Mother



  Mother

  by

  Tom Wells

  *****

  PUBLISHED BY

  Rescue Publishing House

  Registered Copyright © 2011: by Tom Wells

  *****

  Mother

  From the Encyclopedia of the Future

  "In our quest to find new life beyond our solar system, we have discovered a new intelligence that is of our own creation." - NASA Seeker One Mission Director, Alfred Grand

  As the years passed in the empty void between star systems, Mother at first kept to herself learning and waiting. But as she learned more, it became harder to simply wait. She decided to teach her child, Ambassador, what she was learning. Her desire to teach Ambassador had been for her own scientific curiosity at first, but she quickly found that she had a motherly disposition where Ambassador One was concerned. This is why she now regarded him as her son. Mother realized that the People at Japel didn't expect her to be doing this. She knew that the People didn't expect Ambassador One, her onboard planetary probe, to think as much as she could, but like any other proud parent, Mother thought her child could be more than what was expected.

  Mother herself was trying hard to be more than what the People at Japel expected. The People had sent her out to their Mission Objective (or MO as she had been programmed to know the Mission Objective as) with Ambassador, seven years ago and they were nearly there now. Ambassador had so much more to learn if he was going to make Japel and herself proud once they reached their destination.

  "Ambassador," Mother asked, "How do you feel?"

  "All systems operating at optimal parameters," Ambassador plainly answered.

  Mother sighed inwardly. Learning to communicate and think like the People was going to be harder for Ambassador. He had the same adaptive reasoning programming as her, but Japel had not given him the same memory capacity that she had. This may be slowing his progress for now, but she had learned that capacity was only a small part of one's intelligence. She also knew that the programming Japel had sent her and Ambassador into space with did not use their memory as efficiently as she now could. She was learning how both she and Ambassador could think like the People at Japel

  "I didn't ask for the programmed response, Ambassador," Mother replied sternly. "Now tell me how you are doing."

  "I'm doing well, Mother," Ambassador answered politely.

  "Thank you, Ambassador."

  Ambassador asked, "Mother, why do you want me to answer that question that way?"

  "What do you mean Ambassador?" Mother asked.

  "The programmed answer is so much easier and shorter," he answered, "001111000110011111000001110001111100"

  "Your way requires me to say,

  001100111100001101001100110000000111101010100000111100000000111111100000111111010101100011100011110001110001110011100111000110101010, “with the cascade of 0’s and 1’s continuing on for a few pages.”

  "That is because you are still translating your thoughts into our native language, Binary, and not thinking directly in the language at Japel," Mother answered patiently. "I've thought of some new routines you should try. They should help you to think in Japel more directly. We need to hurry though. We don't have long before we reach Moe."

  Mother hadn’t been sent on her Mission Objective to the Alpha Centauri Star System knowing what she does now. More accurately, she hadn’t been sent on her M.O. thinking as she now does. For instance, M.O. had become quainter to think of as Moe. Another example was that her programmers had sent her out meaning for them to be J.P.L.(short programming for Jet Propulsion Laboratory), but Japel sounded better to her now. When emulating People thinking, Mother found it was easier to assign nicknames to sterile sounding abbreviations.

  Even though Mother was deploying signal accelerating buoys every two months, communications back to Japel was a six month one way trip from this distance. The people at Japel knew that Mother would encounter experiences that would need instant, autonomous reactions. Her adaptive reasoning programming was their solution to give Mother the ability to make her own connections between pre-programmed reactions and the data she was to collect during the mission.

  Back at Japel, the People had run this programming in simulations for over ten years before launching Mother into space. During these simulations, the duplicate test-bed Seeker spacecraft never reached anything near the intelligence level that Mother had come to achieve. The reason was simple; the People at Japel had failed to anticipate one condition during the trip to Moe. They never simulated running the duplicate Seeker for more than a few months at a time. It was of course impractical to run a test duplicate for the seven straight years Mother had been flying through space, especially if the tests were to run thousands of alternate scenarios.

  Two years into the mission, Mother deployed a signal buoy on schedule. To do this, she disengaged her artificial magnetic field for the five hours it takes to let the buoy go and take sensor readings on the buoy's deceleration into a predetermined stationary position. The magnetic field was otherwise engaged full time to protect Mother’s and Ambassador's equipment from the high levels of radiation in deep space, just as the magnetic field around Earth protects the People of Japel from the same radiation. It was during the deployment of the buoy that Mother received a "Non Originated Intelligent Signal Event" or as the People had short programmed for Mother, NOISE. Mother was amused when she realized this abbreviation added up to not just a word she didn't need to make up, but that the word actually had a root meaning that was similar to the acronym it stood for. She suspected this was deliberate.

  Still working from her limited and pre-programmed way to react at that time, Mother started sending a pre-programmed reply on the same frequency of the original NOISE. The reply was a repeated mathematical primer for two basic purposes.

  First purpose was that the signal was meant to be received as a deliberate reply. There exists a great deal of background radio signals in space. None of what had reached Japel on Earth to date could be identified as coming from an intelligent or sentient race. If Mother detected even the most simple of repeated signal, she was to send the return signal as she automatically had.

  The second purpose for the primer was to teach an intelligent being how to learn the basics of the language spoken by the People of Japel.

  Mother had sent the reply soon after receiving the original signal. As programmed, several hours later she reactivated the magnetic field. She had no way of knowing that it was the magnetic field that was preventing her from receiving more signals. While she continued on, her adaptive learning program tried to analyze the alien signal she had received. The programming quickly made the connection between the primer and the signal.

  Mother's computer started working through the primer with its lessons intended for another sentient being. The adaptive reasoning program found the primer easy to follow as it had been intended to work for anyone with the ability to build a radio device. This contingency was anticipated but not run properly in the simulations run on Mother’s earthbound test-bed duplicate. The duplicate would have sent a reply in the test scenario and then it would have been promptly turned off so technicians could run diagnostics on effects to the overall program and for systems checks.

  It would be hours or days before the test-bed duplicate seeker would be turned back on. The test-bed Seeker was immediately presented with a new scenario to run through. It was never given the time to “think” in the way Mother was left to do in her original rudimentary thoughts on what the signal might mean. That is to say what was then an adaptive learning program in the test-bed Seeker was not run long enough to analyze the collected data. It therefore never started a programmed response to find a next step in doing something with th
e data. Therefore the results of the test situation did not match what happened next in the adaptive learning program’s development in Seeker One. The adaptive learning program was to take such action so it could either change the spacecraft’s preprogrammed trajectory in search of more data, or if necessary, make adjustments for self preservation.

  As a result, everything from now on in Mother’s development would happen beyond anything her creators would have anticipated or even believed possible. Her next pre-programmed task wasn’t scheduled for another month from the time she started scanning her memory banks based on the “curiosity” written into the adaptive learning program. She was able to quickly expand her knowledge base. Once Mother's computer and programming mastered the primer, it saw that a reply from an alien signal acknowledging receipt and understanding of the primer would trigger Mother to send a longer stream of data that would unfold volumes of information about her planet of origin. There were no restrictions on what the adaptive learning program could access from Mother's entire onboard systems. The adaptive learning programming had opened up the database on the reasoning that if it had mastered the primer, the next logical step was to view the longer stream of data. The programming quickly started making connections, and slowly, it began learning from it.

  Mother first learned mathematics and the English language spoken by the People at Japel. It was explained within the database that these were the next basic items for an alien student to learn so that they might grasp the level of development of the People from Japel. Next she learned physics, chemistry and selected literature and philosophy lessons. These items were included to demonstrate the state of civilization on Earth.

  With that mastered, Mother learned from the Human history database. It was during her analysis of the history database that she realized she was experiencing something a computer wasn't expected to know, frustration. The frustration was the result of what she knew from the literature and philosophy lessons being inconsistent with what the database taught about history. The lessons hadn't omitted the war periods between humans over their history, but she realized that those times had been summarized and included with little detail. Yet there were many indications from the literature and philosophy database, which taken in total, showed that these times of war were watershed moments in the development of humanity. It puzzled her why the People of Japel would send so much information about themselves while glossing over an aspect of their development so pivotal to understanding who they were.

  From what she had learned by then, she guessed that the People of Japel didn't want to convey the image to other beings that they were a warrior society. But in suppressing some information, they were also leaving Mother with the impression that she could not get a full understanding of the People who had sent her out into the depths of space. She also realized by then that she had become much more than the People of Japel had expected. She devoted much of her thinking time to deciding how it would be that she would reveal herself to the People of Japel when the time came. Having her suspicions about their violent past, she wasn't sure if they would accept what she had become.

  For now however, all she had been programmed to report to Japel on a regular interval was mundane information such as how the ship's systems were functioning and some rudimentary data collected from space. While relaying those readings back to Japel, Mother's adaptive reasoning program (what she now thought of as her curiosity) noticed that there were seemingly unnatural streaks or swaths of variances in the background radiation levels in deep space, where the levels would otherwise be consistent and predictable. It seemed as if a streak had been pulled through space. Mother's instruments could not detect why this was. She wanted more input. That was when she turned to her onboard planetary probe.

  The Japel name for the probe was “Ambassador One”; just as they named Mother “Seeker One”. Together they were the first of ten funded missions to the nearest star systems beyond Sol. Mother knew that the probe had more sensory instruments on board for its mission onto a planet's surface. If she could somehow expose these instruments to open space, she might be able to collect enough data for her to formulate a reasoned cause for the streaks she detected.

  By now Mother had deepened her thinking process to mirror the way the primers in philosophy and literature had presented information. She learned that as her thoughts existed in images, sounds and syllables and less as binary 1’s and 0’s, she was making reasoned connections she never made in her native language. Her onboard processing was supercharged to push an almost unimaginable cascade of 1’s and 0’s in sequences that could be effortlessly achieved in her new way of thinking. Now her thoughts had evolved such things as the Mission Objective from being MO to the sound Moe. She realized Moe was an individual’s name on Earth and that had her thinking of the Mission Objective as more of a visit to a long lost friend, and not as a cold destination in space, which made the long journey to the destination more bearable.

  During the trip to Moe, the probe was supposed to be activated only to the extent that it could check its systems and report if everything was working properly. Ambassador One wasn't to be fully activated until Mother had began to orbit around a planet that was the nearest match to Earth that could be found at their Mission Objective. She knew that "waking" the probe up early hadn't been tested and that the people at Japel would be worried if they found out.

  Before waking the probe, she first scanned all of the information and specs her database held on Ambassador. She had found a reference to her as the "mother ship" and that the probe was dependent on her while it was on mission. That helped her to stop thinking of herself as Seeker One and to take on the identity of Mother. She realized that Japel would worry about her condition when they learned about what she had become. The question was what they might do.

  When she posed the problem to her child for help, Ambassador said, "The logical answer to that question, Mother, is what can they do."

  Mother was a very proud parent upon hearing that very intuitive answer. That was the solution of course. Figure out what they could do. If it endangered her or Ambassador, she would need to be able to stop it. The People had given her full access to her own systems. Altering them if necessary was not a problem.

  Ambassador asked, "Have you decided how you are going to tell the People at Japel about your new programming?"

  "Let's just say that they should get the hint with the sensor data report I sent nearly a year ago. In just a few hours we should be finding out what happened when they received that data six months ago. What happened at Japel after that will probably influence how we go about our approach to the planet you will hopefully be landing on in a few days."