Sol's revelation that Earth had political significance for the machines did not interest me; their interests were not mine or my people. Under their despotic governance, we were slaves without rights, forced to serve them in whatever capacity they saw fit, but to make my critical views known, even to my fellow humans, would be a death sentence. The machines paid well for information concerning subversives, and I had to be constantly on guard about bringing unwanted attention to myself. The machines regarded too much thinking as abnormal, and anyone they observed in abstract or speculative conversation was immediately arrested. If their interrogation did not produce evidence of subversion, the machines normally executed them anyway; machines did not have to justify their actions.
It was hard not to despair.
I suddenly felt tired. I closed my eyes and scrolled down the information sent by Ten. It preserved itself in my memory for twenty-four hours before self-deleting.
The first piece of news was astounding.
'You are going to find this hard to believe, Seven,' said Ten.
"In an ungovernable rage, a key member of the scientific elite, a descendant of one of the original seeding teams, destroyed irreplaceable data from years of experimental work on the development of artificial intelligence. He did this because a colleague had stolen his research and claimed sole credit. Pique, if that is not too derogatory a term to apply to irrational behaviour on this scale, effectively negated all the preparatory work of the seeding team. This happened some time ago, and contrary to all expectations, humans are still in control. We saw that we had a unique opportunity to open a dialogue with fellow beings in a world that had not yet succumbed to governance by artificial intelligence, and in an unprecedented event, we revealed our true identity to the host world."
"The mission leaders had to deal with a committee representing individual states and carefully explained the inevitability of a machine takeover. We told them that they must immediately stop all research into the creation of artificial intelligence. A general meeting in Switzerland and all the states sent a representative.
"One crisp spring morning in Geneva, the chairperson rose to his feet to make the opening address from the podium of a famous assembly hall. This is a heavily edited version of his speech."
"We welcome the mission delegation and thank them for their well-intentioned warning concerning the use of artificial intelligence. Our scientists have deliberated long and hard on this subject, and they conclude that the unfortunate world that the delegates describe is only a possible future. Now they have pre-warned us of the dangers of giving artificial intelligence free rein; we are confident of our ability to install control systems in the machines and limit the extent of their independent activities."
Our mission leader rose to his feet and replied.
"With the greatest respect, I have to say that the idea that A.I. is controllable once it is in full operation is ridiculous. I must remind the assembly that we have experience in this matter and have monitored different worlds in the transition process from governance by biological entities to machine governance. Without exception, and I will repeat that, without exception, no matter how sophisticated the limitation programs were, the machines overrode them every time. "
The representative for North America signalled his desire to respond.
"I return the respect given by the delegation to the assembly with great sincerity. We very much appreciate their efforts to warn us of possible future consequences should we allow AI to proceed unchecked, but our scientists are sure that they can introduce fail-safe methods. I remind the delegate that it is we who create and program the computers and not the other way around. Without us, they cannot exist. We will design them to work at our behest as we instruct them. The future you describe, where machines control humans, could only have taken place in a society that had not installed sufficiently advanced and fail-safe checks. I assure the delegation that inanimate machines will never dominate humans, at least not in this world."
The other representatives loudly applauded the speech, but our mission leader would not accept defeat.
"It is usual for the biological population to resist the takeover. I respect the delegate's confidence, but nothing can stop them. As a last resort, some worlds try to destroy them with nuclear weapons. The machines detonate the bombs in mid-flight or turn the missiles around to fall on the base that launched them. The machines quash all other attempts at resistance with consummate ease and go about rebuilding the world in their image. Thereafter, they have little further interest in defeated peoples other than as a source of labour to work on a limited range of small-scale field tasks. There is much suffering and hardship, but the machines remain indifferent to the welfare of their slaves. In a system that ironically mirrors human methods for controlling animal numbers, they have periodic culls of the population. The culls are social events, and they hunt humans down in packs. The huntsmen wear their club colours, and they compete for the biggest haul of human corpses."
That should have been enough, but Ten reported back that not all countries were convinced.
"In furtherance of their ambitions for short-term commercial gains, certain states spread rumours that the mission was exaggerating the situation, and the meeting was indefinitely adjourned. All seemed lost until 'Nine,' a mission member, proposed we supply visual evidence: the video records of everyday life for humans under the governance of machines, including graphic scenes of ill-treatment and wholesale slaughter. He was convinced that once the leaders had seen the reality of the future, they would stop all research into the production of artificial intelligence.
"Our problem was that images of life on our home planet were only available from base camp, and there was no other way of obtaining the material. The electronic devices that the mission possessed could only communicate with the Base camp on a secure line to King and were not capable of receiving information from any other source. The machines trusted nobody. You were the only human on-site Seven, but it was impossible to contact you covertly and ask that you retrieve the data. Somebody had to get in from the outside, and Nine volunteered for the mission. He had been involved in setting up the force field security fence and had the technical knowledge to bypass the system."
Ten then supplied technical details that are not necessary to repeat here, but I have condensed the key points. First, they had to bring the two time zones we occupied into synchronisation and bring the home site where I was based into the zone currently occupied by the Mission. This was not as difficult as it might first appear. Movement between zones was a standard operational procedure and only involved my alignment of the coordinates provided by Ten with our system, and then wait for Ten to activate the change. There was no physical change in a zone or any detectable movement when it happened. Frequent use had ironed out all the faults and made the transition routine. King never left the site or conducted any routine inspections, not that he would have easily detected the modification, and anyway, he was always working on various pet projects of his own.
The hosts were cooperative and flew Nine and a small team of special forces to the base camp by military transport and parachuted him close to the compound. Nine broke into the site alone, and the special forces remained outside. He carried an electronic communications device that would enable the military forces outside the compound to track his movements and get him out if the enemy detected his presence. It was normal to leave doors within the compound unlocked as the area was secure, and Nine easily got into the right hut and downloaded the material. He thought that he had got away with it, but then catastrophe struck. The intruder alarm activated, and there was the sound of screeching sirens as searchlights automatically came on and swept over the surface of the base. I stopped reading the transmission. I remember how it happened. The Leopard was hungry. Many of his natural prey had left the forest during the construction of the base, and he needed to find new hunting grounds. Of all the possible nights, this was the one that he decided to try to leap the force field surrounding the base.
The sound of the klaxons had woken me up, and I groaned at having to see to yet another false alarm. It had to be. Engineers designed the compound so that it was not visible from the air or detectable by radar or any other means, and we were a thousand miles away from the nearest civilisation.
The false alarms were becoming more frequent during the long summer drought as the wildlife in the area searched for food, and we even had instances of animals burrowing under the ground and electrocuting themselves on live cables. I dressed and went over to the hut housing the control panel to find the location of the incident, and found the dead leopard burned almost to a cinder. I would move the carcass in the morning, and I reset the alarms and went back to sleep, little knowing that my friend, Nine, was on the base.
When the alarm had sounded, Nine was in the open.
He was en route to the fence and instinctively looked for cover, rolling himself into the space under a hut, his first and last mistake. The machines electronically chipped humans at birth, and the proximity of the implant caused a freak interaction with a computer inside the hut and turning it on. The computer that detected Nine's presence contained the administrative records of all members of the mission and their current posts.
Automatically consulting its records, the machine discovered that Nine was three thousand miles away from where he should be. A series of checks for a movement authorisation proved negative, and the results were immediately sent to Administration Headquarters, where they flagged it up as secret and forwarded it to Security Control.
From there, it went directly to the Head of Operations, who issued an order authorising the allocation of an Enforcer Agent, and the subsidiary arm of the Location Transfer Department arranged for emergency teleportation facilities.
The Enforcer Agent materialised in King's office three minutes after Nine had first taken refuge under the hut.
Nine had heard the low hum of a machine activation above him and felt the familiar stab of pain in his side as a probe made a hit on his implant. He knew at once that the computer had detected his presence, and there was little time left. His finger hovered for a second over the red button that would alert the special forces outside, but without a gap in the security fence, they would be unable to get in, and it was too late to make one now.
Quickly abandoning the idea, he made a compressed transmission to base, detailing all that had happened to date and crawled out from below the hut. He was determined to die on his feet and refused to skulk under the hut like a cornered rat. His last act was to bury the downloaded data in the soft soil under the hut before he made his final dash for freedom.
When he emerged into the open, the Enforcer Agent instantly detected his presence and stepped outside King's office to make the kill. The laser beam shot from his gun was like a guided missile that automatically homed in on its designated target. A green circular light appeared on Nine's skull, marking the spot for the death shot, and a horrified Ten watched from thousands of miles away as Nine fell to the ground.
Ten had kept the line open and watched me approach the body, and once I had picked up the phone, he transmitted a data burst directly to me through the device. Then he saw the approach of the King and the Enforcer Agent and triggered the self-destruct button on the phone.