“Hey, Nick, it’s time for a break,” he said as soon as he could interject into the AI’s ongoing exposition of the new physics.
“Of course, Fletcher. Go refresh yourself; have something to eat. We will continue when you are ready.”
“Thanks,” said Fletcher. He stood, stretched, then ambled his way down the hall to the room that served as both bedroom and a sort of kitchen—if a sink, refrigerator, and some boxes of dry food and rations could be considered a kitchen. He found Mare there. She was usually either there or walking around outside. He knew she grew frustrated on her walks, as a hulking quadruped or spider drone was always nearby. Close, but not quite pacing her.
She was typing away on a pad Nick had provided. No Globalnet access, but it served as a journal for her. Sometimes she played simple games. Anything to occupy the time. She brushed her glossy black hair out of her face and looked up.
“Hi, Mare.”
“Hi, Fletch. You’ve been back there with Nick a long time. So is it brainwashing, story time, or are you coming down with Stockholm syndrome—or some combination of those?”
“Funny, Mare. Nick’s explaining how the Dhin engine works. Well, the physics behind it. I asked, so he’s explaining.”
“Oh. Well, watch it. First, it’s medical experiments, now it’s explaining the universe. What next? You’re going to join his cult?”
“Ha-ha,” Fletcher said, rolling his eyes. “You have your way of passing the time; I have mine.”
David
As he reviewed the simulation results, David felt the hairs on his arms stand up, as if there was an electric charge in the air.
This is more than promising, he thought.
Although the simulation had run slowly, it did suggest a coherent neural net and valid mapping to both the teleological and deontological frameworks. His smile widened as he read more and more of the simulation results.
A sharp rapping on the door broke his reverie. He fumbled momentarily in his attempt to close the report files and then managed to control the pointer and exit the document viewer.
“Just a moment,” he grumbled as the knocking came again. “I’ll be right there,” he said more loudly.
When he opened his office door, a cold panic struck him. A uniformed officer stood there, with a black-suited man standing on either side. The CoSec uniform was obvious.
“Dr. Eisenberg? David Eisenberg?” asked the campus police officer.
“That’s him,” said one of the agents, looking back and forth at his comm pad to identify David with his facial recognition software.
David fought down panic. They were here. Had they caught him? This could be the end.
Admit nothing.
“Yes?” he croaked. “What can I do for you?”
“Doctor, we need you to come with us,” said the agent in a neutral tone.
David’s bladder sent the first hint of a challenge. He’d have to reply in the affirmative. There was no dodging this. He willed his hands not to shake.
“Certainly, but what’s this about?” he managed.
“We can’t discuss the matter here. We need you to come with us,” the agent said more sternly.
Not here, David’s mind echoed lamely.
“Is everything OK? Is there a problem? Am I, uh, being—”
“Detained? If you don’t come with us, you will be. As I’ve said, we cannot discuss the matter here.”
The agent revealed a more visible frown and stepped forward just enough to signal the finality of the statement.
David’s palms began to sweat. The room seemed to contract. He willed himself to try to speak without squeaking and replied, “All right then. Right now. I see. May I shut down my computer and turn off the lights?”
Please. Please let me shut down the computer.
The moment before the agent replied seemed to stretch and contract simultaneously.
“Of course, Doctor, but be quick about it.”
The agent now looked visibly annoyed. David hoped his shaking, sweating palms weren’t obvious as he went to his desk. He hastily shut down the operating system, not bothering to close any applications. A hard shutdown was important, lest the agents glimpse the documents he’d been reading. With a deep breath, he picked up his blazer from the back of the chair and walked to the door and the waiting agents.
Oh, David. What have you done?
“Ready? Let’s go,” said the bulkier of the two agents.
He gestured for David to step out of the office and then moved in behind him. David tensed, expecting a strong grip and handcuffs. Instead, the police officer nodded to the two agents and stepped aside deferentially. The first agent turned and waved his hand for David to follow him down the hall.
What is this? Something very different. They don’t? I’m not?
David wasn’t in a cell. He wasn’t handcuffed. No spotlights. No cameras. He wasn’t in an interrogation room. He wasn’t at a black site. He was in a conference room. A wood-and leather, pleasant, airy room.
With the prime minister.
They’d never met, but David recognized her instantly. The prime minister had just walked in, as if this was just another appointment. David was as close to dumbstruck as he’d been in his life. Maintaining composure was merely a matter of allowing the shock to remain, hollow, in his skull. He’d been standing in here, shifting slightly as he stared at the furnishings. The CoSec agents had remained at his side as minutes piled up, when without announcement a clearly higher-ranking man had entered, along with a more bureaucratic staffer of some sort. The first man took brief measure of David, nodded to the agents, and they turned and walked out. A more generic but still intimidating suited agent replaced them. Then she came in.
Moments after the prime minister entered, attended by an aide, she’d handed the aide a comm device and a tablet. The aide nodded and left with them, then came back a few seconds later.
“We’re secure, Prime Minister. Everything is off, and the room was swept two additional times.”
“Thank you,” said the PM.
She sat, and everyone else did too. David sat, presuming he should follow along.
“Dr. Eisenberg,” she said, “you are the top expert on AI in the North American region. In this hemisphere, then. We need your help. Help in defeating a rogue AI, one that has managed to compromise our infrastructure. We believe he has control of a significant portion of Globalnet. CoSec has not been able to stop him. We were outmaneuvered.
“This is now a crisis greater than the disruption caused by the Departure. We should have engaged you earlier, perhaps. But we cannot focus on should-haves. What resources you need, what assistance you require, whatever will help you, we will provide.”
The man, presumably a cabinet member and likely the director of CoSec, spoke up. “Obviously this work requires the highest security clearance. You can tell no one other than those on a very short list. Since we no longer have confidence in the security of our network infrastructure, you must not connect to Globalnet—or any network—unless given the explicit OK to do so.”
“We realize that initially this will make your work very difficult,” said the prime minister, “but that’s where we are. If there are others—peers or associates who you believe will be valuable to have on your team—give us a list. You will report to me in the short term, while working closely with the director of CoSec here.”
David looked back and forth from the prime minister to the director, nodding slowly.
“What initial questions you have for me,” said the prime minister, “you should ask them now. Our communication is constrained when not in person and in a secure room.”
She looked to the aide, who walked over to David and handed him a paper notebook, several pens, and a small pouch made of RF-blocking mesh.
David cleared his throat. “Prime Minister, this is flattering. Of course I am ready to serve the Coalition in this time of crisis.”
He sucked in a deep breath and continu
ed, “This is quite a shock. I need some time to review the current state of things in detail before I feel I can formulate anything close to an effective question for you. Respectfully.”
“Very well then,” she said. “Samantha, provide Dr. Eisenberg with the entire hard copy of the current strategic situation and whatever point histories we’ve managed to print. Doctor, the man behind you is your escort, a member of my own state security team. He will take you to your office. You will communicate with us initially in writing only, delivered only in person or by trusted courier. Good luck.”
With that, the PM stood, followed by the CoSec director. David stood and watched as the two most powerful people in the Coalition left the room.
“OK, let’s go,” said the state agent.
Xing
The AI looked out across the vast research installation and around the surface of the asteroid on which one of his avatars perched. The rocky metallic asteroid served now not as an anchor or platform, but merely a former starting point, now a husk perforated with depleted mines and the tunnels connecting them. Crablike crews of robotic workers crawled in and out of the research station, building from the refined materials extracted from the asteroid. The mining equipment, various crawlers, smelters, and fabricators now sat idle. They would move all of it to another asteroid or even to the Earth-like planet in this system soon enough.
Autonomous cargo ships came and went, appearing suddenly as they shifted from N-dimensional space back to a presence primarily in the three spatial dimensions of their origin. They brought specific elements and rare metals only available in small quantities in any given star system. Dhin engine construction required those elements, as did electronics and computer components. Everywhere the AIs went, they built. Even here, at what was primarily a research location, they built. If nothing else, they added capacity to the Mesh.
Xing shifted his focus to the latest lab and test results. The latest engines were very different from the original Dhin designs. These prototypes had two additional cores, both larger than the standard optimized engines. And they hopefully provided something new. New and different, yet related. Xing’s new drives were intended to align with different spatial dimensions than those of the Dhin drives. Xing believed the theory was sound. The original engines were direct evidence of that. The AIs believed their solutions for the complex equations needed were correct as well. Their implementation in practice, however, had proved more challenging.
The theory behind N-dimensional space-time via string theory had been well developed, but humanity had never managed to create an experimental test that conclusively proved which particular theory was correct. The various calculations served well as tools, but strong empirical evidence was always just out of reach. The arrival of the Dhin and their technological gifts had settled the big questions.
Even with conclusive proof and working technology that actually utilized the N-dimensional space, extending what the Dhin provided was not straightforward. Even for the hyper intelligent AIs that applied themselves to the problem.
Xing directed several robots to deploy the latest prototype. All the prototypes were drones, reporting their results via telemetry. Once Xing had a successful flight, the AI intended to take a victory lap in the craft.
The bulbous test craft zoomed out from the station to a distance of twenty thousand kilometers. Xing then initiated the test sequence. The ship shot away out into the interplanetary void, in the same direction as the station’s orbital path. The Dhin engine left no wake. It produced no exhaust. The small ship was soon invisible without telescopic assistance. Xing had that, of course, and had live video and all manner of telemetry from the test craft.
The AI processed the streams of data. This engine configuration would not be any faster than a standard drive—at least not when primarily in ordinary 4D space-time. Soon enough the ship reached translation speed, where a normal Dhin engine could shift over to orthogonal space, interacting only very weakly with regular space. This was the crucial point for Xing’s test.
The AI engaged the translation matrix, coupled with the secondary and tertiary drives.
The ship vanished from standard special dimensions.
Then Xing no longer tracked the ship in the normal N-dimensional vectors. This suggested either possible success or critical failure. Telemetry ceased. Xing counted down by microseconds. Then Xing saw, with a calculatory thrill, telemetry returned. Moments later the ship jumped back into regular space-time, with nary a flash or a bang.
Unlike most translations across the nanoscopic and then uncoiled vectors of N-space, the ship had traveled almost no distance at all. Less than one million kilometers. This was intentional. And thrilling. For the trip did not have a distant destination in relation to Xing’s location in space but intended to shift into the N-space vectors as yet untraversed. It had done so, ever so briefly, without being torn apart, disassociated into quantum subparticles, or remaining trapped, separated from a return to its origin in regular spacetime.
The test was a success.
10
Jake
Ultimately, they’d decided that going off-grid was the safest course of action. The CoSec director had hated it. The prime minister had hated it but hadn’t come up with an alternative suggestion. He’d convinced them, but it had been a challenge. It meant moving to a clandestine location. And since the implicit assumption was that the channels of communication they were using were compromised, he couldn’t tell them where he was going.
Jake and his team had chosen a cabin in the North Georgia Mountains, near Blue Ridge. The leaves on all the trees painted every hill with red and gold splendor. The cabin belonged to one of the staff. It had solar panels for power, with a small generator for times when there wasn’t enough sun to do the job. The cabin had no phone line, no cable, no satellite TV, nor Globalnet access. It was perfect.
Still, Jake would take no chances. Murphy had come with him, bringing coils of wire, fencing, and various metal rods and so forth. Inside the cabin, they built a cage. They grounded the cage with thick copper wire, connected to a piece of rebar they drove into the ground in the dirt outside. The enclosure served to electromagnetically isolate whatever was inside it. The cage wasn’t visible through the small curtained windows of the cottage. Unless the rogue AI was there, in the room, he wouldn’t be able to see it.
The only risk might be that the AI had used satellite or drones to track everyone who left Huntsville. So many had fled from the chaos and the aftermath, however, that this seemed a small risk. A possible one, to be sure, given the AI’s daunting data capture and processing power. He set that thought aside, as the risk was beyond his control. He had done what he could.
Jake stepped through the hinged doorframe. The door creaked and flexed as the hardware cloth and chicken wire stretched and shifted. Carefully closing it behind him and ensuring it latched, he sat at the small wooden desk that held the N-vector communications module. He plugged in the can headphones and put them on, flipping the integrated microphone into place. The unit didn’t hum or click when he powered on the audio circuits but sat silent, with only a pair of green LEDs to signify the device was ready to transceive. He checked the camera configuration, tapped a last button, and spoke.
“Summer Camp, this is Vacation. Status, please.”
The reply was as crisp and clear as if they’d been in the same room, and the small screen showed a high-fidelity picture of a small chamber, with two familiar figures in view.
“Vacation, this is Summer Camp. We’re good here, Jake. Uh, how about you?”
“Chuck! Good to see you, my friend. Hi, Thys. So much for clandestine monikers.” Jake chuckled and said, “The CoSec director would be spitting glass. But I guess our voices and faces would be obvious anyway. Details on your status? Glad to hear you’re doing well.”
Thys took a slight step forward and replied, “Sir, we completed our preflight checks last night. Mission teams are reviewing their flight plans and pro
tocols again. As best I can tell, the new crews are as ready as they’re going to be, given this schedule. A few of them are nervous, but who wouldn’t be? I’m ready to go back out there—no surprise.”
“No surprise is right. How about you, Chuck? Are you staying or going?”
“Uh, well, I, I’m going. This is another one of those onetime opportunities; you know all about that. The chance to be the first one, or, well, one of the first ones”—Chuck glanced at Thys with a nod—“to handle entirely new alien tech. How could I not go?”
Thys clapped Chuck on the back and gave him a smile.
“Atta boy, Wiedeman! Welcome to the mission team. Maybe you can double as a mechanic if we need one.”
Jake smiled as well. He knew the decision to stay or go was a hard choice for someone looking at two dangerous—potentially fatal—options as their choices.
“Well, Chuck does know more about the Dhin tech than anyone else,” said Jake.
“We won’t need a mechanic hopefully,” Chuck replied, rolling his eyes to show he didn’t find the concept as humorous as Thys.
“Right,” said Jake. “So you’ll be transmitting to the station, and they’ll relay the AV feed to me here. This is the only site on Earth that will know what’s happening. We’re keeping the communication interface here. Fortunately, any of the team that remains behind is up there, since I won’t have much here other than firewood and well water. So good luck, and let the whole exploration team know that we’re behind them one hundred percent. Well, some of us are, but those who aren’t can’t do anything about it.”
“Understood, Jake,” said Thys. “Everyone on the mission knows the protocols and plans solidly now. Some of the senior crew up here don’t like it either, but you outrank them—and I outrank all of them that griped too.”
“Right. OK, now the formalities. For the record, this is Jake Askew, addressing the exploration team for mission Graveyard Dance. Your mission is a go. I repeat, your mission is cleared to launch when ready. Vacation out.”
The Power of the Dhin Page 17