Chapter 1: The Lunar Rover
Little Timmy is eight years old and lives in Besançon in eastern France. His father is an engineer in the local watch industry, his mother is a health receptionist. Little Timmy himself is probably some kind of genius.
He is an isolate at school. The other kids read the sports papers, are mad about football. He hides in the library and reads about Black Holes. His teachers tell his parents he should be encouraged. His father takes him to evening meetings of the Besançon Astronomical Society to listen to talks. His father tries to catch up on his sleep while Timmy puzzles over time dilation.
The coffee is terrible.
On his ninth birthday Timmy gets a surprise. His father pays for him to drive a lunar rover. Twenty minutes steering the machine over parts of the moon no-one else had ever seen.
Timmy is thrilled!
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This is the deal. NASA is mapping the moon using surface rovers. They get to the parts satellites can’t see: overhangs and caves. The rovers are systematic and the moon is big. This project will take quite a while yet.
It is a public relations godsend. The little machines on their tank-tracks are autonomous and AI controlled. They explore in a quasi-random way not too dissimilar to a robot vacuum cleaner. It's impossible to drive a lunar vehicle directly from Earth: the both-way time-delay is more than two and a half seconds.
This is how NASA does it.
Timmy is invited to the engineering lab at the Université de Franche-Comté - which is in town. It’s a participant in the scheme. Accompanied by his proud parents, he’s fitted with a VR helmet and has his little hands gripped around a joystick,
Timmy and his parents have practised all this for half an hour with simulated data.
But now the link is established and Timmy has control. How exciting!
His parents stand behind the space-age chair which enfolds their son. They see what Timmy sees on a large screen directly in front of them.
The machine is presently in a dusty cove, a flattish area perhaps fifty metres across, almost completely surrounded by rocks: rocks perforated with caves. The onboard AI has mapped the terrain but gives Timmy the choice of where to begin. It throws up green-edged boxes in Timmy’s immersive view (and also on screen) and invites Timmy to click on the one which takes his fancy.
That’s where it’ll start exploring and surveying.
His parents see Timmy’s cursor, which looks like a white asterisk or a star, as it swishes across the screen. Timmy loiters momentarily at one box, then tries another before finally settling on the box near the centre which marks the black frontage of the biggest unlit cave in view.
A cave never before explored by humanity!
A few seconds pass. The AI is now tasked, the cart trundles forward, the view updates, more than a second in real time arrears. The lunar landscape flows on the screen, the cave-entrance beckons.
Timmy’s parents are tired of standing. The paid session is nearly half an hour, after all. The father heads to the side of the room to collect a couple of chairs - and so misses the first piece of strangeness.
The mother sees a small constellation of lights ahead, slowly getting brighter in the cave entrance. She doesn’t attach any significance to this. It could be anything - what does she know of space technology?
And little Timmy has no preconceptions at all.
The rover enters the cave which is now over-illuminated, not just by the machine’s own headlights. The very last thing the startled parents see on the screen, as the image comes to a juddering, freezing halt, is a distorted reflection of the rover itself, as if the machine had stopped in front of a giant mirror!
A phone rings and the loitering technician, there to oversee arrangements for the university, picks it up. He listens, stiffens, and then makes himself relax. He walks over to Timmy’s parents.
“I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a glitch. That was NASA. They apologise that Timmy’s session will have to be brought to a close now. Don’t worry, we’ll invite him back for a full replacement. Sorry about that.”
The parents stand, nonplussed, as the technician unstraps the VR helmet and helps Timmy out of his seat.
As he shows them out he points back at the frozen screen.
“Your Timmy is going to be famous,” he says quietly, “Whatever that thing is, it wasn't put there by us. Time to get yourselves an agent!”
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In fact Timmy does not get to be famous, or not immediately. Instead hard-faced, serious men come round to the house within the hour. These men, from agencies Timmy’s parents have only read about, make them sign papers, politely threaten them with direct penalties, and generally convey the thought that they must forget any of this ever happened.
Meanwhile, at NASA, it’s hit the fan.
Within that agency there is a protocol for everything. Some secret committee, tasked with thinking the unthinkable, wondered what should be done if an exploring rover should ever come across an anomaly: something which should not be there.
What's an anomaly? Something that the neural-net can’t classify. When its best attempt has a probability of less than 10%.
Then a second, emergency classification kicks in. A neural-net looking for something which is recognised, but should not be there. Something technological.
When that fires ... Well, it truly does hit the fan.
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