Work Text:
Artificial Intelligence
The Martian counts all had an odd relationships with their cataphracts. They treated them like they were alive, sort of. They talked to them at any rate. Some, like Femienne, seemed to be unable to differentiate between living things and the machines. Either the counts were all insane, or there was something else going on. Inaho decided to find out which one it was.
The Deucalion was in port. That meant she had a skeleton crew, a bare minimum of people on board. Inaho figured that made this the optimal time; if he blew up the ship accidentally, it would result in minimal casualties.
Like a scientist, he regarded the glowing sphere and carefully reviewed all the information he had before starting. The Martian counts treated Aldnoah powered cataphracts as though they were conscious, living things. Slaine Troyard had once said that Aldnoah possessed memory and awareness but no capacity for rational thought, but Inaho had watched a Martian engineer carry on conversation with an Aldnoah device. He did not believe it was possible to have a rational conversation with something that had no rational thought. It was curious.
He stared at the sphere intently, but the sphere glowed steadily and showed no reaction to his presence. “Do you know that I am here?”
The spear continued to glow steadily.
Inaho considered carefully. The engineer had touched the Tharsis before starting his conversation. Martian pilots wore no space suits because Aldnoah required direct skin contact. Inaho cleared his mind to minimize any reaction, then put his hands on the sphere.
Silence echoed as though through a gigantic chamber, one larger than the control room.
Maybe that was the wrong tactic, he thought. He tried listening in the silence for any sounds of activities.
He became aware of air moving through the ducts, passing through purifying filters. Of water in the pipes, someone was taking a shower. Of a guard in the security room sitting still and unconscious. Sleeping on duty, Inaho’s brain supplied.
Maybe he needed to ask you a question. But what do you ask a spaceship?
? ? ?
Inaho blinked in surprise. “Did you answer me?”
! ! !
Inaho still wasn’t sure what to ask it. Start at the beginning, he thought. “Do you know who I am?”
+ + + !
“Do you know I’m the person who activated you?”
+
“Huh.” Inaho stopped to analyze. It was a feeling, not words. But it was definitely a response. Slaine was right about awareness. But how to test memory? “Do you remember the previous people who activated you?”
His head was suddenly filled by a personality - strong always, unbending usually, pliable when it needed to be, but with a hint of a softer side, like satin finished steel. The personality had a feminine resonance, although Inaho sensed the teller had no idea about masculine and feminine. This was definitely not Seylum. “What happened?”
He was made aware of a large gravity well beneath him and another, about 1/6 of the size, about 1.5 light seconds away. There were also lateral gravity attractions from the rugged uneven mountains on three sides and in front of it, a vast heaving plane of liquid gravity rising in response to the well in the sky before falling back to the greater one below it, producing rippling fringes at the edges.
“Oh right,” Inaho said to himself. “The Deucalion manipulates gravity so of course it sees everything in terms of gravity.”
Deucalion shared in delighted confidence that it had secretly wasted computational cycles calculating the movements of the little water particles thrown this way and that by the whitecaps of the waves. A sense of mischief borrowed from the satin-steel woman.
There was another cataphract hovering above it and just to one side. There was a little sense of smugness in the Deucalion’s perception. The Dioscuria thought it was superior to all other cataphracts, or perhaps it was the pilot of the Dioscuria; the Deucalion didn’t seem to make a distinction between the two, but it was having to use thrusters to counter the gravity rather than manipulating the gravity waves directly. If the Aldnoah sphere had had eyes, it would have been rolling them.
Then abruptly something changed. The gravity well in the sky begin emitting strange energy signatures. Temporal and spatial waves spiraling at random frequencies, warping gravity and electromagnetic patterns, causing shockwaves when they hit the earth’s atmosphere.
But the earth’s iron core spun on. One of the energy waves hit the Earth’s magnetic field and bounced off. It encountered an outbound wave, resulting in constructive interference, and when one reinforced wave hit the out-of-control hyper gate, the gravity well exploded into 1.78 million trackable pieces of various sizes and speeds. Some approaching as much as 0.45% of the speed of light. Trajectories, collisions, altered trajectories, too much data. The Deucalion’s CPU overloaded. By the time the calculations were completed, many of them were useless. Drawn in by the large gravitational well, many particles hit the atmosphere. Air resistance and friction slowed them down and mineral impurities caused many of them to heat unevenly and fracture. More particles to try to track. Uncertain of what to do, it reached towards the satin-steel woman but her mind was frozen in shock and fear. Without her, it didn’t know which ones to track or ignore. Too many particle trajectories to try to dodge them all. Too many gravity signatures to make clean calculations, it couldn’t fly. Deucalion threw up a gravitational shield around itself and the Dioscuria, but some of the particles were too large to be affected while others were moving too fast. Satin-steel woman’s mind suddenly unlocked and with firm resolve told Deucalion to put all the shields around Dioscuria and with a mightly gravity wave, pushed Dioscuria cleanly out of harm’s way. Then a particle, small but fast moving, struck Deucalion near midpoint, vaporizing signal relays. Cataphract Deucalion would never fly again.
The heat of the vaporization caused satin-steel woman to overheat as well and begin leaking fluids. After the particles settled, other humans came and pulled her out and took her to a repair bay. They began disassembling the housing around Deucalion, clearly intending to install it in another vessel. But then satin-steel woman powered down for the last time and having no one to tell it to stay awake, Deucalion powered down as well.
Inaho blinked trying to frame a response. But Deucalion continued on without pause.
After sometime, another mind activated it. This one was clear and pure as sunlight. It gave a very strong activation. Deucalion was now in the larger frame, and had many more people to watch over. And they had gone to a distributed control. The activation key was no longer the same as the command key or the directional key. Less efficient but still, perhaps it was good. Multiple processors were less likely to get overloaded than one that did it all. Things went well until the activation key suffered an oxygen intake problem and powered down. The humans managed to get the activation key restarted, after which, she had reactivated Deucalion. Then a while later, the key was struck by multiple projectiles and again powered down. Unable to get an activation response, Deucalion also powered down. Then a third source had activated it. The energy from this third source was derived from the energy of the second source, but it was not as bright and pure. Caught in some sort of feedback loop the energy was more powerful but darker.
…
“Huh,” Inaho said. The dispassionate way Deucalion had transmitted the information was much easier to absorb than it would’ve been from a person. “That’s quite a data dump.”
… + ?
“No, I asked for it.” He scratched his head. “So I have more powerful activation than Seylum?”
+ … —!
“More powerful but less pure,” Inaho nodded. “That sounds correct.” He considered. “Are you aware of the other people on board?”
He had the impression of dozens of people, some clearer than others. The one that stood out the most was reminiscent of the satin-steel woman.
“Captain Magbaredge,” Inaho said.
—!
“That’s her name.”
—!
“Captain…”
+
“Magbaredge.”
- - -!
“I see. Anyone else?”
He got the impression of another person, light and agile as air but like air, supportive when she flew.
“Nina Klein, the pilot.”
+ + +!
“I can call the pilot Nina by her name, but not the captain?”
+ … —!
Figures the Martian tech would turn out to be just as snobby and rank conscious as the Martians themselves.
“Anybody else?”
He got the impression of a strong pair of hands that fixed things. Deucalion really liked that one.
“Calm Craftman.”
+ + +!
@#**!!?
“Yes, he swears at me a lot when I break things.”
? ? ?
“I don’t mean to break things; they just get broken in combat.”
? ? ?
“Yes, I fly a cataphract.”
? ? ?
“It’s called the Sleipnir.”
? ? ?
“I doubt you know it, it’s not Aldnoah powered.”
! ! ! ??? ! ! ! ? ? ?
“It functions just fine without it.”
? ? ?
“Calm keeps suggesting that too.”
? ? ?
“No, I don’t want to upgrade it. It works just fine the way it is.”
…
… ?
“No, you cannot talk to my analytical engine.”
?
“Because I had it removed. We are no longer at war and besides, it was getting too pushy and trying to take over too many of my decisions.” Inaho almost never got annoyed but he was starting to get there now.
… ?
“I like the Sleipnir because it’s agile, responsive and fast.”
… —!
“Also, it doesn’t try to tell me what to do.”
…
Inaho heard a sound behind him.
Calm walked into the room. “What are you doing Inaho?”
“Talking to the Deucalion.”
“You know that’s the kind of thing those psycho Martians do, right?”
Inaho nodded. “And I’m beginning to understand why they’re all psycho.”