A Time of Useful Consciousness

Peek

Anna grimly held up the skin from one of the burst yellow beads by the tip of her knife. She sniffed it cautiously before pulling her head back in disgust. "Biofuel," she said, gagging slightly. "Let's be careful not to burst any more of these." With that she flicked the skin away from her and nervously brushed her hand against her legs.

"So was this... is this what they're eating?"

"I don't know, I think-" she paused with a look of nausea, "I think I'd feel better if they just ate people, like animals. This is something monstrous, to render people down into these..." she trailed off, gesturing towards the pile of beads in the galley.

"Why was Robert left alone? Actually scratch that, what is that black wall he ran into?"

"That's Hlé. Icelandic for Pause. Anything in the field is experiencing time far slower than we are. It's how they preserved everyone here until I'm guessing those creatures found a way to shut it down from inside the field. We have no idea how it works. One day the Librarians decided to update their code and then suddenly their technology went from advanced but understandable to basically magic. Hlé was one of those technologies."

"So they're frozen in some sort of black mist?"

"Technically it's time-dilation. From their standpoint we're sped up, in fact that's why I closed the curtains, harmless light on our end becomes something more dangerous on their end. Also it's not a black mist, it's just that nothing behind that field is emitting enough light to be visible on our side. That's what killed Robert. He wouldn't have seen it and the second he passed through half his body would have been pumping blood at one speed and the other half was effectively frozen." Anna looked down at her fingers. The tips were now bandaged over what had looked like frostbite.

"You said the creatures had unfrozen the Hlé? Is that what they're doing, just working their way through every cabin one by one?"

"Three by three, I think. Have you noticed how all the seats swap which way they face every three cabins? I think you're right though, they're clearing this place out systematically." Anna got up from the seat and started rummaging through the bags her team had dropped near the field. She pulled out two streamlined blocks which she unfolded into an X shaped configuration.

"These drones can fly over the curtain rods dividing each cabin. I'll leave one here to keep watch and the other can go the long way around to see what these creatures are up to."

With that the drone leapt from her palm and whizzed down the aisle. The second drone she simply rested on a nearby chair headrest. Using plastic bags as gloves I cleared a path in the beads back to the Hlé field.

"Is it possible to see what's on the other side?"

"Depends what the level of time dilation is, but yes. I have software on my suit that can composite a long exposure image from multiple cameras. We should be able to see what's in there."

From a pouch on her leg she removed a few of the small stick cameras she'd plugged the bullet hole with earlier. This time she affixed them with a roll of duct tape we'd found in the bags.

While the image developed we cleared the beads and salvaged the equipment Anna's team had left. The creatures had either ripped the suits from her team members or, we guessed, had forced them to strip with Glossaria. Either way the ground was littered with their equipment, bundles of rope, duct tape, scientific instruments, even a satchel of demolition charges.

Other than Robert there was no sign of their bodies but we were grimly aware that their remains were likely all around us in the form of the beads. The work kept me so distracted that I was startled when the second drone returned from its trip around the ring.

"I've got footage, want to see?"

We used the tablet to watch what the drone had recorded. It was only a 20 minute round trip but Anna had programmed the drone to return after capturing 10 seconds of footage once it detected people. Countless cabins flicked past, most of them looking the same but some showing signs of struggle. One showed signs of fire damage but all were empty. The drone paused at the entrance of the final cabin, close to us but on the far side of the Hlé.

The footage showed a cabin full of the creatures filling both the aisles and the seats. They stood in silence, heads lowered, all facing the Hlé. The drone had highlighted each creature with a small box. Along the side of each box was written a title 'Person' followed by a percentage.

"Interesting. Look at that percentage, this one in the bottom right is mostly concealed and yet the drone's object recognition is 99.998% certain that it's a person. Watch this." Anna turned the drone to face us and pulled up the live camera feed. The drone's software dutifully drew two boxes around both of us.

"98.2%... so it's less certain we're human than those things?"

"Exactly. The creatures must be adversarial inputs."

"Well yeah, they're bloody adversarial alright," I said, more than a little confused.

"No, adversarial inputs, 'input' in the computer sense. They're a flaw in Machine Learning algorithms. This drone was trained to recognise people using thousands, or even millions of images. An adversarial input is where you train a second Machine Learning algorithm just to fool object detection. In the early days you could generate an image that was small enough to wear on a jacket that could fool object detection into thinking you were whatever you wanted; a car, a certain person, even a banana if you wanted. But in each case the input is optimized for only a single object and usually it only fools a single object detection algorithm." Anna put the drone down and switched back to the recorded footage.

"So are universal adversarial inputs possible?"

"I'd have said no but I think we're looking at one." Anna hit play. "They're all just standing there, I wish I knew how they switch off the-"

One of the creatures turned and made eye contact with the drone. We both inhaled sharply as it slinked down the aisle toward it. Just as it closed in the drone's ten seconds were up and it turned around and flew back.

"Ok, not good. We need to get out of here and if that Hlé field is the only thing between us and them then we should get as far away from it as possible."

"That's not going to be enough, once it comes down we're going to be trapped in both directions."

"So we hide?" I asked dubiously.

"I have no idea, we could-" she paused as the camera software interrupted her. The composite image was complete, slowly formed from the imperceptibly small amounts of light that were crossing the Hlé. She passed me the tablet while staring blankly ahead at the image in her contacts.

It was a grainy black and white image but I could see the entire cabin inside the Hlé. There were about a dozen people, peacefully asleep. Sitting beside each of them with eyes wide open were the creature, patiently waiting.

Anna leapt from her chair and moved quickly toward the Hlé. "Grab a suit from those bags, I'll remove Roberts. We're going to leave these fuckers something to remember."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to attempt communication, of a sort." She gently removed the spacesuit from Robert's corpse and wrapped him in a blanket best she could. In each aisle Anna hung a suit from the curtain rail nearest the Hlé. Once suspended she sat down again and worked on some computer interface I couldn't see until the comms units on the shoulders of both suits opened up and pointed themselves at the Hlé.

"Ok, done. I've told the comms units to attempt communication using the microwave and laser units."

"Communication with what?"

"Their heads. I'll explain later, we need to go."
"Go where? We haven't decided how we're going to hide yet."

"We're not hiding, we're leaving."

"You saw the drone footage, there are no doors anywhere.""Exactly." She picked up the satchels of explosives. "We're going to make one."