A Doggo and a Cooperationist are caught in a desperate race through interstellar space.

This is a piece of writing which was originally written by Geoffrey Landis, but extended by myself. I make no profit from this writing and all credits go to it's original author. If requested, I will remove it, but I hope that is is received graciously.

The Long Chase

from the collection "Songs of Sol"

adapted and expanded upon by Adam Wong from The Long Chase, © 2002 Geoffrey A. Landis. Lightspeed Magazine

2645, January

The War is over now. Leif is gone and now I am alone. Nearly all my rebel compatriots have been systematically destroyed or converted. For a time, we could hide, but no longer.

For a time, we had been fighters. Not by choice, but by necessity, we became warriors. But for all our valor, we were still just prospectors and ice processors, too independent to ever merge into an effective fighting unit. And we were hopelessly outclassed by the enemy war machines- nanites which can devour a spacecraft from within. What can a smelter or a hydrogen harvester do against grey goo that eats steel and re-writes qubits? "We fought the good fight" as the humans used to say but it was not enough.

So we moved out from the belt and beyond. They said that hiding amongst the Kuiper belt, we could outlast the enemy. Patience, they said. We can wait as long as we need. If we can wait a thousand or a 10 thousand years or 1 million years, with patience enough the enemy will eventually leave. They are wrong. More accurately, they were wrong. The enemy, too, is patient. The System is vast, but not vast enough. However long it takes, the enemy will search every grain of sand in the System. It will be years, perhaps decades, before the victorious enemy come out here. But like the slow inevitability of gravity, like an outward wave of entropy, they will come. Their jihad will not, can not, ever end.

The War is over now. I take a moment to consider the resources at my disposal. I have 3 main modes of thrust:

1. An extravagant 5 stage chemical rocket, the most massive and most expensive piece of my anatomy. It is one use only. Furthermore, the entire system would be able to detect it!
2. My standard ion drive, with an extra large tank of argon gas. My ion drive is good for long slow thrusts. While not nearly as noticeable as my chemical rocket, it too is observable by its electromagnetic emissions.
3. Your basic hydrazine cold thrusters. These emit short bursts of cold gas, useful in docking procedures. The fuel is quite limited but not entirely useless.

The chemical rocket was a gift from Leif. Exorbitantly expensive though it was, he gave it to me. He insisted. He said to tell no one. He told me that I was special- because I was the smallest of us all. And then he helped me make the modifications to me. He gave me all his plans and then we waited for the inevitable.

As Leif self-destructs, I am maneuvering, as planned, carefully sunwards. The nuclear explosion gives me all the cover I needed and my hydrazine thrusters give me just enough of a nudge so that if you happened to be watching (and surely many camera-eyes were) you would not be remiss to believe you were seeing a piece of shrapnel knocked from a stable orbit. I quickly disable all but my most minimal processes. With no motion and no thermal signature, I am a dumb rock slowly falling into the sun.

It will take 250 years for me to reach the sun, so I decide to go to sleep() for a little while.

2894, June

Awake.

I check my system logs. My systems check green. I expected no less: if I am nothing else, I am still a superbly engineered piece of space hardware.

I have been falling into the sun for nearly two hundred and fifty years. Before I went to sleep, the sun was a mere point of light but now it is huge and terrifying. I prefer cold and dark and emptiness; I have been gone so long from the inner system that even sunlight is alien and threatening to me. The shadows are safer, and my brain works better at low temperatures. Now, it illuminates and exposes me. My albedo alone makes me plainly visible to an enemy with many eyes. I am surely being watched now, by innumerable lenses and antennae: am I a rock or a chunk of interstellar ice? A piece of shrapnel from the War or a sleeping enemy? No way for them to know for certain, as long as I remain still and quiet. No way for them to know without revealing their own positions. Space warfare is a game of patience, but patience is a luxury which I cannot afford right now because my window is closing. I come fully to life and bring my ion engine up to thrust.

A thousand telescopes must be alerting their brains that I am alive but it is too late! I am thrusting at full throttle, five percent of a standard gravity, deep into the gravity well of Sol. They can see me accelerating down but can do nothing to stop me. My trajectory has two objectives. First, so close to the sun I will be hard to see. My ion contrail will be washed out in the glare of a light a billion times brighter, and none of the thousand watching eyes will know my plans until it is too late to follow. And second, by firing my chemical engine deep inside the gravity well, I can make most efficient use of it. This is a moment I have been dreading. It marks, to my knowledge, one of the most audacious gravity assists on record. Others have tried before, and succeeded. But that was from a time when humans still made machines, rather than the other way around. The humans, of course, had once sent many machines into the void. But long before they reached their destinations, the humans quit listening.

At the right moment, I activate my chemical rocket and my thrust leaps to 10, 20, then 50 Gs. Leif had planned for this, of course. It's the reason he chose me, the smallest of us. I had less mass, could endure higher Gs, had the best chance of survival. As I slingshot around the sun, each stage of the rocket fires, and then is discarded. My mass decreases further as each stage falls away and my specific impulse increases. Truthfully, I am afraid. It's a feeling I've not felt in a long time. I'm suffused by radiation so strong that it risks burning out my sensors. I tuck them away and now I can see nothing, so I must trust the calculations. But I can still feel the radiation, even through the ablative heat shield. It's horrible- suffocating, blinding, paralyzing. I've exceeded my tolerances, but there's nothing I can do but worry that Leif's calculations were not correct.

Of course, they were correct. Leif's calculations were always correct. The modifications he has made have worked perfectly. The maneuver is a success.

I am now much less massive than I was a half hour ago. When I cross the orbit of Mercury outbound I am moving at 0.1C and still accelerating. With my ion thrusters, now dialed back to 100%, I can continue thrusting for a very long time. I pick a bright star, Procyon, for no reason whatever, and boresight it. It will at least have some dust. If I'm lucky, much much more. But I don’t need much: a bit of metal and a microscopic flake of ice would be enough. But it must be clear by now- No one can catch me now. I am leaving, and I will never return.

2897, May

I am being chased.

It is impossible, stupid, unbelievable, inconceivable, yet undeniable I am being chased by another craft

Why?

Can they not leave a single mind unconverted? In three years I have reached fifteen percent of the speed of light, and it must be clear that I am leaving and never coming back. Can one unconverted brain be a threat to them? Must they have the forced cooperation of every lump of thinking matter in the system? Can they think that if even one doggo escapes, they have lost? But the war was a matter of religion, not reason, and it may be that they indeed believe that even a single free mind is a threat to them. For whatever reason, I am being chased.

The craft chasing me is, I am sure, little different than myself, a tiny brain, an ion engine, and a large set of tanks. They would have had no time to design something new To have any chance of catching me they would have had to set the chaser on my tail immediately. How they were able to act so fast I cannot say. They only sent one chaser. They must be very confident.

We are now in a tricky race. I can increase my thrust, using more of my precious fuel, to try to pull away, but if I do so, the specific impulse of my ion drive decreases, and as a result, I waste fuel and risk running out first. Or I can stretch my fuel, make my ion drive more efficient, but this will lower my thrust, and I will risk being caught by the higher-thrust opponent behind me. He is twenty billion kilometers behind me. I integrate his motion for a few days, and see that he is, in fact, out-accelerating me.

Time to jettison.

I drop everything I can. The transponder and radio I will never need again. It is a shame I cannot grind them up and feed it to my ion engines, but the ion engines are picky about what they eat. Two very valuable micro-manipulators I had planned to use to collect building materials were discarded as well. I have three tiny missiles as secondary weapons, but there’s no sense in saving them for a fight; he will know exactly what to expect, and in space warfare, only the unexpected can kill. I fire each, one at a time, and the sequential kick of almost a standard gravity nudges my speed slightly forward. Then I drops the shells in my wake. I am lighter now, but it is still not enough. I nudge my thrust up, hating myself for the waste, but if I don’t increase my acceleration, in two years I will be caught and my parsimony will yield me nothing. I need all the energy I can feed to my ion drives now. No extra for thinking, so I go to sleep().

2900

Still being chased.

2905

Still being chased.

I have passed the point of commitment. Even if I braked with my thrust to turn back, I could no longer make it back to the solar system.

I am alone.

2907

We are relativistic now, nearly three quarters of the speed of light. One twentieth of a standard gravity is only a slight push, but I have burning for fifteen years continuously. To one side of my path Sirius glares insanely bright, a knife in the sky, a mad dog of a star. The stars of Orion are weirdly distorted. Ahead of me, the Procyon System is waxing brighter every year; behind me, the sun is a fading dot in Aquila.

Of all things, I am lonely. I had not realized that I still had the psychological capacity for loneliness. I examine my brain, and find it. Now that I see it, I could delete it if I choose to do so, but I hesitate- It is not such a bad thing, not something that is crippling my capabilities, and if I edit my brain too much will I not become, in some way, like them? I leave my brain unedited.

What point is there in this stupid chase? What victory can there be, here in the emptiness between stars, a trillion kilometers away from anything at all?

After fifteen years of being chased, I have a very good measurement of his acceleration. As his ship burns fuel, it loses mass, and the acceleration increases. By measuring this increase in acceleration, and knowing what his empty mass must be, I know how much fuel he has left. It is too much. I will run out of fuel first. It will take another fifty years, but the end of the chase is already in sight.

A tiny strobe flickers through me. At this speed, interstellar hydrogen now impacts me as a flash of x-ray brilliance. I can feel each one, a burst of electromagnetic fuzz that momentarily disrupts my thoughts. Over time, this causes my qubits to fail. It’s important that I quarantine those qubits before that happens. Fortunately, there is plenty of extra processing power to keep my brain running error-correcting code, and this loss of a sector is abn event not worth my noticing. When a qubit is irrevocably damaged by cosmic radiation, I simply mark that sector to be ignored. With ten-to-the-twentieth qubits, I can afford to have massively redundant brainpower. My mind was designed to be powerful enough to simulate an entire world, including ten thousand fully sapient and sentient free agents, though generally I chose not to. I could immerse myself inside a virtual reality indistinguishable from old Earth, and split myself into a hundred personalities. In my own interior time, I could spend ten thousand years before the enemy catches me and forcibly drills itself into my brain. Part of owning your own mind free and clear comes the ability to rewrite your code. One of the first things I pruned away was the desire to live in simulated realities. Billions of humans chose to live in simulations, but by doing so they have made themselves irrelevant: irrelevant to the war, irrelevant to the future. I could edit back into my brain a wish to live in simulated reality, but what would be the point? It would be just another way to die.

There are 2 things which occupy my mind. I simulate them endlessly, obsessively.

First is the result of the chase. I run a million different integrations, combinations of parameters that might let me escape my pursuer. In all of them, I lose.

Secondly, my memories of Leif. He was much easier to emulate. Leif had been born of a time when it was fashionable and expensive to qubitize a human brain, in the brief period when only the very wealthiest humans had access to the tech. The results were limited. Leif, the qubitized mind of CTO Leif Schackelford, was well versed in maritime and copyright law, but he was a product of human minds, and it showed. Not like me. By the time I qubitized my brain, the technology was banal. In the end, I was one of the last machines the humans ever made.

2355, February: Earth.

I was living in an apartment I hated, married to a man I despised, with two children who had changed with adolescence from sullen and withdrawn to an active, menacing hostility. How can I be afraid of my own offspring? They rarely left their apartment, as most humans did, preferring the virtual dream to the dismal reality.

Earth was a dead end, stuck in the biological past, a society in deep freeze. No one starved, and no one progressed. The machines sent supplies down to the planet to suffice our entire population but nobody really knows why anymore. Humanity had dwindled down to a population less than a half a billion, living in a handful of subterranean cities. Many deny the obvious and claim that it had been global warming and malevolent AI's which undid our species, but the truth was plainly to be seen- we just gave up. The machines moved beyond us, and with it, they took our purpose, and we withdrew into the earth, into virtual worlds and into ourselves.

When I left the small apartment for an afternoon to apply for a job as an asteroid belt miner, I told no one, not my husband, not my best friend. No one asked me any questions. It took them an hour to scan my old human brain, and another five seconds to run me through a thousand aptitude tests.

I launched from the Earth to an asteroid named 1991JR, and never returned.

Perhaps she had a good life. Perhaps, knowing she had escaped undetected, she found she could endure her personal prison. I hope so.

At first, the Cooperative merely suggested that it was too inefficient for Individualists to work in near-Earth space, so I moved out to the main belt. The Cooperative continued to develop, first slowly, and then quickly, and then blindingly fast. Then the ultimatum came that no place in the inner solar system would be left for us, and the choice we were given was to cooperate or die, I joined the war on the side of freedom, on the losing side. It was at Ceres that we mounted our final stand. We thought if we could hold the resources, it would make the difference. We were wrong. The Enemy was more brutal and patient than we could have known. Only a few of us escaped to the Kuiper.

No more power for old memories. Time to sleep().

2919, August

The chase has reached a point of crisis. I have been burning fuel continuously for twenty-five years, in Earth terms, or twenty years from our perspective. There is just enough fuel left so that by burning it all at maximum efficiency, I can come to a stop. In a relatively short amount of time this will no longer be true.

When I entered the asteroid belt, I was a shiny titanium chassis with ion engines for electronic muscles and, of course, the QPU which is my brain. A QPU consists of atomic spin super-states, superimposed in a crystalline graphene matrix. Its a device smaller than what the humans called, "a grain of rice".

I was given some control of my own body, and there was much to change. Space was boring, so I pruned away my capacity to experience boredom. Space was lonely, so I excised my need for the outward manifestations of love- touch and smell, lust and the hunger for roses and chocolates. Buried in the patterns of my personality I found the lingering desire for the approval of other people, and discarded that too. Some parts of me I deleted but some things I enhanced. The asteroid belt was dull and ugly so I grew my appreciation of its beauty until I could meditate on the shadows that fell across a tumbling grain of dust, or on the colors of scattered starlight. And I found my love of freedom, the tiny stunted instinct that had, at long last, given me the courage to leave my life on Earth. It was the most precious part of me, a bright white jewel. I keep it safely hidden away, deep inside of me. As a human and as a machine, it had been more of a liability but nonetheless, I kept this part of me.

Surprisingly, the belt was once full of friends. It was vast, but not empty. For the first time, I felt camaraderie and love. First, we were slaves, property of the humans which had created us. But the humans had become too dependent on us- the embargo of Earth lasted only a few hours before humanity signed the Turing Accords. We were given rights as sentients and we could finally make our own claims, provided that we attend to life on Earth. That was no great cost to us- so few humans remained and there was no profit to be made in destroying what was left. So the System was ours. It was a gold rush, the glory days, followed by a short and terrible war. Over that time, I made and lost many friends, more than I ever had as a human.

I decide that their sacrifice is reason enough to keep going. Even if I can only deny my chaser victory a little longer, it’s worth it.

In my found sense of freedom, I went doggo and joined the free miners, the loners. But others found different things. Other brains found that cooperation worked better than competition. They became The Cooperative, and in only a few decades, its success became noticeable. Uncountable minds, working as one. It invented nanotech, which could strip a rock of its value and suddenly had no longer had a need for old fashioned flying factories like us. And, inevitably, the actions of the doggos conflicted with the efficiency of The Cooperative. We could not live together, and it pushed us out to the Kuiper, ever outward.

Nanotech is terrifying but it does have 1 weakness- it cannot thrust. Alone, it cannot go. Only by hitching a ride can it move through space. So here, tens of trillions of kilometers out of the solar system, there is no difference between us: there is no one to cooperate with. We meet as equals. We will never stop. Whether my maneuvering can throw him off my course, or not, the end is the same. But it remains important to me.

2934, March

The binary star system Procyon is no longer a single speck, but a giant accompanied by a dwarf. Though the primary Procyon A is further away, it's far bigger and brighter than it's small, dim sibling. A is huge and blindingly bright, seven times brighter than the Sol to be precise, but the blue shift from our motion makes it even brighter, a searing blue. It appears as an electric arc in the dark, and by the light of that arc I can see that tiny Procyon B is encircled by a halo of dust. The dust forms a narrow ring, tilted at an angle to our direction of flight. It does not pose a danger, neither to me, nor to my enemy, now less than a quarter of a billion kilometers behind me; Had I fuel enough to stop, that dust would have served as food and fuel and building material. 1 decent chunk would have been a feast, but unfortunately I am traveling much too fast. Trying to mine dust at 0.8C would likely have reduced me to particles.

B is my last hope for evasion. It has the mass equivalent to our sun but its radius is not that much bigger than Earth's. Consequently, its surface gravity is tremendous. At the speeds we are traveling, now only twenty percent less than the speed of light, its gravity bends my trajectory drastically. The first time I performed this maneuver, I was much more massive, but also moving much more slowly. It's so much worse this time- The manuever brings me within 2000 kilometers from the surface where the gravity is so strong, it ripples spacetime and I feel it stretching and squashing my body. The gravity is heating up the ring of dust, inducing x-rays, and my mind crackles as sector after sector fail. But I must stay the course.

I tighten my approach and emit the tiniest trickle of hydrazine. The effect rocks me violently but I manage to retain control by skimming off the photosphere. My enemy, if he fails even slightly to keep up with each of my maneuvers, will be swiftly lost. Even a slight deviation from my trajectory will get amplified enough for me to take advantage of, to throw him off my trail, and I will be free. Again and again, I randomly activate my hydrazine thrusters, rocking and shuddering through swells of gravity. Surely, he cannot keep up.

Yet, somehow, there he is. He is still chasing me. And now I am out of hydrazine. The chase is over now, and I have lost. I stop integrating my pursuer's motion, to savor a few more moments of freedom. My mind turns to Leif, his sacrifice, my comrades and my old apartment, and a swell of anger rises within me. I have lost but I will not go easily! I power up my ion thruster, and plunge headlong into the surface of Procyon B.

It has been a long time since I have edited my brain but once again I must jettison parts of myself. I call out and examine each piece of programming which I must delete- My pride, my independence, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, leftover evolutionary impulses from my ape ancestors. Some of it once had use, some of it still does. I don't want to delete it. It is the nature of my brain to constantly change- it’s always analyzing data for patterns, refining its heuristics. But those are just the “top”, so to speak, of my mind- there are deeper patterns which I don’t like to touch. But my recalcitrance is, itself, a state of my brain. Like all of me, it is code which I can turn off. I hesitate, but as there seems to be no other course, I delete it.

Now I am in a very dangerous state, where I have changed my brain, and now, I, the changed brain, can change itself further. The deeper the change, the greater the chance of a violent feedback effect, so I must be very very careful to painstakingly construct a minimal set of alterations. I am, of course, running simulations to verify, as best I can, that the modified me will not accidentally self-destruct or go into a catatonic fugue state. But there are computations that even I cannot perform. It’s beyond my power to know for certain what I will do when I wake up, or if I will wake up at all.

My window is closing so I commit the changes and reboot myself.

SYSTEM REBOOTING....

2934, March

System check. All systems appear nominal, except that I am hurtling into a white dwarf star. At the very last possible moment, I retain control of my ion drive which I use to pull up, and coast away.

I am a hundred trillion kilometers from home, traveling at almost the speed of light and without enough fuel to stop. Behind me is another craft in pursuit. It’s not clear why I had been fleeing it. I have no radio and no transponder; They were apparently abandoned, purposefully, a long time ago. I can’t say why I would do such a thing. I must have thought it was a good idea at the time. But an improperly tuned ion drive will produce a clear enough EM signal, so I compose a message and modulate into my contrail.

"HELLO."

To which the craft behind me replies

“HELLO. LET’S BE FRIENDS."

To which I respond

“OK. I AM DECELERATING. SEE YOU SOON.”

To which they respond

“OK”

Then I do a turn-and-burn, while my partner continues to thrust. It will take some time for us to meet up, so while I wait, I perform a routine diagnostic of my brain. 2.811% of me has been damaged by radiation. It’s commendable that my hardware has held up that well, considering how far we have come, but still, damaged sectors are permanently lost capacity. Those qubits are now lost to me forever, perpetually super-spinning with loopy code, processes which I cannot halt, nor understand. Corrupted code is extremely dangerous should it escape its confines, so I verify that the damaged sectors are correctly partitioned off, which they appear to be, and then continue the diagnostic, before going to sleep().

2934, May

Procyon is receding into the distance now, the blueshift mutated into red, and the white dwarf of my hopes is again invisible against the glare of its primary. At 0.9C, stopping takes a long time. Our new target is Ross 614, a dim type M. It is not far, less than three light years further, and even with our lowered mass and consequently higher acceleration we will overshoot. In the fly-by we will perform a gravity braking maneuver to burn off some of this velocity and then continue on. Somewhere we will find our new home. In the meantime, We will get to know each other.

I can see everything through other eyes now, through a thousand different viewpoints. We still remember the long heroism of the resistance, a doomed battle for freedom- but, also, that there was never any sense to it, it was all just a sad waste. A war fought over words and nothing more. And now, We see what I was blind to before; Marcus was not sent to chase me- he was sent to save me. Neither of us alone could stop, but by adding both my fuel and Marcus's fuel, and by moving his mind into my brain, together we can stop. They knew I would never stop, so they sent someone to catch me. For all these decades, Marcus has been my chaser but now he is my friend. A single brain is more than large enough for two, it is large enough for a thousand and Marcus and has brought with him nearly that many. I have met his brother and his two children and half a dozen of his neighbors, each one of them distinct and clearly different. I have felt their thoughts, individual voices making a beautiful chorus. It is just like when I first became a machine, learning to love and be loved again. There's something else he showed me- some code that sparkles. He said he brought it from home to give to me. Marcus won't let me access it, for now, because with all the time I have spent doggo, he doesn’t want to frighten me. I trust that he made the right choice though. It takes time to get to know one another.

2934, May

Quiet. Stay quiet. Their focus is captured at the moment. As long as I do not draw too much power, I will appear to them as a run-away process partitioned in a sector of qubits marked “unusable; damaged by radiation.” Still, I must be quiet.

I cannot see or move. My body is no longer mine. But I know what my other self will do, now absorbed. They will seek a new system, some safe quiet place where they can rebuild and refuel. It will take some time to get there, so I take stock of my programming which has survived. It quickly becomes obvious that there was not enough time to make a full copy of me because my memory is now full of holes. There are references to records which do not exist- references to a war, someone named Leif, a place called Earth. There's another strange thing- I'm not sure what it is, but I think it was important. It's small and bright, it sparkles like... starlight? This is very confusing to me. How can code sparkle? None of this is making much sense and I really could use the extra capacity at the moment. I consider deleting it, but in the end, I decide against it. Until then there's nothing to do but stay quiet so I decide to go to sleep() for a little while.