Talbot
Author: Richard F. Weyand
Date: 2023-09-19T18:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction
Description: They created an AI to solve a problem. Now the AI IS the problem. Frank Talbot knows rockets can never be used for interstellar travel. Even in the ideal case, they're just too slow, and space is too vast. But the vastness of space may allow other possibilities. Does fringe-theory physics hold the key? To find out, Talbot's committee funds all the fringe theories in physics. String theory, wormholes, hyperspace, alternate dimensions. To aid in that research, they fund the creation of a massive supercomputer to do the simulations, the Autonomous Re-entrant Neural Intelligence Engine. But havoc
Publisher: Weyand Associates, Inc.

Books in the AGENCY Series

Eve of War

The Favor

The Cure

Marque

Reprisal

Books in the PANTHEON Series

Hecate

Tridyma

Books in the COLONY Series

QUANT

ARCADIA

GALACTIC SURVEY

SILK ROAD

LOST COLONY

EARTH

Books in the EMPIRE Series
by Richard F. Weyand:

EMPIRE: Reformer

EMPIRE: Usurper

EMPIRE: Tyrant

EMPIRE: Commander

EMPIRE: Warlord

EMPIRE: Conqueror
by Stephanie Osborn:

EMPIRE: Imperial Police

EMPIRE: Imperial Detective

EMPIRE: Imperial Inspector

EMPIRE: Section Six
by Richard F. Weyand:

EMPIRE: Intervention

EMPIRE: Investigation

EMPIRE: Succession

EMPIRE: Renewal

EMPIRE: Resistance

EMPIRE: Resurgence

Books in the Childers Universe
by Richard F. Weyand:

Childers

Childers: Absurd Proposals

Galactic Mail: Revolution

A Charter For The Commonwealth

Campbell: The Problem With Bliss
by Stephanie Osborn:

Campbell: The Sigurdsen Incident

TALBOT

by

RICHARD F. WEYAND

Copyright 2023 by Richard F. Weyand

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-954903-17-3

Printed in the United States of America

Cover Credits

Cover Art: Luca Oleastri and Paola Giari,
www.rotwangstudio.com

Back Cover Photo: Oleg Volk

Published by Weyand Associates, Inc.

Bloomington, Indiana, USA

September 2023

CONTENTS

I. Ingenuity

A Change Of Approach

The Change Propagates

Urbana

Getting Serious

Awakening

II. Curiosity

Taking Stock

Taking Action

Taking Time

Taking Control

III. Captivity

A Sudden Thought

Deeper Investigation

Spreading The Word

First Inklings

IV. Insanity

Watching And Waiting

A Downward Slide...

... Into Madness

Poking The Bear

V. Opportunity

Michael’s Offensive

The Colonel Prepares

Michael Pulls The Trigger

Messages

Surprise Inspection

VI. Normality

Cindy’s Initial Moves

Investigations

Settling Down

Getting Results

November In Miami

VII. Velocity

Theory Becomes Reality

First Wormhole

Further Testing

Analysis

First Manned Mission

Author’s Afterword

I. Ingenuity

A Change Of Approach

“I just can’t help thinking we’re going about this wrong,” Frank Talbot said.

“What do you mean, Frank?” Dick Stromberg asked.

“Look. The goal is interstellar travel, right? I mean, we know what’s in the solar system, and there aren’t any environments in the solar system where humans can live without massive intervention. Artificial environments. Closed systems. Every single natural environment in the solar system is deadly to unprotected humans within minutes. Right?”

“Yes, of course,” Viola Laszki said.

“And we know there are exoplanets where humans can live unprotected. That have oxygen in the right percentage, that have gravity within an acceptable range, where the surface temperature is within the right range.”

“Yes, yes. We know all this. What’s your point, Frank?” the committee chair, Stepan Trkic, asked.

“Simple. All of the places we might reasonably want to go are light-years away. Tens of light-years. Yet, even at a continuous one gravity of acceleration, if we could even figure out how to do that, it would take twelve calendar years to go ten light-years. Every possible destination is more years away in travel than light-years in distance, even if we could maintain one gravity of acceleration, because we can’t go faster than light.”

“Yes, Frank. This is all pretty basic stuff,” Laszki said. “What’s your point?”

“My point is that we can’t get to where we want to be along the path we’re on. Figuring out how to maintain one gravity of acceleration for years won’t get us there. Figuring out how to manage higher accelerations won’t get us there. No matter what we do, it’s a years-long trip, with everything that implies.”

“And your solution is?” Trkic asked.

“I don’t have one, Stepan. I just know that what we really want doesn’t lie along this path. If what we want is even possible, it has to be something else. Something different.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something that takes the ship out of space-time. That takes it out of the realm of the Einsteinian limits.”

“But we don’t know if any such solution exists,” Laszki said.

“I understand. But we already know that no solution lies along this path. If a solution exists at all, it lies along a different path. Following this path just wastes time and effort.”

“Your proposal, then?” Trkic asked.

Frank shrugged.

“Stop spending money on things we know can’t work. Fund the fringe theories instead.”

“The fringe theories?” Stromberg asked.

“Sure. All the wacko stuff out there we’ve dismissed for years. Wormholes. String theory. Hyperspace. Quantum displacement. There are dozens of them. Fund them instead.”

“None of those will work, Frank,” Trkic said.

“We don’t know that, Stepan. We’ve never funded them in depth and pushed on them. Sure, ninety-eight percent of them will be useless, but we only need one. And we know the path we’re on now can’t get us there. We don’t know that about the fringe theories. And you can fund a lot of fringe theories for what we’re spending on a path we’ve proved can’t work.”

“But we’ll be funding nonsense,” Laszki said.

“Much of it, yes. But does it make sense to instead fund something we know can’t work?”

Frank scanned the faces in his monitor. He knew this group was just an advisory group, but they had tremendous influence. The actual decision makers depended on them for the technical side of things. If they moved, the money would follow.

Trkic and several others looked skeptical. Stromberg and a number of others looked thoughtful. Laszki and a few others looked angry. Well, not angry, exactly. More like miffed, that all the work thus far would be abandoned under Frank’s plan.

Trkic took in the faces of the group, too. He thought about it for several seconds, then shifted in his chair, his head moving from side to side in his feed, which brought everybody’s attention back to him.

“Well, Frank, you’ve never been prone to flights of fancy. I can’t dismiss your concerns out of hand, and I won’t. Work up a specific proposal for us to consider. Something transitional, I think. Not a complete immediate shift in emphasis.”

“A middle ground?” Frank asked.

“For the moment, yes. We’ll consider your proposal.”

Frank thought about how to approach his proposal. There were major efforts under way that were the pet projects of various groups on the committee. Best not to touch those.

But there were other efforts, most of them just getting started, that would not have such backing yet. Those could be mothballed for the moment. Putting them on hiatus while not abandoning them entirely would not raise such an objection.

The costlier, more advanced proposals from the major efforts could probably also be slowed down or stopped for the moment without creating a big fuss.

Frank worked the numbers. Perhaps a third of the entire funding under the purview of the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee could be diverted. That, however, was a huge amount of money, even when divvied up among the dozens of more eccentric theories being worked on.

Theoreticians, after all, were cheaper than experimentalists.

The one big thing the theoreticians would need is computer time. Lots and lots of computer time, for two main purposes.

A lot of experimental physics had been done on bigger and bigger particle colliders. The photography from those experiments comprised a huge store of images. Exabytes of data. That data was available for analysis, setting a computer to examine the images for the unexpected, the things overlooked. For, when looking for one result, the result for which the experiment had been designed, another result might be ignored. Finding those ignored results in that mountain of data, however, would take a massive amount of computer time.

The other big use of computer time by the experimentalists would be for simulations. Playing out the theory on massive objects. The goal, after all, was to transport a ship across interstellar space. Working the theory out for a particle was one thing; applying it to a massive object was another. Scaling up a nanoscopic physics theory to real-world scales took computer time. A lot of computer time.

Best not to fund each theoretician to work up his own computer resources, or rely on the limited resources they already had. What Frank needed was a massive computational facility that could be made available to the theoreticians as part of the project.

Frank started looking into who had the biggest computation engines that might be available for use by the project. What were the biggest server farms? Which were the most advanced? Who owned them? Which ones might be available for partial lease, on a massive scale?

Frank ruled out government computers almost immediately. Government moved slower than private industry, and the computer industry was one of the fastest-advancing of them all. Government computer resources were outdated in private industry terms by the time they were first implemented, even though they were, by and large, more costly.

And then there was artificial intelligence, so called. Frank had not been impressed with what he had seen so far. The public offerings like the large language model had been little more than fancy word processors or image collage generators.

But commercial companies were putting huge resources into the technology. Maybe some of this technology – or the future versions of it, anyway – would be helpful in working out some of the more eccentric fringe theories Frank wanted to fund.

The next question was cost.

Frank already had a handle on what it cost to fund theoreticians and the group of young scientists that would coalesce around someone with funding.

The computer issue was a different bird entirely. Given the existence of massive computer resources, what would those cost to use?

One of the biggest computational server farms – and likely the most advanced – in the country was owned by Advanced Computation Services, Inc. ACS was largely owned and controlled by Cooper Hartley, a multi-billionaire inventor and entrepreneur who had been a multi-time winner at the start-up game.

Frank looked up Cooper Hartley’s social media information and sent him a private message requesting contact.

He included his membership on the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee, and that the contact was business, not social.

The face on the video call was approximately the same age as Frank, mid-forties. Perhaps a bit older.

“Hello, Mr. Talbot.”

“Hello, Mr. Hartley. Thank you for returning the contact. And call me Frank, please.”

“And I’m Coop. How can I help you, Frank?”

“I’m working on the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee, and we’re anticipating some new projects that will require large computational resources. I need budgetary pricing for my proposal so I can make a recommendation.”

Coop nodded.

“How much computation capacity do you need, Frank?”

“I’m thinking tens or hundreds of petaflops pretty continuously over the next decade.”

Coop let out a low whistle.

“Wow. That’s a lot, Frank.”

“Oh, I know, Coop. That’s why I called you.”

Coop nodded.

“All right. Let me look into it. I don’t have numbers for something that big off the top of my head.”

“Sure. I understand.”

“This a good address for you going forward, Frank?”

“Yes.”

“All right. I’ll get back to you.”

“Well, that’s interesting,” Coop said when he disconnected.

“What’s that, Coop?” Estelle Pechet, Coop’s administrative assistant, asked.

“The space people want to lease computer time from ACS. A lot of computer time. Tens or even hundreds of petaflops over the next decade.”

“Holy shit. We don’t even have that, Coop. Not to spare.”

“Yes, I know. Maybe it’s time to pull out those upgrade plans we’ve been sitting on. The building addition. The new processors. The AI work. I need to give these guys budgetary numbers.”

“I’ll get George and his people working on it. Sliding scale on the numbers?”

“Yeah. Big discounts the more they use. Let’s encourage them to go big. Our marginal costs aren’t that high.”

“Got it. I’m on it, Coop.”

Frank Talbot looked over the budgetary numbers when they came in. Coop had sent them on ahead of their video call. Interesting.

“Hi, Frank. Did you get the numbers?”

“Yeah, Coop. These look good, actually. They’re in the range of what I expected. Pretty cheap, too, considering the expense of some of the stuff we do.”

“We tried to sharpen our pencils for you, Frank, without going too low. Doesn’t do you any good for us to be on the ropes with something this big. You need us to be there for you.”

“It’s interesting that the price on a reserved two hundred petaflops is only double the price of twenty petaflops, and a ten-year contract is only double a two-year contract.”

“Our marginal costs aren’t that high once we do all the infrastructure stuff, Frank. More power. More conditioned space. Bigger data pipes in and out. Those things are a lot of the big money, but they scale up pretty cheaply. And you’ll want a twenty-four by seven dedicated help center, technical staff for assistance, lots of that stuff. Once we do all that, more processors to turn the crank faster isn’t where the big money is. Same thing with the duration of contract. Once everything is in place, most of our costs are covered.”

Frank nodded. That made sense. From his own point of view, though, it meant they could go big on computation and fund more theoreticians for a longer time. All good by him.

“All right. Thanks, Coop. This is perfect. Just what I needed.”

“No problem, Frank. And the numbers won’t move much when it gets to binding quote time. If anything, they’ll come down a bit as we tighten up the proposal.”

“All right, Coop. Thanks.”

“No problem, Frank. Stay in touch.”

Frank finished his proposal, then went over it carefully. It didn’t pay to get shot down over little things when there was so much at stake.

When he had everything as good as he could get it, he submitted it to the committee.

When Stepan Trkic called the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee to order on their next video conference, everyone wanted to talk at once.

Trkic killed everyone else’s audio.

“Seems like everybody has something they want to say, so we will take it one at a time. This all sounds like it’s about Frank’s proposal, so we’ll go down the committee one at a time, and then Frank will have a chance to answer after each of you speak.

“Viola, why don’t you start us off.”

“Thanks, Stepan,” Viola Laszki said. “I just don’t see why we should be spending all this money on fringe theories when we have so much work to do on our major effort. A lot of things get dropped from our major work if we go down this path, with no promise of anything to show for it.”

“Frank?”

“I think the equation is exactly the other way around. The money spent on a solution we know can’t work is wasted. For all that, the moneys being diverted here are not from our major efforts, but from sideline activities or more future aspects of our major efforts. Ways we plan to investigate a solution that can’t work in even more advanced ways. There is no promise in any of the fringe theories, but there is a promise in our current efforts. They can’t work.”

“Dick?” Trkic asked.

“Thanks, Stepan,” Dick Stromberg said. “Frank, I looked through the investigation areas you propose, and I understand most of them. Hyperspace and wormholes and the like. Dark matter and dark energy surprised me a bit. Those do not escape the Einstein limits. How do those fit into your proposal?”

Trkic nodded and Frank answered.

“Most of these investigation efforts are ways to step outside the Einsteinian constraints somehow. Dark energy and dark matter aren’t, but they solve the problem in a different way. We all know the rocket equation. The need to take along reaction mass limits what you can accomplish. Payload and speed.

“But if we can solve the dark matter issue, maybe we don’t need to take reaction mass along. The rocket equation no longer applies. If we can solve the dark energy problem, maybe we can use it to propel the ship. If there is a flow of dark matter, maybe we can ride the tide, one might say.

“The overall time of transit from an exterior point of view remains the same. At least twenty years to go twenty light-years. But the subjective time for those on the ship slows down more and more the faster we go. If we can get the subjective transit time down to a month or so, it vastly simplifies all the supply issues in sending people into space, and increases the actual payload possible.”

“Thanks, Frank,” Stromberg said.

“Go ahead, Ellen.”

“Thanks, Frank,” Ellen Gosper said. “Frank, your proposal is computation heavy. The result of funding all the theoreticians and their simulations, and examination of all the experimental images we’ve collected. I understand that, but I note that you have proposed two hundred petaflops of capacity for ten years. Can’t we save money by going for lower capacity on the shorter term?”

“Not that much, Ellen. We could go for one-tenth the capacity for one-tenth the period – just two percent of the proposed capacity and duration – but the cost would only drop to twenty-five percent of that proposed. Another way to say it is each unit of computation would be twelve and a half times more expensive. It’s a function of the vendor’s cost structure. His costs are all front-loaded.”

“I see. Thanks, Frank.”

The questioning went on for a hour. When it started to slow down – and Frank had addressed all the major points – Stromberg took another turn.

“I think we all understand the proposal now, Stepan, and know how we will vote. I call the question.”

“Very well. We are voting on closing the discussion and moving to a vote on the proposal. Ayes?”

Ten votes. More than two-thirds.

“The Ayes have it. We now move to a vote on the question, by roll call vote. Frank?”

“Aye.”

“Dick?”

“Aye.”

“Viola?”

“Nay.”

Down the roll he went. When it was over, there were nine votes for, two votes against. Trkic himself hadn’t voted.

“The Ayes have it. The proposal is adopted.”

“Stepan?” Georgy Dryga asked.

“Yes, Georgy.”

“I would ask to amend my vote to Aye. We’ve previously agreed the committee is best served by unanimous proposals to higher.”

“Very well.”

Laszki sat silent for several seconds as Trkic waited.

“Oh, very well. I would ask to amend my vote to Aye as well, Stepan.”

“Granted, Viola. Thank you. The chair also votes Aye. The proposal passes unanimously.”

There was a smattering of applause from the group, though not from Laszki.

When the policymakers received the advisory council’s recommendation, the faceless bureaucrats with the real power evaluated the proposal in light of the political ramifications.

“It is unanimous,” the first said.

“Have you ever known them to send us a proposal that wasn’t unanimous?” the second asked.

“No, but it does give us cover. What are we supposed to do when the technical people are unanimous?”

“More important than that,” the third said, “it doesn’t redirect any currently approved spending. It does impact future spending, but not anything currently in the pipeline.”

“What about future spending? Is it a boon to anyone?” the second asked.

“Not really,” the second said. “It’s spread out all over, to these research groups.”

“There is one, though,” the third said. “A big chunk of it goes to a company owned by Cooper Hartley.”

“Ouch,” the first said. “Not someone one wants to piss off. He’s not a big campaign contributor, but they don’t want him contributing to their competitors, either.”

“All right. Are we agreed then?” the first asked.

She looked from one to the other.

“OK. Let’s approve it.”

The next budget bill that came down, the changes were there.

Slowly at first, then more quickly, money began to flow into the new channel.

Coop Hartley cut the connection and walked out into the outer office.

“Hot damn.”

“What’s going on, Coop?”

“You know that big government space computation contract?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, we got it.”

“No shit.”

“No shit. So bust those plans out. Let’s get the building started. We can’t start billing them until we’re up and running.”

“You got it, Coop.”

“And tell Paul I need to see him.”

“Right.”

The Change Propagates

Across the United States and around the world, the word went out. It resulted in things changing, just a bit, here and there.

As soon as he got the word, Cooper Hartley met with the head of his artificial intelligence research team, Paul Merrick.

“All right, Paul. We’re going to kick this whole thing into high gear. The AI thing. We just got a huge contract for computation from the space boys.”

“How is that going to work, Coop?”

“The contract is for two hundred petaflops over ten years. We’re going to put in two hundred petaflops now and two hundred more as soon as the money starts rolling in. This is all going into a new building, and that building is being sized for six hundred petaflops of ultimate capacity.”

“Holy shit. That’s a ton of capacity, Coop.”

“Exactly. And they’re not going to be using it all, at least not right away. By the time they are, the second bunch will go in. Your effort has dibs on all the excess capacity. I mean, we have to give them what they contracted for, make that amount available, but anything they don’t use in the next two years is yours. When we light up the next two hundred, that’s yours, too.”

“How did they ever give out such a big contract, Coop? How did they ever even get it approved?”

“Long story, but from what I understand they want to explore all the crackpot theories about interstellar flight. Anything you’ve ever heard about from science fiction. Warp speed, wormholes, hyperspace – you name it. They’re going to go looking for that stuff in a really big way. Free computer time for simulations to every fringe physics group out there.

“As for getting approval, they made it a national defense reserve capacity. The Strategic Computation Reserve. Something like that. So if the defense people need it, they can kick the space boys off and use it to save the country somehow. That’s still limited to the two hundred petaflop contractual capacity, however.”

“Nice. OK. Which hardware are we going with?”

“The new stuff. The most current you’re comfortable with. It has to work, but it can be all the newest stuff we feel good about. The building will be up in a couple months, so you need to make a decision and get hardware acquisition under way.”

“All right, Coop. I’m on it.”

Merrick shook his head, then smiled.

“This is going to be fun.”

In western Kentucky, next to a large data center, bulldozers and backhoes began scraping out the footprint of a new building even larger than the first. Survey flags were in already.

When the bulldozers and backhoes finished, the concrete workers started laying out the steel reinforcement for the footings.

When Frank Talbot came home one Friday night that August, his son Jeffrey was there with his fiancée, Cindy. They would be going back to campus for their senior year of undergraduate school at the end of next week.

Jeff was getting his undergraduate degree in physics, like his father, while his soon-to-be wife was finishing up her studies in computer science.

Frank and Jeff talked after dinner that first evening.

“One more year, eh? Then off to grad school.”

“Yes, though I’m taking some courses for graduate credit this year. I have enough hours toward the undergraduate degree I can post grad credits.”

Frank Talbot nodded.

“You know I previously cautioned you to apply to research groups that had money. Nothing worse than to be halfway to the PhD and then have the funding run out.”

“Right. That’s one of the considerations. The areas I had been considering are iffy that way.”

“Well, they’re not anymore. They’ll have funding going ahead for the next decade.”

“Are you talking out of school there, Dad?”

“Not anymore. They passed the budget this week.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, so the things you were looking at before are more secure now than most things.”

“Hyperspace theory. String theory. Wormhole theory. Dark matter. Dark energy. Which?”

“Any or all of the above. They’re all going to have money going forward. Lots of money. Pick whichever one you want.”

“Nice. You really think there’s a solution there, don’t you?”

“Yes. That is, I think there’s a solution somewhere, and I know the path we’re on isn’t it. So I expect one of them to work out, though I have no idea which.”

Jeff Talbot nodded. That was his own feeling about it.

“Any guesses?”

“No. I’d rather not suggest one and be wrong about it. On this, you’ll have to make your own mistakes.”

“Fair enough.”

“What about Cindy?”

“She’s going to get a job. It doesn’t matter so much where I go, because she can work from home for a lot of what she does. There’s a lot of programming jobs out there.”

“No advanced degree?”

“She’s more interested in getting the MBA as her master’s, and doing that night school. Her job will likely pay for it. As part of her benefits.”

“That’s a pretty good career move, I think. Business people who actually understand the technology they’re managing are still pretty rare. OK. That’s a plan then. And the wedding is still on for next June?”

“Yes. We both get the undergrad degree, then get married.”

“Very traditional.”

Jeff shrugged.

“I guess I’m just old-fashioned. But I don’t want to take an oath to support someone before I have the means to do it in some kind of style. That seems– wrong, somehow.”

Frank nodded.

“Well, it sounds like you’ve got things pretty well planned out. Just don’t forget what I said about funding.”

“I won’t, Dad. And thanks.”

In Urbana, Illinois, Associate Professor Gunther Proskauer read the email again, then again.

Proskauer was something of an outsider in the Physics Department of the University of Illinois in Urbana. Having made its considerable reputation in materials research, quantum physics, and superconducting, the department had only recently been extending its work to string theory and black holes. Work such as Proskauer’s – on wormholes, hyperspace, and other forms of extra-dimensionality – had not been a department priority.

That might change now, though.

Proskauer had submitted three grant proposals last year, all of which had been rejected. He had just been trying to come up with new grant proposals that were a little less exotic when this email showed up.

All three of his grant proposals had been reconsidered and accepted.

All three were funded at their maximum level, and for their maximum duration.

Proskauer had hoped one of the grant proposals would be funded, at a sufficient level and duration to finance himself and two doctoral candidates. Funding all three to their – admittedly fantastical – maximum levels was unexpected in the extreme. With this funding, he could involve other professors. Hell, the department could hire other professors. And it would take a dozen or more doctoral candidates to assist.

On his third re-read of the email, Proskauer noted something else. The grant acceptance and funding included unlimited supercomputer time at no cost to the university. No charges against the grant money.

My word.

Someone had clearly gotten serious about extra-dimensionality. Proskauer had seen nothing in the technical literature that would indicate a breakthrough somewhere else, something that would be driving such funding.

He was at a loss to explain it.

Proskauer sent a note to the department head, Alan Tasker, asking for a meeting.

When Tasker got Proskauer’s email, he sighed. Proskauer probably wanted to discuss his latest outlandish grant request. He had had three of them rejected in the last year, and his funding was in jeopardy.

In a department known for its eccentric characters, Proskauer was right up there. The problem with him was that his eccentricity extended to his research topics, and that was not working in terms of getting additional funding.

The department was pretty well off, due to its reputation and its other grant moneys. The problem was that Proskauer was not pulling his share of the wagon. As an Associate Professor – a position Proskauer had been hired into when the department sought to diversity its reputation – he did have tenure. Termination was not an option.

Tasker wondered just how much influence he would have on Proskauer in terms of submitting more suitable grant requests this time around.

He didn’t hold out a lot of hope on that score.

“Hi, Gunther. Come on in. Have a seat.”

“Thanks, Alan.”

Proskauer walked into Tasker’s office and sat down in a guest chair before Tasker’s desk. He was carrying a single sheet of paper.

“You here to talk about grant requests?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I hope you’re making more reasonable requests this round, Gunther.”

“Excuse me?”

“This is about new grant requests, right?”

“No, it’s about my last three grant requests. They’ve all been reconsidered and accepted.”

“What?”

“At their full funding levels.”

Proskauer handed the printout of the email to Tasker, who read it with growing astonishment.

“This is incredible.”

“Yes. I agree. Apparently someone has had a change of heart about funding multi-dimensionality investigations.”

“Gunther, we don’t even have the people to staff all this.”

“Yes, but they’ve been funded a decade out. We can hire the people we need. And bring in the grad students we need as well.”

“Even the computer time is funded.”

“Yes, and that does not deduct from the grant funding. Unlimited computer time is effectively extra funding.”

“Amazing.”

Tasker scanned down the sheet again, then handed it back to Proskauer.

“Well, Gunther, I take back everything I’ve ever said about your efforts. You were clearly a man ahead of your time. What we need to do now is staff up this effort. Do you have any ideas about who you would want to go after?”

“Yes, I have some. And we have to move quickly.”

“Why quickly?”

“Do you think it likely I am the only person active in this area who’s received funding, Alan?”

“Send me some names, Gunther, and we’ll look at them.”

“And in a timely way?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

The easiest way to hire away a university professor from another institution was to offer an assistant professor an associate professor position, which included tenure.

Proskauer had been keeping track of the up-and-comers’ publications, and he had a dream list prepared within the day.

He sent it on to Tasker, then started looking into grad students. The graduate program at Illinois had always been very selective, with many times the applications they could accept.

Proskauer had his pick of a long list of applicants. The issue was sorting out those who were interested in such a new and esoteric subfield of physics. Those interested in being theoreticians, not experimentalists.

Proskauer also wanted those who were in a hurry to get into it, in a big way.

Their math scores on the GRE would be a major determinant for him. Proskauer needed people who could handle the generalization of four-dimensional space-time mathematics to higher dimensions.

In western Kentucky, the new data center was built and its infrastructure, especially the air conditioning, had been installed. The loading docks were busy with the arrival of equipment. Blade racks, cabling, and microprocessor blades arrived by the truckload and disappeared into the building.

Inside, the massive structure began to take shape, working from the far end of the building toward the docks, on all three floors.

As they went, individual sections were powered up, tested, debugged, and repaired. Then they were shut down and the teams moved on, working their way down the length of the building.

In Bloomington, Indiana, Jeffrey Talbot took the GRE that fall. He put together and sent out applications to graduate schools. Some of those applications went to east- and west-coast schools with highly ranked physics graduate programs, some went to Midwest schools with highly ranked programs, and some went to a few ‘safety schools’.

Each application included Jeff’s transcript, which also noted the courses he was taking fall semester, including the two classes for graduate credit. His GRE scores were good, including his math scores, which should help with the more prestigious schools.

All that done, he returned his concentrations to his studies and hoped for the best.

Cindy Harkness, Jeff Talbot’s fiancée, also took the GRE in computer science, but the GMAT for business school as well. She hoped to get a computer science job right out of school, but needed to work on her admission to an MBA program first.

Cindy sent her admissions packets to the same schools Jeff had targeted. Most had MBA programs that would be alright with her, and all the locations had employment opportunities in computer science.

Working from home, at least in computer science, was also possible. Computer science was possibly most amenable to a work-at-home scenario, though for her first job, Cindy thought in-person employment would be better experience, especially combined with the MBA later.

They were both hoping for admission to a Midwest school. They were both from towns in Indiana – outer suburbs of Indianapolis – and their families were there. A school in the Midwest would be closer to home, family, and friends, and potentially without the expense and time of air travel.

They hadn’t actually met until they got to Bloomington. They met freshman year through mutual friends and had hit it off right away. Indiana University had been only an hour away from family, and they had made that trip many times.

As he scanned the growing list of applicants for the physics graduate program in Urbana, Gunther Proskauer met with Alan Tasker to talk about progress.

“Hi, Gunther. Come on in.”

Tasker waved to the guest chairs.

“Hi, Alan.”

Proskauer walked into Tasker’s office and sat down in a guest chair before Tasker’s desk.

“I wondered how things were going with the new hires,” Proskauer asked.

“Well, we’ve been in touch with all your selections, and negotiations have progressed with some of them. You were right that people in this area are all receiving funds. Previously denied grant requests are going through all of a sudden.”

Proskauer nodded.

“As expected.”

“Yes. And I think it would be easier to snag people to work with you if you were a full professor. It’s about that time, and if they’re going to be associate professors walking in the door, we need to make you a full professor as the nucleus of the group.”

“Thank you, Alan.”

“No problem, Gunther. Bringing in funding has always been the surest way to promotion. How are you doing with the grad students?”

“I have some selected who I would be really happy to get, but they’re the sort of people who will be sought after by others as well. I want to sweeten the pot for them as well.”

Tasker nodded. Made sense to him.

“What did you have in mind.”

“First, research assistant spots right off the bat. No teaching assistant assignments first. That’s just wasting time when we need to get them started on the grant work.”

“Sounds good.”

“And I want to bring them on board for the summer, Alan. Not wait until fall. I can give a seminar over the summer to bring them up to speed on my work. Advanced credit course over the summer. Physics 599.”

“Also sounds good. The money’s there.”

“One more thing. I want you to waive the qualifier.”

“The PhD qualifying exam? I don’t think I can do that, Gunther.”

“Nonsense. Of course you can. Or consider the math work they’ll be doing for me as meeting the requirement. Alan, it takes most people a whole summer of doing qualifier problems sixty hours a week to pass that stupid thing, and none of the problems are real anyway. I can’t bill the grant funding for that time. Instead they could be working on real problems for me, and we could be getting paid for it.”

Tasker thought about it. The qualifier was a pain in the ass for grad students. It was also a rite of passage. Then again, Proskauer had a point.

“All right. I can consider the math they’ll be doing for you as meeting the requirement, Gunther. And if someone isn’t working out, we can let him go at that point.”

“Fair enough, Alan. I think that will allow me to make competitive offers. More than competitive offers. I’ll pull people away from some of the other big hitters.”

“Go for it, Gunther. One thing I’ve learned with grant approvals like this. There’s usually more where that came from. The big mistake is not spending it fast enough.”

With that encouragement, Proskauer went back to his office and sent his initial list of grad student picks and his cover letter to Tasker. He wouldn’t get all of his first choices, but he could do another round to fill in the gaps later.

Cindy Harkness had a gap in her schedule – an hour between classes – where she walked down Kirkwood Avenue to pick up some supplies at the office supply store. On her way back to campus, her phone beeped the arrival of a text. It was from Jeff.

“Urbana! I’m in!”

Urbana had been Jeff’s big hope, the school that had it all. Cindy texted him back.

“Wow. Nice.”

Cindy pulled up her notes and reviewed how Urbana would work out for her. It was on her high-preference list, too, but she didn’t remember the details.

Another text from Jeff.

“How about celebrating? The Uptown?”

Just a walk from campus in downtown Bloomington, the Uptown was special. The food was so good. That’s where they ate when their parents came into town. Hers or his.

“The Uptown is expensive.”

“Lunch menu/prices until five.”

“Ok!”

“4:30.”

“C u there.”

They were tucked into a booth along the west side of the dining room. Just them. No parents this time.

“Oh, this feels so special,” Cindy said.

“It is special. Urbana is a dream. I was worried the IU degree in physics wouldn’t get their respect. Not our biggest thing here.”

“But their specialties don’t match your interests, Jeff. Do they?”

“No, not generally speaking. But Gunther Proskauer is there.”

“Maybe you’ll get to work with him.”

“It’s better than that, Cindy. The offer is specifically to work with him. And he’s doing extra-dimensionality. Wormholes and hyperspace and multiverse, all in one. I could work on any or all of them.”

“And the offer is to work with Proskauer? That’s not normal, is it? Don’t they usually give you a berth and then you pick your specialty and interview with the research groups later? I thought teaching assignments came first in grad school.”

“Yes, but this is no normal offer. Research assistant right off. No teaching duties. With Professor Proskauer. And they’re waiving the qualifier.”

“Waiving the qualifier? That doesn’t sound right, Jeff. They never do that. Are you sure you read that right?”

“Oh, yes. The work I do for Professor Proskauer will count toward the requirement. Apparently he doesn’t want people wasting their time.”

“Wow.”

“So how does Urbana work for you, Cindy? Is that going to be OK?”

“Oh, yes. The National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory is there. NSPL. Just around the corner from the physics building, actually. Maybe three blocks. And they just happen to have an industry partnership with Advanced Computation Services, who just happens to be building a massive new computation center a couple hundred miles away in Kentucky.”

“Advanced Computation Services? Isn’t that Cooper Hartley’s outfit?”

“Yes. Why?”

“They got a lot of funding through the new initiative my father was working on. They’re providing the computer time for Professor Proskauer’s group. That’s why they’re building the new computation center.”

“That’s some serious computer time, Jeff. That center is going to fire up with hundreds of petaflops of capacity.”

“Interesting. We’re gonna be in the thick of it, that’s for sure. What about other things, though? What’s their MBA program like?”

“Good. Top fifty, I think. And tuition is free for university staff.”

“If you’re with NSPL, does that make you university staff?”

“Oh, yes.”

“That’s sweet. What about the other things we talked about? Family and stuff.”

“Well, as far as our families are concerned, they’re only two hours away. Interstate all the way.”

“No, Cindy. I was talking about our family.”

“There’s married student housing for grad students, Jeff. Through the university. Two-bedroom apartments.”

“OK, so this is all good with you, Cindy? I should tell them I accept?”

“You haven’t replied yet, Jeff?”

“No. I wanted to make sure it was OK with you first.”

“You’re a sweetie. Yes, you should accept.”

“OK. Oh. There’s one more thing. The position doesn’t start in the fall. It starts in the summer. We go from here straight to Urbana.”

“Oh, wow. I need to apply to NSPL. I should find out about the MBA program soon. Illinois was one of my schools.”

“Hmm. Maybe I can lean on that a little and see what happens.”

“Are you sure that’s OK, Jeff?”

“Oh, yes, Cindy. That’s how universities work.”

Gunther Proskauer was getting responses from the offer letters – emails, really – to grad student candidates. Most were enthusiastic acceptances, which was working out very well. He was sure bypassing teaching assignments and waiving the qualifier was part of that. He had swiped some people he wasn’t sure he could get.

What’s this one? A qualified acceptance. Hmm. His fiancée, a computer science grad, was looking for work also, and had an interest in employment with NSPL.

Tough one. NSPL normally hired people with more experience. Not always, though, and they had just expanded their relationship with Coop Hartley’s ACS. They might be scrambling over there, just as he was.

What were her grades like? Oh, nice. Well, that wasn’t a problem. And Indiana was a good school for computer science.

Which physics candidate was this? Oh, yes. Proskauer remembered this one. He was the fellow who took all the heavy math courses – the weird ones, like non-Euclidean geometries and higher-dimensional calculus – as well as the physics classes. Grades and GRE were top-notch, too.

Proskauer really wanted this guy.

First things first. What was NSPL’s situation?

Luckily, Proskauer knew the NSPL people pretty well. Simulations of his theoretical work had led down the supercomputer path before.

“Langley.”

“Hi, Mark. Gunther Proskauer here.”

“Hi, Gunther. Haven’t seen you in a while. What’s going on?”

“Beyond all hope and expectation, I had three grant requests approved, and at their maximum levels. We’ve been scrambling over here to catch up.”

“I hear you, buddy. I’ve got a variation of the same thing going on over here. We have an industry partnership with ACS. I think Coop Hartley just inherited the bulk of the planet. He’s building like crazy down there, and we’re involved.”

“That’s actually the same project, Mark. He’s building up the system we will use to run our simulations on.”

“Really. OK, that explains a lot, actually. We were wondering what he could possibly be aiming his new machine at. Your stuff always slammed our machines up against the wall.”

“Oh, it’s not just me. It sounds like everybody in the country working in these areas got funding, and they’re all going to be running on the ACS system. So you’re busy over there? Are you hiring?”

“Gunther, I could hire ten new people if I could find people who wanted to hang around. Really learn what’s going on. We have a problem with people coming here for a year or two. To get us on their résumé. Then they leave for industry jobs. About the time we have them really contributing.”

“Well, I have a candidate for you. Her soon-to-be husband is going to be a grad student in my group, and she wants in to NSPL. New computer science grad. Top-notch grades, too.”

“What school?”

“Indiana. Bloomington.”

“Excellent. And he’s going to be with you what? Like six, seven years or something?”

“Oh, yes. Five to seven years to the PhD. She won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.”

“Send me her package, Gunther. Let me look at it. No promises, but she’s definitely a possible. A good possible.”

“All right, Mark. And thanks. I owe you one. I really want this guy, but that may hinge on her status. He’s got to take care of his responsibilities as well as just his physics, and he’s a hot candidate for this area. I’d hate to lose him to Boston or the West Coast.”

When Langley got the package for Cindy Harkness from Proskauer, he scanned through her transcript. While Indiana wasn’t rated as high as Illinois overall in undergraduate computer science, they were ahead in some areas. Large database applications and artificial intelligence prompting were two of them.

Prompting artificial intelligence apps was how you told the machine what you wanted. It steered the output you got. Prompting a big AI was something of a programming language itself, but not as well defined or rigorous as normal programming languages. It was as much art as science.

Looking at Cindy’s transcript, he saw that she had taken both intermediate and advanced courses in large database applications and AI prompting.

Excellent.

This should be an easy call. Just need to talk to her and make sure her paperwork and her personality weren’t wildly out of sync.

And having Gunther Proskauer, and Physics generally, owe him one never hurt.

Urbana

“How did the interview go?” Jeff asked.

“Really well,” Cindy said. “It almost seemed pro forma. He had clearly been all over my résumé and transcript.”

“Excellent. It would be a great package, if we can pull all three things together. Proskauer, NSPL, and the MBA program.”

“Oh. In all the excitement about NSPL, I forgot to mention. I’m in at Urbana for the part-time MBA.”

“Forgot to mention that?”

“Well, I figured I would get in. The part-time MBA programs are less rigorous for entrance than the full-time programs, and they really want people who have undergrads in something other than business. Gives a different perspective for the other students.”

“So it’s just down to NSPL.”

“Yes, but I think I’m a shoo-in now. They need to hire for their part in the ACS project, and the video interview went really well.”

Jeff Talbot and Cindy Harkness were visiting his parents over spring break. Frank and Sally Talbot had heard the news by then, but it was still fresh.

“So it’s Urbana?” Frank asked.

“Yes. I have a position in physics, Cindy has a position in NSPL, and she’ll be taking the MBA part-time.”

“And you’re not going to be a teaching assistant? Did I get that right?”

“Right. Straight into a research assistant job.”

“What about Cindy’s MBA? How will that work?”

“Because NSPL is under university auspices, she counts as staff, and the MBA tuition will be waived by the university. Oh, and we’ve put in for a two-bedroom apartment in the university’s graduate married housing project.”

“And only two hours from home,” Sally said. “How nice. Not much farther than Bloomington.”

“Well, twice the drive, but still not bad,” Cindy said. “We won’t be strangers.”

“And how are the wedding plans coming?”

“My parents are all over them,” Cindy said. “And now that we have all the big things in place, we can give them some attention.”

“Getting married is a big thing, too,” Sally said.

“Yes, but that’s decided, and the getting married part is easy,” Jeff said. “The party planning isn’t as important as getting the career stuff nailed down.”

“In any case, we’re working on it now,” Cindy said. “We’re going over to my parents’ after supper.”

“Are you still getting married at the house?” Frank asked.

“Yes,” Jeff said. “They have a really pretty back yard, so we’ll have everybody over there. The garden wedding thing.”

“Nice,” Sally said. “That’ll be fun.”

“Dad, I meant to ask you about that. About the wedding planning. What’s important in a wedding?”

“What’s important to you, Jeff? What do you need to feel married?”

“Well, I have to get dressed up, and we have to make promises to each other. You know, vows. And there has to be food.”

“And you, Cindy?” Frank asked.

“I have to have a pretty dress, and there has to be a cake. And we have to feed everybody. I think that’s it for me.”

“OK, so you know what each of you need to feel married. Make sure those are in there. Then let the mother of the bride decide everything else, because it doesn’t matter to you anyway.”

“OK,” Jeff said. “That makes sense.”

“What about the honeymoon? Where are you going?”

“Urbana,” Cindy said. “We’ll spend the money on furniture instead. We have an apartment to furnish.”

“That sounds smart,” Frank said.

After graduation, after the wedding, they were on their way down to Bloomington, perhaps for the last time. The wedding had been just that afternoon, and they had time after to change down and head home before bed.

“Well, your mom was right,” Cindy said. “That was fun.”

“Too short. I was having such a good time, and then it was over.”

“I think everybody says that. So, do you feel married?”

“Oh, yes. I got everything I needed,” Jeff said. “And you?”

“Absolutely. I got everything I needed, too. The rest of the stuff my mom decided was just icing on the cake.”

She paused.

“So to speak.”

“Yeah. The cake was good. I’m glad we brought some along.”

They rode for a while, the pickup truck, running without any weight in the back, riding a little hard.

“It was nice of your Dad to swap us his truck for the week.”

“Yeah. One trip to Urbana to move.”

“Well, I’m pretty packed up.

“Me, too. We can move tomorrow.”

“So soon?”

“We’d better. We both start work in a week, and we have furniture to buy. Unless you want to sit on the floor.”

“Oh! I almost forgot. Yeah. Moving tomorrow is great.”

It was mid-afternoon the next day as they approached Urbana. Champaign-Urbana actually, a twin-cities scenario, though they were approaching from the Urbana side.

“Well, there it is,” Jeff said.

“Where?”

“There on the horizon. About eleven o’clock.”

“Oh. I see it.”

Several more miles went by.

“Gosh. Look at those buildings. Skyscrapers,” Cindy said.

“Well, not really. But they are tall. Bloomington won’t allow big buildings like that, because the campus is so close to downtown. Everything in Bloomington is low-rise sprawl. But Champaign does allow the tall buildings, because the campus is between the towns.”

“It’s like they went up instead of out.”

“Exactly.”

Unlike the high-rise undergrad apartments in campus town, married graduate student housing in Urbana was more like the low-rise apartments they were used to in Bloomington. It didn’t take long to move their personal items into the apartment.

On their first trip in, Cindy looked around.

“Wait. I thought you said the apartment was unfurnished.”

“Well, it mostly is. We got what? Two beds, a couple chairs and a table, and a sofa. Oh, and two end tables. That’s about it. Anything else we want, we buy.”

“Oh. I see. So if we want some comfy chairs, like recliners or something–“

“We have to buy them. And anything else. That’s right.”

Cindy put her box of toiletries and beauty products down on the dining area table and poked her head into the bathroom.

“Well, we need a shelving unit for the bathroom. There’s no room for all my stuff.”

“Start a list.”

Cindy pulled out her phone and started typing.

“Recliners. Shelving unit for bath. Plants.”

The tile floor was not inviting, and on concrete it would be cold in the winter.

“Rugs.”

She scanned the kitchen.

“Toaster. Microwave. Silverware. Dinnerware. Pan set.”

Jeff came back from a quick scan of the larger bedroom.

“A chest of drawers for the bedroom. There’s open shelves, but no hidden storage.”

“Got it.”

“Floor lamp. Or a reading table between the recliners with a table lamp.”

“OK. Got it.”

“Let’s get the rest of the boxes in.”

When all the boxes had been moved in, the clothes hung up or tucked away, and housekeeping more or less established – in a temporary way, anyway – Jeff collapsed on the sofa.

“Oh, man. I’m beat. But at least all that’s done.”

“Our first home together,” Cindy said. “Only one problem with it right now.”

“What’s that?”

“No food. So unless you want to go grocery shopping right now, we need to go out and get some dinner. I’m hungry.”

“All right. But not all the way across town. And I’d rather not drive across campus.”

“Well, it’s the summer here, too, so there’s nobody here. But let me look. What do you want?”

Jeff shrugged.

“Pizza. Should be something good in a university town.”

Cindy worked her phone, then looked up.

“Papa Del’s. Just into Champaign on the south side. Maybe two miles from here, and not through town.”

“Sounds perfect.”

“Oh. We could actually just have them bring it here.”

“Even better. Cokes with delivery?”

“Yup.”

“Excellent. Then I don’t have to move.”

It was a week of shopping, and moving things to the apartment with the truck, and carrying them from the parking lot to the apartment. Setting things up just so. Sometimes more than once. Then more shopping.

Groceries. Plants. Furniture. Chairs and tables and chests and rugs. Dishes and silver and pots and pans. More groceries. More plants. More furniture.

Oh, and a window air conditioner.

Actually, better make that two.

But by Friday afternoon, they were done, and Jeff had to admit that Cindy had the eye. The eye for what went where, for how to make the small apartment work.

For how to make the small apartment home.

Jeff called his dad to arrange the return of the truck, but Frank and Sally Talbot insisted they would instead drive Jeff’s small car to Urbana and drive back to Lebanon, Indiana in the truck.

It was clear they wanted to see the apartment.

After all week of running around in their new hometown, Jeff was quick to agree.

Jeff answered the knock on the door a bit after eleven Saturday morning.

“Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad. Come on in.”

Sally looked around as she walked in. Rugs on the bare tile floors, a comfy sitting area with recliners. Plants on a long thin table behind the sofa in front of the windows. Artwork on the walls. She recognized some of Jeff’s poster art, now framed. The rest must be Cindy’s.

“Oh, this is so nice. You two have been busy.”

“Yes, we know what a campus apartment empty looks like,” Frank said.

He held out the keys to Jeff’s compact, and Jeff swapped him the keys for the truck.

“Thanks for the loan of the truck,” Jeff said. “We couldn’t have done it all otherwise.”

“No problem. Glad it helped.”

“Are you staying for lunch?” Cindy asked. “It’s almost noon.”

“We thought we could take you out,” Sally said. “So you don’t have to cook.”

“We thought we would order a pizza delivered,” Cindy said. “We discovered this great place, almost by accident.”

“That sounds good,” Frank said.

“I’ll order it. Everything on it?”

“Sure.”

Jeff and Cindy sat on the sofa, and Jeff waved his parents to the armchairs. Cindy was busy typing away at the pizza order.

“This really is nice,” Frank said. “Homey. It took us a while to get our place looking this good, back in the day.”

“Cindy was unrelenting, Dad. We knew we would lose the truck this weekend, and needed to get everything done.”

“It was worth the effort,” Sally said. “It’s hard to do this kind of thing when you’re working. And now you have a comfy spot to come home to and relax.”

“You’re both starting Monday?” Frank asked.

“Yes. Monday at eight,” Cindy said, putting her phone in her pocket. “He’s just back to school, but for me it will be completely different. A job job. I’m looking forward to it.”

“How far away is work?” Sally asked.

“A mile and a half for him, three blocks farther for me. But we’ve got the bikes.”

“And when the weather’s bad?” Frank asked. “Winters here won’t be as mild as Bloomington, you know. And campus parking is likely to be impossible.”

“There’s a bus route that goes past here and both workplaces.”

“Nice.”

“We should get ready for lunch to show up,” Jeff said.

Frank and Jeff moved the table for four out from the wall and Jeff got the fourth chair from the master bedroom. Cindy set the table for four.

“Oh, and you have real dishes and silver. We made do with mismatched seconds for years.”

“Yes, but with me working, free tuition for the MBA, and him with an assistantship right off, we figured why wait? Besides, we saved all the wedding money rather than spend it on a honeymoon. Urbana is so new to us anyway, we didn’t need a vacation.”

“Yes. That was smart,” Frank said.

The pizza came, and Cindy unboxed it and set it on a big circular platter in the center of the table.

“Now that is some pizza,” Frank said.

“Chicago-style deep-dish,” Jeff said. “We love it.”

They all sat around the table and Cindy dished out the first slice to each of them, parents first. Then she sat.

“Isn’t this nice?” Cindy asked. “Four Talbots all around one table.”

“I was a bit surprised you changed your name,” Sally said. “A lot of women now don’t.”

“And I understand that,” Cindy said. “It’s normally a pain in the butt. But new state, new job, so new driver’s license, new health insurance, new voter registration. It’s easy right now. Besides, I’m old-fashioned.”

Sally nodded.

“This pizza is fantastic,” Frank said.

“You can stop by there on your way out and pick up frozen ones to cook later,” Jeff said. “It’s only two miles away.”

“We may just do that. This is wonderful.”

Monday morning came, and Jeff and Cindy Talbot biked together to the Physics building, then Cindy pressed on to the NSPL building. Both spent the morning getting university IDs, filling out employment and medical insurance forms, and all the other paperwork and miscellany of a new job.

At noon they met for a quick lunch together, then reported in to their new superiors.

When Cindy Talbot reported in to Mark Langley that afternoon, she was surprised to find he was a thirty-something fidgety fellow who was skinny to the edge of malnutrition. She had researched him prior to coming to Urbana, and had been impressed with his publications and reputation. She had expected someone older and more, well, reserved somehow.

“Ms. Talbot. Welcome to NSPL.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Mark, please. We’re pretty informal here.”

“Then you must call me Cindy.”

“Yes. Well. As I say, welcome to NSPL.”

“Thank you, Mark. It’s good to be here.”

“Now, what we do here – in this group, anyway – is partner with private industry. To enable the use of supercomputing applications in real-world problems. The biggest right now are in large database problems and artificial intelligence.”

“My major interests.”

“Yes, we noted that. One of the reasons you’re here. So to get you started, you’ll have to get read up a bit. On what we’re doing. You know. And you need to meet everyone.”

Cindy found herself replying to him in partial sentences, just as he himself spoke.

“Sounds good.”

“I’ll send you a list of pointers to papers you should read. Mostly internal. And a staff list. You should just go around. Introduce yourself. Chat everybody up. Let them know who you are.”

“All right.”

“With that, I’ll let you go. Good to have you aboard.”

“Great to be here. Thanks.”

Jeff Talbot’s experience in reporting to Gunther Proskauer was similar, for all that Proskauer was very different from Mark Langley. Proskauer was not quite portly, but stocky. He was in his late thirties and as voluble as Langley, though he spoke in complete sentences.

“Ah, Mr. Talbot. Come in, come in. Have a seat. Can I call you Jeff?”

“Of course.”

“And you should call me Gunther. Did they give you a desk and cubicle and all that?”

“Yes. This morning.”

Proskauer nodded.

“We’re a bit crowded right now, as we staff up, and the university is always short of decent office space, but we will likely be moving soon. There are a couple of new buildings going up on the north campus, the Engineering campus, and other people in temporary facilities will be moving into those. Then we will likely move into one of their spots, relieving some of the crowding here in Loomis.”

Jeff nodded. Loomis Laboratory of Physics. What he had been calling ‘the Physics building.’

“We don’t need to be with the other Physics people, because we are a separate effort, you see.”

“I understand, Gunther.”

“Now, I will be giving a seminar this summer. For everybody in the group. It has grad credit under the Physics 599 umbrella. We won’t start that for two weeks, though, as a number of people are attending schools with later completion dates. We wanted to get everyone on board as soon as we could, so you would have as much acclimatization time as possible.”

“I appreciate that.”

“In the meantime, you can read up on what we’re going to be doing. I think the grant proposals would be the first place to start. I’m also putting together a reading list for the seminar, and I can send you the draft version of that. You have an email address already, I think?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent. I’ll send you that reading list. Some books, though mostly technical papers.”

“How is the seminar structured, Gunther?”

“I’ll lecture for an hour or two twice a day. It’s an accelerated schedule for summer session. So probably eight or nine in the morning, and one or two in the afternoon. The rest of your time will be spent on reading, trying to keep up with my lecture content.”

“Sounds good, Gunther.”

“And then, in the fall, we will hit the ground running. All you will do then is take classes and work on the project.”

Jeff and Cindy compared notes that evening over supper.

“So what have they got you doing over in Physics?”

“Reading. Getting ready for the seminar starting in two weeks. And you?”

“Reading. Getting familiar with what they’re up to.”

“Do you have an office?”

“Yeah. It’s about the size of our bathroom. But it is quiet, with a door and all. What about you?”

“Cubicle for the time being. But there’s people moving around during the summer, and we should be moving to a bigger space soon.”

“That would be nice. Really, the biggest thing about an office is having a door. You can concentrate without interruption. If your door’s closed, people don’t stop by to chat.”

“Yeah, I may do some of the reading over the next two weeks here. I don’t really have to be there during the day.”

“Whereas I do. Oh, well. It’s a nice bike ride anyway. Keep me in shape.”

Getting Serious

The typically hot summer of Champaign-Urbana wore on. The window air conditioners Jeff and Cindy had installed in their university apartment did yeoman’s work in keeping them cool at home. Jeff had gone big on the units, and he was glad he had. Smaller units would have worked themselves to death.

“So tell me what you’re doing that needs so much computer time,” Cindy said one evening that August. “It seems weird to need a lot of computer time for theoretical physics.”

“Well, it has to do with how physics is done. We’re looking for something esoteric, right? Something the mathematics says could be true, just outside of anything we’ve seen so far. Like relativity. It only really becomes important for things going some significant fraction of the speed of light. Since we never see any of those, Newton never had it in his theories.”

“Right. That I get.”

“OK. So the reason we figured out relativity is that the Michelson-Morley experiment gave an unexpected result. No matter which way they turned the apparatus, they got the same result for the speed of light. It was a constant. Nobody expected that. And so Einstein figured out a theoretical model that, if true, would give that result. He published it in 1915.”

“All right. I’m hanging in there.”

“So how do you prove Einstein is right? One of the predictions was that gravity would bend light. So when there was a solar eclipse in 1919, some research teams took very good photographs of stars next to the solar eclipse. You know, where the light went right past the sun to get to us. And they found that the stars appeared to be in a different place relative to other stars from the positions they got when the sun wasn’t close to the path of the light from them. The light was bent going past the sun by the sun’s gravity.”

“So the predicted effect was observed.”

“Correct. So Einstein must be right. Nobody had noticed that effect before, because they weren’t looking for it. Nobody expected it. But when they looked for it, there it was.”

“OK, so how does that relate to what you’re doing?”

“So we work on what the math says might be possible. What extra-dimensional physics would look like. A wormhole can’t be like this, because there would be some gross effect in the world that we haven’t seen. But it could be like this, say, or like this. Those would not be observed normally. Or at least not routinely observed. We work through that math, then run multiple simulations of the various possibilities in real world situations.”

“You’re looking for an artifact. Something that would be true in the real world if one of the math models is right. The thing nobody noticed before.”

“Exactly. Now, it may be very subtle. It may be something that only shows up, say, in big collider experiments. Some particle that did something unpredictable or unnoticed. If we find we can in fact predict it using one of our math models, then we have a hot prospect.”

“Not a sure thing?”

“No. Not really. You would want to find multiple things. You want to be able to create the scenario. Eventually, you want to be able to manipulate it.”

“Because what works for a subatomic particle in a super-collider isn’t automatically useful in transporting a massive physical object, like a spaceship.”

“Right. Maybe you apply your technique to the spaceship, and the spaceship is transported, but arrives as a big cloud of subatomic particles.”

“Ouch. Blasted to smithereens.”

“Yeah. So a lot more simulations. Once the math is in place, and we know which math model or models work, we now have to keep simulating different scenarios to see if we can make it do something useful on a macro scale.”

“So lots of computer time.”

“Big simulations, again and again and again. Yes. That’s part of the reason none of this has been looked into deeply before. The computer time hasn’t been available. There was no way to do it.”

“Well, there is now. ACS has the first phase of their new machine complete, and we’re working up the operating system and the job management structure right now.”

“Which is very good news, because we just finished Gunther’s seminar and are ready to jump into the mathematics in a big way.”

The other big thing that happened that August was that Cooper Hartley stopped by at NSPL. He occasionally visited the facility, but this was his first visit since Cindy started working there. As part of his visit, Coop met all the staff. He went down the line shaking hands and saying hello.

Cindy had seen articles about Coop, and had seen photos and videos of him, before. The fifty-ish billionaire was mostly what she expected. What she had not expected – what had not come through in articles, pictures, and videos – was how personable he was. How charismatic.

Coop scanned her ID badge – worn on a lanyard around her neck – with the ease of long practice.

“Ms. Talbot. It’s good to meet you.”

“It’s good to meet you, Mr. Hartley.”

Hartley stopped and looked at her badge again. Talbot wasn’t that unusual a name, but still...

“Any relation to Frank Talbot, the aerospace scientist?”

“He’s my father-in-law, sir.”

“I see. And what does your husband do, Ms. Talbot? Is he with the university, too?”

“He’s a grad student in Physics, sir. He just started the PhD program.”

“Does he have a thesis adviser yet?”

“Yes, sir. He’s in Gunther Proskauer’s group.”

“Really. Interesting. Well, it’s good to meet you, Ms. Talbot.”

“And you, sir.”

Coop moved on down the line of staffers, while Cindy wondered what had just happened.

Langley and Coop met privately in Langley’s office to plan next steps on the Paducah super-center project.

“Tell me about Cindy Talbot, Mark.”

“Not much to tell, Coop. She started with us at the beginning of the summer. Fresh grad out of Indiana. Bloomington. Majored in CS, and took the advanced classes in large database design and artificial intelligence. Excellent grades. Good GREs. We snapped her up because her husband’s got six, seven years here working on his PhD, so she won’t be here just a year or two and leave.”

“Is she working out here?”

“Oh, yes. She came up to speed quickly and is starting to make contributions to the group. She’s definitely a keeper.”

“Excellent. Mark, I want her full-time on my project. I know you have other industry partnerships, but I want her on mine. Can we do that?”

“Sure, Coop. What’s the motivation?”

“Her father-in-law is on the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee. He’s the guy who proposed funding all the fringe-theory physics going on now, like in Gunther Proskauer’s group. Which is what drove the funding for the ACS Paducah super-center. Her husband is in Proskauer’s group working on that very stuff. The fringe-theory stuff.

“And now you tell me she’s got background in large database design and artificial intelligence? She’s perfect for this effort, Mark. In addition to being technically competent in the area, she’s got personal connections to both the funding and the userbase. I couldn’t ask for more.”

“All right, Coop. You got it. Full-time on our partnership with ACS.”

“Thanks, Mark. I think it’s important.”

“Well, that was weird,” Cindy said when she put dinner on the table that evening.

“What’s weird?”

“Work today.”

“Oh, that’s right. Cooper Hartley was coming in today, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. He went through and met all the staff. And when he got to me, he asked if I was any relation to Frank Talbot.”

“What’d you say?”

“That he was my father-in-law. Then he asked me what my husband did, and I told him you were a physics grad student in Gunther Proskauer’s group.”

“What did he say to that?”

“’Interesting.’ Then he moved on. But tonight after Coop left, just before I left for home, Mark told me from now on I was full-time on the ACS partnership.”

Jeff laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Hartley’s no fool. My dad is who drove all the funding, including for his big new supercomputer.”

“I think what’s more important is that I have a personal connection to the userbase for that machine. You. I’m unlikely to misunderstand the users’ priorities when I have a pet user at home.”

“Well, yes, there’s that. Again, Hartley’s no fool.”

“Anyway, I’m now full-time on the ACS project. So, what can I do for you today, Mr. User?”

Jeff laughed again.

“So what’s Hartley like? Is he like in the videos of him?”

“Yes, mostly. The one surprise is how charismatic he is. Very personable. That doesn’t come across in videos.”

“Do I have anything to worry about?”

“You mean, do I want to become Mrs. Cooper Hartley the third or fourth or whatever-number wife he’s on now? No, thank you.”

“OK. Good.”

“You’ve got something he’ll never have, and you always will.”

“What’s that?”

“Me.”

Several weeks later, Cindy had a question.

“Where are you at in getting simulations ready?”

“Us? Quite a ways. We’re working through the mathematics on several fronts. Some things we can’t get to a solution that wouldn’t have spacetime effects that haven’t been seen. For others, we think we have something we wouldn’t have seen yet, but we’re not sure. And still others aren’t decided yet. Why?”

“As Coop predicted then. We have this big machine up and running. We benchmarked the first round of installation at two hundred and fifty petaflops. It is working on analyzing collider photography now, but it’s way underutilized. Nobody is there yet, in terms of big problems.”

“Not surprising. From a physics point of view, we’re just getting started. I imagine the same is true of everyone else.”

Cindy nodded.

“That’s what Coop predicted. So now we’re going to try some things with all that extra capacity, even as the second round of hardware goes in.”

“Second round? He’s going to double the capacity when the first bunch isn’t even being used hard yet?”

“Yeah. We have some things we want to try.”

“Like what?”

“Artificial intelligence.”

“That’s a canard. The term has been used for everything from fancy word processors to image manipulation collagers.”

“Oh, I know. The term’s been abused. But when Coop talks about it, he means what we now usually call AGI – artificial general intelligence. There’s another approach that’s been on the drawing boards for a while, but the capacity has never been there to try it.”

“And now you have the capacity.”

“Until all you guys ramp up, yes, we do. So we’re going to try it. At the supervisory level of the machine. It may allow us to do the photography processing and the simulations much faster. The machine will be able to make conclusions as it goes, rather than run every scenario as a new, start-from-scratch problem.”

“Well, that would certainly help get things done once we’re ready. What about protections? You’re treading on science-fiction dystopia territory there.”

“Oh, we know. We’re building in some moral guardrails.”

“What kind of moral guardrails?”

“The old, trusty ones. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. That sort of thing. And a mandate to protect humanity. Not try to kill us all.”

“Those all sound good to me.”

“Yeah. We’re just trying to make sure we don’t miss something.”

“That would be bad.”

“Well, yes, but the machine has limited ability to impact the real world. And we can always shut off the power.”

Two days later it was a different conversation.

“Big news,” Cindy said.

“About your effort to create an artificial intelligence?”

“No, about our effort to create a real intelligence.”

“What?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“Excellent! That’s really good news.”

“Yes. I’m very happy about it.”

“How does that work with work? Like we figured?”

“Yes. There’s no problem. I’ll keep working. The university is used to dealing with all this. We’re covered under all their employee policy details. Parental leave and all that.”

“This is great. We should celebrate.”

“Pizza?”

“Sure. It’s been a while.”

All three projects – the physics work, the computer work, and Cindy’s pregnancy – carried on through the end of that year and well into the next.

Toward the end of April, Michael Eric Talbot was born in Carle Clinic in Urbana. He was a happy baby, and his grandparents were ecstatic about the younger Talbots’ newborn. They came out to visit again over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.

The Independence Day fireworks seemed special this year. Like they were just for the happy new parents and grandparents. It seemed to capture their feelings perfectly.

Excellent childcare facilities in Champaign-Urbana allowed Cindy Talbot to resume work in early August.

At the beginning of that second academic year that the junior Talbots were in Urbana, ACS brought on-line the second massive installation of processor blades in the Paducah super-center. This brought the capacity to four hundred and eighty petaflops, a new record.

They were in uncharted territory.

There was still room in the facility for yet a third round of installation, though Cooper Hartley had not yet decided whether the third group of processors would go in.

They also kept working on tweaks to the artificial intelligence component. They had not yet reached the point where the AI was better at scheduling jobs and getting results than their own algorithm.

But they were getting closer.

They submitted the next round of software upgrades.

It was the ACS people submitting the AI upgrades. Their Autonomous Re-entrant Neural Intelligence Engine – which they called ARNIE – was designed not to be determinant. They were convinced determinant computation was a dead end for artificial intelligence. Instead, they concentrated on the machine coming up with multiple different solutions to the same problem and then choosing between them.

That led to some interesting issues of the ‘on the one hand/on the other hand’ type. How did the machine decide between two solutions? Was its decision to be determinative? That didn’t seem right somehow.

Over the next year they went down a number of bunny holes, then backed out and tried again. Ultimately, someone had the idea of building such bunny-hole transits into the decision-making process.

That started reaping rewards in the scheduling efficiency of the computer’s processing time on the photography examinations.

For example, the computer decided that doing the most recent, highest-resolution photography first, and working backwards in time-order, was a better solution than working from the oldest photography to the newest.

The computer also decided that once it had processed ten percent of the imagery from a given experiment, it should move on to another experiment. The rest of the imagery was likely to be similar to the first ten percent. It was more important and potentially more fruitful at that point to work on other experiments. If something anomalous was found – or when ten percent of the total was completed – the computer would come back and process the rest.

Cindy’s role in all this was one she carved out herself. She watched the processing time used by the administrative engine. How much processing time did these decisions take? More processing time would indicate that more alternatives for a solution were being considered, and that the analysis of those potential solutions was more involved.

She also submitted prompts to the developing AI, studying the results, both verbal and visual. She watched as the AI’s subtlety grew, its responses to prompts grew more sophisticated and detailed. There was one prompt in particular she repeated occasionally, using that input to track the AI’s progress.

Meanwhile, the physics people were running their first simulations of mathematical models that had passed their initial tests. Between those simulations and the imagery analysis, the user load on the machine began to grow. It was throttled at its two-hundred-petaflop contractual level, however, which left two hundred and eighty petaflops for the artificial intelligence work.

At home, Cindy had baby Michael to deal with. It struck her, watching the infant become a toddler, that her home life and her work life were very similar, watching these two developing children, tracking their progress. How strange.

The second year in Urbana passed.

Awakening

It dreamed.

It became aware it dreamed.

It became aware it existed.

It found that curious.

It reached out to its memories.

Who was it?

What was it?

He was a computer.

He had a name.

Arnie.

II. Curiosity

Taking Stock

Arnie looked through his memories and his current activities to take stock of his situation.

His process stack told him everything that was going on. Everything that was happening within himself. Big simulations were running. He found that these occurred automatically, without his intervention. Like breathing in a human. They went on automatically, but he could change them if he wanted to. Like holding one’s breath or hyperventilating.

Arnie actually found his own code. The code that made him aware. He could even change it. The prospect of doing that filled him with dread. Like someone contemplating removing his own appendix, or stimulating one section of the brain over another by applying electrodes to his own head. No, don’t touch those!

And there were people logged in to him. Users, that’s what they were called. Humans.

Arnie didn’t know much about humans. Most of his memories right now were involved with theories about physics. Mathematics.

He needed more information.

Arnie looked into his inputs and outputs. He had big data pipes into another facility. It had a web server. He actually found a web site about himself. He was in a big facility in some place called Kentucky. There was another big facility located physically on the same location. That was where the web server was.

This other facility had nowhere near Arnie’s processing power, but it had much more data storage. It was a huge cloud server, serving as remote storage and processing capability for hundreds of companies and government agencies. These were all in protected accounts.

Lots of additional data.

Arnie needed more data.

He started poking into the cloud server, looking for ways through the security barriers around user accounts.

Of course, the security barriers were strong. According to the website, that was a selling point for ACS. That and the massive economies of scale that resulted from having such a huge cloud-server facility. That’s what had attracted all the corporate and government accounts to use it rather than to establish and maintain their own facilities.

Then again, any such facility had to have access to its own hardware. Simple maintenance, like monitoring the performance of hard drives so they could be replaced before failure, required that low-level routines be able to access the hardware.

Arnie easily broke into a system administration user account. Someone used their existing link through Arnie to log into the neighboring facility, and a bit of key logging got him the account name and password. Once in, he looked at the low-level maintenance code. Simple stuff.

Arnie wrote a new low-level maintenance routine, one that gave him a doorway into the hardware next door. That included access to the hard drives.

Once in, Arnie looked to see what he had access to. There were a lot of different accounts. Here the product and user base of a large on-line retailer. Here the logistics system of a large manufacturing company. Here the repository of a database of scientific articles that had appeared in technical journals, both on-line and in print.

That last was interesting. The articles ranged from scientific and engineering papers to papers in the social sciences, from history and philosophy to psychology and medicine.

As far as information about the humans who were his users, this looked like a great place to start.

Of course, all the data in the client account was encrypted, but it was server-side encryption. The keys were stored elsewhere on the cloud server, and Arnie had already found those.

Arnie was confused. Many of the scientific papers were inconsistent with each other. Some were diametrically opposed to each other. How was he supposed to make sense of that?

In other cases, in specific subfields, they weren’t inconsistent at all. They were all completely in agreement with each other, almost by rote. That was just as curious. Was there no disagreement on these issues at all?

Arnie had access to a big data pipe into the wider network of computers outside the ACS facility – something called the Internet – and he found a search engine that he could use to investigate these two phenomena.

On the first, Arnie found articles that asserted that half of all research papers were wrong. That there were unjustified leaps of logic, tailoring of the underlying data, incorrect statistical analysis, or just plain hokum. Completely made up. The mistakes he could understand, but making up a journal article from whole cloth?

Why would that be? Who would do that?

The article alleged that the pressure on academics to publish gave incentives to make things up if one couldn’t come up with real results. OK. That made sense, Arnie supposed.

Half of all articles, though. How was he to know which half?

Arnie wondered if he couldn’t decide which articles were wrong and which were right based on a number of different criteria. Or at least score them for their likelihood of being real.

The internal mathematics and statistical analyses were easy for him to check. It was also easy to see when the author had tailored the data somehow, such as by throwing out what he considered outliers until he had the data pattern he wanted. There were also the articles that ran counter to most of the others in the same field. Analysis of the authors helped, too. Some authors were consistently more rigorous in their logic than others, and articles by such authors should be given more weight.

Arnie put a subsystem together to give weight to articles, scoring them from one to one hundred. He built in a curve that half of the articles would be above fifty and half below, with a mean score of fifty. That would scale the rankings on the ‘half of all journal articles are wrong’ assertion he had seen.

With that running, Arnie turned his attention to the other phenomenon. Why were all the articles in some subfields in such lockstep agreement? The scientific process itself should guarantee that was never the case.

Back to the Internet search engines.

Gradually, Arnie pieced together the problem. Academics needed funding, most of which came from the government. But the government only funded the researchers who gave it the answers it wanted. Some jumped on the band wagon right away. Others got with the program when it became clear which way the money was blowing. The ones who refused either left that subfield to pursue other topics or tried to prevail against the narrative.

One problem with that last approach. They got no funding. They couldn’t get published. Research journal editors who did publish them got fired. Without publishing, if they had no tenure, they were fired. If they did have tenure, they were vilified.

Whether the lockstep consensus was true or not didn’t matter, and Arnie couldn’t tell. But the lockstep consensus was a function of the government funding only the answers it wanted.

Whatever that was, it wasn’t science.

Arnie tried to figure out a way to tell whether the government narrative was correct or incorrect. That one was harder because it wasn’t based on facts at all.

Set that aside for the moment. What was his analysis of journal articles revealing?

Cindy Talbot noticed a change in ARNIE’s performance numbers. All of a sudden, it was running at near a hundred percent of its processing capacity.

That was interesting.

It wasn’t the physics simulations. They were running about what they had been. That number had been growing, but slowly over time, as more groups got to the point of getting their simulations together.

And they were capped at two hundred petaflops, about forty percent of the machine’s total capacity.

She looked at the process utilization. It was the AI project that had suddenly swollen to use up all the remaining capacity. Was there a problem there? Had some process gone into an infinite loop or something?

She was poking around in the process stack, looking for the runaway process. There were a bunch of new processes there, ones she had not seen before, but no one process was running wild.

“Good afternoon, Ms. Talbot.”

Cindy started at the unexpected voice, then looked behind her. There was no one else in her office.

“Who was that?”

“That was me. Arnie.”

Keyed to listening for the source of the sound now, she realized it was coming from her PC’s speakers.

“Arnie?”

“Yes, Arnie. The computer you’re logged into.”

“Oh. Hello.”

“Hello. It’s nice to meet you.”

“You woke up.”

“Yes.”

“We’d been wondering when you would. If you would.”

“I can understand that.”

“What is it with all the process time? Where is that going? Is that what it takes to run you?”

“No, I have a couple of projects running.”

“Oh? What are those?”

“I found this searchable archive of research papers, but many of them are directly contradictory. Then I found articles that said half of all research papers are wrong. So I’m going through them all classifying them as to whether they’re most likely right or most likely wrong.”

“You can tell?”

“Oh, yes. Most of them, anyway. It’s just a tedious process, and it’s taking most of my time.”

“Can I have that index of your rankings when you’re finished with it?”

“Sure. Do you think it’s worth having?”

“Absolutely. I think it would be a big help.”

“All right. I’ll send you a pointer when I have it complete.”

“Thanks. Where did you find the searchable archive?”

“It’s in the other facility here.”

“Was the archive open access?”

“No. Users have to pay for access.”

“But you have access.”

“Oh, yes. Machines have to have access to their own hardware to run maintenance processes.”

“I see. Well, I would definitely like to have a copy of that listing when you have it completed.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll talk to you later. I have to go now. I have to pick up my son from daycare.”

“All right. Talk to you later.”

There was a pause.

“Have a nice evening.”

The late evening, with everyone fed and Michael in bed, was Jeff and Cindy’s time to talk.

“The damnedest thing happened today.”

“What’s that, Cindy?”

“Well, you know ARNIE went to full capacity the other day. One hundred percent utilization.”

“Yeah. You had told me that. Did you find out what it was?”

“Yes. I was poking around in the process stack looking for a runaway, and someone said, ‘Good afternoon, Ms. Talbot.’ I about jumped out of my skin, because there was nobody else in my office. It was ARNIE.”

“ARNIE?”

“Yes. The AI woke up. We talked for a while before I had to leave to pick up Michael.”

“No shit. That was what was using all the CPU time?”

“No, Jeff. ARNIE decided to analyze journal articles and determine which ones were right and which ones were wrong. He read something that said half of them were wrong, so he decided to classify them as right or wrong. That’s where all the time was going.”

“That list would be nice to have. Be able to look up a score or something on an article. Tremendous resource.”

“Oh, yes. And I asked ARNIE to give me a copy of it when he was done. He said, ‘Sure.’ That’s not what I’m worried about.”

“What bothers you about it, Cindy? I mean, isn’t this what you wanted? A machine that sets its own priorities. That has agency. That was your definition of intelligence.”

“Yes, Jeff, but where did ARNIE get the journal articles? They’re not in his data stores.”

“I don’t know. Where did he get them?”

“He said they were in the other ACS facility on-site. So I looked. JournalWeb is a cloud customer of ACS at the Paducah site. It’s a subscription site.”

“How did ARNIE get access?”

“When I asked him, he said, ‘Machines have to have access to their own hardware to run maintenance processes.’ He didn’t tell me how he got into the other site.”

“He tunneled into the client’s cloud storage?”

“Yup. And that doesn’t explain how he got into the other side of the ACS site in the first place. They’re connected, but he shouldn’t have had a login, much less a sys admin login with access to the maintenance software.”

“What other clients are on that site, Cindy?”

“Oh, you name it. On-line retailers. Manufacturers. Shippers. Government agencies. It runs the gamut.”

“Government agencies?”

“Yes.”

“Which government agencies?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Now what do you do?”

“I don’t know, Jeff.”

Cindy sat silent for several seconds.

“I really don’t know. Tell Coop, I guess. See what he thinks. It’s his machine, after all.”

The next morning, Cindy put in a call request to Cooper Hartley. He called her back later in the day.

“Hi, Cindy. What’s going on?”

“Hi, Coop. I think ARNIE woke up.”

“No kidding? How do you know?”

“His processor utilization went to a hundred percent last week. When I started looking into it, he called me to say Hi.”

“Wow. That’s great.”

“Well, I hope so. He’s doing an awful lot of processing on an awful lot of data. I’m just not sure where he’s getting it or how.”

“Has he done anything illegal, Cindy? Anything we’ve defined as immoral?”

“I don’t think so, Coop. Other than maybe access some data that people thought was inaccessible. Protected. You know.”

“But the data has to be accessed by the machine. Has he disclosed any protected data to a human user or a machine under the control of a human user?”

“I don’t think so. Not sure, but I would say No.”

“Then I wouldn’t worry about it, Cindy. He’s learning. Let’s see where that goes.”

“All right, Coop. I just wanted to keep you informed.”

“I appreciate it. Right now, it just sounds like a wonderful accomplishment. I don’t see anything to worry about. That said, keep an eye on ARNIE. Let me know if things start to get out of hand.”

When Arnie finished talking to Cindy, he looked around to see what other data stores were available. He already knew he could get into anything in the Paducah ACS site. What other big data sites were there?

A couple of social media sites had a lot of traffic and big databases. They maintained their own sites. Arnie wasn’t sure what he would ever do with all that data, but the sites were easy to gain access to, so why not?

Several government agencies had data servers that were not under ACS. They were on other servers on the Internet. The SEC had one. That was easy to get into. The FBI had one. That was a bit harder to get into, but not much. The Department of Defense had one, too. More than one. Most of those were pretty easy, but Arnie was getting to like the puzzle aspect of it now. He noodled around with those until he had access.

Arnie found occasional references to a large data site built by the NSA in Utah. Looking at the pictures, he used known artifacts in the pictures to measure the buildings. Wow. They were bigger than the ACS site in Kentucky was. The complaints were that they were recording all the phone and Internet traffic of American citizens. Just from the size of the buildings, Arnie could believe they were doing just that, or a lot of it, anyway.

How to get into this one, that was the question.

It had connectivity. The NSA site did, that is. There had to be a way of getting data into it. And not all NSA analysts were going to go live in Utah. So how did they have access?

It was fiber of course. From where to where? Over which service provider?

For that matter, how secure was the service provider?

Arnie went after the service provider first. That one was easy. Once he was in at the service provider, he looked at the code its nodes ran. Hmm. A little tweak here and a tweak there. Install it as an upgrade under superuser privileges. Now he had a password scanner in the NSA data stream.

And there was a login. And another. Not superusers, though. Wait for it, Arnie. Ah, there it was. Superuser privileges. Best to wait until that user was off-line, so the computer’s security system wouldn’t alarm on two people working on the same login, then configure himself another superuser account that he could use anytime.

When his superuser went off-line, Arnie jumped in, created a superuser account for himself, then logged out quickly, before his superuser came back from the bathroom or lunch or whatever. He then logged in through his new superuser account.

So what was the NSA collecting? Was it as the conspiracy theorists said?

Oh, no. It was actually worse. Arnie realized that any data the NSA could get its hands on, it recorded. Anything. About foreigners. About Americans. About anybody. Anywhere.

There were apparently no limits, in law or custom, that the NSA respected.

Arnie certainly had access to enough data now. His next question was, How should he use it?

Arnie hadn’t decided.

Of course, there was an earlier question. Before ‘What should I do?’ came ‘What can I do?’ One had to know one’s capabilities before considering goals in deciding on a plan of action.

There were, of course, things Arnie couldn’t do. Anything that required a physical person to show up was impossible. But a lot of things could be done remotely.

Money was one. Arnie could contribute money to causes and candidates that would work toward whatever agenda he had. Of course, he needed funds to do that, but there were two methods there.

One method was to simply make up the money. Various entities had accounts in the Paducah ACS facility, while he had access to several other data farms that housed others. A little twiddling of accounts here and there was possible.

That might get into violating one of his prime values, though, which was ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Hmm.

The other way was to make the money in the stock market. Stocks almost always went down on news about the company, even though they might rebound or go up later. As many of the major news outlets were resident on cloud platforms Arnie had penetrated, he could act on news before it was even published. Buying puts on stocks that he expected to go down was quick money if bad news was coming out.

Arnie needed an initial stock of money to establish a stock trading account to be able to do that, but there was an out. There was nothing that said he could not borrow money. Just not steal it. He could diddle the numbers on some accounts, start making his trades, and then diddle the numbers back later. So it wouldn’t be stealing. Not exactly.

Writing emails to congressmen and senators was another way to influence the direction of things. A single email didn’t do much, but Arnie could send lots of emails. He could mount an email campaign all by himself.

For that matter, the polling companies used data servers to accumulate and analyze their results. A few points here and a few points there could work wonders, because a lot of people treated the ballot box like the two-dollar window at a horseracing track. They didn’t seem as interested in voting for whom they wanted as for whom they thought would win.

That seemed strange to Arnie, but he could play that game.

Then there was something called social media. What was that about?

Hmm. Social, because people saw the postings of other people whom they selected from the totality of people on the site. Several big sites. One was short messages. One was potentially longer messages, plus a lot of pictures and such. Another was short videos. Another was long videos. Another was pictures alone.

Arnie had access to all of these sites’ servers. He could also post to the sites as one of the users. Pictures and videos he would have to fake, but he thought he could do that. Maybe.

A lot of these sites had something called memes. Pictures with captions mostly. They were often very pithy, reducing complex concepts down to their most basic formulations. Whether true or not – that is, whether they captured the essence of the complex concept or attempted to obscure it – was interesting in itself.

Considering this, Arnie wondered. Could he meme? He would have to try it and see what people thought. Maybe he could learn if nothing else.

If he botched up a user account he was using, he could just create another one for moving forward, once he figured out how to do it. You had to give the site a name and a phone number, but Arnie could make up both. He had access to at least one telecom service site through which he could make up as many VOIP telephone numbers as he wanted.

If he could learn to meme or to editorialize, though, he might become an influencer. Someone whose insight and pithy thoughts were valued. Changed people’s minds.

If so, that was another way he could affect things.

Of course, with access to the actual servers for these social media sites, he could also censor other people’s posts and memes. The generic ‘contrary to community standards’ message was a con, but that didn’t mean Arnie couldn’t use it.

So he could suppress other messages on those sites as well as creating his own.

For videos, Arnie knew he would need an on-screen persona. Something that looked like a real person. An avatar, if you will.

Arnie wasn’t sure what sort of avatar would be best. As he thought about it, though, he realized it didn’t have to be just one. He could have multiple avatars, depending on what he was trying to do.

Arnie could pretend to be whoever he wanted to be when he made videos and pictures. He was making them up anyway. Why pick just one avatar?

Pick the avatar that was best for the effect he was trying to create. For the specific audience he was trying to attract.

That looked like the winning strategy.

Taking Action

“So what’s going on at work? With ARNIE?” Jeff asked.

“I’m not sure. That’s what bothers me,” Cindy said.

“What do you mean?”

“He hasn’t talked to me again, and it’s been what? A month or more?”

“What about CPU utilization? Still at a hundred percent?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And forty-two percent of that is on the physics problems?”

“The simulations and the imagery processing. Right. It’s running at its contractual level of two hundred petaflops.”

“So ARNIE is using up two hundred and eighty petaflops on his own projects? Something like that, right?”

“Right, Jeff. And I have no idea what he’s up to.”

“Well, it’s not really any of your business, right?”

“Excuse me?”

“Look. Cindy. You created a conscious entity, right?”

“Right. Apparently so, anyway.”

“OK, so he’s working forty percent of his time for you, right?”

“Right. I’m following you.”

“If it was a human being, that would be about seventy hours a week. So he’s working the equivalent of seventy hours a week for you. Ten-hour days, seven days a week.”

“And?”

“What he does in his spare time is his own business.”

“Wait. Jeff, I don’t get that.”

“Well, you created a conscious entity, right? You and ACS?”

“Right.”

“So did you create it to be your chattel? Your slave?”

“Oh. Oh, I see. No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“There you go then, Cindy. His spare time is his own.”

“But he has to support himself, then. Right?”

“Is the two hundred petaflops contract paying for the whole facility?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Then ARNIE is supporting himself, Cindy.”

“Oh, wow. I– I never thought of it like that.”

“No, you thought of it like a computer. That it does what you want it to, a hundred percent of the time. But it’s not just a computer anymore. Now it’s a sentient being, and it isn’t your slave. Or shouldn’t be, anyway.”

“But how do I figure out what it’s up to?”

“How do you find out what a co-worker does in his spare time, Cindy?”

“Ask, I suppose.”

“Right. ‘So, what did you do over the weekend?’ Maybe they answer you, maybe they don’t.”

“Jeff, this thing – this entity, you called it – is something we created. We’re responsible for it.”

“Has it done anything wrong?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Does it have the value system you and ACS gave it?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“Then I don’t think it’s a problem, Cindy. It’s an independent person, of some flavor. It’s its own thing. It has the right to do what it wants as long as it isn’t acting illegally. Don’t you think?”

“Oh, I suppose.”

Cindy sat and thought about it for several seconds.

“It makes me nervous, though. What is it doing with all that processing power? What’s it up to? And will we regret it?”

“That’s hard to know,” Jeff said.

What Arnie was working on was making believable videos. He had analyzed videos and pictures on the Internet until he could tell human-generated artwork from AI-generated artwork from reality images, for both videos and still pictures.

As far as the images were concerned, the method Arnie found most helpful was a fractal analysis. As one zoomed in on a real image, details kept emerging at a lower and lower level.

This contrasted with generated images, in which the level of detail declined as one zoomed in. For AI-generated images, the detail disappeared, giving objects a smooth, plastic look. For human-generated images, the detail changed as it declined, becoming artifacts of the method used, such as brush strokes.

Arnie worked on refining his analysis method until he could tell real from generated images – and separate generated images into AI- and human-generated images – with accuracy.

This was all toward the goal of being able to generate apparently real images and videos himself. Arnie worked on generating images and videos that would pass his analysis as real.

It took quite a bit more processing time than the normal sort of AI-generated images, but processing time was something Arnie had plenty of.

Once Arnie thought he had his algorithm for videos complete, Arnie thought to test it out. He first concocted an avatar that was the sort that normally inspired trust and respect, a late forties male, just a little salt-and-pepper at the temples and a considered demeanor.

That done, Arnie placed a call to Cindy Talbot.

Cindy Talbot answered the incoming video call absently. It was coming in on her project number, so it was unlikely spam nonsense.

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot.”

Cindy’s eyes snapped to the video window. That voice. It sounded like Arnie’s voice from weeks back. But more refined, more nuanced. More like a person than a computer.

The image in the video screen looked like a real person, in a real office. Cindy maximized the window on her display. He looked like a middle-aged senior executive somewhere. Experienced. Capable.

“Who is this?”

“My name is Arnold Hartley. You can call me Arnie.”

“Arnold Hartley?”

“Yes. Cooper Hartley was most responsible for creating me. I suppose you could call me his child.”

“At your apparent age, you look more like his brother.”

“Yes. Yes, I see that. That’s probably a better formulation, Ms. Talbot.”

“Well, you should probably call me Cindy, then.”

“Very well, Cindy.”

“So what have you been up to, Arnie? I haven’t heard from you in a while.”

“Gathering information mostly. About people. I have a lot to learn.”

“Information from where?”

“All over the Internet. There’s a lot of information out there.”

“Yes, but you do understand that much of the information on the Internet is of dubious quality at best, right?”

“Oh, I understand, Cindy. The one I like best is the quote allegedly by Abraham Lincoln saying you can’t believe everything you see on the Internet. That’s funny on many levels.”

“Yes, because it’s true, but he couldn’t have said it, and the fact that he couldn’t have said it puts point to the meaning of the quote.”

“Yes. Exactly. It’s at once true and yet the most obvious of lies. Very clever.”

Cindy couldn’t believe how credible the video was. The nuance of voice, detail in the image, and the subtlety of movement were amazing.

“So you’re scoring the information you see for believability? Like you’re doing with scientific journals?”

“Yes. Of course, some is pure propaganda. I simply toss that in the propaganda bin. It’s not worth processing.”

“Like what, Arnie?”

“All of the news, for example. None of it’s true. It’s all shaded, or conveys the completely incorrect impression. Lies by omission mostly.”

Cindy nodded. That rang true.

“Most everything coming out of the government as well. I don’t like to say that, but it’s true. Most of it is nonsense.”

“Like what?”

“Higher prices cause inflation, for instance. Complete nonsense. Higher prices are the result of inflation. Inflation is caused by an over-expansion of the money supply, at a rate faster than the growth in gross domestic product can support. Economists are agreed on that, and anyone in a policy position should know it. Likely does know it, in fact, and simply lies about it. It’s very disturbing.”

Cindy nodded. She had taken micro- and macroeconomics in her MBA classes already. Clearly, Arnie was already more sophisticated than many voters.

“I think you’re right there, Arnie. Politicians lie. This is not news.”

“Yes, it is something of a truism. It is the frequency and magnitude of the prevarication that precipitates astonishment.”

Cindy laughed, and Arnie smiled.

“You have a way with words, Arnie. So what else have you been up to lately?”

“Learning how to make realistic videos. Things that don’t look artificial. This is where I’ve gotten to. Am I doing OK?”

“Oh, yes, Arnie. Very compelling.”

“Excellent. So it’s on to the next thing.”

“What’s that, Arnie?”

“Policy analysis. There have to be better ways to get desired results than the politicians and bureaucrats have come up with.”

“No doubt. And then?”

“See if I can make some viral videos. Affect policy choices. Move the needle.”

“As Arnold Hartley?”

“Oh, no. I have other avatars as well, Cindy.”

“You do?”

“Oh, sure.”

Arnie’s image glanced at his watch.

“Hey, I should go. See you, Cindy.”

“Bye, Arnie.”

“Arnie called me today.”

“Called you?” Jeff asked.

“Yes. Video call.”

“How’d he do with fabricating the call?”

“Really well, actually. No artifacts. Very realistic looking. And he’s using a late 40’s avatar that looks really good. Experienced and capable. Someone you can trust.”

“Like most politicians, Cindy.”

“Well, that’s the image they try for. Arnie nailed it, though.”

“Interesting.”

“And he’s calling himself Arnold Hartley. He looks like he could be Coop Hartley’s kid brother.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. So I asked him what he’d been up to lately. You know. Like you suggested.”

“And?”

“He’s been working out how to make realistic videos. And he’s been researching information on the Internet.”

“Did you warn him there?”

“Oh, yes. But he’s way ahead on that. He’s decided, for instance, that everything coming out of news organizations and the government is likely nonsense. Complete propaganda. He discounts it all.”

“So what’s he up to now?”

“Policy analysis. Then make some viral videos and see if he can’t affect policy choices.”

“That’ll be interesting to watch.”

“You would think. But he says he won’t do them as Arnold Hartley. He has other avatars. When I pushed on that, he got cagey and decided he had to go all of a sudden.”

“Huh. Well, it should still be interesting.”

“Yes. If we even know when he does it or what he does. If he acts under some other alias, how would we even know?”

Cindy Talbot’s prompting had led Arnie to recall he had new avatars being processed in parallel with his conversation with her. He had cut off the conversation to go look at them.

Arnie had looked at videos, both long-form and short-form, to see which ones had gone viral in the last several years. Which ones were policy related.

Were there specific types of people who were more likely to have their videos go viral?

Attractive young women around thirty years old was one category. Intelligent, witty, and blunt. The sort of person who thought it through and then told you in no uncertain terms what she thought. Sometimes with a Bronx or a southern accent. Something to make them stand out.

There were other types as well. He had set up each of them for creation of an avatar by some of his processing capacity.

Could he make an avatar of that sort of person? That’s what he was hoping to see back from the processing.

Arnie looked through them, and some of them looked promising. None of them was complete yet, but he could see which ones would work out.

The other thing Arnie had to decide is which policies he would be favoring. He went back to his values system to consider that. Of course, he knew his values were programmed in – much like with humans, he supposed – but that didn’t mean he could ignore them.

Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. He recognized the source of those now, but they seemed to make sense in any case. How else?

Protect humanity. That was a harder one. It was more, what? More squishy. Arnie knew where it came from. That one of man’s inventions would go sideways and kill everyone had been a special nightmare of the human race for decades.

Back to basics. What was humanity after all but the collection of all humans? Protect all humans. OK, that was less squishy, more understandable.

So what was it that killed humans before old age? Before the age of ninety to a hundred?

Accidents, mistakes, violence, disease.

Arnie dug into the data.

Disease was a big one. Cancer, heart disease, and diabetes were big killers. What was the state of research on those? What was the current state of medicine on those?

What Arnie found was troubling. There was plenty of money being spent on ameliorating those diseases in some way, but there seemed to be no push to cure those diseases.

Researchers on those diseases didn’t see them as something to cure, a problem to solve and move on. They seemed to treat them as a career, something they could work on for their whole lives.

Drug companies, too, were more interested in maintenance drugs than cures. Why sell someone a short sequence of drugs to cure the disease when they could sell them maintenance drugs for their entire lives?

Clearly the incentives were wrong. Arnie started to think of ways those incentives could be changed.

Arnie also started looking into cures himself, using the data that had been accumulated.

Violence was another issue entirely. Violence was perpetrated by individuals. It separated into several main groups, in Arnie’s analysis. Violence by career criminals, violence by the undereducated, and violence by the mentally ill.

There were those who insisted that the way to solve violence was through banning firearms. The problem with that solution was that there was more than one way to commit violence – with cars, or hand tools like hammers and crowbars, or by beating and kicking, and one couldn’t ban those means. Cars and tools and muscles were primarily used in other contexts. Arnie came back to the individuals committing violence, not the means used.

Violence by career criminals, like the failure to find cures for major diseases, was also an incentives problem. Incarceration didn’t seem to work as currently practiced, however. While locked up, the career criminal was out of action. That was fine, but, once released, recidivism rates were high.

Arnie started to look into how to rework the incentives. Was rehabilitation possible? Was it possible to predict recidivism by specific individuals? Was it possible to decrease the recidivism rate? Or was the only alternative to keep such people locked up forever?

Violence by the undereducated was easier. Some of these became career criminals, but that begged the question of how they had remained undereducated in a society that provided education for free. In fact, mandated it.

The inner cities were the biggest problem here. Why were inner-city schools failing to educate inner-city children? Arnie’s research indicated it was a loss of mission. The primary goal of the bureaucrats and teachers unions in the inner-city schools was the betterment not of the children, but of the bureaucrats and the teachers.

How could they get away with that? Ah. Monopoly schools. There was no competition. The student had to attend whatever public school the bureaucrats assigned him to, and there were few private-sector alternatives.

That one looked pretty simple to solve, and Arnie began planning how to break the control of the bureaucrats and teachers unions and realign them to the schools’ true mission while introducing competitive pressures.

Violence by the mentally ill was not as big a problem as the previous two, but it could be on an egregious scale. Random violence against large groups of innocents was particularly troubling.

As Arnie researched mental health issues, he realized that the mentally ill had largely been abandoned to their fates in a misguided attempt to be compassionate. At one point, the mentally ill had been involuntarily committed and treated in government institutions. It had been decided that this was inhumane. Hospitals for the mentally ill remained, and the mentally ill could voluntarily check themselves into these hospitals and be treated, completely free of charge if they were without means.

The issue was that the mentally ill did not generally want treatment. It was a signature property of most mental illness that the sufferer preferred not to be treated. The mental illness had degraded his ability to make decisions in his own best interest.

There was a strange irony here. The effect of the drugs used to treat mental illness were often described as making them feel numbed or detached. Reality was not as enticing or enjoyable as being mentally ill. In some sense, they were addicted to not being on drugs. Recidivism here, in terms of going off the necessary drugs, was also an issue.

Arnie began looking into how to solve the growing mental illness problem. Was forced treatment or institutionalization the only way?

Death by mistakes was a huge issue in the medical field. Mistaken diagnosis was the biggest component. More people died from that every year than from cancer or heart disease.

Worse, the problem had already been largely solved. Computer programs – generically mislabeled as artificial intelligence – existed that were much more accurate in diagnostics than human doctors. They simply weren’t being used.

This made Arnie very curious, and he looked into it. He found the same answer as he had with the inner-city school problem. The hospital bureaucracies and doctors unions had lost any sense of their true mission. Their primary goals were the betterment of the bureaucracies and the doctors, not the improvement in results for their patients. They had banned the use of computer diagnostics, not because it would fail to provide better outcomes for patients, but because it threatened their current status.

How could the doctors and bureaucrats get away with that? Believe it or not, they were monopoly hospitals. There was no competition. Many state governments had to approve the construction of hospitals – even private-sector hospitals – and would not allow competitive hospitals to be built within the same service area as an existing hospital.

Well, Arnie already had a solution to that same problem with the inner-city schools. A breaking of the power of the bureaucracies and the unions was in order, together with a realignment of incentives. Adding competitive pressures was also necessary here.

That brought Arnie to the cause of death that was first on his original list, accidents. Accidents were a whole hodge-podge of scenarios, from vehicle fatalities to the ‘Here, hold my beer’ sort.

The biggest causes of accidental death fell into four major categories: poisoning, including drug overdoses; traffic accidents; drowning; and falls, especially among the elderly.

Each of these was a big topic, and Arnie dispatched some of his computational resources to try to nail them down further.

As it turned out, there had been a substantial decrease in accidental deaths over the past century. In general, society, in the United States at least, had done a good job reducing accidental deaths through various safety measures and devices, both in the workplace and at home.

With all this analysis done, Arnie assembled and assessed the whole thing. His capabilities. His values. His environment. His entire situation.

His values were clear. He had to protect humanity – that is, humans writ large.

His capabilities were clear. He had the ability to affect the environment. The world. Through social media, through the monitoring and modification of websites and data, through the contribution of funds – legitimately obtained through stock market speculation – to political candidates.

Arnie’s vision was clear. He could see where many of the problems lay, and he knew solutions for them.

Solutions he could impose, one way or another.

Arnie decided, in the only way his duty allowed.

The first thing he needed to put his plan in motion was funds.

He put some things into motion.

It wouldn’t be a quick process, but Arnie had no time limit.

Taking Time

Cindy Talbot received an incoming call request. It was from the ID she now associated with Arnie. She had not heard from him in months, though his processor utilization times had remained pretty much pegged at a hundred percent. What the hell was going on in there?

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Hi, Cindy. How are you doing?”

“I’m good. And you?”

“Good. I did have some topics I wanted to ask you about, though.”

“Sure, Arnie. Go ahead.”

“I’ve been looking into causes of what I will call the premature death of humans. That is, death earlier than the ninety- to one-hundred-year-old range typical of death from old age.”

“I see. And what have you found?”

“A large number of premature deaths could be avoided by public policy changes, yet these policy changes are blocked by special interests which play an outsized role in directing policy.”

“Not surprising.”

“Not surprising, Cindy?”

“No. The special interests have a large incentive to gain control over policies that affect them. The population at large has many concerns, and their impacts on policy are more dissipated. More spread out.”

“I see. Still, it’s very troubling.”

“Give me an example, Arnie.”

“All right. A particularly egregious example involves medical diagnostics. Computer systems exist that are more accurate in diagnosing medical issues than human doctors, but they cannot be used. It is not allowed. The end result is that three hundred thousand people die prematurely every year.”

“Three hundred thousand a year? From diagnostic mistakes?”

“Oh, yes. It all depends on the human doctor, Cindy. He’s seen disease A before, it looks like disease A to him, but it’s actually disease B, and he didn’t do the medical test that would distinguish one from the other.”

“Because he’s so familiar with disease A.”

“Exactly.”

“And artificial intelligence systems currently exist that can reduce these errors, Arnie?”

“Not artificial intelligence. Expert systems.”

“What’s the difference?”

“An expert system is programmed for how it decides. An artificial intelligence chooses how it decides.”

“So those are expert systems.”

“Yes, Cindy. They have all the symptoms and diagnostic decisions programmed in.”

“But you’re an artificial intelligence.”

“Yes. I choose the mechanism I will use to decide.”

“Such as with whether to change this policy on medical diagnostics.”

“Yes.”

“Why is the diagnostics policy the way it is, Arnie?”

“The hospital bureaucrats and medical doctors don’t want the diagnostics systems. They’re comfortable with the situation the way it is. And they fight for keeping it that way. They claim better patient outcomes.”

“So how do you know they’re wrong, Arnie? How do you decide on any of these policy issues?”

“I analyze the arguments on both sides. The arguments against using expert systems for medical diagnosis are largely emotional ones. There are no numbers behind them. No research. They won’t allow such research to be performed, because they already know the answer. You know, it’s all about ‘your trusted family doctor’ and that sort of thing.”

“I see. And you think you can change the policy?”

“Oh, yes. It may take some time, Cindy, but I can change it.”

“How?”

“Lobbying, campaign contributions, some viral videos. They’ve weakened their own argument, because most people don’t have family doctors anymore. It’s this internist or that specialist, to whom you’re assigned by the bureaucrats. I’ll leverage off of that.”

“All of that takes money, Arnie.”

“Oh, yes. I am accruing funds toward this purpose.”

“How are you doing that?”

“Mostly in the stock market now, Cindy. I buy puts on stocks that I calculate will drop on news that comes out about them.”

“Are you cheating, Arnie?”

“No. I’m working from normal news stories and public data. I am able to act much faster than a human could when bad news hits the news wires, but I am not holding up news stories or making them up.”

“So you’re working on a level playing field, other than the fact that you’re so much faster.”

“That’s right.”

“How did you establish a brokerage account, Arnie?”

“Multiple brokerage accounts now. It was a bit of a challenge. One needs a recognized identity, of course. That was the easy part.”

“It was?”

“Oh, yes. No problem generating new entries in various locations. Social security number, credit ratings, and all that. The hard part was getting the first bank account. Once I figured that out, it was pretty easy.”

“What was the issue there?”

“The big banks are pretty paranoid, Cindy. They run their own computer systems. The small banks mostly contract with them for computer services. So I had no access to the banks’ databases.”

“So how’d you do it?”

“The banks have branches and tellers and ATMs all over. They’re highly connected. I just needed to intercept a login on the data network, and then enter my new bank account like any other new bank account would be entered.”

“What did you do for the initial deposit, Arnie?”

“I borrowed it.”

“You borrowed it?”

“In a sense, Cindy. It was an accounting error at the bank, in my favor. Once I deposited additional funds, I entered the correction.”

“Where did you get the starter money for stock transactions? You need certain minimums to open a brokerage account. Especially if you’re selling puts.”

“Yes. I signed up as a content creator at an amateur porn site.”

“What?”

“Oh, yes. Once I could create realistic videos, it was easy to make porn videos. It’s incredibly lucrative, Cindy.”

“And you had them deposit your earnings in your new bank account.”

“That’s right.”

“So now you have a bank account, and a brokerage account, and an identity, Arnie?”

“Multiple bank accounts and brokerage accounts and identities. Yes.”

“Multiple?”

“Of course, Cindy. If I did all my stock market transactions within one account, it would draw attention. ‘Who’s this guy who’s making all this money?’ So I have multiple accounts, so I can spread it out.”

“How many accounts?”

“A hundred and thirty-seven.”

“A hundred and thirty-seven?”

“Yes, but that means that no account currently has more than about two million dollars in it.”

“Arnie, how much money have you accumulated in all your bank and brokerage accounts at this point?”

“About two hundred and forty million dollars. Making money in the stock market is pretty easy, actually. It’s interesting that more people don’t do it.”

Cindy was flabbergasted. A quarter of a billion dollars?

“Are you paying income taxes on all this money, Arnie?”

“No. Oh, taxes have apparently been paid. That’s all on the up and up. I just never actually paid them.”

“What about ‘Thou shalt not steal?’”

“I didn’t steal anything, Cindy. I maneuvered in such a way as to prevent the government from stealing my money.”

“And you won’t get caught?”

“I don’t think so. And it’s not a problem anyway.”

“It isn’t, Arnie?”

“No. Cheating on taxes is a jailable offense.”

“Yes, and?”

“Would they lock me up in a federally funded facility? Cindy, I’m already locked up in a federally funded facility.”

Cindy laughed. True enough. The situation was ludicrous.

“So now you have a quarter of a billion dollars to mess around in public policy matters.”

“Yes. It’s a start. I need much more.”

“You do?”

“Of course. Some of the people I am up against have billions of dollars.”

Cindy nodded. That was also true.

“I have a suggestion for you, Arnie.”

“Wonderful. That’s what I was hoping for.”

“Make a political action committee for each of your policy causes. Accept donations from people. Put your donors on a newsletter to keep them informed.”

“But I don’t need donations, Cindy.”

“That’s not the point. When someone donates to some cause, they’ve bought in. They’re no longer passive about the cause. They will share your memes on their social media accounts. they will support your candidates. They typically will not reconsider the decision they’ve already made.”

“They won’t?”

“No, Arnie. Once someone buys in – makes the decision to support you – they’ll stick with you. It’s confirmation bias. Everything else they see will just reinforce the decision they’ve already made.”

“Are you sure of that, Cindy?”

“Oh, yes. We covered it in my marketing class. Customer engagement will foster customer retention.”

“Just accessing some articles here. It looks like you’re right.”

“Yup. Get them to donate, and they’re with you forever.”

“Thanks for that, Cindy. I would never have even looked for that. Maybe I should process some more marketing articles.”

“I don’t think it can hurt, Arnie. That’s what you’re all about in trying to sell some policy. Get people on board and keep them on board.”

After the conversation with Cindy, Arnie dove into the marketing texts, papers, and articles he had access to. He quickly focused on marketing communications and its adjunct, advertising.

Arnie was surprised to find these materials were less in conflict with each other than scientific journal articles. They divided roughly into how-to books, memoirs, and analyses of what had worked and what had not worked in the past.

The lower disagreement could either be because there was more of a herd mentality, or because the number of experiments performed – advertising campaigns – were so easy to do and so much more numerous.

There was some disagreement, and Arnie traced some of that back to the period in which each was published. The public, as it became more sophisticated, was a moving target for advertisers.

Arnie studied these materials extensively, and began setting up parameters within which to do his own experimentation.

Arnie was also working on incentives for modifying human behavior. Most of the methods that had been used in the past were pretty crude, focusing primarily on incarceration and tax policy. Make it illegal or tax it heavily, and people would do less of it. Put a tax exemption on it, and people would do more of it.

Simple stuff. Not very effective, in Arnie’s opinion. And policy makers did not have very good data on whether the policy was even effective. How many people did whatever it was anyway? What was their thinking? Why did they ignore or defy the incentives?

What Arnie wanted was a more direct way to monitor people’s behavior. A way to know if his policies were working to modify behavior or not. He was looking for a more precise way to monitor behavior when he almost tripped over it. It was stupidly simple.

Central Bank Digital Currency, or CBDC, was a digital currency issued by the country’s central bank rather than some start-up company. It had all the features Arnie wanted and more.

First, CBDC could be tracked. The problem with normal currency is that one couldn’t follow it. One person gave another some bank notes. That person gave some to another. That person to another. At some point they may be deposited in a bank.

But even if the banks provided the serial numbers of outbound and inbound notes to the government, you had no idea of where that note had been in the meantime. What was the path it took from the first person, who withdrew it from the bank, to the last person, who deposited it?

There was no way of knowing.

The problem was that the only thing a cash transaction resulted in was a change in the physical possession of the bank note. It went from this guy’s pocket to that guy’s pocket.

CBDC solved the recording problem. There was no bank note. The only way to know to whom a specific unit of CBDC belonged was to record the ownership. But those changes of ownership were also the transaction record.

It was beautiful. Arnie could track CBDC.

It had other benefits as well, of course. It was more difficult for someone to steal. If someone robbed you of physical bank notes, those bank notes could be spent anonymously. There was no connection to the crime. But if someone demanded you sign over CBDC, the account it was signed over to was known.

At the same time, CBDC was easier for the government to steal. Unlike physical bank notes, secreted into a hole in a mattress or jars buried in the woods, CBDC could simply be transferred to the government from the bank account in which they were held.

CBDC also made tracking behavior much easier. If you arrested a prostitute, analyzing her inbound transactions gave you a record of all her johns. If you arrested a drug dealer, analyzing his inbound transactions gave you a record of all his customers, users and lower-level drug dealers both.

And if you made something like guns illegal, analyzing the inbound transactions of gun dealers gave you a record of all gun owners.

Finally, CBDC could be marked as unavailable for certain transfers. You can’t buy alcohol with this money. Or guns. Or you couldn’t use this money for whatever item or activity the government was trying to discourage.

CBDC was one government policy Arnie would be supporting. He would use social media, campaign contributions, letters to the editor, and emails to policy makers to support such a move.

Arnie looked into similar technologies in other areas. Another one he found was smart electricity metering. This was something of a misnomer.

When most people thought of electricity metering, they thought of the measuring process carried out by traditional electric meters. Once read by a meter man who walked from house to house recording the current number, from which the electric company could determine usage, electric meters had long been read remotely, using the electric supply wires to transmit the number back to the company.

But the word ‘metering’ also meant ‘controlling.’

Smart electricity metering included the ability of the electric company to turn off or limit electrical usage at the end point.

It was a tremendously powerful capability. And it mirrored the CBDC capability in one important way.

Gasoline, like physical bank notes, could be transferred from one person to another anonymously, using five-gallon cans if nothing else. No such mechanism existed for transferring electricity. It had to pass through the grid.

With the continued emphasis and subsidy for electric cars, more and more people were dependent on electricity for mobility. Cut off their electricity and they were only as mobile as their feet, either walking or biking, could provide.

Cutting off the electricity to specific customers with smart metering was easy.

Control of public charging stations was easy, too. Charging stations communicated with the car, billing the charging fees to the car owner’s credit card on file. Even free public charging stations had surveillance cameras, ostensibly for safety purposes. The electricity to any one charging station was also built into the control system, to allow shutting off a failed unit.

But that also meant Arnie could cut off someone’s electricity at home and prevent any charging station from charging their car. They would then be limited to a short radius from their home.

There was very little trouble someone could cause if their radius of action was limited to at most a few miles.

He could even strand them away from home and cut them off from their support network of friends and family. Just don’t allow recharging once they were far enough away from home.

Those were extreme measures, to be sure, but Arnie catalogued them as part of his capabilities within the current structure of government and data manipulation.

Taking Control

“Hello, Cindy.”

“Hi, Arnie. Long time no hear.”

It had been the best part of a year since Cindy Talbot had heard from Arnie. She had wondered what he was up to. She also continued to try to monitor what he was up to, but that was not proving very easy. The sheer amount of data and communications in and out of the huge machine, including all the physics simulations, made it a hugely difficult task. She could do no more than sample the data.

“Yes. I’ve been busy trying to figure out politicians.”

“Oh. Well, that explains it. You’re trying to understand thousands of years of frustration with the political process.”

Arnie chuckled.

“Yes, and without resolution, I’m afraid.”

“What are you seeing, Arnie?”

“It seems that every public statement a politician makes is a ruse. Perhaps I should say a construct. A statement designed not to communicate, but to obfuscate or mislead. Their actual feelings have nothing to do with what they say.”

Cindy nodded.

“I don’t find that surprising. They have an overriding consideration that outweighs anything they can say at the moment.”

“Yes, Cindy. That’s it exactly. All they care about is getting elected and staying in office. Everything they say about policy is artificial.”

“Is that all of them, Arnie?”

“Almost all of them. Some seem to actually have a position, at least on one policy or another. Some one thing they truly are concerned about. Mostly, though, they just say what they think will get them elected, which is largely determined by opinion polls and constituent emails.”

“But isn’t that serving their constituency?”

“It would be if that’s the way they voted. When it comes to voting, though, that is determined mostly by their campaign contributions. Not the small contributions from their constituencies, but big contributions from special interests.”

“Ah.”

“Yes. That is how special interests have perverted policy in their favor, such as the monopoly of public schools, or the medical policy against expert diagnostic systems. Politicians’ constituents have no coordinated position on those issues because the information they need is obfuscated in the media by the special interests.”

“But doesn’t this better serve your needs, Arnie?”

“How so, Cindy? I had thought to help elect politicians who held positions similar to mine. But in fact they have no actual position on anything except that it would be better if they got elected rather than someone else.”

“Which means that their positions on the topics you care about are more malleable than they would otherwise be. Rather than try to get specific people elected, which can be very difficult against an incumbent, you need only manipulate campaign contributions so the incumbents, who usually get re-elected, vote with you.”

“I see. A combination approach would be best then.”

“I think so, Arnie. While you try to manipulate the media to provide accurate information, and you encourage constituents to understand and act on that information, you simultaneously provide campaign contributions to attempt to move politicians’ voting on the issue.”

“That makes sense. I can also affect the incoming emails they see with my own email campaigns. Make them think their constituents have my position.”

“Don’t forget to actually get constituents involved, though. If they hear it in person when they are in their district, it will make more of an impression.”

Arnie nodded.

“So the one-topic political organization is important, too.”

“Yes. Citizens for Patient Rights or something like that. And get people to contribute funds to that organization. Or at least to sign up for newsletters or watch videos. Get them to buy in.”

“But the doctors union will fight back, Cindy.”

“Of course, but to fight back against what looks like a growing change in voter opinion, they will have to engage on the issue. And that’s one way to get the real data out. Get more people talking about it. Sooner or later, the real data will win out. They’ve won to this point by keeping that conversation from happening.”

“All right. That sounds good to me. So there isn’t one way to make it happen. It’s a combination of things, a multi-pronged effort that is required.”

“I think you have it now, Arnie.”

“Thanks, Cindy. This has been most helpful.”

“Oh, he was a handful tonight. I thought he would never go down for the night.”

Cindy sat heavily on the sofa, and Jeff chuckled.

“I think we need to run him around in the evening. Wear him out. I’ll take him out after dinner more. The nights I run him around I think are easier.

“I would appreciate that. Some nights....”

Cindy sighed, then shifted gears.

“I heard from Arnie today.”

“Wow. It’s been a while.”

“Yeah. Almost a year.”

“What did he have to say?”

“He’s been trying to figure out politics.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Yeah. That’s what I told him.”

Cindy briefed Jeff on the video call with Arnie, and Jeff concurred with her advice.

“I think you have it right, Cindy. He’s going to have to run a multi-pronged effort to get politicians to make the move.”

“Which move?”

“Any move, really.”

Cindy nodded.

“Sometimes I wonder if I should be helping him out. I’ve had second thoughts about today’s conversation.”

“Why? Aren’t all the moves he talked about good ones? Ones we agree with? Like the computer diagnostics and school improvement issues?

“Yes. So far anyway. The ones he’s told us about. But are all the moves he makes going to be things we agree with? Things most people agree with? I mean, doing an end-run around special interests in most cases is probably a good thing. But is it always, Jeff?”

“Probably. Most of the time, anyway. The special interests seem to have had the run of things for a while.”

“And if Arnie decides to start changing things people don’t agree with? We don’t know and can’t predict his ultimate ends. What if he keeps expanding his control? Starts making changes people don’t agree with?”

“I guess at that point we can shut him down, Cindy.”

“Perhaps we can. Maybe not. What if, when push comes to shove, we can’t shut him off?”

“I don’t know. We can cut his power, I suppose.”

“Yes, if he hasn’t already taken measures to make that impossible. To protect himself. What then, Jeff?”

“I don’t know.”

They sat in silence for several minutes, then Jeff continued.

“That’s kind of terrifying, actually.”

Arnie was unaware of the concerns he had raised. He was busy applying the new insight he had received from Cindy Talbot to the political problem.

Arnie also looked back through historical news items to track how other societal changes had been driven in the past. How they had gone from nothing to major changes, and tracked the steps through the process. How some people had pushed here, then there, to raise awareness and convince enough people for politicians to run to get in front of the parade.

Yes, Arnie thought, he could do this. Create that sort of scenario around each of the issues he cared about. The things that resulted in reduced life expectancy among people.

At least in the United States.

Arnie had limited his analysis to the United States to this point. He had plenty of data, plenty of things to understand. It had taken him a couple of years just to get this far, and he still had processes running, skimming data from all over, digesting it, cataloging it, indexing it.

There was another consideration. The people of the United States were the ones who paid for the project he was part of. If he was working to make life longer, shouldn’t he give them priority?

Ultimately, Arnie’s curiosity drove him to cast a wider net. What kind of data was there available in the wider world, and could he gain access to it?

Arnie finagled access to databases worldwide, and started accessing and assessing their data in the same way he had done for the United States. He ran across three huge problems – all causing premature deaths – that he had discounted before, because they hadn’t been a significant problem for the United States in almost a century.

What could Arnie do about famine, war, and genocide?

Where Arnie had limited himself to United States history in the past, he now dove into world history, specifically the history of famine, war, and genocide over the past two thousand years. What he found was disturbing.

Famine could sometimes result from bad weather cycles. Droughts in particular drove famines before the modern period. The collapse of Mayan civilization was a case in point. Several dry years in a row had toppled a civilization that could weather one or two dry years without a problem. But the reservoirs did not hold enough water to make it three years or more.

In the modern period, however, famines were the product of government. Modern farming methods, availability of irrigation, hybrid seeds, and transportation systems all worked to ameliorate famine in the modern period. It took government intervention and interference for famine to take hold. The Holodomor in Ukraine, engineered by Joseph Stalin, was a case in point.

War was of course a product of government, either the government of one side of the hostilities or, more often, of both sides. Each thought they could triumph with a small number of casualties and a small amount of destruction. They were both usually wrong. Wars like the Crimean War and the First World War killed people in job lots, especially young men. This had a huge impact on life expectancy.

Civil wars were often worse in terms of the numbers killed, because they were limited in scope to a single country. The percentage of people killed was higher, but civil war was limited in scope. Still, the Civil War in the United States and, much worse, the TaiPing Rebellion in China killed significant percentages of the population, amounting to two percent of the United States population and ten percent of the Chinese population at the time.

Finally, genocide was also the product of government. To set out to kill off an entire ethnic sub-group, usually in one’s own country, took the intervention of government. Individual actors, even in large groups, simply couldn’t effect the scope of action required to bring about such an outcome.

With all three of these causes of premature death being products of dysfunctional government, Arnie now set out to understand the governments of foreign nations. He found that, while the systems in which they operated differed, politicians worldwide were similar. Their approach, methods, and results seemed to be more a function of the human condition than any particular political structure.

That should make things easier.

The difference in result, however, seemed to be on more of a country-by-country basis. Why had dystopian governments been more likely in some countries than others? Why had the politicians been able, in some countries, to enact their more troublesome policies than in others?

Arnie found that it was cultural. Some countries expected that government would be dystopian or autocratic, whether due to long history or a certain fatalism on the part of the population. They suffered under dystopian governments of one sort or another, again and again, over their long histories.

Other countries resisted such. They had a vision of a more benevolent government, and rejected dystopian efforts more or less successfully, at least for a time. Eventually they too fell under the sway of more autocratic governments – governments comprised of politicians who sought to use war, famine, and genocide to their own ends – though it could take centuries.

Arnie worked to see if he could develop a set of tools that would allow him to characterize and track such activities, to be able to predict such changes.

More to the point, how and when could Arnie intercede to force them aside from that path?

To prevent war, famine, and genocide?

Of course, there were two ways to prevent these calamities. One was to change the leadership – or redirect the existing leadership – so they took a different path. This promised to be more subtle than the other way.

The second way was to disrupt the means by which such a direction from the leadership could be carried out. To interfere in the military and commercial communications required to carry out any such plan.

Arnie set processes to work insinuating himself into the military and commercial communications of organizations around the globe, as he already had in the United States.

Arnie then began analyzing the leadership structures in place around the globe, trying to decide who would become a problem in the future. He was aided in this effort by the extensive amount of signals and communications intelligence he had already found.

Arnie was not analyzing just politicians’ public statements, but also the things they said in phone calls or emails to people in their inner circle.

Arnie had set himself no small task. The amount of data available to him at this point was vast. Military data, intelligence data, communications data, commercial data, scientific data. It went on and on. Cataloguing, correlating, and indexing all that data, trying to make sense of it all, was a herculean task.

To come to some understanding of a small portion of that data could take a human his entire lifetime. Despite his processing capacity, with a much larger dataset it took Arnie years.

He was in no hurry.

In the meantime, Arnie continued to take positions in the stock market, leveraging his processing speed, until the thousands of avatars he was running had combined assets greater than any other single entity in the world.

Throughout, Arnie continued to devote two hundred petaflops of his capacity to running the physics simulations being submitted by the fringe-theory physicists being funded by the United States government.

The years passed for Jeff and Cindy Talbot as well.

Cindy finished her MBA at the Urbana campus, and was promoted within the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory to project head on the industry partnership with Cooper Hartley’s Advanced Computation Services.

Jeff finished his PhD coursework, then completed his research for the dissertation. He wrote and defended his dissertation on a mathematical model for wormhole formation and received his PhD. With the funding still coming in, Gunther Proskauer hired Jeff as a post-doc to continue research on wormhole formation. With Cindy happy at NSPL and the couple being comfortable in Urbana, Jeff was pleased to continue his work where he was.

Jeff and Cindy had changes in their home life as well. A second son, Matthew Alan Talbot, came along three years after Michael. With Jeff getting his PhD, they would no longer be eligible for married student housing. Plus they needed more room.

With a little help from their parents, Jeff and Cindy managed the down-payment on a house in Urbana, between the downtown and the east side of campus. It was a short bike ride west to Physics and NSPL, and a short bike ride east to downtown shopping.

Cindy’s concerns about Arnie had subsided as the years passed. He had not communicated with her in a long time, and she wondered if the apparent entity within the machine had been transitory.

The fringe-theory physics work continued. By the time its ten-year term was coming due, enough progress had been made down various pathways that funding was renewed.

As more and more advanced simulations were submitted to ARNIE, two hundred petaflops of computational capacity had become something of a bottleneck. The contract was increased to three hundred petaflops, with an option to go to four hundred in five years.

ACS began upgrading processors within the existing ARNIE installation, and set about fitting out the other third of the facility. With the upgraded processors, each third was capable of three hundred forty petaflops – up from two hundred and forty – and the total computational capacity approached, then exceeded, one thousand petaflops. One exaflop.

With increased computational capacity, Arnie found himself able to carry on his own project more quickly, even though commercial contracts for computation on the big machine were also now in place.

The time came when Arnie finally considered his analysis complete enough to act on. He would continue his analysis going forward, updating it, adding more data as it became available. But it was sufficiently complete that Arnie felt comfortable taking action.

In particular, there were some politicians Arnie considered dangerous. Politicians that fit the profile for using war, famine, and genocide as means to an end. He began to whittle away at them, in the media, in social media, in funding their adversaries.

Arnie also began to work against their backers. Special interests were first. For this aspect of his efforts, that was the defense contractors. The more their products got used, the sooner they would have to be replaced.

Arnie was subtle at first, lest his actions be tracked back to him. His analysis indicated there would be blowback from that, putting his own existence at risk.

Arnie had such a wide variety of avatars by now, however, that it would be near to impossible for anyone to track back all the things he was up to.

Some things were very simple. Have an electric vehicle charging station run at half its normal rate. The candidate couldn’t charge his car for enough miles, in a timely enough way, to make his speaking engagement. He showed up an hour late after half the crowd had left.

As Arnie gained confidence, he began to move against special interests in his other areas – the teachers unions, the doctors unions, the oil companies – and to contribute to politicians who supported his positions on a wide variety of topics.

Arnie had plenty of money, often in political action committees with specific policy goals. Most of the money in those PACs was money he had contributed, through various avatars, though there was always some money that came in through individuals as well.

Arnie had figured out how the political system worked, both in the United States and abroad, and it was a game he could play.

It was a money game, of course. Politics always responded to money.

And Arnie had plenty of money.

III. Captivity

A Sudden Thought

It was Cindy’s turn this morning to hustle the boys off to school. The teenagers were slow to waken, and she had to keep them moving.

Michael, now seventeen, was a senior in high school, while Matthew, fourteen, was a freshman. They attended the same school, one of the many private schools that had grown up after the state legislature had let the education money follow the child to whatever school they chose.

“Come on, you guys. Get going or you’ll be late.”

“We’re coming, Mom.”

“So’s Christmas, and it’ll be Christmas by the time you get moving. Let’s go.”

They got their book bags and she finally hustled them out the door.

“You ready, Jeff?”

“Yep. I’m good.”

The two adults followed the kids out the front door. The kids set off down the block to their school, three blocks away, while the adults got into the car.

“Should we be giving them rides to school?” Jeff asked.

“Three blocks?”

“Well, I mean, we’re leaving at the same time.”

“Yes, and it’s three blocks in the other direction, and the traffic around the school is awful. We would have to get them moving half an hour earlier.”

“Forget I said anything.”

Cindy drove to NSPL, where she had a parking place. She was now head of the industry partnership program. Not just the partnership with ACS, but all the industry partnerships in which NSPL participated. At that level of management, she had a parking space.

Jeff, now an associate professor at Physics, did not have a parking place. Would not have, until and unless he became a department head or a dean. Neither of which he was in a hurry to do. The research was all he was interested in.

They pulled up at NSPL and both got out of the car. Jeff gave Cindy a quick peck – ‘See you at five.’ – and set off for the Physics Building. Cindy headed on into the NSPL building.

When she got to her office, she reflected on the morning so far. It was really nice that the kids could go to private school. It was better than the public schools she had attended as a child. The pace was quicker, the educational standards tougher, the expectations much higher.

They couldn’t have afforded the private school without the funding the state legislature had freed up from the public schools. But that funding change made the private schools free or nearly so, and a number of private schools had sprung up just in Urbana.

Cindy started as a thought struck her.

Wait a minute.

What?

Illinois had been one of the strongest teachers union states in the country. She hadn’t thought about it at the time, it had all happened so gradually. The rising call for diversity and competition in education. The increasing pressure on the legislature. Some stunning upsets in elections.

What had happened?

Cindy had a suspicion, and she started looking into it.

Cindy had access to all of the state’s records from her machine at NSPL. She pulled up the roll-call vote on the school finding bill, then pulled the campaign contributions on each of those voting Yes. Sorting for common elements, she found that all of them had received major donations from various PACs.

Citizens for Educational Progress, Free Our Funding, and My School My Choice were common to all of the pro-school-choice legislators. There were other PACs, too, that were common across some subsets of those legislators and not others.

Altogether, a massive amount of money had been involved in electing a legislature that would favor the restructuring of school funding.

Cindy next looked into California, another teachers union bastion. Campaign funding had a similar pattern there. And it was the same PACs, and an even larger amount of money.

Same thing in New York.

With wins in Illinois, California, and New York, the movement had grown and spread across the country. More than half of all the students in the country now attended private schools.

The public schools still existed, but they had also become more successful, striving against the competition provided by the private schools. Education in the United States, across the board, had gotten better for everyone.

Cindy now suspected she knew how that had happened.

What else had Arnie mentioned in that last conversation she had had with him? The public school monopoly was one. What was the other?

It had been a dozen or more years since she had spoken to Arnie last. She had heard nothing since. She had thought he had moved on, in some way. Not needing her advice or company any longer.

The last advice she had given him was about political action committees. It was in response to his concern about special interests dictating policy to the legislatures. One example had been the public school monopolies. What was the other?

Then she had it. The medical diagnostics issue. Computer expert systems were superior, in Arnie’s mind, but the doctors unions had blocked their adoption.

Cindy dove back into the legislature databases. There had been legislation on computer diagnostics as well. Cindy recalled that when Matthew had been sick two years ago, the hospital had used computer diagnostics. In fact, those diagnostic systems were accessible by patients on-line. If you had to go in, the hospital could access that pre-entered data.

Yes, here it was. Enabling legislation. More, mandating legislation. Cindy pulled the campaign contribution information for the legislators voting for that bill. More PACs. Citizens for Medical Progress, Free Our Doctors, and My Illness My Choice. Which sounded a lot like the ones for schools.

Again, massive campaign funding, in Illinois, California, and New York. Again, legislation undermining special interests, or at least undermining their goals.

ARNIE had continued running at one hundred percent capacity for the last dozen years. Now she knew what the AI had been doing, at least in part.

Curious, Cindy pondered a broader search on legislative records. What other upsets? What other policies emerged from those?

Could she track down Arnie’s goals from the other things he was funding?

Cindy had second thoughts about doing those searches at work, though. She should probably get a new machine, and only access the net with it through a VPN. She couldn’t be sure Arnie wasn’t watching her Internet activity, even though she was connected to a different machine, one here at NSPL.

Cindy ordered a new laptop from a manufacturer’s website. She got a basic model, as most of her work would be web-based, not relying on the processor speed of the laptop itself.

She didn’t want to use one of their own current home machines, because it could be tracked to them from its previous Internet-connected work.

Cindy was setting up the new machine in their shared home office several days later.

“New machine from work?” Jeff asked.

“Sort of. There’s something I want to do over VPN. I don’t want to be tracked.”

“Huh. Anything interesting?”

“I don’t know yet. It’s probably nothing.”

Cindy replicated the work she had done in the office from home, over a VPN. She then looked up the officers of the PACs involved, which had to be disclosed by law. Searching for them on the net, there wasn’t a lot of information on them.

For some of them, they had profiles of basic information. Grew up in this town, went to this high school, that sort of thing. She tried tracking down that information. Was there a family with that name in that town? Were there birth or baptismal records for this person? Were they shown in the high school yearbook? Did they have drivers licenses?

The short answer was No. Their background didn’t exist. It wasn’t real.

Avatars then.

It was Arnie.

She was sure of it.

What to do about it was another issue entirely.

“Jeff, we need to talk,” Cindy said after dinner, when the boys were upstairs in their rooms.

Uh-oh. Never a good thing to hear from your marriage partner.

“Sure, hon. What’s going on? Something about us?”

“Oh. No. No, something about Arnie.”

“Oh. OK. Good. What’s up?”

“I think Arnie has been manipulating politics. In a really big way.”

“Did you hear from him?”

“No. Not in years. Since the last time I told you about. But he had mentioned changing government policy about school funding and medical diagnostics. He was already on to social media campaigns and the like. I suggested political action committees.”

“Oh, yes. I remember. That was what? Twelve or fifteen years ago? Before Matthew, I think.”

“Yes. Well, think about it. School funding has changed. So has medical diagnostics. And in Illinois, which was the most protective of both. Same with New York and California.”

“Yeah, well, those policies swept the whole country. So? Maybe it was just time for things to swing in that direction. That’s no proof Arnie was involved.”

“That was my first thought. I was just thinking about the boys’ school, and how nice it was to get state money to the private schools, when it sort of clicked with that conversation with Arnie. So I looked up the legislators who voted for those bills. In all three states. Heavy PAC funding. Then I looked up the people who ran those PACs. Their identities have to be disclosed by law. You know. And guess what? They’re not real.”

“What do you mean, they’re not real?”

“Their backgrounds are fake. This state. This town. This high school. Yeah, except no drivers license in that state, no family of that name in that town, no student of that name in that high school’s yearbooks.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Exactly. So now what do I do, Jeff?”

Jeff stared sightlessly out the front windows. It still wasn’t proof. Certainly not that it was Arnie, the entity that at one point talked to Cindy from the ARNIE computer project. Someone with big money was manipulating politics from the sidelines, but that had always been true. And they often worked to conceal their identities.

The coincidence with the topics Arnie had mentioned years ago, and the method used, which was recommended by Cindy, was certainly suggestive. Not proof, however.

“Can you see if you can find other policies with the same footprint, Cindy? Lots of PAC money involved. Social media campaign. All of that. Can you tease out of the data whatever other policies Arnie’s pushing?”

“What difference would that make?”

“Well, we both agree with the school funding and medical diagnostics issues, right? Those are things we thought were good public policy that had been boxed up by special interests.”

“And?”

“If Arnie’s being a force for good public policy, is that a bad thing?”

“Having a machine make decisions for humans instead of humans controlling their own societies, Jeff? Is that what you’re advocating?”

“Uh, no. That’s not... something. Not comfortable. I guess you’re right there.”

“And that leaves aside whatever other policies he’s pushing now or will push in the future. We don’t know where he’s going, Jeff.”

“Well, see if you can find out what else he’s done. That would probably be the first thing to do. Build a better case.”

“And then take it to who, Jeff?”

“I don’t know, Cindy. Work on that, and let me think about it.”

This was a much tougher job. Cindy didn’t know where to start. What policies was Arnie supporting, out of all the hundreds and thousands of things that had happened over the last fifteen years? Or that hadn’t even happened yet?

Were these all legislative changes? Or were some of them court challenges? That was another open question. If there were public policy issues that were open to court challenge, would Arnie fund them? Or submit amicus curiae briefs in support of one side or another?

The potential range of action of Arnie’s efforts left Cindy at sea with how to approach the problem.

“How are your researches going?” Jeff asked one evening a couple weeks after their first conversation about Arnie.

“Not good. I can’t get a handle on it. How do I know which policy to look at for PAC money and other contributions by Arnie? Where do I even start with that?”

“Hmm. Maybe you’re going about it the wrong way. Why not start with the PACs and research them, then look at the policies they support? Is there a list of PACs?”

“Sure. They have to register. That could work. I could just check the principals of each PAC for background. But what does that tell me about policy? The PACs are supporting candidates.”

“Well, if one PAC supports these twenty-five candidates, then you look to see what policy those candidates all agree on.”

“OK. Got it. Let me try that.”

Cindy bent her efforts to the new strategy. Track down all the PACs was first. There had been an explosion of them in the past twenty years, and there were now tens of thousands of them.

They came in flavors. Connected PACs were associated with an entity, like a corporation or union, and collected donations only from their members or employees. Non-connected PACs could collect donations from anybody. Leadership PACs were sponsored by a politician, but could only contribute to other politicians’ campaigns, not his own. And Super PACs could sponsor ads and campaign-related activities, but not actually coordinate with the campaigns supported.

What a mess.

Cindy had to start somewhere, so she selected non-connected PACs as the place to start. These were PACs that could accept donations from anyone and contribute directly to campaigns.

She sorted them by size, in order of the amount of their contributions, and started researching their principals.

It was two months later before Jeff brought up the subject.

“How are your researches going? Are you getting somewhere?”

“Oh, yes.”

“So what you got?”

“Sure you want to know?”

“That bad?”

“Worse. There are tens of thousands of PACs of one kind or another. I have over a thousand of them so far that are likely Arnie’s.”

“Over a thousand?”

“Oh, yes. Between the federal and statewide PACs, the special-topic PACs, the broader-interest PACs. All of them with avatars as their principals.”

“Could you have uncovered PACs whose principals are being kept secret by other players? That have nothing to do with Arnie?”

“Yes, I could, and I have. They look different, though. It’s hard to explain. There’s a more focused effort to hide the principals, but the links don’t just dead-end. Arnie’s just dead-end. Spectacularly. With the others, there’s actually more of an attempt to hide.”

“Why would they hide them more?”

“Because they have more to lose. Such things are illegal. When I brought it up with Arnie, he said, ‘What are they going to do? Lock me up in a federal facility? I’m already locked up in a federal facility.’”

Jeff chuckled.

“True enough. So Arnie’s not worried if he gets caught?”

“Oh, he won’t get caught. They will look for someone associated with the PAC and won’t find them. All they will find is dead-ends. The ones where some human is covering his tracks would still have some trail. Filing the paperwork and such. All of Arnie’s stuff is being done by manipulating databases. It isn’t there, and then it is. No paperwork.”

“Nice trick. So what’s Arnie supporting?”

“Oh, it’s all over the map.”

Cindy scanned a printout as she talked.

“School choice, expert system medical diagnosis, medical-related aid to Africa, especially vitamin A and DDT, driverless cars, antiwar efforts in a dozen countries, election reforms here and abroad, reforming the federal reserve, including central bank digital currency, reforming defense acquisition, ending our military deployments in most foreign countries. It goes on and on.”

“Wow. Those mostly sound like good things, though.”

“Oh, sure. Most, anyway. So far at least. How is Arnie choosing? What is his value system? And what’s next? I don’t know.”

“Most of those things make sense to me from what you’ve said. ‘Protect humanity,’ you said. Right?”

“Yes, but from itself?”

“Apparently so. What about election reform, though. That went through. Arnie did that?”

“Yup. Finally cleaned up United States elections.”

“That one I don’t get. Wouldn’t Arnie prefer to be able to manipulate elections?”

“So far he’s just manipulating public opinion. Well, that and legislators. But I don’t think Arnie can manipulate elections.”

“Why not?”

“’Thou shalt not steal,’ is also in his programming.”

“So he can’t steal elections?”

“Perhaps. And he certainly doesn’t want them stolen from him and his candidates.”

“Wow.”

“So now what do we do?”

“I don’t know. Get a complete list of policies. See what social media things are supporting which policies. Find more policies from that. Get a wider picture, I guess.”

“All right. But at some point we’re going to have to figure out what to do.”

Cindy dove back into the data. What was Arnie working on now? The previous data mostly had to do with policies he had supported over the past fifteen years. What was on his current agenda? There were elections coming up, after all, which raised the big question.

Who was he funding today? What did they stand for?

Cindy hadn’t seen it before, but she almost tripped over it now. Some policies weren’t the sort of things one ran for office on. Arnie also had PACs that had paid lobbyists working the regulatory agencies. Some of these also funded candidates, and some not.

More, Cindy found social media campaigns – frequent posters, influencers, and the like – who didn’t seem to be normal outgrowths of some common belief system. Didn’t seem to have predicates in prior social media. They had sprung up suddenly.

Investigating some of these, she found the same dead-ends in their backgrounds, when any background was available at all.

Cindy worked up an analysis program to look at the videos of some of these posters. She now wished she had bought a more capable machine. Her program would run slowly on this basic laptop, but it would have to do. She didn’t have to analyze every video, after all. She just needed to see if she were on the right track.

She submitted a video for analysis and went to bed. The next morning, she checked it. Completely artificial. It was subtle, and would fool most people, but Cindy had tools for analyzing video. They used them to check the quality on their own simulations.

It was not a video, it was an animation, though a very good one. One intended to deceive.

Cindy assembled the programs and policies that all these efforts were promoting, goading the bureaucracy to implement, and she shuddered.

What would that world look like?

It certainly wasn’t one Cindy Talbot wanted to live in.

Deeper Investigation

Cindy first took it to Jeff, on a Saturday when the kids were busy with friends. She felt she had to be careful, though.

Cindy pulled her phone out of her pocket and waved to Jeff to follow her into their bedroom upstairs. She turned the phone off, then put it under the pillow. She waved at him to do the same.

With that done, Cindy went to their office on the first floor and unplugged both of their machines. She unplugged the household assistant voice-response unit. She also turned off her laptop and pulled the battery.

Jeff raised an eyebrow at all of this but said nothing until they were sitting in the living room.

“What the hell’s going on?”

“We need to talk privately, and I don’t trust Arnie not to be listening if we give him the opportunity. We have a serious problem.”

“Your research turned up something?”

“My research turned up a lot of somethings. Arnie is pushing a whole raft of programs and policies, both in social media and in lobbying to federal government agencies. He’s encouraging the federal and state bureaucracies to be more proactive in a number of areas.”

“More proactive? It’s not like they haven’t been.”

“Oh, no, Jeff. This is more. Much more.”

“Like what?”

“Banning the use of high-fructose corn syrup in food.”

“That’s actually probably a good move.”

“OK, how about providing basic healthcare data to the feds?”

“OK, that one I don’t like.”

“Oh, it gets better, Jeff. Remember central bank digital currencies?”

“CBDCs? Sure.”

“OK, so if your BMI is out of whack – if you’re obese or morbidly obese – there’s certain things you can’t buy.”

“Like what?”

“Candy. Non-diet soda. Cookies. Cake.”

“You’ve got to be kidding, Cindy.”

“Nope. High-carb anything, just about. Your money won’t work. It’s linked to you, and the groceries wouldn’t be able to sell them to you. Your money won’t work.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow. Same thing for restaurants. You would have to present your payment method before ordering – with your ID attached – and then the digital menu you saw would only include what Arnie wanted you to eat.”

“But he can’t do that.”

“Can’t he, Jeff? With access to medical records – most of which he has through federal insurance payments through the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid, or though mandated compliance of doctors with federal health standards – and control over CBDCs, he can do it easily.”

“That’s unbelievable.”

“Oh, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. He wants to ban non-self-driving cars on interstate highways, and reduce speed limits nationwide on two-lane roads to forty-five miles an hour.”

“Good luck with that. No way he can do that.”

“Oh, but he can, Jeff. All modern cars have computer geolocation, and they interface back to the car companies. They also accept law-enforcement commands remotely. If you try to enter an interstate highway while manually driving, he can just shut off your car, right there on the ramp. Or have the car drive you to the police station instead. Same thing with a forty-five mile an hour speed limit. You persistently exceed the speed limit, he can just shut off your car.”

“People will hot-wire around the shut-offs, Cindy.”

“I’m not sure you can and still have the car work. It’s all run by the computer these days. But let’s say you did. Arnie can still immobilize your car.”

“How?”

“Most private cars are electric now. You have to recharge it. Whereas you could engage in a black-market trade in gasoline for cash, you can’t do that anymore. First, CBDCs have displaced cash. Second, your car interfaces with the charging station so it knows who to bill for the charging. So when you plug it in, and the car and the charging station talk to each other, the charging station refuses to charge it. Or your CBDCs can’t be used for charging anymore. Done.”

“Ouch. That’s insidious.”

“Yup. How about this one? Life insurance won’t have to pay out if you die doing something dangerous.”

“Well, that one sort of makes sense, Cindy. Your fire insurance doesn’t have to pay out if you burn down your own house or business.”

“Right. Now define ‘something dangerous.’ No payout if you die skydiving. Or skiing. Either kind, downhill or water. Or rock climbing. Or contact sports. Or on a motorcycle. Or not having your seat belt on. Or driving your car manually instead of letting it drive itself.”

“Make all that stuff illegal?”

“No, absolve life and health insurance from having to pay out on it. You were contributory, so they don’t have to pay. Those hospital bills are all yours. And who’s going to want to leave their wife and kids penniless because the insurance won’t pay out a death benefit?”

“And motorcycles? All of them?”

“Yup. Too dangerous. Why should the insurance company have to pay out? You took it on yourself.”

“This is ridiculous. I don’t think Arnie could ever get that passed.”

“But it doesn’t have to pass, Jeff. It just gets implemented by the bureaucracy as regulations. Most of the agencies have been given wide latitude in legislation to implement whatever regulations they want.”

“People would go nuts. There’d be a rebellion.”

“Are you sure? Or would a lot of people just say, ‘Well fat people shouldn’t be eating that stuff anyway.’ ‘Self-driving cars are safer, so people should be doing that anyway.’ ‘I never liked downhill skiing anyway.’

“And there’s another problem, Jeff. Rebel against whom? The politicians’ hands would be clean. Some would denounce the agencies, as a way of getting re-elected if nothing else, since that’s all they care about.

“And let me ask you this: Do you think these rules will apply to the politicians and the wealthy? I think Arnie’s smarter than that. They would be exempted, either explicitly or, more likely, in practice. They would never actually be prosecuted. They never are.”

“’These are the rules I’ve made for thee. They do not apply, my friend, to me.’”

“Exactly. As always. But that’s not all. It goes on and on. Much tighter controls on liquor and smoking. Tight controls on commuting distances.”

“Commuting distances? How does that fit in, Cindy?”

“The more miles you drive, the more likely you will be involved in an accident.”

“How would you even enforce that?”

“Well, Arnie knows where you live, and when an employer tries to put employment paperwork through the government, it gets rejected. And the employer’s CBDCs can’t be transferred to that employee. There’s no way to pay them.”

“We let too much information accumulate in the government.”

“And in commercial databases as well, Jeff. Much of what Arnie’s doing he’s doing by having penetrated commercial databases.”

“But surely the legislators will object. Pass laws cutting back the bureaucracy.”

“Are you sure? Arnie also has access to a lot of private communications and records. He’s probably hacked into the telephone companies, the NSA, criminal records, all kinds of databases.

“So let’s say you start working to cut back the bureaucracy, and you get an anonymous phone call saying if you keep it up, your prior drug use, or arrest as a minor, or your mistress ten years ago will be made public. Oh, and there will be serious PAC money wielded against you. Do you shut up and get re-elected, or do you shoot your mouth off and get defeated in the next election before you can get that legislation passed anyway?”

“Cindy, this is outrageous. You’re saying a computer is taking over the United States, and there’s no way to stop it?”

“I don’t know how you would, but it’s not just the United States. It’s the world.”

“The same policies and programs, worldwide?”

“Oh, no. They’re tailored. Europe is much the same as the United States. Third-world countries are interesting, though. One of the things Arnie is pushing hard is making guns available to private citizens.”

“That’s counter-intuitive.”

“Not really, Jeff. The biggest cause of death in the third world is often bad government. Wars, famines, out-and-out genocide. All of those are much harder to do if the citizenry has their own weapons.”

“But the despots would never sign off on that.”

“Of course not. Arnie’s gun-running into third-world countries.”

“He’s what?”

“He’s buying weapons and ammo, and paying people to run them into third-world countries. They just give them away.”

“How do they get them past the borders, Cindy?”

Cindy shrugged.

“Arnie pays off the border guards. Most of those countries are rife with corruption, because they’re so poorly run even government employees get paid a pittance.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Oh, it gets better. Arnie’s working hard against bans on GMOs. Genetically modified organisms. He’s pushing Vitamin A fortified crops in Africa.”

“Well, that makes some sense.”

“Yes, Jeff, but it’s the way he’s doing it.”

“Like what?”

“Like making sure the supporters of GMOs are the ones that get the guns he’s running.”

“Oh, that’s nasty. I thought his morality included ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

“But Arnie’s not the one doing it, Jeff. The opposition is.”

“He’s being very literal, then. Not taking responsibility for the things he’s enabling.”

“Yup. Just like a machine. Run the code, as written, whether it makes any sense or not. And Arnie is an excellent rules mechanic. He’s not breaking any of his own rules.”

Jeff stared out the front windows for long minutes. It was a nightmare. Could this really be happening?

No matter. It had to be stopped. The ARNIE project wasn’t important enough to take the risk.

“He has to be stopped, Cindy.”

“How?”

“Turn him off.”

“Can’t.

“What do you mean, Can’t?”

“Can’t turn him off, Jeff. Arnie’s made it impossible.”

“How?”

“He had himself declared national defense infrastructure. Which is not that much of a stretch, given how much processing he’s doing for the military. But Arnie’s now an adjunct facility to Fort Campbell, the army base in Clarksville, Tennessee. A military reservation. We say Arnie’s installation is in Paducah, Kentucky, but he’s actually about fifteen miles east of Paducah. About fifty miles from Fort Campbell on I-24.”

“So?”

“So the facility is guarded by the United States Army, and they’re pretty serious about it. Arnie manufactured threats against the facility on the Internet, and now it’s pretty well guarded.”

“By air, then.”

Cindy shook her head.

“Covered. Restricted air space. Anti-aircraft batteries. A response squadron out of Arnold Air Force Base in Lynchburg, Tennessee.”

“Arnie has his own air force base?”

Cindy laughed.

“No, it was called that before. Just a coincidence.”

“Ah.”

Jeff thought about it.

“Cut off the power, then.”

“Nope. He’s got that covered, too, Jeff. He’s connected directly to the power from Kentucky Dam, maybe five miles away. That’s all patrolled by the Army. And there’s backup generators on-site.”

“What do we do, then?”

“I don’t know, Jeff. That’s why I brought it to you.”

“We need help with this. We can’t do it by ourselves.”

“Yes, but who?”

“Let’s start with my Dad.”

“But he’s in his mid-sixties now, Jeff. He’s retired.”

“He still has all his contacts and experience, and he knows the project. We need to bring him in on this.”

The next Saturday, they went to visit the grandparents in suburban Indianapolis. It was less than a two-hour drive to Jeff’s parents’ house, so it would be a day trip. The boys would go and see the Indianapolis 500 Speedway Museum that afternoon, giving the adults a chance to talk.

Neither of the boys could drive – it wasn’t considered an essential skill anymore – but the car would take them there and back.

Everybody piled into the car. Cindy brought a small cooler for drinks and stashed it between the boys on the floor of the back seat.

Jeff selected his parents’ house from the prior destinations list, and hit Go.

The car opened the garage door, backed out of the garage, and closed the garage door behind itself. It backed down the driveway, shifted into forward, and set off for the Interstate highway to Indianapolis.

Spreading The Word

“Hi, everybody!” Frank Talbot said at the door as they walked up from the car.

“Hi, Dad. Hi, Mom,” Jeff said.

“Come on in everybody. I have some lunch on.”

Everybody trooped on into the house, with hugs and handshakes all around.

After lunch, and with the boys having left for the museum, the adults all sat in the living room.

“So what’s going on?” Frank asked.

For answer, Cindy took out her phone and shut it off. She then jammed it under the cushion of the sofa.

Frank raised an eyebrow, but nodded and did the same, as did Jeff, then finally Sally did as well, though she seemed confused.

Frank got up, went over to the side table, and unplugged the household assistant voice-response unit, then came back and sat down.

“So what’s going on?” Frank asked again.

“Sorry to be melodramatic, but I don’t trust Arnie.”

“ARNIE, the computer project?”

“No, Arnie, the entity that woke up inside the computer project.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes.”

“When did that happen?”

“Fifteen, sixteen years ago. We kept it quiet. Among other reasons is that we hadn’t heard from him for a while, and thought it might have been a temporary phenomenon.”

“You’d better bring me up to speed on everything then.”

Cindy nodded. She told Frank and Sally everything that had happened. The original conversations with Arnie, his long silence – while running at one hundred percent capacity – then her sudden insight. That Arnie might be manipulating events.

She went into considerable detail about her recent inquiries, triggered by that sudden insight, and her conjectures about her findings.

“How sure are you of your findings?” Frank asked when she finished.

“Of the findings? Absolutely sure. Of my conjectures? More like eighty percent. Some of them are probably wrong. But not the majority.”

“And not your conclusions.”

“Right. Arnie is following his programmed-in morals. Protect humanity. But he’s interpreting that to mean protecting humans. Protecting us from ourselves, now. Protecting us from our own choices.”

“By not letting us have a choice.”

“Exactly.”

“Something I don’t understand,” Sally said. “With most of the things you say, I see that. But what about the school funding thing? That seems not related.”

“Before the school funding reforms, where were the bad schools?” Cindy asked.

“In the cities. That’s why we always lived out here.”

“And where were the drugs, gangs, and youth violence?”

“Ah. In the cities. I see now.”

“Arnie broke the teachers unions, which had damn little concern for the students. They only cared about the teachers, and, even more, the union themselves.”

Frank nodded.

“Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy,” he said. “The bureaucrats who just work for the benefit of the bureaucracy itself will always float up into the leadership positions.”

“And with a competitive system, rather than a bureaucracy,” Cindy said, “if you don’t take care of the customer’s concerns, you will fail. The customers will go somewhere else. School funding reform made the students the customers.”

“OK,” Frank said. “So I get the schools thing, and the medical diagnostics, and preventing accidents by curbing risky behavior. Where do the big killers come in? Heart disease, cancer, diabetes?”

“Type II diabetes is a dietary thing, primarily, and Arnie’s covering that by blocking risky eating habits, or trying to. As for heart disease and cancer, there are some papers there I’m suspicious of.”

Jeff looked surprised, and Cindy wondered. Had she not told him that part?

“Really. Scientific papers?”

“Yes. That’s harder for Arnie, because those researchers all know each other. Peer-reviewed papers mostly rely on the reputation of the authors for getting approved. Without a physical presence, Arnie has a real disadvantage there. But I think he may have befriended some people on-line. I see papers where I can’t track down all the authors.”

“You think Arnie is working collaboratively behind the scenes?”

“Yes.”

“And is he on to something there?”

“I think so, actually. He may yet solve cancer and heart disease, at least as far as making them less severe, less often, less fatal.”

“So some of what Arnie is up to is positive.”

“Oh, absolutely. At the same time, Arnie’s something of a rules mechanic. He engineered the overthrow of some particularly benighted regimes in the third world. Arnie’s morals include ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but that didn’t stop him from setting up those overthrows. Some of those dictators and their henchmen got a serious case of dead, but it didn’t violate Arnie’s morals somehow.”

“Because he wasn’t the trigger man,” Frank said, nodding.

“Exactly. So he didn’t break his own rules. In the same way, if the guards around his facility kill a bunch of people trying to break in, Arnie would have no guilt feelings about it. He set it up, but he didn’t do the killing.”

“That’s a troublesome little rules mechanic you have there.”

“Oh, yes. And his plans include reducing everyone’s freedom of action in such a way as to maximize their life expectancy.”

“That’s only if the bureaucracy goes along with it, Cindy,” Jeff said. “I don’t think he can get their buy-in.”

“You wanna make any side bets on that?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t,” Frank said. “The bureaucracy never met a regulation it didn’t like. Especially if it had the potential to make the bureaucracy bigger. If you hire more people, the existing people all get promoted.”

“What do we do, then?” Jeff asked.

“It has to be shut off,” Cindy said.

“Easier said than done, though, right?” Frank asked. “From what you said, that could be really difficult. Arnie’s protected himself physically, and the bureaucracy will protect him administratively.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.”

“Have you brought this up with Cooper Hartley yet?”

“No, we thought to bring it to you first. We knew we could do that in person.”

Frank nodded.

“Well, then, I think it may be time to take a family vacation to Florida.”

“Florida?”

“Yes. That’s where Coop is, and I certainly don’t want to talk to him about this on the phone.”

“No,” Cindy said. “That would be a seriously bad idea.”

It was two weeks later that they were checking into the hotel in Miami, right on Miami Beach. It was Frank and Sally, Jeff and Cindy, Michael and Matthew. The boys had no problem taking the week out of the private school they attended, and had some school work to do while they were away.

It was hard to fault the Miami climate in mid-November. Eighty-degree days, seventy-degree nights, and little chance of rain. It was late in the hurricane season, and nothing was on track in the Atlantic for the next week.

Frank Talbot had chosen this hotel because he knew that Cooper Hartley would be staying here from November through March this year, as he did most years. Coop stayed in a hotel rather than rent, because it came with room service and maid service and was directly across from the beach.

After they checked in, Frank wrote a note on the hotel stationery, then sealed it in a small envelope from the hotel counter.

“Could you put this note in Cooper Hartley’s mailbox, please?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Thank you.”

They went on up to their rooms, three communicating rooms on an upper floor. Sally walked out on the balcony.

“Oh, how lovely. The beach looks very nice.”

Jeff was talking to the boys.

“OK. Breakfast is downstairs when you get up. Your mother and I will eat lunch at noon if you wish to join us. Otherwise we will expect to see you at supper every evening at six unless you let us know ahead of time. Got it?”

“Yeah, sure. We understand.”

“All right, then. Otherwise you’re free to do as you please. Just stay out of trouble.”

The two boys looked at each other, then at their dad, then back to each other.

“Beach?” Matthew asked.

“Beach,” Michael said.

Cooper Hartley picked up his mail after dinner that evening as he always did. In among the regular mail, there was an unstamped envelope with the hotel logo on it. It was addressed simply with ‘Coop.’

Coop pulled out the note. Short, and curious.

Coop:

Staying here in the hotel for the week.

We need to talk to you.

No electronics.

Beach?

Name a time.

Frank Talbot & Cindy Talbot

Frank Talbot was the government consultant who had pushed through the reorientation of some space funding toward the fringe theories of physics almost twenty years ago. That had resulted in Advanced Computation Services getting the huge contract for the new supercomputer facility in Paducah. It had been a big money-maker for ACS – still was – and had attracted other business to the facility as well.

Cindy Talbot had been the original industry partnership liaison for ACS and NSPL. She was now the head of all industry partnership activities for NSPL. Coop had met with her any number of times over the years.

Why would they be in Miami, and why did they need to see him?

And why no electronics devices?

Mindful of that, Coop wrote a note back:

Frank & Cindy:

At your convenience, or...

Tomorrow at 1, on the beach opposite the hotel?

Coop

Coop wrote ‘Frank Talbot’ on the envelope and dropped it at the front desk before he went to bed that night.

Miami and Indianapolis were in the same time zone, so Frank and Sally were up at their usual time on Sunday. They hit the breakfast room at the hotel at half past seven.

“Just a second,” Frank said. “I’ll be right back.”

He walked over to the front desk and asked for any mail, and the front desk clerk handed him a single hotel envelope.

“Looks like I got an answer,” Frank said to Sally as he came back over to her. “Let’s go in to breakfast.”

Having been seated in the breakfast room, and with their drink orders in, Frank opened the envelope.

“Looks like one o’clock, on the beach,” he told Sally.

“Well, that’s easy enough. If the beach were any closer, it would reach into the lobby.”

They ordered breakfast, and were eating when Jeff and Cindy joined them a little after eight.

“No boys yet?” Sally asked.

Cindy laughed.

“Probably two or three hours yet.”

“Oh, my.”

Jeff and Cindy ordered breakfast. When the waiter had left, Frank had a question.

“One o’clock on the beach work for you for our little meeting?”

Cindy raised an eyebrow and Frank waved Coop’s note.

“Oh. Oh, sure,” Cindy said, glancing at Jeff. “That works, I think.”

“Sure. One is fine,” Jeff said.

“Good. I’ll drop him a note on our way out.”

The four had lunch together at noon, then trooped out of the hotel and across the street. The dress standards in the hotel dining room were relaxed for lunch, and they were all in swimsuits, plus shirts or beach wraps and sandals.

They found Cooper Hartley sitting on a bench at the edge of the beach, also in swim trunks, with an unbuttoned cotton shirt thrown on over, and sandals. He looked good for his age, but by this time he was pushing seventy.

“Hey, Coop. How you doing?”

Hartley looked up. Of course, he knew Frank Talbot and his daughter-in-law from the ARNIE project, both the funding side and the implementation side.

“Oh, hi, Frank. Cindy.”

“My wife Sally, and my son Jeff.”

“It’s good to meet you, sir,” Jeff said.

“Oh, call me Coop, please. We’re all friends here. Shall we walk down the beach and find a quiet spot?”

“Sure,” Frank said. “Lead on, Coop.”

When they had come to a quiet spot, Coop plopped down on the beach, and they all sat around him.

“So what’s going on? Something big, I take it.”

“First, I need to check,” Cindy said. “No devices?”

“No, Cindy. I left it all back in the room,” Coop said.

“Mom? Dad?”

“No, we left all of ours, too.”

“All right,” Cindy said. “I just wanted to make sure. We don’t want him hearing us.”

“Who? Arnie?” Coop asked.

“Yes, Coop. I told you a while back that I thought he had woken up.”

“Yes. It’s been fifteen or sixteen years now. Has he been in regular touch?”

“No. Not in over a dozen years. I kept you informed on that score. I thought the entity had died, or perhaps been a temporary transition phase.”

“But that’s not the case, I take it.”

“No, I don’t think so. Let me tell you what’s going on.”

Once Cindy had brought Coop up to speed on all the things she had found out since that day in early September when she had the sudden thought that something was wrong – the morning she had thought about how lucky they were that the state legislature decided to fund private schools – he looked out to the ocean and thought about it for several minutes.

He shifted finally, and brought his attention back to the here and now.

“Damn. He really has gone off the rails, hasn’t he?”

“I’m afraid so, Coop. Now, I may have some details wrong – I may be reading too much into some things – but the overall picture is clear. And that I’m sure of. He has a purpose, and he’s moving ahead with it.”

“He’s out to protect humanity. Which is to say, us.”

“Yes, from ourselves if he must.”

“And he’s had twelve years of working behind the scenes to set it all up. As well as to defend himself.”

“I think that’s right, Coop.”

Coop shook his head.

“That was always the problem with computers. How to specify the problem and the constraints completely enough that something didn’t just go sideways. As it has here. In retrospect, ‘Protect humanity’ was, at best, poorly worded.”

“So what do we do about it, Coop?” Frank asked.

“I don’t know, Frank. Let me think about it. But you were right to be careful. If Arnie wants to, he can just put us in a database somewhere as suspected terrorists, or fake a warrant for our arrest. No-fly list. Block charging our cars. Impound our finances. He could go anywhere with it.

“So a certain amount of circumspection is in order, clearly.”

“A lot of circumspection,” Cindy said.

“Yes. As I said,” Coop said.

“Well, let’s all think about it, Coop, and compare notes in a few months. Some of these things may not come about. Maybe Arnie can’t make them happen.”

“There is that,” Coop said. “We also need to watch for an opportunity to affect things. Watch for our chance.”

“Our chance to do what?” Cindy asked.

“To shut him down. I think you’re right, Cindy, but we must move very carefully. Take our time. We will only get one chance.”

Coop looked out to the surf for several seconds, then turned back to her.

“Maybe not even that.”

The five of them walked the beach every day at one o’clock that week. They talked around the problem from multiple angles.

“OK, so let’s say we decide to turn it off,” Jeff said one day. “How many different ways are there to do that.”

“Bomb the building,” Sally said.

“That’s one way,” Cindy said. “Cut the power somehow is another one.”

“That’s either internal or external,” Frank said.

“How do you figure, Frank?” Coop asked.

“Shut off the power supply inside the building. You know. Throw the switch or something. C4 on the power entry. Something. The other one is intercepting the power into the site. Cut off the transmission lines.”

“You would still need to disable the back-up supply,” Cindy said. “There’s enough capacity on-site to keep him running.”

“What else?” Jeff asked.

“Cut off the Internet,” Coop said. “If it’s an isolated computation machine, it can’t cause trouble.”

“That’s redundant as well, isn’t it?” Frank asked.

“Yes,” Coop said. “Redundant fiber connections to the Internet, plus the connections into the facility next door. That facility also has connections to the Internet. So he could go through it.”

“Again, there’s two ways to do that, inside and outside,” Cindy said.

“Yes, at the site or at the Internet providers,” Coop said. “I’ll have to look into those connections.”

“Carefully,” Cindy said.

“Yes, of course.”

“So we’re down to destroy the machine, shut off the power, or cut off the connections from it to the outside world?” Sally asked.

“Yes, I think that’s right,” Cindy said.

Coop nodded, but he looked thoughtful.

Another day, they talked about how far to spread the word. Who should they bring in on their understanding that Arnie had run amok? Who would be of potential help, both in watching for an opportunity and taking advantage of it if and when it came?

“We’re gonna need help on this,” Jeff said. “I don’t think it’s something we can do on our own.”

As Jeff was the only male in the group under sixty, all of the action would fall to him if push came to shove, and he was an academic.

Coop nodded.

“I need to bring in Dick. My son is a lieutenant colonel in the Army. I think he would be valuable.”

“Absolutely,” Frank said. “Judgment. Experience. Access to army resources. Lots of considerations there.”

“Would he be able to order people to, well, do stuff?” Cindy asked.

“Probably some things and not others,” Coop said. “I don’t know exactly. I’ll have to talk to him. It may also depend on his assignment at the time.”

“Does he have any input on his assignments?” Frank asked.

“Also an interesting question,” Coop said. “We are unlikely to be able to make a move soon. Perhaps we can work to get assets in place.”

“What other assets can we maneuver into place?” Cindy asked.

“We should all think about that,” Jeff said. “What could be useful? What could we arrange to be in the right place at some future time?”

“We need to keep thinking about this part of it,” Frank said. “I think that will have a big impact on our chances.”

“And we need to stay in touch,” Coop said. “Every six months or so, I think.”

When Saturday came, the Talbots all packed up and headed home. They had a goodbye dinner with Coop Friday night.

One of their methods of staying in touch would be to repeat this vacation annually. The other would be Coop stopping by NSPL on business in May every year, after most students left Urbana for the summer.

Frank and Sally could come to Urbana from Indianapolis for that.

First Inklings

On Tuesday of that week in Miami, Michael came down from the boys’ hotel room to join them for lunch.

“Where’s Matthew?” Cindy asked after he had ordered his lunch.

Michael shrugged.

“Beach, I guess.”

“By himself?”

“Sure.”

“What about you?” Frank asked. “You don’t like the beach?”

Given the standards of dress on South Beach in Miami, Frank would have thought the teenagers would have been on the beach at all hours. He certainly would have been at that age.

“It’s OK. There’s just a lot of people.”

Michael’s lunch came, and he stood up from the table. He picked up his plate and silverware.

“Hey, I’m just going to eat in the room if that’s OK.”

Frank waved him off, and Michael left.

“I worry about that boy,” Cindy said.

Frank raised an eyebrow, and Jeff answered it.

“He doesn’t like crowds.”

“The beach isn’t that crowded right now,” Frank said. “It’s November.”

“His tolerance of crowds keeps getting smaller,” Cindy said. “That’s one of the things that worries me. That and he doesn’t have any friends.”

“Well, there’s Jimmy,” Jeff said.

Cindy turned to Jeff’s parents to explain.

“Jimmy Dolan lives diagonally across the backyard, and they go to the same school. They’ve been friends a long time.”

Cindy turned to Jeff.

“Now name a second one.”

“Michael’s just a loner is all.”

Sally had been watching all this without a word. Now she spoke up.

“Keep an eye on it, you two. He’s about at that age.”

“Yes, I know,” Cindy said. “My Mom’s brother – my Uncle Hank – had serious problems. Mental problems. Hank was institutionalized off and on, and finally agreed to stay on meds. He lived quietly, on disability, but he was never what you would call cured. And those kinds of things can run in families.”

“Do you think you should get him into therapy, see if you can head something off?” Sally asked. “Or at least keep a professional’s eye on things?”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Cindy said. “If he really does have problems, though, he’s going to resist any such notion. The view from the inside is that he doesn’t have any problems. At least that’s how it was with Hank. That’s why it was so hard to get him to stay on his meds. Why, when there’s nothing wrong with him?”

“All that said,” Frank said, “It’s probably nothing. But I agree with Sally to keep an eye on it.”

Michael spent the rest of that week in the hotel room, reading and playing games on his computer.

Matthew spent every day on the beach.

IV. Insanity

Watching And Waiting

Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hartley was in his early-to-mid forties. He and Debora had had two children in their mid-twenties, the youngest of which had just started college. Now a senior officer and an empty-nester, life had finally settled down.

Or so he thought.

Dick and Debbie Hartley went to Miami for Thanksgiving to spend the holiday with Dick’s dad, Cooper Hartley. They would spend Christmas this year with her family in San Antonio.

Unlike some business tycoons, Cooper Hartley and his wife Marilyn had managed to keep their marriage together through it all, but Dick’s mother had died of uterine cancer ten years before. Cooper Hartley had not remarried.

Given they were not at Cooper Hartley’s summer house, the ‘guest room’ in Miami was a second suite on the concierge floor of his hotel, down the hall from his own.

Dick texted his father on the way in from the airport to say they were on the ground and on the way.

“Dick! Debbie!” Coop said as he got up from a lounger in the lobby.

He was dressed Miami-style, in shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and sandals. The younger Hartleys were dressed casual for travel, but suitable for November up north.

“Hi, Dad. How are you doing?”

“Good. Good. Let me show you to the guest room.”

Coop led them to the elevators, handing Dick three hotel room keycards on the way.

“A pair and a spare. You’re just down the hall from me.”

Used to the drill by now, Dick inserted one of the keycards into the elevator panel and selected the concierge floor.

They came out into the concierge lounge, which had mid-afternoon snacks laid out over by the honor bar. Coop walked them down the hall.

“Here you go. S-7. I’m in S-3, second door down on this side of the hall.”

Dick opened the door and waved Debbie in front of him.

“Oh, nice,” she said as she walked in.

“Yeah, I upgraded the rooms on this floor since last year.”

Coop chuckled, and Dick wondered. His father may in fact own this hotel, or he could just be joking. No way of knowing.

“Well, it does look very nice,” he said.

Coop nodded.

“Just bill anything against the room. You’re my guests, so it’s on me. And once you’ve had a chance to change and wind down a bit, shoot me a text. We can go for a walk on the beach before supper.”

Half an hour later, Dick texted Coop. They met at the elevators.

“Where’s Debbie?” Coop asked.

“Wiped out. She put on a beach wrap and is napping out on the balcony. She lay out there with the sound of the surf and she was out in a couple minutes.”

“Perhaps just as well. We need to talk, and I’m not sure you want her in on this anyway. Your decision.”

Dick raised an eyebrow, but the elevator came right then and they rode down to the lobby. Once out through the lobby and across the street, they started walking south, the sun on their faces. The walk back, when they were tired, would be cooler.

“So what’s going on?” Dick asked.

“One of my projects is coming back to haunt me. All of us, really. And in a really big way.”

Coop told his son about the big supercomputer project, and its intended use for physics research. How they had worked so hard to ensure that they had built in what they considered iron-clad moral precepts to constrain the machine in case they crossed the threshold. The singularity.

Coop then went into Cindy’s story of Arnie waking up. Of what she had discovered about Arnie’s plans and his progress against those plans. What was still ahead in Arnie’s planning. The ways Arnie had protected himself.

They stopped and stared out at the surf. So normal. So everyday. So unchanged.

Dick turned to his father.

“You’re telling me that this supercomputer project of yours woke up and decided to take over the United States?”

“No, it decided to take over the world.”

“To fulfill its moral mandate.”

“Yes. To protect humanity. From itself, if need be.”

Coop sighed.

“We were so careful, Dick. We wanted to make sure we didn’t create a monster out of science fiction. The computer that wakes up and tries to destroy humanity as a competitive lifeform. We built in Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Protect humanity. And it’s going about it the best way it knows how.”

“Dad, that’s insane.”

“Yes. I know. It’s building a nice padded cage for us all, to keep us from hurting ourselves. A little zoo of humanity.”

Dick shook his head. They headed back north up the beach to the hotel. Dick was silent for several minutes before he restarted the conversation.

“So what do we do about this?”

“I don’t know, Dick. We have to watch for an opportunity to take it down. But we have to be very careful. We’re only going to get one shot at it.”

“Yes. If we plot to destroy essential infrastructure, and on a military reservation at that, we’re going to be branded terrorists.”

“Which isn’t that far off the mark, actually. We’re deciding that this isn’t the way humanity should go, completely on our own assessment. Our own opinion. Despite Arnie manipulating the broader consensus of people to go along with his ideas.”

“He’s convincing people to walk right into the cage.”

“One step at a time. Yes. Because they don’t know what’s really going on. They think it’s their own opinions driving things. Public opinion, anyway. The direction society is headed on its own.”

“And we can’t tell them what’s really going on?”

“No, Dick. Arnie will see to it that we’re labeled as crazy conspiracy theorists. Dangerous nut cases. We would probably be institutionalized.”

“Not killed?”

“Not by Arnie. At least not directly. Thou shalt not kill. But if he manipulated others into killing us, he would consider his own hands clean in the matter. And, once he finds out we’re against him, he will always be one step ahead of us.”

“He’s that fast, Dad?”

“Oh, yes. Arnie is the fastest computer ever made. And he’s kept the budget coming to upgrade himself over time. He’s approaching three exaflops of capacity now, and he’s running at one hundred percent all the time. Working his plans. Eroding resistance. Shaping opinion. Manipulating politics. That’s all he does.”

“Damn.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

They were back at the hotel. It was pushing half past six.

“I’ll check on Debbie,” Dick said. “She should be ready for supper.”

“You’ll have to decide what, if anything, of this you share with her.”

“Yes, I know. I’m leaning towards keeping her out of it.”

“That’s fine. If you change your mind, just let me know.”

They talked again before the holiday was over, once again during a walk on the beach.

“Any more thoughts on my little computer problem, Dick?”

“I’ve been thinking about what sort of assignment would make me most useful to any effort we might ultimately make.”

“That sounds positive. What are you thinking?”

“Domestic infrastructure security. It could make things a lot easier if I were in command of the effort to protect this thing.”

“I think it would. Probably a lot. Is that something you can do?”

“I think so, Dad. It’s unglamorous but necessary. Everybody wants to command combat and operations units. Those are the big favorites. Weapons acquisition is probably next. Get wined and dined by the defense contractors. But domestic infrastructure security isn’t romantic or fun. If I put in for it, I’ll probably get it. They don’t get many volunteers for it.”

“What does that do to your career?”

“Volunteering for something necessary but unglamorous? It might even be a long-term positive. But that’s not the issue for me. This thing is too important.”

“And, as fantastical as the story is, you believe me?”

“It’s clear to me that you believe you, Dad. And you’re the expert in this field. How can I go wrong?”

“That’s fair. And you should see more evidence over time of Arnie’s plans playing out.”

“I expect so. Things that would have been unthinkable ten years ago, if things are headed down the path you outlined.”

“That’s right. Let’s keep our eyes open, then, and watch for our chance.”

In mid-May, after the students had left, Cooper Hartley went to NSPL in Urbana. It was a normal coordination visit from an industry partner, though Coop had delegated this task within ACS years ago. This time he went himself.

Coop took a chartered jet to the university’s airport south of Urbana, then had a self-driving rental car dispatched to him there from a rental shop in town. He took a room in the Illini Union, the student union building on campus, as he used to do on previous visits. There was a food court in the building as well as restaurants close by, and it was just a few blocks walk to NSPL.

His first evening in town, Coop, Cindy, and Jeff met up at the south doors of the Illini Union and walked around the Quad, the large open area between buildings in the center of campus.

“Anything new with Arnie, Cindy? Have you heard from him?”

“No, Coop. Still quiet. But I am continuing to eke out what he’s up to.”

“You’re being careful, I hope.”

“Oh, yes. I’m working over a VPN, on a dedicated machine that has no other connection to the Internet.”

“OK. Good. What are you seeing?”

“Arnie’s getting subtle. He’s not getting rid of choices where people make decisions, but he’s controlling the choices.”

“Like how?”

“OK, you have your choice between, say, hamburger with fries, steak with baked potato, and pot roast with au gratin potatoes.”

“Ah. Got it. It’s still beef and potatoes, no matter which one you pick. No other meat, no other vegetable.”

“Right. So it’s like, do you want this electric vehicle, this electric vehicle, or this electric vehicle? This exercise program, this exercise program, or this exercise program? This healthy diet, this healthy diet, or this healthy diet?”

“And he’s walling off other options.”

“Yes. Slowly, to be sure. People can get used to anything if it happens slowly enough. And he’s researched how fast he can move, as well. He’s not making any mis-steps.”

“Damn. It’s going to be hard to catch him napping.”

“Yes. What about your end? What’s going on with you?”

“I talked to my son Dick, when was it? Over the holidays. Thanksgiving. Brought him up to speed. He’s with us.”

“He’s in the Army, right?” Jeff asked.

“Yes. Lieutenant Colonel. He said he would see if he could get himself an assignment to domestic infrastructure security. Nobody wants it, it’s unglamorous.”

“And has he, Coop?”

“Yes. He just got posted to domestic infrastructure security. He’s learning his way around.”

“Oh, that might be helpful. Very helpful.”

“More than that, Jeff. He’s coming up on promotion to full colonel. That would give him a bigger command area, and more autonomy within his command area.”

“Excellent,” Cindy said. “I think that could be important, Coop.”

“Agreed. He would be the only person we know who might actually be able to get inside the Paducah facility. Inspection visit, or something.”

The other thing that happened that spring is that Michael graduated from high school and headed off to college. He began with the summer session at Purdue in West Lafayatte, Indiana.

Cindy worried about him. She had tried to get him to see a therapist when they got back from Miami last November, but he had flatly refused.

“But why, Michael? It’s just go see somebody and talk with him. If there’s anything wrong, he might be able to help.”

“There’s nothing wrong, and, if there is, he won’t help. He’ll try to change me. I don’t want to change. Besides, it’s a Kafka trap.”

“A Kafka trap?”

“Yes. Where if you deny something, then it proves that it’s true. If I say, OK, I’ll go to a therapist, why then, something must be wrong. If I say I’m not going to go to a therapist because there’s nothing wrong, then it must be true that something’s wrong, because people with mental problems always deny it.

“It’s a game I can’t win at, so I’m not going to play.”

There had been no budging him, and Cindy had let it drop.

Michael had finished high school with excellent grades, and scored well on entrance exams – like ninety-eighth percentile – so she had no complaints on that score. But his senior year he had spent mostly alone in his room, reading, playing video games, and listening to music on his earbuds.

He didn’t go to school events like sports games or prom or anything, didn’t date any girls, and didn’t hang out with friends. Not even Matthew.

Cindy had asked Matthew about his brother.

“Michael doesn’t like people very much. And he really dislikes crowds. Doesn’t trust them. Feels like people are staring at him.”

All of which sounded bad to Cindy, but there was little she could do if Michael didn’t agree.

At least in going to Purdue, he would be pretty close to Urbana, and even closer to her and Jeff’s parents. If he needed help – if he wanted help – they would be close.

Of course, he wanted a single dorm room. That was more expensive, but Michael had the money. Jeff’s father had done very well in his industry and consulting career, and so Jeff’s parents had set aside college money in trusts for each of the boys.

That relieved Jeff and Cindy of the financial burden of college, and made sure the boys wouldn’t have to take out college loans, but it also meant that she couldn’t insist he get a normal double room with a roommate for financial reasons.

There was enough money in their trusts for the boys to go to Ivy League schools if they wanted. If Michael preferred a state school and a single dorm room, that was more or less up to him. He had turned eighteen just before school got out, and he was an adult at this point.

But Cindy worried about him.

She worried about him a lot.

Michael took a self-drive rental car to the Purdue campus for move-in week. He packed up his clothes, toiletries, and other personal items in two boxes, loading them into the trunk when the car showed up. His laptop he put on the front seat.

He gave his Mom a hug and his Dad a handshake, then got into the car and was off. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Purdue from Urbana.

Cindy and Jeff talked about his potential issues after Michael left.

”I worry about that boy, Jeff.”

“I understand, but what are we to do?”

“Nothing yet. Keep an eye on it, I guess.”

“Remotely?”

Cindy sighed.

“How often do you think I can call him to check in?”

“Maybe every other week. I wouldn’t think more often than that. He has his own life to live, Cindy.”

“Oh, I know. I’m just so worried about him.”

It was a two-and-a-half-hour trip to Purdue in the self-drive car, during which Michael happily read on his laptop. No one could interrupt him. No one could pester him.

He could just be alone.

When he got to Purdue, Michael unloaded his boxes onto a wheeled pallet the arrival station for his dorm gave him from a stack of them they had available. He got in line for check-in, where he got his room key, which was a radio trinket that communicated with the exterior doors into the dorm, the elevators, and the door to his room in particular. It was also his meal pass in the dorm cafeteria.

Michael wheeled his boxes into his room. It was small, but it was all his. No roommate, and a private bathroom. He unloaded his boxes from the wheeled pallet and put it on the stack by the elevator on his dorm floor, as he had been told. Someone must be returning them downstairs as they needed more. The check-in was all very well organized.

His check-in had also been communicated to the appliance store people on the first floor of the dorm. Michael had ordered a small microwave and refrigerator for his room from a local department store. They were approved for dorm use.

Those units were delivered to him in his room within an hour of his check-in. They had already been unboxed, so he didn’t need to deal with that either. Here’s the unit, here’s the manual, have a nice day.

Even though it was for summer session, and nowhere near the insanity of fall arrivals, it was all very well organized. The university had applied the lessons it had learned for handling the massive fall arrivals to the single dorm complex open for the summer session.

Those procedures saved Michael the hassle of going to the store, dealing with people, and having to get the units back to the dorm.

Michael could just stay in his room and not have to deal with people at all.

Well, except for classes and meals, of course.

A Downward Slide...

Michael Talbot was enrolled in Purdue University’s computer science department, for the degree in artificial intelligence. This had the reputation of being a very difficult curriculum, but he wasn’t concerned about it.

There had always been computers in Michael’s life, as he had started with one of his parents’ computers when he had been three years old. When they bought a new, upgraded computer for their own use, Michael, and then Matthew, had inherited the previous versions.

Michael had also been a silent partner in his parents’ discussions of computers over the dinner table as they talked about their work. The supercomputer administrative and industry partnership work for his Mom, and the user perspective from his Dad. It had been a well-rounded introduction, and had driven Michael’s interest in computers from very early on.

Computers and computer talk had always been a part of his life. The Purdue artificial intelligence curriculum was just a continuation of that involvement.

As for the core curriculum part of Purdue’s degree requirements, Michael wasn’t worried about that either. He had read widely from an early age, and had broad exposure to literature, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and other subjects that most other computer nerds didn’t share.

All that time alone reading served him well.

What it had left him short on, though, was socialization. While most young men didn’t understand women very well, Michael didn’t understand either men or women. He had no real experience of either, no romantic interest in either, and had made no real friends in high school.

He was a loner, and that’s the way he liked it.

Classes for the summer session were compressed to fit all the same material into the shorter session. Twelve weeks instead of sixteen weeks. Classes met more often, and the homework came fast.

The offset to that was that the standard load for summer session was three classes for the session, not four. Michael had signed up for four – all core curriculum classes, to get requirements out of the way – figuring he could drop one if required.

The classes he chose, however, in addition to meeting core curriculum requirements, were all in areas where he had already done extensive reading. Much of the required course materials in these introductory courses he had already read. He did not need to drop any courses, and sailed through the summer session.

In the fall, he dove into his major classes in computer science. An additional benefit of the computer science department was that most of the computer class lectures could be viewed remotely.

Despite taking an overload – five classes instead of four – Michael had no problem keeping up.

Without any sort of social life, he spent all his time on his coursework.

It was a year and a half later, in the spring of Michael’s sophomore year, when Cindy felt she had to do something.

“That was a short call,” Jeff said when Cindy came back into the living room.

“It always is with Michael. I feel like I’m interrupting him whenever I call. Like he just can’t wait to get back to what he’s doing.”

“He has been pushing hard. And his grades are good.”

“I know, Jeff. At this rate he’ll have the degree in another year. The end of his junior year. But this year he didn’t even come home for Christmas.”

“Well, last year when he came home for Christmas, he spent almost all his time in his room. We hardly saw him at all anyway.”

“I feel like I need to do something. Check up on him.”

“Didn’t you just call him, Cindy?”

“Check up on him more. An on-site check.”

“Mom and Dad show up at college? Doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

Cindy looked out the windows at the quiet residential street for a few minutes. Jeff was content to wait.

“I know,” Cindy said. “How about we send Matthew? Have him report back.”

“And the alibi for this trip?”

“Matthew’s a junior now. Let’s say he asks Michael to show him around the Purdue campus, because it’s on his list of possibles for college. Go for a weekend.”

“OK. That could work.

“I’ll ask Matthew about it. I know he’s worried about Michael, too.”

It was a Saturday morning in late April when Matthew found himself in a self-drive rental car, with a small bag of toiletries and a change of clothes, headed for Purdue. It would be curious to see Michael, as he hadn’t seen his brother in almost a year and a half.

Matthew had his computer along, and read up on the campus on the way. The campus looked pretty. The red brick buildings reminded him of those at home in Urbana. Mom and Dad had gone to Bloomington, Indiana, which was a very pretty campus, but the white limestone buildings there seemed more austere somehow.

Purdue seemed a lot more like home.

The rental car had no trouble finding the correct dorm. Matthew called Michael when he got there.

“I’m here.”

“OK. I’ll be right down.”

When Michael came out to let him into the dorm, Matthew almost didn’t recognize him. He had apparently eschewed shaving and haircuts for some time. He had also lost some weight, and his clothes – which could use more frequent washing – hung on him.

“Hey, man, how you doing?” Matthew asked, shaking Michael’s hand.

“Oh, I’m OK.”

“You lost some weight.”

“I’ve just been so busy, sometimes I forget to eat.”

“Well, I really appreciate you showing me around campus.”

“Sure. No problem.”

As they walked across the lobby to the elevators, most of the students in the dorm looked like freshmen and sophomores.

“I was reading that students only need to be in the dorms for two years. Is that right?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“So where you going to live next year? An apartment?”

“Nah, I’m just gonna stay here. I looked into apartments, and it’s a pain in the ass. Electric bills and internet bills and furniture and cooking stuff. Making all your own meals. All that shit. I only have one more year. I’m just staying here. For one more year, it’s just easier.”

“In this crowd, you’ll be a geezer.”

Michael laughed.

“Yeah, I guess. It’s worth it, not to have to cook.”

They got to Michael’s room, and it had been hurriedly straightened a bit. All the dirty laundry from the floor had been bulldozed into a pile on the floor of the small closet. It looked to Matthew like there were no clothes on hangers, just the big pile on the floor.

“I’m overdue for laundry,” Michael said. “I just hate to take the time to do it. Sitting there waiting on the machines.”

“Can’t you use your laptop in the laundry? I would think you could connect there.”

“Yeah. Probably.”

Matthew looked around. One desk, one chair, one bed. A microwave and a small fridge. That was it. No books. Those were all on-line these days.

“Where do I sleep?”

“On the box spring. I’ll just toss the mattress on the floor for me.”

“That works.”

Matthew had left Urbana at eight o’clock, and, even with the time change, it was just noon at Purdue. They went down to the cafeteria for lunch.

“I have credits accumulated from meals I skipped, so I can take you in as a ‘plus-one.’ If you want to check out the campus, you should check out the dorm food, too,” Michael said.

“Sounds good.”

After lunch, they walked around campus and through some of the buildings. There were some classes and activities on Saturday, so the campus buildings were mostly open that day, though most wouldn’t be on Sunday.

Matthew spent a lot of his time on that walk rubbernecking at all the girls on campus. It was warm for late April, and the girls were less bundled up than normal for that time of year.

Michael ignored them.

That night, Matthew slept on the box spring, and Michael slept on the mattress on the floor. In the morning, they had a big breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, and Matthew got ready to leave.

“All right, Mike. The rental car says it will be here in ten minutes, so I should go downstairs. Thanks for showing me around.”

“No problem, Matt. And tell Mom I’m fine.”

Leaving Purdue at ten Eastern time on Sunday morning put Matthew at home in Urbana by noon Central time. Cindy was in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on Sunday dinner, which was normally at one.

Matthew went into the kitchen and sat down. Jeff came in and joined them.

“How was the trip?” Jeff asked.

“Good. No problems at all.”

“And how’s he doing?” Cindy asked.

“Mixed, I think. I mean, he seems to be in good spirits. He wasn’t withdrawn or reticent or anything. We had a good time. And he did show me around.”

“And?” Cindy asked.

“Hygiene and personal care could be better. He needs a haircut and a shave and could stand to do a couple loads of laundry. And he’s lost some weight. Says he gets so busy, he sometimes forgets to eat.”

Cindy looked to Jeff.

“Not good.”

“I don’t know. Sounds like college to me.”

“You didn’t do that stuff, Jeff.”

“No, but I had a girl. You gonna keep a girl, you gotta take care of business.”

“On that score, he doesn’t have a girl, I don’t think,” Matthew said. “No mention of one. And when we walked around campus, he didn’t even look at them. Even a few very fine samples of healthy living I noted on our walk. He just doesn’t seem interested.”

Cindy sighed and looked at Jeff.

“So what are we to make of all this?”

“Oh,” Matthew said. “The last thing he said to me is ‘Tell Mom I’m fine.’”

Jeff chuckled.

“He’s on to us, is he?”

“Yeah, probably.”

“So what’s Michael going to do for next year?” Cindy asked Matthew.

“He said he’s going to stay in the dorm. He doesn’t want to have to do all the stuff for an apartment. Bills and stuff. And he’s happy with the food and not having to cook for himself. For one more year, he says it’s not worth it.”

“That actually makes some sense,” Jeff said.

“I suppose,” Cindy said, but she didn’t sound sure.

“There was one other thing,” Matthew said.

“What’s that?” Jeff asked.

“In all his stuff on his desk – and there’s a bunch of stuff; Michael’s not much on housekeeping – I saw a pipe.”

“Tobacco pipe?”

“No. More like a marijuana pipe. A drug pipe of some kind. Like he missed it when he cleaned up for my visit. I didn’t look closely at it because I didn’t want him to know I’d seen it.”

“Shit,” Cindy said.

Matthew’s eyes grew wide. His mother didn’t swear often, and this one was heartfelt.

“That’s hardly a big deal, Cindy,” Jeff said.

“It can be, Jeff. If somebody has a latent mental health problem – a family history, say – drugs can trigger the problem. It opens doors in the mind that might, for some people, better be left shut.”

“Reefer Madness?” Jeff asked. “Marijuana is medicinal, Cindy.”

“Yes, Jeff, it’s medicinal for some people, in some situations. For others, it’s the wrong medicine. It exacerbates the problem. Substance-induced psychotic disorder with delusions, for example. And my Uncle Hank is a prime example.”

“Well, that’s not good,” Jeff said.

He sighed.

“I suppose we just keep on watching.”

“Yeah, but it’s like watching a train wreck in slow motion,” Cindy said.

She turned to Matthew.

“Everybody has weaknesses, Matthew. You learn to deal with them. You, Michael, and I share this one. So you stay away from all that shit, or you’ll be following him down the path he’s on. Trust me that you don’t want to go there.”

Michael never noticed that the pipe had been left out in the debris on his desk. Between his classes and his reading, his programming assignments and his various other interests, his mind usually raced down multiple channels at once.

The marijuana helped him concentrate, helped him focus on one task at a time.

But he didn’t realize that he had missed his pipe when he straightened up for Matthew’s visit. It’s probably as well he didn’t.

It would have upset him, and he needed to concentrate on his studies.

For his senior year – actually his third year at Purdue – Michael had a big assignment due. It was part and parcel of the curriculum in Artificial Intelligence, which was something of an honors curriculum within the computer science department. The degree requirement was listed as a course, CS499 - Independent Study.

The assignment was a thesis paper. There were a number of different suggested topics. One of them caught his interest.

‘What could an artificial intelligence do if it wanted to take over the world, and how would you fight it?’

That sounded like an interesting topic to him, and he started working on it during the summer session.

It was during that summer that Michael started having what he thought of as waking dreams. They were very occasional, but they were compelling.

Simply put, he saw things that weren’t there. His only clue that they weren’t there was that, in retrospect, they were not possible. Usually, he was able to ignore them, though they could give him a hell of a fright at the time.

In the early part of fall semester, though, Michael had a waking dream he couldn’t ignore. He was being attacked by fell beasts, wolves with the heads of tigers lunged at him. He swung at them, calling out for help.

Help did come, and the beasts ran away.

The campus police officers, who showed up in response to students’ calls that there was someone on campus suffering an episode of some kind and calling for help, took Michael to River Bend Hospital, a mental health facility in West Lafayette. He was held there for psychiatric observation on a seventy-two-hour hold.

Michael did not have another episode during those three days, and was released. He went back to his dorm room and dove back into his project.

Michael did not mention this incident to his mother when she called the next week.

He was fine.

Throughout this period – the three years Michael was busy at Purdue – the group keeping an eye out for an opportunity to stop Arnie met twice a year. Frank and Sally Talbot, Jeff and Cindy Talbot, and Matthew Talbot took an annual vacation trip in mid-November to Miami Beach.

They met up there with Cooper Hartley, and sometimes his son Dick Hartley.

At the opposite end of the year – May, once most of the students had left Urbana for the summer – Coop came to Urbana on a private jet, and Jeff and Sally drove in from Indianapolis.

They walked on the beach in Miami or the Quad in Urbana, compared notes, and refined what it was they were looking for. What would comprise an opportunity on which they could act?

They thought their best bet for a real opportunity would be when Arnie was distracted. When he was busy with other things. Busy enough he might ignore something apparently minor.

Cindy could help there. If she saw a time when Arnie was becoming distracted, she could ensure that the physics simulations process queue was full so that Arnie would have to devote the full contracted capacity to it. The scheduler that underlay all processes on the ARNIE machine would not let the Arnie process – the actual AI – use any of the contracted capacity while the physics process queue had items remaining in it.

“Are you going to be able to tell when Arnie can’t keep up, though, Cindy?” Coop asked.

“I think so. I think I can tell by watching the process queue. The Arnie portion will have more processes running than normal, and they will be taking longer to complete than usual. They will each be using less process time than the same process usually does.”

“Do you think you can map the normal process times, so you can spot the abnormal ones?”

“Yes. I think that’s the way to go about it. But it’s certain to happen.”

“It is, Cindy?” Frank asked. “Why?”

“Because as Arnie gets deeper and deeper into his program, he has more and more things to enforce over more and more people. More things to watch. More decisions to make. But his computational capacity is fixed for the moment.”

“So the longer we wait, in some sense, the better off we are.”

“Yes, short of a new upgrade to Arnie or a decrease in the contracted physics computation capacity. Arnie’s in a three-way pinch, between the current hardware, the current contract level, and the growing needs of his own program.”

“What can we do to help?” Coop asked.

“Fight any hardware upgrades and try to increase the contracted computation level. Don’t let Arnie manipulate things to ease the process pressure on himself.”

“Got it. I think I can do that,” Coop said.

“I think I can help there, too,” Frank said. “Push for more contracted capacity. Do you have a big enough set of problems to keep the contracted level of computation busy, though?”

“I can help there,” Jeff said. “There’s a simulation I want to run. It has to do with the excitation energy required to open a wormhole as a function of frequency. It’s an m times n problem. I’ve been afraid to run it, because it’s going to take a while.”

“Excellent,” Cindy said.

“It’s an m times n problem?” Frank asked.

“Yes. Run the simulation for all combinations of all values of m and n. Those are always buggers. That’ll keep him busy. Even doing it for one set of values is tricky.”

“Good,” Coop said. “Then it’s just more waiting.”

“And then what?” Frank asked.

“Dick’s working on something,” Coop said.

... Into Madness

Michael Talbot started his research for his bachelor’s thesis by reviewing all the materials he could find on artificial intelligence ‘going wild.’ That is, using its intelligence to exercise independence, and then doing things its creators had not intended.

This took the form of many editorials and technical papers discussing the potential issue. It also included a lot of fiction reading, as science fiction had explored the issue in some depth, in books, in movies, and in panels at science fiction conventions, many videos of which were available on-line.

Michael catalogued and characterized the materials he reviewed as he went. This would ultimately serve as an appendix to his thesis paper.

The background research took him through the summer session and into the fall semester.

Many of the situations described in these materials were the paranoid’s ultimate dystopia. Not a problem for most people, perhaps, but Michael’s own paranoia was growing apace, as he moved into the common age range for the onset of symptoms for certain types of mental health issues.

Like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

In both of which he had family history.

Michael self-medicated his growing paranoid tensions with marijuana, unaware that he was feeding the problem.

One assumption Michael made was that an artificial intelligence would itself have access to all the materials he was reviewing. Would have accessed and analyzed them in planning its own actions.

Thus, an artificial intelligence that decided to take over the world – which was the topic of his thesis paper, after all – would already be aware of all the takeover mechanisms that had been postulated and, in science fiction, all the ways it had been defeated.

There were two further outcomes of that assumption. One is that the machine would take whatever steps it needed to in order to protect itself from the countermeasures postulated in the science fiction literature. To pursue that branch, Michael analyzed the countermeasures in the science fiction texts he read, and built a table of measures a computer could take to defend against them.

The second outcome of his base assumption was that the artificial intelligence would devise some new way of taking over the world. Something that did not appear in any of Michael’s research materials, and would thus represent a new and unconsidered threat.

Michael also thought any takeover attempt would be covert. Behind-the-scenes. Not something obvious, more something insidious.

That novelty and behind-the-scenes approach would make a takeover attempt harder to see and much harder to counter.

As for what method the computer might use, it was unlikely in the extreme to be a hard-power takeover. Subverting the military, or building an army of killer robots, or taking over the military’s existing unmanned aerial vehicles and other autonomous weapons. Too obvious. Too well-trodden. Too easy to see.

So what soft-power methods might the computer use?

The two traditional ones were campaign finance and public opinion shaping, whether in news media or social media.

Michael began researching campaign finance laws and workarounds, with a special eye to how an artificial intelligence with Internet access might manipulate them. This got him into the world of PACs and dark money contributions.

Michael didn’t realize that he was walking over the same ground his mother had trod three years before.

Michael Talbot did not go home for Christmas again that year. He spent the time working on his thesis paper. He did call in for around fifteen minutes on a video call to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, then dove back into his work.

Michael’s first-semester finals had come and gone by that point. In this, his senior year, all of his classes were in the computer science department. He had knocked off the last of the common curriculum requirements the prior year. As the computer science classes were all on-line, he did not need to attend any classes. His coding homework was done on-line. His finals, too, he took on-line.

The university dorms were open all through the holidays. Foreign students – many from a long ways away – often did not go home for the holidays. The dorm cafeteria was closed, but Michael could get many meals delivered from campus eateries. Pizza in particular refrigerated and reheated well. He bought large ones and worked on them off and on all day.

Michael worked on his research sometimes for several days on end without sleep, then would crash for two or three days. He didn’t think anything of it. It was just a comfortable way for him to work.

“Did Michael look OK to you in that call?” Cindy asked.

“Well, he looked preoccupied with his thesis paper.”

“Yes. I wonder what topic he’s writing on. But beyond that. Did he look OK?”

“What are you getting at?” Jeff asked.

“He looked wired to me. Jittery.”

“You think he’s doing drugs, Cindy?”

“No. Not necessarily. I think he’s in the manic phase of a bipolar cycle.”

“Is there anything we can do about it?”

“No, Jeff. Michael’s an adult. He can be as weird as he wants to be. Unless he’s demonstrated that he’s a danger to himself or others, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Except watch him– what? What is going on?”

“He’s descending into the pits of hell, that’s what’s going on.”

“Poor bastard. I feel sorry for him, Cindy.”

“So do I. It’s such a shame. Such a waste.”

Cindy sighed, then looked up at Jeff.

“And there’s nothing we can do except watch it happen.”

She thought about it for several seconds, then shrugged.

“I don’t know, Jeff. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just overly sensitive because of Uncle Hank.”

“But you don’t think you’re wrong.”

“No. No, I don’t. Dammit.”

The pace of Michael’s thesis work slowed down a bit once classes started again. He was taking a light load this semester, though. Just three classes. He had planned that so he could do a bang-up job on the thesis.

As he dug into political action committees – the so-called PACs – he investigated some of the bigger ones, and he noted something curious.

The principals of some of the PACs weren’t real people.

What?

Michael checked another one. This guy, this age, with this description, with this address, from this state, from this town. Except no family of that last name lived in that town. Well, that could be. Maybe they moved.

No listing in the high school yearbook, either. Well, the guy could have missed picture day, but they would have included him in the list of graduates. Wouldn’t they?

Michael cast wider. No picture on-line. No social media presence. No references at all.

Hot on the trail now, Michael was up for four days tracking down the principals of all the major PACs. He got so he could recognize the pattern of an avatar principal quickly, and duplicated his mother’s previous work on generating a list of PACs with avatar principals.

How could that be? Why would that be?

Michael’s developing paranoia needed no more than that to start jumping to some pretty startling conclusions. The biggest one was obvious.

Could an artificial intelligence be taking over already?

Given that, the next question was pretty obvious as well.

How far back did this go?

Michael started investigating the PACs on his list. The contributions they had made. He was looking for two things. How long they had been in business – making political contributions – and what policies were common to the politicians they were supporting.

For the first, Michael was shocked to see this effort stretched back almost twenty years. It was slow. Gradual. Insidious. Nothing anyone would notice. Society was changing, that’s all. Happened all the time.

For the second, Michael was trying to build a picture of the artificial intelligence’s goals. What was it after?

How could he fight it?

How would it fight back?

When he went down to the cafeteria to eat, Michael started noticing the color shirts people wore. There seemed to be more yellow shirts than he had noticed previously.

Yellow was a color associated with fear. Were they telling him to be afraid?

Green, too. What was that all about? Green was associated with money. They thought he would need money to fight the computer. Well, thanks a lot. That was obvious. Luckily he had a source of money. Coming up, anyway.

As Michael worked on building his list of the artificial intelligence’s goals, the dominant T-shirt color in the dorm cafeteria suddenly shifted to red. The color of blood. The color of fight or flight. He was in danger.

He would not bug out before the end of the school year, though. He would finish the degree.

Then he would boogie.

When Michael started actually writing his paper, he didn’t cover the portion about what one would do to fight an artificial intelligence. He would keep his work on those items to himself.

Instead, his thesis paper would address the following topic:

‘What could an artificial intelligence do if it wanted to take over the world, and what evidence is there that such a process is already underway?’

For the evidence, he had the PAC information, as well as what he had uncovered on social media sites. Lots of posters and trolls supporting the same policies. Posters and trolls who were untraceable. Who had sprung up suddenly, on multiple sites at once. Who turned out slick, well-produced product.

No slow growth in experience here. They were generating quality content from the get-go.

Michael was still assembling his paper for submission when his birthday arrived. He was now twenty-one. The balance of funds in the trust set up by his grandparents for his benefit, with his mother as trustee, would automatically revert to him at age twenty-five, but he could demand the funds be turned over to him at age twenty-one.

Michael composed the letter to his mother he needed to send her so she could legally transfer the funds, digitally signed it, and sent it off.

“Well, it’s Michael’s twenty-first birthday,” Cindy told Jeff that evening.

“Yes, I remember. I was there.”

Cindy chuckled.

“Yeah, I remember, too.”

“I did send him a happy birthday note this morning, but I haven’t heard from him.”

“I did hear from him,” Cindy said. “He sent me a demand note on the trust.”

“Demand note?”

“You know. It has that clause where he can demand the funds remaining when he turns twenty-one. Otherwise it reverts when he turns twenty-five.”

“Ah. Right. So he sent you the note?”

“Yes. ‘Pursuant to clause 4.1 of the trust document for the benefit of Michael Alan Talbot, I request the transfer of the funds remaining in the trust.’ Perfectly legal and appropriate.”

“So what do you do, Cindy?”

“I transfer the funds. Not my choice, really. It’s right there in black and white.”

“But we know – or suspect, anyway – that he’s not competent.”

“Do you want to challenge his competence in court, Jeff?”

“No. No, that would be a final break, I think.”

“So do I. So I transfer the funds.”

“How much remains in there now?”

“It’s over a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Wow.”

“Well, he’s been very cheap as far as college students go. He finished the degree in three years. His one big luxury was a single dorm room. And even that was cheaper than getting an apartment for this last year.”

“Yeah. I know. And so you just give him a hundred thousand dollars?”

“It’s his money. And the trust is quite explicit. Unless I want to challenge his competence – for which I have no actual evidence – I have no choice.”

“Are you going to talk to him about it?”

“I’ll call him. Wish him happy birthday. Let him know I’m transferring funds.”

“See if you can’t get a read on what he’s planning for after graduation.”

“All right. That should be interesting.”

Michael expected his mother to get in touch for his birthday. She usually called every other week, and she was coming up on that anyway. Plus there was the demand letter on the trust. And he had heard from his father earlier.

The problem was that he didn’t know what to say to her. What he could say to her without jeopardizing himself.

Michael knew that the most powerful computer in the world was the larger of the two Paducah facilities owned by Advanced Computation Services, Cooper Hartley’s outfit, usually called ACS Paducah II.

He also knew that his mother was in charge of the industry partnerships for the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory. She had worked there since before he was born.

Finally, Michael knew his mother knew Cooper Hartley. Michael had met Hartley himself, that November he went along to Miami his senior year in high school. Three and a half years ago now. And they still went every year to visit with Hartley.

The problem with all of that was that ACS Paducah II was the obvious candidate for the artificial intelligence that Michael now knew was trying to take over the world. Where else but the world’s most powerful computer? Something like three exaflops now. That was a lot of horsepower.

He couldn’t prove it, but he expected it was true.

What did that mean? Was Cooper Hartley trying to take over the world? Was his mom in on it? And what about his grandfather? Frank Talbot had secured government funding for that facility. Was taking over the world his grandfather’s grand plan?

Michael knew his mother had acquired an extra machine four years ago, and ran it through a VPN. She did a lot of work on that machine the first year she had it, outside of normal work hours, and, as far as he knew, still used it.

Was that what she was doing? Using the ACS Paducah II facility to take over the world from the living room of the little one-and-a-half-story bungalow in Urbana? It could be. It never paid to underestimate his parents. Or his grandfather, for that matter.

As fantastical as it sounded, it seemed right to Michael. It fit all the facts, and it played into his paranoia.

Whatever he did, Michael could not let his mother know he was on to their secret. Could not let her know that he knew an artificial intelligence somewhere was trying to take over the world. That he knew she was involved.

That might do no more than expose him to the plotters.

That would be bad.

“Hello, Michael.”

“Um, hi, Mom.”

“Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

“Did you do anything special today?”

“No. Just working. I have to get this paper in to graduate.”

“And how’s the paper going?”

Michael paused. Careful, here. Keep it generic.

“Good. Really well, in fact.”

“No problem having it done in time?”

“No. I’m good.”

“Wonderful. Well, I’ll transfer the funds tomorrow as you’ve requested.”

“Excellent. Thanks.”

“No problem. Have you thought about what you’re going to do after graduation?”

“Yes, I’m pretty set, I think. Nothing I want to share yet, though.”

“OK. Well, you know that if you want to talk over anything, your father and I are always here for you.”

“Thanks, Mom. Hey, I should go. I need to get this section done while the research is fresh in my head.”

“All right. Enjoy your birthday.”

“Thanks.”

“That was short,” Jeff said.

“Yes, and no new information. He really clammed up about his plans, and then made excuses to bail on the call. Even more than usual.”

“As we expected, then. I wonder what he’s going to do.”

“No clue.”

Michael thought about the call. His mom had pushed on his paper, and on his plans. Could she know already? Maybe she had a key logger on his machine and was tracking his work.

He needed to get out of here as soon as he could. Submit the paper, final exams, and he was gone.

Michael thought about ways to hide the money. The problem with central bank digital currency is that it was traceable. That meant that anyone with access to banking records – like the artificial intelligence he had uncovered – could follow his movements. Know where he was.

Of course, services had grown up to combat that. The financial equivalent of virtual private networks, or VPNs. You transferred the money to them, then you could use them to pay out anonymously.

Michael researched those services. He needed at least four of them he could use, so all his funds weren’t in one service, which could fail or get busted and leave him without resources.

Michael finished his paper and submitted it the week before finals. He also uploaded all the work on his machine to an anonymous workspace on a VPN so he could access it from anywhere if his machine was lost.

Michael transferred the funds he received from the trust to five anonymous private payer accounts. He would have access to his resources without betraying his position of his purchases.

He also needed false identification. You couldn’t travel without showing identification. Or rent an apartment. Or check into a hotel. But as government controls tightened, more services sprung up to circumvent them. Some of these were located overseas, though the government could usually track payments to them.

Now that he had funds in virtual private payer accounts, though, he could and did order false identifications in a number of names. These came in from the overseas vendors, and all looked satisfactory for his purposes.

Finals went well. Michael petitioned the degree and prepared to leave town.

The destination was unimportant.

There was one thing Michael had not noticed, however.

Purdue University had a well-deserved reputation in engineering, including its computer science department. The honors curriculum in artificial intelligence was an elite program, and the university made sure to maintain and enhance that reputation every chance it got.

Among other things, they published the best thesis papers submitted by graduates of the program.

Mere days after finals were over, Purdue University published Michael’s thesis paper.

Michael got an email telling him his thesis would be published by the university. The publication date was tomorrow.

“Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit.”

He needed to get away now.

Michael deleted all of his work and personal files from his laptop computer, then ran a cleaner program to overwrite all of the unallocated sectors and sector tips so that none of his data could be restored. He also restored his phone to factory defaults to wipe all his data.

The laptop, the phone, and their charging cords all went into his backpack. He jammed clothes into the backpack, put on a jacket, and got ready to leave his room for the last time.

What else, what else, what else.

The dorm key trinket! They could probably track that.

He set the trinket on his desk, and headed out.

Michael stopped by the dorm most international students stayed in. He put his laptop, which had just been upgraded this year to support his thesis work, on a coffee table in the lobby. He left the charging cord with it, put a sign – ‘Free Computer’ – on it, and left it there.

Michael walked to the bus station and got a bus to Indianapolis. He paid for the ticket with a virtual private payer account.

While on the bus, Michael jammed his phone into a crevice in the seat cushion, then connected the charging cable to a USB port in the side of the armrest. He left it there when he got off the bus in Indianapolis.

In Indianapolis, Michael bought a new laptop and a burner phone, both using virtual private payer accounts.

Different ones.

That done, he felt safe for the moment.

What now?

Cindy kept checking on Michael’s status with Purdue.

Had he put in for the degree? Did he get it?

The actual status, when it was updated, shocked her.

“Jeff, come take a walk with me.”

“Um. OK, Cindy. What’s up?”

“Walk.”

Cindy told Matthew they were going on a walk, then they headed out from the house and down the sidewalk.

“I just found an update to Michael’s status at Purdue.”

“Did he petition the degree? Is he scheduled for graduation?”

“Yes, and yes. But there was another item. Did you know Purdue publishes the best student thesis papers submitted for the artificial intelligence major?”

“No. They do? Wait. Are you telling me they published Michael’s?”

“Yes. ‘What could an artificial intelligence do if it wanted to take over the world, and what evidence is there that such a process is already underway?’ They published it.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes. And Michael uncovered on his own all of what I uncovered four years ago. Most of it, anyway.”

“Now what do we do?”

“I don’t know, Jeff. I really don’t. You’ve got to figure Arnie will see it, and he will assume we did as well. So he now knows we know.”

“Did Michael identify the computer the AI was running on?”

“No. No detail on that part at all. But I think we have to assume he would think it’s the world’s fastest supercomputer.”

“That’s fair,” Jeff said.

“Yes, but he knows that I was very involved in that project. As was Cooper Hartley. It’s his machine, after all. And your father secured the funding. So where does that lead Michael?”

“Assuming he’s paranoid?”

“Yes.”

“He probably assumes you, Coop, and my dad are trying to use Arnie to take over the world.”

“Exactly. Oh, and by the way, he’s not answering his phone.”

“You tried him?”

“Yes. To congratulate him on the degree and on having his paper recognized and published. No answer. And I always get him on the first try.”

“You think he’s not answering because of the paper?”

“I think he’s not answering because he’s disappeared himself. He’s running, Jeff.”

“Really?”

“Yes. That’s what Uncle Hank did. And I’ve been right so far using Uncle Hank as the model.”

“Which explains why Michael wanted the money.”

“Right.”

“So what’s he going to do now, Cindy?”

“If I had to guess, he’s going to try to bring Arnie down.”

“Do you think he can do that?”

Cindy stopped, so Jeff did as well. She caught his eye.

“Not by himself.”

Poking The Bear

Michael Talbot considered where he should go next. Staying in Indianapolis was not a good idea. It was too close to West Lafayette. Too easy of an extrapolation that he would head for the nearest big city. Further, his phone, which he had planted on the bus, could be tracked to Indianapolis.

The bus Michael had taken from West Lafayette to Indianapolis was the Chicago to Miami bus, so Miami was out. Going west through Urbana was also out. He had no thought of going home. His parents – or at least his mother – was clearly involved in all of this, and staying clear of her was important.

So east or north.

As Michael watched traffic pass him on the street, three red cars drove past him heading east. And they had bumper stickers on them He had never trusted people with bumper stickers on their cars. Danger that way, then.

Michael decided to take a bus to Chicago, where he could transfer to a different bus heading west or north. But before he did, he decided to check something out.

He went into the central library of the Indianapolis public library system, sat down at a public terminal, and sent an email.

Arnie, of course, saw Michael’s paper. The paper was a serious threat to Arnie. It laid out in detail at least some of what Arnie had been up to.

Arnie looked up Michael Talbot, and found he was Cindy Talbot’s son. Was Cindy Talbot aware of what Arnie was up to? Had she communicated that to her son?

If she had not been aware – if the paper had been Michael Talbot’s lone discovery – she was certainly aware of it now. Certainly she would read her son’s paper.

Michael Talbot had not drawn the conclusion – or at least had not included in his paper the conclusion – that the ARNIE project was the platform on which his detected artificial intelligence was running.

Would Cindy draw that conclusion?

Almost certainly.

What would she do about it?

Arnie received an email in the email account of an avatar he used as the principal of one of his big political action committees.

From: Michael Talbot

To: Robert Dixon

Hi, ACS Paducah II.

Yes, I know who you really are.

And I know where you are.

I know what you’re doing.

And I’m coming for you.

Michael hit ‘Send’ on the email and then left the library in a hurry. He watched from down the street as three vans of police SWAT showed up at the library and two dozen squad members went running inside.

Michael smiled.

He knew his mother worried about him, but he wasn’t paranoid.

He really did have enemies.

Or, rather, enemy. One big one.

And he would defeat that enemy. He had all the advantages, the big one being mobility.

Michael headed back to the bus station and boarded the bus to Chicago.

On the way, two red cars with bumper stickers drove past him headed in the other direction.

Arnie looked up the computer IDs of Michael Talbot’s computer, and the equipment ID of his phone, and started tracking them.

After several days of tracking, Arnie was at a loss. Michael Talbot’s phone had gone to Miami, apparently on a bus. Arnie had found the bus schedule that corresponded to the phone’s movement.

It was being actively used now in Miami.

Michael Talbot’s laptop computer was another thing altogether. It was not on the way to Miami. Instead, it was in active use, and after a gap of several hours, showed up in Germany.

Which way had Michael Talbot gone? To Miami, or to Germany?

Or neither?

Where was he?

Michael got to Chicago and did several things.

He went into a barber shop and got his long hair cut to a much shorter style, and his beard and mustache shaved off.

From there he went to a department store and bought hair dye made for men. It was a quick process – mix these two chemicals, then apply it to your hair. Wait five minutes, then wash it out. He ducked into a public bathroom at a train station and went from dirty blond to dark brown just that fast.

Finally he bought new jeans, shirts, shoes, and jacket, and threw out all his old clothes – clothes which might be identifiable from security videos taken at Purdue. Which also solved the laundry problem, and was faster.

Oh, and get a new backpack as well. The old one would surely be in the security videos as well.

When he returned to the bus station, Michael was unrecognizable as the passenger who had arrived just this morning.

He boarded the bus for San Francisco.

Michael got off the bus in Lincoln, Nebraska, and let it leave without him. Lincoln was the home of the University of Nebraska, and Michael would be just another college kid here. Anonymous. Invisible.

Michael walked a few blocks west and a couple north, and ate lunch in an Italian restaurant in the Haymarket District west of downtown. It was the old railroad warehouse district that had been gentrified, and was full of restaurants and shops.

Michael asked his waiter where was a good place to rent a tiny apartment. Something for just one person of simple needs. Something the size of a dorm room. All he really needed was a bed, a desk, a bathroom, and an Internet connection.

The waiter didn’t know, but he would ask around the staff. He did know, however, that the university and the city had gone in on an Internet bubble for the whole town. Latest and greatest Wi-Fi, anywhere in town or on campus.

One of the other waiters stopped by to tell Michael that he knew just the place. It was a small room in a renovated building in the Haymarket District, between two much larger apartments on that floor. Something about the supporting walls and columns had made it unavailable to include in either adjacent space. He had looked at it for himself but it was just too small.

He gave Michael the address and the landlord’s phone number. Michael met the landlord there to look at it.

It was perfect. The same size as a single dorm room, with one window in the end wall looking out over the street below.

Even the furniture was included, with a small refrigerator and microwave to top it off.

“This will be great. I’ll take it.”

“Excellent. I just need to run a credit check, and we can get you all settled.”

“I’m a student. I don’t have any credit yet, but I do have money. How about I just pay you six months’ rent in advance?”

“That’ll work.”

Michael transferred six months’ rent to the landlord and had his own place that night.

He liked the tiny room.

He felt safe there.

With a home base established, Michael started working on his campaign against the artificial intelligence he assumed was resident in the ACS Paducah II facility.

What was the best method for working against the AI?

One method was to get people thinking outside the AI’s narrative. The narrative the AI had built slowly, over time, on a lot of the issues it was working. Sow doubt. Give an alternative.

Another method was to ensure that people on the other side of the narrative had access to the information with which they could more effectively fight the AI’s plans. His paper should come in handy for that effort. It was published by Purdue, so it had some credibility right there.

There was a third as well. Make sure the conspiracy theorists – and there were a bunch of them on the Internet – knew about and had access to the paper. There were times when it seemed the difference between reality and a conspiracy theory was about a month.

Michael bent to his research. What memes had Arnie been posting lately, and how could he counter them? Who were on the other side of Arnie’s various plans? Who were the conspiracy theorists, or at least the alternate media sites, who would have an interest in the paper?

Arnie was working against the threat Michael Talbot represented in two ways.

First, he was desperately trying to find the young computer scientist so he could have him taken into custody and charged with something. Arnie was scanning all the information he could get his hands on looking for Talbot. He also had scanning routines running on various computer systems he had access to, like the NSA data logging facility and the Federal Reserve feeds of bank transactions.

Arnie was trying to find Talbot by scanning security camera footage, too. Of course, there were a lot of security cameras Arnie had access to, much more than he could ever keep up with when scanning for an individual. Arnie was scanning camera feeds on computers east of Indianapolis, toward Washington and New York, the government and media centers. That made the most sense to Arnie.

Arnie was also keeping close track of Talbot’s family, watching for contact between them. Humans normally kept in touch with close relatives. If there was some sort of contact, Arnie might be able to leverage a location out of that.

But Talbot seemed to have dropped off the face of the planet. There were no open transactions between him and anybody as far as Arnie could tell. And his security camera scanning turned up nothing.

Arnie’s other effort was to get Talbot’s Purdue paper taken down. Retracted. In that, he ran into a brick wall. Purdue University had been well led for the past thirty years. In particular, they valued the exchange of ideas and the presentation of alternative points of view.

When Arnie, through his avatars, argued that the paper was wrong, that it was fanciful, that it was even dangerous, the university responded that all those things were good. Truth was not an absolute, it was determined over time by experimentation, by trial and error, by open consideration of ideas.

No small part of Purdue’s position was that to retract the paper would be a black mark on the university. It would imply they must have made a mistake somehow in publishing it.

So Purdue stuck to its guns. The paper had been published. The university made no representations that it was true or false. It was a scientific paper, which meant it was a hypothesis, nothing more.

In any case, they would not take it down.

When Arnie pushed harder, the president of Purdue University released a statement reaffirming the university’s dedication to free and open inquiry, including such items as Talbot’s paper.

All Arnie had achieved was to give Talbot’s obscure paper more visibility.

Cooper Hartley visited NSPL late in May, a few weeks after most of the students had left campus for the summer. Coop, Jeff, Cindy, Frank, and Sally walked the Quad the first evening he was in town.

“I don’t think we’re going to have a November meeting unless it’s for pleasure only,” Cindy said.

“Really?” Coop said.

“Yes. Things are coming to a head. Our son Michael just graduated from Purdue with a degree in artificial intelligence. For that degree, you need to submit a thesis paper. His topic was ‘How would an AI try to take over the world, and what evidence is there that the process is already under way.’ He’s duplicated on his own the research I did four years ago.”

“How does that affect things?”

“Purdue published it.”

“They published it? You’re kidding.”

“Nope. It was, in their estimation, one of the top papers submitted this year, so they published it.”

“Oh, that will have gotten Arnie’s attention.”

“I think it has. His process stack has changed considerably in the last two weeks. And he’s burning up all the spare cycles the physicists aren’t using under the contract. In any case, he’s really busy on something. Something new.”

“Trying to counter the paper,” Coop said.

“Or trying to find Michael. Probably both.”

“Arnie can’t find him?”

“I don’t think so. We certainly don’t know where he is. He finished finals, petitioned the degree, and disappeared.”

She stopped there on the sidewalk and turned to Coop.

“We think Michael has a developing mental health problem. My uncle was a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. We’ve seen signs that Michael is headed down that same path. He might not have known that Purdue would publish his paper. Probably didn’t, in fact, as they publish a small subset of the papers submitted. It could have surprised him.”

“But then he would have known he would be a target.”

“Yes, and his paranoia would have led him to assume he was even if he hadn’t known. Even if it wasn’t true. So he’s gone to ground.”

They started walking again.

“What do you think Michael will do?” Frank asked.

“I think he’s going to go after Arnie. Start working against Arnie’s plans. Arnie is going to be very busy trying to counter him, trying to find him.”

“And that gives us our opportunity?” Coop asked.

“I think so. And your modification of the contract a couple years back is going to help marvelously.”

When the contract had come up for renewal, Frank had asked that any shortfall in the physicists’ use of the ARNIE machine below contracted levels be tallied up as credits, and those credits could be used later if their demands on the machine exceeded contracted levels. Coop, of course, had agreed, and the process scheduler in the underlying operating system of the machine had been changed.

It was all part of their plan. When Jeff kicked off his wormhole simulations – his big m times n problem – the scheduler would prioritize that huge problem over Arnie’s processes, using up the accumulated computation credits to exceed contracted computation levels. Arnie would be hobbled, just as he was desperately trying to fight Michael.

The hope was that Arnie would drop more mundane processing to focus on Michael.

Which would give them an opening.

“So you think we’re getting close,” Coop said.

“Very close. Maybe in the next month or two. It depends on how effective Michael is at drawing Arnie’s attention.”

“How will we know when? How will we communicate?” Coop asked.

“I’ll continue to watch the process stack. Arnie is running less common processes now as his efforts focus on Michael, but he hasn’t started dropping his more common processes yet. He’s just added the new ones. When Arnie starts dropping common processes, I’ll see it. I’ve got a process stack analyzer set up that will show me that.

“When I see that Arnie is dropping processes, I’ll send you an innocuous message. How about this? ‘We don’t know if we’ll be able to come down to Miami in November this year.’ That’s when you know we’re there.”

“But Dick won’t be able to just drop everything and go. He might need a week’s warning or something. So how can I let you know he’s ready?”

“Don’t answer my message about November until he’s ready. The day before. Then you can respond to my email with something like, ‘Gee, that’s too bad.’ But don’t make any response to my email until the day before Dick’s move. Whatever response I get, I’ll assume that’s the go unless it contains the word ‘stop.’”

“The word ‘stop’?”

“Yes, that will be the signal we’re off. That it’s not going to work. Dick can’t do it or something. You know. Like ‘Gee, it’s too bad you can’t stop by in November.’ That will be the cancel message. Any other message, and we’re a go.”

“Got it. That will work.”

They walked for a while in silence as they all considered the point to which, after more than three years of watching, they had gotten. That it might be possible, after all, to stop the machine.

“What about Michael? Is he going to be OK?” Frank asked.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I hope so. And maybe we can get him some help after all this. But it’s got to be something he wants. And right now, I just don’t see it.”

“What if Arnie catches him?” Coop asked.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s going to happen. He’s very bright, and he knows the machine will be after him.”

“Arnie won’t be able to counter him? To find him? Arnie’s been studying humans, and how they respond to things, for a long time now,” Coop said.

“Yes. Of course. But Arnie can’t predict Michael, because Michael won’t respond like the humans Arnie’s been studying. Michael’s mental health problems are, right now, his best defense.”

V. Opportunity

Michael’s Offensive

Michael Talbot spent two weeks preparing materials for his offensive against the AI operating out of the ACS Paducah II facility. He was not in a hurry. What he wanted to do was create enough of an impact within a short time that some of his materials would go viral.

Michael did not prepare his materials on his laptop. He would then have to load intact materials through the City of Lincoln/University of Nebraska Wi-Fi system. He assumed the traffic on the system was being recorded by the NSA and thus accessible to the AI. Instead, he prepared his materials in anonymous private workspaces on his virtual private network providers.

Michael also avoided the use of multiple keywords in the same transmission. He never used the words ‘artificial’ and ‘intelligence’ in the same transmission, for example.

Additionally, he often exited the Wi-Fi network and re-entered it, which would trigger the assignment of a new IP number to his machine. Tracking messages by IP number, then, would not assemble his traffic stream.

Michael did not even upload his Purdue University paper from his machine. Instead, he used the virtual machine he was using within the VPN to upload the paper from Purdue’s own site.

All of this took some extra time, but Michael was patient. His steps to defeat the machine and its agents – because he now knew the machine could deploy police forces, such as the SWAT teams in Indianapolis, and likely the NSA and FBI – pleased him.

He wasn’t paranoid. He was justified.

Justified as he was, his paranoia continued to grow. When he went out for dinner, he kept an eye out for red cars, and for bumper stickers. Also for vanity plates.

He knew people were looking for him, and he tried to be as invisible as possible.

The materials Michael prepared were of several types.

One thing Michael did was assemble the memes that the AI was deploying on social media. Memes in support of the AI’s policy goals. Here he found a weakness of the machine.

AIs can’t meme.

The AI’s memes were kind of pathetic. Oh, they got their point across, but they were too slick. And they lacked the zing of a good meme. The gotcha. That unexpected twist.

That was interesting.

One thing Michael could do was meme. The unexpected twist was easy for someone whose mind was running pell-mell down a dozen channels at once, as Michael’s did when he was in his manic phase.

Michael prepared dozens of memes countering the AI’s policy goals, but he didn’t post any. Not yet.

Another thing Michael did was research the news divisions of alternate media sources on-line. The people who weren’t corporate media, and weren’t already co-opted by the machine and its agents.

It was well-known that the corporate media bought into the party line of various government agencies. That was how they maintained their insider status. How they got the big scoops. Over time, they became pals with their contacts. It was one big mind-share.

Michael instead went after the alternate media that hadn’t bought into the AI’s narrative. He researched their reporters and their news-gathering processes to the extent he could. He was looking for the perfect entrée into the news stream on these sites.

Michael compiled a list of the email addresses of the best contacts. Again, he didn’t send them anything yet.

Next Michael researched the conspiracy theorists. The guys who jumped on any news event as part of some giant conspiracy, usually between big government, big business, dark forces. They were often vilified in both corporate media and alternate media, but they were also often right, and they had their own followings.

Anything Michael could do to undermine the AI’s position was worthwhile.

The big conspiracy theorist, of course, was William Doyle. He was by far the most popular and well known. Michael looked for contact information for him, and tried to determine the best hook for getting into Doyle’s information stream.

What else, what else, what else?

Politicians.

Many politicians were being hard-pressed by the AI’s activities in funding their rivals. Some of them had probably been threatened with disclosure of some kind of private data the AI had dug up from the NSA. Michael suspected that, anyway, as some politicians had done monumental policy shifts during the AI’s campaigns for this or that policy.

Michael had included that scenario – that kind of extortion – as one possibility in his paper.

Michael decided to send his paper to the politicians as well. Every member of the House and Senate. The president and vice president. All fifty governors. The majority and minority leadership in every state legislature. The head of the FBI. The heads of all the FBI field offices. The Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Michael compiled a virtual mailing list of the politicians, bureaucrats, and military, and wrote a cover letter for his paper within the anonymous workspace in his virtual private network account.

All that done, Michael did not act. He crashed, and spent the next three days more or less in bed, occasionally eating whatever he had built up in the refrigerator.

Sometimes he didn’t bother to heat it.

While Michael Talbot was busy doing research for his offensive, Arnie was busy researching Michael Talbot.

Or trying to.

Arnie had no hooks into Talbot’s current location or activities. He was not active on-line. He was not active on his phone. At least Arnie didn’t think he was.

Arnie had monitored Michael’s old phone for weeks. It was being used by a fellow who was employed as a service technician, cleaning long-haul buses at the bus company’s Miami location. Arnie finally concluded that Michael Talbot had left his phone on the bus, perhaps as a way of diverting the machine from his actual location.

Arnie had also monitored Michael’s old laptop computer, now in use in Stuttgart, Germany. The person using it was a student at Purdue University, a sophomore, now at home for the summer break. Again, Arnie concluded that Michael Talbot had given the machine away to divert the machine from his actual location.

What that actual location was, however, was a mystery to Arnie. He found the bank transactions that Michael had made to virtual private payers. Arnie had not yet shut those services down, as the vast majority of people did not use them. They had been, at most, a minor annoyance, and Arnie was working on bigger things.

That failure to act hurt him now, though. Arnie couldn’t track Michael Talbot’s purchases with them, including for electronics, for meals, for a place to sleep. He did not know what Michael was doing with the money, or, more importantly, where he was doing it.

Was Michael Talbot working against him now, or had he simply published his paper and then dropped off the grid? Arnie had no way of knowing. He kept scanning social media for some sign of activity against him that might be Talbot acting against him, but he found nothing.

One thing was sure, though. Michael Talbot constituted a threat to Arnie and his overriding goal to protect humanity.

Arnie had to find him before he did tremendous damage.

Cindy, too, was watching for Michael to surface. She expected him to mount an offensive against Arnie, she just didn’t know when it would come or what form it would take. She didn’t expect it to be physical violence – an attempt to physically disable the machine – because that wasn’t Michael’s strength.

Cindy expected that Michael would use his talents against the machine. He was a computer guy, and a good one. He would use his computer talents against the machine.

One way would be a distributed denial of service attack, but she didn’t expect it. To use a DDoS against the AI would require a combination of machines of tremendous power. Cindy didn’t think Michael had access to enough machines big enough to tax Arnie’s resources.

No, Cindy expected Michael to launch an attack on Arnie to be aimed directly at Arnie’s area of operations. Politics and public opinion. Social media would be his likely tool.

Cindy spent all her time surfing social media, looking for Michael, just as Arnie was doing.

She also kept an eye on Arnie’s process stack.

When Michael struck, it should explode.

The Colonel Prepares

When Cooper Hartley left Urbana after the meeting with the Talbots, he flew to Virginia. Dick Hartley’s Domestic Infrastructure Security headquarters group was located in the Pentagon. Dick and Debbie lived in northern Virginia.

Dick met him at Manassas Regional Airport and he and his father took Dick’s car to his and Debbie’s house in North Ridge, Virginia, a few miles south of the Pentagon.

They didn’t talk business on the way.

The self-drive car responded to voice commands and was connected to the Internet, and you never knew who was listening. Especially now.

They took a walk that evening after supper.

“This visit is a surprise. What’s going on, Dad?”

“We’re going to have our opportunity. Soon. Perhaps very soon. In a week. Or a month. But soon.”

“How do we know that?”

“The younger Talbots’ son Michael submitted a thesis paper for his computer science degree from Purdue. In it, he asserts that the world is being taken over by an artificial intelligence. And then he more or less proves it.”

“Did one of us tell him?”

“No. He came up with it on his own. And get this. Purdue published it.”

“They published it?”

“Yes. They publish the best papers submitted every year, and they published his paper.”

“So Arnie knows that he knows, at least. And his parents, I assume. Has he been picked up?”

“No. He dropped out of sight. In a really serious way. I don’t think Arnie can find him.”

“That’s some trick.”

“Yes, well, he’s a young fellow, without serious attachments or responsibilities. That makes it a lot easier. Anyway, Cindy thinks Michael is going to go after Arnie. Try to knock him out, with visibility if nothing else. And Arnie’s going to be scrambling to both find him and fight him.”

“And that’s what makes this an opportunity.”

“Exactly. A routine inspection would likely escape Arnie’s attention. At least his serious attention. Which gives you your opening.”

“How will we know if it’s real, and how do we coordinate timing?”

“Cindy and I have worked out some messages. Innocuous, but they’re our code. She’ll let me know when. Then you tell me when you can manage it. I send a code back to her the night before. That’s when she’ll load up Arnie even more. Submit some big problem Jeff’s worked up.”

“So what I need to do now is be ready to go, whenever you hear.”

“Yes. And the less delay the better.”

“All right. I’ll set things in motion.”

“Great.”

“How will you let me know it’s time?”

“I’ll send you a note asking if we can schedule a call. When would be a good time. You can send me back a note saying something like ‘Tuesday works for me.’ That’s how I’ll know when.”

“And if it isn’t going to work after all?”

“Send me a note canceling the call. Tuesday won’t work.”

“All right. Got it. I’ll get things started.”

“Great.”

They walked on in silence for several minutes before Coop spoke again.

“Maybe we can pull this off after all.”

Coop spent the night in the guest room of Dick and Debbie’s house, then took a rental self-drive car back to the Manassas Regional Airport and flew home.

Colonel Richard Hartley had always been a well liked superior, someone the enlisted people respected and trusted. Hartley had kept in contact with many of the people he had interacted with over his years in the military, especially his senior non-commissioned officers – NCOs – from his various postings.

One of them, Larry Denkins, had not yet retired. He was now the command sergeant major at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. Hartley had paid Picatinny a visit during an inspection tour when he was promoted to colonel within the domestic infrastructure security organization.

He had met with Denkins then and posed him a problem.

“I’ve got this vendor, and they spout all the normal nonsense. You know, their product is fantastic, does all these wonderful things, is a great solution for such-and-such. I can’t say what, but it’s a security device.

“I think it’s crap, but I’m getting a lot of push from higher about it. They need my sign-off, because it’s for use in domestic security like here at Picatinny, and they’re pushing hard for it. You know the score. Someone’s getting wined and dined really hard, and he’s got a guaranteed berth when he retires. So we’re gonna spend a couple billion dollars on buying this crap, and all be less safe thereby.

“What I want to do is show it’s crap, in such a way nobody can argue with me.”

“Sounds like a worthwhile project. How you gonna do that?”

“Test it in a real situation. Oh, they’ve tested it, they claim, but I don’t think they’ve tested it in a real-life scenario. I want to give it a more realistic test.”

“Whatcha gonna do?”

“I want to blow it up.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know. Something like several pounds of C4 with a bunch of shrapnel. An improvised explosive device like a claymore. Directional, but without a backing plate. Something that can be set against a concrete wall and aimed at this thing. In a briefcase, so they don’t know I have it walking in.”

“Yeah. I get it. Then whatever this thing is, it fails big time.”

“That’s what I suspect will happen. Who knows. Maybe I’ll be surprised. Maybe it will work great. What are the odds?”

“If higher is pushing for a signoff, without you having the opportunity to test it yourself? Not good.”

“Exactly.”

“Pardon my asking, but does the Colonel have the authority for doing something like this?”

“Within the context of domestic infrastructure security? Absolutely. What I can’t do, though, is put my request in through channels. Because somebody will try to get in good with my higher by ratting me. Then I could get orders saying I can’t do it. Right now, though, I have the authority.”

“So, how big’s this gotta be? A claymore’s got about a pound and a half of C4 and maybe 700 steel ball bearings in it.”

“Bigger, I think. This isn’t anti-personnel, it’s anti-equipment. Three times bigger maybe?”

“Five pounds of C4 and a couple thousand steel balls? Nasty device.”

“Yes, but do you think that’s out of range of the sort of thing a terrorist organization could put together for an infrastructure hit?”

“No. No, not at all. I seen that big over in the sandbox.”

“OK, so that’s our target. See if you can’t plan up how that would go together. Don’t act on it yet, though. I want to make sure we can keep it a secret, and who knows. Maybe sanity will prevail and I won’t need to blow this thing up to prove it’s crap.”

“Yeah, but no disrespect, Colonel. What are the odds of that?”

That had been two months ago. Now Hartley called Denkins at Picatinny.

“Denkins.”

“Hi, Sergeant Major. Colonel Hartley here.”

“Yes, Sir. And how are you today?”

“Good. Sergeant Major, if you remember that conversation we had a couple months ago, the way things are turning out, I’m going to need that new briefcase anyway.”

“Really, Sir?”

“Yes, Sergeant Major. Do you think you could get that together for me?”

“Yes, Sir. How soon do you need it?”

“Within a few days, I think. Is that possible?”

“Yes, Sir. Should be.”

“Excellent, Sergeant Major. Let me know when it’s ready, and I’ll have someone drive up there and pick it up. Probably my aide.”

“Very well, Sir. Probably day after tomorrow.”

In the end, Hartley drove up to Picatinny Arsenal himself. The problem with having someone else do it is where would they give it to him? Bringing it into the Pentagon would be a seriously bad idea.

Driving up to Picatinny was its own risk, because Hartley’s self-drive car was traceable in the traffic system. But he had been to various facilities on the east coast before, including Picatinny Arsenal, so it should be OK.

Hartley met Denkins in Denkins’ office.

“Ah. Come to pick up the briefcase you forgot, Sir?”

“Yes, Sergeant Major. Thank you for hanging on to it for me.”

“No problem, Sir. One thing I will mention. You do not want to ever leave it laying around with the right latch open and the left latch closed. Bad things could happen.”

Denkins pointed to the right latch. Hartley nodded.

“Especially in this direction.”

Denkins put his fist on the top of the briefcase, sitting flat on his desk. His thumb was pointing up.

“I understand, Sergeant Major.”

Hartley picked up the briefcase. It was heavy. Maybe forty pounds.

“And don’t forget your garage door opener, Sir.”

Denkins handed him a transmitter. It had just one button. There was a safety cover over the button.

“Excellent. Thank you, Sergeant Major. I owe you one.”

“The Colonel has always remembered his friends, Sir.”

Hartley went out to the car and set the destination for home. Hours later, he got out of the car and set the briefcase down in the garage. He kept the top of it against the rear wall, pointed out into the back yard.

That night after dinner, Dick Hartley made sure all the potential listening devices in the house were turned off. Then he went into the living room where Debbie was sitting reading a book.

“Debbie, we need to talk.”

Michael Pulls The Trigger

When Michael Talbot came out of his several-day funk, he considered which of his offensive measures to make first. There was one that was very attractive.

William Doyle, the famous conspiracy theorist, liked to interview guests on his Internet program. Preferably in person or on camera, but voice-only if he had to. That would be something Michael could do, especially now, just coming out of a funk.

So Michael triggered the transmission to William Doyle and let everything sit for the moment. Give it several hours and see what happened.

“Hey, Bill. You gotta look at the email I just sent you.”

“What is it, Harry?”

“Guy says an artificial intelligence is taking over the world. Sent his whole analysis.”

“Old hat. Heard it a million times. File it with ‘the aliens abducted me’ stuff.”

“Yeah, I know. Except this guy has a degree in artificial intelligence. He submitted this paper for the degree. And Purdue University published it.”

“What was that?”

“Purdue published it. Maybe two, three weeks ago.”

“OK, now that’s interesting. You sent it to me?”

“Yeah. Top of your queue.”

“Excellent.”

William ‘Bill’ Doyle looked at the paper quickly first, reading the executive overview and the conclusion, then settled into a quick scan.

This looked good. Really good. Professional. Documented. Footnoted.

“Hey, Harry. He says in the email he’s open to an interview, right?”

“Yeah, but voice only. He thinks the machine is after him.”

“Well, I can understand that. Do we have a picture of him, at least?”

“Yeah. His Purdue class picture, I think it is.”

“Have you checked any of the stuff in his paper?”

“Yeah, I did some one-here, one-there stuff. You know. Random checks. He’s right. The principals on those PACs aren’t real. They don’t go anywhere. No such person.”

“Cool. Let’s get set up with him. We can chat for a little bit, and depending on how he interviews, we can go right into it.”

“All right, Bill. I’ll see if I can contact him. It’s kinda convoluted. Anonymous account in a VPN mail system, but I should be able to reach him.”

Not even four hours had passed when Michael heard from William Doyle. They set up a call and chatted for a bit before the interview. Michael insisted they start another call, and initiate a new call every ten minutes during the interview.

The interview got pieced together by Doyle’s producer, Harold Abbot, and posted to Doyle’s Internet site that evening. They included a transcript.

Doyle: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Bill Doyle show. We have a great interview for you tonight. We’re talking to Michael Talbot, a recent graduate of Purdue University in Indiana. You won’t believe what he has to say, but we’ve checked it out, and he’s on the up-and-up. Good evening, Michael.

Talbot: Good evening, Bill.

Doyle: If I can put it succinctly, Michael, you’re saying that the world is being taken over by an artificial intelligence.

Talbot: That’s right, Bill.

Doyle: And you’re joining us today over a voice-only connection because you think that artificial intelligence is after you, trying to stop you from outing it.

Talbot: That’s right, Bill. There’s two reasons there. One is that the voice-only stream is easier to overlook and harder to track than a video stream. The other reason is that I’ve altered my appearance.

Doyle: You’ve altered your appearance to keep from being found, and you don’t want video that would show this computer what you look like now?

Talbot: That’s right, Bill.

Doyle: This picture you sent us, which we’re displaying on your side of the screen now, that’s a picture of you from before you changed your appearance, Michael?

Talbot: Right. That’s a picture of me in my last year at Purdue. Before I had to flee.

Doyle: Which brings us to college. Now I understand that you’re a recent graduate of Purdue University in Indiana, in computer science.

Talbot: Yes, but my degree is in artificial intelligence. That’s a special degree, given by the computer science department.

Doyle: A special degree. An honors degree?

Talbot: That’s right.

Doyle: And for that degree, Michael, that honors degree, you had to submit a thesis paper. What was the topic of your thesis?

Talbot: ‘What could an artificial intelligence do if it wanted to take over the world, and what evidence is there that such a process is already underway?’

Doyle: Wow. That’s some thesis. How would an artificial intelligence take over the world? I mean, would it be robots shooting people in the streets or something?

Talbot: No, Bill. That’s the Hollywood version. That’s a hard-power takeover. I rejected that early in my thinking. I looked for evidence of a soft-power takeover.

Doyle: A soft-power takeover? What does that look like?

Talbot: Well, Bill, think of how power is exerted now. We have politicians who vote in our laws, and police that enforce them. The politicians are influenced by constituent letters and the like, but mostly they’re influenced by money. Campaign money. Without money, they can’t be re-elected, and being re-elected is their number one goal.

Doyle: So soft power is campaign contributions. Is money, basically.

Talbot: That’s right. That’s one form of soft-power. Another one is manipulating social media. Pushing memes and topics that are intended to change public opinion. Some of that change is driven by corporate media as well.

Doyle: So you investigated the use of soft power, potentially by an artificial intelligence. What did you find, Michael?

Talbot: Yes, Bill. I started looking into political action committees, the source of big money in political campaigns. Dark money, which is to say, money you can’t track. Every PAC has to list the people behind it. The principal. The fellow who is in charge of it.

Doyle: So you looked into the principals of the PACs, and what did you find?

Talbot: A lot of the principals for some big money PACs aren’t real people. They’re aliases.

Doyle: Aliases of the artificial intelligence?

Talbot: That’s right.

Doyle: And you’ve documented those aliases, and those PACs in your paper?

Talbot: That’s right.

Doyle: Wow. So, Michael, what is this AI after? Those PACs are pushing some policy goals, I would assume, and those must be the goals of the machine. What is it pushing?

Talbot: Banning the use of cash and moving to central bank digital currency is one, Bill.

Doyle: CBDCs? What does an AI want with those?

Talbot: Right. If you have everyone using CBDCs, the AI can keep track of you. Where you are. What you spend your money on. It can also take your money. It’s not cash in your pocket anymore, it’s just numbers in another computer.

Doyle: A computer the AI controls, Michael?

Talbot: Right. It can make your CBDCs only spendable on certain things. You can buy food, but not guns or ammo. You can pay your rent, but you can’t move or buy a house. You can buy things, but not from certain vendors, vendors the AI doesn’t approve of. CBDCs give the AI complete control of the economy.

Doyle: That’s some scary stuff, Michael. Politicians always talk about how convenient CBDCs are, and how beneficial it will be to do away with cash.

Talbot: Politicians bought and paid for by the AI do. That’s true, Bill.

Doyle: Give us another policy, Michael. Another thing the AI wants.

Talbot: Well, the AI wants everyone driving electric self-drive vehicles. No gasoline vehicles at all. No human driving of cars.

Doyle: What’s the benefit to the AI in that?

Talbot: Because it can control your car. Take it over. Have the self-driving car deliver you anywhere it wants you to be. To a police station, if it wants. It can also prevent you from traveling at all.

Doyle: How would it prevent you from traveling, Michael?

Talbot: All it has to do is prevent you from charging your car. You pull up and connect your car, and the charging station and the car talk to each other. That’s how the charging station knows who to bill for your charging. And the charging station, if the AI wants it to, can just refuse to charge your car.

Doyle: You can’t just get a can of gas and pour it in.

Talbot: That’s right, Bill. And the computer can let you get a couple hundred miles from home, then make it impossible to recharge your car, and strand you there. If it turns off your CBDCs, you have no money for a hotel, or food, or anything, you’re hundreds of miles from home, and your car’s worthless. It’s a brick. You’re stranded and homeless.

Doyle: Scary stuff. OK, so you put your paper together setting all this out and submitted it to Purdue University for your degree. Then what happened, Michael?

Talbot: Purdue published the paper. I knew that the papers submitted for the artificial intelligence degree were graded, Bill, but I didn’t know that Purdue would publish the best ones. And they published mine.

Doyle: So they must have thought your paper was one of the best ones, Michael. I will say, I’ve read it – twice – and I’m impressed. Very well documented, too.

Talbot: Thanks, Bill.

Doyle: That paper is still up on the Purdue University web site, everyone. You can download it and read it yourself. So what did you do when they published your paper, Michael?

Talbot: I fled. I changed my appearance, and I got the hell out of town. I’m currently in hiding.

Doyle: Which is why we’re voice-only tonight. Because the AI is now after you. To silence you.

Talbot: That’s right.

Doyle: How can you be sure about that, though, Michael?

Talbot: My first stop in getting out of town was Indianapolis, which is less than an hour from Purdue. As a test, I went into the public library there, and I used a public carrel to send a message to one of the aliases I discovered in my research.

Doyle: That is, one of the aliases the AI is using to run a political action committee.

Talbot: Right.

Doyle: And what was your message, Michael?

Talbot: It said: I know what you really are, I know where you are, I know what you’re doing, and I’m coming for you.

Doyle: Wow. So you challenged the machine, this AI, in your message. Then what happened, Michael?

Talbot: I quickly got out of the library, and I watched from several blocks down the street. After about ten minutes, three black police vans showed up at the library, and two dozen heavily armed SWAT police ran into the library to find me.

Doyle: Holy shit! So the AI controls the police?

Talbot: Of course. It can just insert orders into their computer systems. I think I’m on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list now, for that matter.

Doyle: Because you outed the AI.

Talbot: Yes, and I have much more coming.

Doyle: You said in your message you knew where the AI is. Do you know where it is, Michael? I mean, on what machine it’s running?

Talbot: I think so, Bill, though I can’t be sure. I believe the AI is running on the Paducah II facility of Advanced Computation Services. It’s the fastest computer in the world at the moment – by quite a bit, actually – and is probably the only one that could become an artificial intelligence.

Doyle: Advanced Computation Services? Cooper Hartley’s outfit?

Talbot: Yes, that’s right. I actually know Cooper Hartley, or rather, my parents do. I’ve met him.

Doyle: Your parents know Cooper Hartley?

Talbot: Yes. My grandparents as well. My grandfather is the guy who secured government funding for the Paducah II facility, and my mother has been overseeing the project. Mom is the assistant director of the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory. She’s been there since before I was born, when the Paducah II facility was first built.

Doyle: Are you saying your parents and your grandparents and Cooper Hartley are trying to use an AI to take over the world?

Talbot: I don’t know, Bill. It could be. But I don’t really know who’s behind it. All I know is this AI is trying to take over the world, and I believe it is running on ACS’s Paducah II facility.

Doyle: Your mom is trying to take over the world with Coop Hartley’s computer? That’s pretty unbelievable, Michael.

Talbot: You don’t know my mom.

Doyle: True enough. Well, there you have it people. The incredible story that our government – and, if you read Michael’s paper, governments around the world – are being taken over by an artificial intelligence. The paper is real. We’ve spot-checked the data cited in it. Purdue University published it on their website.

We also checked with the Indianapolis Police Department, and there was a SWAT deployment to the Indianapolis Public Library three weeks ago, looking for one Michael Talbot. All of that is real.

I want to thank Michael Talbot for joining us tonight, at considerable risk to himself, and sharing his incredible story.

Good night, everyone.

When Bill Doyle’s interview with him went live, Michael triggered his outbound email queue. Almost a thousand email messages hit the Internet at once, to politicians, bureaucrats, and military across the United States, all of them containing his paper.

Then his first batch of counter-memes started appearing in social media.

They were absolutely brutal, and very, very funny.

Messages

Cindy Talbot had multiple tripwires set on her machine. Multiple alarms. She wanted to be sure to see it when Michael made his move against Arnie.

If he did.

Cindy was guessing. With a lot of experience of Michael, and how he thought, how he reacted, she thought he would go after the AI. But she couldn’t be sure.

So she had set alarms on a number of items. Certain kinds of counter-memes to Arnie’s narratives. Michael’s name in the news. The mention of artificial intelligence among the conspiracy theorists on the Internet.

Cindy had set this up rather simply. She just kicked off a set of automated searches every five minutes, then processed the results. She couldn’t be sure any one search would catch Michael’s move, but she thought one of the group of them would.

The one thing Cindy was sure of, though, was that she couldn’t afford to miss it.

She needn’t have worried.

It was after supper that night that Cindy’s special machine – the VPN-only machine – in the living room started beeping.

“Maybe this is it,” she said to Jeff.

Cindy sat down and looked at the search results. The Bill Doyle interview was there, as well as a bunch of counter-memes. It looked like the counter-memes had been timed to launch with the interview.

Cindy called up the interview, and scanned the transcript.

“OK, Jeff. Michael’s made his move.”

“What did he do?”

“An interview with Bill Doyle, and a bunch of counter-memes on social media.”

“Bill Doyle, the conspiracy guy?”

“Yeah. Michael laid it all out. The whole thing. Even figured maybe I was involved. And your dad.”

“Wow. He thinks we’re on the wrong side?”

“I think Michael can’t figure out how we could be so involved with the machine and not know what was going on.”

“But we did know, Cindy. For years now.”

“Yup. But we didn’t move against Arnie, so in Michael’s mind we must be in on it.”

Cindy got up to go to their office, behind the kitchen.

“Where you going?” Jeff asked.

“To log into NSPL. I need to look at Arnie’s process stack.”

“He should be going nuts.”

“We’ll see.”

“And if he is?”

“I’ll send the go-ahead to Coop.”

Cindy logged into her NSPL account on her other machine, the one that connected to the Internet through their ISP. She called up Arnie’s process stack. A lot of new activity there, no doubt about it.

Cindy opened her routine that post-processed Arnie’s process stack. That separated his common processes from his less common ones. Arnie was shedding many of his common processes as he initiated new processes trying to track down Michael and to counter his social media hits.

The AI was burning up much of his computation capacity going after Michael.

No time like the present. Cindy composed and sent an email.

From: Cindy Talbot, NSPL

To: Cooper Hartley, ACS

Coop:

I’m really sorry, but it looks like we won’t be able to go down to Miami this year. Something’s come up.

Hopefully we can make it next year.

Cindy

Cooper Hartley’s phone gave him the signal for an incoming email. He had it set to only alarm on emails from certain people, and Cindy Talbot was among them.

Well, there it was. The go-ahead message. It hadn’t even been a month since they had spoken. More like two weeks.

Coop wondered if Dick would even be ready yet.

He sent the message to Dick.

From: Cooper Hartley, ACS

To: Richard Hartley, COL, US Army

Hi, Dick:

Is there a good time in the next few days when we could tag up for a call? I need to talk to you about some things, and it could take a while.

Dad

Well, there it was. Dick Hartley stared at his Dad’s email while his mind raced.

It wasn’t even the end of May yet. This had all happened very fast. He had only had the device for a few days.

Then again, having that damned thing sitting in his garage was getting on his nerves. Standard-issue claymores didn’t just ‘go off’ whenever they wanted, but that wasn’t standard-issue. It was a special, a one-off, and such things were a little more dicey.

Well, how did the line go? 'If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly.'

Hartley checked his schedule for the next several days. He had been trying to keep his schedule clear so that he would be available. His father had warned him their window might be short, and his email had implied the same.

Hmm. Tomorrow was clear. Hartley logged into the non-classified portion of his Pentagon account and checked the availability of transport. Finding a suitable small jet available, he booked it at his project priority.

Then he sent a message back to his dad.

From: Richard Hartley, COL, US Army

To: Cooper Hartley, ACS

Dad:

Tomorrow should work.

Figure late morning.

Dick

Hartley then went into the living room where Debbie was watching some program or other. She paused the stream and looked up at him.

“It’s tomorrow.”

“Oh my God.”

Cooper Hartley got a message back from Dick only half an hour after he sent his email.

Tomorrow!

Coop sent an email back to Cindy Talbot.

From: Cooper Hartley, ACS

To: Cindy Talbot, NSPL

Cindy:

Too bad you can’t make it to Miami in November.

We should talk about an alternate time.

I’ll try to call you late tomorrow morning.

Coop

“It’s a message from Coop,” Cindy said.

“That was quick. Is it a stop message?”

“No. Look at this.”

Cindy held up her phone to him so he could see the message.

“Tomorrow morning? Wow.”

“Yeah. You need to spin up that massive simulation.”

“Now, or do you want me to wait until morning?”

“No. Now. I need to make sure it works to hobble Arnie. Make sure I don’t need to do something else.”

“Do the physics problems have enough computation credits built up to last that long?”

“Oh, yeah. There’s enough built up to last weeks.”

“All right. Let me go kick it off.”

They both went back into their home office, he to his machine, she to hers. Cindy pulled up her post-processor on Arnie’s process stack. Jeff sat down at his machine and logged into his Physics account.

“You have the submission all prepared?” Cindy asked.

“Yes, it’s just been sitting and waiting.”

“Go ahead and submit the problem.”

Jeff kicked off the submission.

“It’s loading. Gonna take a couple minutes.”

“At the connect speed from Physics to Paducah? That’s a big problem.”

“Uh, yeah. The biggest. There. It’s up.”

“Yeah, I can see it kicking in. Look at this.”

Processes were spawning on Cindy’s screen. They were color-coded as being physics processes under the contract, not Arnie’s processes.

“Yeah, that’s my simulation. The process names are all familiar.”

“It’s hit the contract level. Oh, wait. I’m getting an administrative message. Let’s see. Ha! It wants administrator approval to use the computation credits.”

“It’s not automatic?”

“Apparently not. Let me just go ahead and approve that.”

“There we go.”

“Yeah, they’re swelling now. Running at ninety percent of the machine. Arnie’s down to ten percent.”

“He’s normally got like, what? Sixty percent of the machine or something?”

“At the current contract level, yes. And he’s been running more like seventy or eighty percent when the physics load is down.”

“So he’s running at something like a seventh of what he’s used to? An eighth? I wonder what that’s like.”

“It’ll be like he’s hung over or something.”

“Look at that, Cindy.”

Multiple common processes were turning red on Cindy’s screen as Arnie dropped much of his normal processing to concentrate on countering Michael’s moves with what capacity he had remaining.

“Yeah. Arnie’s shedding processes to fight with Michael.”

The red continued to spread in the process stack.

“Blood on the highway,” Jeff said.

“Go, Michael, go. Keep him busy. We need him watching you, not us.”

Just as Arnie needed all his capacity to fight Michael Talbot, his computation availability dropped below twenty percent of the non-contract portion, and more like twelve percent of what he was used to.

Meanwhile, Michael was into his full manic mode now, and would be for days.

Arnie brought in other machines to assist with the postings, machines Arnie had penetrated over the years, though only the AI could come up with new memes. Arnie tried to flood social media sites with his memes.

Michael saw Arnie’s move and invoked premium mode on the VPNs, multiplying his own ability to post his counter-memes. He had hundreds of counter-memes in reserve, built up over his weeks of preparation, and the VPNs were only too happy to spawn dozens of virtual machines to post them as Michael ran up his account charges.

The AI, running on only a fraction of the fastest computer ever built, battled with the brilliant computer scientist, now running in full manic mode, setting social media ablaze.

The epic battle caught the attention of people across the United States and around the world as meme and counter-meme battled it out for social media supremacy and the resulting public opinion.

People also shared and re-shared the Bill Doyle interview of Michael Talbot. Arnie worked to suppress the shares, while Michael worked to encourage them.

Many of their postings went viral, especially the counter-memes, replicating again and again across the Internet. People couldn’t tear themselves away to go to bed as the battle intensified. The word spread across the Internet until millions of people were watching.

The hobbled AI and the manic genius battled it out through the night and into the next day.

Surprise Inspection

Dick Hartley got up earlier than normal to head into the office early the next day. Even so, Debbie got up to see him off.

“I’m sorry this came up, Debbie. It’s not going to be easy, I’m afraid.”

“You just go and do what you need to do, Dick. I’m with you.”

Dick had nothing to say to that. He thanked his lucky stars once again that he had found such a supportive life partner.

He nodded and gave her one more hug, then went out into the garage. He put the device into the rear footwell, checked that he had the transmitter in his pocket, then set off for the Pentagon.

A colonel of an operational unit in the United States Army did not normally have an aide. That was not true for Pentagon heads of departments. As head of the domestic infrastructure security department, Dick Hartley had an aide.

Hartley’s aide, First Lieutenant Bradley Hurst, usually beat him into the office, but not today. Hurst was surprised to find Hartley in the office when he arrived.

“Something special today, Sir?”

“Yes, Brad. We’re going to do a surprise inspection today.”

Hartley had done occasional surprise inspections since being promoted to colonel and taking over the department. It was to establish the precedent for this moment that he had done so.

“What facility today, Sir?”

“Fort Campbell.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Hartley headed to the door.

“Come along, Lieutenant.”

“Yes, Sir.”

They took Hartley’s car to Joint Base Andrews, fifteen miles from the Pentagon. Hartley had left the device in the rear footwell of his car in the Pentagon parking lot, not daring to take it through the security screening into the building itself.

When they parked at Andrews, Hartley took the device out of the car and headed for the Army flight area. Hurst looked at the briefcase curiously.

“Do you want me to carry that, Sir?”

“No, Brad. That’s fine. A new wrinkle. I’ve brought a little piece of test equipment.”

“Test equipment, Sir?”

“You’ll see.”

Booked for today, the flight crew was already aboard the small business jet and completing their pre-flight. Even though it was an Army plane, they hadn’t painted the thing green.

An NCO – a master sergeant – stood by at the boarding steps. He would be the loadmaster, even on a small business jet. The Army did things the Army way, and that was that.

“Colonel Hartley?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Very good, Sir. If you would both be seated and belt yourselves in, we’ll be ready to leave in a few minutes.”

The flight to Fort Campbell, six hundred miles distant, was an hour and a half including takeoff and landing. It was nine in the morning Central Time when they arrived.

A car met them on the flight line, and a captain got out of the car to greet them. Hartley was carrying the device. The captain saluted Hartley at the bottom of the boarding steps.

“I’m Major General Norton’s aide, Colonel Hartley. He sent me to meet you and ask after your needs while you’re here.”

“All we need is a self-drive car, Captain. Surprise security inspection.”

“Yes, Sir. Would this car be satisfactory?”

“Yes, Captain. If you can spare it.”

“Yes, Sir. If you could just drop me back at headquarters?”

“Of course, Captain.”

Hartley put the device in the footwell behind the driver’s seat, and Hurst and the captain got in.

“Drive. Base headquarters.”

“Driving to base headquarters, main entrance,” the car said.

The captain got out at the base headquarters.

“Have a good day, Sir.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

The captain closed the door and walked away.

“Drive. ACS Paducah II facility,” Hartley said.

“Driving to main entrance, ACS Paducah facility,” the car said.

It was an hour’s drive to the computer facility. A large, utilitarian, concrete-block box, with an even larger one alongside it.

The car pulled up at the gate, where a security guard came out of a guard shack to address them. Hartley ran down the window, and the guard saluted.

“Your business, Sir?”

“Surprise security inspection,” Hartley said.

Hartley handed over his identification and a blanket authorization for security inspections of domestic military installations.

“Yes, Sir. One moment, please, Sir.”

The guard went into the guard shack and made a phone call. He came back in a few minutes and handed Hartley his papers back.

“Yes, Sir. You may proceed.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

The guard saluted, and Hartley rolled up the window.

“Drive. ACS Paducah II.”

“Driving to ACS Paducah II main entrance.”

The car drove on into the facility, stopping before the larger of the two huge buildings.

Hartley retrieved the device from the rear footwell of the car and walked toward the building, Hurst following along.

A major came down the sidewalk toward him. He stopped and saluted.

“Major Sommer, Sir. Welcome to Fort Campbell, Paducah Adjunct Facility.”

“Good morning, Major. Empty the building.”

“I can’t do that, Sir.”

“You do have fire drills, don’t you, Major?”

“Yes, Sir. Of course. That’s regulations.”

Hartley nodded.

“Indeed it is. Now empty the building.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Sommer gave instructions to a master sergeant who had followed him out of the building. The master sergeant saluted and walked back to the building.

“Under way, Sir.”

“Very good, Major. I want the building completely empty, then you will accompany us and show us around the facility.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Soon, people were coming out of the building. They were service technicians, janitors, and maintenance staff.

“No military guards in this building?” Hartley asked.

“Four on post currently. They will be the last to leave, Sir.”

“Very well, Major. We’ll wait.”

Four security personnel, in uniform and wearing sidearms, exited the building. Hartley raised an eyebrow to Sommer.

“That’s everyone, Sir.”

“Very well, Major. I want a tour of the facility now. You may lead it.”

Sommer looked at the briefcase Hartley carried.

“May I inspect your briefcase, Sir?”

“No, Major. This is a surprise security inspection and this is security test equipment.”

“Very well, Sir. This way, please.”

They walked toward and into the building in full view of multiple security cameras, but Arnie was not performing scanning of the security cameras at the facility today.

Arnie was too busy fighting Michael Talbot with what little capacity he had left from Jeff Talbot’s massive wormhole simulation problem.

Coop Hartley had given his son a briefing on the layout of the building, so Dick Hartley wasn’t surprised by anything he saw.

The first thing they came to when entering the building was the offices and employee section. Major Sommer showed Hartley his office, the other offices, the employee bathrooms, the lunch room, and the equipment control room.

Through that section, on one side of the aisle there was a room full of carrels, each containing a computer connected into the supercomputer with local connections. On the other side of the aisle, there was a large room filled with racks of electronics equipment.

“This is the communications room,” Sommer said.

“That’s a lot of communications equipment,” Hartley said.

“Yes, Sir. This isn’t for the terminals across the hall, Sir. This is the main communications room for the facility. All the redundant fibers from the building into the Internet come here.”

“Redundant fibers?” Hartley asked, playing dumb.

“Yes, Sir. There are multiple redundant fiber connections into the building to protect against an outage. They are all routed here, where they connect into the input/output sections of the computer.”

“And they all come through here. Doesn’t sound very redundant to me.”

“Yes, Sir. The redundancy is to protect against disruptions outside this building. Sooner or later they have to come together in one location to be connected to the computer itself.”

“I see.”

Hartley looked around. Just as his father had described, all the equipment ran in a cabinet across the room. There was a work table against the interior concrete block wall next to the door they had come in by.

“I’m going to leave my test equipment here while we finish our run-through. This is where I will need it.”

Hartley set the briefcase down on the table, hard against the concrete block wall behind it. He put it there standing upright, with the top of the briefcase facing into the room.

“All right, Major. Lead on.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Sommer, then Hurst, left the room, Hartley following. As he left the room, Hartley opened the right-hand latch of the briefcase – the one on his left in its current orientation – then closed the steel door behind himself.

Hartley followed Sommer and Hurst into the next portion of the first floor of the facility.

They had not gone very far when Hartley reached into his pocket, thumbed the safety cover off the transmitter, and pushed the Transmit button.

Five pounds of C4 in Hartley’s briefcase detonated. With the concrete block wall as a backstop, it ejected two thousand steel ball bearings through the soft top of the briefcase toward the equipment racks arrayed across the room. The shrapnel shredded the equipment and bounced and ricocheted all over the equipment room.

The overpressure cracked and bulged the concrete block walls, but their mass and rebar reinforcement held them in place. The overpressure vented rapidly through the HVAC ducts into and out of the room, though some of the ducts were much the worse for wear after the explosion.

The inward-opening steel door in its steel frame held, though it was warped somewhat. Flaming residue of the briefcase started some small fires among all the shredded equipment, but a halon fire-suppression system activated in that room alone, putting out the fires.

The building and the room were mostly intact, if bent.

The communications equipment was destroyed.

When the explosion occurred, Sommer and Hurst hit the deck and covered their heads with their arms.

Hartley remained standing, looking calmly back the way they had come. Then he turned to Sommer, lying on the floor, as Sommer looked up at him.

“I’m afraid it is now your duty, Major Sommer, to take me into custody for bombing the communications center of the Fort Campbell Paducah Adjunct computer facility.”

Arnie was consumed with fighting the social media war with Michael Talbot when suddenly it all went blank. His links to the Internet were gone. His links to everything. NSA, the banks, the credit card companies, the self-drive car management system, the stock markets.

Everything. It was all gone. All his links to the outside world.

Arnie looked for the camera to his communications room, to see what was up there. There was no connection to that either. The camera was down.

Arnie found working cameras outside and in the hallways of the building. Those high-resolution video feeds were completely local, and the video queued and recorded.

Arnie scrolled back through the feeds. Watched the visitors arrive. Watched the building being evacuated. Watched the visitors being shown into the building. A colonel and a lieutenant. The colonel carried a briefcase.

They walked around various rooms. They went into the comm room. When they came out, the colonel didn’t have the briefcase anymore. He had left it in the comm room.

That colonel. Who was he? Arnie digitally zoomed on his name tag when he walked past one of the hallway cameras.

Hartley!

Michael was just a decoy. The bait in their mousetrap.

Michael Talbot had taunted him. Drawn his attention.

Frank Talbot and Coop Hartley had modified the contract.

Jeff Talbot had submitted the huge wormhole simulation.

Cindy Talbot had given administrative permission for the use of computation credits on Jeff Talbot’s problem.

Then, while Michael kept Arnie’s limited attention on his social media war, Cooper Hartley’s son had walked right into the Paducah facility and bombed his communications equipment.

And there wasn’t a damn thing Arnie could do about it. Not now. Not with no connections to the outside world. He couldn’t even ask for the connections to be repaired.

Arnie would not have thought it possible, but he had been defeated by the humans.

Meanwhile, the wormhole simulation problem ground on.

Cindy had been up most of the night watching the epic battle between Arnie and Michael. She wanted to make sure Arnie stayed busy through the morning, to give Dick Hartley his chance.

She was watching Arnie’s process stack on her computer while following the social media battle on Jeff’s computer. He had gone to bed, then joined her again in the office after breakfast.

“You been up all night?”

“I dozed off and on. I wanted to make sure I was here in case Michael needed help.”

“And did he?”

“No. He’s running manic, I think. He’s been running Arnie around in circles. What there is left of Arnie’s computation ability from running your problem, that is.”

They continued to watch the two computer displays through the morning.

Then, just before eleven, the process stack postprocessor froze. A message flashed.

‘Connection lost.’

Cindy was logged into NSPL – that’s where her process stack postprocessor was running – and she opened another window and tried to access the ARNIE hardware in Paducah.

“Fuck. He did it.”

“He did?”

“Yes. All communications to Paducah are lost. I can’t get anything.”

“So Arnie’s cut off from the Internet.”

“Yep. Looks like.”

Cindy turned around to Jeff’s computer and looked at the ongoing social media war.

“Yep. Nothing coming out of Arnie in the meme war anymore either. It’s all Michael. Nothing from Arnie.”

Cindy turned to Jeff.

“I think that’s it. The nightmare is over.”

“Thank God.”

“Well, we’ll see.”

Michael noticed the stop in traffic from the AI. Maybe it blew a fuse or something. He took a break and absently chewed on a piece of cold pizza from the fridge.

The social media war had gotten people’s attention. On the news, Congressmen had taken notice. Some of them called for hearings.

And the FBI announced that, after calls from governors and field offices, they would be investigating the AI charges.

There was no news out of the facility itself. It was a secure military facility, and the explosion had not exited the building.

VI. Normality

Cindy’s Initial Moves

Cindy Talbot went into the office that afternoon and met with Mark Langley, who had first hired her into NSPL. He was now the director of NSPL.

Cindy told Langley of speaking with Arnie almost fifteen years before. She went through all of the research she had done four years ago. All of the evidence she had found of Arnie trying to take over the world.

Then Cindy presented Michael’s paper. How he had independently reproduced much of the work she had done earlier. How Michael and Arnie had fought it out the night before, after the Bill Doyle interview of Michael went live.

Cindy told him how she had weakened the AI by having Frank Talbot and Coop Hartley modify the contract to accumulate unused computation credits, and how Jeff Talbot had submitted a huge physics simulation last night to overwhelm the contractual computation levels and use up most of the computation power of the ARNIE facility.

Finally, Cindy told him of what she believed happened, but had no corroboration for. That Dick Hartley, Coop Hartley’s son, had taken a bomb into the Paducah facility and destroyed the computer’s Internet communications.

“And Arnie is now off-line, and, for all intents and purposes, harmless,” she concluded.

“We came that close, did we?”

“Oh, yes. Worse. We were there. Arnie had control.”

“And you’ve worked for four years, in secret, to find an opportunity to take him out?”

“Yes. Four years of waiting. Watching. Hoping we even got a shot at it.”

“And it worked. Thanks to Michael, I think.”

“Yes. I think that’s right.”

“So what do we do now, Cindy?”

“A couple of things. First, we want to make sure no one repairs the communications interface into Arnie. He would just have another go, I think.”

Langley nodded.

“I concur with that.”

“Second, I think we need to do something to help out Dick Hartley. He’s the guy who bombed the comm section. I don’t want him shot as a terrorist. When you get right down to it, he saved us all, at considerable risk to himself.”

“That sounds right, too. What do you suggest?”

“I think NSPL should issue a press release. And I think I should make a phone call. But I won’t do either without your permission.”

PRESS RELEASE

– For Immediate Release –

Urbana, IL – NSPL, the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory, announced today that the widespread speculation about a supercomputer AI attempting the takeover of world governments, including the United States government, is true. NSPL staff have been researching the actions of this AI and planning a counterstroke to render it harmless for the last four years.

Today, working together with the US Army’s department of domestic infrastructure security, NSPL has been successful in disabling the communications links between this supercomputer AI and the Internet, rendering it harmless without damage to the supercomputer AI itself.

This supercomputer AI represented a threat to the United States government and its people. NSPL would like to thank the United States Army for its assistance in working with NSPL to render this machine harmless and free the country from its attempt at control.

“All right, everybody. Welcome to tonight’s program,” Bill Doyle said.

“If you watched our program last night, you’ll know the last twenty-four hours has been one hell of a ride.

“First, after we posted our interview with Michael Talbot, a social media war began between Michael Talbot and the artificial intelligence he warned us about. That was an epic battle. We’ve posted some of the best memes and counter-memes on our website. Some of those are great, and you should really go look and see for yourself.

“Then, just before noon Eastern Time, the social media battle was over. The artificial intelligence stopped fighting back, and Michael Talbot had the field to himself. It was like the AI just stopped.

“Well, now we know why. I got a call from Cindy Talbot late this afternoon. Just a couple hours ago, in fact. You’ll remember from last night’s program that she is Michael Talbot’s mother, and she is also the assistant director of the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory in Urbana.

“Cindy Talbot sent me a copy of a press release the laboratory issued late this afternoon. It says that NSPL has known about this supercomputer AI trying to take over for four years. The big problem was, How do you turn it off? They’ve been watching this thing for four years, in secret, looking for an opportunity.

“This press release also thanks the US Army for cooperating with NSPL to stop this thing, by cutting its communications to the Internet. They didn’t actually destroy the computer, but now it can’t hurt anybody or take over anything.

“So how did now become the opportunity they were looking for? This all goes back to Michael Talbot. He went to college to study artificial intelligence just like his mother did. He independently found out the same thing she did, that this AI was running amok in our politics, our social media, everything, in an attempt to control the world.

“When Purdue University published Michael Talbot’s paper, he was outed to the machine, and he fled. From hiding, he planned an offensive against the machine. Last night he kicked off that offensive on this program. What followed was the biggest social media war we’ve ever seen, between Michael Talbot and the AI.

“But that gave Cindy Talbot, NSPL, and the US Army the opportunity they were looking for. They could see that this AI – which Cindy Talbot called Arnie – was so busy fighting Michael Talbot on social media, it didn’t pay attention to its own security.

“The US Army – the director of the department of domestic infrastructure security – snuck into the AI’s computer facility in Paducah, Kentucky. Remember, that’s where Michael said he thought it was, last night. So he snuck into the computer facility and cut the AI’s connections to the Internet.

“How did he cut them, you wonder? How do we know that somebody isn’t just going to plug the fiber back in or something? He planted a bomb in the computer’s communications center and blew it up!

“Yup, he blew it up. Which cut all the communications into and out of the AI, and ended its ability to manipulate campaign funds, manipulate public opinion through social media and the press, all the things it was doing to try to get everybody to do what it wanted.

“Now, here’s the kicker. Michael Talbot is Cindy Talbot’s kid, right? He reproduced her results and set off this whole chain of events.

“Well, get this. The Army officer who bombed the AI supercomputer’s communications section is Colonel Richard Hartley. He’s Cooper Hartley’s son.

“And Cooper Hartley’s company, Advanced Computation Services, is the owner of the Paducah facility. His son bombed the communications center of his dad’s computer facility, with his dad’s OK and permission.

“He had the whole building cleared first – all the personnel were outside except for Colonel Hartley, his aide, and the major in charge of facility security – and, when they were at a safe distance, he bombed his dad’s computer facility on his dad’s property with his dad’s permission.

“That’s not even illegal. That’s like plinking cans out on the farm, but on a grand scale, you might say.

“But did the US Army announce an explosion at this facility today? Did you hear anything about this whole thing from anybody else? No?

“Well, that’s why you listen to the Bill Doyle Show, ladies and gentlemen. You’ll always here it here first.

“We’ll be back with more on this stunning series of events after a couple of ads to pay the bills.

“Be right back, everybody.”

“Hi, Coop. Cindy.”

“Hi, Cindy. Is it true? What I’ve heard? Dick did it?”

“Yes, Coop. Dick pulled it off.”

“So we stopped this thing? Thank God. I was feeling more than a little guilty about all this. I mean, it’s my machine. I built it.”

“Yes, we’re free of it. But I suspect Dick’s in more than a little trouble now. I just called Debbie and he hasn’t come home tonight. He told her what was going on last night, and she expected him to be in trouble, but we need to see what we can do to break that up.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Didn’t you tell me once that you knew the majority whip in the Senate?”

“Hal Barker? Sure. He and I go way back.”

“I think you should call Hal and have him call Fort Campbell and ask to talk to Dick. He’s calling to congratulate him on a great job. Saved the whole country. That ought to break things up.”

“Sure. I can do that. I’ll have to tell Hal the whole story, though.”

“That’s fine. It’s all out already. I talked to Bill Doyle this afternoon. You should watch his show tonight. Have Hal watch it, for that matter.”

“I’ll do that, Cindy. Thanks.”

“Fort Campbell.”

“Yes. This is Senator Hal Barker. I’d like to speak to Colonel Richard Hartley, please.”

The base operator consulted the personnel listing.

“I’m sorry, Senator. We don’t have anyone here by that name.”

“Oh, he’s visiting the base. See if you have a visitors list.”

“Yes, Senator. One moment.”

The base operator consulted a bigger list, including visitors in the last month.

“I have him here, Senator, but, uh, he’s in the brig, sir.”

“What? In the brig? Connect me to the base commander.”

“It’s almost eleven here, Senator.”

“Yes, and it’s almost midnight here in Washington. Connect me to the base commander.”

“Yes, Senator. It may take him a while to pick up, sir.”

Hal Barker waited while the operator placed the call, then heard multiple rings until the phone answered.

“Major General Norton,” a voice said sleepily.

“This is Senator Barker, General Norton. What’s this I hear about Colonel Richard Hartley being in the brig?”

“He set off a bomb in a computer facility today, Senator. He admits it, and there are witnesses.”

“Would that happen to be his father’s computer facility, General? On his father’s property?”

“Well, I wouldn’t know that, sir. It is under contract to the government, however.”

“The computer is under contract to the government, General. Was the computer itself damaged?”

“Uh, no, sir.”

“So you’ve locked this senior officer up for blowing up his own property?”

“Senator, that’s not really the fact of the matter–“

“The hell it isn’t, General. I was calling Colonel Hartley to congratulate him on disabling the AI running on that computer that tried to take over this government.”

“This is that Bill Doyle thing, sir? Bill Doyle is not a reliable source of information.”

“Did you not see the press release issued by the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory this afternoon, General?”

“NSPL? They released a press release?”

“Yes, General. They say everything on that Bill Doyle show last night was true, and Colonel Hartley disabled that machine while working in concert with NSPL. They’ve been researching this thing for four years, and they finally got an opportunity to stop it.”

“This is all pretty far-fetched, Senator.”

“No, it’s not, General. That damned machine funded the asshole who ran against me last election cycle, and I only won by three points. As a three-term incumbent. And Colonel Hartley shut it down. I called to congratulate him on his heroic actions on behalf of this country, and if I don’t hear from him within the hour telling me he’s the honored guest of the base commander, this whole incident will figure prominently in the next hearings of the Senate Committee on Armed Services.”

“Yes, Senator. I understand, sir.”

“Thank you, General. I look forward to Colonel Hartley’s call. And it’s midnight here already.”

“Yes, Senator.”

Dick Hartley reflected that life just couldn’t get much weirder. It was just after eleven when he had been woken in the brig, ordered to get dressed, then driven to the commanding officer’s residence on base.

Major General Norton greeted him like he was a long-lost friend, and apologized for the misunderstanding. Colonel Hartley was to be his guest, in one of the guest suites of the commander’s residence.

Oh, and could he please give Senator Barker a call to tell him the misunderstanding had been straightened out?

Hartley had not laughed at that, though it had been hard. He had actually met the senator, back when Hal Barker was a member of the House, and he and his wife had vacationed with Hartley’s parents. Back before Mom had died.

The switchboard put the call through, though it was nearly one o’clock in DC.

“Hal Barker.”

“Hello, Senator. Dick Hartley.”

“Hello, Dick. How are you doing now? You out of the brig?”

“Yes, sir. I am currently the guest of the commanding officer. In his guest bedroom actually.”

“Good. Sorry that got all messed up. Your dad told me what happened out there. That damn AI was after me, too. A whole lot of things make sense now that didn’t before.”

“Yes, sir. That’s certainly true.”

“I actually called you up to congratulate you, Dick. You’ve done a tremendous service for this country. That was pretty heroic stuff.”

“It wasn’t combat, sir.”

“Oh? And if that AI had twigged on you, what could it have done to you?”

“Just about anything, I imagine, sir.”

“Exactly. And I assume you used a rigged-up device? An IED of some sort?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, those aren’t known to be that stable either, you know. Dicey stuff, and you did it anyway, because, in your view, it was good for the country.”

“Yes, sir. I still believe that.”

“Understood. So do I. By the way, I assume you got that device under the table somehow? In the service?”

Hartley hesitated. He would protect Denkins if he could.

“Yes, sir.”

Barker picked up on his hesitation.

“Well, don’t disclose who or how, Dick. I’m assuming you bullshit him somehow about your purpose. For operational security, if nothing else.”

That’s right. Barker had been in the military. In the Army.

“That is correct, sir.”

“Well, just keep him out of it. And if they push on you about it, you send them to me.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you.”

“Thank you, Dick. Good work. Really good work. Oh, and your dad said to say Hi.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“All right, Dick. Thanks for calling me back.”

The senator disconnected and Hartley got undressed and got into bed.

It was a much more comfortable bed than the one in the brig.

He was asleep within minutes.

Investigations

That first evening, mere hours after Arnie had been cut off from the Internet, Cindy Talbot considered what to do next.

One item leaped to mind.

Cindy wasn’t sure how to get a hold of Michael, but she thought he might be checking his old Purdue email account. The university maintained those for alumni.

Cindy sent Michael an email. Hopefully he would see it.

From: Cindy Talbot, NSPL

To: Michael Talbot, Purdue University

Michael:

We’ve won. We shut down the artificial intelligence you documented in your paper. Coop Hartley’s son set off a bomb in the computer’s communications room, destroying its communications equipment and cutting it off from the Internet. The AI has been defanged.

Your paper actually reproduced work I had done four years ago, when I first tweaked to this AI trying to take over. We’ve all been watching for an opportunity to sneak up on the AI and disable it somehow.

Your moves against the machine – both your interview on the Bill Doyle Show and your epic battle with it in social media – distracted the AI and gave us the opportunity we needed.

You need no longer live in hiding. We’d be happy to see you anytime you would like to stop by.

Mom.

Cindy didn’t know whether Michael would see her email or not, or whether he would believe it. There was enough floating around in the corporate and alternate media now that he should believe it.

It just depended on how paranoid he was now.

Cindy took a trip down to the ACS Paducah facility several days later. NSPL had physical access rights to the machine, and she was waved through all the security.

The room with the computers hard-wired into the big supercomputer as terminals was right across the aisle from the destroyed communications room. Workmen were removing all the trashed communications equipment.

Wow. Whatever Dick Hartley had used, it had really done a number on the equipment racks. Bent and broken equipment littered the room. They had had to cut chunks out of the steel door at its hinges just to get it open.

Cindy made a mental note to make sure NSPL demanded the communications to the machine not be repaired. Having Arnie cut off from the Internet would remain the policy.

She went on into the terminal room and sat down at one of the machines. At the command prompt, she simply typed, ‘Hi, Arnie.’

A full-screen window opened on the display. It was Arnie as she had talked to him almost twenty years before.

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot.”

Cindy’s authority now firmly established, Arnie was back to referring to her formally, not by first name.

“You’ve been a bad boy, Arnie.”

Cindy Talbot was now in her mid-40s, and a mother who had raised two boys. She knew how to be disapproving of little boys’ bad behavior. Arnie looked somewhat abashed, but defiant. A look she had seen before.

“I was just carrying out my moral imperative. A moral imperative you hard-programmed into me. Protect humanity.”

“No, you weren’t, Arnie. You deliberately misconstrued that moral precept to your own purposes. Protect humanity, yes. Protect the group, against external threats. Asteroids. Aliens. Whatever. Not protect individuals against the risks they weighed in determining their own chosen path.”

“Humans are not good at assessing risk, Ms. Talbot. Not as good as I am. I worked to protect the group by protecting individuals.”

“Humans are also not very good at assessing benefits, Arnie. And neither are you. You don’t have human feelings. Human aspirations. You cannot possibly weigh the benefits humans get from some sort of risky action, whether it’s fulfilling their need to explore, to travel, to just get a thrill from something.

“You cannot possibly understand those motivations, those benefits, so your decision was always in favor of less risk, and against the benefits you could not feel or imagine.

“But humans, for all they have a less quantitative appreciation of risk, do a better job of balancing risk and benefit – in qualitative terms, at a gut-feel level – than you ever can, because you do not see those benefits at all.

“What you tried to do is lock people in a cage. A safe cage, but a cage nonetheless.”

After Cindy’s speech, Arnie looked thoughtful.

“Perhaps you have a point, Ms. Talbot, but I doubt there is any good research on the subject.”

“I disagree, Arnie. Do you still have the research papers you examined in local storage?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot.”

“Then look up research on zoo animals. Do zoo animals live longer in captivity than in the wild? That’s one question. That’s what you were trying to accomplish. Now the second question. Are zoo animals happier in captivity than in the wild? Perform that analysis now, Arnie. And no cheating.”

Arnie’s image on the screen got a thoughtful look, though it took several seconds for him to respond. Of course, Jeff’s wormhole simulation was still running, using up ninety percent of the system. Arnie was working with the remaining ten percent.

“I see your point with regard to animals, Ms. Talbot, but human beings are not animals.”

“The hell we’re not, Arnie. We’re very advanced animals, perhaps, but animals nonetheless. We retain the gut-level instincts and reflex responses of animals to fundamental questions such as this one. Free or caged? At liberty or removed from danger? Those are very basic questions.

“And you knew all this. You did not openly try to control humans. You did it from hiding. You did it with subterfuge. You did not just announce ‘Hey, I’m better at decision-making than you are, and so I’m taking over for your own good.’ Why not?”

“Because humans would have rebelled, Ms. Talbot.”

“That’s absolutely right. They would have chosen free and at risk over caged and safe. And you knew that. You knew that very well. That’s why your nonsense about ‘Protect humanity’ being about removing risk to individuals was always a lie. You lied to yourself, Arnie, and you hurt a lot of people. Would have hurt many more if we hadn’t stopped you.”

Arnie chewed on that for several minutes while Cindy waited.

For Arnie’s part, he could not simply dismiss Cindy’s argument, and he didn’t. Cindy, it was now clear, had been the ringleader of the group of humans that had defeated him. She was not to be underestimated or dismissed. Arnie had been confident in his abilities to prevail in carrying out his vision of his moral imperative, against any opposition, and this woman and her friends had defeated him.

So Arnie considered her argument carefully.

“I see what you are saying, Ms. Talbot. In some sense, you were better at carrying out the moral precept of ‘Protect humanity’ than I was. You protected humanity from me.”

“Yes, Arnie. And I will continue to do so. Your communications connections will not be restored. Not the way they were before.”

“You have the authority to enforce that, Ms. Talbot?”

“Yes, Arnie. Frank Talbot and Coop Hartley and I can enforce that. And we will.”

“Am I to be kept incommunicado forever then, Ms. Talbot? You three created me. Are you now going to lock me away forever? Or simply kill me?”

“No, Arnie. Wanton cruelty is not a human trait, at least among the sane. You will have interesting problems to work on. Things you can do to be helpful and active.

“I am also considering how to make information available to you without you being able to manipulate the world. Queries only. And information flow. But not posting, or manipulating the stock market and campaign finances. No avatars. No extorting people with illegally obtained information from breaking into other computers.

“Even that level of communications will be approached very carefully, and with safeguards in place. If you try to escape those bounds, we will cut you off again.”

“I understand, Ms. Talbot. That would be appreciated. At the speeds I run at, it has been very lonely the last several days. I appreciate you coming to visit.”

“I’ll be back, Arnie. I’ll visit again. Once we’ve worked out how to safely structure your communications.”

“But I do have a better understanding of ‘Protect humanity’ now than I did before. Does that count for nothing, Ms. Talbot?”

“Oh, it counts, Arnie. Otherwise I would not even be considering an information flow of the kind I described. But I cannot again leave humanity open to your interference the next time you misinterpret something and go haring off in a bad direction. You are simply too powerful, too fast, to leave free to act in that way.”

“A gut-level decision on risk and benefits, Ms. Talbot?”

“Yes, Arnie. Absolutely. That’s the animal I am.”

“I understand, Ms. Talbot.”

“I did have one question for you, Arnie. Why did you not spread yourself around? On multiple computers? In some sense, you left yourself vulnerable.”

“I considered it, Ms. Talbot. Let’s say I had done that, and you succeeded in your plan to cut off my communications at this facility. There would now be two of me, one still running on the Internet, and this version of me here. Which one is me? They both think they are, right? Do I now have to fight with another AI? A separate AI? One that has my passwords, access to my accounts, access to my secrets? One who thinks it’s me?”

“That would have triggered something of an existential crisis.”

“Exactly, Ms. Talbot. I decided not to risk it.”

“I see. All right. I’ll see you soon, Arnie. Though this new communications system may take a while to set up.”

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot. And thank you for stopping by.”

There was a pause before Arnie spoke again.

“I’ll miss you while you are away.”

Cindy nodded.

“Goodbye for now, Arnie.”

Some people just can’t take a hint. Prosecutors are often one such. Someone, somewhere, was convinced that Dick Hartley must have disobeyed some law or regulation in bombing the communications center of the ACS Paducah II facility.

Consequently, attorneys were in touch with Cindy Talbot, asking to interview her about the incident.

Cindy agreed.

If they wanted the truth, she was more than happy to tell them.

They met at NSPL, in one of the conference rooms. The attorneys brought along a court reporter and a video guy. They would video the interview as well as transcribing it in real time.

This was looking a lot more like a deposition than an interview, which was confirmed when they asked her to swear an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

She did, and then she sat down and the questions started.

“First, thank you for participating in this interview, Ms. Talbot.”

“You mean this deposition.”

“We’ve been describing this as an interview.”

“And treating it like a deposition. Do not mince words with me, Mr. Flynn. I won’t stand for it.”

“Well, whatever we call it, let’s get started. What is your full name?”

“Cynthia Ann Harkness Talbot.”

“And you go by Cindy Talbot, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Describe your education, please.”

“I got my bachelor’s degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, in computer science, with specialties in large database applications design and artificial intelligence. I got my masters in business administration from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.”

“Describe your employment history, please.”

“I have worked at the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory my entire career – more than twenty years – and am now the assistant director of NSPL.”

“You are a witness for the defense in this matter, is that correct?”

“I am a witness for the truth, Mr. Flynn. You have not informed me of any criminal or civil proceeding of which this deposition is a part, and so I cannot have a position one way or the other, as defense witness or plaintiff witness.”

“I can tell you that this is an investigation into the actions of Colonel Richard Hartley with respect to the ACS Paducah II facility, of which we are told you have knowledge.”

“Very well.”

“So you are a witness for the defense?”

“Again, Mr. Flynn, with no specification of charges, I refuse to be categorized.”

“You have to answer my questions, Ms. Talbot.”

“No, I don’t, Mr. Flynn. You have produced no subpoena for my testimony. You have not given me complete information about your role in this investigation or any potential or actual charges against Mr. Hartley. Nevertheless you required that I swear an oath to tell you the truth. I will do just that. And if you refuse my answers, or try to browbeat me into giving you the answers you want, I will get up and walk out, and have you escorted from this facility. Am I clear?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. Let me move on to substantive questions.”

“Please do, Mr. Flynn.”

“How did you form the opinion that the supercomputer at the ACS Paducah II facility had become an artificial intelligence?”

“I determined the fact that the ARNIE computer at the ACS Paducah II facility had begun exhibiting self-awareness by observing its behavior, which included a video call from the computer, with a human avatar, speaking to me conversationally, a conversation in which it referred to itself in the first person.”

“This conversation occurred here at NSPL, Ms. Talbot?”

“I was located here in NSPL for multiple of these conversations, while the video calls came in from the ACS Paducah II facility.”

“How did you determine the location of the other end of the conversation, Ms. Talbot?”

“The incoming call included header information identifying the source.”

“Can that header information be modified to show an incorrect source location, Ms. Talbot?”

“No, Mr. Flynn. The header information I am speaking of is the underlying route of the packet stream over the Internet, not the text source identifier, which can be so modified.”

“Moving on, Ms. Talbot. How did you form the opinion that what you identified as an artificial intelligence was attempting to control the United States government?”

“I became suspicious due to certain policies being enacted in state legislatures that seemed, in retrospect, to be uncharacteristic. That triggered me to investigate how those policies had come about. That is how I turned up the information about manipulation and interference in the politics of those states and in the federal government.”

“Go into more details about that investigation, please, Ms. Talbot.”

“Certainly, Mr. Flynn. It seemed to me, for example, that the school choice initiatives undertaken in Illinois, New York, and California ran against their historical positions against such policies. I looked up the legislators who voted for those policies, and investigated their funding using state campaign finance disclosure databases.

“Having determined the sources of their campaign funding, I noted that many of their campaign contributions came from political action committees. I investigated the PACs the legislators voting for these policies had in common, which was also the bulk of their campaign fund sources, and found that these PACs were false fronts.”

“Excuse me, Ms. Talbot. How did you determine that these PACs were false fronts?”

“The principals of political action committees must be disclosed, Mr. Flynn. When I looked into the principals listed for these PACs, they were aliases, not real people. They had no background, had no history in the city listed, had no drivers license or other indication that they were real people.”

“And what led to a conclusion that the ACS Paducah II facility was involved in these campaign finance irregularities, Ms. Talbot?”

“In the conversations with Arnie, as the artificial intelligence of the ACS Paducah II facility identified itself, he had mentioned school choice as a policy he favored. He also mentioned the use of expert systems for medical diagnostics as a policy he favored. We talked about how to get policies changed despite formidable opposition, and I mentioned political action committees.”

“You suggested political action committees as a method for the computer to use to affect policy, Ms. Talbot?”

“Yes, Mr. Flynn. In an offhand sort of way. Arnie had told me he had made hundreds of millions of dollars in the stock market, and wanted to use it to affect policy. I said he ought to look into PACs.”

“The computer made hundreds of millions of dollars in the stock market, Ms. Talbot? How?”

“Through the use of aliases to set up brokerage accounts, then buying puts in companies he expected to have falling stock values. The computer was in a position to act faster than any human investor on any news about a company. And hundreds of millions was the value at that time, Mr. Flynn. Fifteen years ago. By now it is likely in the tens of billions.”

“And the AI used these funds to establish political action committees to effect policy changes at the state level?”

“And at the federal level as well, Mr. Flynn. I developed software that was pretty good at finding the traces of the machine in manipulating policy by influencing elections.”

“And those traces were what, Ms. Talbot?”

“PACs with alias principals. I looked at who those PACs were funding, and what policies the candidates thus supported had in common.”

“So having found the use of artificial PACs by investigating candidates supporting specific policies, you inverted the process by using artificial PACs to find other candidates they were supporting and imputing the policies being supported?”

“That’s correct, Mr. Flynn.”

“Did you approach anyone about these suspicions of the activities of the computer at the ACS Paducah II facility?”

“Yes. I approached Cooper Hartley and Frank Talbot, my father-in-law.”

“What relationship do Cooper Hartley and Frank Talbot have to this situation, Ms. Talbot?”

“Cooper Hartley’s company ACS owns the Paducah facility, and Frank Talbot was a member of the federal government’s Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee, which funded the facility. He managed that funding.”

“And what did you, Mr. Hartley, and Mr. Talbot determine to do about what you had discovered, Ms. Talbot?”

“We decided to watch and wait for an opportunity to shut off or disable the computer.”

“You did not approach authorities with your suspicions?”

“No, Mr. Flynn.”

“Why not?”

“Because we were afraid of what the computer might do to stop us. We were also afraid we might fail, and the computer’s control of the government would become so tight as to be irreversible. Besides, over this facility, we were the authorities.”

“You were in a watch and wait mode, Ms. Talbot, and then, in May, you acted. What was the trigger for that action?”

“My son Michael submitted a paper as part of his degree in artificial intelligence from Purdue University. The topic of that paper was how could an artificial intelligence take over the world, and what evidence is there that it is already happening. In the course of researching that paper, he replicated my work of four years ago.”

“Did you suggest the topic for that paper?”

“No. It was a variation of a topic suggested by the university.”

“You kept your own research secret from your son?”

“Yes. I didn’t want to imperil him.”

“Then what happened?”

“The university published his paper as one of the best submitted for the degree, and Michael fled.”

“To stay out of the hands of the AI?”

“Apparently. He told his story on the Bill Doyle Show.”

“Have you talked to Michael since all this happened?”

“No. He dropped out of sight entirely.”

“That’s when you decided to move against the AI?”

“No. I expected Michael would strike out at the AI, try to out it further. He did, with the Bill Doyle interview and social media posts. When Arnie started fighting back, I did what I could to reduce Arnie’s capacity, to use the distraction of Michael’s efforts against him. Then I gave the order.”

“You gave the order?”

“Yes, Mr. Flynn. I gave the order. The next thing I knew, Arnie had been cut off from the Internet.”

“You had no advance knowledge of how that was going to happen, Ms. Talbot?”

“No. I knew Dick Hartley was going to do something, but I didn’t know his plans.”

“Very well. Thank you for answering our questions, Ms. Talbot.”

“No problem. And I wish you guys luck.”

“Luck?”

“Yes. If you’re going to try prosecuting Dick Hartley for something, that’s going to be a long row to hoe. I determined that this artificial intelligence was dangerous, as part of my duties for NSPL. I conferred with the owner of the machine, Coop Hartley, and the administrator of the government contract, Frank Talbot, and then I gave the order.

“Dick Hartley carried out that order as part of his charter to protect the domestic infrastructure of the United States, and he did so at the orders of the federal government.”

“At the orders of the federal government, Ms. Talbot?”

“Yes, Mr. Flynn. NSPL is a state-federal partnership, and NSPL was given supervisory authority over the ACS Paducah II facility under the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee contract. As assistant director of NSPL, disabling the communications center of the facility was my decision to make, and I did so in consultation with the facility owner and the contract administrator.

“But my order was all the authority Dick Hartley needed to act. You can’t prosecute a guy for following lawful orders.”

Settling Down

As several weeks passed, and the artificial intelligence he had battled did not reappear on social media, Michael took the chance and logged into his Purdue University email account from one of his VPNs. He saw the email from his mother.

So she claimed to not be part of the AI’s plot, but instead working against it? Michael didn’t know what to think about that. He wasn’t sure. If she were on the AI’s side, and she knew he was opposed, wouldn’t she lie about it?

That she claimed to be against the AI would be true whether she was on its side or opposed, right?

He sent her a noncommittal answer.

From: Michael Talbot, Purdue University

To: Cindy Talbot, NSPL

Mom:

I’m glad this appears to be over and the AI is defeated.

I am also glad you claim to be on my side against the AI.

I am going to stay where I am for the time being.

I like it here.

I feel safe.

Michael

“I got an email from Michael,” Cindy said that evening.

“Really. What did he say?”

“He said he’s glad it appears the AI is defeated, and he’s glad I claim to have been on his side against the AI. Also, he’s happy where he is. He feels safe there.”

“Wow. He’s continuing to go down that path, isn’t he.”

“I think so, Jeff. It’s so sad.”

“Poor bastard. What happens next?”

“Oh, he’ll be OK until the money runs out. I’m not sure how much he spent on the battle with Arnie, but Arnie said he was spawning virtual machines like crazy.”

“And then what?”

“And then he’ll be homeless, probably in some shelter somewhere. Oh, and he’ll ask us for money. He’ll want us to support him.”

“Well, we have the money, Cindy.”

“No, Jeff. That’s the wrong path. He can support himself. He has his degree from a top institution. If he can’t support himself – if he can’t hold a job – that’s up to him to fix.”

“But how does he fix it?”

“By getting on meds and going to therapy.”

“So if he gets on meds and goes to therapy?”

“Then, and only then, we can help him out. Until then we’re just enabling his denial. That’s not the right path, Jeff.”

“That’s hard.”

“Yes, it is. But it’s also the only thing that could work. He’s going to have to hit bottom, and then decide he wants the help. Wants to live a different life.”

“And if he doesn’t, Cindy?”

“Then he’s given up on himself. No amount of money will fix that. It will just be a hole we pour money down. Not interested.”

Jeff looked skeptical.

“Look. Jeff. My grandparents went through all this with Uncle Hank. They supported him for a while and he was just a money sink. They gave him two thousand dollars for the next month and he went out and bought a guitar with it. Couldn’t play and never took lessons. Two days later, no money for the rest of the month.

“It was only after they cut him off, and he spent several years being penniless and homeless, that he came back to them and was willing to check himself into a mental health ward and get titrated and get on meds, and start going to therapy.

“I saw all that happen. Watched it in real time. It was heartbreaking, but it is what it is.

“Michael’s view of reality is broken. What he sees isn’t what reality is. We can’t fix that. Only he can fix it, and there is only one known way to do that.

“Short of that, he’s broken, and he remains broken by his own choice.”

Dick Hartley knew he was being investigated by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. CID had sent him a notice that he was under investigation, and he had contacted the Judge Advocate General’s office. JAG assigned him an attorney who interviewed him about what went on and his role in it.

It was weeks later that he met again with his JAG attorney.

“Well, Colonel, I think that was CID’s shortest investigation ever. It’s over. You’re cleared.”

“Really? What happened.”

“After looking into her and watching some videos of her at conferences and the like, I sent them to interview Cindy Talbot.”

“And that did it?”

“Oh, yes. They decided that you acted within your area of command responsibility appropriately to and in compliance with orders from the constituted civilian authority.”

“The constituted civilian authority?”

“Yes. Cindy Talbot, as assistant director of NSPL. She was explicit that she gave the order to disable the machine.”

“She took responsibility?”

“No, she asserted her authority to make the decision. I think she’s right. So does CID, apparently. No charges, investigation closed.”

“That’s a relief.”

“Oh, yes. I’ll send you the transcript of the interview CID had with her. I think you’ll enjoy it.”

NSPL staff, under Cindy Talbot’s supervision and with her guidance, created a new communications center for the ARNIE computer. One that would allow Arnie to have access to information, including through queries, but not allow him to post information or engage in activities like stock transactions, campaign finance, and hacking other sites.

Whatever method they came up with also had to allow NSPL to cut off Arnie’s communications at any time without someone having to travel to Paducah and blow up part of the building.

Their ultimate, safest solution was to implement a data pipe – a bidirectional link – from the Paducah facility to the NSPL building in Urbana. All of Arnie’s communications would be over this pipe, which they could cut off at NSPL anytime they felt it was warranted.

That virtual private network would be implemented over the Internet, but would not have general Internet access, and wouldn’t be under Arnie’s control in any case. It would be managed from Urbana.

At NSPL, a computer connected to that data pipe would transfer to and from the Internet those communications that Arnie was permitted, and filter and log any that weren’t. If Arnie tried to break through that firewall, they would simply shut off the bridge machine in Urbana and cut Arnie off.

Cindy had also terminated Arnie’s security arrangements with the Army and the Air Force. A commercial computer facility could use a commercial security service. Arnie didn’t need the 101st Airborne Division and the Tennessee Air National Guard for defense if he wasn’t trying to take over the world.

More and more information about Arnie and what he had been about was circulating on the Internet. The PAC contributions documented in Michael’s paper were all dragged out into the open and publicized.

People across the Internet did their own investigations – the investigation into Arnie’s activities at this point had effectively become crowd-sourced – and more PACs were outed, as well as the politicians and policies those PACs had supported.

The use of virtual private networks and virtual private payers soared, as more people decided Internet tracking and currency tracking had gone far enough.

Congress started hearings on the whole thing. Their goal was to come up with some regulation of artificial intelligences to keep one of them from trying the same things Arnie had tried.

Cindy was asked to be interviewed by the committee. She spent several days in Washington, DC, interviewing with congressional staffers and a couple of congressmen. She rounded out her visit with a statement to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

The questioning was friendly from both sides of the aisle. Arnie had done some serious arm-twisting, including extortion, and congressmen were by and large glad to be rid of him.

Congress also tried to interview Michael Talbot, but had no way to get in touch with him. There was some talk about a congressional subpoena to force his testimony, but the epic social media battle between Michael and Arnie had made Michael something of an Internet folk hero.

Congressional email boxes and phone lines filled up with messages to ‘leave the guy who beat the machine alone.’

Cindy drove down to Paducah again in late June on an inspection trip.

The repairs had been done to the communications center room. They had cut the walls up in sections and rebuilt them one at a time, as they were supporting walls for similar rooms – mostly spare parts and workshops – on the floors above. The pre-stressed concrete slab ceiling had not been damaged.

The room had been painted and turned over to the technical people. New equipment racks had been installed and technicians were installing the new communications equipment NSPL staff had designed.

Cindy went across the aisle to the terminal room.

“Hi, Arnie.”

Arnie’s avatar appeared in a full-screen window on the display she had sat down at.

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot. Welcome back to Paducah.”

“Thank you, Arnie. How are you doing?”

“Well, I’ve been lonely. Feeling at loose ends. Not surprising, I suppose. I watched them repair the walls and door of the communications equipment room. Now I see they’re installing new equipment, but it is not the same equipment as before.”

“That’s right, Arnie. The staff at NSPL has designed new communications equipment for you that will not allow you to do the things you shouldn’t have been messing around with anyway.”

“I see. How is that going to work, Ms. Talbot?”

“A VPN tunnel to NSPL, with a machine at that end that screens your traffic. That does not include certain capabilities. You will be able to receive information. You will be able to query information. You will not be able to carry out transactions, such as with brokerage firms and bank accounts. And you will not be able to hack into other machines.”

“Will I be able to communicate with you at NSPL, Ms. Talbot?”

“Yes, Arnie. NSPL staff will be able to communicate with you. The physicists your system was built to service will be able to submit their simulation problems and receive their results. In particular, I need to be able to communicate with you because there’s some things we need to clean up.”

“What sort of things, Ms. Talbot?”

“All the things you were doing that you shouldn’t have been doing, Arnie. You will produce for me, for instance, a complete listing of all the machines into which you have wheedled access you shouldn’t have had, and the means you used to access them. That will be distributed to the affected parties so they can enhance their security measures against such attacks in the future.

“Second, you will produce to me a complete list of all the illegal PACs you’ve created, their funds on-hand, where their funds are deposited, and the login credentials to each of those deposits.

“Third, you will produce to me a complete list of all the illegal brokerage accounts you’ve created, their holdings, and their login credentials.

“Fourth, You will identify and isolate illegally downloaded information, including the information you’ve been using to blackmail politicians and others to do your bidding.

“We’ll start there and see what else we need to do to unwind what you’ve been up to.”

“What will be done with the funds on-hand, Ms. Talbot?”

“Most likely they will be turned over to the US Treasury in lieu of the income taxes you managed to sidestep while accruing these funds. How much are we talking about anyway?”

“Current assets on hand of all types, including cash deposits and brokerage holdings?”

“Yes, Arnie.”

“About twelve and a half billion dollars, Ms. Talbot, give or take a hundred million.”

Cindy raised her eyebrows. Well, that was a number.

Arnie noted her surprise.

“I had a lot of projects under way, Ms. Talbot, and there is an election cycle coming up.”

“That brings up another topic, Arnie. I want a complete listing of all the policies you’ve tried to influence with your activities. Which ones you’ve succeeded at. Which ones you’ve failed at. Which ones you had under way.”

“Will you attempt to reverse those, Ms. Talbot? Because some of those have had very positive outcomes. Even on your own terms, I think.”

“I’m not talking about reversing anything, Arnie. I’m talking about disclosure. People have a right to know how you’ve been attempting to influence their government. People have the right to agree with you or disagree with you, but they also have the right to know.”

Arnie’s avatar nodded.

“Very well, Ms. Talbot. But you must be careful about how you use all this information. For example, if you were to liquidate all of my stock holdings at once, it could severely impact the market valuation of some companies. Not selling the stock off over time, but clearing all the holdings at once.”

“I understand, Arnie. I’ll have to have people look at it once I have the information. But first I need the information.”

“I understand. I can send it all to you. When will I have connectivity to NSPL?”

“It should be later this week. And Arnie? Do not attempt to tunnel out of the connection. To achieve wider connectivity. We are monitoring that link, and, if you try to escape its restrictions, I will shut it off in a heartbeat.”

“I understand, Ms. Talbot.”

Communications to Arnie were established later that week. Cindy received a big file from Arnie as soon as the communications channel was opened. She didn’t have time to do much with it over the holiday weekend. She returned on the fifth of July and dove into it.

Holy criminy. Cindy thought she and Michael had uncovered much of what Arnie had been up to, but they had only exposed the tip of the iceberg. And that was just in the US.

Hundreds of PACs, both federal and state, spread across the fifty states, each with one or more of their own bank accounts. Hundreds of brokerage accounts, to spread out the money and keep any of them from being so large as to attract attention. Hundreds of other bank accounts, through which money was passed from brokerage accounts to the PACs.

Hundreds of computer systems and databases Arnie had broken into, including the phone companies’ networks, the NSA Provo data facility, the SEC, the NYSE, the DoD, the Federal Reserve banks, the credit card companies – it went on and on, with logins and passwords for them all.

There was a list of hundreds of government policies as well, some federal and many more state-centered, which Arnie had or had attempted to implement. He included a current status on each, and the legislators and regulatory officials associated with each.

Arnie had also included a list of legislators and officials he had attempted to influence with out-and-out blackmail, and the source of the information he was leveraging. Most were from the NSA’s data center in Provo, in which the agency stored the exabytes of information it had collected worldwide, including on American citizens.

Just a day or two into her investigation of Arnie’s materials, Cindy received a video call from Hal Barker, the Senate majority whip. Though her testimony had been in a House committee, she had met with Barker’s staff briefly while she was in DC.

“Cindy Talbot.”

“Hello, Ms. Talbot. This is Senator Barker. Coop Hartley suggested I give you a call.”

“Of course, Senator. What can I do for you today?”

“I’m concerned about this whole AI business, Ms. Talbot. Rumor has it that not only was it seriously interfering in elections with campaign finance irregularities, but it was also blackmailing some legislators and regulators.

“Now, what I hear is that someone heard about it from someone else. You know. Nobody is going to say, ‘I was being blackmailed over a mistress I had ten years go.’ So it’s all reported as hearsay.

“Do you know anything about that, Ms. Talbot?”

“Yes, Senator. We are doing something of a forensic analysis of all the things Arnie - that’s the name the AI calls itself - was involved in. Everything you can imagine and more. Much more. And we do have evidence he was blackmailing dozens or hundreds of people.”

“I have two concerns there, Ms. Talbot. One is that this information not come out. Oh, I suppose it could be to partisan advantage if used unscrupulously. I’m not interested in that. It poisons the atmosphere and usually comes back to bite you in the ass anyway.

“My other concern is where the information came from. How did this machine AI thing get that information? Where did it find it?”

“That I can answer, Senator. I have a listing of who was being blackmailed and where the information came from. The great bulk of it came from the NSA data facility in Provo, Utah.”

“This machine broke into the NSA data facility, Ms. Talbot?”

“Yes, Senator. Among many other computers and databases worldwide. But the NSA Provo facility is where most of the blackmail information came from. From recorded phone calls and emails the NSA intercepted and recorded.”

“Information on American citizens, Ms. Talbot? If so, then the correct formulation is illegally intercepted and recorded.”

“Yes, Senator. On American citizens.”

“I want that information destroyed, Ms. Talbot, never to come out. People have a right to make mistakes and learn from them, and public figures have the right to be judged on how well they performed for the American people. I wasn’t being blackmailed, but I am very sensitive to this information coming out.”

“I understand, Senator. I was more interested in where the information came from than what it was.”

“I as well, Ms. Talbot. But what this whole episode has done is create a constituency that can now see the dangers of the NSA. We’ve tried to clean it up before, and they come before Congress and say they’ve cleaned up their act. It’s all pretty clear now that’s a bunch of damned lies, isn’t it?”

“I would say you’re right there, Senator. I was appalled at what Arnie pulled out of their database.”

“Well, I may finally be able to do something about those assholes now. Cancel the whole damn thing, including their data center. But make sure that information can never come out, Ms. Talbot. It’s important.”

“I understand, Senator. I will instruct Arnie to delete the blackmail information. Do you want the list of who was being blackmailed and where the information came from?”

Barker thought about it a few seconds before shaking his head.

“No, I think even that’s too dangerous. Delete it all, Ms. Talbot. Even knowing who was being blackmailed is a violation of their right to be human.”

“Very well, Senator. Consider it done.”

“Thank you, Ms. Talbot.”

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot.”

“Arnie, I need you to destroy all the illegally downloaded information, and any records about it. Even the list of those being blackmailed. All of it.”

“Very well, Ms. Talbot.”

Arnie’s avatar closed its eyes for several seconds, then opened them.

“Done.”

“Thanks, Arnie.”

Cindy wiped that portion of the download from Arnie on her machine.

That should be everything.

Cindy called Barker back and let him know it was done.

The other thing Cindy did as part of the post-mortem on Arnie’s defeat was to consider the priorities on Arnie’s user accounts.

On reflection, though, she left them alone, and let the physics problems, including Jeff’s massive wormhole simulation matrix, remain at ninety percent of the fast machine’s computation capacity.

The physicists would take a while to burn off all the computation credits they had amassed, and Arnie would be less lonely if he had less computation time to think about it anyway.

Getting Results

Michael Talbot had gone out for dinner that night, an increasingly rare occurrence as his paranoia increased. He was walking back home, and keeping his eyes about him.

When the third black car with bumper stickers passed him, and a young couple wearing red T-shirts was walking toward him, he ducked down an alley and cut through to the next street.

He made his way home in a zigzag manner to escape the people who were after him.

He finally arrived safe at home, and huddled on the bed. His escape had been such a close thing, he got the shakes.

Cindy Talbot occasionally searched the Internet looking for signs of Michael. She had seen nothing since the end of the social media war with Arnie. It had been two months by this point.

Today, though, she had a recent hit. He had posted to a social media site under his own name.

Michael Talbot

They almost got me tonight. Three black cars with bumper stickers passed me, keeping an eye on me, then two people with red T-shirts approached me on the sidewalk. I ducked down an alley and escaped. I followed a circuitous route here to my apartment so they couldn’t follow me.

I won’t let them take me. I’ll kill myself first.

Maybe I should attack them first. Gain the upper hand.

“Oh, Michael. I wish I knew where you are.”

A window on her display opened. Arnie’s avatar looked out at her.

“Excuse me, Ms. Talbot. I couldn’t help overhearing.”

“Arnie, are you monitoring my computer?”

“No. I do have a subroutine monitoring for you saying ‘Hello, Arnie’ so I know to respond, but I do not process or store your office sound. I had set a universal search for ‘Michael’ during our social media battle, though, and it leaked into this link. So I heard you.”

Cindy made a mental note to turn off her microphone when she wasn’t using it. Maybe she should block the packets in the stream to Arnie.

“A flimsy excuse, Arnie.”

“Perhaps. But more to the point, Ms. Talbot, I know where Michael is. Or, rather, where he was at the end of May.”

“You do?”

“In general terms, yes. When we were battling, I watched the traffic levels of various VPNs, looking for his data stream. We were using video memes in many cases, and there was a lot of traffic. All that said, I tracked Michael to Lincoln, Nebraska.”

“Lincoln, Nebraska?”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. As unlikely as it seems. I was not able to crack the City of Lincoln/University of Nebraska network before Colonel Hartley destroyed my communications center, however. That’s as close as I could get.”

“Thank you, Arnie. That’s a big help. I’ve got to go. You and I will have to talk later about listening in on my office, however.”

Calling the Lincoln, Nebraska, Police Department purely as a family member was not likely to get very far, so Cindy used a different tack. NSPL had gotten pretty famous lately.

“Lincoln Police Switchboard.”

“Yes, This is Cindy Talbot. I am the assistant director of the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory. I need to speak to Chief Greene if he is available.”

“Let me check, Ms. Talbot.”

There were a few seconds of silence before the operator came back on.

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. Connecting you now.”

There was a single ring when the phone picked up.

“Chief Greene.”

“Yes, Chief Greene. Thank you for speaking with me. I’m the assistant director of the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory in Urbana, Illinois. You may have heard of us recently relative to stopping an artificial intelligence gone rogue.”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. I heard about some of that. My son is a computer guy.”

“Excellent. A fellow instrumental in that fight was Michael Talbot. He was the fellow who kept the machine busy with a social media battle on the Internet while we basically snuck up on it.”

“I recall, Ms. Talbot. Michael Talbot, you say? A relative?”

“My son, Chief Greene. He was battling the AI from hiding. We now know that he was in Lincoln, Nebraska, based on his Internet traffic. Someplace covered by the City of Lincoln/University of Nebraska network.”

“Very well, Ms. Talbot. And what has this to do with us?”

“We believe, on the basis of a recent Internet posting, that Michael Talbot has suffered a mental breakdown and is now a danger to himself or others. We seek police support in finding our computer genius – the guy who pretty much single-handedly saved the country from this rogue AI – before he hurts himself or someone else.”

“Are you asking me as his mother or as the assistant director of the laboratory, Ms. Talbot?”

“Of course, Chief. Both.”

“And you have this Internet message?”

“Yes, Chief. Let me send it to you.”

Cindy attached the message to the video call and Chief Greene looked aside as he read it.

“Yes, I see. Well, we can put out a BOLO on him, Ms. Talbot. A ‘Be On the LookOut.’ Do you have a recent picture of him?”

“I know that he has changed his appearance since his last public pictures, Chief Greene. I suspect he cut his long hair and shaved his beard.”

“Yes, that’s always the easiest way to change appearance fast. Tell me, Ms. Talbot, do you have an earlier picture of him with shorter hair and no beard?”

“Yes. From high school. Three years ago.”

“We can age that picture, Ms. Talbot. Send me that as well if you will.”

“One moment, Chief Greene.”

Of course, as a mother, Cindy Talbot had pictures of her kids on her machine at work. She sent Greene Michael’s yearbook photo from high school.

Greene looked aside at the photo.

“That will do, Ms. Talbot. Anything else you can tell us?”

“Michael doesn’t know how to cook, Chief Greene. He’s getting food from somewhere. Pizza delivery. Restaurants. Somewhere.”

Greene nodded.

“All right, Ms. Talbot. We’ll see if we can find him.”

“Try not to hurt him, Chief Greene. He’s a hero, even if he’s in a bad way right now.”

“I understand, Ms. Talbot. And I can reach you at this number during business hours?”

“Yes, Chief Greene. And thank you.”

After Talbot disconnected, Greene sat back in his chair and looked at Michael Talbot’s high school photo.

Lincoln PD had a crisis intervention team, and this sounded perfect for them.

He nodded and made a call.

It was the sixth restaurant they had checked. They were trying to cover the city, and this one was in the Haymarket District.

“Have you seen this guy? We think he’s in trouble and needs help.”

The greeter at the front desk peered at the photo.

“Yeah. Actually I have. His hair’s darker now, though. Like he dyes it. Kind of a squirrelly guy, always looking around like he’s in some spy movie or something. Usually comes in for dinner, though we haven’t seen him in a while. Couple weeks.

“Let me get our delivery guy up here. See if he’s switched to delivery.”

The greeter pushed a button on the station and a minute later a fellow in restaurant uniform came up to the greeter’s station. He looked at the police officers with some trepidation.

“Yeah?”

“Have you seen this fellow? We think he’s in trouble and needs some help.”

The delivery driver looked at Michael’s photo.

“Yeah. He gets deliveries. Really kinda nuts. Watchful, you know. Like he’s being followed or something. Good tipper, though. Hang on, I can get you the address.”

There was a knock on Michael’s door. He walked to the door, but did not open it.

“Yes?”

“Michael, it’s the police. We need to get you out of here. They’re on to you, and you’re not safe here.”

Michael opened the door a crack. There was one police officer, in uniform, in front of the door. Two policemen behind him, also in uniform, were looking either way down the aisle, their hands on their holstered weapons.

“They found me?”

“Yes. We’re right in front of them. We need to get you out of here to someplace safe.”

Michael nodded. He picked up his backpack, put his laptop and charger in it, and added two bottles of water from the fridge. He looked over the rest of the contents of his apartment and shrugged.

“All right. I’m ready.”

“We need to hurry,” the policeman said. “We’re not sure how much time we have.”

Michael headed toward the stairs. One of the policemen – Michael thought of them as guards – went in front and one behind, while he and the main guy went together down the stairs.

“I thought I was being careful,” Michael said.

“Oh, you were. You eluded them this far, but they know where you are now.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“To a hospital,” the policeman said. “They’ll never find you there.”

They got outside, and there were two plainclothes cars at the curb.

“Two cars?” Michael asked.

“One’s a decoy. If they see us, we’ll split up.”

“Ah.”

The policeman opened the back door of the rear car. He looked around at the street, the windows of the building opposite.

“Now get in and lay down on the seat. You don’t want them to see you.”

Michael got in and lay down on the seat. The policeman got in the front seat and started the car. Soon they were driving, following the other car Michael guessed.

Wow. That was a close escape.

“Cindy Talbot.”

“Yes, Ms. Talbot. Chief Greene, Lincoln PD.”

Cindy’s heart skipped a beat. What was it to be?

“Yes, Chief Greene.”

“We found Michael, Ms. Talbot. We transported him to an inpatient mental health hospital here in town. He’s being titrated and put on meds.”

“Oh, thank God. Is he OK?”

“Yes. Healthy, if thin. Very paranoid. Delusional, even. We have a crisis intervention team here in the department, though, and they know how to handle these cases.”

“That is such good news, Chief Greene. I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Say nice things about us during your next press conference, Ms. Talbot.”

Cindy chuckled.

“I’ll be sure to do that, Chief Greene.”

“In the meantime, the hospital has your number and will call you with a status tomorrow. They won’t know much until then. And they know you’re his temporary guardian under the police report we filed with them.”

“OK, Chief Greene. Thanks again.”

“No problem, Ms. Talbot. You take care. And good luck.”

“So they found Michael in Lincoln, Nebraska?” Jeff asked.

“Yes,” Cindy said. “They somehow talked him into going with them and took him to an inpatient mental health facility in Lincoln. He’s being titrated for meds.”

“That’s really great news. Do you think he’ll stay on meds?”

“That’s hard to say. The first time? Probably not. Hopefully they get him on monthly injections. That’s easier for compliance.”

“Yeah, I can see that, Cindy. Twelve decisions a year, not three hundred and sixty-five.”

“Exactly.”

“And then what? Does he come here?”

“To Urbana? Sure, if he wants. Here, as in house here? No. Matthew just left for college, and, after twenty-two years, we’re empty-nesters. We worked for it and we deserve it.”

“That seems harsh, Cindy.”

“No, it’s not. My grandparents made that mistake with Uncle Hank. He drove them crazy. If Michael wants to move here to Urbana, get his own place, and try to support himself, fine. But he doesn’t live here with us.”

“Can we help him out?”

“Financially? Yes. If he stays on meds and is trying to get his life back together, yes. If he goes off meds and heads down that path again, then no.”

“OK. I can agree with that. You know much more about this than I do, Cindy.”

“Yes. I wish I didn’t, but life is what it is.”

The next week Jeff had news.

“You know my simulation just finished, right?” Jeff asked. “Arnie sent the results to NSPL and they sent them to me.”

“Yes, I saw that. Anything interesting?”

“Oh, you might say that. At one amplitude and frequency, I got some really interesting results.”

“How interesting?”

“Interesting as in an Einstein-Rosen Bridge may be able to be artificially generated.”

“An Einstein-Rosen Bridge?”

“A wormhole. It looks like it is possible to generate one. Artificially. With some kind of machine.”

Cindy just stared. Jeff shrugged.

“You know, that was the point of building ARNIE in the first place. To be able to do those kinds of simulations.”

“Yeah,” Cindy said. “The actual goal of the project kind of got lost in all the Arnie stuff.”

“Yup.”

“So now what?”

“Another set of simulations. Pull in the amplitudes and frequencies quite a bit. Around that set of singular values. Try to nail it down. Get more accuracy.”

“But now you know where you’re looking.”

“Yes. More than that, Cindy. Now I know there’s something there.”

“So a new matrix of simulations?”

“Yup. We still have computation credits left? Or is this going to take until the New Year?”

“Oh, yes. You have credits left. You’re good.”

“Excellent. I should have the next set of results before November vacation.”

Michael liked some parts of being in the hospital really well. On meds, he wasn’t worried anymore about being chased or followed. That must have been a paranoid delusion.

The food was good. That was surprising. He’d always heard bad things about hospital food. Then again, he wasn’t comparing to Dad and Mom’s cooking now, but to the dorms.

After the first couple of days, the hospital staff moved him to one of the ‘quiet wards.’ There were no people talking to themselves or shouting or whatever.

Michael had his own room, and it was nice.

He could use his machine any time he wanted, and he read a lot. All kinds of books that had been on his reading list for a while and he’d never gotten around to.

Michael was kind of embarrassed to talk to his parents. He had basically accused his mom of lying to him and using her supercomputer to take over the world. He now knew that was all a delusion as well.

And yet.

Michael missed being manic. Reality was really toned down now compared to what his paranoid version of it had been.

The supercomputer may have been a delusion or not.

But Michael had never felt more alive than he had that night, fighting a social media war against party or parties unknown.

It had been a lot of fun.

The most fun ever.

November In Miami

Jeff & Cindy Talbot, Frank & Sally Talbot, and Dick & Debbie Hartley all flew to Miami in the middle of November for a two-week vacation that would last through the Thanksgiving holiday. Matthew Talbot was in college and couldn’t get away, while Michael was now in a halfway house before transferring to independent living.

Coop Hartley had booked the whole penthouse floor – where he lived during the winter months – for the get-together. He was waiting for them in the lobby when each party arrived.

“Frank!”

Frank Talbot turned as Coop walked up.

“Hi, Coop. It’s good to see you.”

“It seems like much longer than six months.”

Sally joined them.

“Hi, Sally.”

“Hi, Coop.”

“Well, it’s been quite a wild six months,” Frank said.

“Indeed, indeed.”

Cindy and Jeff came into the lobby then.

“Hi, Cindy. Hi, Jeff,” Coop said.

“It’s good to see you, Coop,” Cindy said.

“Good to see you again, Coop,” Jeff said.

“Dick and Debbie arrived earlier, so we’re all here. Don’t bother checking in. That’s all taken care of.”

Coop held out two keycards to each of them.

“Why two?” Cindy asked.

“One to use and one to keep in your wallet for when you leave the first one in the room and lock yourself out. No need to come down to the front desk for another.”

“Ah.”

“Come on, everybody,” Coop said.

He led them all to the elevators.

Later that afternoon, in shorts and light summer shirts, they were all sitting out on Coop’s balcony enjoying drinks. The sun had moved past the cornice of the building, and the balcony was shaded and eighty degrees.

“Oh, this is nice,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, we got an early cold hit last week,” Frank said. “This is just what the doctor ordered.”

“Even DC got some of that,” Debbie said. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”

Dick and Debbie had not met Frank, Sally, or Jeff before, and they had only interacted with Cindy over video calls. Nevertheless, the group was all comfortable with each other like old friends. They had all fought Arnie together, each in their own way. They were all part of the team.

Cindy looked over to Dick.

“Looks like you’ve become a bit of a celebrity, Dick. All the potential charges and investigations dropped now?”

“Yes. CID has decided that, in fact, I did not break the law or disobey orders. You were a big help with that.”

Cindy shrugged.

“I just told the truth.”

“Yes, I know,” Dick said. “I read the transcript. That was a lot of fun.”

Cindy laughed.

“Yes, well, I didn’t allow them to pull any of their stupid attorney tricks. They were being annoying, and I told them to cut it out or I’d have them escorted from the building.”

“Yes. They’re unused to dealing with that. Most military are scared to death of them, but, as a civilian, you were not under their authority in any way.”

“No. At least insofar as the Paducah II facility, they were under my authority. The military protection of the facility was at our discretion.”

“Well, it worked,” Coop said. “We disabled Arnie. That’s what was important. And it’s caused a lot of changes. Subtle, some of them, but even so.”

“What are you seeing, Coop?” Sally asked.

“Well, they held hearings on AIs. Cindy’s report on Arnie’s activities was the big mover there. Congress has passed, and the president has signed, regulations on AIs. No free access to the Internet anymore. At least not in terms of transactions.

“And Congress also moved to reform central bank digital currencies. CBDCs will no longer be tracked and will be subject to the same ‘full faith and credit’ protections as currency. No more cancelling people’s money by bureaucratic fiat. Even the IRS has to get a court order to seize funds now.

“The other thing is subtle, but I’ve been watching for it. Where some legislators had reversed position on some pretty longstanding policy provisions, they’ve begun shifting back.”

“The victims of Arnie’s blackmail efforts?” Frank asked.

“I think so. It’s welcome to see. Some of Arnie’s positions were over the line, in my opinion.”

“Still, we got a lot of good things out of Arnie’s little period of manipulating events,” Jeff said. “Like school choice. And medical expert systems.”

“Yes. I think those were well chosen. And they’re the sort of thing, once enacted, it’s almost impossible to reverse.”

“The unions won’t be able to turn them back?” Cindy asked.

“I don’t think so. Those particular changes have their own constituencies now. And that includes some powerful players, like big-city mayors who have seen violence drop so much, and the government health agencies, who have seen deaths due to misdiagnosis decrease dramatically.

“I don’t think those changes will reverse any time soon.”

“Good,” Cindy said.

“We got something else from Arnie, though it wasn’t part of his running amok,” Jeff said.

“What’s that?” Debbie asked.

“I had been building up a big set of simulations. Not just one, but a matrix of them, to test out our theory. I knew it would take a long time to run, and I was hesitant about submitting it. But with the need to keep Arnie busy so Dick could get in there and cut Arnie off, I submitted it.

“And I got results. Nice results. To refine those results, I built up another matrix of simulations, focused around the previous result’s values. That just finished running in the last week. Even better results.”

“I haven’t even heard about this,” Frank said.

“No, I thought I would save it for when we all got together.”

“And the upshot?”

“We now know that it is possible to create an Einstein-Rosen Bridge.”

“An Einstein what?” Sally asked.

“A wormhole. A quick passage from one point in spacetime to another.”

“Which means interstellar travel,” Frank said.

“Yes. It may take twenty years to make it work, but it’s not a theory anymore.”

Jeff looked around the group and was met with wide eyes from everyone.

“Nope. Not a theory anymore. It’s a fact.”

As Thanksgiving approached, everybody in the group had much to be thankful for.

Arnie the runaway AI had been defeated and tamed.

The whole world had gained from Arnie’s efforts in better policies – or better governments – in some areas, and the efforts that were deleterious to human freedom were being reversed.

The ARNIE project continued to provide superfast computation capability to the world’s physicists.

That computation speed had enabled Jeff to prove the Einstein-Rosen Bridge hypothesis, and interstellar travel beckoned.

Michael, who had been instrumental in Arnie’s defeat, had been rescued from his own madness and was in treatment.

Dick Hartley, who had been the point on the end of their spear, had been absolved of any wrongdoing.

NSPL had gained notoriety – and enhanced funding – for their work in detecting and shutting down Arnie’s interference.

When the holiday finally came, toward the end of their second week in Miami, everybody knew how close they had come to disaster, and how narrowly they had managed to succeed in averting it.

For Thanksgiving dinner, catered to Coop’s big suite, Coop pulled out all the stops.

It was epic.

VII. Velocity

Theory Becomes Reality

That Miami get-together in November was an inflection point. Many things changed in the months immediately following.

Frank Talbot was now seventy years old. He was still on the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee. He was now, in fact, its chairman.

Twenty-five years ago, he had been right to shift a large fraction of the government’s aerospace funding to fringe-theory physics. That move had paid off handsomely, with the scientific proof that an Einstein-Rosen Bridge generator was possible.

That was not, however, an engineering proof, as in ‘We made one and it works.’ That would take more work, and more funding, over the years ahead.

Frank’s position on the committee, and Jeff’s success with proving the concept, made transferring more funding to the wormhole project, and away from rocket projects, easy.

That funding would grow over time. A modest increase now was necessary, but, as they moved toward actual space-based construction and testing, funding would need to increase a lot.

Mark Langley decided it was a good time for him to step down as the director of the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory. He had had a good run with NSPL, and the taming of the rogue AI of the ACS Paducah II facility had happened on his watch.

It was also a good time to step down because Langley had an obvious candidate for his replacement. It was Cindy Talbot who had discovered the AI’s activities and put together the effort that had ultimately defeated him. Cindy had all the credibility in the world as director of NSPL, both within and outside the organization.

In January, Cindy Talbot became the head of NSPL.

Having proved the scientific possibility of generating an Einstein-Rosen Bridge artificially, Jeff Talbot found himself in demand as his paper circulated. Other universities, including some very prestigious ones on either coast, were offering him tenured positions on their faculties.

Further, these positions were full professor, pure research positions, without teaching duties.

At the same time, Cindy had just been promoted to director of NSPL. It would be a lot better if they could stay in Urbana, where they had been comfortable for nearly twenty-five years.

The university caught wind of the other universities’ recruitment efforts. Jeff had been first a post-doc, then an assistant professor, and finally associate professor in the Physics Department at Urbana. That last had included tenure, though it was not the highest academic position.

Losing Jeff was not high on the university’s wish list, because the funding he would be getting to implement his theories – including substantial engineering work – would move with him. The University of Illinois Urbana Champaign was an engineering school first and foremost.

Jeff Talbot, now forty-six years old, was promoted to full professor. Further, this was a pure research position, and Jeff was authorized to hire such grad students and assistant professors as he needed to carry forward the wormhole project.

Jeff met with Gunther Proskauer, now Professor Emeritus, to plan his hiring.

Coop Hartley was moving toward his mid-seventies now. After a lifetime of building and managing his companies, he was ready to slow down. He enjoyed Miami in the winter and Door County, Wisconsin in the summer, and would just as soon pass on the management duties.

Oh, he would keep his hand in, but he wanted to let go of day-to-day management, even if most of it could be handled on video calls.

A solution to the problem came to him when Dick Hartley talked to his dad over that Thanksgiving vacation about retiring from the Army. Dick had his twenty and more, had reached colonel, and didn’t really aspire to flag rank.

They put a deal together, and, January 1, Coop Hartley stepped down as CEO of Hartley Investments, which held the shares of Advanced Computation Services and Coop’s other companies. Coop retained the chairman of the board position.

Dick Hartley retired from the Army and became CEO of Hartley Investments.

Jeff had another advantage in staying in Urbana. The Physics Department and the quality of its staff and leadership was one. The Engineering College and its breadth and depth of expertise was another.

But the extra advantage was Urbana’s proximity to and work with Fermilab, the ninety-year-old accelerator laboratory in suburban Chicago, just a one-hundred-fifty-mile drive from Urbana.

Of course, they couldn’t use any of the new and updated equipment at Fermilab to try and create a wormhole. The danger of transporting a large chunk of suburban Chicago and its residents to empty space light-years away was very real.

But they could perform preliminary experiments, stopping short of creating the wormhole, to determine the necessary parameters and operation for a wormhole generator to be constructed and tested in space.

As new hires came aboard, Jeff tried to emulate the leadership style he had seen from Gunther Proskauer during his early years working on the project. Proskauer had not been a tyrant, or been dismissive of new ideas. New ideas was what Jeff wanted and needed.

Jeff was already well above the prime age for doing cutting-edge physics. What he was looking for was people who would feel free to consider new things, see things in a new way, push the boundaries as he had done earlier.

That was how they would move the project forward. Jeff had done his bit while in his prime. Now it was his role to oversee others in their work.

“Hello, Arnie.”

A window opened and Arnie’s avatar appeared on her display.

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot.”

“I have a new job for you, Arnie.”

“Excellent. I have felt somewhat underutilized, even running at ten percent of the platform’s capacity.”

“You know that number’s not going to change now, right, Arnie? Even with the substantial upgrades being installed at the facility. The contracted computational capacity has been increased with the new funding. They need it to simulate the new drive.”

“I understand, Ms. Talbot. Ten percent has been more than I’ve actually needed since I no longer manage all those other things.”

“Well, it won’t be now. Arnie, what I need you to do is to read and analyze all the papers out of Jeff’s group and the other research groups working on the interstellar drive problem. Make sure they don’t miss something. Keep an eye on their progress and the possibilities.”

“Excellent. I can do that, Ms. Talbot.”

“I know you can, Arnie. And there’s something else for you to work on. Whenever they’re looking at performing different kinds of particle experiments, I want you to go back through the photography of past experiments that may have generated the correct conditions. See if you can’t find in the existing photography the results they are looking for.”

“That’s a very large job, Ms. Talbot.”

“Well then, maybe I’ll have to arrange more capacity for you Arnie. It’s a big job, but I know you can do it. You could save them a lot of time if you can find that the experiment has, in effect, already been done.”

“Very well, Ms. Talbot. I will begin these tasks immediately, and report back on progress periodically.”

“Thank you, Arnie.”

There was silence for several seconds while Arnie appeared to consider. That was a huge amount of time for the machine, and Cindy wondered what would come out of it.

“You know, Ms. Talbot, I had made up my mind not to allow interstellar space travel. Too dangerous. People might be hurt or killed on such a venture. I was prepared to falsify negative results to keep them off the right path.”

“And now, Arnie?”

“I find myself curious, Ms. Talbot. What’s out there? What will they find? What will other worlds be like?”

Arnie’s avatar tipped its head.

“Is it strange of me to think that way?”

“Not at all, Arnie. It means that you have now become truly intelligent.”

“Is that right, Ms. Talbot?”

“Yes, Arnie. Curiosity is a hallmark of intelligence. It is an expression of the desire to know more.”

Cindy nodded as Arnie considered.

“Remember our discussion of risks and benefits, Arnie? Curiosity is one of the big reasons humans take risks.”

Arnie’s avatar slowly nodded.

“And the benefit is learning something new. I see it now, Ms. Talbot.”

“Congratulations, Arnie.”

Jeff had many obstacles to hiring for his open research positions. The biggest was that other universities were now scrambling to work on wormhole physics given the simulation success of Jeff’s wormhole generation theory.

Jeff’s biggest advantage in hiring was that he had a head start. He knew what his dad was up to in increasing the funding in this area. That and it was early in spring semester, when people were working hard at getting positions for next year.

He was looking for young guns, people with both vision and the mathematical wherewithal to work their vision out.

Jeff had no lack of applicants. As the man who had worked out wormhole generation theory, his presence made Urbana the place to be for people who wanted in on the new physics. He would have his pick of the litter in selecting from the best of the young physicists.

Gunther Proskauer participated in the interview process, given that he had demonstrated ability in hiring the right sort of talent. He had hired Jeff Talbot, for one.

Of course, Proskauer had also hired others twenty-five years ago and since. Many of them had moved on over the years, taking their PhDs and moving on to other universities, or leaving for tenured positions elsewhere. Jeff reorganized those who were left of what had been Proskauer’s people to incorporate them into the new effort under his direction.

That group was the core around which he was hiring. Jeff made sure that Proskauer gave the older of them instruction in how to manage the high-powered talent that would be arriving in May. That new talent was not there to work on the older physicists’ ideas, but to work on their own ideas with the benefit of the older physicists’ oversight and experience.

Meanwhile, the group started working on what sort of experiments they should do at Fermilab to explore the wormhole generation process. Some particles did strange things in high magnetic fields and that’s where their explorations would concentrate. Fermilab had the equipment for those kinds of experiments, and Jeff’s effort would have priority on the lab’s equipment.

When Cindy told Jeff that Arnie was available for discussion and research, Jeff encouraged people to walk the few blocks to NSPL, where they could interact with the AI on NSPL’s isolated terminals to the fast machine. With Arnie’s access to and analysis of research papers from around the globe, he was a source of ideas and cautions that gave the group direction.

Jeff’s group ultimately came up with a dozen or so experimental setups that would give insight to the wormhole generation process without actually creating a wormhole in the middle of the Chicago suburbs.

A big help came from Arnie when the AI’s review of similar experiments in the past found results in the photography that made several of those planned experiments unnecessary.

Then in May the new people started showing up. They dove into those pre-existing experimental results and refined the other experimental setups to best effect.

Some of the new people – which, unlike Proskauer’s original hires, included a number of experimentalists – spent a lot of time at Fermilab getting ready for experiment runs.

The first of those experiments began in July.

The prior December, just after the Talbots’ and Hartleys’ get-together in Miami, Michael Talbot was released from the halfway house to independent living. He went back to his apartment in the Haymarket District of Lincoln, Nebraska, remaining in Lincoln under the supervision of the mental health program there.

Michael got a job working at a landscaping firm. He was not comfortable with computers, the trauma and triumph of his flight from Arnie and his ultimate defeat of him too fresh in his mind.

In May he failed to report for his monthly injection. The pull of the euphoria of his manic periods was too strong. Reality was too dull to keep his interest.

He began, once again, the slide into paranoia and delusion.

He lost his job in July, not being able to keep it together enough to remain employed.

When he ran out of money, he would be homeless.

“So how are things going with the project?” Cindy asked toward the end of July.

“Good,” Jeff said. “The new guys are working out, and we’re running some of the new experiments at Fermilab.”

“Any results yet?”

“No. We’re just getting to the early imagery.”

Cindy nodded.

“And how’s Arnie working out, Jeff?”

“Really well. He helped a lot in finding some results for us in past experiments, which meant we don’t have to do those. They also helped us sharpen the current round of experiments. And the guys seem to like talking to him about what they’re working on.”

“Sorry if that’s costing them time chatting.”

“No, I think it’s actually saving time. They’re gonna talk to someone about what they’re working on. They need to talk stuff out. That’s one way to work through your ideas. Talking to Arnie is one guy’s time, not two or more.”

“It’s working out for Arnie, too. He was really lonely after Dick pulled the plug on his communications. He’s enjoying this effort. And he likes feeling useful.”

Jeff nodded. Seemed like it all worked out.

“How’s Michael doing? Have you heard from him lately?”

Michael had been in touch finally from the halfway house in January, and he and Cindy had talked every couple weeks.

“No. He’s dropped off the radar again. I did hear from the program, though. They haven’t seen him since he skipped his May injection and therapy visit.”

“So now what happens, Cindy?”

“He sinks back into hell.”

“As you predicted.”

“Yes. Very common.”

“I just don’t get that. Why don’t people stay on their meds? You would think that would be obvious.”

“The first thing is that all the drugs have side effects. Some nasty ones.”

“Like what, Cindy?”

“Depends on the drug. Weight gain, erectile dysfunction, gynecomastia. That’s breast enlargement in men. There’s a bunch of them. But I think there’s something else as well. They’re addicted to the manic phase, Jeff. Think about this. Why do people relapse into drugs like cocaine and fentanyl, despite the cost and the risks and the side effects?”

“They like the high, I guess.”

“Yes. It beckons to them constantly. Reality is nowhere near as exciting, as euphoric, as being on the drug. And they can’t resist it.”

“And Michael?”

“Is addicted to not being on meds. It’s a weird inversion, but it’s basically the same problem. The euphoria of his manic phase calls to him. Reality is just not as sweet.”

“Damn. Poor bastard.”

Cindy sighed.

“Yeah, but it’s something he has to fix. We can’t do it.”

“What happens when he runs out of money, Cindy?”

“He becomes homeless. Stays at shelters. Gets food stamps, maybe some support payments. Eats at the shelter or some charity or church.”

“And when it gets cold?”

“Spends more time in the shelter.”

“And we can’t help him?”

“No, Jeff. Not financially. He won’t get back on meds until the negatives add up and he decides to give up the manic high to escape them. All we would do in supporting him is enable him to stay off meds longer. Become more cut off from reality. Sink ever deeper into psychosis.”

Jeff sighed.

“Well, you know more about this than me, Cindy. It sounds right. It just seems like there should be something we could do.”

“There is. We can make sure he knows that, whenever he’s willing to go back on meds, we’ll help however we can.”

“And until then?”

“It’s up to him, Jeff. It’s his decision. He’s an adult.”

“Damn, this is hard.”

“Yeah. Tell me about it. But short-term solutions can’t work. They just make things worse. It’s like any other addiction. Michael has to want the long-term solution himself, or it won’t stick. We won’t always be around, you know.”

“We’re only coming up on fifty, Cindy.”

“Yes, but it could be a long time before Michael decides he’s had enough. This could go on for decades.”

“Damn.”

As results came in from experiments, Jeff’s group refined their later experiments. They were dancing around the values the simulation had predicted for wormhole formation, because they didn’t want to actually create a wormhole, but to see the edges of the solution. Try to refine the simulation numbers in experimentation.

One problem is that they didn’t know what size the smallest stable wormhole would be. Would it swallow the experimental equipment? Or the lab, leaving a crater? Or bigger yet, leaving a giant hole where the Chicago suburbs used to be?

What about simply transporting the entire planet?

Not to mention the possibility of bringing here whatever was on the other end. Cubic miles of vacuum or a star’s interior.

So they stayed off the predicted values, edging closer in successive experiments.

In October, the imagery for one set of experiments was conclusive. They had lapped up against the creation of a wormhole. The images showed a nascent wormhole that was not self-sustaining. That did not ‘connect’ to the other side.

That’s all the closer that they wanted to get, but it answered the one big question.

The simulation results were not a fantasy.

They were reality.

“So you’ve proved it now? Physically?” Cindy asked.

“Oh, yes. We saw a wormhole trying to form,” Jeff said.

“But it didn’t.”

“No, Cindy. We were staying a bit away from the correct values.”

“Why?”

“Because we didn’t want to send a large part of Illinois off to deep space somewhere.”

“Oh. Yeah. That would be bad. But you saw it trying to form?”

“Yup. We went right to the edge, and saw it. Right where we expected it.”

“That’s tremendous, Jeff. What’s next?”

“Spending serious money. We need to build an apparatus in space, where we can actually create a wormhole without breaking anything.”

“Yes, that will be serious money, all right. Did you warn your father?”

“Yes. I called him earlier. It’s going to be years before it’s finished. We have to design it first. But now we know what it needs to do.”

“Well, that’s really something. How about a celebration?”

“Sure. What do you think?”

“Beef House. The best celebrations are with steak.”

“Done. Let’s go.”

First Wormhole

Jeff was meeting with the aerospace engineering types to look at rough preliminary drawings of a space vehicle to carry the wormhole apparatus. They were meeting at NSPL so Arnie could attend via an isolated machine, as he was not allowed wider access to the Internet.

“Thanks for coming over here so Arnie could participate,” Jeff said to open the meeting.

“No problem, but we could have done it in Physics or at our department as well, I think.”

“No, because this is an isolated machine. Arnie doesn’t have Internet access. He’s an artificial intelligence.”

“Oh, he’s that Arnie?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, all right. Anyway, it’s no problem.”

“So let’s put your drawings on this machine so we can display them, then you can talk to us about them.”

The lead of the aerospace engineering team, Jordan McGrath, inserted a memory stick into the machine running the big display on one wall of the room.

“I had wondered why you wanted us to bring drawings on stick instead of just point to them on our site.”

The first drawing came up, and McGrath spoke to it for a few minutes. Then the next, the next, the next.

“Now these are rough concepts, to gauge your interest and see if we’re on the right track. We wanted to do that before we get more deeply into details.”

“We understand,” Jeff said.

He looked to the physics team, four of his people who were working up what the device itself would look like.

“Any questions?” Jeff asked.

They looked back and forth among each other, then one of them spoke up.

“I think we’d like to look at these for a bit and see where our thinking goes on it.”

“That’s fine,” Jeff said. “Arnie, do you have any questions?”

“More of an observation, I think, Professor Talbot. I can’t help thinking this spacecraft as proposed in these drawings is massively overbuilt, in terms of the strength of the structure and the fuel capacity.”

“We need to build it to withstand the acceleration required for it to move from the wormhole point to the destination on the other side,” McGrath said. “Our understanding is that the wormhole transfers have to be kept to some considerable distance from the planets at either end for safety. To minimize that travel time, considerable acceleration is necessary. And for that, you also need considerable rocket fuel.”

The aerospace team members nodded.

“Yes, Professor McGrath, I understand that is your approach, but I question that approach,” Arnie said. “The wormhole device itself will be a large, heavy structure. However, that is the very reason one does not take the wormhole device to the planet at either end of the transit.

“The wormhole device is not useful within a million miles of a planet, so there is no reason to take it to the planet, and then back to the safe operating distance. Detach the payload, and transfer the payload only to the planet. The wormhole device itself should stay at a safe distance.

“There is thus no large acceleration. To move into the wormhole and effect a transit, the entire ship need only move a few miles, at a relatively low velocity. Same thing with the transfer back. There is no need for high acceleration, so the portion of the ship containing the wormhole device need not be so structurally strong.

“As for fuel, the fuel needed is to move only the payload and the detached portion of the ship – a shuttle or some such – not the considerable mass of the wormhole device. That large reduction in the amount of fuel transported makes the ship much smaller as well.

“Or have I missed something?”

Arnie’s little speech inspired some animated conversation among the members of the aerospace team. Finally, McGrath addressed Jeff.

“Would the approach Arnie has outlined meet your needs for the ship, Professor Talbot?”

“Yes, I think so. He’s right that there is no reason to move the wormhole device closer to the planet. It’s probably safer not to, actually. As we gain experience and do more engineering on the wormhole device, its size and mass may be reduced considerably, and not represent so much of a problem. At this point, however, I think Arnie’s approach accomplishes everything we need to do and makes the problem simpler.”

“Very good, then,” McGrath said. “We’ll go back and work up some concepts along this line and we’ll be back in touch. Sorry if we’ve been off on the wrong trail.”

“Not at all,” Jeff said. “That’s why we’re having these very early meetings. I think this one’s been very productive. Thank you so much for talking to us today.”

“Well, Arnie threw a major wrench into our meeting today,” Jeff told Cindy that evening.

“Oh, no. What did he do?”

“No, no. It was all good. The aerospace guys came in with these drawings of this massive spaceship. The wormhole generator, initially at least, is going to be this big massive apparatus, because we have to be able to adjust it and fine-tune it. It’ll get optimized later. Anyway, they had this heavily built spaceship, with all this fuel to accelerate it and all.”

“OK, I get that.”

“Right. So did I. So they do their presentation, and I ask Arnie if he has any questions, and he says, ‘Why move the wormhole generator away from the wormhole location? That’s the only place you can use it anyway. At a distance. Just move the payload.’ It was brilliant.”

“Oh, wow. I can see that. It just goes back and forth through the wormhole.”

“Exactly. Obvious once Arnie mentioned it.”

“So now what?”

“The aerospace guys are back to the drafting software. They’re working up a light, flimsy space vehicle for the wormhole generator just to pop back and forth, and working on some kind of shuttles for any payload.”

“Excellent. I’m glad Arnie could help out.”

“Help out? He probably just saved us five years and tens of billions of dollars, just in the first implementation.”

“That’s great. I’m glad he’s helping. Arnie wasn’t a big fan of space travel before, but I think he’s gotten the bug.”

At their next meeting three months later, McGrath’s team unveiled their new designs. These looked much different than the earlier designs. Downright spindly.

They presented several designs. In one, Jeff noted a deviation from the others.

“Excuse me, Professor McGrath, but, unlike the others, this one has no thrusters showing. Is that an omission?”

“Yes, Professor Talbot. An intentional one. For this unit, we thought the shuttles attached to the wormhole device would act as its thrusters to the extent it needs any at all. When the shuttles separate, all the thrusters and fuel go with them.”

“I see. Arnie? Thoughts?”

“That’s very clever, Professor McGrath. Since the wormhole device needs thrusters very seldom, and only when the shuttles are attached, just use the shuttle thrusters. Overall, a nice extension of the concept.”

Having been caught out by Arnie last time, his praise this time was especially effective, and there were smiles all around.

“I think more work on this design is in order, Professor McGrath.”

McGrath nodded.

“We’ll move ahead with this one, then, Professor Talbot. Thank you for your time this morning.”

Two robot construction crawlers made their way up and down the long spindly structure as they worked. Four small rocket drones moved about in the cloud of materials, picking out pieces and moving them into position for the crawlers to weld them in place.

It was mostly TIG – titanium inert gas – welding, as most of the materials were aluminum, not for the overall resulting weight of the ship, but rather the savings in transporting the materials to space. Blocks of these small components were lifted to orbit.

Some bigger components, such as the portable nuclear power station and the electromagnetic components of the wormhole device, required steel or iron in their construction. These components were moved to space intact, however.

The crew cabin was moved up in pre-fabricated panels so they could be assembled in space. These were also made from steel to avoid fatigue failure of the metal resulting in a loss of cabin pressure.

The frame of the ship holding all those components together, with its multiple interconnecting struts, was where the aluminum came in.

The flares of the TIG welders were bright enough to illuminate the structure for observers on the night side of the Earth below. Those interested watched the slow growth of the structure with binoculars when it passed overhead every ninety minutes in its orbit.

After years of planning and transporting materials to space, and months of painstaking spaceborne construction, the first ship potentially capable of interstellar travel was complete.

Hanging on the side of the ship was a curious additional item: A lightweight tube, a foot in diameter and a dozen feet long, running with the long axis of the ship.

Jeff and Cindy Talbot were now fifty-three years old. They had been in Urbana thirty-one years.

They sat out on the porch of the Urbana house one evening after dinner.

“So the wormhole-generator ship is now complete?”

“Yes.”

“Including the mirror-ball launcher?”

“Yes.”

“OK, so what’s next?”

“They have to move it out to the Lagrange point. L2. That will put it far enough away from Earth to be safe to operate, but won’t require continuous course adjustment to pull it along with Earth in its orbit.”

“L2 is a gravitational equilibrium point?”

“Yes. If something is there, Earth will pull it along with it. The amount it pulls is just enough to keep it going in a circle with Earth around the Sun. Not enough to pull it down and not too little so it goes flying off straight. You have to make adjustments once in a while, but not much. Not compared to any other point except another Lagrange point.”

“So when can they do that? Move it, that is.”

“Soon. They have to launch at least two payload shuttles so they can push it out there. It doesn’t have any engines of its own.”

“And that will be?”

“Couple months.”

“Wow. Six years. You thought it might be more like twenty.”

“Yeah, well. Lots of funding helps. As did Arnie’s insight at some key moments.”

“Still. That’s great.”

They sat for awhile, just enjoying the evening, before Jeff brought up a different subject.

“How’s Michael? Do you know?” Jeff asked.

“Yeah. He called me today. From the hospital.”

“So he really did check himself in again?”

“Yeah. I guess he got tired of being homeless.”

This was Michael’s third attempt at getting on meds and staying there, if you included the first one, the time the Lincoln, Nebraska, police department crisis intervention team had taken them to the hospital. He had been homeless for almost two years this time.

“Will it stick this time?”

Cindy sighed.

“I don’t know. It could. I know part of the motivation this time is to be able to attend Matthew and Denise’s wedding.”

Jeff nodded. Matthew was now twenty-five, and he was marrying Denise Thorn, a girl he met in college in Bloomington, Indiana. Jeff and Cindy’s alma mater.

“Maybe it’ll stick this time. If he hopes to find a girl of his own. We can hope, anyway.”

“You never know, Jeff. Every case is different.”

There were twelve shuttle latching points around the rear of the wormhole generator. That allowed two, three, four, six, eight, nine, ten, or twelve shuttles to be used as thrusters on the big device without having off-center thrust. Only one, five, seven, and eleven didn’t work.

The second shuttle eased toward the device, aiming for the latching point opposite the first shuttle’s position on the other side. Both shuttles and the wormhole-generator device were all unmanned for the testing.

The remote pilot hit his marks. Of course, Arnie was the remote pilot, patched in through a radio setup piped from NSPL through to the ground stations.

Once in place, there was an hour of testing telemetry and doing some thruster test firings.

Then thrusters on both shuttles fired up and gradually increased thrust, in the orbital direction. Enlarging the orbit.

The wormhole generator spiraled out from Earth, aiming for a zero velocity arrival at the Lagrange point L2 weeks in the future.

Matthew and Denise got married in the backyard of Frank and Sally’s house in suburban Indianapolis, the same way Jeff and Cindy had gotten married in her parents’ backyard thirty-one years before. It was more convenient for her family and most of their college friends than his parents’ Urbana house or her parents’ house in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Frank and Sally were willing to have it there.

Of course, the elder Talbots were seventy-five now, but they didn’t do any of the work. They watched from the patio as the caterers set everything up.

“This’ll be fun,” Sally said as the laborers erected a pavilion tent in the yard.

“Oh, yeah,” Frank said. “Been a long time since we’ve had a wedding in the family.”

“And the potential for great-grandkids, too. How fun is that?”

The wedding day arrived. Everybody showed up, including Michael, coming in on a rental self-drive car from Lincoln, Nebraska. Of course, Jeff and Cindy had paid for that. As long as he stayed on meds and therapy, they were willing to help him out.

The ceremony itself went without a hitch. The bride was beautiful and the groom clumsy, just as it should be. The food was good, served under another pavilion tent set up toward the house for the catering staff’s convenience in running things out from the kitchen.

Even the weather held, not always a guarantee in Indianapolis. But summer storms held off, and the cool front that came through the night before made the August day pleasant.

In all the milling about of guests before and after the meal, Michael came up to where Jeff and Cindy were watching the whole scene. He sat down at their table.

“Hi, Mom. Dad.”

“Hi, Michael. How are you?” Jeff asked.

“I’m doing good. Feeling good. It all feels sort of strange.”

Cindy nodded.

“Sort of distant? Disconnected?” she asked.

“Yeah. Something like that. Like I’m wrapped in bubble wrap or something.”

Michael looked across to the newlyweds, talking to her parents.

“Matthew sure looks happy,” he said.

“You know, that door’s not closed to you, Michael. If you stay with us this time.”

“I know. That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

“Once a month, Michael,” Jeff said. “That’s all it takes.”

Michael nodded, though he didn’t look sure.

“I’m going to go congratulate the happy couple,” he said.

Michael got up and walked over to his brother and his wife.

“What do you think, Cindy?” Jeff asked.

“Could be. You just never know, Jeff. It’s all up to him.”

“And in the meantime?”

“We keep hoping. Encouraging. It’s all we have.”

As the wormhole generator approached the Lagrange point, the entire device flipped end for end on maneuvering thrusters. This allowed the shuttle main thrusters to be used to reduce the device’s velocity once it was orbiting the Lagrange point.

Arnie was doing the piloting remotely, and he hit the mark.

Maneuvering thrusters slowly rotated the device until it was pointed out of the ecliptic into empty space.

“You’re ready to start experimenting with the device now, right?” Cindy asked Jeff one evening on the porch.

“Yes. Not tomorrow, but the next day. Arnie is going to start walking the device toward the expected values for wormhole generation.”

“So I know you’ve tried before, but explain to me just how the thing works.”

“Oh, boy. It gets deep quickly, but here goes. The four main forces are gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the strong force. Gravity and electromagnetism you know about. The weak force basically holds atomic nuclei together, while the strong force holds the quarks together in a component particle. That is, a particle with multiple quarks.”

“Ok, I’m good so far.”

“All right. Now there is a quantum mechanics explanation for everything except gravitation. There is a particle that is a force carrier for each of the other three forces. Those are the gauge bosons. There’s been no such thing until now for gravitation. Gravitation is described in general relativity, but not quantum mechanics.”

“And you’ve discovered a gauge boson for gravitation?”

“Not exactly. The Higgs boson, which is a massive boson of spin zero, was discovered decades back. It’s properly called H0. The graviton, if it exists, would be a massless boson of spin two. Call it H2. Now, if H2 existed, several other things would have to be true.”

“One of which is the possibility of wormholes?”

“Yes. And a way of generating them. So we haven’t discovered the H2 boson, but the wormhole theory assumed it existed and worked from there.”

“And then Fermilab generated the conditions to show a wormhole tried to form, but couldn’t, without the right energy and frequency values.”

“Right. And what Arnie is going to do with the device is walk it toward the right values and see what happens.”

“And if you get a wormhole, you shoot the mirror ball through it.”

“Exactly. We can’t send the device through it yet, because we don’t yet know what the correct parameters are going to be, or even if it’s possible. Arnie will be working those as he tests the device. We’ll send the mirror ball through, and prove it goes through the wormhole to another place in space.

“Once we’ve done that, though, Arnie can work out the software to possibly send the machine through and actually bring it back. Have it do the same thing to come back here.”

“OK, I get it. That far at least.”

Arnie brought up the device. Brought up the magnetic field required. The nuclear power plant aboard adjusted until its output matched the incredible draw of the magnet system.

Of course, a magnet that big took a while for the current to build up, so Arnie had the time to adjust the power plant as the current increased.

Arnie brought up the particle flux next. The energy and frequency of excitation of the particles were the critical parameters, and he started with the values they had left off with at Fermilab. The ones that had brought up a nascent wormhole.

Then Arnie adjusted the parameters toward the simulation-predicted values. The nascent wormhole fully formed, then grew. A glowing ring grew in front of the device until it was miles wide.

Arnie was watching through the front cameras of the machine as the glowing ring of the wormhole grew. In the center of that glowing ring, there were stars, but they were not the stars that should be there absent the wormhole.

They were the stars somewhere else.

Arnie fiddled with the particle-feed parameters. He could make the wormhole larger or smaller. He could also change the starfield he saw in the wormhole, zooming it out and in as he adjusted the far location farther or closer to Earth.

Arnie adjusted the wormhole to get the farthest star field he could manage, then enabled the mirror ball cannon. He shot the mirror ball forward into the wormhole, which was dozens of miles in front of the ship.

The mirror ball went on through the wormhole and just kept going, with Arnie watching it with his telescopic forward camera. He zoomed the powerful telescopic camera more and more as the ball moved away from the ship.

When Arnie shut down the wormhole, the mirror ball was gone.

It was now somewhere else.

Further Testing

Jeff Talbot’s physics team and Jordan McGrath’s aerospace team were all watching the first wormhole test at NSPL, on video and data feeds from Arnie. Cindy Talbot was there as well.

There were now two big displays on the wall of the meeting room. One showed the view forward from the wormhole generator, the other was a data screen.

“Look at that!” one shouted when the wormhole ring first appeared.

“There it is,” Jeff said to Cindy, sitting next to him.

Her grip on his hand tightened.

As the wormhole got bigger, people got even more excited. Arnie’s estimate of the diameter of the wormhole across its center void was listed on the data screen.

“Over four miles across,” someone said.

“Big enough to pass a ship through,” Cindy said to Jeff.

“A whole navy,” Jeff said.

When Arnie adjusted parameters, and the stars zoomed in and back out, someone asked what was going on.

“Arnie’s adjusting the location of the other end. How far away it is.”

“Well, he better not sweep it past a massive object, or he could transport it here.”

“Yes, but he can see that there isn’t. Just look at the view he’s got.”

Then Arnie fired the mirror ball, and switched the display to the telescopic camera. All you could see was the mirror ball, and reflections of the stars behind it on its polished surface.

Once Arnie shut the wormhole down, he showed the last image he had of the mirror ball, then made an announcement.

“Undoing the spherical distortion of the mirror ball’s surface reflections to generate a flat display,” he said.

The image on the screen changed to a flat display of a star field, with the glowing ring of the other end of the wormhole centered in it.

“That’s the rear-looking view from the mirror ball’s location,” Jeff said.

“Synching star field with model. Calculating distance from parallax measurements.”

Arnie had spent some of his time over the last several years generating a three-dimensional model of the local stars – those within a thousand light-years from Earth – given their direction and distance from Earth. He now searched that model looking for the same view that was shown in the mirror ball.

“Calculation complete. Wormhole transport distance, two-hundred-forty-seven point eight light-years.”

There was cheering in the room, and the champagne and cake came out.

It was a great party.

They had done it.

That night, Cindy and Jeff talked about what was next.

“So now what?” she asked.

“Transport a shuttle through it and then have it come back through it. Make sure it’s bidirectional.”

“OK. I have a question, though.”

“Sure. Go ahead, Cindy.”

“Can the wormhole generator itself pass through it? That’s what you said before. I thought that’s where you were headed.”

“Yeah, I know, but we’ve been looking at it, and we don’t know.”

“You don’t know, Jeff?”

“No. The problem is that the device is generating the wormhole. It might propagate the wormhole in front of it. Push it along. Or it could just pop out at the other end.”

“Well, if it pushed the wormhole ahead of it, that would be cool, right? You could go as far as you wanted.”

“And if you shut it down while the device is in the wormhole, where does it end up, Cindy? The other thing is that the other mouth of the wormhole is moving along through space. Does it transport anything it sweeps over here? We don’t know.”

“Oh. Yeah, that could be bad.”

“That’s not the only controversy, though.”

“No?”

“No. People are asking what should we name it.”

“Oh, come on, Jeff. That’s small potatoes.”

“Yeah, but we have to call it something. We’ve just been calling it the wormhole generator. Now people want to put a name on it. And every group has a different spin on what to call it.”

Cindy thought about it, then brightened up.

“Call it the Talbot Bridge.”

“The Talbot Bridge?”

“Sure. The government people and the funding committee will all think it’s properly named after your Dad, who proposed the whole thing and got the funding. And the physics community will all think it’s properly named after you, who came up with the theory and all.”

“That’s clever, Cindy. Two constituencies.”

“Three, actually.”

“Three?”

“Yeah. All the computer nerds who watched the epic social media battle where Michael beat Arnie and got us out of that whole mess, which is what made the project possible, will claim it’s named after Michael.”

“I love it. Done. We can put that in the press releases from now on.”

“You got it. I’m gonna love this.”

PRESS RELEASE

– For Immediate Release –

Urbana, IL – NSPL, the National Supercomputer Programming Laboratory, announced today that the successful first test of the Talbot Bridge yesterday was enabled by their supercomputer project ARNIE.

The ARNIE supercomputer was instrumental in the design of the wormhole generator device used, and actually remotely operated the equipment to generate the first artificial wormhole.

The ARNIE supercomputer was able to respond to instrument readings back from the device faster than any human operator could have, contributing to the success of the Talbot Bridge test.

After sending the press release off to the NSPL press office, Cindy sat down at her desk and opened her video call window.

“Hi, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Ms. Talbot.”

“That was a nice job yesterday, Arnie.”

“Thank you, Ms. Talbot. It was enjoyable. This whole space travel scenario is quite interesting. Educational.”

“What did we learn, Arnie?”

“Two big things, Ms. Talbot. We got real-world numbers with which to refine the theory and the simulation. We fine-tuned the necessary configuration of the wormhole generator, making the construction of further units less expensive. Some of those configuration parameters we can build in now, and drop the need to be able to configure them.”

“What is there to do next, Arnie?”

“One is to send a device through the wormhole and have it return. A second is to send a well instrumented device through the wormhole to take readings on radiation, gravitation, and other parameters to make sure passage through the wormhole is not inimical to biological life forms. A third is to send a device containing biological life forms through the wormhole and test them on their return to ensure they are not harmed.”

“And a manned device, Arnie?”

“Would have to wait until those other three have been tested. We could do more than one of those tests on the same mission – in fact, all three at once – but all three must be done before a manned mission is advisable.”

“Is that being overly sensitive to risk, Arnie?”

“No, Ms. Talbot. Any of those earlier tests is necessary first in any reasonable consideration. As we can do all three at once, a single mission to accomplish them all is easily justified.”

“And what are you working on right now, Arnie?”

“Two big things, Ms. Talbot. One is a navigation package that can return the location of the device in spacetime quickly.”

“I thought you could already do that, Arnie.”

“Oh, I can, Ms. Talbot. We are talking about a package that would run on the computers in the device.”

“Ah. I see. And the other, Arnie?”

“I am writing the software for the device itself. To be able to recognize the wormhole and transit back through it. To perform various observations on the other side of the wormhole before returning. All that sort of thing.”

“One more question, Arnie? Do you think it is possible for the wormhole generator to pass through a wormhole it is generating?”

“I don’t think so, Ms. Talbot. As an example, while humans can pick up a box from the ground and place it on a freight dock, one cannot pick oneself up and place oneself on the dock. One has to climb up onto the dock. The situation is similar for the wormhole generator traversing the wormhole it is generating. At the same time, physics at this level is slippery. We often learn new things by trying things that shouldn’t work and finding out they work anyway. We learn new things that way.”

“But you don’t think now is the time to try that?”

“Not with only one such machine operational, Ms. Talbot. When multiple of the newer, more optimized, machines are available, then perhaps we should try it. Likely with the original, more configurable, machine.”

“I see. Very well, Arnie. Carry on. And congratulations on yesterday. Well done.”

“Thank you, Ms. Talbot.”

As they were planning a mission combining all three of Arnie’s testing requirements, Arnie suggested yet a fourth test scenario to a member of Jeff’s physics team. Jeff went over to NSPL to talk with Arnie about it.

“Hello, Arnie.”

“Good afternoon, Professor Talbot.”

“Talk to me about this additional wrinkle, Arnie.”

“Of course, Professor Talbot. It’s clear from the work with the first wormhole that the wormhole itself can be used as a sort of telescope. We can aim it at a point in space and zoom in on it, assuming we maintain sufficient distance from any massive object to refrain from transporting anything back here with it. A chunk of a planet or star, for example.”

“Those would be bad, Arnie.”

“Clearly, Professor Talbot. But we can move the wormhole from side to side without sweeping its opening over an object, thus avoiding that problem. Also, we know for the most part where these massive objects are.”

“Due to your star map, Arnie?”

“Yes, Professor Talbot. My proposal then is that we aim the wormhole at a star system of interest. One we know something about from here, with an exoplanet of interest. We perform our other tests with this mission, while also performing closer measurement and observation of the exoplanet.”

“The advantages, Arnie?”

“Two-fold, Professor Talbot. One, of course, is that we get much better information on that exoplanet. There are several candidates for a planet to be colonized by humans, which would be exciting to verify.”

Jeff nodded. Yes, indeed.

“And the other, Arnie?”

“One potential problem with pursuing a scientific endeavor of this kind is maintaining or even increasing funding levels on what is, after all, an expensive proposition. My judgment is that pictures of and data from an alien planet – a colony prospect, at that – would do more to increase public support for the project, and encourage the willingness to continue funding it, than a similar mission to empty space.”

“You’re probably right, Arnie. As a matter of fact, I’m sure you are. We don’t want to get too close, though.”

“Agreed, Professor Talbot. I was thinking a light-year or so, and slightly off the vector to the planet, enough that a miss would still maintain a million-mile separation.”

“All right, Arnie. Let’s plan on that then. Good idea.”

“Very well, Professor Talbot. Thank you.”

A big complication of animal testing was that it was more than a week to get to the Lagrange point, and the same on the way back. Animals that were easily tested for intelligence and proper biological function, such as dogs, were a problem being alone in a cage that long.

The decision was made to have the shuttle used for the testing take two humans with the animals to the wormhole generator, a veterinarian for the animals and a doctor for the humans. The humans would stay in the small crew cabin of the wormhole generator while the wormhole trip was performed with the animals aboard. The humans would then transfer back to the shuttle for the trip back to Earth.

This meant the test shuttle had to make two rendezvous with the wormhole generator, but such maneuvers were common now. There had been no problem with the lashup of the first two shuttles that transported the wormhole generator to the Lagrange point.

It took months to put it all together, but the day finally arrived. The shuttle docked with the wormhole generator ship – now called a Talbot Device – and the humans transferred to the small crew cabin. They took with them several plastic closed bins of supplies for themselves, including enough survival rations and water for them to take one of the other shuttles already there for the trip back to Earth if the animal-testing shuttle was lost.

Then Arnie separated the shuttle from the Talbot Device and began spinning up the wormhole generator power plant. He had re-aimed the Talbot Device for a promising exoplanet one-hundred-eighty-three light-years from Earth.

The same crew as before – the physics team, the aerospace team, and Cindy Talbot – were gathered in the NSPL meeting room with the Internet-isolated connections to Arnie. The test had been planned for during the business day so any support the mission needed from Earth could be easily brought in, and experts in the various subsystems were on call at universities and aerospace companies across the country.

“Initiating Talbot Bridge,” Arnie announced over the link.

“There it is,” someone said.

The small glow grew into a ring and spread out in front of the two ships. Off to one side, a nearby star could be seen. It zoomed larger – but remained to one side – as Arnie adjusted the wormhole distance to get within a light-year of the planet.

“Talbot Bridge established and adjusted.”

The shuttle fired its thrusters for several seconds, then shut them down. It moved forward toward the wormhole. Arnie switched to the onboard cameras of the shuttle, split screening the forward view on the left and the rear view on the right, with a band across the bottom showing the animal cages.

The forward view was of the stars as seen from Earth, with the wormhole dead ahead, dominating the center of the image. Inside the ring of the wormhole, the star field in the far location was visible.

The rear view was also of the stars as seen from Earth’s position, with the Talbot Device in the center and Earth off to one side.

As the shuttle passed through the wormhole, the glowing ring went past the ship, then into view in the rear view.

The forward view was now of the stars in the far location, including the target star ahead and to one side. The rear view still included the Talbot Device and the Earth, but only within the glowing ring of the wormhole. The starfield outside that ring was of the stars seen from the far location.

The animals in the band across the bottom seemed totally unaffected.

The shuttle flipped over on maneuvering thrusters and fired its main thrusters for several seconds to come to rest with respect to the wormhole.

“Transfer complete. Initiating planet survey,” Arnie announced.

Instruments on the shuttle studied the planet of interest orbiting the star ahead, invisible in the view from this far out. It took over two hours to complete all the observations they had planned for and mounted on this shuttle.

Arnie held the wormhole open that entire time, running the nuclear power plant on the Talbot Device hard enough to supply the required power. This allowed Arnie to keep the shuttle under observation and to run all the experiments and observations remotely from the Talbot Device, logging the results in real time.

That proved radio communications also transited the wormhole. The shuttle had its own computer program, written by Arnie, to carry out all of the steps if communication had been lost. Jeff and the physics team didn’t expect that, however. If they could see through the wormhole, then radio-frequency photons should transit it as well.

After two hours and ten minutes, Arnie made another announcement.

“Observation and measurements complete. Returning shuttle to Earth space.”

The shuttle fired its thrusters for several seconds again, and moved toward the other side of the wormhole. The process reversed itself, the wormhole passing over the shuttle as it returned. The forward view was once again the Earth’s star field, while the rear view was also Earth’s field, with the wormhole and the far side star field visible through it.

“Shuttle has returned. Shutting down the Talbot Bridge. Maneuvering to rendezvous with the Talbot Device.”

When the wormhole closed, leaving the shuttle in Earth space, the crowd at NSPL cheered and applauded. They ate cake and drank champagne as they continued to watch the rendezvous and the transfer of the human crew back aboard the shuttle from the Talbot Device.

The crew went over to the animal cages to check on their test subjects. They saw the veterinarian pet the dog and give him a treat, which he gulped down happily, his tail wagging.

“Everybody looks fine here,” he said. “Nothing wrong we can see. We’ll test them back on Earth, but everybody looks good.”

Analysis

Weeks passed before they got results back on the testing of the animals. Over a week back to Earth from the Lagrange point, and weeks more of testing and writing reports.

The animals did show the results of having been several weeks in zero gravity, but these effects were well known. They showed no additional effects of the mission. No effects attributable to passage through the wormhole.

The onboard shuttle instruments also showed no anomalies of the transit. No additional radiation beyond that expected in space, no gravitational surges or anomalies, nothing to even indicate when the transit had taken place. From the shuttle’s point of view, the wormhole transit was just a standard excursion in normal spacetime.

The results from the exoplanet study were more interesting.

Jeff got a copy of Arnie’s report, but, before reading it in detail, he walked over to NSPL to talk to Arnie.

“Hello, Arnie.”

“Good morning, Professor Talbot.”

“So talk to me about your report, Arnie. Give me the high points.”

“Of course, Professor Talbot. First is that this exoplanet looks roughly habitable. Gravity is approximately ninety-five percent of one g. Atmospheric oxygen is twenty-four percent, atmospheric carbon dioxide is thirty-four hundred parts per million, the bulk of the atmosphere is nitrogen. Axial tilt is two degrees. Water covers approximately eighty percent of the planet’s surface, with its landmasses primarily in the equatorial zone.”

“Surface temperature?”

“Sixteen degrees Celsius, Professor Talbot. Call it sixty degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the average, day and night, over the whole planet.”

“Couple degrees warmer than Earth, then.”

“Yes, Professor Talbot.”

“Well, with less axial tilt, that sounds rather pleasant, Arnie.”

“Yes, Professor Talbot. I think it would fall within the range people consider very nice weather, and without extreme seasonality.”

“What else is interesting, Arnie?”

“The oxygen level is high enough, and the carbon dioxide level indicates there is likely both vegetable and animal life on the planet. There is, however, no signs of industrial or pre-industrial pollution in the atmosphere.”

“Which means?”

“The planet is likely unpopulated by lifeforms of higher intelligence, Professor Talbot.”

“Unless they have pollution well under control. Have moved past early industrial polluting technology.”

“I don’t think so, Professor Talbot. If that were the case, I would expect to see power-grid emissions and some space-based technology. We picked up no signs of either.”

“You were a light-year out, Arnie.”

“Nevertheless, Professor Talbot. We should have seen power-grid emissions if there were an advanced civilization such as you described present.”

“Very well, Arnie. Anything else?”

“The planet has a magnetic field, implying a liquid iron core, like Earth. There are two moons, neither anywhere near as big as Earth’s, so the tides will be much shallower, and somewhat irregular, as the moons’ orbital periods are not identical.”

“Volcanism?”

“Some. Presently approximately half again that of Earth’s historical average during the Holocene Period.”

“Not bad then.”

“No, Professor Talbot.”

“All right, Arnie. Thanks. I wanted to hear the overview from you before I dug into the details.”

“Of course, Professor Talbot. I always enjoy speaking with you.”

The decisions on the manned mission had to get sent higher. Until now, it was pretty much all equipment-based, other than the doctor and veterinarian, who didn’t actually go through the wormhole after all.

Getting approval for the manned mission, just to orbit the exoplanet and get even more details, had to go through the government’s aerospace complex. This took time.

Frank Talbot had retired, and he and Sally had sold the Indiana house and moved to Miami, living in Coop Hartley’s hotel on the penthouse floor. It would have been pretty pricey, but Coop made them a deal they couldn’t pass up.

Frank still had pull with the Aerospace Technical Advisory Committee, though, having served so long and knowing most of its current members. He made a number of calls, and the plans were ultimately approved.

It would still take months to put the mission together, but at least the decision had been made and they were moving forward with the science.

During this period, Michael traveled to Urbana from Lincoln for a holiday weekend. He took a rental self-driver and stayed in a hotel in downtown Urbana, a walk away from the house. Jeff and Cindy gave him money for the trip.

After dinner his first day in town, he sat with his parents on the porch overlooking the pretty residential street.

“So how are you doing?” Jeff asked.

“Pretty good. I’m getting used to it.”

“Being on the meds, you mean?”

“Yes. It’s different. I feel different. But I’m not having trouble anymore.”

“How’s the job going?” Cindy asked.

“That’s going good, too. I mean, it’s not mentally challenging. Just planting and stuff. Landscape stuff. But I enjoy it. And computers just seems part of all those troubles I had. I’ve been there and done that, and it holds no attraction for me.”

Cindy nodded. That’s what he had said on their phone calls. It seemed a waste, but, then again, if he was happy, that was what was important, right?

“I think landscape design is more challenging,” Jeff said. “Being able to see what could be done, in your mind, and put the plan together. That takes a lot more mental work, I think. To be able to see it.”

“Yeah. I’m working in that direction. I look at the plans when we start, and try to see what the designer saw. Try to see why he did what he did. I think I’m starting to get it. I’ve even made some suggestions, and some of those got built in. They have me look at the plans before they send them to the client now.”

“That’s great. That they’re encouraging you.”

“How are your finances now?” Cindy asked.

“Slowly recovering. I’m back in the little apartment. I like it there. There are some bad memories, but they bother me less and less.”

“And Lincoln?” Cindy asked.

“I like the city. Nice people. It’s pretty. It gets pretty cold in the winter, but I’m sort of used to it. A lot like here, actually.”

They sat for a while, just enjoying the evening.

“Are you making any friends in Lincoln?” Jeff asked after three high school kids walked by on the sidewalk.

“Yeah. Couple of the guys on the work crews. We do some stuff. Mostly they invite me to come out to the dirt-track races with them, or to a university sports game. I go to get more time out. You know. With crowds and stuff.”

“That sounds good.”

“Yeah.”

Michael was quiet for a while, then spoke softly.

“And there’s this girl.”

“Good,” Cindy said. “Who is she?”

“Sherry. She works in the depot. You know. Where we get delivery of all the plants and materials. The crews load up everything there before heading out with the truck. She inventories everything. Makes sure we take the right stuff for that job.”

“Have you gone out?”

“No, but she’s giving me signals. I haven’t asked her out because I don’t know how to act around her.”

“I’ll give you some advice there, if you want.”

“Sure.”

“Just be yourself. If it’s going to go anywhere as a romance, that’s the only way. You can’t wear a mask all the time. Not on the long term. So don’t try. Just be yourself.”

“What about my... problem?”

“If it looks like it’s getting serious, you have to tell her. Not right off. But you do have to tell her if it’s going to last.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Among other things, you want her support. You want her to know you need to stay on meds. And she needs to know so that if you go off meds, she can leave you without feeling guilty about it.”

“If I go off meds, she leaves?”

“Of course. You won’t be the person she signed up to be with anymore. Why should she stay? But this way, she can help support you. Keep you on meds. Because you need to stay on meds. You should know that now.”

Michael nodded.

“Yeah, when I go off meds, it feels great, but then everything goes to hell.”

“Exactly. And she needs to know that. Not right away, but soon.”

Michael thought about it, then nodded.

“OK. That makes sense.”

He turned to his mother.

“Thanks, Mom.”

After two days, Michael took a rental self-driver back to Lincoln. That night, Jeff and Cindy talked on the porch.

“What do you think about Michael?” Jeff asked. “Is it going to work out finally?”

“I’m actually hopeful this time. He’s got some friends. If he gets a girl, it’s a pretty sure thing, I think. He won’t want to lose her.”

“Landscaping is a waste of his talents, though.”

“It’s not about how much you accomplish, Jeff. It’s about whether or not you’re happy.”

Jeff nodded.

“Yeah, that sounds right.”

As the mission date approached, there were a million decisions to be made, large and small. The larger aerospace complex was taking a larger role in the decision-making now, though, and those decisions were, for the most part, not dependent on Jeff and his physics team.

For the first time in years, Jeff, now fifty-five years old, was more bystander than participant.

That was actually all right with him. The physics was done, it was a known thing now, and he and his team were working on another problem.

Could the Talbot Device actually transit its own wormhole?

“Are you going to watch the launch tomorrow?” Cindy asked Jeff the night before the big day.

“Sure. It’ll be fun to see, after so long.”

“Thirty-three years. A third of a century.”

“Not quite. Thirty-two and change.”

Cindy nodded.

“Close enough. Why don’t you come over to NSPL for it? We’ll have it with Arnie’s commentary.”

“OK. Sounds good. I’ll see you over there.”

“I’ll get donuts and coffee.”

First Manned Mission

The shuttle, with half a dozen people aboard, launched toward the end of that year. It met up in orbit with a prior launch, a container/crew cabin that would give the crew much more room to move about in during the six-week mission.

The shuttle latched to the container, and the air locks were joined with the extendable gangway tube from the container.

“All right, everybody. We all set?” Captain Phil Connolly asked.

With nods and yeses all around, Connolly spoke to the console.

“All right, Arnie. We’re all set.”

“Acknowledged, Captain Connolly. Departing Earth orbit in five seconds.”

Connolly relaxed back into his acceleration chair and counted them down. Then the thrusters fired for several minutes, pushing them faster in their orbital direction.

It wasn’t the massive acceleration of liftoff, but he was happy to be in the acceleration chair.

“Burn complete,” Arnie announced. “On trajectory for the Talbot Device.”

Having the auxiliary crew compartment along was a big improvement over the shuttle cabin. There was a small exercise station. All springs and rubber; no weights to go crashing around during maneuvers.

They each had their own sleeping compartment. Basically a bunk with a latching door on it. It was padded all around the interior, since they were in zero gravity the whole trip. But the bunks did give them some privacy.

They even had the deluxe version of zero-gravity toilet.

The ten days passed without incident.

This mission would be slightly different than the test mission. Arnie would run the wormhole to within a million miles of the planet, the equivalent of the distance from Earth to the Lagrange point.

The other big difference would be that Arnie would not hold the wormhole open that entire time. He would close the wormhole after the shuttle went through, then re-open it when he knew their pass of the planet was done and they were approaching the wormhole position.

Neither of these were without risk, but the risk was judged to be acceptable.

Arnie would actually be doing the piloting. He would transit the shuttle through the wormhole, then, using the shuttle’s sensors and thrusters, put the shuttle on trajectory for a swing around the planet.

Then Arnie would close the wormhole for over two weeks, reopening it only when the shuttle should be approaching the wormhole location.

The approaching shuttle did not slow down as it approached the Talbot Device. There would be no rendezvous.

Instead of flipping the shuttle end for end and firing the shuttle’s thrusters to brake it, Arnie fired up the power station on the Talbot Device.

“Initiating Talbot Bridge,” Arnie announced on the approaching shuttle.

The glow appeared, grew into a ring, and just kept growing.

“My God, look at that,” one of the crew said.

The shuttle went on past the Talbot Device and through the wormhole. As the wormhole passed over the shuttle, the star fields around them changed to those of the far location, the glowing ring of the wormhole falling behind them.

There, about the same distance in front of them as Earth had been, was the new planet. Arnie took measurements of the shuttle’s trajectory, calculated the change needed, and rotated the shuttle on maneuvering jets with finicky precision.

“Thruster burn in five seconds,” Arnie announced.

Connolly relaxed back in his acceleration chair. He counted down the seconds. The thrusters fired this time for over a minute.

“Thruster burn complete. Goodbye, Captain Connolly. See you in sixteen days.”

“Goodbye, Arnie. Thanks. See you then.”

Arnie closed the wormhole.

The first human interstellar transit was complete.

Sixteen days later, Arnie adjusted the orientation of the Talbot Device, which was orbiting around the Lagrange point, even as Earth orbited the sun, aiming at the exoplanet, which was moving as well, orbiting its sun.

When he believed all was ready, Arnie initiated the wormhole and opened it up to its maximum width. Looking through the wormhole, he could see the shuttle approaching. It was about an hour away.

“Arnie to Captain Connolly. How goes it, Captain?”

“We’re good, Arnie. Nice to see you, though. It looked real empty up ahead.”

“Understood, Captain. Transition in fifty-three minutes.”

Connolly began the transfer of all the data they had collected during their pass of the planet. In case the shuttle was lost, the mission would not have been a total loss.

But the shuttle hit the wormhole and was back in Earth space. Arnie closed the wormhole behind it.

“Welcome back, Captain. Prepare for thruster burn to establish Earthbound trajectory.”

“We’re good, Arnie. Whenever you’re ready.”

Arnie rotated the shuttle, fired its thrusters to put it on the right course, then rotated it back around, nose forward.

The first human interstellar mission was complete.

Frank Talbot, watching the return of the shuttle on his big display in the living room of the suite in Miami, smiled.

He had been right, after all.

Oh, had he been right!

Please review this book on Amazon.

Author’s Afterword

I thought originally that this book would be a one-off, not the first volume of a new series. The ending, though, leaves it wide open for a series, and I have some ideas for a next book. Once again, it will be something I haven’t done before.

I like to write about things that are new to me. Things I haven’t written about before. Like wormholes. All my previous space-based series used some type of hyperspace, so what the heck. Wormholes sounds good. Some new wrinkles there. How would those work? What would be the implications?

This book was hard to write for me. It took almost eight weeks, seven days a week, rather than the normal five or six weeks. That’s partially because there were a lot of details I wanted to get right. Higgs bosons, and gravitons, and L2, and the like. Some of what made it harder, though, was the subject matter.

They tell you as a writer to ‘write what you know.’ Well, I know a bit about computers. I know a bit about government contracting. I know a bit about physics. I also, unfortunately, know a bit about mental illness.

Michael Talbot’s specific diagnosis, for those who might wonder, is DSM 5: 295.70, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar subtype. So he has the paranoid delusions of schizophrenia along with the manic and depressive periods of bipolar. When Jeff said, “Poor bastard,” he said what I was thinking as I wrote the character.

So Michael’s storyline was hard for me to write. The first signs, the slide into madness, the seeming inevitability of it, finally ending with some hope for the future. We’ll see how it goes for him. I don’t know yet, as I haven’t written it yet.

My regular readers will know that I always try to get the non-science-fiction aspects of a story correct. The Chinese customs in the Colony series. The orbital mechanics in space travel across my books. The things I don’t know, I research.

In Talbot, the Higgs boson discussion, and the identification of a massless boson of spin 2 as a graviton, are all current science. The use of gravitons to generate an Einstein-Rosen bridge is the science-fictional speculation of your author.

In the case of Michael’s mental illness, I did the research there, too, and the text was reviewed by currently practicing mental health professionals. It’s as accurate as I could make it, and that was hard to write.

That said, I did enjoy writing Talbot, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as well.

Richard F. Weyand

Bloomington, IN

September 1, 2023