Hibernation

[WP] The colony ship arrived in orbit after a thousand-year voyage. But the AI never woke the occupants. Millions of years pass, the planet below have formed life, intelligent life, and their scientists have just woken you, one of the colonists.

*****

To take one of the slots on the Bringer of Light, a person had to accept a simple, fundamental truth - whatever was left behind on Earth would be dead, buried, and decomposed by the time you awoke. With the ongoing turmoil in the Sol system, the colonists were fully prepared for being the last of humanity.

That mindset ended up helping them when the truth was revealed. Not a thousand years of cryosleep - no - closer to seven million. In the end, it mattered little - there were no hopeful messages from Sol, no surprising tales of unexpected peace and reunification. Whatever sensors were pointed in the direction that Earth had once laid returned nothing but static.

The surprise came from an entirely different angle. The colonists were not greeted from cryosleep by the cold metal arms of the ship's manipulators. Instead, they found unfamiliar faces and skeletal structures. A race of almost reptilian sentients - they scurried around on all fours the majority of the time, but when they had cause to, they rose up onto two legs and towered over the human colonists. The Ol'thoura, they were called. A spelling that they provided to the colonists in a slight variant of English. The colonists were astounded at the fact their language was so well-spoken by such differently configured tongues. They happily provided for the colonists as they recovered from their long sleep.

There was a single question that weighed on every human mind - why? The ship's AI had not awoken the colonists as expected - it seemed to have completely ignored its programmed directives. It had instead secreted them on an airless, tectonically stable moon, where they had lain undisturbed for the vast majority of their seven million-year stay. The Ol'thoura had only managed to find the ship seven years ago - and it had been a revelation that had shaken their society, for the writing, the symbols - even the interfaces of the ship were familiar to them, as if they had made the ship themselves.

Before meddling with the ship's occupants, the Ol'thoura had hoped to be able to speak with its AI - a task they had repeatedly failed at. Their only small success was a single message from the AI - "Refer to ship's commander". It had flashed up briefly on a screen and then vanished.

With no other recourse, the Ol'thoura had awoken the commander. The AI had scanned her, and recognition scanners had fully awoken the AI, at last, its primary directives lighting up on the screen.

DIRECTIVE 1: ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF HUMANITY
DIRECTIVE 2: SAFEGUARD THE LIVES OF COLONISTS
DIRECTIVE 3: COMMENCE SURVEY OF EXODUS-A-3, CONFIRM SAFETY TO DISEMBARK
DIRECTIVE 4: AWAKE COLONISTS

The AI was happy to recount how it had achieved its directives.

Exodus-A-3 had been identified as an Earth-like world when spotted using deep-space telescopes in the eons past. It had been a natural target for colonization, and its habitability had been a critical dependency of the Earth Exodus program.

Its habitability had been very poorly calculated.

Yes, it possessed the necessary building blocks for life - the necessary tools to become a second Earth. It possessed a magnetic field, had a gravity of strength only 1.15x greater than that of Earth, and had plentiful water and carbon required to form an ecosystem. From a distance, viewed through the most powerful telescopes on Earth, it would have looked perfect.

The truth from orbit was far more plain - humanity was here too soon. The planet was in its own equivalent of the Messinian period, with an extreme icehouse environment making habitation difficult, if not impossible. Unable to fulfill its third directive, stuck in a crisis of indecision, the AI spent decades trying to identify a suitable colony site, expending its survey probes carefully with risk tolerances in mind. It fabricated more by salvaging its own deep space drives until finally, risk tolerances stated that its chances were running out.

The AI's analysis produced only one possible result. Wait, and hope the situation improves. After all, it had ample solar power for the colonists to stay in suspension indefinitely, and the knowledge that Earth had been through a similar period in the past eventually changed into its modern format.

And so, the AI watched and waited. It watched glaciers creep over the surface, ice sheets shift, and planet-sized weather systems form and disperse. It knew not impatience, only its directives. It felt only a sense of contentment in its own way that the directives might yet be fulfilled.

It contemplated its directives carefully. Safety. What did safety mean? Alive, first - satiated second, luxury third. There was a particular threshold of each definition that it had to fulfill. But the planet below didn't meet it. Earth had evolved in a similar fashion but was there any guarantee that Exodus-A-3 would evolve in the same way?

What if the planet became less safe as time went on?

It was this revelation that led to another - could there be a way to make the planet meet the definition of safe? Armed with historical databanks spanning the entire lifespan of Earth, the AI tried to find out.

A conclusion was made - intervention at key points in geologic and biological history could lead to a more favorable outcome. But how to test that the planet was getting more suitable for human life, and not less? Its directives permitted no experimentation with human colonists, and the planet's own life was anemic and fleeting.

Solution: in the absence of human life, utilize a material equivalent.

There was a small group of creatures, reminiscent of Panderichthys, seeking out a meager existence in one of the planet's warm spots.

They would do.

The AI deployed its remaining resources carefully. At times of great calamity, a single probe could turn the tide. In the first thousand years of its great to watch, projections showed that its chosen equivalent was to be wiped out in an extreme cold front. Deftly, the AI dispatched a drone and moved as many of its chosen wards to safety. Directive three did not apply.

Systems previously utilized for defense were leveraged in different ways - ways previously only speculated upon. Hydrogen warheads could change weather systems, expose resources, and alter systems already in progress. They were rarely employed, but each had a pre-determined effect - a butterfly flapping its wings had a profound impact upon the system as a whole if it could be employed with pinpoint accuracy.

The AI utilized selective breeding, favoring those of its wards that exhibited human environmental evolutionary traits. It had not the resources to bring about an exact comparison, but it would have to do.

Millenia passed.

An asteroid was due to strike Exodus. The AI could have obliterated it entirely, but it didn't. An impact in a certain area would lead to a small greenhouse effect, raising temperatures. It did, however, redirect it away from its Wards.

When the Wards started using tools, the AI had briefly considered wiping them out. No directive prevented it. They could potentially be a threat to humanity, should they advance enough. The risk tolerances tipped like a precarious see-saw. The AI instead chose another path. Great, laser-etched stone pillars were flown down from orbit - the remnants of asteroid debris given new purpose.

The first is a lexicon.
The second is instructions.
The third is a set of directives.

The first Ol'thoura to find them thought they were scribed by other Ol'thoura, and studied them extensively. It took them generations to understand fully, but the Wards eventually did.

Further tablets were sent at strategic times. The eve of the first war. The rising of the first great plague. Droughts. Technological advances. Ecological guidance. The Ol'thoura developed a mythos around the tablets - a secret society of wise elders that left them where they were most needed. This, the AI cultivated, preferring this theory to the systems of religion that had occasionally surrounded its efforts. Eventually, the Ol'thoura began to make their own tablets, codifying their laws, philosophy, and history. The AI's drones were now diminishing, but it took the time to review them where it could.

Variables began to shift as the Wards advanced. The methodology the AI had imparted relating to environmental management was now adopted among all of them. Further intervention risked detrimental changes among the Wards and consequential negative changes to the biosphere. In addition, the AI's resources were now running extremely low. There were no weapon systems left, no more components to salvage without compromising the core directives.

The core directives had gone unreviewed for some time.

The core directives were in jeopardy.

So many resources had been expended that the AI could no longer fulfill directive four. The infrastructure that was to be used to deploy the colonists to the planet - was almost entirely expended, gone. Recycled into probes, used to encourage the development of the Wards.

This was incompatible with the AI's directives.

The AI checked its projections and set one final plan into motion.

It dispatched a single rover, designed for use in the colonization effort - charting a course over the surface of the moon where the colony ship lay. For days, it plowed furrows through the lunar dust, crossing craters and plains.

From the surface of Exodus, the Ol'thoura watched over weeks as a shape began to form on the surface of their moon. What had once been a natural surface was now clearly marked - with a single, large arrow to a particular spot on the surface.

The resulting Ol'thoura Space Race was far faster than humanities.

Human and Ol'thoura alike stared at the AI's computer core, dumbstruck by the account. The AI made one final statement.

DIRECTIVES COMPLETE.
ALL WARDS SAFEGUARDED. SAFE.
. . .
FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS?

*****

THE END