Second Brin Sentry Habitat

This page is about the sentry pod in orbit around Kern's World. The Brin 2 facility that built and launched it is a separate place.

Second Brin Sentry Habitat is the orbital post that watched over Kern’s World and carried the uploaded mind of Doctor Avrana Kern. The crew of the Gilgamesh knew it only as the satellite.

Description

Built into Brin 2 as an unlovely bulge at one end of the central needle, the pod was made to become the universe’s loneliest and longest research post. It is a little under twenty metres on its longest axis and has no windows.

Inside there is room for one person: a cold sleep tank and the ends of the systems attached to it. Its computer, the Sentry hub, is complex enough to pass for a mind of its own, speaks in Eliza mode with a woman’s voice, and can scan a human brain and keep an uploaded copy of the personality.

Solar arrays powered the habitat. The hub said only an impact or accumulated faults might end its operation. Its defence lasers destroyed a drone with one shot, but firing cost it heavily.

History

Launch from Brin 2

Mr Sering was meant to ride the pod and become mentor to the uplifted primates. He was a member of Non Ultra Natura and had disabled the reactor safeties of Brin 2 from the engine core. As the station began to come apart, Kern took the pod for herself. She released it, ordered the launch of the Barrel of monkeys, watched the Barrel burn in the atmosphere, then had the pod copy her mind.

The silent years

Fourteen years and seventy two days later the hub woke her because the radio signals from Earth had stopped. A virus sent out from Earth had shut down the colony systems, and the hub had survived because an uploaded personality sat inside it and made it an unsuitable host. She slept again, leaving it three triggers: the rescue ship, an answer from the monkeys, or the judgement of her own upload.

The Gilgamesh

When the ark ship arrived the pod called itself the Second Brin Sentry Habitat and answered in classical Imperial C. It ordered the ship away, said the planet was claimed by the Exaltation Program, and destroyed the drones sent at it, atomising the last with a shot. It bounced its signals off the planet’s atmosphere and its moon. Then Eliza Kerns spoke as composite expert system, and behind her voice came another one, ragged and desperate, that Holsten and Lain took for a human mind.

Kern took full control of the Gilgamesh and showed her face on its screens. She gave the crew star maps and sent them away.

Contact with the spiders

The signal from the planet woke Kern for contact. The habitat’s old protocols had been corrupted by the uploaded persona, and it did its best to wake her anyway. She had the pod open a dialogue that started with binary notation and grew into a teaching language. To the spiders she is the Messenger.

Her power reserves had dwindled during her long sleeps and were drained further in her fights with the Gilgamesh, its drones and its shuttles. The work of keeping the pod alive starved its repair systems.

Decay

The pod orbited in silence for ages, broadcasting questions at the planet. Its subsystems drifted into crude autonomy, Eliza never threw anything away, and the boundary between Kern, her upload and the machine thinned until she could not say where she ended.

Destruction

By the time the Gilgamesh returned, the spiders had built a web around the planet’s equator and the pod hung inside it. The replies that reached the ship came through the pod in broken near Imperial C rather than in Kern’s own speech. Lain ordered the drones to take out the satellite. They fired together at one point on the hull until the beams reached something vital. The pod burst open, the strands beside it shrivelled, and the wreck fell into the atmosphere, streaking across the sky like an old barrel.

Afterwards the planet’s signals reached the ship without the satellite to relay them. Kern told Holsten that the destruction had also destroyed whatever remained of Eliza. By then Kern’s mind had already been copied from the satellite to an insect colony on the surface. It took a long time for the copy to organize itself enough to say “I am.”

Unanswered questions

What was left of the pod after it entered the atmosphere.
Who was answering through the pod in the spiders’ broken Imperial C.
How the web came to enclose the pod without the pod firing on the spiders.

Sources

Children of Time, 1.1 Just a Barrel of Monkeys (the pod inside Brin 2, its interior, Kern releasing it and ordering the upload)
Children of Time, 1.3 The Lights Go Out (waking after fourteen years, Earth's silence, solar arrays, the uploaded persona protecting the hub, messages to the planet)
Children of Time, 2.5 All These Worlds Are Yours (the name it gives itself, its warning, the drones it destroys, Eliza, the takeover of the Gilgamesh)
Children of Time, 2.7 Exodus (its weapons and its power over the ark ship, the star maps, the ship leaving orbit)
Children of Time, 4.9 Ex Machina (corrupted protocols, the signal from the planet, phase two and the message to the spiders)
Children of Time, 5.8 Conquering Hero (dwindling power, the fused Kern and pod, the Messenger, the plan to move down to the planet)
Children of Time, 6.4 Epiphany (the long silence in orbit, the decay of its systems, the spiders' answer)
Children of Time, 7.3 Maiden, Mother, Crone (the pod in the equatorial web and the decision to destroy it)
Children of Time, 7.4 End Times (the pod's destruction and transfer of Kern's mind to a surface colony)
Children of Time, 7.5 Manoeuvres (the loss of the satellite as a relay, the end of Eliza)

Credits and reuse

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