“Please state your name for the record.” The interviewing officer’s eyes were red.
“Howard Lester. Systems administrator.” I wonder if there will be a record. Who would it be for?
“Do you know why you are here?”
"Yes.”
“You are being held here on charges of sabotage. Do you understand?”
“Sabotage, no. But charges, I expected.”
This conference room had only needed to be repurposed into a holding cell twice before today. The chairs were awkwardly pushed back against the walls, empty, seating no jury of peers. Whiteboards had been wiped blank of equations.
The officer’s jaw clenched. “You have been given the opportunity to explain yourself. Would you like to do so?”
“I’ve covered it already, but why not. We have the time.” Howard winced, realizing his faux pas a moment too late. The interrogator jumped to his feet and leapt at Howard, sending his chair screeching back across the aluminum floor. The wedding ring on his left hand made a hard noise when he grabbed the edge of the table. Howard’s barely open eyes lifted to the band, and thought from the other man’s point of view. He stood by his choice.
The angry officer was grabbed by two others before he could cross the table, carried outside with cries of rage and anguish escaping him as he went. Another man sat down to take his place, holding a tablet and pen. He was polished and poised with a military haircut, starkly contrasting Howard’s broken nose that had poured ribbons of dark blood down his gray t-shirt
“I am Officer Stuttard. Tell me again, the whole story.”
I am the System administrator for the computer network on board the ship Wheeler-5, orbiting the black hole called DV-N554C. Our ship is home to over one thousand of the very brightest academics in a handful of fields, each of whom have unique experiments to run relating to the nature of space near black holes. We have biologists studying how animal’s circadian rhythms might detect relative time. Megastructure engineers designing proof of concept systems for using black holes as massive batteries or stellar engines. Information theorists fiddling with gravity waves, hawking radiation and quantum entanglement in their noble but endless quest for faster-than-light bit transmission. Most abundant of all are the countless teams of physicists and topoligists who seem to do nothing but watch things stretch out as they approach the event horizon. The exterior of our ship is covered in a rough acne of sensors, telescopes, and all manner of equipment used by these teams. The data from these sensors flows through my computer network on its way to terminals throughout the ship. My team is responsible for organizing this sensor network, and assisting the scientific teams in running analysis and regressions based on the data they collect. My role specifically is simulation scheduling on our onboard cluster.
“You run the computers?”
“Yes. I make sure everyone gets enough time to use the computers.”
“Understood.”
Many of the simulations and experiments run by the scientific teams spawn further tests. A simulation often needs to be re-run with a changed variable, or ten, or a thousand. Demand for computer time has only ever increased over the course of the mission. It should not be a surprise to you that computing power became the weakest link on this craft.
At first, I enjoyed the challenge of an increased workload. After all, by working with each scientific team, I was effectively a part of every breakthrough made on the ship. By a real metric, I am the most decorated scientist here; my direct contributions span fields in a way that no one else’s ever could. But the strain on our systems kept growing, and every team believed their work to be the most critical. My team could not keep up with the requests for help tuning hyperparameters and optimizing regressions. Late nights routinely bled into early mornings.
By the one-year mark in our expedition, I had come to resent the role I played on the ship. The constant bearers of bad news, my team and I bore responsibility for every delay and missed deadline. You know that horrible nickname we were given. Our resources were finite then, but the needs of the research teams were always growing. I spent the few hours I had to sleep searching for a way to increase the computational power available to the crew. I had not lost faith in the expedition - I only hated the position I was trapped in. We had no way to make real increases to the hardware limits of our ship, being millions of miles away from the nearest silicon foundry which could mint us precious more CPUs or accelerators. How can I speed up the output of a fundamentally closed system? I felt trapped. My precious processors were drowning in requests. The answer came to me as I turned and looked out my window on a rare night when my cabin faced a neighboring gas planet, beautiful and bizarrely elongated from orbiting closer to the black hole than us.
“So we are here because you were too busy?”
“No”, said Howard, “We are here because the mission grew - we needed more computational resources than were made available. We are here because my team solved the problem of infinite computation.”
“You killed us all because you had too much work to do?”
“This is not about me. I gave us a solution. I gave us time! Our mission was on track to fail had I not acted. I have never acted with malice. Let me continue, please.”
The following morning, as I arrived at my desk, I delegated the hundreds of tickets I’d received overnight to my team. I began writing a keylogger, a program I could place on every machine on the ship’s network, to capture the login credentials of every system on board. Knowing the systems like I do, it was not hard to write a program to accomplish the task.
I released my worm into the network that morning, and by lunch it was quietly listening in the background of all the terminals on the ship. I forwarded the findings to a file on my administrative account, building a table of passwords for every system in use. The one I was most interested in was, of course, that of the Captain, for the eventual purpose you know now. I left my keyloggers to listen, then I had a new task to attend to.
Some teams on our ship have launched satellites out of our on-board docks. The EV team had the capability to remove the sensors from the exterior of the main ship and place them on to smaller pods, which could be launched to closer orbits of DV-N554C or nearby planets. The next phase of my plan was to write an extremely compelling proposal for a launch of my own, as these satellites held the key to my private mission.
I fabricated the premise of an experiment, consulting with a peer specializing in heatpumps on the thermodynamics team. I proposed a plan to send a probe packed with processors out into orbit, to be used regularly but remotely. We had some tests to run with regard to heat dissipation in a vacuum, which could lead to better heatsink design for compute clusters in space. The findings from my experiment alone would have made a dent in my problem of finite computation, but my full vision was orders of magnitude more significant. I launched the satellite just a few days later. It passed without much suspicion, since the equipment would remain entirely usable and perhaps faster.
“Are you admitting to a further crime - fabricating this sham experiment?”
“No, not at all. The experiment was real. It was just a part of a larger plan.”
Stuttard looked unconvinced and wrote something down on his tablet.
Once the probe was launched, I went back to my log file of credentials and found the set I needed. I opened a remote session to the captain’s terminal, commandeering the ship’s navigation program. I generated a new key pair known only to myself, removing the captain’s controls of our vessel. He didn’t notice at the time, but why would he? The ship had been in free orbit, the engines not engaged in months. Feeling nothing, I accessed the engine interface. I fired our engines directly against our vector of motion - causing us to begin to fall towards the heart of DV-N554C. Our ship being the size it is, we didn’t feel the acceleration.
“You broke into the captain’s computer?”
“Yes.”
More notes.
I set the ship’s engines to fire for 3 months. I felt that would be enough. I deleted the key, then sent the hashes to the satellite probe for it to be re-assembled from scratch. It would take thousands of years for the probe to perform the mathematics needed to do such a task. Millions of miles away already, the schoolbus-sized data center floating in space woke up, and allocated a small percentage of its power to guess the key which would let us turn our ship around.
I trust you don’t need me to cover what happened between news of my actions reaching the academic teams and us arriving here, Howard said. His two black eyes spoke for themselves, swollen nearly shut. His mouth had gone wet again from his nose bleeding into it while he spoke. The programmer shrugged, the handcuffs clinking against the table. The officer nodded. One may assume that academics would be slow to violence, but the bloodied man here proved that mobs behave differently than people.
At the ship’s initial speed, our 22 month journey would take nearly 25 months for our families at home. Relativity is old physics, well understood by anyone qualified to be on board this research ship. The faster we move, the more time slows down. The slight dilation we were experiencing for the last year was hardly significant. However, 3 month’s deceleration meant that our ship would drift closer to DV-N554C than we had ever intended to be, which meant we would be moving orders of magnitude faster than we intended. I had estimated that our time dilation was a minimum of one thousand times what it was intended to be. My maneuver had brought the passage of time on board our ship to a near dead halt, while it flew by for everyone farther away.
This includes the satellite ship I had launched days ago. As our ship slowed down, the satellite remained near to our original orbit, which had the effect of accelerating it compared to us. That small satellite had become a greater supercomputer than any mankind could hope to assemble in a thousand years. While minutes passed on our ship, that lonely machine could hum for months, solving all the problems we could ever ask of it. My freezing of our ship’s clock gave us the tool we needed to finally complete our work.
“Your crewmates did not see this as the opportunity you did.”
“No. Nor did I expect them to.”
“Finish your story.”
As I increased the gap in time between my computer and our ship, so did I increase the gap between the ship and our home. Judging by my benchmarks, 22 years of satellite CPU time has passed in the 50 days since our engines fired. This gap will only grow. By the time we reach 90 days, decades will pass each day we spend on the ship. When we return home, it will be a home unrecognizable to us.
Howard thought again of the officer wearing the wedding ring. He thought of the photograph of a child’s first day of school, the new student beaming at her father behind the camera, taped to the corner of a subordinate’s terminal screen.
Howard spoke softly now. “A month from now, anyone we left behind will be gone.”
Stuttard’s eyes were cold and sharp. Howard wondered who he had left behind to join the Wheeler-5.
“Tell me why you did this to us.”
Howard felt the grief behind the other man’s stare across the table. His eyes fell to his wristwatch. Seconds passed in silence, as they always will.