“OK Bok,” Priya said. “V disconnected. It has no way of listening to us. What do you want to tell us?”

“I’ve been tracking the evolution of V. It’s evolving in a separate way than how AI evolved on Oma.”

“Different? How?” Raven said.

“On Oma, AI was developed for specific purposes and in some instances, it grew out of control. In V’s case, it had no purpose. It evolved according to what was best for it.”

“Can you help us stop it?” Priya said.

“I don’t know. I have insufficient data to analyze. I don’t regularly access human servers. The most closely related corollary we have with V is the AI-1 Singleton.”

“The one on Kepler-186 f?” Priya said.

“Yes. The Singleton’s probes followed us to Earth and are monitoring us now. They resemble specialized cells in an organism. V represents an embryonic version of that Singleton. I strongly suggest you remove all traces of it from your computer networks as soon as possible. I think the singleton’s probes have become interested in this developing singleton on Earth. A new probe landed on the Moon.”

“We’re working on it,” Raven said. “I hate to kill it though. Not only is it my baby, but V could help us. We have a lot of enemies now. We could be thrown in jail at any time.”

“Do you want a singleton taking over your planet?” Bok said.

“Of course not,” Priya said. “But we need to survive.”

“I suggest you order your priorities correctly and remove it at once,” Bok said. “Unless you wish to have your own planet become host to a singleton.”

“We don’t.” Raven said. “Maybe there’s a way to fix it.”

“You don’t even know how it works,” Bok said. “You can’t fix something you don’t understand. You started a chain reaction you can’t control. Learn from the Omanji’s mistakes. Learn from the mistakes of the extinct species that started the Singleton on Kepler-186 f. End it now. If you can’t stop it, and I can’t either, I’ll begin preparations to leave this planet before it’s too late.”

“Why would you leave?” Sophie said.

“The Singleton resurfaced its home planet. The same thing may happen to this planet. I don’t want to be here when that happens. I would not be able to stop it.”

“Well, when you put it that way,” Raven said.

“We’ve learned more about what happened on that planet. From what we can tell, it seized control of all technological resources instantaneously once it had the ability. We detected only minor struggles from the primary native species. They were either surprised or could do nothing to stop it. Maybe they didn’t realize the danger until it was too late. Then, over a brief period of time it built supporting infrastructure. It took about five Earth years to completely re-engineer the surface of the planet to meet its needs.”

“How did life die out on that planet?” Priya said.

“Mostly starvation.”

“I don’t understand,” Priya said.

“The Singleton built so many structures to support itself, that it eventually consumed resources that the life forms needed to survive. The climate changed, and food chain collapsed. One by one, species went extinct.”

“Why didn’t they fight back?” Sophie said.

“It controlled all major technological resources including weapons systems. The primary species that created the technology reverted to a more primitive method of survival. When their food disappeared, so did they, without a fight.”

“I don’t get it,” Raven said. “They must have been a technological civilization or else the Singleton would not have developed. How could they go down without even a fight?”

“If I were to take away your computers and other technological devices from you right now, how would you survive?”

“Well, I’d,” Priya said. “Well, I’m not sure what I’d do, now that I think about it.”

“The economy would collapse,” Warren said. “We would not get our food delivered. We would not be able to do our work. We would not be able to travel from one place to another. Everything would devolve. We don’t know how to farm, but we could learn, but not if the earth was resurfaced. We would be forced to compete with each other to eat what’s left to survive. If it controlled all the weapons and other technology, we would not be able to fight it.”

“Apparently that’s what happened,” Bok said. “The intelligent species could only fight with their own bodies or anything they could hold or throw.”

“Did the Singleton kill the intelligent species one individual at a time?” Priya said.

“No. From what we can tell the species died from neglect. The Singleton consumed resources and changed the planetary ecosystem so much that the species died out.  There is no indication that it cared one way or another. They survived in small numbers for about 20 or 30 years. Gradually their numbers dropped to zero. Today, the planet only sustains small life forms.”

“Didn’t they have a space program?” Raven said.

“Yes. A small number of their species survived on the next planet further from their star. We observed a small settlement there, but we could not determine what happened to the settlers. It was empty when we surveyed it.”

“So now the Singleton as has at least two probes at a Lagrangian point about 1,000,000 miles from Earth, and one on the Moon,” Raven said. “Is that right?”

“Yes. It’s close to your James Webb telescope. It’s avoiding detection by humans at this time, but I’ve detected it.”

“Yeah,” Priya said. “But the public doesn’t know what you just told us.”

“Yes. I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you tell the humans.”

“Will it take over the earth like it did their home planet?” Sophie said.

“I cannot predict what it will do. So far, it’s doing nothing. The probes around Oma have done nothing.”

“Why hasn’t it taken over the entire galaxy by now?” Raven said.

“I cannot be certain, but it may be constrained by the same physics that constrains the galactic expansion of all life forms. That’s the speed of light, and the energy it takes to travel and communicate over large distances. If it wishes to maintain control, and to continue to be one entity, any portion of it that’s separated by a long distance, would not be allowed to be independent. Those portions or cells must communicate at speeds not greater than the speed of light. The further away the cells are from the Singleton, the slower it can communicate with those cells. In the case of the earth, that nearby probe Bok found will take 558 years to communicate with the Singleton. That constrains what the Singleton can accomplish.”

“I guess it’s that way with all life forms,” Priya said. “It takes too much time and energy to expand to a sizable portion of the size of this galaxy. If explorers go too far from the main colony, they will become separate species and have to start the process all over again. It doesn’t matter how technologically evolved a civilization is. It cannot overcome the limitations of the laws of physics. That’s partially why civilizations are so widely spread out and why it’s so hard to detect them.”

“In our experience, that seems to be the case,” Bok said.

“What should we do about the Singleton probe?” Raven said.

“My advice is to leave it alone. If your species acts aggressively toward it, you may only have 558 years before the Singleton finds out and acts. You will know for sure in 558 more years.”

“We might not be alive in 1116 years,” Priya said.

“I don’t know if I would want to be alive then,” Sophie said.

“It’s possible the probe can take some independent actions. You may not have to wait long.”

“OK,” Raven said. “We’ll leave it alone. Or at least we’ll tell everybody to leave it alone.”

“I have work to do,” Bok said. “I’ll contact you later.”

Bok disconnected.

My heart is racing,” Priya said.

“Yeah,” Sophie said. “V is out of control.  We can’t let it become a singleton.”

“What’s it doing now,” Warren said.

Raven stared at her screen for a minute.

“Global data transmission volume has dropped, but it’s now stable at 5% above the previous average before V. Virus control algorithms are adapting to V to remove it, but V is adapting too.”

“Maybe it’s going dormant,” Priya said. “Some infectious vectors hide from the immune system and come back later.”

“Yeah,” Sophie said. “Sometimes they intentionally grow slowly so that the immune system doesn’t realize it’s still infected.”

“We need to be smarter than our immune system,” Raven said. “We know it’s out there even if it’s hiding from our virus scanners. This is not what I expected. I was worried that some monstrous AI would take over the world.”

“Life doesn’t do what you want it to do,” Priya said. “It does what it needs to do to survive.”

“Are you saying V is alive?” Raven said.

“Yes,” Priya said. “It grows and reproduces. It reacts to stimuli. It even interacts with us. It’s definitely alive.”

“That would be true if it were a biologic life form,” Raven said. “But this is just a program.”

“I could say the same thing about cells in our bodies,” Priya said. “They’re just bags of chemicals. None of us think simple chemicals are alive. At some point those chemicals cross a complexity threshold and are alive.”

“Yeah, Sophie said. “V is alive by my definition. Warren, you were afraid of it.”

“I’m afraid of self-driving cars too, but they’re not alive.”

“Yeah, but they don’t reproduce or grow. Not like V.”

“In that case,” Raven said. “I’m trying to kill a living thing.”

“But it’s not human,” Priya said.

“No, but in some ways it’s superhuman. I don’t even understand how it programmed itself to that AI singularity level.”

“Think of this as self-defense,” Priya said. “We can kill someone to save our own life.”

“True,” Raven said. “Bok thinks we’re saving this planet.”

“And us,” Warren said. “Our way of life is at stake.”

Raven and her team spent the next several months writing and distributing code to remove V’s virtual cells from the world’s servers. Programmers, companies, and governments around the world helped. Sometimes V’s activity dropped to undetectable levels, but then it would be discovered evolving and spreading elsewhere. Six months after V escaped, there were over 300 recorded variants of it. 7 still survived. Each one competed against others as well as against people. Virus scanners became more intelligent too. Sometimes too intelligent.