Stuyvesant: “Do you provide this service to species other than humans? Do you speak languages not derived from Earth?”
“Yes.”
Barnes: “How can you run this depot with so little critical information?”
“I do not run this depot. It is separately automated. I am here to answer questions.”
Hannegan muttered, “Not very helpfully, so far.”
Clover wagged a finger at him: “Are you programmed to deny us information about your technology?”
“No. Ninety percent of my information is about technology. I contain complete descriptions, operation details, status reports, maintenance records, documentation, and instructional and design manuals for this station, and for its satellites.”
Barnes: “Tell us all about the depot.”
“That would not be a good idea.”
“Why?”
“I would not know what you would want to know. I would start with the first facts in my memory and proceed through the databases in an orderly manner. Done orally, it would take seventeen Earth years. Do you have sufficient time?”
Clover: “Don’t you have more efficient ways to transmit information than talking?”
“Of course, but I do not know which ones of them, if any, are usable by you. Technology changes very rapidly. In comparison, language changes extremely slowly. I doubt you are equipped with I/O protocols from even a century ago. But English, as spoken several centuries ago, would still be comprehensible to you today. If you have communications specialists I can talk to, we can probably find a mutually agreeable protocol.”
Clover: “And you are willing to transfer that data to us?”
“Yes.”
Barnes held up a hand to slow him down, then looked at the jukebox:
“You say you can’t tell us about your makers or other species. Is that because you are prohibited from sharing that information, or because it’s not in your databases?”
“Your question is not entirely correct. I do have some limited information about my makers and other species, but you have not asked the correct questions to elicit that response. As to your other point, I am not prohibited from answering any questions for which I have information. Everything I know or can synthesize is accessible to anyone who asks me questions.”
Clover jumped in: “What would be the correct questions that would elicit your programmed response about your makers and the other species?”
“The correct questions would be: First: ‘Are your makers afraid of us?’ The correct answer would be, ‘Not at this time.’ Second: ‘Should we be afraid of them?’ The correct answer would be, ‘Not at this time.’ Third: ‘Should we consider them hostile to our species?’ The correct answer would be, ‘No.’”
Emwiller looked at Barnes: “Sir, should we be trusting these answers?”
Barnes shrugged: “I don’t know.”
Clover asked the jukebox, “Is there some way we can determine if you’re telling the truth or not?”
“Not that I am aware of, but I have not been programmed to lie. I am not an advanced AI. I cannot construct elaborate fabrications. If I were to mix false information with the true, it is likely the questioner would eventually find a discrepancy or contradiction in my answers. Lying would also interfere with my function, which is to provide instructional information on how to best make use of this depot and to ensure that visitors do not harm the depot or themselves unintentionally.”
Clover turned to Barnes: “What we have here is the ‘all Cretans are liars’ problem. Its responses make sense, but this could be a very elaborate fabrication. I’d say that either this machine is pretty much as it seems, or it’s much more sophisticated than we can imagine, a very high-level AI, well beyond our systems, masquerading as a low one. I think we have to assume the former until proven otherwise, because there’s not much we can do if it isn’t true.”
Hannegan said, “But if it feeds us incorrect information on physics, we’ll find that out pretty quickly. I personally don’t care if it’s lying about what the various species are like, if it could deliver, say, a thirtieth-century Physics Handbook.”
Stuyvesant: “That’s a little parochial, Bob.”
Hannegan: “Yeah, well, what if he could deliver a thirtieth-century Biochemistry Handbook?”
“That would be helpful,” Stuyvesant admitted.
Barnes said, “Our jukebox raised another concern. New question: Why do we have to worry about harming ourselves or the depot?”
The jukebox said, “This depot has technologies and artifacts from many different species. No visitor could be familiar with them all. Some of these devices are dangerous if misused, the same way a milling laser is dangerous if misused.”
Clover nodded: strange technology, strange tools.
The jukebox: “Also, there are containment modules that should not be accessed without proper instruction, as they currently hold a total of eight hundred and forty-nine tonnes of antimatter.”
“Holy shit,” Hannegan said. “Uh, where did all this antimatter come from?”
“It’s manufactured here.”
Before anyone could say anything, Barnes barked, “All right, everybody, speakers off, intersuit comm channel 7, full encryption, wait for my lead.”
When everybody had gone to encryption, he said, “This is exactly why our mission was top priority for the U.S. We need to secure this, or make sure that nobody else gets their hands on it. That is a buttload lot of antimatter. Bob, thoughts?”
The physicist had been looking off in a distracted way and tapping the fingers of one hand together. “Yeah, I’m doing a little mental arithmetic here. If the Wurlitzer is telling the truth, that’s on the order of a teratonne explosive equivalent. Call it a million of those H-bombs the superpowers used to stockpile. Which immediately has me wondering, first, where is it? And second, how are they making it? Related to that, where are they getting the power to make it?”
Barnes said, “Numbers one and two are what most concern me. Plus, there’s a number four: Will the answer-bot tell us how to make it?”
“Let’s go back to the jukebox.” They turned back to the answer-bot. “Excuse us, we need to discuss the information you imparted.”
“My programming informs me that is very common with first arrivals and I am not programmed to take offense in any way. Do you have any other questions at this time?”
Hannegan cleared his throat: “Uh, you said this depot stored over eight hundred tonnes of antimatter. Where? And how?”
The jukebox said, “The constellation of small moonlets you see associated with this depot are the containment modules for the antimatter. The material is in the form of iron-58, which is electromagnetically isolated from the walls of the modules.”
Hannegan raised his eyebrows: “Anti-iron? We can barely manage anti-helium. How do you make this and where do you get the power? For us, manufacturing that quantity of antimatter would require roughly a year’s worth of solar output.”
There was a perceptible pause as the answer-bot considered its answer. Then:
“I can’t give you an accurate answer to your first question unless your engineers can establish a high-bandwidth I/O path. Very inaccurately and roughly, the transformation reaction makes use of a supersymmetric resonance to convert protons to antiprotons. An analogous lepton pathway produces positrons. Assembling those into neutrons and higher-order nuclei is a straightforward exploitation of a subset of localized D brane excitations to chain up isotopic ladders of least resistance—”
Hannegan said, “Okay, stop. I get it. We’ll wait for the interface.”
“As for your second question, this depot taps the rotational energy of Saturn for power. The reaction pathway is approximately twenty percent efficient. Consequently this depot can produce something in excess of one billion tonnes of antimatter before Saturn’s rotational period will be significantly altered.”