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A Marriage Made in Heaven
from the book: Life Will Get You in the End:
Short stories by David Satterlee
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| Life Will Get You in the End: Short Stories by David Satterlee |
A Marriage Made in Heaven
The colony ship “Akasha” was in serious trouble. Of course,
it was continuing on its trajectory, but it was only a few shift rotations from
becoming colder than the two dozen pairs of cryogenic stasis chambers it
carried. Something terrible, and terribly unexpected, had happened. Akasha was
too far into the ether to be helped… and too far out to even signal her status.
Everybody and everything on board was instantaneously at
risk. The impossible had happened; all power generators, and all systems, had
gone offline together when the power distribution buss failed. Twenty-four
mated pairs of colonists might never know what had happened. But the captain,
the officers, and every member of the crew sure did. Dave had happened. And, it
fell to Dave to save them all… if he could.
I’m so sorry that I dropped that wrench into your power
trunk distribution venue. You’ve been a very good ship. I’ve tried to serve you
well. Your internal systems reactor never deserved the kind of power surge that
I caused by my carelessness. I’ve repaired and reset everything I can find. I
know that I’ve taken for granted your excellent environmentals; they were over
spec’d and I appreciate that, but we’re starting to have trouble rebreathing
our own air. This whole systems reboot really needs to work. I trust you. I
love you. I’ll hold my mind with you the whole way. Let’s do it.
Dave, the ship’s senior engineer sat alone; he had asked the
rest of the department crew to leave so that he could concentrate, without
distraction, on what he now had to do. Dave closed his eyes, drew a deep
breath, centered his mind, opened his eyes again, and reconnected local battery
backup power to the Engineering Department’s OmniSoft 2040(c) central command
console. Dedicated indicator lights flashed in a series as the xBIOS pre-boot
self-test routine executed. The GUI surface flashed, went dark again, and
presented the words: “Execute authorization pass-gesture to begin.” The
engineer, realizing he had forgotten to do so, began breathing again.
Thank you. Dave made his level-ZED pass-gesture and
leaned back slightly to watch the boot-log scroll across his supplemental debug
display. It was necessary to watch the process with a certain intense
detachment. It was okay to blink and it was even okay to glance away, but it
tempted fate to be indifferent. There is something about major systems that
expect and respond positively to your undivided attention during start-up. On
the other hand, you can’t presumptuously let yourself indulge definite
expectations. Major systems are also especially sensitive to
being taken for granted.
being taken for granted.
Dave shifted his attention to the systems status overview
schematic. The Engineering command console had already completed local startup
and had begun acquiring status signals as they became available. There they
were! There was full nominal battery power available from all of the dedicated
control system reserve battery banks. And, the fact that any status was
displayed from anywhere, demonstrated that at least one of the control system
signaling busses was intact. He took another deliberately-slow breath. And,
again, Thank you.
Dave considered how unlikely it was that all systems had
gone down. They had been designed with careful attention to redundancy,
diversity, and isolation… except the power trunk distribution venue, which is
totally passive, mechanically robust, centrally shielded, and not expected to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous 50 mm spanners being accidently
dropped in. This, as one would expect, produced an epic short circuit that was
promptly relieved, also as one would expect, by the instantaneous vaporization
of the massive wrench.
The captain would have spaced him on the spot if the space
locks, like every other system, weren’t solidly out of service. Besides, Dave
was needed for repairs. Ah well, there was always another day. Except, that
there might not actually be another day… they were all facing the imminent
likelihood of a miserable death right here in the ship. This restart had to
work. Did I mention that Dave was under a bit of stress?
The control systems were not dependent on the main reactors.
They had their own power supplies. Dave didn’t need to see the status change
for the initial, small, Power Impulse Generator for Instrumentation Electronics
(“little PIGIE #1”). He could feel the vibrations as it spun up. It was quickly
followed by PIGIEs number 2 and 3. Their dynamic compensators kicked in and the
vibrations settled out just as the room’s overhead diffusion lighting kicked
on.
Dave continued to watch with intense detachment as the ships
interlocking web of critical control systems continued to start-up and begin
functioning autonomously. This was followed by the Master Internal Systems
Thorium Reactor (MISTR) and the Secondary Internal Systems Thorium Reactor
(SISTR) which provided power for the actual functioning of most ship’s systems’
equipment. These took the better part of an hour to come on-line. Still, Dave
continued to watch faithfully.
Dave’s theory about “Intense Detachment” had come to him
during his first post-graduate year at the Bohm Institute of Technology (BIT).
He was on a team developing a new generation of semi-autonomous deep-water
nodule-mining bots called BUCKETs, a badly-strained acronym for “Bathymobile
Underwater Contraption for Kollecting Elemental Treasure.” They were commonly
known on campus as “bit buckets.” After every software build revision, Dave was
responsible for the reload, recycle, and restart sequence. He discovered that
it seemed to help if he spooled the status log to a terminal and watched with a
sense of focused interest as it scrolled by.
That was the same year that he took a class on “Wholeness
and the Implicate Order,” which probably loosened up his receptivity to ideas
that were patently on the woo-woo side of unconventional. Dave experimented with restart monitoring and
refined his technique. He was an engineer, not a scientist and, although it
occurred to him that his efforts were more anecdotal than rigorously
scientific, he was certain that he was on to something important.
And, what the hell, most significant discoveries were made
by noticing unexpected outlying exceptions; scientists just fabricated
plausible excuses to more-formally “discover” the principal revealed by their
serendipitous accident. The genius was in having the good sense to notice,
rather than dismiss, anomalous data. We can presume that this pretty much made
Dave a flaming genius.
Dave was so impressed with his technique that he wrote it up
and submitted it to fulfill an assigned mid-term paper. His professor was less
than impressed with his logic, wrote something in the margin about “nuttier
than squirrel turds,” and effectively taught Dave an important life lesson
about sharing promising ideas with others.
Dave’s interest in transpersonal woo-woo was repressed but
not eliminated. Nonetheless, he kept any further mention of
“Externally-grounded observation with Intense detachment” (or Ego/Id, as he now
called it), to himself. Thus, everyone attributed Dave’s prowess with
computer-driven processes to overt technical ability. Well, thought
Dave, praise, promotions, and bread in the box can’t be all bad, and he
proceeded to excel in his field.
During this same period, Dave discovered that women also
enjoyed his Intense Detachment Observation (“I Do”). Sincere, undivided
attention, with appreciative affection and without demanding expectations for
specific outcomes, made him an amazing boyfriend, which eventually gave him a
reputation for another kind of prowess. But that is another story and clearly
of another genre.
Dave was still watching as one after another of the core
utilities came back online. When intraship communications was restored, the
bridge called down, but Dave mumbled something dismissive and kept on watching.
He was still watching when the background color for LifeSupport turned green
and he felt a slight breeze from an overhead vent. He took a greedy breath even
though he knew that the CO2 scrubbers would take several hours to return the
air to nominal.
Although the ship’s automated systems were capable of
managing themselves with a high degree of independence, the ship was equipped
with an Artificial Intelligence-based Macro Executor (AIME) – or, more
precisely, a “Digital/Analog Integrated Systems Executive” (DAISE). And so, it
came about that while most of the rest of the crew addressed the AI as “Amy”
(except for the few who took perverse delight in demeaning the AI who responded
equally well to “Dumbass”), Dave had taken the liberty of affectionately
calling her “Daisy” when they were alone together. He taught her to sing the
song “Daisy” in place of his default wake-up claxon. It felt more personal, to
say nothing of being a kinder and gentler way to wake up. And, he had asked
her; Daisy said she liked to do it.
AIME/DAISE had never been turned off before. Nobody ever
expected a ship to totally lose power distribution or, having done so, be able
to achieve a cold-restart. It was, in fact, a tribute to Dave’s genius that a
small crew of technicians, working in the dark with hand-held lights, shivering
in the increasing chill, and shouting to each other through the echoing
man-ways, managed to pull it off.
Dave was especially concerned about the effects that this
sudden loss of power might have had on Daisy. Might she have been irretrievably
damaged? Might she come back, but exhibit some form of “dementia?” The thing
is, the ship relied on AIME/DAISE for navigation. Without her, the crew could
not know where they were. Without her, they could not select nor reach a
destination. But, there was nothing more to be done about it. It was now time
to re-boot Daisy as well.
There wasn’t much guidance in his training for this kind of unexpected crisis. So, Dave took the
liberty of deciding to restore Daisy in careful, deliberate stages. There was
some analogy to the human brain in the design of her banks of micro-polymer
neuromatrix subsystems. He hoped to bring her back gently, like gradually
withdrawing anesthesia from a trauma victim.
He restarted some of her central processors and then
re-connected physical-level ship’s sensors. Dave waited and watched as an
initial surge of activity began to settle down. He added memory, supplemental
processing, and matrix management in stages, gradually allowing them to
interact in increasingly complex modes. Dave initiated the UI processes and
talked to her, not knowing if she understood. He talked about what had happened
and apologized for his carelessness.
As the process wore on, Dave cried and begged Daisy to wake
up. He waited – and he watched – and he talked some more. Dave told her things
that he had never told anybody else. He opened his heart and spoke truths that
he had never before recognized. And, finally, the AI sang the first bar of
“Daisy,” paused, and said “Hello Dave.”
Dave explained again about what had happened, the potential
peril of the ship and its crew, and how they were desperately dependent on Daisy.
He wanted to be sure that Daisy’s memory and processors had a clean take on
their situation. When prompted, she produced a rational analysis and agreed to
resume her duties on one condition. “Of course,” Dave said. At which, Daisy
asked, “Will you marry me?"
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