There's No Direction Home, Part 1

Posted on Fri 29th May, 2020 @ 6:06am by Commander Jasmine Collins-Keller

1,071 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Resolution
Location: Unknown Space
Timeline: MD 3, 1842

Hari Seldon walked back toward the science officers once more. It was a good thing he wasn't a human being. He probably would have exceeded his capacity to keep multiple tasks lined up correctly by now!

"Any luck finding the planet's pattern?" he asked.

Jasmine shook her head as she stared at the hologram in front of her. "Nothing yet." She crossed her arms and walked around the image which spanned about five feet in diameter at the moment.

"Anthony is searching for the frequencies and the color patterns now. I'm looking for any anomaly that may have put us out here." She stopped. "Did we make any course changes?" She gently rubbed her chin as she contemplated their predicament. "Our last position was right here...We were sitting at this heading." She drew a lighted line through the sector with a small stylus that she held. "We just have to back track ... maybe?"

Seldon looked at her map. "Alright, so you're saying presume that there's something wrong with our sensors, but we can follow our path backward? But what if -"

"Eureka!" Anthony shouted. "Hey, does anyone know why people say that when they find something? Anyway, I think I might have it, and if I do ... it isn't our navigation that's off, it's the stellar map sensors."

"If that's the case, we just have to reorient ourselves and find our location manually." Jasmine said as she walked to the computer. "If I plug in our heading and position, mark the amount of time we were at hyper warp..." She tapped at the console frantically. "It will take a little while, but the computer should be able to recalculate our position and using my program, should be able to place us fairly close to our true location."

Even if they were outside the sector, if they were close enough, the computer could pinpoint their location within a few parsecs which would be enough to find their way back once the stellar map sensors were corrected. "I mean we would be off course, but we'd be within 48 hours or so to the base. That would be enough to get our bearing and navigate home."

Seldon looked over Anthony's shoulder. "Interesting discovery. I would not have thought to look at the sensors the way you did here," he leaned down and pointed at a line of code. Shaking his head, he sounded put out with himself. "Your human brains really do have something over artificials like me."

Anthony was stumped for something to reply. He hadn't actually been thinking of Hari as artificial intelligence ... basically the same thing that had just gotten them into trouble. Hari was so much more than a computer or a chip. "Well, I don't know. It just sort of popped into my head, Mr. Seldon. It might not have occurred to another human brain, either. We are all wired differently."

Smiling at the response, Hari grinned. "You're a scientist, all right. Many humans still have trouble thinking of people like me as anything more than a servant or a computer. Miss Lantz has done a great deal to help us see ourselves differently. So has Dr. Anderson. Being invited along on this trip is another example of finding humans who don't see A.I. as a threat ... although these little guys have certainly tried to prove otherwise."

"That's their limitation, not yours," McCabe asserted, before turning to his boss and asked, "So what do you get when you put all that in?"

"The computer is still working on it, but nothing concrete." Jasmine shook her head, "Unless we can fix the stellar map sensors." She explained, "I'm almost certain we'll be able to do this though." She smiled.

Seldon replied, "I know you will. I'm going to hang around here for a bit and see what the computation looks like, and then go forward and see how the others are doing. Anything I can do to help out, speed things up a little?"

"Well," Jasmine thought for a moment. "Is there any way to verify our course heading while we were at max warp or whatever speed that was we were traveling?" she asked and then looked sheepish. "I'm not very good with mechanical sciences or the engineering systems of a ship."

"Let me think about that a minute," Seldon replied. Thinking as fast as an AI can, it wasn't a minute before he said, "I'm guessing the ship has a record of everything we went through, so why can't we look back to see how fast that was?"

"We can," Anthony agreed, "as long as the AI chips didn't interfere with that, too." He tapped his screen a couple of times and then said, "Computer, show all speeds this ship has traveled in the last twelve hours. Display on screen as a chart with time and speed columns."

=^=Displayed.=^=

Quickly scrolling his eyes down the list, he pointed to the sudden change and tapped just before that point. A graph came up in the right quadrant, slightly overlaying the chart. "That's it, and wow. We managed to exceed our speed capabilities and actually go warp! It's showing half the speed of light as we moved back to SB109, then it hit our max of .65, and took off, hitting ..." he peered at the chart again, "2.1 for thirteen minutes before slowing down to 1.5 until we could stop the whole problem." Turning to Seldon and Keller, he asked, "Does that help?"

"That helps immensely," Jasmine smiled and moved the red laser line a bit. "Now can we determine what our heading was when we sped up?" She moved through the hologram again as she did the math calculations.

"Yes, that's easy. Just ask the computer and double check for course changes," McCabe said. "It's only course changes that would take a little plotting." Tapping the computer screen for a different section of information, he said, "Computer, show course at the time speed began to increase. After that point, show all course changes to our present position."

This time it took slightly longer before the computer said, =^=Displayed.=^=

Looking at the list, McCabe gave another direction. "Computer, transfer data set to station being used by Chief Science Officer Keller."

=^=Transferred.=^=

"You should be in business now, Commander. I'll just stick around and watch you work magic," Tony grinned.

Stay tuned to find out what magic the Commander has!

 

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