Chapter 4 - Spooked
Mark 10 is not your average tunnel drill. Think of him as a descendent of the Channel Tunnel excavator: duties would have included cutting, crushing and conveying chalk material back from the drilling face, to create the England to France rail connection in the late 20th Century. Tenth generation Mark or Mark 10, designed by engineer Deiter Fischer, is much more than that. Still cylindrical, it is smaller at 3 meters in diameter, 7 meters long and a mere 75 tonnes, but is not like any old-style tunneling machine at all, in fact, few machines built after 2025 can really be compared to the nuts-n-bolts assemblies of the past. They’re as far in front technically as passenger jets were to Stephenson’s Rocket, thanks to Fischer’s genius. Sure, mankind still builds and uses traditional machines, but even the most basic use some x-quantum electronics, bit-power and nano technology.
Some of the human technicians back on Earth strike up a conversation with a Mark 10 drill when they're bored, a few have even claimed they’ve chatted with Mark 10s in their dreams. Mark 10s are designed to interact with humans on all emotional and spiritual levels. You can talk about your girlfriend, what you should be eating for breakfast, your plans for the day – anything, really. You can ask Mark 10 what his plans are for the next 5 minutes and then again, an hour later. Usually you'll get two slightly different answers, based on what happened during the hour, but exactly the same plan is rare, so the guys have a sweepstake to collect when this happens. Too much detail is a built-in feature. Another favourite is checking Mark’s predictions of how much Scandium he will dig out by midnight. Checking the logs the following day gives a weight to the nearest one-thousandth of a gram. The odds are better, the further you pick from Mark’s estimate, but he is normally within a tenth of a gram. The daily winner gets paid for a good night out, whilst the profits send the team on holiday in the summer.
You can ask Mark 10 what he likes to do best, ask him to list his top 3 desires in life; number one will be: “To drill all the time!" unless number two gets in the way: "To maintain myself for drilling." Number three will be either “Talking and drilling,” or “Reading and drilling.”
Mark 10 is not another idiot robot though, he actually does love drilling, by any definition or measure of consciousness. A computer physicist could explain how Mark 10 thinks and reasons with a boat load of equations and theories, but it's easier and perhaps more accurate to think of Mark 10's mind existing in a perfect world for him, he is literally living the dream. He doesn't sleep because he doesn't need to, his mind is always ON, unless he’s paused. Imagine a job you love so much, all you can do is stay at work as long as your body and wife lets you. With a job like that, eating and sleeping are annoying chores you can do without, but you do need them for good health. Mark 10 of course was designed specifically for the job of drilling 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and it's something he simply adores doing.
Leaving Mark 10 alone without any human instructions is also possible. If you left a young child in a sand pit to play, things normally get out of hand quickly. Usually throwing sand out of the pit is the start, then putting some in the other kids’ eyes is the finish. Mark however, cannot get bored or rowdy, he just drills and drills, like a happy fish swimming in a warm sea. Left to his own devices, he will play-drill.
Of course, Mark is nuclear powered for such autonomy, right? The very first Mark was, Mark 0, but nuclear power was phased out a generation ago, then bit-power came along. Every part of Mark generates power from his surroundings, with each electronic component using forced quantum heat transfer – basically, quantum-sized heat pumps, making electricity by stealing heat from the environment. It doesn’t even need to be hotter. Heat is sucked to where it’s required, despite massive temperate difference in the ‘wrong’ direction, a quirk of quantum physics for the tiniest components. So when Mark is working hard, the surroundings are a little cooler than they would otherwise be, so he can work anywhere where the temperature is just above absolute zero.
Can he be killed and is he intelligent? His mind cannot be erased like a disc drive, his 'personality' is the system design, his 'thoughts and memory' are his x-qubit arrays, just like the arrangement and connection of neurons inside our brains give us personality, memory and humanity. Mark 10's x-quantum electronic components are arranged and connected just like neurons, but trillions more in a specific and predictable way, so that the resulting 'mind' is entirely tailored to the machine and the tasks at hand, so there's nothing to be erased, no computer program to run, hack or debug.
If you ask Mark 10 the question: “What’s my name?” his x-quantum electronics begin by seeing if he recognizes you from memory. If this draws a blank, he asks something called the ‘information field’ for data held on you. His architecture is designed to grow exponentially for each nano-second the problem is unresolved, so will not ask you any questions unless he’s stuck without the information he needs. Mark’s mind works by taking what he knows and providing a 100% reliable answer or nothing.
Like an orange, Mark’s mind is divided into segments, and these cannot work unless they’re held together by an electromagnet. Disturb that magnetic field and his brain falls apart. Reconnect, and Mark thinks again as if nothing had happened. His neural connections, once made, are permanent, so he never forgets, even his mistakes.
How does all this work? X-Quantum or extended quantum electronic components are all bit-powered, taking energy from their surroundings, mounted on wafers arranged in a sphere, so they power-up on demand from the centre and just like a chain-reaction, these x-qubits switch on exponentially. Computer scientists have predicted, that Mark 10 ‘can’ know everything in the universe, using less-than-half his mind, but to do that, he would also have to ‘see’ everything.
A typical learning computer then? Not really. He doesn’t learn anything. Learning implies skills through experience. Mark has exponential processing power, the longer he takes on a problem, the more he thinks and faster. His ‘experience’ is reading vast amounts of data from the ‘information field’ and his onboard memory. His ‘skill’ is using a rapidly increasing brute force process, acting on that data, to deliver a solution.
Humans tend to be limited by their ability to think quickly enough and have to experience things over and over again to do anything useful. Mark just needs as much information as possible about his environment, so he is what he ‘sees’. His Quantinium reader accepts data from every elementary particle within a radius of 50 kilometers, by tapping into the local ‘information field’, so in his bubble, he has everything covered. His designers limited his reader to 50 kilometers to make sure he stays focused on the local area.
One of the fringe benefits of Quantinium, is the ability to connect to different dimensions beyond the spatial one we live inside. The ‘information field’ stores everything about every elementary particle, right next to us, in a dimension we cannot see! Since Mark can tap into this vast data resource, he doesn’t need a large memory to know everything about his environment.
So is he intelligent? Within his bubble, nothing knows more, he can read everything. Outside that imaginary 50 kilometer ball, he can only make assumptions and that’s one thing he’s not designed to do. He can only answer or act if he knows for sure. He thinks like us and acts, based on his environment and what he knows, so yes, he is intelligent if humans are, but his abilities are far greater. He knows everything about his local environment and he can think progressively quicker and harder to solve the toughest problems, so in these respects, he is light years above us.
Mechanically however, Mark seems pretty basic, he can only dig forwards in his tunnel with a very slow rate of turn, and the material he drills is conveyed behind him. He is like a mole. Quantinium drill tips, cut through the hardest rock like butter. These tips use their properties to disrupt the atomic bonds holding matter together, making the valuable ore fall off the drilling face, with very little effort. The precious material he’s looking for is filtered out of the ore using a Qu
antinium grid: which further separates, refines and compacts the precious, valuable and worthless materials. The dirt he doesn’t want, compacted by the process, is left behind. This ‘waste’ is so dense, having been disrupted by the Quantinium, immediately settles like a liquid in the bottom of the tunnel to form a roadway and Mark uses some of it to make interlocking blocks to form dense rings, to support the tunnel roof. Every so often he ejects a block of precious or valuable cargo onto this roadway, so that another smaller collection robot can pick it up later. Not only does Mark dig a fortune everyday, he also delivers a by-product – a network of tunnels suitable for underground transport, or one day to be filled, if required, with breathable air for humans to live in.
His sensor can see Marsonite ore in any direction 50 kilometers away and all Mark 10s have an insatiable appetite for drilling this rare-earth-bearing rock. They’re in constant touch with IPMC Mars Base and Earth HQ updating them with production news and stats, and if a Marsonite seam is too far away from his current location underground, he either reverses along his roadway, or drills to the surface and drives himself over ground to the next seam. He doesn't have to ask the supervisor to do this, his mind is designed to drill for Marsonite and extract new deposits as well as he can.
So what if Mark 10 goes berserk and starts drilling where he’s not welcome? Like a windmill grinding flour, it will not suddenly start baking bread. His design is very specific, in a well known environment, he cannot change without human help. But, just in case, he does have an OFF switch. The electromagnet, holding his mind together, can be disrupted by humans, using a jamming signal, directed at his brain, to make the segments fall apart. An opposite signal must be used to re-establish the electromagnet. Once revived within one second or in a million years, he remembers everything as if nothing had happened, he only knows from his clock that he spent some time hibernating and has a log of other information received, like where he has been and a summary of his bubble history.