He kept his silence until Kane was ready. Electronics Mate First Class Edwards arrived, a worried look on his bearded face.
“Where’s Gessup?” Kane asked, referring to the firecontrol chief, the man he wanted to tell him the status of the firecontrol system.
“He was getting a cup of bug juice in the crew’s mess,” Edwards said, “when he just keeled over. Doc says he’s got a concussion but he looked like my daddy did when he had his stroke—”
“Okay. Edwards, hang in there.” Kane looked at the assembled men. “The reactor is up and we’re on the way home, at least for now. I need to know if we can remain submerged and I want to send a message about the Destiny. Radio first. What’s the status, Senior?”
“It’s hosed, Captain. Every cabinet. I’m cannibalizing components from every system trying to get one up. I think I can get one UHF transceiver going through the bigmouth antenna, but the crypto gear has shit the bed. Anything you say, you better count on the enemy hearing.”
“What about a slot buoy?”
“All broken to hell. Not one working, and they can’t be repaired no spares.”
“How long till you’ll be ready to send a message?”
“Ten minutes, but that doesn’t mean the bigmouth will work. All I can do is wait till we’re ready to transmit.”
“Okay, Senior. Get to it. I’ll write the message when you’ve got a functional system. Sanderson, what about sonar? The Destiny is still out there, and I’d just as soon not get ambushed by him again. And I don’t want to get rammed by some stupid supertanker when we go up above the layer.”
“I need time, Captain. I’ve got some bad cards that need replacing, and I need to check every hydrophone”
Kane frowned, knowing Sanderson was a perfectionist, and that there was no time for perfection.
“Screw that. Senior Chief. Change out the bad cards, skip the loop check and bring the system up. I don’t care if it’s reduced status or broadband-only. I want ears and I want them now.”
“I’ll do what I can. Captain, but I can’t promise”
“Quit bitching and get it done, Sandy.” This was from Binghamton.
Sanderson’s face turned red, but he stomped off to the forward sonar equipment space.
“Edwards, firecontrol?”
“Bad disk drive, sir. We’re putting in the spare now and it checked out okay. Already switched a dozen cards, doing another dozen now. When we’re done the computers will be damn near brand-new. Only thing stopping us is if the spares are bad. We have no more spares, though. If one of these circuit boards dies, that’s it. That puts us into an initialization in about an hour after we reload, a half-hour to reload the modules. That’s firecontrol up in normal mode in ninety minutes, but it ain’t any good without sonar.”
“Get going. Nav?”
Mike Jensen, the navigator, had come in when Edwards was talking. Jensen was one of the superstar mid-grade officers, a tall broad-shouldered and handsome black man who had graduated in the top five percent of his Academy class and had been a runner-up for Rhodes scholar before he did physics work at Stanford. His face was swollen and lumpy, making him look more like a boxer than an academic, his right arm in a sling with a splint formed by an inflated tube.
He seemed to be struggling against his pain, one of his trademarks his refusal to take any medication or drugs, not even aspirin or coffee. He had probably turned down the prescription painkillers, Kane thought.
“The GPS Navsat looks like it lived. Its self-check put out a few bugs that we’re looking at but it’s showing the same position it did just before we got hit. The ESGN inertial navigator is dead and gone for good. Wiped the ball. But as the quartermasters say, a pencil, a calculator and a compass can do about as good.”
“Okay. How’re you doing?”
“Never better. The fractured skull is a nice touch, don’t you think, sir?”
“Smart-ass,” Kane said. “XO, get me a message draft with Jensen’s position and the Destiny encounter.”
“Aye, sir.”
Forward in sonar Sanderson’s broadband display began cascading down the screen as the Q-5 initialization completed.
He was at the beginning of a long series of self-checks and didn’t intend to tell the conn that they already had rudimentary sonar, not after the tough words spoken in control, but his anger melted when the broadband trace came down the screen with the first noises. The contact was another ship. Close aboard. Submerged.
The Destiny was close enough to collide with.
The ship’s computer system, unofficially the Second Captain, had a mouthful official moniker, the YEBMG Destiny-Hull-1 Distributed Control and Layered Artificial Neural Network Intelligence System, manufactured by Yokogawa Electronic Battle Machinery Corporation. Its architecture had been compared to the human brain by more than one research psychologist. The comparison was perhaps the only way the interfaced, interactive system could be understood by its operators.
The lowest elements of the artificial intelligence were the sensors — sonar hydrophones, electronic countermeasure antennae, as well as valve position indicators, pump running contacts and the nuclear reactor’s neutron flux detectors functioning as nerve cells. The monitoring and control of the ship’s basic functions — reactor control, atmospheric purification and life-support, depth-control, weapons-control were all done by the distributed process-control modules in a function much like the human brain stem, controllers of the human heartbeat and respiration.
Surrounding the distributed process-control modules were the higher level functions related to sonar and electronic monitoring. Sonar and EM to the ship were its way of sensing the environment outside, much as vision and touch are to the living organism. And just as a human brain has whole lobe regions dedicated to vision and touch, the Second Captain had a layered modular neural network that had separate nodes associated with the reception, recognition and interpretation of sonar and electronic data. The neural nodes themselves made the supercomputers of the decade before seem crude … their logic was not hardwired. The sonar node was capable of simultaneous handling of massive quantities of data in real time, assembling the data into recognizable interpretations of the outside environment by the higher levels of the layered neural network.
The highest functions of the system were the neural artificial intelligence assembler modules, a part of the collected computer totality that were not specifically mentioned in the training or maintenance manuals except in the broadest terms. The assembler modules’ relation to the lower layers was similar to human brain frontal lobes, the functions that took the data of the sonar modular neural network and interpreted them, comparing them to data received in the past, generating internal questions that required investigation and analysis.
The assemblers were part of the system tasked with interfacing with the human crew, the advanced artificial electronic intelligence assigned the heavy responsibility of making the crew understand what the system understood, making the crew aware of its interpretations of the environment.
The task of interfacing with the crew was the most difficult to design, but in this model, Yokogawa had marched into the frontier of artificial intelligence and extended the science a crucial step.
It would be untrue to say that this level of electronic consciousness was capable of thought, but the unit had a random memory regenerator that reached into the plasma-bubble memory cells for things related to current processing, reaching out across the neural network for associations and previous learning. The unit was not capable of reflection but it did reexamine previous experiences for comparison to present processing and extrapolated such experience into a weighted probability prediction of what future events held in store. It was not capable of confusion, but its processors were designed to suppress action recommendations and slow down neural functions in the event that the comparison of past experience and the prediction of future events were in disagreement with the present reality as perceived by the modular neural networks. When the prediction of reality that benefitted the ship’s mission was correct as sensed by the modular networks, the system was programmed to experience a higher neural flux and the release of electrochemicals at certain neural transmitters giving the system the equivalent of self-satisfaction. When the ship’s encoded mission was not achievable the system’s neural flux was suppressed, turning the processors away from continued attempts to direct analysis at the problem. It had no fear but when the predictor of mission success was perceived as low and system survival was seen as improbable the system’s tolerance for risk increased. It also had no way to experience hope but when mission success as seen by the event probability analysis was perceived as high, the assemblers experienced higher levels of neural flux and a release of electrochemicals associated with higher neural connectivity. It had no equivalent to aggression but when the ship’s mission was threatened by rapidly developing threats it was capable of understanding, the risk-gradient position moved into the high positive values and the nodes that considered action options became highly stimulated.