One or Zero?
07 Jul 2016Ouberos
I have an interest in antiquities, or more correctly, I have an obsession for them. You might think me mad but one of my favourite possessions is a two thousand year old brass telescope and your suspicions of insanity might be confirmed if I told you how much I paid for it. Put it this way, that broken telescope is the reason I’m not out here exploring in an Anaconda. William Herschel though. There’s a name for you.
My antiquities collection also encompasses slightly younger artefacts. I own some tech from the Petrol age for instance, and some of it still works. The operating system is a little black and white but given the constraints of the age the device works well enough. You see at that time, the Petrol Age technology worked with ones and zeroes. Everything could be resolved with those simple concepts. Something was either this or that. One or Zero.
They called it Binary for that reason.
William Herschel knew about Binaries too, only his were more, Stellar.
They say with practice comes perfection. Its an accepted trope. The more you do something the better you get. Muscle memory, training, experience. However you choose to explain it. Given the amount of frame shift jumps I’ve been making recently you might think I would be in the zone. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got a routine, call up the Galaxy map, switch to realistic, check for unusual Stars, anything out of the ordinary, plot a route, switch to map mode, check for dry stars, drop the map, hit the FSD and then four seconds later I’m in the Witch tunnel with a dry mouth, throttling back for re-entry. Boom! Honk the horn, open the system map, decide to scan or just drop it and click the next star enroute. Practice makes perfect. The more times you do it the better you get, its one or the other, black or white. One or Zero.
Binary.
Sometimes though. Sometimes practice doesn’t make perfect. Sometimes practice makes routine and routine makes boredom and boredom, well boredom makes sloppy.
During the Golden age of technology, Humans developed simple Artificial Intelligences. Then unsurprisingly those simple Ai made more complicated ones. Then they made some really complicated ones. Then things got out of hand and as a species we came closer to an Extinction level event than we had been for a long time, maybe closer than when that Asteroid hit Earth back in 2017. Some how we beat the Ai and dismantled them. You can read about it I guess.
By the way, I’ve got one of them too.
Well, to be honest I have an imprint of a calculation an Ai once did.
In a secure room back in Naddodur there is a desk and on that desk is a glass case that holds the imprint of a sentient quantum state that passed through a magnetic field that just happened to be attached to a recording device. I suppose you could call it a fossil.
Maybe, with the correct diagnostic tools you might be able to reassemble the section of intelligence the machine was using at the time but it wouldn’t be much use without the rest of its mind.
What’s interesting though is to compare the two levels of tech. The Petrol age and the Golden age. Binary and Sentient quantum. One and Zero versus Maybe.
Practice makes perfect. Maybe.
I guess the thing you can draw from all of this is that both types of technology were made by people and people aren’t perfect.
Which explains why I missed the Binary star on my route this morning.
I checked the realistic map, I know I checked it but I guess I had looked at it for so long I just didn’t see the two stars on the same jump point. Not until I dropped out at least, and then I saw them. Both of them, either side of me like a pair of class G hellmouths that couldn’t wait to punch me out of supercruise and roast the Hidden Agenda in their nuclear insanity. The sudden loss of the FSD drive turned into twisting and rolling as the ships thrusters tried to compensate and for an instant, for a brief second, when the sirens were going off, the HUD was flashing warnings and the console was sparking flames across the cabin it felt like the ship itself was rolling in pain. For a moment it felt like the ship and I were a single beast caught in the maw of a predator and this was our last gasp at life.
I dropped a heat sink and the ship stabilised, the FSD crawled back to life and I dumped another heat sink. Then it was online and I punched us upwards, desperately trying to hold onto the escape vector and claw my way out of the trap.
William Herschel would have loved it.
