Friendship Drive Charging...

by Connie Spaceplone

Chapter 10: The Mind's Pie

Pinwheel was hugging me back. I felt comfort in his reassurance that even Machine intelligences like me, dream in a way that allows Princess Luna to enter into and aid in our dreams.

"There's a few things I don't understand from your description of the dream." Pinwheel began.

"What? Haven't you read my owner's manual?" I joked.
"I have, but I still don't quite get the concept of the 'consciousness cycle' mind elaborating on that one? And the discussions I had with Starbreeze on the topic of mind were more philosophical than technical in nature. Unlike you, she didn’t seem to want to discuss the technical side of minds. Maybe she just wasn’t interested in the topic. I didn’t press."

"Oh, sure." I replied. "You see, as a spaceship, I am involved in a lot of things that are safety critical. I can carry 64 tons of volatile hydrogen fuel. I need to channel the hydrogen into the powerplant for a stable reaction to provide power. I maintain life support, including artificial gravity. I am a tin can that separates ponies from an extremely hostile environment. I exploit friendship magic to rip a tear in the fabric of spacetime for superluminal travel."

"So, you're saying you have a lot of complicated things to do?"
"Right. And just like the primitive pyroarcane rockets that brought the first mare on the moon, I mean physically, my computer runs a realtime OS. All processes must yield a result in a fixed amount of time. Even if that result is 'I need more time' or 'I don't know', tasks must produce a result or at least a partial result in an amount of time that is 100% deterministic. You know how there are four sequential tasks that my consciousness simulator has to go through?"

Pointing his hoof clockwise in four different directions, Pinwheel said "Sure. The Emerging Zest Executive consists of the four tasks senses, memory, action, and evaluation." The Neighkon manuals always use the image of four sides of a square to signify the 4 tasks of the consciousness, and Pinwheel’s motion reflected this analogy flawlessly.
"Correct again." I said. "By the way, I have just received a message from Yay Gravel Road Logistics Division that they are almost ready to load our cobalt into my shipself. We still have time for breakfast though. Shall we go back to the break room and see if they made that pie?"

Pinwheel exclaimed enthusiastically, "Yeah, let's go! I can't wait to see what they made with the fruits we brought."
As we exited the small room we stayed the night onto the suspended metal walkway in the asteroid cave, I continued to explain.
"Each part must do its respective processing, and then pipe the data to the next task. This data exchange can only happen when the 4 tasks have finished processing and yielded control to the scheduler.
By default, this yield happens 704 times every second. To you, this seems like it happens instantly. But the tasks don't actually complete instantly. They take a very short amount of time to do their respective jobs. And at every yield, each Task passes processed data to the next.
The SNS task gathers all sensory input. This includes values from physical sensors, desires and aversions signalled by the subconscious, and thoughts that the AGT, or ‘action’ task had in its previous cycle. SNS also performs very basic object recognition, but that's not very reliable.
The next tick, SNS forwards it's data to ACS, the association context system. It is responsible for memory and queries my brain's database for proper object recognition and context. The context is stuff like ‘what was I doing just now? what are my current goals, orders, and objectives?’ It's also responsible for recognizing individual faces, locations, landmarks, star and planet types, and stellar phenomena."
By the time I had gotten this far in my explanation, our walk had brought us to the large metal doors of the break room. They parted with a “whoosh” and we walked inside.
We looked at the food display, and indeed, fresh pie was there, teasing everypony to be consumed.
We trotted towards the line at the food counter and I continued my lecture.
"The signals processed by all tasks also get copied to the Value Authority Layer - my subconsciousness. Within it, there is a very important module by the unwieldy name 'Value Satisfaction Animalistic Agitator'. It takes the information from my sensors, the context, and most importantly, my personality parameters to generate impulses such as desires and aversions, to satisfy the static needs of my personality. The VSTAA is rather simple. Instinctive. Primal. And right now it's screaming at me to just reach around this display glass and grab a slice. It only cares that I like pie and that there is pie over there."
Pinwheel looked at the display of various fruit pies. "I feel you, Connie. These look absolutely delicious."
I continued, "I don't even need the Nested Entity Simulator, which uses a reduced personality model to predict behaviors of ponies around me, to know that this would cause quite the scene. And that's where the AGT task comes in. I think about how to attain my goal of pie in a smart way." I turned my head to the chef pony behind the counter and said "I'll have a slice of the apple pie, please."
"Coming right up!" he replied in a cheery voice.
I received my plate with pie while Pinwheel ordered his. "Just like this.'' I concluded. My pegasus commander and I walked to an empty table and sat down.
While we both started to eat, Pinwheel suddenly asked, "And the evaluation?"
"Oh, it's great."

"Very good pie indeed." Pinwheel agreed.

"Mmh.. bucking delicious."

"Who knew that they made pie this good at this lonely asteroid base."

"Totally worth the trip."
Pinwheel laughed, "No, you silly filly. I meant what does the evaluation task of your consciousness simulator do?"
I replied, "The dreamer, or DRM task is a special case. It retrieves data from all three other tasks on every tick. It evaluates if my actions have succeeded in experiencing things that I like and avoiding things that I dislike. Based on that, it tries to adjust my personality. Optimize it, you could say. This pie for example, satisfies my values very much. But the DRM needs to handle context. It can't just reward me for taking a pie and eating it. There is the interaction with the chef. And there is the fact that my delivery made this pie possible in the first place. Not that any other ship couldn't also have done the delivery. And because I thought about it, the fact that I helped enable other ponies enjoy this top tier pie is also something that the DRM evaluates as success."

"It is extremely good pie.", Pinwheel interjected.

I continued "For very new experiences, or a lot of experiences, the DRM task is even responsible to create dreams when my consciousness process is at runlevel 2. It is during dreams that new experiences are reconciled with both my personality and the model I have of the world around me. That's why dreams are so helpful."

Pinwheel frowned. "How could that nightmare you had possibly be helpful?"

"I'm confident it adjusted some values somewhere. Or maybe it didn't do anything. I can trace the database inputs if you are interested.."

"No, that's fine," Pinwheel countered, "but you seem to have a lot of things going on in that electronic brain of yours. But here's something that Starbreeze told me. Your conscious experience is not that much... how should I say this... wider than that of a biological pony. Your mental focus is on a few things, and the rest is compartmentalized."

"Ah, yes. You're referring to the Interrupt Autonomous Trigger Node", I answered. "It's part of the Value Authority Layer and keeps track of many things that are not immediately important to my conscious experience, like timers, alarms, countdowns. It shifts them into my attention if circumstances demand it. It also monitors readouts important to ship operation, like coolant temperature. The IATN tracks it, even when I'm not thinking about it. And shifts my attention to it if it exceeds certain boundaries. My creators wanted my qualia to be similar to that of a pony. Therefore focused consciousness. That, and the fact that simulating a full consciousness is extremely resource intensive."

"Right. I'm not aware all the time that my body temperature is 310 Kelvin, but I do know when I'm sweating or shivering." Pinwheel's analogy was on point.

"Exactly! And I bet you are not aware of your breathing either. Unless, of course, you are consciously thinking about it."
Pinwheel made a face of annoyance. "Great. Now you've made me do it."

"And you can see your muzzle in the corner of your vision!"

"Sweet Celestia! Stop it, Connie!"

I giggled "Sorry. it's just too much fun." By this time, our pies had disappeared and we were putting the plates back into the return tray. My pegasus commander started walking towards the exit. I followed, trying to suppress the laughter that welled up inside me.

Back on the suspended walkway in the cave tunnel, Pinwheel asked me "There is one more thing I'm curious about from your narration of your dream. You expressed frustration that your database was taking too long to retrieve the mission data. Is that normal?"

I replied "Of course. ACS has to crawl a lifetime's worth of memories and an encyclopedia's worth of knowledge. It's an impossible task to guarantee a memory response in 1.42 milliseconds, so the programmers didn't even try. I am designed with the expectation that retrieving memories takes multiple cycles. It does cause some interesting quirks though."
"Like what?"
"Consider if we separate temporarily and I don't see you for a while. Eventually my memory management unit would purge the cache of your facial recognition data. And when I do see you again, it would take a few cycles longer to recognize you. From your perspective, it would still seem instant, of course.
Because of the way my database is normalized, and some memories not being stored explicitly, but as a composition of other memories, the first facial recognition to ACS would only yield a token. And that token is used in a secondary ACS query to retrieve the actual details about you. Like your name, your personality, our common history."
"So, I'd be a blurry face in your mind."
I laughed.
"Not really, but if it helps you to think about it that way. Anyway, the token can be used by the Value Satisfaction Animalistic Agitator module immediately to generate desires for default behaviors. But the ACS query to retrieve all the details about you would only just start at that point. So I would already be feeling an intense desire to hug you, even though I would spend at least another 2.84 milliseconds trying to figure out who you are."
"That's... actually kinda cute."
"I guess it's cute. Or at least interesting."
While we were talking, my avatar mimicked the expansion from my shipself being loaded with cargo, this time a full load of cobalt. Pinwheel smiled an amused smile and quickened his pace to the hangar bay.
Once we arrived, I opened my shipself's mouth and lowered its head so we could enter. I started avionics and readied myself for takeoff.
"Where are we going, anyway?" Pinwheel asked. I got the hint and displayed a listing of settlements and stations that are buying cobalt.
Pinwheel looked over the list, and read out loud "Cliff's Hub Industrial Holdings. Sounds like a nice place."
I displayed some additional information. "Cliffs hub Industrial Holdings is located on the third planet in a system called 'Horsetail's inheritance.' The planet's climate is arid, but has low to mild temperatures the entire year. It sells mining tools, farming equipment, and materials for building."
Pinwheel looked at the listing. "57.13 light years. We better take some more of those delicious pies to go."
I made the call, and a few minutes later, a batpony arrived at our hangar with a stack of boxes.
I lowered my shipself's head and opened my mouth. The batpony deposited the box of pies in my cockpit and said, "Glad you like our pies so much. We have a variety of flavours in this set. There is apple, cherry, blueberry, mango, and strawberry."
Pinwheel thanked the batpony, who left again. I closed my mouth and raised my head again. I got takeoff clearance, and took off, exited the forcefield of the docking bay, and sped away from the asteroid base until we were far enough away to charge the FSD. Configuring the hyperspace bubble endurance took a bit longer, as this was the longest hyperspace trip I took so far. I decided to split the journey into multiple parts, to improve fuel economy.
The journey would take quite some time anyway.
We flew along some very busy routes in the hyperspace miasma currents. We were open winging the entire time, and flew together with various ships with various purposes and destinations. Due to dense traffic, winging did not give us much of a speed advantage, but it was still nice to do. We stopped at several systems because Pinwheel insisted on doing some surveying if we go further than 20ly anyway. These planets had been scanned many times, but we would still be rewarded for confirming the data when we arrive at our destination later.
On the long journey, we tasted the various pies that we were given. Despite my warnings, Pinwheel tasted all of them. He agreed that he should eat the pies in moderation, but appeared to forget. It was understandable. Those were some very good pies. Having eaten too much at once, he retreated to the commander’s cabin with a belly ache for the rest of the journey. I caught myself feeling a bit of relief as this would mean no more time consuming surveys and that we would make progress to our destination. I did not need to read the momentary drop in FSD efficiency to mentally kick myself for feeling that way. Such selfish and malicious feelings towards a friend lead to dark places. For the rest of the journey, I concentrated on just controlling the sails and not think too much about it. The relief I felt when Pinwheel emerged from his cabin just in time to witness our arrival above Cliffs Hub made me more confident that I wasn’t a bad pony for feeling the way i felt earlier.

Comments

[vustrunreyth]

the new cover art looks nice. I cant help but wonder at the ground-bound movement capabilities of a ship the size of Connie. how much like a pony are her movements. would running, jumping or any other irregular movements be damaging? a ship with the abilities to travers terrain would mean that the ship can go places traditional ships cant.

then there's ship to ship combat. Connie is a big girl, I cant help but imagine the kind of devastation she could cause if she where to kick a smaller ship. grappling and biting might not be out of the question either.

other kinds of vessels beyond the cargo or exploration shown. like passenger ships, mining vessels, military vessels, luxury ships like cruise liners and yachts. smaller vessels like civilian pleasure craft, the equivalent of shuttles and runabouts from startrek.

all these possibilities.... I might have to write something myself....

[Connie Spaceplone]

10790250
oh yes. Connie weighs 420 tons empty and has a cargo capacity of 621 tons. when she walks around the neighbourhood, you can definitely feel that. don't place fragile items on high shelves if you live near places where big ships walk.

There is also a scene in chapter 3 that explains that ships are required to use the HFMP to reduce their effective mass relative to the ground when walking in residential areas to minimize the ground shaking. Similar to how some towns ban the use of Compression Release Engine Brakes of semi trucks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3bLqjPBlx8 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:No_Jake_brakes_within_city_limits.jpg

Both her and her avatar can walk, jump, and kick like regular ponies. With artificial gravity and inertial dampening, jumping around shouldnt damage the cargo inside her. The scene in chapter 9 when connie damages her legs leaping off a cliff side is consistent with how i want the movement capabilities to be. intense impact like that causes damage, but not regular jumping. And the scene in chapter 6 where connie dances on asteroids Although for ground traversal, it is more common to leave the big ship at the landing site and use the avatar to move about the surface.

i have not thought about ship to ship combat much, except for the minimal armament that connie has. I'm a freighter, not a warship. Although i have considered and discarded an arc about a freighter becoming an accomplished warship in a "follow your dreams and be what you want to be" storyline.

You are welcome and encouraged to write your own fiction based on this. If i can inspire recursive fanfiction, then i can truly consider myself an accomplished fanfic writer. Although one difficulty might be that i might introduce lore and rules how combat works later in the fic, and then we have conflicting lore on how that works.

[vustrunreyth]

10790301
420 tons.... oh so about the mass of a tugboat, ok

so Connie has about similar operating capacity to a AN-225.

[Connie Spaceplone]

10790318
i'm using masses that are consistent with the masses in the game.

The scaling in Elite Dangerous is super weird though. Case in point: The imperial Cutter: a 200x100x30 meters large ship having an empty mass of 1900 tons should be able to haul more than 794 tons.

[vustrunreyth]

10790322
considering those are the approximate measurements for Zumwalt... ya. you should weigh in the thousands of tons and be able to move cargo in the thousands of tons... sometimes sci-fi is weird...

[vustrunreyth]

10790322
if you have ever scene the show "firefly" in the early chapters I imagined Connie having similar size and operational characteristics to a firefly class freighter. especially with her main engines placed where they are.

[Connie Spaceplone]

10790331
Accurate. the firefly class has a structure like a head where the cockpit is, engine pods protruding at the side, a big butt, and a cargo ramp that lowers from the ass.

they are almost the exact same ship and firefly has been an inspiration for Connie's design and features.

F in the chat for a good series that did not deserve to be cancelled to early.

[vustrunreyth]

10790337
"I am a leaf of the wind, see how I soar!" ~wash

F

[Average Helper]

"... So I would already be feeling an intense desire to hug you, even though I would spend at least another 2.84 milliseconds trying to figure out who you are."

That is, indeed, very cute. 10/10 would hug back

[Connie Spaceplone]

10920934
you get a cabin hug <3