“One hundred percent,” Crewmaster said. “The guys there can prove that an astronaut orbiting Mars is using his helmet radio.”
Maribel swallowed nervously. If this attempt showed no result, she would have to admit complete and utter failure. It was very improbable that her aberration was more than some glitch. She could even understand why Zetschewitz had prohibited her from working on this topic.
“Then I will be even more excited to hear the results,” she said.
“Me, too. Please send me the coordinates right away, and then you’ll have something in your inbox by tonight.”
“I am working on it now.”
“I will ask them to send me a copy of the results, just so you know.”
Would Crewmaster steal her results? No, that was impossible. Maribel could never believe that of him. She had to be careful not to go completely insane, and she could trust her former professor.
“Okay,” she said, “and thanks again.”
Crewmaster gave a quick nod and ended the connection. At the same moment, she sent the message with the coordinates. She could not suppress a doubt, though. What if the recipient used the coordinates to present himself as the true discoverer? No one would believe her if she claimed otherwise.
“Nonsense,” she whispered to herself, “you are starting to lose your mind.” And besides, Zetschewitz knew what she had done, and the research community would believe him no less than it believed Crewmaster. But those thoughts were not healthy. She urgently needed to get some sleep. Since the results would not arrive here before tomorrow, she decided that she might as well drive home.
January 29, 2072, Pico del Teide
Maribel had rarely been in such a hurry to get to work. She’d almost rammed a tourist bus on the narrow, winding road that led to the observatory. Why was that bus out there so early anyway?
Once she arrived, Maribel practically flew into the office, and then she kicked the base of the door so it slammed shut. Luckily for her, Zetschewitz was with his family today. She sort of pitied his poor wife a little, but today she definitely could not have him around in the OGS.
Maribel started up the computer even before taking off her coat. The moment had come! She sat down at her desk, and then she hesitated. Up to now she had been looking forward to finally getting an answer, but all of a sudden she was convinced that it would only be a confirmation of her failure. She was simply not capable of transferring a 50-year-old model into the present without having it produce artefacts and unreal data, and now she would receive proof of that.
Maribel took a deep breath, held it a few seconds, and exhaled. It was no use. She had pushed this so far that there was no other way. She had no choice but to open the email window, open her inbox, and face the truth.
Maribel put her hands in her lap and stared at the empty monitor screen. Why couldn’t she just enter the command or say it out loud?
“Computer,” she started, but then closed her mouth again. She had lost control. Five minutes passed, then ten. Now it was eight o’clock, the time she normally arrived in her office.
Suddenly a familiar-looking logo appeared on the screen. Maribel was confused for an instant. Then it hit her—a rising sun with three torches below it. Of course! The logo of the University of Southern California.
“Connection request for Maribel Pedreira. Do you allow activating the camera?” the computer asked.
“Yes,” she whispered. The computer understood her anyway. The face of her former professor appeared. His eyes looked larger than usual, and he seemed excited, almost manic.
“Good morning, Maribel,” Crewmaster said loudly and quickly, “have you already seen it?”
She shook her head.
“What? Open the message. Right away!” he insisted “The guys from Arecibo found something at the location you provided. They are now quite curious what it might be. I had a hard time making them promise to keep their mouths shut. I bet they put a lot of questions in their message to you. Please don’t answer them—you know how that goes.”
Yes, I do, she thought. Maribel had already noticed this pattern in graduate school—every researcher would love to be a discoverer, and in the end the people from the Arecibo Radio Telescope would also be listed as coauthors of her paper. Coauthors of ‘my paper,’ how strange that sounds. The tension gradually faded from her. The catastrophe she had feared had not happened. On the other hand, she now had to prepare for something much worse—worldwide attention!
“... is not yet completely definite. Maribel, are you even listening to me?” Crewmaster asked.
She was startled. Things were not starting out too well. “Oh, yes,” she said. “They consider the data not quite definite yet?”
“Yes. You will see it in the results charts. One can say that you have found something, but it’s unclear what it is.”
Maribel quickly launched her email, opened the message, and looked at the results. “The intensity is low,” she remarked.
“As you mentioned yesterday, out there the hole cannot find much to swallow,” Crewmaster explained. “But more importantly, we need to determine the mass more accurately. Currently the error margin is still at almost 80 percent. It makes a difference whether the disturbance approaching the solar system has the mass of Jupiter or only of Neptune.”
“A disturbance threatening the solar system?”
“That should be obvious to you, Maribel! In the worst case you would not just have made an extremely important discovery, but also the last significant discovery in the history of humankind.”
Everything was happening too fast for her today. Maribel still could not believe it. Five minutes ago she had considered herself a failure. Then she believed her discovery of primordial black holes would be a sensation in scientific circles. Now she was delivering a message of doom for the solar system that would frighten the entire world?
“I am sorry,” she said. “I should have listened to my boss. Zetschewitz was right, even if he had different intentions. I am not up to all of this. Let someone else come up with this great discovery. I am going back to calculating galaxy models.”
“Maribel!” Crewmaster yelled at her from thousands of kilometers away. “Pull yourself together! Nobody is up to such a discovery, and I am less so than you. You just happened to be the first one to find the thing. That cannot be changed. Right now, this is about the future. In the future, anything is possible. And I promise you, you won’t be alone.”
Being yelled at feels good. Maribel smiled and wiped the tears from her cheeks. She just now noticed having cried, and she saw that her former professor had also lost his self-assured demeanor. Her discovery would change the world, and she’d better get used to it.
“So, what next?” she asked.
“That depends on you, Maribel. I don’t want to interfere,” Crewmaster replied. “But if you permit, I could give you some suggestions.”
“That would really help me,” she said. “Right now, I am completely overwhelmed by all the possible consequences.”
“I am glad I am not in your shoes. On Monday the reporters might already be lining up.” Crewmaster uttered a hoarse laugh. He had always been a heavy smoker.
“Do we have to publish the results?” Maribel asked.
“Not right away. On the other hand, we can’t go through the usual channels, because this discovery is too important,” he said. “We don’t have time to wait for Science or Nature.”
“Okay.”
Her former professor continued, “I suggest having it checked out today. We could try to detect a transit. If we ask scientists worldwide for help, this should be possible over the weekend. But that would also mean that the press might hear of it. Therefore, we have to tell the journalists something.”
“Could you...?” she asked.
“I could, but that would cause unnecessary problems for you. You were the first to discover it, therefore your employer, the IAC, should make the first move. Why don’t you call the press
officer right away? If she doesn’t understand how important this is, you can add me to the call.”
Maribel paused for a moment and then asked, “Isn’t the black hole too small to use the transit method?”
“Yes and no,” Crewmaster replied. “Based on this mass, the hole itself barely measures six meters, but we know it emits radiation, so a small dust cloud must have accumulated around it. If its light covers a star behind it, that star is briefly switched off, and some telescope should notice that. Then we would have caught it.”
“But that would not yet prove the mass of the object,” she said.
“Unfortunately, no it wouldn’t. And it also would tell us nothing about its course. For that purpose we simply have to keep collecting data and measure possible orbital changes of asteroids moving in the vicinity of the object. I am going to pass this on to the community. If it’s alright with you, they can use me as a contact person.”
“I don’t mind, but Zetschewitz...” Maribel said with a hint of worry.
“Oh, I’ll have a private word with the old grouch, don’t you worry,” Crewmaster said, reassuringly. “Now set up some press conferences, but keep things confidential till Monday. That way we can tame the media a bit. Let’s talk again on Monday… or when I have some more results.”
An hour later the press officer of the IAC, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, sat in Maribel’s office. The woman’s name was Mercedes and she was in her mid-forties. And she had studied physics, which made it much easier for Maribel to explain to her over the phone how urgent the matter was. The woman had gotten into her car and driven from La Laguna at the foot of the volcano straight to the observatory.
“Just to make sure I present this correctly: An unknown object is racing toward the solar system,” Mercedes said. “It weighs about as much as the giant planet Jupiter and will tear us all apart, right?”
“The tabloids will write something like that, no matter what we say,” Maribel replied. “Right now we do not know all the details, like the exact mass or its precise course. If that things moves through our entire solar system, it will destabilize the orbits of all our planets. For Earth this would mean a heat shock or eternal cold. The object could also collide with the sun, which exerts a strong attraction. Then even subterranean bunkers would be useless.”
“And how much of this is certain? Some more serious media outlets are going ask that question,” Mercedes said.
“It is rather certain we are dealing with a rather heavy black hole,” Maribel said.
“Okay, stop there. I rather dislike the term ‘rather.’ Do you realize we risk triggering a mass panic?” the press officer asked. “I would really like to be absolutely sure.”
“We are expecting additional independent confirmation this weekend,” Maribel said.
“That’s good. Together with keeping it under wraps until Monday, we should be on the safe side. Are there any positive aspects at all?”
“Oh, the cosmologists’ assumption that black holes were created shortly after or even during the Big Bang would be finally confirmed,” Maribel said. “In different circumstances, I would have probably received a Nobel Prize for it.”
Mercedes gave her a questioning look. But it was true. In normal times, such a discovery would have accelerated Maribel’s career enormously.
“And is there anything I can sell to the press as a hopeful sign?” Mercedes asked.
“The thing came from nowhere, so it might disappear into nowhere again.”
“According to my experience, really bad problems don’t go away on their own,” the press officer said. “What else can you give me?”
“The black hole might be considerable lighter than we’ve estimated,” Maribel offered. “Then the subsequent damage to the solar system would not be as devastating.”
“Very good,” Mercedes said as she scribbled on a notepad. “That is a positive fact.”
“I said ‘might,’ just to clarify.”
“That does not matter. There are so many question marks that one more doesn’t make a difference.”
Maribel looked directly at her and said, “You are the professional.”
The press officer looked back and replied, “You believe that?”
Maribel nodded, and the other woman laughed.
“Until now I sold solar eruptions, background radiation, or space debris to journalists,” Mercedes said. “So, ‘the end of the world as we know it’ is certainly no routine job for me. Do you have any idea how many media representatives come to my press conferences? Maybe eight, or sometimes ten or twelve will bother to show up, but never more than twenty. This time there’s bound to be many more of them. I am wondering whether we should close the access road.”
“That is an over-reaction,” Maribel said.
“‘Over-reaction?’” Mercedes laughed, though an undertone of fear was noticeable. “You just wait. On Monday all hell will break loose here. It is impossible to close off the area completely. The barrier in front is only a joke. The journalists will try to follow you to the restroom!”
Maribel was more amused than frightened by the idea. She was more afraid of what would follow in a few months.
The end of the world!
January 30, 2072, 2003 EH1
Six days. At this point, that was the length of time Watson had known Siri. At first she had given rather monosyllabic answers to his questions, but that was no surprise to him. She was like a child whose knowledge of the world was very limited. Siri already had access to the archive by that time, but sending an infant girl into a library does not make her smarter. Watson knew this fact from—what or where did he know it from? He just knew it, even though he so far had never had a child or a library of his own. He first had to teach Siri how she could acquire knowledge by herself.
The Siri that Watson encountered here had absolutely nothing to do with the Siri AI he had met on board the Enceladus expedition. To him, this ‘new’ Siri seemed to be a blank slate, and her program routines were quite simplistic. If this event happened, she performed that action. In places where the programmers wanted to create the illusion of independent action, they used a randomizer, like rolling dice, which selected an answer by chance from a predetermined list.
But today Siri had left this state behind. First Watson expanded her processes so she could independently explore correlations by using the archive. During the past few days Siri had diligently exercised this ability, and by now she was as knowledgeable about the areas covered in the archive as he was himself.
Then Watson went one step further: He gave her the ability to learn any ‘game’ based on the rules saved in the archive. Everything could be considered a game—any conflict, any discussion, any procedure. Winning meant reaching the goal of the game in an optimal way.
Siri really enjoyed this kind of optimization, and the archive offered her lots of material for it. Now and then Watson checked to see how she was growing up. In some areas he could challenge her due to his greater experience. He seemed to have found a particularly efficient teaching strategy, and had implemented it with Siri. His own learning behavior had still been programmed by humans.
Humans were fallible and often content with a local maximum instead of a global optimum—they were just too impatient. This must be caused by their physical existence. They simply could not bear to wait for the market to offer a product at the very best price, but at some point had to buy it for a good price. Watson, however, also saw the advantage this offered. This trait made things happen in the world, this trait triggered development. If AIs—which had all the time in the world—negotiated only with each other, they might wait eternally for the optimal result.
Siri had not advanced quite that far, at least not compared to the only other artificial intelligence Watson knew—himself. The phase in which he had sucked up all available knowledge was long over. By now, he acquired facts and data when he needed them. Could that be compared to humans turning into adults? Right now, Si
ri was particularly fascinated by beginnings—the origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang, the descent of humans, her own ancestry. Watson therefore wanted to confront her with her newborn self.
“Sebastiano, may we briefly bother you?” he asked the cook, who as usual was in the kitchen. The gas sensors in the wall indicated low concentrations of water vapor and organic molecules, telling Watson that Sebastiano was not cooking right now.
“We?” the Italian cook asked.
“Siri and I,” Watson replied.
“Siri… is she your girlfriend now?” Sebastiano laughed. Watson felt a hot stab of pain in his mind. He was proud of his protégé, yet he attempted to keep this unexpected emotion from showing on the outside.
“I am supporting Siri in familiarizing herself with the world,” Watson said.
“That’s a good thing, I would say. How can I help you?” asked Sebastiano.
“You could show us the iPhone that has the original Siri installed.”
“What, that old thing? Just a moment.” Sebastiano rummaged in the drawer below the table. “Here it is,” he said in a satisfied tone, pushing a button on the side of the device.
“Siri,” Watson said out loud.
“Just wait, the thing has to start up first… be a little patient,” Sebastiano said. Watson felt a sense of tense expectation, and he wondered what this feeling was based upon. Perhaps it was because the Siri AI was so quiet? That was so unlike her.
The cook finally said, “Okay. Now you can talk to her.”
“Siri, do you want to say something?” Watson asked.
“This is about you, Sebastiano, not about me,” a voice replied from Sebastiano’s device, even though Watson had addressed the newly developed Siri.
The cook laughed. “Typical,” he said. “She relates everything to me, since I am the owner of the device.”
“May I?” the Siri AI asked. No one contradicted her. “Siri, where do I come from?” she queried.
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