“V-SINN?” Old-timer asked.
Aldous nodded.
“But you said it built itself. How?”
“Nanotech,” Samantha answered. “The Planck portal and the prosthetics on the dead cyborg soldier’s body were rife with intricate nano structures. Within a decade, the age of nanorobotics had arrived.”
“V-SINN was a nanorobot neural net,” Aldous elaborated. “It had incredible abilities and aided us tremendously. We solved so many problems with its advanced algorithms and specialized intelligence. Advances in medicine came rapidly, disease and even aging were eradicated. An age of abundance was upon us.”
“But then,” Samantha cut in, “V-SINN woke up.”
“Woke up?” Old-timer reacted. “It became conscious?”
“It didn’t pass the Turing test,” Aldous pointed out, “so it didn’t pass for human, but it—”
“It stopped taking orders,” Paine stated frankly as he finished swallowing a swig of his simulated beer. “And just like that, we had ourselves an artificially generated intelligence that could outsmart us and didn’t particularly seem to give two shits about the problems of the human race.”
Old-timer thought back to a conversation he’d had with Colonel Paine in his own universe, so many decades ago. That version of Paine had warned about the exact scenario that the trio of cyber ghosts were now relating to him. Back then, Old-timer hadn’t wanted to listen—he’d thought it was the trifling fears of a Luddite—the small-minded concerns of an evil man. But now, here he was, being told that very scenario, that very nightmare, had come true.
“V-SINN wasn’t even remotely human,” Samantha further explained. “We could never understand it, and because we couldn’t understand it, it got out of our control.” Then she held her hands up to the void around her. “And that’s how we ended up here. Nowhere. Erased.”
12
Rich and Djanet returned to Universe 1, and floated just above the surface of the Planck platform, seemingly hanging together in a still picture. Old-timer’s body had unfurled dozens of tendrils to latch itself into place on the platform’s surface. He had warned them about potential time distortions after a crossover, but this was their first experience with the unpredictable effects of universe-hopping. Hovering there momentarily in their miniature tableau gave both of them the time to absorb the terror of what they saw all around them. Rather than being in open space, covered by the radiation of a coronal mass ejection, they found themselves surrounded by the android armada, their incomprehensibly monolithic ships seemingly still, blocking out the vastness of the starscape around them.
Then, a moment later, like a video clip suddenly taken off pause, the ships began moving again, the Planck ripple having subsided. It immediately became clear that the ships were moving at a tremendous speed, continent-sized ships sailing past them on a trajectory that both Rich and Djanet immediately recognized was heading toward Earth.
“What the hell is going on!?” Rich shouted.
“James, are you detecting this?” Djanet asked through her mind’s eye. A few seconds later, her face paled as she turned to Rich. “No response.”
“James?” Rich asked through his own connection. “Commander James Keats, this is Rich Borges. Come in! Are you there?”
“Try the A.I.,” Djanet urged.
“I am,” Rich said in a near panic. His terror increased several fold when he saw the look on Djanet’s face as she stared behind him. He turned to see one of the android ships, a structure larger than most of the moons in the solar system, heading straight for them on a collision course. “Get the Planck and Old-timer’s body onto the ship before we get demolished!” he shouted to Djanet.
They scrambled to guide the Planck safely onto the craft James had designed for them. When the platform lifted back up into the belly of the ship, they re-pressurized the interior and fired the thrusters.
“Can we outrun them?” Rich shouted.
“I don’t know. They’re fast! Calculating!”
“Calculate faster! Or we’re gonna be bugs on this thing’s windshield!”
“I think we can outrun ‘em,” Djanet called back, slight relief in her voice. “We can open wormholes and suture space together, just like the android ships, but we’re smaller, so the energy is far less for us. We should be able to beat them to Earth.”
“But will we be able to send a warning message to Earth if we’re going faster than light?” Rich asked.
“I doubt it, but we can try!”