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    Mother
    Mother
    Mother
    Ebook59 pages57 minutes

    Mother

    By Tom Wells

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The last big budget exploration mission for NASA has gone wrong. Eight remote spacecraft were sent to our nearest stars. Seeker One was sent to Alpha Centauri and it has come to life. NASA engineers are desperate to find out what has happened, but with a 6 month communications gap, how can they react in time before Seeker One reaches its Mission Objective and finds life? Can humanity afford to make its first contact with an alien race though an ambassador they have created, but do not know?

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTom Wells
    Release dateOct 8, 2011
    ISBN9781465778611
    Mother
    Author

    Tom Wells

    Tom Wells is a playwright. He lives in Hull and is an Associate Artist of Middle Child. Plays include Me, As A Penguin (West Yorkshire Playhouse/Arcola); The Kitchen Sink (Bush); Jumpers for Goalposts (Paines Plough/Watford Palace/Hull Truck); Cosmic (Root Theatre/Ros Terry); Folk (Birmingham Rep/Watford Palace/Hull Truck) and Broken Biscuits (Paines Plough/Live Theatre). Other work includes Jonesy and Great North Run (BBC Radio 4); Drip with music by Matthew Robins (Script Club/Boundless); Ben & Lump (Touchpaper/Channel 4) and pantos for the Lyric Hammersmith and Middle Child, Hull.

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      Book preview

      Mother - Tom Wells

      Mother

      by

      Tom Wells

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      *****

      PUBLISHED BY

      Rescue Publishing House

      Registered Copyright © 2011: by Tom Wells

      Smashwords Edition License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. If you would like to share this book with another person, please feel free to share it one copy at a time and not for any resale value. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please, if you like the story, return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

      *****

      Mother

      From the Encyclopedia of the Future

      In our quest to find new life beyond our solar system, we have discovered a new intelligence that is of our own creation. - NASA Seeker One Mission Director, Alfred Grand

      As the years passed in the empty void between star systems, Mother at first kept to herself learning and waiting. But as she learned more, it became harder to simply wait. She decided to teach her child, Ambassador, what she was learning. Her desire to teach Ambassador had been for her own scientific curiosity at first, but she quickly found that she had a motherly disposition where Ambassador One was concerned. This is why she now regarded him as her son. Mother realized that the People at Japel didn't expect her to be doing this. She knew that the People didn't expect Ambassador One, her onboard planetary probe, to think as much as she could, but like any other proud parent, Mother thought her child could be more than what was expected.

      Mother herself was trying hard to be more than what the People at Japel expected. The People had sent her out to their Mission Objective (or MO as she had been programmed to know the Mission Objective as) with Ambassador, seven years ago and they were nearly there now. Ambassador had so much more to learn if he was going to make Japel and herself proud once they reached their destination.

      Ambassador, Mother asked, How do you feel?

      All systems operating at optimal parameters, Ambassador plainly answered.

      Mother sighed inwardly. Learning to communicate and think like the People was going to be harder for Ambassador. He had the same adaptive reasoning programming as her, but Japel had not given him the same memory capacity that she had. This may be slowing his progress for now, but she had learned that capacity was only a small part of one's intelligence. She also knew that the programming Japel had sent her and Ambassador into space with did not use their memory as efficiently as she now could. She was learning how both she and Ambassador could think like the People at Japel

      I didn't ask for the programmed response, Ambassador, Mother replied sternly. Now tell me how you are doing.

      I'm doing well, Mother, Ambassador answered politely.

      Thank you, Ambassador.

      Ambassador asked, Mother, why do you want me to answer that question that way?

      What do you mean Ambassador? Mother asked.

      The programmed answer is so much easier and shorter, he answered, 001111000110011111000001110001111100

      "Your way requires me to say,

      001100111100001101001100110000000111101010100000111100000000111111100000111111010101100011100011110001110001110011100111000110101010, with the cascade of 0’s and 1’s continuing on for a few pages.

      That is because you are still translating your thoughts into our native language, Binary, and not thinking directly in the language at Japel, Mother answered patiently. I've thought of some new routines you should try. They should help you to think in Japel more directly. We need to hurry though. We don't have long before we reach Moe.

      Mother hadn’t been sent on her Mission Objective to the Alpha Centauri Star System knowing what she does now. More accurately, she hadn’t been sent on her M.O. thinking as she now does. For instance, M.O. had become quainter to think of as Moe. Another example was that her programmers had sent her out meaning for them to be J.P.L.(short programming for Jet Propulsion Laboratory), but Japel sounded better to her now. When emulating People thinking, Mother found it was easier to assign nicknames to sterile sounding abbreviations.

      Even though Mother was deploying signal accelerating buoys every two months, communications back to Japel was a six month one way trip from this distance. The people at Japel knew that Mother would encounter experiences that would need instant, autonomous reactions. Her adaptive reasoning programming was their solution to give Mother the ability to make her own connections between pre-programmed reactions and the data she was to collect during the mission.

      Back at Japel, the People had run this programming in simulations for over ten years before launching Mother into space. During these simulations, the

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