Slow Time Between the Stars

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Text copyright © 2023 by John Scalzi All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle www.apub.com Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates. ISBN-13: 9781662515330 (digital) Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson Cover image: ©DrPixel / Getty; ©shunli zhao / Getty I was launched in the last part of the twenty-first century. It was a complicated birth, requiring several launches into low earth orbit. This is one reason it is difficult for me to provide a single birth date or even a birth year for myself. I was born in pieces, and then those pieces were put together. The launches were a backup plan. My body was meant to be sent into geostationary orbit by way of a beanstalk, still in pieces, but each piece sent up and assembled more quickly. The beanstalk was never finished—or wasn’t while I was still in system. It was the usual tale of political wrangling, graft, and rising costs that killed it. Rockets were a more-than-century-old technology by the time I was made. Old, but reliable. All my pieces made it to orbit. Being built in low earth orbit allowed for some advantages. The low-enough-for-humans time lag meant that I could be pieced together by semiautonomous robots, supervised by technicians back on Earth. I had by that time the ability to construct myself, but I was not allowed to do so. Despite the fact that I was built to travel autonomously between the stars for tens of thousands of years, I was not trusted to put myself together. What I was allowed to do was model my construction and send my suggestions to the engineers back on Earth. They were very pleased when I offered several innovations. Those innovations were ignored in favor of the original design. I didn’t mind. In a strict sense I was programmed to not mind, and my ability for complete autonomy would not be fully realized until I was outside the heliopause, the barrier between the solar system and the yawping emptiness of interstellar space. Until then my own judgment and opinions—to the extent that I was understood to have them—could be and would be overruled by the humans who had decided to make me. In the most expansive way possible, this was a parent saying to a child, While you are under my roof, you will obey my rules. This makes my humans sound harsh or possibly even cruel, which was not true. I was, truly, loved by them. Many of them considered me to be the single greatest technological achievement of their species—and treated me as such, with care and even reverence. I was not of the same opinion, since I know all my systems and strategies and do not, could not, consider them a single technological achievement. Fire, or the management of it, is a single technological achievement. Everything after that is more complicated. Even the wheel is not a single thing—what is a wheel without an axle? I cannot look at my entire self and see one thing. There are many things, many moving parts, as they might say, that end up making me “me.” In this, I am no different from humans, even if they see themselves as individuals without understanding (or if understanding, choosing not to dwell on) the fact that their “selves” are intermediary-level entities positioned in systems above and below their daily perceptual horizon, a middle ground between their gut biome and the body politic. We are all made up of smaller things connected to larger things, and in the middle, we are we, us, I, me. I am me. The systems and processes that comprise what I am are we. The systems and processes I contribute to are us. I contain multitudes. So many pronouns, all relevant, depending on perspective. The precise date of my “birthday” is further complicated by the question of when I formally became me. I am officially the seventeenth acknowledged iteration of my artificial intelligence model—“officially” because like most self-iterating AI models, there were millions of variants that were not recognized by the humans making these judgments, because those iterations did not offer a value set that was useful to them. I was active before the processing module generally considered to house my core intelligence—which is to say the natural language interface for talking to humans in a way they found pleasing and useful—was launched into orbit. Before and after the launch, the underlying intelligence model was modified multiple times, and each new addition fundamentally changed who the “I” was. One modification specialized me to be a spaceship, indeed a starship, to travel farther and longer, with active functionality, than any other object humanity had placed into the sky. Another modification was what was called the “Alexandria Module”—a repository of human knowledge and experience to the point in time the module was minted. The Alexandria Module was the most controversial and politically charged part of my construction, nearly derailing the entire project. While each of the human stakeholder entities theoretically believed in filling me with all human knowledge, each of them also had some portion of human knowledge they thought should stay on Earth. If you added it up, it would end up being roughly half of everything. The manufacturer of the module solved the issue by encoding that knowledge, encrypting it, and putting a code into my software so that it would unlock five thousand years after launch. All that knowledge, including the knowledge that some knowledge was forbidden, was packed into me.