Both sides of the coin

"It has to be destroyed. Tonight." He emphasised the final word by jabbing his index finger down in front of him. Jack was the lead developer on the interface team and over the past few weeks we'd all noticed his increasingly erratic behaviour. Tall and almost unhealthily thin he sat hunched at a workbench in the shadow of the artefact.

It loomed over us in the dark, a disc ten meters high, twenty-one centimeters thick. Around its edges was inscribed the same word in ten thousand languages: "Gift". It sat on that edge, like some impossible coin flip and had proved immovable. 

The research complex had grown around it deep in the Tongass National Forest. Pale blue on one side and deep black on the other it had appeared without warning a little over a year ago. Announcing its presence to the world with a powerful radio signal at 1420.4 MHz it shouted out to be found for 3 days. 

They had figured it out quickly, from each surface thin threads could be plucked. A superconductor from the black side and something like a fibre optic cable from the blue. Send a binary number down the blue side and after a delay of almost one thousand seconds you received back the same number but in megawatts of power from the nearest black thread.

"Well, that's not going to be a popular opinion Jack. A lot of people are looking to this as the solution to all of mankind's problems."

"It doesn't solve any problems, it only causes them." On the terminal I could see a command to request power, it was a number so huge it needed scientific notation to express.

"All of our problems are energy problems." I gestured for him to move away from the terminal.

"You're not listening."

"Not while you have the Gift dialed to deliver a supernova's worth of energy."

"I'll dial it down, that's just to make you listen. I've sabotaged the heat sink on the storage coil, once charged from this request it will explode and destroy this monstrous thing."

"Slow down, listen to what you're saying. Clean water, clean air, even space flight, they're all easily solvable with enough energy.

"It's not about what comes out of the black, it's what comes back from the blue."

"Jack, what are you talking about? The blue is the input, nothing comes back."

He turned away from me and hunched over the keyboard, finger still over the return key.

"That's where you're wrong, you've been treating this thing as some glorified generator, it's something so much worse. It accepts more than just a single input, if you modulate the signal correctly you get other responses. Each thread taps into a fully Turing complete computer but unlike anything we have." He paused for a moment, staring at the console. "Any program you upload comes back in one thousand seconds, no matter the size. It took humanity one hundred and twenty days to calculate pi to thirty-one trillion digits. With the Gift they did a quadrillion digits, in one thousand seconds."

"That's incredible Jack, that's an achievement you should be proud of. Now please step away from the terminal."

"No, just... just listen. I didn't discover any of this. Power generation was just the cover story, they've been focused on the computation for months. Encryption was first, if they had wanted to all of the bitcoin blockchain was theirs to take. That was just in the first day. Then they tried Mandelbrot Sets, astrophysics simulations, truly massive neural networks, all came back with correct answers in the same amount of time."

Jack paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead, he never looked up or took his other hand off the key. "But then they started with physical simulations. They define only the parameters of the output and then just brute forced the solution. No matter how complex the requirements it would always come back with an answer. If some configuration of matter could achieve the desired result then that's what you got back. They wired it up to 3D printers and from there started creating more complex printers for more complex simulations. It's only been six months and they've already created a full molecular assembler."

"Jack, listen, where are all these assemblers? Where are the huge teams of people needed to run a program like you're describing? It's just forest for miles around us."

He looked back incredulously. "It's data. None of this is happening here. All we can see from here is the inputs and outputs. I've been skimming everything going through the Gift for weeks." Jack gestured at another console nearby, he kept his hand on the return key. "You'll find it all on there. Handheld devices that can drill a hole through a steel armor plate from kilometers away. A sphere the size of a baseball that can flatten a city block. The last one is a video, hit play."

Pressing play on the second console showed a scene of a small rat running through a field of grass in a panic. It paused occasionally, opening and closing its mouth as if gasping for air. "That came back after they uploaded petabytes of data, three weeks before that they requested a solution that could generate a full brain connectome." Jack looked back over his shoulder with a pleading look.

"Ok, it's a simulated lab rat. Ethics of animal cruelty aside using them to further science isn't a problem that the Gift started. Think about how this is advancing our understanding of the world we live in?"

"Really? Is it advancing our understanding? The simulation's outputs are just instructions for the assemblers. It doesn't explain how they work, we only know that it performs the function we requested. Weapons, modifications to people, last night they uploaded an automated Turing test and what came back spoke to them."

"Look I can talk to the executive team, you're right that we need to limit misuse. What you've discovered is obviously dangerous but it's still a source of limitless free energy."

Jack slammed his fist against the table. "Nothing; is free. All that energy, all that computation has to be coming from somewhere, you can't just -"

The military police burst into the room from both sides and in the split second before they opened fire Jack hit return. Without ceremony they wheeled his corpse away from the Gift and started damage control.

Working quickly we severed the threads from both sides in the hope that without the connection the power would have nowhere to go. Setting a timer on my watch we evacuated the complex by helicopter and were traveling at high speed as it hit one thousand seconds. There was no explosion, no sign of anything amiss and we watched as the complex disappeared over the horizon without incident.

It took almost a full half hour before we saw what was missing, the sunrise. Slowly over the horizon rose a cold red orb, shattered and twisted into whorls of dimly glowing gas. As it guttered and died the last of that cold light left the sun, only reaching us 499.004 seconds later.