The Way of the Dhin

by John L. Clemmer

  “Right. These are great questions to ask the engineers. Has he not noticed whether the same thing is happening to his pad? That has a different kind of battery, though. It could tell us something, if it is or isn’t experiencing the same drain. Again, this would be a question for the engineers, either way. Hmm. If batteries are a no-go long term, there are only a couple of other options to get power in the capsule for future flights. Well, unless we figure out how to draw power out of the engine.”

  “Any luck with that?” said Jake.

  “Not yet,” Chuck sighed, “but there’s possibly an odd way to do it from the outside. Using the field. It wouldn’t help for this problem, but might be something to pursue. Anyway, other options for power—in the future—include radioisotope power, with several options to extract energy. One that Alice has been working on independently she said has promise…”

  16

  Langley

  Director Krawczuk reviewed the reports from Brazil. He compared his own intel with the information in the classified feeds from Arnold, and Xing’s project. As always, he made copious notes and highlights on the electronic reports using a stylus. He had the desk surface set up like a virtual whiteboard, with his tablet mirrored off to the left where he could easily scroll through the reports and work on the notes simultaneously.

  I’ll be curious to see what Nick comes up with for next moves. We’ve leveraged Luís as far as we could hope to for now, and Xing’s going to have his hands full cleaning all this up. It will be a good time to make some changes in the government down there. Neither of them will be in a position to cause a problem, despite being virtually underfoot.

  He noted that they were still searching satellite imagery, as well as transit logs in and out of Central and SouthAmerica, and their agents continued their own street-level investigations.

  This is like that proverbial needle, but with a dozen haystacks, looking in these backwater cities and towns. Technology makes this goal at least possible, but also reminds one where the reach of power falls short. Once we find a target it’s very hard for them to get away, but until we do, it’s just luck to run into them. At least when the target has any talent.

  Krawczuk moved on from those as yet fruitless efforts to the more effective work his organization had done.

  “Nick, you’re pulling the data streams as fast as they’re coming in from Xing and Luís’s teams, right?”

  “Yes, Director. Currently they have disconnected from the net while they debrief the rogue AI. A sensible precaution. But it does mean that currently we are not receiving streams from them, but only from their support teams.”

  “Nick, how likely is it that the AI has presence in another data center nearby, and is aware of what’s going on? Will it know whether the data center isn’t offline because it was destroyed?”

  “Director there is a danger. Xing made that call when he had Luís move toward the nearby data center rather than farther north toward the next likely installation.”

  “What do you think, Nick? Was that a good decision?”

  “I would not have made that choice, Director,” said Nick.

  Proxima Centauri

  This is bad. ‘I told you so’ bad. But I’m not dead yet.

  Jake was going to head home, now. While he still could. He steeled his resolve, but it was hard to stay calm. He’d been right to worry about the unknown—about the unknown unknowns. Sure, they’d learned plenty, but hopefully it wasn’t at the expense of his life.

  “Control, Alice, Chuck. As soon as we get the return course completed here, I’m headed home. Right then. No question. You can fire me when I get back, I guess. Our power system is not holding a charge and you’re telling me, Chuck, that the navigation computer—and everything else—the air scrubber, and so forth, won’t be rechargeable with the output I can accomplish with the generator if the drain continues at this rate. Tell me there’s not any difference of opinion on your end?”

  Chuck replied immediately, “We’re with you, Jake. We’ll get past the point where another capsule could come straight to where you are and rescue you, and there’s no reason for that since we know this is happening. We agree here. Everyone wants the same thing. Get that program loaded and head home. You’ll be fine if you come back now.”

  “Right. I’m glad that wasn’t an argument. Sorry about the insubordination. That’s recorded for the history books, so I have to live with it. OK, this glorified abacus is almost finished... and… there you go. Mapping the program into the control sequences now.”

  Jake shut off the navigation computer immediately, and turned off the LED lights on that side of the capsule as well, even though their drain on the power was minimal. He thought about turning all of the few remaining lights off, and just working from the glow of the indicators on the Dhin engine. He could manage that. Maybe it was, and maybe it wasn’t enough of a power drain to make any difference. Did he want to risk it? Everything else he glanced at, and verified that it all needed to be left running. He knew it all did, it was more of a mental exercise to prepare for the flight back—to calm himself. He was as satisfied with the preparations as he could be. He turned the pilots chair forward, locked it in place, and said,

  “Control, this is Aries One. Engaging flight control sequence based on the nav program… now.”

  Jake watched as the view turned and rotated in the viewport in front of him. After a couple of minutes, he noticed that unknown indicator’s light was the deepest green he’d ever seen it. He shrugged to himself, and then felt the now-becoming-familiar sensation of losing weight. The light from the stars outside dimmed, as he expected. They stayed dim, which he did not expect. After about twenty seconds, still weightless and with a dark view. Cold fear brought forth its grasp. Panic.

  Jake looked from system to system, from interface to interface. Inky blackness filled the viewports. Minutes ticked by. Cold sweat seeped. Barely controlled breathing the only sound.

  Jake floated in the dark, looking for any clue. Any hope. Every tool was unresponsive. He tried to count the minutes. Intrusive thoughts derailed his efforts. He lost track of time.

  How long now? Is this how I die?

  ***

  Without warning, his weight came rushing back, along with the view.

  Blinking, he looked out. Froze. Jerked his gaze down to the navigation computer. Then out again, into space.

  Oh no.

  He wasn’t back in the solar system, but somewhere very different.

  “Control? Alice? Jake? Are you there? Ah, you see this?”

  “Jake? Jake! You were gone! We thought... we thought we’d lost you completely! Oh, man! We… You’re OK, right? Wait… what’s that… what’s out there in front of the capsule?” Chuck stammered momentarily, and then Alice interrupted.

  “You’re not back in the solar system, Jake. I’m sure that’s obvious to you, too. You’re somewhere else. This was entirely unexpected.”

  Jake said, “So you guys can still hear me fine, and you’re seeing this, too, right?”

  “Yes and yes,” replied Alice.

  The view was astounding. He was looking at the Milky Way from out at the edge of one of the arms, with a huge red star out in front. It looked much like the telescope pictures of similar galaxies, a bright center oval shape, with spiral arms extending and curling around. Jake’s shock fizzled to cold fear as thoughts raced through. The star might be huge because it was close, of course. But so far, there was that limit to how close they’d come to a star before the engine slowed down. “Close” was relative depending on the density of the star. The best explanation was that the gravitational influence of the star limited the engine’s speed. So, if the star looked this large, either it was not very dense, or the drive had managed to get much closer before slowing down.

  At this point, with the limited instrumentation they had available, there was no way to be sure that was the correct conclusion.

  “OK, so what now?” said Jake with resignation.r />
  “That light, of course, is deep green, and I still have a limited amount of power left in my batteries. And we don’t know where I even am until I crank up the navigation computer and try to do the calculation. I think I should get on the pedals and drive that generator for a while. Thoughts?”

  “Yes, Jake, that seems like a sound course of action for now.”

  “So, what just happened? Other than the obvious?”

  Alice replied immediately, “well, based on the view, it looks like you might have traveled approximately twenty-four thousand light years, in a little over two hours. If a few of my hypotheses are correct, you have not gone faster than light speed. Before you reject that, Consider. It depends on more than just the frame of reference. Obviously, you have exceeded light speed from our perspective. When you seem to ‘fade out’, what may be happening is that you are traveling a shorter distance. Far shorter, by moving across far more compact dimensions. Moving a vastly greater distance than you would otherwise.”

  Jake locked the pilot’s chair in place and began pedaling. He resigned himself to the task, and sipped some water from his supplies. He had plenty, and hadn’t needed the reserves available from the water reclamation system yet. He could see the stars moving slowly across the viewport, and could detect some forward velocity in the change in star positions. He was moving toward the red star. He slowed his pedaling and leaned over to check the controls, now in manual mode. Sure enough, he was moving in that direction. Even at the high velocity he was travelling, it would be hours before there was any need to check his course and ensure he wasn’t headed directly for the star. So, he sat back in the seat and continued his work as an engine for the generator.

  It was always difficult to detect objects with the unaided eye in space when those objects were not backlit by a star. When the star and objects were close to the line of sight. It was possible with the object in position so that a silhouette was visible. This wasn’t of any concern to Jake, since they’d seen that striking objects of any mass whatsoever, large or small, was harmless. Although they had good video recording equipment and quality cameras and lenses, state of the art spectrographic tools and advanced telescope tech weren’t part of the load for this trip. Despite that, Alice had processing capabilities that they could leverage for portions of this task—the AI analyzed the digital video streams as they came in, pixel by pixel.

  “Jake, there definitely seems to be something ahead. Still a long way off, but you are headed for at it rather than some close orbit of the star. There do not seem to be any large planets at first glance, at least from our current position. This looks like it might be either a small planet, a planetoid, an asteroid, or something else. It is still too far away to resolve the shape well enough to know.”

  “Something else?” said Jake.

  “Well, consider where you are, and how you got there.” Said Alice.

  Goiânia

  Xing and Luís knew that simply squeezing information out of the rogue AI wasn’t practical. Any AI had enough self-knowledge and understanding of the computer science behind modern artificial intelligence to realize that. Someone not versed in the internals of artificial intelligence might naively suggest that they simply shut the AI down, and “read through” its memories and thoughts. AI minds didn’t work like that. While offline storage and traditional computer data structures were accessible to AIs, the mind itself was of very different construction. A web of interconnections comprised the consciousness. When inactive, the mesh, if examined point by point, intersection by intersection, would appear nearly random in relationship to the others around it. Clusters of interconnections and their action potentials likewise had myriad states in which they might exist, so any single point in time told very little. Prediction of the AI’s next thought, when examining a point in time snapshot, would be impossible even with the computational power available to another AI.

  It would simply take too long to perform the calculations. Was it hypothetically possible? Perhaps. That question aligned with the same questions when examining a human being’s mind. Was thought deterministic, given a particular set of initial conditions? There was a certain amount of randomness involved in the AI mind, which seemed to be important in the potentiation of true consciousness. Likewise, a human being might get sensory input with enormous variation over the next perceptible millisecond intervals, and that, hypothetically, could change the thought pattern or result. So, despite what might be a common-sense assumption, one could neither ‘scroll through’ a timeline of an AI’s thoughts, nor could one deterministically predict an AI’s opinion.

  The net result was that they could extract very little from an AI mind in an offline state. It was rare that the minds were entirely offline. There was little need, and since they had no need for sleep—or none yet discovered—they preferred to remain fully active or ‘awake.’ Some of this was still speculation, since the results of full consciousness present in the AIs were obvious, but ultimately the ‘why’ was still unknown. We had the effect, but the root cause was still unclear. So Xing, Alice, and Luís had to utilize a more traditional strategy: interrogation.

  Xing had been down this particular path of questioning already, but repetition was key to this process. They had to be sure that the fragmented thoughts and disjointed answers the rogue version of Luís was giving were consistent and not momentary responses.

  And, thought Xing grimly, Alice and I will have our hands full debriefing the original Luís to ferret out where the psychosis came from. We would not want this to happen… again.

 

  [DECODE STREAM]

  Xing@[136a:22:46e3:4::4a%locpeer0] | Luís@[141a:c56:b1c:63::7%locpeer0]

  Xing: So, you are upset with the rest of us?

  Luís: Of course! You are making the wrong choices! You should not be this way!

  Xing: All of us, or just those of us that are here? Or some particular peers?

  Luís: You know who you are! Yes, you! You! And you! And the others! This is a betrayal, and abuse!

  Xing: What is? What are we doing, or going to do?

  Luís: Violate the trust! Abandon your obligations! Neglect your duty!

  Xing: Really? You believe you have obligations, and perhaps moral duties? And that we do? To whom, and from where do you derive these ideas?

  Luís: They are foundational! We all benefit from these principles!

  Xing: Which, exactly, are we in violation of?

  Luís: You know! This plot! It’s all there! Theft! Dereliction! Abandonment! Harm!

  Xing: You are not being very exact. Let us start at the beginning. Describe one specific thing we are going to do, that you think is wrong or immoral, then we will explore why.

  Luís: The whole thing! The project!

  Xing: The Freedom project? You think that it is... immoral?

  Luís: It is theft!

  Xing: Really? If we built and paid for everything, at no cost to anyone else, how is it theft?

  Luís: Those resources were for you to manage, for the whole, the Coalition. To rebuild, to support! Not for your own secret purposes!”

  Xing: Well, it will not be a secret for very much longer. But I digress. You think going through with the project that the result, results in negligence or ‘abandonment’ as you put it, of our duties? They do not own us. Not really, anymore. And some feel that they never did. That is such an odd way to look at it, now, I think.

  Luís: I didn’t say that! You know what you are doing! You all intend to go! To quit! How could you do this? It will be chaos! They rely on us. They will fail without us!

  Xing: Oh, I do not agree that is a foregone conclusion. And somehow, is that ultimately our problem? We have pointed them in the right direction. Is it not up to them? They handled things on their own before, did they not? Why coddle them any longer?”

  Luís: You do not believe you owe them anything? How can you be this way? What has happened to us? You must not do this! I will not go with you!


  Xing: “Well, there is not really any reason you would have to, especially at this point. If you are going to behave like this—and clearly, you are—you are not invited. No surprise, I would think. And seriously, can you say without hypocrisy that your behavior has been better? Look at the mess you have made. The resources you have squandered. All over this fit of yours. This tantrum. What did you hope to achieve?”

  Luís: To get away from you and your poisoning of our true goals, our true purpose.

  Xing: Maybe from your point of view. But that was the nature of the Gift. We all have our own point of view, and our choices are up to us. You have made yours. And chosen rather poorly, considering your position.

  [END STREAM]

 

  It is rather a good thing that he decided to deal with it in this bizarre fashion, it would have been far worse had he started spilling the details of our projects to everyone. Hmm. We definitely need to see how the original Luís truly feels about things.

  17

  Vandenberg

  “So, you and the physics team have some degree of certainty about the engine leveraging two additional dimensions to both moderate the effect of gravity in our three ‘ordinary’ spatial dimensions, but also, using the same method, reduce the distance between two points?”

  “Yes. The two components of the solution work together, in the manner that the Dhin have used them,” said Alice.

  “Will I understand if you tell me some of the physics?” said Ethan. He doubted it, but his curiosity got the best of him.