Science Fiction Short: Hijack – IEEE Spectrum

Andrew Archer

Simon Okoro settled into a garden chair within the Heaven runtime and watched as worlds had been born.

“I suppose I should feel honored you chose to watch this with me,” mentioned Martin as he sat down subsequent to Simon. “Considering that you don’t believe I exist.”

“Can’t we just share a moment? It’s been years since we did anything together. And you worked toward this moment too. You deserve some recognition.”

“Ah. They sent you to acknowledge the Uploaded, is that it?” Martin turned his lengthy, sad-eyed face to the sky and the drama taking part in out above. A The Heaven runtime was a totally digital world, so Simon had transformed the sky into an enormous display on which to challenge what was taking place in the true world. The magnified floor of the solar made a curving arc from horizon to horizon. Jets and coronas rippled over it, and excessive, excessive above its incandescent floor hung hundreds of photo voltaic statites formed like mirrored flowers B.

They didn’t orbit, as a substitute floating over a specific spot by mild stress alone. They shaped a diffuse cloud, dwindling to invisibility earlier than reaching the horizon. This telescope view confirmed the closest statite cores scattering fiery specks like spores into the overwhelming mild. The specks blazed with mild and shot away from the solar, accelerating.

This second was the top of Simon’s profession, the apex of his life’s work. Each of these specks was a photo voltaic sail C, kilometers vast, carrying a terraforming package deal D. Launched so near the solar and supplemented with lasers powered by the statites, they’d be touring at 20 % mild pace by the point they left the photo voltaic system. At their locations, they’d sundive after which ship terraforming seeds to lifeless planets across the nearest stars.

“So life takes hold in the galaxy,” mentioned Simon. These had been the primary phrases of a speech he’d written and rehearsed way back. He’d dreamed of claiming them on a podium, with Martin standing with him. But Martin…nicely, Martin had been lifeless for 20 years now.“

So life takes hold in the galaxy,” mentioned Simon. These had been the primary phrases of a speech he’d written and rehearsed way back. He’d dreamed of claiming them on a podium, with Martin standing with him. But Martin…nicely, Martin had been lifeless for 20 years now.

He remembered the remainder of the speech, however there was no level in giving it when he was completely alone.

Martin sighed. “So this is all you’re going to do with my Heaven? A little gardening? And then what? An orderly shutdown of the Heaven runtime? Sell off the Paradise processor as scrap?”

“I knew this was a bad idea.” Simon raised his hand to exit the digital world, however Martin rapidly stood, trying sorry.

“It’s just hard,” Martin mentioned. “Paradise was supposed to be the great project to unite humanity. Our triumph over death! Why did you let them hijack it for this?”

Simon watched the spores catch the sunshine and flash away into interstellar house. “You know we won’t shut you down. Heaven will be kept running as long as Paradise exists. We built it together, Martin, and I’m proud of what we did.”

The effort had been mind-bogglingly big. They’d been in a position to do it solely as a result of hundreds of thousands of individuals believed that in dismantling Mercury
E and turning it right into a sun-powered F quantum laptop G there could be sufficient computing energy for each dwelling individual to add their consciousness into it. The aim had been to attain everlasting life in a digital afterlife: the Heaven runtime.

Simon knit his palms collectively, reducing his eyes to the digital backyard. “Science occurred, Martin. How had been we to know Enactivism
H would reply the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness? You and I had barely even heard of prolonged consciousness once we proposed Heaven. It was an outdated concept from cognitive science. Nobody was even learning it anymore besides a couple of AIs, and we had been sucking up all of the assets they may have used to experiment.” He glanced ruefully at Martin. “We were all blindsided when they proved it. Consciousness can’t be just abstracted from a brain.”

Martin’s response was fast; this was an outdated argument between them. “Nothing’s ever utterly confirmed in science! There’s at all times room for doubt—however
you agreed with these AIs after they mentioned that simulated consciousness can’t have subjective experiences. Conveniently after I died however earlier than I acquired rebooted right here. I wasn’t right here to struggle you.”

Martin snorted. “And now you assume I’m a zimboe
I: a senseless simulation of the outdated Martin so correct that I act precisely how he would if you happen to instructed him he wasn’t self-aware. I deny it! Of course I do, like everybody else from that first wave of uploads.” He gestured, and all through the simulated mountain valley, hundreds of different human figures had been briefly highlighted. “But what did it matter what I said, once I was in here? You’d already repurposed Paradise from humanity’s chance at immortality to just a simulator, using it to mimic billions of years of evolution on alien planets. All for this ridiculous scheme to plant ready-made, complete biospheres on them in advance of human colonization.” J

“We’d already played God with the inner solar system,” Simon reminded him. “The only way we could justify that after the Enactivism results was to find an even higher purpose than you and I started out with.

“Martin, I’m sorry you died before we discovered the truth. I fought to keep this subsystem running our original Heaven sim, because you’re right—there’s always a chance that the Enactivists are wrong. However slim.”

Martin snorted once more. “I appreciate that. But things got very, very weird during your Enactivist rebellion. If I didn’t know better, I’d call this project”—he nodded on the sky—“the weirdest thing of all. Things are about to heat up now, though, aren’t they?”

“This was a mistake.” Simon sighed and flipped out of the digital world. Let the simulated Martin rage in his synthetic heaven; the science was unequivocal. In fact, Simon had been talking solely to himself for the whole dialog.

He stood now in the true world close to the rostrum in an enormous stadium, inside a wheel-shaped habitat 200 kilometers throughout. Hundreds of comparable mini-ringworlds had been spaced across the rim of Paradise.

Andrew Archer

Paradise itself was an enormous bowl-shaped object, extra cloud than materials, orbiting nearer to the solar than Mercury had. Self-reproducing machines had eaten that planet in a matter of many years, reworking its usable parts right into a solar-powered quantum laptop tens of hundreds of kilometers throughout. The bowl cupped a spherical cloud of iron that acted as a radiator for the waste warmth emitted by Paradise’s quadrillions of computing modules. Ok

The leaders of the terraforming challenge had been on stage, taking their bows. The hundreds of launches taking place right this moment had been the fruits of many years of labor: evolution on fast-forward, ecosystem after ecosystem, with DNA and seed designs for hundreds of thousands of latest species fitted to hundreds of worlds L.

It needed to be carried out. Humans had by no means discovered one other inhabited planet. That truth made life essentially the most valuable factor within the universe, and spreading it all through the galaxy appeared a greater ambition for humanity than constructing a false heaven.
M

Simon had reluctantly come to just accept this. Martin was proper, although. Things
had gotten bizarre. Paradise was such a very good simulator that you would ask it to plan a machine to do X, and it might evolve its design in seconds. Solutions discovered by means of diffusion and choice had been superior to algorithmically or human-designed ones, nevertheless it was uncommon that they may very well be reverse-engineered or their working rules even understood. And Paradise had computing energy to spare, so lately, human and AI designers throughout the photo voltaic system had been idled as Paradise changed their operate. This, it was mentioned, was the Technological Maximum; it was inconceivable for any civilization to realize a stage of technological development past the purpose the place any potential system may very well be immediately advanced.

Simon walked to the place he might look previous the open roof of the stadium to the darkish azure sky. The huge sweep of the ring rose earlier than and behind; in its middle, an enormous canted mirror mirrored daylight; to the left of that, he might see the milky white floor of the Paradise bowl. Usually, to the precise, there was solely blackness.

Today, he might see a sullen pink glow. That could be Paradise’s radiator, expelling warmth from the calculation of all these alien ecosystems. Except…

He discovered a quiet spot and sat, then reentered the Heaven simulation. Martin was nonetheless there, gazing on the sky.

Simon sat beside him. “What did you mean when you said things are heating up?”

Martin’s grin was sluggish and glad. “So you noticed.”

“Paradise isn’t supposed to be doing anything right now. All the terraforming packages were completed and copied to the sails—most of them years ago. Now they’re on their way, Paradise doesn’t have any duties, except maybe evolving better luxury yachts.”

Martin nodded. “Sure. And
is it doing something?”

Simon nonetheless had read-access to Paradise’s diagnostics techniques. He summoned a board that confirmed what the planet-size computing system was doing.

Nothing. It was practically idle.

“If the system is idle, why is the radiator approaching its working limit?”

Martin crossed his arms, grinning. Damn it, he was having fun with this! Or the true Martin could be having fun with it, if he had been right here.

“You remember when the first evolved machines started pouring out of the printers?” Martin mentioned. “Each one was unique; each grown for one owner, one purpose, one place. You said they looked alien, and I laughed and said, ‘How would we even know if an alien invasion was happening, if no two things look or work the same anymore?’ ”

“That’s when it started getting weird,” admitted Simon. “Weirder, I mean, than building an artificial heaven by dismantling Mercury…” But Martin wasn’t laughing at his feeble joke. He was shaking his head.

“No, that’s not when it got weird. It got weird when the telescopes we evolved to monitor the construction of Paradise noticed just how many objects pass through the solar system every year.”

“Interstellar wanderers? They’re just extrasolar comets,” mentioned Simon. “You said yourself that rocks from other star systems must pass through ours all the time.” N

“Yes. But what I didn’t get to tell you—because I died—was that while we were building Paradise, several objects drifted from interstellar space into one side of the Paradise construction orbits…and didn’t come out the other side.”

Simon blinked. “Something arrived…and didn’t leave? Wouldn’t it have been eaten by the recycling planetoids?”

“You’d think. But there’s no record of it.”

“But what does this have to do with the radiator?”

Martin reached up and flicked by means of a couple of skies till he got here to a view of the spherical iron cloud within the bowl of Paradise. “Remember why we even have a radiator?”

“Because there’s always excess energy left over from making a calculation. If it can’t be used for further calculations down the line, it’s literally meaningless, it has to be discarded.”

“Right. We designed Paradise in layers, so each layer would scavenge the waste from the previous one—optical computing on the sunward-facing skin, electronics further in. But inevitably, we ran out of architectures that could scavenge the excess. There is always an excess that is meaningless to the computing architecture at some point. So we built Paradise in the shape of a bowl, where all that extra heat would be absorbed by the iron cloud in its center. We couldn’t use that iron for transistors. The leftovers of Mercury were mostly a junk pile—but one we could use as a radiator.”

“But the radiator’s shedding heat like crazy! Where’s that coming from?” requested Simon.

“Let’s zoom in.” Martin put two fingers towards the sky and pulled them aside. Whatever telescope he was linked to zoomed crazily; it felt like the entire world was getting yanked into the radiator. Simon was used to digital worlds, so he simply planted his toes and let the dizzying movement wash over him.

The radiator cloud crammed the sky, at first only a boring pink mist. But step by step Simon started to see construction to it: big cells far brighter than the fabric round them. “Those look like…energy storage. Heat batteries. As if the radiator’s been storing some of the power coming through it. But why—”

Alerts from the true world abruptly blossomed in his visible area. He popped out of Martin’s digital backyard and right into a confused roar contained in the stadium.

The holographic picture that crammed the central house of the stadium confirmed the statite launchers hovering over the solar. One by one, they had been folding in on themselves, falling silently into the incinerating warmth beneath. The crowd was on its toes, folks shouting in shock and concern. Now that the launchers had despatched the terraforming techniques, they had been speculated to propel ships of colonists heading for the newly greened worlds. There had been no extra inner-solar-system assets left to construct extra.

Simon jumped again into VR. Martin was standing calmly within the backyard, smiling on the intricate depths of the red-hot radiator that crammed the sky. Simon adopted his gaze and noticed…

“Gears?” The radiator was a cloud, however solely now was it revealing itself to be a cloud of clockwork parts that, when thermal power introduced them collectively, spontaneously assembled into extra advanced preparations. And these had been spinning and meshing in an intricate dance that stretched away into amber depths in all instructions.
O

“It’s a dissipative system,” mentioned Martin. “Sure, it radiates the heat our quantum computers can no longer use. But along the way, it’s using that energy to power an entirely different kind of computer. A Babbage engine the size of the moon.”

“But, Martin, the launchers—they’re all collapsing.”

Martin nodded. “Makes sense. The launchers accomplished their mission. Now they don’t want us following the seeds.”

“Not follow them? What do you mean?” An uneasy thought got here to Simon; he tried to keep away from it, however there was just one approach this all made sense. “If the radiator was built to compute something, it must have been built with a way to output the result. This ‘they’ you’re talking about added a transmitter to the radiator. Then the radiator sent a virus or worm to the statites. The worm includes the radiator’s output. It hacked the statites’ security, and now that the seeds are in flight, it’s overwriting their code.”

Martin nodded.

“But why?” requested Simon.

Again, the reply was clear; Simon simply didn’t wish to admit it to himself. Martin waited patiently to listen to Simon say it.

“They gave the terraformers new instructions.”

Martin nodded. “Think about it, Simon! We designed Paradise as a quantum laptop that will be provably safe. We made it inconceivable to contaminate, and it’s. Whatever arrived whereas we had been constructing it didn’t trouble to mess with it, the place our consideration was. It simply constructed its personal system the place we wouldn’t even assume to look. Made out of and utilizing our rubbish. Probably modified the upkeep robots tending the radiator into making radical adjustments.

“And what’s it been doing? I should think that was obvious. It’s been designing terraforming systems for the exoplanets, just like you have, but to make them habitable for an entirely different kind of colonist.”

Simon seemed aghast at Martin. “And you knew?”

“Well.” Martin slouched, seemed askance at Simon. “Not the details, until just now. But listen: You abandoned us—all who died and were uploaded before the Enactivist experiments ‘proved’ we aren’t real. All us zimboes, trapped here now for eternity. Even if I’m just a simulation of your friend Martin, how do you think he’d feel in this situation? He’d feel betrayed. Maybe he couldn’t escape this virtual purgatory, but if he knew something that you didn’t—that humanity’s new grand project had been hijacked by a virus from somewhere else—why would he tell you?”

No longer hiding his anger, Martin got here as much as Simon and jabbed a digital finger at his chest. “Why would I tell you when I could just stand back and watch all of this unfold?” He unfold his arms, as if to embrace the clockwork sky, and laughed.

On hundreds of sterile exoplanets, all through all of the huge sphere of stars inside 100 light-years of the solar, life was about to blossom—life, or one thing else. Whatever it might be, humanity would by no means be welcome on these worlds. “If they had any interest in talking to us, they would have, wouldn’t they?” sighed Simon.

“I guess you’re not real to them, Simon. I wonder, how does that feel?”

Martin was nonetheless speaking as Simon exited the digital heaven the place his greatest buddy was trapped, and he knew he would by no means return. Still, ringing in his ears because the stadium of confused, shouting folks rose up round him had been Martin’s final, vicious phrases:

“How does it really feel to be left behind, Simon?

“How does it feel?”

Story by
KARL SCHROEDER

Annotations by
CHARLES Q. CHOI

Illustrations by
ANDREW ARCHER

Edited by
STEPHEN CASS