Chapter 96

Time: Friday, August 8, 2019 9:21 PM GHT

The last of the evening twilight had faded from the sky by the time Emily, Aggie, and Mark came to the Green Mall lounge, almost two hours after the meeting was supposed to start. After a quick link with Fatima, Mark waved his arm to make sure he had everyone’s attention. “We have a slide presentation,” he said simply. “Would you all please join us in the multimedia room?”

A few minutes later, the entire crowd was gathered at the first-floor presentation area. After checking to make sure Jada’s group could see the presentation on their library consoles, Mark and Aggie stood up by the giant display screen covering the wall while Emily worked the video controls nearby. No one failed to notice how grim the three people looked. It was evident even to the people in Wobanakik. They all waited for the presentation in anxious silence.

“First slide, Emily,” said Aggie loudly. “Right. Here is a piece of a log file being stored on the orbital platform. It explains the cause of this afternoon’s power failure. It explains a lot more. To be blunt, the power outage was the result of a failed security override command. Someone tried to seize executive control of security over an area of unknown size, probably across the entire Great Hexagon, perhaps even more. People, we are in serious trouble. Mark, Emily and I have been studying this log for several hours. The success of the override would have turned us into slaves or worse. Someone just missed seizing absolute control of everything we depend on. Mark?”

He nodded. “Lynn pointed this out to us weeks ago. The annual cycle of Wobanakik appears to be synchronized with a number of the core engineering cycles of the Great Hexagon. Some are biannual. An example of this is Lynn’s ability to trigger the reset at Wobanakik’s summer solstice on April 1^st, and then again in two Wobanakik years. From our analysis of the orbital logs, we also found a seasonal window that opens security protocols and privileges for reassignment. From the logs, we even know where the attempted security override originated. The coordinates indicate it originated in the long building three kilometers south of Black Mall’s home complex. Part of the building near its central core appears to be a security hub for the entire hexagon.”

Whitney raised her hand. “Mark, I’m confused. Why is this information being stored on an orbiting telescope?”

Mark cracked a thin smile. “Yeah, why indeed. I believe it’s there so I can see it.”

Whitney blinked. “Play that again?”

Mark nodded. “It’s a core issue, I know, and worth the time to understand. Let me back up for a moment. The interface, all the people that have been trained by it, we all agree, it feels much more than working with a computer interface and perhaps vaguely less than interacting with a true sentient being. It’s almost as if...”

Mark struggled for words for a moment. “Free will, consciousness, we tend to think of it as a yes or no issue. The human mind has free will. We are conscious. Other animals have it too, desires, emotions, think of a dog you might have known in your life. But computers, machines? We might talk sometimes as if they have personalities, but there’s no true conscious. Artificial intelligence is exactly that, completely artificial, the illusion of intelligence. My laptop has no true ability to understand anything, anymore than a book on modern chess openings understands how to play chess. The book itself understands nothing.”

“And now we come to Kappa Alpha’s interface. Is it conscious? Does it have free will? Emily and I have debated this issue for months. Our tentative answer is ... somewhat. That’s our guess from weighing all our experiences. Our impression is that the interface is working under guidelines that it cannot violate. It cannot break its rules, not that it doesn’t want to but as a true impossibility. The physics of its limited version of consciousness forbids it. That’s how Emily and Aggie and I frame its behavior.”

Aggie spoke up. “But it wants to. I know this sounds absurd, but we feel the interface wants to help up. It’s rooting for us. But it also has overriding orders to follow, and those orders are to be impartial. Humanity is on trial here, that’s our model, and indirectly the interface has all but admitted our thinking is correct. That’s why the logs are on the orbiter. It’s an executive Section Zero area and thus a valid storage area for the data. That’s the interface’s loophole to obey its prime directives for neutrality but still help us along.”

Paige raised her hand and was recognized. “But behind the interface must be the actual builders of this place. The ultimate decision to do all this, to put our species on trial, it must have been an act of free will. I don’t understand. The interface is not the true builder. It openly admitted that to me when I was studying to be a med tech. I hope you all remember my report. I asked the interface when in came into being, and its answer was after Wobanakik became operational but before surface construction. And you say our species is on trial, right? So why aren’t the builders our true judges?”

Emily took a second before replying. “Because we don’t think they’re around, not anymore. Mark and I have probing this issue with the interface ever since we got here. It finally gave us an answer less than an hour ago. It’s reply was that the answer to our question is here for us to find but we have to search for it.” Emily gave a small laugh. “And then things got really bizarre. After about two minutes of silence, the interface started playing the theme music of Party #6.”

“What?! Stairway to Heaven?”

Emily nodded. “We think it was the original 1971 recording too, Led Zeppelin’s band, Robert Plant as vocalist and Jimmy Page on the guitar.”

Paige looked perplexed. “It played a song as an answer? What does that mean?”

Emily sighed. “We think the interface is trying to answer our question without officially answering our question. Mark and I are also guessing it means our trial is not being observed by anyone or anything higher than the interface. I know, I know, in human terms this makes no sense. But playing the song was more than just plain weird. It’s a clue.”

She paused to take a sip of water. “The effort involved to create a world, and then to just walk away ... But that’s what we think happened. Maybe the builders were forced to walk away. Was Earth’s destruction intentional? Were the builders at war with other entities that destroyed Earth? It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

Paige blew a full load of air from her cheeks. “Somehow that seems sort of right but not exactly ... I agree with you on one thing though. There’s much here we don’t understand.”

After a long moment of silence Mark resumed his presentation. “Next slide, Aggie. This next section of the log shows that the security override attempt was initiated by Citizen ID 50. This supports our earlier guess that the person we’ve seen wandering in the southern regions of Black Mall is Diego, whom we think is Citizen ID 53. Next slide, Aggie.”

“And here’s a close-up from the orbiter’s most recent flyby. We’ve zoomed in on an area on the eastern side of the linear building. It appears to be a bathroom on the top floor with a transparent ceiling. Note there is a person high up on the northern wall. We have a better shot with the primary mirror. This will be our last slide. Aggie?”

A few seconds after the final slide was displayed, several women from Party #5 shouted simultaneously, “My God, that’s Jessica!”

Mark nodded. “Yes, that was Amber’s and Whitney’s opinion too. We have identified Jessica as Citizen ID 24. She’s in the same building complex as Citizen ID 50, the person who attempted the security override. The orbiter logs identify the security center as approximately two kilometers west of Jessica’s position. The question we were debating was how to interpret all this. What’s the glue that holds all these facts together?”

“I’ve got a pretty good idea for some of it,” answered Charles from Wobanakik. “Jenaro was pretty much computer illiterate beyond running his Facebook site. Ricardo though, I knew some people that were taking a programming course with him. It’s Ricardo who wrote the override code. He drove his instructor nuts. His teacher called him a bright but daf programmer.”

A voice in the media room chirped up. “Uh, this is Holly. You mean daffy?”

Charles laughed. “No, I mean D.A.F., Deploy And Forget. It was Ricardo’s great weakness. He was blindly overconfident in very code he wrote. Once it compiled and ran a few test cases okay, he would just turn it loose and never check it again.”

Mark replied with a very worried voice. “Maybe that’s what saved us here, but it won’t happen again. The interface nailed Ricardo on a very minor error. One trivial change and I think Ricardo would be our god now. And we have to assume all this is blindingly obvious to him.”

Cassidy was sitting nearby and said, “But we still hold a lot of good cards too. Ricardo knows so little, nothing about us, almost nothing about the surface or the spiral arms of the Mall, nothing about Wobanakik.”

Mark looked grim. “But he will, once he can appoint himself Security Director. He’ll know everything we do, and probably a lot more.”

Cassidy frowned for a moment. “Charles?”

“Yeah?”

“Jessica and Ricardo are alone in the long building complex, and Jessica is two kilometers from Ricardo’s position. Does that suggest something to you?”

Charles gave a small gasp. “Yes! Great thinking, Cassie. Everyone, do you see what Cassie is saying? Jessica has escaped from Ricardo. She’s hiding from him. It’s the only explanation. That guy is so paranoid, he’d never willingly turn her loose like this.”

“This is Oona,” spoke a voice from Wobanakik. “Will one of you presenters please tell me how bad it would be if Ricardo got the security authority he was trying for?”

Aggie locked eyes with both Mark and Emily and then spoke up. “I’ll try to answer, Oona. It would be really bad, bad enough that we have to evacuate the Great Hexagon. We’re hoping his security authority wouldn’t cover the whole planet, but we just don’t know. To be safe, we might have to evacuate all Kappa Alpha facilities, go native as Kelly and Laura’s teams did, hide on the continent of Africa and hope our children can remain hidden until Ricardo dies. I know this sounds gruesome, but it might come to this.”