The Futility of Golf In Almost Zero Gravity

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

But the hole in Martin Vadimovich's skull wasn't going to allow him to scream anywhere, vacuum or no vacuum.

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Archimedes. Edison. Pasteur. Tesla. The Wright brothers. Tim Berners-Lee. Jobs. Musk. Folly. Gripton.

Vadimovich could have slotted in nicely alongside that group with an invention that would have revolutionized the course of human history had Martin made it back to Earth.

But he didn’t.

In fact, his name barely rated a mention on the mission’s closing out report when it was filed, a week after the TOK Corporation’s mining vessel ‘Haven’ returned from its mission to the Kuiper Belt. In fact, Martin Vadimovich was listed below a number of expensive pieces of equipment that hadn’t made it back home either, a fact that enraged his elderly mother and triggered his only sister to write a strongly worded letter to the corporation’s CEO.

The CEO read it on the toilet and then made one of his PAs, Michele, stay late to write a letter of apology. She sent it out that night with a digital money transfer attached that meant should the Vadimovichs accept the TOK Corporation wasn’t to blame in any way whatsoever for Martin’s death and never mention it again to anyone, they could take the money and never have to work again.

They took the money.

Apart from his mother and sister, Martin Vadimovich had no other close family and few friends. He had dedicated most of his life to solving a problem that no other human had ever managed to solve: the creation of true artificial intelligence. That dedication had taken him through eleven years of academia after which he had decided to stop wasting his time teaching ungrateful students and pandering to the University’s board who insisted he publish regular studies connected to his field of expertise, and go out alone.

That hadn’t worked out as well as he’d planned. The savings he had accumulated dried up quickly and without a source of income, or a sponsor for his work, he found his focus on artificial life was starting to wane as he began to panic about how he was going to pay for his groceries.

Fortune offered less of a shine on him, and more of a lackluster smolder, and Martin stumbled across a large off-world mining company looking for a developer capable of maintaining and improving their fleet of autonomous machines. It was insanely well-paid because it meant a four-year journey to and from the Kuiper Belt with an asteroid mining crew. No-one in their right mind would accept that contract so invariably everyone who did accept that contract, wasn’t in their right mind.

Martin took the assignment for a number of reasons. First and most importantly, it got his mother off his back about not doing ‘real work’. Retirement was sneaking up on her and she was starting to get mildly annoyed that her super-smart son hadn’t made enough money for her to jack in her cleaning job and play bingo all day. She was also annoyed he was still single but that, she concluded, was a consequence of his first problem.

Secondly, he wouldn’t need any money while he was away from Earth. His monthly pay cheque would be deposited into an Earth-based bank account he couldn’t access whilst traveling and by the time he returned, there would be enough to cover a decade of living expenses.

And finally, best of all, he was going to be left alone for four years surrounded by state-of-the-art AI equipment. He could experiment for as long as he could keep his eyes open. His new bosses wanted advancement and no-one in the inventory department batted an eyelid when he presented them with a list of equipment, parts and raw materials that ran to sixteen pages. In fact, he’d received two messages from a senior manager in that department wanting to ensure he hadn’t missed anything off that list. The TOK Corporation saw this as an opportunity to have their own mad scientist on the payroll for four years. If he stumbled on some amazing invention in their time, they would claim it as their own, submit the patent paperwork and get rousing pats on the back from shareholders. Large bonuses would be dished out left, right and center. Senior executives would be snorting a large amount of blow off stripper’s tits.

So with some brief goodbyes and a duffle bag full of mainly underwear and socks, Martin joined the expedition to the Kuiper Belt. Three months, seventeen used sick bags and one tonsil removal operation later, he was declared a C plus for fitness and given a ‘Space Worthy’ certificate that he lost in a dingy dive bar on the outskirts of Washington on the night he’d received it. One more week after that, he was blasted into space.

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The journey out to the Kuiper Belt was uneventful. A large proportion of the beginning and end of the trip was spent in protective stasis, a safety measure to prevent the crew’s feeble human bodies being turned into liquid during the important acceleration and deceleration phases.

Throughout the remainder of the time, the crew played a very poor interpretation of happy families. Travel time to the Belt outside stasis was approximately eight months and they all tried to maintain some semblance of civility. Unsurprisingly, that proved a challenge.

The personnel were split into two. On one side were the seven crew members flying the actual ship. They all wandered about the corridors with a smug sense of self-importance pretending that their input into the journey was vital when everyone really knew that the ship’s AI - Greg - and his fleet of service bots were largely doing everything. The ship’s captain Franz was a toxic short South African man with beady eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and a ridiculous beard. The rest of the crew had been hand-picked by Franz and were subservient technically-orientated men, or blonde women with big boobs. Either way, few of them were worth a conversation with.

The other group were the mining crew. Whilst they were much more down-to-earth and likable, between them they had a long list of undesirable habits. Some of these were bearable - the failure to replace the empty toilet roll for example - and some of them were amusing - rewiring the ship’s internal automated doors so they would emit a farting noise when they opened. But the major issue which riled up the ship’s crew the most was their absolute disregard for any sort of hygiene. The galley was constantly a mess, soiled underwear found in places no-one should have been removing their underwear and the junk food wrappers wedged in between vital ship systems. Captain Franz had a short temper as it was; the daily interaction between ship’s crew and mining staff caused furious slanging matches that could be heard throughout the corridors.

It was, thought Martin, a miracle that any of the people on board made it to their designated asteroid in one piece. He largely kept himself to himself, working on the current iteration of the positronic brain that he’d been obsessing over for the past few years. Sometimes he’d join the crew for movie night if there was something worth watching but aside from that and meal times, he limited his conversations with anyone to top level discussions on where they were in relation to their destination, how the ship was performing or what did someone think of the previous meal they’d all just consumed. His hermit-like behavior rewarded him with over twelve hours of solid work every day.

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The journey itinerary was simple. Departure from Earth to arrival on the asteroid was approximately a year. There would be an unloading of cargo, equipment and personnel for another two months after which the ship - the ‘Dark Forest’ - would leave, en route for a second asteroid where they would be picking up a different mining crew to take back to Earth. Martin’s group would remain on the asteroid for approximately two years, commencing mining operations before a second ship - the ‘Haven’ - would come and take them home. Two years was, in Martin's opinion, overkill but he understood that the corporation required the monitoring of the automated facility for at least a year before it was left to function on its own. Once the mining crew were satisfied that the asteroid could be mined successfully for the next thirty years without the need for human interference, that second ship would pick them up for the journey home.

This was a huge opportunity for Martin. Not only did get months of research and experimentation time on the journey to and from the asteroid, he got two years of testing out his upgrades and ideas on the hundreds of automated vehicles, systems and humanoid robots that would be left behind to run the mining facility once humans had left.

Most of the equipment was to a degree already fully automated. It was possible to have a conversation with one of the bipedal robots that worked diligently throughout the mine. They could all tell you how a particular piece of machinery was working, what to troubleshoot if it wasn’t and even what tactics your favorite soccer team should employ if they wanted to break their current losing streak. But every answer they gave to a question was a canned response. Not in the sense that it had been pre-programmed but in the sense that their systems pulled responses from thousands of human data sources and presented them in a way to make it sound like their opinion. That wasn’t detectable with mining discussions but it was a bit more obvious when they started talking about the system Manchester United should be playing. They could neither comprehend their place in the Universe or explain how a false nine worked.

The struggle AI researchers and developers had faced since the growth of the discipline in the mid-2010s was taking the step from machine learning to true artificial intelligence. A sentient machine whose consciousness was unique. The industry had been at it for over fifty years and no-one seemed to be getting any closer. Most promising projects had been mothballed after billions of dollars had been pumped in and the result was a computer that was great at beating people at chess but terrible about explaining its own existence. Most people didn’t care any more. Machines were great. They cured cancer. They ran complex industrial projects. They fought each other. They even went out and got you a six-pack. Taking the leap to a computer that could have an existential crisis in the same way the average human could wasn’t a goal anyone was trying to achieve. There was no money in it.

But Martin felt differently. It was a problem he wanted to solve and through his research and study, he felt he was close. He just needed the time, the materials and people to leave him the fuck alone for a bit.

---

As these things tend to go, Martin solved the problem of creating actual artificial life on the last day he was on Rocky McRock Face. The asteroid wasn’t the first one that humans had begun to mine and like all those that had been identified and named previously, the orbiting rock in the Kuiper Belt had gone through the same naming process that the fifteen asteroids previous had gone through.

Almost.

The Asteroid Naming Convention that had been accepted by ninety-nine per cent of the countries on Earth had appointed a small committee to manage the naming process for all off-world rocks and planets around 2031. With the space mining companies throwing in a tiny proportion of their annual budgets, it was a ridiculously well-funded organization. It consisted of a committee of twelve former diplomats whose entire purpose was to spend their time negotiating names with member states in order to ensure that everyone was happy with the choice and no-one was offended. They tended to feel that negotiating was best done at very expensive luxury holiday resorts.

To save time, the committee had created a website where the public could propose and vote for new asteroid names. Normally, those names went through a strict vetting process to remove - in all different languages - abusive names, rude words or porn star monikers. And for the first fourteen asteroids that had worked fine. But prior to the competition for the fifteenth asteroid, the committee had engaged a local website company to rebuild the naming platform. After being provided with an obscenely low budget for the job, the website company cut as many corners as they could. One of those was ensuring the legals on the site were correct and up-to-date. No-one had noticed that the clause concerning the winning entry not being legally binding until ratified by the committee had vanished completely, and despite protests, the enterprising general public repeated a joke that had originated on the internet in 2017. Much to everyone’s amusement - the committee aside - Rocky McRock Face was ratified as the rock’s name by an organization’s junior clerk who was annoyed that her bosses spent so much time sipping cocktails by very big swimming pools. Even a legal challenge from the committee failed after the presiding judge pointed out that she had so many better things to be doing than assess this case, and threw it out.

In reality, apart from the international asteroid register, the asteroid’s name barely rated a mention anywhere else and during the mission was routinely abbreviated to McRock. There was an ongoing joke amongst the mining crew about whether they would open the first off-world burger franchise on this asteroid.

Martin’s last day on McRock began relatively uneventfully. He’d had plenty of time during the last two years to test every single hypothesis he had about artificial intelligence. Three robots had been dedicated to the experiments, each one pulled out of service for a few days at a time when Martin would replace their positronic control systems with newer, upgraded versions, run a series of tests and then push them back into service. Day after day, week after week, he improved the three robots to the point where, on the last day, he was left exasperated, unable to understand why his years of work had failed to pay off.

To his credit, most inventors would have lost their cool long ago, but one of Martin’s few strengths was his patience and resolve in overcoming problems. On his final day stationed on McRock, he stood in front of the three units, hands on his hips, running through possible further experiments he could carry out on the journey back to Earth.

“Jump ship delta departing in thirty minutes.”

He had run out of time here. Most of his equipment had been loaded up onto previous trips to the main ship and all that was left was for him to take one of these robots with him. The TOK Corporation had been generous but they had insisted that just one unit was all they could spare; the other two had to remain on the asteroid and return to active duty.

Martin carried out an eenie-meenie on the robots and picked one, giving it an order to make its way from his workshop through the tunnel system and towards the docking bay. Without any comment, the robot complied, and moments later the door hissed closed behind it as it left the room.

Scratching his chin, he took one final confused look at the remaining two robots and shook his head. Whatever he was missing, he had time to work on it once the main ship was back up to speed and on its way back to Earth. He powered down the lights, ordered the robots to return to active duty on their next shift and left the workshop.

---

If Martin had been gambling man, that was probably the day he should have bought himself a lottery ticket. The odds of winning the Global Lottery Jackpot every week were astronomically high. In fact, there were few things on Earth that one person could stand less chance of experiencing.

But as he walked between his workshop and the main building via a short corridor system less than ten meters long, Martin Vadimovich was the recipient of one of the Universe’s biggest fuck yous. The odds of dying in space weren’t low. Things happened to mining ships. Things happened to mining crews on asteroids. It was a comparably dangerous job to sitting in an office and keying in data. But the chances of a micrometeorite hitting the asteroid you were on and not only piercing the reinforced outer exterior of the section of habitat you were walking through at that exact moment but also connecting at such an angle as to pass through the slightly weaker millimeter-wide join between panels that were the only susceptible part to such impacts were, of course, much worse than winning the lottery.

But that summed up Martin’s luck. Little did he realize that he had actually cracked the secret to creating artificial intelligence. The three devices that could have revolutionized humankind and make him, his mother and the TOK Corporation shareholders extremely wealthy, would remain undiscovered for quite some time. One was powered down and stored in the cargo hold of a jump ship, whilst the other two were sat on a table in a dark workshop wondering whether perhaps they should have said anything before the human left.

Inevitably, Martin realized very little. After walking half way along the corridor, the tiny micrometeorite found its way through the joint in the panels, plunged in and out of Martin’s skull and embedded itself in the opposite wall. An alarm sounded for an atmospheric containment breach, doors at either end of the corridor were sealed and Martin’s dead body hit the floor, face-first. If he’d been alive to experience it, the fall broke his nose too.

Martin Vadimovich, the only man to have created actual artificial intelligence and give birth to three new sentient lifeforms, ended his existence on a distant asteroid called Rocky McRock Face and no-one heard a thing.