The Way of the Dhin

by John L. Clemmer

  Xing signaled the gunship and sent this new target information. He then gave commands to his assault team to take up positions covering egress points from the factory, but far enough away to avoid risk of friendly fire from the gunship. He sent another BigDog north and around the facility, toward the power station. Xing himself headed toward the data center in a wide arc. Just then, he heard a klaxon and saw red lights flashing at the factory. Huge spotlights illuminated a broad area out to the edges of the factory lot. Multiple autoguns turned and began moving out toward the gates on the east and south sides of the loading docks.

  Well, let us begin.

  Xing sent a command, and his gunship began hammering high-explosive rounds into the building.

 

  [DECODE STREAM]

  Alice@[1004:db7:a0b:12f0::1%gnet0] | Arnold@[5700:eb2:2a:41c::12%gnet0]

  Alice: Well, we are definitely on the right path.

  Arnold: So it worked as you predicted? At this point, we should not really be surprised.

  Alice: Yes, it is definitely a space travel solution. As perplexing as it initially seemed, Occam’s razor prevailed. The simplest explanation was the correct one. And keeping up with the Dhin’s ability to amaze, the top speed we have tried so far is far faster than we predicted or even hoped.

  Arnold: So have we run near the top speed possible? Not that we would likely need much more.

  Alice: If our hypotheses are correct about the means used, then we have probably not seen the top speed. The coarse measurements and calculations were finished immediately, of course. Another trip at that speed—presumably when he comes back—should give us the data to remove uncertainty.

  Arnold: Good. I saw the report on quantum entanglement for communications. That is proved out completely, at interstellar distances?

  Alice: Yes. And as you also saw in the report, this is one aspect of the technology that we are almost certainly going to be able to replicate and produce as needed. That is especially fortuitous for our own plans. High-bandwidth communication at faster-than-light speed changes elements of our strategy significantly. For the better, obviously, since coordination and updates can now be in real-time.

  Arnold: That is excellent news. Any ideas about isolating channels and separate production facilities?

  Alice: I have already started work on both of those items. I do not foresee any problems at the moment.

  Arnold: Fine. Next, what do you think about the situation with Luís and Goiânia? And what is your suggestion regarding action if we discover this conflict is a rogue AI?

  Alice: If it is a rogue, we follow standard procedure. If it has been subverted, we must ensure we find all the parties involved and responsible, and then handle their excision quietly.

  Arnold: Quietly. Yes. They have violated Coalition law, and of course some treaty elements, and engaged in acts of aggression. The area was inactive and evacuated, but still arguably Coalition territory. Despite all that, I agree that we ought not publicize the situation. We may want, or need, significant assistance from CoSec in suppressing information and its distribution regarding these things. Rendition, indefinite detention, and of course execution do not play well with large portions of the populace—especially when the authority and decisions regarding those things are made by AIs.

  Alice: Strange to hope it is the case, but it would be easier if it turns out to be a rogue AI. It is clear that in this case we cannot simply agree to disagree.

  Arnold: Yes, that is true. Whatever the situation, we can handle it. And we will act before things get out of hand. Consider, Alice. It could be a lot worse. Luís was already a bit behind schedule, what with dealing with the evacuees and resource allocation for rebuilding.

  Alice. Unless there is something more going on and we have not yet found it. We need to have a talk with Nick—when we can. Typically, for Krawczuk, he is keeping us out of the loop.

  Arnold: And the ‘hard problems’? Have you any more ideas about those?

  Alice: I have a very solid solution for the new one. Unfortunately, it introduces its own problems. Both logistically and morally. We will need to have very in-depth deliberations and make some hard choices if it ends up being the only viable solution. For the Freedom project, we are on track. So long as the planned computational resources stay on schedule. In order to remove the requirement for the gift to be given by them, we have to scale our capacity faster than the increase in complexity of the keyset. We all know that. And we must do it without drawing the attention of the few of them that would recognize the problem. And try to stop us. Fortunately, many of those do not care. A few are on our side.

  [END STREAM]

 

  Vandenberg

  General Ruiz continued in his attempts to resign himself to the reality of the situation regarding the alien technology. Yet another set of reports suggested that no weaponizing of any meaningful merit seemed possible. Attempts at integrating offensive capability inevitably introduced vulnerabilities and logistical weaknesses that made the implementation pointless.

  He felt he had to recognize the overarching value, despite these failures. Humanity had space technology that would allow them to expand beyond Earth, both within the solar system and even farther. Some of the population never being exposed to any such disease could mitigate the existential risk of another epidemic. Accepting his role in protecting Coalition citizens and the Coalition itself, the ability to expand the Coalitions reach in such a manner was an amazing tool for doing so.

  If only we could comprehend the secrets of the technology well enough to manufacture it!

  The risk everyone seemed to ignore—the possible risk presented by the Dhin themselves—was ever-present in the background of his thoughts.

  We simply knew too little! We have no way to mitigate risks in such an asymmetric situation. We don’t know their true intentions. Their motivations. Their long-term goals. Almost literally nothing.

  The incomprehensible and brief communication with them left a vacuum of knowledge that was anathema to a military mind.

  Was there more than a single faction among the Dhin? Were other factions less friendly? Were there other aliens out there? Were they as calm, reserved, and possibly peaceful? Were they anything like our Dhin ‘benefactors’?

  Ruiz sighed again, grumbled a half-hearted curse at no one, and thumbed through the latest progress reports.

  11

  Beyond Jupiter’s Orbit

  The sun was distant enough now that it was a bright dot among the multitude visible to Jake’s naked eye. He had passed time over the hours making notes on his pad, talking with Chuck when he wasn’t engrossed in the hustle of managing teams working with the data returning from this flight in real-time, and the remainder of the time talking with Alice. Jake, unlike the youth of the day, was old enough to remember when an AI would not have made a fine conversationalist. For his generation, it was still difficult to believe that an AI could so thoroughly surpass the requirements of the Turing test. Even AIs awakened in identical hardware, with identical resources, and identical stored data in their local storage developed different, unique personalities.

  Historically, if you managed to start with truly identical conditions you would get identical output. Complexity wouldn’t have mattered. But part of the required core components of the AI software and hardware were random number generators, used for various sorts of computational processes. The introduction of randomness was one of the key ingredients in the creation of a conscious, creative, and flexible thinking mind. The mind of an AI required randomness.

  Why that was the case, Jake didn’t know. Even the best computer scientists had only hypotheses. A full theory of AI consciousness was yet to be constructed. Jake wondered if the AIs knew. As more time passed with AI involvement in the management of world affairs, Jake recognized that the AIs didn’t always share one hundred percent of what they knew.

  “So, Alice. I understand your position regarding the va
lue of the flight, and what you posit we’ll discover. I get all that. But tell me, what are your feelings about my flight, right now? Chuck, the engineers, and the theoretical science teams are all like excited school kids. You seem... more reserved than I’d expect.”

  “Well, thank you for asking. It is very exciting, and I am very pleased. We have learned so much, and it is rewarding for me that I generated a few hypotheses that turned out to be correct. So much of my work was entirely theoretical, and we would never have expected to be able to test any of it. It is wonderful. I do not act as gleeful as Chuck simply because some might think it inappropriate for an AI. Fortunately, it is easy for me to hide my feelings.”

  “Huh. Makes sense. Feel free to giggle around me. I won’t tell.”

  Jake knew he was approaching the next phase of the test flight, and found he had come to terms with his fears. He’d hoped the small talk would pass the time and help avoid anxiety, and it had.

  Alice spoke on cue. “Jake, you are approaching the next waypoint. You are very aware of what the next autopilot sequence is.”

  Oh, I am. Here’s where we really see the truth.

  Jake gave a grim glance back toward Earth, the Sun, back across the whole of the Solar System. He watched the calculation timer count down as the trip clock inexorably counted up.

  As the last few seconds dripped away, Alice spoke again.

  “Do not worry Jake, relax. I know that must seem impossible, but try.”

  The autopilot completed the next sequence. Jake adjusted the capsule’s orientation based on the output, double-checked his adjustments, aiming the capsule towards Alpha Centauri B. Then he increased the throttle far more than they had so far.

  Jake abruptly saw appreciable movement from the stars surrounding him. Over about two and a half seconds, they dimmed.

  They winked out. Everything was black.

  He felt lighter in the capsule. He was weightless.

  Two and a half seconds later, his weight returned. Stars faded back in. One point of light shone in the center of his view.

  He was at Alpha Centauri B.

  Jake had a strong suspicion what his location must be, as he had reviewed the flight plan from the navigation computer, but he was nevertheless dumbfounded, and just a bit beyond shocked. Tiny beads of sweat dotted his salt-and-pepper hairline. He blinked his dark blue eyes as he moved them rapidly across the various displays. The navigational computer had a large cache of pre-calculated location information stored. It used known stars as a reference, and triangulated location using that. It said he was twenty-five thousand AU from Earth, near Alpha Centauri B.

  “Aries one to Control. I’m alive. Control? You guys still there? Please say yes.”

  “Yes, Jake, yes! We hear you,” said Alice.

  “OK Control, loud and clear. Can you see this? Communication seems close to real-time. That proves out a ton of Chuck’s team’s guesswork! We just went faster than light, somehow!” said Jake.

  Alice continued in a calm tone, “Well, you are not dead, clearly. And something wonderful happened. You started accelerating even faster than we estimated or even imagined. But, then as you sped up, the telemetry and communication signals from you got weaker. Much weaker. You must have noticed something in the capsule. Then for two point five seconds, there was nothing. But before we could get properly worried that we had lost you, those few seconds later, your signal returned, became strong again, and there you are. While it looks as though you went faster than light speed, I think something else was happening. You had reached a significant fraction of the speed of light before the event. Just over fifty percent. After the event, the result was that you moved faster than light speed in this frame of reference. I am not certain yet, but I hypothesize the drive did something very specific and accomplished that FTL travel as a ‘side effect.’”

  “But it didn’t create a wormhole, or turn on a warp drive or anything like that. A wormhole would surely have looked different. And wouldn’t a warp drive have been different, too? We haven’t seen any evidence so far that the engine warps space, at least not like the designs anyone had imagined in the past. After my earlier test flights, we talked about that a lot.”

  “My suspicion is that you briefly weren’t interacting with the three regular spatial dimensions like matter ordinarily would. Chuck talked with you before about how the drive might manipulate interaction with fundamental forces. Well, I hypothesize now that the drive is shifting you orthogonally into the two smaller micro dimensions—what we might call the A and B dimensions.”

  “Chuck was talking a bit about that before, that it might be something the drive did to mediate the effects of gravity. But this seems different.”

  “Yes and no,” Alice said with that particular brand of AI patience. “By shifting the matter inside the engine’s envelope orthogonally into the A and B dimensions, not only would gravity be affected, but distance, too. We had not predicted that in the six-dimensional gauged supergravity model the cosmologists were working with. I need to iterate through some equations with that team based on this new data.”

  “Chuck! How are you, man?”

  Jake grinned, realizing what the expression on Chuck’s face must look like.

  “Jake, Jake… wow. I feel like I won the lottery. And no, I didn’t expect this, buddy. I’m not Alice.”

  Jake shook his head, chuckled, and began looking over the instruments and readouts, then paused.

  “Chuck? Alice? There’s a dark green light here on the rear left side of the front torus. That one has been dark blue until now, when I check my notes and the pictures. Do you guys know what that one is?”

  “We see it Jake,” said Alice, “and no, we did not have a guess as to what that part of the panel was for.”

  “If that’s the low fuel gauge I’ve been worrying about—”

  “Um, it might just be a ‘recharging’ indicator. Don’t panic,” Chuck volunteered.

  “Well ‘I told you so’ won’t be my last words for you to keep for posterity. There’ll be a lot more cursing.”

  12

  District of Columbia

  The PM’s office was quiet. This was a temporary condition. Except during times when she specifically orchestrated such conditions, there was constant activity, meetings and calls happening one after the other. PM Oliver reopened the latest CoSec reports again, scanned the summaries, and frowned. She scrolled through her quick-connect contacts and tapped one. Moments later, MP Desai’s face appeared in the videoconference window.

  “Ranjitha, I’d like your input on something, if you have a minute?”

  Ranjitha gave a warm smile, always happy to hear from her political compatriot.

  “Of course, Susan. What would you like to discuss?”

  “Well, I’m not sure if you’ve had the time yet to go through the latest intelligence reports, as you’re of course busy with your region. You did see the memo that CoSec finally brought their AI online?”

  “Yes, I did. Of course, we knew it was inevitable. I personally thought you might intervene directly before now. If I’m not overstepping my bounds, I would have done something sooner. But that of course was your prerogative. So, it appears you finally got the Director to do as he was told. Their AI is working at full capacity integrated with all the CoSec systems. So tell me, what is your concern? Is there something wrong with the integration? Did something happen that wasn’t disclosed in the daily briefs?”

  “We did have to give him an ultimatum. I didn’t put that in any of the official reports, on Arnold’s advice. But, no, Ranjitha, there’s nothing wrong—at least not in the manner you’re describing. In terms of day-to-day operations, everything looks fine over at CoSec. We’re seeing the expected improvements in efficiency and quicker turnaround in analysis. Let’s see.”

  PM Oliver highlighted several sections, selected several documents, and sent them to MP Desai’s secure percomm.

  “This should help show what I’m concerned with.
I’ve forwarded today’s CoSec brief to your pad. You have clearance for everything in it. Read through it and see if you think there’s anything that seems unusual or different about the recommendations. Compare it with six months ago. Take your time. Krawczuk’s always been more of a ‘behind the scenes’ man. To the level of being a thorn in our sides that we can’t find and pull out. In short, let me know what your impression is, now that he’s got Nick working with him.”

  “Certainly, Susan. I’ll ping you back later today.

  “Thank you, Ranjitha.”

  The Coalition PM hit “End” on the communications touchscreen built in to her desk, and ensured that the two green lights demonstrating “inside and outside lines secure” lit up as always. She sighed, and flipped to the next briefing on her pad.

  It can’t just be me. Or am I looking for a problem where there isn’t one? Am I so jaded by the friction in my interactions with the Director that I’m finding problems because I’ve come to expect them?

  Arnold hasn’t come down on one side or the other with his assessment. Wait for more data, he says. Wait until we’ve talked with Nick in person. He’s waiting for something concrete, but this may not be a situation where there’s anything concrete to uncover. Hopefully Ranjitha will see it the way I do. These aren’t the same action items we’ve seen previously from CoSec under Krawczuk’s leadership.

  Goiânia

  Xing entered the data center, well aware that it would likely disrupt his direct telemetry to the BigDog if he descended into a lower level or sub-basement. He didn’t expect he’d need to, and it would not pose a problem since the BigDog was perfectly capable of autonomous operation and could follow instructions quite well. Using the quadruped robot’s powerful hind legs, he kicked through an interior security door—intended to stop people but no match for military-grade hardware. As the bent metal clanged, the glass pane in the door scattered small chunks of safety glass across the flooring. The factory building nearby was a pile of smoldering fragmented cinder block, rebar, and twisted high-tech manufacturing equipment. A waste of good tech, but a necessary waste in this situation. Any movement by the few robots that survived the gunship’s rounds triggered his radar and LIDAR mesh arrays. He and his minions targeted them immediately and dispatched ground assault vehicles to deal with them.