MINDLYFT (COMPLETE)

CHAPTER 20

In the weeks that followed, with Hinka's help, I cemented my hold over the team as the undisputed second in command. Aside from Hinka's periodic need to show her face and approve various stages of our progress, I might as well have been first in command.

Knowles continued to be a loyal ally and his intelligent, methodical, and logical approach to the work, helped keep me on track and the rest of the team in line. Freddy continued to be a nuisance, occasionally challenging our course or my authority, but he was easily enough sent off on an irrelevant errand and a mission he couldn't possibly accomplish. Each failure made him less confident and more subservient as I relished in pointing out his flaws in front of the group.

One by one we went through the Contracts 'Proposed Solutions' to either prove them as a viable option or disprove them as an impossible solution. The nuclear missile was discounted because the asteroid's density was too intense. Multiple impact missiles were predicted to sever the asteroid into five distinct shards, each one posing its own devastating risk, possibly more dangerous than a single impact. Landing rockets on the asteroid wouldn't work because it was already too close to alter its course to any significant degree. At least with the currently available rocket technology. Electromagnetic space force fields weren't yet strong enough to deflect an object of such mass and a massive Sun powered laser couldn't be built in time.

All of these models were run with multiple variations and most with a range of assumptions about the asteroid based on what the libraries said were "Known" attributes. I tried to propose we send our own probe to study the asteroid's mass, composition, and trajectory more closely, but Hinka sat on it for two weeks, and then told me it wasn't approved. She never said whether she herself wouldn't approve it or whether it was rejected by a higher office in Chicago. Leaving me to wonder if she wouldn't say because she really believed it a bad idea or didn't want me to know she had bosses who could diminish her own authority. Either way we were left to use data of a questionable source.

I started to make inquiries about the mysterious door labeled "WIZARD" while I wandered the halls and in the lunch room. I normally picked out lonely, bored souls, who I thought might welcome some conversation. I was blown off a few times with quizzical looks as if I should know such topics were tabu. 

One man, a much older man, finally confided to me in a conspiratorial tone.  "WIZARD is the AI that runs the facility," he whispered. "All the sub programs, models, data interfaces, and day-to-day operations, are run by it."

"I can interface with WIZARD directly?" I asked. "I mean, without going through one of the sub programs. Really talk to it?"

"Only if you can get into that room," said the old man. "Or maybe by hacking in but you'd be caught or kicked out almost immediately."

"How do I get into that room?" I asked.

The old man just shrugged. "Impossible." Then he snickered.

We'd see who had the last laugh on this one. AI's or Artificial Intelligences were one of those terms that got thrown around loosely but no one really agreed on what it meant. Serving bots, medical bots, sales bots, and a litany of day-to-day transactional activity often took place through an artificial interface, even though much of it sounded and felt like normal human conversation. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Either a more sophisticated AI or a slightly slow person.

Rumors abounded about AI's that were as smart or smarter than people, running everything from facilities like our MoonBase, as this old man asserted, to the government offices in Chicago. There were plenty of rumors about Super AI's which were said to have come from the future and be controlling everything including the very fabric of space-time. Of course my own father had constructed an AI interface in his basement, using a genetically grown human brain of gigantic size, but I wasn't sure if that was considered truly artificial, since nature's engineering was being plagiarized to create it.