ROBIN’S CELL-PHONE ALARM BEEPED.
Henry
was still
sleeping, so as soon as Robin woke she quickly silenced the phone,
then went into the bathroom. Returning to the bedroom, Robin opened the door to the closet, pulled out her bestuni
form, dressed.
Robin
went to the
apartment building’s nearby garage. Her car was a Porsche,
one of
the perks of pilot’s pay.
At
the airfield, Robin
parked, entered the company’s office building. The
receptionist said,
“Mister Anderson’s expecting you. Go right
in.”
Robin
entered an
adjacent office. Frank, Mister Anderson’s secretary, looked
up from
his monitor. Robin declared, “Mister
Anderson’s expecting me.” Frank keyed his com,
announced, “Robin’s here.”Robin went into
the
inner office.
After
closing the door,
Robin casually said, “Mornin’ Ray.”
Around a crooked smile,
Ray replied, “Robin.” Ray asked, “I
assume
Jack’s briefed you on today’s test
flight?”
“Certainly.”
Ray
stood, said “I’ll
walk you out.”
At
the edge of the
tarmac a crowd was gathering. There came scattered applause as Robin
walked
to ward X-AV1.
***
Tethered
to a couple of
truck-sized concrete blocks, the dirigible floated ten meters above the
tarmac. An aluminum ladder
extended downward from a hatch in the ship’s underside.
After
Robin climbed
through the hatch, Jack keyed the motors that hoisted the ladder,
closed the
hatch.
Robin
entered the
flight deck, strapped herself in. There was no need for a parachute;
the flight
deck doubled as an escape capsule for both her and Jack.
Over
an audio
transducer, Jack, the autopilot said, “twelve minutes until
scheduled ascent.”
Robin
reached over,
patted the top of the console to her right which contained Jack, who
was
mostly an LSI chip (large scale integration) enclosed in a radiation
hardened box
within the console.
Like
most aircraft,
grounding the console was done with a two-wire system, one wire serving
as the
ground.
***
Robin
glanced out the
portside window. The crowd on the tarmac was growing.
Robin
sat back in her seat, fastened her seat and shoulder belts,
took in a deep breath, and thought
about the test flight.
The
X-AV1 was the first
of its kind, a dirigible that received its lift from vacuum filled
chambers. Hydrogen and helium,
though lighter than air, had mass, which causes weight. A vacuum has no
appreciable mass.
Robin
reviewed the
forthcoming flight. Externally, except for
its turbo fan jet engines and lack of gondola, the X-AV1 resembled a
typical dirigible of the early twentieth century. Much of the
ship’s
internal skeleton was aluminum. Critical load bearing and stressed
components
were titanium. The several internal
spherical containers previously would have been fabric gas bags
containing hydrogen or helium. In stead, the X-AV1’s
rigid containers, containing nearly complete vacuums, resisted the
external pressure of Earth’s atmosphere with carbyne
nanotubes bonded to
polymer fabric. The containers were supported by the dirigible’s
skeleton.
At
T-minus two. Jack
spun up the engines, kept them at idle. Robin felt a jolt as the ground
crew
cast off lines from the concrete anchors. Robin heard a faint whine
from
the nearest take-up reel as Jack spooled in the lines.
The
ship rapidly rose. Jack pressurized the
flight deck. Soon, the ship punched
through a light layer of clouds.
Jack
announced, “Our
ascent is slowing. I’ll dump some ballast.” Later,
Jack added,
“We’re nearing the maximum altitude rating for our
engines. I’m shutting
them down.”
Robin
had never before
flown this high; she very much enjoyed the view.
After
a time, Jack
said, “Standby to begin our descent.”
***
At
lower altitudes, to
descend, standard procedure was to open valves, allowing measured
amounts
of air into the vacuum chambers. At high altitudes,
cylinders of compressed nitrogen fed their gas into the chambers, thus
reducing
the vacuums.
The
descent was much
more rapid than the ascent. After sometime passed, Jack fired up
the jets, began centering the ship over the airfield’s beacon.
Once
they reached a
lower altitude, Jack slowed the descent by dumping ballast and using
pumps
to expel nitrogen.
Floating
over the
concrete anchors, Jack spooled out the tethers, which the ground crew
attached to
the anchors. Jack winched down the ship.
Robin
said, “Well
done, Jack. My name’s going into the record books.
I’m going to do my best to
make sure you’re mentioned, too.”
***
“No
need,” replied
Jack. “I know enough about you organic beings to realize your
motives are
not based upon pure logic. Much of what you creatures do is based upon
genetically derived instincts bred into your kind many millennia ago by
the
survival of the fittest dynamic.”
Robin
smiled.
“Nonetheless,” she replied, “I appreciate
what you’ve done. I think it’s time we
humans accept beings such as yourself into polite society.”
The
audio transducer
projected a snort.
“Polite
society?”
sarcastically said Jack.
Robin’s
laughed. “Did
I just hear a snort?” she asked.
“I
cannot lie,”
declared Jack. “Some programmers share your opinion about
artificial
beings. They’ve been sneaking in unauthorized code, making me
more like your type.
Typically, your administrators and managers haven’t the
intelligence to
find or analyze the unauthorized code.”
Robin
left the flight
deck.
***
Robin
climbed down the
ladder a step, paused, said, “See you later, Jack.”
“Later,
sweetheart,”
replied Jack. Robin laughed all the
way down the ladder.
Robin
took a few steps
toward the cheering onlookers, spread her arms wide; the
crowd’s
cheering grew louder.
Halfway
across the
tarmac, Robin saw Henry pressed up against one of the barricades. Robin
went
to Henry, hugged and kissed him.
A
security guard moved
the barricade to one side, allowing Robin to pass through.
Upon
the reviewing
stand, Ray shook Robin’s hand, whispered to her, “You
do understand
that all conversations between you and Jack were transmitted to our
ground
station? I heard the crack about Managers. Nonetheless, I
will do everything I
can in supporting your beliefs. It’s time.”
***
At
the microphones,
Robin praised Ray and Jack, then went on to explain the advantages of
vacuum lift in airships.
Not
only could such
airships lift more weight, they also were able to reach the altitude of
jet
streams, which could move the airships at speeds of 160 to 500
kilometers per hour
with no fuel consumption.
Referring
again to Ray,
Robin announced it was time to recognize the contributions artificial
intelligence had made in the advancement of the human species. The
following
applause was genuine.
Decades
later, Robin’s
speech would be marked as a major advance in the civil rights movement.
By that time a significant portion of the Solar System’s
population,
occupying planets, moons, space stations were human/machine hybrids—and even cyborgs!