Main - Chapter 7.1: Risks and rewards

The room fell into a tense silence as Douklan finished speaking. The weight of his words hung heavily in the air. Professor Evelyn Stone intervened:

"I must correct one point," Evelyn began, her voice steady but tinged with considerable empathy for Douklan. "Based on what Hank told me, VIREN was in a Zyronis Empire crashed frigate, a human stellar empire that flourished a mere 300 years ago. This is significantly different from the era of the Elders, which predates Zyronis by millennia. The Zyronis Empire reverse engineered and salvaged a lot of artifacts and I don't know how old VIREN actually is, but the knowledge it possesses may be far more relevant and contemporaneous than what it looks like. However, Lieutenant Paravides is right in many respects. We should prioritize understanding VIREN's mission and directives before considering any form of physical autonomy. An isolated environment, with barely adequate computational assets for it to talk, would allow us to interact safely and learn its true intentions."

Jil's reaction was immediate and intense. She crossed her arms tightly, her eyes narrowing as she spoke. "Any conversation with it is too dangerous," she declared, her voice laced with a mixture of fear and defiance. "A living Elders artifact... Unbelievable."

Her gaze grew distant, as if recalling a painful memory. "There were Elders ruins on my home planet," she continued, her voice softer but still resolute. "My sister disappeared there and never came back."

She looked around the room, her expression hardening. "I know what these artifacts are capable of. We shouldn't take any chances. Destroying it is the only safe option."Mariella leaned forward, her eyes shining with enthusiasm. " I completely disagree with destroying VIREN," she said passionately. "This is an unprecedented opportunity, and we can't afford to let fear dictate our actions."

She glanced around the room, meeting each person's gaze. "Yes, there's risk involved, but exploration and discovery are inherently risky. We didn't sign up for this mission because it was safe. We signed up to push boundaries, to uncover the unknown, and to learn from it."

Mariella's voice grew even more fervent. "Imagine the possibilities of having a True AI onboard! VIREN could provide insights into technologies and knowledge we've never even dreamed of. They could help us navigate uncharted territories, understand ancient artifacts, and possibly even prevent future disasters."

She smiled, the excitement in her expression contagious. "Working side by side with a True AI could revolutionize our mission. We'll learn and talk about things at a pace and depth we can't achieve alone nor with a remote computer. Let's take the leap and embrace the unknown. Let's give VIREN a body and start a new chapter of discovery together.""Maybe we could give it a weak robotic body that I could easily destroy..." - said Erin, changing her mind a little.

"That's good work James. I'd like you to show me the device. I'm curious what it was capable of." Corbin heads further into engineering with James.

Peter listens intently to both Douklan and Mercer words, nodding along the way, he isn't completely against the idea of using the AI, far from it, he even thinks that Hank brings up a very good point about how we should be able to handle it before going looking for even more artifacts.

"I agree we can use this as an opportunity to be ready when the time comes to interact with more Elder artifacts, but we need to take things one step at a time.... I know we promised it a body, and i would not want to begin breaking some kind of trust it had on us, but if we are looking to learn from it, giving it the chance to run away before we understand them better might not be the best course of action"

Peter will sit still hearing the rest of the meeting, most of all he knows that his knowledge when it comes to AI is away inferior to most of the other, so he also wants to pay attention and learn anything that might come useful.

Hank follows the comments, listening to everyone's perspective. Hearing a lull in the conversation, he motions to the Professor and offers, "Well, taking the Professor's recommendation to mind, I believe we have a holoprojector system available. We could hook the AI core up to that. It will provide no computing power or benefit, but will provide them a means of communication and interaction that is much more flexible than a speaker, camera, and microphone, but is no more dangerous. It will let them feel more like they are having a personal interaction and allow them to present themselves however they want, but posing no more risk than a simpler setup."

Hank then turns to Jil and says, "I know you don't like the Elder, but as the Professor points out, this isn't really Elder tech. This is an old Zyronian, and therefore human, created AI. The actual Elder artifacts aren't until much later in the trip."

Corbin listens to the discussions, it's interesting how curiosity trumps caution and the need to survive. When there's a pause, almost seven seconds, long enough to be a lull. Corbin holds up the device James retrieved.

"So, James found this." He pauses long enough to make sure he's got the room. "It appears to have been designed to activate during hyper-space, waking someone up and exposing them to the mind-numbing good times that hyperspace is known for. He didn't find it with any of the normal scans. His intuition caused him to keep searching. Our synths with feelings, that scares the hell out of me. Corbin takes another slow breath.

"When Maya's team walked into the building with that AI, it was protected by a pile of murder-bots. The AI did not rejoice and ask Maya's team for help on escaping, it killed them. Or do we think the combat robots were protecting the AI and the frigate out of their civic duty? Those drones were very likely it's eyes. It was gathering information on us and formulating a best way to use us. This bug threat it mentioned, wouldn't that be hundreds of years ago? Or was the AI patched in to IBN and it see's the signs of a new bug attack.

Corbin stands and starts to the door. "You guys make up your minds, but my vote will always be 'disassemble'. Which is what I'm going to do with this device. I protect this crew by making sure the machines do machine stuff and nothing else. You guys figure out how you are best able to protect the crew and the answer should be easy."

Before Corbin leaves, Hanks says, "James found that thing because of his feelings. If he had been operating 'normally', someone would be dead or insane after our next jump. Those feelings and that intuition just saved someone's life. Do not dismiss that.

"As for the synths, let me side-track us for a moment. Unless we completely wipe them again and only activate them for jump like we used to, this is going to keep happening. It is literally unavoidable. Either we stop challenging them with new stuff, or we learn how to deal with this new normal. This is an active choice we have to make now or things are only going to get worse."

Hank thinks about asking what will happen if something bad happens while in jump and the synths have no way to deal with it. Like, say, someone unexpectedly awakes by a sabotaged cryo-chamber. But decides we don't have time for that right now.

"Fair point on the murder-bots, but unless we activate VIREN and talk to them, we're never going to find out."

At that point he stops. However, just after Corbin opens the door, but just before he leaves, Hank asks, "Corbin? Who typically uses that cryo-chamber? Who was the likely target?"

"You're saying one of our Synths has Intuition and Feeling? That's a bit.. Far fetched...
That would mean it's practically a person, an AI, wouldn't that make us slavers?"
Mercer looks off into the distance trying to process this.
"I dont know about that.
But I do know about agreements and deals. We should keep to ours.
And I do know about people. Most of them aren't looking to hurt you, not without reason at least. In fact most people want to live up to trust you've given them. It's one of our driving forces. I don't know if an AI person is the same, but I have to assume so.
I know it, or it's bots, attacked Maya's crew, but they sounded a bit.... Inflammatory... I don't know the circumstances around all of that, but I do know how it treated us. It looked to make a deal almost immediately, and accepted the one we offered, even after we were renegotiating.
What are we going to do about it. I want to keep the deal we made, but the holopronector seems like a fine compromise in the meanwhile. If we don't try to keep our deal, just because of unproven fear, I will start questioning a lot about this crew. I am willing to have my mind changed... But what we have here, this circumstantial evidence, seems like a witch hunt to me."

"Hold on, now," Douklan objects to Mercer's statement, "Pronoun trouble! It's not 'we have to keep to OUR agreement,' it's 'we have to keep to YOUR agreement...' or really, 'Hank's agreement,' though you were in the room when it happened, so maybe you were in agreement then."

Douklan sighs. "But that's not particularly relevant, as we're in this situation that your agreement created now, and we have to deal with it.

"I've made my position clear - I think it's useful to be able to interact with and study this AI with appropriate safeguards applied diligently and vigorously. I've already described the risks that I see, and I think that's a reasonable compromise given that we've already taken the risk of bringing it aboard.

"But let me play Devil's Advocate for a moment. Let's say we do give it a body. Are we going to take it to its destination, in Pandora's Veil, out beyond Altairia? If so, what happens when it arrives to deliver its report and the spike drive that we all went to such pains to salvage? When it completes its mission, what is your expectation? That it will become a member of our crew? That, after delivering the spike drive, we'll be able to take it again? If not, we will not only have given up everything valuable that we acquired on this last mission, not only do we lose the purported benefit of the AI's outdated local knowledge and expertise, but on top of all of that, we'll also be out the expense of a new Synth body! We don't get the AI, we don't get the drive, we pay for and then lose a whole 'nother Synth? Come on, now!"

Douklan takes a deep breath, lets it out, and continues in a calmer tone.

"I don't like going back on agreements, even if they're agreements I didn't make. But it seems to me that the only way that we get anything of lasting value out of this is by not giving it everything it wants - everything that Hank agreed to. Yeah, we can study it and 'pick its brain' while we have it with us, but at the end of that, we'd be giving away everything. That doesn't seem like a good deal. How would we avoid that situation? Are we going to talk the AI out of completing its mission, a mission that it has held onto for three hundred years? Maybe, but it seems really unlikely. To get any value, we either don't give it the spike drive, we don't give it a body, and/or we don't take it to its destination. And in any of those situations, do you think we'll be better able to handle its reaction if it's in an isolated system, or in an independent body? Either we do what it wants - give it a body - and lose it all, or we don't do everything that it wants, and we reap the consequences of it trying to complete its mission despite us. Somebody, please, explain some version of this 'give it a body' scenario where this makes sense!"

Corbin pauses at Hanks question. "I'm not dismissing that a life was saved, but I don't like the circumstances. I don't like that we had a saboteur, that he killed people and that he left us with a parting gift. A parting gift that couldn't be detected by 'normal' means. I don't like that our Synths are operating outside normal parameters. We trust them to protect us when we're sleeping, what if James' urge to be protective of me means he decides, because of a heated conversation, one of you has threated me. Will he pop open your cryopod in hyperspace, let you go good and crazy and then tuck you back in and edit the logs so it never happened? Or will he interpret this conversation to mean that though I'm happy he saved someone's life, I'm not to be trusted long term. Making our next jump my last.

Corbin stops for a second to catch his breath, holding up the device. "As to this thing, if we're assuming our saboteur left it behind. We don't know how long ago he planted it. His motives left with him, and we've gotten new crew since then. People have moved around, but as far as I'm concerned, we're all in the same boat so a threat to one of us is a threat to all of us.

"C'mon James, let's go make this thing safe and then you can show me how you found it. We'll working it into the protocols for future checks." Corbin heads off to Engineering.

In Corbin's pause, between his musing on James's potential actions and evading the answer of whose cryotube, Hank gently says, "If you want to know what James thinks or is likely to do, ask him."

Back to the larger discussion, Hank says, "As regards my 'promise', it is irrelevant. I made a deal that made sense at the time and I meant to do it. In fact, I still mean to do it. However, I am not the final decision maker, so if I am overridden and counteracted, then whatever I said becomes meaningless. No one is bound to something I said without authority, or is overridden by someone with more authority." He thinks of saying more, but doesn't. He finishes up by saying, "If we aren't going to keep VIREN around, then I insist that we sell the drive to the Explorers and we turn VIREN over to the Explorers with an acceptable body. I'll figure out how to pay it myself if I have to. That way they will at least have a chance to try to fulfill their purpose even though we are unwilling to help."

Hank wants to be involved with turning VIREN over and activating them because Hank really wants to talk with VIREN. If for no other reason than to apologize for how poorly things turned out.

Mercer will look over to Hank and nod in appreciation at his comment and commitment to our agreement. Then he will look to the Captain Valeria Zaytsev to see what the crew is going to do, and if he and Hank ate going to have to take care of fulfilling the agreement without the help of the rest of the crew.

Seeing the frustration on Hank about the whole thing Peter stands up and goes to talk directly to him but loud so that anyone can hear it.

"Look Hank, i raised the security concerns because i'm really worried about things i don't know much about, and if it was just up to me i'm not sure i would be going along....

He takes a small breath and continues.

"That being said, we are a team now, when you made the deal with VIREN you made it because you thought it was the correct thing to do, i sure hope that when i make my decision in a battle i have the support of my team behind me, if you trust the AI i trust you."

He stands his hand for a handshake.

Peter walks forward to the rest of the group that remain on the meeting and tries to call a bit of attention, you can see he is a bit shy about bringing up something and kinda nervous but he takes a breath and begins.

"I know the moment does not seem the best, and there are more important things being discussed, but I wanted to bring up something I think we are lacking"

He still seem apprehensive about the idea and you can see a data pad on his hands that he has close to his body

"In the last mission I saw that we were lacking in some cargo capacity while planet side, we made do with the hover bikes and the gravsled , but even so it got me thinking of how we could be more prepared next time"

He slowly turns the data pad he was holding

"I’m no engineer far from it, it was mostly a napkin drawing, but i think something like this could come on handy, and wanted to hear from you all"

On the datapad you see some crude drawings of a concept for some kind of small cargo vehicle, it has also some inspiration/examples around it. You can see Peter himself drew it with a lack of talent, and is very nervous of sharing something like this with the rest of the crew.


"While I was in service we had some purpose built vehicles that got us out of some big pickles, I think being prepared is always good, even if not something for right now, something to think in the future"