Mission: Tomorrow
Page 14
And the dreams of people like Mike.
Attached deep beneath those cloud tops, Mike’s beacon kept the Beanstalk clear and the Jovians safe.
“Let’s put Jupiter beneath us,” the man said. He tapped a couple of icons floating before him, and the seats slid back to their original position.
Below her grippy slippers, the planet raged with silent beauty. Nina shivered. This was the place that had nearly killed the only man she could put up with enough to share a life.
She closed her eyes, painfully aware of the thousand quick deaths that lay just beyond the walls of this little ship.
She tried not to dream.
Eight hours later, the climber’s AI startled Nina awake.
“Contact,” said the speakers.
The flip-out carbon tabletop between them was littered with interface devices and display frames Velcroed to its surface. Williams gave her a short nod as his eyes and fingers flickered across colorful 3-D user interfaces projected above the frames. His lips moved in silent communion in a way that reminded Nina of Mike working with his beloved adaptive intelligences. Both had cybernetic enhancements, like most who worked with AI.
Williams looked up from his virtual wrangling. “Climber transmitted your test broadcast. We’re also within range to pick up Jovian signals.”
“Any word on Mike?” Nina asked.
“We’re out of comms range, but an hour ago Else reported his repairs are progressing as expected.”
Nina looked through the window at her feet. They had fallen so close to Jupiter that vast, stepped cloudbanks rose up toward the craft, half-lit ephemeral valleys thousands of kilometers long and hundreds tall. Lightning flickered within the stacked layers, and pale storms swirled far below. Some of those cyclones could swallow other planets whole. It was as if vast celestial potters fashioned the clouds into roaring towers on a scale designed to provoke existential horror. The Sun had settled near the horizon, setting the higher wisps afire in yellows and golds. She felt the same kind of awe as locking eyes with a tiger.
“Do we need to be so close?” she asked.
“Farther away, Jupiter’s electromagnetic activity overwhelms low-power transmissions,” he said. “It’s why we shield the station. And this Climber.”
Nina powered on her tablet. Orange columns and green rows poured out of the 3-D display as the AI interface flickered to life. She studied the signal. Exactly the same as the recorded message Mike had tight-beamed via laser to the torch ship. Right before his accident.
“Getting a signal clean enough to work with?” Williams asked.
She nodded. Her AI easily scrubbed the background static. Her new decryption algorithm pecked away.
“Climber,” Williams said, “decelerate and hold position.”
The hull began to hum even louder than when they left the station. Nina gained much of her weight back. Their devices shook on the table. After a few minutes, she grew nearly weightless. Her display popped up a new stream of data.
Nina studied the results. She’d transmitted a hybrid of the two basic Jovian phrases, hoping to spur a dialog. She’d be happy if they merely asked, Huh? No response. At least, nothing different.
“I’m not even sure it’s communication,” she said. “What’s the point of such heavy encryption? How do they expect us to understand?”
“Perhaps it keeps outsiders from eavesdropping.”
“The message hasn’t changed in all its repetitions,” she said. “A discrete, uncrackable, 12-gig packet. It’s more lecture than conversation.”
Nina gave an exasperated sigh and rapped the power icon on her tablet, dispersing a hopeless confusion of data, then tossed it to the tabletop. The device rebounded, but Williams caught it and fastened it down.
“What do you need?” he asked.
Nina unfastened her seatbelt, grabbed a handhold beside the central porthole, and stretched across, feet floating up behind.
From this angle, she could see all the way to the edge of the planet. One of Jupiter’s moons gleamed dull silver in the black sky, perhaps the one that fed them. Night fast approached, a black shadow devouring the planet. Lightning seared the darkness, some bolts longer than the Grand Canyon. To either side of the Equatorial Zone—where the Beanstalk pierced—two cloud belts raced in opposite directions with winds powerful enough to shear the skin from the Climber. Cyclones boiled to life where belts and zones touched. The atmosphere swarmed with thousands of spiraling storms each powerful enough to desolate the Earth. Deep beneath blazed the heart of a failed star. People could only survive this close to such an utterly indifferent god by relying on miraculous technologies. Which sometimes failed. Nina tore her eyes from the view and looked at Williams.
“No offense to your babies, Don, but AIs are less creative than freshman-calc students.”
“I have faith in you,” Williams said.
“How about letting me send this to some post-docs I’ve worked with,” she said. Her voice echoed against the ultraglas.
“We need to understand what we’re dealing with before opening this up to others,” Williams said.
“Typical.” She glared at him. “You’ve made first contact with aliens a trade secret. Amazing. They don’t belong to you.”
“We face both promise and risk. It’s best to—”
“To keep the Jovians for yourself?” Nina made a frustrated sound. “When did you become a robber baron?”
Williams crossed his arms. “I’m as big a fan of exploration as Mike. Here, I’ve ushered the human race to the doorstep of the stars. I intend to take us the rest of the way.”
“Lovely,” Nina said, “but you’re infected by a meme. Ever since the first Australopithecus started demanding tribute for access to his river or his fruit trees, capitalism has perpetuated and spread. It’s a brain disease. Whenever a market bubble or banking scheme based on untenable math collapses, civilization falls closer to ruin. All because the most-infected people can’t stop gathering fortunes. The more you collect for yourself, the worse it gets for everyone else.”
“Without funding from wealthy donors,” Williams said, “your university wouldn’t have survived the Crash. There wouldn’t be grants for research. Grad students wouldn’t have fellowships for tuition. We wouldn’t have AIs to analyze algorithms or crunch numbers, or the interfaces to direct them—”
“So you’re the patron saint of a big charity.”
“It costs a fortune to exploit these kinds of resources,” Williams said, gesturing toward the side porthole. “It takes visionaries to do something meaningful with it.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Nina said.
Williams nodded. “You’re talking redistribution. When have people ever chosen less? Spread humankind’s resources equally among everyone, and there’d be nothing left for projects like this. We’d lose our capability to realize great dreams and visions.”
“You’re not listening—” Nina began.
“I am,” Williams said. “We’re close to achieving your vision, Nina, but to get there we need to use the system to our advantage. Capitalism won’t vanish overnight. If we dive headfirst into utopianism without filling the reservoir of wealth, we’ll break our necks when we hit dry lakebed.”
Nina looked away, out at Jupiter, a waning crescent. “It’s just a failure of imagination.” Sunset moved fast across its cloud tops, setting her skin ablaze with Jupitershine.
“I agree,” Williams said. “Do you know why Mike signed on to work here?”
“He wanted to explore Jupiter,” Nina said, her voice flat.
“Sure, but also because I agreed to base JoveCo on a transformative socioeconomic framework. You got him thinking about such things. He’s pretty convincing.”
Nina arched an eyebrow and said, “You’re calling JoveCo a utopia?”
“Hardly, but it’s a fairer system than most. Only partners can hold JoveCo stock, and everybody here’s an equal partner.”
“E
ven you?” Nina said.
He shrugged. “I invested more, so I hold more stock. But my salary’s the same. We all share equally in the bounty we produce, with opportunity for bonuses based on three-sixty performance reviews.”
Nina sighed. “I didn’t mean to pick a fight,” she said.
“It’s my fault,” Williams said. “I’ve worked with programmers for 30 years. I should know better than to get defensive.”
“And after working with academics for two decades,” Nina said, “I should know better, too. I’m just disheartened. Mike’s accident really threw me. Frontiers are dangerous, but it’s Mike.”
“Fate and the cold equations of space conspire to yank the controls out of even the boldest hands,” Williams said. “We need a break. In more ways than one.”
“This is the first encryption I’ve been unable to crack,” Nina said, “ever.”
Williams reached into the knapsack belted to the seat beside him and withdrew the wine. He slipped a straw through the cork’s membrane and passed it to Nina.
“To better luck,” he said.
Nina saluted him and took a long pull. It was the most delightful wine she’d ever tasted. She sighed, then handed it back. “Wine through a straw. I feel like a student again.”
Williams chuckled and took a sip. “Let’s listen to the locals,” he said. In a firmer voice, he said, “Climber, tune comms to the Jovian broadcast and put it on speaker.”
The climber suddenly got noisy, speakers hissing and then crackling loudly whenever lightning seamed the sky below. Williams did something with his interface to clean up the signal until they spoke a steady rhythm—Go away!—accompanied by a background sizzle that reset every 42 seconds.
Same as ever. Nina gave a strangled groan.
“Can I help?” Williams asked.
“Ozymandias,” Nina said, “your power is meaningless here.” She stared down at Jupiter. Winds raged and an entire species sang a background chorus to ignorant ears.
Williams handed the wine to her again. Nina took a long drag before tossing it back to him. It left an aftertaste of flowers and dappled sunlight on her tongue. She closed her eyes and thought of her last dinner with Mike, before he came here, so long ago. She couldn’t remember what they ate, only the outdoor table overlooking Puget Sound—boats and floatplanes humming nearby.
“When I took sabbatical to come here,” she said, “the problem seemed simple. Mike thought he’d decoded the Jovian Rosetta Stone. Two signals comprising an entire dictionary, and a global demand to leave. A language of pragmatic math. Elegant. Turns out we’d only touched the snow atop an iceberg.” She opened her eyes to look accusingly at Jupiter.
“All those creatures down there,” Nina said, “thinking with a single mind. What are they saying?”
The vessel hissed and crackled with unintelligible voices.
Nina got an idea. She strapped down and fired up her tablet, whose display flickered green and red patterns across her face. She wrote a new algorithm to cycle through permutations of the simple signals, then saved it and flicked it over to Williams’ interface.
“Try this,” she said.
“Mike said that it’s as if all we see is a UI panel,” Williams said as he tapped icons in his own interface. “But it has only two settings. If someone built an interface like that back at EmSol, I’d fire them.”
Nina paused. “User interface,” she whispered. She glanced out at the brightening planet. Something itched at her mind.
“What if the Jovians’ simple statements aren’t a Rosetta Stone?” she said. “What if they’re just squirrels barking to let the others know about danger or food? Maybe we should look elsewhere to decode the encrypted data.”
She looked into Williams’ eyes. “What if the planetwide static is just a UI that operates something deeper: the encrypted message. Maybe it’s an entirely different language, the way AI language is different than ours.”
“The EmSol interface acts as human-AI intermediary,” Williams said. A smile crinkled the skin beside his eyes.
Nina nodded. “Maybe the encrypted code progression is something different, not simple Jovians or unified Jupiter-Mind. Different math. Different logic.”
“You’re suggesting there’s another mind?” Williams said. He was quiet for a while. “The question then becomes . . .”
“Who is that third mind?” Nina said. She pulled herself to the side viewport. Such roiling mountains of hydrogen and methane could hide a thousand civilizations.
“You haven’t observed any other natives?” she asked.
“No,” Williams said. “It’s a miracle the floaters survive. But if we assume a different mind is behind the encrypted message, it must be hugely advanced.”
“Smart Jovians,” Nina said, “who want us to leave.”
“Perhaps an AI that spontaneously formed in their network,” Williams suggested, “like Econ?” That feral mind, spawned from investment software, lurked silently inside almost every device on Earth’s ‘net.
“Comforting thought,” Nina said.
Williams chuckled. “If Jupiter-Mind’s jazz is UI, we know the output. There’s a lot going on beneath the hood. We need to identify the machine code, so to speak.”
Nina nodded. “It’s definitely more like code than communication. No one talks using encryption,” Nina said. She drew a sharp breath and looked at Williams.
“That’s it.” she said. “What if it’s a handshake? That explains why we can’t decrypt it. Who could crack 12-gig encryption? But you’re not supposed to decrypt a security key, just process it and return the handshake with your own trusted key.”
Nina hammered at her tablet and called up the packet. She spun it above her display, then wrapped it in her personal JoveCo comms key.
“I’ve repackaged it inside my key,” she said, “so they’ll know we’re responding. It’s not a handshake unless you both offer a hand.”
“Brilliant,” Williams said. “What’s next?”
“Transmit this,” she said. She flicked the handshake over to Williams’ interface.
He pulled himself down to his display and tapped an icon. “Chatbot’s loaded and ready to go. Shall we?”
Her blood rushed in her ears. She nodded.
“This feels like when I shipped my first beta UI,” Williams said. He tapped his tablet.
“Handshake away.”
The speakers continued to rumble and hiss. Full night now engulfed this side of the planet, lightning veining the darkness like a sea of camera flashes.
Nina was about to suggest they resend when the speakers went quiet. Her ears strained. She started to notice little pings and creaks in the vessel’s hull. The circulation fans sounded like turbofans in the silence.
Suddenly the speakers crackled to life.
“Seems we’ve opened a conversation,” Williams said. His eyes skimmed a deluge of incoming data. He shared the stream with Nina’s interface.
She put her decryption algorithm to work on the stream. “We’re getting terabytes of new data per second. Jupiter-Mind’s message is definitely not repeating anymore. Incoming math’s still variable.”
The speakers buzzed and thrummed like a noise-art concert.
“I’ve tasked Chatbot and Finder to continue processing,” Williams said. His fingers performed an air ballet.
Suddenly, the speakers went quiet.
After nearly a minute, Nina said, “That’s it. Sixty terabytes. Can your AIs handle this much data?”
Williams smiled and raised an eyebrow. “We’ll see,” he said. “Climber, take us back to the station.”
Acceleration pushed Nina into her seat as they started back up the Beanstalk. Her weight lifted as they reached speed.
“Shit,” Williams muttered. He inspected a flutter of light in his display.
Nina looked up.
“An app’s been uploaded into Chatbot’s memory.” He started pulling on his helmet. “Seal up, just in case.”
He frowned. “First they’d need to learn our AIs’ native language,” he said. “It’s like a punch card system trying to talk to a fish—completely different information infrastructures.”
He did something that made a calm female voice come over the speakers: “Patching. Patching. Patching . . .”
“I can’t isolate the affected AIs,” Williams said. A few seconds later, he winced. “It’s in the comms system. That connects everything.”
His finger movements elevated to frantic waving. Finally he shook his head. “Unresponsive. We’re too far down to contact JoveCo Way Station.”
“Patching . . .”
Each of Nina’s breaths fogged the helmet. Her blood sang in her ears. She noticed that her own AI was unresponsive. Is this how Mike felt during his accident?
She swallowed. Her throat felt dry. “Whoever’s down there responded to the key exchange,” she said. “Maybe they’re installing a custom interface—”
The lights and speakers in the vessel shut off, along with the fans and other systems. The only illumination came from flashes of lightning. The weight imparted by accelerating toward the station lifted as they began to fall back toward Jupiter. If they couldn’t restart the climber’s drive, they’d be crushed by atmospheric pressure in a few days. If they didn’t suffocate first.
“I’m sorry,” Williams said.
Nina gave him a wry smile but said nothing.
A few seconds later, the lights came back on. Nina sensed some weight returning. The speakers remained quiet.
Nina exhaled, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.
“Climber, status,” Williams demanded.
Silence.
Nina’s tablet flickered, then displayed a stream of unintelligible icons. She tried to interact, but none of the usual UI gestures gave any response. She felt the suit sticking to her armpits.