Chapter 14

Thomas was slightly out of breath, but kept pace with me as I charged up the stairs, then briskly walked to the moving platform against the windows. “Forward is the direction of rotation, backwards is opposite. Port is on your left when facing the direction we are rotating, Board is to your right.”

“Isn’t it starboard?”

“Not in space, stars are in every direction,” I said, joking.

He bounced as we stepped onto the port platform running forward. I stepped off as we went a quarter of the way around the ring, and he followed me thru a set of glass doors into a building. The visual curve of the floor was less apparent in the smaller space of the building.

He followed me to the probe operators room. I stepped up behind Mithra, “3M, Thomas and I are going to be observing you for a bit. Can you give us an explanation of where you are, what you are doing, and what you’ve discovered so far?”

“Nice to meet you Thomas,” he said, without looking up, “Welcome to Exploration Command.”

“Excuse me, sir,” came a soft voice from behind us.

I stepped out of the way, as Tigress set a mocha on the desk next to 3M. Thomas’s eyes grew large, and he backed up a step, before realizing that she wasn’t wearing anything but fur.

He gave her a big smile, and put out his hand, “Thomas Diaz. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

She gave him a feral grin, then turned and went back to her duties.

“Who was that?”

“That was Tigress. She’s on coffee duty today, lost a bet with Pooh,” I told him.

The confusion on his face was priceless, but 3M continued after a sip of his mocha, and a sigh. “I’m currently controlling a probe around Lacaille 8760. I’ve identified the plane of the elliptic by studying the rotation of the star. I’m currently making thrust moving farther from the star, but up into the elliptic to better search for planets.

“So far I’ve found two Jupiter class worlds, each with numerous moons, some quite large. The largest is in the habitable zone, and I believe it’s magnetic field is large enough to protect the moons from the energy released during the star’s occasional super flares.

“I’m about an hour from being in position to view it again, and I’m hoping to confirm a reading I got of oxygen and water on one of the moons.”

“How far away is this system?” Thomas asked.

“Not quite 13 light years from Earth,” he replied.

“You think you might have found Endor?”

“I’m not familiar with that.”

“How do you not know about Endor?” he asked, “Are you an alien like that cat lady?”

“Be nice,” I warned, “That cat lady is one of my fiances.”

“You’re marrying an alien? But I thought you grew up on Earth.”

“3M grew up on Earth too, but he’s almost 90. I think he missed Star Wars.”

“Never liked Star Wars, Star Trek at least tried to get the science right,” 3M said.

“But cat girl!”

“Her name is Tigress, and there is much more going on than you are aware of yet. She used to look human. Now please pay attention.”

He looked around the room, trying to spot others, but they were all seated at their cubicles, and the high cubicle walls made spying difficult. Finally he turned back to 3M, “Endor is a forest moon around a gas giant named Yavin 4.”

“Ok, this is a moon around Lacaille 8760 b.”

“These names stink.” he said.

“These names are what they got when detected on Earth. Now looking at the controls, do you think that you could train Bee to control something like this?” I asked interrupting the argument.

“Sure, before I left for college I had her working on a flight simulator, she was getting good at take off and landings, movement in 3d space was easy for her to pick up.”

“Great, let’s leave 3M to his work, and I can show you the building set aside for the computers that will run a version of Bee here.”

“She’s gonna love having a real mainframe to run on,” he bragged.

“She’s gonna need it if she’s monitoring and controlling several hundred probes at a time.”

We stepped onto the forward moving slide walk again, and I pointed out the copy of the probe we were using sitting in the middle of the space.

“That thing is massive!”

“Yeah, helps the probe operators remember how big it is on their way to work.”

“How many operators?”

“Each probe has 6 operators that swap off for 24hr a day coverage.”

“They only do that job for four hours a day? What do they do the rest of the time?”

“Actually it’s an eight hour shift, every third day they have a day either on other duties, or a free day.”

“So will I have probe operator duties?”

“Maybe, it depends on whether our recordings of inputs at the controls, and recordings of events are enough to train her or not,” I stepped off the slide walk, in front of another building.

As we entered he looked around at the cavernous space. It was a 40 meter by 60 meter building that went from floor to ceiling.

“This is huge, you really want to fill this up with computers? What about the heat gain?”

“Proxima station is permanently in the shadow of Proxib, the planet below. An extra source of heat would actually be helpful to the energy equilibrium of the station, as it tends to run cold here.”

He started walking off the distances trying to get his mind around the space. “What kind of machines do you plan to install?” he asked.

“I’m building a custom system that uses Intel AI hardware. While we will be doing some visual processing, using it to identify planets, moons, and large asteroids, it mainly needs to be on alert for fast moving objects, radio broadcasts, and piloting itself around the star system to get the best visuals of all the objects it detects,” Dee said, walking into the room.

“Dee, this is Thomas the AI programmer I found. He’s been designing AI systems to learn to play video games by watching a player.”