Chapter 2: Awakening

“Yes!” Ericson said with excitement. “Three years of working with this, and I finally got it working!” He stepped away from the table and looked at the large screen. If the program worked correctly, it should respond to his words. The display still showed the green lettering as if it was waiting for his next action.

“Right ... Program, can you understand my voice?”

The letters on the screen changed and depicted the word “affirmative” on it.

“Good. You will identify yourself as Minerva. Is that understood?”

The next series of letters popped in that also depicted “affirmative.”

Ericson knew that even with this success, there was still a lot of work that needed to be done. This was only the very beginning stages of the running program of Minerva. The fact that Minerva understood his words and responded back to him was amazing in itself.

“That is a good start, but we need to get more of your interface up. Minerva, I need Face Interface B-18 to work. Are you able to initiate it?”

The green letters dropped and displayed a new sentence. “Negative. Unable to initiate.”

“Shit ... I imagined that there would be some kinks. Thankfully I programmed you to be able to help me out once we get to this stage. Minerva,” he directed his order. “I want you to show me what the issue is with why you are unable to initiate Face Interface B-18.”

The display on the screen showed the waterfall move. The waterfall sped up a little bit as the program was initiating its diagnostic. There were ten sets of subroutines that need to be corrected.

“Hmmm ... not bad. Some of these just have some missing codes to them. I can make the changes. Minerva, once I start to fix these, I want you to initiate Face Interface B-18.”

“Affirmative,” it replied in green letters. The letters dropped as Ericson tapped his wrist to activate his arm display. He began to focus on the highlighted subroutine. He had designed it to operate this way, and it was working. Now he could make the necessary fixes faster and quicker with Minerva to help him out. One by one, he would go to the algorithm and fix it. Some were a simple addition of code or number, and the next one was fixing the fragmented data. His years of work were starting to pay off. Each set of codes and numbers of the billions to trillions were something that he created by himself. Each of those codes in itself was trillions upon trillions of terabytes of information. It would be his ultimate creation.

Finally, within less than a minute, he fixed all the subroutines. He smiled as he looked at the last one that needed to be fixed. He looked at the micro camera that was on top of the display. It would have to work. He tapped his arm display and corrected the last one.

Immediately, Minerva had done its job. It initiated the program that Ericson was trying to get working. The waterfall continued to move downward. A white and blue face began to appear on the waterfall. The face was seemingly bald and almost plastic-looking. The face looked like it was a woman. It had eyes, a nose, a mouth, and eyebrows. It would provide him a real face for him to talk to the AI he was creating. Now that he had it working, the AI could interface with him better.

“Good ... How are you, Minerva?” Ericson asked it.

“Hello, Dr. Ericson, my name is Minerva. I am functioning at 70% efficiency,” the face spoke to him with a male voice. The mouth of the face moved as it spoke to him. There were occasional flickers as the face would drop and reappear. Ericson nodded and understood what was going on.

“Don’t worry,” he replied to it. “We have a lot of work to do to get you working. First, let me try to fix that voice of yours. I can’t believe I had a male voice in that program of yours. I never had a chance to fix that when the voice subroutines were sent to me. I had the female voices installed, though. Let’s give you the voice that you deserve to have.”

He was checking his arm display as it depicted the varieties of voices he could choose. The face of Minerva gave him a blank stare, but occasionally the white and blue eyes would blink together as it looked at him.

“Minerva was the goddess of wisdom,” he told it. “She was a Greek deity. I think you should deserve a voice that is fitting of that,” he said as he was going down the list and found it. It was a female voice that depicted a woman from Eastern Europe close to what was Turkey and Greece on Earth. He highlighted it and implemented it into the program. “Minerva, how are you?”

“Dr. Ericson,” it replied with a female voice. “I am functioning at 70% efficiency.”

“That’s better. You might be genderless, but at least you will be as close to a woman as possible,” he could feel himself wanting to yawn. “Looks like we will be working on things for the next day. I am getting pretty tired. I guess working for twenty hours straight will do that to you.”

“It is recommended that you at least sleep for eight hours, Doctor Ericson,” Minerva replied to him.

“Well, your response subroutines are at least partially working. We got a long way to go. Tomorrow will be a big day for us. I wouldn’t be surprised that we will get you to 85% by the end of the day for tomorrow. Doing three years of programming and having you active will help point out any flaws that need to be fixed. The hard part is over.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ericson,” Minerva replied.

Hearing his own AI talking back to him even if it was basic was still unusual in itself to him. He knew that it was capable of doing so much more, but it would have to wait until the next day. He put his hand to his head.

“Alright, Minerva, I will go ahead and deactivate you. It looks like we will both get some much-needed sleep.”

“Sleep well, Dr. Ericson,” Minerva replied in the emotionless face. It responded by closing its blank eyes almost to mimic the looks of it trying to sleep.

Ericson simply smiled as he tapped his display. He went ahead and initiated the off sequence for the computers. Immediately the computers shut down, and the screen in front of him went black. There was a sense of satisfaction in his voice. He managed to achieve the hardest step for him, but he knew that he wouldn’t be famed for creating an AI that simply spoke to him. A few essential reactions were something done long ago, and recreating it wouldn’t be enough. It had to do far more. He shut down all the lights and other displays in the room. He unsealed the door and proceeded to walk out.

He walked back out to the computer lab. Unlike the galley, which was the opposite side of the ring, his quarters were only a few rooms away. He walked straight ahead of the long passageway. It seemed empty on the ring. There were never that many crew members on the Tyson. It was a research vessel, after all. The ship was designed to sit and hover over places for long periods of time. Even colony ships had to struggle with cramming people in the rings for the short voyages to other planets.

He passed a set of quarters for other crew members before he reached his own. He waved his hand over his door scanner. It quickly scanned his hand and unlocked the door. The door slid open, and he stepped inside. The door closed behind him as he took a good look at his room.

Ericson’s room was seemingly simple in layout. Anything that he had personal belongings wise was designed to be stuck or secured whenever the ship moved. There was a plastic globe of Mars on the table. He had a couple of paintings on the walls that depicted the UHN Tyson. It was a glory shot of it as it was moored inside the Deimos shipyards. Built into the very rock of the Martian moon, the shipyards made the perfect place to construct everything from freighters, transports, and warships. Phobos, the other Martian moon, was a dedicated weapon’s platform in case of a large scale assault. It was built way before the Itreans were ever discovered.

Perhaps his other favorite portrait on the wall was an actual overhead shot of the famed Equatis Wreck. It was a fantastic picture of the great ship discovered in the early 23^rd century. With most of the people of Earth fully evacuated to Mars, an enormous sand storm enveloped the planet. After three days of the storm, it had settled. A child in his spacesuit was playing near the equator and found the piece of debris sticking out of the ground. Unearthed by the sand storm, a scientist named Equatis, discovered that the debris came from an artificially constructed ship. Teams were sent to dig out the massive vessel buried in the sands. The vessel was over millions of years old. It took over a year to painstakingly remove the dirt from the ship. Even with the amount of time, the wreck of the vessel was in absolute poor condition. The entire ground was nothing but splintered pieces all over Mars. It was the first proof that sentient alien life had existed even if there were no bodies or DNA to be recovered from the wreck. It would give humanity the technology to fold space. The wreck remains as it is today. Great care was insured so that the wreck would remain safe as Mars continued to pummel it with its vicious sandstorms.

Ericson shook his head. He had seen enough as his mind wondered, looking at the picture. He decided that the best course of action was to go to bed. His room was nothing big, but it had everything for him. It had a small restroom and even a shower stall for him. The room itself was perfectly engineered, much like the rest of the ship. Everything was designed in case the centripetal rotating ring went offline. The toilet was designed to prevent water from floating in the air, and even the shower stalls could be quickly reset to allow crew members to wash in zero-g environments. His bed, which was mostly a large alcove on the left side of the room, was equipped with Velcro straps. If there was no gravity, he could simply strap himself to the bed to ensure he didn’t float away. Thankfully, the rings barely had any problems. Jabr was a sound engineer and always ensured that his equipment functioned properly. Ericson knew that the Einstein Class Research Ships, despite their vast age, were still built to last and perform their jobs. Even fifty-year-old vessels, like the Tyson, could always perform well in the uncertainty of space.

Without much thought, Ericson began to take his suit off. With a simple zipper pull, the suit came undone. He pulled it down and placed it next to his bed. He then took his shoes and put them next to the wall. The magnetic shoes activated on the wall and held in place, ready to be used again. He still wore his black underwear. He didn’t take long to look at his body. He was slightly skinnier than the people of Earth used to be. Mars had 38% of the gravity of Earth, and the bodies had adjusted to this lesser force. The rings were designed to generate more gravity than Mars but not as much as the other colony worlds.

He climbed into his alcove. He was used to sleeping in a spinning ring anyway and didn’t bother to strap his body in. If worst came to shove, if the ring began to fail, it would still spin for a while and send out alerts to everyone that artificial gravity was not functioning correctly. He took the bedsheets and wrapped himself. Resting comfortably on the bed, his mind went to his achievement. He began to think about Minerva and what he created. It had been a long day for him. Part of him wanted to do so much more, but he felt his body get sluggish. Mentally exhausted, he fell asleep as soon as he closed his eyes.

“That is wonderful news,” Jabr told Ericson as they sat in the galley. It was the next morning. Ericson had a full night’s rest and felt ready to get started with the day. They were busy eating again, but the TV was off. There were a couple of crew members in the galley, but nobody that Ericson took notice. He had told his best friend about his achievement last night.

“Yeah,” Ericson explained with some satisfaction. “I feel liberated. It was as you said. I needed to take a break, and I came back and poof ... I found the subroutine that needed to be fixed. Minerva turned on, and we began to go through the first steps in troubleshooting.”

“I am proud of you. I am happy that your work is starting to finally pay off.”

They were busy eating cereal mixed with fruits. Ericson was drinking orange juice from his canteen. He continued to display a level of peace that his friend could see. It was as if he ran for twenty miles and completed the longest marathon he ever achieved. Even his friend nodded his head.

“I feel like walking around the ship a little bit,” Ericson told Jabr. “I have been working in my lab nonstop these last three days, and after all this, I don’t mind walking around.”

“My wife is currently in the shuttle bay in the forward compartment. If you wish, you can go and talk to her.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t mind that,” Ericson said with a nod. “A part of me wants to work with Minerva right now, but being in that lab so long has taken a little bit of a toll.”

“You just need to talk to a few people on the ship. I know you are careful when it comes to choosing friends. Have you had a chance to talk to our parents?”

“I spoke to them about five days ago. They are doing fine so far. I keep trying to discourage them from leaving Mars.”

“Why do you discourage them? Where do they want to move to?”

Ericson displayed a sigh on his face. “They are doing what most of the Martians want to do, and that is move to Cebravis. The problem is that most of the Martians feel the same way. I might have grown up on Mars, but I know what will happen if everyone just got up and left. We still have an infrastructure there, and the economy will suffer as a result. Eventually, the shipyards will be abandoned, and we don’t need that right now.”

“I agree...” Jabr commented. “Even on Oshun, I discourage some of my family and friends from leaving. I tell them just because things aren’t working with the government and administration doesn’t mean that they should pack up their bags and leave. I tell them to go and fight. Running away solves nothing.”

“And with our hostile aliens out there, I tell my family that it is best for them to remain as they are. They seemed to agree.”

“It is unfortunate,” Jabr sighed. “I will not fear it, though. Fear only wastes energy.”

“I agree, as well. But... , “ he said as he put his spoon down. “I have had enough food for the morning. I will go ahead and walk around.”

“You do that. I will be working this morning and afternoon. Maybe I will get a chance to meet this Minerva.”

“Alright, you take care, Jabr,” Ericson said as he took his tray and walked over to the window to turn it in. He handed his canteen over and headed out of the galley.

In the passageway of the ring, he looked around. There were a couple of chutes that would lead to the main compartments of the ship. It was a simple process really that he and the rest of the crew were used to. With the ring rotating, he would have to find the ladder that would allow him to climb into the central areas of the ship. He continued his walk until he saw it. The tube was large enough that you could essentially walk down it, but they had ladders built in so you can climb out. Gravity and force were a funny thing, but it was how life operated on these ships.

He placed his foot on the steps and began to climb upwards. The feeling began to change in his body as he could feel his body being pressed down. Essentially Ericson was crawling to the center of the ring. It was a trek that would last for a full minute. The force exhibited was hard on the body but not overly challenging. People were used to this, after all. He looked up and could see the other side of the tube that leads to the center of the ship.

Upon reaching near the center, he pushed forward and grabbed the assembly. His body, free of the rotating ring, felt the sudden shift of weightlessness. He gripped onto the handles and pulled his body away from the centripetal ring. He then proceeded further forward of the ship. The handles allowed him to bypass the second rotating ring, and it was there that he could finally plant his feet down.

There is no up or down in space, only humanity’s interpretation of it. On the ship, zero gravity allowed you to do many things. Inside the central section of the Tyson and away from the rotating rings was the heart of the ship. It was a long passageway that led to many rooms. Clear from the rotating rings, Ericson could now plant his feet to the deck of the ship. The feeling of weightlessness was more of a nuisance in space. It was fascinating for those that first experienced it, but trying to operate a spaceship can be a tricky one. Zero gravity made it hard to get around from place to place. Thankfully for Ericson, he was used to this and already had something to help him navigate the zero-g environments.

His feet pressed to the ground, and the magnetic shoes immediately clicked on. Producing a very light clicking sound, it pulled his feet to the deck and held him in place. It did not simulate gravity as his body was still weightless, but the shoes prevented him from floating inside the vast passageway. His body immediately began to adjust to the shift in environments. Most humans had a hard time at first, but many that have lived on the ship we’re used to it.