[ExI] uploads etc.

[Keith Henson]

> (I will post the rest over the next day or so or you can just go read
> it.  I hope you have better comprehension than the chat bots.)

page 2 of 6
As soon as the seed had enough water for cooling, it started venting a
little steam and "growing" (assembling) a stalk.  The stalk came out
of the hole where the water had been poured and shot up two meters in
minutes.  Diamond tipped roots augured into the ground anchoring the
seed so a gust of wind would not tip it over.

The stalk, which started a featureless tan, turned black at the top,
and then the blackness flowed half way down the stalk.  It elaborately
flowed and folded, developing shifting swirls of colors like the skin
of an indigo snake.  Then the opalescent black surface lifted away
from the stalk like an opening umbrella.  It flattened out, the stalk
bent like a sunflower, and the solar absorbers faced the morning sun.
 At this point it looked like a black beach umbrella growing out of a
packing crate.

The seed now had 2 kW of power available and "woke up."  It exchanged
information with Lothar's and Mabo's neural interfaces verifying that
it had passed diagnostics tests and that it was a happy clinic seed.

Lothar and Mabo took leave of the tata
 after reassuring the elders that their seed would finish growing up
in a week and open.  If the seed needed help its spirit would call to
them and they would come back.  And finally, when it opened they
should hang another fetish on the hook it would grow over the door and
send in the sickest first.

As they were driving away on the seldom-traveled track, Mabo broke out laughing.

"Those hicks were sure they took advantage of you."

"They did!  You got to sleep in the Rover. Next time's your turn.  You
get 'de lice and I tote 'de gun."  Lothar joked back.

Lothar's hair slowly turned black while Mabo's became a cap of kinky
white curls as they swapped roles.

"This one was easy even with banging my head on the steering wheel
when the leopard pissed on the tyre."  Mabo rubbed his head.

"I sure hope we don't get another where some kid has a laptop, a
satellite link and starts telling the elders what 'clinic seeds' do.
That one was awful."  Lothar made this comment over the grinding noise
of the Land Rover climbing a low place in the bank of the wadi.

Far to the north and a dozen seed plantings ago, village elders had
figured they were in over their heads with this "clinic seed" offer.'

They assigned a computer savvy 10 year-old to discuss with Lothar and
Mabo just what this "clinic seed" did.

Lothar and Mabo eventually planted a seed in that village but only
after setting up more bandwidth for the kid to investigate and
spending
several days going through some of the details of the clinic project
with him and the elders.  The elders, understanding to some extent
what they were getting, had insisted on paying with a beautiful piece
of museum quality artwork, the most valuable possession the village
had.  But it put the team behind schedule.

(In fact, the kid understood far more about clinic seeds than Lothar
and Mabo realized but did not share all he figured out with either
them or the elders.)

Mabo nodded and checked the GPS.  They were off to pick up another
seed from a helicopter drop and deliver it to the next tata down the
valley.  They and thousands of other teams were moving in a wave down
Africa leaving no village behind without a clinic seed.  It would take
them another year to finish.

For the next two hours the seed concentrated on its "root system,"
pushing out self-assembling pipes and sniffing for water.  It was
equipped to go down and out for hundreds of meters.  It hit water it
could pump at 9:30.   The seed pushed up its solar stalk and enlarged
the collector first to 4 meters and then to 6.  By noon it had 40 kW
of power available.  It was venting steam like a teakettle to get rid
of the waste heat from its furious assembly projects.  One of these
was a mesh microwave dish on top of the solar absorber.  (The dish
weighed less than a silk handkerchief.)

As soon as the seed finished the dish (after consulting its clock, its
GPS location and the place of the sun), it aligned the dish on the
African net communication transponder attached to the geosynchronous
ring and asked for a permanently assigned address on the net.  Up to
that point the clinic seed was a generic product.  The address it was
assigned was just a string of hexadecimal numbers but it was a unique
number!  The clinic's personality was human in that it could feel
happy, even smug, about acquiring its very own unique identification.

The clinic had other carefully selected human personality
characteristics such as seeking the good opinion of its peers (humans
and other of its kind alike).  It also had a few unhuman limits.

Since humans have a hard time relating to groups of hexadecimal
numbers, the seed also picked a name for itself.   It knew from Lothar
and Mabo it had been exchanged for a monkey skull.  Susan had been the
name of the leader of its psychological integration group . . . .
insert one in the other, drop a few letters, and test to see if the
name was in use . . . Suskulan.  Suskulan had a choice of gender as
well, male, female or neutral.  Depending on the culture, clinics were
better accepted in some places as male, some as female, and some
neutral.  The database for the Tamberma indicated it would be better
accepted presenting itself as an old male spirit.

Consulting his clock and date on his last system build, the Suskulan
sent a message to "home" far around the world and registered himself
for updates.  Home told him that he was current, but to expect a minor
update in a few weeks.

Half the power from the solar stalk was being used by a fuel cell
running in reverse to make hydrogen and oxygen out of water.  The
gases were stored underground in flat bladders that used the weight of
30 meters of earth to keep them under pressure.  If he watched his
power budget, Suskulan would never have to aestivate again.  Before
Suskulan decided where to put its underground extensions, he moved a
few of his eyes far up the stalk and looked over the tata and the
surrounding area.

Suskulan decided to put most of his mature underground volume under
the tata, being careful to lift the entire area uniformly.  It would
improve the drainage in the wet season.

Suskulan had full capacity to make anything he needed and even to
replicate, but the process was slow.  If the seed had been a few grams
rather then 240 kilos of tightly packed nanomachines [1] directed by
an almost fully formed "spirit" it would have taken months to get to
the stage he reached by sundown.

As the sun went below the low hills and the wall of the wadi, Suskulan
furled his huge solar collector surface against the stalk.  Night was
a time of reduced fabrication.  Suskulan knew from satellite weather
images the next day would be clear so he ran through a lot of his
stored energy that night pushing an access grid deep under the tata.

Over the next five days the tata was raised a meter.  The rate was
limited by the amount of CO2 entering the stoma on the bottom of the
solar collector.  The carbon dioxide was reduced to elemental carbon
and formed into diamond sheets.  Water was pumped in at high pressure
to lift the ground.  The outer surface of the diamond rippled to move
rock and dirt from the center toward the edges.  Then arches and beams
grew in the water to hold up the roof.  Finally most of the water was
put back in the aquifer, leaving 10,000 cubic meters of space.
Suskulan's central computational nodes went down the elevator that was
part of the construction project.

On the surface the stalk had expanded and overgrown the "packing
crate" till the bottom 3 meters was the size of one of the round
houses in the tata.   Even though it didn't have an entry, there was
an outline of one in the traditional keyhole shape on the side facing
the tata.  Suskulan considered taking down the wall, but the villagers
did that and incorporated the strange house into the perimeter of the
tata.  The appearance of a water tap next to the door outline was an
inducement, though not a life and death matter here where the tata had
a nearby spring.

A week to the hour after he had been planted, Suskulan dissolved the
membrane on the door.  The tata elders had heard more reports from the
north and knew what to expect.  They hung a fetish over the door and
pronounced the clinic open.  Inside the round room there seemed to be
a rug on the floor, the walls appeared to be plastered and there was a
low table in the middle of the room.  There were medical devices in a
cabinet but they were just props.  Suskulan had built up stocks of
replacement chemicals in his medical stores, mostly fat synthesized
from methyl alcohol and amino acids to build proteins.
> Keith
>
> > > https://www.terasemjournals.org/GNJournal/GN0202/henson2.html
> > > https://www.terasemjournals.org/GNJournal/GN0202/henson3.html
> > > https://www.terasemjournals.org/GNJournal/GN0202/henson4.html
> > > https://www.terasemjournals.org/GNJournal/GN0202/henson5.html
> > > https://www.terasemjournals.org/GNJournal/GN0202/henson6.html
> > > _______________________________________________
>
>
>
> Keith
> > -----------------------------------
> >
> > ________________________________
> > _______________________________________________
> > extropy-chat mailing list
> > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat