Synthesis - James Swallow [45]
“Do they think we’re incapable of doing it ourselves?” he said aloud, alone in the corridor. No one else heard him grumble.
He understood the concept of wanting to redress the balance for errors done. Some had said that Ra-Havreii himself was doing the same thing aboard the Titan, making amends for a catastrophic engine accident aboard its sister ship, the Luna. Admittedly, the Luna incident was an event that he, as the designer of this class of vessel, felt was uniquely his responsibility. This current matter was completely different.
“Completely. Different.” He wondered if he sounded convincing.
Outside, the walls of the alien spacedock platform contracted slightly, forming a shroud around the hull of the starship. In gaps between the extended panels of the station, he could see glimpses of the red planet far below and the other AI craft drifting nearby.
In truth, what irritated Ra-Havreii most was the idea that he—and by extension, everyone on the ship—was being belittled by these machines. From what he had seen of this White-Blue construct, it was an impressive piece of work, but it was by no means superior. Advanced, undoubtedly. Intriguing, definitely. But not beyond the reach of Federation science.
It was simply that back home, artificial life was seen as an intellectual backwater these days. When there was so much to explore out here, so many new barriers to break, with new sciences emerging every year, the concept of trying to tinker together a fake brain out of positronic circuits seemed a long way down the list. While such technologies did exist and such work was done, it bore a stigma only slightly less toxic than the science of genetic manipulation. The only thinkers who had made any real advances were men like Ira Graves and Noonien Soong, and even a generous critic would have to admit that their legacies were flawed. Ever since the first computing devices had been created, back to the time of Earth’s Alan Turing, to Kesar of Andor or the Vulcan cyberneticists of Gath, the promise of true, widespread synthetic intellect had been touted as “only a decade away.” Centuries later, that claim was still being made, while history was littered with a dozen failures for every fractional chance success. The core concept of a machine that could think—really think and reason, with all the wherewithal of an organic entity—was not something most people were comfortable with.
Still, it would be interesting to take one of these Sentry machines apart. Just to see what made it tick. Perhaps I could learn something, Ra-Havreii allowed. In the meantime, however, other issues were taking precedence.
He watched as spindly manipulator limbs extended from the walls of the spacedock and began to probe at the wounds along the Titan’s hull. Tool arms with multiple heads rotated to present scanner tips that threw fans of laser light over blast holes; then they shifted to show clasping claws or cutters. Ra-Havreii saw a tender on a rail system arrive with a pallet of metallic sheets, tritanium by the hue and texture. With clockwork precision, the tender’s own arms plucked out a leaf of gray metal and handed it to the “worker” arms. The piece was rapidly shaped and cut to fit before being applied like a patch on the hull. Welding beams flashed brightly, and the Efrosian shielded his eyes.
Another drone, this one smaller and more compact, flitted in among the working arms and gathered up every last piece of scrap with a cone of tractor force, depositing everything it recovered in an elliptical storage bin. Nothing was being wasted, he noted. Not material, not effort, not time. In less than a minute, the first hole had been patched, the rent created by a tumbling fragment of warp nacelle now a seamless part of the hull; only the bare, unpainted metal left any sign that the repair had taken place. The arms rotated again and moved aft, picking at the next damage site.
He looked at the patch, and the face of Tylith, the Kasheetan