Dark Mind by Ian Douglas

Author:Ian Douglas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

Bethesda Medical Center

Bethesda, Maryland

1512 hours, TFT

What is it you want?

Admiral Gray felt the words more than he heard them, felt them as a compelling surge of curiosity and command. The questioner was Konstantin, arguably the most powerful AI working now with humans, and certainly the one with the most experience in cracking alien languages and exposing alien motivations.

What is it you want?

Gray was a part of the interrogation partly because the object of Konstantin’s attention was the mass of alien bacteria still inhabiting his body . . . and because Konstantin, while remarkably human in many ways, was not human when it came to emotion. The super-AI could mimic emotion, certainly, but it probably couldn’t feel urges rooted in organic experience—anger, fear, love . . .

. . . or the need for self-preservation on anything deeper than a cold and rational sense of logic.

What is it you want?

To live . . .

Gray felt the response deep inside, a striving, desperate yearning for survival, for life. It was, he thought, quite possibly the one emotion common to all living beings.

Some part of his own brain, he realized, was attaching words to wordless feelings and concepts. He felt Konstantin moving inside his mind. I am adjusting the sensitivity of your implants.

“Go ahead,” he said out loud . . . then realized that Konstantin had not asked his permission, that the super-AI didn’t require his permission. The fine-tuning was ongoing as Konstantin continued to try to extract meaning from the super-organism inside him, and the Prim in him shuddered.

The relationship between Humankind and human technology—in particular with smarter-than-human artificial intelligences—was still poorly defined. Maybe, Gray thought, the ultimate destiny of humans was to serve as disposable but easily replaceable tools for work that didn’t require the highest grade of precision. . . .

Without your active and voluntary participation, Konstantin told him over a private channel, communication with the Symbionts would not be possible at all.

Well, that was nice to know, at least . . . though Gray wasn’t sure what the AI meant by “voluntary.” In any case, medical intervention by both Konstantin and Andre had saved his life and the lives of every infected member of the battlegroup’s crew. At the same time, though—according to the human doctors attending him—they’d left a sheet of the infecting organism still alive inside his body cavity, and a thick concentration still growing in the higher centers of his brain—especially in the regions associated with speech, meaning, and cognition.

What had Konstantin called the alien? Symbionts. The name, he realized, had been drawn from his own memory, but the choice had been guided by the bacteria. It was, he thought, a very strange kind of two-level communication.

We have sought communication with these hosts for over five thousand generations, the Symbiont said, using his own words within his head. Gray listened . . . and recorded everything in his implant RAM, where it could be directly accessed by Konstantin.

How long was the Symbionts’ generation? Terrestrial bacteria, some of them, could reproduce every six hours or so.

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