ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

by N. Richard Wagner

"Another crap star system," said Eli, groggy from the SenSim tank. The AdSim screamed, "Make your every fantasy real," and it did -- anything was possible. You could slay a dragon and make love with a maiden. You could even make love with the dragon. . . .

The crew leader Ted Comfort looked him over. The Company had to stretch to find crew willing to undergo endless months of decontamination at mission's end. You never knew what an addict like Eli fixated on. Better not to know.

The third and youngest crew member, Arthur Something-or-other, had scarcely said a word for days.

They were patched into the ControlRoomSim, watching colored icons for the elements of the approaching system. Planets were light green, with information in glowing letters below. Their ship and its drones were a range of purple and blue. Any questionable artifacts would be bright orange.

"Why are the purple drones flashing?" asked Eli. "Shouldn't they be steady?"

He must have slept through the BriefingSim, thought Ted. "Drone icons flash when they're too close to us. At that distance, if they become contaminated, we are too. See, the farther ones are steady now."

"The Company's so forking paranoid," said Eli.

"Well," said Ted, "if you want to be sloppy, do it on the next cruise, and spend your extra year of decon with someone else."

The bright blue ship's icon, with its expanding cloud of spy and relay drones, coasted deeper into the inner system. The ship itself was almost invisible, even in the infrared.

* * *

One instant there was empty space and the next a massive object moved in an orbit toward the sun. The Watcher Octet followed more than eight powers-of-eight separate points with mass detectors. After the delays of gravity wave propagation and communication with other octets, "they" noticed the impossible event -- mass where there had been nothing. Backward extrapolation with second and third order approximations confirmed it.

The octet dutifully sent a pseudospeech message to the Central Octet. At (literally) the same time they composed a truespeech packet for racial memory -- something no human could hope to understand. (Think of it perhaps as a poem in DNA with a scratch-and-sniff card and local intelligence.)

The new electromagnetic detectors gave an improbably small cross-section for the object -- an eighth of one sixty-fourth of what its mass promised. There were also several powers-of-eight of near massless objects moving with the main mass.

* * *

They had hit it big -- intelligence and sophisticated technology. This meant a much longer decontamination time -- endless psychological and physical tests, with every cubic millimeter of the ship and its contents examined under a microscope. But it also meant a very much larger bonus. Ted felt weak from the implications. He could get a neural tap. He could have a son.

Spies were sending vast amounts of data. Everywhere were small white puffy-looking creatures doing mysterious things while moving like a fast-forward sim. The computer was trying to analyze their speech and activities, with only partial success. A spy had even found a deceased creature and was looking at tissue samples.

Ted drifted into the common room. Arthur and Eli were playing cards -- not a sim at all, but actually physically playing cards in zero-g. "A thousand things to do and you guys are just forking around."

"There's plenty of time," said Eli. "We'll get our ReportSims done. See to your own."

* * *

[Very rough translation from pseudospeech]: "As always in their ship, the creatures function in a flux of electromagnetic radiation, with a slow, steady, sinusoidal pulse. Two of the creatures are again engaged in a 2-person zero-sum game, some type of ritual activity. We have analyzed their simple language completely, except for the exact meanings of abstract concepts. The game uses rectangular sheets with thirteen markings of one type and four of another, to make fifty-two distinct objects. The game itself is modeled as a trivial finite-state automaton, whose simple rules the creatures themselves cannot follow accurately -- there have been repeated mistakes, some corrected by the other party, some unnoticed, some disputed. During disputes the ritual exchange is usually the same: First creature: `You are the offspring of a (designator for a fellow creature who engages in the reproductive rite for payment).' Second creature: `You should engage in the reproductive rite with your own progenitor.' "

* * *

" . . . and these creatures really make me uneasy." Ted was composing his SummaryReportSim. "I think of them as large termites, because they are nearly white and make little if any use of visible light. In effect they're blind I guess, but assuming so, they really get along well." He paused. "Anyway I'm rambling. Except that they move so fast, they're closer to animated plants than to insects. Scratch that -- that's dumb. They're not like anything we know. Study the full Sim." A longer pause. "OK, they scare hell out of me. They seem to have perfect memories, with, in our terms, incredible amounts of molecular structures devoted to memory or instinct or whatever. They can even exchange molecular information packets, and may pass on a lifetime's experience to their offspring genetically. Now I think that would just completely stifle originality. Everything they do seems like a ritualized, memorized response." The summary was getting too long. He had to wrap it up. "Luckily they know nothing about us. They can't get out of their system. I say watch them carefully -- of course with an extra decoy relay ship next time. Perhaps even exterminate. What they do -- what goes on inside them isn't thinking really. Not in our terms anyway. It's sort of an artificial intelligence."

* * *

"We used biosensors to investigate the creatures' ship without their knowledge," the Central Octet formed into pseudospeech. "The only trace left is a tiny hole in the metal ship's wall, plugged with a hardened organic paste made of the same metal. We assume they will not detect this hole or will mistake it for a micrometeorite. We have extracted eight-to-the-twenty- second bits of information about them, as yet only partially analyzed and understood."

"In studying these creatures we are left with logical contradictions. They can travel faster than light and use marvelous metallic constructs with capabilities beyond anything we have. Yet as individuals they do not understand their own constructs. And the creatures are slow -- nearly two powers-of-eight slower than a full octet, and more than twelve slower than their special constructs. Who built the constructs? Or did they evolve? Are these creatures degenerate descendents of the builders? They cannot remember twelve binary bits in a row, though the constructs have large perfect memories. How do the creatures function so successfully? Their only form of communication or information storage is a rudimentary code much simpler even than pseudospeech. They have nothing like quickspeech or truespeech. They also use flat patterns of pixels which they can access with electromagnetic receptors. Their pulsating electromagnetic flux is another puzzle."

"At priority seven several eights of octets will analyze the data about their method of travel. Fortunately they think they remain hidden from us."

"These creatures are erratic, dangerous. Their thought processes are based on primitive animal instinct, without logic or reliable memory. However they function, it is not proper thinking as we know it. We could call it a type of artificial intelligence."