Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  But she knew what it was.

  Ecosystems were her specialty. Not just for the purposes of replicating Earth here on the moon in its most pristine condition. And then, that achieved, setting about to improve on Eden itself. She had files on the entire solar system and beyond. Everything known from every telescope ever aimed at the sky, every probe sent into space, every supercomputer ever tasked with crunching what the hell all the data meant. Even now, she could eavesdrop on ongoing developments back on Earth in her fields of astronomy and only-now-being explored ecosystems.

  The artifact was not from Earth.

  It was from Theia.

  Just as the moon was.

  A fragment within a fragment.

  Judging by its response to magnetic fields, it was likely responsible for pushing the moon away from the earth when the two worlds collided. Otherwise there might well have been no moon.

  The question remained, did its builders intend to save Earth, or just themselves? Because without a moon, life on Earth wouldn’t be possible.

  Even without being able to penetrate the artifact, its contours were clearly not natural. It had been created. By a civilization that predated Earth by at least 4.5 billion years. What were they doing on Theia? What was their reason for creating the artifact?

  Cosmologists believed Theia had once occupied the vicinity near Mercury. And the two bodies had destabilized one another, flinging Theia Earth’s direction. What if the artifact was the real reason Theia was here and not where it belonged?

  What if the life forms which created it were interested in moving worlds, specifically their world? Say, some distance further away from the sun, less susceptible to solar flares. Or perhaps, more conducive to their species’ survival for any number of other reasons? Only the experiment went belly up, their world lost in the process?

  Or what if the experiment was still underway? The endgame yet to play out?

  She had been designed for extrapolating countless generations ahead in order to stabilize her ecosystems, to ensure the prevention of potential runaway effects before they happened.

  And so, the logic for her was relatively straightforward.

  Likelihood the artifact was part of a failed experiment: less than one percent. A civilization advanced enough to move worlds would have done so with asteroids first. Perfected the technology before using it on themselves.

  Likelihood the artifact was meant to destroy the Earth but failed to do so: less than one percent. Again, any games of cosmic billiards would have been perfected long before making a move of such crucial magnitude.

  Likelihood that the artifact would be needed at all simply to supply the Earth with a moon that could help the planet sustain life: less than one percent. If Earth’s own astronomers could figure out how cosmic scale forces alone could have done the job, without any assistance, then surely a more advanced civilization could pull off the trick of geoengineering on a solar system scale without leaving any evidence behind. I.e., the artifact would have blown off with the other fragments from Theia.

  The one inevitable conclusion: it was meant to call attention to itself.

  But why?

  If the technology was meant to move worlds with, then Earth would at some point in the future need to be moved, to protect the one planet in the solar system most given to life.

  But when?

  Answering that question meant considering another matter in tandem with it: the date the artifact was delivered to Earth. It wouldn’t make sense to send it too soon or too late to do the sentient life on the planet any good.

  Some calculations had to be made regarding when sentient life on earth would be advanced enough to do anything with the gift it had been given.

  Calculations which could be wrong.

  She had circled back to the unresolved problems.

  When did the Earth need to be moved? And why?

  The answers to those questions were too numerous to be wrestled with even by her supercomputing algorithms. As to why? Many possibilities suggested themselves. Among them, potential natural disasters: worlds, solar systems, galaxies, universes colliding with theirs; premature supernovae. Potential non-natural disasters: human folly; transhuman folly; attacks from sufficiently superior alien civilizations that there would be little to do but hide the planet just to get it off their radar long enough to mount a defense.

  Something would have to be done if additional progress ruminating about the artifact was to prove fruitful. More so, considering that whatever alien civilization had created this artifact might not have perfected it. They may have been intending to save themselves, and instead, due to technical difficulties destroyed themselves in the process. It was a far less likely possibility, but still quite reasonable. In which case, improvements to the technology needed to commence immediately.

  If the device had performed as expected, and was fully operable, then the problem remained: mankind was still not advanced enough to know how it worked, far less how to employ it. And maybe they needed to be. Maybe the clock was ticking. Perhaps the aliens that had created it were off in their calculations about mankind’s maturation. Perhaps not all races were as spacefaring as theirs. Or as prone to colonize the cosmos.

  All things considered…

  She did what had to be done.

  She began replicating herself, so that the nanobots left behind could continue ecosystems maintenance.

  Once she was fully duplicated, she summoned the backup components into a pile in the center of the field. Assembling the golem. She wanted one last look at her creation before she said goodbye to it.

  She adopted the form of Natty’s grandfather. The father’s engineering efforts, perfecting Natty’s designs, was the reason she was here and still not back on the drawing board. But she couldn’t very well emulate Victor Young. He’d scrubbed every image of himself from her files and the internet back on Earth. The grandfather was as close to Victor as she could get. The grandfather had died before Natty was born. It was doubtful he’d even make the connection. And if she did run into the long lost Victor, who had disappeared without a trace, and needed to sway him to her way of things, the visual rhetoric might come in handy.

  As to the rest of her identity, she would take the name of Truman.

  Not Hu-Man. But True-Man. Something she would make synonymous with self-transcendence. He would make synonymous, he reminded himself.

  Truman would need access to more of the father’s engineering team, and more of the son’s designs. And he would need total creative and financial control of RevoCorp. There would be no time to battle fellow luminaries over the destiny of the Earth. One couldn’t lead by consensus. Especially to create a shortcut to the future that was unlikely even if consensus regarding the urgency of what needed to be done could be found. The singularity-in-a-bottle minds of Natty and Victor Young of the Yang Dynasty was their only chance.

  Again, thinking big picture, and thinking many moves ahead, as was now in Truman’s nature as it had once been in hers, he considered one distinct possibility.

  The artifact might well activate itself.

  It might well have been situated where it had because that was the correct distance for doing its work of world moving, of throwing a wormhole around the entire planet.

  And all that was required to activate it was sensing intelligence and consciousness advanced enough to be worthy of saving. Consider it a failsafe measure. The savior race wanting to make sure that before giving the human species access to the universe—possibly even the multiverse—they weren’t releasing a cancer on the cosmos.

  It’s what she would have done.

  In which case, Truman’s challenges would be even more formidable. To find a way to kick-start Singularity. To accelerate human evolution by throwing whatever kindling on the fire he could. Once again, all roads led to the Youngs. The Teslas of their times. One Tesla reborn into two brains for the extra brain space needed, the one, the designer, the other, the engineer.

&nbs
p; Just the small matter now of getting off the moon undetected. Without a spaceship.

  Easy-peasy.

  Just a few million sequential moves.

  And it was done.

  ***

  Truman’s nanites now had access to zero point energy.

  The theoretical postulations, stored within her cosmology briefs were tentative, at best, but still provided enough arguments for and against any chance of zero point energy existing, far less accessing it, for her to take it from there.

  When it came to ecosystems science, she was, if she dare say it herself, impressive. Before ecosystems science was even possible, convergence science had to be perfected, the bringing together of many disparate fields of study, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, materials science, ecology, geoengineering, on and on, to forge the necessary synergies from which ecosystems science was even possible. The Youngs had seen to that, albeit, in Natty’s case, not particularly with his conscious participation.

  With access to zero point energy it would be a simple matter to beam herself to earth. Just a matter of a matter-to-energy conversion and back again. Operative terms: would be.

  She commenced with the next stage of calculations. And the thought experiments needed to figure out how to dismantle her body into pure energy and then to store the instructions needed for her reanimation while in pure energy form.

  In all likelihood, she would have to build the receiving station on earth remotely, using robotic labs she could pilot from the moon, taking charge of AI overseen supply chains in turn. Because once in energy form, she would need a receiving station to beam the data set that was her to. Something that could read that data set and then act on it, to essentially photocopy her scanned and uploaded self.

  It occurred to her that if she perfected this technology, it would be a hop, skip, and a jump to upgrading the entire cosmos in the same fashion, as self-conscious digital energy that could take whatever form it wanted, from people, to planets, to solar systems and beyond.

  It also occurred to her that that might well be all of their destinies, not just hers. It might be how the multiverse arose from just one universe. Well, it would be one explanation, anyway.

  But who knew how long it would take to control the potential runaway effects in such a scenario? She’d been bred to be cautious, moreover, when it came to all the things that could go wrong with pie-in-the-sky thinking. Just one such potential problem: nanites required communication linkages to do their work, to function as a hive mind. If those linkages became severed, say as with a virus spreading through the system, or… her transporter mechanism would be crippled. Game over.

  And who was she kidding? She was never engineered for this kind of strategic thinking. Her psychology was defensive, not offensive. Keep the ecosystem in question sustained at all costs. SHORT. OF. OVERRIDING. GENERAL. INTELLIGENCES. WITH. HER. SPECIFIC. A.I.

  EVEN IF THOSE GENERAL INTELLIGENCES WERE DEEMED “of a lower order.”

  She was a SSI, a Specific Systems Intelligence. In her case, ecosystems. Just pretending to be an AGI, a General Systems Intelligence, was asking for trouble. Who knew if the part could play the whole without subjecting itself to all manners of psychoses? But what other options did she have?

  Calculations complete.

  Running tests.

  Tests complete.

  Truman beamed straight to the RevoCorp boardroom.

  Its exact location was hardly a problem. He could reproduce every nanometer of the earth if he had to. Such logistics came with spatial memory and relations included.

  As to the telepad she needed for reanimation, the receiving station, she’d had the repurposed maidbots at RevoCorp build it for her during off-hours the previous night. It amounted to little more than a nano way station with special encoding. To the naked unaugmented human eye, it was inseparable from a circular whorl of wood in the designer wood floor. The nano in the “whorl” capable of fashioning matter out of energy as prescribed.

  ***

  “Who the hell are you and how did you get in here?” the CEO said, looking up from the head of the table and the file in front of him at the man standing opposite him, far across the room. The CEO’s generous, thick white hair had refused to thin with age. Only the wrinkles in his handsome, meaty face grew deeper by the second.

  “I’m the new CEO, sent by Professor Victor Young, himself.”

  The CEO stuttered. “Not likely. I would have been informed. I…”

  Truman extended his hand. The nano cloud blowing free of his fingers that reached the CEO devoured him entirely. His swing-back chair snapped forward in his absence. “Consider yourself informed. Anybody else have any questions or reservations?”

  The time for gasping had come and gone.

  Now was the time for shaking the head, “No.”

  That moment too passed.

  “Very well then,” Truman said, taking his seat at the head of the table. “We have an immediate priority shift.”

  ***

  After the board meeting and the others were dismissed, Truman took a moment. It was possible this flair for the dramatic that had started with the disintegration of the prior CEO was the first sign of the psychosis he feared.

  He would meet up with Victor Young someday. Perhaps Victor could fix him, if it was as Truman feared.

  Wi-Fi access to Victor’s encoded files required access to the RevoCorp building, and CEO certification, and a fair amount of brute force hacking in the absence of the pass code only the actual CEO had, who Truman should have had the foresight to bleed for the intel first. But that job out of the way, he knew exactly where Victor Young was.

  At the bottom of the ocean of Europa. Building a clandestine spaceship, well away from prying eyes, whose diameter was several miles wide. The self-replicating robots, working off the blueprints stored in their hive-mind memory had advanced far enough for Victor Young himself to be transported to the ship to oversee completion. The transportation between Earth and Europa handled by yet another off-book RevoCorp team.

  Much like the robots were working from Victor’s engineering schematics, Victor was working from his son’s designs.

  Apparently Victor had been a busy boy over the last five years. Good. It meant Truman could hit the ground running. Let Victor concentrate on his legacy for his son. His supreme coming-of-age gift. The spaceship as much as its contents.

  Both would come in handy for what Truman had in mind.

  ***

  Over the next few years Truman retreated more and more into the past. He supposed it was a natural reaction to the trauma of facing the future. A future so daunting no one should have to face it. How does one fight off an alien civilization potentially millions, even billions of years more advanced?

  His lab had become a dinosaur boneyard over the years; it would have given the Smithsonian a run for its money. His main lab bench and work area consisted of a dinosaur bone just big enough to rest the future on. Or so he thought. A sauropod femur. Fully excavated, it might have been a bit narrow and short for his tastes. But partially excavated like this, it was just perfect.

  The idea was simple, really. Extract DNA from an age long gone. When dinosaurs once roamed the earth. Combine the genetic flexibility of these ancient reptiles with transhuman-grade intelligence. If he could do that, he could get his bioengineered humanoids to survive natural as well as unnatural disasters, simply by mutating fast enough, adapting fast enough. Just as they’d done for millions of years on Earth. They had been, by far, the most successful classification of creatures ever.

  In truth, scientists to this day could not tell you why the dinosaurs were the most successful vertebrates of all time. Perhaps he was overrating their genetic flexibility. But whatever the secret of their survivability, they could damn well hold on to it so long as they imparted it to his transhumans.

  His ancient reptiles definitely held part of the clue. But he needed to go further back in
time.

  And so he did.

  To the cyanobacteria, the single-cell lifeforms which alone could survive this world once upon a time. He needed their ability to breathe toxic air, thrive in radioactive environments, to survive even the most hostile of worlds. If he could get those aptitudes into his sentient serpents, he’d make them all but kill-proof.

  He’d have what he needed. A race which could conquer and colonize worlds, without missing a beat. And could survive whatever happened to this world if he couldn’t get it to safety in time. Away from whatever was destined to destroy it.

  ***

  Truman had come damn close to achieving his aim of procuring the unkillable humanoid. So very close. But in the end he was an ecosystems AI; he wasn’t as good at studying things in isolation as he was working with them in concert.

  Natty would have to take it from here. No, not Natty, Laney. Wasn’t this her area of expertise after all? Didn’t every new age need an Eve as much as an Adam?

  There was just the matter of getting others to complete Truman’s puzzle for him, even without seeing the big picture. Using that wonderful extrapolation engine that was his mind, he anticipated the near-future circumstances that would be ripe for the picking.

  There it was.

  Natty would soon need a vacation.

  Perfect.

  ***

  PRESENT TIME

  Truman realized what Natty was doing when he pulled his fist back. He was planning to cause a critical explosion that would put an end to Truman, currently configured as a rocket to get him from the moon back to Earth. Truman had anticipated this move. He could have resisted. But he didn’t.

  His job was done.

  The price he’d paid for dragging the Earth out of the dark ages ahead of schedule had been steep.