Chapter No.49 Kill Switch
Look out for the inevitable.
No sooner had we arrived back at Earth when the next crisis reared its ugly head.
"I have a request for visual," Judy informed us.
"Put it on," I said.
It was Fist, and what he had to say made me feel sick.
"There is a powerful gamma ray burst headed directly to your planet's location. Estimated to arrive in two days at 1300 hours your time."
"Where did it come from?" I asked.
"It is from a Wolf Rayet star near to your solar system."
"Thanks for the warning," I said.
Fist nodded before the transmission ended.
I turned to Molly. "Is that going to be a threat?"
"Yes, if it's powerful enough. It could definitely destroy the Earth's ozone layer. It could also blast away some of the atmosphere."
"How does that kind of star produce a gamma ray burst?" I asked.
"Basically, it will explode as a supernova, and in order for the resulting gamma ray burst to hit us, the main O-type star would have its spin axis pointed directly at Earth as if it were aiming a big gun at us."
"I suppose it doesn't matter how it got aimed at us," I said. "The question is; what are we going to do about it?"
"The simple answer is that we would have to get the people off the planet in time. But, I have a better idea."
"I'm listening."
"We could use my virtual mirror idea to reflect it away. I would have to program the other two ships so that they could merge with ours to produce a huge virtual mirror. I'll have to figure out how to increase the power to the combined virtual mirror so that it could withstand a gamma ray burst."
"It sounds like a good plan. However, we don't have much time to implement it."
She smiled. "I think the androids can handle it."
"Do it," I said. "In the meantime, I will prepare for evacuation if you can't get it to work."
She nodded and rushed off to engineering. I stayed at my station and began setting up crews for a possible evacuation of all of the colonists.
The good news is that I didn't have to worry about it.
Molly came back onto the command deck with good news. "The virtual mirror has been activated. The two other ships will maintain a triangular formation while projecting their parts of the virtual reflector. It should be able to deflect the gamma ray burst with minimal damage to our ship engines or the planet."
"That's great," I replied. "If this works, we will have saved humanity . . . again."
She offered a smirk. "Yeah, I know. It seems that we're doing that more often than we should."
"It makes one think about how fragile human life really is."
"At least we don't have to worry about that. Our ships could easily handle a gamma ray burst."
She was right. We had the shielding to protect us from just about anything, including the most powerful energy beam in the universe.
We had our ships in formation and at full energy production when the gamma ray burst hit. The ringing noise that resulted was very loud, but there was no damage to our systems.
"Well," Molly said with a big grin. "That worked very well."
"Thank goodness," I replied. "It appears that we've been able to prevent the destruction of life on Earth every time it's been threatened. I wonder if there is a threat that we can't avert."
"No use worrying about it until we discover it," Molly said. "Perhaps it would be a good idea to determine if we could impart some element of imagination to these androids so that they would be able to discover and predict threats."
"What are you proposing? That we change their programming?"
"That might not be necessary. I'm certain that there are learning algorithms in their code. All we have to do is make them use it."
I tensed my jaw. "I'm not sure that's a prudent idea. What if they begin to use it to attempt a takeover of the galaxy?"
"That sounds like an apocalyptic plot. I don't think that they could do that."
"I think they can. With three ships and twelve thousand androids, they could pretty much tame every species in this galaxy. I believe that we're the only reason they haven't done that."
"So, what you're saying is that we're playing with fire."
I nodded. "Yes. We need to figure out some method to tame them and make them act with mercy."
Molly thought about it for a few seconds before looking at me. "I'll have to go through their code and see if there's a way to do that."
I nodded, but I wasn't sure that she could succeed in purging the androids' code of any evil residual from the Phoenix Project. However, it is good that we're beginning to realize the possible catastrophic danger we're dealing with