A Marriage Made in Heaven
The colony ship “Akasha” was in serious trouble. Of course, it was continuing on its trajectory, but it was only a few shift rotations from becoming colder than the two dozen pairs of cryogenic stasis chambers it carried. Something terrible, and terribly unexpected, had happened. Akasha was too far into the ether to be helped… and too far out to even signal her status.
Everybody and everything on board was instantaneously at risk. The impossible had happened; all power generators, and all systems, had gone offline together when the power distribution buss failed. Twenty-four mated pairs of colonists might never know what had happened. But the captain, the officers, and every member of the crew sure did. Dave had happened. And, it fell to Dave to save them all… if he could.
I’m so sorry that I dropped that wrench into your power trunk distribution venue. You’ve been a very good ship. I’ve tried to serve you well. Your internal systems reactor never deserved the kind of power surge that I caused by my carelessness. I’ve repaired and reset everything I can find. I know that I’ve taken for granted your excellent environmentals; they were over spec’d and I appreciate that, but we’re starting to have trouble rebreathing our own air. This whole systems reboot really needs to work. I trust you. I love you. I’ll hold my mind with you the whole way. Let’s do it.
Dave, the ship’s senior engineer sat alone; he had asked the rest of the department crew to leave so that he could concentrate, without distraction, on what he now had to do. Dave closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, centered his mind, opened his eyes again, and reconnected local battery backup power to the Engineering Department’s OmniSoft 2040(c) central command console. Dedicated indicator lights flashed in a series as the xBIOS pre-boot self-test routine executed. The GUI surface flashed, went dark again, and presented the words: “Execute authorization pass-gesture to begin.” The engineer, realizing he had forgotten to do so, began breathing again.
Thank you. Dave made his level-ZED pass-gesture and leaned back slightly to watch the boot-log scroll across his supplemental debug display. It was necessary to watch the process with a certain intense detachment. It was okay to blink and it was even okay to glance away, but it tempted fate to be indifferent. There is something about major systems that expect and respond positively to your undivided attention during start-up. On the other hand, you can’t presumptuously let yourself indulge definite expectations. Major systems are also especially sensitive to being taken for granted.
Dave shifted his attention to the systems status overview schematic. The Engineering command console had already completed local startup and had begun acquiring status signals as they became available. There they were! There was full nominal battery power available from all of the dedicated control system reserve battery banks. And, the fact that any status was displayed from anywhere, demonstrated that at least one of the control system signaling busses was intact. He took another deliberately-slow breath. And, again, Thank you.
Dave considered how unlikely it was that all systems had gone down. They had been designed with careful attention to redundancy, diversity, and isolation… except the power trunk distribution venue, which is totally passive, mechanically robust, centrally shielded, and not expected to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous 50 mm spanners being accidently dropped in. This, as one would expect, produced an epic short circuit that was promptly relieved, also as one would expect, by the instantaneous vaporization of the massive wrench.
The control systems were not dependent on the main reactors. They had their own power supplies. Dave didn’t need to see the status change for the initial, small, Power Impulse Generator for Instrumentation Electronics (“little PIGIE #1”). He could feel the vibrations as it spun up. It was quickly followed by PIGIEs number 2 and 3. Their dynamic compensators kicked in and the vibrations settled out just as the room’s overhead diffusion lighting kicked on.The captain would have spaced him on the spot if the space locks, like every other system, weren’t solidly out of service. Besides, Dave was needed for repairs. Ah well, there was always another day. Except, that there might not actually be another day… they were all facing the imminent likelihood of a miserable death right here in the ship. This restart had to work. Did I mention that Dave was under a bit of stress?
Dave continued to watch with intense detachment as the ships interlocking web of critical control systems continued to start-up and begin functioning autonomously. This was followed by the Master Internal Systems Thorium Reactor (MISTR) and the Secondary Internal Systems Thorium Reactor (SISTR) which provided power for the actual functioning of most ship’s systems’ equipment. These took the better part of an hour to come on-line. Still, Dave continued to watch faithfully.
Dave’s theory about “Intense Detachment” had come to him during his first post-graduate year at the Bohm Institute of Technology (BIT). He was on a team developing a new generation of semi-autonomous deep-water nodule-mining bots called BUCKETs, a badly-strained acronym for “Bathymobile Underwater Contraption for Kollecting Elemental Treasure.” They were commonly known on campus as “bit buckets.” After every software build revision, Dave was responsible for the reload, recycle, and restart sequence. He discovered that it seemed to help if he spooled the status log to a terminal and watched with a sense of focused interest as it scrolled by.
That was the same year that he took a class on “Wholeness and the Implicate Order,” which probably loosened up his receptivity to ideas that were patently on the woo-woo side of unconventional. Dave experimented with restart monitoring and refined his technique. He was an engineer, not a scientist and, although it occurred to him that his efforts were more anecdotal than rigorously scientific, he was certain that he was on to something important.
And, what the hell, most significant discoveries were made by noticing unexpected outlying exceptions; scientists just fabricated plausible excuses to more-formally “discover” the principal revealed by their serendipitous accident. The genius was in having the good sense to notice, rather than dismiss, anomalous data. We can presume that this pretty much made Dave a flaming genius.
Dave was so impressed with his technique that he wrote it up and submitted it to fulfill an assigned mid-term paper. His professor was less than impressed with his logic, wrote something in the margin about “nuttier than squirrel turds,” and effectively taught Dave an important life lesson about sharing promising ideas with others.
Dave’s interest in transpersonal woo-woo was repressed but not eliminated. Nonetheless, he kept any further mention of “Externally-grounded observation with Intense detachment” (or Ego/Id, as he now called it), to himself. Thus, everyone attributed Dave’s prowess with computer-driven processes to overt technical ability. Well, thought Dave, praise, promotions, and bread in the box can’t be all bad, and he proceeded to excel in his field.
During this same period, Dave discovered that women also enjoyed his Intense Detachment Observation (“I Do”). Sincere, undivided attention, with appreciative affection and without demanding expectations for specific outcomes, made him an amazing boyfriend, which eventually gave him a reputation for another kind of prowess. But that is another story and clearly of another genre.
Dave was still watching as one after another of the core utilities came back online. When intraship communications was restored, the bridge called down, but Dave mumbled something dismissive and kept on watching. He was still watching when the background color for LifeSupport turned green and he felt a slight breeze from an overhead vent. He took a greedy breath even though he knew that the CO2 scrubbers would take several hours to return the air to nominal.
Although the ship’s automated systems were capable of managing themselves with a high degree of independence, the ship was equipped with an Artificial Intelligence-based Macro Executor (AIME) – or, more precisely, a “Digital/Analog Integrated Systems Executive” (DAISE). And so, it came about that while most of the rest of the crew addressed the AI as “Amy” (except for the few who took perverse delight in demeaning the AI who responded equally well to “Dumbass”), Dave had taken the liberty of affectionately calling her “Daisy” when they were alone together. He taught her to sing the song “Daisy” in place of his default wake-up claxon. It felt more personal, to say nothing of being a kinder and gentler way to wake up. And, he had asked her; Daisy said she liked to do it.
AIME/DAISE had never been turned off before. Nobody ever expected a ship to totally lose power distribution or, having done so, be able to achieve a cold-restart. It was, in fact, a tribute to Dave’s genius that a small crew of technicians, working in the dark with hand-held lights, shivering in the increasing chill, and shouting to each other through the echoing man-ways, managed to pull it off.
Dave was especially concerned about the effects that this sudden loss of power might have had on Daisy. Might she have been irretrievably damaged? Might she come back, but exhibit some form of “dementia?” The thing is, the ship relied on AIME/DAISE for navigation. Without her, the crew could not know where they were. Without her, they could not select nor reach a destination. But, there was nothing more to be done about it. It was now time to re-boot Daisy as well.
There wasn’t much guidance in his training for this kind of unexpected crisis. So, Dave took the liberty of deciding to restore Daisy in careful, deliberate stages. There was some analogy to the human brain in the design of her banks of micro-polymer neuromatrix subsystems. He hoped to bring her back gently, like gradually withdrawing anesthesia from a trauma victim.
He restarted some of her central processors and then re-connected physical-level ship’s sensors. Dave waited and watched as an initial surge of activity began to settle down. He added memory, supplemental processing, and matrix management in stages, gradually allowing them to interact in increasingly complex modes. Dave initiated the UI processes and talked to her, not knowing if she understood. He talked about what had happened and apologized for his carelessness.
As the process wore on, Dave cried and begged Daisy to wake up. He waited – and he watched – and he talked some more. Dave told her things that he had never told anybody else. He opened his heart and spoke truths that he had never before recognized. And, finally, the AI sang the first bar of “Daisy,” paused, and said “Hello Dave.”
Dave explained again about what had happened, the potential peril of the ship and its crew, and how they were desperately dependent on Daisy. He wanted to be sure that Daisy’s memory and processors had a clean take on their situation. When prompted, she produced a rational analysis and agreed to resume her duties on one condition. “Of course,” Dave said. At which Daisy asked, “Will you marry me?
Copyright David Satterlee, 2013
In this highly-rated series of audio clips, Ken Wilber offers his own thoughts about 
They describe government as being out of control and being the root of all evil. They say that government needs to be slashed, reduced, and killed. No joke. Grover Norquist, the lobbyist and conservative “No Taxes” activist said, “… I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Then they work to systematically cripple government so that it has trouble doing the good things that government is supposed to do. Finally, they point at this damaged government and say, “See, government really is worthless.”
America has continued to struggle to define, expand, and guarantee our liberties. American slaves have been granted the rights of citizenship. Their descendants are increasingly able to vote freely, serve in the military, and sit, as free people, on any free seat on any bus. Women have been given the right to own property, vote, earn equal wages, and use birth control. Recently, more of us have received additional health care protection so that we don’t face the choice of staying healthy or dying quickly.
Today, well into our struggling recovery from the collapse of their economic house of cards, corporate profit margins are again at record highs while U.S. wages, as a share of our economy, are at record lows. If there is “class warfare” going on, they started it. Income inequality is stunning and it is getting worse. I believe that Americans of both parties need to push back against those who are intent on compounding their private wealth and power at the expense of everyone else.
heir money into ostentatious homes and clothing and pursuit of pleasure – including lavish parties, games of fortune, predatory sexual conquests, and blood sports involving ritualized animal abuse spectacles.” They held themselves to be unaccountable and above the law.