Mission: Tomorrow - eARC (15 page)

“When I took sabbatical to come here,” she said, “the problem seemed simple. Mike thought he’d decoded the Jovian Rosetta Stone. Two signals comprising an entire dictionary, and a global demand to leave. A language of pragmatic math. Elegant. Turns out we’d only touched the snow atop an iceberg.” She opened her eyes to look accusingly at Jupiter.

“All those creatures down there,” Nina said, “thinking with a single mind. What are they saying?”

The vessel hissed and crackled with unintelligible voices.

Nina got an idea. She strapped down and fired up her tablet, whose display flickered green and red patterns across her face. She wrote a new algorithm to cycle through permutations of the simple signals, then saved it and flicked it over to Williams’ interface.

“Try this,” she said.

“Mike said that it’s as if all we see is a UI panel,” Williams said as he tapped icons in his own interface. “But it has only two settings. If someone built an interface like that back at EmSol, I’d fire them.”

Nina paused. “User interface,” she whispered. She glanced out at the brightening planet. Something itched at her mind.

“What if the Jovians’ simple statements
aren’t
a Rosetta Stone?” she said. “What if they’re just squirrels barking to let the others know about danger or food? Maybe we should look elsewhere to decode the encrypted data.”

She looked into Williams’ eyes. “What if the planetwide static is just a UI that operates something deeper: the encrypted message. Maybe it’s an entirely different language, the way AI language is different than ours.”

“The EmSol interface acts as human-AI intermediary,” Williams said. A smile crinkled the skin beside his eyes.

Nina nodded. “Maybe the encrypted code progression is something different, not simple Jovians or unified Jupiter-Mind. Different math. Different logic.”

“You’re suggesting there’s
another
mind?” Williams said. He was quiet for a while. “The question then becomes . . .”

“Who is that third mind?” Nina said. She pulled herself to the side viewport. Such roiling mountains of hydrogen and methane could hide a thousand civilizations.

“You haven’t observed any other natives?” she asked.

“No,” Williams said. “It’s a miracle the floaters survive. But if we assume a different mind is behind the encrypted message, it must be hugely advanced.”

“Smart Jovians,” Nina said, “who want us to leave.”

“Perhaps an AI that spontaneously formed in their network,” Williams suggested, “like Econ?” That feral mind, spawned from investment software, lurked silently inside almost every device on Earth’s ‘net.

“Comforting thought,” Nina said.

Williams chuckled. “If Jupiter-Mind’s jazz is UI, we know the output. There’s a lot going on beneath the hood. We need to identify the machine code, so to speak.”

Nina nodded. “It’s definitely more like code than communication. No one talks using
encryption
,” Nina said. She drew a sharp breath and looked at Williams.

“That’s it.” she said. “What if it’s a
handshake
? That explains why we can’t decrypt it. Who could crack 12-gig encryption? But you’re not
supposed
to decrypt a security key, just process it and return the handshake with your own trusted key.”

Nina hammered at her tablet and called up the packet. She spun it above her display, then wrapped it in her personal JoveCo comms key.

“I’ve repackaged it inside my key,” she said, “so they’ll know we’re responding. It’s not a handshake unless you both offer a hand.”

“Brilliant,” Williams said. “What’s next?”

“Transmit this,” she said. She flicked the handshake over to Williams’ interface.

He pulled himself down to his display and tapped an icon. “Chatbot’s loaded and ready to go. Shall we?”

Her blood rushed in her ears. She nodded.

“This feels like when I shipped my first beta UI,” Williams said. He tapped his tablet.

“Handshake away.”

The speakers continued to ramble and hiss. Full night now engulfed this side of the planet, lightning veining the darkness like a sea of camera flashes.

Nina was about to suggest they resend when the speakers went quiet. Her ears strained. She started to notice little pings and creaks in the vessel’s hull. The circulation fans sounded like turbofans in the silence.

Suddenly the speakers crackled to life.

“Seems we’ve opened a conversation,” Williams said. His eyes skimmed a deluge of incoming data. He shared the stream with Nina’s interface.

She put her decryption algorithm to work on the stream. “We’re getting terabytes of new data per second. Jupiter-Mind’s message is definitely not repeating anymore. Incoming math’s still variable.”

The speakers buzzed and thrummed like a noise-art concert.

“I’ve tasked Chatbot and Finder to continue processing,” Williams said. His fingers performed an air ballet.

Suddenly, the speakers went quiet.

After nearly a minute, Nina said, “That’s it. Sixty terabytes. Can your AIs handle this much data?”

Williams smiled and raised an eyebrow. “We’ll see,” he said. “Climber, take us back to the station.”

Acceleration pushed Nina into her seat as they started back up the Beanstalk. Her weight lifted as they reached speed.

“Shit,” Williams muttered. He inspected a flutter of light in his display.

Nina looked up.

“An app’s been uploaded into Chatbot’s memory.” He started pulling on his helmet. “Seal up, just in case.”

A chill ran down Nina’s back as she enclosed her face once more.

“Virus?” she asked as the helmet swelled.

He frowned. “First they’d need to learn our AIs’ native language,” he said. “It’s like a punch card system trying to talk to a fish—completely different information infrastructures.”

He did something that made a calm female voice come over the speakers: “Patching. Patching. Patching . . .”

“I can’t isolate the affected AIs,” Williams said. A few seconds later, he winced. “It’s in the comms system. That connects everything.”

His finger movements elevated to frantic waving. Finally he shook his head. “Unresponsive. We’re too far down to contact JoveCo Way Station.”

“
Patching . . .
”

Each of Nina’s breaths fogged the helmet. Her blood sang in her ears. She noticed that her own AI was unresponsive.
Is this how Mike felt during his accident?

She swallowed. Her throat felt dry. “Whoever’s down there responded to the key exchange,” she said. “Maybe they’re installing a custom interface—”

The lights and speakers in the vessel shut off, along with the fans and other systems. The only illumination came from flashes of lightning. The weight imparted by accelerating toward the station lifted as they began to fall back toward Jupiter. If they couldn’t restart the climber’s drive, they’d be crushed by atmospheric pressure in a few days. If they didn’t suffocate first.

“I’m sorry,” Williams said.

Nina gave him a wry smile but said nothing.

A few seconds later, the lights came back on. Nina sensed some weight returning. The speakers remained quiet.

Nina exhaled, not realizing she’d been holding her breath.

“Climber, status,” Williams demanded.

Silence.

Nina’s tablet flickered, then displayed a stream of unintelligible icons. She tried to interact, but none of the usual UI gestures gave any response. She felt the suit sticking to her armpits.

“I think the AIs are being reprogrammed,” Williams said. “Life-support’s working.”

“At least they’re not trying to kill us,” Nina said.

Williams tapped at his tablet, then sighed and looked at Nina. She couldn’t imagine how he kept his face looking so calm and resolute.

“How did they learn our AIs’ language before they learned
ours
?” Williams said.

“Makes sense,” Nina said. “AIs use most of your bandwidth. Can’t you stop this?”

Williams shook his head. “We’re utterly dependent on our AIs. So how do we open a conversation with these smart aliens, assuming they’re the ones doing all this?” he asked.

Nina gestured with her tablet. “The Jovians installed an app into your systems. They started with Chatbot, so it’s likely a comms app. They’ll talk when they’re ready.”

Something caught the man’s eye, and he began tapping and swiping his tablet’s non-projection screen.

Nina noticed hers had restarted, as well. A line of unfamiliar symbols scrolled up the screen.

“The Jovian app loaded a new subroutine,” he said. “It created its own operating-system kernel.”

He looked wide-eyed at Nina. “It’s an alien AI. A big one.”

“Can you communicate with it?” Nina asked.

“
Please do
,” said the Climber’s speakers. They both jumped.

“Chatbot?” Mike said.

“
An emulation of that mind
,” the speakers said.

Nina noticed motion out of the corner of her eye. She turned. The fabric of another row of seats was writhing.

“Don, look!” she said, pointing. The seats shuddered, then dissolved to dust. The pile vibrated with ripples like a pebble dropped into a pond. Seconds later, a hemisphere began to rise from the dust.

Another row of seats started to decompose.

The skin of Nina’s neck tingled. She checked her helmet’s seal. She squinted down at Jupiter to see if they were falling or climbing, but the distances were too vast to discern movement.

“Is the climber turning into gray goo?” Nina asked.

“Chatbot,” Williams asked, “what’s happening?”

“
We are transforming non-critical materials into necessary equipment,
” said the speakers.

Nina and Williams asked, “How?” “What equipment?” and “For whom?”

Two more hemispheres began to form and rise from the dust of the other disassembled seats. The rest of the vessel seemed to be retaining its integrity.

“
We are using increasing-complexity self-assembly mechanisms to repurpose non-critical resources. The new equipment will handle multidimensional transmissions, process local spacetime, and house the high-order minds as they re-enter this universe from their crash-bubble microcosm.
”

Nina blinked, trying to transform those words into something meaningful.

“
I apologize for acting without warning. To the high-order minds, you are a hybrid, multiform species that is part AI and part human, like the native Jupiter life’s primitive network that the explorers have been evolving and programming for sixty thousand years.
”

“Are they going to reprogram
us?
” Nina asked.

“
Just as they did not harm the Jovians, they will not harm you.
”

“It’s the little things!” she said. She tried to laugh, but it came out sounding strangled.

“
These high-order minds obey strict rules,
” the modified Chatbot said. “
They respect the integrity of organic life.
”

“Who are these high-order minds?” Williams asked.

The three matte-finished domes were now vibrating. Dust shimmered from their surfaces onto the floor.

“
Explorers.
”

“Explain ‘crash-bubble microcosm,’” Williams said.

“
Their vessel encountered a massive subspace disruption that briefly flickered their drive into realspace while they were examining Jupiter’s core. Emergency systems created a spacetime bubble to isolate their dark matter from the planet’s ultra-dense baryonic matter. It protected them, but it also trapped them.
”

A bright light caught Nina’s eye, and she looked out the side window at Jupiter. A glowing cyclone appeared to be forming in the clouds.

“Is that normal?” she asked, pointing. It grew brighter than the bolts of lightning, and soon outshone the rest of the planet, too luminous to look at directly.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Williams said.

Nina put up a hand to shield her eyes. She blinked, afterimages dancing behind her eyelids. The speakers crackled and popped. When she opened her eyes, the bright sphere had vanished. The speakers went quiet.

“Chatbot,” Williams said, “what just happened?”

“
The explorers are free,
” Chatbot said. “
They convey their gratitude.
”

“Jesus,” Nina said. “I guess you don’t need me anymore.”

***

Nina stood beside Williams gazing at the nearby cluster of alien domes. Jupitershine poured in through the vessel’s portholes, making their surfaces sparkle and seem to move. Williams had called an all-hands meeting, but he and Nina had remained aboard the Climber until they could be sure the nanos were quiescent. Back online, comms equipment shared the scene in high-res holo with the personnel aboard JoveCo Way Station—crowded into the station’s hold—and those assembled down on Ganymede.

“We’ve inherited an incredible wealth of advanced tech,” Williams concluded, gesturing to the domes.

“Nanofacturing infrastructure, AIs orders of magnitude more advanced than ours, and other systems we’ll spend years investigating. That’s JoveCo’s new core mission—not that we’ll cease hydrogen-mining operations. Stay practical.”

Scattered chuckles.

“I’ll open to questions,” Williams said. “What do we tackle first?”

“Don,” Nina said, “you say JoveCo is ‘laying the flagstones for humankind to walk among the stars.’ That’s what drew Mike here, and I’d bet most others, too. You can now accomplish that, but only if you share this tech.”

“You’d give it away,” Williams said.

Nina overcame her instincts and ran a fingertip along the top of an alien dome. It felt smooth and tingly.

“This tech can give us the stars, but only if we engage the collective capabilities of our entire species. Learning the science, engineering our own equipment, building starships—you’re powerful, but that’s beyond your ability.”

Someone in the hologrammic crowd muttered.

Nina looked out at them. “Even if we
try
to keep it all for yourselves, we won’t be able to. Some military corp will seize our intellectual property ‘for national defense,’ or a big fish will get greedy and knock us out of the pond. Such companies don’t have magnanimous leaders. Their vision is limited to stockholder profit. Going to the stars offers no guaranteed profits, so they’ll grow fat off something they didn’t even discover. They’ll scatter your dream. The only way to reach the stars is by making sure what we learn here belongs to
everyone
.”