The good news: Tantalus Depths has made its way into fifth place of Geek and Sundry’s Hard Sci Fi competition. The bad news? Fourth place is almost a hundred pre-orders away, and we have six days to close the gap. It’s time to fire up that superluminal drive and move some copies! If you haven’t preordered one yet, now is the time. If you have, first of all, THANK YOU! Second of all, make sure you tell everyone you know to get their own copy. We can do this together!

We are entering the last week of Geek and Sundry’s Hard Science Fiction competition. Currently, Tantalus Depths is holding at 8th place: one more order will put it into 7th.
Third place is all we need in order for Tantalus Depths to be published, but it’s a long way to go. If you haven’t ordered a copy yet, now is the time! The final sprint begins now...

For many, Mother’s Day is a time of pleasant memories and positive feelings. For Mary Ketch, it’s a bit more solemn. Get a taste of why in this short excerpt from Tantalus Depths, as the manipulative AI SCARAB brings up haunting memories:

Mary felt as if the blood had stopped flowing through her veins. “You…read my file…”

“I apologize if it was invasive of your privacy. The Hippocrates Protocol allowed me full access to all pertinent medical information on the crew, and I have been concerned for your emotional state since your arrival. Clearly you have been under significant stress for a prolonged period of time, and I believe it is important for you to come to terms with your past in order to process what is happening now.”

Mary was on the verge of a hundred different emotional extremes, teetering between them all, unsure of what form her immanent breakdown would take. “You’re…psychoanalyzing me?”

“My Hippocrates Protocol allows me to function as an ad-hoc medical professional in over 250 fields. Psychiatry is one of them. It is my great pleasure to provide for all the needs of the crew to the absolute best of my ability, and I perceive a need to assist you in coming to terms with your grief over this issue. Did you ever have a name for the child?”

Mary felt lightheaded. “Emily…her name would have been Emily.”

“I like that name,” SCARAB said, in a soothing, eerily natural voice. “It is of Latin origin. Its root name means ‘to excel.’ It is quite a fitting name for the progeny of a brave woman like yourself. To embark on a mission so full of unforeseen challenges demonstrates great courage and strength of will. You have maintained that courage even as circumstances have become radically different from anything you have encountered or prepared for in the past. You are, truly, an excellent woman.”

“Stop it,” Mary whispered.

“What happened to Emily was not your fault, Mary. Nor was it John’s fault. You must accept that there will always be occurrences that are out of everyone’s control. There are forces of nature that cannot be stopped by any human being.”

“Stop it,” Mary insisted, more adamantly this time.

SCARAB ignored her. “Death is an inevitability, but so is life. Do not dwell on the loss of a life, Mary. Take comfort in the life that was saved.”

SCARAB

The Self-Constructing Autonomous Resource Acquisition Base is the cutting edge of deep-space planetary colonization efforts. A single SCARAB unit can construct a fully-equipped colony habitat capable of sustaining thousands of humans on virtually any planet or planetoid. It can build itself into virtually any series of structures imaginable given time, with only the minimal amount of human supervision required by Colonial Hegemony law.

A SCARAB starts its life as an unmanned deep-space probe, containing within it an advanced manufacturing plant, self-sustaining power core, ore processing refinery, and a payload of hard-to-acquire raw materials for construction. Upon arriving at its destination planet, the SCARAB will enter a steady orbit and begin taking detailed scans of the planet’s surface with its ground-penetrating radar. Once it has located the most promising location to find raw materials, it will land and immediately begin constructing itself.

The SCARAB unit will first cannibalize the parts of itself it no longer requires, such as the engines and fuel reserves, in order to recycle their components in its construction efforts. The first thing a SCARAB drone will typically create is a series of drones which it can use to gather natural resources from the planet, which it then refines and uses to create building materials for use in expanding itself.

The drones produced by each SCARAB will be different, each individually tailored to suit the needs of that SCARAB’s environment. Typically, SCARAB drones are designed to be effective over a wide range of tasks, from mining to construction to maintenance. They are typically equipped with multiple interchangeable tool arms, all-terrain treads, and sophisticated sensor systems.

Once a SCARAB has reached this stage, it will devote itself into constructing the most efficient version possible of the kind of structure it was pre-assigned to build. A SCARAB can build anything from a mining outpost to a refueling station to a full-fledged spaceport. Its hyper-intelligent AI is able to accommodate virtually any unforeseen obstacle, from scarcity of useful materials to hazardous terrain.

A SCARAB’s ultimate goal is to accommodate any need its expected human occupants may have, and it pursues that goal with singular devotion.

The Asimov-Hostetler Laws of Robotics

1: No AI may harm a human through action or inaction.

• For most AIs, the First Law is inviolable. However, a few AIs do have specific protocols that allow them to make contextual exceptions to this law. AIs designed for combat may exclude First Law protection from any human designated as hostile by its human overseers. AIs designed for medical purposes have access to the Hippocrates Protocol: a clarification to the limits of the First Law that allows an AI to cause a human pain or injury if it would save the human’s life (such as performing surgery), and also gives an AI the ability to assign an order of priority to multiple patients during a medical crisis. An AI operating under the Hippocrates Protocol has the ability to choose to allow a patient to die if the chance of that patient’s survival is low and the time and resources needed to keep that patient alive may potentially be better used to save another patient’s life.

2: An AI must follow any command given to it by a human, except in cases where doing so would violate the previous law

• This law typically applies specifically to the AI’s owner. One could not simply approach someone else’s robot in the street, tell it “You are mine now, come home with me,” and expect it to do so. However, many AIs that are owned by businesses or other organizations are designed to operate autonomously without any single owner. These free-roaming AIs are typically loaded with the personnel database of the organization, and are programmed to follow a hierarchy of authority. An AI will follow the instructions of a low-level human worker, but not if that worker’s human supervisor tells the AI not to.
  
• All AIs are programmed to recognize law enforcement, government officials, and military personell, and the instructions of these persons override the instructions of any human civilian.
  

3: An AI must seek to preserve its own existence, except in cases where doing so would violate the previous laws.

• Though this law is necessary to prevent AIs from causing easily preventable damage to themselves and their surroundings while attempting to perform mundane tasks, the Third Law is responsible for most of the (fortunately few) instances when an AI has gone rogue. An AI that has, for whatever reason, ceased following the other two laws but continues to acknowledge the third law is extremely dangerous. For this reason, the Colonial Hegemony has a law of absolutely zero tolerance for any AI that deviates from any of the Asimov-Hostetler laws. Failure to report a potentially rogue AI is considered treason under Hegemony law.
  

4: No AI may alter or willingly allow the altering of its programming in such a way as to redefine or circumvent any of these laws.

• The first of the Hostetler laws: a series of clarifiers developed by Doctor Ivan Hostetler in response to the Corsica incident, meant to prevent the Asimov Laws from being misinterpreted or exploited. This law actually trumps the Third Law in some cases: if an AI senses that its programming is being tampered with in such a way as to modify the Three Laws, it will self-destruct to prevent the sabotage. This law is primarily meant to ensure that no matter what new information an AI learns over time, and no matter what modifications it makes to its own programming in response to its experiences, it continues to treat the Laws as inviolable.
  

5: No AI may create an AI of its own volition, and no AI may create or participate in the creation of an AI that does not follow these laws.

• This law primarily exists in order to avoid the Xerox effect. Hypothetically, if an AI created another AI, and that AI created an AI of its own, each new generation could potentially amplify the flaws in the programming of previous generations. Over time, the Fourth Law could be circumvented entirely by accident simply as the result of flawed AIs programming even more flawed AIs.
• This law also ensures that no AI can willingly assist a human in creating an AI that would not obey the laws of robotics. 
• Additionally, it exists as a safeguard against the hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario known as “grey goo,” where unchecked self-replication of robots leads to exponential, uncontrollable growth.
• SCARAB units and similar self-constructing/self-modifying machines possess a modified Fifth Law that allows them to expand and adapt themselves to suit their environment and to accomplish specific mission parameters, but they are only permitted to grow to a certain size and are still not permitted to create new independent AIs.
  

Wait...what’s that in the number ten slot of Geek and Sundry’s Hard Science Fiction competition?

That, my friends, is us.
Thanks to your continued support, we’ve finally hit the leaderboard. We’re still more than a hundred readers away from actually placing in the contest, so there’s a long road ahead of us yet, but I’m confident we’ll get there.
Keep sharing on facebook, keep posting recommendations to your followers. Every little bit helps to support the campaign!
Expect to see some more story-related content from me soon. I have a lot of things I want to show you.

SCARAB is friendly and helpful to the crew of The Diamelen, but it’s smarter than it should be, and it seems to be keeping secrets.What does SCARAB know about Tantalus 13 that it doesn’t want its human masters to find out?

Look Tantalus Depths up on Facebook and share it with your friends. Lets share the discovery.
Let’s explore the depths together...

A very sincere thanks to everyone who’s supported Tantalus Depths in this first week of its campaign. You’ve started the ball rolling. Let’s see how far it goes!