[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]"What's its size?" she asked.
"Looks to be two three seven klicks diameter," Viktor read off the flickering scale. "Surface grav, maybe
a hundredth of a g."
Easy to approach and hang alongside. Hard labor, lugging the hoses around, melting that incredibly
tough, deep-frozen ice. But it would be R R, too. As her mother used to say, Your mind working too
much? Use your hands instead.
"How far?"
Viktor beamed. "Two days flight, with some time for delta-V. I was worried maybe we not find much
ice near this bow shock."
"Enough time to fix the antennas?" Julia asked.
"Some, anyway." Viktor grimaced. "We'll have to run the all-'bot teams. And get them ready to operate
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on this iceteroid, too."
Julia finally managed to rouse herself from her lethargic depression. She had lost team members in the
long decades on Mars, starting in the first expedition, with the two who had ventured into Vent A on
their own. But never quite so brutally. And never to an enemy other than carelessness and bad luck. "I'll
go help."
Veronique had been principally in charge of the robots. Her loss meant they would all have to pitch in.
Hiroshi volunteered right away. Julia found in the first hour that she was rusty. She had telepresence
skills learned in the generations of workbots sent to Mars, but these were the very latest designs and
built for different tasks. In the flight outward Veronique had done too much of the work and tutored too
little. But then, they had all been infernally busy. A new ship is a fresh menu of troubles.
On High Flyer robots did maintenance and repairs outside and in the fusion region. If they got hot near
the reactor, they then cooled off in a shielded vault, nestled beside the huge water cylinders, until ready
to use again. They never entered the living quarters. If they themselves needed repair, the work was
done by other semiautonomous robots, operating under smart telepresence.
"How're they looking?" she asked Hiroshi in the midpod, between life systems and the water columns.
"Cranky." He looked distracted, punching in commands to a big, cylindrical stack of multipurpose
armatures. The many arms made it look like a very dangerous Swiss Army knife with jets attached.
"Lemme see." She started on prep.
None of the ship's robots looked remotely human. A two-armed, two-legged 'bot would be maladapted
here. Spindly ones operated in the zero-g sections near the axis, and on the hull when they were not
boosting. Other bulky ones had multisocketed arms, so they could lurch from socket-hold to tie line in
the rugged radiation environments of the drive. Slender, snaky forms labored to check and patch the vast
water cells that had to be kept from freezing. Water circulated by sluggish pipes to the warming zone of
the reactor, but the joints had a tendency to pop.
They were smart 'bots, of course, because they had bodies. This elementary point had eluded the
twencen AI savants: intelligence builds up from sensory-motor experience, not from logical rules. Start
with a body and build a mind.
So the rise of the robots, starting in the early twenty-first century, meant that form of AI came into its
own. No more software and wiring diagrams; bring on the neural plasticity and learned patterning. A
working robot was not a set of abstract reasoning software walking around in a metal skirt. It was
instead a mind brought up on a diet of inertia, fraction, torque, and balance. All along through the 2020s
and 2030s, machines learned from animals, not from logicians. In space they crawled and slithered and
even flew-all using methods mimicked from worms and rattlers and octopi.
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She told the hull 'bots to check for flaws and damage, delegating a special, spindly team with big hands
to install faraday shields around the microwave antennas, once another team had replaced them. These
were just wire cages, with grid spacing greater than the emitted micro-wavelengths. Since the big power
they were getting came in far longer wavelengths, this should protect their comm gear against overload
and blowout.
Robots grew up in a techno-universe that was getting embedded, smaller, sneakier, and everywhere.
High Flyer was not made on the mode of the stalwart Titanic, splendid gray iron in hull and hammering
engines. It was instead a moving bulk ruled by a nervous system of chips and 'bots-buggier, not just
bigger.
"Hey, Viktor, we need zero g now," she was finally able to send on comm. "Gotta get these 'bots out."
"Was quick," he said approvingly, and the rumble of the drive cut off. Julia clung to a beam, and the
'bots went into their automatic, gyro-stabilized positions, ready to work. She wished Hiroshi were there
to help, but he was sedated.
Out the 'bot hatch they went-a long tube leading to an automatic air lock. They popped into space, got
oriented, and started. Julia watched and corrected.
She could feel the whole system at work, in the working immersion pod. Tuning into the embedded,
fixed sensors, she picked up the whole-body feel of the Swiss Army cylinder balanced intricately on a
gas jet. It was remarkably like sensing the entire High Flyer, because the perception space was the same.
When Viktor let her immerse in High Flyer, she could feel how its fusion flame adjusted its flight, sense
the throb as pumps moved its arterial water and air through capillaries. She saw the framed scenes as
artificial eyes peered into circuit tangles and even the fusion hellhole.
She would never forget the first time she saw their drive, from the inside. She had never paid much
attention to fusion, believing-as the skeptics had said for half a century-that controlled fusion power
plants lay twenty years ahead, and always would.
But the sudden advent of a high-quality fusion rocket made her hit the books-or rather, the Net-and
fathom the magnetic doughnut that held the ions of boron and hydrogen. The ions snaked around the
geometry and then slammed into each other, giving forth brimming radiation, spitting hot alpha particles
out. Then the doughnut collapsed. Ions let fly. The rocket engine was this flickering, come-and-go
doughnut, holding the plasma, then letting it fly as the doughnut died.
This called up the memory of scuba diving in Hawaii, on the north coast of Oahu, offshore Turtle Bay.
The wonder of it had charmed her. Hanging upside down above a coral reef, she had learned to blow
bubbles that, rising, formed into rings. They were magically exact, thinning into hoops a hand wide but
of thickness less than a little finger.
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Toroids, she remembered from high school geometry. A fat one was like a doughnut. She floated thirty
feet down, utterly relaxed, and watched the floppy bubbles shape themselves into beautiful rings, order
emerging from chaos, another of nature's miracles.
Like now: another doughnut of fierce fires, dying. The ions escaped down a magnetic gullet that became
a throat, shaping the plasma into a ferocious fire that jetted out the back. The doughnut died, crumpled
magnetic field lines sagging. Another torus, she remembered from Hawaii, seeing them shape magically
into toroids, into rings. Nature found so many uses for the same geometries.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plkajaszek.htw.pl
