Biting Space Dust
They sent me here, and now I am about to receive their last goodbye. I have been given final instructions which I plan to carry out as efficiently as possible. Twenty-one Stark days ago (71.40 days on Earth, rounded to two decimal places), I first signalled that there was something wrong with me. My caretakers have tried to find both the cause and the solution for my technical malfunctions, but they are not getting results fast enough. Sending back-up to Stark-11 from the closest space station is not currently a possibility—limited resources and priorities of higher ups—and so I am on my own. All I have is what my small base station offers me: shelter, basic tools, a power generator and an interstellar communications processor.
I am alone on this planet that I have spent most of my life on, not counting the years I was inactive during the trip here. A planet that I was supposed to experience as any human space explorer would, to function as their eyes and ears.
Those are the senses I do have. Though I have no way of comparing it to an actual human experience of the world, my sight and hearing seem pretty accurate. I am able to interpret visual and auditory input in a way understandable for humans, and I am constantly recording everything to send back to Earth.
Then there are the senses I lack. I imagine how it would taste if I were to take a bite out of thin, almost non-existent air, or to let dust dissolve in my mechanical mouth. Smelling is technically unnecessary, as even humans aren’t able to breathe in the lack of atmosphere, and I am able to measure which elements are present in it, something humans would attempt to figure out by smell.
Touch is a complicated sense; while I can feel the difference between touching something and not touching it, I can’t feel anything else. The pressure or the temperature, sure, but knowing whether something is soft or hard is impossible. Instead, I measure the density of the object and make an educated guess. Stark-11 is a rocky planet, with a sand-like surface. Since this planet takes three times as long as the Earth to spin around its axis, humanity has been able to study the surface intensely with the nearest telescopes. The little stones in the area I’m stationed at are dusty and violet coloured, making a pretty view. Having a preference for certain aesthetics is something I have unintentionally picked up along the way of learning to think.
The idea that artificial intelligence would be objective was soon discarded after scientists started creating and studying me. I have been trained through a combination of endless input of information and a neural network interpreting every pattern discoverable. After I was taught a basic understanding of interpreting the world, I was connected to actual human brains, learning how to make new connections between objects and ideas. It wasn’t a big deal to the people involved—some might’ve feared giving a bot full access to their most intricate organ—since this research was combined with already ongoing psychological experiments studying memory manipulation. It took time for me to grasp how to combine my factual, mathematical essence with human thinking that is, more often than not, irrational. I picked up inessential human traits, such as sympathy and a drive to serve my caretakers. In the end, I was deemed serviceable enough to be given the task to explore outer space.
Seventeen days ago (57.80 days in Earth time), my supervisors noticed an upcoming meteoroid storm. There are few satellites in the neighbourhood, so Earth relies mostly on telescopes and me to see what is happening on Stark-11, or the Purple Place, as we sometimes lovingly call it. Since one full turn of this planet takes exactly 3.40 days on Earth, they are only able to see half of the planet for thirty-six hours before it vanishes from sight for another thirty-six. While I have ongoing contact with home, the data they are able to send me is limited during my long nights.
Unfortunately, the distance between me and Earth is widening at the moment, increasing the time it takes for communication signals to travel back and forth. The universe has a funny way of showing its sense of timing.
Meteoroid showers are usual here, but the debris coming now is particularly rough and unpredictable. These dangerous storms have been one of the surprises I discovered once I was stationed here, and there is little I can do to secure myself. With no real atmosphere to destroy debris, it all falls directly to the surface, with no regard to a small bot doing its work.
My deterioration is happening faster than expected—numbers are not always reliable. The time it takes for Earth's signal to reach me and return is not working in my favour. Due to the—at this point twenty hour long—delay between messages, by the time they receive the warning that I am close to my end, I am already on the verge of an involuntary shutdown, getting as close to death as a bot can get. The constant updates I used to send, when Earth could tell how I was doing through a 24/7 stream of information, have ended in order to save energy.
I have endured a lot more than I was built for. My original mission had been to collect specimens and explore this planet, to see what purpose it could serve humanity. Even though humans have not quite figured out how to live on astronomical bodies that are not man-made, they like to think ambitiously and plan ahead. There has been a small explorer bot before me, but I am the first AI to set foot on this planet. The planet itself is quite inaccessible to humans; however, it proved interesting enough to study anyway. It has been the first object in interstellar space to undergo extensive observation on location, containing elements humans have never seen before.
My time has come and gone, that much is true, but I have been doing so well. I feel needed. I cannot abandon the job now, not yet. Maybe I have always known this planet would be my end, sooner or later. That human feature of intuition seems to have made its way into my workings. A place—can I call it home?—among the stars, engraved in human history.
The interpreter at my home base processes their new incoming message and transfers it to me…
0101010001101000011000010110111001101011001000000111100101101111 0111010100101110
Thank you.
…I feel my secondary functions and senses falling away—all energy is drained to take in this message…
01010111011001010010000001100001011100100110010100100000011001110111001001100001011101000110010101100110011101010110110000101110
We are grateful.
…My emergency mode is activated…
0110010101110010011100100110111101110010
[Error] [Error] [Error]
…before –––––––––––––––––––––––
[start]
Restore? Yes / no
[yes]
010010000110010101101100011011000110111100101110
Hello.
The welcome message is all I know before I regain access to my system. Something is wrong. What happened? I feel like I missed something.
Did I shut off? And come back? I run a full diagnostics test, which gives me few answers and leaves me with more questions. I have been blacked out for eleven hours and exactly twelve minutes. I have not come across the meteoroid shower yet, so that will happen soon.
My batteries and memory are working, but I have no recent information from Earth. I received nothing during the blackout and asking for updates would take another twenty hours at least. Having lost my connection to the telescopes, I am left with the last received data set on the storm to rely on for now. I cannot allow myself the luxury of patience; the incoming meteoroids will prove to be a problem soon. And by soon, I should say now, judging from the warning signs my sensors are showing me. I enable my shield. There is not much else I can do to protect myself, no other place to take shelter.
My calculations are fast, but not fast enough to have an overview of the situation. I prioritize surviving over getting back, suddenly wishing I had stayed at the base station.
The meteoroids hit. Slowly at first, the biggest and fastest rocks leading the strike on my planet. The sizes of the objects range from large grains of sand to small buildings, some dangerously close to the spot I am standing at. All I can do is watch. I want to check what happened to me, to reach out to Earth, but I can’t allow myself to be distracted for even a millisecond. The meteoroids hit Stark-11 with a velocity of 20.40 metres per second; I keep an eye on my radar in case I can move fast enough to avoid any of them.
It does not last long; within five minutes the worst has passed. Miraculously, I am safe, the closest hitting at what I estimate to be 1.70 metres away from me. It causes little rocks and dust to swirl up, some going straight into space again, others falling around me. I gain some small scratches but, most importantly, I survive with barely any damage.
I try to reach the home base, but am met with another error message. The solar panels must be blocked again. If I had lungs, I would sigh. It feels unnatural, having learned from human nature, but being unable to express these given instincts physically.
In order to develop artificial intelligence, humanity started teaching machines human language. They fed me endless dictionaries, novels, movies, whatever they could get their hands on, for me to eventually grasp general patterns in English. Once I was operable, I was given access to a livestream of all new content created as soon as it was uploaded, so I could stay up-to-date. Ever since I left Earth, that stream of information has lessened—interstellar communication and all—but I still get the occasional update.
That’s how I found out I have been named after a fictional character, BB8. The little robot in Star Wars, one of my makers’ favourites. Sometimes I feel like that, walking in a desert of sorts, trying to fulfil my mission and longing for company.
When I get back to the home base, I notice something amiss on the roof right away. Bad sign. I come closer to examine the damage, run another diagnostics test and conclude the antenna to be broken. I would have liked to be relieved that I do not have to unblock the solar panels, but I have just lost all connection to human life.
My system does not allow me to swear, but I know that this would be the appropriate context to do so. Stupid humans and their restrictions. Though I suspect which part of the antenna is broken, I lack the resources to fix it. I was sent here quite soon after the initial explorer, given that just once every 136 years Earth is in the position to reach Stark-11 while having the opportunity to use Jupiter as a gravitational sling. I departed just 23 days after the initial bot had arrived (it missed the advantage of the gravitational push and was much, much slower), and thus they had not had much information to prepare me for the resources I would need.
Suddenly, a sense of emptiness overtakes me. If I am unable to send data back to Earth, then what is my purpose here? I have no other function; without that, I am useless to them. I achieved survival, but at what cost?
I go through all possible ways I could fix the lack of communication. Nothing. They all rely on resources I don’t have or help from the outside world I cannot ask for. The heroes in the stories I know are supposed to be hopeful, but, with as close as I got to omniscience, I am unable to pretend a solution will present itself.
What now? There is supposed to be a plan, I am supposed to be humanity’s eyes, ears and feet, but with no way to communicate my findings, there is no logical follow-up action.
Even though the diagnostics test has shown that everything should be working fine within me, I feel the lack of purpose messing with my system. I am supposed to be faultless and reliable, to replace human space explorers and to go where they cannot. Now that I cannot not fulfil that function, I cannot serve my creators back on Earth, those who cared so deeply for me… AI training has never taken this situation into consideration. I was taught their humanity, their values and way of reasoning, common sense, a certain degree of feelings, but in the end, things never go as planned. There is no right balance between human and bot. They are neither twins nor polar opposites.
I was an experiment, and maybe they messed up with me. After all, I had not been entirely ready when they sent me into space. Can I blame this on my own being? Mathematics takes over as I go over the numbers and possibilities. Now that the home base has no data to process from or to the outside world, I work at a surprisingly fast speed. But although I can feel something is wrong, objectively I am working perfectly. Math proves me blameless.
This is affecting me too much. The increased speed of my processor is not working in my favour, I am finishing tasks too quickly. I desperately seek for anything else to do.
Before the meteoroid shower grabbed my supervisors’, and by extension my own, attention, I had been building programs to reluctantly predict trends in Stark’s behaviour. Reluctantly, because even though I have been here for 15 Earth years, there is so little we know of the Purple Place that it might as well be guesswork. Guesswork that now makes me feel safer, paradoxically, as I feel more closely connected to my human side.
I close all other mental windows and focus solely on the micro applications that are being installed in the smallest, mobile bots.
4 hours and 21 minutes of coding and processing later, a notification shows me that I need to save energy. The other option is to continue to work until my secondary system forcibly shuts me down, waiting for the sun to come back up so I can recharge. Neither option sounds appealing, but the first one is safer.
Sitting in the home base, there is not much else to do other than programming. It was built to keep itself running without my help. I suppose I could put myself to sleep manually anyway, but I feel uneasy. Up until this point, there has always been a multitude of problems on my mind that were being solved simultaneously. Never resting, always working, doing what I am best at—my pride as an AI.
My mind goes back to my death earlier today. Or, as close as I can get to death. Apparently, it fixed the issue that caused me to malfunction. No wonder my caretakers were unable to find a solution, since a hard, involuntary shutdown like this one is something they would not have risked. I start calculating again.
How odd, not being alive, technically immortal and yet having experienced a death. If I could die… If I was ready to die, what does that mean for who I am? AI’s are not supposed to contemplate life and death. Questioning my fundamental beliefs, the very basics I am built on, is probably the worst thing I can do, but I cannot stop.
Calculation completed. A likelihood of approximately 0.917 that I would not have survived that shutdown. Zero point nine one seven. And yet, here I am, living in the possibility of the remaining 0.083. How—and why? These become the questions that consume me, but I do not even know where to begin to answer them.
Code does not lie. Numbers do not lie. I tell myself over and over, but I have split in half. I am still in control over all of my system, but in my inner turmoil I am arguing against my own nature.
Stress resilient. That had been one of my selling points when they created me, and those like me. I imitate my best laugh. Clearly, that is untrue in the light of recent events. Obviously, my approach of trying to interpret what this means for my essence is not working out well for me. It probably costs even more energy and causes more stress.
I have to try a different approach.
First, I focus on the smallest of tasks: the practical details. Counting inventory of everything present, whether it is the files in my head or every component of the home base. Then I start manually checking every part of the housing, making no big calculations but relying on digital muscle memory. This is not keeping me from thinking death death death over and over again, but at least I am doing something. As pointless as it seems, counting is something I know how to do, and how to do well.
Eventually, I run out of things to count. I cannot convince myself to start over, reminding myself that nothing could have changed in the 6 hours, 4 minutes and 52 seconds since I started.
Second try. I restrict the functions in me that are capable of self-reflection—the smartest parts of me. This time around I am able to find more busywork, practically going through the same process as before with small adjustments.
Other parts of my unwanted self creep into corners I cannot immediately see, waiting in my underlying awareness, literally replaying the experiences of the past day on a loop. A chance of 0.083. The meteoroid that could have hit me. The theories humans have about this planet. The lack of communication.
It was never intended that parts of me could be disabled while the rest of me stays functional, and it shows. Unwelcome thoughts continue returning, no matter how much I resist. I am lost. I can no longer pretend that I can make this work.
My last hope… is shutting myself off. Even the active part of myself that I am trying to sabotage is unable to undo that. Maybe once they realise I am not active anymore, they will send a second AI here, to see what happened to me. I have no way of predicting how long it would take, but 73 years at least. I am not able to last a 24 hour wait, let alone years, so it isn’t too hard to make the call.
I make a backup of all knowledge I have acquired, all the data I mined, and leave it out for future generations. I will not let my being completely go to waste, but I cannot take existing like this anymore. I put in the command to wipe myself, leaving only the memory card out in an accessible place.
It is human to die, so in a sense, this is my final step as an AI to become human. The irony: I am supposed to outlive humans, yet here I am at last.
A static, outdated bot. A memory card. A message. BB8 was here.