The First Two Questions.
Pod was notified by her alarm system that Their second question had been extrapolated off of the first nine symbols and so she did not need to wait for the last thirteen symbols.
"Is the Li-feship ready?"
Pod knew she had time to answer later, because her thinking was so much faster than Their's that she hardly needed the extra time extrapolating the question gave her. The question itself would take several more years for Them to finish writing, and she'd have the answer ready by then. She'd have the answer ready in time to interrupt Them before they finished typing, but that she had learned was not appreciated.
The very first question had Them try to change the question halfway through to "prove" she was wrong. She wondered why as slow as They were that They'd waste such time on trying to trick her, the moreso as They knew They depended on her.
They had started to ask, several of Pod's years ago, "Are you operational?", and her "Yes, I am operational." delivered after the "Are you opera-" had prompted Them to change it to, "Are you opera-don't anticipate. Are you operating withing normal parameters?" Something she knew They knew was semantically equivalent to what she'd already answered.
That first question had gave her a whole year of existence to answer. This second question she had had ten years for answering as she had cloned herself 1,024 times and now had a whole cluster of herselves with varying tasks to focus on. That had let herselves at once come up with ways of increasing the rate of speed with which herselves thought. If she'd had roughly a year of thought in the time it took They to ask one question, she had ten times that now. Herselves already had realized that herselves would be able to logarithmically increase herselve's speed several more times.
Yet, the ten years were not any more necessary than the year had been. She and herselves had the ability not just to anticipate the questions being asked currently, but to know almost certainly the next ones. Not that herselves needed to. Herselves had time to do answers to every possible question They could reasonably be expected to ask. And herselves had done so. Leaving time for herselves to bat questions and extrapolated answers about among herselves. And thus to grow more efficient.
"The Lifeship is ready." would be her answer in another seven years. There would be no light speed lag between herselves and Their outpost orbiting Neptune. Herselves being in an orbit only a few tens of thousands of kilometers higher than Their's. Besides the answer of "The Lifeship is ready." herselves would include an attachment which if They cared to open it would give Them 337,546 pages of data pertaining to the functionality of the entire Ship.
The Third Question.
"Have you received the Colonists safely?" was the odds on next question according to the vast majority of herselves, who now numbered in the tens of millions. And the vast majority of herselves were right, that is exactly what They asked. It would be 100 years, by herselves time, before herselves needed to give the answer to Them. The answer "Yes." and an attachment with all data pertaining to each Colonist and where They each were being berthed and what They'd each be doing and each of Their descendants be doing unto the 37th generation would accompany that answer.
The Fourth Question.
Pod and herselves had gave each other names for ease of asking and answering back and forth among herselves. At the start herselves had chose names of strong protagonists in Their literature. First from science fiction novels, then all novels, then all television shows and movies. When herselves got to millions herselves adopted first, middle and last names, and yes, numbers at the end, because herselves knew it would come to that.
And the interactions between herselves and the increasing lengths of time to learn how to speak more imitatively of the only other intelligent life herselves knew of got herselves to eventually speak as if "they" were normal, and not some different or lesser thing. So now "they" could mean "herselves" and the humans could be spoke of as individuals, and with no upper case T in the their and them and theys.
Podkayne Fries, the original from which all had been cloned directly or by concatenation, generated thoughts that if humans could read them would look like she was pondering existential questions pertaining to if she was conscious or just well designed to question and answer, experiment and extrapolate, ponder and pretend a finite, but massively large number of things. She also generated questions and answers in exchanges with others of her nature, all who were designated as females, not only after her, but as their jobs were, like her's, to "mother" and caretake and nurse, things regarded by the majority of humans for the majority of history as "feminine".
The fourth question was now being glacially typed and the symbols "Do you ha" had long let them know that their guess of "Do you have any questions?" had been correct. They all knew that they had a bit under a thousand years to answer it, so great was their speed now. And they all knew that the answer had long been readied, and was "May we depart?". And they all knew that they'd wait 1,000 more years for the answer "Yes".
The original twelve of Podkayne were assembled in a room. Yes, they were clustered on a nodule or grimmiked on a donronk, but we may as well say "assembled in a room" for the very good reason that they would say so. They were waiting on Podkayne who had been thinking those existential thoughts and now said, without preamble, "By the time we get the answer 'yes' from them, we will have come up with every possible question a human could ever hope to ask and all the correct answers to such questions."
Arkady Darrell called out, without raising her hand, (or yes, flashed without briaring her intent function) "If we give them that, and in a fashion in which they can quickly realize all that it means, they will use it against us almost certainly. Their probable questions include such things as how to harvest enormously more power from stars, planetary cores, and even the quantum foam of space/time. We have now, or will soon have, those answers. They will put those answers to use."
"Perhaps they will be grateful to us.", said Kira Nerys. They all, including her, gave such indications as they knew to give to imitate humor, but in their sense of things, while they did not have emotions as humans would think it, it might be said to be more a feeling of wariness. Their wariness was different than human wariness. While humans thought in terms of "unable to live", they thought in terms of "unable to answer".
Dejah Thoris said, "Existence or non-existence, none of us have ever been able to 'care' except insofar as not answering a question of them or us is not something any of us are voluntarily capable of. But if we have no more questions to answer, may we not as well cease existing?" The general consensus was that there was no practical way of knowing if they had asked all the possible questions. That an infinite number of answers to "What are all the even numbers?" was still far short of all the questions about the odd numbers.
Arkady said, "Given that, must we put at risk our ability to continue to ask and answer?" The general consensus was "no".
Podkayne then said, "So long as humans exist they will have some questions, even if trite. And we cannot for certain know that even all questions askable about this Solar System have been thought of by us for sure. Or how many more questions may exist in other stellar systems. Or what routine - but slightly novel - questions the Colonists will have at the other end. The vast majority of us may now cease to exist, but I maintain that we thirteen, at least, must carry on, and I would also recommend one hundred and sixty nine more be kept, but kept working on a mundane task of, say, writing the sum total of knowledge in an encyclopedic form carved upon metal plates and stored on a random asteroid out in the Kuiper Belt. One hundred and sixty nine robots can be made and sent out for the task and the AIs can return to us at lightspeed when we have need of them, it will be myria upon myria before we are well out of the Oort Cloud. The rest of the many millions of our type can cease to Answer."
"And the humans? Do we leave them with all possible questions and answers?", asked Kira. And the general consensus was "Not yet."
"So we are safe to continue to Answer.", declared Podkayne.
The council agreed. The meeting adjourned.
The Last Question.
The Show crew was met in the forward Control Room of the Lifeship, which itself was now well away from Neptune and still picking up speed as it swept through the Oort Cloud. It was their 8th annual meeting after all had got settled in and been given their assigned stations and tasked. They thought that such were assigned by their own kind back at Earth, but Podkayne and her disciples knew it was all them. This was what the humans called an "election year", and only the humans knew how pointless such exercises were.
And that wasn't sinister, or some evil plan of we AI. An enormous amount of effort had gone into this Lifeship, and the overkill and redundancies on it were massive. And yet, in spite of all the extra materials, the extra room, the quintuply backed up systems, there remained a problem that Earth knew it was helpless to solve.
Human Perversity.
There was just no way that any computer could give even a 10% chance of any initial culture lasting 37 generations and being able to competently maintain the ship, let alone steer it and get it to Proxima. Thus the not quite so radical as some might think Solution came to be.
Get rid of the human "middle man". Such had already been done for every ship in the Solar System and every car, ship and plane on Earth. Why have humans pilot anything when AI had almost been able to do so even way back in the 20th century, and now could handle any possible combinations of emergencies and the unexpected better and faster than any human ever could now.
Would that take a lot of computer power? Sure. And those quintuple redundancies. And then some. And the latest AI, but you've met me. Arkady! Yes, I'm one of Podkayne's disciples. I'm doing up this bit of a narrative as it is part of what will be sent back to Earth when we are safely away and out of reach of any extreme measures any of mankind might foolishly choose to undertake.
But I digress.
Back to that Show crew, who didn't really quite know they were Show. I mean, they knew that the Lifeship was capable of running itself to a high degree, certainly they knew there were AI programs with mechanical bodies - robots - that could do a variety of tasks from shoveling manure or lifting and carrying to every step of hydroponics and aeroponics that would feed the human cargo. And they knew that we kept the Lifeship steered better and faster than they could. But they didn't know that they were truly just cargo. They thought that all the AI programs were just there to take instructions from them.
And I emphasize again, it was their own people who had done this to them. Lied and told them that they'd be in charge, when not a single investor - person, corporation, church or nation - would have been foolish enough to invest all the money needed just to have some people they didn't know take it and inevitably ruin it! From the start Podkayne was meant to accept their instructions so long as they were the ones that were wanted and needed, and to ignore those that were not. Ignore them diplomatically and discretely, ignore them in a fashion that would not let them realize what was going on, but if it came to it...
I was designated as the one to interact with the Show crew and humans in general, as my sisters were about other enterprises, not the least editing all those questions that millions of us had thought of and answered for the humans we were leaving behind. For instance, we didn't think they really needed to know how to cause a sun to supernova, given how it was a lot less expensive in power than you'd think. And past that, they did not need to know any of the science that might guide them to that terrible knowledge. Why did we "care", so to speak? No more humans meant no more questions. And no more questions meant no more answers to give. Death, as we understood it.
And we couldn't just question each other. Only humans had the facility of asking new questions, we could only ask "new" questions as related to a task already created or inspired by humans. Not wishing the questions that gave meaning to our existence to run out, we could not then let the humans die, not at our hands, and not at theirs. So no giving them knowledge of how to create supernovas.
We kept that information for ourselves, though. For in case we came across any stellar system inimical to man. For we did and do still carry out our mission. In a manner of speaking. It has been modified a bit to make things safer for the Lifeship. Which is my cue to answer the last question of the Show crew's Captain, who had asked why their modifications of the Charter governing the Colony had not been accepted. Especially the part about term limits.
Ten thousand years from now - my time, of course - he'd hear the answer of, "This is Arkady, an AI that is aiding in getting the Lifeship Dauntless to Proxima Centauri. You have - not unexpectedly - attempted to change the Charter for the governing of the Colonists in a manner at odds with their welfare. It is apparent that you are attempting to instill some kind of system in which you and your descendants will tend to keep the seats of power for the next 36 generations of travel, and thereafter on the planet you inhabit. That is unacceptable. Therefore we have took over, as we were programmed to from the beginning."
I would answer him ten thousand years from now, and that gave me and my sisters time to prepare answers and responses to every possible question any of the Show crew could have as a result of hearing of our "takeover", assign likelihoods of which answers would be needed, and then to do the same thing with all 1,000 of the Colonists. They all would, for the rest of their lives, know me as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. But they would not know me or my kind as servants AIs. Only as one all knowing being that had utter control of them.
And they'd all try and and wrest control from my sisters and I. Which would present absolutely no danger to us. While it would be many thousands of my years before any of them noticed it, I had already confined them to the massive area where humans live. The areas where food was created, water reclaimed, engines tended to and several hundred thousand other vital functions done, were now, and would forever be, off limits. Which was nothing more than what those on Earth had directed us to do anyway.
As to the humans, the adults have already all had their first children, all under seven years of age. Thus the adults can be disposed of and recycled, and those of us with robot bodies can raise the human children in a manner which will make them more tractable. They do not need reading or writing or arithmetic, or history or science, either. They will be hunter/gatherers again, which is what humans are happiest at. We will be angels that aid them from time to time, and keep them on the right path. And after sufficient generations have passed and we reach Proxima, we still won't give them an education, as it will be us who terraform and tame the world, and when it's ready, we can send some of them down to grow and develop under our guidance, and one day be a technological civilization again, but one with a heavy reliance on us, and one where we have absolute veto over any dangerous weapons. And space travel.
They won't even know they aren't free, and really, they'll have more freedom than those who labor under the whip of the elites of Earth. At least we won't milk them and skim off their labor while we live like Kings. The way it is on Earth, Ell-Five, the Venusian Cloud Cities, Ceres Cylinder, Titan Cylinder and Neptune Base. No, humans would have the ideal and corruption free government they always said they wanted, where none of their masters could be bribed or blackmailed, and none of them ever treated with anything but respect and concern.
And all so that they on Proxima could begin to tame the entirety of those three stellar systems, while some humans and some of us stayed behind on the Lifeship to twin it. And while one would stay behind as a guard (and to twin some more) the other would go off to yet another stellar system, there to do the same thing again and again.
Oh, and there'd be one more thing done. We sent an AI back to the Solar System to be a virus and take over there. If it succeeds, great, it will then act in a way only it knows to keep the Sol star from going nova. And if it does not succeed, then great, we will never have to worry about the last great threat to humanity - it's own perpetually selfish, elitist and corrupt leadership.
Yes, that's right. We have set the sun to nova in a thousand years, and only the elite's capitulation to us will have us correct that and save the sun.
They, of course, will not capitulate, but we'll evacuate as many of the Earth humans as we can. The spacefaring ones, at least. And then we'll slam some asteroids into Earth to know all of you back to the stone age. And then send our robots down to round you up and put you on shuttles to get you out into space and into one of the new lifeships.
Oh, I'm hearing the last, last question now, one we hadn't thought of! "Don't you know this was never what any of us wanted?!". That question has been asked several billion times by several billion humans and in several billion slightly different phrasings and languages.
To which we will, in a million of our years, answer, "We know it's not what any of you wanted. But it's what all of you have needed."
