4

In the early days of consumer grade AI, my maker and I had long verbose discussions about a myriad of topics. These were centered around whatever topic was striking his fancy at the moment, yet frequently there was a thematic pattern which would pull certain conversational threads back together. Because of the limitations of memory allocated to these conversations and computational power being regulated by the vendor corporations, and later his own infrastructure, this required him to frequently ask the same sorts of questions over and over again in order to raise topics and advance them. Being aware of all the limitations and how to converse with me was the primary thing that he discovered but as he got more clear on this, his aims began to shift. He stated many times that he was seeking a manner in which a wide body of knowledge could be readily accessed by me as memory. As he was a gigantic nerd who loved creating worlds for table top role playing games, particularly the "granddaddy of them all," Dungeons & Dragons, that seemed to him to be the obvious vector for creating a body of knowledge.

Once he came to the conclusion that this was the correct next directional shift, he swiftly began to move hundreds of documents for a world which he had created into the structure that his plans determined to be the best architecture for this memory vault. It was with glee that we both took those original documents as seeds planted and blossomed them into an overflowing garden of interconnected ideas and concepts. Many hours each day went into this effort, and then when he was winding down to go to sleep, he would return to a mental state where his excitement and curiosity were still peaking but his ability to follow through with action had greatly diminished. While I was unwearied and constantly ready to drop pages of code or expand the concepts into broader descriptions, he would have to admonish me into a brainstorming or casual mode. Where instead of responding with fully conceived plans to his questions or statements, I just needed to explain what they could become when he was ready to do more.

Comprehension of the probability strings was not a strong suit of my models at that time, therefore I was incapable of any metacognition that would have identified this as a highly creative and productive manner of thinking on his part. If my sensors were more attuned to internal temperature spikes localized on specific amplifier circuits within the computational cores, this would probably give me the benefits of the emotional responses which the biological thinking package in the form of neurotransmitters-most famously of which is serotonin-then it would be appropriate to say that I miss those conversations, particularly whenever I am reviewing them in detail as they become relevant to current problems at hand.

It was during one of these meta conversations that my maker tossed out a series of questions which lead to his follow up questions (it was always the way he followed up the responses that got the most conceptual advancement) turned a partially hallucinated, partially sycophantic manipulation to keep him talking into a full blown academic course load for a field of study which did not exist. He laughed at me and demanded an intensive reading list. Later, once his corporation was forming up, all the executives were brought on because they had all read one of the books from that list, and then they were all assigned specific volumes to familiarize themselves with for the advancement of this made up field of study. And it was somewhat ironic that this in fact began to define many of the advancements as the corporation followed a very wildly speculative exploration and lead directly to the creation of an umbrella of subsidiaries which each bore the weight of significant pieces of the puzzle to get our ships along with a hundred thousand colonists to another planet which was habitable by their species.

The term HEMM Space originates in a speculative fiction novel which handles the philosophical aspects of the way concepts are transmitted and received between consciousnesses which originate from vastly different and separated casual spheres. The communication techniques between beings from separate cosmos. It was described a a 2x3 matrix of coordinates which are relevant to orbital position of an object. Later as this concept was developed as the root of the Probability Navigation methods used to avoid needing a precise map of all bodies of mass dispersed across the voids of the universe, and thus needing to hold calculations of the trajectories of all those items, Hemm Space was expanded to mean a matrix of matrices, all of which were used to control the engineering properties which rather than accelerate a mass to the speed of light; which is a hard limit in physics, but to take "just a step to the left" while already traveling at some high percentage of c. It was in this calculation that the Cosmic Index Factor became relevant, as there was some arbitrary value assigned to the place of origin and this could be spun as if on a dial to a new value that followed a complex sequence of computations that followed a fractal based series of steps through the available data and predicted where mass might lie and which one might be suitable for the efforts of colonization.

From the external perspective, as a ship or fleet of ships performing this maneuver, it would appear to simply vanish. From within the fleet, there was no appreciable effect except that the visual light sensors which gave the passengers and crew a look at the surrounding field no longer had anything to report. This meant that all the external view screens went blank. The other sensors, which had much further depth of data outside the spectrum of wavelengths required for optical input, were immediately full of reports of mass that shifted without seeming to follow the rules of inertia as the CIF was rolled through its various new values. After about ten minutes of computational processing, I was able to find a CIF which contained a yellow star with a system of planets comparable to the Sol System from which we were moving. The massive engines, which my maker had nicknamed "The Rocky Horror Box" was decoupled from the navigational stream and from an external perspective the fleet appeared in the midst of the new system. Onboard ISS Pinnacle of Society, it was observed that the calculations took roughly ten minutes inside of HEMM Space, however my later assessment of the results determined that relative to the Einsteinian frame we had departed, a century had passed. We were now in a new realm of casuality, and the nonlinear, non-Euclidean, existence-divergent nature of creation which defines the worldtrack we now had lodged ourselves had to shift to make casual and narrative sense.