Saturday, August 3, 2024

Extremus: Year 75

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Eagan Spurrs is not a man, and that is not a derogatory way to put it. Artificial intelligence is a complex subject. There is no clearly defined point when a robot becomes truly self-aware and conscious. There are ways to test this, but no one here is qualified to do such a thing. Not that they would have to anyway. Eagan fully admits to being artificial. Research into the field of AI started in the 20th century, and by the end of the first quarter of the 21st, generative AI was the hottest form on the market. These were extremely sophisticated programs, which could answer unique queries, often in ways that would not inherently give their true origin away. They were used to analyze and synthesize vast amounts of data to organize people’s lives and work, and teach users about various topics, but they couldn’t actually do anything. Humans were still needed to implement any ideas that their collaboration produced. The natural evolution of them was the realization of something known as Performative AI.
PerAI is an offshoot of GenAI, and in fact, requires the latter in order to function. A request is fed into the system, and a response is formulated. This response is sometimes an answer to a question, but it also sometimes requires the manipulation of other systems. For instance, one might ask a GenAI how to write the code for a website. A PerAI could come up with that answer too, but also plug the code directly into the coding program itself, and even debug it. Further advancements allowed PerAI to be incorporated into robotic substrates, so that they could perform physical tasks in the real world; tasks which they hadn’t necessarily ever been asked to do before. That’s when the general population really started taking notice. All of the sudden, all of your chores could be done by someone else. Your handy dandy personal robot could wash your dishes and clothes, mow the lawn, and buy your groceries. This solved a lot of problems in the world, even if it took a little time to be adopted. But in the end, who would bother spending all their time on work that bored them, tired them out, and prevented them from enjoying their life? Only people without the money. Fortunately, that problem was eventually solved too, thanks in no small part to the advent of General Intelligence, but that’s a topic for another time.
Eagan is a PerAI with an android body. It took Tinaya and Belahkay a few frustrating minutes to figure this out, though. Being such an old technology, neither of them was initially aware of Eagan’s limitations. He can tell them why he was created, and what his job is here, but not why, or why anyone built the structure. Who was supposed to live here, and who decided that? It’s his responsibility to welcome new residents, and teach them how the megablock works. Or rather, it was going to be his job. Ever since the time mirror exploded, no one else will be coming here, leaving Eagan without a purpose. He’s not even been allowed to enter the interiors unless accompanied by a human, which is why he’s been staying out of the elements in this wikiup.
There’s another question, which they will likely never get an answer for. When Belahkay’s crew first showed up here, they scanned the surface of the planet. That was how they found the settlement in the first place, and started getting involved in the survivors’ lives. The megablock is the biggest above ground structure across the globe. It should have been easily spotted by the Iman Vellani’s sensors, so why wasn’t it? According to Eagan’s information, construction began eleven years ago, so it should have already been visible a few years ago. Belahkay dispatched a drone scout to explore the buildings while the two of them had lunch together. Once the survey was done, the three of them left the area with the images and specifications to report back to the group. Everyone else was just as surprised, and couldn’t explain it, but it did prompt them to find out whether there was anything else hiding around here.
Most of the visiting starship crew are gone by now, but they left them with a shuttle to use as they wished. The Kamala Khan has been slowly flying all around the world unmanned, looking for energy signatures, right angles, and even lifesigns. For the last several months, nothing has come up, besides a heavy water processing plant under the ocean, which will help refuel their fusion reactors. Today, the shuttle has detected something else. It’s an underground complex, hard to detect with the shuttle’s limited sensors. It’s running on very low power, presumably due to the now absence of a human presence. But that’s just conjecture. The group has not yet uncovered what the purpose of this facility is. They’re going down to the main level right now. It’s a long ride.
More than a kilometer underneath the surface, the elevator stops, and the doors open. They’re immediately struck by what’s been hiding down here. They stare up at it, gradually walking forwards to the guardrails, and then they keep on staring. “It looks like the Extremus,” Lilac points out.
“It’s a battleship,” Tinaya determines. “Look at that exterior weapons array. That down there looks like the entrance to a fighter bay.”
“Why the hell are they building this?” Belahkay questions.
“Who are they?” Aristotle asks.
They all look over at Spirit, who rolls her eyes. “For the last time, I didn’t know everything. SCR&M. Safety, Compartmentalization...” she says, stopping before the last three words of the mantra. The Bridgers were there to maintain order in the event that it was necessary, but we didn’t have our fingers in every pie. That was... Tinaya’s purpose.”
“Lataran was also a spy,” Tinaya reminds her. “Now she’s the Captain.”
“Yes, and either she was keeping this whole thing a secret, or the other Bridgers were keeping it from me. All I know is that I don’t know what this is.”
Belahkay moves over to a console, and starts flipping through the information. “I think I know why we weren’t able to detect this before,” he soon says. “It’s running off of extremely low power, prioritizing frugality over speed.”
“Why would they need to do that?” Tinaya asks. “If this planet, with its abundance of resources, is nothing more than staging grounds, why not get it done?”
“The megablock,” Spirit realizes. “That’s to house, and probably train, an army, and maybe even raise them. That would take time. Getting the ship done quickly wouldn’t be necessary, so you may as well save the hydrogen.”
“Wait,” Niobe jumps in. “Who were they planning to fight?”
Tinaya and Spirit exchange a look, and simultaneously say, “the Exins. We believe this world to be relatively close to where they live.”
“It makes sense,” Aristotle figures, “to find the one world perfectly hospitable to humans to prepare for an attack.”
“Belahkay, keep doing what you’re doing, and report in when anything interesting comes up,” Tinaya orders. She didn’t set out to become the leader here for their tiny little group, but whenever a decision has needed to be made, they’ve routinely looked to her to make it. Everyone just fell into their roles. “Niobe, you can stay with him. Spirit, there are three more levels. Explore with Lilac, stay on comms. There could be people living down here for all we know, or more Eagans. Totle, you’re with me.”
“Where are we going?” Aristotle asks her.
“Into the ship, of course,” she replies.
They step into the second elevator, but this one is fully exposed, and running down the side of the hangar. They then have to get into a third elevator in order to go up into the ship. They begin to search it with flashlights, but the lighting systems turn on by themselves to show them the way. Tinaya was right that there is a hangar bay here, but it’s for transport shuttles, not fighter jets. They are apparently troop transports for ground assaults. The fighters, on the other hand, are designed to shoot out of tubes that litter the hull everywhere there is not some kind of gun to protect the battleship itself. They find the bridge, the engineering section, and a few staterooms, but the rest of it is taken up by stasis pods. Tens of thousands of fighters can sleep here in wait for the long journey ahead of them. Belahkay would be the one to figure out where exactly they were going to be sent, and how long it would take them to get there, but unlike the Extremus, this is not a generation ship. The people who were meant to live here would lie down one second, then wake up the next, but it would be decades later in realtime.
Who were all these people expected to be? The battleship could accommodate the entire current population of Extremus, and still have plenty of room to spare. Even if every security officer and reserve soldier were conscripted into this, there would be absolutely no need for this much space. There was never any reason to build something quite this large unless they had more time to build their army. Or perhaps they had some other means in mind, like cloning. The ethical ramifications of this whole endeavor is making Tinaya’s head spin. Lataran was keeping this from her, and the Extremusian people. This is not what the mission is about. If the Exins were going to attack, then protecting the ship they already had is the only thing that ever made any sense. This thing is new. If it had been built in the past with plans for it to meet up with Extremus before it flew out of range, that would be one thing. But they’re in the present day, with no hope of catching up without a new time travel event. None of this makes any goddamn sense. They need answers. They need to contact their people, now more than ever. This is no longer an extended vacation. Now it’s a mission.
When they’re done searching the whole place, they meet back up with the rest of the group on the mezzanine level. “Anything interesting? Any people?” Tinaya asks.
“Just some labs and offices,” Lilac reports. “Nothing of note. No people.”
“You?” Niobe asks.
“It’s a sleeper ship,” Tinaya answers. “No crew quarters. Everyone in that megablock could fit in here. It was...disheartening to see.”
“We didn’t come all the way out here to wage war,” Spirit agrees.
“It’s fully operational,” Aristotle continues. “We could teleport out right now, and go. The automators are still building a few things, but all vital components are done.”
“Belahkay?” Tinaya prompts.
“I can confirm everything that you’ve been saying. The weird part about it is that it doesn’t have a reframe engine. The Goldilocks Corridor, their destination, is 216 light years from here, straight back down into the galaxy. It was gonna take them 216 years.”
“I didn’t think that we were that close to the Milky Way,” Tinaya remarks. “We should be pretty deep into the void by now, given Captain Yenant’s new heading.”
“We’re not far.” Belahkay acts like he didn’t realize that the rest didn’t know that.
“We also found out the name of the ship,” Niobe goes on, building some suspense. “It’s the Anatol Klugman.”

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