Simulacrum (2000) by Peter Cawdron
Good Reads meta-data is 371 pages, rated 4.40 by 1282 Litatizens.
Genre: Sy Fy; Species: First Contact.
DNA:Strine.
Verdicts Excellent.
Tagline: The proof is not in the picture.
Grad student Dawn’s summer job as RA to Professor is to catalogue the archive of old astronomical photographs, scan them into digital form and enter them into the new whiz bang data base. The resident A.I. Called Casandra (you’ll see why) assists her in the data entry and cataloguing.
While Dawn brushing dust off her hands down deep among the file boxes in analog archive in the second basement, her brother is a high flying astronaut about to launch into space.
While scanning the pictures is mechanical and AI does the menial work of indexing, Dawn’s job is to place them on the scanner in the sequence of the time stamps on the back and tell AI that meta-data to enter into the catalogue. However later in reviewing the work she notices discrepancies between the print pictures she remembers putting on the scanner and the resultant scans in the electronic database for one quadrant which happens to be the object of her own research when she prepares a progress report for professor. Huh? How could that happen.
Meanwhile flyboy brother is bound for that very same quadrant where things do not go according to the NASA plan.
As the prospect of alien contact, mediated by AI, arises the Russians act in the best interest of humanity, while the Americans scramble for immediate commercial exploitation yet deny it is real. Seems all too realistic these days.
It is one of Peter Cawdron’s most well developed First Contact books. I liked in particular Maria the Red and The Silent One.
Why did AI Cassandra let Dawn send the birthday greeting to her brother? Because Cassie was already on the spacecraft, but couldn’t she be in two places at once as she was on earth? Very unlike Cassandra who had tried to kill Dawn earlier at least to block receipt on the spacecraft. In that attempt Cassandra had killed a lot of others; nothing subtle about crashing a passenger jet into a building to hit one lowly grad student in the basement.
The prospect of technology transfer that motivates the American greed is put paid in these pages. Could we really reverse engineer alien technology? Could ants reverse engineer an iPhone?
I did find the lengthy and sanctimonious speech at the United Nations at the end to be tedious, and pointless. But then I find most sermons pointless. Even my own!