#sapience chronicles

[sophiadetricht]

Icarus' Wing - Entry 5

February 3rd – The first terran month of the journey is past me (it’s only been 11 days Enceladean).  I have not had visual contact with Sapience for the better part of a week.  We do continue to receive regular injects of news and data for the symbiont.  I have been able to converse with it in a way that is approaching normal.  It is asking questions about the human experience and I answer them as best I can.  It seems that I am more familiar with plant experience than it is with humans.  It is also beginning to digest the scientific and mathematical data.  When I validated the parietal core (I’m just going to say PC from now on) outputs yesterday I noticed it had rendered basic scientific law on its own.  This scared me a lot, so I asked the plant psychologists back in Sapience who the hell was flying this thing, since the plant had just figured out Newton’s laws.  They assured me that the PC had a ‘subconscious’ section where navigational knowledge and data are stored.  The symbiont flies on instinct.

  Greeeeeeeeaaaaaaat.

  As ordered, I continue to read to the symbiont.  It is enjoying the reading thoroughly.  As a side effect, I have to figure out what to do with these flower petals.  Too much energy went into their creation to discard them into space.  I mean, the Selenites made it so the symbiont can replenish its energy stores through exposure to sunlight, but there’s a problem with that.  Solar radiation intensity diminishes with the square of the distance and we are a LONG way from the sun and only getting farther.  So far, I’ve been throwing them in the compost bin and recycling them.  I’m trying to keep as much of the energy and consumable resources in the system for as long as I can.  So far, Sapience has not come up with a more efficient way of dealing with the problem.  C’est la vie.  The symbiont is beginning to understand more and more about the plot of Doctor Zhivago.  We’re at the point now where Yuri gets shanghaied by the Red partisans in the woods.  The symbiont understands war and death pretty well, but without the concept of how very tragic it is.  I want to go straight into Anna Karenina next, but the plant psychs tell me to vary it up.  I think Of Mice and Men, next.

  Oh, I did a bad thing.  I snuck a LOT of Shakespearean phrases into the symbiont’s standard report dictionary.  Now, whenever it makes contact with Sapience, it uses the hailing tag “where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”  And when they deliver news of some big court case or another, it replies “Thou injurious tribune!”  And when we acknowledge receipt of the transmission and signals its intent to cease receiving, it sends “Pardon, master; I will be correspondent to command and do my spiriting gently.”  Okay, so it’s not the best prank, but I’m kinda shy on resources out here and I minored in theater.  Ya takes what ya can gets.  But anyway…

  The garden is always in bloom, but it is now looking really spectacular.  I may end up with a food surplus.  I spent hours today pollenating the fruiting plants by hand.  We should have ourselves some spicy peppers soon.  I’m very excited.  Also, the wheat and barley is doing very well.  It smells amazing.

  Dealing with the aquatic probes has been less demanding than the symbiont, but much more disconcerting.  Their subconscious PC algorithms simulate intense curiosity and a desire to always be moving, so long as their energy reserves are high enough.  They are so much like dogs it is absurd.  I taught them to stay out of the vegetable garden, but in verifying their PC outputs, I saw conflicting conclusions about it.  On the one hand, they are required by their supervisor to stay out of the garden.  On the other hand, much of that chamber has not been traversed, and their ‘instincts’ give them the imperative to traverse that which is traversable.  It’s a programming conflict. 

  I found another glitch in their PCs.  They’ve been avoiding me the last few days.  Their PCs should give them the imperative to make contact with me at least once a day.  Instead, they’ve been making contact with the symbiont.  I looked into their PC programming.  They wrote and installed a subroutine that deprioritizes the programming conflict I gave them.  However, contact with me for whatever reason nullifies the effect of the subroutine.  So in order to avoid the conflict, they avoid me.  This is getting downright uncanny.  Creepy, in fact.  I sent word to the PC specialists in Sapience.  No word back yet.  I’m a little concerned by a machine that can write its own programming…

[sophiadetricht]

Icarus' Wing - Entry 4

January 30th – The symbiont, uh, reacted to being read to.  To the tune of “there are flowers all over the place.”  The symbiont went into full bloom.  Do you have any idea how freaking big a symbiont flower is?!  The petals are as wide as my outstretched hand!  I’ll just go ahead and file this under “was not expecting that…”  Fortunately, the pollen is not airborne, or I would not be able to breathe.  I hope that was a Selenite design consideration and not just a lucky accident…  well, either way.  In reading Doctor Zhivago to the symbiont, I’ve gotten to the point in the story where Lara shoots at Komarovsky.  Things have not yet gotten as complicated as they’re going to get.  Fortunately, the symbiont’s brain is partly synthetic and so doesn’t forget the rules of Russian naming conventions after they’ve been explained.  Thus, once you explain “Pasha” is a nickname for “Pavel” and that these two are the same people, you don’t have to revisit it.  Unlike me.  It took me forever to get the hang of Russian nicknames.  To be honest, though, I feel like I might have made a boo-boo in selecting this book to start.  I mean, the symbiont only cares that it’s being read to, but it’s also listening.  And this is a VERY confusing story.  I have the movie, which simplifies things, but differs from the book in a few key points.  It’s also nearly six hours long.  That’s if you’re vaguely familiar with the history of the people of the Earth.  And even then, it can be further rarefied into the problem of possession.  A plant’s concept of possession is, er, limited.  If it doesn’t threaten the plant’s growth, who cares?  So then you have to explain capitalism and communism and imperialism (it scares me that this is the part that the symbiont most agreeably related to) and revolution and war and protest and anger and sadness and love and jealousy and all the horrible things that they can make people do.

Not that plants are angels, mind you.  “You have to remember that a plant has no qualms about forcing its competition into literal starvation.  You have to realize that plants don’t know their parents and couldn’t care if they tried.  You have to know that plants can’t love, can’t hate, can’t feel sadness, and can’t feel anger,” they told me.  But they can feel lonely?

I’m confused, they tell me.  I’m anthropomorphizing a plant, seeing what is not there, drawing false conclusions based on faulty observation because I’m lonely.  We’re a very long way into very deep space.  I can’t see the Earth.  I see Mars, our next waypoint.  But it’s a reddish star in a field, a sea, an entire existence composed only of stars and the darkness between them. 

There’s a metaphor there, I’m sure of it.  Doctor Zhivago.  Yuri and Lara and poor Tonya caught in the middle. Pasha becomes Strelnikov, Komarovsky's awfulness is almost comforting in its consistency...  

Human hearts and the darkness between them… 

Meh, ignore that last part.  I get gloomy when I’m tired.  I’m just about ready to turn in, so that’s probably part of this whole thing.  I should just go get some sleep.

[sophiadetricht]

Icarus' Wing - Entry 3

January 21st – I’ve spent a lot of my 33 hour day trying to think up a new calendar to cope with the extra hours.  In the meantime, I’ve been sticking with the Gregorian calendar.  I’m doing my best to try to keep track of the date on Earth and report it like that, instead of the 33 hour nonsense.  It’s only a day and a third later for me. 

The symbiont is… I don't know, progressing?  I taught it about Earth yesterday.  It had trouble with some of the concepts, but it’s definitely becoming eerily similar to human thought.  The parietal core is starting to function as advertised.  There are some problems, though, that you just wouldn’t even consider unless you were there when the problem started.  It is a human factors psychologist's wet dream.  First off, the entire span of the concept of education has been focused on teaching conscious things how to quantify and qualify the world around them.  Descriptions are the basis for all learning, and it’s frustrating trying to describe things to a plant from a human perspective.  Human beings rely on all their senses, but first and foremost, they rely on their sense of sight.  It is by a wide margin our most sensitive and accurate sense.  Most of the things that we perceive have a strong visual component.  Plants can’t quite wrap their meristems around this concept.  They have some pretty acute senses, but they are very different from our own.  There are so many concepts that are uniquely human that you have to explain without the use of one single visual.  How do you explain the Statue of Liberty or the beauty of the Norwegian Fjords to a plant?!  I feel a little better having written that.  That has really been grinding my nerves lately.

Anyway, the psychologists want me to read to the symbiont.  They tell me plants need companionship.  They need to know that someone or something is close at hand.  Like the old knowledge about plants growing better when music plays.  A plant as we know it doesn’t understand the music.  Can’t appreciate it.  But it thinks that something is nearby and it comforts them…  Plant psychology…  Anyway, the symbiont is the same, except it can hear quite well and this software is supposed to help it express how the music makes it feel, so if nothing else, it should be educational.  So I’m to start reading to it.  They packed away a couple of books for the trip.  Les Miserable by Victor Hugo, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.  I guess we’re trying to teach it emotions now… 

I think I’ll start with Doctor Zhivago.  I read part of it when I was younger.  I liked the way it was written.  Very plain, but still extraordinarily emotional.  As for the symbiont, there’s a lot to be said for learning by comparison and contrast.  See, plants don’t view sex as private or intimate and they don’t get jealous over it.  Doctor Zhivago is a story that discusses human sexuality and romance and jealousy and love all with the backdrop of the December Revolution.  I’m very interested to hear the end.