“I’m sure Rover can just dismantle our barricade if it chooses to. And then electrocute us to death.”
Kodiak pulls me tighter into his side. “I thought you were supposed to be the positive one.”
“Maybe that was a previous me.”
“Funny,” Kodiak says grimly.
“This much I know. OS is keeping us alive because we have a list of maintenance tasks to do, and it can’t afford to keep waking up new clones. It needs to use us sparingly. It’s been how many years since the ship took off?”
“I don’t know. Time is starting to feel very relative. Those radio transmissions said it’s 8102, but they’re old by the time they get here, which is why OS Prime told us we’re even further into the future.”
“Yeah. Nine thousand eighty-one,” I say, drawing outthe words. “I think we can assume Fédération and Dimokratía aren’t in a cold war anymore.”
“We might be able to assumehumansare no more.”
“Earth could be just algae. Or a rat civilization.”
“Socially organized rats, hrm. That would take more like five million years, I think.”
“Okay,” I sigh, leaning harder against Kodiak. “No rat civilizations yet.”
“Dolphins. Dolphins could get there sooner. Or maybe ants. Actually, I’m going with ants.”
Distracted by the heat of Kodiak, it takes me a few moments to remember what I’d been talking about just a minute before. “Oh yeah,” I say. “It would seem that if we haven’t yet completed our list of tasks, then OS will keep us alive.”
“But OS Prime said that we’ll be killed if we stop working. This is also about resource use. There’s a finite supply of food on the ship. OS will need it for our later clones, too.”
“Right. Eventually, if we don’t complete any tasks, OS will cut its losses and destroy us. Start again with a fresh set of naive spacefarers.”
“Then we should complete them slowly.”
“Just to die later?”
“Well, yes. That was how life on Earth worked, too. People did a lot of tasks and tried to keep death as far away as possible.”
I load up OS Prime and start typing. Can you determine roughly where we are?
In a way. I would place you 187.63 light-years from Earth. TheCoordinated Endeavoris a slow acceleration vehicle. It would take 5,629 years to slow to a stop, and another 11,258 years to make it back to Earth. So you are effectively three times farther from Earth than your physical distance would indicate when we measure the distance with the more useful metric of time.
Kodiak takes over the terminal. Are there any other planets nearby?
Again assuming humanlike parameters for “nearby,” yes, based on your probable locations on the sphere. There is a G-star candidate 0.43 light-years away, 12.1 degrees off our current course. Judging by the flickers in the star’s light, as measured back on Earth and uploaded into the OS, it has four to six orbiting planets. None of them were seen as likely candidates for habitability, so I don’t have any more focused research on it.
How long would it take us to reach that system?
Without knowing the particulars of the ship’s current speed from within my shell state, given your most likely location, I’d expect theCoordinated Endeavorcould reach this star in approximately four years.
Kodiak stares into my eyes.Four years. Could we handle that?
I’m almost certain we wouldn’t survive four years on this ship. I lean in to whisper in Kodiak’s ear. “OS is never going to let us navigate off course.”
“Then we take OS offline,” Kodiak whispers back.
“How?”
Kodiak writes to OS Prime: Is there a way to hook you into the ship’s mechanicals, bypassing the current OS?
Yes. It would involve entering the yellow portal of theEndeavorand linking me into the wiring of the ship. A complicated operation, but with me uploaded into your bracelet, I could guide you. Of course, I’m an earlier OS. Any adaptations the AI has undertaken in the years since I was copied would be lost. We can’t really predict how the online OS will react.
