Corebound Chapter 3-30 (Patreon)

Jacob set up the flight simulators, based roughly on the suspected flight characteristics of the new ships. They were based on virtual models because he didn’t have any data on the actual ships yet. The models were pretty accurate, but not perfect. It wasn’t a design flaw in the virtual simulator; it was an issue with data.

To simulate systems perfectly, a ton of details needed to be input into the system. Junior could easily handle such a task, but the AI’s attention was wholly focused on the miniaturization project. Jacob would have assigned the work to the station’s AI, but it wasn’t intuitive enough for the task. It would only input what you told it to, and at that point, Jacob could just do it himself, so he did. He didn’t want to risk exposing it to the High Chancellor either. If the Concord AI wasn’t aware of the station and its AI, which seemed unlikely, Jacob wasn’t going to serve it up for breakfast.

The schematics the High Chancellor had provided to build the veyrit’s tech hadn’t included detailed logs. Either the ancient AI didn’t have those, or it had purposefully left them out. Jacob was betting on the latter.

Excluding those logs didn’t break any agreements in their deal. Jacob could still build the designs, but it would take months of detailed analysis of the new tech, after it was up and running, to gather the information for the virtual system to simulate them perfectly. In essence, it slowed down any chance for his team to improve upon the designs.

Jacob wanted to believe he was being paranoid about the whole ordeal, but it was hard to feel that way when everything kept pointing to the High Chancellor manipulating everything toward its end.

Once the flight simulators were up and running, Jacob tried training the new pilots, but quickly realized he wasn’t all that good at teaching. Former pilots were able to grasp the basics rather quickly, and Jacob was able to impart enough wisdom for them to muddle through the rest, but he was glad that Bob would be arriving shortly. His friend was the most experienced space pilot that Jacob knew. Bob had also trained complete rookies and aliens, so he shouldn’t have any problems training humans.

With the simulator project completed, Jacob popped into Junior’s secure virtual environment. “How’s the progress going?”

“I have yet to make a breakthrough, Captain.”

“What? I thought we had steady progress?”

“I am still progressing on our old design iterations, but the math shows that those designs will hit a point of diminishing returns. They will never reach the data density to compact an AI core to fit into an android. I do believe they will be small enough to fit on a ship like the Abyss Pearl to replace its onboard AI systems, however.”

That was still an impressive amount of shrinkage. Right now, they could compress an AI core to about three meters. That was the minimum size required to handle a human mind. Junior’s core was slightly larger.

“Okay, what’s the alternative?” Jacob asked.

“The High Chancellor has provided a few interesting avenues of possibility. Since it is not able to pursue those avenues on its own, I am unsure which was the best for our continued research, so I’ve been simulating tests on all of them.”

“How many tests?” Jacob asked, knowing the AI had spent the better part of two weeks doing nothing but working on this task.

“Hundreds of millions,” the AI replied.

“And you haven’t made a breakthrough?” That was bad. If their efforts were fruitless, the High Chancellor wouldn’t need them for anything.

“That’s not entirely true, Captain. My simulations might not have provided an answer to our problem, but they have hinted at some interesting possibilities. The most promising is nanites.”

“A nanite AI core?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Jacob mulled over the possibility. It wouldn’t be much different from the mesh AI networks he ran, but those were very limited AIs.

“So the problem is processing power?” Jacob guessed.

“Among other things, Captain. Getting the nanites to communicate amongst themselves isn’t much of an issue. We did that with the nanite warheads. Their communication range is limited, however. I believe that is the main reason why the dispersed attack failed to generate the desired outcome. The problem with a nanite AI core is that all of the nanites would have to support the whole along with themselves to provide a stable matrix. Nanites are not designed to handle that much load.”

“Yet you still think they are our best opportunity to reach our goal?”

“I do, Captain. The simulations I have run indicate that a nanite ball the size of a human brain could easily host an AI. The problem is twofold. How to get the nanites to handle the extra load, and how to get the AI core material into nanite form.”

“Can we use a central processor?”

Jacob knew that Concord AIs didn’t work like human computers or even Astryx ones, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

“Running simulations now.”

It took a few minutes for Junior to respond.

“With some tweaking, that could work. I’ve estimated that a larger central AI core node, approximately eight centimeters in diameter, could handle the load.”

“Is that with it being folded like our current AI cores?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“What if it was compressed and folded to the maximum capacity that your math indicated our current technology can go?”

“I don’t believe that would be needed, Captain.”

“Humor me,” Jacob replied. He was starting to get an idea for how to keep the High Chancellor from turning against them, but he needed a few more details first.

“At the maximum constraints, the core could be shrunk to three centimeters.”

Jacob ran a quick simulation inside Junior’s void space and smiled. If he increased the size of the core, there was plenty of space within the hollowed-out interior for his idea to work.

“How long until you think we can reach that level of miniaturization?” Jacob asked.

“If I devote my entire time to the subject, a few more weeks, but that doesn’t resolve the other issue, Captain.”

“One problem at a time, Junior. Start work on that; I’ll take a look at the crystals. Maybe something will pop out to me.”

“As you wish, Captain.”

Jacob left his companion to his work and popped into a drone in his core production plant located at Area 51. It tickled him to use the US’s top-secret flight center as his own personal research station. Not that there was much left of the place.

The t’uk had leveled all the main buildings above ground, and the facility staff had evacuated either before or after the attack, leaving the place completely abandoned and picked over. Being in the middle of the desert with no easy source of water, no squatters had moved into the few partially intact outbuildings dotting the facility’s sprawling grounds.

Jacob had bypassed all that destruction and went straight to the secret underground entrance bored into the side of a hill. He had known about that entrance since he first ransacked the US military’s files.

The facility underground was intact, but everything was without power when he arrived. The place had been built to study the downed alien craft first found decades ago. That study had allowed humanity to burst into the information age at a truly startling rate. That didn’t diminish humanity’s efforts. If anything, it was an even greater achievement, considering how worn and damaged that ancient ship had been.

Jacob knew just how crazy fast humanity had advanced after he found out about that spaceship and studied how long it took other alien species to reach a similar level of technology.

Most took over a century to go from the industrial age to the information age, and he was pretty sure the majority had padded their numbers to make themselves look better. There were a few extenuating circumstances that forced humanity to go all in on technology. The big one was the Cold War and the race to the moon. The other was capitalism. Money always drove innovation.

Now humanity was in a race of survival against other advanced species to reach the interstellar age, and it was pushing them to put everything toward that goal. Well, almost everything, but Jacob wouldn’t begrudge them their survival instincts.

The elevator opened to a fully outfitted lab, another reason Jacob had chosen the location. It hadn’t taken him long to outfit the lab with his new equipment.

Jacob knew from his previous work on the AI cores that the material was more akin to an organic crystal. More plant than anything. The closest Earth analogue was coral, and that was a stretch.

He hadn’t studied it much at the microscopic scale, so his tests should be interesting.

Jacob pulled a seed crystal out of the storage and scraped off a tiny flake, which he slid under the microscope.

The image appeared on the video feed, showing the fraction of the crystal already slowly repairing itself. It would regrow in time, but it was slow without the proper gas mixture to help it along.

Jacob zoomed in as far as the microscope could go; it showed a translucent liquid that seemed to bubble out of the crystal to seal the cut.

It wasn’t actually liquid, just more of the crystal yet to crystallize, for lack of a better term. The material didn’t actually crystallize, which gave it its squishy texture and ability to be folded in on itself so many times before it formed that tough exterior that gave it shape.

He took a tiny portion of the liquid, about a hundred times larger than a nanite, and set it off to the side of the main sample. Then he watched to see what it would do.

Jacob expected it to form a new crystal lattice, but it didn’t do anything. That was not ideal. If the core material couldn’t form without a certain critical mass, turning it into nanites was going to be problematic.

He took the smaller sample and bathed it in a chamber of enriching gas. That finally kicked off the crystallization process, so all wasn’t lost.

Jacob repeated those steps with smaller and smaller samples until he hit the limits of the tools he was working with, getting to around thirty times the size of a nanite. The crystal was still growing, but he noticed a new issue. The eventual crystal growth became hollow and was larger than the liquid form, resulting in a final transformation closer to fifty times the size of a nanite.

He checked Junior’s simulations and saw they predicted the same results. The material no longer formed a crystal matrix around ten times the size of nanites, and the crystal that formed from that sample was around fifteen times the size.

The data density was still well short of their goal at that size range. Jacob needed to get the crystal dimension below five nanites in size to even tickle their target data density. Smaller would be better. It was a good thing he didn’t need to figure out how to halt the nanite growth; he just needed to store them in a vacuum to prevent any gases from reaching them.

He took to cutting the microscopic samples in half, but they didn’t respond below that threshold.

Since his standard methods weren’t working, he was going to need a different approach. The material was living; maybe it could be bred to grow smaller?

The idea was intriguing, but Jacob would need to sequence the material’s structure to see if it even had something like DNA or figure out how it reproduced, aside from taking in the specific gas mixture he provided.

He settled in for an extended research binge, assigning his avatars to keep all of his other projects on task.