Eternal Frontier (The Eternal Frontier Book 1) Read online

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you,” he whispered to her.

  Before he set her down beside the rest of her downed marines, he kissed her forehead and closed his eyes, desperately collecting himself for the monumental tasks ahead.

  Once the morbid task was complete, he walked dejectedly to his quarters. He took a long shower, letting the warm water rush over him. His eyelids felt heavy, and the thought of crashing into his bunk tempted him. It would be a blessing to wake up and find this entire tragedy was no more than a nightmare.

  But that would be too easy.

  Instead, Tag trudged to the galley and made himself a cup of strong coffee. He gulped the hot liquid down, praying it would allay his exhaustion. After stuffing away a dehydrated nutrient packet, he went back to work. Like all members of the research vessel, he had an EVA suit for off-ship missions. He grabbed it from his cabin. From the armory, he gathered an additional mini-Gauss and several loaded magazines. He scrapped a field scientist’s suit for the navigation sensors and attached them to his own suit. It would’ve been much easier to take one of the field scientists’ suits for his own, but of the three researchers, none shared a body type remotely tall and thin enough to fit him. Likewise, the marines’ EVA suits were customized to fit each wearer exactly, and most were fitted for individuals much shorter than him. Those marines that had been his height sported a more chiseled physique that, despite Tag’s best fitness regime, he simply couldn’t match without their considerable genetic enhancements.

  From one of the marines’ EVA suits, he took the holsters for sidearms and attachments for ammunition storage. With a fair bit of effort, he secured all these extraneous components to his own suit. The only thing he couldn’t salvage from the marines’ suits was the built-in armor plates. The thought of running into pirates—or even something far worse—on Eta-Five made that fact hard to swallow. But there was little he could do.

  Back in the galley, he grabbed a few containers of water and dehydrated nutrient packs. He ensured he had enough food for a several-week journey should some unforeseen disaster occur, which he deemed rather likely given the events so far. He lugged all these supplies back to the corridor near the cargo bay. The rupture in the inner and outer hull around the cargo bay meant he wouldn’t be able to safely access the bay without donning his EVA suit. He peered through the porthole in the hatch. Ice sparkled over bits of torn alloy, and snowdrifts piled against various crates and over the boxy, jagged shape of the air car. The car would be his mode of transportation to Vasquez, but loading it could wait. With everything ready to go and waiting by the cargo bay hatch, it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes to get his supplies into the vehicle.

  Now the most important task was attempting to restore the ship’s AI. Even though he’d studied the basics of AI on ships in his navy education, he feared he didn’t have the acumen to effectively diagnose and repair the massive damage the pirates had managed to inflict on the computers.

  But he did have one idea. One almost quixotic idea. It was one he’d worked on for years, and there was no better time to run his first real-world experiment.

  An unavoidable yawn signified that the effects of coffee were waning as he padded back to his quarters. Exhaustion crept into his flesh. The turmoil of the day had taken its toll on his body, and what he had in mind would have to wait. He needed his brain operating at one hundred percent. For now, the only thing he could do was sleep.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Tag woke, gasping for air. His pulse pounded in his ears. But there were no alarms. No flashing lights. No sounds other than the creaking of the ship. He sat on the edge of his bunk and listened for a moment. But he didn’t hear the pirates scouring the ship for signs of life, nor did he catch the telltale footsteps of his crew preparing the ship for flight.

  He was well and truly alone.

  As anxiety faded, the pain crept into his body. His head pounded, and his bones felt weak. A mottled bruise had formed along his ribs, and he imagined that the soreness in his cheekbones bespoke black eyes and bruised skin from the prior day’s battles. He slid from his bunk, and the cold deck met his feet, sending chills through his goose-pimpled flesh. He donned his clothes and slipped his boots on then left his cabin.

  The lights in the passageway greeted him. He rotated his arms. His joints seemed to click, and a throbbing pain in his left calf forced him to walk with a slight limp. A constant fire burned in his ribs, flaming with every breath. Tag wondered how he hadn't noticed any of this yesterday. Probably too busy trying to stay alive, Tag frowned, and then preparing the crew for a space burial.

  He continued his hobbling gait to the brig. There he made sure the three pirates’ bodies, including the one he’d taken from the reactor room, remained unmoving. He considered trying to pry their armor off again but thought better of it. It had been difficult enough the first time, and what did it matter who these people were? He wouldn’t recognize their faces. It would be a waste of time. And he couldn’t help the half-paranoid thought that they might have booby-trapped their armor to explode should some unauthorized person start tampering with it. After the ferocity and desperation he’d seen in these people in their attempt to rid the universe of all evidence the Argo existed, the thought didn’t seem so farfetched.

  Satisfied the dead were still dead, Tag trod to the medical bay. He looked through some of the portholes on his way there. All were covered in snow. It was a somewhat reassuring sight. The atmosphere of Eta-Five should protect against probing radar or lidar, and if an enemy ship did decide to venture through the strange atmospheric barrier, the snow would provide a formidable visual obstruction, concealing the Argo from prying eyes. As long as he didn’t start up the impellers—and it didn’t look like he’d be able to—anytime soon, it would be difficult for anyone to happen upon the ship even with the most sensitive of sensors.

  Of course, that meant if for some reason a rescue party ever came, it would be just as hard for the Argo to attract their attention. Tag wondered if the same fate had befallen the UNS Hope generation ship that had been lost in this sector of space so long ago. He could now see how such a huge ship might escape the efforts of the past exploratory ships trying to find it. Three hells, he thought, maybe the Hope is somewhere on Eta-Five.

  But finding lost generation ships wasn’t his major concern. Getting back to his fleet was, and in order to do that, he’d need some help. Some AI help.

  The M3 droid was still slumped where he’d left it in the med bay. Tag grabbed it and placed it atop a patient exam bed. Due to its caretaker-like role, the droid was one of the more humanoid bots aboard the ship. The SRE navy’s researchers had claimed the thin frame and silver arms, modeled after a human’s, were more comforting to the injured than a more utilitarian bot such as the tentacled, octopus-like droids responsible for ship repairs. He started to strap the bot into the exam bed’s safety straps out of habit, then stopped himself. They weren’t hurtling through space, and the dead droid wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway.

  At least, not yet.

  Tag assembled a set of surgical and normal hardware tools. He stared at the droid’s face. Its designers had given it visual sensors that looked like blank, unstaring eyes and a mouth that actually moved when it spoke. But they’d given the rest of its face a distinctly machine-like appearance so as not to frighten patients by venturing too far into the uncanny valley.

  With a bit of cutting and unscrewing, Tag withdrew the panel along the back of the droid’s “skull.” There he found a mostly empty space. The main processor was housed in the droid’s torso. But he needed to make sure there was plenty of room within the head of the unit for what he had planned.

  “If I only had a brain,” Tag half sang to himself. He started whistling the ancient Wizard of Oz song, half amazed at the longevity of 2D films in the era of VR holos and entertainment that absorbed all five senses. There was still something mythical and mystical about a flat-screen movie. He laughed aloud, half mad
. If all these efforts failed, he’d have plenty of time to watch all the 2D films he liked stuck on this damn ship buried in the snow.

  He carefully undid the main chest plate of the bot. There, the proverbial heart of the droid rested. Thin wires emanated from a central processing unit that performed all the robust calculations needed to sustain the droid’s AI. Tag found a small manual restart button within the hardware and pressed it.

  Several seconds passed. He hoped to see the droid whir back to life. With a fresh restart, maybe whatever virus or command the pirates had inflicted on the Argo would be vanquished from it.

  But the M3 droid remained dormant. Two more attempts to restart it were met with the same fruitless results.

  Tag eyed one of the ship’s intranet ports. He could hook the droid up and scour the code that gave it life. But such a task, even for someone who knew their way around these systems, would take weeks, maybe years. Time that Tag didn’t have if he wanted to warn the Montenegro.

  Besides, the virus or whatever the pirates used might still be sitting on the ship’s intranet, ready to sweep back into the droid and make it lifeless once more. There was nothing he could do in the digital realm of the ship to reverse the damage to the AI systems.

  It was time for surgery.

  With slow and careful movements, Tag undid the wires around the processor. He pulled it from the droid and set it aside on a nearby table. He labeled each wire so he remembered which provided sensory input or controlled the droid’s navigation systems. The tedious process took several hours. Minutes seemed to bleed by as Tag succumbed to tunnel-vision focus on the project. His dissection ended after he felt certain he’d taken all the components that gave the droid its AI.

  A slight feeling of guilt swept through him. It was as though he’d torn the brain and heart out of a human. He surveyed the array of wires, chips, and other electronics on the table next to him. This had been the soul of the droid.

  Now for the most crucial part of the experiment.

  He unlocked the exam table the droid’s shell lay on and rotated the table vertically, with the droid strapped in, to fit in the decon chamber. The table’s wheels squeaked as he pushed it into the decon chamber. Once in, white gases hissed over him, then the chamber opened and let him into the lab. He walked to the terminal, and his fingers danced over its input display. The lights glared more brightly, and he focused them on the droid’s table to give the space a makeshift surgical-suite appearance.

  The air in the room had already been contaminated when he and Kaufman had sought shelter here before, but Tag hoped that wouldn’t compromise what he was about to do. He opened the incubator at the far end of the laboratory. The door opened with a release of hot, humid air, and he gazed on the small object that represented years of work and toil. Years of dedication as a medical officer and researcher. A culmination of everything he’d worked toward.

  He wasn’t scheduled to begin experiments with this item yet. And the first few experiments would’ve been more ... subdued and simple than what he had in mind. But as he donned a pair of surgical gloves, he decided there was no better experiment than trial by fire.

  His fingers wrapped around the polyglass container, rotating it slowly, and light hit the object, making its half-synthetic, half-biological flesh glisten. This was what he’d devoted himself to after realizing his career wouldn’t lead him to the bridge. But maybe this was fate telling him it had turned out better after all.

  He peered at the object, rotating it gingerly. This was it. This was the first live synth-bio brain to go into a droid.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Tag gingerly placed the polyglass container with the synth-bio brain on the table with the lifeless droid. This certainly wasn’t the first experiment he’d wanted to start on the Argo. But now it would have to be.

  The combination of biology and computers was not Tag’s idea. The many researchers that had come before him shared the common objective of adapting one of the most sophisticated computers known to man in the pursuit of artificial intelligence: the human brain. The field’s historical roots dated back to the early twenty-first century. Researchers had developed brain-computer interfaces by using isolated rat neurons to control miniature drones and even fighter jet simulation programs. These advancements progressed slowly but surely and led to savvier brain–computer interfaces.

  But leaps in more traditional computer technology had made the field of synthetic brains almost obsolete. These half-biological, half-mechanical processing units cost far too much more in time, labor, and money than the standard mass-produced computer unit. And most experimental synth-bio brains were still restricted to basic, single-minded tasks, like guiding missile systems, that didn’t require the same tremendous processing power as steering a ship through hyperspace did. Besides, those simple tasks had already been conquered with the more ubiquitous hardware-based computer and AI systems, making synth-bio brains both less efficient and redundant.

  At least that’s what everyone else thought.

  Tag placed the polyglass unit with the synth-bio brain in the skull of the droid with reverence. He planned to literally and figuratively breathe new life into his vision of what synth-bio AI could be. Sure, a purely software-based AI could do its job well. But there was a certain vitality that machines lacked. Humanity hadn’t evolved from stone tools to spaceships capable of interstellar travel by being able to perform calculations well.

  No, it had always been the ability to dream, to believe, to inspire, to feel, to intuit. Those were the properties that separated humans from the most advanced AI. And that was why he hoped to combine the best of both these worlds in his synth-bio brain. That’s what he’d always told Kaufman, and she’d been his most adamant believer.

  He felt a little like Dr. Frankenstein as he connected the conduits and wires of the droid’s sensor arrays and servos to the synth-bio brain unit. The entire unit and all its connections fit comfortably in the droid’s head. The location of the brain unit wasn’t solely to mimic human anatomy, but it certainly didn’t hurt to make this droid feel more lifelike to Tag. Due to the biological component of the synth-bio brain, it was necessary to fit a miniature life-support unit into the droid. The torso, now devoid of the processor and other unneeded components, was a prime spot for holding the life support mechanisms. These mechanisms pumped nanoparticles that served as artificial blood cells, delivering all the nutrients, oxygen, and even immune system-mimicking molecules that the living part of the synth-bio brain needed to survive.

  The life-support unit also generated and delivered power to the droid. In a way, the heavy, tube-shaped device in Tag’s hand was a synthetic replication of most human organ systems, scaled down and built with electronic components. He inserted the canister into the torso and spent the next couple of hours connecting wires and tubes, then checking and rechecking them.

  His stomach growled, but he ignored his own body’s needs. He was too close to seeing this one come to life. Anticipation lit his nerves on fire, but he willed himself to remain calm and unhurried as he grabbed a terminal and hooked a diagnostic tether to a port in the bot’s torso. One by one, he powered up each of the droid’s systems.

  First, he checked that the life support’s batteries and miniature fusion center were able to generate, receive, and store power. Green lights on the terminal’s holoscreen signified they worked properly. Then he ran a quick diagnostic on the materials within the artificial bloodstream loop. Everything was there and accounted for. He moved on like this, meticulously debugging any unexpected results.

  His heart fluttered when he sent a small burst of power to the synth-bio brain. He simulated an auditory sensation through the terminal’s connection with the droid: the sounds of birds chirping. A smile tore across his face. The appropriate lobes of the synth-bio brain lit up. Then he delivered a visual cue. The sun. Earth’s sun. Several different portions of the brain glowed on the display, signifying neural activity.

  Next he d
elivered a more abstract cue. One humans knew well but computational AI had no concept for other than a rote dictionary definition. Pleasure. A dopamine effect rushed through the synth-bio brain, and he watched the holoscreen’s image of the brain light up in a bevy of neural sparkles like distant stars across the universe. Now happiness spread through Tag like a warm tide. Had he done it? Had he actually created the SRE’s first synthetic-biological lifeform?

  He continued quizzing the synth-bio brain with more restricted simulated senses and emotions. It was working. It was truly working! A hoot of victory escaped his mouth, and he pumped his fists in the air, dancing around the lab—but then his elation evaporated. There was no one to celebrate with him. Yet a small spring of hope trickled up through his despair. Out of all the tragedy and death aboard the crashed Argo, new life appeared ready to emerge.

  The testing continued for some time, with each result ending up in a notebook he labeled “Experiment: Alpha One.” He prayed there would be no Experiment: Alpha Two, Three, or Four, much less a Beta series. This had to work. He lost track of the seconds, minutes, and hours, too enthralled by his invention. Finally, when his fingers started to twitch and his vision blurred, he stepped back and took several deep breaths in and out.

  This was it. This was everything he’d worked for.

  The time on the Argo was supposed to be for the development and growth of more synth-bio brains based on this original unit. But he hadn’t had time yet for any of those nascent experimental brains to mature. Most were still squirming neurons replicating and dividing in cell culture plates. This was the only one he’d ever completed, and now it was time to see if his work would make the SRE navy proud—or if it was all a foolish embarrassment.

  Emotionally he was ready to turn the whole unit on. But his hunger continued to nag at him, and his eyes were feeling heavy once again. There was no telling how the droid would react to its environment once it was fully untethered. He needed to be prepared, mentally and physically, to welcome his creation into the world.