Chapter One

Dominick watched as the robotic arm dipped the retrieval beaker into the silvery liquid that wasn’t a liquid. It withdrew a half-liter sample which, at ten trillion nano-bots per liter, would be more than enough. The arm swiveled counter clockwise, stopping over the inoculation port at the top of the Dark Matter conversion tank.

It would stay there for just over an hour as the programming instructions were loaded into the nano-bots. Once the programming was done, the inoculation would begin and the nano-bots could go to work.

Without programming, the nano-bots were little more than inert atoms arranged into subatomic, machine-like structures. But tell them what you wanted done and strange things would happen.

Even for a Cloud Mind, the nano-baths were a source of wonder.

Dominick would spend hours in the control booth watching the microscopic machines build things out of apparently nothing. So far, most of the construction time had been spent building probes and creating fuel for the ship’s ever-hungry propulsion engines. However, the small machines were capable of building just about anything, given the proper programming.

Dominick had terabytes of programs ready for use. He could have the nano-bot make anything from a deep space probe to a cheeseburger. Granted, the demand for cheeseburgers had been low for the last hundred years.

There was plenty of raw material to work with. Dark matter was everywhere. The ship was in a continuous harvest mode, scooping it up and funneling it to the storage facilities adjacent to the nano-baths where the inert nano-bots were kept.

Whenever the ship needed fuel or another probe, a small amount of the machines was drawn from the nano-baths; never more than a liter. They would be programmed and then mixed with a few tons of Dark Matter. Then, over a period of several days, a tank of Dark Matter would turn into fuel.

The same thing held for the production of probes. The ship sent out dozens of probes every day. One entire section of the nano-production area was dedicated to probe construction. Interestingly, no two probes, amongst the thousands made so far, were ever the same. The programming gave the nano-bots some latitude in construction. Variability in the ultra-small world of quantum probabilities meant that nano-production would produce unique products, all capable of meeting the operational standards of their programming.

As for the probes, the ship kept sending them out and, so far, none had ever called back.

The odds were that it would happen - eventually. The galaxy was just too big for there to only be one place where life could exist. Size, while lending to the higher probability of finding a target world, was also part of the problem. The Galaxy was huge. It took a long time for probes, even those traveling near the speed of light, to reach target systems. Even though nearly half a million probes had been launched, only a handful had actually reached their destinations. And none of those had reported back.

If it turned out that the Milky Way galaxy was a bust, there would be others. EARTHSHIP was designed to go on forever. So long as there was dark matter to convert into fuel and spare parts, the ship would never stop.

Days turned into years. Nano-bots churned dark matter into whatever was needed…and the Cloud Mind that was Dominick watched it all in perfect solitude. He never felt alone or impatient or even hopeless. He was capable of replicating those emotions, but why bother?

Until something was found, he was little more than the night watchman on the most advanced device, aside from himself, ever developed by mankind.

On day 37,771, Dominick received a digital tap on his shoulder.

After more than one hundred and one years, a probe sent back a positive find. A world had been located.

Dominick had poured over the data stream, again and again. He needed to be certain. The probe’s information clearly showed an M-type planet meaning it had the proper environment to support life. There were thousands of parameters but only a few needed to be met in order for life to be sustainable. There had to be a breathable atmosphere. The temperature extremes needed to fit within a fairly narrow band. There had to be land and liquid water. And as equally important as habitability, there must be no EM, no electromagnetic, emissions. EM’s would indicate the planet was already occupied by an intelligent species and should be avoided. The project designers had reasoned that the chances of success were slim enough without competition from an established species.

Aside from the planet’s habitability qualifications, it was also within the time/distance parameters needed for a successful seeding. Raising a seed population would take decades. In this case, it looked like he would have twenty-five years to prepare a seeding; to prepare one hundred and fifty colonists that could be sent to develop the new world.

Dominick turned off the data stream, confident that it was time to begin Phase 2. He sped off to the Birthing Bay. It was time to “plant” a crop of colonists.

The fertilization process was relatively straight forward. Children had been conceived in test tubes for centuries. Cloning had been considered as an option but, in the end, it was decided that “natural” birthing would be healthiest. Let nature do what it did best.

The fertilized eggs were transferred to artificial wombs and left to grow. They would require little if any outside interference.

It was the ship that needed the most attention.

Four months after the news of a target planet, the ship has taken on quite a transformation. The nano-baths had been busy around the clock, creating an environment suitable for raising colonists. The ship had been designed knowing that such a transformation would hopefully be required someday.
Thousands of nano-bot programs had already been executed, causing the creation of everything from food and clothing to sleeping quarters. Even breathable air had to be manufactured.

In half-liter batches, never more, the programmed nano-bots worked around the clock for there was only nine months to get it all ready.

Dominick supervised it all. He allowed himself to install a slightly pessimistic persona. He reasoned that it was better to be worried and double check rather than to assume all was working as planned. He could replicate any emotion but uploading the appropriate program. He knew they were just programs; just collections of ones and zeros strung together. Still, to his Cloud Mind, any emotion he chose to use, “felt” real while the subroutine was running.

There was an entire suite of emotional programming at his disposal; most of which would be needed once the first babies were born. For now, he went with simple, mild pessimism.

His daily routine had change significantly as the embryos grew. No longer did he spend his time floating through the ship or watching the nano-bots at work; he left his sub-minds to that task. He spent all of his time in the Birthing Bay.

At month six, he uploaded his parental programming. Almost immediately, his world fell apart.

He spent nearly all of his time monitoring each of the unborn colonists; his children. No heartbeat went uncounted. No consumption went unmeasured. Everything was tracked and nature, it seemed, was very good at taking care of business. Still, he worried. The Birthing Bay was filled with a hundred and fifty wombs; each floating weightlessly while tethered to umbilical cabinets which fed and monitored each unborn child.

If nothing went wrong, Dominick would be giving birth in another five months. He felt certain he wouldn’t last that long. No amount of programming could have prepared him for what he was experiencing. He was all at once, proud, excited and terrified. There were times that he considered turning off the emotional programs, at least for a bit. However, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was worried that he might overlook something that only that programming would cause him to notice.

Between monitored heartbeats, he refreshed data feeds for the last four months, looking for anything that may have not happened exactly as planned. He did this countless times a day.

So far, everything was progressing as planned.

Sub-minds housed in spider-like robots, scuttling throughout the ship constantly reporting back on routine ship functions. Dominick gave them little more than a passing glance. The ship was designed to last forever with a minimal amount of routine maintenance. Almost nothing ever happened that wasn’t anticipated.

On Conception Day 245 something went wrong. A metabolic spike from one of the pods got Dominick’s immediate attention.
“I knew it,” he thought as his systems went into “peak performance” mode. Moments later, was making his way amongst the floating wombs. There was a time, only a few months ago, when he could simply zip over to whatever womb needed his attention. Now, with the embryos near mid-term, he had to take care as he maneuvered between misshapen artificial wombs in search of the one that initiated the spike.

One of his “children” was in trouble and his maternal programming had ramped him up to a state of near panic. Although it only took a minute to find the right womb, still, Dominick fretted that he was too late.

A quick visual inspection didn’t turn up anything unusual.

The clear womb held a male child whose mass was in the mid-range for a thirty-five week old embryo. Dominick jacked into the pod’s control panel and initiated the diagnostic suite. In moments, he had the results.

The unborn child would not survive.

Dominick was caught off guard by a wave of unfathomable grief. His first thought had been one of self defense; so strong was the emotion. He caught himself just before he disconnected the programs that made him care. After a brief pause, he let them be. He would still need them in the days, weeks and years to come.

He stayed near the child for over an hour; watching as it float in its pod. The child had no idea that it had been cut from the heard – designated for termination. It was not at fault; just one of those things that happened. All of the selectivity in the world couldn’t eliminate a quantum chance event that sentenced this child to die before it was born.

Dominick felt the grief start to wane. He welcomed the relief. While his mechanical body was immune to pain, his mind was not. It was time to accept the situation and terminate the child.

He called up the termination protocol and loaded it into the child’s control panel. It would be a tragedy to lose one of the children, but not the end of the world; not the end of the mission. He looked out across the birthing room where one hundred and forty-nine other pods floated; each with a healthy child inside. They would need his complete attention in the coming months and years. This one child would take too much of his attention. Soon enough, it wouldn’t even be missed.

Dominick’s virtual finger hovered over the “execute” button that would enable the termination application.

He couldn’t do it.

There had to be an alternative.

The entire Library of Knowledge was at his disposal. Certainly there was something in the gigantic database that could be of use. Dominick, not ready to give up just yet, went in search of an answer.

This was not a simple matter of finding a similar case and applying a tried and true solution. From the start he understood that this was a one-off type situation. The child’s brain had failed to adjust for the weightlessness of space. The synaptic gaps had grown too large to effectively allow for the free flow of electrical signals. The child couldn’t think.

Dominick searched as the starship silently cut through the Milky Way Galaxy at near relativistic speed. Earth, the home planet, was long dead by this time. It’s only legacy flew on autopilot as its Artificially Intelligent commander tried to find way to save an unborn child.

Dominick could feel it, there was an answer. He navigated through his cloud-mind in search of a nugget that he knew was there. Subroutines crisscrossed through his thoughts, each picking up hints and discarding false leads. He collected the tidbits of hope, trying to find – anything.

Soon, a pattern emerged. More and more signs were pointing towards the nano-baths; a quantum world where everything was possible, just not highly probable. He turned his attention there and was soon deep into the quantum world of nano-programming. The ship had vats filled with nano-bots; all capable of being programmed to perform specific functions.

The problem was that no programming existed to solve a problem of this nature. The nano-bots, without specific instructions, would not be able to fix anything. They were incapable of coming up with a solution on their own. They were not intelligent; not sentient.

Something kept coming up in search results. “Never more than half a liter.” That had been the rule with nano-baths since shortly after they were first conceived. Dominick looked into the history behind the rule and found something interesting. The nano-baths were actually a precursor to Dominick’s own Cloud Mind. Dominick could think independently simply because his mind’s analytical speed and memory capacity surpassed a certain threshold. It seemed that once that threshold was achieved, self actualization may, or may not follow.

The same idea held true for the nano-bots. When large quantities of them are put together, there is a slight probability that the bath would become aware. It would start to think on its own. It happened a few times, in the early days.

When word got out, a strange thing happened. Instead of celebrating the creation of an artificial intelligence, the world had recoiled in fear. An abomination is what it had been called. Laws were passed and forever after, the rule was, never more than half a liter.

The nano-baths were the only hope the unborn child had. They could be set on the problem and possibly come up with a solution. The problem was, at “less than half a liter,” the nano-bots couldn’t think.

Dominick was about to change that.

With the precision of thought, the android created a sub-file within the nano-directory and began to selectively choose from all of the already existing programs. He kept part of his mind on the ship’s condition along with the status of the unborn children. He knew that he didn’t know how to fix the child, but he had to get the nano-bots pointed in the right direction. Hopefully, they would understand what he was trying to program them to accomplish and then take it from there.

Hours later, an eternity to a cloud-mind, it was done.

Dominick didn’t know if it would work or not but he’d made his best effort. He made his way to the nano-baths and drew a two-liter sample. He uploaded his program into the solution and waited. Even unintelligent Nano-bots could be temperamental, rejecting a set of programming codes for no discernible reason.

He could only wait for a green light on the programming console indicating that the nano-bots were ready to go to work.

Normally, the programming would take minutes or even as long as an hour. Now, four hours later, the amber “in progress” light continued to blink. At least it hadn’t turned red, indicating the programming had been rejected.

The light went green.

The nano-bots were signaling their readiness to get started.

Dominick wasted no time inoculating the child’s food stream with the nano-bots.

Now it was up to something else to decide if the child would survive and if it did survive, what it would become for there was no doubt that it would not be entirely human. Dominick, not being human himself, saw little issue with that.

The android didn’t know if there was such a thing as God or not. He only knew that the fate of the child was no longer in his hands. Hopefully, something greater than himself would see fit to let the boy live.

Four weeks later, the birthings began.