Dream Dance

Day 274 - The Glamors of Interstellar Travel, Part 2

The worst thing about traveling to the stars was the schedule. SCN protocol required that each of us exercise 90 minutes a day -- the prolonged zero-gravity demanded it -- and yet all of us shared only 4 health stations. If you do the math that meant that there were 3 hours in every 24 hour day that there wasn't someone working out. Protocol also required a period of recreation for the whole team, an odd requirement when making it happen meant stressing everyone out.

We slept in 3 shifts, offset by 7 hours. The shifts rotated slightly over the 72 day transit, and at every moment I think I was on the bad end of the plan. My body likes to exercise in the morning and sometimes early evening, so naturally my allotted time was late afternoon and night. Typical, somehow. I was also normally just waking up when the party was starting.

The social period involved pulling back all the curtains and securing as much as possible to the perimeter of our cylindrical dorm, leaving the center space free for people to mingle, float around and do gymnastics. Every nine days we had a ration of ethanol for our beverages, and then it was a party. Just what I needed when I was getting out of bed.

There was one moment that made it all worthwhile. It was not a "party" day as such; people were mostly talking in small groups about technical topics. There was music playing, but it was localized. You might move from group to group and hear a different mood, or mix or completely different selections. Somewhere, and everybody remembers hearing it (although that may not be possible), there was a long whining drone that wavered ever so slightly. Anyone who grew up after about 2280 knows that note by heart. For me I feel like this note -- the opening of the greatest sing-along song of all time -- makes my entire soul reverberate.

History is full of music. People make music all the time, everywhere, doing everything. Rhythm is a strange human thing. Most of it is personal, or mundane, or interesting for a short time. Ironically, only after the invention of crass "popular music" can some some of it become timeless. Motzart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Beethoven's 5th, The Beatles' Twist and Shout, Nagamoto's Nintendo Variations, and of course, Doty-gon by The Unobservables.

The change hit me like a wave. At first the note was just barely audible, something that my acute pattern-seeking mind was picking out of the background noise. Within seconds, before the first note twisted and the drumbeats began, it was everywhere. Everyone had tuned their own music to the common theme, and it echoed throughout the tiny ship.

For The Unobservables had created a new type of art form, the collaborative sing-along, and no-one was going to be left behind. The words boomed out, the same intro as always, and then new words appeared in front of my eyes and I sang them. Someone had written, in the seconds between the time the first note had lingered until now, a new first verse. One about the G. Agricola and her band of explorers.

The singing and the composing were the same: both music. The verses forming in real-time -- flashing across the tiny network -- like a harmony to the singing in sound waves; or perhaps it was the simpler sounds that were the rhythmic counterpoint to the cloud of ideas and revisions happening in the virtual space of the miniature Roam. Frankly it was hard to tell. One could get lost in the minutia of fixing a meter or filling in a rhyme while belting out the Fibonacci-inspired chorus:

Di, di
po, pi, dity
di-do, di-dity, po-dity
doty-po, poty-pity
di-pi-di

Imagine my surprise, while working on another verse at the same time, to find myself singing about myself:

Philosopher ethologist Walkran
not deigning to walk, ran
nature’s quiet daughter vets Ticho
sentient epi-man?
che we know.

Technology’s finest Evo child
yet she minute trace wild
setting underwater and see below
ocean facts are filed
nu we know.

I rated a complete verse, as did Evo. Gregol's entire wolf pack got a single verse for the five of them. I felt quite special.

Peak experiences have a way of slipping though your fingers, and I don't feel like my meager words really capture what happened that day. These are extraordinary people, chosen from a pool of extraordinary people, and -- although sometimes I complain -- I can't imagine anyone who should be here who is not. Or more strongly, who is here who should have stayed home.

Day 270 - Lessons in Passive Agression

Space travel is complicated. It's a rainy fall day on Sigma 957 in 2326, but on Earth right now it's midwinter 12 years ago, and I'm at Pi's Solstice party. 500 light years away a much younger me is fuming over her punch. Paal and I are having an argument. If only I could talk to that younger me, what wisdom I could impart.

Pi always did a huge Solstice party. It was kind of her thing, as were parties in general. My role was quite different than it was even a few months ago. Since I was able to help her golden boy's rise to prominence I was allowed to move from the ranks of volunteer server into Pi's irregular reserve. I was a guest now, being offered hors d'oeuvres from trays held by people that helped to train me in the servicing arts. I felt sometimes ashamed, and especially now.

We were arguing, although no one could really tell. Technically the argument was over long ago. We had said our piece, agreed to a cease fire and gotten on with our cordial relations. And yet the argument continued to smolder. That was the way we argued. There was the long fuse at the start, where one or the other -- or both of us in turns -- would hold a grudge about something the other person said. Then there would be the outburst, which would usually trigger other related outbursts, culminating in a long period of silence where both of us felt we were right but didn't have any more arguments to make. Then we would make up, apologize, say we were both wrong just for the fact that we were angry, and we'd try to accommodate and get on with things.

That's where we always fell down. Once we reached the stage where we agreed the argument was over it was never over. We both held onto secret resentments, and we'd look for the chance to apply them, discretely and technically, to something that the other person had just said. That's what we were doing today -- that other today back in December of '13 -- waiting for the other person to say something sloppy so we could make our cleverly rehearsed cutting remark. It was a lovely party that neither of us enjoyed.

It was almost always about the same thing one way or another for us. The original argument was about auditing, which is a very common point of disagreement for couples. It's like money in the olden days, an issue that killed many a relationship. Paal and I could not agree on primacy for some of the basic ideas that drove our research. I felt that his ties to Pi made him see things in a less than objective manner, and yet I tried to keep my arguments based in reason and facts. It was Paal who always said the same thing: "You're so insecure." I hated that. Anything I said could be easily dismissed because of my messed up emotional system, assuming that's what he meant. What do I say? Yes, that's true, my brain is objectively miswired and yet you should accept my arguments despite the fact that they come from an e-zero, PSS-negative freak? I wish.

So we argued, even when we had decided that the argument was over, with ironic side comments about how the other had been so wrong on this or that point, even when we really should have been backing each other up. It's not the way for collaborators to operate. Today's me would have been different. But there you have it -- you have to live with the choices you make, and if you travel in time, you have to live through the choices you make.

Day 266 - Good Day for a Walk in the Rain

The rain has come. The fall temperature had dropped to an almost pleasant 36 degrees, and then the clouds opened and the thermometer shot back up to 39. It's like taking a hot shower, in the mud. I'm outside anyway. The hab is unbearably stuffy, and working through my research program is incredibly tedious. There's a stack of messages I haven't returned, including one from Noriko that I'm dreading. It feels better to be slogging through the mud than being mired in the constant babble required to be a human.

I've made my way to the overlook -- a clear spot in the forest partway down the north ridge just above the settlement. With a scope I can observe the Tanzen directly. I want to build a blind here so I can just watch them. Somehow staring at monitors isn't the same; I'm always searching the archives or programming a statistical analysis, never just looking at what they do. It was amazing in the first few months of the expedition. I want to get back to that.

The Tanzen ignore the rain. They don't do any crafts that might get wet, but they go about their regular foraging and cooking mostly unfazed. The larger pups play inscrutable games. At least I think it's a kind of play. They sit or stand in circles, then they all move left or right suddenly. They move their hands, each one moving them differently, but all oddly in a similar manner. Then they jump up and move to a different spot to do it again. They also pick out an adult and sit and stare at them, sometimes stock still, other times twitching and touching each other.

Shell's pup Sen is still too young to join his older cousins. Shell's dorsal pouch has dried up and mostly healed, but he still clings to her back like a pack. She ignores him, and he peers over her shoulder intently. Occasionally she'll push a strip of the root she's flaying towards him, and he'll consume it slowly like a long strand of spaghetti.

It's starting to get dark; I'll have to head back soon. The rain has let up unfortunately, so the mud that worked itself deeply into my pants won't be washed out anytime soon. It'll be a long, filthy hike, and worth every moment of it.

Day 261 - That Leaves Just This Journal

I like Noriko. Some people are bothered by everything -- nothing that happens makes them happy -- but most people are bothered by at least one or two things. Noriko is one of those rare people who isn't bothered by anything. Not like Evo, who glides by on optimism and an inflated sense of self-worth, Noriko is someone who's biggest concern is that right at this moment in time she's not enjoying it quite enough. Ever since the alpha session we worked well together. She was always a great help when I had technical problems and I think I was able to help her, perhaps, from time to time. More than any other person on the team she's lifted my spirits just by being herself.

It must be difficult being a junior member of the support team. All the rest of us are here to do science, make great discoveries and publish once-in-a-lifetime results. She's here to support: build machines, maintain communications, install and repair all our life-sustaining systems. She has a degree; she's a expert in aeroponics, which she might get to practice for real in ten years or so, assuming we're still here. And yet, here she is, not doing anything for herself and spending all her time basically fixing the plumbing. OK, she's in another star system, but it's still not the most glamorous of vocations.

Yes, I like Noriko. And I can't trust her. Not now. We were talking, as we do. The conversation turned to data systems, and I started to ask her -- casually -- about why we brought the data that we did. She talked about our data budget, some ten to the something or other bits that we could take with us, a kind of careful but tiny slice of the global Roam. Teams of A.I. employed stochastic analysis to select those data that would serve us best, based on criteria determined by the Taskforce. What we ended up with was a subset, the reference materials that we would find most useful and further the mission. So I laughed -- ha ha, why did we bring the works of Jane Austen and leave behind hab test data?

Her eyes narrowed. This is a girl whose eyes are always somewhere in the general vicinity of laughing, twinkling, slyly winking, or widely innocent -- they never leave that neighborhood. They don't narrow like that. She asked me what I meant, and I could see her eyes flicking as I talked, querying up more data. As prolific as Jane Austen may have been, she explained, she just wrote text which is highly compact to start with and compresses well. It's probably many times smaller than the missing test data. And probably more important too, she sort-of laughed; we all need something to read.

I can't confide in her again. That leaves exactly no one. There's no one I can really talk to. I'm alone.

Day 254 - The Triumphant Tale of the Brain Parasite

About 10 million years ago, an opportunistic semi-aquatic scavenger foraging along the shores of the oceans of a distant planet got sick. It was an infection common to its species, and one that it probably caught from a chance encounter with another of its kind, but it had profound consequences. This microbe had adapted especially well to a life cycle in this type of host. Instead of simply replicating as much as possible until defeated by the host immune system, it used special enzymes to avoid detection and selectively colonized the creature's brain. There it set about the subtle process of altering its chemistry.

This is a fairly common story in the history of parasitism. There are many well-know cases of Earthly parasites that change their host's behavior for their own benefit. Dicrocoelium dendriticum infection in ants causes them to climb to the tip of grass stalks where they are more readily eaten by sheep, the parasite's preferred host. Sacculina establishes a barnacle-like existence in a host crustacean and castrates it, effectively changing the host's self-interest from reproduction to survival, very much to the benefit of the parasite. Even viral infections like Rabies or rhinoviruses can alter behavior to enhance their own propagation.

Best models suggest that the first thing primordial Lexocyte infection did was make the normally solitary Crabs gregarious. Infected individuals would seek out other Crabs, better to infect them. At some point the behavior became counterproductive, however, as the Crabs gathering together would mostly be already infected and their higher density would cause them to deplete the available food and starve. It turns out, we believe, that the second Lexocyte innovation came to the rescue: trophallaxis.

The Crab esophagus runs basically right through its brain, so passing a brain parasite between individuals is easily accomplished by allowing one to feed from the stomach of the other. Trophallaxis, the sharing of food by mouth, allowed the gregarious, infected Crabs to survive. Originally a behavior induced to improve cross-infection, this "communal stomach" had the side-effect that concentrated populations were able to thrive by gathering food in dangerous places and sharing it in the safety of a social hub. What was parasitism evolved towards the virtuous cycle of symbiosis: host Crabs were far more successful than the uninfected, and so were the Lexocytes they harbored.

It's difficult to have a lot of confidence in evolutionary just-so stories like this one, but there is some paleontological and molecular evidence to back it up. Even if the exact details are more complicated, the Crabs and their symbiotes discovered a way of life that promoted their mutual survival. Over the intervening millenia their partnership transformed their home planet and took them into space.

Day 250 - On the Quality of Automated Data Collection

A lot of people have spent a lot of time looking at the probe data. The first batch of raw observations from Sigma 957 arrived on Earth in July of 2312 and within weeks the volume of analysis had exploded across the Roam. It was clear that this was a very unique planet and perhaps the closest chance we had of finding intelligent life like our own in the galaxy. However odd the Tanzen looked (or then, "lifeform AA01") they were hunting and gathering bipeds, living in social groups and using fire and other tools. It seemed like they would be our kin.

This was all shortly before I started graduate school in Potsdam. At the time I was fixated on Crabs, which gave me a properly skeptical perspective. The spacefaring Crabs were far more technological than Tanzen after all, and they were nothing like us. I was far more interested in that mystery. The movies from Sigma 957 were tantalizing -- showing creatures so familiar in shape doing things we could imagine ourselves doing, if we were about 10 times more naturally graceful -- and yet the details had to be teased out.

They eventually were. The probe's science program was focused on answering fairly specific questions about the order of intelligence exhibited by these new lifeforms. It gathered data around their artifacts and tools, problem-solving and cognitive abilities, and their social interactions. For all they do, it became clear that they do it without any apparent kind of language. The conclusion from the longest and most contentious debate was that these are beings with a lot of talents, but not sentience.

That finally got my attention. Perhaps there was something in how the Tanzen operate that would shed light on the far more advanced Crabs. But when I started to look into the question in detail I ran into a huge roadblock -- the probe data. It wasn't very good.

The probe had decided to work primarily with aerial sensors. Little bug-like things that would buzz around making close-range observations, plus some larger platforms that covered a wider area from a greater height. It was also tightly organized around answering the questions that the probe had been programmed to answer. If your line of research required anything too far afield it simply didn't exist. It was possible to do a lot of good science with the loads of data that was collected, but for finding subtle answers it was a bit hit and miss.

The probe continued to collect data the entire time it waited for our arrival. I've spent many evenings here combing through its Tanzen observations. Sadly it's not that much more useful. The probe settled down into a pattern of collecting statistical data around basic questions of large-scale movement and census. It wasn't very creative. As result we have lots of data, but not much of it is any better than the first data from 13 years ago.

My sensors are much better placed. I may not have made any major discoveries, but I can at least be proud that my data will end up being orders of magnitude more useful for doing real science. Even if I don't put the Tanzen story together, my observations will be essential to someone solving it.

Day 245 - I, Permeable Membrane

Neither the mechanisms of finance nor national governments can stanch the flow of these particles, although that is the only solution that they propose or can propose. It is left to us, we who strive for a new age of science, to embrace the whole of biology and our part in it.

There were, in my opinion, three main seeds to the Reawakening. The first, as I have written before, was the sea-level rise resulting from the fuels of the industrial age. The rise was not as large as some doomsayers had predicted, nor was it as fast, but when it got large enough to be measurable it's effects were far more devastating than any model had suggested. Widespread displacement, destruction of crops and aquaculture, famine, loss of infrastructure -- all were far beyond the ability of Financial Age institutions to handle.

The second seed was given a name in 2041: Ljungdahl Syndrome. Scientific Cassandras had been raising alarms about increasing incidence of immune failures and auto-immune conditions for perhaps as much as 50 years prior, but since they mostly affected poor, urban children they were routinely ignored. Asthma, Lupus, Juvenile Arthritis, Guillain-Barre Syndrome -- all rose for decades unchecked and misunderstood. Only when they hit epidemic rates (and the children of the suburban rich were at risk too) was it recognized that these were disparate outcomes of a common process. Even then it took another dozen years of research to discover the cause, only to find that nothing could be done.

Human populations evolved at fairly low density, and children were exposed mostly to relatives during their development. However, with worldwide population doubling every 50 years or so, there would come a point when those assumptions were no longer true. At some critical threshold a child's immune system has to assimilate too many slight variants of the same human proteins, either from the tens of millions of people that live in the same city, or the hands of the workers making the products that surround them. The system cascades ultimately into a compromised state where it can no longer distinguish the body's own proteins from invaders and begins to attack them.

The reaction of the market was to raise children in bubbles. Closed communities, sterilized products, increased suburban sprawl, even jingoistic and xenophobic "DNA-fingerprinting" -- all of them a blight on generations of kids, and none of them in the least bit effective. The decrease in Ljungdahl Syndrome in those years was due entirely to the introduction of immune-boosting drugs and treatments, which were themselves clouded by the many quack treatments that flourished in the unthinking panic of parents with no other options.

Princeton, quoted above, promised rational, global progress, and the systems that had failed so miserably fell. After many years the Syndrome was finally licked, not by changing our environment, but by changing ourselves. Incidence among the enhanced are somewhere between unheard-of and impossible. Among we few e-zero the rates are hard to measure accurately, but it's still pretty much a toss of the dice. I came up snake eyes.