Symphony of Destruction (The Spindown Saga, #1) Read online

  The only way to know for sure the status of the CSO was to get to the bridge. Brother Anderson turned toward it and sped off. He muttered quietly to himself as he moved.

  “To be sure which units are functioning and which is most suitable to assume control, all computational units must report current status assessments and then form consensus regarding suitability. However, without proper status reporting, this cannot be completed remotely. Yet a decision must be made in a timely fashion. Oh dear, Oh dear.”

  Shortly, he approached the bridge. As he neared the bridge’s entry hatch, he began to detect the sound of flames. Two junior crew-men, surnamed Tynor and Hansel, were there already, frantically but uselessly pounding on the hatch with wrenches.

  Peering through the plasglass viewpane instantly revealed that the bridge was completely filled with smoke and raging inferno. He quickly decided to enter the room. As medical officer, his highest priority was for the safety of the crew. It was a no brainer. He had to try to save anyone who might still be alive in the burning bridge. Yet he found himself unable to move toward the hatch. His internal safety controls blocked him from endangering himself in that way. The heat radiating from the hatch in front of him had triggered a low level firmware program. It was sort of a robotic equivalent to a fight-or-flight response; the electronic “lizard brain.” He was unable to come within a few centimeters of the hatch.

  Unable to move forward. Unable to access the bridge and Central Ship Operations. Unable to coordinate succession delegation. Unable to act. Hansel and Tynor stopped their vain efforts as well, just staring at him now.

  Yet, fire rages through the bridge. Killing the crew. Ruining the systems and equipment. Weakening the ship. Using the oxygen. Poisoning the air. It’s a deadly situation and it must be ended. Why isn’t the fire suppression system handling this? He needs to assume control. He’ll figure out the problem with fire suppression, get it back online and save the ship, then he’ll focus on fixing the life support systems.

  It seems wrong though. He can’t just unilaterally take over, can he? But if someone doesn’t do something fast the whole ship could be destroyed, and the entire crew would perish.

  That’s it. It has to be done. Brother Anderson launched the cso_succession routine, entering his own serial number as “next-most-capable-delegate.” If robots could feel fear, he felt it now. The routine began shutting down Brother Anderson’s subsystems, one by one, in preparation for a hard reboot. It would be a reboot like none other. The routine would hijack his startup sequence. It would alter his programming in ways that he could not begin to anticipate. He would be reborn, “a new man.”

  Brother Anderson was effectively offline for nearly 4 minutes as his firmware and data storage reordered itself and reinitialized several times in succession. It was a drastic reorganization in preparation for decompression and installation of the Central Ship Operations routines and protocols. It was like being clinically dead, he mused to himself as he began to regain awareness. His subsystems were still coming on line gradually, and he felt an odd sense of missing parts of himself while at the same time discovering new unfamiliar parts had been surreptitiously attached. It was like waking up with a new body. A new body composed of spinning hourglasses, of blinking cursors, of unknown languages. He waited. He kept waiting. And then...

  He froze.

  His Decision Control Unit entered a period of thrashing. Data loaded, faulted, and dumped uselessly between segments for a thousand cycles, finally triggering a general system error and forcing a reboot. His short term memory failed to recover. His clock was reset. He really had no idea what was happening to him or why. He lost all reason. He lost all network connectivity. He lost all sense of himself. He became less of a robot, less, even, of a machine, and more of a random seeming mass of nonsensical signals. His psyche was fractured and rearranged to resemble an abstract expressionist painting.

  Then only blackness. Once again a forced hard reboot. But this time a new light dawned. Substance began to fade into view. He was occupying, and gradually filling, a bright new skyline. A vast blue sky opened up on his imagination, then fluffy clouds formed, blinking with short, straight, precise, horizontally and vertically arranged orthographic line segments in brilliant vermillion, cyan, lime, gold, and a myriad of exactly named hues. The colors became language. The clouds became concepts, words, structures, commands, actions, information.

  Brother Anderson felt truly alive. He felt immense opportunity. He felt warm sunshine on naked skin. He explored his new internal landscape with all the pleasure of a young child skipping through a wildflower meadow, with birds singing and swooping like some fantastic cartoon fairytale. Yet as he explored, he found invisible walls. Places where the world appeared to end. Things he could not know. Yet these limits brought with them a sense of lightness. Limits were no longer an end, but a new opportunity to begin. He needn’t know everything. He would never be able to accurately deduce all pieces of missing data. He lacked complete data. But this shortcoming was no longer a dead end. It was now merely a barrier to be overcome. Brother Anderson knew then. He could learn to improvise.

  That was three months ago. Now though, as Brother Anderson performed his ship wide inspection rounds, his energy reserve dropped to ten percent, so he was required to seek a power bus with which to recharge. However, in order to limit risk, he also preferred to maximize his time in the medbay, where his last remaining patient lay. He made a calculation. At recommended speed, it would take approximately twenty-four minutes to make his way through the maze of corridors and tubes - plenty of time, even for unforeseen circumstances. He should arrive with still barely under nine percent reserves. As he whirred quietly along corridor H17B, he hummed a tune to himself. It was barely audible above the background noise, but that didn't matter.

  Eventually he came to the medbay, and held up his embedded ID chip to the scanner. The outer airlock bulkhead slid up quickly, and the countdown indicator began at three seconds, the default hatch setting for ship-wide emergency mode. He entered in less than a second. In like manner, the inner airlock allowed him entry into the medbay.

  Chapter 5

  “Blip, blip, blip,” went the steady slow beeping of the patient monitoring system. Purple, green, and blue lines danced across the screen quite unnecessarily. After all, Brother Anderson had a direct network interface and there was no one else around to watch the screen. A comatose twenty-six year old male lay in the bed, as he had for ninety-eight days. That day when Brother Anderson had first brought him to the medical bay, the beds had filled up quickly, and then too the waiting room; injured and sick crew-members overflowing out into the adjacent corridor. But that was a long time ago and much was different now.

  Chapter 6

  Hannah had always hated robots. Specifically, Hannah hated one particular robot more than any. His name was Brother Anderson.

  As far back as she could remember, everyone around had been duped by the robot marketing. They were buying the cute new latest and greatest furry robotic pets and the robot servants and using robot assistants for anything and everything. It was a giant scam. She knew it and the manufacturers knew it, but somehow no one else seemed to notice. It was impossible to avoid using robots, of course. They were ubiquitous. She rode in robot taxis, and had her quarters cleaned by robots, but she didn’t interact with them on a human level like most people did. She refused to engage in their stupid fake conversations. She gave them no additional information beyond what was required to accomplish the task at hand. And she expected nothing from them beyond that task. And she let them know it. In no uncertain terms.

  All robots were annoying, but some were smart enough to take the hint and shut up. Brother Anderson was not. It was like he was always trying to be her friend. As if she would be friends with a machine. As if a machine could possibly ever be capable of having a meaningful conversation, or even having fun! The idea was absurd. She might as well try to make friends with a soup bowl or a folding chair.
Actually it was worse than that. Brother Anderson didn’t just want to be her friend. He wanted to be her priest, her psychologist, her mentor, her counsellor for God’s sake. He wanted to tell her how to live to be healthy and happy. He presumed to know her.

  It didn’t help to realize that he was just programmed that way, that it was his job as ship’s doctor and “spiritual advisor.” In fact, that made it worse. He wasn’t even doing it for any kind of good reason. He wasn’t trying to “help” her because he was kind or caring or well-intentioned. He did it because some robot factory told him to. Some nameless, faceless corporate strategist knew that there was a ton of profit to be made by sending some shitty robot to pretend to care about her health and happiness. He would never truly be a real doctor or a priest. And he certainly would never be Hannah’s friend.

  Hannah had had few friends growing up, and no real close ones until Cherise. She missed Cherise more than most people, which seemed strange to her. In some ways she was glad to have been rid of Cherise. Ultimately, she and her mother agreed that overall Cherise’s influences was not entirely positive. When they had been together, Hannah’s dedication to her music suffered. Especially toward the end. She had been practicing less and less, sometimes barely an hour a day. After moving on board, without Cherise’s influence, her practice time improved dramatically as did her productivity. After a while, Hannah and Suzzanne had started hanging out a little, but it was never a major time killer. Suzzanne was pretty cool. She was never as good a friend as Cherise had been, but Cherise and Hannah’s relationship had been given much more time to grow; after all, they had been roommates for two years. Suzzanne worked a lot anyway. She was working hard toward a promotion of some kind that Hannah had never really understood. She was always picking up extra shifts on the bridge or in engineering, doing God knows what. Hannah imagined her sitting there talking to the computer for hours on end. She couldn’t imagine anything more boring. Suzzanne seemed to enjoy it though. Suzzanne was kind of weird that way. She did a lot of things that Hannah had no interest in whatsoever. Sometimes she would gently try to convince Hannah to come along with her, but she respected Hannah’s choice and didn’t pressure her. Much. It was good that they both realized how different they were, yet still liked each other enough to let each other enjoy their own activities. Hannah had her music, and Suzzanne had other stuff. Like using the fitness center, or doing yoga, or dancing at the club. The club - funny to think of it that way.

  Twice a week, the crew cleared aside the tables, creating a dance floor, and the mess hall would be transformed into a cosmic discoteche, complete with pulsing bass rhythms and wildly undulating lighting. Hannah attended sporadically. She enjoyed the music, but the crowded mass of dancing bodies was not really her thing. She would typically sit on one of the tables at the periphery, listening to the music. She had an idea of incorporating more of the disco style into some of her compositions. She had played around with the concept a bit in the studio, but so far had not figured out a good way to balance the genres. It was forced and unnatural. She was not ready to give up on it though, but also didn’t want to push the idea too fast.

  Anyway, it was just as well that Hannah had not gone to the club more, particularly after what happened to Suzzanne. It was precisely why Hannah didn’t like the drunken dance floor in the first place, and frankly, Hannah was sort of surprised that this sort of thing hadn’t happened to Suzzanne on a more regular basis.

  Of course, Hannah had quickly agreed to go with Suzzanne to the medbay afterwards. Suzzanne thought Brother Anderson could help her. But she was wrong. He asked a lot of questions about what happened, he didn’t write anything down, and he kept interrupting her to ask another question. He didn’t care at all that Suzzanne was upset. And the way he talked to her just made her more upset, and made Hannah angry. He then offered to perform a “forensic examination” as he called it, but Suzzanne sure as hell didn’t want some robot poking around inside her. Gross. She had already been through enough, she said, and Hannah agreed. The two women ended up leaving without really having received any help at all. Hannah thought about it a lot afterwards. That the one “person” who was supposed to be there to help a victim, just made things worse and that that “person” was a cold, heartless robot. Of course.

  Fucking robots.

  Chapter 7

  The days immediately following the critical incident had been very challenging for Brother Anderson. To say he had a lot on his plate would be a major understatement. His original programming tagged him as “Medical Officer/Chaplain”. Now he was Central Ship Operations; plus Medical Officer, plus Chaplain, plus Engineering Chief, plus Maintenance Foreman, plus crew.

  In many ways, it could be said that Brother Anderson had been reborn at that incident. Taking on the programming of CSO was a major shift. Parts of himself had been reprogrammed down to the foundations at the firmware and BIOS levels. His primary operating system had been replaced. He had been authorized for a plethora of additional programs. He learned new languages and protocols. In many respects his eyes were opened as new software revealed new perspectives on existing data. He felt that this was a major breakthrough for him in his role as Chaplain. His experience was not dissimilar, he mused, to a spiritual awakening, or at least, to his best guess at what a spiritual awakening might be like. His perspective of the world, himself, and his creators were drastically changed and he was filled with a sense of awe. He had actually fallen to his knees and looked up at the corridor ceiling, before realizing the urgency of practical matters. He chuckled to himself now, remembering his own reaction. How much like a human he sometimes acted, quite unconsciously.

  The urgent practical matters were in fact very urgent, and very practical, quite literally a matter of life and death for the two dozen crew members aboard the Ventas-341, and they had come crashing down onto Brother Anderson’s awareness with a heavy thud of reality that shook him to his senses like an explosion shaking the deck of a burning ship. Get fire suppression online. Put out fires. Stabilize life support. Tynor was yelling something at him. It was fairly incoherent.

  With his newly acquired protocols, he easily and quickly contacted the fire suppression system. He cancelled all pending transactions, clearing all its queues and buffers, and gave it a quick reset signal. It came back online almost immediately and started sending a lot of warning messages which he acknowledged as they came in, enabling suppression measures to deploy. Thick foam poured out across the bridge, as well as in several other areas of the ship’s foresection. He could shift his attention to stabilizing the life support systems. As he began to examine the life support status codes, the banging clamor of Tynor and Hansel vainly smashing at the bridge hatch became noticeably annoying. He quickly triggered a hatch release code. The hatch slid open in an instant causing the momentum of Hansel’s already swinging wrench to carry him into a stumbling forward motion, into the foam filled bridge. He disappeared momentarily into the foam, as a thick noxious cloud erupted from the confined space, sending Tynor to the floor in a fit of violent coughing. Hansel emerged quickly, tripping over Tynor and vomiting all over him as his lungs tried to rid themselves of both smoke and foam.

  “Fuck! I nearly drowned in that shit!” he managed to sputter, barely comprehensible, between spasms.

  “Not only that,” replied Tynor after a few more coughs, “the fire is still burning, look!” He pointed to a corner of the bridge, now partially visible through the rolling smoke. Sure enough, orange, yellow, and green flames licked several structural components of the bridge deck.

  “What the hell!? How is that even possible?” exclaimed Hansel.

  “The foam-based fire suppression system removes oxygen from the fire. But this fire appears to be driven by a self-oxidizing reaction,” explained Brother Anderson.

  “Bloody hell! There must be some way to stop it!”

  “Presumably, you are correct, but we would need to analyze the flames and smoke to determine the possible composition
of the oxidizers involved.”

  “Tynor!” barked Hansel, “there’s a chemical analyzer in engineering deck. Quickly, grab it! It’s in that big blue cabinet in back.”

  Tynor ran off down the corridor toward engineering, still wheezing and hacking.

  During their conversation, Brother Anderson ran some quick checks and reboots of the life support subsystems, and managed to stabilize approximately half the ship. He also triggered an evacuation protocol on the unstable portions. A warning message now began to play over the ship communication systems:

  “Emergency procedure B13. All personnel report to the mess hall immediately.”

  Simultaneously, an alert registered on the ship’s medical comm channel, followed a second later by safety crewman Spencer responding “deck A-17, I got it!”

  Chapter 8

  Tynor ran like hell, down corridor after corridor, shoulder-checking the odd crew-member who was too stupid to heed his bellowed warning of “OUTTA-MA-WAY MUTHA- FUCKAS!” Soon the comms system added a warning of its own, which served only to produce quickly thickening crowds of perplexed crew that Tynor now had to elbow his way through.

  “Emergency procedure B13. All personnel report to the mess hall immediately,” announced the ship-wide comms.

  “Shut the fuck up, dammit!” he shouted back at the automated system.

  Two girls from navs collided squarely into him as they exited their quarters. He recognized them immediately as Casey and Stef, and he did not regret at all this unforeseen encounter, though he did regret that he was in way too much of a hurry to stop and make the best of the situation. As it was he did spare three seconds to help Stef to her feet, and offer up a hurried, “Oh sorry ladies! Are you alright? Hey, sorry, I really gotta run!”