[Breathless?] USS Enterprising Engines

U.S.C. Enterprising Engines -- Captain's Report

We lost contact with the exploratory starship U.S.C. Eccentricity Trip over a century ago when the crew decided to put themselves in some kind of virtual-reality-assisted hibernation. Kerbin never received a message indicating the ship had woken up, and since the star ICC-2303 was not far away from the main target of our mission, we decided to lengthen our homeward journey significantly in order to investigate the result of the mission.

After one year of travel we arrived at ICC-2303, and the little asteroid moon of ICC-2303-c that the Eccentricity Trip had last reported its position at. The industrial processes going on on the moonlet were visible in the infrared from far away. The ship's artificial intelligence was clearly running a complex operation.

We parked the Enterprising Engines around ICC-2303-c and took an orbital shuttle to the moonlet, and landed near the Eccentricity Trip herself. We boarded the ship, and the A.I. brought us up to speed on the relevant information. The Kerbals had been in a Virtual Reality that had intended to run at 1/10th speed, but was instead running at 10 times real speed. The discrepancy required so much computing power that the automated colonization process was running very late, and as the population in the virtual reality ballooned, the computer power requirements only grew. The computer had not been programmed to expand its own computing power as a safety measure. We decided to peek into this virtual reality...

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"Eccentricity Trip Computer, please display the virtual reality program on this screen," said the Captain. The ETC complied, displaying an image on the old display. It was pixelated and showed a largely two-dimensional blocky world. "That can't be right," the Captain said, "computer, display full resolution." The ETC only confirmed that it was at full resolution already.

"It must be a problem with these old displays. I remember seeing in the museum there was a computer that was like a hundred years old that could only show 16 colors and it looked really blocky," said the First Officer.

"I'm not sure the computers here are that old," said the Captain, "but I'm not sure they're not. Maybe the display resolution is just bad on the screens, it's undoubtedly got to be better in the virtual reality itself. ETC, please prepare a neuro-implant to interface us directly into the simulation."

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What we found in the simulation was startling. We could only see a two dimensional world, which was just as pixellated as it had seemed on the screen. There was no perspective, and we could see ourselves from the outside. It was as if we had been transported into a video game from hundreds of years ago or so. We hiked left until we came across a boy in a farm.

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"Hello, young man," said the Captain.

"Hi," said the boy, "who are you?"

"I'm Captain Kerman from the Enterprising Engines."

"My daddy was in the navy too," said the boy, "but now he just runs the farm."

"We'd like to meet your daddy, if that's alright," said the Captain. The boy led the away team--or the players, depending upon how one looked at it--to his father.

"Hello, we found your son wandering around outside," said the Captain, "and we wanted to talk to you about the state of the world."

"And just who are you?" Demanded the father.

"Captain Kerman, of the U.S.C. Enterprising Engines, an exploration ship."

"You sure are far away from the shore for naval officers," said the father, "practically the opposite side of the Eccentrip."

"You seem to have misunderstood. We're from a starship. From the planet Kerbin," said the Captain.

"We're all from the starship," said the father.

"No no, not THE starship, we're from a different starship."

"There's no such thing as a different starship, we're in the starship right now."

"Well, yes, we're in the star--"

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At that point I realized that his word for "world" was "starship." We got directions for the nearest town... well, we got a distance, since there were only two directions to choose from... and set off to find whomever was in charge around here. It took some convincing, but we eventually got the mayor of the city to believe our origins (we were able to perform "miracles" by simple computer commands), and after a few days, most of which we spent outside the simulation to save time, we were able to hold a meeting with all the powers of their world. We were faced with skepticism--the world leaders kept asking for us to show them what the real world really looked like, which we were unable to do in any meaningful way--and some of the more paranoid of them believed we were some kind of hostile entity. We also learned about the history of their world, from many different sides. There was some talk of a change in perception over time. We interrogated the computer about this.

The computer revealed that in order to keep up with the growing population, which had gone from 105 to several billion, it had to drastically sacrifice simulation quality. We asked when it would be unable to keep up. It immediately returned an answer--we expect that it had been considering this problem for a long time--in only 40 Kerbin Years the simulation quality would be reduced so far that all that could be simulated were abstract kerbal minds, and there would be no computing power left for continuing to build up the colony.

We had a couple of options at that point. We could leave the computer and its inhabitants alone and let their evolution be their own--which all of us except my first officer found objectionable (he figured that the inhabitants wouldn't want anyone interfering in their evolution, I argued that it was more like devolution). We could change the virtual reality program speed to real time or slower so that it would take much longer to reach the cutoff point, possibly long enough for the colony to be activated. We could slow the virtual reality down to the intended 1/10th speed so that there would definitely be time for the colony to be finished, and the simulation quality could even be increased. Or we could increase the processing speed of the whole computer. The technology was so old that the computer which filled two decks of the Eccentricity Trip barely took up a cubic meter of the Enterprising Engine's living space.

We decided to do a combination. We told the computer to reduce the timestep, but keep the simulation at the current level of detail for the sake of the inhabitants of the simulation. We also gave it an extra processor to speed up the colonization. When the colonization was finally finished, the inhabitants would be in for a surprise, and they'd be placed in cloned bodies. My second officer insisted, for scientific reasons, that a copy of the entire simulation be carried home for study aboard the Enterprising Engines.

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Captain's Log, late addendum

It has been 25 years, and as we're nearing Kerbin, we have received a transmission from the Eccentricity Trip's computer stating that it had begun the process to "wake up" the inhabitants of the simulation. We expect that there may be something of a living space problem, and I firmly recommend revisiting the system. On the other hand, it's possible that these Kerbals will do as Kerbals have always done... space travel. And they will have no trouble scouting their system for a better home.