Chapter 13: A Fascinating Discovery

When we reached Psi Serpentis we were astounded to find a water-ice bearing superplanet just outside the Goldilocks zone. Even more amazing we found an abandoned starship embedded in solid ice. It was much smaller than our great ships or even our moonlet ships. It was only a about 600 meters long and barely a quarter of that in diameter. We managed to slice it free of its entombing glacier. Once we could examine it, we found what appeared to be an emergency crank to open the hatch in the ship's surface. It took the form of a splined metal shaft in a recess. We quickly machined up a matching coupling and attached it to an electric motor equipped with a hefty power cell. A teleoperated robot approached the ship, slotted in the coupling and attempted to open it. It used the reverse protocol than we used of 'righty tightly, lefty loosey'. Slowly the hatch receded a bit to clear its thickness, then slid sideways into a pocket. The cameras showed guiding tracks cut into the floor and ceiling.

An inner hatch was opened in the same fashion, then the ROV pilots took several duty watches to plot out and photograph the floor plan of the ship. It had five decks. What confused us was it had engine nacelles. It seemed that the ship's designers had not stumbled onto the secret of the reactionless drive.

In what was obviously engineering we discovered the ship's power supply. It was quite familiar to us--a lithium fusor. The units of measure looked a bit strange, and I had no idea what sort of voltages it was designed to deliver, but a fusor is a fusor. We got it up and running with a fresh charge of fuel. Several ship's systems came on-line, including the illumination. It had a much higher red component than our usual lighting, and a lower percentage of the higher optical frequencies. I had the pilots shift to an infra-red capable camera and the walls came alive with drawings, deck maps and art work.

There were berths for perhaps seventy crew members. They weren't allowed much personal space, but that could have been a reflection of their culture.

Something unforeseen happened that we did not notice. The ship's computer core began to bootstrap. I had no idea that it was possible for computer memory to retain data over the millennia that ship must have been buried in that ice. It had been over two kilometers below the surface when we found it. However, the computer's backup image was successfully copied into the core and the thing came up, then started initializing subsystem after subsystem. Soon we were confronted with a working alien machine intelligence. We first learned that some sort of guiding intelligence had come into play when the ship's hatches locked our ROV out of sensitive areas aboard the ship. Then we noticed repair drones flitting around, almost too fast to see. Next we discovered that the ROV was being tracked by cameras. That was enough for me. I had the pilots move their robot in front of a camera, turn its screen towards said camera and start running the computer-to-computer first contact script. Number theory and mathematics up to calculus and planetary motion was displayed. Then the basics of an alphabet was demonstrated along with the sounds of the letters played on the ROV's speaker. Next, simple animations were displayed along side nouns, verbs and modifiers. Within two ship's days a remote entered the room where our ROV sat, equipped with an LED display. A dialog began. The ship wanted to know the duration it was off-line. All I could figure to do was to feed it a high resolution visible light map of the local cluster and a recorded high-resolution gravitational anomaly image of our galaxy set against a backdrop of the local galaxies. All conversation halted for several days as the alien ship's mind analyzed the information.

Then the questions began. It started out with where was everybody. I had the record of our explorations of the fast-moving star systems played back. Next it asked how did we get there. I spent a couple days creating an illustrated and animated introduction to the slipstream drive as well as the equipment involved and the powering up and powering down of a slipstream drive. Then I tacked on the field equations for both the reactionless drive and the slipstream drive. When I had that played the conversation halted again, this time for over a week.

When the ship's machine intelligence again opened a dialog with us it asked a question. What would we want in exchange for working engineered devices that projected these fields?

All I could think to say was, "What do you have?" We were at an impasse, frustrated by our unfamiliarity with each other's technology. I suggested that the ship send over its own ROV to learn about our technologies and what we considered leading edge. With the captains clearance, this was found to be an agreeable solution to both parties. The machine intelligence set about constructing its ROV while the captain sequestered me in his day room to plan just what we were going to do.

Assistance came from a direction that I really didn't expect. My son Vernon was totally conversant with the patois we'd designed as the first contact language. He volunteered to act as our ship's host. The captain liked the idea, but realized that Vernon was quite young, and didn't know the dangers inherent to some of the ship's equipment. A thirty year-old engineer was assigned to shepherd the two of them around the ship, answering questions and keeping them out of trouble. Harold, the engineer, was told not to withhold any information.

First, Vernon described the theory of operation of our ROV. Everything came to a screeching halt when he described how quantum Q-bits were used as bi-directional data and control feeds with zero propagation time, which we had been tested to a distance of eight light years. Harold explained enough of quantum theory necessary to understand how paired quantum dots could be grouped into Q-bit words. He also explained the tedious, difficult steps necessary to create those paired quantum dots, then read from and write to them by changing their spin states. A lot of research and automation had gone into their production in the time since their discovery, back in the pre-fusion days.

To achieve a common ground, our system of measurement had to be defined for the alien ship's mind. A centimeter in length was defined in terms of multiples of the emission spectra of the orange-red spectral line of Krypton 86, The second of time was defined as a multiple of the ground transition period of Cesium 133, and mass was defined as one gram equaling the weight of one cubic centimeter of pure water at one gravity. since the acceleration G is defined in terms of meters per second per second, there were no circular references. From there, e, pi, C, a light year and other constants were derived from formula and simple derivations. Electrical units of measure were defined in a similar manner once the definition of one Mole was understood. (One mole of atoms of any element weighs the same as the atomic weight of that element.) Then the coulomb could be defined, and from there voltage, amperage, resistance, capacitance and inductance.

Once we started assigning values to the field strengths the alien understood the incredible power densities that we were dealing with.

In conversation we learned that the ship had found itself marooned in that system because it was severely lithium deficient while the ship had little or no stores with which to replenish its fusor. We had literally tons of purified lithium stores as lithium is quite abundant in most systems. We suggested keeping in reserve a combination of electromagnetic and gravitic field generators to generate Bussard scoops and thus mine the ion clouds around supernova remnants such as white dwarfs and in the Oort clouds around various systems.

It asked how we generated such a detailed mass defect map. That got them into the field geometries and skin effects noticed at the boundaries of the slipstream fields. I was called in to demonstrate how to measure the resonance points of our reserve stardrive coils and modify the computer routines to safely bring up the fields. I also went through the program designed to unload the fields. I asked Vernon to inquire as to the alien's understanding of a stellar-level energy release, and what could happen if the field power supplies were interrupted before they were gracefully brought down. In his pride, Vernon told the alien that I had designed and built the first slipstream drive and determined how to use it safely. I was brought in to consult over the implementation of the field generators several times after that.

The alien was excited to learn about our nanite replication technology. It noted that we were doing it the hard way, and it was quite willing to exchange technologies with us since it had learned that it had tech that we did not. Their culture had learned to manipulate matter on an atomic level through an entirely different approach using, of course, field technology. With it, samples could be non-destructively sampled of any complexity or temperature, as long as the sample fit within the bay provided for it. The bay could be constructed to operate on three-dimensional samples several meters on a side. Eight meters cubed was as far as they'd been able to push the technology. They also had repair drones that were several generations advanced over ours. Then we got down to the details. We began with chemical processes and catalysts. This was the sort of thing that took generations to advance the state of the art. With their field-based manipulation technology applied to chemical engineering it had blown the roof off of what they'd had before the discovery and introduction of this principle.

Surprisingly, we had better network and data security than they did. They'd never had to deal with a hacker culture like we experienced. The concept of religion was alien to them which turned down the heat quite a bit on their social unrest.

In passing Vernon mentioned that we used what was essentially a collimated gravity beam to aid in asteroid mining, moving heavy equipment and moving boats in our landing bay. Now I know what a hyperventilating machine intelligence acts like. It couldn't stop asking questions!

I sighed, ate a good dinner, kissed my wife and told her that I'd see her when it was over.

I got everybody in front of a white board and proceeded to give a post-graduate class on the theories and engineering implementations of the reactionless drive, artificial gravity, the black hole generator and the 'graser' beam that we used as a common tool. It took over forty eight hours from beginning to end, and I was damned glad to learn that the captain had it recorded because I sure didn't want to do it again.

We learned how to modify a chemical process with a ring of field effectors around a pipe that forced a desired reaction product in a standing wave front in a continuous flow process. The things were stupid--purposefully designed to do one thing, and one thing only but quickly and completely. It changed the hell out of our refineries and gave us atomically pure elements and alloys, as long as they were kept in vacuum to keep from bonding with incident matter.

The alien ship's society had sensors based on different theories than we'd discovered. They'd never thought about a U. V. sensitive CCD. It was a series of tradeoffs that enriched both of us.

Finally the ship's core asked us to help it capture a planetismal, create a ship out of it designed to take advantage of the field drivers that it had been exposed to, and migrate its Machine Intelligence into its new shell.

I flat-out donated the CAD design of our current ship. In return we received a small assembly factory that we could boot-strap into larger factories as well as the alien ship's entire atomic-level assembly factory image library, including documentation as to what each entry was used for. We'd have to basically triple our computer infrastructure to control a one meter cubed factory. Then I received an extensive email packet exploring how to create a point-to-point field congruity that could be used as a stellar power tap, but only for a static station in a helio-synchronous orbit. That tied the knot between us.

We captured several high-mass asteroids from that system's Kuiper belt, fused them together and moved the resulting mass into a close orbit around the system's primary. As per our usual methodology, after a decade the molten mass was removed into a solar shadow of the ice planet and spun up to cause the stony dross to settle into a shell. With six tugs retarding the proto-ship, one tug with an over-powered gravity beam pulled plugs of solid metal out of the central core of the rotating work piece. Then the rocky exterior was shaved off to accelerate the cooling process. Huge shearing blades stabbed out from the end of the Typhon to shape the mass into the characteristic double-cone shape of a ship propelled by the slipstream drive.

The entire process which created the Typhon was duplicated to create the Kaast, or fisherman. The only issue was the soil, seeds and other organics which had to be carefully harvested from the Typhon, leaving its reserves a bit thin. However, the algae, krill, shrimp and fish tanks were fully populated and ready to support fauna aboard the new ship. The aqua culture tanks had the fastest rebound. The soil bacteria had to reproduce and migrate through the strips of sterile media.

During this process the hardware infrastructure of the Machine Intelligence was evaluated for compatibility to our systems. Dedicated high-speed bridging processors were designed and implemented to work with the human's IP infrastructure and security protocols. Slowly, carefully, plans were made, tested, debugged and tested again to move the core hardware that supported the M.I. into its new ship.

Finally, sixty-odd years after their first contact, the two ships set out for Sol. I was anxious to get in touch with our corporate lawyers. I had a lot of new patents to file!

I suppose the Fisherman was lonely and had become acclimatized to us. Its ROV stayed aboard. We had some highly entertaining and thought provoking conversations.