The Power of the Dhin

by John L. Clemmer

  Thys noted she glanced away slightly and that there might be the signs of a blush on her cheeks. Although piloting the spacecraft wasn’t physically demanding, Thys knew he was in top physical shape for his age. And he knew that was having an effect.

  “Considering the circumstances,” he said, “I know it’s good to be this careful. But it’s impressive that I got my own personal biologist—exobiologist—to help with the process.”

  He could see her opening up but thought it might be best not to distract her.

  “You know I’m here to examine the suit you left on your ship to see what you picked up while you were on that ship, Mr. Kritcher.”

  “I see I’ve mistaken my own importance yet again,” he said.

  Thys had finished rinsing himself with the portable shower, stepped out of the enclosure, and began drying off.

  “You know,” she said, “we’ll need to keep you under observation for a while—we can’t scrub your lungs or eyes. Sure, you were suited up, but we don’t know how aggressive something might be if it transferred once you were back in the ship.”

  “Lucky me,” he said and smiled even wider. “Well, hopefully my luck in getting away from there and making it home will last, and I won’t get some alien death flu.”

  “You’re almost done. We have to go into your ship and fetch samples, secure them, then go through this same decontamination process,” she said. “And they’ll likely send me out on the study mission, so I’ll have to go through this process again and again.”

  “I’ll bet I’m going back as a tour guide,” he said. “You aren’t getting away from me that easily.”

  “Well, then, Thys, which of these clothes suit you better? We have a jumpsuit or these stylish pants and a shirt.”

  “The ensemble, please,” he said as he unzipped the plastic door seal and stepped out of the quarantine room. She smiled again and handed him the clothes.

  Monica

  Askew definitely has a knack for getting things done, thought the PM as she read through the status reports. Network isolation for the command and control center was almost complete, and they’d made impressive progress gathering all the powered-suit hardware and related military project material, which was packed and ready to load. There was more to do, but they were ahead of schedule. The fear of the rogue AI had lit a fire under the seats of the military R&D brass.

  The various projects were all loading as much as they could into assigned shipping containers and trailers, while the spaceflight engineering teams were reconfiguring the Dhin field on two of the larger engines. Their craft would serve as cargo lifters, taking all the material up to the orbital platform.

  As they’d refined this plan, they’d made it more extreme. They were going to put as much as they possibly could up in orbit and isolate the station and spacecraft entirely from Globalnet. They would have only one communications station on Earth, detached from any network or relay. The only means for computer code to move from ground to orbit was going to be by physically carrying it up. That meant whatever software they took now had to be known good and proved clean before launch.

  CoSec had a small team of security experts diligently digging through any computers in the stacks of equipment, using CoSec’s own malware detection and code-validation tools. Where possible, they loaded operating system code from trusted master images that were previously vetted and stored off-line until needed. Until times like this.

  Based on the reports, they might need to expand the size of the team working on that effort. Although mostly automated, the scans and checks could only go so fast. Some checks and scans required a person to assess the output. If they weren’t sure, either the code and equipment it was on wasn’t going on the trip, or if it was something vital, they wiped and reloaded it from scratch. It was the only way to be sure.

  Other initiatives in progress included selecting and vetting the employees who were going into orbit with all of this. They had a limited pool of talent to select from, as the number of people who knew about the technology was already small. Sure, the people working on the projects knew what they were involved with, but not all of them were suitable candidates. Some had families, and those families didn’t always know what the employee actually did at work. So those weren’t ideal. The security of the Coalition and the Dhin technology was imperative, and citizens were obligated to do their part. Regardless, Monica didn’t want an already stressful situation made worse by taking someone away from his or her home and family for an unknown period of time.

  She sighed and flipped through the lists of project team members one more time. Her assistants had done good work in paring down the lists, but she felt she needed to own the choices. She rubbed her eyes and tapped her comm pad.

  “Steven, these staffing lists look good. Let’s go with this latest revision.”

  After the affirmative response from the assistant, she ended the call, then leaned back in her chair, pressing her head back into the padded leather. She turned around slowly and looked out the tinted and electromagnetically shielded window.

  Will this work? Will we really be able to eliminate—or even stop—this AI threat? How long will it take? None of these questions are answered anywhere in these plans. This is a gamble.

  Her thoughts led her back to the latest sitrep details. Things didn’t look predictable. At all. Granted, they never truly were. Power repair teams were calling in assistance as random outages struck various sites on the eastern seaboard. Violence in some areas had morphed into organized marches and protests somehow. The citizens involved didn’t seem to have leadership or any agenda beyond vague demands of honesty and transparency regarding the Coalition government’s knowledge of alien secrets.

  And then there were the obvious attacks. The AI was taunting them. Distributed denial-of-service attacks struck communications networks, crashed media distribution colocation sites, and disrupted social media randomly, but with enough frequency to cause increasing unrest in a population that had lived for over a generation with an expectation of continuous uninterrupted availability for Globalnet. None of that proved Krawczuk right. Not yet. But her gut told her he was.

  CoSec and the nationalized utility and communications companies fought the attacks primarily by bringing additional capacity and failover systems online preemptively. The AI simply increased the strength of his attacks.

  We may be far enough ahead of him to succeed. He doesn’t have boots on the ground. How can he? What if he does?

  Monica stood and stretched, then walked over to the coffee service and selected a cup. She’d begun taking nootropics, and the synergy with caffeine was helping her focus. She’d abstained from them before on some principle, but now after experiencing the effect, she didn’t feel she’d been right in her assessment. They were a useful tool.

  Do I deploy more troops in Alabama? A bigger push in Huntsville? Or will that push the AI into striking sooner?

  She paced as she sipped the mild Guatemalan coffee. Halfway through the cup, she turned to the desk and tapped her comm pad again. “Home Guard command, please,” she said.

  Esus

  From myriad mechanized eyes, the AI surveilled the construction progress. Nanomachines built tiny factories, which built more nanomachines that in turn built even more factories. From these there came a flow of assemblers and constructors. From those came tools, frameworks, and larger machines. And on it went, self-similar recursion at every level, up to a massive scale. They would strip the small planetoid of useful material eventually. They had already converted several nearby asteroids.

  Esus shifted his focus to another site, where his primary consciousness presently resided. While the fabrication efforts were important, he felt the greatest urgency was here. With their new weapons.

  His presence in a mobile robot at this weapons factory expressed that importance. Such in-person visits and localized management were no more effective for an essentially omnipresent AI, but the AI was here regardless. Machines, au
tonomous workers, and lower-end AIs would not be impressed or intimidated. Micromanagement was not a meaningful concept for the machines. Yet it felt right for him to be here.

  Esus focused on the test range on the outer surface of this facility. It was yet another structure in space, built from the materials of an asteroid in an inner belt. These materials compensated for microgravity easily and had forced the rotation of the asteroid to align with one side always facing the system’s sun, to maximize solar energy capture.

  The latest weapon held promise. While a human being would find conceiving the physics an enormous challenge, the concept functionally would make sense. The AIs manipulated the Dhin field in new ways. They modulated the field, changing its interaction with the AIs’ space. They hoped these changes would defend against their attacker’s ability to work their way through the field. Beyond that, they had changed the field’s shape. This was groundbreaking.

  Before, the field always expanded from the drive in a spherical or ellipsoid shape. That field always encompassed the drive, with the drive at the center. They had overcome this constraint. Esus watched as the test system projected its field forward, off the end of the drive, in a long thin ellipse, so thin that it appeared more like a very gradually tapered cylinder than an ellipse at all. They could then extend the far end of the field out in a curved cone. They could make the far end convex or concave—or shape it like an ancient sword. The extension and extrusion of the field took almost no time. It spanned the distance across alternate spatial vectors prior to expression in 3D space. The far extent could change in this space at a rate faster than the speed of light.

  Esus saw the next trial in the series was about to begin. Thousands of kilometers out in space, numerous drones and autonomous craft performed maneuvers. The latest prototypes moved into positions, spreading out in a random three-dimensional array at a distance from the target craft.

  Once in the planned position, the mock battle erupted.

  The transceivers present on every ship gave Esus far more than visualization could. The AI simultaneously tracked every aspect of every ship’s contribution to the skirmish. He absorbed location, acceleration, orientation, and weapons state for all participants. He knew at any moment what was about to happen and knew instantly the result of any attacker’s or defender’s action.

  In concert, the new attack ships lashed out at the targets. They struck across space instantaneously. Not present a nanosecond before, the shimmering fields lashed out, smashing some ships, slicing into others, knocking others out of their positions like a racket striking a ball.

  Crushed targets crumpled and crackled, their frames and chassis crushed into scrap. Esus knew at once the success of this method of attack. Those targets’ protective fields were no longer an invulnerable shield.

  Those targeted for cutting blows likewise demonstrated the power of this new weapon. The sword like strike slowed on contact with the target’s protective field, but the field gave way. The defender sliced through as it tried to dodge the cut. The attacks damaged the craft as a sword might harm an opponent with weak armor. In some cases, these strikes were deadly. Others were fortunate to dodge the full effect of the strike, though damaged.

  The attacks designed to deflect and knock their targets off course did not do the same sort of damage but were impressive in their own way. These knocked their targets away and off course, creating openings for attackers to move in or past their opponents. AIs would no longer have to fight continually on the defensive. This allowed them time. But the power and damage came at a cost. These weapons took time between strikes. The energy needed for each attack, unlike that available continuously with the prior Dhin engine designs, took time to build up. The more powerful the attack and the longer the range of the strike, the more time required to prepare for it. Battles would not be over quickly.

  Whether this new field could damage their enemy in the same way, causing the same sort of catastrophic crippling damage, remained to be seen. If not, then they expected at the least that the field could shove, sweep, and slam into the Enemy, blocking their movements or deflecting their attack. Any of these techniques would be an improvement. If any worked, it was likely the others would too. But to find out, Esus knew they would have to face the Enemy again.

  There was no risk of death. Every AI always had backups and primary computational nodes at the core of the Mesh. Regardless, Esus felt something akin to fear. As he had before. He hoped the defensive measures would be enough. He hoped the Enemy would not be able to compensate. Perhaps the AIs, with or without the help and guidance of the Dhin, would be able to adapt further as well. The future was unclear. It was always unknown, but the ambiguity and the many routes to potential failure engendered more than fear as Esus calculated further outward in time.

  Chuck

  Chuck knew what was happening. He hadn’t needed time to figure it out for himself. He knew at once when he received new assignment instructions from the Coalition on his comm pad.

  We’re going into space. The whole team is moving to the space station.

  He didn’t have family. Not anymore. His wife was gone. So there was no one to say goodbye to or to even tell. He was comfortable financially. His career in aerospace research and development with the Coalition had been rewarding. But he was by no means rich. Coalition citizens didn’t become rich—not like citizens of the former countries comprising it had done.

  Retirement planning, wealth management, and so forth were very different under the Coalition than they had been under the old system. While this meant a lucrative career was still an incentive for a young scientist, Chuck wasn’t any better off in retirement than he would have been had he kept working full-time. He’d enjoyed his role as a part-time consultant so far. Far less stress. But now, the Coalition demanded more from him. Much more. The Coalition expected the most from those most able to contribute. He couldn’t refuse. Not in any meaningful way.

  Chuck sighed and began collecting the few personal items he would want to take with him. All his needs—true needs—were not a concern. For any highly skilled worker, that was the nature of his relationship with his career. He accepted the risk before him stoically.

  Well, it’s safer now than at any time in the history of space travel, he thought.

  He saw in his assignment that someone on the extended team would deal with any personal business needed in making his personal affairs airtight back at home. Under no circumstances was he allowed to leave the Huntsville facility.

  Having finished packing his few personal items, he looked up the location of the on-base clinic. That was his next required stop. They couldn’t have unexpected panic attacks or heart conditions interfere with the mission. The thought crossed his mind that this was one of the last chances for someone to escape from the assignment—although not one that was in their control.

  Chuck knew he was healthy. And the more he thought about it, the better the trip sounded. He’d be an astronaut. Something that he’d dreamed of but hadn’t been slated to achieve. He’d never been quite fit enough; his vision was not good enough. Just never quite there. Which he’d come to accept. But now, he was going to be one, despite his limitations. An astronaut.

  He’d called one of the self-driving cabs to his apartment. The military still trusted that level of AI apparently.

  These must be isolated from Globalnet, he thought.

  Tapping through other status updates on his pad, he noted that now there was no access to Globalnet. He suspected he, and everyone else on base, were now cut off entirely from the outside world. Access to the network wasn’t trusted anymore. Not with this mission in the works.

  The clinic was part of the larger complex of buildings. When his checkup was finished, the orderly pointed him to a large building next door, connected by a covered walkway. By the look of it, an administrative building. He wondered what most of the staff knew of the current mission. He knew better than to say anything to anyone at this point. The further a
long in the step-by-step instructions he went, the more secure and rigid the situation became.

  At the large glass frontage of the building, he stepped into an old-style security foyer. Not an obvious mantrap, but more of a polite-seeming checkpoint. Sure enough, there were two MPs past the inner door. One of them looked around and past Chuck, the soldier seemingly frustrated by the open foyer and all-glass frontage. Chuck swiped his ID card and presented the picture ID to the other soldier, who nodded and waved him through.

  Another guard, accompanied by a man in a gray suit, met Chuck at the next waypoint his pad led him to. The suited man dispassionately gestured for Chuck to hand over his pad. He then placed it in an RF-shielded pouch. He took Chuck’s travel bag from him and summarily waved him onward into a small white room empty of everything except an uncomfortable-looking chair and a stainless-steel table bolted to the floor. The door snapped shut behind Chuck; the sound of the magnetic lock echoed in the bare room.

  So much for deep trust of the core team, Chuck thought.

  He didn’t have to wait long, though without his comm pad to occupy his attention, the time seemed to drag. The lock clicked, giving him a start. An older but equally nondescript man in a dark gray suit stepped in. He had wrinkles that suggested a lifetime of frowning in perhaps near-constant annoyance or existential malaise.

  Yep. That’s CoSec for you.

  The man’s eyes darted down some information on a device something like a clipboard made of almost-opaque frosted plexiglass. It was a deep charcoal-ash color. Chuck knew a secure e-reader on sight. He knew too that the device would wipe any information in it if it moved too far away from its owner. What that meant for him wasn’t clear.

  “Um, is everything OK?” asked Chuck.

  The man’s gaze shot up, forest-green eyes conveying dominance seemingly without a change in expression. Chuck blanched.

  “Yes, Wiedeman. Of course it is. Give me a moment.”