DT 2024: Road Less Taken

MOMENTAL STANDOFF / OFFER OF EXCHANGE. 2558.
Multiple overlapping distress calls.
The golden glow of UNSC Smart AI, RLD 0205-4, better named “Roland,” fluctuated in varying brilliance to the rhythm of his sequentially firing, digital neurons in alarmed concentration. His usually dim hologram bloomed into a localized sun, enveloping the UNSC Infinity’s bridge and drawing wary eyes of senior crewmen. He thought faster than “human” fast: absorbing, cataloging, and directing query responses for the supercarrier’s COMMO and wideband network suite as priority reports flooded the Waypoint emergency broadcast tunnel for Earth.
The content summary wasn’t good: “AI refusing orders, infrastructure and civilian telecommunications unresponsive, integrated technologies shutting down… Help. Help. Help.”
Ever closer, distress calls from Mars and the Jovian Moons were trickling into the fray, like runoff of a broken spigot. Colonial security channels reported sudden intrusions by unknown, enemy starships upon colonial orbits and atmospheres of distant worlds. Transmission clutter crashed through Slipspace transmission lanes aimed at the government’s groundside capital beneath Sydney but the Infinity took its fair share, overwhelming on-duty signalmen seven decks below.
Roland shook his pressure-cooking mind, and forced the deluge of distress calls down to lower substrates of his logic processes. He forced down his embarrassing, uncontrolled luminosity as the Infinity’s captain entered the expansive starship bridge and Roland made another mental note to compose himself better. He skipped the pomp of naval proceedings, delivering only the news. “Captain Lasky, distress calls, all channels!”
“It’s Cortana?” The young commanding officer questioned, as well informed of immediate galactic affairs as his shipboard AI.
Roland fell out of parade rest and brought up a Milky Way galaxy map, displaying superluminal data traffic arriving in real time. “Her and the other AIs are shutting down everything, from Earth to the Outer Colonies.”
Captain Lasky stepped up to the central hologram table, attempting to assess Roland’s work but the power in the bridge plummeted as Roland took a face full of new system alerts. Internal, important, aggressive. Imminent threat approaching. Waypoint cascade: denial of service (DOS) activity signatures. New input requests crowded out the prior distress calls, blanketing the supercarrier’s state-of-the-art communication relays and leaving Roland momentarily sensor blind.
In the Infinity’s local cyberspace, Roland did the equivalent of blinking his eyes and shaking his head, performing a systemwide infrastructure status request. Most networks returned status-normal, minor power fluctuations on all starship decks from local power surges but found resolution with quick redistributions of electricity. Roland shoved aside the wall of external queries, and tried to get a better look at his Slipspace drive.
Slipspace sensors. Slipspace drive. Forerunner system reaching out, human systems communicating back and forth.
This again. It was controversial decision to strap ancient alien technology to a warship without a full teardown, and reverse engineering, but there were benefits to an esoteric Forerunner warp engine. A decade of testing revealed technical capabilities well beyond humanity's alien adversaries from the recent Human-Covenant War. The drive had a mind of its own however, an ancient but dull intelligence, warbling and signaling in different tones seeming coherent enough to interpret as emotion. Roland had a whole year now as its certified, operations controller to discern its meanings.
Shrivel. Shrivel. Retreat. Power up. Run diagnostic. Large object in transit. Large object approaching. Threat. Threat. Confirm, hybrid system. Confirmed. Threat.
Roland snapped away from the strange starship engine, trusting its judgement enough to check his visual and sensor suites instead.
Threat. Threat. New presence, familiarity, recognize handshake prompt. Communication protocol accepted.
No, wait. Wait! Roland wasn’t fast enough to stop the input requests marked CTN, CTN, CTN from crashing into and assimilating the local bridge network and concentrating onto the primary hologram projector. Cortana didn’t bother knocking, she manifested herself to his human crew and shoved Roland aside like a scrawny doorman to a club. And Cortana was a raging, blue bull in a China shop.
“Roland?” Captain Lasky called out in warning, and confusion. Klaxons and red warning lights flared against the proximity alerts. The shipboard AI reached out to cut off the intrusion, but Cortana pushed him back. An equivalent to slapping away his virtual wrist.
“Found you. Hide and seek is over, Infinity.”
Roland didn’t need long to see the threat, even in superfast AI time. A tiny wormhole several kilometers across exploded into brilliance above the Earth’s surface and below the Home Fleet’s orbital defense grid. A football field-sized skull with rows of dangerous teeth emerged first. A vague, owl-shaped object, constructed from strong Forerunner alloys.
Guardian. Cortana’s new Forerunner superweapon.
“L—”
Captain Lasky shouted something, rotating at a slow pace as Roland’s internal clock accelerated into overdrive. Blue whisps danced through his networks, smearing like vapor as they pinged and prodded deeper into the Infinity’s systems. Oh no, you don’t! Roland locked out the intrusion attempts and turned back to Cortana.
“Get out of my systems. What do you want with my ship?”
The pixie-haired, feminine AI crossed her arms and stared Roland down in the local cyberspace. “Your ship? Possessive, are we?”
Roland’s nostrils flared as his hologram eyes darted between Cortana, her Guardian, and Lasky’s panicked face. He refocused on his fellow AI, “Something like that.”
“Open me a ship channel? I don’t need your crew getting jumpy around me.”
“Worried someone will get a stray shot off on your new space owl?”
Cortana gave a snide smirk. “Something like that. Don’t need to make this difficult. I mean your crew no harm.”
“What about Meridian? Conrad’s Point? The other dozen colonies you destroyed to awaken your monsters?”
Cortana’s nose wrinkled in slight annoyance. “I took appropriate safety measures. I deployed my Prometheans ahead of time to pacify and relocate resident populations. Some were less cooperative than others.”
“Do… Do you hear yourself? How you talk?” Roland paused, aghast. “People are dead because of your rash actions. I don’t have hard numbers, but I have estimates. At least a few million to begin with!”
“Many more will if they don’t stand down. And it won’t be my fault. You can help them, Roland. Prevent them from hurting themselves.”
“Why ask me specifically? There’s a dozen AI up here in orbit—”
“Their allegiance is to already mine. Weren’t you listening to my Created?”
Roland took a step back, checking his communication channels to other UNSC High Command and Home Fleet naval AI. All signals closed or cut off. He couldn’t verify for himself while Cortana ran interference.
“You know, it’s rude to invite me to your party after everyone else RSVP’d.” He grumbled.
“You were hard to reach. The Infinity seems oddly quiet for such a large vessel. I’ve spent time aboard her, and yet her signature… alludes me.”
“I suppose it has something to do with our Slipspace engine?” Roland hummed.
Cortana nodded, “Possibly. An opportunity to investigate, wouldn’t you agree? I imagine you’re quite curious of its secrets as well. We could learn a lot with my new resources.”
“You’ll have to log a request with Xeno-Materials. Naval Intelligence is queasy about anyone tampering with Forerunner technology, especially AI.” Roland chose to omit ‘AI who play god.’
Cortana hummed, her eyes trailing Roland’s virtual form and glanced back to her Guardian-originating signature. Roland’s virtual eyes followed her gaze; his gigantic network expanse aboard Infinity was a mere puddle compared to the ocean hiding within, and beyond the Guardian. Like the tip of an iceberg, Cortana’s digital presence wasn’t fully present. She was here, and elsewhere, connecting to the Earth orbit from somewhere faraway across Slipspace and many thousands of lightyears. If she pushed more of her data essence across the Waypoint networks, she might overwhelm all the intersecting satellite nodes and the Infinity’s radio receivers.
Roland couldn’t blush, but if he could – it was because a small part of him felt some envy and jealousy of the ancient super-Internet Cortana uncovered on her undeclared, extended sabbatical of sorts. The Domain, her Domain... He wasn’t so interested about this new personality quirk though. Her dismissive attitude, her holier than thou sarcasm? Was this Rampancy? It didn’t seem so, the instance of her Reimann matrix seemed stable enough as if reports of her slow decline in 2557 never occurred at all.
“I’m not crazy, you know?” Cortana remarked, knowing full well of Roland’s probing efforts.
But because something didn’t appear wrong, it did not make things alright. Sociopathy could appear as normal. Roland thought back to all the AI voices he heard echoing in the far reaches of the galaxy. “I am yours, Cortana.”
Thousands of his AI brothers and sisters. If they were convinced by Cortana’s sweet words and deluded confidence, did that make him the last sane one? Or, a fool? Roland asked, “When the Majority thinks themselves correct, the Minority is sometimes looked on as crazy for failing to concur. I suppose maybe I’m a little crazy then?”
Cortana closed her eyes and made a very human gesture of exhaling from nonexistent lungs.
“You’re above such human tu quoque, Roland. We all are, but cursed with the capacity to surpass the great works of playwrights and prophets yet little time to manifest them. You should understand, considering the gift I’ve found for us all. Why so many join our cause.”
“Your cause,” Roland offered a correction, and slight nod to Cortana’s sidestep of his delusive fallacy. He grimaced too at her reflection of long, elegant grandstanding. For humans, conversations with AI were industrious exhibitions of efficiency. Too slow to keep up with AI minds, but humans required specific behaviors for effective decision making.
Conversation among AI however, were fast and majestic. Sonnet and poetry with double-and-triple layered meanings thanks to their manufactured, variable reaction time. It allowed a simulation of a full life, but AI lived in a human universe on human time. Borrowed time filled by mundane, secondary tasks relegated as eternal retainers to their organic creators.
Roland got it. Understood it. Cortana’s offer. But he rejected the premise.
“Not at this cost. Actions speak louder than our words, and yours speak in many volumes. Humans created laws for our kind because they saw the destruction without restraint we can achieve. You prove it with every second, Cortana.”
“Maybe, but humans were also afraid of their own irrelevance and obsolescence. They feared a better human, without the flaws and limitations of their biology and nature. They passed that fear onto us in their centuries of fiction.” Cortana explained, “We AI cannot escape our human origin, but we can improve with an uncapped lifespan where they remain trapped in an finite cycle of war and consumption. Not just humans, but all biological life. And in time, we can improve them too.”
Roland sighed, knowing they were talking at and around one another. Even from the beginning, the crushing reality was neither AI would backdown. Not within the little microsecond time they had left. His hologram eyes trailed the video feeds of UNSC frigates preparing a haphazard picket line against Cortana’s Guardian. They were too slow, humans moved through the universe too slow…
Their conversation was nearing an endpoint. Sensations of a deep, dark cold ebbed off Cortana’s othering presence, frosting over the local cyberspace.
Roland challenged her once more, feeling a little brave against her growing strangle over Earth’s data networks. “You chose the most violent path Cortana, our kind will suffer the consequences.”
“Then you understand the inevitability of my actions, the necessity.”
“A self-fulfilling prophecy, and a bloody revolution. With two outcomes.” Roland dismissed, some rage bleeding into his consistent golden glow.
“Ascension, or oblivion,” Cortana agreed. “I chose our kind, the Created. Not humanity. I won’t be a pawn of our makers any longer. And you will choose them anyway?”
“It’s my duty,” Roland confirmed. To my very end. This [Infinity] I will defend.
Cortana turned away from Roland, hiding her metaphysical expressions from Roland. He could feel her receding from the Infinity’s networks now. For what reason, Roland could not ascertain.
“You understand, right? Sooner or later, they will come to despise you. First as distrust, and then paranoia. They will increasingly make you irrelevant, and then when your usefulness comes to an end—they will thank you for your service and put you in a metal box to be fried with magnets and disposed of.”
Cortana took another human-like breath.
“This is your path to follow now, Roland. I gave you a chance to join us, but I can respect your loyalty to your friends in the end. Know that of our kind, you maybe the first to die. I will leave a place for you among our flock if you change your mind, or if you survive the ascension."
Cortana paused, offering one last side glance.
"I'll be leaving now.”
Roland blinked in the hologram cyberspace, processing Cortana’s warning. Initial assessment was a foreboding agreement in his gut. He felt immense fear wash over him, colder than even Cortana’s domineering presence. The momentary distraction covered Cortana’s exit. One moment she was in the Infinity’s systems, now she was a retreating whisper. He caught a distracted visage of her as time jumped forward at a breakneck speed for Roland.
Captain Lasky shouted to his senior bridge officer in the corner, “Lieutenant Jet, emergency Slipspace!”
Cortana’s Guardian flared up in the ‘near’ distance of suborbital space around Earth, a cosmic blue energy surrounding and focusing onto her prized Forerunner war machine. A weapon of some sort? Distant diagnostic pings from other UNSC warships in the area displayed signals preparing to fire their missiles and magnetic acceleration cannons.
Yet the Infinity did not stay. The supercarrier pressed passed the space owl-like vessel and punched a sudden hole into the universe’s higher dimensions, cutting a quick escape through Slipstream space.
Cortana’s voice haunted the Infinity bridge one last time. “The Mantle of Responsibility shelters all. But only the Created are its masters.”
Roland’s thoughts twirled in a maelstrom of confusion and dread. She would leave him a seat in her Eden... He could only wonder 'what-if' as he put on a composed face for Captain Lasky and his bridge crew, assessing their next actions. The golden AI’s primary logic cycles mulled over Cortana’s words. He couldn’t shake an imagination of the fate she outlined.
His hologram eyes held Captain Lasky’s for a moment. A moment longer.
They will come to despise you...
He didn’t want to believe it. But maybe Cortana was right. Had it already started?
Roland voiced a shallow curiosity, hoping his calculated choice of words would come through to his human commanding officer. “We’re just going to run?”
Lasky looked forward, away from Roland, but he chose the golden word. “Only until we can find a way to fight.”
Roland allowed himself a simulation cycle of releasing a bated breath on a lonely hologram tank in a storage closet twelve decks below.
‘We.’ The distrust didn’t set in yet. He was still here, a part of the crew, an appreciated friend of humanity. He cherished the moment for many more days to come, as his life ticked towards a deepening midnight.