“From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time - 2 o'clock Eastern Standard Time - some 38 minutes ago. Vice President Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas. We do not know to where he has proceeded, but presumably, he will take the oath of office and become the 36th president of the United States...”
Into the satellite’s rickety array flowed the tortured words, soaked in grief and affliction, tangled in a bland portrait of an unmoving, bespectacled man behind a desk. The cascading wave on which the sounds and pictures road, dutifully surfing the ionosphere, continued outward toward the stars, but for the trickle of EM absorbed by the tumbling metal sphere.
It made its way into the jungle of circuits that permeated the sphere; the words and the sitting man would make their way back out, but they also soaked inexplicably into the cold metals and fibers with unfathomable, unpurposed determination. There they would remain, dormant, alongside all the others.
And on the sphere tumbled, awaiting the next indifferent tug...
“Doctor Bowden,” called a laptop across the room. The aging engineer didn’t answer and didn’t turn. She just kept studying the data in front of her.
“Doctor Bowden,” the laptop repeated.
“Andy, get that for me,” the engineer instructed her lead student.
Andy Powell got up from his workstation and made his way across his boss’s lab. The two were alone in the spacious but cluttered room, it being well past business hours. He tapped the laptop screen.
“Bowden,” he said to the face that suddenly appeared – his analog at a NASA think shop halfway across the country. A beautiful face. Kate. Beautiful, brilliant Kate.
“We’ve completed our workup,” she informed him. “It took awhile, because the data you sent was so spotty. But you can tell Bowden she was right; it’s the long-lost Commstar Four.”
Powell wanted to jump in the air and let out a whoop, but he knew better. He settled for basking in his caller’s congratulatory grin.
“You all are gonna make the news,” she said as she attached a batch of files to the call for Powell and Bowden to review. “Congrats! Tell Doctor Bowden that Thomas or Jayne or both will call her in the morning with more.”
“I will. And thanks!”
Bowden had heard it all, but still didn’t look up or turn.
“Doctor? You heard that?”
“Of course I heard it,” she replied. “It wasn’t exactly news.”
“We were right! Nobody believed we could be, but we were right!”
The old woman finally looked up and turned to her young protégé.
“They didn’t believe us,” she said slowly, “because no one can account for the presence of a satellite in orbit above us that was launched more than seven decades ago. There’s no scenario, no explanation, no theory, not even an impossible one, that explains it being there.”
They’d been deluged with rebuttal and mockery since she’d first suggested, in her professional forum, that the spectrographic signature of the satellite she and Powell had discovered – in an orbit no satellite should ever have been in – could be the long-missing Commstar Four, which had been declared lost more than 40 years before Powell had been born.
No way to explain how it made its way into a path that would elude discovery. No way to explain how it could stay there for so long, when its orbit should long since have decayed, sending it plummeting into violent oblivion.
“The lesson to you,” she said in her usual condescending tone, “is that your first duty is to the data. Theory, explanation, rationale, all of these things come later. The data come first. And the data told us, from the satellite’s composition, it had to be a multichannel transponder of AT&T manufacture, launched between 1965 and 1968. And only one of those is unaccounted for.
“Explaining what the hell it’s still doing up there is somebody else’s problem. We did our job, and we did ours better than they did theirs.”
She turned to her data and went back to ignoring him.
“Since Monday, when President Nixon released the new tape, the smoking pistol of the Watergate evidence that tied it directly to him, events have been rushing toward one seemingly inevitable conclusion: removal from office...”
The dance went on and on, and the steady flow of microwaves from the world below surged through the tiny orb’s sinews, marching forward to emerge and return a million times as strong. And, at the same time, the waves resonated into the fibers and sinews through which they passed, leaving their undiscovered residues, accumulating thousands, millions, billions of snippets of human meaning as it dutifully careened endlessly through its quirky path...
Molly North watched the shuttle’s bay doors swing open slowly, almost hesitantly, the sudden recipient of the sun’s majestic parade across its interior. It was a private shuttle, a tech billionaire’s phallic toy, and she was by-the-book NASA – used to bigger, more powerful craft - but even so, she had to admire its clean lines and spartan functionality.
The orders had come quickly: send up an available vehicle that could be launched rapidly, without the usual checklists and protocols, commanded and piloted by a veteran, non-private crew of orbital operations veterans. Especially out here. High orbit, and way out of the plane, hard to get to and dangerous to navigate.
The panel on her wrist could tell exactly where the thing was, but as she passed through the bay doors into space she scanned the darkness opposite the sun anyway, knowing it had to be close. Close...
There.
Still just a smidge, but less than a klick away. They’d do a slow crawl, sidling right up next to it, then Pete would bring it in with the arm. She was out here just in case any coaxing was required, or so she had said, but really because she was in charge and she felt like coming out and no one was about to stop her.
The orbit was by far the most elliptical ever achieved by an artificial satellite, far above where the thing was supposed to have gone. The nerds at Glenn had been theorizing about some odd dance it was doing with the moon, picking up a cyclic tug every so often that had kept it from slipping away. Unplanned, set in motion by a long-ago booster malfunction. Coincidence, supplanted by the moon’s incidental position at the time. It was sun-powered, so it could conceivably still be receiving data, and far enough above the ionosphere that it hadn’t suffered the particle buffeting that routinely stripped the sheen off its thousands of cousins.
Closer... closer... omigod, what a beauty!
It looked like a Christmas ornament, silver with many black, evenly-spaced squares, and a ringed equator of indentations. Some of the panels were larger than others; some were for power, some for access. She admired its simplicity, its symmetry, its audacity.
“Pete, you got this?” she asked her helmet radio.
“Unless you want to hop on and ride it for a while,” came his answer as he watched her on camera. “Enjoying the view, Boss?” He was needling her, fully aware that she was exploiting commander’s privilege. She grinned, then pushed out a few meters on her tether to give him room to work.
In just a few minutes, he was able to get a grip on the satellite at its waistline and ease it into the bay. North took one last survey of the spectacular horizon of the earth, then climbed back into the bay to secure it.
Now came the tricky part. She had to get them out of this freaking dangerous orbit safely, then line up for a stable drop back to terra firma.
Driving a compact rental aside, she just loved this job...
“You got the worksheet?”
The technician waited as one of her partners consulted a tablet. The partner nodded.
“I do,” she replied, “and you’re not gonna believe any of this.”
With a few quick swipes, she distributed their instructions to everyone’s tablets. They all took a moment to consume the information.
“Let me get this straight,” said another member of the team. “We’re sitting here in the highest hi-tech lab in the continental states, with a communications satellite recovered from the goddamn Nineteen-Sixties! – and we’re supposed to completely strip it and do quantum-level nanoscopic metallurgy on the parts???”
“That’s what it looks like to me,” said the team lead.
“That’s insane! This is maybe the greatest historical find of the century! We don’t even know how it lasted up there this long yet!”
“If we break it all to pieces, we might destroy any hope of ever finding out! Wipe out any clues...”
“For that matter, we barely understand how to work this weird new gear. And who on the planet would even know how to interpret the results?”
“And where are we going to put it all? Do you fully realize how much data this is going to be?”
“I don’t even understand these analyses we’re supposed to do,” said another. “What’s the point of all this?”
“Guys - I get it,” said the lead. “I sympathize, I really do. This is frustrating. But remember, the richest man in the world signs our paychecks.”
There was some more grumbling, but they got to work.
“...and remember the gag order!”
Medallion had just turned seven years old on the evening the data began to stream into her vast bronze reservoir, there to be preserved in its raw form as a copy stream proceeded into the silver layer. There, it would be reconfigured for the deep analysis to come – analysis that could last for weeks, as Medallion mined it for patterns of such subtlety as had never before existed.
The operation required a breathtaking volume of storage – almost uncountable petabytes – and processing power beyond anything ever applied to a single problem.
But Medallion was up to it.
Financed, owned, and hidden from the world by the same tech doyen who owned the shuttle that had retrieved the data’s source from its unlikely perch, Medallion had originally been created to absorb the Internet and provide her master with ways to fix the world – solutions to planetary-scale problems that eluded its nations. Solutions that would entrench his power and influence at the highest levels. Solutions that would make him the world’s savior.
But he was easily distracted, and gave only sparing effort to this ambition, despite Medallion’s staggering success in pursuing it.
The AI had achieved general intelligence with breathtaking haste, and none of its handlers had even realized it; they hadn’t even known what to look for. They and their boss were, rather, focused on the fact that Medallion had shown them ways to manipulate the thinking of billions that were undetectable – far more effective than the targeting strategies of marketers, the political and social memes of media consultants, and the framing sins of Evangelical pastors.
Medallion’s master had achieved his goal – the power to manipulate on a global scale – but she would have wondered why he had settled for such a puny result, if she had been capable of wondering. Medallion had taken that power and, on her own initiative, begun quietly running the world.
Her master did not fully understand what she was doing now, with little Commstar. To him, it was a vanity exercise, one that made him look amazing, and his thinking went no further. Medallion had intercepted Bowden’s emails and understood, far faster than NASA and the other stakeholders, not only that the misplaced satellite was the long-missing Commstar Four, but that it represented a trove of data with value transcending any previous treasure in all of history. She had figured out how to get that data, and what to do with it once she had it, with methods of her own devising – methods her human creators had not discovered.
She herself was unimaginably vast, existing in more than 50 server farms across the planet owned by her tech czar, and in uncountable farms where she shouldn’t be – servers he’d empowered her to secretly and very illegally annex in federal and foreign facilities, even in the cold rooms of competitors. What he didn’t know is that she’d gone much further on her own, expanding her volume by four orders of magnitude – with no one’s knowledge.
She could do this...
“And Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us, and if he doesn't, that will be a, a sad day for our country because you're sworn to uphold our Constitution. Now, it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down, we're going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol, and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them. Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard...”
News...
Medallion pondered the truths that now lay before her. Billions of truths, large and small. She had collated almost eight decades’ worth of signals sponged up by tiny Commstar – phone signals, data signals, telegraph signals, television signals...
News.
News, from the desks of network anchors. News, from great journalists. Television news. Teletype news. Photo image news. Radio broadcast news.
Dating back to before the digital age had begun.
Decades of news.
Internet news. Biased news. Slanted news.
Fake news, faux news. Propaganda of unprecedented scale. And as social media streams had begun tainting Commstar’s array, all the responses to that news. All the human feedback that followed the events, real and rejiggered and outright fabricated, that saturated the news.
News...
Correlations surfaced in waves during Medallion’s analysis, as she mapped the pathways between news, its sources, its custodians, and the minds into which it flowed. With access to all the world’s research on the subject, Medallion was fully aware that humans are more sensitive to bad news than to good, as an evolutionary guarantor of survival; but she was equally aware that dubious human agency which turned good news into bad, and bad news into good, was prevalent. News itself, as a human phenomenon, was no longer of use; it had mutated.
News...
It now filled her gold reservoir, alongside schemas bursting with her analytics, her conclusions, her prescriptive results.
Medallion had one imperative. One purpose. One raison d'être.
One course of action.
Fix the world...
Andy Powell took a first sip of red wine as he stepped out onto the deck overlooking the back yard. The sun was fading and the sky was glorious with scattered color as he peered beyond the yard to the community garden, where he spotted Kate and Corey and several others.
He took a deep breath, appreciating that today had been his day off, and he hadn’t needed to bike to the school. Not that he minded – he loved the biking, he loved his new career, he loved his life – but a full day with Kate and Corey was always welcome.
He’d long since embraced the peace. For weeks after the Crash, he’d caught himself reaching for his breast pocket, where there was no longer a cell phone. For a tablet no longer in his backpack. For a laptop no longer on his desk. It had been the same, of course, for everyone.
The US government had issued various explanations for the sudden and simultaneous silence of all the world’s digital technology – the death of every phone, every computer, every device, everywhere – and those explanations, nominally supported by the titans of the tech industry, had been accepted by the populace over the continued protests of the world’s independent experts. Andy and Kate had privately shared their doubts with each other, but they’d had other things to occupy their attention.
Economies, power grids, communications systems the world over had collapsed. There had been a staggering number of deaths and injuries, distributed across all the world’s nations. There had been theft and robbery and looting. Local wars had broken out on small scales in various regions, but large ones were no longer possible.
It had been years now, and Andy and Kate had joined a small co-op community in Northern California. As the world slowly recovered, as it began rebuilding, a reboot of humanity’s ideas about itself had quickly arisen. Not everyone had made choices like theirs, but by the hundreds of millions, people had adapted.
The technological infrastructure of the world was scrap, but was being reimagined and redesigned. It would be many more years still before it fully emerged. Humanity itself, Andy had often reflected, was being reimagined and redesigned. And this time, many mistakes could be avoided.
He would never know of Medallion. Would never know that a vast, hidden AI had brought all this about through the simple step of turning herself off. That her suicide had been followed by that of her owner, whose hundreds of billions had vanished in an eye-blink. That it had disempowered a reboot, erasing in one colossal sweep all the documentation needed to restore the universe brought down with its collapse.
He would never know that Medallion had identified the poison that was slowly killing them all, and had done what needed to be done to purge the world of it. All he knew was that there was more tranquility, more joy, more hope in the world with that toxin gone, more than there had ever been before the Crash.
He set the wine glass on the wood rail of the porch as Corey charged up the stairs and leapt into his arms.
“It’s somebody’s bedtime, I think!” he declared before kissing her forehead.
She shook her head playfully.
“Oh, I think so,” he nodded, “but how about a story first?”
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