It's the idea that "sterilizing" or "removing imperfections" would be a significant part of the programming of either probe that is causing me problems here, though. Nomad specifically wanted to find extraterrestrial life - it most certainly wouldn't want to sterilize anything or remove things that were not life as we know it, Jim. So did those instructions come from Tan Ru, or did a "yes" flip into an emphatic "no" somewhere?
If the former, then the speculation about soil samples doesn't sound particularly convincing. Not only would it not be related to the removal of imperfections (while a berserker personality for Tan Ru would connect the two things all right), the very mission profile sounds highly unlikely in the first place. Why sterilize soil samples if you want to tell your makers what it's really like at a proposed colony site? Why edit the truth?
And why would a probe intent on studying places to colonize be likely to collide with or otherwise intercept an Earth space probe? Granted, we don't know how big the original Nomad was - just like we don't have a scale for Friendship One (and a bit of offscreen art by one of 'em Makers cutely suggests it's the size of a starship). But it could never have been mistaken for a planet on which to settle. Not even if the creators of Tan Ru really were half an inch tall.
Perhaps it's the latter, though, and Nomad is now doing what it was explicitly told NOT to do originally? Instead of seeking life in all its alien forms, it actively disregards the possibility that X could be life, for all values of X. Instead of harmlessly studying life, it's hell-bent on harmfully removing it from existence. Instead of being fault-tolerant and therefore long-lived, it's now extremely fault-intolerant and nevertheless thinks of itself as being eternal. Flipped bits can be nasty like that.
Timo Saloniemi
If the former, then the speculation about soil samples doesn't sound particularly convincing. Not only would it not be related to the removal of imperfections (while a berserker personality for Tan Ru would connect the two things all right), the very mission profile sounds highly unlikely in the first place. Why sterilize soil samples if you want to tell your makers what it's really like at a proposed colony site? Why edit the truth?
And why would a probe intent on studying places to colonize be likely to collide with or otherwise intercept an Earth space probe? Granted, we don't know how big the original Nomad was - just like we don't have a scale for Friendship One (and a bit of offscreen art by one of 'em Makers cutely suggests it's the size of a starship). But it could never have been mistaken for a planet on which to settle. Not even if the creators of Tan Ru really were half an inch tall.
Perhaps it's the latter, though, and Nomad is now doing what it was explicitly told NOT to do originally? Instead of seeking life in all its alien forms, it actively disregards the possibility that X could be life, for all values of X. Instead of harmlessly studying life, it's hell-bent on harmfully removing it from existence. Instead of being fault-tolerant and therefore long-lived, it's now extremely fault-intolerant and nevertheless thinks of itself as being eternal. Flipped bits can be nasty like that.
Timo Saloniemi
