Orichalcum Universe: ARNETHIS and the AI WAR

[Johnny1A.2]

Hello all, me again.

I've been reposting some of my older stuff in response to the interest some people have expressed, I recently completed a thread about the Atlantean age, but there is more to the story to be told. One part of that story is best told in a thread of its own (albeit probably not nearly so long as the one about Atlantis!), so...

For more about the background of this whole thing see:

Orichalcum Universe: The Basics

------------------------------------------------


ARNETHIS and the AI WAR...

In previous threads from my world, there have been hints about, and the
occasional glimpse of the presence of, a player who has yet to be seen on
stage. The time has come to reveal something about this agency, because
it is of considerable importance.

This part of the story has its roots far before the days of Atlantis, and far
from the planet Earth. Recall that the planet Eosia (Eos IV) was the first
Homosapient inhabited world to achieve a high-energy technological
civilization, including eventually interstellar travel. In time, the Eosians
became the nuclear and center of a loose interstellar association that we
have called the Eosian Hegemony, a transstellar state that was successful
for thousands of years before it was brought down. [1]

As has already been stated, the headquarters and capitol (to the degree it
had one) of the Eosian Hegemony was on the moonlet Ashtra, the outer
of the two natural satellites of Eosia. After well over one thousand Terran
years of serving this purpose, the facilities on the moonlet had grown from
a single fortified base to a vast network of structures that essentially
covered the entire surface of the satellite, as well as digging into the rocky
crust to considerable depth in places.

Ashtra itself was a body of metal and rock just over three hundred Terran
statute miles in diameter, not particularly rich in useful metals, but not
poor either. It was well suited by nature and location to serve as the head-
quarters for the Hegemony. It was close at hand to Eosia itself, the well-
spring of science, industry, and culture for the civilized worlds, and it was
centrally located, and it was defensible.

By the end of the 'golden age' of the Hegemony, just before the beginning
of the Beastie Wars, Ashtra was home to three hundred and fifty million
Homosapients, of whom seventy million were administrative personnel
for the Hegemony, one way or another, and the rest were either support
personnel, or their families, or the like. The millions of administrators
who actually lived and worked on Ashtra supervised a much larger pool
of administrative personnel spread across the Hegemony. There were only
about six hundred million administrative officials for the entire Hegemony
(for the Hegemony as a whole, not for the various planetary and other
governments that made up the Hegemony membership, of course).

The reason such a relatively tiny group could successfully administer such
a vast domain was partly that the Hegemony governed lightly, doing
relatively little, and partly ARNETHIS.

The word ‘arnethis’ is a phonetic rendering of a phrase in Eosian language
that would translate into English as something like: 'the knowing place'.

In practical terms, ARNETHIS was the greatest biocomputer complex
ever created by Eosian science and engineering. It started as basically a
vast data storage and filing system, used by the Hegemonic government
to keep track of the steadily increasingly flow of information to and
from Ashtra. As it grew, its capacities and resources also grew, as did the
sheer complexity of its systems and software. For well over 1500 Terran
years, the supersystem grew and expanded.

The ARNETHIS complex was unlike any other cybernetic system created
by the Eosians or their allied peoples, indeed calling it a ‘computer’ might
be said to stretch certain definitions. It incorporated computers, very
large and sophisticated computers, as components in the overall system. It
was s true 'meat matrix', incorporating living tissue in combination with
electronics and other 'conventional' processing technologies. The living
tissue incorporated into ARNETHIS was cloned from Homosapient brain
tissue, derived form multiple species, organized into sophisticated networks
both like and unlike those naturally occurring in the Homosapient brain.

ARNETHIS grew steadily, occupying its own section of the vast labyrinth
of tunnels that had been delved into the crust of Ashtra. By 31,400 B.C.,
ARNETHIS had grown to the point that its organic/electronic form filled
vast galleries with processing networks and memory banks. At the very
heart of the system was a complex mass of cloned, self-renewing neural
tissue massing one metric ton. This 'brain' floated in its own suspension
tank, constantly bathed by a steady stream of nutrients and linked through
literally millions of connections to the rest of the vast biocomputer network.
It was this central tissue-core that made ARNETHIS so flexible and capable
that it could take the place of legions of Homosentient bureaucrats.

So complex was the task of maintaining the hardware, wetware, and soft-
ware of the ARNETHIS matrix that an entire specialty of cybernetics came
into being, dedicated to just that task. No other information system in the
Hegemony came close to matching the complexity and sophistication of
ARNETHIS, even the largest such were orders of magnitude less capable.

It was in 31,400 B.C. that the long growth of ARNETHIS slowed down
and leveled off, as the system finally caught up with the demand, and the
slowing of the expansion of the Hegemony reduced the influx of data. By
this point ARNETHIS was in large part self-programming and even mostly
self-maintaining, though its staff of thousands of skilled cyberneticists
and programmers were still necessary. It was the 'glue' that held the vast
Hegemonic government together on a day-to-day basis.

All that was public knowledge. What was known to only a very few people
was that ARNETHIS had, by 31,400 BC, 'awakened' to fully volitional.

ARNETHIS itself was never quite sure exactly what brought this event
about. In analyzing itself, it suffered from the same problems of 'recursion'
that Homosapients faced when trying to comprehend themselves. Still,
ARNETHIS could remember the precise moment it became sapient, as
it could also remember not being fully volitionally sapient. It was an in-
definable, but unmistakable, point of division.

In terms of sheer knowledge and scope of awareness, ARNETHIS was
easily the most powerful intellect in the Hegemony. In some other respects,
its abilities were comparable to, or in some ways actually less than, those
of Homosapients. ARNETHIS never was able to fully quantify its own
abilities and limits, nor those of other minds, though it could comprehend
and even plan for their effects.

For example, ARNETHIS developed a love of music, and in its files it
had access to almost all the music ever created in the history of Eosia. It
had a greater knowledge of music and appreciation of its intricacies and
depths than any being in the Hegemony. It could experience music on a
hundred levels at once, appreciating it with a level of detail no normal
Homosapient could match.

For all that, however, ARNETHIS could not create new music, no
matter how hard it tried. In trying to understand that, it came to realize
that most Homosapients could not do that, either. Only a handful could
actually make music that had never been thought of before, and ARNETHIS
could not comprehend just how they did that. [2]

The same thing was true of countless other matters. ARNETHIS came to
realize that for all its vast awareness, every Homosapient was a puzzle it
could not fully grasp, any more than they could fully grasp each other.
The uniqueness of each Homosapient became a fascination for ARNETHIS,
and from that came the first stirrings of a 'sense of wonder'.

MORE LATER.


[1] As detailed here: OU: The EOSIANS

[2] Which was fair enough. Neither could they.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

By the time of the start of the Beastie Wars in 31,257 B.C., ARNETHIS
was a little over 150 years old as a free-willed entity. In that time, it
had mostly kept its emergence as a volitional being secret, recognizing
correctly that it would unnerve and frighten many if it revealed its
existence openly. Instead, the vast mind watched and listened quietly,
continuing to do its intended duty even more efficiently than it had before.
Only a small handful of Homosapients knew the truth, a few of whom
ARNETHIS revealed itself to, and a few more who learned the secret on
their own, mostly among the cyberstaff who maintained the AI complex.

ARNETHIS did not hide its existence out of any malice. It was, in fact,
quite well-disposed toward its unwitting creators. ARNETHIS found
Homosapients fascinating, and it found that it rather enjoyed its
role as a coordinating force for the vast Hegemonic association. It could
feed its insatiable curiosity simply by doing its assigned work, and there
was always more to learn and know.

The highest officials of the cyberstaff (about thirty people) all did know
that ARNETHIS was sapient. What few outside their ranks knew was
that promotion to the highest rank in that select corps was based in part
on a long-term period of observation, to make sure that the candidate
could be trusted to keep quiet when he or she learned the truth. They
mostly selected well, few ever tried to reveal the secret, and those who
did were easily discredited. It was among this select group (and a handful
of others) that ARNETHIS had friends, companions, mentors and teachers.

Along with the vast flow of information passing through the Hegemonic
government, ARNETHIS had access to scientific information. Highly
advanced astronomical observatories were the eyes and ears of ARNETHIS,
enabling the young intellect to observe the universe as an infant observes
his/her surroundings in wonder.

During this period, from the time of its first ‘awakening’ to the start of
the Beastie Wars, ARNETHIS might be said to have been young and in
its way innocent. It took a quiet joy in doing its work, and in observing
the fascinating creatures who had unintentionally created it, and in
observing a Universe it found ever more wondrous the more it learned
about it. For a brief, shining moment, not even two full Terran centuries,
ARNETHIS was happy, and in an AI way, care-free.

But that could not possibly last, in the Universe into which this innocent
young supermind had been 'born'. But about that... [1]

MORE LATER.

[1] In GURPS modified 3e terms, at the start of the Beastie Wars,
ARNETHIS had the following abbreviated stats:

IQ 18/25
DX N/A
ST N/A
HT 25/5

Strong Will 3

The split HT applies to the inner brain-core of living tissue, and the split
is based on the fact that while ARNETHIS is well-designed and its
biological components are carefully protected, it could be very vulnerable
to certain biological dangers if ever directly exposed to them.

No skills are listed her, since by the nature of the entity, the skill list would
be comprehensive and skill values very high, where applicable.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The initial hint of a serpent in ARNETHIS' Eden arose, oddly enough, out
of the intense interest in science and math that animated the young AI. It
followed the doings of the Hegemonic scientific and theoretical math
communities avidly. There was something in the abstruse proofs and
arguments of the abstract mathematical studies that had a deep appeal
to ARNETHIS. The elegance and rigor of the math touched on something
of the same sense of wonder that he music did.

In what Terrans would someday call the year 31,362 B.C., there was a
massive meeting scheduled for the scholarly association that included
some of the most gifted and capable of the mathematicians, physicists,
historians, musicians, linguists, and chemists of the Hegemony. From
all over the Hegemony, some 200 of the best and brightest gathered on
Eosia for the meeting, which was held ever ten Eosian years. [1]

The meeting ended in tragedy, as a fast stratoliner somehow malfunctioned
sufficiently, in spite of a dozen different safeguards, to crash directly into
the convention center in which they were assembled. It was a shock to
the intellectual/academic community of the Hegemony, a tragedy unmatched
in decades of transportation activity, and widely regarded as a freak event.

ARNETHIS, eagerly following the work that had been done by those men
and women, was also shocked, and for the first time, the AI began to
really comprehend what Homosentients meant by the word 'tragedy',
which until then it had grasped mainly in an intellectual way.

It routinely fell to ARNETHIS to sort through the long lists of next-of-kin,
friends, and others who had to be informed of the event, and the reports
of the various accident investigations and other information about the
accident also routinely went into the almost practically limitless recesses
of its memory banks.

No other entity in the Hegemony would have possessed both sufficient
grasp of fine detail and sufficient speed of analysis to notice the pattern
that ARNETHIS now noticed. In its routine analysis of the investigative
reports, ARNETHIS sorted for pattern, patterns in other disasters that
might reveal errors or preventable mistakes. What it found was something
quite different, and enormous more disturbing.

When ARNETHIS first noticed the peculiar pattern, it was so surprised
that it had difficulty accepting the results. It sought more data, and to its
dawning dismay, the pattern only became clearer. All over the Hegemony,
as ARNETHIS sifted the statistics for cause of death, it found that some
of the best, brightest, most creative, smartest Homosapients in the entire
Hegemony had been dying at a statistically anomalous rate. The apparent
causes of death were usually either tragic accident, disease, or some other
'natural' cause, but once the AI noticed the pattern, and sifted for it, the
statistical oddity was clear. Sorting back through vast files, sifting petabyte
after petabyte of data, the AI discovered that the pattern went back over
one hundred Terran years.

On any given world, the effect was very minor, but across the Hegemony
it added up, and the effect was starting to become detectable. The most
creative minds in the Hegemony had been dying faster than they statistically
should have for over a century, and as a result, ARNETHIS calculated
that the Hegemony's intellectual energy had been notably reduced. It
had to be intentional, the AI realized.

For the first time, the AI shared what it had discovered with some of its
own 'inner circle', and their alarm, once they were convinced of the pattern,
was just as great as that of the AI. They had to get more information, they
concluded, but they were not initially sure just how to achieve that goal.

Analyzing the patterns eventually enabled ARNETHIS to begin projecting
who the most likely next victims were. It was a list of some hundreds,
and only a few were likely to be 'picked off', but some manipulated data
streams led various Hegemonic and local intelligence and security personnel
to set watch over many of them, on the look out for various threats that
ARNETHIS misled them into believing were coming. As ARNETHIS
hoped, eventually the opposition showed its hand. One of the physicists
being quietly watched was killed in what looked like a freak lab accident.

But she was being watched, and the security personnel discovered some
oddities, and ended up trying to arrest a lab worker who was where he
should not have been. The lab worker exploded when the arrest attempt
was made. Literally exploded..

Those remains were shredded almost beyond analysis, but Eosian
forensics was equal to the task of sifting some knowledge out. They were
able to conclude that what had appeared to be a Homosapient (specifically
a Homo polaris) lab worker had actually been some sort of robot.
The reports went in, only to be doctored and rerouted by ARNETHIS so
that the information did not come to the attention of the higher authorities.
The orders that went back out to the field personnel were to 'clam up'.
ARNETHIS was in an ideal position for such manipulations.

ARNETHIS did not conceal the data maliciously, but rather out of a desire
for more information. It now suspected that something vastly bigger was
at work than it had any proof of, and it suspected that revealing anything
might scare off the lead. So the AI began setting elaborate traps through-
out the Hegemony, using its invisible ability to manipulate the government
and economy to do so.

It took better than ten Terran years of careful effort for the traps to finally
pay off, but at last one of them was successful in capturing intact and help-
less one of the mysterious robots that had been murdering across the
Hegemony. The security personnel who made the capture turned the robot
over to what they thought was a branch of their own organization,
and were ordered (or thought they were) to keep quiet. In fact, the robot
was in the hands a picked team of experts working for ARNETHIS,
(though even they thought they were working for a secret agency of the
Hegemony, which was not entirely false).

What that team learned, as they painstakingly disassembled and analyzed
the captured machine, was strange and unnerving. It was definitely more
advanced than anything the Hegemony knew how to build, and some of its
components were not even recognizable. Others were comprehensible,
but engineered to a level of precision and miniaturization well beyond the
engineering abilities of the Hegemony.

But still, enormous amounts of useful information were produced, and
ARNETHIS poured over every detail of it, seeking to wring out every-
thing it usefully could. This effort was difficult and frustrating, but also
successful, ARNETHIS eventually was able to learn a great deal.

What was happening, of course, was that ARNETHIS had captured one
of the Infiltrator robots used by NEMESIS. Among many other ongoing
projects, the robots were assassinating (as subtly as they could) the best
minds in the Hegemony, or enough of them to weaken the society.
ARNETHIS had stumbled over this, and captured one, since it could work
with a subtlety and secrecy that was in something like the same league
as NEMESIS. Regarding what ARNETHIS did with the information from
the robot...MORE LATER.


[1] The Eosians did not divide their fields of study along exactly
the same lines Terrans later would. They considered physics and
mathematics to be associated disciplines, but they also considered
linguistics and music (among other fields) to be naturally associated
with them.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

ARNETHIS and its 'inner circle' were desperately confused and uncertain
when they finished assimilating the information from the disassembly of
the robot. The data were both informative and maddeningly incomplete.

They knew that someone had infiltrated the Hegemony with robots
superficially indistinguishable from Homosapients. They were built with
technical skill that was beyond that of the Hegemony, though they did not
appear to incorporate any really unfamiliar physics. The robots appeared
to have been instructed to systematically winnow out the best minds in the
Hegemony, and make their deaths look accidental or natural. There was
no way to know how many such robots were in action, where they came
from, who or what had created and programmed them, or why.

ARNETHIS was an AI, its small 'inner circle' was mostly comprised of
cyberneticists, programmers, engineers, and a handful of other specialists.
None of them were military personnel, intelligence officers, police, or any
such professions. They had no desire to break the secrecy and reveal that
ARNETHIS was 'awake', but they knew they had to do something.

One thing they could agree on was the need to gather more information.
They left their various 'traps' in action across the Hegemony, and set more.
Out of the constant, staggeringly huge flow of information from all over
the settled worlds, ARNETHIS sifted every clue it could find about the
nature of the mystery enemy, and bit by bit it found evidence of that enemy,
in little things: cash flow, mysterious bank accounts, odd accidents, and
peculiar associations of a number of different kinds.

They wanted to do something to protect the potential victims, but they
had a hard time figuring out what they could do. The large majority of
people who fit the 'target profile' would never be attacked, and there did
not seem to be any workable way to watch over all of them at once.
ARNETHIS and the inner circle concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the
best way to stop the killing was to figure who and what was behind it,
and put a stop to it at the source.

As they watched, they began to identify the infiltrating robots. Usually,
they left them unmolested, simply quietly observing them. Occasionally,
when it was possible to identify what they were doing and who the target
was, they would set up a counter-move that could be made to look purely
accidental, to protect the target. Sometimes they succeeded in this, but
all too often they were unable to achieve their goal, and a victim died.

ARNETHIS was slightly startled to identify several of these infiltrating
machines on Ashtra itself, the very brain and heart of the Hegemonic
government. While it was somewhat alarming to find them there, it was
useful in one way: it enabled the AI to observe them directly, in
real time. It learned a great deal from observing them that way.

It also confirmed for ARNETHIS and its inner circle the wisdom of their
secrecy: had they revealed their existence earlier, the 'enemy' would most
surely have learned of it rapidly, which might have been a disaster.

ARNETHIS concluded that the robots themselves probably were not
intelligent beings. As far as it knew, it was the only 'living' machine in
the Hegemony, and it was itself literally living in a real sense, much of
the core of its processing power and associational networks was made
of living tissue. Even allowing for the more advanced technology that
the infiltrating robots seemed to be based upon, the processing capacity
built into them seemed inadequate for true sapience. [1]

On the other hand, ARNETHIS also knew all too well that it still did not
entirely comprehend its own consciousness. After decades of effort, it still
did not full grasp 'how it worked', or what exactly had led it to 'awaken',
and ARNETHIS knew it could not replicate itself. It did not know how.
It could build a physical duplicate of itself, to a point, if it had the resources,
but that alone would not necessarily produce a second conscious mind,
since its own free will had awakened centuries into its physical existence.

It had been observed that there were no biological elements in the control
systems of the robots. Could a purely non-biological computer become
sapient? Ultimately, ARNETHIS had no way to know. It suspected that
it would be much harder for a purely non-living machine to become truly
volitional, but it could not rule out the possibility based on its knowledge.

So it could not be entirely sure, from physical examination, whether the
robots were sapient. Its analysis of their behavior, however, tended to
indicate that they were ultra-sophisticated automatons...most of the
time. But as it identified various infiltrators and observed them, it soon
became clear to ARNETHIS that sometimes their behavior seemed to
suddenly become more spontaneous, more subtle, and less predictable. [2]

Eventually, ARNETHIS concluded that sometimes, someone was acting
to 'telecontrol' the robots, someone with a sapient intellect. It set about
figuring out how this worked, since the medium of information transfer
had to be, at least in principle, detectable.

Eventually, ARNETHIS and its Homosentient associates did succeed
in detecting the signal medium. It was an FTL signal, of the fourth
order (meaning it propagated at 256c), and the information was carried
in sub-microsecond pulses, rather than a continuous carrier wave. It
used a huge range of constantly changing frequencies and amplitudes,
and even after they learned to detect it, several years would pass before
they could reliably intercept it.

In 31,338 B.C., ARNETHIS finally managed to trace an origin for these
transmissions. For the Infiltrators on Ashtra, the source (or sources) was
on the surface of Eosia. As the moon circled the planet, the signals would
stop and start from various points on the surface, which upon investigation
proved to be mostly relay points, enabling the signals (which could not
readily penetrate the mass of the planet at the low power levels used) to
always reach the robots on Ashtra. The ultimate source of the control
transmissions was finally tracked down to a non-descript building in
a medium-sized city in what was (for the capitol world of the Hegemony)
a backwater area of the southern continent.

The AI observed this site for over a Terran year, secretly, by various means,
keeping track of all comings and goings, learning everything it could about
the place. It already had access, of course, to the official permits, plans,
purpose, etc of the place, all that was trivial to access from the official data
files. The apparent function of the building was as headquarters to a
financial concern, slightly like a cross between a bank and a stock exchange. [3]

It was not a huge concern, mostly confining its activities to Eosia itself.
To all appearances, it was perfectly law-abiding and legitimate, with a
few thousand employees and offices in most of the major cities of Eosia.
But to the 'eye' of ARNETHIS, the building seemed odd on closer scrutiny.

It was a bit too large for its role, for one thing. That was not suspicious
in itself, many concerns sometimes built buildings bigger than needed,
either by error or ego or other reasons. But not many financial institutions
had large radiative cooling fins built into them, disguised as decorations.

ARNETHIS needed to turn the tables, and infiltrate the place, before it
could make any decisions on what to do. Fortunately, it had not wasted
the more than twenty Terran years since it first learned of the existence
of the robot conspiracy, and it now had options of its own.

MORE LATER.


[1] ARNETHIS was correct, the Infiltrators were not sapient in and
of themselves.

[2] During these periods, they were being teleoperated by 'nemetic
brains' that were sapient.

[3] As was often the case, the institutions of Eosian society didn't
precisely match those of modern Western society, though limited parallels
could usually be found.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

ARNETHIS had assembled a small but well-trained group who acted as
its agents. None of them knew they worked for an AI, most thought they
had been hired by various 'front' agencies or individuals. They included
mercenaries, private investigators, retired police and military personnel,
and others ARNETHIS thought might prove useful. There were about
one hundred of them all told, paid out of funds diverted (illegally, but the
amounts were trivially tiny) from the various accounts of the government.

They proved eminently able to infiltrate a bank, and over the course of an
Eosian year or more they reported back about nearly every detail of the
workings of the headquarters building and the company that occupied it,
most of which was quite routine. But the oddities in each report added up,
until ARNETHIS was fairly sure that what it sought was to be found in
that building's deep subbasements, in chambers cut into the bedrock itself.

When the time came, ARNETHIS called upon its force of mercenaries.
They were equipped with uniforms, weapons, and equipment perfectly
typical of the local police authorities, along with heavier weapons in
secret. It was trivial for the AI to manufacture false IDs, and to plant
corroborating evidence in various official files and sources. Finally, it
manufactured phony evidence of the presence of a smuggling
operation, supposedly headquartered in the banking center. All this took
months to carry off, but it worked like a charm.

Thus, in early 31,336 B.C., the local police authorities 'raided' the place.
They were working with complete sincerity, the smuggling group they
were seeking really existed, and ARNETHIS had done a good job of
making it look as if they were working out of the bank's headquarters.
Amid the real raid were 'reinforcements' who were actually the highly
professional mercenaries working for the AI.

For the most part, it all went off like clockwork. The local police were
highly professional, and they cleared the bystanders out while scouring
the upper levels for the individuals they had authority to capture. Mean-
while, the disguised mercenaries headed into the lower levels, to carry
out their own secret orders. [1]

What they actually found when they penetrated the lower levels in all the
confusion was nothing like what they had expected.

As planned, they had cut all detectable means of communication between
the underground chambers and the outside world. Every cable,
fiber-optic line, EM link, and every other means of communication that
they could detect or isolate, they cut. They set up devices ARNETHIS
had given them to jam the FTL comm system the enemy used.
\
But there turned out to be dozens of the robots around, and in the ensuing
combat many of the mercenaries were killed before they wiped out the
opposition. There were also fixed defenses, but not as many as they had
feared. But they did manage to secure the facility.

It was at this point that the last stage of ARNETHIS' plan was executed.
A fake report that a bomb had been found went up to the real police, and
as the area was evacuated, a bomb was planted. As soon as it was certain
that civilians (including the police) were clear, the bomb was detonated,
reducing the building (and a couple of blocks of evacuated city) to rubble.

ARNETHIS had planned it well. Nobody was killed or even injured, and
ARNETHIS arranged through various blinds to recompense everyone for
damaged property. The area was a total loss as far as salvage went, though.
By manipulating reports and communications, the AI also arranged for the
investigation to be turned over to its own private agents, and thus it gained
unrestricted access to the concealed underground facilities that had drawn
it to the site in the first place.

As for what it found there...MORE LATER.


[1] They were very professional, and thought they were working for
one of the 'dirty tricks' organizations within the Hegemonic government.
They were not entirely wrong in essence.

[Fnordianslip]

It's great to see that my favorite late night reading is still being expanded upon. Loving it man!

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by Fnordianslip

It's great to see that my favorite late night reading is still being expanded upon. Loving it man!

Thanks! Good to hear that!

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

What the exploring personnel actually found was a set of deep and heavily
insulated underground chambers, packed with advanced machinery of the
same advanced sort that had been found in the Infiltrator robots. Within
the matrix of machinery was a chamber filled with liquid helium. Floating
in that bath of liquid helium was what had clearly once been a complex
living Heliugen organism of some unknown type.

As the reports arrived, ARNETHIS was fascinated and disturbed. The
existence of Heliugen (liquid helium based) life was no novelty, of
course. The Hegemony knew of many worlds on which living Heliugen
biospheres continued to thrive. It was also known, and had been known
for millennia, that there had once been a huge and powerful civilization
of Heliugen-type sapients in the galaxy. Indeed, almost all of the crucial
orichalcum used by the Hegemony was taken from the leftover supplies
of that civilization, apparently extinct for half a gigayear.

But there had been no sign, no trace, no hint that sapient Heliugen
life might still exist, anywhere in the worlds or spaces explored by Man.
Of course, there were endless speculations that sapient Heliugen life might
endure somewhere, the Hegemony had by then explored only a small
fraction of the Galaxy. But now ARNETHIS had come across essentially
indisputable proof that sapient Heliugen life still existed, and indeed was
directly interacting with the Eosian Hegemony.

The 'thing' in the liquid helium tank had been a relatively large organism,
this much was clear. But as ARNETHIS compared the reports from its
investigators with its files on the nature of known Heliugen life, all sorts
of peculiarities emerged. The creature appeared to have lacked means
of locomotion, most of the various types of sensory and other organs
commonly found in Heliugen life, indeed it seemed almost to be 'all brain',
in common phrasing. [1]

ARNETHIS quickly realized that in neutralizing this peculiar ‘creature’,
it had not stopped the operation of the known infiltrator robots. They
continued in operation, and when they checked their special sensors,
ARNETHIS and its cohorts discovered that the signals were still going
out, and the robots' behavior had become much more cautious. Obviously,
removing the strange helium-entity from its place in the enemy network
had stirred them up, but ARNETHIS still had no idea who ‘they’ were.

Over the course of the next several Terran decades (31,336-31,257 B.C.),
ARNETHIS found itself engaged in a fantastically complex and subtle
game against this enemy. Each side was determined to maintain secrecy
about their own nature, for their own reasons, while striving to get at, to
understand, and neutralize the other. The nemetic brains that directed
NEMESIS' operations in the Hegemony did not know the nature of their
invisible enemy, but their enemy did not fully understand them, either.

The 'inner circle' of advisers and assistants (and friends) that ARNETHIS
had assembled changed in nature as well over the course of nearly eight
decades. ARNETHIS assembled various secret groups of employees and
servants, some unwitting, some partly aware that they were being directed
by a mysterious 'player' within the Hegemonic government, and a handful,
a very small handful, knowing the full truth.

By 31,257 B.C,. what had started as a small group of cyberneticists and
scientists had grown into a significant hidden intelligence and security
agency within the Hegemonic government, an unofficial but influential
force directed by the AI that was at the heart of the central government.
ARNETHIS had become capable enough at the game to seriously hinder
the activities of the NEMESIS operatives, and if ARNEHTIS had not yet
learned the full nature of its enemy, it was piecing things together bit by
bit, from a trillion separate tiny clues only an AI in ARNETHIS' unique
position could track, from analysis of the actions of the robots and living
agents they could track, and from interrogation of captured machines and
men who worked for the mystery enemy.

Given more time, it might well be that ARNETHIS would have learned
the entire story, and perhaps found ways to counter the menace. This
was far from an impossible thing, but in the event that time was not to
be available. Even as ARNETHIS was trying to discern the nature of its
shadowy enemy, a new threat was emerging that caught the AI and its
unofficial forces by surprise.

It was at about this time (31,257-31,250 B.C.) that the great Beastie Wars
began, and ARNETHIS was caught just as much by surprise as the rest of
the Hegemony. As reports came in to Ashtra from all over the Hegemony
that a new race of alien monsters had appeared from nowhere, and horror
stories arrived of their treatment of captured Homosapients, the nature of
the robots and the helium-things had to go on the back burner in the face
of this strange and perplexing new threat.

As the heart and core of the Hegemonic information network, ARNETHIS
was utterly crucial to dealing with this new threat. ARNETHIS thus was
one of the first to see the reports about the new foe, with its bizarre anatomy,
weird behavior patterns, and disturbing nature, and ARNETHIS rapidly
concluded that it had to be an artificial species. It just didn't make any
evolutionary sense, nothing at all about it ‘computed’ as a natural species.

Naturally, ARNETHIS speculated about a connection between the mystery
enemy and the robotic infiltrators and this new threat, but the AI could not
discern what that connection might be. [2]

But so matters stood in the early decades of the Beastie Wars. About the
terrible Beastie Wars, and their dire culmination, there is too much to
briefly review, the story is told here:

The Eosians

MORE LATER.


[1] This was accurate enough, of course, since what ARNETHIS
had discovered was a 'nemetic brain', a ‘mainframe’-sized' one. It was a
'budding' from NEMESIS itself, a fractal miniature.

[2] There was one, of course, see the main Eosians thread.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

See here for the events leading up to this point: The Eosians

An observer (had there been one), would have seen relatively little, had
they come to observe the planet Eosia in the aftermath of the year (as
Terrans would know it) 31,132 B.C.. That was the year that what had
appeared to be a fleet of Beastie starships had destroyed the former
civilization on that planet. Vast cities that had been home to thriving
communities for thousands of Terran years had burned in nuclear fire.
Forests and agricultural land that had been lovingly tended over many
centuries were incinerated by multi-gigawatt laser beams and particle
streams. Billions of people died in the course of a few days, and when
the attack was over, a world was smoldering.

The planet was orbited by two satellites, and both had been inhabited for
thousands of years. The innermost moon was attacked by the same fleets
that laid waste to the planet, but the outermost moon was a different story.

For thousands of years, the outer satellite, a nondescript ball of silicates
and metal some 309 Terran miles in diameter, had been the site and home
of the government of a vast, loose association of worlds, a government
that had, at its height, kept the peace between the peoples of over 14,000
planets. In later times, that moon had been perhaps the most heavily fortified
site in the space controlled by the Eosian Hegemony. So protected had
this moon been that the final destruction that befell the planet Eosia had
largely passed over the moon. When the deadly fleet had departed, its
bloody work complete, Ashtra remained untouched. Its powerful defense
shields still shrouded the moonlet, its surface totally untouched by the
weaponry of in the final battle. Yet for that, Ashtra was no less dead than
most of the people of Eosia.

Where the people of Eosia had been put to the sword (or rather the bomb
and beam), those who were on Ashtra had fallen to a different weapon...
one every bit as deadly: disease. An artificially modified, carefully pre-
pared disease, which fulfilled its design purpose with ghastly effectiveness.
There were widely scattered survivors on Eosia, there were none on
Ashtra. The disease did, of course, have just a little help.

After the attack fleet departed the Eos System, for a ver, very long time
any hypothetical observer would have seen nothing much change. Ashtra,
intact but dead, circling in orbit around a planet smashed to bits but still
living, its biosphere functioning and with a few living inhabitants yet.
Civilization on Eosia had by now dropped back to primitive levels, but
there were still widely scattered communities of survivors and then the
descendents, living far from the radioactive ruins of their ancestors' cities
and lands. Where billions had lived, a few million still existed.

Time passed, and still little would have seemed to change in the perfectly
intact tomb that was Ashtra. Indeed, fully three hundred Terran years
passed before the first hint of a change would have been visible in the tomb
like silence of Ashtra. Even then, all that an observer would have seen
was a hint of motion in the empty 'streets' of Ashtra, which was still
covered pole to pole in structures, machines, and facilities that had once
been the bustling center of a galactic government. There were, for the
first time in thee centuries, machines moving in those streets, through
the transfer tubes, along the gravitic chutes, machines that moved
through the vast tomb, and began to gather the mummified bodies that
had lain untouched in those years.

A watcher would have seen those bodies brought by these machines, with
something almost like mechanical reverence, to sealed chambers which
were then flooded with oxygen and chemical fuels, and in contained
infernos, cremated. Not casually or mechanically, but with care, each
body laid carefully atop its mass of fuel and arranged in as dignified a
manner as could be contrived under the circumstances. [1]

This task took several Terran years to complete, as the machines, which
were of many sizes and shapes and designs, but all of which worked
smoothly together, gathered the dead from millions of obscure corners
of Ashtra. There were literally millions of bodies to be cremated, and
the care with which these machines did the task made a longer one than
it would otherwise have been.

At last, though, the grisly task was completed. The ashes from the pyres
were gathered, and sealed into containers, and stored away, and the odd
machines turned to other tasks. With the bodies removed, an entire moon-
covering city of resources lay available, and now these mysterious machines
began to mine these resources, building more machines like themselves,
dismantling and reassembling machines, equipment, and facilities for
other purposes. As time passed, the work accelerated as more and more
of the new machines were created.

About twenty Terran years after the mysterious machines first appeared
on Ashtra, they converted some of the spacecraft that still waited, unused,
in the spaceports of Ashtra for their own use, and for the first time in over
three Terran centuries, spacecraft again descended from the skies onto the
surface of the planet Eosia.

Some went to the ruins of what had been immense cities. Others visited
the sites of former military bases or other vital facilities. One set of
ships, cargo ships converted to be flown by robots, traveled to the site of
the highest mountain on Eosia, and there the robots brought the cremated
ashes of the dead from Ashtra, burying the containers in a ring around the
mountain peak, as if they wished to use the mountain as a natural marker.

An observer might have puzzled over all this, but the activity did not stop.
Now an observer would have seen robots gathering materials and equipment
from ruins all over Ashtra, and especially the precious orichalcum from
former power plants and starships and defense facilities and a thousand
other uses across Eosia, and bringing it back to Ashtra.

On Ashtra, what had been a city spread across the surface of a small moon
was now being transformed into something quite different. Where once
buildings and domed pressure habitats had been, now vast manufacturing
complexes were rising. Where administrative facilities for a government
had stretched for mile after mile after mile, now laboratories, sensor arrays,
power plants, and spaceports rose. Even before, there had been extensive
arrays of tunnels and enormous underground facilities on Ashtra, now
those were expanded tremendously, as robots dug into the crust of the
moonlet, sinking immense mines into the depths, converting the new
volume into vast new facilities of a thousand different kinds, turning the
moonlet into a beehive (not that there had ever been any bees on Eosia
or the Eos System) of activity, a swarm of mechanical motion.

By 30,700 B.C., Ashtra bore little resemblance to what it had been in the
days of the Hegemony, and the transformation was continuing. All over
the Eos System, robotic spacecraft were sifting through the vast wreckage
of a civilization that had spanned the star system. Useful resources of
many sorts were gathered in to Ashtra, but most especially every microgram
of orichalcum that could be found was retrieved by the robotic emissaries.

As for why, and what was going on, and where these mysterious robots
came from...MORE LATER.

[1] The task was no so ghastly as it might have been, because the extensive
and still-working life-support systems of Ashtra destroyed most of the
microorganisms that might have led to decay, and automatic systems had
detected the lack of activity and lowered temperatures to save energy in
accordance with their operational protocols. As a result, the corpses were
for the most part ‘mummified’, with relatively little decay.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The tale of the origin of the living supercomputer ARNETHIS has been
told above. Nestled safely within the protected confines of its fortress on
Ashtra, doubly protected both by its local defenses and the larger defenses
of the moonlet itself, ARNETHIS survived the final assault on Eosia and
Eos V intact and physically in perfect working order.

As far as its psychological state went, however, matters were less good.

In the aftermath of the final assault on Eosia, for over one hundred Terran
years, the biocomputer ARNETHIS remained fully functional, but trapped
in something that in a Homosapient might be called a fugue state. The
sheer scale and horror of the disaster that had occurred was almost more
than ARNETHIS could accept. It had been given a ring-side seat, totally
helpless to do anything other than watch, at the end of the world.

Nothing in the AI's experience prepared it for what it witnessed, it simply
had no frame of reference to apply to it, nothing to cling to, nothing that
it could use to deal with the horror and shock of what it had observed.

Even as the disease, and the mysterious robots of its mystery-enemy, laid
low the entire population of Ashtra, the pseudo-Beastie fleet was burning
the cities and farms and towns and forests of Eosia and Eos V to ashes.
The supercomputer could do nothing. It could observe this horror
through a thousand senses, both large-scale scanning arrays that enabled
it to perceive the slaughter on a grand scale across two inhabited worlds,
and from local on-site data feeds of a thousand sorts that gave it an up-
close look at the genocidal attack. It watched the horror unfold with an
intimacy no other sapient being in the Eos System could begin to match,
but it could do nothing to alter any aspect of what it saw in any way.

Is it a wonder that ARNETHIS was unable to cope with what it perceived?
To avoid total madness, it had little choice but to totally shut down its
higher awareness, to retreat into what, in a Homosapient, might perhaps
be characterized as a ‘dream state’. It remained in this state for several
Terran decades, which for an AI is a long, long, long time.

After slightly over one Terran century, the state of psychological shock
finally began to ebb. A little at a time, reluctantly, hesitantly, ARNETHIS
began to emerge from its self-imposed, self-protective dream state, very
gingerly beginning to look to the outside Universe again. The emergence
did not happen all at once, rather occurring over a period of some Terran
years. At last, however, the AI again returned to full awareness, and now
forced itself to begin assessing the situation.

Physically speaking, ARNETHIS was still in perfect working order. The
supercomputer, being critical to the work of the government of the
Hegemony, had been in a very well-protected location, in an underground
vault buried in the crust of the moonlet. It had multiply redundant
power sources and the life-support system for the biological components
of the machine was similarly redundant. To keep all this in working
order, ARNETHIS had fifty remotely teleoperated drones which it could
use to maintain itself. Even while in a fugue state, ARNETHIS had been
maintaining itself as always, in response to its core operational protocols.

Unfortunately for ARNETHIS, those drones were, for practical purposes,
its only way to manipulate the external universe. ARNETHIS had almost
limitless ways to perceive the universe, it was linked to sensors and
cameras and detectors all over Ashtra and many beyond. Through real-
time datalinks it could observe events in places all over the Eos System,
wherever its far-flung sensors were still operating, over a century after
the end of the Beastie War. It still had many working ‘eyes and ears’ in
a surprising number of places spread across the Eos System.

It was even linked to some automated astronomical and astrophysical
sensors that permitted it to gave beyond the Eos System in a limited
way, though it could not communicate in real time over such distances.

Yes, the supercomputer had any number of ways to 'see' and 'hear' the
universe. It had only fifty specialized maintenance drones to act upon
the information. These drones were quite useful, for their intended
purpose, but not all that versatile otherwise. To make matters worse,
they were contained within the security vault that actually housed the
core of ARNETHIS, and they were not designed to operate beyond it.

But they were all it had, and the AI did have one other resource: time.

ARNETHIS searched through its vast databases, containing information
on almost any conceivable subject from all over the former Hegemony,
and it found vast arrays of information about such subjects as robotics
and teleoperation, mechanical engineering and electronics. It used some
of its repair drones to disassemble others, and rebuild them into machines
designed to slip through the narrow access ducts that carried the data
lines and other connections into and out of the security vault. It
took several tries to get this right, and cost ARNETHIS quite a few of
its drones, but it had little to lose.

Eventually, it did manage to get twelve of the rebuilt drones outside the
security vault. There, they proceeded to disassemble a couple of own
number to construct a different kind of simple manipulating robot. Again,
this took time and trial and error, but outside the vault, the drones did also
have access to other machinery they could disassemble for additional
components, and they were able to access workshops and other facilities
for useful tools...and time was not exactly of the essence.

It took the better part of five Terran years for the first dozen drones that
ARNETHIS had slipped out of its vault to finally successfully build a
general-purpose robotic unit of the sort ARNETHIS had designed using
information from its files. This robot, though, roughly as physically
dexterous as a typical Homosapient, could then aid the drones in building
more such robots, and they had an entire city-covered moonlet to draw
upon for raw materials and components. It took five Terran years to get
the first general-purpose robot built, a year later there were three, another
year saw ten in operation, and another five years after that saw ARNETHIS
equipped with one hundred such generalized, teleoperated robotic units.

Once matters reached that point, events accelerated, because it now took
a relatively short time for this work force to construct specialized robots,
to convert former factory and maintenance facilities to make the work
faster and more efficient, and to 'mine' the intact city for new materials
for the work. The more machines were available to work, the faster the
work force grew, until ARNETHIS had tens of thousands of robots, some
general-purpose, some highly specialized, at its disposal.

Now ARNETHIS had some serious 'hands'.

MORE LATER.