The Backwards thinking machine

My grandparents were among the first to venture out and lay claim to the bounty that was available to anyone with the backing to launch out into the solar system and grab it. They had always loved the old television show Xena Warrior princess so naturally, they made a beeline for Eris.

They easily made back their initial investment and struck it rich selling off the volatiles to venture capitalists before the outie bubble of the 2070s forced enough innovation to obviate the need for chemical propulsion, even if it is ion based. My family became one of the richest in the system in those decades of plenty. Every cubic liter of gas that we could mine was spoken for to the highest bidder in the automatic market. Futures were not allowed so it had to be in storage before it could be offered for sale. They made out like bandits.

Metals were too cheap to be sellable so those became piping and packaging. Every bulbous thousand-liter liquified gas tank was made out of metal. The planetary system dwindled in mass as they mined further and further into each of the bodies yet even with all of the easy to grab volatiles and metals taken for storage and sale to the highest bidder, plenty was leftover to leave hundreds of square kilometers that enclosed billions of kilometers of mined out paths and transport tramways.

The AIs had already determined that the whole thing could be spun up as Ceres had already started to work on. Eventually, portions of the interior could be made livable for people to live at various points and have percentages of earth normal gravity to gestate a baby or to recuperate muscle mass after prolonged periods of microgravity. Everyone had the ideal gravity that they felt most comfortable in and a spinning dwarf planet could easily accommodate everyone from Earth-normal through 1/100th of the home planet pull. The added bonus of having microgravity zones inside of a planetary size mass left the potential for high-cost crystal growing as a side business.

The spinning up time period was orders of magnitude longer for us since we had so few watts per square foot of infalling sunlight to work with, but we still should be able to have gravity emulating cruise trains rocketing around the interior starting the process off while providing living and vacation areas for residents and visitors alike. I had the factory fabbers churning out the latest and greatest fiber-optic memristive cable from the mountains of silicon left over from the more valuable materials that made up my home. I would cover every surface that wasn't in active use with photoreceptive photovoltaic materials to capture every photon that falls upon us. If it is from the sun, we both get energy and images from the results. If it is from the numerous other angles, we capture higher resolution imagery than anyone could have imagined possible even a decade ago. I could read the newspaper being held up on Earth or a dome on the Moon if I had the inclination to do so.

I was interested in the dark non-photon emitting objects moving around the solar system and those that were outside of the system altogether. Keeping track of where craft originates and their vector on the last view was going to be important in the next round of conflict as well. After China and the United States, both seeded KEW killers throughout the system in the early 2040s and ceased to exist as viable nations the same day they dared to use them. Everyone now kept the peace through mutual passive monitoring and any violations would be swiftly and finally dealt with. My current setup allowed a multispectral recording of almost the entire radio spectrum. Having the entire Xena moon available for a second angle gave a slightly different perspective on available data collected and gave a kind of built-in backup with a parallax of any recordings obtained. Keeping track of the position of each photoreceptor and the vectors involved at the time of recording would allow AI to gain even further information from the raw data and backtrace where it was when it was originally taken.

Storing all of this data and having room for future expansion with the law of ever-expanding data storage in mind, I planned very long term. We had tens of thousands of years worth of data storage space even assuming a ten percent bloat per decade increase as has become common. I wanted the entire thing to be accessible to future versions of humanity so cross-platform duplicative backups were assumed from the start. Each sector of storage was backed up across every other sector and fragmentation correction was enabled to deal with random flipping due to neutrino interaction. This also provided an indirect neutrino tracking system so that data was also recorded. The gravity wave effects were so strong that we automatically integrated those results as we corrected for them with the incoming light to provide another layer of data.

The computer had been running for a week, recording data on everything that came in and I wanted to check on the recordings and see if the AI had come up with anything new from the data yet when I noticed that the server indicator was off. It should have read a fraction of a percent full yet it had less than 20 percent remaining free. Apparently I had configured the system incorrectly or it was duplicating more data than it was designed too. I was sorting through the decision tree of what gets recorded and where when a notification popped up with my personal codes associated as the sender.

A video of myself plus at least a hundred years popped up and started explaining how our setup was both a stroke of genius and a failure at the same time. My setup infuriated multiple nations and they planned on destroying both worlds to prevent the leaking of movement data yet the very act of planning on the destruction of my worlds brought about the destabilization of those same nations. The computers that I had created accidentally recorded enough detail to recreate the words spoken during meetings as long as we knew where that meeting took place. Using the two recordings of gravity wave interference correction, enough detail could be obtained to recreate a secret meeting inside a secure windowless bunker. Every word uttered could be reliably recreated and played for the whole world. Test after test verified that anyplace in the solar system could be recreated and sounds reliably reproduced from recordings that were even now taking place. The video went on to describe how instructions for a much higher density storage system was already being distributed to the machines around the world to update and copy over the data already recorded. It should allow even these holographic gravity wave recordings to be stored for all of the decades that I clearly had left to look forward too.

He went on to explain that my setup also happened to be perfect for sending data retroactively back until the point of creation of the machine. He was uploading some of the software updates and workarounds that helped the AI deal with this new aspect of data transmission. I was not to tell anyone else about the retroactive time messaging capabilities and only focus on the recreation of reality aspects of my setup whenever I released information on it. The strategy for short term investing would also propel me to the top of the heap of financial empires as well.

Once the idea was out there, gravity wave holography mapping and reproduction were expanded upon and became just another way of keeping your government honest. I can't wait to see what future generations are able to do with the data that we are creating for them.