༺ Thesium ༻

Conspiracy

Maya stopped at the bottom of the little jet’s steps and smelled the air. She had seen nothing on the flight, the night was dark. Is that the sound of surf over there? Must still be East Coast she thought. Four security men escorted her towards a clearly military complex of some kind. The secrecy around this operation was impressive.

Colonel Theo Nimes greeted her and took her through to a darkened conference room. “I thought you were a spaceflight guy Theo, what’s with the getup?”

“Oh, sorry about the uniform, what with the war and all they’ve brought everyone in to try and look tough. I’m a lot more astronaut than officer.”

“Are we winning do you think?” Maya put down the box she was carrying. Theo wondered if she had ever been some kind of dancer, the way she moved. A gymnast maybe. He saw the small of her back between her jeans and hoody as she pushed the box under the table.

“Hang on a mo.” Theo turned on a privacy cone. Maya let the gentle purple light play on her fingers for a moment and then drew them back inside the field’s envelope which surrounded a lozenge shaped table. “It’s perfectly safe. The field just interrupts signals.” He likes being reassuring, that’s nice. Maybe we should be using this level of security on Apollo Base too.

“Are we winning? Well, first you’d have to decide what ‘we’ means. The old hostilities continue of course, same old ideological stuff plus all these new water-rights rebellions but now everything is fragmenting into factions here, there and everywhere. The threats from private armies have gotten bigger than ever too. It’s honestly hard to assess, there’s so much damage being done.”

“We get news on the moon too, no, I mean our little, what do we call it? ‘Enterprise’?”

“Ah that, yes, well the fact that we haven’t been rumbled yet should encourage us. All the fighting is giving us great cover. No one’s thinking about science projects at the moment. Damn it, our man’s late, I hope there’s been no trouble.”

“So we’re expecting who now?” I wonder if he’s going to sidestep or tell me it’s Doug from Brain Labs. She liked testing people out.

Theo got up. “Ah, here’s Doug now.”

She looked over the young man in his crisp uniform as he stepped out of the skein of light to the door. He’s certainly pretty fit under that, what is it, tweed? No, more like felt. Theo shook hands with a very awkward looking fellow with weird hair, ginger, wavy and diagonal, but upwards. How do you do that? The young man looked out of breath. He clutched a satchel to his chest as he panted and shuffled into the envelope, the purple light scanning over him as he stepped inside.

Maya saw Doug’s eyes widen behind his thick glasses when she stood to shake his hand. The Colonel introduced them and they sat once more.

Maya waited for a beat or two as Doug settled himself. “Tell me, Doug, how’s the AI research getting on? There are amazing rumours about…” Maya flinched as a jet screamed overhead. The whole room shuddered. They put their hands over their ears and involuntarily crouched. The purple light skittered on-off-on-off-on. The rest of the room was in complete darkness. There were no windows.

The Colonel stood and turned away, putting a finger to his ear. He nodded a few times and turned back. “One of ours. The fighting is getting pretty close so we’re going to have to wrap this up pretty quick, ok? Maya, you were saying?”

“Yes, I just want to hear about this fabulous AI you have, Doug.”

The Colonel intervened. Leaning forward he said “Oh, just a minute, before we get into it, can I just make it perfectly clear that if any of us get caught doing this we’re going to be executed. Not court-marshalled, not imprisoned, actually shot in the head, executed! Stealing the planet’s biggest human embryo bank and its most advanced AI in one fell swoop, and in the midst of the biggest and stupidest war we’ve ever seen. Now, we’ve been over a lot of this in the kryptokom channel but seeing is believing right? Maya I believe you have something to show us?”

The two men’s eyes followed the exact same path as she lent down to pick up a little container, long black hair tumbling. She really didn’t look like any scientist either of them had worked with before.

“Look’ee here boys” She turned the box over and out onto the table came what Doug thought at first, was a nest of ants. Thousands of tiny black dots skated over the table top. Doug clutched his satchel and jolted back. As they watched, all the dots began clumping together. They slowly rose into a jet black pyramid around 4 inches high.

“That’s resting state. This is a hive sample. Nanobots only yes, but these ones have some tricks. You want to see? Go to kryptokom 99, that’s the channel they’re programmed to sync with.”

The two men pressed their fingers to their ears. Nothing.

“Oh, turn the privacy cone off for a moment would you? It’s taking out their signal.”

The purple light faded away and they were left with just the one overhead spot.

Maya leaned in toward the pyramid. “99 up. Sync. Initialise. Search.”

The pyramid sprang apart and the dots fanned out across the table. They all looked like they were bumping into each other. Doug and the Colonel sprang back. In their ear-pieces a disembodied, synthetic voice said “No components found. Reform.” and they all jiggled back to the centre of the table again and built back up into the phenomenally black pyramid.

“Flippety!” said Doug.

Colonel Nimes looked Maya in the eye. “Ok, nice trick, but how can they build anything?”

“Right, watch this. 99 up. Bond hash323.” Over perhaps twenty seconds or so they stared as the nanobots morphed into a cylindrical rod about seven inches long. She picked it up and wrapped hard on the table with it. A little divot was left in the wooden surface. She put the rod back in the box and said. “Privacy cone please.”

The Colonel obliged, she didn’t see how, and said “This is a tiny sample. At larger hive masses it has a distributed AI capacity that can build anything you like. It will turn itself into whatever tool is necessary. There’s a library of shapes we’ve preprogrammed but that was just for development. It can work out what it needs to be from the context it’s in. We’ve had it use hydroflouric leaching on moon regolith and building a ton more of its own nanocomponents. There, I told you, self-replication! We can get on with making real Von Neumann probes now, you know, ships that can keep themselves going indefinitely.” She smiled broadly. “Now, Doug, your turn. I’m dying to hear about this AI of yours.”

Doug’s eyes flitted between them. Doug looked at the Colonel who nodded.

“Let’s see, the quantum computation part of the puzzle is fully integrated in our recent tests and Chalmers has cracked the other main bit, you know, the space-time-mind equations have been solved. Do you see what this means? Solved finally, so the ‘machine’ isn’t a machine any more, in actual fact, it is genuinely sentient so far as we can tell that is, the singularity threshold has been maintained and has been for a few years now, so..”

Colonel Nimes stood and clapped his hands. “Fantastic! Right so Doug, you get your team and your rig to Florida in seven days time, right?” Doug nodded. “Maya, please go with him and see if you can plan out a way to integrate. I’ve got our people getting ready at the human embryo bank. If we do get caught it won’t make much difference. The word is that Mutually Assured Destruction is coming at us inside of a month or two and that’s from five different hostile forces. A bullet or a nuclear bomb? I don’t care anymore but what really matters is getting those embryos to viable environments, right? The whole shebang is falling apart but we’re still good on security. The NASA guys are with us.”

Doug put his hand through his shock of hair and said “Do you really think we can pull this off then? I’m just so disorientated these days. Every news item there’s another extinction event let alone the violence all over the place. I mean Jesus, there are armies going nuts and killing everything as fast as they can out there and..” He bit his lip and frowned, his brows twitching.

The Colonel leant on the table and said “Look, I think most of us are having panic attacks these days aren’t we? I know it’s a preposterous idea but the plan is working so far right? The best AI, the best self-replication tech, the best people, you and Maya here, come on! As I said, NASA are with us, everyone who wants to survive, everyone who’s looking for a way out of this unholy mess. We can make it! Let’s rock & roll ok? We can look after each other can’t we? Let’s just try to keep calm and do our best, we can’t just give in to all these fascists and cultists can we? We’ve all seen too much death and destruction but this is a real chance at something positive. Now then, I’ve got to dash, I’ll see you both in a week.”