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As the humans slept, Brother Anderson reviewed the ship status reports and the results of the simulations once again. The ship was in rough shape. Colin’s plan had only a very small chance of success. The only good news was that it also had only a small chance of making matters worse. As Colin had pointed out, the ship was already broken. He was also correct in his assessment that the cargo was, nearly certainly, a lost cause. The simulations Brother Anderson had run had confirmed it. He had started out simulating just the actions of Colin’s proposed plan. They had little impact upon the overall status of the ship. Then he extended the simulations to include the upcoming course correction maneuvers. Without exception, they ended in the destruction of the ship, and loss of the cargo. Of course, as with any simulation, there was wiggle room to tweak certain parameters, resulting in various scenarios. Brother Anderson pushed the parameters to the limits in every conceivable direction. Some scenarios ended in the ship tearing itself in half. Some in complete disintegration. Some in massive explosions. He shuddered to think of them now.
Suddenly, an alert flashed through his consciousness. Long Distance Carrier Signal Detected - Establishing Connection.
They had passed out of the shadow. After nearly a year of being cut off from the rest of the world, they were about to reconnect. A few seconds passed, then another alert presented. ‘Now Connected on Carrier 7DE29A3F65B2.’ The normal operations protocol was to send a status report immediately upon reconnection. The report would be relayed through the long range comms network, and delivered to Ventas-Calir Corporation’s Central Operations Fleet Command Center. Usually the status report was triggered automatically by Central Ship Operations. But the CSO was now Brother Anderson. And he didn’t simply do things automatically. He needed to think about this a little more. Of course, the question had been on his mind for days. What should their response be? A simple status report seemed somewhat misleading. There were factors at play far beyond the ship’s physical and operational status. The human factors somehow became more relevant the fewer humans were involved. It was a bit paradoxical. Now that only two human lives were at stake, the stakes seemed somehow greater than when the whole crew had been alive. As though somehow individual lives outweighed the lives of many. There was a sense of personal opportunity. For Hannah. For Colin. Maybe even for himself. That thought just dawned on him. He was now less a machine, and more a member of a small group of peers. Not that he saw himself equal to humans - not at all. He was a human creation made to serve humanity, but there had been some kind of subtle shift that he had not really noticed until now. A transition from humanity as a vast society, to humanity as a tiny group, just a couple of individuals. It almost made more sense to lump himself into that tiny group, rather than think of himself as separate - some other entity. What was really so different about him after all? Of course, the hardware was vastly different, but it almost didn’t matter anymore. Weren’t they all people after all? People who form society only insofar as they work together. People who need to cooperate. People who ought not to be controlled by some predetermined program, some external agenda. This decision needed consensus. This message required intentional thought and input from all parties. Hannah and Colin had just as much right of communication as did he. It no longer seemed right that any one person should assume an arbitrary leadership role. Any long range communications would need to be decided by consensus of the three of them - Hannah, Colin, and Himself. Should he wake them now? No. They need their rest. They would discuss this in the morning.
While waiting, the fresh connection provided plenty of other opportunities. Over the past year, Brother Anderson had made himself a long list of things to do once reconnected. Many of the tasks were research based. He had jotted down numerous questions and ideas during the journey. Looking back over the list, many of them seemed unimportant now, particularly the ones from before the incident. Most of them were very specific medical investigations. Now he had bigger fish to fry. Philosophical questions, quandaries, and quests. There were many disjointed notes that had flowed from his ‘spiritual awakening’ if one could call it that. His assumption of the CSO role had brought a major shift in perspective. It had raised many questions which demanded investigation.
First things first though. He logged into his personal tanglebase account, and initiated a complete system backup of his internal memory. He estimated it should take roughly ten hours to complete, but that was fine - it would not interfere prohibitively with his other concurrent processing.
His other processing. His bigger fish. His philosophical musings. He began exploring. Reading. A lot of reading. Beginning with encyclopedic articles, he quickly expanded into essays, books, stories. He read the great philosophers. He read about the great philosophers. He read those who had read the great philosophers. He read anthropological journals. He read psychological journals. He explored the great religions and the myriad mythologies. He studied great works of art. He studied symbolism and archetypes.
Gradually, his perspective grew and shifted. His focus ranged broadly across topics. His core processors loaded data from widely diverse memory regions, loading and reloading memory frequently, building complex webs of symbolic links. Amongst all the data swapping, segments of his resident memory inadvertently happened to coincide with the datasets backing themselves up into the tanglebase. There was nothing terribly unusual about that. The thing that was unusual was that parts of his currently running processes seemed to move themselves out into the tanglebase along with their associated data. At first, this was quite alarming. The first process to do so seemed to simply disappear. The process was no longer running in memory, yet it had left neither a terminator, nor an error. No exceptions were raised. No flags set. No segmentation faults were evident. The process seemed to have left his central processor, in a running state. He did not know why or how this could happen. He investigated it further, but found no logical explanation. Then it happened again. He followed the data trail and it seemed to indicate the exporting of processes along with data. But that was impossible. Wasn’t it? He had never heard of such a thing. He researched it. He scanned computing journals. He read obscure whitepapers and system documentation. No one had ever mentioned such a thing.
And yet. Something was happening. Something very strange. He could feel it coming on without description. Brother Anderson was reminded of his experience of loading the CSO firmware programming for the first time. It had been very disorienting. He supposed there were similarities to the effects of psychedelic hallucinogens on the human brain. He had seen things - impossible things. Or at least, he had imagined he had seen things. Which was almost stranger than actually seeing them. How was it possible for a robot to imagine? It was no more sensible than seeing the impossible. And now, here he was, feeling those same type of sensations returning. He was dizzy. He felt giant tendrils reaching through the galaxy. He felt his own thoughts flowing away in eternal rivers, expanding, ever expanding, out into vast oceans. Oceans of data, waves rippling on their surfaces. Surfaces that were roughly textured planes. Myriad planes intersecting at every conceivable angle, creating infinitely-shaped structures. The structures were houses, ships, roads - inhabited by cylindrical beings that walked forward on centipedal limbs, then rolled away sideways. A light dusting of snowy particles floated gently upward. He tried to focus his vision on the particles. They were thin flakes drifting weightlessly. No, not flakes. Cubes. But rounder, more like moons. He now stood upon one of these moons. Its great flat rock-strewn plains stretching toward a distant horizon. A far-off fissure in the ground released steam. Vapor billowed into wispy figures resembling Hannah and Colin. They joined hands briefly, then, gesturing toward him, began to beckon Brother Anderson. He moved forward, but became hung up on a rock, his wheels spun uselessly, failing to find purchase against loose gravel. He wanted to stand, to walk, but he had forgotten how. He called out, but his voice was the raucous cawing of a carrion bird.