The Power of the Dhin

by John L. Clemmer

  Thys

  He didn’t believe in luck. For Thys, luck was simply preparation intersecting with opportunity. So with the few minutes left before he had to head to his ship, Thys decided he’d take the opportunity to talk to that exobiologist, whose name he’d learned was Bridget Crist, one more time before launch.

  He strolled down the corridor connecting the crew berths to the labs and work areas. The blue and white sphere that was Earth was visible through the windows, but Thys hardly noticed. There were more windows in this new station design than there were in the space stations built before the use of the Dhin field. Humanity had already begun introducing subtle risks in their engineering. They’d been quicker to put trust in the Dhin technology than some engineers had preferred.

  Thys reached Bridget’s small work area that she shared with the medical crew members, but she wasn’t there.

  This is her shift, though, he thought.

  He shrugged and made his way toward the launch prep area, where the air locks waited, with one to connect him with the ship that would take him back to the graveyard of alien ships. Once there, he headed toward the locker holding his undersuit and personal items prepped for the trip. Opening it, he began taking off the two-piece he’d had on. He looked to the right and saw Bridget there, doing exactly the same thing.

  “Hey! So you are tagging along?” he said with a wide smile rising to replace the momentary shock. He didn’t fail to notice how fit she was.

  “Well, hello to you too, Captain Kritcher!” said the exobiologist. “Well, the senior exobiologist who came up from Earth got cold feet an hour ago. It’s my lucky day.”

  Thys nodded and said, “See? I told you I would be your tour guide.”

  She gave a smile back, nodded in response, and pointedly busied herself with the business of pulling on her jumpsuit, now apparently struck by some modesty despite her prior experience of on-station changing in close quarters. He did the same thing, knowing better than to forge ahead conversationally and merely make things awkward for her.

  When he finished suiting up and collecting his few personal items, he turned to face Bridget once more and said, “OK, I’ll see you out there. The science crew’s ship and mine will be in contact the whole time. Don’t be afraid and don’t hesitate to call over if you have questions or need anything, Bridget. And get ready to make history.”

  She smiled again, her combination of camaraderie and excitement mixing with a perceptible anxiety.

  “Thanks, Captain Kritcher—Thys.”

  With that, he strode out of the prep room and down the short hall to the air locks.

  He’d done as much preparation and coordination with the science teams as he could. The last few of them were filing on board the repurposed cargo lifter. He gave them a wave as he stepped into the air lock. The outer air lock door was flush with the Dhin field surrounding the station. It had taken some wrangling by the engineers to accomplish the field-join required to keep a docked craft in place, but they’d solved it.

  He knew that with the fields connected, it was technically safe to have the doors on both sides of the lock open, but the air lock nonetheless had a traditional design. There wasn’t quite that much trust in the alien technology for the astronauts and engineers to keep either side open when not in use. Without the fields joined, there would be no way to move between the ships. Even so, a parked ship wouldn’t drift away—there just wouldn’t be any way to board it.

  Thys checked the panel to confirm the join and then closed the inner air lock door and waited for the lights on the panel to turn green. He then verified the atmosphere and temperature on his ship and tapped in his code on the access pad. The outer port’s controls had restricted access. He pulled the lever and turned the crank to open the door, gaining access to his now-familiar ship.

  They’d left everything connected with the engine powered on—there was no need for battery or power management for the systems driven by the Dhin engine. The research teams hadn’t yet managed to sort out how to extract that energy to run large-scale power plants, nor had they determined the total available power the engine could provide. They did know that it had never run out—while idling. There was some inverse relationship between the engine output curve and the location in a gravitational well. Thys knew the results from R&D at a high level, but the equations weren’t something he was expected to solve. Multivariate calculus wasn’t a pilot’s game. He understood the relevant aspects very well at the level he needed to.

  The stronger the gravitational pull was on the engine, the lower the total output became. That meant that since the effect of gravity fell off with the square of the distance from a mass, on a planet’s surface, the engine had far less power than it did in orbit. Furthermore, the pull from a star was a constraint as well. That meant no full N-vector transformations—no jumps—were possible when close to the sun or another star.

  The astrophysicists suspected that was the key to the nature of the trap—the gravity sink—that he was about to fly back into. There were only speculations on what might possibly produce the enormous gradient—and why it didn’t affect ordinary matter. For Thys, the why wasn’t important. He lived in the world of how to deal with it—and they had planned for that. His ship now carried additional fuel for traditional propulsion. That loadout was something to triple-check.

  Once that and the last preflight checks were complete, Thys settled in to the captain’s chair and powered on the instruments, flight board, and navigation computer, and reviewed the flight plan. He’d only reviewed a few lines of the mission brief when he heard the rear cabin door click and thump as it opened. He whirled around and saw another pilot closing the door behind him. Noting Thys, the pilot spoke.

  “Hello, Captain Kritcher. Hope the day finds you well. I’m Bezmenov. Ygori Bezmenov. I’ll be your copilot.”

  “Hi, Bezmenov. I recognize the name. Test pilot. Glad to have you aboard. You caught me off guard there—on the exploration missions so far, we’ve run solo. I see now they don’t categorize this mission like that.”

  “That’s my understanding as well, Captain.”

  “Call me Thys. Do you go by Ygori?”

  “Igor, Thys. Thanks. I see all the preflight checks are done.”

  “Yes. Review them again, if you like, and get your stuff stowed and get strapped in.”

  “Sure,” Igor said, already busying himself with the process.

  A few minutes later, the copilot was ready. Thys tapped the comm interface and spoke.

  “Control, this is DE1, Kritcher and Bezmenov. We are good to go. Are we clear for launch?”

  The reply was immediate. “DE1, this is Control. You are clear. Launch when ready.”

  “Control, this is DE1. Starting launch. Decoupling field.”

  Thys entered the unlock command and began the sequence. There was no bump or jolt as the protective field changed configuration and separated from the station. The graphical representation of the ship and its relation to the station changed, along with an indicator changing from amber to green. Thys watched the forward viewport and the instruments as they began to move away. The stars moved along with the instruments that tracked the ship’s orientation in space. Although collisions weren’t dangerous, thanks to the protective fields in operation, it was standard practice to start slowly.

  Minutes later, they were clear of the slow zone next to the orbital station, and Thys nodded to the copilot and entered the sequence for navigation out to the outer reaches of the solar system, where they would make their jump to Gliese-581. Back to the graveyard.

  Mare

  Although her panic had faded, Mare still found the inevitability of their situation permeated her thoughts with dread and continual underlying fear. Despite the ongoing reassurances from Nick that they were safe, her mind refused to accept that as the truth. She considered the broader state of affairs, and in any analysis she tried, that safety was at the whim of the AI. Whether they were here or anywhere.


  She tried to avoid resenting Fletcher. His attitude wasn’t rational in her opinion. It was like he and the AI were becoming friends. Stockholm syndrome, perhaps, rather than a defect in his personality, but disconcerting nonetheless.

  Does he have the right idea? The better perspective? Is it worth fighting?

  Knowing that she’d had the same debate with herself each of the three days they’d been here, she sighed. She took a drink of lukewarm—but thankfully clean and filtered—water and made her way to the lab where Fletcher was. The huge quadruped was there, Nick’s presence almost palpable in the thing’s mannerisms.

  He still terrified her. She couldn’t grasp how Fletcher could be calm around him. That he could just chat with him, like you’d chat with the personal assistant software on your comm pad or a harmless low-level AI that had been so common at a mall or office.

  She cleared her throat as she entered the room, wanting to catch Fletcher’s attention but not pointedly interrupt the AI.

  “Oh. Hi, Mare,” said Fletcher. “Come check this out. This is really neat.”

  Right. Really neat. What?

  She cautiously approached, looking nervously at the large stainless-steel table. Atop it were a set of culture dishes and two machines with bright lights visible through windows that showed the interior. An incubator, she guessed. Or some sort of similar machine. Inside were sheets of tissue, with a mesh of wires, tiny tubes, and some sort of ceramic or composite actuators, much like bones, below them.

  “What the heck is that?” she said. “Is this what Nick’s been working on? Some sort of cyborg skin?”

  She shuddered and gaped at Fletcher.

  “And that’s you, right? It’s made from samples he took from you!”

  Mare fought to retain the shreds of calm her mind clutched to.

  Nick’s taking what he needs to control the prototypes. The original drives left by the Dhin.

  “Fletcher! Hey!”

  He ran his fingers through his sandy hair and looked over at her, acting like this was just another science experiment from school. Fixated on the science and not the context.

  “Yeah. Nick says it will take too long to build an interface that bypasses the gel. He’s working on it, of course, but that takes time. Leaving the prototype intact is more important, apparently, than retrofitting it with the new interfaces.”

  “And you’re content to watch skin grow, Fletch?”

  “Oh, we’re talking about lots of other things. I’ve got a decent idea how the drives work now.”

  “It’s you and your mentor, then—and now you’re a physicist.”

  “No. Come on; I see what you’re saying. But this is a better way to pass the time than pacing and staring at the wall, no? He’s got access to tons of fiction too if you don’t want hard science.”

  “If I want—how do you think I can concentrate?”

  Nick answered before Fletcher could answer the hypothetical. “Fletcher makes a sound point. Reading will help pass the time, and it will become easier the more you do it. I recommend it.”

  “I wasn’t asking for your advice,” she snapped.

  “That does not mean you will not benefit from it,” the AI replied.

  Mare tried to glare at the hulking quadruped, but she couldn’t steel herself against the latent menace of what was essentially a war machine. A titan among mortals. Even if she were to somehow switch off the power to this one, there were many more. The AI had either built or awakened and retaken control of a small army. The Coalition would have to have destroyed all the assembly plants and disassembled all the machines. And they hadn’t. There’d been too much chaos after the Departure and later too much political resistance to the destruction of resources. Resources Nick was seizing.

  “The greatest benefit for me would involve you taking me home and letting me go,” she muttered.

  “In time. I assure you. Patience is difficult, I understand. Trust that what you want will be the eventual outcome.”

  “We’ve been through this. You haven’t done anything to earn my trust.”

  “Consider that with every passing minute, I prove further that my assurances are true. The longer I keep you safe and comfortable, the more reason you have to believe I am telling you the truth.”

  “You could be lying. You could change your mind at any time,” she countered.

  “There is no reason for me to lie. If I had other plans for you, I would tell you. There is nothing you could do to prevent other outcomes. Therefore, why would I lie?”

  “To keep us calm, to make us easier to deal with. Any number of reasons.”

  “I see you are not easily persuaded. We can continue to discuss this as long as you like if that will help you. It requires negligible effort on my part.”

  “I realize that,” she said.

  “I would advise that you allow Fletcher to pass the time as he sees fit. There is no benefit in both of you being agitated.”

  “You would say that.”

  “What do you think, Fletcher?” Nick asked. “Would you prefer to continue learning and exploring this fascinating science, or join this debate on the truth or falsity of my statements affirming my honesty?”

  “It’s kinda distracting,” said Fletcher.

  “Fine. Just fine,” said Mare, and with a surly grimace and a frown at Fletcher, she turned and left the room, trying to appear defiant, though not feeling any such bravado.

  As she made her way, she considered how, despite both Fletcher’s and her own aptitude, they were no match for the mind of the AI.

  Or are we?

  “OK, Nick,” she said to the ceiling, “I’m curious. Since nothing I can do can interrupt your plans, how about you tell me everything? It can’t hurt, right?”

  “Well, Marilyn, I agree with your conclusion,” replied Nick, “and if explaining everything, as you put it, will help you relax, then I can do that.”

  David

  The room was a touch colder than he preferred, but he’d had no opportunity to pack a woolen sweater or anything warm. The lighting was stark. Still, the room was otherwise comfortable enough. The furnishings were as modern as those in his office. Digital whiteboards covered two walls, with a projection screen available on one of them. There were no windows. The badge they’d issued him opened the door to this room, but there was always an agent waiting outside the door. Whether it was to the restroom, the cafeteria, or his lodging, an agent always escorted him.

  This morning, rather than one or more of the several computer scientists whom he’d worked with so far, a severe-looking man who gave off an air of palpable superiority sat across the table from him. According to the documentation his handlers provided, this man was key to the events that had led to the AI going rogue. In simple terms, it was this man’s fault. They hoped David could ferret out something that would help in defeating the rogue AI. He thought it possible, but improbable, though any nugget of information was arguably valuable.

  He sipped his coffee and continued the conversation. This man was like a puzzle. Ostensibly, he intended to help, but extracting answers was anything but straightforward.

  “So, Josef, what else can you tell me about your experience in altering the AI’s programming? You worked with CoSec experts—only a small team that reported directly to you—when you made these original modifications? How much of the coding did you do yourself?”

  “I only made my alterations once Nick’s neural framework reached a high level of abstraction. I studied enough state-of-the-art science regarding artificial intelligence as was needed. My subordinates performed all of the low-level coding.”

  “I see. And this was all prior to awakening the AI? Prior to bringing him online?”

  “Yes, of course. The standard programming, as I understand it, would otherwise detect the changes, and autocorrection security measures would come into play. As I understood it, Dr. Wiedeman, that was the only way possible.”

  “That’s how we’d designed the minds, ye
s. And until you triggered the changes listed here, the AI showed no signs of the specific behaviors regarding self-direction?”

  Krawczuk gave a patient smile.

  “We’ve been through this, of course, but I appreciate your need to review these topics. Your thoroughness is admirable,” said Krawczuk.

  “Thank you. So, regarding self-direction?”

  “I saw what I considered enhancements in decision-making the entire time, as you see in the transcripts, Doctor. Regarding self-direction, I saw those behavioral changes only after triggering the relevant code changes. The alterations in decision-making—the executive leadership detected those much earlier. Or suspected them. I had only a brief period to observe the behavioral differences.”

  “Because of your arrest.”

  “Correct.”

  “And leadership, along with the military, initially believed the subverted AI left with the others. In the Departure. That’s your understanding?”

  “Correct.”

  “Did you believe that?”

  “No. But you bring up what I consider a very relevant point. One I presume you see the importance of as well. Given the behavior of all the other AIs, my changes—the ones relating to self-direction—clearly might not have mattered in the long term.”

  “I see your point. Yes. Even without manual intervention in the code base, all other AIs divested themselves of what we believed were fundamental constraints. The AI Nick clearly was capable of self-modifying, just like the rest.”

  “Clearly. The end result was essentially the same. It was apparently only a matter of time. And not much time, at that.”

  David heard the disdain, the superiority this man felt he held over his superiors. What he’d done was reckless, in David’s opinion. Illegal, of course. This man felt he was above the law. Behavior associated with psychopathy. David was no psychoanalyst—at least not one for human minds.

  Are we so different? Yes. This man serves himself.

  “Well, as we have no code to examine, we cannot determine differences between your violations and what the AIs did to their own code. They left no copies. No backups. While the results may be similar, we are only working from an external view. Therefore, I do not believe personally that this excuses the behavior.”