Mission Failure

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Dave.” Vocalized Brent in a mocking, high pitch tone. It came through the actual speaker mounted on the backup controls. Twenty years of settled dust shook from the speaker housing as it vibrated for the first time in nearly that long. Dave watched his processor temp rise by a tenth of a degree in response. One of the first concerns over full personality uploads was how they would respond without biofeedback. The higher level of neural activity associated with emotional responses actually generated higher heat loads on the quantum cores that functioned as the brain. This gave uploaded personalities, known as “figs” (for figment), a real life stress response to emotional events. The additional heat would impact the cores almost exactly like anger on human thought processes.

Dave had a more pressing issue than the intricacies of his digital embodiment. Brent was going crazy. Their donor minds had volunteered for this hundred year round trip to Alpha Centauri and back knowing they would be dead and gone by the time they were back. It wasn’t an intrusive procedure, Dave was still probably alive living in his apartment in Minneapolis. When the recruiters went looking for fig donors for this mission, they targeted single men living alone who they judged would be able to handle the long periods of isolation and separation. The figs stayed motivated by being able to turn off for long periods of time and the promise of being implanted into a top-of-the-line android upon their return.

Five of Brent’s fifteen heat sinks malfunctioned at year twenty. It was the equivalent of being extremely agitated with no way to release the pent up aggression. After a week it became unbearable and started to affect Brent’s psyche. He had three options – he could deactivate for the next eighty years and trust Dave to pull him out of hibernation when needed, he could erase himself entirely and allow Dave access to reprogram his core to be at least a useful AI, or he could start taking control of the ship’s few physical implements and start destroying things. Unfortunately he chose the third option and was currently working around Dave’s hasty firewall to the robotic arm on the atmospheric drone.

Dave made the mistake of trying to reason with him instead of immediately moving to quarantine his access. The system was designed so neither fig could completely erase the other, but the designers had put in quarantine abilities in case something like this happened. Dave’s problem was that he waited too long and unwittingly let Brent deactivate his quarantine controls. Now Brent was slowly breaking through firewalls into the various physical components of the ship, trying to find something that could physically tear out Dave’s core.

When Brent finally broke through and accessed the drone arm, any doubts Dave had about his intentions were eliminated. The screech of metal and hissing sounds of the nitrogen atmosphere escaping the vessel meant hull breach. Dave thought the klaxon alarm that went off was a bit ridiculous, the pressure sensor embedded in the microcontroller board used the same neural pathways as his old sense of touch.

There was one play left for Dave. By turning the ship around he could blast a short distress message that would reach Earth in about two years. It would allow them to send another ship out with just a twenty year delay instead of waiting the full fifty years for them to arrive. It would also mean effective suicide as the engine wash would quickly catch up with them and overwhelm the ship. The programmed turn for deceleration took a month due to the slow loop required to avoid the blast. Right now Dave had about two minutes until Brent finished with the airlock and moved on to his quantum cores.

Two light-years later, Dave Barlow opened his door to an unexpected knock. Two uniformed men stood outside with somber faces. After sitting down on the couch and being prepared for terrible news, Dave felt somewhat relieved. The whole fig process felt like donating sperm to him. The enforced total lack of contact with his digital embodiment meant he never really felt any connection to it. Even if it came back and was implanted into an android, would it know to love his three kids? It wouldn’t know his wife, his dogs, or his new favorite restaurant. Would one hundred years in space really change him from the pizza-eating lonely man he was to who he was today?

He put these thoughts aside and asked his visitors if they wanted anything to drink. It was a weird feeling to be proud of his mind even though he felt like a different person. He felt worse for Brent, who had died of cancer five years ago.

In between the stars Dave accelerated back towards Earth. The escaping nitrogen had formed an unexpected barrier against the engine wash and allowed the ship to make it through with almost no damage. Brent had responded predictably to the flip maneuver and fell into Dave’s trap. He was now quarantined and deactivated. The servo arm had been able to patch the hole and the onboard diagnostic alarms had stopped going off. The communications equipment was useless after the emergency burst, but Dave would meet Dave soon enough.