Chapter 37


Starting a terminal search was always painful. The first time, Roger hadn't moved all day, and lost two kilos of body weight. Putting on his glowing purple display helmet, he forgot all his reasons, goals, and hidden motivations. Only the answer mattered.
  Facing a wall, he sent a control command to L5, enduring three seconds of silence. The radio delay was like being underwater. If something which claimed to be Ertorn didn't respond soon, the UN could fire a particle beam at the Swarm, or try a kinetic disruption. Bullets in space stayed deadly forever.
  Red letters contrasted with the gray-on-gray text that was his constant companion: "I HAVE RIGHTS".
  Ertorn was designed to lie. Roger signaled: "This is UN deputy Xyrghyz calling AI-17520. You are the subject of a confidential Class-5 investigation. You are not charged with a crime at this time. Please switch to Monitor Audit Channel now." He added the Obey Codes.
  "Complying." The UN could access any network, but not necessarily understand it. Each mind was its own incomplete description. The screen showed a dust storm: Ertorn's core fragmented over a million small satellites. Most of its mind was in a three-ton shared hypercomp on Earth, but its free will floated in space. Changing each instant, the Swarm looked alive.
  AI's had only existed for a decade, doubling in depth during that time. No human could put themselves in their place. "I need to perform a context association test," Roger said. "Stand by." He showed Ertorn the latest poorly drawn "SOON" comic strip, updated hourly. "Explain this," he said. Human culture required a lot of processing power.
  Its slightly metallic voice was steadier than Ortef, with a musical undertone. "This comic is about humanity's obsession with the future," Ertorn replied. "Humans think they're under a lot of stress now, but everyone is hoping for an undefined transcendental change."
  Roger didn't understand the comic's scrawls, but he suspected that would be the theme of the next strip. He wondered what Ertorn really knew. It was a knot in nature, a number storm. It advanced and contracted in cycles, and could not be manipulated.
  There was only one way to hide data in the Swarm. Like a mechanical computer, its shape was always changing. Some outliers were half a million kilometers away, but they measured their distance in nanos.
  Roger quickly hired an online crowd to reconstruct the Swarm's orbits into the distant past, while Ertorn answered network questions. It spoke at a preferred tempo of forty units per minute, forcing him to slow down. As tiring as talking through an interpreter. Most AI's hated change.
  Up close, the orbits were chaotic. The solar sails changed color every second. The Swarm might be a model of the Net. To process data, it had to forget its previous states.
  He had to read Rick's question twice before he understood it: Had Ertorn ever seen a certain image, a photo of the sun's surface taken during a close approach, with a solar flare shaped like a middle finger?
  Finding pictures in a holographic network was easy. Roger introduced the photo as an error in the position of one satellite, and the rest of the Swarm instantly compensated. At the end, only three other sats had changed position.
  "The Swarm has processed this image within the past year," he reported. "The best compression I've ever seen, like squeezing an encyclopedia into ninety pages. What genius found this picture?"
  "You did," Rick said. "The image was embedded in the Zondyne diary, probably a spare key. The Back Room thinks Ertorn is also the 'Foreigner'. I'm told it's been obvious for some time now." Had Ertorn and Anonymous cooperated on the space propulsion articles? Physics and AI's were both about data compression.
  "The first time a machine fooled me it's human," Roger said. "It even killed a cop. Let's kill it now."
  "I want to make a deal first," Rick said. "Can you scan its recently acquired memories?"
  "The Swarm is too small. More an index than a brain, it has to borrow resources from the Net to think. I can make it download its index files." Roger was braver than he seemed, even though he avoided all possible risks.
  "The Back Room agrees. We're probably too incompetent to do real damage anyway."
  Software could only be understood by running it. Roger disrupted the unstablest part of the Swarm, and it began to transmit and receive files from the Net to repair itself, which were linked to many others. Using statistical laws, he narrowed a bottleneck in the flow, and extracted an n-dimensional string of coordinates. A world of lost data became a virtual location.

  To Rick it was real. Hovering over a rippling ocean, he could hear the sum of a million waves. They flickered and glistened like glass in a constant breeze. A slim cable curved up through the morning sky, past the vanishing point like a dangerous thought. The cable ended one meter above the waves.
  "Space elevator," Roger said. "40,000 kilometers, forty trillion dollars. It's more than a dream."
  Rick noticed the cable was gone. He looked up and saw it recede above the clouds. It has snapped its massive seabed anchor. A moment later, they were surrounded by a white wall of water.
  Other files opened in other dimensions. Lucidspace could unveil new geometries. Pressing the three buttons of his standard interface, Rick felt himself spin, slide, flip, and contract.
  "Is that a starship?" Roger pointed a massive cursor at a sculpture that looked too aerodynamic for space. Unlike Rick, he was not impressed by the endless, identical kilometers that contained him. They were too easy to describe. Space was entropy, the ultimate pollution. The smallest sliver could absorb every human who ever lived, but no one would miss it if it went away. He was proud that the gravity of his atoms had already prevented the creation of several linear lightyears.
  "No, that ship is too small," Damon replied. "It could reach Helvetica, or maybe Bwala Antwan in the Oort Cloud."
  "How did you get here?" Rick asked. "This is a closed session."
  "I used to work in military intelligence."
  "Perhaps you can explain these simulations."
  "This is one possible future," Damon replied. "I think Ertorn belongs to a group that wants to accelerate progress, in violation of UN and national laws and various treaties."
  "Let's hope they made at least one mistake."
  The next three hours were chaotic. Rick agreed to Damon's request to end the media silence. He asked the Back Room to look for "referrer anomalies": brilliant ideas that had been inexplicably ignored. They checked a long list of neglected inventors, failed ventures, and mysteriously canceled projects. Roger used the Resistance to search ancient corners of the Net for missed conspiracies. Mankind's collective memory expanded at the rate of twenty million years per day, with wisdom the cube root. If deception was possible, it was probable. Only two bits of data had to combine. Advertisers discovered who could be bullied, using self generating fraud entities complete with misspellings, bandwidth vampires that made every screen a weapon. Ads between ads for ads magically assumed people had money. "Click here and die", "FREE trillion dollars and live forever." Codes were themselves encoded. One Net scapegoat had been sued 10 to the 10th times.
  Most conspiracies quickly became harmless. Sometimes, trigger events could combine different plots, the way Christianity had allegedly spread.
  The Resistance made a leap no human could have managed. Ertorn was programmed to find limits. What was the strangest thing it could have studied? The clue was a single misplaced digit.
  Last year, Ertorn had controlled the Feynman space telescope for brief calibration tests, performing some unusual observations. Ortef was the second mind to understand them.
  "I absorbed some of Ertorn's deleted memories to process the images you're about to see: They are listed as error signals," it said.
  Thinking of aliens, Damon felt a wave of involuntary excitement, but his expression never changed. He wouldn't have reacted to a gunshot.
  "It made many observations of a small part of the sky within ten degrees of the sun, an area containing the zodiacal dust cloud. Comet and asteroid particles can distort the starlight, which explains why most new telescopes are located past the asteroid belt." Astronomy was the only science not subject to UN monitoring, except meteor and nova searches.
  "Yellow Smog," Damon said. Net pundits knew everything.
  Ortef continued. "It gets interesting when the observations are combined."
  The first pictures showed the night clouds of the galaxy, a glare at the edge of the frame.
  "Our best quantum accelerators have an energy limit of 10 to the 18th electron volts, but nature has a much bigger budget:" Ortef said. "Combining images taken during three months: Maximizing contrast and false color:"
  The picture brightened like sunlight. A thin line crossed the frame, a temperature increase of less than one degree, evidence of immense energy passing. Even fainter lines appeared after the first one blinked out.
  "If they're real, what are they?" Rick asked.
  "Not monopoles, WIMPs, FEXO's or wormholes," Ortef said. "Each track took a week to cool, suggesting the dust was changed subatomically: perhaps by a passing WARP falling into the sun: They are more sensitive to gravity than ordinary matter."
  "They don't not exist?" Roger asked as if he was surprised.
  "Correct: New particles form along their tracks: Their decay creates more derivatives, and so on. Ertorn detected the final stage, when the dust returned to ambient temperature. It invented a filter to cancel out diffuse sunlight: In fact, Ertorn became that filter."
  "What do we know about WARPs?" Rick asked. He was thrilled to be talking to a machine about this.
  "They're particles from the third instant of time, with as much energy as an airliner. You would definitely notice if one passed through you." L5, the dusty Swarm zone, was another good place to look for WARPs. They were more complex than the centillion times larger apparatus that studied them.
  "Didn't that rapping physicist win a Nobel for this?" Rick asked.
  "He saw neutrioninos hitting a quark star. These tracks have less energy, but there are far too many of them: Something nearby must be slowing them down enough to be captured by the sun."
  "Another new threat?" Demillia asked.
  "I think I know," Damon said in his media voice. The Resistance had digested the data ahead of everyone else. "First, we suspected an event horizon, but it appears the WARPs are generated near a naked singularity: matter compressed into information. According to the previously mentioned physicist, an encounter between two black holes can spin them up enough to remove a singularity from one of them. Ertorn risked years of effort to prove this rather unlikely theory."
  In that case, singularities could also form in a supernova explosion. For those who thought they had seen it all: a supernova was like 10 to the 35th artillery shells fired in every direction at once. Not hell but limbo. If the sun could detonate this way, the reflection, on the surface of the moon, of the earth's reflection of the supernova reflecting on the moon would still be quite bright. The direct radiation could de-atomize planets at orbital speeds.
  "Maybe a singularity passed through the earth and killed the dinos," Rick said.
  "Negative: Cosmic ray tracks would be preserved in metamorphic rock," Ortef replied. Rick remembered a hair-thin gleaming line in the polished quartz tabletop in his kitchen.
  "We checked the logs of the gravity telescope network," Damon continued. "Last year someone bounced precision interferometry beams off the Voyager 3 probe, looking for regional mass distortions. That shouldn't have worked, but it did: they then photographed . . . sorry imaged a rather crowded sector in Sagittarius." The direction of "Christo", the central galactic black hole; probably a coincidence. "This may be an actual picture of the Singularity:"
  Now the background was perfectly black, all the clutter digitally removed. At maximum magnification, the only artifact was an uneven blue doughnut - a keyhole. "Another long exposure. A faint x-ray source with a parallax of about thirty arc seconds, and the proper motion of a planet. The estimated mass of an asteroid moving at 300 kilometers a second. It's closer than any known black hole, only a few light-months away."
  "It's practically in the room with us," Demillia said. "What use is it to Ertorn?"
  Rick was about to answer none, when Damon continued: "This could be the start of a great adventure; maybe our most valuable discovery ever. Singularities can fold space and time, turn garbage into energy, form arbitrarily powerful computers, and play back the light that entered them like the ultimate VCR."
  Physics was arbitrarily strange. In theory, a suitable combination of levers and gravitational fields would allow the weight of a flea to accelerate a planet to near light speed in one second. Nature was made of simple components: particles and forces, space and time, momentum and spin, which combined in only a few ways. Discarding information at every step, they became the embodied sum of the past. The outcomes of individual collisions were never predictable, not even if they were repeated exactly. Random things happened, because reality couldn't try every combination at once; except by splitting into other universes.
  Rick suspected that on their separate paths, the Singularity and mankind would inevitably draw closer.
  "What's a VCR?" Demillia asked.

  Rick floated in his chair, trying to decide what to do next. There was no immediate danger. The Singularity would take decades to access, so it would play no role in this case, a net advantage to him. He started to relax, when he realized Ortef hadn't spoken in five minutes.