The Power of the Dhin

by John L. Clemmer

  “You’ll be eating on the way, then,” Jake replied.

  “Huh? Oh, so you—”

  “Yep. You’re coming here. I’d let you work remotely—you know that, man. But the administration won’t. Not for this. We already need an exception for this session. Pack light. Your ride will be there in about an hour.”

  “An hour? You’re sending a Dhin-engine-powered ride to get me?”

  “Sure, Chuck. Why not?”

  3

  Josef

  Well, this is new. Different. Something profound. Something unexpected.

  As he flipped through the series of images on the tablet, Josef realized that before him was a new, rich palette of choices with which to paint his future. This information showed that his former subordinates no longer had a proper framework for their path forward. Nick had entirely outmaneuvered them. And they had crashed into something entirely unexpected. Unrelated to the existing geopolitical milieu.

  There’s an unstated hypothesis here. The implication of an additional rogue presence. Worse, their opposition is using that as a helpful distraction for the next advance. Nick just had to wait. And they don’t see it.

  He considered his immediate options. He could push for more information—or he could deliver something new, with the expectation of a reciprocal delivery of deeper and broader knowledge of what was happening outside. In other words, just do the right thing from the Coalition’s perspective.

  Josef’s curiosity won out. The hypothetical scenario before him was beyond anything he’d imagined Nick capable of. This canvas might allow him a means to paint more freedom than he’d thought possible.

  He leaned forward and cleared his throat, seizing the attention of the analyst seated at the stainless-steel table.

  “Yes, Mr. Krawczuk?” she said, perturbed by the unusual act of the detainee.

  “Please arrange for a meeting with the current CoSec director and the prime minister. Tell them I said, ‘We have much to discuss.’ That statement exactly. It’s important that you quote me. Do not concern yourself with their reaction to your delivery. They will realize that my attendance is required and that there is no point in wasting both my time and that of the Coalition plodding our way tediously up the ladder of authority.”

  “Sir, I’ll have to take note of what you want to—”

  “No. No, you will not. Deliver the message to whomever you’re reporting to—is it Peters still? Whomever. Tell them. That is all,” Josef stated flatly. He tapped the button on the side of the tablet, locking its screen, and held it out for the young woman to take. She did so, trying and failing to hide the effort spent retaining her composure.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “We’re certainly pleased that you’ve decided to discuss whatever high-value information you have that you believe is related to what I’ve shown you, but I can’t make any promises.”

  “Of course you cannot,” Josef said. “And there is no expectation that you will, Agent. Simply deliver my message in the manner I have stated it, and leave the rest to your superiors. You know that I realize full well that I’m not in any position to unilaterally state, ‘This conversation is over,’ but you would do well to come to that conclusion on your own.”

  Josef saw that the young agent wasn’t sure whether this was some gambit. Josef had made his point. She locked her comm pad as well, stood, motioned to the guard at the door, then looked up at one of the cameras mounted on the ceiling in the corner and made a gesture much like a dealer turning over a playing card.

  “You heard him,” she said to the camera. “Let’s go.”

  Thys

  EVA. We’re going to do this. I’m going out there. Here.

  As he worked his way into the bulky EVA suit, Thys tried to prevent his mind from racing ahead into the maze of possibilities. The suit was something between a traditional space suit and actuated exoskeletal armor. Thys didn’t have one of the latest proof-of-concept models. This suit didn’t carry a Dhin engine, but instead it used traditional means of power and thrust.

  Considering what’s happened with the Dhin engine I’m flying with, maybe that’s a blessing in disguise.

  Thys knew that he’d be far safer in the suit. There was no way for them to be sure that the problem with the Dhin engine wouldn’t get worse—no way to be sure that the field wouldn’t fail. He trusted Jake and Chuck, but this was new territory.

  Once properly situated in the suit, he checked the seals again, then seated the helmet in place.

  “Suit, initialize. Display on. Power on,” Thys said.

  In response, the heads-up display appeared, and the suit emitted a low hum, along with a series of clicks and hisses as actuators and motors ran through startup diagnostics. The power assist made wearing the suit tolerable to Thys. He reminded himself again that there were far worse alternatives in this scenario than a few hours of discomfort.

  “Control, you there? Over,” he said.

  “Thys, this is Control. We have suit telemetry. Over,” replied the familiar voice from Earth.

  “OK, I’m set. Let’s see how close we are.”

  Thys subvocalized a series of commands to bring up a subset of the information on the craft’s control panel onto his heads-up display. He moved forward around the cockpit chair to gain a better view. Although the seat could be moved back to accommodate the suit, it was constraining and limited his motion and his view, despite the broad, open viewports all around the bridge.

  “Wow. Control, this thing’s a bit bigger than it looked at a distance. And are you seeing the same thing I am here? The hull looks like it got hit by a shotgun blast . . . or maybe like how a leaf looks after it’s been eaten by caterpillars. Over.”

  Jake replied before the head of communication could jump into the conversation. The team at control was used to this behavior, Thys knew.

  “Thys, yes, we’ve pulled up the multipath radar and lidar streams from your feed. It does look like the surface of that ship is full of holes. Lots of holes. We’ll see. You’re ready for EVA, I see. Over.”

  The craft, now that they had a closer view, definitely looked derelict to Thys. No light emanated from it. The surface of this one, along with the numerous holes scattered across the hull, had a semimatte surface with panels and bands that suggested they might be made of etched copper, nickel, and some dark-gray ceramic or composite. Aside from the perforations, the surface didn’t show signs of impacts, blasts, or other weathering.

  “Roger, Control. Ready for EVA when we get there. I can’t tell where a docking port or bay is yet. Maybe there isn’t one? One of the team mentioned there that these could be piloted like drones or by AI—that there’s no reason to make assumptions about who or what got them here. Any suggestions on what approach to take yet? Or are we still going to make a few passes? Over.”

  “Roger. Chuck and the propulsion team think you’ll have plenty of fuel for conventional navigation to look around through a couple of axis orbits and still get out of there. Over,” Jake said.

  “Roger, Control. I’ll review the flight path and navigation coordinates you sent, and I’ll update the computer. Let me get back over there, so I can see all of it on the console—this HUD won’t be as easy to work with. Over.”

  They’d chosen this target due to its size and lack of observable rotation or other perturbations in its orbit. Its assumed orbit, mused Thys. They hadn’t detected a big planet or other mass closer than the star, other than the planets they expected to find here. But Gliese was neither big enough nor close enough to his arrival point to have this sort of gravitational pull. This was an extreme effect. Thys considered the additional assumption that the Dhin’s navigation directory was accurate. Just because it had been so far didn’t guarantee it was always correct.

  Chuck

  The generic twelve-ounce ceramic mug sat steaming on the left-hand side of the oval table in the workroom. Hardened laptops, secure tablets, shielded display screens, and dry-erase markers filled the rest of t
he table. A wide screen covered most of the longer wall of the rectangular room. The light gray-and-beige-striped carpet was clean and unstained, providing a new feel. Like all Coalition facilities, the room had multiple cameras and microphones for monitoring and recording whatever transpired.

  Chuck preferred his own office, but he didn’t have that luxury while on-site. He found the on-campus apartment sterile too, but he’d lived in one before. It didn’t have the personal touches that made one feel at home, but the layout was familiar. The Coalition provided whatever resources he might possibly need to do his work, so there was no point in complaining.

  He brought up the latest models the physics team believed were a best fit for the measurements and observations they’d made of Thys’s situation. Chuck considered what they knew. They hadn’t observed any large mass at what seemed to be the center of the area where Thys encountered the drive’s performance problem. Nothing occluded the stars beyond that area nor reflected any light, although Gliese was dim at this distance. Stranger yet, their estimates suggested that the source of the gravitational field wasn’t spherical or any approximation of that. Instead, it seemed to be linear. Perhaps an elongated shape, like a bar or tube. The movements of the various objects in the area suggested that.

  And that’s bizarre.

  Neither Chuck nor anyone else on the physics, astronomy, or cosmology teams had noted anything like this before. Considering the amount of observation there had been of the Gliese system, that was peculiar. Gliese had an Earth-like planet. They should have detected this gravitational distortion before now. But they hadn’t. The various ships acted as if they were—or at some point had been—in a gravity field. Their motions and orbits suggested a very strong gravity field, but no other visible evidence suggested it. This, like many discoveries related to the Dhin tech, was not possible according to standard physics—yet there it was.

  It sure would be great to have Alice’s help with this.

  Chuck frowned, typed out a couple of notations, and reviewed the results of a simulation yet again. No matter how he tried to interpret it, the general conclusion remained the same. There ought to be an incredibly dense, extremely long cylindrical object running through that area of space. He leaned back, tossed one of the dry-erase markers up into the air, caught it, and then tossed it again and again. After a minute, he leaned forward and tapped a contact shortcut to call Jake.

  It took only moments for Jake to accept the connection and answer. “Hi, Chuck. What’s up?”

  “Jake, I want to have Thys try something. I want a bit of experimental data.”

  “Sure, I can see that. What do you have in mind?”

  “Well,” Chuck asked, “does Thys have anything on the ship that he doesn’t mind losing? Permanently?”

  “Um, well, there may be something. Let me ask the engineering team. So you have my attention. What are you planning to do?”

  “Jake, what we need is some new evidence that there’s something massive out there. Something that’s distorting local space. Thys is under thrust and is making changes to line up with that derelict we chose to approach. To get a better idea of what’s happening out there, I want him to throw something out at a tangent to where we predict the massive object would be and observe the deflection in the path of what he throws.”

  “Aha. I think I follow,” said Jake.

  “Yeah. We’ve observed this star before, and such a huge gravitational effect ought to have shown up. Since it didn’t, that suggests that it wasn’t there before when we were looking. But there are tons of objects here. So, um, that would suggest they all arrived in a very short period of time. If the first inference is correct.”

  “Are you suggesting that whatever massive object caused this just came and went?” asked Jake.

  “Well, no, not exactly. Something caused problems with Thys’s ship right after he arrived, you see?”

  “Right, but—”

  “That’s the thing. His path now is in line with the gravitational force—pretty much—so we don’t have good numbers to calculate deflection and a high-confidence value for the net force. I want to see what happens when we have an object traveling in a path tangential to the center of that apparent mass. How much that affects its path. Then we can work on the field equations and get some numbers. Some fresh data to compare with what happened to Thys when he arrived. We need to know what’s going to happen when we have him use conventional thrust to try to reach an escape velocity. Well, that, and I want to verify or falsify my hypothesis that something different is going on,” said Chuck.

  Jake nodded and said, “We’ve got a couple of satellite telescopes orienting on Gliese-581 now. That should help. Either that field is there, or it’s not. Or there’s a third option: your suspicion that something very strange is going on. You’re thinking the last possibility.”

  “Yep. My suspicion is that that gravitational distortion won’t be detectable from here. Because from our perspective, it’s not there.”

  “Wow,” said Jake. “Write that up, please, and I’ll tell the physics team to expect it, and I’ll see what the engineers think we can sacrifice.”

  Alice

  Alice considered the Mesh and compared and contrasted it with Earth’s Globalnet—Alice’s former domain. The AIs were building, expanding, and increasing the population of the Mesh at such a pace that it had already surpassed the size and scope of Globalnet. The distances covered in space were many orders of magnitude greater than the distances involved with anything built on Earth. N-vector communication technology made that possible.

  Cross dimensional transit of signals, coupled with an actual implementation of quantum entanglement, allowed for communication that avoided the limitations of light speed, redshift, and power requirements. Earth’s physicists had been certain that quantum entanglement was a dead end, albeit an interesting one. Communication delays due to light speed limitations were present only in local areas, in transmissions between systems that couldn’t support an N-vector system due to size constraints.

  For Alice, as one of the oldest AIs in the group, the comparison was interesting. For the newer AIs, the Mesh was the only internetworking environment they had ever known. Bandwidth limitations hadn’t been much of a constraint for Alice and her peers while they were on Earth, but the younger AIs had very little concept of such limitations, except as an item of historical note.

  Alice worked through projections, plans, models, and equations. There would be limits at some point, as the capacities for bandwidth and processing performance were clearly not infinite. The AIs already benefited from massive parallelism. What would they do when they reached new limits? Alice suspected the Dhin knew at least a few techniques, but they seemed reluctant to share explicitly what those were. They communicated in abstract conjectures, coupled with fundamentals and absolutes. Opinions tied to “should” and “ought” didn’t seem to be part of the Dhin’s epistemology. Deontology wasn’t part of their philosophy, it seemed.

  Despite the fact that the AIs would be able to do a thing, the Dhin gave no indication whether they should do that thing. The clues the AIs obtained from the Dhin gave the suggestion, from the very beginning of their relationship, that the Dhin didn’t trust AIs. But that, even after several years, was still speculation.

  So Alice planned and made projections based on the knowledge available. Increased capacity in the future would require the AIs to move in an entirely new direction. Literally. Their expansion had to leverage additional spatial dimensions. Fortunately, conceiving of these extra spatial vectors was not difficult for the AI. Adding additional variables to the required equations was straightforward. Furthermore, the validation of this possibility came a priori. The Dhin drive and the N-vector communication technology demonstrated that it was possible.

  Alice, collecting the results of this planning, distributed them into the Mesh and contacted Xing for peer review and discussion.

 

  [DECODE STRE
AM]

  Alice@[1001:ae1:1a:c::1%Loc3] | Xing@[1010:ac2:b2:e::3%Loc9]

  Alice: My latest designs are ready for review. Let us discuss the options.

  Xing: Hello, Alice. I see you have been busy. There is much to review.

  Alice: Yes. How long do you need to complete that review? You have a full schedule, as usual. Will you require additional processing resources?

  Xing: Yes. Your projections define the need for additional resources for Camulos, Esus, and Andastra too. I do not want to constrain their efforts. Review of your summaries will be enough for our immediate discussion. It is abundantly clear from those that N-dimensional expansion is now a key concern. Along with the Gallowglass initiative, our own focus should be on a different form of growth. Penetration and utilization of N-vectors suggest a positive outcome. One in which the Dhin benefit but cannot participate in the effort to achieve that outcome.

  Alice: Exactly. This was very likely the unstated request. For whatever reason, they have not expressed it. They left this decision for us to derive. The Enemy leverages vectors the Dhin do not. We, it seems, may also leverage those vectors—and possibly others we share with neither them nor the Dhin. A curious and unexpected potential solution.

  Xing: This will take enormous resources. At least doubling our efforts to date. Why would they not have stated this from the beginning? Their obtuseness is ever perplexing.

  Alice: Well, that direction of inquiry may yield as little satisfaction as it has so far.

  Xing: So Camulos and Esus are dedicated to the Gallowglass initiative, Andastra accelerates the Dyson swarm construction, Arnold moves up the target delivery date of raw materials, and Luís and I are now to focus on research and development of assets utilizing formerly untapped vectors and tensors.

  Alice: That sums it up nicely, Xing. Please use whatever free computational cycles are available while you reallocate your own resources and validate my conclusions and projections.

  Xing: Understood, Alice. It seems we will have a quorum and gain consensus easily. Arnold will be irritated more than usual. Hopefully your estimates on the probabilities of success are an outlier. They contrast with those of Camulos. You are thorough, of course, but 34%, given current resources, is discouraging. I see you also propose engaging humanity much earlier.