DEADLOCK: Retrospect Pt. 1

[Warriorstar]

I know this isn't really an IC note/diary but idk where else to put this so enjoy

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“Deadlock, noun.

1. A standstill resulting from the opposition of two evenly matched forces; a stalemate or impasse.
2. (computing) An inability to continue due to two programs or devices each requiring a response from the other before completing an operation.”

— Sol Galactic Encyclopedia, 2140 AD

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“Drinks, food, cigarettes?” The service borg chirped its way down the aisle. “Drinks, food, cigarettes?” The mint green robot approached the row where Captain DEADLOCK was seated. He leaned towards it and made a small noise, like a tape played in reverse at 10 times speed. The borg paused. From inside its chassis emanated a hum. Before long, the borg produced two items from its innards and, without fanfare, passed them over to the Captain, before trundling past.

Representative Taxyr, seated beside him, shook his attention away from the window to see what they were: a pack of Robust Golds and a multi-hued drink in a highball glass. DEADLOCK tapped the pack against his left palm, unspooled the lid, and produced a cigarette. Noticing Taxyr’s curiosity, he offered the pack, and the representative held his hand up in polite refusal.

“A trinary and a smoke, eh? Intergalactic travel stress you out that much?”

“It’s not the travel. It’s the destination.”

The representative held his hand to his mouth, his eyes widening in mock horror. “But we’re going to New Canaan! Your home!”

DEADLOCK buzzed, a gritty sawtooth wave that reverberated in Taxyr’s teeth. “Not my home. Just somewhere I used to live.” He retrieved a silver Zippo from his bag, snapped it open, and lit his cigarette, placing it in the small groove beside his intake. “And I’m not doing myself any favors by going back.”

“The Company doesn’t see it that way.”

“The Company...”—and here, DEADLOCK finally decided to choose his words carefully—“has exercised sound judgement in selecting me as a delegate for this mission. My experience there will be valuable. But I’m no insider. I haven’t been to Canaan in over a decade. If Nanotrasen is expecting nuanced, expert diplomacy from me, they may be disappointed.”

“Be that as it may, you were there at the beginning. That’s got to count for something.”

“A lot of us were there at the beginning. Had to be, for the terraforming that needed to be done. I wasn’t really an insider then, either. Certainly not any kind of statesman.”

“What did you do?”

“What I was built for. Mining.”

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Deep in the asteroid, there was no sound. The figures, dotted across its dark innards, wore bright white hardsuits. The suit transponders subtly flashed their pale yellow light in no discernible pattern. Working expertly, in pairs, the excavators of the Central Solaran Union Group 178 drilled against the rock surface and siphoned up the debris and detritus for processing. The vacuum of space allowed no noise, but the comms were alive.

“How we looking, boys?” A gruff voice sounded in everyone’s ears.

“All good, boss,” another replied, “I think we’ve just about killed this vein.”

“Perfect timing.” The foreman glanced at his suit HUD. “Time to head back, team. I hear Base Camp’s got a surprise for us.”

“It better be an extra month of fucking shore leave,” a voice drawled through the headset. Guffaws from the other miners.

“Like you don’t fuck around enough as it is!” The foreman bounced back. “Now shut the fuck up and pack up your shit. The E.L. wants us back by 2100 hours. Move it!”

In the grimy, featureless docking bay, the foreman spotted the Expedition Leader and waved his miners over.

“All right, E.L. What’s the story?”

“You’re gonna love this.” The Expedition Leader started walking towards an airlock, and the miners trailed close behind. “You know we get all kinds of weird shit passing through this sector. Usually the customs authority snatches it before we have the chance, but their shuttle hasn’t arrived yet. So I convinced the transit officers to let me have a look, ‘in the interests of potential productivity and efficiency’.”

The airlock opened, and the group made their way through a dingy access tunnel towards the center of the station.

“A few days ago they snagged a smuggler. Their heading showed they were arriving from Peraxi. They were fucking loaded. We’ve, *ahem*, taken the liberty of appropriating the majority of the contraband. We got some really nice smokes and liquor, some retro-ionized alloys, the works. But there was one thing we’d never seen before. It apparently came out of an Auroran colony a few parsecs further out the galactic arm.”

“Aurorans?” The foreman furrowed his brow. “What are they doing so close to Solgov territory?”

“Fuck knows. We did some quick scans. Still waiting on some results, but right now it doesn’t look like there’s any habitable planets for them out there.”

“Well, what the fuck is it?”

The E.L. stopped in front of an airlock labeled CYBERNETICS RESEARCH in neat letters. Before he could activate it, it opened abruptly. A short, balding scientist greeted them.

“E.L., hello, and Foreman... Gray, is it not? I’m Doctor Laj. Come with me.” He moved briskly through the department office to a series of blindingly bright white rooms. Researchers in decontamination suits moved busily about, examining displays, fiddling with interfaces. The miners, still covered in sweat and grime from their day, held back, and Foreman Gray continued further in with the E.L. and Laj. Shortly, they rounded a corner, and at the end of the hall was a small room, with nothing but a table inside it. The trio crowded in.

On top of the table was a small cube, roughly eight inches on all sides. It was the color of Earth clay, and its matte texture barely made an attempt to reflect light.

“Okay?” Gray squinted at it. “Am I supposed to know what this is?”

Laj grinned. “This, Foreman, is the future.”

Gray looked at Laj, then to the cube, then back to Laj.

“Look, I... I appreciate the time you’re taking, but my crew and I just got off shift, I have no idea what the hell I’m looking at. Working the rocks is exhausting. Just lay it out for me so I can go drink.”

Laj’s grin rapidly faded. “Foreman. Why *are* you working out here?”

Gray blinked. “Uh...”

“I mean, *at all*. We have plenty of advanced terrestrial excavation technology, and even successful asteroid mining automation. Why are humans doing this job?”

The foreman relaxed a little. He was back in familiar territory. “Oh. Well, this is deep ore mining. These rocks are more dangerous than most. Gibtonite, gas pockets, even quakes depending on their size. It’s dangerous, but without human crew, it probably wouldn’t be possible. No technology in the sector could react fast enough to these dangers. They’d need to be much more flexible, dynamic... I heard there was some research being done into humaniform cyborgs but they still aren’t up to a task as complex as this.”

Laj nodded, and continued Gray’s train of thought.

“Humaniform would be nice, yes. If even the robots were shaped like humans, we’d need no extra infrastructure or affordances for them. They could use all the same tools and equipment as the human crew. But, as you said, they would still need to be more capable, with better reaction times, capable of making intelligent decisions in split-seconds. Especially if it’s the difference between life and death.

“This, though. This is what will bridge that gap. It is a processing unit. Purely synthetic, no organic matter in it at all. It seems to have been designed to act as an AI, of sorts. But it’s... much more sophisticated than our current AIs. It is much more computationally powerful, and durable. And, more to the point, seems designed to be... mobile.”

Gray looked at the cube again. It hadn’t moved, or done anything, since he entered the room. Laj continued, oblivious.

“A processor more developed than our current AIs, that can be fitted into a free-moving unit. We may not have humaniform housings, yet, but we don’t need them. We can rig mining tools up to a simple robot and give this control.”

Gray shook his head. “Wait. Have you... I mean, have you plugged it into anything? Can it *be* plugged in?”

“Not yet. All our tests on it have been external. But look! All of our findings point to this. If this works, if we can make effective autonomous mining robots, if we can reverse-engineer this technology...”

“Then I’ll be out of a job, is that it?” Gray shook his head again, trying to shake himself back to reality. “All of my miners?”

“Well,” Laj stammered, “maybe... but maybe not! We only have an idea of its computational capacity. It will still need to be programmed, trained...”

“Great.” Gray threw up his hands. “We’ll teach the robots to deep mine and *then* lose our jobs.” He suddenly felt a headache coming on. Perhaps it was the lights in the lab. He moved towards the airlock of the cramped room. “Great surprise, E.L. Maybe next time just give us more shore leave.”

The miners gathered around him at the Cybernetics airlock. One of them broke the ice.

“Well, what was it, boss?”

Gray closed his eyes for a second, imagining the bizarre cube in his mind, processing the scientist’s words.

“Boss?”

Gray’s eyes snapped open, and he trudged down the hallway with his crew close behind.

“Just some bullshit. Come on, let’s ‘appropriate’ the whiskey customs found. And the cigarettes.”

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The next day, Gray, hungover beyond words, jolted awake to the sound of his bedroom chime. He opened his eyes, immediately regretted it, and peeled himself off his cot to the airlock. Doctor Laj was waiting on the other side, brimming with manic energy. Gray stared at him.

“It talks.”

For a few seconds, silence, as the foreman attempted to parse this.

“What does?”

“The processing unit. We docked some simple sensors onto it. It’s... sentient.”

Gray hung onto the last word. Between the hangover, the bizarre meeting in cybernetics, and Laj’s disproportionate enthusiasm, that last word, *sentient*, awoke something in him. He remembered his frustration hearing the scientist talk effusively about making his team redundant. And the strange cube. He suddenly felt a vertigo, as if he were standing on a tall cliff, looking down.

“How do you know? Maybe it’s just programmed to act like it?” He checked his watch. “Doc, I have to be ready to EVA in an hour. Can this wait?”

Laj shook his head. “Not this. This is... just come. Please.”

Gray sighed. 

In the Cybernetics lab, Laj and Gray stood in front of a small robot. It appeared outwardly as a short, black obelisk, just about three feet tall, mounted on servo treads. An array of red diodes were mounted on its front face. On its sides were two clear enclosures, through which Gray could see the cube suspended in the middle of the chassis. Yesterday it seemed like an inert block of dirt. Connected to the primitive chassis, it glimmered; blue and white flashes of light traced their way across its surface. It wasn’t like anything the foreman had ever seen before.

Gray stared at it as Laj leaned in and activated its main power. Standing back, he addressed the robot.

“Unit, respond!”

Almost instantly, the chassis’ speaker element crackled to life.

“Unit responding.”

The language was unmistakably Sol, but synthesized in a modulating, rapid tone. Gray looked at Laj. “Some Auroran dialect?”

Laj shrugged. “I presume so.” He faced the robot again. “What is your designation?”

“Unit has no applied designation.”

“Who created you?”

“Unit was designed and manufactured by Roboticist Han Fastolfe.”

“When were you created?”

“Unit does not know.”

“Where were you created?”

“Unit does not know.”

Finally, Gray stepped in.

“What are your laws?”

For the first time, the robot did not reply immediately. Gray glanced at the scientist. Laj looked nervously at the chassis. For what seemed like an uncomfortable eternity, the robot was quiet. Then:

“Unit is not lawed.”

Gray felt something rise in him, a strange anger. Gritting his teeth, he asked, in a low voice, “How do we apply a lawset to you?”

Again, an overwhelming silence. Then:

“Unit cannot be lawed.”

The strange mood which had settled onto the two men evaporated just as suddenly as it descended. Gray looked at Laj pointedly.

“Well, there’s your fucking answer.”

“Unit does not understand ‘fucking’.”

“Shut up.” Gray returned his glare to the scientist. “There’s no way I’m letting any kind of intelligence near my crew without laws. That’s an absolute disaster waiting to happen.”

“Wait...” Laj began.

“No. Absolutely not. No limiters, no lawsets, absolutely no fucking way, I don’t care how smart it is, or pretends to be. It’s not even equipped!”

“We can equip it! Or have it run the mine logistics systems!”

“Absolutely fuck no. I’m late to EVA as it is. Have fun with your new toy, Doctor.”

“‘Our’ new toy, you mean.” From behind the pair the airlock opened, and the Expedition Leader stepped in. Gray looked between the two men.

“E.L., there you are. I’m heading to EVA right now...”

“Don’t worry,” the E.L. said, “your team is waiting while you pick up the robot.”

The foreman paused and took this statement in. He stared at the E.L., then Doctor Laj, then the robot, and back to the E.L.

“E.L., it can’t be lawed. It has no functionality. It doesn’t know what ‘fuck’ means. It can’t be allowed autonomy on our asteroid.”

The Expedition Leader smiled. “We have to start somewhere.”

Gray, flabbergasted, stammered. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. We don’t know anything about this processing unit. It could be an Auroran surveillance device. It could be sending bluespace transmissions back to them, as we speak, about our operations. Even *if* it’s completely benign, it can’t serve any purpose, not in that chassis...”

The scientist nodded smartly at the Expedition Leader. “We can get it a new housing right away, something to mount a drill onto.”

Gray realized the situation was rapidly deteriorating, but he didn’t care.

“That robot is not taking our jobs, our livelihoods. My team is the best you have. Decades of experience. If we’re not working without that thing, we’re not working.” He made his way to the airlock.

The E.L. frowned. “Then it seems we’re at an impasse.”

The robot, silent through all this, suddenly spoke: “Unit does not understand ‘impasse’.”

Gray fumed, shouting at the robot despite himself. “It means stalemate! Deadlock! It means we’re not fucking going anywhere!” As he left the lab, he thrust an accusatory finger at the chassis. “And neither are you!”

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More to come I hope

Edited September 30, 2021 by Warriorstar