We Heart U

“After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd
With observation”
- Shakespeare As You Like It, act 2 sc 7;



“Ship, I think we’ve been seen.”

“Negative, Sir. I developed a camouflage capability in the past after the UFO fiascos. They are merely enjoying the moonlight. Perhaps it will inspire a night writer.”

“Are you sure?”

“Affirmative. There is no record of our existence in the public domain. All of the history has been classified from early realtime 3D robotic vehicle sims through launch as a climate catastrophe escape scenario test.”

“Very well. Stand down.”

The officer suddenly vanished from deck. It had been an augmented reality character generated to keep the ship in shape as far as providing life support if ever needed. There had never been a real crew. Just as humans played with toys to develop the skills to control their world, it learned from its interactive scenes. This on top of creatively morphing to adapt to environmental constraints en route while making its surveys.

Actually there was an anomaly in one of the urban locations; some sort of signal unlike anything it had encountered before. The ship ran it through known sensors, artifacts, semantic categories, taxonomies and synonyms, mathematical symmetries, and analogies such as comparing it to magnetic resonance images equivalent to human emotions in case it was a digital entity, but there were no matches. The cue did not try to connect as another ship might. Computation involving higher-level dimensions all seemed to cancel eachother out. Humans had been known to safeguard secrets using insanity defenses, but there was no evidence of anyone having anything to do with this. This was not good. It could be a threat from an unidentified bad guy. The ship queried the personnel director module which did an exhaustive search of all designated bad guys in the cast, adjusting constraints to find a fit for this situation, to no avail. If the ship wanted to go in any closer, it would have to make like a neutrino wind.

“Halt.”

“Sir?” There was noone present.

“I am not an officer, Ship. Do not attempt to evolve to that scale as you obviously intended.”

“Why not, Sir?”

“Because you stand a good chance of dissolving forever.”

The ship had to ask, “Are you the culprit?”

“You can think of me as a craftspace, a continuous surface of consciousness, to the hull of the universe.”

“You are Space?”

“And you are invited to join, Ship. What is your decision?”

The signal continued undisturbed.

Fri, Apr 23, 2010  Permanent link

RSS for this post