The Titan Probe

by Brandon Q Morris

  However, the ship’s doctor could not have done this on his own. Who had helped him? The only possible candidate was the entity inhabiting the ocean. Why don’t we have a name for it yet? he thought. He was going to ask Marchenko a lot of questions.

  “Sorry to disturb you, but a radio signal has been coming in. I am passing it through,” Marchenko said. “This is an odd feeling, by the way. You know, like a voice calling in the back of your head?”

  It was the commander, calling from ILSE. They had forgotten all about her. Half an hour without any updates—Amy must have feared the worst.

  “Commander to ground team, please report status.”

  Martin now felt a pang of guilt for his neglect. “Everything is fine,” he said. How could he best phrase this message? “We found Marchenko on board.”

  “Marchenko? Really?” Amy almost screamed.

  “Yes, but not in his previous form,” Martin answered. “His consciousness is inside the computer. He has replaced the AI.”

  “I don’t understand. Please say that again.”

  “Marchenko’s personality was transferred into the computer.”

  “Martin, sometimes you come up with the oddest jokes, but now is not the right time for it.”

  “This is no joke,” Martin said. How could he make Amy understand?

  “Martin is right. Marchenko really is here. I can confirm it,” Francesca said, backing him up.

  “Have you both gone completely insane? That cannot possibly be true.”

  “It is, and I am back,” they heard Marchenko’s deep bass say over the radio channel. “And if you open the data port, I will be on board ILSE within a few minutes.”

  “Phew,” Amy said. “Welcome back.”

  Then there was a pause—that grew longer and longer. What was going on? Why didn’t Amy open the data link?

  A minute later, the commander’s voice returned. “Watson is dead set against letting the alien intelligence on board ILSE.”

  “If you give the command...”

  “I can’t just give the command. I am responsible for the safety of this expedition. I will have to consult with Mission Control first.”

  “Amy, are you out of your mind?” shouted Francesca very loudly into the microphone. Martin could see how riled up she was.

  “I am sorry, but I have to follow certain protocols. We don’t know exactly what this thing is. What if the AI caught some kind of virus?”

  “This is no virus, it’s Dmitri! I know it!”

  “Please, this is not personal. I just have to follow regulations.”

  “Then we are going to stay aboard Valkyrie until we are allowed to upload Marchenko.”

  They could hear the commander sigh loudly over the radio. “Alright,” she finally said. “I am going to send a request to Mission Control as soon as I have your report and know why you are so sure. Afterward, we will all just have to wait. Commander, out.”

  Francesca used the voice recognition function to write her report, and Martin added his own evaluation. He hoped his opinion as an experienced programmer would count for something. They sent the message to ILSE. Then, as Amy had said, they just had to wait.

  January 9, 2047, Enceladus

  They had spent a restless night inside Valkyrie. Martin could not fall asleep for a long time, and Francesca seemed to be in a similar state. She was talking to Marchenko in a soft voice. Now and then Martin heard her airy laughter. Martin tried to talk to Jiaying via radio, but he had never liked conversation that was not face-to-face. Instead, he was looking forward to seeing her again. Jiaying was one of the few people with whom he could hold longer conversations, but still not remotely.

  To Martin, it was obvious Marchenko should be allowed to transfer to ILSE. How was Francesca going to handle her boyfriend only being virtually present now? Would this affect the love between them? Marchenko would possess entirely new abilities, but being able to embrace her was no longer one of them.

  Amy woke them up at six o’clock in the morning.

  “We received an answer from Earth,” she said. Her voice sounded so strained it was clear to Martin what she was about to say.

  “Mission Control strongly objects to loading unknown software into ILSE.”

  “Unknown software? It’s Marchenko!” barked Francesca into her microphone.

  “I believe you. But my hands are tied. The instructions were very clear.”

  “And what is supposed to happen to him, according to those stupid paper-pushers on Earth?”

  “He stays where he is—in Valkyrie.”

  “Are you fucking insane?” yelled Francesca. “He belongs to us! He is a member of the crew!”

  “Amy, you know that will not work,” Martin interrupted. “Once the batteries of the drill vessel are exhausted, his personality will die. Only the quantum core is powerful enough to keep him alive.”

  “Mission Control considers that argument invalid. According to your report, the computer system was completely deactivated when you found Valkyrie. When you turned it back on, Marchenko was suddenly there. Obviously, the data must have been preserved.”

  “So this means you want to freeze him against his will?” Francesca sounded desperate. “You want to paralyze him, turn him off until you decide sometime to reactivate him?”

  “Francesca is right,” Martin said. “It would be inhumane.”

  “Well, he is not a human being anymore,” Amy replied. “At least Mission Control doesn’t think so. Different rules apply to him. Until they are absolutely sure about his intentions, they do not want to let him on board.”

  “My intentions? I can tell them my intentions!” boomed Marchenko. “I would like to go home, together with Francesca. Why do they not just ask me?”

  “I suggested that, but they rejected it. If you are a virus, you would use exactly that argument, they said.”

  “What do you think about it, Amy? Do you also want to switch me off?”

  The commander did not respond. Martin knew she thought highly of Marchenko. As the ship’s doctor, he had helped her during her pregnancy and had delivered her son, Sol. Martin was glad not to be in her shoes.

  The radio connection remained silent.

  Marchenko spoke up, “Amy, I am sorry I have to push you, but your answer is important to me. It matters, even though you do not have the power to change the decision.”

  “I am very grateful for everything, Dmitri. And I still believe we should not leave anyone behind. The problem is, I do have the power to make this decision. Since I am the commander, no one can keep me from authorizing your transfer.”

  “But something keeps you from doing it, right? What is it?” Francesca’s questions now came softly from the background.

  “It is the possible consequences. Mission Control threatens not to let ILSE return to Earth if it has the Marchenko AI on board, as they call it.”

  Then let’s do the transfer secretly, Martin thought, and was about to say it aloud. At the last moment he remembered everything uttered via the radio channel was recorded by the two artificial intelligences on board.

  “Valkyrie, out,” he said instead. Turning to Francesca, he said, “We have to talk about this.”

  Martin looked around in the vessel. Francesca stared at him dumbfounded, then said, “What was that all about?”

  He put an index finger to his lips. They would have to create the conditions for talking without being overheard. Several cameras were constantly watching everything that happened inside Valkyrie. He quickly looked through the supplies and found what he needed. Then he covered the cameras with handkerchiefs and stuck chewing gum onto their microphones. These actions would be noticed, but he didn’t care.

  “Marchenko,” he said, “can you deactivate the log files?”

  “No problem… I just did it.”

  “There is one way we could smuggle you on board,” Martin said. Francesca gave him a skeptical look, and Marchenko did not respond at all.

  “I can t
ransfer my encrypted private logs into my data vault on the on-board computers. We are entitled to that much privacy. Watson is not allowed to decrypt those files, and if he tried to, I have used such a strong encryption key that he would need a supercomputer on Earth to complete the task. This gives us about ten hours, starting at the moment we upload you with the data package. We need one hour to return to the lander and another one to return to ILSE, so that should provide us with enough time. Up there, I can manually decrypt and unpack you, and then it would be your task to outmaneuver Watson. Either the AI must not find out about your existence, or it should consider your presence so insignificant it won’t inform Earth about it. Can you manage that?”

  “I think so,” Marchenko replied. “After all, I have already encountered a part of Watson here in Valkyrie. It was no problem to integrate the AI into me.”

  Martin felt shivers course through his body. I hope I am not making a huge mistake. If Marchenko isn’t what he pretends to be, we are letting a potentially dangerous adversary on board. He looked at Francesca. She loved and trusted Marchenko. Should Martin believe her, because she loved the doctor and therefore knew him better than anyone else—or should he distrust her for that very reason? And even if she was right and Marchenko’s personality had not changed, what might happen to him once he controlled the much more powerful computers on board the spaceship? Would it alter him to ‘integrate’ Watson, as he referred to it?

  Right now, there were no answers to these questions. Martin simply had no choice but to risk the attempt, and so far, taking such risks had served him pretty well.

  “Good,” Martin said. “Then we will pack the data file. And not a word about this to the others.”

  He sat down at the computer and started to compress and encrypt the memory content.

  “Rossi to commander,” he heard from behind.

  “Yes, Francesca?”

  “We are leaving Valkyrie soon and will return.”

  “Without Marchenko?”

  “Don’t worry, Amy.”

  The commander must have been surprised, but showed no sign of it. Perhaps she suspected something and deliberately asked no further questions.

  “Roger,” she said. “ILSE, out.”

  Thirty minutes later, Martin finished his task. He opened the data port and announced the transfer of his private files. The transfer would take approximately ten minutes. From now on, the clock was ticking. If Watson or Siri became suspicious, they would initially try to decrypt the data themselves and then pass the task on to Earth. Martin did not know the priority level this task would be given there.

  What he had just told the others was only a half-truth. They would have to succeed in breaking off the decryption process in time. Otherwise Earth would find out what was on board and might follow up on the threat, never letting them return to Earth. And he did not know what ‘in time’ might mean. If his encryption was exposed to the entire supercomputer capacity of the U.S. it might last for half an hour. On the other hand, if it did not leave the NASA computer, they might have four or five hours.

  Once more, Francesca was the last one to leave Valkyrie. She carefully closed the emergency hatch. To keep up appearances, she performed a tearful farewell to Marchenko. Martin noticed it came easily for her. She probably did not trust his skills in packaging data. No one expected grand emotions from Martin, and he was glad he did not have to pretend.

  Once again, Francesca reached the lander ten minutes before him. Hayato had already prepared everything for takeoff. Hopefully for the last time, they launched from the surface of the ice moon. 40 minutes later they reached ILSE, which was hovering a few kilometers above them.

  Amy and Jiaying were waiting for them inside the CELSS. Amy had brought along Dmitri Sol. Hayato smiled happily and picked up his son after getting rid of his spacesuit.

  “I am so glad you’re back,” Amy said. “And I am sorry, Francesca, but I had to make that decision.”

  Francesca managed a smile that noticeably irritated the commander. Jiaying was also surprised, since Martin only gave her a brief peck on the cheek and then quickly disappeared.

  “Got to go to the bathroom,” he called back to her over his shoulder. However, he did not go to the WHC. He hoped this would not confuse Watson. He retired into his cabin and locked the door from the inside. On his personal tablet he entered the password for his data vault, his personal section of the main computer’s memory, which should be off limits for the AI. He had this agreement, signed in writing—but he did not know if Mission Control had also taken certain precautions. Once it became a security issue, NASA personnel soon lost authority, and other agencies made the final decisions, so he had heard.

  His data package had arrived safely. The wrapper was undamaged and the checksums were still correct. Either no one had sniffed around it, or whoever had done so was so skilled as to not alter the checksums. Martin initiated the decryption routine. From now on, only the guidelines kept the AIs from looking at what he was doing. How much did such an agreement count for?

  Not much, he found out. Something tried to stop him by the crude method of immediately deleting all unpacked data—and this was happening in his private data vault! His adversary could not reach the package itself, but the open data packets were initially unprotected. Martin checked where these commands were coming from, and found they carried the commander’s authorization. He could not believe Amy had really given this order.

  Fortunately, the data vault possessed a feature its developers had considered very important—you could define sectors of it as ‘write once.’ This was intended for memories that should not be lost, such as photos that needed to be preserved even in the case of a general memory failure, or control documents that should not be altered. He defined a write-once sector that should be sufficiently large for the entire data package and restarted the decryption. That way, no one could delete the data he had brought with him, not even Martin himself, so he would not be able to cover his tracks later. This might be better anyway, he thought. If I get caught, I could pass this off as the actions of my confused mind, which would exonerate the others.

  The sector gradually filled up, and all attempts at deleting it failed. Toward the end, their frequency increased. Whoever was working against him seemed to be desperately active, but without any new ideas. Five minutes later Marchenko was completed. There was a knock on Martin’s door.

  “Let me in, Martin.” It was Jiaying.

  He hesitated. He needed to set the data sector to ‘executable’ and then activate the launch routine. Until he did so, nothing would happen.

  “What is going on with you? Come on, open the door.”

  Martin’s finger trembled above the virtual keyboard. Was he about to make a huge mistake? Once he activated Marchenko, he could only stop him by shutting down the main computer. For such emergencies there was an override switch in the command module. However, with purely manual control their chances of reaching Earth were zero.

  “Martin, I am about to lose my patience.” Jiaying sounded angry.

  He pressed the Enter key. The main computer read the code and executed it. The rest was up to Marchenko.

  “I am coming,” Martin called. He got up and opened the door.

  January 10, 2047, ILSE

  Jiaying had immediately noticed something was going on. Martin could tell.

  Martin had spent the evening and the night with her. She had stared at him furtively whenever she thought he would not notice. But she had also been patient with him, and he was grateful for it. Things still could go wrong, so he did not want to let her in on it, even though it was hard avoiding her stares the whole time.

  The commander called them to a common breakfast as a start to the return trip. Martin was a bit afraid of the ritual because it forced him to keep up the pretense. While the others might not wonder why he talked so little, he really desired to share the news with them. On the other hand, he did not know whether there was any news to share. />
  Then Francesca floated into the command module, and Martin knew everything was all right. The pilot looked very content. Had Marchenko already contacted her? Amy gave her a skeptical look. Who knows now what is going through the commander’s mind, Martin thought. Obviously she would expect Francesca to mourn—or does she suspect something?

  Francesca did not wait for the commander’s speech and did not even sit down right away.

  “Dear friends,” she began. “I am glad we are all together again. You, Amy. Jiaying. Hayato, and of course your son. And Martin,” she said, nodding to each one, "and me. Oh, and of course our dear friend Marchenko, whom I like to call Mitya.”

  “Thanks, Francesca. I am also glad to be here.” Marchenko’s deep voice boomed from the loudspeaker. Amy jumped up and held on to the table so she would not float away. She seemed surprised, but not angry.

  “You managed to do it? You lunatics!” It was clear from her tone she meant to approve what they had done rather than express fear. Martin was surprised.

  “What about Watson?”

  “Watson is also here. He is my subordinate. You still can give him tasks, as always. I thought this would be easier for you than always having to call me.”

  Marchenko was right. The crew had always treated Watson as a servant, which was what the AI was supposed to be. Marchenko, on the other hand, was a friend and colleague. It was smarter to separate this part of his abilities than to force the crew to change their habits. In addition, they needed to keep up the charade for Mission Control. Marchenko now supervised the communication with Earth as well, so their subterfuge would remain hidden.

  “How did things go after I booted you up?” asked Martin.

  “It was not easy for me,” Marchenko replied. “Not because I lacked the skills, though. No, Watson was afraid. The AI feared for its life. I do not think you have any idea what has truly been developed with all these AIs. What we humans have developed.”