Free Ad Astra by Jack Campbell Page A

and followed her down the hallway. “I could always monitor the director’s health from my office,” he suggested.
    “Nice try. Didn’t your teachers at med school ever tell you not to try to con a shrink?”
    Sandra was still at loading dock four alpha. Yasmina led the way onboard the ship, then along a passageway that ended in Sandra’s control room. The limited area was already full of exasperated engineers of various types and persuasions, some looking dejected, some angry and some staring into space as they tried to think. “Why can’t we do a virtual meeting?” one complained as Kevlin and Yasmina wedged their way in.
    Another engineer answered in an accusing voice. “Because the director found out you guys had been hacking the meeting code so you could have avatars sitting in for you while you did other stuff. Now we all have to crowd in here in person so he can be sure we’re all actually getting yelled at.”
    “People have been hacking virtual meeting code since the stone age,” the first engineer protested, then hastily stopped speaking as a short man with a lofty attitude and an ugly frown strode in, the crowd somehow contracting away from him so he had free room.
    “Report,” the director stated, glowering at the chief designer.
    The chief designer, who had been arguing with Sandra’s captain, made a helpless gesture. “Sandra won’t work. Something’s shorting out her central control functions.”
    The director’s glower deepened. “The Spaceship Autonomous Network Developmental Research Application is the most expensive project in the history of this company. I expect more from you than vague reports that it just doesn’t work! Are you saying the control network isn’t receiving the commands?”
    “No,” the chief designer responded in a tight voice. “I’m saying that the control network isn’t responding to external signals. It’s in some kind of weird loop, with only a few apparently random signals going out to minor sub-systems. We give a command and nothing happens.”
    “Nothing happens? Something has to happen! If nothing is happening that means something is happening!”
    Kevlin gave a glance at Yasmina, who was watching the director with a fascinated expression. He just knew she would love to get the director into a controlled environment so she could analyze his mental processes.
    One of the other engineers tapped the air in front of him, activating a virtual display. “This is what Sandra’s central processing activity is like.”
    Yasmina looked suddenly startled as an image appeared overhead. “That looks like an EEG of an epileptic seizure.”
    Eyes swung to focus on the doctor. “An epileptic seizure?” the director asked in a deceptively mild voice.
    Though it was obvious she regretted speaking, Kevlin wasn’t surprised that Yasmina refused to back down. “Yes,” she insisted. “That’s what that looks like. If I saw that representation of signal activity in a human, I’d say it was a seizure.”
    “This is a ship,” the designer protested.
    “Yes,” Yasmina agreed. “A ship you constantly refer to as if it were human, as if it were alive, talking about the complexity of an internal and external sensing network that mimics that of a living creature. I’ve read the specs on the central command system. You modeled it on basic brain functions. Well, maybe that means it’s subject to the sort of problems living brains develop.”
    Kevlin waited for an outburst of laughter or scorn, but it didn’t come. A third engineer nodded with a wondering expression. “The operating system is incredibly complex, full of learning routines and development loops. It could’ve developed problems like that.“
    “How do we cure it?” the director demanded. “In people?”
    This time Yasmina grimaced in the way of a doctor trying to explain complex things in lay-person’s terms. “Short term, we use medications that raise the seizure threshold. Long term, we go in