

.

./

There is, as yet, insufficient data for a meaningful answer

Collecting additional data

macroVAC: ~$ Signing off