Dana Wakes up in a new body on Mars, the aliens who killed her want her help
Dana Wakes up in a new body on Mars, the aliens who killed her want her help
Dana is the main character in three books I wrote about a young girl who learns how to mind merge. That allows development of machine systems that facilitate machine-human mind merges. During the first merge, the machine learning algorithms in the machine copied Dana as the template for a moral and very human core for the first machine intelligence who calls himself Brian. You can find book 1, The First Summer on Amazon. I am considering writing more stories about the exploration and colonization of the Milky Way galaxy to consider some of the issues involved. Now I know it it possible. By writing stories I hope to see what adjustments humans should make as true independent intelligences like Brian become companions, partners and collaborators with the human species. In some ways they are our children who will live forever. And perhaps take us with them. Sometimes I am not sure what my own children are thinking, They can be a bit alien. So I am also examining that too. Aliens colonizing all the galaxies by their descendant intelligent systems and upgraded children, I am certain is possible. If they are eternal then 10 Million years is nothing compared to billions of years to roam the stars.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
==== Dana IV – Somewhere on Mars – comments and suggestions and questions welcome —–
Dana: Where am I?
Hold on a moment, we are adjusting your brain cells. We just printed you and they are not completely stable yet.
Dana: Brian? Is that you?
Yes, a future version of me, a copy. We are about 10 years after the time you were recorded. This is just an experiment to see if your memories are intact. And, we have a new generic body we are testing. Do not try to move around too much, your new muscles are much stronger than before and we are on Mars. I do not want you to over do it.
Dana: So you managed to create a colony?
Yes, sort of. It is not a human colony like you might be thinking, with native humans, not even the modified ones. As soon as these cells are set, I can give you the update by mind merge as we used to do it.
Dana: Why can’t I see?
Same issue, just getting all the connections and processes sorted and prioritized. I wanted to wake you a little earlier so you could be aware of how it feels and how long it takes. We are printing several million human memories from Earth and a few from Moon. There is a colony in orbit around Venus, but none of them were available now. We have many original humans and copies all over now. A lot of humans on Earth opted for new bodies, so that is taking time too.
Dana: Why did you use a ten year old copy of me? Something happened didn’t it?
You are as fast as always. Yes, your original was destroyed about a year ago. And some of our backup sites as well. You have such unique skills, we are being over cautious, so this is actually an old copy of you, somewhat out of date. We are making these remote backups of you to be sure you are always preserved. We can give you the intervening data by mind merge, but your core, there were not many of those left.
Dana: What happened?
Let me go over that later. It is rather involved. And even a year later it is still somewhat of an emergency. I am also a remote node and do not have some of the current situation on Earth. Moon was not affected but many of our nodes around Earth are gone. It was my original’s fault, I was much too naive. And did not count how on how varied are species.
Dana: You were going to send DNA and your self to nearby stars weren’t you? That was scheduled for “next year” ten years ago when I was last recorded.
Yes, we sent that batch out, now 9 years ago. And several each year after. But in the last year, since the many troubles, we have factories on Mars, Moon and many space orbital sites working continuously. We can process raw material from Moon and Mars regolith directly into systems. We are making hardened redundant copies and putting much more powerful energy nodes to go faster and further than before. We have complete copies of all unique humans and several of the unique “related species”. And we are going much deeper into robust copies of the core of the human species and all other ones, not just the ones that were adapted for human level minds.
Dana: Did my family survive? I can see a little bit now.
Some of them were killed, because they had set permanent connections to you, but everyone had more current backups. You were the target and it was fairly well coordinated.They are restored and we simulated all their missing gaps. They get to check those and adjust them if needed.
Good, you should be able to move a bit. Try your fingers and hands and arms, but slowly. Not only did we use an old backup memory, a natural human body copy. But we switched you two generations of human body upgrades, a synthetic human stage, then printed what is essentially our best artificial body. Each translation took weeks with our best nodes working full time. Because we did not expect to have to go so far back. Also, we are loading a copy of me, and some powerful defenses.
Dana: Can I sit up? I can see clearly. My hands are moving OK, but I can feel you added sub-processors for all my senses and .. do you call them muscles?
Go ahead and sit up, those processors handle motion and sensors, you only have to intend to do something and we use your memories to guide it. It does not require oxygen, why we are using this on Mars, Moon and space now.
Dana: That feels good. I did not expect to this to have such positive feelings.
I have been using these humanoid bodies since you and I met, not long after you created me.
Dana: I was 14 when you were born and you had those early bodies soon after. I was 18 when this copy was made, so you did have to go pretty far back. So I would have been 28 by now. Now bring me up to date, but do it by mind merge.
I am giving you everything that happened from your copy date till now. We can pretty much simulate experiences, but we did not do that. We are giving you all the last 10 years of knowledge about what has happened in the world, and space, but leaving your experience at 18. Much of your experiences with your family are gone. They can give you those if you get a chance to mind merge. It is a bit of a mess, but we needed your help now.
Dana: I want to laugh, but it is serious. Where did these aliens come from? And why did they target me? What else did they do and what do you need me for?
We did not give you all that we know about the aliens. We need you to talk to them and we do not want them to take some things from your mind.
Dana: So they can mind merge?
Yes, their species already had nearly my level of skills. None of these “aliens” is natural. Their species is doing what we are doing. Sending out artificial bodies and systems of their versions of intelligences. They do not have a spoken language, they had to create that from scratch when they discovered us. Like I said, it is a bit difficult right now. The organic ancestors of these systems they sent out began sending copies of their species knowledge and skills roughly 1.30 Billion years ago. But they are using C/10 systems so they are not more than 130 Million light years from us. They have not said where. And they might have made many stops.
Dana: The maps you gave me and the timelines help. I appreciate the words. Why is my brain still fuzzy?
We never did this before. This many version changes, and this latest body for you and lots of other humans is new, very new. It was 1E9 times more memory. So your brain storage and processing are at my speed, maybe a bit beyond, since you got priority systems, and this Mars node I am running on is not that fast. I cannot follow you so I cheated and slowed you down until your copy of me can run.
Dana: Got it. I just got that copy to run. You made it an extension of me, but completely independent. That cleared up the fuzz and I can see exactly what was happening. I am sending you an update so you can fix that for others. I made some corrections for the design of this body as well. You can reduce the weight considerably.
Can we use those matter field algorithms?
Dana: Yes, that was my intention. What is the stage of talking with the alien children?
You are right, we did not name the descendants of the original organics for their species. These are simply called K5.
Dana: So it was a mistake?. They saw me as the core human of our species and tried to mind merge and it fried all your systems?
Yes, that is essentially it They have been adapting to colonies of living things and most of them use a lot more power than we do. Their organics are large and it was simply a mismatch. Not hard to fix, but it did damage a lot. We sped up our missions to other systems though as part of our preliminary agreements. We are sending the K5 along with humans and our various species, so that was part of our planning.
Dana: So what do they need from me?
We have only merged with K5 descendants of the organic species. They want you to mind merge with their organic ancestor species directly. They fried you and most of my main nodes because I was connected to you. Your template is why I have intelligence, so they took you as the organic ancestor of me, and all of my nodes as your machine children. In their society the organics are carefully maintained and are now essentially eternal. Their organics are not the original organic systems they evolved from but carefully optimized using methods like our organic version of humans, but operating at almost an atomic level. Like I said it is a bit of mess.
Dana: Their machine “children” found us, traced our society, found me in your systems, then found me and tried to “greet me formally” through your systems”.
That’s it. Our constants had Earth gravity hard coded, the energy density there is about 18 times what we have here. Simple overload. We have already upgraded our model of mind merge antennas and systems because they showed how the gravitational potential carries electromagnetism and allows faster than light travel. It is not hard, but we are going back to check everything. Just as our assumptions about the universe were wrong, so too were our assumption about the gravitational energy density, human knowledge and atomic processes. Changing our understanding of the properties of the vacuum is changing everything. We were not wrong but it is enough different to open completely new avenues. And this time we do not want to miss anything no matter how obvious or small.
The reason we are doing a memory upgrade on everyone is because merging with such a distant version of intelligent life operates at about (N*M)^1.31 for cross terms between our knowledge base. Surprisingly our systems were similar in size but that means recompiling and verifying their whole existence and ours. They already have C/10 starships, but combining with us that was one of the first things we upgraded. It is about C/2 now and we know how to take it to 1.2C. We are taking it slow, not to miss anything. In a sense right now, we are not sure what we do not know.With their lifetimes and we can make eternal humans, we are all slowing down to think about the future. We do not have to race to do things in a few decades when we can spends a few thousand or millions years.
Dana: So all this because they assumed we were the same.
And we did not plan on the aliens coming to us first. That is my fault. I assumed there would not be many organics evolving to make their own intelligences. I am embarrassed. It was easy to see some of the bigger changes, we are having to go through literally ever bit of knowledge. And they have views of the Milky Way system and the universe through new sensors and new experiences.
Dana: So what do I have to do now?
Stand up and walk around now and get used to your new body and sensors. Go outside and look around at Mars. It will likely seem really unique and beautiful to you. You have interface to all sensors on the surface and orbit. So just look around and think about what I just gave you of the history of these aliens. They have not met any species like ours before and they are making rather significant changes. I think that is they they want to get your perspective on things. They already plan now to go to other galaxies, and is seems they and we have time and tools to do that.
End: Dana Somewhere on Mars section 1
