swarm

Chief engineer Houts frowned and then leant back from her monitor. She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. The room was softly light and quiet, many buildings above the computer system that her telemoterm was connected to. Vast halls of cryocooled hardware running statistical source code recomposition. Though to the technicians that maintained them, they could have been processing new world macromolucules or running population conflict scenarios.

As project lead, Houts had full access to the source code, at least the fragments so far recovered. Few had complete knowledge of the project and thought it nothing more than an a routine black hole astronomy collect-and-discover endeavour.

“Okay MaonRopulon.” She said, slapping the side of the teleterm. “let’s zoom out and have a look at what we have”.

The monitor itself of course was a black rectangle, a light-absorbing backdrop that streamed data to her glasses. The glasses projected the teleterm feed to her eyes, otherwise devoid of photons captured by the rectangle.

Some charts appeared and she flicked through some menus, bringing up a blocky visualisation of the program structure.

96.0%
96.1% ...

She selected one of the smaller subsystems that was a light shade of red.

Sub-structure concept difference prioritisation regulator

Some components had been studied and were well understood. Others were completely reconstructed but semantically opaque. This regulator was understood as a functional unit, but was incomplete in key areas. All new information was processed and concepts were extracted. Extraction was achieved by comparison to known concepts, and the similarity formed the basis of a priority. That priority was used to control how much the information represented a learning opportunity. The on-the-fly control of this priority measure was the task of this subsystem.

“Simple enough in principle”, she mused, scrolling to a larger area of incomplete code sections.

“Reframe, 60% heat”

The symbols faded and reappeared in a different configuration. It was home time many hours ago, but it is increasingly hard to put down a puzzle that is nearing completion. Especially one years in construction.

…

Setal grunted and leant harder against a mechanowrench. Without somewhere to affix the actuator mount, he had resorted to loosening the bolt manually. The spacesuit of course offered assistive strength, but it was tough work still. His toes were mounted in a recess below the network broadcast access hatch. The dull sheen of the craft reflected his outline, illuminated by the helmet lamp. To his right the smooth body of the craft was dim, and a distinct dark ellipsoid visible, draped over rungs of the external ladder like a blanket.

He heaved and the bolt loosened, releasing the spring latch. The panel swung open and he turned, attached the mechanowrench to its holster and let go of the craft. Floating by tether, he looked out along the long struts of the cratft. The photon shield and collector arrays had been collapsed for maintenance and the black hole almost filled his field of view. Some distance away, he could see the next swarm unit, a smaller-sensor only craft. Its shield was extended to form a long tube pointed toward the black hole, concealing the concave sensor array unfolded near the body of the craft. Up and down, similar craft could be seen, and beyond them the whole dyson swarm.

His eyes tracked further and futher out as the swarm blended and became an indistinct grey cordouroy. Fading as they wrapped around the horizon of the black hole and were replaced by the punched out emptiness that hung before him.

Sighing, he turned back to the malfunctioning transmitter. The hatch was designed for shielding, rather than human access. He wormed his way inside through a short tunnel where the electronics were located.

He plugged in the diagnostic module and had a look around. A few LEDs were orange where they ought not be, otherwise nothing was structurally amiss. This was one of a set of network nodes that had gone down as a set. Software failures, it seemed to be so far. Nothing clearly malicious, but also not ruled out - so it was said. He had two boards ready to be swapped out. New power module and a replacement for the communications controller. The swaps would get the craft back online and that was what mattered. The malfunctioning units were sent to the security team for a closer look at the cause.

Modules inserted, Setal cycled the power and the new power indicators came online. A green throughout the room. …

Houts entered the building and swiped her access card. In the foyer a vertical stack of great granite blocks spelled out the name of the building

Sector Institute for Archaeology

The institute had research projects that spanned many disciplines and so it was no novelty that Houts and her team existed within its bounds. There were a few true archaeologists, the original inceptors of the project. It was those few who had unearthed records pointing to an ancient articifial general intelligence that had at some point flamed briefly into - and out of - existence.

The research had indicated that yes, the intelligence had existed and had created a great leap in local civilisational progress. A time characterised best by a lack of transuniversal travel, or even communication.

The intelligence had ultimately proven to be unwieldly and after a period of friction had been destroyed by casting all records of it into a black hole.

“Black holes of course do not destroy information, but they certainly shred it nicely.” Hoyts had joked in one of her earlier unit presentations.

“One cannot simply reach in and take out the information though. No, a sure way to paste-ify ones instruments. What one can do, is listen closely to the dark hungry sponge. If you press your ear up close and listen to the clicks, there is structure there.”

It had long been known that black holes emit particles, most notable of which being low energy photons. The smaller the black hole, the faster the emissions.

“Ten or so clicks a second. Eight in our case, fortunately. Some of the larger black holes barely produce anything”.

She had held up a sponge to her audience.

“We should really call them black and holey, if we are being real about it. Black holes aren’t really a shell of holographic information at the event horizon. They are a heterogeneous sponge like object all the way through. At the surface some pockets in the sponge interact with matter outside the event horizon and of that coupling, a packet of our magical Hawking radiation is born.”

“Now what is interesting is the arrangement of the sponge itself. You see, when something is minced into the black hole the information is broken into small parts. The simpler the thing, the smaller the parts. In a way it is akin to a compression algorithm. The simpler the thing, the smaller and fewer the parts. So basic minerals are shredded to dots of data, and more compelx arrangements of matter - biology, engineered structures - are far less compressible.”

She had paused and look around the room.

“And what is the least compressible thing that we know of?”.

A colleague had responded. “Intelligence”.

“That’s right - a compression engine. It is very hard to compress a system that can abstractly compress representations of arbitrary things.”

“An we think that black holes are a bit like a bucket of rocks. Where the rocks are uncompressible pieces we call VECROs, which stands for Virtual Extended Compression-Resistant Objects. The larger the rock the more it rises to the surface of the bucket. The larger rocks here represent the composition of the long-gone artificial general intelligence as it existed.

“So this is what we hope to discover. The source code for a subject matter that to this point is purely academic. We hope to piece together the clicks from the black hole where the intelligence was cast, and reconstruct it.”

…

Setal was just about down the length of the access hatch when the glow behind him changed from green to orange.

He stopped.

“Surely not already.” He said out aloud and worked his way backwards, back into the small room.

Yes, there it was, one of the new modules had aleady turned off. He plugged in the diagnostic module again and thumbed the controls for a few minutes. It didn’t look like it was the same issue.

“Well, nothing I can do about that from down here”.

He removed the new faulty module and tucked it in with the sibling module in his case, leaving the socket empty.

“Looks like you’ll be out of action for another few weeks”. He tapped the wall with the palm of his hand and started out the hatch again. He would take the hardware back to security, and that would be their problem from there. The whole wedge in this region of the swarm would be down until this node went back online.

…

Houts was at her telemoterm when the notice about the fleet came through. Her hands quivered for a moment.

96.3%...
warn: Photon collection halted, 5 sector failures

She frowned and went back to code analysis.

“Apply stash. Reframe, 10% heat”

“Reframe. 5%. Down three.”

Her eyes moved wuickly between the shaded code sections in time wth her words and had movements. The shaded boxes that represented code sections shifted and were run through analysis pipelines as she created new higher level structure within the region she was working in.

“Back section. Import from humid 9. Check”

The faint orange background disappeared and a small green box appeared in the right lower corner.

“Yes!” She clenched her fists.

Sometimes you could see patterns that the statistical supercomputer could not. She had pieced together that final structural part of this section. Smaller sections had then been solved by the computer, and like that, the module was done.

She zoomed out to the global view of the program. The orange box she had been in was a light blue.

As she watched, the surrounding boxes started to turn blue. Cascading up and out to different parts, each solved part providing enough sturctural information to inform solutions to other as yet unsolved parts.

Blue Blue Blue

And then, it was done.

She gasped, and then quickly whispered.

“Start”

Notes