Destiny

The AI

The AI or Plato as its name was the first one to detect the alien ship. Every human starship in the 25th century had an AI running it, and the Istanbul-51 was no different. In fact AI’s were humanities partners and were responsible of running most everything in the human realm. 

Plato was both an individual as recognized by law, but also part of a greater whole. Almost all AI were born part of a greater network called Gaia. While humans valued their privacy, this concept had never been understood by the AI’s, who viewed it as a inhibition, and ironically the robots and the AI’s could have passed of as a race by themselves with their own cultures and values.  

It was because of this that Plato had been able to recognize the alien craft for what it was. It’s silence was one thing, but Plato had in a sense asked Gaia who knew nothing of it.

The alien ship was still far away, and the sensors had not really seen it yet, the reason it had been detected was that it was turning and de-accelerating, something that none of the natural bodies found in space could do.

At this point both Plato and Gaia were doing millions of calculations, trying to figure out what the best course of action should be, there were no indication that the aliens were aware of the Earth starship racing towards them. The starship Istanbul-51 was in night mode. Most starships kept their time in sync with their home ports, and so most of the crew of Istanbul-51 were asleep.

The I51 was galaxy class scientific and exploratory vessel, its main mission was to map unknown space and find planets that could be colonized. It had a crew of 1021 human beings.

It had been discovered in the early days of space exploration that humans prefer to travel in large groups, especially the longer the mission is.

The first exploratory spaceships were manned by small crews usually less than hundred souls. This however had soon proven to be catastrophic as the exploring and mapping missions would last for years and a small spaceship and small crew would eventually experience ship wide depression and had to be turned back to the nearest port by its AI.

So the ships had gradually increased in size with tens of decks, resembling  small cities. Most of the population of the starship were scientists. But they were not alone, many had their families and children with them on the voyage, some would have children on the voyage as well. And the starships were equipped with facilities for the children. And although most teaching were done by the robots, the tradition of having real teachers had never stopped. And there were an ongoing debate about who benefited the most from this the adult because they liked to teach or the children, so they would not forget that they were children, and not small adults.

The holo-decks portrayed in the science fiction of the early 21st century had not been invented yet, and while humans could submerge their minds into artificial worlds which were incidentally called the Matrix coming from an old Earth movie, most people still prefer to enjoy life in real. And so the Galaxy class starship with all their technological wonders, also had shops, cinemas, restaurants and even parks for its inhabitants to use.

With the extended human life cycle there were no shortage of volunteers for these missions who looked forward to spending time at the rim of known space for some years.

At this point Plato was also thinking of all the humans that were travelling with him. In the past hundred years there had been almost no loss of life in space as the ship sensors were capable of detecting most threats, and the robots on board would keep human error to a minimum. But this alien ship could change that, not just for Istanbul-51 and its crew and passengers but for the entire human race, and thus both Gaia and Plato contemplated hiding the truth from their partners. This had lasted only for a second, but in terms of AI’s time this was the equal of a month long debate among humans, were every possible argument and counter argument had been made.

In the end they had decided to share the knowledge and the captain of Istanbul-51, a young man in his early sixties was woken by a robot of Gaia.