This is the first entry in the personal log of Colin Flannigan, IT-systems engineer for the Arc-ship Salvation, employee of the Eden Foundation.
02/14/2218, my name is Colin Flannigan; I am one of the IT-Systems engineers for the Eden Foundation, assigned to (voluntarily) Project Salvation. Currently I am working on the man computer system for the Arc-Ship. I’m tackling this on my own, mostly, I have a few testers. But I chose to do this on my own because I don’t think it would help to try to compile the work of multiple individuals and make sure it all works. Sometimes I fear I bit off more than I can chew, but I think I’m nearly done. I have been working on this just over two years now. The core of what I am working on is a system I’ve called M.I.S.S.I.E , it is a Multiple Interface Semi-Sentient Information Engine. Semi-sentient is a bit of a misnomer because it implies some level of A.I. but the system is designed to be adaptive, and even intuitive, but it cannot exceed its parameters, or make decisions it was not asked to make. So it’s not fully A.I. but if you ask this system to examine any information it can make conclusions that are not pre-determined. It’s fairly difficult to explain, but as a whole it’s designed to identify potential problems that a human crew would only identify when the problem shows up, and in this situation when a problem shows up, it may be too late to fix it.
I thought about trying to give the system an interactive personality, but when I started on that, well, I’ll just say it reminded me of trying to teach my sister anything. So I scraped that, and it stopped arguing and just accepted the changes. I also scraped the idea of having a primordially vocal input. The speech recognition was a problem, and it just becomes annoying. But I did have to set up a few audible responses, for notifications and warnings. I’ve left the baseline, so maybe we can have that option available another time. I didn’t think it was critical.
The problems with a system like this, is trying to anticipate what it might be asked to do. And making sure a system understands things I don’t, like theoretical astronomical physics. And mechanical engineering. I’ve been feeding textbooks into the system, and I think the system is at a point where submitting a textbook is the rough equivalent to adding new program parameters. So as I work, the work is actually progressing faster. The information systems on this ship are going to be astronomical. We are going to have electronic copies of roughly every book ever written, every movie ever made, and every song ever recorded, roughly. We couldn’t possibly find everything. We joked once that we are saving a copy of the internet and sending it into space, which is more or less true. Files have been downloading two and a half years now, so we just might have enough pornography to last all 100 years of this voyage. I thank god every day that we don’t have the problems with “computer virus” that existed 200 years ago. It took about 100 years but, eventually the effort to create a dangerous piece of code that could distribute and execute on it’s own so far outweighed the benefit that it became a novelty. Most of the “virus” these days are only seen as practical jokes. And even those are rare, since you risk spending half your life in prison for writing it, and about one year for each person you infected. The popularity of the virus prank died when some guy got 77 years for emailing a picture to his friends that had an embedded code that disabled the keyboard space bar. The sentence wouldn’t have been so severe had the joke not been spread to half the U.S. It wasn’t dangerous, or even particularly hard to fix. But there it is, no one feels like taking that kind of risk these days, thank god.
The latest update is nearly done compiling. I hope to fix the problem with the notification system. She was notifying of every single potential error she saw. I started calling it the cry wolf system. So now I hope to have fixed it so that the notifications will only be for important issues. I don’t need to be told that; our current course has us locked in geosynchronous orbit with the Earth’s moon, is a major error since we are not on course to our final destination. The system forgot to check for departure before verifying the course to the destination. Maybe it’s just me but I find that funny.
Colin Flannigan
02/14/2218
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