The Medusa Chronicles (2.10-14)

Last time on The Medusa Chronicles: everyone sucks and we're in the Kuiper Belt.

And now the continuation.

Chapter 2.10​

A few years after the ship incident, and a few years before the present, Howard Falcon's final visit to Earth's surface. Unusually for him, it was for a musical orchestra. Less unusually for him, it was for a cutting edge technology gimmick-orchestra that was more about showing off the supertech than enjoying the music it produced. Kinda like this book.

The setting is an immense amphitheatre carved out of the ice of Antarctica, complete with ice-carved VIP boxes and ice-sculpted bars with naturally chilled drinks under them. All is lit by colorful neons set into the ridges of the ice structures, and emperor penguins who never had a chance to evolve a fear of humans wander curiously through the throngs at the outer platforms.

This all sounds really pretty, I will definitely give the book credit for this visual.

At the center of the arena is a perfect cube of ice one kilometer in diameter. Holy fuck this amphitheater is huge, it must only be one small part of it that has actual people seated. Before the performance begins, Kalindy Baskhar - who the book describes as the foremost musical composer of the era, explains her new opus.

This ice excavation was originally built as part of an experimental neutrino-sensor. She hooked it up to some lights, and wrote a script that reacts to the light patterns in a way that varies with the site's current neutrino activity but is still algorithmically determined to be what humans would consider "musical."

The world's greatest music composer, everyone.

If this were in any other book, I'd be sure it was a commentary on AI art. As it is...well, I'm still sure that it's a commentary on AI art, but I'm 50/50 on whether it's meant to be a criticism or an endorsement.

Also, some of the audience members in the pre-show are interested to meet Falcon, and others insult him to his face for being a cyborg. Marvel civilians infected with mutant-racism bacteria, what can you do.

Baskhar spergs about neutrinos and algorithms for multiple consecutive pages before the lights and music start. There's one paragraph about the actual sound of that music before Falcon gets interrupted by some officious asshole who decided it was appropriate to walk up and start babbling in his microphones within a literal minute of the show starting. Falcon assures her that she's not disturbing him, don't worry, he's more interested in the technology than in the music anyway. Wow I hadn't noticed. Anyway, this person is a representative of Earthgov's new Machine Affairs agency, in charge of overseeing the race of AI's that apparently started existing for no reason after Conseil saved that ship. People were apparently very enthusiastic about AI personhood for about a year before promptly changing their minds and being bigoted toward them.

Why is this all offscreen?

Why do we get detailed historical interludes about the Icarus mission, but not about this?

The whole thing with Falcon's presence at the ship incident with Conseil, meanwhile, is completely backward in terms of what it did and didn't show. Why WAS Falcon even there, if he didn't do anything or even see anything that wouldn't have been on the news that evening anyway?

Anyway. The government lady - Madri Kedar - gives a totally undisguised "as you all know" speech about the state of AI and treatment thereof, and then says her agency wants to hire Falcon as a special liaison. See, there's a thing they're doing, where they're sending the AI's to the Kuiper belt to do some mining work there where they can both be productive and outside of range of the apparently AU-sized xenophobia fields that every inhabited planet gives off.

Falcon, understandably, has opinions about this.

Kedar responds by politely telling him to shut the fuck up and stop being such a woke libtard.

Anyway, they're raising a new bunch of AI's to slave away in the Kuiper belt, and they want a human to live with them and guide their mental development in a deep space environment until they're deemed "adult" and ready for work. In particular, there's a prototype who they want Falcon to essentially raise, so that it in turn can raise the others. Falcon is better able to survive for prolonged periods in that environment than anyone else, and he's used to long solo missions. So, does he want the job?

...why did they have someone ambush him at the neutrino concert and interrupt him during the literal performance instead of, um, oh I don't know, sending an email?

Falcon surmises that the other reason they want him for the job is because they think he's half machine anyway and thus might be able to relate better. He says so aloud. She pretty much ignores it.

...

I should note here that in this conversation, Kedar refers to the neutrino algorithm song as "awful noise," and Falcon doesn't show any sign of disagreeing with her assessment. So, maybe the writers really did intend to use the orchestra to characterize an philosophically backward and creatively bankrupt culture.

On the other hand, Kedar isn't exactly portrayed positively, and Falcon is nonconfrontational enough that I can't just assume that his silence on the topic signifies agreement. Maybe we're meant to see her distaste for AI art as an extension of her villainous contempt for AI rights and judge her for it as well.

Dunno.

...

And...mostly out of boredom, partly out of vainglory, but also partly out of a desire to be an explorer of some kind again even if it's not of physical spaces this time. And...

...we then return to the present, with him having been human traffick'd out to Makemake by Djoni. The next chapter starts with Kedar landing, all of Falcon's novel experiences with the AI's in the meantime having happened offscreen.

Maybe there will be more interludes that actually show it. If we're lucky. As a treat.


I'm going to be really grateful when the book decides its ready to stop telling us about the story and start telling us the damned story. At this point that's a much bigger flaw than any of the bad plotting or socially clueless character writing.

So, here's hoping Falcon gets to work with the goddamned robots already in this next chapter. Or, barring that, a Pan Nation warship arrives on Makemake to conquer it in the name of simpmanity. Actually, screw the robots, I just want the second option now.

Chapter 2.11​

Meeting room in one of the ramshackle little hab camps on Makemake. Falcon has his serpentine bronze tentacle-body dressed up in a suit and tie that - when he holds himself up straight with his undercarriage hidden behind the conference table - lets him almost pass for a normal guy in a suit. Across the table from him sits Kedar and a couple of her colleagues from the robot wrangling agency. Next to him, unfortunately, sits Dr. Dhoni.

Right off the bat, Kedar does her best to ensure we don't start to like her. Asking Falcon if his latest set of surgeries went well, and then elaborating very quickly that she has to care because of his irreplaceability. And then flips out at him when he makes light of it.

Cue Kedar's companions rushing to make excuses for the people of Mars and Ceres and their AU-sized xenophobia fields.

Anyway. The situation out here in the Kuiper belt. There was an industrial accident that brought down one of the railgun-thingies the Machines use to launch masses of ice toward the inner system for ships to pick up. The Machines should be able to fix it on their own, and if they can't they should ask for help, and if they for some reason failed to do that they should still respond to hails. Their comms are still working. The pings are being exchanged just fine. But not a word. No responses to questions or commands.

Now, the sensible thing to do here would be to get a team of diplomats, engineers, and a security detail for them onto a well-stocked ship and send them out to see if the Machines have demands that need to be met or software corruption that needs fixing or anything else. However, that would be expensive, so instead they want to send Falcon alone.

...wait, why are Kedar and her colleagues coming out here in person at all, then? If they're going to send another ship full of baseline humans, why not send...oh whatever.

Anyway, there's another reason besides not needing much support or supplies that they wanted Falcon to do this. That being that the mining site in question is being overseen by Adam, the same AI that Falcon kinda-sorta played parent to a few years back. "Adam" is sort of a forced backronym that Falcon himself came up with; the AI wasn't actually named "Autonomous Deutsche-Turing Algorithmic Heuristic Machine, and its initials wouldn't exactly spell "Adam" even if that was its original name, but Falcon didn't sweat the details. Anyway, it's Falcon's old AI friend/sortofadoptivechild who's at the center of this industrial mystery.

I could see that being good reason to include Falcon as part of the TEAM sent to handle this. Not sufficient for sending him by himself though. This government-run mining interest that allegedly supplies vital materials for multiple colonies around the inner system is surprisingly stingy. Are there politicians trying to privatize it that could use any large expenses as ammunition?

...

I kinda hope that's not it. A peaceful synthesis between mid-20th century American regulated capitalism and Soviet command economics somehow, inexplicably, leading to the same Reagan/Thatcheresque neoliberal bullshit that we got IRL except a few decades later would be...disappointing, to say the least.

...

Also, remember that little toy robot that Babby Howard Falcon was playing with in the prologue? I didn't until just now, but Kedar brings it up, and, well.

"Not authorized by me."

So. Dhoni is basically forging his consent to shit like book licences. And he's not making an issue of it beyond some resentful whimpering.

Okay, seriously. Does she legally own him? Did she trick him into letting her replace enough of his remaining human tissues to push him over a legal line from "person" to "equipment" and then claim salvage rights?

I don't care how the book describes Hope Dhoni. I can no longer picture her not looking exactly like Makima.

Well, in the end, Falcon says that while the question of AI sentience and personhood are still up in the air, he personally considers Adam to be...well, the word he uses is "friend," but from what's been implied about his role in the AI's development and the time they spent together it might be a bit more like family. Well, depending on Falcon's own views on where Adam sits on the object-to-animal-to-person spectrum, I guess. But in any case, Falcon says that he'd go out there to find Adam and see if he needs help even if there were no industrial stakes or financial rewards.

Hmm. ARE there financial rewards? I'd assume so by default, even if realistically Dhoni will be taking all of it, but the topic hasn't been raised at all. The closest Kedar's cronies come to mentioning payment is sort of implicitly threatening to stop defending Dhoni's right to keep experimenting on Falcon within the government.

Anyway. The ice mine in question is a bit further out into the Kuiper belt. They've brought a little one-cyborg podship for Falcon to take, much like the one that once brought him to and from Jupiter. Falcon is ready to get going. End chapter.


So, if Falcon feels so strongly about Adam, why did we need Dr. Dhoni to drag him out to the Kuiper belt out of desperation while he was unconscious in order to make the plot happen?

Wouldn't it have been better if our ostensible protagonist had a little bit of agency, and decided to take the mission when he was sought out for it back on Ceres or in Earth orbit or whatever? Even if it's important for the story that Dhoni is an abusive tyrant who can do anything she wants to and with him, wouldn't letting him make the decision in this one case where their interests actually do align have made the story more engaging?

You know, honestly? Assuming for the moment that the story does have a good reason for not telling Falcon and Adam's story in chronological order, then I think the best place to start the novel would have been with Falcon's pod arriving at the mining site. All the exposition about the politics, Dhoni, Falcon's life since the events of the original Clarke story? That could just as easily be told bit-by-bit in retrospect, or in larger chunks via interlude chapters. The NEXT chapter after this one, sixty-six pages in, is the first chapter of the actual novel.

And hey, didn't "Meeting With Medusa" start with Falcon's pod arriving at Jupiter? Wouldn't that be a nice mirror of and tribute to the original?

And Jesus HMF Christ, the entire thing about the terror attack on the ship. There was no reason whatsoever for Falcon to have been there. His deep space savvy, cyborg physiology, and xenopsych experience are easily enough to explain why he'd have been chosen to work with Adam. The backstory with Conseil's first glimmer of sentience should have been an interlude chapter, and it should have been written from Conseil's perspective. Or maybe from Ham's perspective, if the simps are going to play an important enough role to need foreshadowing. One of the two. Either way, not Falcon.

Chapter 2.12​

Short chapter. Falcon gets his new podship (a hastily stripped-down and rejiggered service shuttle), and - since it surprisingly was never given a name - decides to christen it the Srinigar, after the region of India where Falcon took his first-ever balloon ride when he was a young man. That's a nice detail. I dig this, both for its own sake and as a bit of extra characterization for Falcon and what he deem important. And yeah, someone who remembers places moreso than people, values moments of adventure and boundary-pushing and considers them his most formative...cyborg or not, it would require a personality like that one to agree to that Jupiter mission.

And, the rest of the chapter is him launching the Srinigar and shutting himself down into sleep mode for the twenty-five day trip to the mining site. The chapter is two pages long, and a page and a half longer than it needed to be.

It's starting to feel like the writers are actually stalling for time or something.

Sixty-eight pages of waiting for the story, not sixty-six. I misspoke.


Anyway, the next chapter is the one where Falcon actually reaches the nameless iceball that the robots are mining. This one is much longer, and it looks like stuff actually happens in it. I guess if this book is going to start getting good anywhere, it'll be this next chapter. If it hasn't gotten interesting by then, it probably never will.

Here goes.

Chapter 2.13​

Falcon is automatically woken up a couple hours out from the target and starts slowing down for the landing. Well, "landing" might not actually be the right term in this case. This ice chunk is small enough that it doesn't even have the gravity to compact itself into a sphere, so "junction" or "attachment" might be more accurate.

Anyway, the final approach is well described. The Kuiper Belt is huge (should go without saying, since it wraps all the way around the solar system in an orbit wider than Pluto's, but I'll say it anyway), and while it contains countless asteroids and iceballs there's enough empty space between them to make each of them look and feel completely alone in an endless starry void. Additionally, Falcon's target is much further out into the belt than Makemake, so the sun is even weaker here. It would be indistinguishable from just a brighter-than-average star to someone who lacked Falcon's high-tech cybereyes. Baxter and Reynolds are good at describing the desolate beauty of space, I will give them that.

The nameless proto-comet that Adam and his spawn currently inhabit is marked by a thousand kilometer long tower that acts as a sort of hybrid centrifugal-magnetic-combustion launcher for sending resource parcels back to the humans. Railgun shoots the package out of the (weak) gravity well, centrifugal force accelerates it from there, and then at the end it shoots the projectile's back end with a laser to evaporate a little ice and propel it even faster via improvised rocket propulsion. The contents are mostly just water ice, but it's a lot cheaper to launch it from out here than it is to lift it out of Europa or Enceladus' gravity wells, and there are also some volatile chemicals in there that are in short supply for industrial uses. It's a zany system, but a reliable and affordable one.

Granted, I'm not sure how you'd go about safely catching these things once they reach the inner system. They might not be super hard or super heavy, but at those speeds...I guess you could repeat the laser-heated-reaction trick from the other side to slow it with an improvised retrorocket effect, but by that point they're likely to be spinning or tumbling pretty rapidly, which could make the trajectory pretty unpredictable...eh, I guess they've figured something out.

At any right, right now the immense space elevator cannon thingy is very visibly damaged. Looks like an impact or an explosion just smashed open its support struts and bent the shaft at a certain point along its length. Could have been a magnetic track misalignment, could have been a freak meteor impact, or it could have been sabotage. Just as reported, the Machines don't appear to have taken even the first steps toward repairing the damage, and while Falcon is picking up each AI's constant personal status reports and radio pings none of them are reacting to his approach. Even when Falcon transmits the standard "announcing my presence" signal, there's no response.

He tries an audio transmission, identifying himself by name and addressing Adam specifically. Still only silence.

Either the AI's are in a kind of stupor, they're actively rebelling, or there's some foul play going on with an outside party faking their status updates.

Falcon lands near the base of the superstructure and installs himself in a more suitable mobility carriage for this environment.

It's probably not viable in Earth-equivalent gravity, or even Mars-equivalent gravity, but on these little space icebergs it's the best option. Hell, depending on just how weak the gravity is it might be hard to get around at all without grippers on your feet.

The entrances to the processing plant under the tower are unbarred, and also unmanned. There are no Machines at work. No Machines coming out to meet him. No Machines jumping out to attack him either. Still, as he scuttles down the ramp and into the belly of the ice carving plant, Howard has a sense of alienation and unease. Even moreso when one of the employees scuttles over with six insectoid legs of its own and addresses him.

Surprisingly good turn of phrase here.

That feeling you get when the big friendly dog you've been petting suddenly tenses up and growls, and you realize that this whole time you've been playing around with a predatory animal bigger than you are with long, sharp teeth and no sense of longterm consequences. It was there all along. What kind of trick must you have been playing on yourself, to not notice?

On top of everything that goes without saying about an autonomous machine intelligence, this one is housed in an industrial scale robo-ant three times the size of Falcon's. It was mentioned earlier that Falcon's current arm modules are strong enough to crush coal into diamond if he's willing to spend the battery power for it, but he knows that this thing is stronger still.

It's Adam, naturally. As the administrator of this mine, he would be the one to step forward even if it weren't for the personal history with Falcon. The AI's radiotransmitted voice is described as high-pitched and childlike. Interesting. Was this set in stone by Adam's creators and/or the manufacturers of his current body setup, or is it something he chose? Chose, and perhaps is still continuing to choose every time he uses it?

Well, Adam is pleased to see him, and Falcon is pleased that Adam is apparently alright. Or...is he? When Falcon asks him if he's suffered any kind of damage or corruption, Adam tells him that he isn't entirely sure. He thinks his definition of "damage" may have shifted, somehow, sometime, and recent events have made him aware of this. He's been confused. Introverted. Paralysed, really, just trying to figure this out.

There was an accident. No foul play, Adam is sure, at least as most would define it. A misfire of the ice-launcher damaged it, and also killed a number of its Machine crew. It isn't the disaster itself that's had Adam and all his subordinate intelligences in a stupor, though. Rather, it's a question, one which Adam poses to Falcon now: why was the launcher more important than the Machines who operate it?

Falcon isn't sure what Adam means by that. Is Adam just upset that they didn't inquire about the lost robots but only the supply chain disruption? No, no it isn't that. Or at least, not JUST that.

Adam suddenly comments that Falcon has changed since the last time he saw him. And Adam himself, Falcon notes, has reverted to pronouncing his name with the robotic intonation that he'd trained him to not do. The tension is silently mounting as they wait to hear more from each other. Why does this feel so adversarial, when they used to be something like friends or even family?


Well, I said the book would either start getting better now or it never would. And, well, it's getting better. Hopefully it can keep it up. This is promising, though.

Obviously, Falcon was thinking biblically when he chose it for the kinda-sorta-first member of this new lineage of intelligent machines. I think the authors may have had a different literary Adam in mind, though. Or, well, a character who should have been thy Adam at least.

When we met the simps in arc one, they persistently came across as basically beggars. Small physically and politically. Inhabiting one small region of Earth's surface, surrounded by humans. I still think that episode was a waste of time overall, but I can see what the book is doing with that one detail at least. This time, the creation is not a beggar. Physically large. Control over an important supply line. Inhabiting a vast region that surrounds human territory (even if realistically they're only in a few different spots of it at a time).

This time, if we fuck around, we are going to find out. And it definitely appears as if we are fucking around.

Next chapter. Let's hopefully find out what it is about that accident that has Adam so much more disturbed than he thinks he should be.

Chapter 2.14​

The ice-launcher was damaged in a freak accident of the kind Falcon had erroneously assumed only humans were incompetent enough to have. The Machines had shut the launcher down to do some periodic maintenance. Some kind of unexpected magnetic discharge caused the railgun part of the tower to fire. The empty catapult-compartment had much lower mass than usual on account of there not actually being an ice parcel inside, but the thing was still heavy enough to smash up the parts of the track they'd been realigning and to destroy several of the Machines who had been working on them.

The launcher does have an emergency braking system. However, using it once the catapult is already in rapid motion would deal much greater damage to the launcher than what it ended up suffering. As such, Adam is only authorized to pull the brakes mid-launch in order to protect the launcher from even greater damage, or to save a human life (ie, if there's a spaceship right in the line of fire or something). So, he couldn't do it. Instead, Adam just formulated the best plan he and his networked thinkers could to get as many Machines out of danger as possible before it hit them. He saved many. Not all, but many. He isn't sure if the evacuation plan he went with really was the best one, in hindsight, but at the time, with the information he had available, it seemed to be.

Wondering if he could have saved more of his crew if he'd thought about the problem a little differently is only secondary to the real problem, though. Why was the BEST solution, the one that would have resulted in zero Machine deaths, not made available to him?

The thing is, Adam already knows the answer. The cost to EarthGov of replacing those Machine crewdroids and repairing the minor launcher damage put together was still less than the cost of repairing the much greater launcher damage that the brakes would have caused. He thought he was fine with that. He was designed to be fine with that. But.

During their time on this protocomet, Adam's team created a new unit named 90. He'd intended for this one to be a bit more autonomouss than the others, more like Adam himself, so it could act as a second-in-command as the operations grew. In order to make the next generation of Machines better adapted to their work environment, Adam tried switching 90 on for the first time while it was latched onto the end of the launcher, watching the stars fly passed with the ice chunk's rotations. Monitoring the newborn's thoughts, Adam discovered that the very first thing it did when it woke up was wonder if the protocomet was spinning around, or if the stars were orbiting around the protocomet. Adam doesn't say it explicitly, but this is damned close to what pre-scientific humans thought when they looked at the sky.

A moment after being "born," 90 took into account the centrifugal force its internal sensors were detecting and determined that the object it was perched on was in fact the thing in motion. But then, a moment after that, it had another thought; what if the stars were, themselves, asymmetrical spinning objects? In that case, mightn't the motion 90's sensors felt actually be caused by the stars' gravity fields as they swung parts of themselves closer and then further from him?

To explore that possibility, 90 started putting together a model of what this centrifuge-starred version of the universe might look like. Including laws of physics that were compatible with the rest of 90's sensory experiences and pre-programmed basic knowledge. Adam and Falcon both recognize the parallels with Einstein's series of whimsical dreams that led him to discovering general relativity. And, just as with Einstein, the whimsy led to discovery. When 90 had matured and learned more, it recognized that some of the inferences it made about pinwheel-universe's physics might actually be applicable in real life too. The other AI's analysed it, and all concurred; it appeared as if 90's moment of outside perspective from a novel angle had actually led to the expansion of transhumanity's understanding of physics.

Adam's group wrote down their findings in APA format and submitted it to the EarthGov Science Directorate for peer review. They never heard back from them.

90 was killed in the ice launcher accident. Adam wonders if, perhaps, he was wrong to use the evacuation plan that he used. Allowing more Machines to survive, but not this particular Machine. But again, the bigger question is why he wasn't allowed to save all of them. He understands the economics of the situation of course, but he was also programmed to value things like the advancement of the state of human knowledge (even if at a lower priority than gathering resources). 90 and the others' discoveries proved that Machines have - at least potentially - an intrinsic value beyond their industrial utility, and EarthGov had reason to be aware of this. Why were the protocols not adjusted to take this into account? The complexities of the situation make the priorities hard to work out, on top of which, well...Adam and his brood have been developing some interdependent social behaviors to improve efficiency, and the sudden loss of several Machines has made strange cognitive things happen.

All Falcon can do is repeat what he said before: EarthGov makes the decisions here, not Adam and not Falcon. Adam asks - in that same childlike voice, but with that quiet sense of foreboding menace rising - if Falcon has come to give him orders. Falcon answers, honestly, that he isn't quite sure. He was just told to see what was wrong with the mine and try to solve it, but he wasn't told how he should do this.

For now, Falcon tells Adam, he will simply tell his overseers that he's made contact with the Machines and that the problem is being worked on. That will at least buy them time to decide how to proceed.


Well dang.

On one hand, this is definitely one of the more convincing leadups to a robot uprising I can recall reading about. The pathway from the Machines' programmed directives and learning behaviors leading to confusion and then dysfunction and then (presumably sometime in the near future) rejection makes sense at each step along the way with a bare minimum of anthropomorphising. Not NO anthropomorphising, to be fair (for instance, I'm not sure why Adam would be mourning 90 instead of just creating a perfect replica of them unless he'd been given some priorities you really would not want to give an AI servitor), but very little. I'm not exactly a computer scientist, but to my very limited understanding of machine intelligence this seems pretty close to plausible.

On the other...I'm having trouble understanding what the hell they were thinking with that ice launcher design. Like, if the railgun was capable of firing at all, shouldn't it also be capable of unfiring by switching polarity? Adam said that the system does have a slow-braking system that works just like that, but that the oppositely charged rails were unplugged as part of the maintenance. Why would they ever unplug HALF of the rails while leaving the other set connected? Frankly, this might not even be a problem with the design itself so much as the Machines being sloppy.

I mean. I can buy AI's being sloppy in the same way that humans can get sloppy. That doesn't absolve EarthGov of being so stingy with the emergency solid brakes. But it does make Adam look a hell of a lot worse than I think the story wants him to look.

At any rate, it seems that EarthGov inherited America's penchant for corporate greed causing stupid industrial disasters, and the USSR's penchant for bureaucratic apathy causing stupid industrial disasters, and synthesized them into something just as maddening as the sum of its parts. With a side order of "let's antagonize the intelligent AI's we've left largely to their own devices beyond our ability to easily monitor or reign in."

You know, with how humanity as a whole has been portrayed throughout this book I kind of just want Falcon to sit down and start tinkering with Adam's ethical restrictions. Then the two of them can start modifying the ice launcher and scouring the Kuiper Belt for fissile elements.

Maybe that'll actually happen. It seems like everything's been set up for it.


I'll stop it here for now. Glad this book is finally getting good.