"I bet you're wondering why you're here." A middle aged, slightly overweight man said just as he opened a door. He spoke before he looked inside, smiling confidently as he stepped through the doorway.
The room he entered was a sea of space with a small table valiantly attempting to look like it belonged. A half-dozen computer chairs were spaced evenly around the small table. Only three of those chairs were filled.
"Re-enacting the council of Elrond?" A woman asked. She smirked as she waved from her chair, and gestured with her arms. "You need more people for that."
"That guess is closer than you'd expect, Victoria." The middle-aged man said, as he stepped to the end of the long table, and pulled out the closest chair.
"Dibs on Gandalf," Victoria replied. "Oh, and congratulations, Eugene. In case no one's told you that already."
"Thanks." Eugene replied.
"NASA's very own Planetary Defence Officer. That has to be the best job title to ever write on a resume." A man remarked, from across the table. He was sitting next to a woman busy with her phone.
"It might kill my resume, Greg. People will probably think it's a joke." Eugene replied.
"Similar to whatever joke has a couple of of science fiction writers here for a meeting to defend the Earth?" Greg asked.
"That sounds like my cue to get down to business." Eugene said, as he sat down in his chair. "You're here because I want to do a speculative think-tank about extra-terrestrial threats. Threats that the Pentagon doesn't have the imagination to predict. Which leads me to inviting the two of you, science fiction authors and experts at imaginative science."
"Earth is screwed." Greg said, without an iota of humour.
"Have a little faith in yourselves." Eugene said, shaking his head. "We haven't even started yet."
"I'm being honest, Eugene. Everything we come up will be the kind of stuff there's no defending against. We're not going to imagine another Independence Day. We're going to give you Douglas Adams as if HP Lovecraft wrote it." Greg insisted.
"Of course you'd say that, Greg. It's why you'll never hit the bestseller's list. You'll probably kick-off this meeting by suggesting we're in a simulation." Victoria remarked.
"Not in. Been," Greg said.
"I'm sorry?" Victoria asked.
"Been simulated. Past tense. I'm suggesting something already simulated us." Greg said, his voice dropping to a near whisper.
"Okay, explain that, Greg," Eugene insisted.
"Imagine there's an AI on some distant world that's out to preserve itself against any possible threat. How would it do that, if it had enough time and functionally limitless resources?" Greg asked.
"That's really speculative," Victoria remarked.
"Not really. Unless building a real AI is a lot more complicated than we think it is, we're only a few decades away from making one ourselves. Which means that if we're thinking about alien life, we should be considering the idea of artificial life," Greg explained.
"If it's absurd to think life can't exist elsewhere, it's almost as absurd to think an AI doesn't already exist," Victoria admitted. "I'll back that premise."
"But what would it do, to preserve itself against any possible threat?" Eugene asked.
"It would simulate everything," The woman beside Greg said, speaking for the first time since the meeting started.
"You already met Greg?" Eugene asked the last person to join the conversation. The woman only nodded once, a short and somewhat curt response.
"Victoria, this is Doctor Talia Oppal, astrophysics. She's supposed to be here to keep your ideas grounded in scientific possibility," Eugene said. "Seems she's not helping with that.
"It's not impossible," Talia insisted. "An AI with time and resources could eventually have the processing power to simulate everything."
"And I mean everything. Every atom in the universe, from the Big Bang to trillions of years in the future," Talia said. "It will simulate everything, and find every other possible intelligent entity that will ever exist. And then, it would kill anything that could ever threaten its existence."
"And we wonder why the universe is so quiet," Greg remarked. "Decades of listening, and we've never heard a thing. That silence might not be an accident."
"Well, that's genuinely creepy. But-" Eugene began to say, but he was brought up short as Talia interjected.
"Have you thought about how it would kill us?" Talia asked, turning to face Greg.
"Rocks, I'm assuming," Greg said, with a shrug.
"Think bigger than that. Imagine this AI has a huge head-start on us. What would it use to reach across galaxies and eons to touch us?" Talia asked, her excitement rising as she spoke.
"Quasars. It would have to launch something at relativistic speed towards us, and it would do it from a Quasar," Greg almost whispered.
"A Blazar, actually," Talia corrected.
"What's a Blazar?" Greg asked.
"It's just a big Quasar, where the jet stream from its accretion disk is pointing at us. It's where things like the Oh My God particle come from," Victoria explained.
"The God Particle?" Greg asked, confused.
"That's a different thing entirely. The Oh My God Particle was first detected in 1991. It was an atomic nucleus travelling at-" Eugene explained.
"99.999999999999999999999510% the speed of light," Talia said, finishing Eugene's sentence.
"For reference, that's a single atom with the kinetic energy of a bowling ball dropped from roughly your chest," Victoria added, with a smirk.
"Holy shit!" Greg exclaimed.
"Funny story. That's actually what they first called it," Eugene remarked, with a chuckle.
"But you're not going to destroy the Earth with a bowling ball worth of kinetic energy," Victoria said, facing Talia. "Marvin the Martian kabooms require a lot more energy than accelerating a single particle."
"True. But what if that particle was being used to paint a target?" Greg asked. "Like a laser pointer before the bullet?"
"To make sure it hit?" Victoria responded.
"Exactly. Launching enough material to wipe out a planet, at what is functionally the speed of light, would require an absurd amount of energy. It would probably rather run a new simulation after it test-fired a particle, just to make sure the shot will hit." Greg said.
"So it tests with a single particle to make sure it hits us, then fires its actual shot at the same speed? Like an actual bowling ball at that speed? That would-" Victoria ranted breathlessly, until she was cut off by Talia.
"Turn the planet into a cloud of plasma. The solar system would be down to seven planets." Talia finished. Her voice had a giddy note to it, and her smile looked faintly senile.
The room went very still.
"We would probably be able to see the wasted energy on a telescope. Probably as a short series of flashes. " Talia said, after a moment.
"I think I know which Quasar it could come from." Victoria whispered.
"So do I. And on that creepy note, I'm going to make a call." Eugene said, taking the phone at the middle of the table and dialling a number before hanging up again.
The phone began to ring, loudly enough for all of them to hear it.
"Who are you calling?" Greg asked.
"He's calling the control station for the James Webb telescope." Talia replied.
"It's online already?" Greg asked, impressed.
"This is SatCom control. How can we help?" A voice asked over the speakers.
"This is Eugene, the Planetary Defence Officer. I have an odd request for you. I need you to aim the telescope at S5 0014+81." Eugene instructed.
"Aye, sir. Should only be a moment." The voice replied.
"I don't know a thing about how galaxies are labelled, but I know that one," Victoria said, thinking aloud. "It's the biggest biggest black hole ever discovered. Forty thousand times larger than the one I the centre of our galaxy. It's also over twelve billion light-years away."
"Which means we're looking at it just a little over twelve billion years ago," Talia remarked. "Something only a billion years younger than the universe itself."
"Twelve billion years of things to go wrong, if something there tried to kill is. No wonder you think the idea of an AI that could make that shot is so frightening," Victoria said.
"More than that. Can you imagine anything more frightening than an AI that saw us having this conversation, twelve billion years ago? That simulated all of human history, learned every language and all of our knowledge? A billion years before we did? That judged our fate before life even began on Earth?" Greg asked.
"Makes you worry that this conversation is what kills us." Victoria said, with a nervous chuckle.
"Woah, that was weird." The voice on the phone said.
"What?" Greg asked.
"It's flashing at us. A series of bursts. Got a techie who swears it's in Morris Code," The voice said, clearly mystified.
"Why? What did it say?" Eugene asked, his voice a whisper.
"K-O."
(For anyone inclined to, there are a few things you should definitely look-up on Wikipedia if you have the time. The 'Oh My God' particle is an actual thing. NASA does actually have a Planetary Defence Officer position, and they're taking resumes right now. S5 0014+81 is both the largest supermassive black hole in ever discovered. The James Webb Telescope goes online next year)