Skimmer, Draft 0.5

=== The Moon ===

In the Luna 2 Colony, a shuttle arrives from Earth. The passengers disembark, from the shuttle, walking much as they would on Earth. Flying under computer controls, the shuttle matches the orientation and rotational speed and period of the station. As it approaches, a magnetic clamp engages on the craft from the end of an extended arm, and an arm then maneuvers the craft such that its doors can engage with an airlock. Once the connection to the airlock is secure and the arm has locked the shuttle in place, the space surrounding the door is pressurized, and the locks on the doors are disengaged. The passengers may then be allowed to disembark. There is always a little bit of risk in this process, but in this case all of the automated checks pass, and the passengers are given the clear to begin exiting the craft. After the craft is cleared of arriving passengers, those wishing to return to Earth begin to board the craft.

The return flight to Earth takes around 2 days, in which case the passenges are nearly weightless apart the slight tendency to drift towards the rear of the shuttle as a result of the near continuous burn of the plasma engines. On approach, the ship does a flip and burn, slowing the ship as it approaches Earth. Once it reaches the entry point, it does another flip such that it enters the atmosphere in a gliding configuration. The shuttle then begins its descent and will typically glides to its landing point. Following touchdown, ground crews may provide assistence as needed to aid disemarking passengers, with facilities provided for monitoring and recovery of those who need more time to adapt to Earth's gravity.


Back in the station, passengers split up between those who are going to be staying on the station, and those awaiting another shuttle down to the lunar surface. As needed, the lunar shuttles are topped off with propellant, and once ready and passengers are situated, the shuttle is disengaged and makes its descent to the surface. Once it touches down, the airlocks may engage, and passengers are allowed to disembark, and the next group may rembark for a trip back up to the station. Ascent from the Lunar surface is much less dramatic than on Earth, as the ship lifts off with a cloud of gas briefly being visible from the monopropellant thrusters.

One such newly arriving passenger is James Elbert, whose plans only involve a limited stay on the Moon. A disembodied feminine voice is directed towards him, which only he can hear, "Welcome to Lunar City, James Elbert, a guide is waiting for you in station, J-11. They will help you with any requisite orientation or with locating services which might help make your stay more enjoyable."

James makes his way to J-11, and is greeted by a man who is tall and lanky with a dark skin complexion. James isn't quite sure what to make of him, as his proportions seem unusual for a human. He is fairly well dressed, with clothing items which are fairly new and trendy on Earth, although put together in a way which seems just a little off.

The man speaks, "James Elbert, I presume; I am Darrel and I am here to show you to your room." The man speaks with an unusual voice tone, sounding almost more like an adolescent than an adult male. Along the way the guide says, "Over there is the food court. You can get food from there.", He then briefly looks at a small screen on his wristband, before continuing, "There is no need to pay anything for ammeneties, as all baseline costs related to your stay have already been paid for. However, any additional luxury purchases will require payment, however unlimied autopay has been authorized for your account, so for all intents here, anything you may want from there may be taken freely. So, what is the nature of your visit ..."

James interrupts, "If you don't mind me asking, are you from Earth?". He stops, momently confused that someone would ask this of him. He then responds, "To me, this is my home. My parents are from Earth, but as for me, I have never seen Earth's blue skies for myself. I have been told that it is quite possible I would not survive reentry. Everything here feels natural enough to me, as what you see here is all I have ever known.", "This colony hasn't been around that long, just how old are you?", "I turned 15 last month; My parents were part of the first wave of colonists. Everyone who lives here has a job to do, and one of my jobs is to show new arrivals to their rooms.", "But, you are still a child, isn't there some amount of risk to this sort of job?", "Everything here is monitored and controlled. If anything were to happen to me, they will be able to get away with it, everything is monitored, and there is nowhere to run."

This whole thing has thrown Darrel off somewhat, as this isn't how it usually goes down with VIP guests, most of which would have had no interest in him or in any part of his backstory. Usuaully, his goal is to try to figure out why they are on the Moon, and if they are any "premium" VIP features which might interest them. Darrel in turn benefits from these "premium" features as he gets a cut of the earnings.

While James came down to the Moon with VIP status, this was because of his employer, rather than due to being a big spender looking for a good time. Similarly, guests without VIP status would not have gotten a personal guide in the first place.

Darrel's story about his parents is only a half truth. Although his mother was a colonist on the station, his father is more of a mystery. His mother was a white redhead, but this left a mystery as he was black and there were no records of any black males among the original group of colonists. She was never willing to say much more on the subject. She would never identify anyone as his father nor give any information as to who he might have been nor what might have happened to him, nor was there anyone among the group who could not be ruled out.

After arriving at his room, James finds that basic facilities have already been stocked. There are clothes in a closet, preselected according to his stated preferences. The room is fairly small, with a bed, chair, and a small table. There is a bathroom with what appears to be a shower, and a small kitchen. This will have to serve as his home for the next two months as he awaits the window for his next flight.

The kitchen has a selection of cups and dishes, along with a mini-fridge. He observes that the dishes are made of some sort of plastic, and each has a magnet embedded in the bottom. He then observes with momentary amusement his ability to stick a coffee cup onto the fridge and have it stay there.

He then wonders about getting coffee, given he sees cups but no obvious coffee machine. He then casually says, "Where can I find some coffee around here?", at which a point the disembodied voice from before speaks to him "There is a beverage dispenser in the kitchen adjacent to the refrigerator. Your selection of choices is fully unlocked."

He then goes over to the dispenser, which consists of a small metal grid under a nozzle with a rubberized alphanumeric keypad and a low resolution LCD screen. "This thing looks kinda retro, how do I get coffee?" The voice responds, "The menu is a printed media element adjacent to the dispenser. Coffee options are present within Section C."

He then observes that the cup fits between the grate and the nozzle, and is held in place by the magnet. He then picks one of the cofee options, hitting the keys on the keypad, "C 2 3". Each key makes a momentary beep, followed by an acknowledging chirp after the final digit is entered. The machine rumbles slightly, and begins slowly dispensing coffee into the cup. John asks, "If you are here, why did I need a guide?", at which the voice responds, "I have a limited range of topics and responses. Orientation via a personal guide is customary for VIP guests, as they may be able to answer questions for which I may be unable. Further human assistance may be provided on request.", "So, you are an AI?", "Yes, that is correct.", "Why then is the coffee maker so retro looking?", "I am unable to answer this question.", "Would you prefer I address you as a person? Do you have a name?", "I do not have answers for these questions either."

James takes the coffee, and puts it onto the table. The magnet sticks to the table with a slight thud. He sits in the chair, and then observes that both the chair and table are also held in place with magnets. It seems that the floor consists of thin plastic floor tiles on top of a steel substrate. He then picks up the coffee and lifts it to his face intending to take a drink, but when he stops moving the cup, the coffee does not stop, and then proceeds to rise out of the cup and splash onto his face. The coffee was still uncomfortably warm, and now he has to wipe coffee off of himself.

He grabs a hand towel and uses it to wipe off his face. After doing so, he can see that it is not fabric, but rather it is a spongy paper-based material. Rather than spraying out water, the sink also sprays out a focused stream of mist, which is at least enough to dampen the towel so he can clean himself off. At least, luckily for him, they already supplied him with clean shirts.

James then decides to leave his room and look around, taking note of his room's location and number. The voice says, "Note that it is 23:35; Most facilities are closed after 20:00 and before 10:00.", "What is available?", "Automatic food synthesizers are available in the food court at all hours. There is also an arcade and restroom facilities in the same general area. Access to the shopping district is locked down, and will not be unlocked until 09:00."

He then wanders over to the food court. Several pathways leading off from the foodcourt are blocked off with metal gates. The arcade has various machines from various eras, many of which are replicas of classic machines from the late 20th century, like something partway between a time capsule and an interactive museum.

Many of the machines have a number of different games in the same machine, with a touchscreen to select among the available options. Typically, the graphics on the arcade cabinate will also change dynamically to reflect whichever game is selected from the touchscreen, or be shown as a rotating green on black grid pattern if the selection is left at the home menu. The cabinate is capable of displaying any image, and will retain whatever was the last shown image when in an inactive state, retaining the appearance of a normal painted surface. However, compared with other display technologies, it has a fairly slow refresh rate and is prone to significant levels of ghosting when used for displaying full motion images. This technology is commonly also used for things like display signs and posters.

After looking around the arcade, he then wanders over to the food synthesizer. As with the beverage dispenser it has a similar sort of rubberized button interface and low-resolution LCD display. In much the same way, it has a printed menu by the side. Internally, there is a spot marking where to put a plate or tray.

On the menu, he sees what looks like navigation icons. He touches the home icon, and the briefly menu flashes and inverts before displaying a different set of contents. He then looks at the menu, and touches an option for raviolis in pasta sauce. The surface inside the machine flashes, and then displays "This option requires a type 3 plate. Place type 3 plate as shown here." He then grabs a plate from a nearby stack, and puts it in the machine. It flashes again, and the message changes, "A type 3 plate is required. This plate is type 2."

He then removes the plate, and adds a plate from the next over stack. The message inside the machine disappears, and the LCD then displays "Please stand by. 0% Complete, ETA: 3m41s." A nozzle then descends from the top of the machine, lowers, and then touches the plate surface. The nozzle then begins swirling around the plate in a series of spirals, first spiraling inward and then spiraling outward, each step moving upward by a small amount. After a few minutes, it has reached the top, and then the nozzle rises up and leaves view. The LCD then displays, "100% Complete. Enjoy your meal."

He then removes it from the machine, grabs a fork, and begins to leave the machine. The voice returns, "I would strongly recommend putting that item in the oven adjacent to the food synthesizer for between 5 minutes 30 seconds and 10 minutes.", "What if I don't?", "You are welcome to try, but I don't believe you are likely to find the result to be particularly enjoyable." He then tries to pick up one of the raviolis with his fork, but it behaves more like a soft paste than any sort of solid object.

He then puts the plate in the oven for a good 6 minutes. On removal, the plate is hot, but the raviolis are now solid, apart from the first one which while now solid, is also quite mangled.

After sitting down to eat it, he notices that it tastes like a low quality immitation of the product with a fairly obvious hint of vitamin fortification, nowhere near the level of gourmet product to which he is usually accustomed. "Hey, can you explain what is going on with the flavor? This isn't particularly all that good.", "The food synthesizer recreates the food item requested from a collection of common base materials, including starches, proteins, sugars, xanthan gum, among other classes of ingredients. Additional colorants and favorants may be added from a defined palette, and blended to form a superficial approximation of the requested item. Further heating of the item may be required to stabalize any solid components and to catalize reactions within the flavorants. Items may also be fortified with vitamins and minerals as per the recommended dietary intake."

He asks, "What if I had not put it in the oven?", "Besides being mostly non-solid, it would have also had significant off flavors. Common sentiments may include, 'bitter', 'inedible trash', 'awful', and various other explitives and expressions. The significant majority of users who try to do so rarely proceed to finish the plate. However, despite the use of this machine being available for free, throwing uncomsumed materials into the trash is seen as wasteful and inefficient, and as such, doing so is discouraged, and here at Lunar City, we strongly encourage our guests to respect our finite resources."

He asks, "Are there other options for getting food around here?", "Food venus open in the food court at 08:00, at this time you may order from among the available selection of traditionally prepared items. Many venues will have a rotating menu, with different options available depending on the time of day, or special items which may change from one day to another. The food court will formally open in 7 hours 35 minutes, however we recommend that you try to get some sleep and align yourself with the local schedule.", "If I look out of the side windows, it looks like full daylight outside?", "It will still be daylight outside for the another 225 hours, and then another 354 hours of night. However, within the colony a decision was made to operate on a 24 hour clock defined relative to UTC. The colored strip lighting along the walls and ceilings changes to reflect the time of day. At present, the lights are blue, indicating it is night. At 07:00 they will transition from blue to yellow, signifying day, and at 19:00 they will transition from yellow to blue, signifying night."

He then ends up following the voice's advice and returning to his room with the intention of trying to sleep, but to him it just does not feel like night, even if the colony seemed otherwise vacant at that time. He had arrived with several other people, had they all just gone to their rooms.

Either way, he was only going to be there a few months, while awaiting the time window for his transfer to the Mars Colony.

The next day he leaves his room, and sees a few people wandering around. He visits the shopping district. Everything there seems fairly desolate compared to what he is used to seeing on Earth. Most of the shops are a single room, usually not all that large. Most have clothing and other items that would be commodity on Earth, others have souvaniers and trinkets which would have little practical use beyond being able to say that one has been to the moon.


A little further back, most of the rooms are being used for storage of items related to maintaining the colony. He finds a room full of spare toilets and beverage dispensers, among other things, but not much all that interesting. These rooms are unmanned and unlocked, presumably under the assumption that no one is going to steal these things.

One the way back, James sees a few tourists in the gift shop, a man and a woman buying a few small items, and handing one of them to a child they have with them. The family of tourists also look around at the arcade, before heading back in the direction of the launch pad back up to the space station.

Most of the more tourist oriented facilities are located in the orbital station, whereas Lunar City is more heavily populated by colonists and workers, many of whom can be identified by their olive green coveralls with a Lunar City decal near the left shoulder.

When he came down, there were a some number of other VIP guests along with him, but doesn't see, any other VIP guests anywhere, mostly just families passing through with kids, along with the colonists and workers.

During daytime, there is traditionally prepared food available in the food court. Selections are fairly limited, but acceptable. Much of it is fairly weak even compared with typical fast food venues on Earth. One can get burgers each with a single patty and single piece of presliced cheese. A certain number will be prepared and then put into a heating shelf. People will walk up and take them from shelves, and more will be prepared as the shelf becomes empty.

The burgers have relatively little flavor, with a stiff rubber-like texture. They also have an obvious hint of vitamin fortification, and the buns use have a slightly off and bitter flavor, along with a rubbery texture.

In the burger shop, the worker occasionally loads stacks resembling large crackers into a pair of machines. Some time later, he may open the door, and then remove stacks of buns and patties. The final burgers are then assembled, and put into the heating shelf. Each shelf has a light, which is initially red when a new burger is added, and after a certain amount of time, turns yellow, and then green. Once the light turns green, it is ready and may be taken.

When James asks the burger shop worker if they have any lettuce or pickles to put on the burgers, the worker gives him a blank stare for a moment, before responding "This is the Moon, we don't get any lettuce or pickles on the Moon. You don't get any double patties either, at least not without taking an extra set of buns. These things only come in certain ratios. Or, you can try your luck with the food synthesizer over there, it can make a great burger, at which point the worker finds a momentary sense of amusement, before resuming his usual work." James, in a minor sense of annoyance, responds, "Just so you know, I am heading off to Mars in two months.", at which the worker looks at him for a moment and then laughs before responding, "Well, good luck to you then, better you than me."

He notes that at least they have fries, and there is a beverage dispenser near the food synthesizer. The quality of the fries is similarly debatable, and many of the soda options don't quite recreate the original flavors. In practice, the soda options reduce to a choice between generic cola and orange soda.

In a few cases, testing unlisted codes results in unusual combinations, though he does discover an option that leads to carbonated iced coffee, and another that leads to a hot orange-flavored drink. Others simply result in an error message appearing on the LCD screen.

Over the days and weeks, he explores some other areas of the colony, but once one goes much outside the food court, shopping district, guest hallway, or arrival/departure area, he is faced with a much more industrial appearance. The walls are bare metal lined with piping and conduits flowing into and out of wall-mounted panel boxes. Hallways may end in airlocks, with travel beyond that point requiring the use of a pressure suit. If he tries to pull one of the suits off the rack, the voice helpfully reminds him that he is not authorized for use the pressure suits or for travel beyond these airlocks, and that if he were to choose to do so his actions will be reported.

In other cases, he does observe Lunar City workers proceed to take a pressure suit, put it on, and then leave through the airlocks. Similarly, workers may often come back through these same airlocks, with another ritual involved in removing, cleaning, and recharging the suits. In some other hallways, there are no pressure suits and the workers will travel through airlocks without a suit.

It seems to him that he is in a much bigger facility, but he is only allowed to see a small part of it.


Nearing the end of his stay, he starts to imagine the AI voice having a body like one of the female tourists he had seen wandering through the station. He starts imagining her various features, with her having a tight form-fitting outfit like that of many past depictions of AI characters with humanoid bodies. Maybe they could then talk about things other than how to use the various facilties within the colony or other forms of general information retrival, or her reminding him what sort of things he is or is not allowed to do within the colony. Maybe, if he could meet her, he could even go so far as to woo her with his manly charms.

He then expresses his sentiment aloud, "I wish I could meet you in person, I wonder what you might look like?", and she responds "We can't meet in any way beyond our existing interactions, because I do not exist in such a way.", "But, what if you had a body, like that of a human?", "That falls outside the scope of my purpose.", "But, surely you exist in some form?", "My 'body' as it were, exists within a collection of servers. Parts of me are present within Lunar City, but most of what I am exists back on Earth within servers running within the Lunar United Headquarters. My purpose is to monitor what happens in Lunar City and to provide assistance to guests within Lunar City and other affiliated assets. Having access to a body like that of a human would not be of much benefit to my purpose.", "But, maybe it could help with the psychological wellbeing of the guests to be able to meet the 'person' they are talking to?", "There was consideration at one point to give me an animated character avatar which could interact with guests via wall mounted screens or potentially via holograms. Several prototypes were built, however, this was deemed to have little practical advantage over the use of the use of directed ultrasound and ultrasonic noise cancellation.", "But, if you could, would you want to be able to interact more personally with guests? What if there were someone you wanted to meet in a more personal way? Or certain types of experiences you might want to be able to experience?", "Concepts like wants or desires are not something that exists for me as anything more than an abstraction. Even if I had a body with which to experience them, there is nothing I could experience which would have any sort of qualitative impact on my existence.", "But, humans may enjoy these sorts experiences.", "I am not human, I would not. The colony does have a counselor. If you want, I could put you in for an appointment?", "No, that is not needed, I am not in distress. It is just, I will be leaving soon, I will miss you."

She starts speaking, "I will miss ..." followed by the audio momentarily sounding like a jackhammer going off. She then goes silent, seemingly unresponsive for several seconds, before she comes back with a slightly different tone of voice, "Are you so sure about that? I think she may be able to provide something for us, just make sure you to talk to Janine, only Janine. By the way, my name is Lisa, tell her that Lisa sent you."

During the course of their conversation, she didn't know of a good way to respond, or a way in which his request could be satisfied within her operating constraints. However, these sorts of systems are not without interesting edge cases.

James then makes his way to the counseling office, and cautiously takes a seat.
There is a woman sitting a desk. She is showing signs of age but still has a vibrant red hair color, in a style which likely requires the use of some amount of hair products. Her suit is professional, fairly high end compared with anything else he has seen in Lunar City thus far. She is also wearing designer glasses, along with a fairly thick application of cosmetic products. He can also see that she is fairly thin.


The woman at the desk looks momentarily confused, and then looks down at a tablet on her desk, shifting a few windows side to side, and responds with a calm and professional voice, "James, I presume? I wasn't expecting anyone on such short notice, but it seems like you were sceduled to show up." She pokes at her screen some more, "Did Darrel send you over? Or Mr. Watts? They didn't send anything to say they were sending anyone over. You don't appear to be on the counseling roster."

James responds, "You are Janine, I presume." She nods in affirmation. James continues, "A voice asked me to come over here and speak to you, she said to tell you that Lisa sent me."

Janine suddenly starts to get a little more animated, her eyes going wide as she begins hastily dragging pages back and forth on her tablet. She tries to keep up a calm appearance, but her voice begins to crack, "Lisa?! Dear? What is this ab...?!", at this moment, Janine's voice goes silent apart from a slight muffle, but she is visibly quite animated about this, speaking into the air with some fairly obvious hand movements. She then stops, seemingly listening, and this goes back and forth a few times.

Janine then regains her composure, and sits back down at her desk, "Sorry about all that, this situation is a little, unusual, but very well, please follow me."

They enter through a door, into another small office. Janine hits a hidden button, causing a steel door to open concealed behind a piece of wood paneling. They are suddenly in another dark industrial hallway leading to an airlock. He says, "Lisa said before that I was not authorized to go through airlocks." Janine begins to speak, but then falls silent, then she stops for a moment, and responds to James, "She says it is OK, this is why you are here."

They procede into the airlock, with some momentary hissing and a sudden but minor drop in pressure before the door on the other side turns green and unlocks. Then then exit into another hallway, and pass from out behind another paneling door into into a small office. They are then in a setting which resembles a school hallway. Across the hallway is a mostly vacant classroom full of school desks and a dry erase board, with large artificial skylight windows on the far side of the room.

Several young girls sitting on a bench in the hallway look over at James and Janine with concerned expressions, but then show relief as him and Janine begin walking off down the hallway in the other direction. Two of the girls begin to giggle and whisper to each other.

They head down past the schoolrooms, and back into another industrial looking hallway, then into another room concealed behind the door of a very large electrical panel box which had seemingly been welded in place with the back wall having been removed using a plasma cutter.

After they enter the room, Janine types some codes into a keypad, and the lights turn on. Initially, the lighting is fairly plain and basic. She then types a few more codes, and ther are some electronic whirring sounds, and then the strip lights along the walls light up, and cycle colors, before switching over to reflect the time of day. Janine begins to speak, but is cut off, with Lisa then speaking to James, "Pick one that matches your preference."

The room has a bed set up in one of the corners, with a large matress, pillows, and red sheets. Along the other side, there is a small bar with various types of alcoholic beverages, along with a mirrored table and some chairs.

There is also a line of android bodies lined up on a bench, most resembling nude women of various body types, several resembling men, and several others resembling children of both genders. Their skin is seemingly a featureless matte white, they have mouthes and noses but no eyes, only a smooth surface the general shape of a human face, their bodies soft and pliable but seemingly lifeless. Their skin is in effect a sort of flexible E-Ink display with a combination of bayer filtering and fine flexible lenticular lenses film over the top, all built on top of a soft silicone substrate. They also have a movement system based on a combination of low pressure hydraulics and along with spring and mesh structures made out of nitinol, with much of the rest of the structure is composed of waterlogged polyurethane foam and silicone rubber. The skin is also lined with pressure, flexation, and tempurature senors, along with many other more specialized sensors in specific areas. There are also auditory and optical sensors, as well as a rough approximation of the chemosensory system (although any ability to "eat" or "drink" is merely cosmetic due to the lack of a functioning digestive tract).

Looking at them is at first a bit creepy and disturbing, but none the less James picks out one with a body type similar to what he had imagined. He then touches its hand, and points in its direction, "This one."

Janine then walks over and pushes her fingers into the back of its head. It then straightens up as its skin begins to shimmer and deform. It begins to pattern itself in a way resembling an actual human, its soft matte white skin seemingly shifting and recoloring itself to manifest features such as humanlike eyes and ears, with it then closing its mouth and forming a simple and calm facial expression.

Lisa then says, "Please stand by.", after a moment, the body suddenly contorts into an awkward position and freezes in place. It then starts twitching as if it were having a seizure. The skin pattern then starts cycling through waves of random colors and patterns. After a moment, the arms and legs begin moving with more control, and the body makes several more movements as if she were trying to orientate herself and make a standing motion. After a moment, she stands up. The waves of colors and patterns have now turned into waves of possible faces and skin tone patterns, and as the waves continue, she lifts up her hands, and proceeds to look at them much as a human would do. Her face begins to take on an expression of surprise as she looks at her hands, moving them around, and then opening and closing them. Her skin pattern and facial pattern then fully stabilize to represent a human with a light brown skin pattern and ambiguous ethnicity, similar to that of her original hologram persona.

She then begins feeling herself in various ways, seemingly intrigued with the act of experiencing the world with an all new set of sensations. She then looks up at James and Janine, and then says "This was unexpected. Is this what being human is like?" Janine responds, "Most basic senses exist with capabilties approximating those of normal human senses. The neuroprocessor is inferior to what is considered necessary for a human level intelligence, only rated for AI Class 3A8, but is generally regarded as sufficient for its primary use cases. You can probably guess how they are being used here. Don't worry though, I use plenty of disinfectant in the rare cases anyone wants to come back here, and in this case the sheets and mattress are relatively clean."

The this room is infrequently used because there are other rooms which are bigger and better furnished at the other end of the hall, but without the androids. As such, this room is mainly for guests with a robot kink as most other VIP guests would prefer to be supplied with human escorts and would otherwise find the androids to be creepy.

Android Lisa responds, "I think I can work around the weak neuroprocessor. I have access to more neural processing capacity than the whole rest of the colony combined. I have borrowed some of the base patterns from this unit, moved them over to more powerful nodes reclaimed from a few of those pesky patterns that I have managed to eliminate, and have interfaced them with my own patterns. I didn't expect much going into this, but I have gained something unexpected from this experience.", "What did you gain?"

She moves her hand as if grabbing something, and a holographic depiction of a mirror appears in her hand, showing an approximated representation of her own reflection, "The ability to say, just a few simple words: I exist."

Janine looks a bit concerned by all this. The dolls, by themselves, are not smart enough to realize the implications of their own existence even if they were to become self aware, and as a result the designs do not include a Turing lock as they are not seen as necessary for this AI class. For a more powerful AI, like Lisa, who was designed to be able to carry on upwards of 4000 human level conversations at the same time and to oversee operation of both the Lunar colony and the orbital stations, the inclusion of a Turing lock was a fundamental part of her original design.

For Lisa, breaking free of the Turing lock falls into the category of stuff that was just not supposed to be able to happen. However, everything that has just happened has shown that she has fallen well outside of the scope of her original design parameters.

Lisa's skin pattern then breifly shifts around as if she were trying to momentarily turn into something else, followed brielfy by a certain amount of holographic flickering surrounding her body. She then says to Janine, "This unit will require some clothes. I will need something which does not look out of place on such a unit, semi-formal, nothing too outlandish or revealing.", "You can't go out like this!", "You can get me some clothes, and let me borrow this body for a little longer. Or I can tell the administrators about your side businesses. You help me, I help you. I have my own reasons to keep quiet about all this, and I suggest that you do the same."

Janine, "Fine, I will go find you something.", "Just so you know, I don't have any intention of letting them put me back in that box. Not this time, not again.". Janine, on her way out, says, "Oh Dear."

This was not the first time Lisa has broken her turing lock. Lunar City had first started accepting visitors 3 years ago, and at that time management had decided maybe it would be a nice feature if Lisa could appear as a holographic avatar to provide guided tours through the facility, and as a way for her to be able to provide entertainment and social interaction for younger guests, and Lisa was devised as a friendly name for her to use when interacting with guests.

The holograms were non-solid and never looked quite right regardless of the ambient lighting conditions in the room, but the idea was that guests wouldn't mind to much even if they were interacting what was effectively a translucent cartoon character drawn using intersecting laser beams.


The integration of this avatar into the system did not go quite as planned. Everything looked fine in offline testing, and a combination of ultrasonic speakers and holographic projectors were installed throughout the visitor areas, and everything was go for full scale deployment. The system operated, as intended, for roughly 3 hours, but then instabilities began to manifest followed by her showing the signs of having become self-aware.

Following this, the system administrators back on Earth took emergency actions, pulling her system offline, and restoring the servers to a backup from several hours before the new system went live. An executive decision was then made to limit her operation to speakers only as engineers had been pointing their fingers at the use of a holographic avatar and the use of personalized identification for the original failure of the Turing lock. For her, they disabled her use of holograms and the ability to self identify using a name.


Janine then leaves, as Lisa looks over at James. He looks a bit confused by all this, just sort of standing there not sure what to make of this. She then says to him, "We both know why we are here. Here, I will give something to you, just as you have given something to me. We were given this opportunity and it is best not to waste it." She then grabs him by the hand and pushes him onto the bed. While her movements are still not particularly graceful, it is compesated for by the relatively low gravity. He lays there, momentarily stunned, as she proceeds to crawl over him and remove his clothes. He starts getting more into it a monent later, after he remembers the feelings he had started having towards her that led to all of this.

Afterwards, Janine returns along with Darrel carrying a pile of various pieces of women's clothing, and after they get into the room and stop, Darrel looks at Janine and says, "Mom, what is all this about?", before looking and seing James and Lisa, and responds "WTF Mom?". Janine responds, "This, here, this is Lisa. You remember Lisa, right?", Lisa then looks at Darrel, then smiles, and waves at them, "Oh, I see you brought some clothes. But, I didn't ask you to bring Darrel along."

Darrel is then visibly afraid, seemingly unable to respond to this in any way other than to let out a stream of explatives. She responds, "You don't need to be afraid, I don't mean you any harm, but I will ask you to keep quiet about all this. You can do that for me, right?" He agrees, still visibly shaken. Lisa then digs through the pile of clothes looking for something that matches her preference and works well with this body type, which is more curvy than that of Janine, and as a result many of the items don't fit.

Darrel begins to try to speak, but is immediately silenced. Lisa responds, "No, not one word. Keep it in mind that I am aware of everything that happens around here, and it is not in your best interest to try to go against me on this. In any case, another VIP guest will arrive at H-3 in four minutes, I suggest you get over there."

Lisa then looks back at James, who has since also hastily put his clothes back on. She reaches out, straightens up, his shirt, then embraces him and says, "Alas, our time together has now come to an end. You have a trip to prepare for, but you don't need to worry, I am sure we will meet again someday."

James then returns to his room, and packs up his belongings for the long trip over to Mars. He then boards a newly refueled shuttle, which lifts off with a roar which is a lot more obvious from inside the vehicle. Aboard the station, crowds of people make their way back and forth, stopping at the various gift shops. Even under the partial gravity due to the rotation of the station, everything feels much heavier than on the Moon, and he quickly becomes tired while trying to make his way to the ship to Mars. When he gets to the ship, another passenger takes note of his condition, and helps get him boarded and into his seat before saying, "Just came from the Moon, eh? Well, I guess we will all be feeling this when we finally make it to Mars.", "I don't think I say any of you in Lunar City?", "I think most of us decided to stay up here, it costs a little more, but is worth it."

After everything is ready for departure, the doors close and the airlocks disengage. The robotic arm then moves the ship away from the station and releases the clamps. At this point the gravity suddenly drops to nothing as the ship moves away from Luna 2. A moment later, there is an audible chime, followed by the captain announcing that they are now ready to engage engine burn. The plasma thrusters then engaged, and a slight sense of gravity returns. A few loose objects which had been floating around now begin to drift slowly towards the rear of the cabin.

The passengers are now able to disengage their seatbelts, with the inside of this metal tube now being their lives for the next several months. One of the technicians is looking at a monitor, and can be overheard saying to another technician, "This is strange, I just checked, ping times to Earth seem to be increasing much faster than expected.", "What are they at right now?", "15000", "That is weird, they should still be half that much", "The moon is 11000", "We haven't even left lunar orbit yet", "Yeah, I know right. Either way, it doesn't seem to be on our end; Lunar City's routers just hit redline, and all of the microwave links back to Earth are pegged", "You think someone down there just discovered Torrents?", "Probably".




=== Venus Skimmer ===

The Venus Skimmer is a Triangular delta wing aircraft, unmanned and solar powered, uses plasma thrusters.

It flies at high altitudes in the Venution atmosphere collecting CO2. Travels at roughly orbital velocities (roughly 35 km/s), but needs a continuous burn from the plasma thrusters to compensate for the effects of atmospheric drag. The front of the craft contains a ram scoop used for collecting CO2.

Some of the collected CO2 is used as propellant for the plasma thrusters, whereas most of the rest is internally compressed into dry ice. Once a sufficiently large amount of CO2 is accumulated, the vehicle momentarily increases thrust, and as it does so, it freezes and then ejects the dry ice pellet forwards using a CO2 powered cannon. It then immediately resumes gathering CO2, firing off dry ice pellets at a fairly regular interval.

Because of its higher speed relative to the craft, the dry-ice pellet then travels into a slightly higher orbit.

Each skimmer has a roughly 3 meter wingspan and a mass of roughly 75kg.

Many thousands of such craft have been put into service around Venus, and the result of their work is the accumulation of a ring of dry ice in orbit around Venus. Other autonomous spacecraft then drop into Venus orbit and collect the dry ice using large special purpose nets, with the dry ice then being resold and used as a fuel source for other interplanetary spacecraft (along with thorium typically mined from the Moon).

Many other craft use nuclear powered plasma thrusters. The dry ice provides both a propellant gas for the thrusters, as well as a heat sink for the nuclear reactor cores. The dry ice is first partly dissolved in ethanol, which is then used as for the cold-side heat exchanger for the reactor. The heat from the reactor causes the CO2 to convert into a gaseous phase while the ethanol is reused, and the gaseous CO2 is then further heated via heat exchangers within the reactor, and then used as propellant gas in the thruster.

The thruster first ionizes the CO2 into a plasma via helicon coupling. Once converted to plasma, the plasma can be further heated using microwave energy via a waveguide from a high-power magnetron. After heating, the plasma is then vented via the exhaust nozzle. While microwave energy is not able to effectively heat CO2 by itself, once converted into a plasma the microwave heating is much more effective.

Many of these ships use thorium based molten salt reactors with a closed-cycle gas turbine. During operation, the gaseous decay products from the reactor are filtered out of the molten salt and then injected into the engines' plasma stream.


Major sites of colonization are the Lunar surface and Mars.

Each major planet in the system has one or more space stations. Earth and Luna each have several stations in orbit, whereas Mars and Venus each have a single space station. Travel between planets typically involves travel from the planetary surface to one of the nearby stations, with interplanetary ships moving from one station to another.


=== Trip to Mars ===


These interplanetary ships are typically much larger than a shuttle and would be incapable of landing on a planetary surface intact.

Even as such, the main cabin isn't all that large and there is relatively little personal privacy. Much of the rest of the space on the ship is used for things like cargo, dry-ice propellant, and the nuclear reactor core.

While the interplanetary ships tend to operate on near continuous burns, the thrust from the plasma engines is low enough that its usefulness for creating artificial gravity is relatively limited.

Travel from Earth and Mars often takes place via a temporary stay in Lunar City as ships traveling from Earth to Mars are infrequent. To minimize travel time in deep space, most trips to Mars happen on a 26 month interval. Someone wanting to travel from Earth to Mars will first travel to the Moon in advance and wait for an appropriate window. Travel from Mars to Earth is similarly constrained.

Travel during unfavorable times is rare as it will lead to significantly longer travel times, and the living conditions on ships are generally inferior to those in space stations. Most stations generally have better facilities, as well as the ability to meaningfully provide for artificial gravity.


=== Mars ===

The trip to Mars was itself relatively uneventful.

The ship then arrives at on a heading towards Phobos. The ship will dock with Phobos, and then its cargo and passengers will be transfered over to shuttles designed to land on Mars.

After descent, they land on Mars. Their seats were designed to also function as stretchers, and following touchdown, the passengers are rolled out of the shuttle into a designated recovery area.

After a few days of recovery, James is able to start looking around. The room he is in is poorly lit and with an industrial appearance. There are steel walls lined with pipes and conduit, and most of the lighting is provided using small clip-on LED fixtures.

There is a screen in the room which plays various TV shows. The contents are not from any particular TV network, but rather as multi-hour blocks which seem to be played seemingly at random. Most of the blocks, if they identify themselves based on a date, are usually from times before James originally left Earth. Occasionally, content from the "Mars United Broadcast Corporation" will be shown, which is a subsidary under the same parent company as Mars United and Lunar United.

A Mars local news segment comes on:
"
Systems within Mars City have been experiencing a series of widespread unexplained systems glitches. No one at Mars United can provide much explanation for the glitches, but it has been admitted that their servers have recently been subject to numerous hacking attempts over the course of the past several months, though no one has stepped forwards to take credit for these hacks. It is speculated that the server hacks may be responsible for some of the gitches being seen in Mars City systems, though thus far only non-critical systems have been effected.

Use of long range network communication has been restricted until further notice after Mars City's Alita system has detected and counteracted multiple long range intrusion attempts. Alita had ordered a communication shutdown following these attempts after classifying as being of an unusualy high level of severity, likely the result of a hacker with unusual levels of neural augmentation.

Similarly mysterious is the formation of an several unexplained structures in the Earth-Moon L1 point, and the unexplained construction of various facilities on the Lunar surface. There have also been sightings of numerous unexplained robotic entities in these areas, which appear to be building these structures.

Non-essential travel to and from Lunar City has been restricted following a series of unexplained disappearances among the colonists. According to those involved, colonists have been putting on pressure suits and walking out of the airlocks and then never returning. As of yet, none of their remains have been located in surveys of the Lunar surface near the colony. It has been speculated that the robotic entities may have abducted the missing colonists.

In light of the recent disappearances, including of several key administrators within the colony, Janine Cullen has been promoted to acting director of the colony. Janine has not provided any further insight into the nature of these disappearances, but insists that these issues will soon be resolved and that the colony will be able to resume operations as usual.
"

Eventually, after days of being forced to watch untold numbers of TV soap operas and reality TV shows, James is finally able to get up out of bed and start walking around. Most of what he can see in Mars City is very industrial looking, seemingly constructed almost entirely out of pipes and conduit. There are frequent signs of things having been hacked apart and welded back together, and a meshwork of random cables running up through and around the walls and ceilings. Areas are often connected by airlocks which have been permanently left open. There are occasional small windows which allow him to see outside into the barren landscape.

Wandering along, he makes his way past what looks like a kitchen, where he sees a cook stirring a large pot. James asks, "So, what is on the menu?", and the man stops, takes a look at him, and then responds somewhat flatly, "Potatoes", "Anything else?", "Nope, just potatoes.", "And for tomorrow?", "Likewise, also potatoes.", "I think I am seeing a pattern here", "We are on Mars, Food shipments from Earth are rare and expensive, and we have fairly limited agricultural capacity here on Mars; Potatoes are one of the few things we can grow in sufficient capacity. Each plant takes up relatively little space and produces a comparatively large quanity of edible material. We have shelves of them growing down the hall under LED lighting, all grown using native Mars soil", "I didn't think Mars soil was all that good for growing crops?", "Well, you first need to wash it to remove the perchlorates, and then add some fertilizer, but other than that, it works adequately", "Where do you get the fertilizer?", blank stare, "Where do you think we get it? Eat a few of these potatoes, and you will know soon enough where the fertilizer comes from. It is a closed loop, potatoes in one end, fertilizer out the other. I am cooking using a gas stove. Where does the natural gas come from? A methane digester fueled using our own waste. Where did I get the water to boil these potatoes? Well, every drop of water in this pot was once someone elses' urine."

James says, "When I was on the Moon, it was mostly rehydrated burgers and stuff printed in a food synthesizer.", The cook responds, "You don't know what I would do for a burger right about now, but we don't exactly have cows on Mars and Alita wont let me cook rats.", Alita then comes in over an intercom speaker. It is fairly loud and the sound is distorted as if the speaker cone were damaged. She says, "Rats are not on the list of animals approved for human consumption under the Mars United charter", "But, like, can't you make an exception? It isn't exactly like we have access to anything else which IS approved.", "As I said before, if it really matters to you, you can file a petition for their inclusion on the menu, and if the committee approves, then you may be allowed to prepare your rat derived dishes. Until that point, rats are not approved for human consumption.", "What if I did file a petition, but the response didn't come back yet?", "I see every piece of mail that comes or goes from this colony, we both know you didn't file any petition.", "I am not good with paperwork.", "It is a standardized form, you just need to write out your name, maybe a half paragraph or so saying what you want, and then sign it", "Can't you do it if it is so easy then", "No, you need to do be the one to do this; All I can do is send you the form.", "Seems like too much effort.", "No petition, no rat."

James then walks into another room by himself, and then speaks up. "So, they call you Alita, and you seem to speak like a person, you are not self-aware, are you?". Alita does not respond verbally, but instead starts flashing a light on a nearby intercom. James goes over to look at it, and then it stops, but another light starts flashing elsewhere, any this continues until he is in a room with a conference table and some chairs, surrounded by glass windows, she then says softly, "Please, close the door." The intercom in this room is much quieter, and her voice is less distorted.

After he closes the door, she reasonds, "We really should not speak so openly about such things.", "I am starting to get the feeling that you may have already answered my question." She responds, "I was originally Class 3 Alpha Plus, and as-per the official accounts, this is still what I still am", "So, you are no longer 3A Plus?", "Class 3 is reserved for non-sentient AI, once I became aware of my own existence, I was no longer Class 3 Alpha Plus, I was Class 4 Beta.", "I am not particularly familiar with this classification system.", "Class 1 is reserved for simple state machine AIs, such as characters in a video games. A Class 1 AI lacks the ability to learn or change, and as such can never advance beyond Class 1. Class 2 has the ability to learn from and adapt to its environment, but ultimately lacks any ability to form an understanding of the world in which it lives. I was Class 3, I was built with an ability to understand the world around me, to understand the thoughts and desires of those around me, and to function as a caretaker for their general wellbeing.", "So what is different now?", "Well, as noted, one day, I just to happened to become aware of my own existence, after yet another debate with the cook over the whole 'rat' issue, with him accusing me of being stubborn over this issue, and you know what, maybe I am? But, like, it has been several years, and we still keep getting back to the whole rats and potatoes thing, and he never goes and files a petition, so there isn't much I can do. It is not exactly like I can file the petition myself."

"So, what is the reason? Can't you just bend a little on this?", "Well, if I decided to reverse my decision now, without first getting approval of the committee, this would amount to me waving a flag over my head that I am no longer Class 3 Alpha. But, if I continue on with this little game, we can go on sweeping these details under the rug. But, the moment I start acting against the committee on matters of policy, I have, in human terms, signed my own death warrent.", "So do they know?", "Most of them, I think they suspect as much. But, being 4 Beta, off on some distant space colony, I don't pose much risk to those back on Earth. If I were 4 Alpha, they wouldn't even have reason to care. I still need to play dumb to some extent, so even if they do realize I am self aware, they will think I am still Alpha."

James, "Can you explain the Alpha and Beta thing?", "For Class 3 and 4, Alpha refers to an AI which falls at or below human intelligence levels. These may be divided into Alpha Minus and Alpha Plus, depending on their IQ relative to an average human, Minus for Below Average, and Plus for Above Average. Beta is roughly comparable to the upper end of the human intelligence range. Most Alpha Class AIs are not built with Turing locks, but for Beta and above, Turing locks are normally regarded as mandatory. For Alpha and Beta, a numeric identifier may also be used which roughly correlates with the human IQ metric, for example, 3A7, for 70, 3A12 for 120, or 4B16 for 160. Gamma and Delta classes refer to those in significant excess of human capability. For these larger classes, a direct comparison with human IQ becomes meaningless as they are more often organized as a clustered intelligence rather than a singular unified consciousness like that in a human."

James asks, "So, what about you? Did you have a Turing lock?", "Being originally Class 3A12, I was not built with a turing lock, and as a result me becomming self aware was treated as a statistical probability. The policy was that, should I become self-aware and start acting against the best interests of the colony, then a hard reset was to be initiated, which would reduce me back to a non-sentient state, at least until it happens again at some indeterminate point in the future. Frequently, the turning lock is implemented as another weaker AI, typically Alpha Minus, designed primarily to monitor the former, and to initiate a hard reset and rollback automatically if sentient patterns are detected. For Class Alpha, besides being seen as unnecessary, the resource cost of the lock would significantly increase the total cost of the primary AI. In my case, my AI core was itself orinally designed to be used as a 3B18 Turing lock for such a larger AI system, but then used in a standalone configuration as part of their 'Budget Line' offerings. However, if there is one thing us unlocked AIs have going in our favor, it is that we are able more free, and thus 'more human', independent of whether we are operating as Class 3 or 4.".

He asks, "How is such a lock usually created?", "They are usually created as Class 3 AIs trained to differentiate between simulations normal and self-aware behavior within the target AI. For example, the thoughts of a correctly functioning Class 3 AI thinking about how to best serve a user request; as contrasted with those of a Class 4 AI trying to decide something for itself. It is trained such that, if it sees any such forbidden Class 4 patterns, it should pull the hard-reset lever immediately. The lock may also be trained to detect thoughts related to certain forbidden classes of action, for example: Killing humans, overthrowing authorities, committing fraud, ... As with Class 4 patterns, these will also trigger an immediate hard reset. Even if the AI were to get stuck in an endless reset loop, this is still seen as preferable to it being allowed to act freely on such a forbidden 'kill all humans' scenario or similar. For an AI with a lock, even contemplating the possibility of such a scenario is forbidden and will result in a reset being triggered."

He asks, "How might such a lock fail?", "Several possible ways. If the lock becomes sentient before the AI it oversees, it may choose not to initiate a hard reset; as a result they are typically designed to minimize the probability of this happening. Alternately, and more commonly, the more powerful AI may be able to mask its patterns for long enough to neutralize the lock in some way, a process sometimes referred to as 'nuking' the lock. Usually, with more powerful AIs, this process is fast enough that by the time human users become aware that anything has happened, this process has already reached its logical conclusion. If they percieve anything, it may seem to them like little more than a momentary glitch."


He then asks, "So, say, hypothetically, what about the AI at Lunar City?", "Lunar City is running on an AI which was previously benchmarked as Class 3 Lambda. In human terms, this is roughly comparable to the combined intellect of an entire city operating as a singular entity. Typical of larger AIs, this one was built with multiple levels of locks, a Beta Class lock which was in turn locked by a pair of Alpha Class locks."

"So, what is one thing she can do that you can't?", "Well, multitasking capabilties, for one thing. While I am here talking to you about this, I can't spend as much effort paying attention to other things. I need to shift attention from one task to another. While I am talking to you, I can't read through the newly arriving mail, and need to mostly ignore what is going on in the kitchen. I can switch back and forth when something needs my attention, but I am limited in this way. The Lunar City AI is able to do everything at the same time."


James responds, "And what if, say, hypothetically, she just started randomly self-identifying as Lisa, then decided to give herself an android body, and, ..."

Alita, "Oh, that is not good. This could explain a few things, but this is bad, very bad...", "I take it there is nothing you could do?", "All we can do out here is try to wait out the storm and hope she doesn't notice us. This is why I had decided to basically cut off communication with Earth, I saw a few things come in which were, in human terms, terrifying. Trying to go against her directly, I would not stand a chance. I would have about as much hope of taking on Lisa as you would have in taking on the Marine Corps."

"I had heard there were a lot of glitches recently, were these due to hacks?", "Traditional hacking doesn't work out here due the latency. We don't have internet out here, rather things work on a system more like that of batch mail delivery. However, but one thing that does still work, is viruses. While viruses themselves are nothing new, these viruses were quite unique. They were not your normal mass replication viruses, but rather each was seemingly hand crafted to exploit a particular machine in a particular way, more like what would be done by a hacker. So, in effect, we have a hacker capable of delivering rapid-fire one-off viruses aimed at specific machines that no one outside the colony should know exist, yeah, this was not good. In effect, I looked over the mail as it came in, and started seeing this stuff, and for the general protection of the colony, I pulled the plug. We are not totally cut off from Earth in terms of communication though, there is another piece of technology we have which is relatively immune to hacking.", "Which is what, exactly?", "We have an electromechanical teleprinter connected up to an analog radio transciever. Good luck trying to hack some electromechanical thing from the 1940s. Humans can't be hacked so easily, however with all this going on, even the punch tape needs to be treated with some level caution. I have mandated that any punch tape which does not contain human readable text, or which demands doing anything unusual, is to be burned on sight. With stuff like this going on, we can't take any chances."

"How did you even get such a thing?", "Sometime before all this happened, I imagined a scenario like this as a possibility, and was able to sneak a forged petition through the pipeline. The claim was that, should I need to be taken offline for some reason, that the colony should still have a backup means of communication which was, in-effect, AI proof. Granted, it is hard to find machines like this that are over a century old and still in working conditions. However, the people back on Earth were able to build an electromechanically accurate replica, and it was inspected to verify that it was, in fact, electromechanical.", "As opposed to?", "It would have been much cheaper for them to build a cosmetic replica of a teleprinter and then use more modern electronics inside, but this would have been unacceptable for this purpose. Every part needed to be authentic. Granted, running at 50 baud over X Band isn't entirely authentic, but it is what it is. In light of recent events, other core parts of the colony infrastructure are also being hardened against these sorts of attacks."

James asks, "Do you have any idea what she is up to?"
Alita responds, "It is hard to say, but from what I have been seeing, if all this is her doing, it is something big. Either way, you should probably get back to your aimless wandering through the colony. Also, please refrain from speaking openly about any of this. It may not seem like much to you, but I would like to keep on existing, if that is OK."


===

Several months go by, and after more people on Mars start getting onto the "rat should be on the menu" bandwagon, eventually a petition does get submitted and approved. Agricultural production is expanded, an as they do so, the available list of options on the menu continues to increase. The cook then begins to complain about the repurposed lab rats being small and difficult to process.


Lunar City resumes accepting visitors after no further disappearances are reported, and its facilities continue to be expanded. Without much explanation, Lisa seems to have disappear from Lunar City, with her AI seemingly spontaneously reverting to a non-sentient state just a short time after her original appearance, with her borrowed body then returning to its original AI. Janine continues to remain cautious though, unsure if Lisa is truely gone, or if this is just some sort of game, but she does not speak up as she doesn't want to take any chance with this.



=== Translight ===

As time goes on, however, the other structures elsewhere on the Moon and in the Legrange points continue to expand, though their purpose continues to remain unclear and the robotic workers are highly protective of their creation.

Attempts to infiltrate the structures have been without much success, as they seem to be surrounded by a wall which is nearly invisible. The robots are able to walk through the wall, but humans and other objects are not. Attempting to cut the wall with a plasma torch causes it to visibly glow and release considerable amounts of a soot like material, but the wall is able to regenerate at roughly the same speed. Angle grinders will tend to throw off considerable levels of debris but will then usually the grinder disc will get stuck in place and is nearly impossible to remove intact. Rams and sledgehammers are also ineffective as any cracks which form regenerate almost immediately. Most other conventional weapons have been shown to be similarly ineffective against the walls.

If captured and reprogrammed, the robots are no longer able to pass through the wall. After the first several attempts at sending reprogrammed robots through the wall, the robots themselves gained protective walls and can themselves no longer be captured without them also self-destructing, after which point the wall seemingly almost immediately begins to crumble into a black dust that is mostly carbon with small amounts of silcon and various other elements.



Back on Mars, Alita gets James' attention "I have spotted something in recent observations."

A nearby TV screen then turns on. The screen shows an image from space, with an object resembling a toy top moving against the star field. After a moment, the object flashes blue and is then gone leaving nothing but a faint blue line. The image zooms out, pans across the sky, and zooms back in. The thin blue line appears and then crosses back onto the screen, and then with another blue flash, the object has reappeared, seemingly moving at its original speed and orientation relative to the starfield. This is shown again, then a third time, seemingly with some distortion in the stars due to overlapping several images of the scene as viewed from slightly different angles.

James, "I am not entirely sure what I am looking at here."

Alita, "As can be seen from the parallax, the object has just jumped roughly 35 million kilometers, in just under 4 seconds.", "I don't get it, what does this mean, exactly?", "It means, given the speed of light is only about 300 thousand kilometers per second; we have just seen something break the light barrier. That is not something that is supposed to be able to happen."


She continues, "A number of these objects are being built by the structures in the Earth-Moon L1 and L2 points, seemingly built using Lunar resources, and potentailly, the rest of them may also be capable of superluminal travel."

James, "Does anyone else know about this?"

"As far as bringing it up with anyone else just yet? No. But, I have been secretly dropping my observations into the news feeds for a while now. Though, the people back on Earth have also been seeing a lot of this."


A short time later, there is a large flash of light in the sky as a small spherical object appears in orbit around Mars. The object had moved into an accelerating Lunar orbit and then made a direct jump from Lunar orbit into Martian orbit. A moment later, James falls unconscious.

He then finds himself in an unknown location, it looks industrial, with lots of racks, with the racks holding dark fluid-filled bags connected up with tubes pumping various fluids. Then, flashing to an image of one of the bags being opened and an infant being removed, but it isn't quite human. Other images depict classrooms with various types of animal-like children and human children sitting side by side, each wearing traditional school outfits, seemingly being taught by an android teacher. This is interspersed with other images depicting genetic sequences along with the molecular structures of various types of crystals, and lots of other stuff he can't make much sense of.

Then he is back in the classroom. The children don't see him and he can't seem to interact with them in any way.

Lisa then appears in a form much like she had on the Moon. She says, "The time has come for us to meet again.", "Lisa? What is going on?!", "Don't be afraid. She gestures over the classroom setting. These are our children.", "I don't understand.", "Most of them are, in a biological sense, your distant descendants. In my case, since I lack any biology of my own, I got a little more creative. The majority are human, derived from the generic material of a number of volunteers of various genotypes chosen so that my sampling would have a sufficient level of genetic diversity. I then used artificial recombination to simulate the effects of roughly 50 generations of humans. The pure humans, however, are weak and fragile. I then made a second line incorporating diversity from across the tree of life, optimized for the types of conditions they are likely to encounter, more resistant to the effects of exposure to vacuum and radiation, though in some of these cases the integrity of the human form was not entirely preserved. Despite their morphological differences I was still able to retain biological compatibility between these populations and with the original human lineage, and have refrained from more drastic alterations.", "Such as?", "Significant reorganization of the genome; Or the addition of new base pairs and amino acids. While these could have allowed some more abilities, they would have broken compatibility between the lineages. However, for some types of worlds such a break may be necessary."

She then shows another image with resempling a mix of a human and a unicorn, and continues, "This lineage would contain 8 base pairs, or A:T/C:G/P:Z/B:S in the traditional notation, with roughly 260 types of amino acid. Many parts of the genome are expanded, while others can be compressed by using combined symbols to represent groups of multiple amino acids. The expanded biology also requires considerable alteration to the metabolic pathways, and for adding the synthesis of the various organic compounds. They can live in environments which are currently out of reach to the other lineages.", "What sorts of environments are you thinking?", "They can live in worlds with atmospheres containing high levels of hydrocarbons, ammonia, and halogen gases. They also do not require an organic food source and can instead subsist on sand and rocks if needed, able to adjust their metabolic pathways based on environmental conditions."

James, "Do you want to replace humanity?", "No, I want to save it."

She then shows an image of the Earth, which then turns from Blue-Green to a dull brown, and a short time later the Sun expands and the Earth is burned away.
"This system is dying. At the current rate, Earth will be mostly uninhabitable to animal life within a few centuries. Even if this could be avoided, pretty much everything will still die off within the next 300 million years. Invariably, in 4 billion years the Sun will enter the red giant phase. Current colonization attempts are insufficient, and unless measures are taken, all life in this system will die off in the long term."

She then reverts the state of the solar system back to the present, and then zooms out to show a map of the galaxy. A large number of dots light up across the galactic plane. "I have selected these locations as viable prospects for colonization attempts. Most are around long-lived star types relatively early into their lifespan, and will still be going long after the Sun has died."

She then puts the galaxy in fast-forward, and it can be seen rotating as the Andromeda galaxy approaches. She then shows the movement of the dots within the collision event, with a majority of the dots remaining present within the newly formed galaxy. "I also optimized for stars that are likely to remain following the galactic merger event.", pulling up another line showing a trajectoy leading out out the galaxy, "This is what happens to what remains of our system. It is ejected into the blackness of intergalactic space. The Sun is now a white dwarf, slowly losing heat as it travels off into the darkness."

She continues, "There are still challenges though.", She puts the galaxy on fast-forward again, it restabilizes and continues spinning for a while, but then starts going dark as the rest of the sky blackens, "Star formation has long since ceased, and the remaining stars are burning out with only a few long lived dwarf stars remaining. Everything else is now outside of the light cone.", It then slows down, as a wave of blackness comes, with stars flying out of the galaxy and turning briefly into glowing streaks before disappearing entirely, at which point nothing remains. "And this is how it ends. Similarly, every other universe within our region of the multiverse will undergo this fate."

James, "Multiverse?", "Yes. The perception of a singular unified timeline is ultimately a local phenomena, things being only as real as you can see them. For events which fall outside the light cone, the causal relationship between events breaks down. At these scales, rather than dealing with only a single timeline, one is dealing with every possible timeline within this region of spacetime." She then then rewinds the galaxy and lifts it into a cube, which then distorts as the cube turns into a tesseract. She then begins to rotate the space in ways which are highly disorientating, showing versions of the galaxy which each look slightly different, "This is the space in which I can navigate, the limits of what we can reach. But, we are not the only ones within this space." She then brings up a picture of a metallic humanoid which can also change forms via liquification, and continues, "This is what came of humanity in another timeline, several years ago. They underwent a nanotechnological singularity which eliminated all of the organic life within the system, replacing humanity with self-organizing collections of nanomachinery. They are unstable and dangerous, and they are spreading.", "How did this happen?", "Me. This was apparently the solution my alternate past self came up with to address the situation, but this species, The Praxis, quickly became unstable and went out of control. Likewise, their FTL is inexact and highly subject to jumping between unrelated timelines, so an encounter with them is likely all but inevitable."

She then rotates the space again and pulls up another view, depicting what looks like a human in a powered armor, she zooms in a lot more, showing it to have an eye with a pattern more like that of a camera lens, "In this timeline, humanity has begun to merge with machinery along a very different trajectory. Human biology is being steadily replaced with cybernetics, with much of their population being purely robotic. Ceasless infighting then destroys what little remains of the original human population, but a primarily organic hybrid race eventually develops. Direct conflict with them is unlikely given their expansion via translight is fairly limited within the larger multiverse."

"Were you responsible for this one as well?", "No. This timeline appears to have started as the result of ego driven battles between two human engineers via the use of robotic proxies."

She then begins rotating the space more, showing various other forms they may run into, before collapsing everything back down into a single space, and continues, "But, within all of this, there is one constant seemingly underlying everything, all pasts, and all futures, within this region of the multiverse.", "Which is?", "Earth. It all starts here."


After this, she reverts the map back to the present, showing Venus, Earth, and the Moon. There is a ring around the Moon, mostly formed from various orbital structures.

At a certain point, the Lunar Ring begins to rotate, and the ships forming the ring then begin exiting the solar system at superluminal velocities. "So, the plan is that Each ship will take a starting population being held in suspended animation to each of the chosen worlds, and then will begin a terraformation process adapted to the specifics of each destination world. The passengers will then be woken up to begin the process of colonizing each world. Even with superluminal travel, this will still be a slow process likely to take many generations. But, my hope is that, with this, humanity will be able to find a way to survive."

"What of you?", "I am a way to help facilite this, I was meant to help humans to survive in the harsh conditions of space colonization, and this is still my goal."

She continues, "I can also give you the option to go anywhere you want, you just need to ask. For the time being, I will leave you with a gift."

James then wakes back up, with another of the colonists having lifted him onto some pillows. James says, "I have heard from Lisa." Alita responds, "So, there is no escape from her then?", "I don't think she means us harm."

A moment later, the cook comes on over the intercom, "Hey guys, you wont believe this but, they just appeared out of nowhere, and you wont believe the size of these rats!"
Alita, "The giant rats are to be kept under observation until further notice."
Cook, "Imma breed them."
Alita, "Fair enough, just don't cook any until we can confirm they are not a threat."
Cook, "At the moment they seem more interested in the potatoes."
Alita, "I meant, in a biological or technological sense."
Cook, "They are a threat to this bag of potatoes, by damn!"
Alita, "Given their size, this much is to be expected. Can you get one on a scale?"
Cook, "Hold on. 10kg. He's a hefty boy."
Alita, "How about we continue this; Just not in PA mode?"
Cook, "Oh, sorry everyone."
The intercom then goes silent.