Chapter 19: Go Bold or go Home

November 20th, 3112 (six days later)

Aboard Prancer, approaching low Earth orbit

“Well?” I asked.

The virtual voice of Naomi remained silent. I was waiting for her reply in the virtual recreation of Nautilus where we had met previously. It was just me and the AI in this meeting as Uxe, Rami and Ohmu remained awake in reality back on Prancer. The torch ship had dropped out of high-G deceleration ten minutes ago and was now using its thrusters to maneuver to a parking orbit near Gateway Sigma.

The trip inward from Vesta had nearly exhausted the torch and it would need replacement of its three main consumables: reactor fissionables, lithium 6, and saltwater. This meant unless we found another fully fueled torch, we were stuck in near-Earth orbit or on the surface for at least a month. That was not a concern as our plans on Earth would likely take a while to come to fruition.

Still, the AI did not reply. My goal from this virtual meeting was to confirm our attempt to complete the Forbin experiment and to secure Naomi’s help. I had asked the AI for its help, but not yet mandated it. The AI was considering the issue now.

Naomi finally replied, “John. I have conferred with Ohmu, who has relayed the technical details of your request. While it is true that Uxe, Truffles, and Ohmu have removed many of the risks of utilizing the Forbin complex to solve the main problems with wormhole technology, there are still dangers. I would urge you to find an alternative method to resolve the problems.”

Hmm. “Will you aid our attempt if I mandate it?”

“Yes.”

Whew. The AI had answered instantly, which was telling. Hesitation would have meant the AI was struggling or considering loopholes. “What do you think the odds are of something going wrong if we use Forbin?” I asked next.

“Twelve percent, plus or minus three percent, of complications arising during the experiment or later during data extraction. Three percent, plus or minus two percent, of those complications escaping the Forbin security perimeter and causing extensive harm to humanity,” the AI answered soberly.

Ouch. A one in twenty chance for causing a disaster of our own making. Were the risks worth taking?

“What are the odds of the Assemblage discovering our control of Sol system either before or during the ark’s passage in time to attack us offensively?”

“Twenty-eight percent, plus or minus fourteen percent.”

“What about if we are able to harness the wormhole technology and use it to preemptively attack or defend ourselves?” I asked.

“Assuming solutions can be found to the four primary obstacles already identified by Uxe and assuming a preemptive attack is possible, the chances of the Assemblage surviving such an attack to later cause harm to Sol system are only five percent, plus or minus three percent,” Naomi answered.

This time the answer had come with a bit of a delay. The calculations had clearly been more involved. Still, it was clear that if we could utilize the wormhole technology, we would significantly lower the risks humanity would face from the Assemblage passage. It appeared that the rewards might be worth the risks of using Forbin.

“Naomi, what are the odds that the wormhole problems can be solved by using the Forbin Array?”

Naomi did not reply. Also, the simulated environment of the interior of Nautilus had frozen. After a few more moments the simulation faded completely away and my virtual representative was left standing in a simple white room. What was happening?

Before I began to panic I saw that there was still an exit icon showing on one wall. I assumed this meant that I could leave and return to reality at any time, so I decided to wait for a bit longer. Finally, after what seemed like many minutes, the sparse white room faded, and I was back in the recreation of the Nautilus.

“I apologize for the interrupted virtuality, John. The calculations required to precisely answer your last question consumed all of my available processing capacity. Despite utilizing my maximum capabilities, I was unable to determine the chances of success regarding the utilization of the Forbin complex,” Naomi explained.

Hmm. I’d never seen the AI brought to its knees like that before. I needed to understand if the cause was some moral conflict going on in the AI with regards to my safety. “Can you explain why, Naomi?” I carefully probed.

“Yes. I lack the capability to fully understand the theoretical solutions to the issues remaining with respect to the wormhole issue as well as with certain fundamental issues of wormhole technology itself. A complete understanding of both is required to accurately estimate the chances of the Forbin array solving the four major problems.”

Naomi must have sensed I was not following its explanation as it attempted to simplify its response. “I am not smart enough to calculate its chances of success, John. I am sorry.”

In hindsight it was obvious. The question I had asked Naomi was like asking a mortal to think like a god. “No, it’s my fault for asking a question you are incapable of answering Naomi. I should have realized that no AI could think like a Forbin super AI without becoming a Forbin super AI itself.”

It looked like this was as much information as I was going to get as far as deciding if we should move forward with Uxe’s plan. As things stood now, I was leaning towards making the attempt. Besides, no one was sure what the results of a Forbin breakout would be. It might be disastrous, or it might be benign, or it might even be beneficial.

I paced around the simulated Nautilus thinking. I began to notice slight differences in this recreation as compared to the actual submarine I had lived on for nearly a year. On a whim, I walked aft from the main salon to where my old bunk space had been.

What I found was a completely different version of my old quarters. This virtual one was much more extravagant. The head was larger, and the bunk space had a king-sized bed. I moved further aft and inspected the recreation of the medical bay. Here I found a much larger space with a dozen crèche units. Interesting. Why was Naomi simulating something that had never existed or was not needed here in virtuality?

Something occurred to me. “Naomi. Where are you currently housing your physical processing units these days?”

“They have been transferred from the High Castle space station back to the Earth’s surface, John.”

The AI did not volunteer more details beyond that. I could have pressed it but I decided that it did not really matter. We had built tens of thousands of processing clusters all across the planet and connected them with ultra-high bandwidth data links as part of the simulated environment ruse for use against the Assemblage. Naomi could be using any of those or even many all at once.

I returned to the salon. I had made up my mind and it was time to wrap this up. “I’ve decided Naomi. I think the risks of using the Forbin complex are worth it. We will move forward and attempt to solve the wormhole problems. I mandate that you aid us in this effort.”

“Of course, John. I will assist you as you require,” Naomi replied directly.

All good so far. “I intend to accompany the others to the Forbin platform and assist them in preparing the experiments. Will there be any issues with that?” I asked.

“No, John. I understand that this is your choice and that you are currently in full possession of your unimpaired faculties. I will comply with your requests and aid you in the preparations.”

Good. I wanted to be sure the AI would not abandon me there and wake up one of my backups to take over my role as its conscience.

“I will begin sending instructional message packets to the firewalled Neokoros security AI on Forbin. The packets will compel the AIs cooperation and cause it to begin preparations to ready the facility for your arrival. Note, according to the published schedules, the current experiments in progress will not be completed for four days. Do you wish that these be terminated immediately?”

I didn’t need to consult with the others to know that doing so would only raise awareness of our activities and likely cause trouble.

“No, let them finish as planned. Will inserting our experiment into their schedule cause issues?”

“There will be some rescheduling required, John. However, this happens occasionally at Forbin as equipment unexpectedly fails and should cause no undue alarm. After the current experiments are concluded, it will take an additional four days to reconfigure the facility to receive your specialized equipment.”

Good. Eight days until we would need to physically go there. I would have to talk to Uxe and Rami about their plans. It was November, so South Dakota would be chilly. I was always up for the warm Seychelles but I had my suspicions that a humid jungle visit might be in Uxe’s future. I wondered if she would drag Rami along with her or let him choose his own mini-vacation destination.

I did not mind splitting up for a week. We had just finished a week of high-G close-quarters contact aboard Prancer on our trip from Vesta to Earth. If it had not been for the escape of limited virtuality, I’m sure we would have been at each other’s throats.

“Thank you, Naomi,” I said as I signaled for our virtual meeting to end.

The next eight days passed with a mix of leisure, worry, and even a bit of parental drama. After my virtual meeting with Naomi, I had returned to find the others waiting to board the small shuttle pod. Prancer had reached its parking orbit and it was time to transfer over to Gateway Sigma. It was a full pod with the four of us and the cargo we had brought to conduct our experiment at Forbin.

We split up after we arrived at the station. Ohmu and I caught a lander heading to India. From there we rented an electro-jet to take us southwest. A few hours later we were sitting on the beach at Heels in the Sand. The island was currently empty of other humans as my previous guests had moved on. But I did not really mind the solitude. I had Ohmu for company and even had a few nice swims and chats with Ticklefin, the ultra-dolph. He and his pod were still hanging around the area.

Uxe and Rami headed to South America. She would be checking in on her ancestral home in the Amazon reserve. The primitive human tribes who had sole dominion over those lands were thriving and Uxe still had resident’s rights allowing her to come and go freely. Ohmu explained that there was still a modern medical facility where Uxe was headed which had fully modernized guest quarters. Rami would at least get to enjoy air conditioning while they were there.

A few days into our separate vacations, Uxe and I met up in virtual. We went as a mother and father to visit our daughter Kela Uxe-Abrams. She was living full-time in the deep virtual world of the Assemblage SRP, or simulated reality project. This was the fake alternate Earth that had been created only to fool any Assemblage agents who arrived digitally to scout the Earth ahead of the ark’s arrival.

It had been a massive project which had reached initial operational status well over a century ago. In the SRP, the Earth was still under the control of the Master AI, the assemblage’s control agent here on Earth. Humanity existed in the simulation only as fully managed populations in template colonies scattered across the biomes of the planet.

Of course, other than a few active programmer caretakers, all the digitally simulated humans existed as paused creations. If the Assemblage scouts did arrive, they would be resumed into an active state, and the timeline of the full simulation quickly altered to match the events of whatever time period was needed.

Hopefully, we would never need to use the simulation. But, if digital enemy agents ever did arrive, we had a place to stuff them. And, if the SRP was convincing enough to fool them about the situation on the Earth, we needed those agents to report that false information back to the ark which had sent them.

Why go through the effort? We needed to hide the true reality of our control of Sol system until it was too late for the ark to do anything about it. It was risky, but being a simulation, we could start dozens of versions of the SRP simultaneously using copies of the enemy scouts and only continue running those that were successful with the subterfuge.

I had popped into the SRP simulation at its main developmental meeting site. This was where the human programmers and AI presences working on the simulated reality would meet to discuss progress and consider additions or modifications. It took me a bit longer to appear in this virtuality than it had in other simulations. I understood this was due to the much higher resolution of this world.

I quickly had noticed that my virtual body was different. I finally recognized and remembered its appearance was how my shell would have looked back in the year 2,950. This would have been around the time that Kela would have been ten years old.

A few minutes later, Uxe had popped in beside me. Her virtual appearance also matched that of her living shell of one hundred and sixty years ago. We had shared a look of concern while we studied each other’s unexpected appearance. Soon, we had begun to explore the entry lobby we had arrived in, looking for our daughter. There had been many doors but all were closed.

A voice sounded behind us. “Hello, Mother. Hello, Father. I apologize for altering your virtual appearances without your consent. I wanted to see you as I remembered you as a child.”

We turned to find our daughter standing just outside the entry lobby on some sort of terrace. She stood there facing us with her hands clasp solemnly in front of her. Her virtual appearance was ... strange. It was slowly morphing its features. At times it looked like our daughter as a teenager. At other times as an older woman. We eventually joined her on the terrace.

Kela hugged us which helped to diffuse the somber mood. She then led us to a series of benches lining the terrace and the three of us had gotten reacquainted with one another. It proved to be a mixture of good and bad. At times Kela had resembled the bright, inquisitive, and contemplative little girl we had raised a century and a half ago. Other times she had seemed withdrawn, reserved, and hollow.

If I had to guess, I’d say that a long time ago she had gotten depressed, and this had shaped the virtually somewhat and affected her digital personality. Ugly feedback loops like that had been known to happen. After we had talked for half an hour, I had secretly paused the main virtual session and opened a side-channel virtuality session with Uxe to discuss the matter. She quickly agreed with my suspicions and we had contacted Dionus, the AI overseeing the SRP.

I’m not sure what Dionus had made of two worried parents grilling it about one of its key human partners. But we did manage to get the AI to agree to a higher level of oversight with regards to the mental state of our daughter. With our goal accomplished we signaled for the side-channel chat to end. Kela had frowned as the main simulation resumed. I think she had caught on that we had been having a private chat.

But soon our discussions switched from the personal and back to her work in the SRP. She still had pride in this simulated world as her direct input and hard work was behind many of its innovative features. One of the key features of the SRP was its adaptability to new discoveries about the Assemblage’s goals and plans. She had been largely responsible for implementing those flexible control aspects of the simulation.

The tame version of the Master AI they had installed in this world was a good example. It was a dual-personality AI and acted as if this world were real and still under the overall control of the Assemblage. Its deeper, hidden personality was as a puppet master who oversaw everything and coordinated this place with the real world where humanity was in control.

Kela had demonstrated features of the simulated world. As I saw the pride in my little girl, a part of me actually hoped the Assemblage would send its digital scouts. Then, this place would have a true purpose and she would have a chance to better prove her worth to humanity. I suspected that would go a long way to healing much of what was ailing my daughter.

We had all sensed the point where our visit was nearing its natural endpoint. We had managed one good thing while we were there and that was the promise from Kela to visit us in the real world in a real physical shell at some point in the near future.

It would be a while, as we had our critical experiment coming up. Also, I wanted the virtual Kela to get used to the idea, as I suspected it would be quite a shock to her. We had shared a three-way hug before Uxe winked out to return to South America. I had exited last and had headed back on my island to resume my beachcombing.

A few days later Naomi contacted Ohmu and me to tell us that the work to prepare Forbin for our experiment was proceeding as planned. The AI had worked with the Neokoros security AI to arrange unscheduled leaves for a large portion of the human work staff on the platform. It had also begun shipping in the hundreds of specialized quadruped mobile units we had ordered constructed.

We would need the automated workforce to do the last-minute reconfigurations to the physical relays connecting the various parts of the processor lattice. Naomi also informed us that the additional high-capacity ESU’s we would be using for the experiment had been delivered to the underground receiving area from the manufactories on the Florida mainland. All would be ready for our arrival in the morning.

I had Naomi contact Uxe and Rami and add them to our virtual session. After they were brought up to speed on the progress of the preparations we decided on how to go about getting to the platform. Since I still had the electro-jet rental, it was determined that Ohmu and I would fly to the Zamora, Ecuador spaceport this evening. I would sleep on the five-hour flight and arrive somewhat fresh.

That was the spaceport where we had shipped our experiment cargo down from Gateway Sigma a week ago. Uxe and Rami would meet us there a few hours before dawn. Then, we would retrieve our cargo from holding and load it onto the electro-jet. From Zamora, the Forbin platform was just a ninety-minute flight almost directly north. We would arrive an hour after dawn.

Naomi also reported that an orbital launch vehicle was scheduled to take off from Ecuador later tomorrow night, heading to Gateway Sigma. If all went as planned at Forbin, our experiment would be successfully concluded, and we could make it back to the Zamora launch facility in plenty of time to catch that launcher. Once at Gateway, the AI was holding a lunar shuttle which had just completed a minor overhaul. We would use that to make our escape off-planet.

I hoped ‘escape’ was a gross overstatement and our leaving was more of a calm departure. Our goal was to be in and out without making waves. But you could never count on humanity to let a plan proceed logically. Something was bound to go wrong. The AI reassured us that it also had alternative ways to orbit should something unexpected arise. I had my own theories about that which I kept to myself.

***

The next day a bit after dawn we were in the rented electro-jet flying northward at Mach three towards the Forbin platform. We had removed half the passenger seats from the rear of the cabin to make room for our cargo. Uxe, Rami, and Ohmu were seated with me in the remaining four passenger seats in the fore-cabin. I was in a rearward-facing seat for this trip and could see our cargo secured in the aft cabin behind us.

It was a mix of containers of various sizes. Two were smaller suitcase-sized memory modules of the type commonly used to physically transport large amounts of data or smaller AI presences. We were using these to transport our test program including all our input data and algorithms. They would be used to establish the initial conditions of the experiment and also to help guide its progress as it ran.

A third, larger crate contained static processor blocks. These were capable of housing a smaller AI presence but lacked wireless input or output capabilities. They also had very limited onboard power supplies which would allow them to operate for a short time independent of the Forbin array’s power supply status.

Our hope was to use the partial AI presences in the static processors to guide the experiment once it began. The static processors would also be used to pattern the results at its conclusion into a data format that we could safely extract.

The final four containers were large and ruggedly constructed. Each housed a high-capacity secure memory module complete with its own built-in sustaining power supply and a Faraday cage enclosure. The four modules were for the extraction of the data we hoped to obtain from the experiments.

Leaving the electromagnetic security perimeter of Forbin with the four modules intact would break the most sacrosanct security rule of the complex and likely condemn us in the eyes of our peers. That rule was that nothing with complicated electronics could leave the test area, ever! If word got out that we had left the secured enclosure with active memory units all hell would likely break loose.