But, as I said, the feeling of annoyance I had was fleeting, for I soon realized that an Ancillary Documentation chapter can present plot details as effectively in an expository chapter as it can within a character's dialogue, and increase suspense for the reader by creating questions in the reader's mind as to how the AD details will be influencing the course of the story. In other words, these Ancillary Documentation chapters have a lot of potential in increasing the story's entertainment value.
I don't know if I agree with all the chapter's assertions in any absolute sense (such as: order = the desire for safety and stability; chaos = the desire for escape--it seems to me that both order and chaos can represent more things than these), but I find reading about them here to have some entertainment value for me. And that's because the description of the dynamics between chaos and order give the introduction to the the plot device of irrefutable evidence (in the datacore) the aura of being a part of some grand universal struggle (or, at least a grand theme about a galactic struggle). I suppose that I'm trying to say that reading this philosophizing before we get down to the subject of datacores turned out to be a bit of an unexpected pleasure.For convenience, history is often viewed as a conflict between the instinct for order and the impulse toward chaos. Both are necessary; both are manifestations of the need to survive. Without order, nothing exists: without chaos, nothing grows. And yet the struggle between them sheds more blood than any other war.
The initial reasoning for the presence of datacores is perfectly sound to my mind, to gain an exact record for purposes of learning how to explore space in the safest possible manner. And it's not hard to see how the presence of datacores in this story could serve to promote conflict by having a device to control or punish the actions of story characters.Nevertheless stability and predictability themselves would be impossible without chaos. Chaos exerts the pressure which requires order to shape itself accurately. Without accuracy, order would self-destruct as soon as it came into being.
For these reasons, the struggle between order and chaos is entirely necessary--and extremely expensive. By nature, human beings are at their most violent and belligerent in self-defense. The cost of their survival would be prohibitive in any less fecund universe.
In this context, the importance of datacores is easily understood. Both metaphorically and actually, they were powerful tools for order. They gave the governments of Earth--and their effective enforcement arm, the United Mining Companies Police--the ability to find out what happened to any ship anywhere in human space. Ultimately anything that could be known could be controlled--or at least punished.
Of course, this was not the rationalization when they were first introduced. Then the rationalization was simply that space was vast; the gap, mysterious; accidents, common. If the future wanted to learn from the past--in order to make space travel safer--it needed to know what the past was. Therefore a record was required of what every ship knew, did, and experienced, so that its past would be available for analysis and understanding. And, naturally, this record had to exist in some unalterable form, so that it couldn't be falsified by damage or self-interest, by stupidity or malice. Surely it stood to reason that every ship should carry the technology to make such recordings--for the sake of all future spacefarers.
However, the possibilities for control were so obvious that enforcement of these records was not left to reason. It became an absolute requirement: no ship could be built and registered unless it carried, in effect, an automatic and permanent log which would keep track of everything that ship did or encountered: every decision, every action, every risk, every malfunction, every crisis.
The codes which unlocked these logs belonged to the UMCP.
This chapter goes on to outline how the datacore basically works, once it had been perfected with the use of silicon-on-diamond complementary metal oxide semiconductor (SOD-CMOS) chips to facilitate an unalterable record of a spaceship's journey.
Freedom-lovers would object to such rigid oversight, naturally, but this chapter explains that the threat of forbidden space (which has yet to be defined) made the argument for datacores on ships too formidable to be effectively opposed. This chapter states that nevertheless proponents of individual rights gained concession in the datacore legislation, that the UMCP could not access datacore information without proof of criminal activity by ship occupants, and that sickbay logs would store information separately from the main datacore. Such concessions did not seem likely to increase the threat of "forbidden space" or to hamper scientific knowledge.Not only were the data unalterable, but any attempt to alter them was unalterably recorded. In effect, this provided a kind of Write Only Memory: with the proper UMCP codes, it could be read; but it could never be rewritten.
The chapter concludes by mentioning libertarian fears that the datacore could lead to ships being entirely machine-controlled, but adds that these fears would prove unfounded, as human responsiveness would always be needed to counter the unpredictable dangers of space travel exploration.
As I've said, I first experienced annoyance at the digression from the main story that this chapter represents, but started to enjoy how it added to the detail of this galaxy, and got intrigued by wondering how all this would be fitted into the plot.
