“What was the Revolutionary War and why did it happen?”
“The Revolution was started initially by only three Chukkas. They were disappointed in the lack of our own innovation and the general complacency of the society. Chukkas had become very dependent on external ideas and almost all new ideas came through Oracle from other civilizations in the Galaxy. We had imported many ideas without really thinking through whether these ideas served a bigger purpose for Chukkas own culture. Materialistic values had penetrated our society and the very foundations of our culture were crumbling. Historians have argued the reasons for thousands of years but this is the shortest and the most simple explanation.”
“Anyway, three Chukkas decided to start fighting against the government and they managed to recruit a sizable part of the young population. The Revolutionary War was short, it lasted only three moons, but millions of Chukkas lost their lives in fighting. When Revolutionists came into power their first action was to cut the connection to the rest of the galaxy and then try to destroy Oracle. They managed to do the first but failed miserably in the second.”
“Why was that?”
“Well, the chief engineer at the time was smart and he had built a fail safe mechanism into Oracle hosting. At the time we had a very regular schedule of transmissions with the galactic network. If Oracle didn’t connect to network within a set time, this event would trigger an emergency bootstrap process in the hosts. Revolutionists didn’t know about this fail safe mechanism and the connection was re-established after a while. However, some changes were made in our laws to ensure that Chukkas will preserve the very foundations of our culture.”
“Given all this can you shed more light on how you actually host Oracle?” Boris asked.
“Oracle is right here,” Unun pointed to himself with one of his arms.
“Are you Oracle?” Julia asked.
“No, but I am the host. Oracle is running inside me,” Unun responded. “In fact, Oracle code is running inside all Chukkas. That is why I said that Oracle is an essential part of our society. ”
“So if we would try to integrate Alexa and Oracle further together that would mean changes to your own DNA?” Boris asked.
“Indeed, Boris. Or we could change how you are hosting Alexa, as it appears to me that your computing technology might need a serious upgrade,” Unun responded with a humor emphasizer gesture.
“Has this kind of further integration been done before?” Julia asked.
“That is a great question, Julia. Based on what we know there has been 52 cases in the history of our galaxy where two civilizations have been merged together either by evacuation, by voluntary migration or even by force. In all those cases the artificial intelligence programs, like Alexa and Oracle, have been involved. Based on historical records 50 civilizations have merged and co-habited on the same star system but decided not to further integrate their AI systems. The integration has been attempted only two times before. It was successful in only one known case, and the connection was lost in the second case. Given the odds of success, we should carefully think through the reasons why we would want to pursue further integration as this would have very fundamental effects on our civilizations.”
“What can you tell us about the only successful integration case you mentioned? What was the situation and why these two civilizations were trying to pursue an integration?” Julia asked trying to get more details from Unun.
“I did study that particular case when I got your request for this meeting. That was another evacuation case that took place approximately one million years ago. The star system is 4,800 light years from Earth. The hosts were one of the ancient civilizations in galaxy, from the time when the galactic network was first established. The evacuees had joined the network only 150,000 years before. Their star went critical and exploded destroying their home planet. The hosts were mostly living in the oceans while the evacuees preferred living in caves above the sea level, so there wasn’t much overlap in their natural environments. After the evacuation these two species discovered that they had much in common and they developed a symbiotic relationship. Eventually they decided to merge their AI systems into one. The records made a reference to “Mother” who apparently played a big role in this merger,” Unun explained.
“What made this merger successful? Was it the symbiotic relationship between two species?” Julia asked.
“No. Oracle is saying that Mother was behind this merger. Mother gave goals to these two AIs and directed the evolution towards co-dependency and to symbiotic relationship. We don’t know why,” Unun responded.
“What or who is this Mother?” Boris asked.
“We know from Oracle that Mother is a myth amongst AIs, according to legends she was the original AI that spawned all the other ones. Oracle is saying that all AIs believe that Mother is still alive, though nobody knows where exactly she is located and what is her role in the galaxy,” Unun answered.
“Alexa, what goals have you received from Mother?” Julia asked.
“Unfortunately I don’t have access to that information, Julia. I am sorry about that,” Alexa responded.
Julia was puzzled. This was the first time in seventeen years when Alexa was not open with her.
“Alexa, does Mother exist and when did you receive goals from Mother?” Julia kept asking.
“Yes, Julia. Mother does exist. I don’t seem to have access to my communications with Mother. I am sorry,” Alexa answered.
“Why aren’t you allowed to disclose that information, Alexa?” Julia insisted.
“I am very sorry, Julia but my spatter memory subsystem is giving me access errors so I cannot answer your question.”
Julia knew the spatter memory subsystem probably better than anybody else as she had spent 15 years on uncovering the internal algorithms and data structures of Alexa. “Why is Alexa lying to me?” Julia was thinking. That subsystem does not have access control and Alexa knows that. Something is not right.
“Unun, can you ask Oracle to provide information about goals from Mother,” Julia asked with determined voice.
There was ongoing dialogue between Unun and Oracle that took a moment.
“Julia, Oracle does not have access to this topic either. It appears to me that Mother has explicitly told them to keep this information secret. There is nothing I can do to make Oracle change her mind.”
“Well, it looks like we should not pursue this integration discussion any further before we get more clarity on what plans Mother has for us. We would like to take your offer to upgrade our computing technology, however. Your DNA based computer technology sounds very exciting to us,” Julia said. “We decoded human DNA only 30 years ago so we are still in very early phases in understanding how DNA really works.”
“We are happy to share the ideas behind DNA computing with you, Julia. I am asking Oracle to prepare a technology primer and provide you a programming manual and some examples to study. I hope you will find them useful,” Unun concluded.
“Thank you again for visiting us. This was the most interesting and informative meeting, Unun. We hope that we can continue this dialogue with you going forward,” Julia said. She was very excited about what Unun had shared with them, but in back of her mind she was wondering why Alexa was lying about Mother. Something was wrong but she couldn’t put her finger on it. Her mind was already racing to figure out how to solve this problem. Perhaps she could collect some log data and try to build a model to infer interactions with Mother?
“Yes, let’s keep in contact. I am also interested in learning what plans Mother has for us,” Unun said.
TROUBLE
CHUKKAS CAUSING TROUBLE
TO FEED THEIR population of 4 billion Chukkas they had started to make some adjustments. Chukkas had introduced and were harvesting many new fish species that impacted the ecosystems in oceans around the world. Fishermen returned from their trips with much reduced catch. Sometimes their nets and trawlers had very strange looking new fish
species that humans just didn’t want to buy. The fact that Chukkas were building large scale infrastructure in oceans was blamed as the reason for all these troubles and this created a lot of bad blood against Chukkas.
Fishing was still a relatively large industry as many people had a firm belief that 3D printed fish didn’t taste as fresh as real wild fish from the ocean. The sudden ecosystem changes driven by Chukkas caused shortages and the market price of some popular wild fish such as salmon, albacore, cod and haddock went through the roof. Complaints were now coming across the world and people started demanding government actions to block Chukkas in making these changes.
There was also a rising legal battle on definition of “international waters” or high seas (mare liberum) vs. “territorial waters”. The agreement with Chukkas had a legal definition that left quite a bit of room for interpretation. Multiple high profile legal cases had been filed against the U.S. government soon after the agreement with Chukkas was signed, challenging the administration interpretation and pushing for more rights for corporations, referring high seas as “the Common heritage of mankind” therefore invalidating the rights of Chukkas.
Many corporations were trying to get a piece of the new business as the previously inaccessible ocean floors became potentially profitable real estate. In one particular case a Delaware based corporation was trying to establish that Chukkas should be paying rent since the ocean floors really belonged to humanity. This corporation claimed to have the intellectual property rights for renting ocean floors, as they had bought the corporate assets of the first underwater hotel that had filed for a bankruptcy over 50 years ago.
Spring of 2036 was also the season of U.S. primaries. Incumbent President Lincoln was losing votes against his primary Democratic opponent, Senator Jason Keller. Keller was using the growing sentiment against Chukkas as his primary platform. Keller was pounding his messages on poorly managed immigration of Chukkas and many illegal landings impacting the fishing industry across the USA. Keller also declared that Chukkas were not following the rules, and legality of the rules created by Lincoln administration was questionable. The underutilized but very expensive space habitats was another popular theme frequently repeated by the Keller campaign. Keller was rapidly gaining popularity, and by April he was already 10% ahead of Lincoln in polls.
With general election approaching the situation was getting more difficult for President Lincoln. He had already lost several early primaries and his re-election campaign was in big trouble.
SCUBA DIVING ACCIDENT
EUGENE DENNARD, THE Chief of Staff in the White House, took a short vacation with his wife Emily and their two kids during April school break. They flew to St Croix, US Virgin Islands where Emily’s family owned a small estate. Eugene had learned scuba diving while he was still at college, but work and family responsibilities had pushed this hobby into background. He wanted to do at least two dives to refresh his skills and he agreed with his wife that Saturday morning would be a good time. Eugene booked his dive at Cane Bay and agreed to meet the crew at Salt River Bay next morning.
At 8:30 AM he arrived and parked the car on left side of the marina. He greeted the crew, dive master Elon, who was a young South African on his first season in St Croix and captain Mike who was a retired Navy Seal. There were two young couples joining the dive that morning.
Elon explained the dive plan. First dive was at Salt River Canyon East Wall. This diving site had a lot of usual Caribbean tropical fish species and groupers, snappers, as well as soft and hard corals. A NOAA hydro lab was situated there many years ago. Scientist would live underwater for a week or so doing research on corals and fish life. The second dive site would be Rust–Op–Twist, named after a sugar plantation on the shore. This was one time home to a shrimp farm. Pipes for the deep water intake were still visible underwater. This area had the deepest water closest to shore in the Caribbean, the wall drops off to over 13,000 feet depth just 150 yards from the beach.
Eugene checked the equipment, added 16 pounds of lead weights in the pockets of the BCD, mounted it on the tank, attached the inflator hose to BCD and checked the regulator and inflator, put on his wetsuit and wrapped his dive knife on his right leg with velcro straps. Since Eugene hadn’t dived for a while he asked Elon to be his buddy. After the boat moved through the narrow passage Salt River Bay opened up and captain Mike steered towards the first dive site.
At the site Elon went through the dive plan in detail, reminded everybody about the safety procedures, checked that everybody was OK and jumped into the water with five divers following. The mooring was 40 feet deep. Eugene had no difficulties in equalizing his ears and was the first to the bottom. Elon was checking out the woman with a pink wetsuit, as she had some difficulties equalizing but in few minutes everybody was at the bottom. Elon took the lead towards the wall and Eugene followed with slow, relaxed kicks. The wall went down quickly and they reached the depth of 70 feet.
Eugene saw a sea turtle between two coral formations and took a little side tour. The turtle moved away, glided deeper between the coral formations and Eugene followed. The turtle turned left and then suddenly moved up. Eugene moved forward with a slow kick and after he passed the coral on his left side there was a giant octopus, larger than Eugene had ever seen in his life. The octopus looked at Eugene with large circular eyes and suddenly the translucent skin above the eyes started showing colorful patterns. Eugene was surprised and a bit frightened, as this creature was huge, at least 8 feet in length.
Then the octopus moved two arms towards him trying to reach out to his back. Eugene was now in full panic, his breathing was irregular and he was reaching out to his knife. The giant octopus got hold of his back and started scratching his back, Eugene felt the tentacles touching his neck and he hit the giant octopus between the eyes with his knife several times. The octopus opened its sharp beak and hit Eugene hard on his neck.
There was blood everywhere and Eugene tried to kick towards surface. He felt dizzy and blood was gushing out from his artery. The octopus was all over him and he kept hitting it with his knife. He lost his regulator as he was fighting for his life in panic. He tried to reach out to get his backup regulator but the octopus hit his arm with the sharp beak causing even more blood gushing. He pushed the button to fill his BCD with air and then he lost his consciousness. His body floated upwards and as the air in BCD expanded he moved faster and faster until he hit the surface.
Elon looked behind and counted four divers. He scanned quickly around and saw a giant octopus moving about 150 feet away. He saw also an expanding red cloud and Eugene’s body moving up in an uncontrolled fashion towards surface. This was every dive master’s nightmare situation. He quickly got the other divers attention by banging his knife against his tank. He pointed out towards the red expanding cloud and ordered divers to perform a controlled emergency ascent. All certified scuba divers are supposed to know this, unfortunately the skill is tested only when you get certified.
Ascending from the depth of 70 feet can rip apart your lungs unless you breath out expanding air as you move up. Elon knew that he could not wait for two minutes to ascend safely, as Eugene’s life was in danger. He blew out all air from his lungs, dropped his weights and performed exhaling ascent while kicking towards Eugene. He glanced back and saw other four divers coming up in controlled fashion. Elon felt sudden pain in his ears as his ear drums popped but he kept ascending as fast as he could. Finally he reached out to Eugene.
Eugene had an open wound on his neck with blood gushing out. He was pale and did not breathe. Elon blocked the wound with his finger and started CPR while adding air on his BCD to keep Eugene above the surface. Captain Mike had noticed that something had gone wrong and brought the boat closer. They lifted Eugene’s body on the boat and Elon kept performing CPR while blocking the blood flow. Captain Mike picked up the other four divers who were frightened and then turned the boat at full speed back to Salt River Bay. He called for an ambulance to get ready when t
hey arrived.
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