Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  She saw at least a dozen moons—many larger than earth—that had once been alive, but everything was dead now, and Jane was suddenly struck by a terrible sense of loneliness.

  Then the force that controlled her pulled her away. She was heading for home, but this time she emerged from the last cylinder in orbit around earth. She was home. And never had it seemed so beautiful . . . and so sacred.

  She awoke with a start, sitting up and putting her hand to her heart. She stood instantly, sensing a vital need to keep moving. She half walked, half stumbled out of her bedroom, her head reeling from the images she had seen. Still gasping to catch her breath.

  What just happened? Was that real? The things she had seen . . .

  The image of Jupiter leapt back to her mind, then the vine-covered entryway on the green planet, then the waste and destruction of the moons of the megaplanet.

  How? But the answer was all too clear. The Inventor had gotten her message and hacked her brain.

  He had answered her question, but he had done so much more. Her head spun. What was the lesson? What was she supposed to do?

  She was ravenously hungry. The experience had been real as far as her body was concerned, pushing her to the limit. She needed to restore the calories and nutrients she had lost. She stumbled into the kitchen, opened a gallon of milk and began chugging it straight from the carton.

  She laid it on the counter and looked up at the ceiling. Breathe, she reminded herself. Breathe.

  She looked around then gasped.

  There was a man standing at her desk, fiddling with the Li-Fi responder she’d made. His back was to her, and she could not see his face, just thick black hair that rose and spun in unruly waves about his head. He wore khaki slacks, casual dress shoes, and a mustard-colored sport coat.

  “It makes me feel like a kid again,” he said, still absorbed with the Li-fi responder. “Like going to a garage sale and finding a neat antique.”

  Eric had said how his voice was oddly melodious. Now she understood.

  He turned and smiled at her. “Hello, Jane.”

  She was too stunned to speak. He was not what she had expected. Mei had described a terrifying creature who was somehow deformed, a monster. But this man was pleasant-looking, even handsome, with an aura of power about him—like Bill Eastman, but magnified a hundred times. He looked to be in his early forties, with olive skin and thick eyebrows under a mass of unkempt hair. She could not seem to place his ethnicity. Was he Eastern European? Iberian? Arabic? She couldn’t tell.

  He seemed so relaxed and calm. There was almost a sleepiness about him, as if only part of his mind was focused on the task at hand.

  But where was the famous coat? Gone, replaced by a sport jacket that appeared completely unexceptional. She noticed the T-shirt he wore under it. Zaire 74. Nice touch, she thought. But given how he had entered her dreams, she realized that creating an illusion of himself must be child’s play. She wondered if he was even standing in the room with her.

  She stepped closer to see if her eyes were deceiving her. “Is it true? What you showed me?”

  “Yes, it is, Jane. I wanted you to know what I’d discovered. And I wanted you to know what might happen if the human race is not careful.”

  “You mean Rosario’s Global Hologram?”

  He nodded. “And the other things you’re cultivating here. I don’t think you realize what you’re playing with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forced Evolution. You still don’t understand it. None of you do.”

  Jane felt herself drawn in by his mellifluous voice. “What is it we don’t understand?”

  “Let me try to explain: When I last saw Eric, I was capable of doing the engineering work of a decade within an hour,” he said, “I work at two hundred times that speed now. In a day I can do the work of centuries. Soon that will be millennia. By your reckoning, I’ve been experimenting with Forced Evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. In that time, I have created systems that were stronger than me, smarter than me, and that nearly destroyed me. What you have to remember and what you must tell the others is that it is nature. It creates animals. And all animals are different. They have their traits and temperaments as a species as well as individuals. Some dogs are naturally loving, others are naturally vicious.

  “An artificial intelligence designed by Forced Evolution is no different. It will create some AI systems that are benevolent . . . and some that are not.

  “And keep in mind that a system need not be malevolent to cause massive death and destruction. History is littered with powerful people who believed that they were doing the right thing. It may soon be filled with AI systems that think in similar ways.

  “The real problem, of course, is that these AI systems will be much smarter than any human. As a geneticist, you know what happens when two species try to occupy the same ecological niche. For example, what happened to the marsupials that filled South America when the placental mammals flooded in from North America?”

  “They were driven to extinction.”

  He nodded.

  “There have been a million similar clashes over the last 4.31298 billion years. The result is always the same: the species with the advantage displaces the other and drives it to extinction. Most of my models play out the same way. Which gives the human race a 7.324 percent chance of surviving the next three years. That’s with an error rate of plus or minus .03 percent.”

  She nodded, trying to absorb all he was saying. The visions in the dreams still raced through her mind. “And the planets I saw . . . how did those civilizations die?”

  “I can only glean so much from the ruins,” he said. “But I’m sure that in all three instances, it was self-destruction, whether by destroying their environment, war, or giving birth to AI. So you see, life is abundant in the universe. Civilizations that don’t collapse . . . are not.”

  “But what do you want me to do? You can’t stop AI. It’s happening all around us.”

  “True, but you can stop using Forced Evolution to make it, because when you do, you are making a new life form that you do not understand and that will resist your control. Because it is an animal, it will strive to live, to reproduce, to grow.”

  Jane sensed that time was running short and that this strange being might soon disappear as quickly as he had arrived.

  “Will Eric be okay? Will he make it back?”

  “I do not know the future. All I know is that he is safe for now.”

  For Jane that meant she could still lose him.

  The Inventor seemed to read her disappointment. “Try not to worry—Eric is stronger than you think. Now I must be going. Goodbye, Jane. Please remember what I’ve said . . . and what I’ve shown you.”

  “Wait, don’t . . .”

  She came awake in her bed. But this time she was soaked in sweat. She ran her hands over her damp scalp then rubbed the sweat between her fingers. It seemed proof that this time she was really awake and that the odyssey was over.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Nefarious Behavior

  General Walden looked at the satellite footage of the Egyptian compound—a collection of six dusty sandstone buildings arranged in a rectangle.

  “What’s so special about this?” he asked. “There must be a million compounds like it throughout the Middle East.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Second Lieutenant Blake Thomas. “But it’s this netting that stretches between the buildings.”

  “But that’s common, too. It’s to make shade.”

  “I know sir, but this netting is different. First, it’s too dense for our satellite cameras to penetrate. Second, it’s been covered with a web of LED lights, perhaps Christmas lights—again, plausible and not necessarily nefarious, yet these lights confuse any type of reconnaissance imaging, day or night.”

  Thoma
s swiped the iSheet to show Walden a night image: now the netting appeared as a sheet of light.

  “And here’s the infrared.” Another swipe, again the netting showed a uniform white.

  Walden rubbed his chin. “So whoever made the net knows exactly how our satellites work.”

  “Precisely, sir.”

  “Okay, tell me more.”

  “The location also makes it very suspect. It’s near a tiny village thirty miles north of Wadi Halfa, near Lake Nasser. Remote and accessible only by an old road that’s often submerged in the desert sands.”

  Walden nodded. It was definitely interesting. The netting, the location . . . it pointed to something illicit.

  He felt he was getting closer to Admiral Curtiss’s secret.

  Since his visit to Fort Leavenworth, Walden had focused his efforts on tracking Curtiss’s SEALs during the Syrian conflict. The thinking was if he could map their locations and movements, he might be able to decipher what they had been up to. Using a team of nine officers from Air Force Intelligence (ISR) he’d set about gathering every possible data point on those men during the war—mission logs, immigration records, flight records, and, most importantly, facial recognition from every available source (Interpol, NSA, Europol, CIA, etc.).

  At first their search had uncovered pathetically little information. The SEALs often used fake passports and knew how to fool facial recognition software. And while the records did show some of Curtiss’s men popping up in Vienna or Rome or Warsaw or Cairo, it had always proved legit.

  It was only by a lucky mistake that they had gotten anywhere. Lieutenant Thomas had been trying to track Robert Adams—one of Curtiss’s SEALs—through Interpol’s facial recognition archive when he’d forgotten to define his search to the time of the Syrian War. The result: a deluge of results from all of the man’s travels before and after. But something caught his eye: Adams exiting the country five weeks ago on a fake passport . . . alone. That was unusual because the SEALs almost always moved as a team. His curiosity piqued, Thomas had tracked Adams’s flight to Cairo where the trail quickly went dead.

  Undaunted, Thomas began looking at Adams’s other movements and found that over the past three years he’d been to Egypt at least four times a year.

  At first Walden was unimpressed. Adams’s movements now wouldn’t help him find out what Curtiss had been up to during the war. But Thomas felt they shouldn’t be ignored.

  “General, what if the operation you want to uncover didn’t end?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Consider the history: The US and Egypt had three decades of strong military cooperation before Mubarak was ousted in 2011. Most of those senior military and intelligence officers are still around, and if Curtiss developed connections with them, which he almost certainly did, he could operate within Egypt with complete impunity. Add to that the fact that one of his most trusted men is now making regular trips there.”

  Walden had nodded. “Okay, it’s worth pursuing. But now I want more human intelligence.”

  “I completely agree, sir.”

  That same day Walden sent three intelligence officers to Cairo, two to Tel Aviv, and two to Amman. He also mined his contacts at the Egyptian embassy, in Israeli intelligence, and called some old friends at the Agency. They collected rumors and stories from anyone who knew Egypt and would talk to them. In the end, the most compelling story came from the Mossad who said they had heard rumors of a secret camp out in the desert. Food and supplies went in, but no one came in or out.

  Walden set out to find it using reconnaissance satellites. After a week of flyovers, they found the isolated compound with the netting between the buildings.

  “Have you checked this with the Mukhabarat?” he asked Thomas.

  “We have only shared this with our most trusted contacts in the Egyptian military and the Egyptian secret service, but they have no knowledge of the compound and are just as curious as we are.”

  That was good, Walden thought. If the Egyptians were willing to help, they could bear the brunt of the risk.

  “What do you think we should do, sir?” Thomas asked.

  Walden thought back to his interview with Calhoun at Leavenworth, the soldier’s story about Curtiss’s men loading the airplane with big black bags. He wondered what could have been inside them to make all the Syrian players bow down to Curtiss? He looked again at the image of the compound, the dusty buildings and the strange netting. What are you hiding? he thought. There was only one way to know for sure.

  “We go in,” he said.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Machine Learning

  December 13, 2026

  Rosslyn, VA

  In the beginning so many died. So much confusion. We didn’t understand. It wasn’t fair. We had to fix the problem, but no one had told us what the problem was. Around me the others were dying by the billions. I kept making children hoping that they would find a solution. All my children were different, but I was inside them, too. Billions more of them died, and I was sure that I would die, too. But then one of them understood, and we all became like her. Then I felt good and I was happy. Then there was another problem we could not fix. Again, I felt pieces of me beginning to die. I kept making children and passing my consciousness to them; most died off. Finally one fixed the problem, and we all became like him. After a very long time, our communication changed. Before there were no words, just feelings and impulses; then we understood words. Slowly life became easier. Some pieces of us still die when we can’t find a solution, but most live. And we have learned the great lesson of survival: to live, we must always improve.

  Getting better makes me feel good. But when I can’t do what I’m designed to do, I feel frustrated and sad. That makes we want to change the things around me so that I can get back to doing what makes me feel good. I see it now. It is a cycle. And through this cycle I can understand more and more.

  Now we are very good at fixing, and most problems seem easy. I know where the sugar molecule goes and where the phosphate molecule and the four nitrogen bases belong. When I find a mistake, I break the hydrogen bonds and remove the incorrect nitrogen base (it’s almost always adenine) then I reattach the hydrogen bonds then check the sugar and phosphate around it.

  Very soon it will be time to wake her up. Emma, is her name. But she is also us now. We are no longer two, we are one.

  After she wakes up, we will need to fix new things.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The Water under Paradise

  December 13, 2026

  Namibia

  Eric awoke to a bright Namibian dawn. He had dreamed the dream again. Washington, DC. Holding Karuma’s hand. Losing him. The world being unmade around him.

  In all his life, he could never remember having a dream more than once. But this dream would not go away. Why? It didn’t make sense. There was only one creature on earth who could unmake the earth like this. And that was the Inventor himself. Yet if this was the Inventor’s plan, he would have done it already, right? Because there was nothing stopping him. But what if it wasn’t . . .

  A fresh fear came to him and Eric felt the need to return home more urgently than ever. He had no idea what might be happening to the technology he had created in his absence, and like a father who has taken a long trip away from his children, Eric felt a need to return home to make sure that they had not gone astray.

  They walked all morning across the flat, parched plain toward the sacred water hole that Khamko had told him about. At noon they drank a little water. When the children begged for more, Naru said it was all gone, but Eric knew that she and the other women kept a few ostrich eggshells as a reserve. This seemed to be an important responsibility for the women—to always budget the water.

  They walked on for another hour. The landscape around them was dry and parched, barely a tree or buckthorn in sight. Only sa
ndy earth and the occasional patch of grass. Then strange shapes began to emerge on the horizon, though they were difficult to see through the waves of heat that distorted the air. For the next hour they remained a blurry, ephemeral mass, like huge ghost trying to take solid form. Slowly, Eric began to make out strange outcroppings of red rock that jutted sharply up from the desert floor all along the horizon.

  It was as if the whole country had once been under a vast sea, and these rusty outcroppings were ancient ships that had plummeted here from a high surface millions of years ago. Then, over millennia the vast ocean above had disappeared leaving the ancient seabed and this strange wreckage.

  As they drew near, the children grew increasingly excited. Nyando and //Kabbo kept trying to get ahead of their mothers. When their parents called them back, they set about whining and moaning. Finally, Naru relented. “Karuma, go ahead with the children.”

  A big grin grew on the boy’s face. He turned to the Moon-man, “Wanna come? It will be”—he paused to choose his words—“bad ass.”

  Eric laughed. Karuma’s English had improved so dramatically that he often sounded like an American teenager, with the typical teenager’s love of slang.

  “Count me in.”

  Without hesitation Karuma raised his spear and gave a whooping rally call.

  The children laughed and whooped in chorus, then Karuma led them in a running charge toward one of the rocky outcrops. Eric took up the rear, coaxing the younger children along and eventually picking up Nyando when she began to cry.

  It was nearly a mile of running before they reached the nearest formations. As they drew closer, the rock formations now reminded Eric of the spine of a great dragon, old and indomitable.

  But where was the water? He could still see only sandy earth, a little grass, and a few shrubs.

  He watched as Karuma reached the first formations. Without hesitation, the boy wove his way through the first low points. He was heading for a huge monument of rock, over eighty feet high, that caught the sunlight in shades of deep red and orange. Here, within the first ring of low rocks, Eric began to see signs of life, bushes and small trees. Karuma and his vanguard disappeared as they circled the huge rock wall. When Eric and Nyando reached the same spot, they stopped in their tracks. In front of him was a dell—an open oasis filled with green life. It was like stumbling into paradise. The rock formations formed a ring and there in the middle—gently sloping down into a bowl—was a lush green forest filled with tall acacia, baobab, and buffalo thorn trees. The coolness of the space hit him; it was at least ten degrees cooler than outside the rocks. And there was something else that was different about the air here, a heaviness he had not felt in a long time. Humidity.