K. D. McAdams

Science Fiction Author

Off Earth

Space fighter pilots and artificial intelligence

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I’m having my wisdom teeth out tomorrow. This is a bit of a short update, but I’m trying to get a little ahead on the word count for the week in case I don’t feel much like writing tomorrow. I also wanted to mention that last Friday I released Book 5 in my Seamus Chronicles sci-fi series. It’s called Exploration and is on sale for $0.99 for a few more days.

My Off Earth series is coming along nicely, I’m past the half-way point! One of the things I’ve been thinking about recently is how fighter ships will work in space.

From an action and excitement perspective I love space fighters and the cool pilots that fly them. As a kid I had X-wing and Y-wing fighters to play with. The BattleStar Galactica vipers were on almost every drawing I made from third through fifth grade. Afterburners, thrusters, and the control stick hard right or left inducing a roll is an adrenaline pumping scene.

Unfortunately, from a reality perspective I doubt that humans will be sitting at the controls of s a space ship with windows and guns. It makes sense to me that artificial intelligence will handle the bulk of flight control in space (and soon on Earth as well). And a big part of me thinks that artificial intelligence won’t want to conduct combat missions that have a real possibility of failure.

So where does the space battle action come from? For me it comes from an alien encounter (new data set) and AI instances struggling to learn. The humans are urging them to make exceptions to both comfort and safety protocols but the ships are reluctant to listen.

In the Off Earth Series I’ve decided my ships have commanders, not pilots. The commander directs the AI flight control and at times is required to persuade the AI to go against it’s programming. For example, if the odds of success are below twenty percent an AI flight controller might refuse to do a maneuver that could stop or destroy and alien star ship. It’s up to the human commander to override that decision, because the fate of the human race rests in their hands. This is a gray area that comes into play in other places.

As for the windows I don’t feel like those are going to be common in space. More likely are monitors that show a visualization of what the ship perceives to be outside the hull. They are already talking about doing this in airplanes and I think it makes even more sense in space. For my characters in They Awake, their salvage ships, the Cthulhu ships, have a small circle of port holes around the body. These are because the ships were designed and built by an Earthling who had grown up driving cars. He didn’t trust AI or computer representations to be one hundred percent reliable so there were small windows built into the ship, though rarely needed. Except of course in an emergency.

For those following along for the numbers update on the Off Earth Series progress –

Book 1 – They Awake
Target release date – 4/13/2018 On schedule
Last weeks word count/target – 25,723/22,000
This weeks word count target – 22,000 words
Total words/projected – 59,708/95,000

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The Chondrule Club

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Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

One of the longest running jokes on Lagrange-4 is that when Kai Nazca excavated through the first vein of DeGrassium and revealed the Chondrule Club, Kinkaid was already behind the bar.

Of course the Chondrule Club didn’t actually exist until it too was excavated but the joke gets some funny looks when a newbie first hears it.

Maddison Holtz was not a newbie. It was more than two years ago that she accepted her job with Off Earth Salvage and moved here to Lagrange-4. She was a quick study and learned early that you don’t ask Kinkaid questions and if you ever hope to enjoy a cocktail you avoid pissing him off like you avoid the airlock.

Suddenly Maddison couldn’t remember if the joke was because of how old Kinkaid was or the fact that he never seemed to leave the bar. Probably a little of both.

“Hey Kinkaid how is everything in here?” she leaned through the door.

The Chondrule Club was technically closed, but as the operations manager for the whole rock Maddison had business being just about anywhere. She needed a drink, but hoped she wouldn’t have to ask.

“Fine Ms. Holtz,” Kinkaid studied her face int he dim light. “Come on in and have a seat.”

He read people better than most. Only those that ‘did it right’ became a friend and Maddison hoped that she was one of them.

Maddison walked past the tables with their chairs upside down and on top. At the corner of the bar she bent over and lifted the case of beer off the floor. Placing it gently on the top, she slid it down the entire length and pressed it neatly against the wall. The lessons her parents taught her on Earth served just as well here in space. If you see something that needs doing, do it.

“Thanks. The ore sorting team Mike brought in near cleared me out.” Kinkaid explained his need for restocking beer.

In truth there was always someone new cleaning him out. Maddison almost never saw invoices or cargo manifests for alcohol and didn’t know where most of it came from, but Kinkaid kept the place stocked.

“No problem. Don’t see too many beer drinkers these days.” She couldn’t help but think about the water used in making beer.

“Ore sorters are the greenest of the green. If they stick around they’ll learn. Speaking of, any word on that A.I.? Paying these guys can’t be good for Mike’s bottom line.” Kinkaid wondered.

“Still in therapy. It is convinced that was a human hand it saw. It won’t even sort simple finished pieces.” Maddison smiled at the fact that a computer program wouldn’t work because of an image.

“Well I suppose most of us wouldn’t be out here if those instances always did what they were supposed to.” Kinkaid chuckled.

Maddison sighed deeply. It was unintentional and she hated that it was going to look like she wanted to talk about a problem. Even though she really wanted to talk about her problem.

“You ever been around for a lighting?” Kinkaid pretended to ignore the sigh.

“No, I hear it’s amazing.” She answered quickly.

“Hold on,” Kinkaid disappeared around a short wall.

Moments later the walls came to life. Little bits of color shone in the black stone surrounding it. The glass chondrules refracted and bent light into colors people on Earth could never imagine. It was more colorful than a perfect rainbow and more dazzling than a sky full of stars.

Maddison left the bar and walked to a wall. She gently touched one of the pieces of glass. The elements in this crystal may have been around when the universe was formed. That made them even older than Kinkaid.

Everything glowed. The walls, the ceiling, the floors, even the supports underneath the bar had chondrules in it lighting up. Someone told her that it was all from a single laser beam and somehow each orb was connected by fiber optic strands winding their way through the rock. Different colors came from the bend in the fiber optics, not the chondrules themselves.

Then the room went dark. Not exactly dark, but back to it’s traditional level of dim.

“Can’t leave the laser on too long. One of the structural A.I.’s says it heats the fiber optics and could allow for a fissure in the stone.” Kinkaid explained why the light show wasn’t a permanent feature.

“Thank you for sharing. I’m glad I got to see that.” Maddison replied gratefully.

“But it’s not what you were looking for. Can I fix you a drink?” The bartender always understands.

“You don’t have to do that. I was really just looking to clear my head and this helped.” She regretted poking her head through the door.

“I only offer once.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“Got any vodka handy?” Maddison stopped waffling.

“ZG or terrestrial?” Kinkaid naturally had vodka.

Maddison knew there couldn’t be a difference between vodka distilled in zero gravity and vodka distilled on Earth or the Moon. Still something about terrestrial vodka was better than it’s ZG counterpart.

“Terrestrial please,” she moved to a stool at the end of the bar.

A small glass of clear liquid was placed gently on the bar. Kinkaid kept his hand over the top and slowly slid it in front of her.

“This is distilled in the Mariana Trench. They use nearly frozen sea water and geothermal heating. It is remarkably pure and about as opposite ZG as I could think of.” He smiled.

Maybe if she had gone ZG it would have been a bigger pour. The liquid swirled around the cup and she sniffed to detect a complete lack of smell. Then her lips parted and the ice cold liquor flowed easily into her warm mouth.

The contrast was startling but the purity obvious. Her chest filled with warmth which slowly radiated out to her limbs and the rest of her body.

“Wow,” she acknowledged the quality of his selection.

“Look, I don’t know what you’re looking for, but my advice is to stop. If you’re meant to find whatever it is, you’ll come across it at the right time. If not, looking won’t do you any good.” The bartender explained.

The problem was that she thought she found what she was looking for. When she took the tablet off that freighter captain it matched Mike’s description of his holo-tab almost perfectly. There wasn’t much tech that age filling space on freighters and most of the stuff floating from that generation was already salvaged or burned up in Earths atmosphere.

It wasn’t the looking that bothered her, it was all the effort to repair that piece of crap. Effort that would have been worth it if the display showed Mikes dad. Instead she spent a month working on the thing only to have a series of crude sex acts projected when it finally booted up.

“You’re right. I just wish I could find nothing instead of tricking myself into believing I have what I want.” She explained cryptically.

“If it was found in salvage, it’s not what you want anyway. Most people are looking for a thing when what they really need is a feeling. When you find that feeling it doesn’t matter where you are or what you have, the feeling goes with you.” Kinkaid explained some more.

Of course he was right. She didn’t want the holo-tab. What she wanted was the good feeling she would get from giving it to Mike. That feeling she got when she saw Mike relaxed and happy was what she was looking for.

But even Kinkaid wasn’t going to hear that.

“How much for the drink?” Maddison asked.

“It’s on me.” Kinkaid smiled.

This wasn’t a bad feeling either.

“Thank you. I suppose I should get out of your way though. We both have work to do.” Maddison stood to leave.

“Don’t mention it.” Kinkaid replied bluntly.

“Okay I’ll see you.” She waved and headed for the door.

Facing the door it was hard to miss the massive arch of DeGrassium. Maddison had never seen it in this light before and it looked magical. She wondered what Kai Nazca felt when he first saw this vein of ore curving through his massive rock.

More than that, what was he looking for? She knew that he excavated most of the Chondrule Club by hand while the mining bots were focused on processing the ore filled with oxygen and elements used for fuel. The question she now pondered was why.

He must have been looking for something. And that may be where Kinkaid took his advice. Digging by hand though an asteroid in space is not done to find an object, it’s done to find a feeling. Accomplishment, knowledge, or fear could have driven Kai to dig. And one of those could just as easily have caused him to stop.

Kinkaid wasn’t a fixture in the Chondrule Club because of any material thing he had. He was able to stay in the role as long as he had because of his feelings. It never mattered if it was slow or busy, rowdy or subdued, Kinkaid worked the bar exactly the same. Somehow, he was able to find the feeling he was looking for and by staying here on Lagrange-4 he never let it go.

What was the feeling Maddison was looking for? And what feeling would make her stop?

There may not be one answer to either question, but for now she had to keep looking.

 

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A companion for sorting

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Humans are messy and tricky. While I was thinking about artificial intelligence working aboard a space salvage station I realized that there would be some unlabeled parts. This was even before the story about John Young smuggling a corned beef sandwich on board a Gemini-3 launch. When systems can’t identify things, people are going to get the job. Below is a story about a junk sorter from the Off Earth Series world.

Photo by Mike Wilson on Unsplash

Before the first orbital war there were tens of thousands of pieces of space debris orbiting the Earth. Expended satellites were parked in a geo-stationary orbit where they wouldn’t affect modern, functional satellites. Smaller decommissioned satellites were de-orbited to mostly burn up in the atmosphere though in some cases their mass survived and plummeted into one of the oceans. It wasn’t a great system and many people believe it was the true cause of the first orbital war. A piece of Chinese space debris collided with a United States based space tourist station. One hundred and four customers died and an equal number of staff perished when exposed to the void of space.

When the orbital war was finished the every day amenities people on Earth were accustomed to were gone. No satellite communications, no global positioning and limited weather forecasting. There was so much debris orbiting the planet and so little information available that any space launch was considered a suicide mission.

Then Kai Nazca returned.

Flying the rock now known as Lagrange-4 back from deep space was remarkable enough. But when he saw the mess preventing him from returning to his planet his next idea was pure brilliance. Using old radio wave technology he was able to communicate with the early ruling body that was to become the Planetary Operating Alliance (POA). In exchange for cleaning up the debris circling the Earth he was granted exclusive rights to the stationary orbit of Lagrange-4 in perpetuity and passable to his heirs, as well as complete ownership of anything he was able to recover for a ten year period.

The ten year period for ownership ended long ago. Now they were required to purchase any debris from the owners before it could be salvaged. While every component of a ship launched into space was logged and labeled, humans were less precise. Tourists, laborers and stowaway’s all brought personal affects with them. When a vessel failed and the escape pods were used, plenty of unlabeled items were left behind, eventually needing salvage.

Artificial Intelligence and bots were great at processing individual labeled items. They were terrible at processing unlabeled items or products that were assembled from multiple-labled items. A.I. Would routinely label complex systems as something simple based on the component on it’s surface.

When A.I. And bots fail, humans get involved. That’s how Kurt Plaque ended up in the massive salvage bay of Lagrange-4 parsing through a motley collection of jewelry. The value of gold, platinum and silver dropped dramatically after it was discovered in abundance in several asteroid mines. Here in space there was a market for handmade Earth goods. A gold necklace with a locket made on Earth was worth more than it’s weight in gold.

[Read more…] about A companion for sorting

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3 opportunities to make salvage the first successful orbital business

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The new space race is moving quickly but there is a trash problem that could derail it all.

My new Off Earth series was initially an idea about an asteroid mining company. While I was doing research to understand what it would look like to mine asteroids I learned about the debris circling our planet. Asteroid mining became part of the backstory and orbital salvage became a key element.

A visualization of the trash around out planet – Image courtesy of NASA

If you aren’t interested in trash in our orbit, here is the quick update on the Off Earth Series progress –

Book 1 – They Awake
Target release date – 4/13/2018 On schedule!
Last weeks word count/target – 18,802/15,000 (it was a Holiday week, but I crushed it)
This weeks word count target – 22,000 words
Total words/projected – 18,802/95,000

And on to some of the cool stuff driving my story…

Over 29,000 pieces of material, mostly parts of satellites, larger than .10 inches (10 cm) are freely circling our planet.

This debris routinely causes damage to existing satellites and even the International Space Station. There have been times when the ISS was forced to change it’s orbit to avoid a piece of trash. This picture shows the damage something estimated to be the size of a paint chip can do to an orbital vehicle –

Damage to the ISS Cupola Window via EAS/NASA through PopSci

If you haven’t been paying attention to the new space race, it’s very exciting. Private companies are launching rockets and sending real payloads into orbit. There is renewed commitment to landing on the moon and space tourism is on the verge of becoming common. More stuff and more people are going into orbit than ever before.

The orbital debris situation will get worse before it gets better. While I was daydreaming about my story I came up with three business opportunities for an Orbital salvage company.

Opportunity #1 – Disaster mitigation

The first profitable opportunity for space salvage is in disaster mitigation. I believe it is in the best interest of governments and commercial businesses to clean up orbit before a disaster happens. If the ESA, NASA and Chinese National Space Agency (CNSA) joined together to offer a time-bound contract for cleaning up orbit it would drive business and innovation.

Simply looking at the value of communications, navigation, weather and military satellites that each of those agencies represent would warrant a sizable contract. The terrestrial economy is so heavily reliant on orbital technology that the economic impact of a satellite colliding with trash could stretch far beyond the individual satellite damaged.

When we introduce potential risk to human lives it makes even more sense. Can you imagine how our planet would react to losing a space plane full of tourists, or students, because a 50-year-old fragmented circuit board smashed into the crew compartment?

There is value in solving the problem before it becomes too big.

Opportunity #2 – Recovering sunk costs

Getting stuff into space is expensive. That’s a major reason that launch solutions were one of the first pieces of the space economy to be commercialized. It costs around $10,000 per pound ($22,000 per kilogram) to send material into space. That number is coming down but that doesn’t help the launches that have already occurred.

The debris in orbit around Earth represents billions of dollars of launch costs. Letting it float aimlessly is a waste of resources. Allowing it to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere or crash uncontrolled onto the planets surface loses that value completely.

Even collecting the material and holding it until we can develop orbital recycling system will help retain some of that launch value. The stuff is up there, we don’t need it back on Earth and getting more stuff up there is still expensive. Feels like a business opportunity in there.

Opportunity #3 – Sparing for non critical systems

Humans like to be comfortable and have some luxuries. Early space adventures will go without in exchange for the thrill of of being in orbit, but that won’t last long. When the orbital population expands there will be an increasing demand for creature comforts.

All the pieces of satellites and machines in orbit could be sorted, inspected and inventoried. If someone needs a spare washer to repair their coffee maker or aroma therapy machine why not take one from salvage inventory to make the repair at a fraction of the cost of launching a new one from Earth.

I wouldn’t advocate for repairing mission critical systems with salvage parts. But there could be a scenario where a suitable spare is in orbit as salvage and could save lives while waiting for newly manufactured parts to be launched from Earth. If we’ve learned anything from our history with trash on Earth, it’s recycle, reuse, reduce.

Challenges

People are currently working on the space debris problem. My guess is they are smarter than me and could discredit each of my suggestions with a few key points. One of them being, all that junk belongs to someone. You cannot simply go into orbit and start collecting other peoples stuff, it’s stealing (see the sunk cost idea).

There are also engineering challenges with trying to capture a piece of material moving at 17,500 miles per hour (almost 23 times the speed of sound). Not just anyone can send something up to try and salvage this debris. A collision with a poorly designed salvage vessel would result in more of the problem it was trying to solve.

But those challenges could help to drive the opportunity. A smart group of engineers and investors could purchase all the debris for a fraction of it’s cost (governments would love to get even a little money back for stuff they have no use for). This would also remove the responsibility for the pieces from the agencies that launched them. Once someone owns it all they would be even more intent on extracting value.

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Becoming Kai

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This is a short story I wrote while planning my new Off Earth science fiction series. It is some deep back story that tries to get into how a human will take a risk so crazy that an artificial intelligence drone refuses to do it. So meet Kai Nazca, I hope you enjoy.

Image copyright Dmitry Islentyev via Dreamstime.com

Becoming Kai
by K. D. McAdams copyright 2018

The launch vehicle rolled and he caught a glimpse of the Nazca plain below. Simple, remarkable drawings sat motionless as they had for thousands of years. Who made them and why could not be answered regardless of how much technological progress humans made.

No matter how far into space humans went there would be no explaining much of their history.

Lowering the blast visor on his helmet, he finally permitted the tears to flow. Dreams of living and working in the stars belonged to his father. His heaven was on the ground, feet in cool damp grass waiting to hear his young daughters squeals of delight.

There was no one left that he wanted to hear squeal and no delight.

People always talked about the pace of change. Some felt it was always coming faster while others insisted it was a constant. He would rather not have had the proof of it’s increasing pace.

Transitioning from peace to war should have taken more time. All of the reporters and pundits promised that cooler heads would prevail, things were going to work out.

And then they didn’t.

The hot heads were in charge. Their constituents all salivating for war. Tired, simple people believing in the glory of standing up for an institution that abused, lied, and coerced it’s citizens at every turn.

The rest of the world looked on in horror as the United States tore itself apart. Armed militias stood up to National Guard troops and neighbors drew arms against neighbors. Any slight, real or perceived devolved into a gun battle in those first few days.

Video reporters loved it. Everyone clicked on their links and watched the violence with nervous excitement. Would it happen in their town? On their street?

Never. Most people believed that their own town was exempt from hostility and infighting. It was always the next town over or the people from the nearby city causing trouble.

Until it wasn’t.

Guns were everywhere. You could get shot for anything.

Cut someone off on the street, a barrage of bullets.

Music too loud? Gunned down.

Laugh at the wrong time? Executed in cold blood.

They didn’t have time to pack up and leave. Besides where would they have gone? San Diego had been their home for almost fifteen years. There was no family somewhere else that could take them in. Plus the war broke out so fast.

So they stayed. The bathtub was filled with water and canned goods were inventoried and rationed. Doors were locked and windows covered. Their house truly became their castle.

When the food got scarce he and his wife ventured out. Scavenging for cans and boxes of non-perishables in an abandoned market nearly got them both killed. A hail of hot lead exploded most of the packages they were able to gather. They went home nearly empty handed and shared the meager rations with the girls.

After that his wife wanted to leave. It didn’t matter where they went, she said. Just get my girls out of here before we get killed, or worse.

No, it’ll pass. They have to be almost done, order will be restored. We’ll be get by and start rebuilding, was his promise.

An ignorant man committing to things beyond his control. The bitter argument dragged into the night until they couldn’t fight anymore.

The next morning, before sunrise he snuck out. All he wanted to do was get a box of donuts or some packaged pastries to say he was sorry. She was right, they could leave.

He wasn’t gone long, maybe an hour or a little more. Not long enough for anything to happen.

It hurt to think about the injuries and the pain they must have felt. But their eyes were the things that almost killed him. Vacant, lost eyes looking at nothing but staring intently into the distance. Death robbing them of even the ability to close their lids

His blind rage was impossible to describe. It couldn’t be remembered. A manic animosity was all that was existed in him and it was deep in his soul.

The trail of blood and death was now his legacy. For days on end he prowled the city killing anyone and everyone he encountered. Young or old, man or woman it didn’t matter, they died.

How could a person who had lost what he lost, and took what he took go on? Where in the world was he supposed to go to escape this internal hell?

Nowhere.

By the time he came out of his murderous furry he was deep in the heart of Mexico. He couldn’t remember taking any vehicles for more than a few miles at a time. It was a hell of a walk, leaving him gaunt. But there were fewer people who appeared as threats and here they were not hiding. War was happening somewhere else.

What had been third world countries five years ago were now bastions of hope. Countries that embraced the space economy were too busy to fight amongst themselves. There were launches to plan and support.

And that was what led him to Peru. They needed people to get on rocket ships and go into space. It was dangerous, a better chance of dying than making it into orbit, but it was better than being on the Earth that he had just experienced.
Once he completed the required two weeks of training he had two days off before launch.

He was lucky enough to hook up with a mining crew destined for an asteroid that was out just beyond Mars. Other companies were sending out drones with artificial intelligence to do their mining. But drones were expensive and had a tendency to fail.

Failed drones required humans to fix them. So the company decided that they might as well just send humans, there were plenty of volunteers. A civil war in the most prosperous nation on the planet left enough desperate refugees that people were fighting over the chance to die in space.

There were twenty-eight crew members on board with him. The ones that had killed to get here were easy to pick out. Those that hadn’t had no idea who they were sharing space with and the type of person that last used the oxygen they now breathed.

Several of them were talking and trying to make friends. Typical banter, what’s your name, where are you from. Nerves permeating every word.

How many were telling the truth and how many were living lies? It didn’t matter, up here in space it would be a fresh start. If they made it.

“Hey, how about you buddy. Who are you?” A friendly young woman asked.

The launch vehicle completed its rotation and his view was now out to the black of space.

He didn’t respond immediately.

Who was he?

“Kai. Kai Nazca.” He finally answered.

Did you like it? Put your name in the box below and I’ll send you more like it every other week.

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