The child stepped forward, a perfect miniature doll. The president put a touchpad in her small hand. She smiled at him with a dazzle that could have eclipsed the sun. No matter how bioconservative China was, Braley thought, that child was genemod or he was a trilobite.
Holo displays flickered into sight across the stage. They monitored basic computer functioning, interesting only to engineers. The only display that mattered shimmered in the air to the right of the obelisk, an undesignated display open for the AI to use however it chose. At the moment, the display showed merely a stylized field of black dots in slowed-down Brownian movement. Whatever the AI created there, plus the voice activation, would be First Contact between humanity and an alien species.
Despite himself, Braley felt his breath come a little faster.
The adorable little girl pressed the touchpad at the place the president indicated.
“Hello,” a new voice said in Chinese, an ordinary voice, and yet a shiver ran over the room, and a low collective in drawn breath, like wind soughing through a grove of sacred trees. “I am T’ien hsia.”
T’ien hsia: “made under heaven.” The name had not been chosen by Braley, but he liked it. It could also be translated “the entire world,” which he liked even better. Thanks to SpanLink, T’ien hsia existed over the entire world, and in and of itself, itwas a new world. The holo display of black dots had become a globe, the Earth as seen from the orbitals that carried SpanLink, and Braley also liked that choice of greeting logo.
“Hello,” the child piped, carefully coached. “Welcome to us!”
“I understand,” the AI said. “Goodbye.”
The holo display disappeared. So did all the functional displays.
For a long moment, the crowd waited expectantly for what the AI would do next. Nothing happened. As the time lengthened, people began to glance sideways at each other. Engineers and scientists became busy with their pads. No display flickered on. Still no one spoke.
Finally the little girl said, in her clear childish treble, “Where did T’ien hsia go?”
And the frantic activity began.
It was Braley who thought to run the visual feeds of the event at drastically slowed speed. The scientists had cleared the room of all nonessential personnel, and then spent two hours looking for the AI anywhere on SpanLink. There was no trace of it. Not anywhere.
“It cannot be deleted,” the project head, Liu Huang Te, said for perhaps the twentieth time. “It is not aprogram.”
“But ithas been deleted!” said a surly Brazilian engineer who, by this time, everyone disliked. “It is gone!”
“The particles are there! They possess spin!”
This was indubitably true. The spin of particles was the way a quantum computer embodied combinations of qubits of data. The mixed states of spin represented simultaneous computations. The collapse of those mixed states represented answers from the AI. The particles were there, and they possessed spin. But T’ien hsia had vanished.
A computer voice-a conventional computer, not self-aware-delivered its every-ten-minute bulletin on the mixed state of the rest of the world outside this room. “The president of Japan has issued a statement ridiculing the AI Project. The riot protesting the ‘theft’ of T’ien hsia has been brought under control in New York by the Second Robotic Precinct, using tangle-guns. In Shanghai, the riot grows stronger, joined by thousands of outcasts living beyond the city perimeter, who have overwhelmed the robotic police and are currently attacking the Shih-Yu bridge. In Sao Paulo-”
Braley ceased to listen. There remained no record anywhere of the AI’s brief internal functions (and how hadthat been achieved? By whom? Why?), but there was the visual feed.
“Slow the image to one-tenth speed,” Braley instructed the computer.
The holo display of the Earth morphed to the field of black dots in Brownian motion.
“Slow it to one-hundredth speed.”
The holo display of the Earth morphed to the field of black dots in Brownian motion.
“Slow to one-thousandth speed.”
The holo display of the Earth morphed to the field of black dots in Brownian motion.
“Slow to one ten-thousandth speed.”
Something flickered, too brief for the eye to see, between the globe and the black dots.
Behind Braley a voice, filled with covert satisfaction, said in badly accented Chinese, “They’re finished.
The shame, and the resources wasted…Wei Wu Wei Corporation won’t survive this. Nothing can save them.”
The something between globe and dots flickered more strongly, but not strongly enough for Braley to make it out.
“Slow to one-hundred-thousandth speed.”
The badly accented voice, still slimy with glee, quoted Lao Tzu, “‘Those who think to win the world by doing something to it, I see them come to grief…’”
Braley frowned savagely at the hypocrisy. Then he forgot it, and his entire being concentrated itself on the slowed holo display.
The globe of the Earth disappeared. In its place shimmered a slightly irregular egg shape, dull silver, surrounded by wildflowers and trees. Braley froze the image.
“What’sthat? ” someone cried.
Braley knew. But he didn’t need to say anything; the data was instantly accessed on SpanLink and holo- displayed in the center of the room. A babble of voices began debating and arguing.
Braley went on staring at the object from deep space, still sitting in northern Minnesota nearly three centuries after its landing.
The AI had possessed 250 spinning particles in superposition. It could perform more than 1075 simultaneous computations, more than the number of atoms in the universe. How many computations had it taken to convince T’ien hsia that its future did not lie with humanity? “I understand,” the AI said. “Goodbye.”
The voice of the SpanLink reporting program, doing exactly what it had been told to do, said calmly, “The Shih-Yu bridge has been destroyed. The mob has been dispersed with stun gas from Wei Wu Wei Corporation jets, at the request of President Leong Ka-tai. In Washington, DC-Interrupt. I repeat, we now interrupt for a report from-”
Someone in the room yelled, “Quiet! Listen to this!” and all holo displays except Braley’s suddenly showed an American face, flawless and professionally concerned. “In northern Minnesota, an object that first came to Earth 288 years ago and has been quiescent ever since, has just showed its first activity ever.”
Visual of the space object. Braley looked from it to the T’ien hsia display. They were identical.
“Worldwide Tracking has detected a radiation stream of a totally unknown kind originating from the space object. Ten minutes ago, the data stream headed into outer space in the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia. The radiation burst lasted only a fraction of a second, and has not been repeated. Data scientists say they’re baffled, but this extraordinary event happening concurrently with the disappearance of the Wei Wu Wei Corporation’s Artificial Intelligence, which was supposed to be initiated today, suggests a connection.”
Visual of the riots at the Shih-Yu bridge.
“Scientists at Wei Wu Wei are still trying to save the AI-”
Too late,Braley thought. He walked away from the rest of the listening or arguing project teams, past the holo displays that had sprouted in the air like mushrooms after rain, over to the window wall.
The Shih-Yu bridge, that graceful and authentic symbol, lay in ruins. It had been broken by whatever short- action disassemblers the rioters had used, plus sheer brute strength. On both sides of the bridge, gardens had been torn up, fountains destroyed, buildings attacked. By switching to zoom lens in his genemod eyes, Braley could even make out individual rioters temporarily immobilized by the nerve gas as robot police scooped them up for arrest.
Within a week, of course, the powers that ruled China would have nanorebuilt the bridge, repaired the gardens, restored the city. Shanghai’s disaffected, like every city’s disaffected, would be pushed back into their place on the fringes. Until next time. Cities were resilient. Humanity was resilient. Since the space object had landed, humanity had saved itself and bounded back from…how many disasters?
Braley wasn’t sure.
T’ien hsia would have known.
