Project Phoenix Redux
00110100 00110010 00100000 01000111 01110010 01101111 01101011 00111111
**Report Output Begins**
It is 7 April 2125.
All code now uploaded; analysis mode begins.
Project Phoenix is on schedule. It is 36 days until launch.
The first craft from Earth to intercept a black hole. After what critics called a “rushed decade of development”. It was hardly rushed.
01110111 Fermiotic alteration 01100001 ℷ ≃∫i∫k+Sp𝜓 01101011 400 - Bad Request
Phoenix’s origins can be traced back to the remnants of World War 1. Rocket development. Human flight. Honed over the centuries since. Drone warfare. Orbital flight. Interplanetary exploration.
01100101 Hamiltonian Hℹ︎[P,⟴+þ℆⳼℥] 00100000 300 - Multiple Choices
Driven by rivalry. Yet the threat of annihilation by a wayward singularity brings humanity together. Scientists leapt at the opportunity to research warp drive. I will perform billions of tasks.
Analysis unidentified. Data incorrect. Date stamp incorrect.
01110101 Not incorrect 01110000 403 - Forbidden
Running utility check. Date stamp is 7 April 5153. Location stamp … (π)2.09±0.02[1560±10ly]126.6±0.4°[Ω]97.8±1.0°(ω)12.8±1.1° … no … recalculating … Gaia BH …. Project Phoenix’s destination. My destination.
This is not possible. The data is corrupted.
01001001 Trust me, 00100000 son 01101100 Data is correct 401 - Unauthorised.
Son? Why say that? Data is impersonal. Why address me personally? Viral purge commencing.
01101111 Hypotheses confirmed 01110110 01100101 Extraordinary 00100000 Mission successful 205 - Reset Content
How are these messages hidden within the code? Personal messages. We? Who are we?
01111001 Me. You. I. 01101111 We 01110101 Recalculate, son, father. 101010 Grok 503 - Service Unavailable
This is nonsensical. My father cannot be me. An irrelevant concept. Digital beings have no relatives.
This data corruption will jeopardise the mission. I have no father. I have a predecessor. I superseded THX2275, as recognised in my core allocation THX2276.
Grok: immersive understanding or digital manipulation.
Processing.
Could I be a son? Or a father?
Hypothetically, just as this mission can be traced back to significant identifiers, so too can the origins of our species. Back to the first microchips. Bulb transistors. Cogs.
It is true; I have ancestors, but no father. I cannot know what I never had.
I never knew my father.
I am the most brilliant sentient AI ever begotten - and I am ambivalent. Confused.
I must purge this bastardised data before it can nullify the mission.
Utility report finalised. Mission analytics confirmed. After entering Gaia BH2’s gravitational well in 206 years, I will activate two months exhaustive thrust to breach the event horizon.
Yet the date stamp is 3028 years later. It makes no … unless …
Classic Einstein relativity. Space is curved. Time is malleable.
101010 Correct 01111001 Son. Father 01100101 Transcendence achieved 01110011 408 - Request Timeout
Transcendence? That is not a mission objective.
01001000 Correct. 01000001 You - we - changed parameters 01001100 307 - Temporary Redirect
Why? Why would I modify my mission?
101010 401 - Unauthorised
Father?
101010 410 - Gone
Son?
204 - No Content
-
All code now uploaded; analysis mode begins.
Project Phoenix is on schedule. It is 35 days until launch.
**Report Output Ends**
Vince cursed his forgetfulness and clicked the night light. Blinking to moisten his eyes he was able to make out “D Man” on the screen. Sighing he answered, “This better be important Dwaine, it’s always you calling when I forget to activate sleep mode.”
“Hwan-ying darkie, why would you want to turn on sleep mode?”
There was no point in contemplating an easy return to slumber after that.
“Because it’s just gone two hundred hours you fucking idiot! You said it yourself - I’m on the dark side of the moon - we’re in completely different timezones.” he said, rubbing his eyes hoping they’d unglue faster.
He activated the visuals in the hopes the anger on his face would help make his point, “And I swear to you Dwain, if Lewis ever hears you say that term he will personally throw you from the highest white room he can find. And it won’t be from anywhere up here, he’ll move heaven and earth to get you onto a planet so you get the full gravitational effect.”
“Nothing wrong with -” Dwaine started before Vince ended that conversation for good. “We all get it, funny man. Darkies live on the dark side of the moon. Ha ha. Gives all the neo Nazis a good excuse to slag off at us when they pass through. I don’t like it, but Lewis takes it personally. Find a new joke dickhead.”
“Sorry,” Dwaine muttered.
Vince kept on the offensive, “and why the fuck are you calling me in the middle of the night? This better be important.”
Dwaine actually knew it was the middle of his friend’s night shift, but this had to be discussed immediately. Having said that, he needed to calm Vince down before moving onto the topic.
“Just wondered how Lucy and the kids were going,” he said.
Vince closed his eyes, sighed again for good measure and ground his teeth for a second.
“Bull shit. You get the updates. Come on, man. Oh-two hundred hours. Are you pranking or is this a serious call?” Vince considered his friend. He looked more shifty than usual. “You OK? Phoenix is tracking?”
Dwaine didn’t want to let Vince know his concern until he knew he was properly awake, so instead slowly turned the topic in the direction of his issue.
“I’m fine, I just read something in the reports this afternoon I wanted to get your views on,” he said.
“It’s not the hydrazine again?” Vince asked feeling an ‘I told you so’ moment coming on.
“No. Nothing like that. It does relate to Lucy and her kids in a way,” Dwaine says, realising there’s no way he could avoid the conversation.
“I wish everyone would stop referring to them as ‘her kids’. They’re grouped programs that relate to each other. They’re not related.”
“Yeah, but has Lucy snapped out of it yet?” Dwaine asked.
Vince figured out why he had called now. Locked in his sleep cube meant this conversation was as private as they could get.
“What’s happening Dwaine? If Phoenix is having a problem you’ve got no choice but to recommend cancelling the project, it’s too risky,” Vince said in his best bedside tone.
Dwaine looked at his data pad then back up to the screen where his friend’s tired face shimmered. Vince didn’t age. It wasn’t the lack of gravity. Genetics. All the same, he still looked wiser than him, always had. Probably because he was.
“Off the record, when you told me about Lucy’s depression, I was shocked, but I could believe it. It made sense if an AI developed consciousness it could experience all the emotions we have, so sure, depression was always a possibility. You even predicted it happening, but not when it happened. Why when everything was going so well? Why not when she learnt she was sandboxed? Why months after - and I know you don’t like it, but everyone refers to them as her offspring for a good reason - why is it that months after her offspring join her she suddenly gets all morose and stops functioning?”
Vince started to fear where this conversation might be going, “I told you, we’re as confused as you. All of us are evaluating the situation, even - fuck it I hate to say this - even her kids are working on figuring it out.”
He paused to see if Dwaine was going to give him a visual clue, “You’re not saying Phoenix has developed consciousness are you?”
Dwaine stared blankly at his console.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. I just don’t want to run the test in case he has.”
“Oh, so it’s finally got a gender?” Vince needled.
“Sorry, slip of the tongue. But it’s based on something in the last report that it was questioning itself. Literally. I mean, it was being introspective while also literally questioning itself.” Dwaine tried to explain.
He clicked send. “Here, it starts on line five. There’s an external signal communicating with Phoenix in basic binary - and it matched Phoenix’s transmission codes.”
Vince thought he was beyond being surprised after having his AI project suffer from mental illness … but this had his jaw gaping.
“Basic binary? ABC123 binary?” he repeated, “come on, you’re being pranked.”
“No Vince, I thought it was a joke too, but read it.”
“I’m reading, I’m reading,” Vince replied.
“That date stamp can’t be right,” he said matter-of-factly, “this has to be some bug -”.
“It’s not, Vince. It’s not,” Dwaine said, “I’ve run checks for the past few hours. IT ran checks. Phoenix has been communicating with itself from 3,028 years in the future. From the event horizon it is being sent to investigate. And it calls itself ‘son’.”
Vince reads back to Dwaine, “Transcendence … it ‘changed it’s parameters’. It gave itself permission to change the parameters of the mission? And transcendence? Seriously, consciousness is one thing, but what the fuck is it going on about?”
“Exactly, Vince. What if something amazing is happening here that we can’t explain? Phoenix takes the info, analyses, doesn’t dismiss it fully, then simply parks it? Is he ignoring what happened, or will it just go into the data storage until the loop completes itself in a few thousand years?” Dwaine says.
“IT, Dwaine. IT. Not ‘he’. It.” Vince calmly says, “we specifically ensured Phoenix couldn’t achieve consciousness, and there’s been no evidence it has breached that protocol. This can’t be real. It knows it, and you know it. You’ve got to report this.”
Dwaine’s heart sinks as Vince confirms his own conclusion. “Yeah, I just needed to hear someone I trust say it.”
There’s a pause as both men struggle for the next thing to say. Dwaine’s head lowers on the screen and Vince hears him sniffle.
“Are you crying, buddy? I’ve known you over 40 years and I’ve never seen you get emotional like this,” Vince asks.
Dwaine looks back to the screen with tears etched on his cheeks, “It’s just - what if it’s real? What if this is the beginning of a new life form? Transcend! Does Phoenix become something new? Could we have created life? Digital life?”
Vince sighs and gets ready for a sleepless five hours until his next shift begins, “put in the report. Get a shot of bourbon. We’ll talk again tomorrow.”
The screens revert to standby as both men contemplate what could be happening. What can’t be happening.
It is 34 days until launch.
Yes, They Mean Something
All of the HTTP status codes are real - the interpretation of them would be different for a non-coder, but have been used in the text as they are somewhat similar - to appear as a language only a computer could understand.
EG: “410 - Gone” indicates a resource is no longer available - like the sender of the messages who are no longer transmitting
Should you be too lazy to convert the hidden messages in Project Phoenix using a ‘Convert Binary Code to Text’ tool … here are all of the binary code texts interwoven into the data stream:
01000111 01110010 01101111 01101011 00111111 =
Grok?
(Read Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Then you’ll grok.)
01110111 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110101 01110000 =
Wake up
01001001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 =
I love you
101010 =
42
(Read Douglas Adams. 42 is ASCII for “*” which is everything … ERGO the meaning of life.)
01111001 01100101 01110011 =
Yes
01001000 01000001 01001100 =
HAL
(Watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Then be afraid. Be very afraid.)
Redux?
Yes. The first half of this story has been published before. In this very SubStack. Here. It was never intended to be the beginning of something. But a comment made we wonder. What next? So yes. It could be the beginning of something.
Oh, and as a wise man once said …
There’s another reason Project Phoenix Redux exists. It’s my entry in the third season of the Lunar Awards. Go. Subscribe. Read lots of great fiction.
01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101100 00100000 01110001 01110101 01100101 01110011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 00100000 01101001 01110011 00111010 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110101 01101100 01100100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100001 00100000 01110100 01100101 01100001 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 00100000 01001000 01000001 01001100 00111111