"But here's the thing. They looked at that last generation. The robots had about a dozen different ways to do the same job. Absolutely none of them were the way any human designer would have done it. A couple of them, so far as the scientists could tell, shouldn't have worked at all. And for half of them, the scientists simply could not tell how it worked. The robots had created a solution by pure random chance— several solutions, all of them the product of guesses and misfires and junk program loops and a tangle of circuits and code nobody could figure out."
Mark shook his head in frustration. "I'm mangling the story," he said. "I haven't heard it since college. But that's emergent properties in action. Randomness leads to order, depending on how you look at it. But even the simplest of rules, allowed to run, can produce unexpected results. In fact, all life on my world comes from simple rules allowed to run for a very long time."
The ponies all shifted their weight on their hooves enough for the sound of scuffed soil to crackle through the almost silent cave. "Are you saying," Starlight asked in a shocked whisper, "that humans— that your whole world— is based on chaos?"
"I told you," Dragonfly said, "a Free Forever universe."
"Well, it's based on a lot of things," Mark said. "Chaos is just one way we explain it." He cocked his head and added, "But what does that have to do with anything?"
Starlight told them what she saw in the crystal.
"Aaahhh," Mark said, when the explanation was complete. "Your friend Chaos was explaining how the rainbow crystals work. Your blast must have accidentally laid a random enchantment on the crystals. And at least one of those enchantments is self-replicating."
Starlight looked at the crystals again, a bit horrified. "They're... they're alive??"
Mark considered this. "Starlight, I don't know about ponies, but humans have been discussing it for hundreds of years, and we've never been able to come up with a definition of life that satisfies everybody. But the crystals obviously aren't alive. No respiration, no eating or excreting, no reproduction. The enchantment might qualify, but only if computer programs are alive." He brightened and added, "We have sci-fi stories about that, y'know."
"That doesn't make me feel better!"
Mark shrugged. "The question is, will it do any harm?" He pointed to the light sources in the ceiling. "What happens to the sun lamps when the rainbows get up there?" He pointed to Fireball. "Can he eat rainbow crystals safely?"
"Not gonna try," Fireball said firmly. "We go back deep in cave, cut all crystals I need through launch, take to Hab soon. After that, not a problem."
"And finally," Mark said, "will the rainbows have an effect on the plants? We know they don't actually glow by themselves, at least not in the visible spectrum..."
Starlight nodded. "I see where you're going," she said. "This is a job for science."
"Yep," Mark nodded. "Magic science."
Author's Notes:
For those who asked about Discord, now you know.
I no doubt botched the explanation of emergent properties. The example I mention is in one of the volumes of The Science of Discworld, the first three of which are worth the read... the fourth, sadly, demonstrates the decay of Sir Terry's powers in his last years, plus a lack of coherent scientific theme.
But no, we're not done with the sparklies, oh no indeed.
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Sol 307
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Venkat's phone rang in the middle of a paragraph, as it usually did. Venkat's time was generally divided between reading reports (or, not nearly often enough, papers exploring the theoretical possibilities of magic, if humans could ever get it to work) and writing letters thanking, pleading, or ordering somebody to do something on behalf of Project Ares. It was all important, but no matter how important it was, there were dozens of people with his office phone number who thought their issues were more important. A few of them were even correct.
He checked the caller ID. Bruce Ng. Well, Bruce never wasted Venkat's time with trivialities. Bruce never had any time of his own to waste.
"Hello, Bruce," he said as soon as he picked up the line. "And how are things in sunny California?"
"I know there's a sun in theory," Bruce said. "Not by direct observation. I've been working for over a month to find some way to make the MAV landing stage work as a booster. I'm calling you to tell you it can't be done."
Venkat leaned back in his chair. "I'm listening," he said. "Tell me why a step that's absolutely indispensable to Mark Watney and friends making a direct rendezvous with Hermes is impossible."
"It comes down to weight and timing," Bruce said. "The whole point of keeping the landing stage on and running the pony engines on it is to gain surplus delta-V to make up for the weight we can't shave off the MAV. We'd need to reduce a craft that weighs twelve and a half tons empty by over five tons to achieve escape velocity on internal power alone. We haven't been able to find more than two tons without taking steps that render the MAV nonviable for long-term habitation— that is, we have to put a hole in the hull to make it lighter. That would take away the Sparkle Drive option as a backup system."
"Yes, I understand all that," Venkat said. "But that's what the landing stage and the engines off of Friendship were meant to overcome."
"And we've tried it in every configuration possible," Bruce said. "We've tried launching it fully fueled, on the assumption that the ponies can find a way to transmute or synthesize hydrazine. We've tried ripping out absolutely everything and just using the descent stage as a framework to hang the pony engines on. And, of course, we asked Starlight Glimmer to make larger batteries that could run the engines for a full three-minute burn instead of the one minute we originally planned.
"But it all fails in the sims, Venkat. Nothing we try gets more than a thrust-weight ratio of 1.3. A three minute burn just barely gets the ship to the height of the Schiaparelli Basin rim, when you factor in gravity and air resistance. The sims routinely show a failure rate of fifteen percent attempting to decouple the landing stage, ignite the first ascent stage, and reorient the craft. And by failure, I mean surface impact before the procedure's complete. And even the eighty-five percent of successful flights yield only an average delta-V gain of two hundred meters per second. That's out of over five kilometers per second we need."
"Okay," Venkat said. "So what happens when you move the pony engines to the first ascent stage?"
"No improvement," Bruce said. "Without any way to decouple the engines and their batteries, they stay on as dead weight after they burn out. If we cut the pony engines to fifty percent thrust we might be able to stretch them through the whole first stage burn, but the efficiency losses mean they don't quite get us to where we need to be. And we lose the most efficient portion of the ascent burn to that added eight tons of engine and batteries."
"Bruce," Venkat said, marshaling his thoughts carefully, "I don't need to tell you how bad this news is. You know better than anyone. But I'm not hearing much in the way of potential solutions."
"We're... still working on it," Bruce said. "But we're at the point that we need some input from the ponies. Is there any way to lighten their engines, or to modify them so they produce more thrust faster? And I know we've turned off the email exchange, but I wanted to ask for a waiver so I could send them the work we've done so far through Pathfinder."
For a second Venkat lost the power of speech. When he recovered it, it still spluttered like a car with a bad injector. "Wha-bwuh-wha... Bruce, you are two thousand miles closer to the Pathfinder relay than I am. You have a team who knows intimately the problems we're having just getting a signal. The data stream's been getting parity check errors on data packets for the last two days. You know why we decided to shut down everything but the bare bones. And if you thought we could still send your data, you wouldn't ask me for confirmation. You'd just do it."
Venkat heard Bruce's sigh over the line. "I know," he said. "And you're right, we can't load up the link with a ton of data when it's barely good enough for emergencies. But the alternative is that we lose more than a month. A month in which we could work the problem."
"Well, continue working it from your end," Venkat said. "I'll try to drop the problem into the morning check-in, but no promises."
"Thanks," Bruce said, and cut the connection.
Author's Notes:
Yes, it's short. But that's all there is for this sol...
... and by the time I go to bed tonight, there will be a chapter in the buffer again.
I did a run-down of all the ways the MAV could or couldn't save weight or add thrust about a month ago. And it boiled down to the descent stage booster doing very little even under ideal conditions.
So, obviously, something else will have to be thought of...
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Sol 308
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AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE — MISSION DAY 312
ARES III SOL 308
[08:31] SYSTEM: ERROR — Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold — Unable to Display
[09:36] SYSTEM: ERROR — Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold — Unable to Display
[10:10] JPL: Well, as you see, Mark, we're beginning to have problems even at this low bit rate. Explanation will have to wait. For now, don't bother making the cargo brackets for the alien engines. Put it off until later.
[10:42] WATNEY: How come? Did Bruce Ng and his boys run into a problem? Anything we can do to help?
[11:37] SYSTEM: ERROR — Destination reports Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold — Message Not Sent
[11:39] WATNEY: I see the problem. Roger wilco.
Spitfire frowned as Mark worked his way through the end of the chapter, delivering Smeagol's lines in the weird voice he used for that character. It was a terrible voice, a wheedling, whining, rasp-edged voice that got on Spitfire's nerves... which, of course, made it perfect for Gollum. Spitfire liked it a little better than Mark's normal voice for one reason; doing the Smeagol voice forced Mark to slow down a little as he read, which made it easier for her to figure out what was being said.
"I don't get it," she said. That was one of the English phrases she'd memorized whole, mostly because she found it so useful so often. "We know Gollum betray... will betray them. Now he look nice for, for, for little time, and Sam, he, he, he make it bad?" Faust alive, but she sounded like Rainbow Dash right after she slammed into a mountain headfirst at speed... twice in a row. Which was a thing she did sometimes. "Why writer show this?"
"Maybe Gollum is changing," Cherry Berry said. "He is a hobbit, or he was one. And Gandalf said hobbits resist the influence of the Ring. Maybe he's fighting it off?"
Smoke rose from the snort Fireball gave at that. "I bet he already did betray," he said. "Maybe he feel bad about it. He's loco, you see that."
"I think he's changing his mind," Starlight Glimmer said. She was fussing over something by the color-changing crystals, squinting at one and then another. She hadn't taken a turn reading this time. "Or anyway, that's what I want to believe. I listen to Smeagol's bits, and I keep thinking how easy I had it, how generous Twilight Sparkle was to me. And the good part of Smeagol isn't having it easy at all."
"Is no good Smeagol," Spitfire insisted. "Is bad Smeagol and Gollum worse. This cheap writer trick."
"I think it's a good moment of... um... right and wrong," Cherry said. "The ring made Gollum do all sorts of evil, but there's still a little part that resists. And it takes control for a minute, and Sam swats it down with bad temper. Suspicion."
"Good." That, unexpectedly, was Dragonfly. "Smeagol isn't to be trusted. I'm sure he's already sold out the hobbits, but to what I don't know."
"But it's the Ring doing it to him," Cherry insisted.
"Nope," Dragonfly insisted. "First rule of mind control: you can't directly force someone to do something against their will. At least part of them has to want to do it."
"Actually," Starlight began, "that wasn't how it worked when... never mind." Spitfire couldn't help smirking as the unicorn took an extreme interest in the rainbow crystals again.
"As I was saying," Dragonfly continued, "the Ring couldn't have done a thing to Smeagol by itself, not without making him into a total puppet. Which obviously it didn't do. Look at his history. Gandalf said he killed his brother, or cousin, or whatever, for the Ring. He snuck around, poked and pried at things, listening for secrets, stealing little things. That's how he was before the Ring— that's how it got him. Bilbo, on the other hoof, didn't want anything for himself. He was kind, generous, brave, and loyal. The Ring couldn't do much with that. That's why it kept slipping off his finger— it wanted a new host."
"But Bilbo couldn't give up the Ring by himself," Cherry protested. "It had hold of him enough to make him protect it."
"Sure," Dragonfly said. "It's a gold ring that makes you invisible. Not hard to persuade someone to want to keep it. But Bilbo actually wanted to be rid of the thing. He wanted to give away the Precious, think about what that took! And it wanted to be rid of Bilbo, is what I think. That's why I think it let Bilbo drop the envelope."
"We're getting away from Smeagol here," Starlight said. "What makes you think Smeagol isn't reforming?"
"Because Smeagol doesn't want to reform," Dragonfly said. "He wants his treasure back. That's who Smeagol is. That's who Smeagol always was. The Ring didn't create that, it just made it worse, took away whatever good things he might have had in him. But you just can't make someone do something they really don't want to do. You have to first persuade them they want to do it. You have to start a crack. Smeagol was vulnerable already when he first saw the Ring."
"Dragonfly," Mark said slowly, "is this first-hand knowledge? The mind control, I mean"
The changeling looked Mark directly in the eyes and said, "Yes. Yes, it is." She looked at the others, continuing, "Before the invasion I had a lot of infiltration roles, usually as a pegasus courier. Fastest changeling in the hive means a pretty fast pegasus disguise. My job was to read the messages and pass on anything useful back to headquarters. And yes, that meant hypnotizing a lot of ponies so they'd give me certain jobs or let me look at something I wasn't supposed to see. I know exactly what I'm talking about."
