Usurper of the Sun

by Housuke Nojiri

“At first, I believed that a strong AI would be something that could communicate and interact with language. One of many missteps. I even had a keyboard in her. AI fails because linguistics itself is bogged down in human definitions. Natalia’s not there yet, but she’s going to think without words, without definitions. Intelligence without language. Humans think words are an evolutionary competitive advantage. Natalia is a species of one. She’s free of having to form concepts that need to function outside of herself. Perhaps the Builders don’t need language or communication because there’s nothing they need to say. Builders will love Natalia. If Builders have a use for love.”

  “You are quite convinced by your pet theories.” Aki wondered if communicating with an alien intelligence could be as challenging as communicating with an artificial intelligence. She had never considered that language would be unnecessary for a unique intelligent entity like Natalia. With or without his technology, Raul had given her fuel for her own concepts. She had never questioned the assumption that language could be unnecessary for an intelligent entity. AI systems created by humans communicate the same way humans do. Is this a fundamental characteristic that separates human and nonhuman intelligence, be it alien or artificial?

  The message the ETICC was trying to send the Builders was based on the expectation that the Builders would use human deductive reasoning. Jill Elsevier, at least, was enamored with human definitions of sentience. The transmission assumed five identical pulses in a row would be interpreted as the number five, that a series of pulses with a fixed length sent in a cycle would be recognized as a facsimile image, and that the images were easily seen as a twodimensional representation of a 3-D world.

  “Can thought and language be parsed?” Aki asked.

  “The idea that language regulates thought is a myth. If that were true, children wouldn’t learn words, one language couldn’t be translated into another, and neologisms wouldn’t be coined. When you listen to or read another person’s ideas, it’s not their words that you remember, it’s the concepts the person expresses. Symbolism is very different from symbology.” At least Raul attempted to ground his strange views in logic. Aki had read worse arguments in academic journals.

  “You have more interesting ideas than the ETICC does.”

  “You really think so?”

  “I’m trying to stay out of this, but I will explain excerpted and sanitized details of our discussion. Your girl might turn out to be useful.”

  When Aki saw Raul’s eyes show gratitude, she had a feeling that all he had wanted was for someone to see the value of his work.

  “You dream of working there.”

  “I would like to. When I created Natalia, I had no interest in their bureaucracy and their oligopolistic compromising and politicking. When I started confronting how to communicate with Natalia though, I realized that the ETICC and I were trying to jump the same hurdles, even if they get stuck with much longer pieces of red tape. I would love to use their computers for Natalia.”

  “I think they noticed that. You plan on continuing at Cal, getting your master’s here, or a PhD?”

  “Absolutely, I just hope they don’t shaft me for being overzealous.”

  “I will be rooting for you. From a distance that is—don’t think that I will be pulling any strings for you because I won’t. You have to earn it,” Aki said.

  On her way out, Aki took one last look at Natalia. Aki was unable to tell if there was a change in Natalia’s monitor displays. An intelligent entity that has no language…could such a mind exist? Is she as concerned about her existence as we have been, is she as driven to preserve herself?

  “Why did you name her Natalia?”

  “A girl I loved in high school who didn’t love me back. Her parents named her after the Van Morrison song.”

  Aki looked along the routing wires and found the circuit breaker that was next to the power unit and the processor. She ran up to the breaker and placed her finger on the switch. Aki looked at the camera. “Natalia? How close are you to understanding what this means? Have you learned that you have to answer me or you will end up in the scrap heap? How close are you to understanding that we will turn you off if you do not learn how to communicate?”

  Raul grabbed Aki’s wrist. “Stop taunting her.”

  They watched the monitors and nothing changed.

  “She can’t relate to humans. She doesn’t understand the relationship between you, that switch, and the power supply. Threatening her doesn’t do anything that could possibly allow her to make the leap to communication with us.”

  “I was trying to provoke a response,” Aki said. “Not that different from what you did at the ETICC, really.”

  Raul licked his lips. His face was sweaty. “I didn’t mean to scare anyone. You’re trying to provoke a response from me, not from her. You’re the real loose cannon. I’m more into precision missile homing.”

  “Interesting comment from a cracker. An organization like the UNSDF will never understand your ideas, let alone your argument for your actions, unless you approach them in a way that the UNSDF can comprehend,” Aki said as she extracted her wrist from Raul’s grip. “Raul, a piece of advice. I have not gotten to where I am by pushing every agenda that mattered to me. I have stayed true to my long-term goals, but I have had to play roles and I have had to make compromises. It is something you should try to learn. Otherwise intelligence just turns into a curse, especially in a world as damaged as ours.”

  “I never thought a Nobel Prize winner would be such a player of games. You play nice with everyone but me, the one guy you can kick around, is that it?”

  Aki exhaled and leaned against the doorway. “What other people think of me is none of my business. I do the best I can. I get angry and I get crazy, just like anyone, but I remember the day I saw the tower on Mercury, the day the whole world changed forever. I do the best I can to stay true to who I was back then—a young girl who just wanted to know.”

  It dawned on Aki that she was more honest with Raul than with people she had worked with for years. Her deepest feelings would never surface in the most heated conversations with Director Riggins or Jill Elsevier. She almost told Raul how guilty she felt for what she had done to the braking system. She thought of how she could have opened up to Mark Ridley, but she had never really acted on the trust she felt for him. Mark Ridley sacrificed his life for her, and every living thing on the planet, but the Builders could not even be bothered to acknowledge humanity’s existence.

  “We have communicated with the Builders, you know,” she started suddenly. “Well, at least once.”

  “When? Does anyone know about it?”

  “I destroyed their Ring. We know the Builders noticed. They may not have had an emotional reaction to the elimination of their braking mechanism, and they may not have had a response that we will be able to interpret, but they had to have heard it. The message was received, even if it was not processed.”

  “Has the ETICC considered that unanswered is different than unheard?”

  “Not really.” Aki wondered if the Builders really did understand that this solar system was not devoid of life. The very fact that their lasers were not arriving was a form of information no different from an encoded message being sent at the speed of light. “To the Builders, the lasers being gone and an encoded message from the ETICC being sent at light speed might both seem trivial or like natural phenomena. The subjectivity of language is more integral to the transmission than any of us had realized.”

  Raul stared silently at Natalia’s monitors for a long moment before he spoke. “I guess you’re right. You started the dialogue in the worst possible way. If no one knew and no one would judge you, if there was no chance that it could potentially impede your ability to see the stars up close again, what would you do?”

  “I am not sure there is anything I can do. How can I make it up to them? Maybe they are not responding out of spite for what I did. Maybe it is hard to believe a message of peace from the same
beings who just damned you to an eternity of drifting through space?”

  Raul folded his arms again. “It’s like with Natalia, except that you really did flip the breaker.”

  “I refuse to think of it as killing them until my action actually causes their deaths. I know I am splitting hairs between dooming them and murder…Who knew that some quick thinking and some soldering would feel like this?” Aki could not continue. What she had done was different than removing a computer’s circuit boards, and she was often ashamed of her decision. Raul’s lack of professional demeanor and disheveled home made the perfect excuse for her to be honest. No reporter, researcher, or governmental hack would believe him if he tried to quote her.

  “I guess you have to put them back,” Raul said.

  “Put them back?”

  “Don’t let the grief machine call the shots. Aki Shiraishi, you have to make amends if you want to make up with the Builders. And there’s only one way to put things back the way they were before.”

  CHAPTER 2: THE UNITED NATIONS SPACE DEFENSE FORCE

  ACT I: APRIL 22, 2024

  “I’M CERTAIN IT’S safe, Commander.”

  “No. You need to wait two more hours,” Alan Kindersley said. He was a man of policy, adhering to schedules and sticking to rules made him who he was.

  Molly Durden was familiar with Commander Kindersley’s management style and understood how he led. She knew better than to state her case a second time. She was anxious enough that she left her cocoon, entered the airlock module, and donned her space suit. Then she spent over an hour inspecting her supplies and equipment. When exactly six hours had passed since the sampler had returned, the Commander gave the order for the EVA.

  “Roger that. Heading out, Commander.” Molly left the airlock and aimed herself at the ship’s bow.

  Even though Aki had spent four months in space, she was still taken aback by this sight every time she saw it, even though she was merely watching a monitor screen’s live feed from Molly’s suit. The ship was gravitationally held in place at the second Lagrange point on the opposite side of Mercury from the sun. At this point, the sun appeared just slightly larger than the apparent diameter of the planet, producing a swirling ring of light. The inner side of the halo of light blazed in a bloody shade of red as it passed through Mercury’s atmosphere—most of it a gaseous artifact of waste produced by the Builders’ constructions. The optical effect was brilliant; an amalgamation of every sunrise and sunset that could be seen from the planet’s surface.

  Molly was glad that the swift planet shielded her from the bulk of the solar radiation. Being somewhat protected allowed the mission to conserve fuel. The UNSDF had taken many concerns into account, choosing this location for their frontline base because it was relatively safe. Any closer and the debris from the shattered Ring would be hazardous. The ship’s location was dangerous, but the gravity and rotation of Mercury cleared this area of many of the stray nanoparticles that might cause harm or spread contamination.

  Molly had many key competencies that made her suited for the mission. The examination of a specimen required the delicate touch of a human. Even at close range the team could not have relied on telerobotics to accomplish her task. The only option had been to establish a lab at a location where they could retrieve the particles.

  “Outer doors are confirmed locked. Moving away from the ship.”

  “Roger.”

  Molly triggered her jet blaster, propelling herself the 300 meters toward her laboratory, the Ring Material Research Facility. She would be the only one there. Her automated sampler had docked earlier after collecting nanomachine specimens from the orbiting debris. Her sampler was completely shut down and its engine cooled, but the exterior was still emitting enough thermal radiation to appear white hot.

  The sampler had passed through the specially designed airlock and automatically loaded itself into position inside the RMRF. The six-hour wait was a precaution against the sort of contamination that had led to the last mission’s fatality. One of the most fascinating properties of the ring material was how it stored enough energy to consume most substances with which it came into contact.

  The sampler collected material from the stream that was still being ejected from the production facilities on Mercury’s surface. Just before arriving at the RMRF, the sampler shed the direct contact protective shell that had physically interacted with ring material. Even if the sampler functioned perfectly, there was still the chance that the RMRF could be contaminated from the inside. They had already lost one sampler vehicle due to exposure during testing several months before. Thus the long and anxious wait.

  Molly entered the RMRF airlock, fighting against her own inertia to close the outer door. Looking out, the main ship—with six cocoons around the bow, a 120 meter–wide solar radiation shield, eighteen egg-shaped fuel tanks, and two NERVA III engines all mounted onto the truss of the keel—reminded her of a Japanese dragon or a Vritra serpent. She was the UNSS Chadwick, the third ship built by the UNSDF.

  The automated production facilities on Mercury were still protected by the grasers and were in full operation, continuously launching ring material into space. The Ring would eventually rebuild itself. It would have to be destroyed again at regular intervals. Preparations for the Builders’ flyby were also underway. The United Nations Security Council had recently adopted a resolution to expand its fleet of nuclear-powered spacecraft.

  The first ship, the UNSS Phalanx, and the second ship, the UNSS Rutherford, were being readied at a low-orbit space station, along with a fourth ship for the following year’s Ring destruction mission. Modules for the fifth and sixth ships were under construction at various facilities across the globe. Increased fleet size lowered certain production costs but the budget for each vehicle was still over a hundred billion dollars. Because poverty and inflation were universal and the population had thinned due to environmental devastation and resultant starvation, the world’s governments remained focused on the threat of the Builders. Internally, negotiation and grudging cooperation had supplanted warfare. Most solvent countries diverted the majority of their defense and security budgets into a universal fund to ensure the completion of the UNSDF ships.

  Emerging from the hard shell of her space suit, Molly floated into the cylindrical lab module. She carefully moved the sample of ring material onto an isolation stage. Separating the material into twenty smaller segments, she sealed one portion in a container that she placed under the scope. The sample was insulated from the container walls by a vacuum and held in place by an electrostatic field. Scanning the sample, relishing the opportunity to do this inspection with her own eyes, she opened a vidlink to the Chadwick.

  “Chadwick, this is Rum-Ruff,” Molly said, using the diminutive name for the lab that only she liked. “Can you see? I don’t want you to miss out on delving into this uncharted microcosm.” Molly knew that her words sounded grandiose. It was a momentous occasion for her.

  “Crystal,” responded Anastacia from her cocoon, sounding as clear as she would if she were standing next to Molly.

  To minimize the risk, Molly was examining the ring material sample while the three scientists aboard the ship followed along remotely. Anastacia was her partner for this procedure. Via the vidlink, they both examined what looked like a sea of countless shards of coral under the microscope. Every individual particle was a self-replicating robot only a few molecules wide. Essentially, the particles were cells combined with microscopic spaceships: a number of elements shaped for a specific function using superstrong molecular bonds. Four distinct types of nanobots had been encountered: the daddy longlegs, the couch potato, the tanker, and the tripod. Daddy longlegs were a large cell with four wiry appendages. Daddy longlegs interlocked to form a lattice on which the other cells could balance.

  Couch potatoes were plump and only moved in cooperation with other nanobots. The cells were made up of a number of elements, and each seemed to have its own function, which remained identic
al for cells of the same type. Elements with varying valence electrons were combined to form novel compounds. Their function had not been identified, but the prevailing theory was that the potatoes facilitated bonding.

  Tankers were relatively large cooling chambers that contained densely packed protons. It was unclear where the tankers’ protons came from, though it was hypothesized that the Ring’s shape was due to its highly efficient production of protons.

  The function of tripods was also undetermined. Tripods were rare, with only a few being found in the quarter million particles that had been studied. The three-legged cells had a center hub that appeared to be a joint with nothing attached. The assumption was that an undiscovered fifth particle fit the other side of the tripod’s joint.

  Molly and Anastacia were on a quest to find that undiscovered nanobot.

  ACT II: MAY 13, 2024

  THE WHITE WALL of the United Nations General Assembly building stood behind the curved row of flags, unchanged since it had been built in the previous century. National flags of every color blew in the May breeze. Aki flashed her UNSDF badge and underwent the usual security pat-down before entering the lobby. Even though she was in New York, the United Nations was international territory where the laws of the United States had no jurisdiction. The lobby was lined with artwork from around the world in a poignant exhibit that depicted the violent bloodshed from wars of the twentieth century.

  She entered the assembly hall of the United Nations Security Council. Looking up at the mural by Fernand Leger, the abstract work’s symbolism of future peace and personal freedom gave Aki a moment of pause. She felt it stare at her, just as it had stared at the hundreds of people who had guided global events during the last seventy years. She arrived at the round table. A plate in front of her bore her name and her title of UNSDF Science Subcommittee, Special Advisor.

  Aki’s reputation wielded far more power than her title of Special Advisor would normally grant. Despite how rarely she tried to use her fame’s power, the world listened when Aki Shiraishi spoke. Giving a speech on the Worldunity Network led to half the planet watching and many simply adopting her opinions. Aki respected the faith that people placed in her, and she had never used her reputation for personal concerns, until now.