“You feel like you got it now?” Jacob asked.
Bob nodded a bit less hesitantly than before.
“Just remember, I’ll still be here even when I’m on the station.”
“You do realize how weird that is?” Bob asked jokingly.
“It’s better if you don’t think too hard about it. That’s what I do,” Jacob replied with a chuckle. “Anyway, I’ll leave you to it.”
Bob wished him well, or he wished his avatar well.
Jacob hadn’t actually been back on the ship since they departed the station a few weeks ago. Telling his friend that bit of information might harm the budding confidence his friend was finally getting back, so Jacob kept it to himself. He planned to reveal that tidbit after they arrived at Earth just to prove to his friend that he had been in total control the whole time.
Well, most of the time. There was a bit of a bobble during takeoff, but Jacob corrected that before the ship could skew into the floor or walls of the hangar. Honestly, it was way better than Jacob had done in his first simulations.
Once Jacob finished processing the Avatar’s data feed, he focused his attention back on the crystal growth issue, while sipping on some fruity cocktail in a new beach environment he had built after visiting Earth.
“Haven’t you ever heard of relaxing?” Katherine said as she lay face down on a towel on the sand beside him, naked from the waist up.
He just shook his head. Her digital nudity was just as odd as her choice of relaxation. It wasn’t like she could get tanned, although she could change her skin tone at any time.
“This is relaxing,” he replied without taking his eyes off the dozens of simulations he was running through his core.
Katherine grunted without raising her head. “You’re ruining my break.”
“If I recall correctly, you’re the one who decided to interrupt my work. If you don’t like it, you can always leave.”
“And lose out on some beach time during my rare days off? Not a chance.”
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, you’re doing a wonderful job.” And he meant that. Her work to smooth out alien relations had kept the station problem-free since the incident with the shalis man, who had been arrested, charged, and then turned over to the Bounty Association to face not only the charges he racked up on the station, but three other bounties that he had in Astryx space. That was one alien the universe could do without.
Katherine was quiet for a moment. When she finally responded to Jacob’s comment, it was muffled. “Thanks.”
Jacob had to pause his work and look over at the woman. She sounded genuinely happy with the compliment. For her part, she was doing her best to bury her face in the towel on the hot sand. He decided to look away to spare her any further embarrassment.
When he looked back at his work, he saw that half the virtual tests had run their course. Each of the tests was contained in an actual virtual environment, which took up a lot of storage space, but was necessary for what he was doing. The Concord Imperium’s desire to make the virtual world nearly seamless from the real one was once again working to his advantage.
As for the data storage, that had ceased to be an issue months ago. Jacob figured out how to purge the data lock that the Alliance had put on the station’s internal storage.
All of those data centers had been wiped clean after any important data had been backed up manually. The process would have normally taken years, but Jacob convinced the station AI to assist by duplicating certain archives and then transferring that data back into those archives after the fix removed the lock.
Technically, all the fix did was force the lock to activate on a specific data center, then Jacob used some of the techniques Redline Dynamics had used on Franky’s cores to purge the data. They were never designed to do that, so about one in twenty data cubes burned out from the ad hoc process, but having any amount of freed-up storage was a huge win.
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All of the production that had been going to replacement data cubes for the station was now redirected to fixing Melody’s missing data centers.
Jacob set those thoughts aside as he pulled up the test results. Failure, failure, failure, …success! He quickly pulled up the actual test and not just the results. A three-meter-wide concrete and steel crystal reactor plopped onto the beach opposite Katherine, who didn’t even look up as the ground shook. To be fair, this wasn’t the first time he had done this in the last hour. Each round of tests had successes, but success didn’t mean it would work for what he needed.
When he opened the reactor, he saw that the crystal looked melted, but it was not distorted like in previous tests. That was a step in the right direction. He noted the settings and went through the rest of the tests, finding an even dozen successes.
Jacob refined his test parameters and had his AI core generate more tests along those new paths.
Two generations later, he had a workable process to grow an AI core. The rest of the day was spent optimizing the process, then scaling it up.
By the time he walked off the beach, the sun had gone down, and Katherine had cleared out hours ago. He spent a moment looking over the crashing waves of the ocean and his bare feet in the cooling sand before he vanished from the virtual environment and put it into archival mode to free up bandwidth.
All of his efforts over the last few weeks had paid off. He could now grow an AI core at a rate of about thirty millimeters per day. That might not seem like a lot, but the AI reprogrammer only had about fifty millimeters of core material to hold a kernel. In a little over a month, Jacob would have a full meter of material.
Getting it all into a single cohesive chunk would be a whole other issue, but he had faith it was possible. Concord had somehow managed it, and he doubted they had moon-sized crystal reactors when they made Melody or the station’s core.
Actually, he knew they grew parts of the core into a larger whole, because the chunk he had examined clearly showed where the facets of the crystal-like material had grown together. Their pieces were also much larger than what Jacob was aiming for, but he didn’t need a core the size of a warehouse for what he was planning.
On that note, he appeared inside the void. Jacob had spent a lot of time coming up with a plan to tackle the next part of his project to revive Melody.
The first was to ensure the AI couldn’t escape and cause havoc if Jacob screwed something up when making changes to the kernel. Since he still needed to be able to access the environment, he set up a temporary data center that connected only through Melody’s core.
With Jacob having full control of that core, thanks to Melody locking it down, he didn’t need to worry about the program escaping or taking back over. It would likely be much too simplistic to even attempt such a thing, but he decided to err on the side of caution.
Jacob loaded up the simulation of the kernel; he had designed it to change all the base structures into individual colors to make it easier to understand. He winced when the full thing formed inside the void, filling his view in a riot of ever-shifting colors.
The changes to the kernel’s DNA, for lack of a better word, were quite clear because their colors clashed with the ones they were attached to. Jacob didn’t actually know if that mattered, but it did make his job much easier.
Jacob paused the simulation, plucked out that section of code, and studied it at length. He learned… nothing. He sighed and pushed the code back into the simulation, restarting it. The whole thing jerked as it caught up with what was happening inside the reprogrammer, and that’s when Jacob noticed something.
He paused the simulation again and left it paused for even longer. When he restored it, the image quickly blurred to catch up to the present. He repeated that process, a smile growing on his face as the beauty and complexity of what he was looking at finally dawned on him.
To verify he wasn’t imagining things, he turned off the color coding, and sure enough, the code blurred once again, the segments shifting color as the image raced to catch up. The code wasn’t just simple instructions; each base seemed to also have a certain wavelength that shifted, much like light did.
The base pairs had to be designed that way because the Astryx changes showed none of that beauty. It made their slapdash attempts to reprogram the AI stand out all the more. It made some less-than-obvious changes stand out as well, and Jacob quickly marked those areas for study.
He also noticed that the twelve base pairs he thought the AI was composed of were actually twenty-six, making it far more complex than he had originally thought. Despite being put off by the newfound complexity, Jacob reveled in it.
The Astryx obviously hadn’t been able to reverse engineer the Concord technology to its fullest; otherwise their changes would have been seamless. That meant Jacob might be the first person to rediscover this since the Imperium fell.
It made him feel a bit like a renowned archaeologist discovering the mysteries of the past.
Jacob spent the next week engrossed in the sublime design of the kernel, teasing out its secrets little by little. By that point, he felt like he had a basic understanding of how the pairing worked. He still didn’t know what each of the pairs did, but now he could start changing things and seeing how the kernel simulation reacted.
It wouldn’t be quite the same, since the simulation couldn’t entirely simulate an AI. He had tried, and the program just fell apart as it unpacked. But it might give him some much-needed insight into what each pair did.
He would start with small changes and go from there. With a plan in place, Jacob started generating tens of thousands of simulations, using up the majority of his core processing to do so. He only left enough computing power for himself, the avatar on Abyss Pearl, and basic operations. The rest he shoved toward cracking the AI code.