The Power of the Dhin (The Way of the Dhin Book 2)

by John L. Clemmer

  He then double-checked what appeared on the screen with what he’d entered into the form fields in the navigation interface.

  “Control, destination entered and checked. Increasing throttle through target acceleration needed for translation. Now.”

  At the distance he was from Earth’s sun, his initial acceleration didn’t show any noticeable movement in the stars in his field of view nor of the sun itself. Moments later, his ship swung about fifteen degrees to the left and tilted upward slightly. If he’d had his eyes closed, he wouldn’t have perceived the motion or change in orientation. Even with his eyes open, the effect of a shifting view with no physical sensation of movement didn’t bother Thys. It was much like the view in a video game. The stars in the viewports at the top and sides of his view, in his peripheral vision, now moved out of view. As his craft accelerated closer and closer to translation speed, Thys felt himself grow ever so slightly lighter. He knew from his many excursions that when he felt himself almost weightless, the stars and anything else in view would dim. Then when his view went entirely dark, the Dhin drive would cover the vast distance to the programmed waypoint in a fraction of the time it would take even at light speed.

  Thys didn’t entirely understand the physics involved nor how the drive’s most rapid stage of travel managed to avoid relativistic effects. The equations involved were complicated—incredibly complicated—but he didn’t have to solve them himself in order to travel or program navigation.

  The short period of weightlessness and darkness didn’t disturb Thys, as he’d experienced these effects more than a hundred times by now. The first couple of times, almost any pilot would consider a scenario where something had gone wrong and perhaps they wouldn’t come back or where their travel ended abruptly—and catastrophically. But the Coalition had selected Thys and his peers from those not prone to panic. While he floated, he smiled and wondered how many didn’t make the cut.

  A few minutes later, a new star field began fading into view. Thys felt his weight return. It would take a minute or two for the navigation computer to confirm that the location matched the programmed waypoint. As with other aspects of this mode of travel, he wasn’t concerned—it always worked. Thys didn’t wait for the navigation computer to chime and alert him to the results. There was a bright star dead ahead, centered in the front viewport. He placed his hand on the luminous control surface, tapping in the sequence that would maintain his velocity and direction, then sat back and stretched his legs. His reverie lasted mere seconds. His eyes snapped to the monitor on his left.

  That doesn’t look right.

  There were red circles popping up. More every second. This was strange. Unexpected. These things were close. And big. And there were dozens of them.

  Monica

  PM Walker sat in the conference room and flipped through seemingly endless advisories, summary reports, executive orders for review, and economic projections. She hadn’t been prime minister of the Coalition when the office had the benefits of AI cabinet advisors. That former government had grown unused to managing the massive volume of data both available and relevant for execution of the role of her office. The size of her cabinet had swelled enormously, with historic roles and departments instituted seemingly monthly during her tenure. They had grown comfortable and lean with AIs managing the executive branch of the Coalition, and now they were paying the price. The complexity seemed too great for organic minds to handle.

  We can do this. I can do this. Can’t I?

  She ran her fingers through her ash-blonde hair. She was sure her gray eyes were bloodshot at this point.

  What concerned her most now was the social and economic unrest affecting the lower socioeconomic strata of the Coalition citizenry. The Aztlán province was the most problematic. The riots had been the worst right after the AIs orchestrated and executed their escape. The shortages, the outages, and the disruptions were under control now—mostly—but the immediate aftermath of the AI abdication had been ugly. Unfortunately, some of the populace, once disturbed, never quite seemed to calm down. She tried to have empathy for them. With AI-assisted governance, the Coalition had done the majority of the work in keeping civilization running smoothly. Coalition policy placed citizens in roles based on their abilities. In an economy and national interest managed for the most part by machines and algorithms, the less intelligent had little in the way of abilities to offer. They were put on guaranteed minimum income and sent off to do whatever sort of hopefully harmless activities they saw fit to do.

  Without AI assistance in managing the economy, coordinating logistics, orchestrating automation, and guiding drone workers and automata, the below-average citizens’ daily lives had become chaotic and unpredictable.

  Even if we’d passed the resolution allowing for reintroduction of AI, that wouldn’t have returned us to the stability we’d enjoyed previously, she mused.

  Her predecessor had lost her bid for reelection precisely because of her support of that position. Use of AI was verboten now. Heresy. The pro-AI position might have had more success had chaos reigned for longer, but some infrastructure and related services had stabilized sooner than expected or predicted. While some of the Coalition civil engineering leadership chalked that up to their own skills and efforts, she suspected they were in denial. She, along with her predecessor and some in CoSec, was not sure that humanity’s competency was the correct interpretation. That, even more than the shock of the abrupt AI departure, kept those with alternative possible explanations awake at night. What if one or more rogue AIs had remained on Earth and were managing success in both remaining hidden and in manipulating the Coalition’s foundational infrastructure and services? What did that mean? What did it portend? Although the absence of AI management precipitated enormous disruption, an attempt to fight a rogue AI might have far worse consequences. Then there was the matter of pitting an unconscious, primitive AI of the sort they were capable of creating now against a fully conscious AI, one brought online in the past. Surely the Coalition would lose that fight. They were likely at the mercy of an overlord or demigod that saw no need to engage with its creators. Yet.

  This is all Krawczuk’s fault.

  She tapped at her tablet, surfing through the more pedestrian summaries, and brought up the latest status regarding CoSec’s former director.

  That psychopath. Why won’t he just come clean and help? He’ll never get what he seems to want.

  A reminder popped up on her screen, coupled with a polite chime, notifying her of her next appointment.

  Ah, more debating on the proper course of action regarding the protests in the Western European zone.

  She spent the next seven minutes reviewing the reports. She felt that the Europeans were lucky. Their populations were far more homogeneous than in the Americas. The purges and re-creations of traditional ethnostates prior to the inception of the Coalition made consensus and compromise much more straightforward. She had to deal with the four factions present in the former United States. Their regions weren’t as homogeneous—not like Europe. But they were on the way there. Fortunately, with Coalition influence the process was far smoother than it might otherwise have been.

  David

  He knew he’d still go down in the history books as the computer scientist who was the primary contributor to the development of fully conscious AIs. It pained him that the AIs had absconded with the source code that made it possible—what the AIs called the Gift—and that they destroyed any instances of it on Earth at the time of the escape.

  It could have turned out differently. It should have.

  David finished the short commute to the office without incident. He missed the convenience of reading the tech news on the trip, but CoSec’s moratorium on self-driving cars made that means of commuting impossible. Thankfully, he lived only a short ten-minute drive from the vast data center that also contained his workspace. It was a rather longer drive to Georgia Tech, but he didn’t have to navigate that route this morning
as a lecture wasn’t on the schedule.

  Unlike almost all of his peers, David did not work from home. His craft required isolation from the distractions found in his home. His department of the Coalition’s R&D organization wasn’t directly managed by CoSec nor supervised in place by the military, but their oversight in matters of security required employees to be on-site. Particularly for his role in the AI group of the computer science division.

  After parking in the enormous deck, he navigated the pallid gray concrete pillars and echoing staircases. Even his reserved parking space wasn’t particularly close to the entrance. Next was the gauntlet of physical security. He swiped his RFID card at the revolving door mantrap, placed his worn leather messenger’s satchel and wallet on the conveyor to run through the scanner, walked through a detector, and then showed his picture ID to the dispassionate guard. Collecting his belongings, he swiped his RFID card again to allow him to pass through a turnstile.

  Finally inside, he made his way to the break room to fill his carafe with coffee. He kept real half-and-half in the refrigerator. He couldn’t stomach the pasty powder provided as creamer. The regular employees knew the half-and-half was his and didn’t risk his wrath by sharing. After a few sips of the steaming brew, he headed for the elevator. Once it arrived, he entered a code that allowed him to select the floor that held his work area.

  His stature merited a far larger space than even the managers who shared the floor. It was filled with wide worktables, numerous smart boards, imposing plotters, and a dozen widescreen monitors connected to various computers, ranging in size from toasters to refrigerators. He held court over far more computing power. A significant portion of the data center’s processing power was his to use.

  Of course for now we only need a fraction of it.

  David considered the current situation. Robots, drones, and automata were scattered everywhere throughout the entire domain of the Coalition, but they were either inactive or disassembled. By law, they required extensive reprogramming before someone could even propose that they be put back into production. At the very least, they demanded reworking for algorithmic automation. The Coalition infrastructure and service management divisions were recruiting the additional programmers and engineers needed to rework the entire automation framework of modern society, but so much had been handed off to the AIs that ramping up an initiative of this size presented a Herculean challenge.

  We did it before. I did it before. We can do it again. And do it right this time.

  He tapped a few notes into his tablet, then clicked the record button and switched to dictation. While he was a rapid typist, he found that talking aloud was somehow sometimes more satisfying. It also allowed him to query the data repositories without pausing in his work. The responsive system made some of his peers nervous. Their concern was unwarranted. The data retrieval interface was no AI. Not yet. David had a lot of convincing to do before they would even consider that course of action. And a lot of work to do.

  It will be different next time.

  Mare

  Mare pulled her glossy black hair back and secured it with a purple elastic scrunchie. She didn’t have any blue in her hair this month. She glanced at the 3D picture of Fletch on the right side of her desk, smiled, then thought over her goals for the day. After mentally prioritizing her tasks, she considered what the desk before her would look like if it were Fletcher’s.

  Gadgets. Covered in gadgets. Total mess. But somehow, it works for him.

  Mare didn’t consider it a fault but rather an endearing quirk. She was well aware that everyone had his or her quirks. “An uncluttered desk makes for an uncluttered mind” was what she’d been told growing up. Like so many things, what her parents and teachers had taught Mare hadn’t turned out to be entirely true. Mare had never been naïve. Still, she’d never imagined the scale and scope of the falsehoods and half-truths those in power presented to society. The sociopolitical world didn’t hold many secrets for her now. She was a senior Globalnet security analyst for CoSec, thanks to her sharp mind, programming ability, and information security acumen.

  From each according to her ability—whether you like it or not.

  Her recruitment by CoSec resembled perhaps the plot of a film from the turn of the twenty-first century. The process was in the realm of fiction at that point in time. When she was born, the Coalition hadn’t existed. The global political sphere had transformed frighteningly quickly, though Mare was too young back then to remember it. She’d suspected when she was young that the rise of the Coalition hadn’t been nearly as smooth as the history presented on Globalnet to Coalition students suggested. Her work now as a CoSec analyst confirmed that. Not every population had welcomed the opportunity to join the Coalition and become “enlightened citizens of a new, better world” with open arms and welcoming hearts. And the conflict wasn’t over. Not by far.

  Rebellions and resistance were still realities. But if those weren’t happening right on top of you, you’d never know about it. Even for someone competent at research on what was exposed on the public Cloud and across Globalnet—if you didn’t know what you were looking for or weren’t enough of a subversive to delve into the ever-present Darknet—everything would appear calm and stable in world politics.

  Sure, there were still leaks and whistle-blowers, but average citizens making their way through daily life on guaranteed minimum income didn’t care, nor did they usually want to know. It didn’t affect them. Speaking out against the status quo or distributing information the Coalition didn’t want distributed earned you an overwhelming smackdown by CoSec. They ruined careers, derailed lives, and turned well-meaning activists into pariahs. Or if you were good enough, they absorbed you and converted you. You became a tool for them, rather than a thorn in their side.

  So now, I’m a tool. A comfortable, well-rewarded tool.

  Given the Coalition’s vast resources and near total control of world industry and infrastructure, it wasn’t clear how the rebels operating in the independent states managed to continue operations and disrupt Coalition logistics so effectively. Granted, the rebels had made a rather impressive comeback since the time of the Departure. Without AI management and analysis of the thousands of drones used for recon and engagement, the military had what amounted to too much information and too few soldiers with the skills and knowledge to adequately replace the AIs. CoSec wasn’t at the same disadvantage, as they’d eschewed the use of AI historically.

  This was the essence of Mare’s challenge as a dutiful analyst at CoSec. Predictive analysis. Improvement of algorithmic processing leveraging vast amounts of data. To know more about the enemy’s next move than the enemy knew himself. Without the help of an AI. Mare knew about the rogue AI. The one who hadn’t left during the Departure. Thanks to her prior encounter with him, she knew better than almost anyone at CoSec, other than those at the highest levels of government. She doubted that personal knowledge gave her any more chance of succeeding at her job.

  If only.

  The AI changed things. He changed himself. Polymorphic code was merely the beginning of the challenge in finding him. He commanded a dynamic horde of autonomous sub-AI minions, malware, and viruses and commandeered hardware seemingly at will. Globalnet’s underlying infrastructure and logistical support required automation—which they managed with computers. Of course they did. So it was hackable.

  Any systems connected to Globalnet were at risk. These days, that was pretty much anything electronic. The only way to be sure was to keep any devices and systems you hoped to trust completely disconnected from Globalnet and the Cloud. While not impossible, it was an enormous challenge. While CoSec and the military had some networks and systems isolated from Globalnet, the current director and military advisors had now adopted a strategy akin to building an entire new Globalnet. That seemed impossible to Mare.

  Someone would make a mistake. It was inevitable. Then the AI would compromise the integrity of the new network.

  She sighed
and considered again her own immediate challenges. Predicting the moves of an enemy unencumbered by human emotions. Knowing the thoughts of an enemy unrestricted by emotions. Knowing the timelines of an opponent unencumbered by deadlines. Knowing the plans of an enemy unconstrained by the need to satisfy human goals. The AI seemed to take control of every system he could, for no further purpose than simply having control.

  It can’t be that simple, can it?

  Josef

  Josef Krawczuk knew exactly where he was, although his captors didn’t know that he knew. He’d headed the team that designed this facility, prior to his tenure as CoSec director. He considered there apparently were innumerable things he knew that his captors did not realize. He attributed that not to their incompetence, since CoSec employed only the most exceptional candidates, but instead to their underestimation of his own abilities. Josef’s detractors and opponents had always considered him formidable, of course. His genius was, unfortunately for them, difficult for them to grasp, as they were not on his level. Careful self-reflection, not to mention hard evidence, confirmed that this was not hubris on his part.

  He stared at the dreary, bland wall and reflected on his current predicament. The cold LED lighting did nothing for the flat, antiseptic paint used in a rendition facility like this one. No natural sunlight graced his environs. No sky. No breeze other than the faint whisper of the recycled air pushing through the metal grate of the vent set into the solid wall. His temporary solitude was incidental to his situation. Not an intentional punishment so much as a precaution by CoSec. This thought evoked a wry grin.

  They’ll be back soon enough, hat in hand, begging for my insights into their predicaments. Today, I expect.

  His inquisitors visited more and more often. That very fact told quite a tale. Their sessions weren’t quite as frequent nor did they last quite as long as they had initially, but at this rate, they would get there soon. He held no hope that his circumstances would change. No imagining of reinstatement nor suspension of his detention. This attention by his questioners merely demonstrated the severity of the present challenges facing them, CoSec at large, and therefore the Coalition.