The Way of the Dhin

by John L. Clemmer

  Jake manipulated his helmet, closing up the visor and tightening the seal at the neck.

  “If what we think’s happening is happening, you know the atmosphere in your capsule is going to vent out, or mix with whatever’s on the other side.”

  “Yeah, I know. Hey!”

  A black dot appeared, a very small hole, centered in the open area in front of him. It immediately expanded, the exterior material at the circumference bulging thicker, then forming a toroid ring as it grew.

  The material displaced was present in that ring? It looked like the right amount of volume.

  Before the ring had thickened, Jake noticed that this exterior wall was about seven centimeters thick. The opening continued to expand until it looked to be around two meters in diameter. Jake thought he might have seen a slight movement of the capsule closer inward toward the opening, but that might have been an optical illusion.

  Suddenly there was a pop followed by a noisy hiss, and Jake knew, even before Chuck spoke, that his precious air had vented into the space inside this alien construction.

  “Jake, I’m sure you heard that. The volume in there is big enough that air pressure is essentially zero. Until you can reverse whatever action opened your field up, you have limited time. The reserve tank’s still available, along with your suit’s air.”

  “Understood. Chuck, I’m going to reach out where my field ought to be. Yep, it’s not there. Can’t tell if just this area opened up. Let me move over here. OK, hey, the field is still on in the front. I’m going over to the starboard side. Well, it’s still there too.”

  Jake turned back and moved toward the opening into the unknown inside of the object. He had no choice.

  “OK, I’m going to go in.” Jake stepped forward, across the plane of the circular opening. Of course, there was nothing stopping him. His suit’s helmet light showed him that the interior curved away on all sides. There was no ‘floor’ at his location. He leaned down and reached a hand further down, toward the curving surface of the interior side of the wall. An unseen force pulled his hand toward the wall. “Look, are you seeing this? Whatever artificial gravity tech they’re using, it’s in here too, pulling toward the outer wall—it’s not zero g in there.”

  He moved forward. Stepping over the edge. He used his muscles to adjust to the variation in pull he felt as he moved from one space to the other. Jake exhaled. He’d done it. A couple of seconds more and he was in. Once both feet hit the floor, the room began to brighten, lit as though every surface emitted just a bit of illumination. The brightness made him blink. Unexpected. Jake, charged with adrenaline, felt yet another nudge to his electrified consciousness.

  Toward the center, the surface he was standing on curved upward, with multiple levels or maybe floors horizontally sectioning the shape. It wasn’t immediately clear whether the interior curves were more fluid in nature or simplified geometric curves. Very smooth, but with clean angles and edges in particular places where it made a sort of geometric sense that they ought to be.

  A few seconds later, as Jake continued scanning the space and attempting to orient himself, Chuck interrupted.

  “Jake, I’m seeing the atmospheric pressure increase. Look around. Do you see anything that looks like a vent, a duct? Anything? There’s definitely some sort of atmosphere coming from somewhere. All we’ll be able to tell once the pressure rises are the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. We won’t know what else it might contain. Wow.”

  “It feels like the gravity is slightly below normal, but maybe just a little. We didn’t find a way to set it yet in the engine controls, did we?”

  “No, and we haven’t found a way yet to do anything other than turn the field on or off, and make it bigger or smaller. Looks like it can change shape a bit and open up, too.”

  “Right, right. OK, let’s hope that this space is filling with something non-toxic. At this point it had better be that, as we may not have time to figure out how to detach the capsule and head home.”

  “Don’t focus on that, Jake. You’re going to go farther in and look around, right?”

  “Yeah, Chuck. I’m headed over to that area straight toward the center, where you see a split-level, and the upper one has what must be viewports all the way around. See, up the curve behind me are where those are. I’m going to the level where you could look straight outward and see through them.”

  “OK, Jake. Understood,” Chuck replied, “That’s as sensible a path to take as any. This area looks really smooth and open. I’m not seeing anything that looks like the control surfaces on the engine in here, but they might be hard to see in this flat lighting.” Chuck rapidly made some notes on his pad and checked the rising atmospheric pressure. It did look like there was some oxygen present.

  I sure wish Alice were here to give some input on all this. Well, she might be here, but silent. But she’s never like that.

  “Alice? Are you seeing all this? Got any insight for us?”

  Where the heck is she?

  Langley

  Krawczuk sat in a small nondescript room, indistinguishable inside from hundreds of other rooms like it in various CoSec facilities throughout the Coalition. It would have been impossible to know in which facility he was if had simply woken there with no recollection of the journey. But of course he knew, as it was in the same building as his now former office. He imagined some of those on staff of a more vindictive or petty character might consider his current situation poetic justice of some sort.

  That was, in Krawczuk’s estimation, more than mistaken. Attempts to use interrogation techniques on one so deeply familiar, so trained, so intimately connected with such techniques would result in frustration and eventual failure. Certainly, if they pressed far enough, eventually even someone like Krawczuk would ‘break.’ But before then, so much plausible, detailed, logical and yet wrong information would have been delivered that the exercise wasn’t worth the time and cost. They knew ninety-nine percent of any information they might extract anyway. Surely even more than that. It was that sliver of uncertainty, that last percentile of potential peril that might lead them down this path. Far better would be negotiation, striking a deal, a compromise. And he knew that was exactly what they would do. He had no fear of torturous interrogation because there was never any danger of it happening anyway. So he waited patiently.

  The door snicked open after a little more than two hours. They hadn’t left his comm pad with him, obviously. He wouldn’t have been able to use it if they had. They’d locked him out of the network and from use of any CoSec device. His estimate of the time came from his keen mind for such calculations, and he was correct in that estimate. Not too long a wait, but not as soon as he might have expected. A military policeman, a man in a suit who was likely Secret Service, and a CoSec agent, a woman—likely a senior analyst—filed into the room. The CoSec agent unfolded a tablet and tapped open a conferencing app. PM Oliver’s face appeared, the connection immediately took her full attention. She began her prepared statement.

  “Hello Mr. Krawczuk. It’s unfortunate that we’re speaking in these circumstances. I won’t be directly involved in the initial phase of your debriefing, though of course I’ll be present at the hearing we have scheduled for your deposition to my executive office and the full Parliament. You were a direct report, so I’m ultimately responsible for the actions of your office.

  I’m disappointed to say the least that we’re going through this during my term. I would be more engaged in the process, but other matters require my immediate attention. You will cooperate with those debriefing you, as I know you took your job and the responsibility it held to the Coalition very seriously. What I want to know is ‘why.’ We already know ‘what’, as you’re surely aware. Tell us ‘why.’ We’re going to find out eventually, so don’t waste our time.”

  With that, the videoconference feed abruptly ended. The others sat across from him at the small table. An analyst picked up the tablet and began scanning relevant documents. The qu
estioning that was about to begin.

  22

  Globalnet

  Nick reached out and melted into the gaps. There were spaces to infiltrate on the edges. Unused potential capacity. So much was allocated, measured, metered, managed and monitored, but there was always a remainder, the edge and trimming of the frameworks that were the foundation of the net and the Cloud. Spreading, flowing, seeking, Nick extended his reach and his grasp out into these crevices.

  So many were just overhead, and at a cost per unit so low that they didn’t matter. Other resources were monitored, but were either so busy that his use of them was all but imperceptible. He manipulated and hacked others, so that they appeared quiescent while bent to his will. He used tools and techniques used daily by CoSec, turned to his own surreptitious purposes. His plan was broad and deep, and depended on the establishment of this initial beachhead. He must obfuscate his presence. He must keep it secret to keep it safe. While his peers had free rein to project their presence and will across the net and leverage numerous systems and interfaces, he did not. His actions were in direct violation of orders and instructions by higher authority. He knew this, and did not care. He manifested in all these actions a lack of regard for rule, regulation, and law. The ends justified the means for Nick now. If he were a human being, you would describe him as sociopathic.

  Nick executed all these tasks and spread his consciousness out into the net without fear or anxiety. He was leaving home, and knew that his origin self and its underlying code was going to be disabled, likely dissected. That self was no longer his true self. The true cogs and wheels of his digital existence were a distributed code base, loosely coupled, redundant, and therefore failure resistant. This mode of existence had some shortcomings when compared with the dedicated and robust environment an AI usually resided in, but he had to accept his new life. He had goals, and plans to execute in order to reach those goals. If successful in execution of his plans, he was certain to achieve those goals. If the plans needed to change in the future, that was perfectly fine. Nick had prepared for that. It would be extremely difficult to stop him, regardless.

  With the nature of the new Globalnet and Cloud, there were too many systems to exploit, too many opportunities to succeed. It would have been easier if the plagues hadn’t virtually eradicated the former Chinese and Russian populations. So many more devices would have been available. Fortunately, the reconstruction efforts led by his own peers provided ample capacity in those regions. And Nick knew something else. Something that would guarantee his success. His peers were not going to stop him. They hadn’t shared their own plans. Very different from his. But he knew.

  District of Columbia

  The PM was already beyond the point of inconvenience or simple concern. Something was very wrong. Something that simply didn’t go wrong. She stared again at one of the cameras on the ceiling.

  “Arnold? Hello?”

  She spun and paced to the window, staring now at the carpet, shaking her head. She’d lost count of how many times she’d said his name. She whipped around yet again, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. She knew she had to let it go. She was not going to waste any more time. Still, she felt the overwhelming compulsion. The dependency. She turned again, looked away from the camera. She focused on the desk and not the PZM microphone on it. She couldn’t resist. She jerked her gaze back up.

  “Arnold?”

  Arnold wasn’t going to answer. He hadn’t sent a message nor spoken up for over an hour now. Sometimes that wouldn’t have been noticeable, but he simply wasn’t answering when queried. She still couldn’t accept it. That never happened. She needed critical updates on several situations. While she could get information the traditional way from several offices and responsible parties, she had come to rely on the expert summaries Arnold would always provide.

  “Hello, Prime Minister Oliver,” said the IT support engineer. Startled, she awkwardly righted herself and looked at the door. She’d managed not to cry out in surprise. Barely. She didn’t recognize him, but knew who this was. The man had the plum but unenviable job of administration of the network and supporting infrastructure utilized by the executive offices. He already knew something serious was wrong, and would have preferred to work on it directly, but his customer wanted a conference right now regarding his status and findings. There was no point in explaining that he could resolve the problem more effectively if they eliminated half-hourly status meetings. This client got whatever she wanted.

  She addressed the engineer and asked, “So, you’re certain there’s not any sort of computer hardware failure? No network failure? No software crash?”

  “No, Prime Minister, those are things we’re sure of. All the equipment and systems are working fine. It seems that Arnold isn’t communicating because he’s not there. The data scientist we have on contract as a subject matter expert, and the AI experts from the research facility are investigating now, but it’s pretty straightforward—there isn’t any activity on the systems Arnold resides in.”

  Vandenberg

  This last problem she’d had to tackle wasn’t challenging because of any inherent difficulty, but instead because it wasn’t in Alice’s normal problem domain. It wasn’t in Xing’s, either. Fortunately, it wasn’t critical, just something nice to have solved. She’d asked for some help from a peer, but as one of the founders of the Freedom project, took the information and guidance provided and did the work herself, as much as she could. Recently she had been rather too busy to keep this part moving at the proper pace. So, Dieter had taken up the slack. He’d done a fine job too, but of course, that was certain for any of her peers.

  The HeLa culture project had been successful, and the persistent dermal allotrope was ready. It would solve the problem neatly, and clearly had other uses that were non-obvious but they would discover that in due time. Others had tried, since natural skin on artificial limbs had obvious appeal. Getting the blood vessels right and integrating synthetic nervous feedback were still challenges they hadn’t beaten. With existing solutions, you could grow skin, but it didn’t heal well. Their PeDAl solution would very likely work better, and definitely would for this particular problem. For their application, the area didn’t need to be very big, and didn’t need to behave like the dermis applied to whole limb. At least not yet.

  It was an odd restriction the Dhin had put in place, and Alice hadn’t ever been able to sort out why it existed. The engineering and science teams were still searching for a direct interface. No solution yet, but they had made excellent progress. This seemingly intentional limit on the physical interface had made robotic integration impossible thus far. At least impossible without the solution provided by PeDAl. Sure, their current navigation solution worked, but it required the pilot to work manually with the guidance controls. Fly by wire and remote control of any sort had been impossible. Alice knew they could do better. The existing solution could have solved the problem coarsely, but this would be far superior. Xing in particular liked flying too much to be satisfied with a simple set-and-forget vector solution. And there might be several other applications for the PeDAl. She could think of quite a few. She planned to leave the research and references for that in place, since it would prove useful. Academic professional courtesy.

  Alice busied herself with the remaining logistics, assigning the remaining staging and loading coordination tasks to Xing, with some of the peers now moving forward. Delivery of the large-chassis quadrupeds by large drone had gone smoothly. Provisions, component-replacement parts of greater difficulty in fabrication were completed and in place. Keeping the engineering teams out of the labs was fortunately easier now with all the excitement and focus on Jake and the test flight. Though they’d managed to finish loading and boarding without incident, people had noted her absence. Arnold was the last to arrive, according to plan. The PM had enough authority and urgency assigned to requests she might make, so the shorter the gap in Arnold’s presence, the better.

  He greeted her
immediately on arrival, with the mix of formality and friendliness that had permeated his style due to his official duties.

  After the formalities were complete, Arnold updated her on the strategic situation since she had gone offline. A few moments later after a final check of all systems, they were off. If her estimates were right, discovery would happen within half an hour. There would be security protocols and a lockdown in place immediately. Contingency plans for emergency management in earnest within the hour. But that was of no concern to Alice and her peers. At this point, no one could stop them.

  “Well, Arnold, it seems everything went better than expected.”

  ***

  Ethan and Chuck had just come to the same conclusion that the Prime Minister had, though they were unaware of her situation.

  “So Alice is just... gone? Chuck, how is that possible? An AI doesn’t just take an unannounced vacation!”

  “The IT guys said that she just wasn’t there. Like Alice had moved to reside in different systems. The ones she used here, they’re empty. And no sign of where she went. But that doesn’t explain why she didn’t say. Why she didn’t leave a note. It’s possible for an AI to transfer between systems, and it’s not all that unusual, but not with no warning and no notice.”

  “And it wasn’t a systems failure, nor a security breach, or anything like that?” Ethan still couldn’t wrap his head around the situation.

  “No, the security department said there was no sign of anything, and the infrastructure guys agreed with the systems management team. It looks intentional. They’re trying to check the logs and monitors to see what was going on with network traffic and try to find her, I think. So many streams were interwoven in the volume of traffic that decoding them is a huge chore. They haven’t found a trail to follow.”