The Tethys Report (The Rise of the Chirons Book 1)

by Rian Davis

  “There’s a lot of things happening lately that I don’t fully understand or agree with,” I said looking at Jen. She looked back without saying anything. She gave a look which I couldn’t read.

  “Indeed! Let me show you some video of the Chirons during their time. They have some very interesting video footage that we can view.”

  I glanced at my watch nervously. I knew Hal would simply go without us if he were pressed. I didn’t know how long he would give me. I knew I shouldn’t push it and thought of something to get us all moving towards the Cucumber.

  “You mean we can actually see them?” Jen asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s hurry it up Doctor Aspect,” I said. “We really do need to get going. I want to see this now purely because I’m a scientist, but this has to be it.” I was, of course, thrilled to see all of these amazing new discoveries, but the thought of missing the boat out of this underground lake took priority.

  He gave me a testy look. I knew he wasn’t in a hurry to leave this place. After pushing a few buttons, an incredible image appeared.

  “Behold!” he said he said with his arms outstretched in an almost theatrical pose. He was clearly very excited by the Chiron’s secrets.

  The video footage of the Chirons was quite a spectacle. In the video images, we saw them building the miniature sun. They had very fancy looking machines that were made with incredibly sophisticated looking designs.

  We looked at the miniature-sun, and I saw now what was hidden before. There were actually three cores according to the screen. Each progressively larger and encapsulating the smaller one inside. The core was enormously brilliant, giving off radiant colors. All I knew about fusion was that it was impossible (supposedly but apparently not) and that the sun and other stars did it through gravity packing in hydrogen molecules to make helium. That seemed to be exactly what was happening here. I couldn’t understand exactly how the electromagnetism forces worked by looking at the screen, but it seemed to be controlled by four points on the innermost core. Somehow it was able to push the molecules together. From what I could tell, there were a lot of hydrogen molecules left for fuel. That explained how the energy lasted this long. After all, if the sun could continue for over four billion years, why not this mini-sun for over twenty million?

  “Who are these Chirons?” I asked again. Thoughts of danger left me. I was a scientist after all. As Aristotle said, we humans are born with a desire to know, and scientists most of all. “And what happened to them? If they were so perfect, why did they die out?”

  “Your first question,” the professor started, “Is mostly unknown, but I was able to gather some information while I accessed the information from the remaining … I hate to call them computers exactly. They are something altogether different, more alive, yet not really alive.” He paused in thought. He would scratch his beard and adjust his gold-rimmed glasses. “They are calculating and predicting machines that try to incorporate elements of both best possible outcome with proper analytical methods.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Jake, I figured you for someone who could easily figure these things out.”

  “I’ve been through a lot today. Just give me the skinny.”

  “Well, the systems here in this building—and most likely the rest of the city if they are in fact in operation still—have many qualities that we have, but they lack things we have too.”

  “Such as?” Jen asked.

  “Emotions, passion, drive, but they do have goals—a purpose. Humans, like Hume said, have the passions as drivers of rationality—rationality as the slave and passions as the driver, but this computer system is the opposite, if they have passions at all.”

  “And to your second and third question, which are really the same, I will say this: nothing happened to them but they evolved.”

  “What?” Jen asked. I was speechless, totally unprepared for his answer.

  “Yes, you already know what I mean. Think about the purpose of humanity. What’s going to happen someday? The computers—AI, etc. will take over some day. They will replace us. That’s what has happened here. Leo, the last Chiron, he prepared all you see here. His fellow citizens are living—in a sense—in all of these small cells surrounding the miniature sun that powers this whole city. They are preserved, while the autonomous computer—which is really imprecise compared to what it actually does, but it’s the closest term we have—continues to function.”

  “What is their purpose?” I asked. I was hooked on this kind of conversation. It was very fascinating to me since it mirrored a lot of discussions I had had on the origin of life. Did all living things down to the single cell, and even viruses, have a similar purpose?

  “That is a very interesting question,” the doctor said. “And I believe that after you do as careful a study as you can do in a few days, you find it is the same as any other living thing: reproduction, unification, metabolism, and some kind of selection mechanism for random information with selection are the key things I found so far. “

  “That’s amazing,” Jen said. “This is a gold mine for all of our research goals.”

  “What do you mean by ‘information with selection’ doctor?”

  “That’s the most peculiar and amazing aspect really of the whole thing! Come look, I’ll show you first something to help explain.”

  We followed a clearly excited professor as he nearly danced to the monitor overlooking the sun, but then he pushed a few buttons on a panel, and new images appeared around the sun itself. They were shapes of all kinds, very elaborate, hexagons, pentagons, and so many others.

  “What are they?” Jen asked.

  “Those, my dear,” he said as if he were Willy Wonka showing off his chocolate, “Are the random bits of information—so many shapes. It is making many different combinations of these geometric shapes. Manifolds, fractals—all mathematically complex and novel.”

  “They look like it—the sun, the system, or whatever it is—is building something—many things and then breaking it into parts again. What on earth is that thing?”

  “That—“Doctor Aspect said. “Is precisely what I’ve been trying to figure out for most of my time here. Look at that shape over there,” he said indicating a part of the sun near to us. “It looks like some kind of Calibi-Tau manifold, but it is slightly different. That one has been in existence,” He looked at a portable panel he was carrying, “for exactly twenty-one hours and forty –two minutes.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I believe,” he said smiling, “It means randomness. It’s creating new shapes and forms and keeping the ones that are useful. Imagine doing that for millions of years—you are correct by the way, this machine is perhaps twenty-one million years old—and think of all the new shapes it’s making. The possibilities are endless.”

  “But what’s the point of making all these shapes. Why would it go over these different forms again and again to make random things as you say? Surely there has to be a reason.”

  “Yes, there is. It’s learning. This system is learning new things, beyond even of what its creators did. I’m talking about P equals NP, at least over time. And that’s what’s so precisely so important. It’s building up its knowledge base. I think it’s learning from the creatures it’s feeding.”

  “You mean it is feeding the fish and other life forms on its own volition?”

  “Yes, precisely. It’s learning from all the sea creatures in this lake as well as the random shapes it makes.”

  “But how can it learn from shapes doctor? Forgive me, I don’t see the connection.”

  “The shapes,” he said, his hands shaking with excitement, “Are like pure numbers. It’s building equations with random numbers to build anything it wants, models, structures, new buildings, anything. It’s able to apply these new forms to anything it learns. Take building a new vehicle for instance. It has information for that too. It has made trillions upon trillions of calculations a
lready, tested each shape and applied it to many conditions. It can apply this theoretical knowledge to any applied conditions. It’s simply amazing.”

  “You said P equals NP, what does that mean?”

  “It’s the holy grail of computer science! They’ve all been looking for it even before Turing and his famous machine. It means any problem is within its grasp. This is a perfect Maxwell’s Daemon—the one that can put order into the Universe for free! It can and perhaps already has cheated the Second Law of Thermodynamics.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “That’s like cheating death.”

  “Look around you,” he said gesturing towards the miniature-sun and its surrounding support structure. “What do you see. Twenty-one million years it’s been sitting here.”

  “You have a point, doctor,” I replied. I wasn’t sure I was convinced yet.

  “So it’s learning,” Jen said. “For what purpose?”

  “I don’t know yet. It’s trying to solve uncountable theoretical problems with solutions it stores away and can apply at a moment’s whim. I need to understand how the system works first, and I appear to have run out of time.”

  I looked up at the sun with all of the many shapes and odd structures. Then I heard it again: the music. It was faint this time, fainter than it had in the large chamber, but it was distinct with its electronic cacophony of sounds. If the rhythms could be translated into a picture it would be a roaring river of smooth electrically charged stones that collided in regular, predictable intervals while forming some coherent mixture of sonic information.

  While the Doctor fiddled with his instruments, I steadied my gaze again at the miniature-sun. Each time I looked, it had a hypnotic effect, as if in tune to the rhythms of my own heart. There was certainly something pulsing within in it. Along its surfaced danced electrical shapes that Dr. Aspect had described. Once in a while the shapes would glow for reasons I did not understand. Perhaps it was keeping the shapes and storing it as information in some part of its system? I looked around and realized the miniature-sun was not in isolation: the entire building was some kind of integrated system, and Dr. Aspect had been tapping into it, learning its secrets and those of the lost race that was perhaps related to humans in some way.

  The Chirons, nature’s left hand to our right. The asymmetrical balance really set things apart. What would it be like to interact with such beings? Would they speak a language like our own? After looking at the strange remains of the one Chiron I had seen, I thought it possible, but without actual ligament structure it would be impossible to know how their voice systems worked. I was sure though that the possibility was open as the throat structure from the bones were more like ours than the Great Apes who could not make the complex utterances humans could make.

  Dr. Aspect could see my puzzlement. “It all comes back to symmetry. All life on Earth is asymmetrical—the left hand. But where is the right hand? Poof! Now we have it. Most life contains D-sugars, but not L-sugars. Why? Amino acids are almost always L-amino acids, why? Now we have a life form, the Chirons, who have the opposite structure as we do. It’s as if Mother Nature in all her wisdom had two doors. When she closed one door, she opened another.”

  “Now both doors are open at the same time, is that it? We finally have symmetry?” Jen said.

  Dr. Aspect looked back in contemplation. I do not believe he had an answer.

  “Symmetry yes!” he said. “That’s what physics always comes back to. It’s what led me to my famous equation, after all! Topology—Groups! They’re all important here—each in their own way.”

  Many questions remained. How was their society organized? How did they utilize the land? Why had we not seen any trace of them? Had they really been only limited to the lands over Antarctica? Many other questions came into my mind. This technological marvel was just the beginning of my questions. Some civilization that had made a thing like this and harnessed its energy clearly had a long development process. I did not believe in panspermia, so I assumed the Chirons were a product of Earth’s life evolutionary processes. Of course I needed lots more data and time to find out, but I wasn’t going to get it.

  “If this was the power station,” Jen said. “Then why doesn’t anything else work in the city? Why aren’t there any lights or other signs of activity? Why just this energy source?”

  “For that,” Dr. Aspect explained, “The Second Law really did have its way. Technology couldn’t do everything, I suppose, and they never meant to designed their lights and other machines to last this long. So far as I know though, I was able to access a lot of their systems and information.”

  “How did you interface with their systems?” I asked. “I doubt they speak English, and I’m sure that you don’t speak their language, right?”

  “Actually, I do,” he said smiling. “I figured it out. It’s a form of binary. They use binary, but obviously they used a different code other than the one corresponding to our English via the programming languages. I figured out how their system worked: they were using machine language. Isn’t that amazing? It’s like wings for birds and mosquitoes. They both came to the same elegant design based on Nature’s constraints. We came to the same thing too, and mainly, I think, because they had two fingers for each hand. They started with binary counting from the very beginning. Therefore, it’s natural to see how they became so advanced so quickly.”

  “That’s why they have this music too,” Jen said. “Think about it. Two to the third power is eight—the octave, the base of all music.”

  “Yes, by God, you’re right! That’s the missing link. That’s why they have this in the background. It’s not noise, it is music. That music there is by design. It’s the universal language. My God isn’t it beautiful? Move over Beethoven. You’ve just been upstaged!” he was dancing now, wild with childish delight. His joy at discovery had fully enmeshed him in pleasure. He was like a child who has come upon a room filled with all the toys and fun objects that he has dreamed of in his entire life.

  “But how did they build all of these things? What is their history?” Jen said. “My research into the biochemistry of the origin of life is very related to how they formed from more primitive microbes. What’s their evolutionary history? There is so much that can be learned from how they evolved and how we humans did. This is so exciting.” She looked crestfallen for a moment. “Of course the government is going to complicate things. This kind of discovery would be top secret, especially now, and I doubt they’d let me study something like it. Especially, not after my loud, public objections after the Afghanistan Incident.”

  “The government will never let anyone hear about it,” I said. “I doubt even my top-secret status will allow me to study it further once Command gets wind of this. The thing is, I have no idea how they’ll keep this secret from the opposing powers. Out here, we’re very far from Eagle Zone, and I doubt, assuming we can get out of this place, that we can prevent someone hostile from finding out.” I was looking at my communication device nervously realizing for the first time that none of my team had tried to contact me. Was there interference from the structure I was in? There was no evidence to believe so. I would have to call them in private though I realized because I would possibly have to listen to some sensitive information.

  “All the more reason not to let anyone know about this place down here,” Dr. Aspect said. “I’m not sure that humans can handle the secrets of this place.”

  “But what about the needs of society? You can’t ignore your own kind,” said Jen.

  “I can if they ignore all my advice. What good are they if they won’t listen to us scientists? How can I trust our society to act wisely when time and time again they’ve proven to be beyond redeeming? Can you imagine what they’d do with something like this? Why they’d make a weapon out of it.”

  “How do we know this race you call Chirons did not do that? Maybe they wiped each other out? If they were so advanced, how did they not preserve themselves other than in the com
puterized forms you explained about?” Jen asked.

  “That is a question that deserves a careful answer. Come see this,” Dr. Aspect said pushing some buttons on a panel.

  A sliding door opened up and a metal statue appeared, looking very much the shape of a tall human, except that the figure was far too bulky to be a human. It was standing on a metallic looking table that seemed to be built precisely for this metallic figure as it matched the proportions very well.

  “Is that a Chiron? Remains that were enshrined perhaps?” Jen asked in amazement. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Not quite!” Dr. Aspect said with glee. “Behold! I give you one of the fantastic products of Chiron technology, what I call a Golem because it reminds me of old stories I used to hear as a child—mythical machinery made by the Gods. It is a device that the Chirons used to project their powerful minds into a shell that could be used for many different purposes. For instance, I’ve seen the specs on how powerful these machines are, and they can lift very heavy objects. Notice that the head is very large. This is anatomically similar to the real Chirons. It holds a mass amount of data that can be used at a moment’s notice.”

  “So they could control these humanoid machines remotely?” I asked. “As if they were another body they could control with their minds?”

  “Precisely, but I take issue with one of the words you used. Not ‘humanoid’ but ‘Chironoid’.”

  “I see your point, Dr. Aspect,” I replied.

  “They were an ancient race. We should treat them with respect.”

  “I agree,” Jen said. “I wonder. Could they be related to us at all? How recent is our common ancestor?”

  He seemed to ponder this for a several seconds before giving an answer. It was clear that he was concerned with this very question before, despite being a physicist. “I think that there must have been a common ancestor at some point, but it will take lots of empirical data. That is not my realm of course. I will let my biologist colleagues sort that out. Perhaps some of my geologist colleagues as well can answer that one in the future,” he said with a wry grin.