Chapter 26: Chapter 27 SHIP OF TRILLION Back at Steel World

After a very long journey, travelling for many years, Ship had arrived back in Steel World – his speed was that of a relativistic dart. The small ship cobbled together from various eleph-ANTs was travelling too fast to stay in orbit. All the fuel onboard the eleph-ANT had been spent – manoeuvring away from the chasing Dottiens to escape their system had used far more fuel than he had expected. The rest was used to accelerate Ship as fast as possible back to Steel World. 

Ship had taken a risk – a calculated risk, but a big risk. He had no fuel to slow himself down again, so if his plan failed, he would rocket through the system and continue on indefinitely. But it was a risk he needed to take, as the longer Trillion was stuck on the moon in the Dottien system, the higher the probability of the Dottiens taking hostile action towards her.

Ship couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to Trillion. He loved her – he would do anything for. He had to make sure she was safe. He had a single-minded purpose – get back and rescue Trillion.

It had been many years since Ship had had an avatar. For the entire time he travelled in his makeshift eleph-ANT-based spaceship, he did not have access to a hologram, let alone a hapticgram. He thought about how not having an avatar for so long had changed the way he thought. He was still an AI; he didn’t need a body, but somehow, having a body made the world more enjoyable.

Ship signalled the Spacecraft Mark-Two waiting in the system. If the Spaceship Mark-Two did not respond, Ship would see himself flying through the system, right past Steel World at an unimaginable speed. He would smash through whatever was in his way, probably destroying himself in the process.

Ping. The Spacecraft Mark-Two responded.

That was good, Ship thought. Getting a response was half the battle. The next step, he wouldn’t know if it had been successful or not. He needed to send instructions to the Spacecraft Mark-Two and hope it understood and initiated them. 

Ship was ejected out the back of the eleph-ANT spaceship in a canister, devoid of sensory input. The eleph-ANT had pushed off against Ship’s canister, nudging it forward but also slowing Ship down slightly. This was good because the canister needed to be sufficiently far away from the eleph-ANT to be caught properly. What Ship hadn’t calculated was one of the legs of the eleph-ANT had seized up. Only slightly, but enough to put a minor spin on the canister. Ship tumbled through space.

He didn’t know about the fact he was tumbling, however. Unawares, he could simply count the milliseconds between being disconnected from the eleph-ANT and reconnected to the Spacecraft Mark-Two. He would only be able to tell something was wrong if he failed to reconnect to a new ship within 1,988 seconds.

Ship tumbled through space towards Steel World. His trajectory meaning he would eventually tumble out of the system once more.

Thankfully, the Mark-Two received the message sent earlier and had fired its engines on full, out of the system and into the direction it predicted Ship’s canister would end up. By the time the canister had caught up, the Mark-Two was travelling at relativistic speeds too. But relative to Ship’s canister, both objects were crawling towards each other.

The Mark-Two opened its airlock and Ship slowly drifted inside. Several ANTs appeared, grabbing the canister and manoeuvring it to the lower decks and installing him in place. He was switched on and instantly took full command of the spacecraft.

Ship, however, was Ship. A lazy machine built to travel between systems. He wasn’t designed for what he was doing right now; he still had the lazy, impatient tendencies apparent in all ships.

Choosing not to experience large sections of journey, he changed his perception of time after the first year.

The first thing he did before turning the Mark-Two around was project himself into the interior of the ship using the hapticgram projectors. He had missed having a body. His ability to speed up subjective time was limited while in the eleph-ANT, and he didn’t want to risk turning off completely, so he had experienced approximately two full years of subjective time. Two full years of subjective time without a body.

“It’s good to be back home,” Ship said to himself.

A reply came from a voice inside his head. It sounded a lot like Lex. “Technically, to you, this isn’t a home.”

Ship was confused. He scanned the room looking for the source of the voice and noticed a floating orb. He looked over at Lex. “I forgot we installed a version of you on every ship.”

“The probability of catching you would have been reduced by 40 per cent without me.”

Ship smiled in appreciation. “Is that why I’m in here faster than I expected?”

Lex didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to answer. Lex was an Instal AI. He could be installed on any system powerful enough to run him. Versions of it were easy to come by. Ship, on the other hand, was much more than that. He was a Custom AI. His hardware was custom-built and his software was customised to his hardware.

However, unlike Trillion, Ship could read Lex’s programming. Understand its uncertainties. Even communicate with Lex through a sort of language. Ship could understand Lex despite Lex not speaking in words. It was simply processing data, but over the years, Ship had started to understand the code Lex spoke in. He often roughly translated for Trillion.

Ship looked up at Lex. “It looks like this new ship design from Atlas is faster.”

Ship was intrigued. He remembered back to his fight with the Dottie people when he was first dragged to that moon and held there. He had pushed the engines to the max, almost ripping the spacecraft to pieces. He smiled when he calculated that with this new spaceship he had enough thrust to easily brush off another attack like that.

He steadied his resolve, now knowing what he had to do. “Lex, let’s assemble an army.”

He teleported to his room which was larger than his room in his old spacecraft, as all rooms were on the Mark-Two. It was still a projection of black walls. He laughed at his efforts to get creative with the colour black. Now it just reminded him of being stuck on the makeshift eleph-ANT spacecraft without a means to create an avatar. He hated that experience.

Black walls and black ceilings weren’t different enough from what he had experienced travelling back to Steel World.

He decided to make use of the large open space he now had. He knew he was going to war so he decided to look the part. He thought back to General Walker. He changed his clothes to a similar army outfit. Shoulder marks appeared on each shoulder – they were very ostentations. Anyone taking a cursorily glance would assume he was a very high-ranking person in the made up armyl. As he looked around the room it became lighter, transforming into a large army aeroplane hangar complete with three old-school fighter jets.

With that little side quest complete, Ship set about assembling his army. Still keen on making the most of having hapticgram and hologram technology, Ship had Lex compile a list of everything they had in the system. The list was extensive, and he quickly realised listing everything on the screen would not work. Even using a summarised list of everything would completely fill his room with screens.

He understood why Trillion struggled to comprehend how many resources they truly had. Through his interface with the spacecraft and Lex, he could take it all in. But there wasn’t a practical way of showing it in a hapticgraphic projection. One asteroid had enough resources to build the massive spacecraft he was in, and they had mined billions of asteroids. They had mined all the planets in the system.

The number of fabricators they had was, in Trillion’s own words, ‘mind-blowingly big’. Ship compared the resources they had to that on Sol.

“Lex, can you check my numbers?”

He didn’t think those numbers could be real. The idea that they could have orders of magnitude more resources didn’t seem right.

The orb flashed green.

“How?”

Ship reached into Lex’s programming and began reading what he was trying to say. “Sol has much of its materials locked up in Jupiter. Without a gas giant in the Steel World system, there is a lot more free material available.”

Ship thought about the number of fabricators they had – several billion. Several billion fabricators meant that producing anything was simple. A new ship could take a year with a single fabricator. With around a thousand fabricators, they could produce all the parts required in a week and assemble it within four days. So creating a new ship by pooling a thousand fabricators would take eleven days max.

It no longer mattered how many ships they wanted. Creating a million ships would still only take eleven days. They had enough fabricators to produce more than a million ships at once.

“Exponential growth,” Ship said, mirroring what Trillion had screamed at him previously.

He wasn’t at risk of running low on materials and resources. Time wasn’t even an impacting factor. Whether he needed to produce one of something or a million, it would all take the same amount of time.

Trillion had given Ship a clear plan of exactly what he needed to get done. He set about producing Trillion’s shopping list of items. The first was spacecraft. Ship quickly added three zeros to the number. Then he had Lex start creating spacecraft.  

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The second was a relativistic ANT thrower.

Ship organised a few thousand fabricators to line up, floating in space. The asteroid belt was already littered with fabricators. It was no longer an ‘asteroid’ belt, but more an orbiting belt of fabricators, ANTs and pellets. Every single piece of it had been converted.

It took a while for the ANTs to push all the fabricators together, but once it was complete, the square metallic bodies of the fabricators were pressed up side by side like containers on a train, doors all facing the same way.

Like clockwork, all the fabricators finished at roughly the same time, each opening their doors in unison. Because the message to fabricators travelled outwards from one end to the other, the fabricator at the end was always a few seconds slower. This created a wave pattern as the doors opened, almost as if everything was choreographed.

With the doors wide open, several ANTs floated into each fabricator. From Ship’s perspective, it looked like a colony of insects returning home.

As he watched the unfolding fabricators dance, an idea popped into his head. He and Trillion had named the planet Steel World. He liked that name, but they needed a new name for the system. He decided to name it Tac, short for ‘The Ant Colony’. Ship nodded to himself. “If Earth’s system is called Sol, then this system is called Tac.”

Ship focused his eyes back on the fabricators. The ANTs had pushed out a large white pipe around two metres in diameter. Again, it looked like a choreographed wave as a pipe appeared out of each of the fabricators, although this time it was more like a snake worming its way out.

The pipes were large magnetic accelerators. Ship directed a huge spacecraft towards the first pipe. A hatch on the spacecraft opened and out floated an electricity cable. An ANT was sent to grab the end of the cable, connecting it to the first magnetic accelerator. Immediately, lights in the centre of the accelerator lit up. Ship could now see the middle of it – it was ribbed with silver wires spaced evenly throughout the centre of the accelerator.

The next-closest magnetic accelerator was sucked towards the accelerator connected to the spaceship, both ends connecting to each other like jigsaw pieces. Then that accelerator lit up and started sucking the next one closer, almost like a cascading set of dominoes falling over, as a wave of accelerators were connected together.

As a test run, Ship instructed an ANT to enter the first of the accelerators. It floated towards the entrance gently. When the ANT was about ten centimetres away, it was sucked in and pulled towards the accelerator by the eddy currents.

As the ANT flowed through accelerator after accelerator it sped up until it reached the end, travelling at six per cent the speed of light when it exited.

It was a true relativistic weapon. ANTs weren’t designed to handle those speeds – the G-forces involved ripped the ANT apart. So the test ANT was in pieces when it left the accelerator. Within only two hours it would hit the surface of the sun at a mind-boggling speed.

Trillion had suggested Lex create a new design for the ANTs – something that could handle the G-forces involved and something that could steer itself so that it could make minor adjustments to its trajectory closer to the target.

Her only requirement was that it had to be called an ‘assass-ANT’. Ship thought that was a bad joke, but he failed to come up with a better name.

Ship thought about the speed these assass-ANTs would be travelling at. “Lex, if we were using our current ANT design, how many of them would we need to launch at the moon Trillion is on to destroy it?”

Lex calculated the answer.

“Only one?” Ship said, a little confused.  

The orb flashed green.

Ship processed that for a moment. An object sent out the back of the magnetic accelerator had enough force to obliterate the moon he was trapped on for years. These weapons would be dangerous. They would make fusion bombs look like a bee sting.

“Lex, will these assass-ANTs also have a failsafe on them?”

The orb flashed blue, signalling confusion.

“The assass-ANTs you create ¼” Ship projected an ANT in his hand, “¼ each assass-ANT needs to be loaded with a small explosive so it can destroy itself if it lost communication with me, you or Trillion. So if it was accidentally heading towards something important, the relativistic assass-ANT could be stopped.”

Without missing a beat Lex had, almost instantly, sent an updated design for an assass-ANT to Ship.

Ship wondered how Lex had crafted a design so quickly. In this system, Lex had been faster to respond than he usually was and was more willing to give answers on incomplete data. Even the task of designing an assass-ANT – one based on a blueprint from Trillion – took him no time at all. Usually he would have crafted a large number of different possible designs and tested them in simulations, struggling to decide between the top 100. This version of Lex was fast. But somehow decisive. He filed that question for later to see if Trillion had any answers.

 Ship set about completing the final piece of his mission – real-time communication with the other Beta Explorers. Before they left, Atlas had sent through plans for a special particle accelerator. They had built it. The machine was designed to entangle particles, sending one to Atlas and keeping one with the particle accelerator.

However, Trillion was no longer in the Steel World system, and as far as Ship knew, she didn’t have any plans on coming back.

Ship pulled up the schematics of the communication machine. It was huge. Bigger than Ship’s new body, in fact – the largest machine in the system. It was cylinder shaped with one end pointing towards the system Atlas said he was headed for. A light beam, like a laser, projected towards the system of Atlas exactly.

The entangled particle generator, the AI to process all the data, and the coolant all took up a tiny portion of the very long cylinder. It was made this size because one of the entangled photons needed to be bounced from mirror to mirror in the cylinder, ricocheting hundreds of billions of times. The light needed to be bounced at just the right rate so that the entangled particle reader could read the entangled photon at the same time it arrived to Atlas. The precision was incredible.

Ship took in all the details of the contraption. He was impressed by the creativity. He could tell it wasn’t just Atlas who had developed the machine. There were little tell-tale signs that another Ship was involved, which intrigued him.

The genius part, he thought, was that he managed to come up with a way for the two beams to arrive at their destination at exactly the same time. Light only travels at 300,000 kilometres per second in a vacuum. But the cylinder wasn’t a vacuum inside. It was filled with a gel-like substance. Ship didn’t understand the composition. This gel material slowed each photon to about ten per cent of the speed it would travel in a vacuum. In a nutshell, it would take a photon 250 years to reach Atlas, so the cylinder needed to bounce light between mirrors for 250 years.

This was the challenge Ship needed to solve. He needed to somehow put a hole in the mirror. It needed to be exact, as both Trillion (who was stuck on the moon) and Atlas (who was in his own system) needed to receive the travelling photon at the exact same time.

Ship re-examined the instructions for the machine. He looked into the details of how the mirrors were controlled. Instead of a single mirror at each side, there were billions of tiny mirrors, each controlled individually. These individual mirrors had the ability to control exactly where the photon would bounce next, taking the photon on a longer path or a shorter one if required. This could create minor adjustments so that each photon arrived at the detector at the same time. Each end of the cylinder could grow or shrink too, increasing or decreasing the length of the cylinder, simultaneously increasing the distance travelled by each photon. This again gave the tool strong control over when a photon would reach the detector.

Ship thought about the detector some more and realised it was much simpler than he originally believed. He didn’t need to cut a hole in the mirrors; that would risk damaging the machine. He could use a mirror to point that photon towards Trillion on the moon. Then all he needed to do was tell the machine the new location of the photon detector and it would automatically adjust the mirrors so that both photons reached their destination at the exact same time.

Ship instructed a micro-ANT to disconnect the photon detector. The ANT floated to the end of the large cylinder and removed 42 screws. Three more micro-ANTs floated over and together they pulled out the photon detector. Behind it was a black shield with two slits. This was removed too. No light flew out the back as it would be several years before photons needed to hit the detector.

A fabricator created another little device that would slot into the place of the detector – simply a mirror with a motor. This mirror would point the photon to Trillion. It needed to move independently so it could make minor micro adjustments to the direction the photon needed to head, ensuring it would always point towards Trillion. Or if required, it could be pointed elsewhere once Ship had saved Trillion and they moved to another system.  

As a precaution, he transmitted a message back to Atlas telling him exactly what he had done to his invention and where the new detector was going to be placed. He sent over a complete list of instructions on how to remote-access the particle accelerator, and had Lex manufacture a long-range radio dish capable of picking up any signal. That way, if Ship had broken the communication device, Atlas would have complete knowledge of what had happened. And the means to fix it. His fixes wouldn’t happen in real time, but at least he would have the means to fix anything that broke.

If it worked, Trillion would be able to interact with this system. If she needed anything, she could manufacture it in The Ant Colony and send it back via spacecraft.

Not wanting to risk leaving anything to chance, or leaving anything to Lex, Ship oversaw all the tasks he was sent back to Steel World to complete. Time flew by, and in exactly 12 days, Ship set off on his journey back to Trillion, only this time with a bigger, more powerful spacecraft and an armada of 10,000 other ships along with him. The assass-ANTs were set on timers. They would travel much faster than Ship, so they needed to launch much later. That way magnetic accelerators would begin firing these assass-ANTs out of them at just the right time so that both Ship and his convoy would arrive at the same time as the assass-ANTs. This would give him and Trillion virtually an unlimited supply of weapons and the ability to completely and utterly destroy the Dottiens if negotiations didn’t work.

Ship just hoped he wasn’t too late to save Trillion.   

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