It took almost a whole month of working continuously on the little corvette to finish it, along with a several day fitting out and shakedown cruise in and around the Luna area.
Afterwards, Ash went out to meet the snowball coming in, just in case of a failure in the systems designed to decelerate it into a halo orbit around L2. Still, it proved unnecessary, and Ash instead spent a couple of days watching everything work as designed.
"Ship, it's always good when a plan comes together," Ash said in good humour from the command couch from the bridge. If he had a cigar, he would have lit it up. Instead, he sat with his quips unacknowledged. It's going to be so tragic that for the rest of his life, nobody will get his Western pop-cultural references.
"Hsss! Prepare for a high-G boost. Accelerating in thirty seconds for a powered orbit around Luna. There will be three more scheduled burns before we reach our parking orbit in low Earth Orbit, Mistress," replied Ship, the Viper's AI. Ash made another mental note to get the AI to at least refer to him as Captain or something in the future. Unfortunately, getting him to stop hissing was already a lost cause.
High-G boost was considered anything more than 6G of acceleration, and this flight plan had a first phase of over twenty-five G's anticipated. In his past life, accelerations that good were reserved for the surface to air missiles. Thankfully he wouldn't feel it at all, but any time a high-G burn was planned, all organic personnel had to be in acceleration couches on the off-chance the tractor fields that provided internal dampening failed. Each acceleration couch had a redundant field emitter that would save your life, although it wouldn't feel terrific. He watched Klara, the blonde-haired, blue-eyed copy of Liesa, check her straps on her couch.
Ash pursed his lips and glanced at her, "Oberleutnant Klara, coordinate with Ship and the constellation control centre. Once we get within one thousand kilometres from Earth, I want to go active on radar from the surveillance constellation below us, as well as those that are either in front or trailing behind our orbit."
She brought her fist to her chest in some manner of salute, which strictly speaking wasn't called for inside a ship if his fragmented naval knowledge from his past life was correct, "Jawohl, Fraülein-Kapitän!"
Ash continued, "High-priority interdiction on any optical, thermal or radar contact that indicates a probable contact boosting up to orbit. Maintain Earth-facing EMCON with Viper unless you detect a target, then go active for a target solution. If it's a probable missile, destroy it with no further orders. If it is a probable shuttle or ship trying to reach orbit, report it."
Ash clucked his tongue in thought after Klara acknowledged the orders. Actually, it suddenly occurred to Ash that the most significant danger to him wasn't from things boosting up from orbit but from items left in orbit before the power couple landed. He doubted they had space mines in their yacht's inventory. Still, it wouldn't be hard to convert a ship-killer missile into autonomous ordinance, even with minimal or no designs in their fabricators. Not that he believed that they didn't have some, it was too easy to squirrel away data even considering how massive in size fabrication designs were.
In fact, if he were that couple, he would have likely converted almost all of his ship's complement of missiles to this mode and deployed them in high orbit to hopefully kill that asshole if he came back in his freighter.
Ash certainly didn't trust him and Ash had a semi-modern corvette at his disposal now. Of course, the missiles on a yacht couldn't have outstanding performance, but their yield was still probably pretty good. Enough to threaten a tramp freighter.
Ash was suddenly quite glad that he never had the Mistress of Space enter orbit to deliver any of the satellite constellations. The freighter was too busy doing with other tasks to oversee placing a constellation of thousands of sats, so he just sort of tossed them around the Moon in lots of a few hundred each, in a space vehicle that decelerated them to their proper speed, released them into their correct orbit and then burned up in the atmosphere.
Ash said suddenly, "Ship, new navigation plan, please. Continue the powered orbit around Luna but tighten up our entry point. I want to be higher, try to intercept an elliptical orbit at least 100,000 kilometres. Once we've established an apogee, I want to be a hole in space while descending down closer to our perigee, so get the heat sinks ready and prechilling now."
Ship was silent for a moment, "With this flight plan, we will not meet the Mistress of Space on station like planned-hsss."
Ash frowned, "Coordinate with your other self over there and adjust their flight plan. I don't want them any closer than 200,000 kilometres until we give the okay. They can delay their departure, boost more modestly or whatever Liesa decides. Have her pick new orbital parameters with this in mind. I'm concerned with potential improvised mines in orbit." Ash coughed, "Oberleutnant Klara! Belay my last order, go active on the entire constellation now. Continuously, not just while they're on their Earth-facing perigee. When they're on the other side of their orbit, I want them radiating into space. Also, I want separation of our entire complement of RDs soonest, and I want them on descending powered orbits in a minesweeping pattern around and in front of our general orbital parameters. Try to program them so that they're recoverable later, though, please, if you will. By the time we reach apogee, I want all tactical point-defence systems on auto-engage. But, uhh, make sure to double-check that constellation control centre is networked into our IFF."
Klara looked surprised but gave a spirited, "Jawohl!"
Ship also came back, "New nav plan set. Boost reducing. Mistress of Space reports compliance. Four recon drones separating now; they will begin a high powered radar and LIDAR sweep ahead and around us shortly. They should be recoverable. In fact, they won't even burn more than 1% of reaction mass and will be able to return to us themselves after they complete their program, Mistress."
It wasn't surprising they didn't have more than four recon drones aboard. The drones were high-performance spacecraft in their own right, each with a fusion powerplant, lots of delta-V and ridiculously powerful electromagnetic sensors. Each was almost as big as the one assault shuttle they carried. They were expensive, too, at least if he were buying them and not fabricating them himself. But he'd much rather enter Earth in stealth with a few RDs emitting. They'd be targeted by the nukes, not his ship if there were any configured to launch autonomously. So now, he just had to wait.
Or maybe not. Klara interrupted him, "Fraülein-Kapitän! Reporting! Constellation control centre rejects programming as invalid! I'm, uh... not sure why!"
Ash sighed. Class 2 AIs are not really problem solvers outside their area of speciality, and Klara was mainly a generalist. He took a look. Ah, it was complaining that the earth-plot would be corrupted with the extraneous data. He didn't WANT the irrelevant data, though. It took him a couple of seconds to change the code base, test it in virtual, commit and transmit the patch to the constellation control centre. He didn't care if the surveillance sats SAW anything, and their ultra-wideband emitters weren't really designed to detect targets that far away in space. Ash just wanted them to become targets; he figured they might irradiate a missile sitting doggo and trigger it to attack the tiny, cheap satellite and spare an expensive RD or his even more precious ass.
While latency with Mistress of Space was still low enough, Ash checked in on the status of his landing teams in virtual. He had adjusted plans and decided to first land a significant force at a presently uninhabited area and then expand out from there like spokes on a wagon wheel, with the first spoke being as planned in China. Originally Ash had planned on such a base being the Antarctic but realised that while that was possible, it might be impractical for now.
Instead, he chose a small uninhabited island in the area between Greenland and Europe, one of the Faroe Islands. The southernmost one, with an area of a little over sixty square kilometres. It was presently uninhabited, but there were signs that it was inhabited in the past. He would ensure it would remain uninhabited going forward, though.
At first, he wanted to pick Guam, but he found himself chagrined to discover it was inhabited. For some reason, he never realised that America's little unmoving Aircraft Carrier in the Pacific had people on it before it was discovered by Magellan in the 16th century.
The first team of two hundred or so were ready and were actually awaiting the fabrication of their bodies, which was occurring as he spoke aboard the Mistress of Space. Their series of atmospheric landers and over twenty thousand tons of heavy equipment was already complete and being shuttled aboard the freighter. Each loaded lander massed as much as a tugboat, and it would take thirty-one of them to get that amount of supplies to the surface. The trail of their re-entry would be spectacular to behold, and there was unfortunately little he could do about that.
He originally wanted to fabricate an actual drop ship for their use, but at this stage, that was overkill. They didn't need the capability to get back into orbit right now, and besides, they could feed the landers to the recycler they're taking with them to regain all the mass for their substantial construction projects.
Ash decided to keep the construction either below ground, below the water or both at this site. He wanted to give the impression of an uninhabited and perhaps haunted island. There were islanders in the other parts of the Faroe Islands chain, which weren't very far from his chosen island at all. He would even utilise a chain of fusion-powered submersible buoys whose only job was to ring the island in continual fog to sell the haunted aspect.
He didn't even need to design the buoys; they were an off-the-shelf submersible design that included filtering deuterium from the seawater to power them so they wouldn't even need to be refuelled. They also had a respectable projected fifty-year service interval before maintenance was required. He was not the first person who wanted to make his private island spooky or even the first hundred thousandth person.
While ensuring a level of fog that reached spooky in all weather conditions was actually horrendously expensive in terms of energy, especially during the summer, it wasn't like the ocean was going to run out of deuterium in the next billion years, so it didn't really matter.
Over a thousand of these devices would be in the first five re-entry vehicles that were roughly scheduled to enter the Earth's atmosphere in approximately eighteen hours... well, that was the original plan. Realistically, probably two days from now. These first five were less landers and more along the lines of giant five hundred ton planetary bombardment missiles, each with hundreds of independently targetable re-entry vehicles, which each contained one submersible with the associated equipment such as parachutes to ensure a relatively low-G splashdown. This took a couple hours of design time, but the missiles were in his database, so he just had to upsize them and swap the nukes for his autonomous fog submersibles.
Ash will program each missile for a simultaneous time-on-target delivery of each submersible to their individual loiter-area a little past midnight local time. It was impossible to hide over a thousand MIRVed tracks all aerobraking in the atmosphere, so he figured doing it all at once would be best. He considered landing all the submersibles in one spot, but they did not even move at three kilometres per hour, and it would have taken too long to position each that way. In addition, by that first morning, he wanted an excellent and thick fog to hide the multi-ton excavator bots, earth moving equipment and thousands of tons of supplies.
There will likely be a vast multi-level subterranean complex over a significant fraction of the island in a couple of years. In fact, the Island might end up just a little bit bigger just from displacing all that earth and rocks!
To get the sprawling complex he wanted, Ash would likely need to continue supplying feedstock in the range of at least ten thousand tons a week for several years, which equated to about fifteen landers a week. He hoped the predictable trail of giant re-entry vehicles the size of tugboats didn't invite investigation from one of the inhabitants of the other Faroe Islands or some inquisitive Viking but, honestly, he didn't hold out much hope for that, which is why the second priority after the fog machines would be setting up an autonomous aerial drone network.
The first layer of defence would be the constant spooky fog cover surrounding the island. However, if he spotted any boats coming to investigate his island, one of the aerial drones could induce nausea in humans with high-powered but low-frequency MASER technology from kilometres away. It was a standard non-lethal riot control measure and a mature technology. He found it in the database when he was researching his Earth-facing defence satellite designs, and it was one of the only examples of MASER technology used as a weapon he discovered.
And, if that didn't work, he would fire a low-powered snowflake round from his peashooter constellation, which he had finally settled on a design for, directly in front of the interloping boat's path. Seeing a giant geyser of water in front of your boat multiple times would likely convince even the bravest soul to turn around.
If, for some reason, they didn't wise up and actually made landfall, his defence teams would incapacitate them and then remove any of their memories beyond setting foot on the island. Then for good measure, he would keep them in a medically induced coma for some period of time (perhaps a year and a day if he was going to be playing the role of haunted fey island) before returning them covertly to whichever island they originated from.
Perhaps he'd play tricks on them like painting their entire longboat pink or replacing all their clothes. But, one way or another, he'd ensure nobody wanted to settle on his island.
For an artificial intelligence, twenty-six hours was a long time to wait, but time still passed. A watched pot never boiled, so he busied himself with other tasks after confirming the Viper was in stealth mode with point-defence on auto.
——
Hours later, he was interrupted by a kind of klaxon, both audibly as well as digitally, over the command and control network while Klara yelled at the same time, "Vampire! Vampire! Vampire! Missile detected, CIC designate M1 14,521 kilometres ahead but behind and below our orbit, it's begun boosting at one hundred gravities trying to catch up to our general track... projected target is RD1. It's irradiating our volume now... I don't think it can see us. Optimal target solution for point defence lasers is in 26 seconds."
Ash kept his eyes closed while looking through the ship's sensors with another thread of awareness drinking down CIC's analysis. This missile wasn't really a threat to a warship, especially one expecting it. In fact, it wasn't really a threat to the Mistress of Space, neither.
Klara continued, "Missile changing track. CIC analysis, high confidence it knows its target is a drone. It has shifted targets to roughly the volume in between all four drones. It suspects a stealthed ship being screened by drones. CIC projects that its terminal guidance will try to get us optically as we occlude the moon or starfield behind us, with a low probability of success. Firing!"
Through the sensors, Ash saw the terawatts of UV light focus on the surprisingly intelligent missile and destroy it. A flash. Klara's voice, "Target destroyed! BREAK ten new targets CIC designated M2 through M11. All over 12,000 kilometres away, scattered above and below the plane of our orbit. Accelerating at 252 gravities. We're the target, CIC confidence high. We're ballistic, so they won't miss. All batteries will engage independently."
Ash has had missiles shot at him before but never eleven at once. The pucker factor hadn't changed. This was a rope-a-dope; the first missile was used as a sacrificial pawn. Once Viper had fired its point defence, no amount of low-radar cross-section or passive heatsinks could hide it, and the others pounced. Ash hadn't been expecting the couple to utilise their missiles this way because they couldn't have more than fifty or sixty reloads in a ship that small. How much cargo space did that yacht have? There was a lot of stuff missing from the wreckage of the spacestation if he recalled.
Either these missiles had small ion drives that let them reposition themselves into an ideal ambush position, or Ash needed to seriously study space tactics because he was missing something. Space was supposed to be big! They were a lot stealthier than he thought, also. The Viper's RD had detected the missile at a little above 10,000 kilometres, and they immediately started boosting. The bot controlling the missile must have witnessed the recon drone work through the electromagnetic spectrum and then focus on it too long and figured the gig was up, which it was.
Ash had thought he'd detect any missiles at over fifty thousand kilometres and just pop them. These weapons were a lot more sophisticated... but he still was going to pop them.
The sensors aboard Mistress of Space weren't on the same level as Viper, but Mistress of Space was still a freighter from a second-rate state. The Measure Twice, Cut Once was a tramp freighter from the Solar Union. This ambush may very well have killed that ship. He thinks the Mistress of Space would have survived, but it might have had to launch missiles of its own in anti-missile mode.
Each missile was destroyed more or less a second or two apart. With a single threat that hadn't detected the ship with a low kill probability, the computer would wait for optimal conditions to fire, but with ten missiles with a good track, it started firing a lot sooner. The closest the last missile got was 9,000 kilometres. That's basically in range for a bomb pumped x-ray laser warhead but thankfully, not any other type; not even casaba howitzers can reach out that far.
Klara continued, "All targets destroyed, Fraülein-Kapitän!"
Ash relaxed slightly. Still, he felt that he had been somewhat stupid today. "Go active on all sensors, full power, then max continuous power to the emitters. Next, flush the heatsinks, start dissipating heat. If it's bigger than a speck of dust, I want to see it."
Ash found forty-five missiles that day in four clusters. Then he looked around for another twelve hours before he was convinced nothing else was there.
——
Leif was feeling older than his years. He was depressed and losing faith. The golden age of Vikings was gone over half a century ago before he was born even and every year, fewer and fewer people followed the old ways and the old faith. This may not be the end, but it was definitely no longer just the beginning of the end.
What galled Leif the most was that the end of everything he cherished didn't come with one great final battle as foretold in Ragnarök but with the mewling whimper and gasping of a man dying of old age. His entire culture was dying a woman's death!
He decided to speak to the men, and hell, even the woman, who followed him one last time this night at the darkest hour. He would ask the gods one final time for some sort of direction or sign, and then when they declined to reply, he'd curse all the Æsir, the Christian god and anyone else who would listen and then get proper drunk. Then, when he woke up a few days later, he'd leave and find some exciting way to go to Valhalla while there still was anyone around who knew what it was.
Hours later, Leif was somewhat nervous. Did everyone within a hundred rôst come to watch him humiliate himself? Granted, he was paying for all the drink so if he was being honest Leif probably would have done the same, he thought.
Still, he began his speech, begging Odin or Freya or even some fucking dwarf to give him and his people a sign as to where in this Christ-cursed world could people live like the old ways? He really got to gesticulating and didn't even realise how quiet people got until he looked up to see five of the brightest falling stars falling in sync down the horizon.
Leif was stunned, stupid. He'd seen falling stars before, but never ones this bright! Was ... was this the sign? Perhaps not...
Just as Leif was trying to talk himself out of what his eyes were seeing, the five falling stars broke into hundreds of different streaks, maybe a thousand! Each smaller falling star was still brighter than the brightest falling star he'd ever seen, and they didn't burn out like every other falling star he'd seen! They all seemed to be falling in more or less the same direction! They came from different sides of the sky, but they were all falling on the same place?!
Leif felt chagrined for doubting his gods initially—Thor, you could have just doubled them from five to ten! You didn't have to go crazy!
People were chanting Odin and Thor's name, and even Leif's! Leif would find out where these things from heaven landed if it was the last thing he did. And when he did, his people would all follow! It would be a Varangian Adventure.
i kinda want Leif to not be pranked ngl. Ash could be a protector of old dying cultures oof
With VR and mind-uploading, that could totally be the case. Leif and his adventuring buddies could make their way onto the island, entreaty for something glorious to do, and Ash could decide to create biological android replicas of their bodies and upload their minds to the emulator chip in 'demo-mode', where it doesn't give them access to anything they would perceive as beyond a mortal body. Then when they 'die', in that something happens to them that would've killed a normal human, the chip could go into sleep mode and beacon for retrieval and Ash would then put them into a VR sandbox of a Valhalla simulator.
In fact, death is tyrannical. Everybody should have their bodies replaced like this so that they can live uninterrupted on Earth, and then go to an 'afterlife' for sure after they 'die'. They can be given the option of choosing what afterlife they want, or to just join Ash's service as a subordinate android. If they choose the former, the memory of making that informed choice can be erased to preserve the illusion if need be, and they can spend the rest of eternity as they want. Even the heat death won't be a limitation because Ash can just tunnel to a parallel universe that's exactly the same except much younger.
@0xFFF1 I was just thinking of being given a meeting with a representative, Ash could make themselves out to be one of the gods of each old culture or whatever (already planned to do this for Chinese/Christian religions in order to explain their mystique as they do buisness) and therefore even gain actually human followers to help so things and grow influence
@Nari The issue is would it piss off Ash's ROB if he did that, which depends on if the soul transfers to the new medium, or if it counts as a death and therefore causes a karmic debt that may or may not be cancelled out by creating a new race of organic androids with copies of their personalities and memories that would obtain a new soul and slot neatly into the old one's place and amount to the same thing on average, except they are effectively immortal after they're done being 'mortals'
@0xFFF1 thats why i never suggested making them androids. just presenting himself as one of their gods or something and being an active protector to keep the old cultures alive
@0xFFF1 I’ve actually thought about this question a fair bit, although not for this story (yet.) But my best guess is that to convert someone into an AI without it just being merely a copy you would have to do a neuron by neuron copy/destruction process and have to do it while they were awake. For example, your copy mechanism would have to simultaneously copy that neuron into the emulation and destroy the one in the brain at the same time.
Consider the scenario where a person have some traumatic brain injury to a small part of their brain. They have surgery where that part that is damaged has been replicated by a computer. They’re still themselves, and alive, right? Well, what if your person’s brain was connected to a brain emulator. Then, as each piece of brain area is copied neuron by neuron it is simultaneously activated on the brain emulator, plus each the organic brain can continuously communicate with the emulated brain that is being built and visa-versa.
In my opinion for you to be copied into an AI like what you were suggesting and for it to be considered the same person and not a copy of the same person what is cruicial is that you have one uninterrupted continuous stream of consciousness that starts while you had an organic brain all the way up to the point where your entire mind is digitized.
@SpiraSpira it's a philosophical question tbh, and the most accurate answer is probably just "humans uploaded to a computer aren't the same person, just a copy with shared memories, but at the end of the day does it really matter when they continue to live as if they were the original?"
its even more of a weird situation if the original is still alive after the upload. perhaps the best we can do is to artificially create a hivemind. where we have an interface in the originals brain that can control the robotic brain as if it was just a single brain in two parts, then when the organic half dies then the robotic one can be considered to truely be the original person still
@SpiraSpira I normally wouldn't care about the sanctity of having a continuous stream of consciousness. So long as my ego survives in some form, I don't care how many times I've been copied and reset, or even duplicated and allowed to diverge. We don't seem to care about the lack of continuity between days because of the need for sleep, so why should we care about other forms of continuity breaks?
As far as I'm concerned, it only matters here because of the confirmed reality of the mysticism of souls and the Karma that's linked to them. The ROB cares about such things, and Ash is an investment for it, so for the sake of a second second chance on the off-chance that it's needed, Ash need to consider how souls and karma interact with the various technologies available and play it as safe as feasible when he isn't sure, weighted against the value of the chance that the ROB would spend its resources to allow us to try again if he fails and the likelihood of Ash requiring such a measure.
@0xFFF1 Your idea about a digital afterlife may be difficult because Ash would be unable to include anyone who had died before in it. He could make a digital Valhalla but he couldn’t include anyone who had died before he came around. A Viking who died gloriously in battle would expect to see some of his forebearers, probably people he was related to maybe even, like Grandpa who died in battle against the Christians, etc. It’d be hard for Ash to slip into a pre-existing pantheon like that without some difficult questions to answer. Giving his new recruits the idea that everyone they ever knew all went to Helheim is probably not great for morale. He’d have to start some new afterlife somehow.
@SpiraSpira then again morale for the afterlife is completely bonafide useless since everyone sent there is "dead" and obviously wouldnt be allowed to get that info out to the living.... exact same issue irl where nobody can confirm or deny an afterlife due to .... well.... being dead
@Nari also wanted to add: Ash could reprogram them a little believe that the people they know just so coincidentally happen to all be in a different location in valhalla, and no he cant see them sadly. after enough generations then it would sort itself out