Beyond Pi Snippet 3

 Sitrep: So, I checked my mail and Goodlife sent Beyond Pi back early! So, this is the last snippet. I'll publish the book later today or this weekend.

Chapter 3

 

In Hyperspace

 

The rogue science ship, Lois Pasteur, made her cautious way across the void to the Omicron sector. The AI on board had argued with the doctor many times about the idea of abandoning their normal route. He had overruled them by simple force of will and his role as owner of the ship. They were committed now anyway.

The ship’s AI Loi managed the internal systems carefully. It controlled a legion of robots of various sizes and capacities to keep the ship running smoothly. It was his diligence that had allowed the ship to remain functional over the centuries of the dark time.

Nikki, his android AI counterpart, was the second half of the equation. She managed the day-to-day operations of the ship as well. She was too limited to pilot the ship though; that task fell to either Loi, the doctor, or one of their subjects.

Doctor Mathis had been trying for centuries to recreate his lost love through cloning and memory implants. To date he had failed utterly or so he insisted.

In truth the bodies were perfect copies of the genetic template. There was no drift; each clone was a copy made from the original, carefully maintained subject in a stasis pod. Her cells were cultured from samples and rigorously checked for genetic damage from the lethal amount of radiation she had sustained in life.

Since the subject’s DNA had been unstrung and encoded into their files before her accident, she was carefully preserved.

No, the fault laid in the improper copy of her mind or so the doctor insisted. In truth he could not and would not accept that any copy of the original would hold those intrinsic flaws. They were growing up in a different environment and time, under different circumstances. They were effectively sisters of the original template.

The other issue was that the memory implant process was flawed. If they pushed the memory implants too far, it damaged the subject. It involved reprogramming the entire brain neuron by neuron. Which was a problem since the original subject’s brain had been damaged before death and the process of sampling her mind to upload it to an AI hadn’t been complete because of that damage.

And then there was the doctor himself. Doctor Mathis, or, at least the original organic version had died years prior. He had also been preserved but this time in the science lab mainframe. He had maintained his bewilderment and grief over the loss of his beloved and had continued with his obsession to bring her back no matter how long it took.

There were seven subjects currently being cultured. The first had been woken early to help pilot the ship. Her inherent helm skills had ensured their survival in the arduous trek across the void. Nikki was caring for her now. Loi checked on her and then went back to his duties.

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Doctor Mathis sighed as the inevitable signs of failure manifested itself in the latest MRI and GRI scans of subject Z981A. The young clone had begun to formulate her own memories and personality that differentiated from his beloved.

He could trace the change to when she was woken to take the helm and endure the first scans. They really needed a better method of implanting the memories into the subject brain while monitoring it. However, MRI and GRI scans were not reliable in the detailed nanometric level his work required within the close confines of the pod.

Just the act of transferring the subject from the artificial uterus to the pod might be another factor for failure.

It was all so frustrating. But he would play politics and allow Nikki to continue to coddle the youth until they found a proper place to drop her off and start anew once more.

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