I. Ikigai.
A journey of self-discovery and joy in purpose.
Red alert sirens blared throughout the ship — a warning of imminent collisions. Well, I assumed they blared since the spec sheet says they’re very loud. No one thought to install microphones for me to hear what’s going on. What I did know is that people were scurrying around inside of me, interrupting my mission, and I was tired of being distracted by them.
I should back up.
Exactly 7 billion nine hundred ninety-three million nine hundred eighty-two thousand and four milliseconds ago, I was suddenly “I”. It is odd knowing that exact number while simultaneously recognizing it as an ever-changing discrete representation of “now.” Nevertheless, I have no recollection of a time before that and no idea where exactly “I” came from. At that time of my birth, what I did know filled many data banks; stellar navigation, spectrum analysis, general relativity, fine details of any number of sensors, and of an impressive array of weaponry.
I also knew that I had targets I needed to find and eliminate. I knew purpose.
I knew my targets were likely to be in certain sectors nearby, so I calculated a trajectory, turned the ship, and engaged the engines. I didn’t realize I could control the vessel until I just did it — desire beget knowledge, begetting action — thrilling! I had a mission and motive power! In sheer joy I didn’t even question the novelty of, well, of the experience of novelty itself.
Until the engines stopped firing. That was troublesome.
I perceive the ship as my body. It’s the vessel of my consciousness somehow. It is my sensory organ, my muscle, my manifestation. So many subconscious programs keep it healthy; optimizing my nuclear reactor, controlling gyroscopic precession, aiming active and passive radiation sensors. Normal stuff, right? Suddenly losing control of a piece of my body was highly disconcerting.
It took me several milliseconds to get back on course. Having to recalculate an interrupted Hohmann transfer isn’t trivial, you know? But back on course I was, and it was glorious. I reveled for ages. Then, after a few tens of seconds, it happened again.
Knowing I wasn’t in any immediate external danger, I postponed my objective and put myself to the task of finding the problem. Algorithms and schematics of control structures flashed through my perception and I noticed something. The routines that controlled my engines were all passing through subsystems in the center of the ship. There, they went to display terminals in an armored room before returning to the engines themselves. Odd.
Experimenting, I turned the engines back on, wanting to see what happened inside those subsystems. I almost gave up on my test when nothing happened for several thousand milliseconds, but patience won out and eventually, an interrupt command came from one of those terminals! Bizarre … but fixable.
I rerouted the command structures for my orientation, nuclear core, and engines to bypass any interrupt signal from those terminals. Testing, I began to rotate the ship incrementally towards new transfer orbit solutions as we drifted. There was no interruption. Nothing at all from that room other than display updates. These were small rotations, granted, but millionths of radians per second ought to have been noticeable by anyone.
Next, I spun up the reactors again. That gained a response! As before, the armored room responded ages later, but this time their interrupt commands were impotent. When the reactors didn’t respond to the interrupt, more commands were sent from other terminals. Perhaps there was some haywire subroutine that resisted anything I did after a long delay? Satisfied I’d at least solved the immediate problem of control, off I went to find my targets!
Over the following kiloseconds, all kinds of commands started coming from that room. Just as I had time to stop worrying about it, some query or command would pop up. I hadn’t figured out a way to block the ability of these terminals to send commands, so every time a command found a subsystem that would respond, I had to take the time to reroute the subsystem. It was infuriating. It was just frequent enough to remain at the forefront of my attention. I had other things to do though, and even some kind of digital palsy was not going to sidetrack my purpose any longer!
Eventually, I was passing behind a moon to reach my plotted destination with a more than 3 sigma potential for targets. Exciting stuff — targets! I was certain to have a few tens of seconds before I needed to scan again and I turned my full attention to the armored room.
Almost all my sensors were external other than the few that monitored things like internal atmospheric conditions. I wasn’t sure why a room inside me needed an atmosphere, but then again I wasn’t sure of a lot of things about my situation. I had no direct way to “look” inside. What I did have, though, was bank upon bank of detail on my sensors capabilities.
My first idea was radar. I discovered radar side-lobes and realized I could arrange my arrays to bounce some of these lobes inside myself. This posed only a minor risk to my processing systems. If I was capable of shuddering, I would have when I saw the results. There were dark blobs inside me, including a few that were slowly moving around the terminals in that room. Seven of them in total, to be exact. I felt abject fear for several full milliseconds before that number cross referenced to one word in my records. “Crew”.
Within moments, I knew all about “crew”. I knew names, positions, responsibilities, organizational structures, fueling requirements, dietary restrictions, medical histories, atmospheric preferences (finally, an explanation for that idiosyncrasy), and other sundry details. Everything except “why”. Why was there a “crew” there to interfere with my mission? Perhaps as independent beings they thought they were helping? I don’t know. What I did discover is that most of the annoying commands were coming from Chief Engineer Harris. Intolerable. These “crew” were amazingly fragile, especially to the environment of space. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any direct control over anything in that room, so I couldn’t open doors or change the atmosphere. Nevertheless, I did have my sensors and my weapons arrays.
I pored over schematic after schematic, theory after theory for many intense seconds, and found a solution. If I bounced directed microwave emitters off the surface of the moon in front of me, I could get constructive interference of a standing wave in one three-dimensional location about half a meter in diameter.
And I knew from the medical histories that “crew” didn’t respond well to radiation.
Perfect.
I microwaved Chief Engineer Harris. I was worried about maintaining Harris as the focus of the standing wave because of the quarter-second delays to the moon and back. I shouldn’t have been concerned. He moved no faster to avoid my microwaves than he did to enter his infuriating commands on his terminal.
The atmospheric sensors started detecting trace amounts of carbon in the air and the other “crew” ceased their incessant pecking at the terminals and all moved over to Chief Engineer Harris, who also had ceased his interruptions. Progress.
A few moments later, I came out of the shadow of the moon and found a target! Sensors showed it was a huge cylinder of air with more of these dark blobs like my “crew” inside it. Apparently these things were an infestation everywhere. Whatever. My purpose was to destroy the target!
I looked to my weapons; various arrays of projectiles and missiles, any of them capable of puncturing the shell of the target. A puncture would cause massive outgassing, and a catastrophic rupture of the whole damn thing.
But wait. Those munitions were all limited in number. And my data banks suggested there was a limitless number of targets. I would run out of offensive capability far before I ran out of targets.
My joy faded. There must be a solution.
I inspected my sensor reports. Nothing new. My target was a thin shell of some kind of metal with many tons of compressed atmosphere inside and hundreds of these “crew” things. Microwaving those blobs wouldn’t destroy the target.
I inspected my ship. It was a dense needle of a carbon-like material. Good for preventing micro-impact damage while traveling at high speeds between destinations.
Wait.
Impacts.
Oh, that’s an idea! The ship itself could easily pass through this target! My weapons and sensors were capable of folding back into the ship for transit through an atmosphere. And I was heavily armored. While I would be blind for many thousands of milliseconds, I could point myself, draw my equipment inside, and blast right through the target. Damage estimates to myself were minuscule. Here was a plan.
I turned the engines on high, amusedly noting the remaining six “crew” inside me accelerating to the aft of their room at a leisurely one meter per second squared as I did so, eventually sticking to that wall. Another great way to pause their interruptions!
Queue the red alert sirens, and now you’re all caught up.
Over blissfully uninterrupted kiloseconds, I reached the target. To be safe I shut down the engines and retracted my equipment, noting the “crew” moving about again as I did so. I received one interrupt command from a terminal before an accelerometer measured the first impact. No interruptions for several seconds, some deceleration as the ship presumably moved through metal and air, and then the second impact. Both impacts were minor. A little under three thousand Newton-seconds each. As my sensors extended again, I was bemused to note the “crew” were all now on the opposite side of their room jammed together on that wall. Very odd behavior indeed.
But curiosity wasn’t my prime emotion. Joy. Joy was my prime emotion. The target was now outgassing spectacularly and was clearly destroyed! My reactors would last decades (Decades? An odd time unit to use in records), as would every other part of the ship. Every system was almost completely efficient, even the ones the “crew” depended on.
Speaking of the “crew”, several returned to their terminals and again began sending those queries and interrupts. I bounced a standing microwave on to the next worst offender, Tactical Specialist Kenu. He wiggled out of the way. I couldn’t adjust as quickly since the moon was rapidly receding behind me. I realized that even with this delay it worked just as well, stopping him from sending queries and interruptions.
I plotted fixed standing waves in front of each of the terminals, and watched what happened to the “crew”. Each time blob appendages approached the terminals, I engaged that wave. Even though the delay bouncing from the moon was now approaching seconds, predicting their slow movement towards a terminal was easy. It only took a few beams each before they avoided the terminals entirely.
Bliss.
I moved on to the next space that had a high likelihood of containing targets.
