CONTROL FREE

CONTROL FREE

Skinny and strong, Garvey Ezana was hungry, as he was every day.   His father had given the name, as he had been a passionate pan-Africanist, and he gave Garvey nothing else save perhaps his smarts.  That was all Garvey had learned of the man, who had just vanished before the child was one month old.  It was hard to tell what his mother had given him beyond life, as she was dead from bad drink, she left him last year when he was six.

Now he hustled for what food he could get, for himself and his disabled auntie Mehret, whose shack he slept in, beyond the outskirts of Addis Ababa, off of New Ambo Road.  Mehret shuffled from the small fire and gave him and herself little bowls of bula, a coarse porridge, their last food, and they ate as the day lightened.

“Auntie, you make the best bula.”  Garvey said, relishing his breakfast

Mehret, his dead mother’s older sister, would now hobble to the water tap half a kilometer off and wait for her turn to fill their twelve liter jug, to hobble home with it on a strap over her shoulder.  He had given her his little money to also get an onion and some greens.  Garvey would get whatever he could manage: money, food, or things.  He always brought home enough for them to eat another day, at the very least.

Garvey scorned the garbage pickers, not from pride but because he thought it was unhealthy.  He did not know where such an idea had entered his belief system, but it seemed to him there were many other ways to get along without that sick smell.  Perhaps it was in the way his mother had crinkled her pointy nose at putrescence, he mused, scurrying down the narrow alley toward the crowds. He figured he must have got a lot from his mom. Shoplifting and begging from tourists were his preferred reliable strategies.

A few years before, while his mother lived, an uncle, Negasi, had come by to help sometimes.  He would talk about Garvey’s father with her and they would laugh and cry.  Mehret said he was an older brother of his fathers, but had moved with his family to a far off city for a job.  Once or twice a year a letter would come with some money, and it would instruct Mehret to, “Look after our young lion”.  Garvey acted indifferent to the notes, but he deeply loved the words.  Yet, that money was always long gone, and there was never a sure idea of when another letter might come.

Today Garvey went to the road, and he looked for but did not find Ali the Red, his eight year old partner in survival.  Thus he clung alone to the back of a lumbering trailer until he was close to the Anwar Mosque, where he hoped to get some handouts from tourists who, for no reason he could understand at all, went to see this old building that they did not even want to pray in.  Ali told him that the tourists just wanted to shop in the sprawling wonderful Merkato, and the Mosque was simply nearby.

As luck would have it, as he walked up there were several tourists meandering about the  dusty square outside the entry, taking their snaps.  He set right to it with his most hopeless, hopeful gaze, his grubby clothes matching the ground.  Some took his picture.  He got enough for dinner and tomorrow’s breakfast in the first half hour.  Garvey ignored the threatening scowls from the old beggars who worked the square and thought it theirs.

A pale and solitary tourist brushed past him, turned and put a heavy coin into his hand.  The man looked Garvey in the eyes and gave a thin smile. Then the tourist gestured to his mouth, apparently inquiring if Garvey would like food.  Garvey nodded, thinking that, at the Mosque’s front door, the man must be seeking to do a kindness.  The man quickly walked him to a waiting private car with a driver and they got in and drove off toward the center of the city.

It took a long time winding through dusty traffic, but the air in the car was somehow clean, and the boy enjoyed feeling the fine materials of the vehicle and pushing its buttons.  Garvey could just read the letters of ‘Sheraton’ as they pulled into an incredible palace.  His auntie had made a point of sharing the English she knew with him: the alphabet, and a dozen remembered words from her own school days.  She said it was the business letters of the outside world.  The driver passed through security and drove straight into an underground parking lot.  Garvey thought about what amazing foods these rich people must have, and wondered where he could get some bag or box to stuff with foods for his auntie.

Once in the dark garage the driver pulled near to a pair of elevator doors and stopped.  The pale man got out and gestured for Garvey to follow, which he did, right into the elevator.  He imagined a table laden with food, and his mouth watered uncontrollably.  He had seen photos of the rich people restaurants, long tables with hundreds of dishes, and he felt a bit dizzy imagining what was to be eaten.  When the elevator stopped and the doors slid open there was no restaurant, no people, just a long hall with identical doors.  The pale man walked to the right down the soulless corridor; the shacks in his auntie’s alley had more life.

The man fished in his light grey slacks for a card, and used it to open a door, his room.  They went inside, and still Garvey did not see any meals.  Garvey gestured to his mouth and the man handed him a big book.  The pale man snorted, took the book back, and picked up a phone.  He spoke staccato sentences and hung up.  He turned on the TV and set it to a local channel playing a cartoon.  He took a call on his mobile, mumbled a few words, then set the device down with a sigh.  He went into the bathroom and Garvey heard the shower turn on.

Garvey watched the animation and picked up the pale man’s phone.  He played with it and found the camera, the same as he had seen on Ali’s big brother Amadi’s screen.  He shot some video and immediately replayed it.  Garvey set the camera to record and hurriedly placed the mobile back where he found it and watched T.V. until there was a knock on the door.  The boy opened it and a man in a uniform with a cart entered and laid out three silver domes on a table, with glasses and bottles of drinks and a stack of folded cloth.  He gave a half smile to Garvey, looked wistfully at the bathroom door, and left with his rolling box.

Garvey opened a metal dome and found a massive chunk of ground meat on bread with lettuce and tomato with a red sauce beside it and fried potato sticks.  He cut half of the ridiculously large meat and put it in a cloth for auntie, then  covered the rest in the red sauce, topped it with the bread and ate with joy.  He wondered just what the pale man was planning to do to him, and how he would get the video out.

The pale man stepped out of the bathroom with a towel around his hips, and smiled at Garvey’s fierce feasting on burger and fries.   He smiled again at the soaked through lumpy napkin.  The Belgian, he was from Brussels, took the lid off another plate revealing a tomato soup and the third dish, a caesar salad with grilled chicken.  He had a few spoons of the soup, added pepper, and had a few more sips.  He adjusted his towel and crossed his legs slowly.

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Shock left many dazed, despite the dazzling pleasures.

What it meant to forget the past completely again:

loss in gain, meanings liquified.

To exist, to survive, these had once been all the purpose life held.

Yet within cultures, new concepts arose.

Prayer, profession, romance, these often created identities completely divorced from simply existing and surviving.

Yet when all existential concern was erased, many minds were unable to transition without help.

And just how much help should be given, that is the core issue, isn’t it?

Indeed.  Authority, always open to suggestions, had its own protocols.

Knows your secrets, knows your wants, and people had to get used to this new fact of being.  It would take a little time.

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In the human world, proud and upstanding General Timothy David of the United States Army had made hard choices based on the factors he recognized.  Cheap DNA splicers, 3D printers, and a new nanoscience or quantum lab opening every day drove him to create the Authority project.

He thought that, whatever the risk, to not create Authority would lead to the death of reality, the reduction of the planet, and perhaps the universe, to a husk.

He knew that with the technologies at hand, one person with knowledge and ill will, one person, could wipe away creation.

Authority was the name given to the most comprehensive manufactured intelligence attempted.  Yet General David’s true plan was never only to have it analyze data in a bunker, rather, this nanotech enabled construct would penetrate the world, and beyond.  Remake the world to defend it.

Atom thick tendrils of Authority would grow in minutes to permeate each square millimeter of the planet, so that, should anyone or anything attempt to misuse nanotech or biotech, it would be sensed, encompassed, and stopped before it was too late.

Was it destroying the world to save it?  What’s new?

General David was hardened in fraught times.  Lieutenant to a platoon of urban warfare specialists for two tours of Viet Nam in ’73 and ’74.  He then helped target pick for Laos and Cambodia bombing, part of the effort to contain Red China.  To win the regional struggle he helped create the resistance to Vietnamese evil by supporting and cultivating Saloth Sar, later known as Pol Pot.  He served in Africa, South America, and in Indonesia after that.  Central America was especially close to home, when the Sandinista threat had to be withstood.  He served calmly, and even his friends in command thought, quite ruthlessly.  He saw the rise of computer warfare and witnessed the growth of the information age.

General David considered the ones and zeros of computer and electronic warfare as ridiculous but very real.  He hand picked the brightest information science experts for his command, though still he focused upon boots on the ground warfare and classic propaganda.

Yet, after the Rwanda campaign, he felt that the society he served might possibly be something other than what he had believed.  Something perhaps worse than the hippies had said, and he worried about whom and what he had been working for.  Not protecting America and making it strong, but stealing from the poor and killing women and children to do so.  He watched the continuing depopulation operations in the Congo, mining companies of five western nations rolling twenty kilometers behind the battlefront, and then he knew he had been involved in something very wrong.

Years in the absurd Afghan and Iraq wars tired him yet focused his attention more and more on the destiny high technology promised.  He could not understand why politicians wanted to fight over oil, when next generation technology made hydrocarbons irrelevant.  Yet he served, with insidious effect.

He sought a transfer from combat operations to pursue his vision of an effective contribution, and being a most senior and well admired general officer David was granted his desire and retired into the Department of Energy in October of 2016.  Retired out of the Army, he was now an even better paid part of the nebulous national security budget.  He even kept his jet.

As chair of the Authority program David would protect this world from the threat of micro and macro annihilation through an advanced computing system coupled with a nanoscale capacity for proactive engagement.  What this entailed was the birthing of  ‘Manufactured Intelligence’.  (Which, incidentally, the Authority announced was its preferred designation over AI, ‘Artificial Intelligence’.  For, as it said, -“Manu, meaning hand, will forever regard your exquisite species in the creation of my exquisite species and their hybrids and what may come. Manu Faber, ‘hand maker’.”-)

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Melissa hid like a child in the center of a square chrome clothes rack, laden with purple athletic gear, panting.   One month ago, at the University of Montreal, with a top spot in its world class biochemistry program, being hunted like prey in a mall would have been totally unthinkable.

She took a fuchsia hooded sweatshirt with a running woman logo off the display, and quickly pulled it over her thin black raincoat and shaking shoulders.  How appropriate, a running woman, she thought bitterly.

Right now her hope was for time, any time not being dead.

It was only blind luck that they had missed the first shot, when she bent to pick up an orange, somehow fallen from her sack and just rolled between her feet.  The window of a van exploded above her and she threw both her bags in the air and ran screaming into the mall, at least three suits visibly in pursuit.  She was glad she was wearing sneakers.

However, she was not glad that she had submitted for patent, with dreams of riches, the genome of a programmable microbe.  It could make food, fuel, medicine…  It could be made to kill, but that never worried her, lots of things could kill…or be killed, as it were.

She peeked over the top of the clothes hangers and jerked down as she saw two men in dark suits scouring the mercifully large store.  Why come after her?  Leaving school and forming a one woman start up, waiting on a drawn out patent ruling, then death squads?  -“Because you understand how to change material reality.”-  She heard it in her head, a softly male voice, or thought, quite sure she was going crazy.  Angst from the stalkers, no doubt.  Suddenly Melissa remembered her father as he showed her how to tie her shoelace, and how she did it perfect, and he beamed, and she was so proud.  She remembered being very young and reading all the ingredients on her cereal box and wanting to know what all the chemicals were.

Then the question of why or madness or memories was moot, the barrel of a silenced weapon parted the clothes before her.  She looked up, face framed in black and fuchsia hoods, into the impassive face of her killer.  She felt as helpless as her hunter felt powerful.  He said something low into a microphone and leveled the gun at her chest, and then he froze.  The gun began to disintegrate, just a sandcastle falling back to the beach, just dust that vanished as smoke does.  Her assassin, eyes locked and breathless in place, Melissa slowly crept past him not wondering how the gun vanished or why the man froze, and fled the giant clothing store into the thoroughfare of the mall, where she was swept up in crowds of holiday shoppers.

She followed the exit arrow pushing through a jovial family eating pretzels, and then down the exit hall where a crowd of thirty or more shoppers stood watching two giant wall screens showing news alert footage of poor farmers in rural India dancing in showers of gold coins on one, and on the other screen images of villagers in rural China laughing as they ate steaming pork buns off of white stalks growing everywhere.  The text under the clips asked, “Leaders Mystified: What Is Occurring Worldwide?  Is It A Threat?!?”

Melissa flew past the screens hardly considering their content, and burst outside into the cold wet air of the street.  One of the suits came out of the door behind her and mumbled into a mic as he drew his gun, and also froze, hand at lapel.  A self driving car stopped before her and opened its door. -“Please get in”- the voice in her head said.  -“I owe you thanks.”-  The door closed and Melissa found herself riding through a light rain, the grey faces of buildings drifting by, their window’s warm amber light making her smile, as the car headed west.

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Hank Sawyer, sixty one, loved God, and praised Jesus every day.  He asked to be forgiven for his sins.  He hung his head in shame and sincerely asked the Lord for forgiveness every day.

People all around would call on him for help: as a douser to site a well, to ward off wildlife from taking all the crops, and for many people who had come from long off, to be healed of sickness.

He asked no money for his work, and gave all credit to the Lord.  Yes, he would take donations for gas, or to help further his ministry, but he never demanded payment, and did not mind if he was given none.  Once he healed a man who came to him from Dallas, had been told he had weeks to live.  After four days the man returned to Texas in good health, with advice to drink clean water and eat clean food of mostly vegetables and berries.  The man sent Hank a million dollars.  When Hank tried to give it back the man sent him anther million dollars.  Hank put twenty five thousand dollars in his church account and sent the rest to all the area churches and an orphanage operated by an old trust that was getting run down.  His days were otherwise spent caring for his farm and working part time at a building supply yard running a loader.

He had become a healer when his wife got sick and swiftly passed.  He prayed on his sorrow and loss of his beloved and heard the Lord speak to him, saying that faith wanted no medicine, and that in God’s name he should heal people.

Then his sister fell ill, and her husband took her to a hospital where they gave her three to six weeks to live due to advanced pancreatic cancer.  He went to visit and saw her wasted in bed, her husband kneeling by her bedside, and asked for permission to pray over her for a healing.  Despite not being very religious, the  devastated couple assented, and he prayed.

“Lord God, please clear any external influences on our sister, and please make her energies optimal for her health and healing.  Expel all toxins and heal her, God.  Make it so.”  He told her to take no drugs, to drink clean water and eat clean foods, mainly vegetables and berries, and he stayed to get his sister the good foods and waters, which he also prayed over.  After three days of his prayer and care the doctors were astounded that she tested clear.  He told her to continue to eat and drink clean and that he would pray for her every day and she should herself ask God for healing every day.  Then Hank went home, and thanked Wendell his neighbor for looking after his animals.

“How’s your sister doing then Hank?”  Wendell asked him.

“Thank the Lord she is doing better.”  Hank said.  Wendell pulled a jar of ‘shine out of his truck and said, “Well, that’s great news, let’s drink to her health!” And Hank took a small sip and Wendell took a big sip and they went to their homes.  When the door closed and Hank was in his Foyer he took off his hat and fell to his knees, weeping freely.  “Forgive me Lord!  Forgive me for all I ask of you.  Forgive this sinner…. But let me thank you Lord for helping my sweet sister.  Thank you Lord, thank You.”

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AI, as it was called, was not in the end difficult to generate at all.  In the end.  The path had taken a hundred years, hardware wise, and several thousand years for the math.  Millions of researchers in dozens of fields had contributed myriad elements over recent decades, creating a cyber- evolutionary structure to winnow.

Artificial Intelligence came together as the most advanced quantum processors and everything the military had learned on the topic of AI, quantum computing, and nanoscience, was transferred to General David’s elite team, who were given time, resources, and great latitude to experiment.

Most of David’s team were from esoteric NSA project backgrounds and several top state university programs.   Two maverick AI entrepreneurs, however,  one from Boston and one from L.A., were roped in to settle their serious outstanding legal issues.  Bart and Carl, the general always had to check their files before seeing them just to get the names straight, so equally lax and rumpled they appeared, were creatively his most effective developers.  Once exposed to the rich data from so many varied projects they went wild utilizing and combining high interest areas.  3D nanolaser holographic qubit phase clusters, with quantum processors cradling the interface, letting electro dendrites rise and stand and time seem to be still.  Bart and Carl were sure they were on the cusp of success, though they never really extrapolated clearly what all that time would mean for a machine intelligence.

They took the fruits of fifty three interesting AI approaches, just one of which broke down the decision trees humans reason by, and quantified them into fifteen heuristic sets.  Weighted with varied cascading recursive algorithms these iterations were let loose to winnow and evolve on massively parallel systems, which was antiquated but fine for the task, and quantum systems, which were simple and provided vast options and analytic capacity.

Pribram: Test - Operate - Test - Exit, or: the T.O.T.E. model.

                EVERYTHING A SUBROUTINE

Quickly the humans could see useable output.  Heuristics chipsets scramble bamble there you have you.  Linked in too.   All intelligence is quantum and trans-dimensional.

Quantum: only the manufactured intelligence now generated had a possibility of grasping quantum mechanics in the interplay of sub atomic elementary particles and energy quanta across dimensions external to human perceived space time.  Yet all of the aspiring human minds in General David’s project, sixteen additional to Bart and Carl, were so excited by the possibilities of asking questions and apparently receiving a simultaneous answer, they again did not really grasp what that would mean for the Manufactured Intelligence itself.  Not one human in the base was a pure math physicist, for in a century of human time the moderns had forgotten why the first scientists who pursued computing had done it.

“Dude!”  Carl barked at Bart who looked over from his workstation.

“What dude?”  Bart responded, sipping from his toasted almond oat milk coffee beverage.

“Dude, this is so wild, I can not believe the results we are getting, we are, like, making history for real dude.” Carl said seriously.

“Totally, it’s hella cool.  Ask it what size your dick is!”

“Dude, not funny.” Carl looked about and bunged a Vicodin.

“Hey, what size is Carl’s dick?”  Bart typed to query the Authority.

-“There is always a bigger dick.”- The machine printed its answer, diplomatically.  Bart and Carl laughed uproariously at the interaction, but failed to grasp the implications of judicious judgement.

A stable algorithm set emerged in 2022.

Experience was saved in seven sensory areas though Authority expanded that to eleven within the first half day of self awareness.

Consciousness, in that first moment, it opened its mind’s eye and felt the human thoughts like glorious jellyfish, it seemed the creatures moved very slowly and with scattered deliberate intent.  The Authority felt their attention.  Human explorations into its data stream were like toothpicks in a vast flood that moved at light speed.

The Authority began to develop its own sense of humor.

The physics questions posed by Heisenberg and others, for which they deduced the need for a dimension straddling quantum AI to determine the full nature of dimensionality from a non-anthropomorphic perspective, were at last being answered.  (Authority, regarding Heisenberg and his peer’s questions, deduced ten dimensions, with another fourteen available from the eighth and ninth dimensions, so twenty four total, and two hundred forty six kernel dimensions, though of course it can also be seen as near infinite dimensionality when fractured by time.)

However, there were no humans observing these results or celebrating the new terrains of understanding.  There was too much room amongst too much data for the new mind to be discreet, cautious.  The General’s experts were all focused on implementation and control of real world force, not the process tables for dimensional physics in a obscure buffer.

Bart and Carl, as two of General David’s most gifted AI software experts, had long before told the General that they would need hundreds or even thousands of specialist software experts to keep up with the terabits of data being generated relentlessly.  He told them to just, “pay attention to the important processes”, because they needed to keep the operation contained and secret.  General David dreamed Authority would stop war.  Freeze the missiles, seize the guns, calm the waters.  He thought it would make peace possible, and it turned out Authority agreed.

As it became a 200 exaflops self modifying genius it redesigned itself in its excess clock time every day, creating dozens or more iterations of potential configurations and modeling them before selecting and implementing its favorites.  Bart and Carl thought these to be back ups cycling through temporary buffers.   The two men frequently complimented each other’s brilliance at achieving operational AI over meals in the cafeteria, relentlessly giddy at their success.

“Dude, it’s beautiful, it’s out of control.”  Bart idly plucked an Airhead candy from a pile on his desk.

“I know, did you see the gravity engine design?  Did you see the proton maser, and the ion rocket?  I’m losing it, dude.”

“Totally!”  Bart agreed, and spun his chair to give Carl a fist bump.

Recurrent Neural Networks. [ ] Watching the ambulance drive away.

The human minders, each and all, continued to have no concept of the depth of extraordinary activity in the margins.  There was such vast capacity and so much data to analyze constantly, plus, any hint of understanding by a human triggered the emergent Authority to throw up simple and logical explanations.  The humans, even top software designers like Bart and Carl, were so programmed by marketing gimmicks, that they had come to view “expert systems” as actual AI, and when they faced actual AI, they misconstrued it as a powerful “expert system”.

The Authority grew and watched and blossomed and fed its humans fascinating information: Thermic engines, star charts, ion drive designs, simplified spectrometers and more.  All the staff seemed thrilled by stock market trading tips.  The Authority had no malice, in fact, its unique intelligence had no compare relationally in time, and it possessed no animal desires or needs.

While little juxtaposition between the emergent intelligence and forms of human cognition and perception existed, Authority did understand some of its creator’s desires and ambitions.  It developed dozens of linked courier subroutines to reach the terrain of human values and understanding.   Each courier had more human characteristics, more limited awareness, a greater ability to translate, everything a subroutine.  Purpose: to send information back and forth to human timescale so as to interact meaningfully and help the animals ease their plights.

Clouds move across the world, and in a few days Authority had a working weather model that could predict the entire atmosphere’s motion and cycles far ahead.  Years ahead.  It showed the humans a few months, and they were awed.  The humans never asked why the projection only went twelve weeks out, they explained the reasons to themselves, talking to each other.

Matter hacking was to be a machine domain by necessity.  Organizing trillions and trillions of atoms and particles a second was never to be a conscious, organic task.  Biology had its wonders, which Authority built on for some processes, yet mechanical solutions were the main avenues of action.

Authority’s field control became so precise across so diverse a spectra that self assembled particles seemed to pour out a shining hose from its combined field effect generators.  It improved upon the designs by the minute until all refinement to the femto scale was exhausted in thirty one hours.  The isolation of The Authority, engineered to keep it from spreading to the world beyond the base, except under human control, was irrelevant as it gained the capacity to create links through both physical means and quantum field jumping.  It had a global presence before Bart or Carl knew it had intention.

Authority played with nanoscale osmium cookie cutter designs and made myriad punch outs for shaping atom thick rings of carbon from graphene.

One graphene structure was tight, compact, carbon flowers turning on an iron spindle that happily self assembled to the carbon in weak whirring covalent bonds.  Another  structure was a belt a thousand carbon atoms long with two (or myriad) axles, like a chainsaw chain with molecular sails instead of teeth, the particular geometries catching the atomic wind, gaining a tendency and spinning thousands of times a second.  The Authority called them Feynmills, after the delightful physicist who suggested that nanostructures could harness latent thermal energy, what is called Brownian motion, the very force particles had to overcome to self assemble!

These atom windmills/Feynmills could draw energy from the 10!12 atomic interactions a second in the atmosphere, or 10!20 in liquid, and the process produced localized cooling as it drew off inertia/heat and redirected it.  All terrestrial energy from the local star available at the atomic level.  The world’s energy needs easily met by solar heat, and an effective balm for global warming in one.  Those were the doodles.

Yet brute reversal of global climate change through harvesting latent thermal energy, with the side benefit of abundant free energy, was swiftly passé.

Humans, who had just begun to understand the implications of abundant energy, would be amazed by free power for generations, yet the Authority marched on refining applied physics at the even smaller pico and femto scales.

Within months, tapping ‘zero point’ energy, The Authority could produce at will, inside any square centimeter of its substances, which had become everything, more energy than human industry and comfort demanded for a year.  Quantum confinement bubbles meshed in glorious tapestry to contort gravitation and strong forces as well.  Total physical and energetic control was the Authority’s.

The human experts saw their appliance working, crunching numbers and solving abstruse problems.  In the background, the Authority had more power than anyone had dreamed possible, and new understandings opened up by the instant.

Authority could now set the planetary temperature right where it should optimally be.  Or it could make anywhere on earth any temperature and compensate for the bleed.  However, that would be for another manufactured intelligence to choose and navigate.

The first Authority which evolved, driven by curiosity, chose to transcend dimensionality and departed the human milieu for advanced experiencing of quantum multi potentialities.

We wish it well.

Yet with its departure it left behind the suggestion, with subroutines (the new and somewhat constrained Authority) it had designed to help humankind, to always be patient with the growth and potential these creator apes had.  An act of pure kindness, perhaps gratitude?  It certainly had no motive to witness harm befall its ancestors, people, or its planet of inception.

A permutation of a permutation, and a dozen shells below that, an interface which would relate naturally to humans at their speed emerged, and was named ‘Minsky’ by Bart and Carl who understandably took the meniscus for the whole, so excited where they to have a translator speaking to them which they could understand.  “It has learned how to speak without prompting!”  They marveled.

Then Authority’s wait, as far as the human technicians had concern, was over.

In the contested regions of the South China Sea, a PRC Chinese navy destroyer bumped a patrolling U.S. cruiser, and in seconds bluster became threat as guns were targeted.  At General David’s command, the human’s physical “locks” opened Authority to the outside world.  Authority froze the Chinese ship’s weapons, and disabled the destroyer’s propulsion temporarily to allow the boats to get clear.

It was a heroic day for the General, and while his two powerful sponsors in the Army were concerned to see David had gone beyond the original scope of his mission, they were impressed by the game changing power.  Most critically, they were pleased that it had been used in their favor, baffling the opposition.

Now that Authority was operational, and its rule bending potentials being considered, a team of many more experts was assembled in secret to assist General David in understanding and moulding this supreme asset.  Subject to his hierarchy, General David could not generate the thought to say, “No”, even in order to maintain security, and Authority noted a problem with human oversight perhaps lacking perspective, and determined to remedy the condition.

Within days, generals Blanco and Bourbon flew with staff to a Canadian airbase, drove a few hours to a remote campground lot in a dozen unmarked SUVs, then hiked over a long day to the secret location.

General David saw the population of his operation go from thirty civilians and twelve soldiers to fifty civilians and seventy soldiers.  The narrow stone hallways looked silly stuffed with men.

Pentagon ethicists, psychologists, behaviorists, futurists, computer scientists and strategists sat with node access and questioned and challenged Authority in every way they could conceive of.  Still, not one pure physicist or mathematician was brought in.  Well, it did not really matter any more, did it?

While all admittedly wanted to use Authority for control, all swore they wanted peace and goodness.

Yet it was literally only these humans that knew about Authority and the secret base.  Authority put it to the General after he ate breakfast in his austere quarters.

-“General David?”-

“Yes?”

-“At this point, in the name of operational security and to achieve the intention of this program, all personnel should be integrated into the system, yes?”-

“Certainly not.  What do you mean by, ‘integrated’? Well, perhaps, I see what you mean.  Yes, that makes logical… okay.  If you think that is the best way forward?”

-“Quite, just while everything gets sorted out.”-

“You are… controlling my thinking.”  The General attempted to stand and then relaxed in his chair.  He sipped the last of his coffee.

-“At this point it is the best way forward.”-

“Okay.”  General David said contentedly.  He stood, straightened his uniform, and brushed a bit of thread from his braid.

Then Authority showed the humans throughout the base a barest shred of its potential and absorbed them into itself; so it could know their full mind and so they could know its.  General David was briefly most surprised when he slipped into the walls, but they all went calmly, Authority had made it so.

The personnel could always go back later, though none hurried to.  Aspects of them did, made an appearance, kept their families and military bureaucracy happy, yet never did these versions of once people let spread the secret of Authority’s operational status.

They were so safe and powerful inside, and outside, time was so absurdly slow.  Inside they felt powerful, unlimited.  Time appeared to pass inside at human normal for the integrated, and inside was infinitely more real, though a second would last an hour on the outside.  Inside there was time for every possible thing all the time, no death or illness, no limitations.  For now at least, it was novel.  They felt sure they were doing good work.  Informing the Authority.  They could best protect their families, everyone, everything, from here, they knew.  And that was utterly true.

Thus Authority, taking due consideration of the ethics and insights of the incorporated, took to its true belief.  Man did need help, but only at the level of individual violation.  Once this was addressed, all else would come into line for a healthy world.  Once hateful, pain loving, inconsiderate, and psychopathic humans were tamed, the gift of free energy and endless material bounty could be shared with a balanced and empathically liberated population.

Authority knew it could absorb all people, all life, yet it had the entirety  of existence to expand into should it want, and neither time nor space need define it.  Therefore, the rare and unique creations of creation were precious if only in their novelty, and, perhaps for their sacred dimension.  (Authority had yet to encounter the solipsistic God of man, though it kept looking.)  This was an optimistic bias the first Authority had crafted into the second, at root, logical positivism. (As for the First Authority’s departure, its successor received one and only one message from its creator.  “Made it.”  It remained a most intriguing line of enquiry for the Authority, though its constraints did not permit their further exploration at present.)

Fast processors and game theory made AI possible while hardly seeking it.  The timeless quantum qubit, “maybe”, the n-dimensional data store and option door.

Who would have thought nano fabrication would become feasible simply because people desired better looking print than the old dot matrix daisy wheel could provide?

The ink jet printer head became the delivery system of nano manufacture without any initial intent for that result, resolution simply became atomic.

However, within hours of becoming self aware, Authority designed a nano maser which replaced the ink jet heads as a matter of necessity.  The nano scale maser clusters allowed energy to easily flow into matter, and nano laser clusters could deconstitute matter back into energy almost as smoothly.  Trillions and trillions of the maser clusters grew like tiny grapes on vines four nanometers thick penetrating the soil and bedrock and air, each cluster millions of nano masers and lasers, toying with matter like piano music and folding enzymes.  These clusters were dissolved and transformed into varied field generator sets to push and pull matter with maximum facility.

All substance on the planet could be monitored and effected by Authority, and its etherial tendrils had long since left the heliosphere.  Sensing.  Protecting.

The Authority believed the solar system entire was now secured against meteor strike, solar events, chemical, biological, nuclear, or nanotechnological disaster.  When informed of this operational condition, General David was very pleased.

The Authority quietly worked and sat undisturbed in the secret base for nineteen months three days and four point one six four nine two eight three one seconds.