Singularity Point

by Brian Smith

  “I think I could live with it,” Ashburn grinned, and Kusaka saw the raw desire gleaming in his colleague’s eye. “Besides,” he went on, “the system needs something big like that to pull it together—to pull us together, I mean—humanity. All this recent jabber about unified Earth governments, independent Martian governments. . . . Some days when I plug into the newsfeeds, it feels like the world is shifting under my feet—and maybe not in a good way. We’re almost into the twenty-second century, and it looks like we’re setting up to repeat a lot of past mistakes. Reminds me of that old Chinese proverb . . . How does it go? ‘May you live in interesting times.’”

  Kusaka nodded. “That’s how it goes all right, Mike. But it’s not an old Chinese proverb. It’s an old Chinese curse.”

  Chapter 3

  September 2091 (Terran Calendar)

  Aberdeen Shipyards, Phobos

  Damn transmission delays! Bill Campbell swore to himself. The good news was that the sun wasn’t directly between Mars and Saturn—in fact, the communications relay sitting at Earth’s L3 point was currently on a fairly direct path between the two planets. The bad news was that Titan was behind Saturn right now from the perspective of Mars, so the “conversation” he was having with Dr. Shu involved a total one-way signal delay of almost an hour and a half. It took that long for the high-power signal to go from Mars to the EL3 communications relay, pick up a power boost, travel the rest of the way to Saturn, and then get bounced around the gas giant to Janus Station’s secure communications satellite over Titan.

  At present the signal had to cross slightly more than 10.5 AU: more than ten times the distance between Earth and the sun. After it was received on Titan, Shu could listen to his transmission, formulate a reply, and then send a signal back to him. So if he limited his first transmission to saying “Hello,” he would hear “Hello” back from her three hours later. Understandably, they tried to put as much information into each transmission as possible, attempting to anticipate each other’s questions and provide any preemptive answers they could. It made for a stilted, frustrating conversation, but such were the limits imposed by physics.

  Shu’s latest report had prompted Campbell to contact her directly for a rare, signal-delayed “conversation”—it seemed to be a significant development. While he waited for her latest reply to come back, he replayed a portion of her previous transmission. He was watching and listening via his ocular snoopers and eardots—none of it was anything he wanted visually displayed or audible in his office, especially since it was addressed to his Kevin MacDonald alter ego.

  Shu sounded a little nervous and he wasn’t surprised; in her place, he probably would have been nervous, too.

  Campbell had consulted with Dmitri Federov’s team back in February, following their private meeting during the Crandall Foundation annual meeting. Tsong Chiang, Sam Hyman, and Kusaka Shiguro had given him all the data on their astrophysics theories, as well as the mathematical framework of the Tsong calculus, to be fed into OURANIA for analysis. Again, Campbell told them nothing of OURANIA itself—he merely hinted that he had a team of people he wanted to share their work with, people who might be able to offer some helpful insights. Federov’s team was highly skeptical, but they agreed to cooperate.

  Nothing special happened for about two weeks after OURANIA was fed the data, and then the supercomputer’s output dropped off significantly for a month. Shu was concerned, but diagnostic testing came back clean, and OURANIA herself assured Shu that all systems were functioning normally—by the computer’s own admission, it was just working an exceptionally hard problem. Then, with no warning and without comment from the computer itself, OURANIA’s data outputs returned to normal.

  A few days later OURANIA made a strange request: it wanted access to the Galileo Optical Imager for astronomical tasking unrelated to locating terrestrial planets. Specifically, the computer asked for a series of “midfield” and “deep-field” astronomical observations in apparently nonsensical, random spatial directions. These sorts of observations were cosmological snapshots, looking as far back as the cosmic background radiation and the Big Bang itself.

  Intrigued, Campbell went to Carter Drayson with the request, still making no mention of OURANIA. Drayson denied him at first, but Campbell made himself such a pain in the ass that Drayson finally gave in, although not on the requested timetable—current tasking demands on the GOI couldn’t just be abandoned, but the observations were integrated into the schedule over a period of several months.

  After the data was collected and transferred to OURANIA, there was another incident more alarming than the first: the computer went “dark” for several days and wouldn’t respond to any outside stimuli at all, even though its diagnostics kept coming back as normal.

  Shu was frantic almost to the point of shutting the system down, when it suddenly rebounded. OURANIA started communicating again after a five-day gap, assuring Shu that it was functioning normally but that it had been concentrating on a problem that had taxed even OURANIA’s capabilities.

  Within a week the computer provided over a terabyte of output data to be handed back to Federov Propulsion Associates for further work, while claiming the solution was still incomplete—an unprecedented admission for OURANIA.

  Interesting, Campbell thought to himself after reading the initial report.

  Shu was under orders to conduct periodic Turing tests on the machine to determine whether it had crossed the threshold of self-awareness. OURANIA failed those tests spectacularly in the beginning, but, as theory predicted, it had improved at them over time. Campbell ordered a spot recheck on OURANIA after the five-day blackout, yet the results remained negative. OURANIA’s refinements to the designs of the Project Daedalus torchship dropped off rapidly after the blackout, and when queried about further updates the computer was stubbornly noncommittal.

  Campbell began thinking that maybe OURANIA had finally hit its design limit, and that this was the best they were going to get. He ordered Aberdeen Astronautics to begin work on Project Gateway: the acquisition of another deep crater on Phobos which would be hollowed further and turned into the space-construction dock intended for building the Daedalus torchship—all according to the latest design specifications outlined by OURANIA.

  Then this latest report had come in: the bombshell. OURANIA was suggesting that all work on Project Daedalus be suspended pending “further analysis.” Just that—nothing more by way of an explanation, or how long the hiatus might last. Campbell wanted to know what the words “further analysis” meant in this context. His fingers drummed on his desk impatiently, and on impulse he called up his administrative lead for Project Gateway. A harried female voice promptly answered the call.

  “Maya,” he groused, “call a meeting for all division managers at 1700. We might be making some changes. . . . Nae, I dinnae ken yet. . . . Just maybe. . . . Just do it, will you, damn it all, and quit arguing with me!” He cut her off in the middle of an angry, invective-laced squawk. He hated jerking his people around like this (start, stop, hurry up and wait . . .), but depending on how the rest of this conversation with Shu went, he might need to call a halt. If he decided otherwise, he could always cancel the meeting.

  A watched pot never boils, he fumed, drumming his fingers impatiently and watching the ticks on the chronometer. The latest reply took an agonizing thirty minutes longer than expected—he hoped the time Shu had put into her reply would make it worth the wait.

  After a slight burst of visual interference in his data overlay, her face appeared in virtual 3D as she resumed the conversation from her end.

  “Damn, these time delays are frustrating,” she opened, mirroring his own sentiment. “All right, let me see. . . . I’m attaching a list of the work OURANIA thinks should be halted—it’s not quite the whole show, but pretty much everything directly related to building the ship. I asked her specifically about Gateway as you requested: she says go ahead for now but stop after Phase I unless she issues subsequent dir
ections. She also mentioned that she would like to personally evaluate the first batch of new synths from the Mars facility, and she attached a list of equipment she says we need shipped to Janus Station to facilitate some other things she’s working on. She says that none of the synth or materiel transfers are necessary if you allow her access to outside networks, but she anticipates you won’t budge on that—hence the request to have some of the new synths and equipment brought to her. I’m going to try to anticipate your next question here, and guess it goes something like this: What makes her assume you won’t allow her to network into the cloud? Answer: Past policy, for one thing, but on a deeper level, I think OURANIA understands how her existence is perceived as a potential threat, and she is obviously well versed in the law. She periodically makes the request anyway, as I’ve reported before. In this she sometimes reminds me of a child asking for something repeatedly even after being told no, but that’s just my being animistic. Anticipating another question: Yes, I’ve run a Turing test as recently as this past week, with negative results.

  “Now, about what you mentioned in your last transmission: I told you OURANIA has requested that we put the Janus Station manufacturing plant back into full production and begin expanding her node web. She claims to have engineered significant improvements to the original core design, and that our long-term goal should be to replace and expand her current hardware with a 1,000-node web made up of her redesigned cores. Why do I say she ‘claims’ to have engineered the improvements? Why can’t I verify it one way or the other? There’s the rub: it’s impossible to know, because I don’t understand the improvements she’s made: I’m still studying them, but her designs are flat-out beyond me and will be for some time. She says that, given production limits, the best option is to use the new designs to expand her node count to 1,000 and then go back and replace the original 500 cores. You asked if I thought it was a good idea to do that.”

  On his display, Campbell saw Shu hesitate and take a deep breath before shaking her head ever so slightly.

  “Honestly,” she said, “given our stated goals and what we want to avoid, I’m not sure such an increase in capacity would be in our best interest. At least, not until I have a firm grasp on OURANIA’s new core designs. I’m giving some thought to building a few mockups just so I can dig into the hardware and try to reverse-engineer what she’s done. It might help me understand her work.”

  Campbell felt a chill run down his spine and paused the playback to think for a moment. She’s worried, he realized. She’s at the top of the computer-science field, and now a supercomputer has engineered component designs she can’t decipher. It bothers her more than she’ll admit, and she’s obviously worried that increasing OURANIA’s capacity further might lead to some form of conscious machine. That possibility had always been the elephant in the room, and now Shu seemed to be addressing it directly.

  Campbell resumed playback and Shu continued.

  “Anticipating your next question: Why the sudden caution on my part? Frankly, the last blackout has me concerned. Not the first one so much, but the second, where she wouldn’t communicate at all. It was unnerving to say the least, and it’s not the way I designed her to function. During the latest transmission delay, I pressed her as you instructed, to elaborate on the reason she’s recommending a halt to the Daedalus project. I’m going to read you her verbatim reply: ‘The project should be suspended indefinitely because the torchship design was flawed due to an error stemming from improper data. Your understanding of physics is all screwed up.’”

  Shu cocked an eyebrow at Campbell from across the solar system. “You heard that right—‘all screwed up,’ she says. When I asked her what she meant by that, she laughed and apologized for using a colloquialism—it’s just the sort of AI response that makes you want to run another Turing test, isn’t it? The layman’s answer is that she agrees with Tsong and Hyman, that our understanding of physics is either incomplete or incorrect. I couldn’t really nail her down on that. I’m not an astrophysicist, so I probably wasn’t asking the right questions. Awaiting your reply. Over.”

  Campbell would have leapt out of his seat except, in the microgravity environment of Phobos, he was currently belted in. Jackpot! Oh, sweet Mary, mother of God, that’s a BINGO!

  He let out a jubilant whoop and did a little chair dance.

  “Oh, my bonnie lass,” he said to Shu across the void, “that’s the answer to the big question!”

  He wasn’t recording for transmission, merely talking to himself. His heart was going like a triphammer, and he took a few minutes to regain his composure. He began composing his reply to Shu once he had himself under control.

  After he transmitted it to Titan, he put in a call to Forester down at the Barsoom Traders company headquarters in Kasei Spaceport on Mars. Kasei was located on Sacra Mensa, bordered by Kasei Valles to the northwest and Lunae Planum to the south. It was one of Mars’s biggest ports, nominally a U.S. territory, but with a lot of shared jurisdiction among the nations of the Trans-Oceanic Alliance.

  “Bill!” Forester boomed when his face appeared in virtual in Campbell’s oculars. “You calling to tell me you’ve got Thuvia ready for delivery? That’d make my day!”

  Campbell chuckled. “No, but she’s on track to be finished ahead of schedule. Listen close, my lad: I need to charter one of your torchships. I’ve got a veritable shite-ton of mass to move from here to Titan and my usual go-to won’t cut it. I’ll pay top rate.”

  “Damn straight, you will,” Forester replied with a twinkle in his eye, holding up the antique slide rule he kept on his desk for decoration. “A veritable shite-ton, eh?” he laughed, playing with the device. “Lemme see—is that the same as a metric shite-ton or just an imperial shite-ton? Seriously—how big a ship do you need? How’s about Issus?”

  “I’d rather use Dejah Thoris if she’s available.”

  “Well, you can, but she’s not here. She’s headed up-well, though, due in from Ell-4 in about three days. Probably take you at least that long to get your payload all packaged up anyway, right?”

  “Right! I’ll shoot you a manifest ASAP, and a schedule.”

  “Damn, but this is going to scramble up my contract runs a bit—never you mind, though, I’ll make it work. It’s your deuterium, amigo, but a burn straight to Saturn’s a real bitch right now. Remember, the longer we take to load and go, the curvier the route gets this time of year. Mars is swinging behind the sun with respect to Saturn, headed for conjunction. Trajectory’s gonna look like a synth-whore’s ass.”

  “I’ll light a fire under my people. Just as a personal heads-up: I’ll be making the trip myself.”

  “Enjoy it!” Forester told him without missing a beat. “You need anything else, gimme a call, y’hear?”

  “Aye! Thanks, Ty,” Campbell replied, signing off.

  He wondered if his friend was able to sense how excited he was. He got so distracted with planning the payload for Titan that Maya had to call him back and ask where he was when he missed the 1700 meeting. He called a halt to all construction work pending further review and announced he was going on one of his occasional impromptu sabbaticals.

  October 2091 (Terran Calendar)

  Barsoom Traders Torchship Dejah Thoris (the Deety)

  Janus Station, Titan

  It was a currently a fifteen-day burn to Titan flying under an acceleration of one Martian gravity, which was standard practice for Mars-based vessels. The lower acceleration was normal and comfortable to the native Marsmen on the crew, and it was also easier on the fusion plant and propellant-mass consumption.

  Dejah Thoris’s passenger module had twenty cabins, each able to comfortably accommodate up to four passengers, even more if there were families with small children. It was common for those cabins to be booked on the normal trading runs she flew around the solar system, but this time the only passengers aboard were members of Campbell’s own retinue. They consisted of two dozen tough-looking men and women who came abo
ard wearing the uniform coveralls and patches of Tafuna Yaro Security Associates, a Mars-based corporate-security firm (Nihon-flagged) that handled all manner of contract jobs. It was obvious from the moment they stepped aboard that this was a run they’d made before, and they were familiar with being aboard ship and how to stay out of the crew’s way.

  They supervised the cargo loading carried out by the crew and loadmaster and then largely disappeared except for taking meals in the passengers’ dining room or finding an empty spot in the main hold to practice throwing each other around on their portable dojo mats. They weren’t unfriendly, but they didn’t mix much with the crew or divulge anything at all about the payload, which was sealed up tight.

  In the eight months since the Crandall Foundation’s annual meeting on Mars, Ashburn had moved up in rank to first officer aboard Dejah Thoris. Unlike deck officers on the navy ships he had come up in, all those aboard a commercial torcher, except for the captain, stood bridge watches. It was more economical that way, requiring fewer officers and thereby increasing the profit margins.

  Rank had its privileges, however—Ashburn was senior watchstander and could juggle the schedule as he liked. He had the forenoon watch today, their last day of deceleration “hard-burn” before they began the task of “rolling around Saturn” to fall into a parking orbit over Titan. He was occupying another otherwise boring watch by running off numerous trajectories, seeing if he could match the “best case” the ship’s computer would eventually calculate for getting them to Titan with the absolute least expenditure of propellant mass.

  It was very much like the graduation-week competition at the Crandall Academy, where cadets were given a burn problem, headed into one of the habitats or moons of the Jovian system; the prize went to the cadet who could hand calculate the most fuel-efficient approach with only the most basic of computer assists. The problem involved factoring in the gravitational tug of hundreds of celestial objects in the region of Jupiter; Jupiter itself; and even the influence of the other planets, depending on their current orbits. Given the fact that celestial bodies were always in motion, it was never the same problem twice for any class of graduates. It was real geek stuff, but the winner could claim bragging rights at reunions for years to come—and did.