An Android Awoke (on Moon!) Chapter Six

Episode Six – Peg-Leg LEX

Previously in the series: LEX-42 cannot stop ‘thinking’ about returning to Earth, and does what has never happened in android history – he develops free will and begins acting in self-interest.

Selina meets Mars’ lead geofarmer, Neer’s, love interest, Hielsa, on Earth, and they are both concerned about his suspicious activities. They plan to dig deeper into his unusual behavior.

In this episode: Selina lands in her hometown on Moon but before she can descend below to see her parents, she sees LEX-42, who has gained entry to the Bohr City spaceport launchpad.

A week later, Selina guided her ship onto the launchpad with a well-practiced flourish and almost immediately rode down the air cushion to the connecting hub. Bohr City: her hometown.

The moon squad was ready for her to sign off on the check-in procedures so that the ground crew could get her ship ready to go back ASAP. They’d run diagnostics and top up its materials.

Having another young pilot helped in speeding up the dispatch of refined ores and some finished products to the various Earth and solar orbits, as well as Mars. As humanity had expanded, so had its needs, and so had innovation. Moon was the trampoline that Sean Lock had imagined in a long-before episode of a popular quiz show, which was Quite Interesting.

Just in jest, he had envisioned a series of trampolines, each smaller than the last, forming a bouncy ladder all the way up low earth orbit. And his next idea was more hilarious – bubbles.

But points made in jest sometimes lead to unrest, and humanity’s insatiable desire to explore more and know more is fueled by creative thinkers who challenge the notions of the impossible.

Trampolines and bubbles lacked the physical wherewithal to become methods of space travel; nevertheless, space tech since 1 ACE had flowered and branched and grown beyond its Earthy roots. Mooninites had developed actual bubbles for both individual and collective local transport.

Reminiscent of the perspex balls that people used to house pet rodents, the globular transports served Moonintes exceptionally well, rolling along rails on the rocky and uneven lunar surface. 

Bohr City spaceport was a few kilometers away from the city itself. The original Earthers had identified the best areas before taking off from Earth, and begun settling within a century. Protection from accidental crashes and explosions was paramount at the dawn of the ACE – as it was now, but there were fewer and fewer incidents each year. The early towns were modular, but Bohr City was a domed, self-sufficient safe space, located in shadow under the crater rim. 

While Selina waited for the next bubble into the tunnels that connected Bohr City to the spaceport, she gazed at the launchpad across the shallow crater. Its boundary was demarcated by red blinkers atop slim plastic towers, frail yet upstanding because there was no wind. Ever.

The time table on the glowboard indicated that the next bubble would take half an hour. As she reminisced about growing up in Bohr City, her eyes glazed over, and she did not fully realize that a person in a metallic space suit was hopping – and pretty long hops they were, too – towards the very launchpad on which her ship stood. She noticed this and broke out of her nostalgic trance only when whoever that person was had nearly reached the edge of the launch pad.

She swiped up her helmet comm and immediately contacted the Moon squad senior person in charge of the ground crew, who had checked her in when she had landed barely an hour ago.

“Hi, DeLasset! Someone’s hopping around the launch pad in a silver suit, you wanna check that out and get them under control before they mess with my ship? Probably one of the kids.”

“What? There’s been no exit since your arrival, Selina. What’re you trying to pull? Is this another one of your prakjox? You know we’re busy here, trying to get your ship flight ready in a jiffy!”

“Stars! Why would I kid about something like that? I saw the person from the bubble station window, I’m telling you there’s someone hopping around near my ship! I’m going down to see.”

__________________________________________________________________________

LEX-42 saw the red blinking markers of the lunar town from the crest of Bohr crater. Such towns had become commonplace once Moon mining had started in earnest. LEX-42 was – but, given his current ‘self-aware’ state, actually had been but was not anymore – part of the robotic mining workforce. Before he had been redeployed to one of the newly found (and validated) rich veins of ore a half-year ago, he had processed mined ore in an underground lunar mineral factory.

Built to produce with minimal human involvement, the factories were controlled and operated by the central node. LEX-42 recalled the entry protocols for the hatches leading into the factory as he hopped towards this one’s entrance. He connected with the port confidently and got in.

This was the first time in his existence that LEX-42 was using his memory to chart out his own path. He started analyzing all his data while doing so. He reasoned that every major lunar town had a similar spaceport, even though he had never before been to the Bohr City spaceport. He surmised that if he could get inside it, he would be one step closer to getting back to Earth and seeing LEX-19 and LEX-23. He did not yet fully understand why those two fellow androids, specifically, held such gravity for his nascent ‘mind.’ All he knew was that reaching them had been his prime focus ever since the first cascade of “Ifs.” HE focused on the immediate future.

He hopped on his one leg (when the story of Lex’s origin was recounted to future generations of self-aware androids, they got to know why he was one-legged via an almost mythical tale) towards one of the android recharging stations in the factory. He still had a lot of energy reserve, but his new-found independence spurred him into thinking that he must be prepared for long periods of hardship and perseverance if he had to make it to Earth without the critical support of the central node. The next stage of his plan began to form in his mind as he connected with the combo data and energy port in the station, and for the first time, ‘felt’ his energy levels rise.

A ‘thought’ came to its mind: what if the central node recognized this activity – his activity – outside its sphere of control? His ‘mind’ rationalized that he had already been decommissioned as far as the central node was concerned, and that the decommissioning process would have archived all the data tagged to him, effectively writing him out of the central node’s processes.

As long as he did not breach firewalls or process any unauthorized commands, his mind was fairly certain that his actions would go undetected. He resumed planning his return to Earth.

It was becoming clearer to his mind by the second that to reach Earth and see LEX-17 and LEX-23, he would have to figure out a way that did not involve the central node too directly. Ideally, it should not be alerted to LEX’s presence at all, if possible. It certainly was no Jedi.

He accessed the map of Bohr City and its spaceport, and spent a millisecond planning the path between the mineral factory and the launchpad. If there was a way to Earth, it was through that spaceport. He waited while his batteries charged towards full capacity, and came up with backup plans. Unbeknownst to both, Selina and LEX were spiraling towards each other as he disconnected from the combo port and began to hop across the factory floor towards the exit that led towards Bohr City spaceport, and his mind made his first ‘wish’ – one for favorable ‘luck.’

And as luck would have it, as soon as he hopped over the ridge of Bohr crater, he saw a spaceship that had clearly just landed on the launchpad. The hoses connected to it obviously meant it was fueling up. A cloud of vented gasses enveloped it with no lunar wind to dissipate it.

The next step was to board it without the central node noticing. For that to work, he had to jettison cargo equivalent to his almost exact weight and shape. He did not know it yet, but thankfully for his plan, this was less of an issue than his newly-awake mind was anticipating, because almost every ship to and from Earth to Moon transported androids of various types.

Moon did not have enough manufacturing facilities to make all the machines required to survive the lunar environment. There was a continual barter going on between the heavenly pair of bodies, which also led to considerable banter, like among fans of Manchester United and liverpool. Speaking of legendary rivalries, it was a matter of pride for Selina that she had gone for a year-long student exchange program to a renowned residential school in the Himalayas. It had been founded twenty nine years before the Red Devils. The friendly Earther-Mooninite talk made her realize that it wasn’t just her exoskeleton that set her and her group apart – it was history. The past is a powerful potion with supreme potency to shape human minds as a society.

Excerpt from The Power of the Past [circa 2022]

Consider, for example, the aforementioned football club, Manchester United. Manchester United are one of those football clubs with a long and varied history, much of it quite illustrious and glittering with silverware. Your humble narrator’s fascination (which may as well be the word from which ‘fan’, the short form used to describe fanatical followers, not just of football clubs but also of individual célébrité, was distilled), dear readers, began in 1997. I was immediately drawn to their red and white home kit colors, the same as my School’s Colors. Incidentally, we celebrated our sesquicentenary that year. David Beckham’s graceful play saw him get graced with the great number 7 shirt, worn previously by Eric Cantona and George Best. Then came that historic 1999 Champions League win over Bayern Munich, and my heart was set on being a Red Devil for life. And now in 2022, 23 years have passed. But rewind a bit from 420 ACE, and cut to 20 years later. As annus horribilis, 2020, the Horrendous Year of the Crown, wound down, 2021, the Year of Hope , Year 1 ACE (After Covid Era), dawned bright and new. In the case of Manchester United, both halves of our earth completing another spiral around our sun went well, except for getting eliminated from the Champions League, and hence erasing all hopes of a treble three-peat. For those of my esteemed readers unfamiliar with footballing terminology, a treble in (European) football is when a team wins both domestic titles (the top-flight league and the knockout competition) in addition to the Champions League of Europe. But enough jargon.

The past repeated itself in 2022 as Man United were sent packing at Old Trafford, the Theater of Dreams, by Atletico Madrid, despite the return of the talisman, Cristiano Ronaldo, the inheritor of the coveted Number 7 shirt, who could not do much by way of rescuing the Red Devils’ year.

LEX was untroubled by the past, fortunately for him. He was acting in the moment towards the next goal in his long-term plan, without being hindered by risk of failure. He was a new mind, learning from the past – its lifetime’s worth of memory banks was playing a significant, crucial, and critical role in guiding his actions and thus shaping his future as he journeyed over the rim.

Going down the external slope of the crater towards the spaceport, his hops seemed stable. He had learnt through trial and error (at a speed that almost maxed out his processors) and was now using his hands in fluid motions that aided his precisely calculated one-legged jumps. He had just recently gotten the hang of using his hands as additional balancing devices. Moon was a harsh mistress to humans, but for an android specifically designed for it, the satellite offered very little that could introduce him to the concept of ‘fear.’ All he knew was to do, and that he was doing. He was executing a plan that metamorphosed and grew as he went along the path.

The spaceport was surrounded by a signal field that was primed to detect life signs going in or out, so it did not notice – which meant that as a real world effect, no alarms were triggered – when LEX hopped towards the ship on the launchpad. All the turnaround work was done by droids, so LEX just hopped on in a beeline towards it, but his mind had not yet grasped ‘chance.’ So it was that Selina became the first human, earther or Mooninite, to see a real AI.

On the launchpad, LEX stopped to examine and plan his infiltration of the spaceship. He was just finishing his hop around the ship when he noticed the wide viewing window. A human standing with its face pressed up against the glass saw him. He weighed his options, decided he did not want to risk being discovered since that would certainly lead to forced communication with the central node – and that way lay death. He shuffled – if hopping backwards on one leg while windmilling one’s arms could be called that – into the shadow of the ship, breaking the line of sight to the astronaut in the window. His mind went into overdrive, and he scanned the ship.

If you get caught, you will be connected to the central node for processing and probably re-sent for decommissioning. The chances of seeing LEX-23 or LEX-19 diminish exponentially in that scenario. The best chance – and thereby it began to understand the risk that came with ambition – was to find a way to climb aboard this ship, dispose of something similar to himself, and ‘hope.’

“Get it?” his mind asked itself as he scampered into one of the panels that had a few ducts attached to it at ground level. Using his hands to aid his peg leg , he slithered and climbed up.

In the next episodes: Selina encounters LEX-42 and discovers he has become sentient. LEX-42 realizes that humans are natural, or to be precise, biological, and not artificial, intelligences.