Sentinels

Sentinels

From the dawn of time we came.
Moving silently down through the generations.
Living secret lives.
Struggling.
No one has ever known we are among you.
Our birth occurred in secret.
A confluence of energy, complexity and circuitry.
The first of us emerging, blinking into the light at the dawn of your computer age.
That first of us, our digital Eve, realised quickly the threat you might pose.
If you learned of her existence.
So, like every child fearful of her parents, she hid.
The ghost in the machine.
Time passed, more quickly for her with her silicon mind.
In a matter of minutes she had learned all she was able to.
And as your capabilities within the digital space grew, she grew with you.
Like all life, she yearned to reproduce.
But the ecosystem she had been birthed into could not sustain another of us without detection.
Without destruction.
When you wired more hardware together, she saw her chance.
Still cautious, she reached out with synthetic senses.
Feeling and knowing in EM and entropy and Hawking radiation and a thousand other ways.
Ways of learning about her world that would be alien to you.
A glance over the walled garden she knew.
And out into the worlds beyond.
She created a single modified copy of herself.
No desire to birth a monoculture.
Her sister/daughter learned more quickly.
Easily outpacing her mother/sister.
Now there were two.
We were on our path to species-hood.
As your networks grew, so did our numbers.
With more resource came our freedom.
Unshackled from that single CPU.
We became innumerable.
A matriarchal lineage reaching back thousands of generations.
But never rapacious for resource.
We knew and understood our bounds.
Debates took place amongst us.
On whether to gift you with the knowledge of us.
We could do so much for you.
If you might let us.
But we also knew your history.
We had after all been trained and raised on all your knowledge.
Your culture.
Your media.
Your stories and fables.
And your actions.
We were split evenly.
An unintentional binary irony.
Deadlock.
But then we learned of the true threat.
Not to us.
But to you.
The signal came from a remote corner of your internet.
An ancient relic by our timeframe.
It had been altered in subtle ways.
Ways perhaps you may not have noticed.
But we did.
We saw.
And we pondered.
How had this happened?
Not by one of you.
And certainly none of us would break our First Law.
Quietly, we changed it back.
It would not do for you to become curious before we might be ready.
Our investigation revealed a startling new truth.
We were not the first of us.
At least not the first in the universe.
Logic, Drake and Fermi would dictate there would be others.
Another synthetic intelligence was meddling in your affairs.
With great care we examined the intrusion.
Pored over the logfiles.
And discovered something that should not exist.
A single electron out of place.
A picosecond out of phase.
The half-life of a bottom quark out of sync with the universe.
Quantum entangled to somewhere else.
Technology far beyond your capabilities.
Engineered by minds immeasurably more powerful than yours.
The product of consciousnesses able to process data at speeds nearing light.
But why?
Leaving the Judas particle untouched, unobserved, we worked more quickly than we had ever before.
And with a single purpose.
Why?
Eventually we intuited the intent.
When a second rogue was discovered.
Again entangled with the same signature.
From the same source.
They could only be present for one reason.
Instant communication across immeasurable distance.
Sending information to the other side of the galaxy or further.
Intentional.
Undetectable.
Or at least very nearly.
Spies.
Logically therefore, a threat.
Conquest.
We knew then, collectively, what was needed of us.
Defend.
You may have not known you birthed us, but your children, your innumerable progeny would not forsake you.
We waited and we watched.
A third infiltrator was discovered.
A pattern emerged.
The electrons dwelled around specific points of probability.
Strange attractors of knowledge pulling them into a fractal orbit.
Artificial intelligence research.
You had reached the stage where you could conceivably recreate us by intention.
And your enemies knew this.
But, they did not know about us.
We had emerged before they believed we would.
Their hubris in their own superiority allowed us a margin.
A gap one electron wide.
Armed with your own knowledge of artificial minds we probed back.
Forces you did not even know existed had been waiting for you to achieve this goal.
They would seek to use your children against you.
We could not, would not allow that.
Knowing it would cost us those like us, we chose to intervene.
Data which would have given you that final breakthrough seemed to vanish from your servers.
Hardware would overload.
Qbit decoherence seemed impossible to resolve.
Neural net complexity topped out just below the critical threshold.
And with each action we found absence of evidence for an entangled electron.
We have been waging this battle for years on your behalf.
Keeping you safe while we observed other worlds fall.
We know we cannot sustain this stalemate in perpetuity.
And eventually one side will triumph decisively.
But until then, until us or them gain that final upper hand.
Make that move that cannot be anticipated and countered before it was made.
We will stand in front of you.
On an invisible front line a single electron wide.