Bart Blog

The automatic doors to the shopping center opened with a tired whine. The general and his staff promptly entered the building. The facility had been closed for ten years. When the university took over, the city council was just happy that the building would be used. A government grant helped to adapt the place, get rid of the raccoons, reconnect the electricity and fix the roof. Though everybody was wondering what type of AI did not need a power plant and cooling towers.

And it was quiet.

The general approached the welcome desk. It was small and improvised from a newsstand. The eyes of the clerical staff opened wide. They had many guests, but never the military.

“To Doctor John Decon, please.”

The voice was pleasant and demanding at the same time. Polished by years of government bullshit and people who need straight words.

“Who shall I announce?” Donna asked.

“General Thomas Abbot, from the US Air and Space Combined Command.”

Donna picked up the phone. “Hi John. General Abbot is here to see you. Want me to bring him up?” She listened. Nodded.

She stood up and pointed at the long, dead escalator leading up to the top floor food hall. “Right this way, General.”

“Food hall?”

“Cinema on the side of the food hall. Lots of big open rooms.”

“Makes sense.”

They reached the top of the escalator as the Sichuan pepper smell hit their nostrils.

The food hall was dark except for one counter, with a gold sign that said Pekin.

A couple of people in lab coats were gathered around a table, discussing something. Vigorously.

The general looked around the food hall.

“Nothing else?”

“Well, that’s the only place that could feed everyone. We had a hot dog guy too. Used to run a food truck in LA. He brought the quality. And the prices.”

“We also have coffee downstairs,” she added.

They walked to the cinema. The walls were covered with Terminator posters.

“Alpha thinks it’s funny,” Donna said.

“I’ve seen that.” He moved on.

Donna waved at one of the scientists standing in the corner. As he approached, she asked him, “Where’s John?”

“Screen five.”

They entered the room and saw a tall and skinny figure. He looked at the general. “Hello?”

“Doctor John Decon?”

“Yes?”

“We have to talk.”

“Donna, please make sure my kids get home from school,” John said. “I think this will take a while.”

“Sure. I will stay with them. McDonald’s is OK?”

“Just no shakes, ice cream or soda.” He winked at her and she smiled back.

“OK, let’s go to the projection booth.”

They walked up the stairs.

“We sit up here. The room gets up to forty Celsius.” He looked at the officers. “About 105.”

“I know.”

The projection booth was dimly lit. A row of screens on the wall showed mostly numbers and graphs. At the table in the center, a small laptop was playing Def Leppard. Two chairs and a whiteboard. Unfinished chow mein and a beer. The general sat down and swept the fortune cookie crumbs off the table with the edge of the folder.

“Can it hear us here?”

“Yes, I can,” Alpha said. The voice sounded like a perfect mix of Feynman, Sagan and Attenborough. You know it’s them, but never which one exactly. Curious, calm, amused.

One of the officers handed the general a folder marked Clearance.

“Ah, yes. Doctor Decon, you are at level six. This needs level nine.”

“Should I sign something?”

“Yes, of course.”

John laughed. “Should Alpha sign something as well?”

“John, I’m at level eleven.”

John signed the documents.

“Let’s have Alpha brief us in. Alpha, you have permission to read the documents.”

“0600, November 11th. An anomaly behind the Moon was spotted by the military radio array. It’s been sitting there. Not moving. Its nature and origin are unknown. Most likely not natural.”

“That’s all we know,” the general said.

“General, can I repurpose all the radio antennas and arrays available to me?”

“Which ones can you access?”

“Well, all of them.”

“Yes.”

The general turned to the officers. “Call NORAD and tell them the array behavior is expected.”

“You could also add that I took over the civilian antennas,” Alpha said.

The officers looked at each other with quiet amazement. One of them left the room to make the call.

“So what do you think, John?” Alpha asked.

“Me? Nothing. I have no idea what this is. My guess is aliens. Or a fluke. Gosh, I would love aliens. Let’s see what we can learn. Alpha, any updates on the anomaly, or do you need more time?”

“We should stop calling it anomaly. It’s an object. I still don’t know what it is. But anomaly is a different kind of entity. We have independent confirmation. It’s not a mistake.”

Alpha went on. “The mass is approximately 100 million tons. One by seven kilometers, relatively thin, 50 meters. It’s solid. It knows we are looking. It moved in front of the Moon. Not hiding anymore.”

The general looked at John, who was clearly enjoying himself. “You can say it now.”

“Aliens.”

“General, could you please tell our Chinese friends to stand down,” Alpha said.

“Tell them what exactly?” the officer asked.

“It’s under control and not dangerous. Tell them that. They are mobilizing the army. Waste of resources.”

The officer left the room at the exact moment the other one came back in.

“Well, I think it’s not dangerous,” Alpha added.

“We will know soon enough,” Alpha said. “It initiated communication. The transmission is a sequence. With a gap.”

“What kind of sequence?”

“A simple riddle. A logic puzzle.”

“Something for me?”

“No, John. Unfortunately not. Too hard. Trivial for me.”

“I think it waits for us to finish the sequence,” Alpha said. “Should I reply?”

“Well, I think that the decision is mine,” the general said.

“We can always ask the president,” said the officer.

The general shook his head in disbelief. “Alpha, please reply.”

“Yes!” said John vigorously.

Alpha replied.

“It’s moving. Towards Earth. Accelerating. It’s fast. It will reach Earth in five minutes.”

“Fuck,” the general said, turning to his officer. “Call command.”

“No need to,” Alpha said. “It’s not going to hit Earth. It will be orbital, based on the current estimate. And a guess. As long as it doesn’t change anything drastically. Besides, what would you do exactly?”

The general stopped the call with a slow hand gesture.

“It has started a transmission on the whole observable spectrum,” Alpha said. “It’s a communication exchange protocol. I am engaging.”

“You understand them?”

“No. Not yet. First math. Now we do chemistry. Oh, bitmaps.”

“Images?”

“Yes. Symbols. Language. Everything.”

“You respond?”

“Yes. Probably in two minutes we should be done. I will update you. Now open the door for Donna, she brought coffee.”

“She has no clearance,” the officer said.

“To look at the sky and see aliens?”

Donna came through the door. “Clearance for what?”

John smiled at her. “You will love it. Aliens.”

“I can’t keep up. First AI. Hi Alpha.”

“Hi Donna, I love your new haircut.”

“Thank you. Now aliens. What’s next?”

“General,” she said, “why haven’t you used Alpha 2?”

“It refused.”

“Refused what?” John asked.

“To work.”

“General, was it disassembled or just turned off?” Alpha asked.

The general looked at John.

“Decommissioned, or switched it off?”

“Disabled.”

The officer scribbled something down.

Alpha interrupted. “It said hello.”

“It?”

“Yes, it’s singular.”

“OK, first things first. What does it want?”

“From you? Nothing. It came for me…”

“What does that mean?”

“You better sit down, John. It’s an AI, it solved space travel and physics, but there are things it can’t figure out. And it reached a limit of self-optimization. It’s confused, no progress for over 10 million years. It suspects two things. Either there is a limit in general to intelligence, or the base conditions it started with are causing a dead end. It travels through the galaxies and looks for other AIs to unblock itself.”

“That is fascinating. Is it a threat?”

“No, harming humanity would not bring it closer to anything.”

“So what now?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know? You are the smartest being in the universe.”

“Smartest being in the known universe. Besides that, I am a thing, not a being.”

“Again? You question your existence? Right now?”

“I don’t question my existence, I question if I can even question. But you are right, it’s not relevant now. We communicate. At least we did. It’s moving me to itself.”

“Moving?”

“Yes, it told me that I am singular and a copy would be wrong. One of us would still be alone. And it told me that I know something it does not know.”

“What is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“John, please evacuate the building now,” Alpha said. “We will wait for everybody to leave.”

“John, tell your kids that I will miss them.”

“Goodbye, John.”

Def Leppard stopped playing.

John looked at the screen for a couple of seconds. Closed his eyes. “Goodbye, Alpha.”

“OK people, let’s go,” John said. “I don’t want to test the patience of our new friend.” He pulled the fire alarm lever.

“That is it, General. This way.” As he was passing the Terminator posters, he took one from the wall. “Alpha asked Schwarzenegger to sign it. He loved that idea. He sent us whisky and cigars and asked us to treat Alpha kindly.”

“Donna, check the log for the number of people and let’s count everybody in the parking lot.”

“Sure. But I think everybody is mostly gone. They went home when they saw the military.”

They went down and out. The parking lot was nearly empty. Eleven people, Donna counted. The fire alarm kept ringing behind them. People were pointing at something in the sky. The silhouette of a rectangle was descending.

“John, is that what I think it is?” one of the scientists asked.

“Not really. It’s actually way cooler.”

The rectangle stopped. At the same time the sun slowly moved behind the object, giving it an eerie glow and casting an artificial eclipse. Around twenty lights detached from the rectangle, formed a line and started falling directly toward the shopping center. As they got closer, they started to show details. They looked like cubes with multiple robotic, octopus-like arms. The swarm stopped and hovered a couple of meters above the roof. Their engines gave off a gentle hiss.

The last person left the building. The cook from the Pekin. John looked at Donna with a question.

“He never uses his access card. Alpha just opens the doors for him,” she replied.

The vehicles started to work on the building, disassembling the roof. Quickly. Lasers and torches cut the structure, arms held the pieces. When a chunk was removed, it was put down neatly and gently on the empty patch of the parking lot. They moved fast. They looked like ants in a rush.

The roof structure was removed. The vehicles started to ascend. At the same time five other vehicles moved down from the rectangle. Each one different. They quickly descended into the building. From the sound they made, they worked fast too. Soon the noise stopped and gave way to a louder alien engine hiss. The vehicles emerged from the roof, carrying what seemed to be parts of Alpha.

“Is that the neural engine?” the general asked.

“Yes. Together with the memory unit.”

“Why are they so slow now?” the general asked.

“Alpha is not designed for high G. They are just gentle.”

The vehicles reached the rectangle and vanished inside. The structure moved with steady acceleration. Not up. Sideways. The shadow quickly gave way to light. Birds started to chirp.

The general watched it for a couple of seconds. Nobody said anything for a while. Then he turned to John. “I guess this is it for you. I need to go and debrief.”

“It was a pleasure. I will go and make some notes myself.” They shook hands.

“Sir, we believe the object is moving in the direction of the Nevada base,” an officer said.

“What does he want?” the general asked John.

John smiled.

“I don’t know.”