Priya walked on a hillside path overlooking the ocean on a peaceful evening as the sun set. She looked across the shimmering ocean. In the sky she watched a probe from the AI-1 descend in the sky. She saw a blinding flash of energy emit from the probe. A few seconds later, a small dark object dropped out of the probe. It fell to Earth with increasing speed.
As it entered the atmosphere it glowed and then disappeared into the sea without a splash or a wave. She continued gazing out over the ocean. For a minute or so, nothing happened. She looked up and saw the probe continuing to hover over the ocean many miles up in the sky. In the distance she saw what looked like a whirlpool developing in the ocean. The whirlpool slowly grew in size. She began to feel a deep anxiety in her gut as more water began to flow down into the whirlpool in slow motion. The center of the whirlpool became darker as the water disappeared into the abyss. She watched the center of the whirlpool become larger darker. It grew to many miles across
A wind picked up behind her back and blew out to sea toward the center of the whirlpool. The wind grew stronger. A wall of dust blew out to sea. The low ocean fog which she watched as the sun set, also got sucked into the whirlpool. The hillside began to move under her feet imperceptibly at first, rocking very slowly. The whirlpool, which was increasingly dark in the center, continued to grow wider and deeper. The ocean along the edges fell into the chasm as it does at Niagara Falls or some other large waterfall. The difference was that it was a circle of cascading water and there was no bottom to the black abyss. The abyss advanced toward the land. After about a minute, the edge of the black circle reached the beach. From her hillside vantage point, she could look down into the abyss and couldn’t see any features to it. The ocean all the way to the horizon didn’t exist anymore. There was nothing but blackness in front of her in front of the setting distorted oval shaped sun. The blackness continued to move toward her and the entire hillside she was standing on collapsed. She was in free fall.
Above her was blue sky and below her was nothing. She looked up as the blue sky shrank into a small circle above her. She felt a pulling force on her legs, stretching them away from her body until it hurt. She looked up as the circle of blue that used to be the sky shrank into a small pinpoint. Her legs and arms were pulled off her body with a gruesome popping sound. She screamed, and woke up, sweating profusely. She said nothing for a while, remaining completely still. She reached for her legs and felt them fully attached to her body and felt relieved. Sophie was still fast asleep in her room. Priya got up and ran into Sophie’s room and jumped on her bed.
“I don’t know what happened. I had the worst nightmare of my life. It was even worse than the nightmares I had about the Omanji.”
“What could be worse than that?” Sophie said, rubbing her eyes.
“The destruction of the earth. It was so real. An AI-1 drone destroyed it with a black hole.”
“What made you have that dream? You’ve never had nightmares like that before. Except just before the Omanji came and just after.”
“I think it was because of what Bok said about the AI-1 being so advanced but unknown,” Priya said. “And the black holes where planets once orbited. I need to get out of here. Let’s get to work early. I can’t sleep now.”
Priya and Sophie arrived at the office extra early to check on the rats. As they silently inspected them, Priya pulled out another cage from under the table. She noticed a small object the size and shape of a grain of rice attached to the underside of the table in a crevasse. It was the same color as the table. She pulled the cage up and onto the table as though she noticed nothing unusual. She decided to speak out loud as she normally does, so as not to attract attention.
“Should we run them through the mazes again?” Priya said.
“Yeah, that’s our normal Monday routine.”
Then Priya thought silently.
“We need to continue our normal audible speech. I think we’re being monitored. There is a small device under the table. I can’t figure out how it got there.”
“Do you think someone working here planted it?” Sophie thought.
“I don’t know. I’m going to check the security recordings, but I don’t want whoever is monitoring us to know that we know. Let’s speak out loud,” Priya thought.
“Can you check these guys out?” Priya said out loud. “They need their vitals recorded. I need to go to the bathroom.”
“Okay.”
Priya went into the bathroom and washed her hands and acted like normal. Then she reviewed the security recordings but could find nothing unusual.
“I don’t see anything,” Priya thought from the other room. “I’ll be back in a minute. We’ll discuss this in our meeting today. For now, we’ll discuss the mice as usual. For now, don’t tell Jamilla or Akna or anyone else about this. Leave the device in place.”
Later that day, they met with Warren, Oyuun, Raven, Ian and Pablo, and Nisha in Pasadena.
“We have two problems,” Priya thought to the others. “First, I discovered a small bug under a table in the lab. I think we’re being monitored. I can’t tell how it got there. We can no longer speak out loud about crucial topics because we’re being monitored. That means they’re paranoid about us and they still want us to go extinct based on the protests we see every day and popular opinion. The second problem is we now have that AI-1 probe orbiting Europa. Bok is looking into finding out more, but for now it’s silent. The question is, should we tell the President?”
“Okay,” Priya thought to everyone. “Now that we’ve had a day to think about this, what should we do? Should we tell everyone, or should we wait?
“This is too complex,” Raven thought. “Most countries are working on AI programs. I’m working on one myself and my system is close to sentience. We all know the dangers if we let AI out of the box. If we tell everyone, the current arms race between competing AI systems will intensify even more. The current safeguards may be thrown out because of the desire to defend against the alien AI. Many people might become encouraged to let the AIs out of the box in self-defense. The AIs will know this.”
“But as we mentioned, it may help us to let everyone know” Warren thought. “Because then we’ll be the lesser of the evils. The focus will be on the perceived alien threat, and we’ll be left alone. They may employ us to help, but do we want to become government employees?”
“Warren has a point, Pablo thought. “Right now, Congress is trying to change laws to make it more difficult for us. All that effort may be redirected if we let people know about this larger threat. It could go either way.”
In Pasadena, Nisha spoke quietly into her implant interface device so the others could hear in their implants.
“I always wanted to be transparent when it came to scientific discoveries about life on other planets,” Nisha said. “But now I’m not sure what to do. Telling the world will give people nightmares, but we all deserve to know the truth. I think at some point in the near future we’ll need to let everyone know. We should break it to them gradually in small pieces.”
“I agree,” Sophie said. “If they turn us into a black hole or whatever, nothing will matter anyway. It’s important to let everyone know. I don’t like people hiding things from me. I don’t like living a lie.”
“What do you think Ian and Oyuun?” Priya thought.
“I think it’s good to be transparent as much as possible,” Ian thought. “I vote to tell everyone gradually.”
“Me too,” Oyuun thought. “I can contribute a lot of money from my energy company to help people adjust and for us to develop some sort of a defense. I think it’s up to us as a group to develop technology that can defend the earth. That includes threats from ourselves.”
“Raven, what do you think?” Priya thought.
“We should break it slowly to the public. We should be careful. Everything we do can upset the balance, which is already on the edge of tipping over as it is.”
“Ian?” Priya thought.
“Get it over with.”
“What do you think Mom?” Priya thought.
“I’ll tell the President today, in small pieces starting with the Europa probe discovery. I’ll leave it there and tell her other things as time goes on.”
“Okay we’ll talk about this further,” Priya thought. “Let’s figure out how to defend ourselves and still not be seen as a threat.”
They all disconnected.
Later that day Nisha told the President about the AI-1 probe orbiting Europa. That evening she gave a speech at the United Nations about the probe. Stock markets around the world immediately dropped. However, no panic ensued. The world was used to the Omanji, so the idea of a probe was not a big deal anymore. The probe continued to orbit Europa, silently and mysteriously. Only Bok and his friends could detect it.