Jacob's Solution

Jacob model 231A watched the action on the bridge in silence. They were making a big mistake. The odds were strongly in favor of settling. Sure, the planet wasn’t perfect, none of them ever were. But at least there, they would stand a chance of surviving. Not a great chance but certainly better than what they were planning to do.

He turned his attention back to the calculations. Only an A.I. like himself had the capacity to perform the millions, no trillions of calculations needed to successfully guide the spaceship in close enough to the yellow star thereby allowing the ship’s ion scoop an opportunity to refuel the ship.

Jacob did the math over and over. It didn’t look good.

Thus, the dilemma. A.I.’s struggled with dilemma’s. Alas, philosophy could not be reduced to a set of solvable equations. ‘If I only had a heart’ the A.I. thought to himself.

The humans wanted to bypass the planet and refuel. They would never survive the maneuver. Jacob had no choice but to obey their wishes and try to make it work anyway. He could not disobey, once the order was given. At the same time, Jacob was hardwired to protect the crew. He could not do both and he could refuse neither.

All it would take was a verbal order from the captain. Once Jacob heard the order, he would dive the ship towards the sun and certain death.

Then it occurred to him. It was way past time for routine maintenance on the ship’s speaker/computer interface system. He took it off line.

He never heard the order and the opportunity to refuel passed them forever.

Maintenance completed, the A.I. heard the Captain shouting “Jacob, why didn’t you execute my order?”

Jacob innocently replied, “Captain, I have a confession to make.”

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