#sapiencechronicles

The Symbiont is sick.

I don’t know what happened, but the Symbiont is sick. A month or so ago, I noticed the PC functions were a little bit erratic. There was nothing wrong with the PC itself, so I started monitoring the systems feed (think of it as the ship’s biologics) and I noticed a deficiency in the circulatory system. So I went looking around the ship’s xylem. I found a tumor. I cut a section of it out and ran tests and sent the data back to Sapience. About a week ago, it was confirmed. The long-term exposure to solar radiation has caused cancer. Xylem cancer. My spaceship, my best friend, my life support and my home has a deadly, incurable disease of the circulatory system. The Selenites engineered the Symbiont so that it's circulatory fluids are reactive with a catalytic converter in the PC that provides independent power from the xylem canals pass through it, which is what was causing the slowing down of the autonoetic functions.

January 19th - The Earth is very far away.  All that is and was in those two tiny little blobs.  Good riddance.  Earth is as it always has been.  It sucked to live there.  And the problem was all the people.  One in particular just ruined the Earth for me forever.  She hurt me so badly that I can’t tolerate living on the same planet as her.

When they found me and told me about this job, they were really surprised at how quickly I said yes.  But then, they didn’t have all the information in front of them.  I was disgraced, disowned, all but homeless, hungry, borderline alcoholic, unemployed and separated.  I lived in HUD housing after I lost my job.  All because the woman I married lied to protect herself.  She blamed me for all of the things she did, going so far as to not deny allegations that I abused her and her child (which was totally false, I would never do anything to hurt either of them.  A fact that was later mentioned by literally everyone but her and her lawyer, who then had the entire file sealed, but not before leaking her allegations.  It was a very nasty business) all so she wouldn’t lose custody of her daughter.  People are complicated.  They have agendas.  Life out here is less complicated.  Robots don’t have agendas.  The Symbiont doesn’t have an agenda.  At least, they don’t have sinister agendas.

 The Symbiont and I have been “conversing” over the last couple of weeks.  It’s my job.  It is a surprisingly robust program they’ve put in here.  I help input data.  It is a little frustrating, though.  I guess you could say it’s a learning experience for me.  The pareital core attaches metadata tags to all the information that it takes in and spends down time trying to combine data with similar tags into logical if-then statements.  Each of these, in turn, is tagged and applied to physical, logical, epistemological, or philosophical rules in-built in the system.  Those which pass the logic test are stored as “possibly valid,” which sounds really whiz-bang, but as the caretaker, my responsibility is checking the output.  There’s some really whacked-out stuff that’s come out of that machine and we’ve been underway for less than three weeks…

We’re receiving routine data injects from Sapience.  I get all news that is news in human space.  We get digital copies of what they’re currently passing off as newspapers from both Earth and the Moon.  Although the Moon is certainly less exciting half of Sapience, news-wise.  Things rarely happen there.  The most exciting thing to happen on the moon is the breeding of a huge habitable tree (see what I mean about the trees?!) that is shaped like a spiderweb/dome. Don’t get me wrong, I rather prefer living in a tree to a nuclear bomb shelter and I get that the Selenites don’t really have much to work with in the way of resources, but that’s their fault.  They cut ties with the Earth.  They declared themselves “independent but friendly”.  And to their credit, they’re not complaining.  That’s okay, I guess they’re doing alright.

Doesn’t mean I have to like ‘em.  It just means I have to ride inside their hypersonic shrubbery.

My other duties involve minding the vegetable garden.  I like gardening.  I used to be a soldier, in my previous life.  Part of why it was so easy for people to assume that I was an out-of-control abusive jerk.  But either way, I’ve seen some really horrible things.  I was present the day that the Peace of Tamil Eelam failed.  I witnessed the Fall of Trincomalee.  The Seige of Batticaloa.  The Sinhalese Last Stand on the ancient fortress of Sigiriya.  I saw the pogroms.  I saw the soldiers opening fire on the refugee zone.  I saw the rebel airstrikes and one horrible night I stood under a sky on fire with anti-aircraft artillery tracers.  The Seventh Eelam War.  It was small, by global standards.  But particularly, quietly brutal.  For me, it was like living the end of the world every day.  How would the blood on our hands ever let us carry on a normal life?  I guess making things grow is a kind of penance I pay to the universe.  After so much destruction and killing, I am very happy to make things grow.  It’s peace that I never found on Earth.

January 1 - The psychologists tell me I should write a journal so they can better understand the effects of extreme isolation on my mission.  So here goes, I guess.  I, uh, I guess I'm leaving Sapience today.  I'm off to Enceladus, a moon of Saturn.  I'm to explore the moon and its subsurface ocean.  Hundreds of years, we've been at this whole expansion thing, and we've still only expanded human presence to the moon.  So I'm off as a seeder to a new human settlement.  If my report is favorable, apparently we can expect a colony within years.  But it's unlikely that I'll ever return to the Earth.  Which is fine.  She's there.

     My symbiont is working pretty well.  It's a real wonderful piece of... whatever.  I mean, technically it's a plant (freaking Selenites...  They'll make anything out of a tree), so I guess it's alive?  But it's grafted with a propulsion system, communication system, and a computer grafted into it's meristem (plant brain?).  They call it the Pareital Core.  I guess it uses input and output from the meristem to simulate autonoetic consciousness.  I don't even know what that means, but I don't buy it. 

But then, I do live in a spacefaring plant.  Stranger things than artificial intelligence have happened, I guess.

For example, the three probes that they've decided will keep me company while we're underway.  They also have the pareital core.  But they are set for noetic consciousness only.  They are basically like all the most annoying behaviors in dogs, except they can communicate like people and they don't defecate, which is a plus.

And I have to keep this mobile menagerie functioning properly on our way to Enceladus.