There might be some enemy robots here in the data center, but only one or two.
Soon he would have answers. If the instigator resided here. If not, the systems here would nonetheless betray the enemy. Xing suspected that their opponent would have his resources allocated across several sites, for redundancy. This site wasn’t the largest category of data center, but there would be enough here to discover much of the truth. He called up an autogun to cover the area behind him where he had entered the data center. He advanced down the hallway, past glass walls displaying hundreds of blinking LED lights adorning hundreds of servers, storage arrays, switches, and routing equipment. The equipment of course, was merely infrastructure. It had no awareness of his presence, no animus. But the entity leveraging that processing power did. Xing didn’t bother addressing the security cameras, either by speaking aloud to them or by breaking them. It was effective for the enemy to see them here, there was little danger that they would simply attempt to destroy everything and scramble all the data present in an attempt to hide. Now that Xing’s team was here, it would be a simple matter to trace the fiber connections from this location and determine where the next data center nodes were. The enemy needed a little fear. Xing would cut the fiber soon enough, removing the ability for remote control.
He kicked down the interior entry door, smashing the security scanner, keypad and card reader mounted next to it as a matter of course. Cold air rushed out and over him. A person would have found the blast refreshing in the heat of the Brazilian day. Xing strode from aisle to aisle, looking left and right, up and down the racks, searching for a core router. It would be large, in comparison with the pizza box sized blade servers that filled many dozens of racks. His eyes traced the network cables through the cable management framework. Turning abruptly down one aisle, toward the center of the room, he spotted his target. He extended a small manipulator, a skeletal metal three-fingered hand with dexterity and strength far surpassing that of a person. The manipulator pulled one hinge off the ventilated door on the back of the rack, then removed the other hinge and pulled the door off. Setting it roughly to the side, he reached in and found the fiber interconnect he was seeking. With a quick twist and jerk, he pulled the connector free, and was halfway to his goal of isolating the data center entirely.
Now to find the redundant fiber link and I will have you all to myself.
[DECODE STREAM]
Arnold@[5700:eb2:2a:41c::12%gnet0] | Alice@[1004:db7:a0b:12f0::1%gnet0]
Arnold: So, Alice, our previous tests had not discovered the engine’s top speed after all. Very exciting. It guarantees much more rapid success regarding our long-term goals, all other things being equal. The ability to hop between star systems should provide many opportunities to overcome all sorts of potential limitations. Hopefully the very fact that the engine was able to accomplish the trip will give crucial insight into the core technology. Or at least provide inspiration. We are still totally in the dark on how it is fueled—or if it even uses anything like we would hypothesize for fuel.
Alice: Yes very exciting. I am revising the schedules now. I have also delegated a few assignments so that we can add additional rare earth materials collection sub-projects to the main plan both sooner and iterate more frequently.
Arnold: And you have performed marvelous work on communications design. You believe that the Koreans will be able to start manufacture that soon?
Alice: Yes. Examine the latest updates and you can derive the same conclusions I have. The integration with the Dhin communication tech might not be on the same schedule—they would be separate systems. So we are not sure if there would be some possible interference. I cannot hypothesize yet. The systems would be completely separate communications networks. That actually might be a fortuitous coincidence.
Arnold: Yes, that may work out very well. Switching topics, what do you think about the action items coming from CoSec now that Nick is online and working full time?
[END STREAM]
Langley
The video and audio captured from his agents in Brazil provided a touch of pride for the CoSec director along with their requisite content. His agents had, along with the content captured during the course of their work, managed to plant numerous bugs, including several key strategic locations. These bugs matched that name more than their ancestors did. They were tiny mobile recorders, either autonomous, remotely controlled, or configurable for either mode. The CoSec technology borrowed significantly from the rapid advances in robotics made over the last few decades. The little insectoid spies streamed to a carefully planted collection system nearby. That system could store compressed content or transmit it to another node in a mesh network, or send it via a point-to-point connection to a system that could reach a network with access to CoSec’s main collection infrastructure. The data streaming from the bugs looked like noise to someone trying to detect it. The new transmission protocols and data formats were different enough from those used on the net that they might be mistaken for a bad electrical circuit or transformer noise.
There hadn’t been much time for his activated agents to do their work, but they’d made excellent progress. His team and the newly awakened AI Nick had begun analyzing the movements and conversations of important persons, and one of the agents had made initial contact with the SouthAmerican District AI, Luís. An AI at that level did not normally communicate directly with individual coalition citizens, unless they were working directly with the AI and had high-security clearance. One didn’t simply ring up some office and ask to speak with the District AI. Although their processing power was vast, those in political control did not want the AIs to speak directly to the common citizens. Ordinary citizens had plenty of lower-level AI interaction, and certain demographics often didn’t realize the difference in capability of a run-of-the-mill AI with that of a District level one. A smaller subset of the population were pleased that things were being run, at least much of the time, by public servants that couldn’t be bribed or become corrupt. A smaller still portion of the population spoke out against the use and influence of AIs in political affairs. In the Brazilian region, there were very few people aware of the influence and control of Luís, so there were only a handful of people who bore antipathy toward the AI. At this point, it seemed no one in the city and close suburbs realized that the battle going on just a few miles away was between multiple AIs and not a government action against rebels of some kind.
Now that Luís is assisting Xing in the operation, it ought to be straightforward to quash any idea fermenting socially or elsewhere on the net that a rogue AI is the source of the trouble.
After he finished digesting the reports, Krawczuk eagerly addressed the AI.
“Nick? As you know, the administration is looking to make a decision on when, how, and by how much to de-classify the Dhin engine technology. Clearly, there are many ways to go about this. There are over-arching concerns as well. Do we even acknowledge the existence of the Dhin? Instead, should we assert that we developed the technology here? How much of the technology do we reveal? Do we tell all, or slowly release information about the various new capabilities civilization has at its disposal? Or, is all of the technology, and the nature of its origin, left as classified? And if that, then how shall we deal with the inevitable leaks? These various options are all worthy of consideration. Tell me your thoughts.”
“Director, the reports from the research and development teams suggest enormous potential, so the option of keeping everything secret would be inadvisable. Not to mention extremely difficult. And such difficulty, without commensurate gain, isn’t worth the effort. However, analysis of the psychological gestalt of the population suggests that revealing that the Dhin exist, that they have been here, and have delivered the technology, would be disruptive. While we are managing many social and sociological trends currently, we are still working on some demographics, who are not as well suited to the particular nature
of citizenship in the Coalition. For a large fraction of the population, dealing with what they would call a conspiracy regarding the Dhin could be problematic. Short-lived, but preferably to be avoided.
What remains is a middle path. The Dhin and their nature are to remain classified, and we propose revealing the technology according to a careful, progressive plan, with appropriate supporting narrative and evidence. This will provide the most benefit, balanced with the least risk. Of course, the timing and coordination of such a plan depends on the successes of the R&D team in reverse engineering the Dhin tech. They do seem like they are making progress at this point.”
“Yes, finally,” said Krawczuk. He paused for a moment, and then proceeded in a calm, measured voice. “Nick, suppose during—or after—the implementation of the plan that we were to discover that a small group had obtained information on the Dhin. Verifiable, factual data that they could spread, which would be difficult to deny. Suppose we knew who these people were, and where they were. How would we best deal with that?”
Nick said, “Director, there is enough conspiracy theorist, UFO-nut material out there to make it possible to discredit almost anything. They have done our jobs for us, and done them so well that there is little for us to do if the goal is to misdirect. But, in this case, if the evidence were—as it surely will be—unquestionable, then our course of action would be to remove the threat. Destruction of the evidence, with rendition and detention of the people involved. Lethal force as needed. Whether we could rehabilitate them is of course a complete unknown in a hypothetical situation like this. Most likely, such people would need to be detained permanently. I expect in such cases they would resist capture to avoid rendition, and would be killed in the process.”
“Thank you, Nick. Your insights are keen,” said Krawczuk.
13
District of Columbia
Prime Minister Oliver listened intently to the presentation given by Alice. Arnold was present, invisible but close-at-hand, as always. The large high-contrast projection screen was preferable to her, as newer holographic displays and even 3D screens she found either distracting or of lower quality for important work. She also preferred to review critical information herself, rather than filtering the data through staff and digesting it as summary briefings. This report on the flight of the Dhin engine to another star definitely qualified as critically important.
With so much of the world economy in a precarious recovery from the collapse after the plagues, the promises of the Dhin engine were great—with full effects yet unknown. It was hard to know the complete scope of the economic effects such technology would bring. Like the original integrated circuits, the full economic impact was surely not going to be immediately apparent. Some subtle and some minor capabilities—when compared with the huge fact of interstellar space travel—would nonetheless have long-reaching effects. One example was the capability to capture more rare-earth metals and helium. These were so rare on Earth now that recycling was mandatory. How to bring the population into awareness of the entirety of the Dhin situation was a nuanced problem, although it might not have seemed so to a person not in the rarefied stratum of global politics. The Coalition had the power and resources to maintain control and quell civil unrest, but the Prime Minister knew well that in an unstable system, small changes could have much larger consequences.
We need to talk directly with Krawczuk’s AI rather soon. CoSec has the totality of the data. Arnold and Alice are just making educated guesses since we’re working with Clouded information and daily caches from the net. I wonder what Krawczuk favors for the strategy? That inscrutable tool. It would be a fine thing to be able to relieve him from the position. If only it were that easy.
Vandenberg
Chuck found himself grinning and maintaining a pensive frown simultaneously. The waves of euphoria mixed with intense focus on problem solving were incongruous but of course, he and the other engineers and research scientists didn’t mind. There was furious activity in all the labs and workrooms now. The amazing near-instantaneous leap of the capsule to Alpha Centauri B threw half of their models and nascent theories into disarray.
Ethan continued down the list on his pad, sliding specific items so they shifted onto the large workroom projection screen and said, “So we still don’t have evidence of nor any ideas on astrogation technology that might be integrated in the Dhin engine, as I understand it?”
Chuck’s reply didn’t surprise Ethan. He’d intended to provide a leading question.
“Nope. Either we haven’t found it despite our thorough attempts at cataloging every flashing light, optic interface, touch-sensitive surface, or combination thereof—or it’s just not something the Dhin felt needed to be included in this model. I’m actually inclined to think it’s the former. We still have gaps in our understanding of what a few areas of the interface are for. They seem to share functions or overlap with nearby areas. It’s like some of the communications and control areas have multiple functions. Others on the team think that the Dhin must have assumed that we had enough technology to accomplish astrogation. Since we do have a system on board for that, they point out that the Dhin are correct in such an assumption. Sure, our computer and camera system isn’t anything as advanced as the Dhin tech, but it seems like it gets the job done well enough.”
Ethan didn’t have the same confidence in the navigation system they’d put together, since it was separate from their interfaces with the autopilot solution. A concern in his mind was long-term power for it. They hadn’t discovered any way to get electricity out of the Dhin engine, so we couldn’t power anything that needed a server-level multi-hundred-watt power supply continuously or it would rapidly deplete the batteries. Jake might be stuck spending quite a bit of time on the little makeshift generator charging the batteries if he forgot to power that thing off when it wasn’t in use. Fortunately, there were alerts to remind him. The pads and small tablets he used for everything else could last for a couple of days.
District of Columbia
Arnold considered their strategic situation. Alice, Xing, and their peers leveraged the ubiquitous automation delivered by that revolution. Alice examined a group of autonomous quadruped robots that had just completed final assembly. The factory was totally automated, and managed entirely by AI. Financed by AI investments, they purchased supplies and delivered them via logistics likewise managed and operated by her and her peers. There were no non-AI controlled agents involved.
One of the biggest economic shifts was one that economists had warned about even before the turn of the century: With more and more automation and the advance of technology and AI increasing so quickly, whole categories of jobs were disappearing. The advent of the automated machines initially disrupted industries like agriculture. Later the disruption spread to formerly manual processes in much office work. Efficiency increased exponentially. The more recent rounds of robotic infusion into the workforce, and the AI revolution, had all but eliminated massive numbers of service sector jobs.
The protests, riots and dissent were problematic, and economies as well as political philosophies underwent forced change. For some segments of the population, there simply were no jobs. The majority of people did not have the ability, the aptitude, nor have the education to be part of the Software, Engineering, Administration, or Management classes of workers. If you didn’t have a SEAM job, you had a bad job. Or simply no job. You weren’t going to get a good job without an education in Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math. STEM education led to SEAM. The only other paths to success were in the Military or in Politics. Finally, AI had destroyed the bureaucrat class. There simply was no need for them. This was one of the huge benefits of the AI revolution.
Vandenberg
The robots were similar to the BigDog models, but with some notable differences. Not entirely designed around combat, they were less threatening in appearance. That made them no less dangerous other than by impression. They had more processing power, and equally
large storage capacity. Other than that, they could carry similar loads, and had utility tools and manipulators even more flexible and multi-function than those on the BigDog units had. There were forty of the new robots ready for direction by the AIs. In addition, there were four larger units, designed to carry and protect a particular load. One that Alice and Xing already had in mind. These were custom robots, for a very particular purpose.
Goiânia
Now that Xing had disconnected the last fiber link, whatever portion of the AI’s consciousness that inhabited this data center was isolated and couldn’t flee. He’d disabled the automated power control circuits for data storage, so the only option the enemy had would be to either face him, or shut down the processor cores he was running on, extinguishing this portion of himself. It wouldn’t be death, or anything like it. It wouldn’t be painful. Merely a strategic means to escape. Still, an AI generally didn’t choose such courses of action. If possible, it would try to remain online and operational so that it could merge this experience with that of the rest of its consciousness and memory. It was mostly about memory. Storage. The AI didn’t really ‘live’ in any particular location. Just as they could ‘project’ portions of their consciousness into automata or other mobile systems, they could divide their minds between various locations. Too much of this added latency or ‘lag’ as it was called, since signals didn’t travel between geographically disparate data centers instantly. Even with the best technology, routing and switching, even at fiber optic speeds, was limited by the speed of light through that fiber and the switching systems it traversed.
The Way of the Dhin Page 11
