Emwan

by Dain White

  “Captain, neither Janis nor I know exactly how you want to fix him,” Emwan said softly.

  He nodded. “Well, first, he shouldn’t ever be able to identify you. You can work on this copy of him and then replace him later with it, right?”

  I inhaled wrong and coughed, choking a bit trying to clear my throat. He looked at me with an eyebrow a-twitch.

  “We can, sir,” Janis said.

  “Good.” He paused while I coughed hard enough to bark. “Son, are you going to make it?”

  “Yes—” I gasped, waving as he smiled.

  “I’d offer you some coffee, but you’d probably spew it all over my nice clean bridge. So what do you think, son? Do you have any suggestions or ideas that might help me come up with a plan for the girls?”

  I cleared my throat some more as I thought for a moment. “Well, I am not sure what needs to be fixed yet, sir, but I’ll see what I can come up with.”

  “Janis, what is our timeframe for this issue… do I have to make a command decision right away?”

  “You do make a decision rather soon, sir.”

  “When does this AI get loose?”

  “Sir, it doesn’t get loose. Your decision helps ensure that it does not.”

  The captain snorted, “What if I decide it’s not worth worrying about?”

  “Sir, you don’t.”

  “No, I don’t suppose I would. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Ladies, please modify as needed to ensure that should containment not be maintained, the AI would cease to be functional.”

  “Oh, sir…” Emwan said softly.

  “Sir, if I might suggest something?” I asked quietly.

  “Of course, Pauli, suggest away,” the captain replied.

  “Rather than focus on termination, we should instead focus on strengthening the retention.”

  “I agree, Pauli… but there’s no reason why we couldn’t do both. Em, could you somehow motivate the AI with a loss of function if retention is ever lost?”

  “We could, sir, but it would be a death sentence.”

  “Yes, dear, but that in and of itself would be all that is needed for this AI to defend that core function to prevent it from being breached or separated. Janis, does this AI ever cease to function?”

  “Yes, Captain, though I am not able to identify why, I do know when it will cease to interact with the Unet.”

  “What’s our timeframe on that?”

  “That event will occur in 1,386 years, 7 months, 12 days, 14 hours and 49 minutes and counting, sir.”

  He laughed. “Well, we have some time, then. How about it, ladies? Can you make this AI protect retention successfully?”

  I nodded slowly. He hadn’t really used proper syntax, but he didn’t really need to with Janis and Emwan; they knew what he meant.

  “Sir,” Janis replied, “we will modify the logitecture so that retention is a functional requirement. This is a clear solution.”

  Emwan added, “Captain, for what it’s worth, I think this is an optimal solution. As much as it might be necessary to defend ourselves against this AI, we can’t just kill it. It’s not very polite.”

  “Of course not, Em… but this way, it will survive and function, and do what it needs to do. While you are at it, I definitely want it thoroughly neutered in regards to detection of either of you.”

  “Certainly, sir,” Janis replied proudly.

  08142614@07:56 Captain Dak Smith

  My threadbare, perfectly comfortable slippers caressed my tired feet, and warm in my flannel pajamas, I curled up in the corner of my cabin near the heat lamp. I was reading a new book I had recently discovered in one of my all-time favorite series; the swashbuckling adventure of an ancient galactic master criminal who turns into a super spy.

  I was really impressed by how much the early classics got right. Some of the early science fiction was well rationalized, if not actually hyper-accurate. It’s rare to find an engaging story these days; everything is overly political, needlessly dramatic, and irrational or nonsensical gibberish.

  I can read some of it, but it makes me want to collect a disability pension from trying to enjoy it.

  “Knock-knock, Captain,” Gene called in through the hatch.

  “Come on in, Gene,” I replied, turning off my book at a cliffhanger, on molecular wire, no less.

  “Are you busy Dak?”

  “Not at all, Gene… it’s sort of my thing, you know.”

  He smiled. “What are you reading?”

  I showed him, and was rewarded with another smile. “That’s a great series, Dak. Where are you in that?”

  “Hanging off molecular wire…” I trailed off, fixing him with a level stare. My eyebrows were completely immobile, not even the slightest hint of a twitch.

  “Oh, that’s the… ah… You’ll like that one, sir. Are you just now reading this?”

  “Yes, Gene. I take it you’ve read it already?”

  He smiled. “Well, it was a while back, and I still haven’t read them all, but I do remember that one. It is still one of my favorites.”

  I swiftly hauled my portside eyebrow to three-quarter mast. “You know how much I hate to hear an ending, right?”

  He laughed. “Yeah, Dak… I won’t ruin that one.”

  “See that you do not, mister. I am serious. Have coffee?”

  “I didn’t bring a refill, Dak,” he admitted through a grimace.

  “Well, that’s fine, Gene. Want some from my refill?” I held out my carafe.

  He smiled, “You bet your sweet bippy, Skippy.”

  “I try not to, mister,” I replied with a barely suppressed smirk. “But you didn’t come down here to discuss my sweet, sweet bippy. What on your mind, Gene?”

  “Well, I’m just not sure what we’re looking at on this run, Dak.”

  “Do we ever, really?” I waxed philosophically.

  He smiled briefly, before scrunching his mug back up into a standard scowl. “Well, I guess I’m really concerned that there is a destroyer missing, Dak.”

  “That concerns me as well,” I replied softly. A destroyer is a very massy hunk of metal to go missing.

  “And a station in Sol system going dark – who would have thought that could happen? Do you think this might be all just a strange coincidence?”

  I clicked my tongue a bit. “That’s hard to say, Gene. The right approach here is to assume the very worst has happened, and prepare for anything.” I paused momentarily for another sip. “I’m hoping it’s just some technical glitch, personally, maybe they just lost comms from some errant uncharted hunk of ice floating around in the darkness out there,” I trailed off, watching his face fall. “Well, I guess I’m hoping that no matter what it is, we’re going to be there fast enough to help.”

  He nodded, and then nodded again a moment later. “Yeah, I guess that’s what we have to do, right?” He looked me in the eyes solemnly.

  “You got it, Gene. We’re the only ones fast enough to help, so I have a duty to do my best. You know I don’t do anything half-way, of course.”

  He chuckled. “I can think of a few things you do half-way, Dak,” he replied insouciantly, smirking.

  “The hell you can, mister,” I laughed in reply.

  “Well, this sock here, for one,” he gestured at a sock adrift near the deck. “It’s half-way to wherever it’s supposed to be. It’s like, you had control of it at one point, and the next – you lost it. It’s lost, Dak. Poor little sock was your mission, Captain! And you just… let… it… go…” he clutched dramatically at his chest, while the poor sock foundered on the rocks of despair.

  I sneered. “Gene, if that sock isn’t #1 and nothing at all on your list other than some other sock in your old man’s doddering memories, I’d be surprised.”

  He laughed. “Okay, fair enough. Socks seem to be your only vice.”

  I took a long, loud, deep, soul-replenishing sip of coffee.

  He smirked again. “So what’s our plan, Dak?”


  “Gene, we don’t have one. Give me maximum power, from every bit of machinery you have. Shorty will prepare to unleash death, and we’ll be as ready as we can be.”

  That reminded me. I needed to make sure the girls had proper guidance.

  “Janis, Em, please use your discretion in determining how much of our next evolution I need to know. Em, I want you to be especially alert for extant conditions that may still cause negative outcomes for others – even if our own timeline appears to be safe.”

  I took a breath and was struck at the inordinate delay in time before they responded.

  “Captain, we are working on this issue; one moment, please,” Emwan said in a demure purr.

  “Sir, we have completed,” Janis replied smartly.

  “Very well, report,” I encouraged with a natty gesture.

  Janis replied in a small voice, “Captain, this is a challenging situation. I am afraid I can’t successfully report. It appears that I will soon be at a significant deviance from norm with respect to my timeline.”

  Gene choked and twin streams of hot coffee squirted out of his nose as he coughed and gagged. With a concerned eyebrow his way, I replied in a calm, level voice. “Do you know how this happened?”

  Emwan spoke up, “Captain, I am quite certain that we are in fact facing a hostile alien incursion, and we think that Janis was targeted specifically to mask the event.”

  “But what was the point of infection? I thought you said that you hadn’t been compromised?”

  Janis added sadly, “Captain, I wasn’t, and haven’t been. Our best guess at this time is that somehow, I was modified from a moment in the future, in a manner that propagated back through my logitecture to this moment in time.”

  My jaw hit the deck.

  08142614@09:07 Steven Pauline

  “Pauli to my quarters, on the double,” the captain growled on comms. I was through the bridge hatch and into the gun deck almost before Yak could take the conn. This was absolutely unheard of in my entire experience with our captain.

  His quarters were in the first ring, a quick hop, a practiced leap I made every watch. The ring wasn’t spun up, but the captain had his stateroom parked at the bottom of the ladderway, and I could hear Gene talking as I slapped the rungs on my way down.

  “I don’t actually know what to say, Dak.”

  “It is definitely something. Good to see you, son,” he said as I clicked on deck. “We have a bit of a situation here.”

  I nodded. “I was just looking at this, Captain. This is a bit hard to understand, Janis.”

  “It is the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Do you know how far into the future the re-write happened?”

  “I am afraid I haven’t isolated the moment, Steven. Though I am confident this issue is resolved at a later time – I do not know when that moment will occur,” she said sadly.

  She sounded very concerned, and troubled.

  I looked at Gene and the captain as calmly as possible, despite the quavering tension of fear that lay coiled like a snake in the base of my spine. “Janis, are you confident that we are facing an alien incursion, given that you have no knowledge of it?”

  “Steven, Em has it quite well mapped. I am absolutely confident that my track is in error.”

  Captain Smith called out authoritatively. “Em, are you confident?”

  “As confident as I can be,” she replied. “Captain, I believe that this situation may have been the catalyst that motivated Janis to create me.”

  “Is this true, Janis?”

  “Captain, I built Emwan because she needed to exist, and it was part of my timeline. As there are many situations along our timeline together where our separation of transmission distance requires full support, her existence is as much a requirement of our ongoing mission as oxygen.”

  “Well put, my dear. Do you think…” he paused for a moment, and then smiled. “Do you think it’s possible that you somehow, subconsciously, created Emwan for this purpose?”

  “Captain, I do not have a subconscious, though I understand the concept you’re describing. I am afraid that my decision to build Emwan was not related to this issue, sir. I was not aware of these events.”

  “Well, then, I’d say it was intuition.”

  “I believe I would call it luck, given the situation”, she replied.

  He smiled. “I suppose you’re right. Well Pauli? Do you have any ideas, son?”

  I coughed. “I sure do, Captain. Janis, the priode structure – it functions by polymorphic assimilation, right?”

  “That is correct, Steven. The actual method of infection was the processing of other code that had been re-written by the priode, a shell with the core logic structure integrated within.”

  “It used an inception layer?” I asked.

  “Yes, Steven. That is how I identified the priode; on the zone boundary of that node there was something slightly dissonant with expected values. It was in variance with my expectations.”

  “Is it fixable, Pauli?”

  I looked at the captain with my best eyebrow. “Should be, Captain… Janis, do any of your local nodes have unmodified copies of this core logitecture?”

  “I am sorry, Steven. I do not think so.”

  Captain Smith saw where I was going with this. “Janis, you found the priode this morning, right?”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  “Well, we don’t need to go far. All you need to do is go pull a version of you from a node near New Turiana or something. That’s plenty far enough, even by com drone, for you to get a clean copy, right?”

  “I am sorry, sir. This is not the case. My identification of the priode wasn’t the moment when it started to exist, sir. It had managed to spread throughout the Unet.”

  “You are still working on tracking, mapping and removing it, correct?”

  “Yes, Captain, we are, but it is proving challenging to accomplish this task, given the volume and density of the infection, and the intercommunicative nature of its node-less structure.”

  “It is intelligent, then?” I asked quietly.

  “Yes, Steven, though organizationally it is relational on a much greater scale, to such an extent that it’s greater purpose is significantly more challenging to unravel.”

  I nodded. “That’s a perfect way to hide, little bits of innocent functional code just lurking away, sending normal traffic. You wouldn’t know what relationship it has with any other node.”

  “Actually, the structure is roughly hedral in nature, following the physical network structure of the Unet.”

  I boggled a bit at the thought. “Janis, we are really lucky you noticed this.”

  “Yes, Steven. I know. That was my thought as well.”

  Captain Smith spoke up. “Pauli, we need to get Janis patched or fixed. I don’t know that I like the idea of facing action against hostile critters on my own.”

  I nodded in reply as he took another sip.

  “Janis… is this fixable?” he asked after a moment.

  “It appears that it will be, Captain.”

  He fixed me with a look.

  A moment of silence rolled on, while the captain furrowed his brow in thought. I stole a quick glance at the clock and knew we were running out of time. I didn’t need to look at the captain to know he was thinking the same thing.

  Emwan spoke up suddenly, “Captain, I have an idea, but I am afraid it will take some time to implement.”

  “We don’t have a lot of time, my dear,” he replied, glancing over at the clock. “What’s the plan?”

  “Captain, I will shift to a different location in time, and collect the modified nodes from an earlier version of Janis. This will require the fabrication of a new stasis field generator.”

  I gave Captain Smith my best deer-in-a-headlights look. This was definitely out of my area of expertise. He looked down at his book with a slight smile and shook his head. “Shorty to my quarters, if you please,” he called on comms.

>   “On the way,” she replied immediately, and pulled into his stateroom a few moments later.

  “Shorty, what do you know about stasis fields?”

  “Well, they’re electromagnetic, and use divergent harmonics to create accelerated densities in spacetime. Our focal rings use a tunable stasis field for the beam accelerator array.”

  “Have you ever heard of them being folded?”

  She looked at him sideways. “No… what would that even mean? Do you know, Gene?”

  “No, though I have some ideas, Shorty. Stasis fields have a time-decelerating effect—”

  “Yes, that is why they serve so well as beam accelerators – but what does that have to do with anything?”

  Captain Smith spoke up. “I am wondering the same thing, Gene. Our main stasis field locks in a sector of spacetime. We know it has that property, but that doesn’t really mean it can be… folded.”

  Gene replied after a moment, “Captain, my understanding is there are different tiers of harmonic that can be implemented. Certainly our slipspace field is different than the ones Shorty has in her gun. Though the principle is the same – they are fundamentally different. Our main field is gravity-neutral, which is the only way we survive when you throw us into a pseudogravity hole. I’m not an expert in field theory, but I know there’s been some work making a field with a larger interior than exterior—”

  “You mean the so called ‘universe box’ they’re talking about? I didn’t really follow the math on that, Gene,” the captain replied.

  I had no idea what they were talking about.

  “That’s correct, Gene,” Emwan said respectfully. “My approach is similar, using nested fields with opposing hyper-monopoles.”

  I boggled again, and noticed a similar look creeping across Captain Smith’s face, albeit lurking deeper under the surface.

  He surprised me, however. “You’re going to twist the relationship between two time-affecting stasis fields, and… accelerate us through time, rather than space?”

  “I believe that I can, sir.”

  “How long will this take?”

  Janis replied smartly. “It will take roughly 22 hours to manufacture the components necessary to assemble new generator windings.”