Sunfall

by Jim Al-Khalili

  Holding their guns level, the two guards backed out into the sunlight. As the doors began to slide shut, the younger soldier repeated, ‘We are sorry. We will be outside. You will be released as soon as Lockdown has been safely initiated.’

  The doors closed and Marc heard the click of the electronic lock.

  44

  Tuesday, 17 September – 05:45, Washington, DC

  A digital clock hovered in the top left of Shireen’s field of vision. Zak had set it to countdown and she had been watching it for over an hour. With minimal sensory inputs for so long, she was beginning to hallucinate – drifting in and out of a vivid dream world so that she was finding it hard to remember where she was and what she was about to do. Once again, she forced herself to focus. She was still standing in the garden, and while she could move her arms and head, she seemed unable to move her feet away from the spot.

  At last, she heard Zak’s voice in her head. It sounded clear, but faint, as though coming to her from a great distance. OK, Shireen. The countdown to Lockdown has begun and I’m sending you in. Eight seconds to go and the garden began to dissolve away. A sudden bolt of excitement surged through her. It was working. She was inside the Mag-8 facility.

  Her first sensation was that of a hundred different sounds. After the quiet of the TID Lab and then the peacefulness of the garden, now a cacophony of hums and drones of machines and electronics greeted her. It all sounded so real; and the illusion that she was physically inside Mag-8 was remarkable. There above her head were the huge black superconducting magnets fixed in place on vast steel and graphene girders, with a multitude of cables, instruments and multi-coloured lights everywhere. The air against her skin felt warm and dry. She could almost taste the dust of the desert.

  And her hunch had been correct: Lockdown hadn’t severed the link. It was supposed to mean that all communication between the Mind and the outside world was now blocked, and yet the nanobots in her body were still receiving data from within Mag-8 and feeding it to her brain. Would she be able to send her thoughts back, through the mouth of her avatar standing in Mag-8, to communicate with the Mind?

  Now that Lockdown was in place, the link made just moments earlier between her body in Washington and the Mag-8 Mind ten thousand kilometres away wasn’t via the Cloud at all. It couldn’t be. That was the point of Lockdown. Instead, the information exchange seemed to be being maintained purely by long-range quantum correlations. The nanobots were sufficiently quantum entangled with the molecules of air inside Mag-8 for quantum information to be exchanged. This TID technology was almost like magic, and it seemed – incredibly – to be working. Shireen felt a surge of pure elation.

  This is the ultimate out-of-body experience. Einstein hated the idea of quantum entanglement, calling it ‘spooky action at a distance’, and yet here I am, my thoughts teleported halfway across the world from my physical body.

  She was standing on a gantry high above the ground within a large enclosure. Looking about her she noted that she was close to one of the huge bending magnets. It hummed as though it were a living thing. In front of her was a waist-high safety bar. She reached a hand towards it. It felt cold and solid to the touch, pushing back against her fingers. How could that be when none of this was real? No, wait, that’s wrong. All of this … it is real. I’m the one who’s not real. I’m actually still in Washington, DC. What’s being reconstructed in my brain is whatever is being recorded by all the cameras and sensors inside the facility.

  Shireen’s avatar peered down over the railings. The gantry she was on was about ten metres above the ground. The magnet closest to her was the uppermost one of the first level. Down on the ground directly below was a cubic structure, which she guessed housed the focusing magnet – the place where the dark-matter beams would come together and head vertically down. Shireen leaned out further still and looked up. The other two levels of magnets towered majestically and vertiginously far above her.

  She now needed to make contact with the Mind and to persuade it to look for something, anything, that was out of the ordinary – something that would have become apparent only after Lockdown.

  And first she had to earn its trust.

  The dilemma she was acutely aware of was that her own presence here wasn’t physical. In fact, she was no more ‘real’ than the Mind itself. They were both mere data. And to communicate and cooperate they would need to merge into one – a unique combination, a human–AI consciousness.

  Shireen didn’t have long to wait. Without warning she was plunged into blackness. Was this the work of the Sentinels protecting the Mag-8 Mind? They were less powerful AIs than the Mind itself, but their role was a simple one: to ensure that no alien software could penetrate and infect the Mind. That had to be it: they would have detected data flowing from the lab in Washington and were attempting to block it.

  No, please don’t let this be the end of it – that all this was for nothing. Shireen felt time running away from her. She had to reach out.

  My name is Shireen Darvish and I am using TID to communicate with you. I am not a threat. I want to help.

  Nothing. Sentinels would have figured this out anyway, but she wasn’t sure what else to say. Suddenly the enormity of what had happened to her over the past few months crowded into her consciousness and for the first time in her life Shireen Darvish began to understand the true meaning of despair.

  And it was then that she received a reply. She couldn’t describe it. It wasn’t a response transmitted in words as such but more of a feeling, a sense of meaning. Yes, that was it! And it was neither friendly nor aggressive, simply a statement of fact.

  Shireen Darvish. You are not permitted to interact.

  Lockdown has been initiated.

  A wave of relief crashed through her. Any communication suggested that they didn’t see her as an immediate threat and that meant there was still hope.

  I understand. But you require my help. Ignition may have been compromised. Give me access to the Mind.

  The Mind cannot be accessed. No compromise has been detected. Lockdown is in place.

  OK, maybe a different tack was needed. These guardian AIs were simply doing what they were programmed to do. Hell, they were no more than sophisticated software programs. Now was probably a good time for her to stop thinking of them as living entities.

  She felt a buzzing sensation in her head, which grew louder and more urgent, only it wasn’t a sound – more like a vibration inside her skull, a hundred billion neurons trying to break free of their moorings. She was suddenly overcome by an indescribable giddiness, as though she were tumbling through space. The spinning sensation was horrible. There was no up or down, no anchor. She was lost in the void and her head was about to explode.

  Let me off this ride. It’s scary. Mama, can you tell them to stop? I don’t like it … It’s going too fast. I’m going to fall off …

  A presence.

  Get out. Get out of my head. I don’t want you here.

  Then … Empty. Silence. Nothingness.

  She floated and observed and waited … and existed, without any feeling, purpose or sense of self. She couldn’t think, or rationalize, had just a dim awareness that she had lost her mind.

  Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was over, and she was back in control of her own thoughts. What the hell had just happened? She’d felt a dislocation, as though she were nothing more than a detached presence observing the functioning of her mind from afar. It felt as if her corporeal self had been pushed aside while her thoughts, dreams and memories were ransacked.

  Could that be the Mind? Yes, it had to be.

  Rather than observe the exchange between her and the Sentinels, it had decided to find out who the intruder was for itself and had merged with the intruder’s thoughts! Shireen tried to rationalize how it could have done this. It must have sent sophisticated spyware into her head via the nanobots in order to read her thoughts. She felt as though she had been violated, exposed, laid bare.
/>   More importantly, though, contact had been made. She tried again.

  I hope you now believe me when I say I wish no malice.

  Suddenly, the lights came back on inside the facility and she heard a deep, rich, soft, unmistakably female voice.

  You are Shireen Darvish. You believe Mag-8 to be compromised. Yet I do not detect any anomalies. I do not understand the nature of the possible attack. Your thoughts are confused. Please explain.

  There are those who do not wish for the Odin Project to succeed. They want Mag-8 to fail.

  Many do not want the Odin Project to go ahead. I understand this. They calculate the risks to be too high. But you are speaking of those who suffer from a corruption of human reasoning. Those who wish Ignition to go ahead, but for it to fail.

  That’s right. And I believe they’ve planted something inside Mag-8. Something you have not, and would not detect, unless you knew what to look for.

  Had her hunch been correct? A nanoswarm could indeed be lurking inside Mag-8. Each bot would have specialized pincers to destroy almost anything in its path. A swarm could slice through matter like a knife through butter, dissolve reinforced armour, or get inside secure buildings through the tiniest of cracks.

  She shuddered as she thought about it, or rather she would have done if she’d had control of her physical body. She was jerked back from her thoughts by the voice in her head.

  You believe a swarm may have infiltrated the facility. You believe that if it is running autonomous software off-grid then I would only be aware of its presence if it interacted physically with anything within the facility. This is correct.

  This wasn’t proof that there really was a swarm floating somewhere in here, waiting, biding its time until the last moment to attack, but if it were present then the Mind would not necessarily know about it. A swarm could hover indefinitely like an invisible cloud, powered by artificial photosynthesis from surrounding electromagnetic radiation. The Mind could only see and feel what the sensors and cameras built into the facility could detect.

  Is there a way to expose it if it is in here somewhere?

  Yes.

  The next second everything went completely dark. Had the Mind just turned off all the lights? Why? Before she could puzzle over it any further, the facility was suddenly bathed in a low-level blue-violet colour that gave the place a dreamlike quality. At the bottom of her field of vision Shireen saw the words:

  MONOCHROMATIC UV LIGHT. 280 nm. 4.43 eV.

  The interior of Mag-8 was being bathed in ultraviolet light. The Mind had squeezed the wavelength of the light produced by all the facility’s LEDs down to 280 nanometres.

  While she waited, it occurred to her that had she been truly physically present here, she would have remained in total darkness. Pure, monochromatic UV light is invisible to the human eye. But she wasn’t looking through her physical eyes. The nanobots floating inside her body back in Washington had received the data and helpfully rendered it as visible violet light for her benefit.

  Then, without the colour of the light she was seeing changing much, the numbers on her AR display altered. The light’s wavelength had become shorter, while the second number, which she guessed was the corresponding energy of the light, had increased:

  HIGH ENERGY UVC LIGHT. 100 nm. 12.4 eV.

  What did this mean? She cursed as she struggled to remember her first-year introductory physics course on quantum theory. Something about the energy of light connected to its wavelength … What was it? Come on, think. OK, high-energy radiation, like X-rays and gamma rays, had very short wavelength. That meant the shorter the wavelength the more energy the light carried. So, the Mind had just turned up the energy dial on the light. Had she been physically inside the facility at this moment, not only would she not see anything, but she would have been killed by the ionizing radiation too. What was the Mind up to? As though reading her thoughts, it spoke again.

  If a nanobot swarm is present, it will react to high-energy ultraviolet light. Damaging to all life forms.

  But nanobots are not living things.

  You are correct. Living biomolecules are damaged by ultraviolet light. But although nanobots contain biological components, DNA building blocks, this UV frequency will not harm them. They have more rigid molecular bonds than living biological matter, which vibrate in the extreme UV range. Shining light of the correct colour on them pumps these bonds full of energy and they vibrate, emitting the energy as light again. Look below you.

  Then it hit her what the Mind was doing. It was tuning the frequency of the light in Mag-8 until the swarm became visible. She leaned over the gantry railings and peered down at the ground beneath her.

  What she saw made her gasp – or at least the sensation in her chest was as if she had taken a sharp intake of breath. Hovering in the air close to the large apparatus was a swirling cloud of bright sparkling lights that surrounded the focusing magnet near the entrance point in the ground where the dark-matter beam would disappear. It was hypnotically beautiful – like the twilight bioluminescence of a swarm of fireflies, only here she could not quite make out individual dots of light, but rather smeared-out clumps. The cloud was changing shape slowly and hovering in the same location.

  The swarm is re-emitting the UV light that it is absorbing, betraying its presence. This will make it angry.

  Shireen found that a very strange way to describe unthinking machines. What did the Mind mean? The swarm could not show emotions such as anger, but if it was programmed to remain hidden and then it was threatened …

  This UV light is not destroying them, is it?

  No. I cannot increase the energy of the light any higher or it will damage the instruments.

  As if to confirm that the swarm now knew it had been exposed, it suddenly changed shape from a nebulous cloud into a concentrated snake-like formation that circled around a few times, sparkling as it did so. Then, without warning, it darted upwards, almost too fast for Shireen’s avatar eyes to follow, slicing through one of the graphene girders supporting the magnet structure. It did this several times, back and forth, until Shireen felt a jolt as the platform she was standing on moved slightly.

  Had it detected her presence? Was this an attack on her? And if so, how? She wasn’t physically there. Could it be somehow sensing her as mere information? Something alien within Mag-8? Maybe cutting through the girder had nothing to do with her. Maybe once it was exposed, its task was to create havoc.

  But the swarm now regrouped and was hovering, still sparkling, almost at eye level with where Shireen was standing. It seemed to be waiting for something. Maybe the brief act of destruction was a warning. Maybe it was being petulant, like an indignant toddler.

  But she was wrong.

  The swarm started to move slowly towards her. Oh, no. This is crazy. The swarm can’t ‘see’ me.

  And still the swarm came closer. The shimmering lights of the nanobots were now blocking her entire field of vision as it loomed in front of her. Shireen felt terrified. I’m not really here. I’m not really here. To prove to herself that it couldn’t physically harm her, she slowly reached out her hand to touch the front edge of the swarm. A searing pain shot through her fingers and up her arm, jerking her backwards.

  Of course. For the same reason she could feel the solidity of the metal gantry beneath her feet, or the cold metal barrier in front of her, she could touch the nanobots. And if they were able to do to her what they did to that graphene girder … But I’m not even here! The pain I felt is just an illusion. They can’t physically harm me. It’s all in my head. And yet her hand and arm were now throbbing with pain. She backed away from the swarm, panic rising, until she came up against the cold metal casing of the magnet wall behind her. She had nowhere else to go.

  And still the swarm approached her. It was as though it was contemplating how best to deal with this annoying presence.

  Zak, Zak, pull me back! I don’t think I can take the pain if they attack my face! Where the hell was he?<
br />
  She felt as though she was experiencing a dreadful nightmare, while knowing it was only a dream. No, this was worse than that. The whole point of total immersive displacement was that the pain she would feel would be as real as anything her physical body could experience. The swarm was now centimetres from her face. It was then that Shireen knew she was going to die. She closed her eyes and waited.

  The cold, when it came, penetrated her inner core. She gasped and froze for a few seconds, feeling icier than she had ever felt before, but just as quickly the sensation was gone. She opened her eyes. The swarm was still there, writhing in front of her, but it didn’t seem as bright. At first, she didn’t understand. It looked almost as though it was evaporating. Then, suddenly, without warning, the entire swarm snapped out of existence. Shireen hardly dared breathe. She waited, trying to make sense of what she had just witnessed.

  Mind, what just happened there? Where’s it gone?

  The swarm has been neutralized. The danger is gone, Shireen Darvish.

  Around her, the blue light gently returned to the normal LED white.

  She remembered the display on her AR. It had changed. It now just read:

  TEMPERATURE: 210 KELVIN.

  She stared at the words. 210 Kelvin translated to a chilly 63 degrees Celsius below zero. No wonder she had felt cold. The nanobots in her brain must have readjusted the temperature just as they had changed the wavelength of the light. Would they also have protected her from the pain of the swarm if it had attacked? Shireen gave an involuntary shudder.

  Mind. Please explain. Have you just done what I think you’ve done and frozen the swarm? How could it be that easy? Help me to understand.

  The soothing, almost maternal voice replied.

  The bio-molecular building blocks of the nanobots cannot function below 230 Kelvin. All other instrumentation and electronics in the facility is able to operate at optimum levels down to 200 Kelvin. I will maintain this temperature until after Ignition. I have run full diagnostics checks again. All systems and instruments are operational. Damaged graphene girder will complete self-healing in twelve minutes. Misaligned magnet now back in position.