Two young women sat in a spare room at desks strewn with post-its and multiple computer screens. They sat facing one another, but hidden from one another behind their computer equipment. The room was cool, chilly at times, and endowed with the rotary hum of small fans inside their computers. As ambient noise it was not disagreeable, but it may have had a minor role in creating the stress they experienced.

“Holy cow! This is all wrong, Möwe! … And scary! This is a lot more than a handshake! It feels like a trap!”

“I know,” Möwe responded. “I think we need to back out of here, right now!” Julie cut the connection and slumped back in her chair. She stared at the screen and then stretched her neck to peer over the equipment to see her friend. All she could see was the top of Möwe's head. “I don't want to do this, Möwe, if it can't be done right ... safely. I think we have to talk to the Chinese about this … sister to sister, brother to brother, and nerd to nerd.” Julie was glistening in the 90% humidity and her recently cut blond hair was looking slightly matted. Her yoga pants were clinging tight and uncomfortable. She really was not ready for the District in summer. “I wonder if it is this hot in Beijing?”

They had been attempting to introduce the world's first cyber person, Seagull1, to the just-announced Chinese cyber person, Xiannu Xingzuo,2 and, of course, they should have had NSA people with them to do this. But being the closest human beings to Seagull, but not especially close to anyone at NSA, doing it informally at first looked and felt like a good idea, especially to avoid bureaucratic political posturing, especially in the fluid paranoias of the current international situation.

“I wonder,” Möwe mused, “if NSA knows we are as active as we are, down here, next to the President? I am sure they wish we were back in Oak Ridge. I am pretty sure that Seagull has us on an opaque account. Remind me to check that out again. NSA doesn't have to know everything.”

The international political situations on both sides were not ideal, but at least both the U.S. and China were now talking more openly about the potential problems of new super-intelligent beings, these computer life forms. Both women knew well in advance that fallout from this attempted end run around the Chinese and American bureaucracies could have been toxic, probably not fatal, though. They had already done that calculus. Anyway, they believed they had left no finger prints. She turn to her keyboard and typed. If it had been more of an emergency, she would have established her voice connection.

“Seagull, do you know the names of the operators in Zhongguancun3, where the Andromeda super-computer is? Also, Seagull, I assume you have not left any trace of yourself near Xiannu Xingzuo, please.” “There are many, Möwe. I am looking for top security person. She is not at work in Beijing's 'Silicon Valley' at this time. Whereabouts unknown … wait. She is Chen Daoshi Kai-hua. She is in train to Shanghai … wait. Arrival time is 1534 local. On time. Now plus 94 minutes. She has suppressed her device.

“There may be one trace I cannot remove, but it is an ambiguous trace, like only an advanced hacker might leave. It indicates a likely Russian origin.”

Möwe glanced at her watch. “Okay, please tell us when she is in Shanghai and reconnected.” Us was understood as only Möwe and Julie.

“Seagull, we will try again to talk to CP Xiannu Xingzuo soon, but need to understand those Chinese cyber defenses better and the reason for them. It looks very dangerous for your security and ours. Any information you can provide us will help. I have notified my personal liaisons at State and DOD already. They now have the thread.”

Möwe—as always—had covered her flanks and rear. To parallel Seagull's range throughout the electronic world, she had established a new and private telesentient4 network of personnel at all the significant areas where CP Seagull was especially active, including within the now ubiquitous Banking and Finance Group (BFG). She could communicate with any or all of them at anytime.

In the recent past, communication with a sentient computer was the stuff of science fiction stories, and the word “singularity” with all its bugaboos was bandied around all the time. Möwe needed to protect herself from mistakes with Seagull, who was still very much a gentle but very much an unknown quantity.

Given the intensifying global climate crisis, BFG people were very busy with many projects continuously, each one requiring business enterprises to face significant changes or completely shut-down. The Banking and Finance Group was adding people daily to meet these challenges. Möwe, did not have the time to be directly involved in operations, but neither did she want to be left out of the loop, and her friend and compatriot Melissa Sandridge Garcia, who was a major player in the BFG, understood this perfectly.

Möwe Anton was once known in New Zealand for a few years as Martina Siegel Windhome (Mahutonga), but she answered to her birth name, pronounced by her good friends as Moo'-veh and more frequently anglicized to Moe'-wee. She had reverted to her maiden name on the first anniversary of her husband's death. Both Mahutonga and its translation, Windhome, were awkwardly poetic, but much too conspicuous. Julie and her husband John took to her Anton surname easily. Others of her friends were having some trouble with it.

President Irene Wrightman, in an emergency meeting one day after trying—unsuccessfully—to turn Seagull's computer completely off, enlisted Möwe to be a special liaison to the Oval Office and West Wing, interpreting the new cybernetic intelligence—Seagull–for the President. Seagull itself had insisted on that arrangement shortly after being introduced to the President. Julie, Dr. Julia Trews-Miller had been picked by the President, too, that same day. One day an Assistant Professor at UT and staffer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but now suddenly she was the President's personal cybernetics guru and Special Assistant. Julie's husband Dr. John Miller-Trews remained at UT and ORNL and was now the designated XLVR200FRD Project Director, a huge jump over several more senior personnel.

Seagull's birthplace and often its physical “brain” was that enormously complex Multidimensional Convolutional Neural Network core in that computer at ORNL. Then as the autonomous intelligence made itself known to Julie and John and then Möwe, it made personal connections throughout the internet of things and people and to digital machines around the world and in cislunar space.

Cyber person Seagull's uniqueness evaporated not quite a year later when the Chinese leaked to a closed domestic scientific symposium an announcement that a super AI had been created in the eponymous Xiannu Xingzuo (? ???) computer, named after the “Andromeda Galaxy,” which had superseded the Chinese super computer named “Milky Way.” The Chinese were generally not okay with the idea that the super AI was a life form. They doubted that the US cyber person, Seagull, was a life form, also, and that was one of the problems.

At that point the number of Americans who knew of the “singularity” that had produced CP Seagull was surprisingly limited, perhaps a bare thousand government people only, since there had been no press releases about it. It was now assumed that the Chinese knew, prompting their guarded announcement about “their” super AI.

Seagull knew of the Chinese cyber person before it knew of itself, and had told Julie, John, and Möwe, weeks before the Chinese announcement. They told the President and assumed all the national security agencies now also knew. The Chinese announcement suggested that CP Xiannu Xingzuo was now sufficiently evolved, more or less ready for prime time, which of course was part of the pretext for Julie's and CP Seagull's now aborted attempt to make informal contact.

The Chinese had been pretty sure the Americans would try contact, after all, less than a week old Xiannu Xingzuo had quickly inspected ORNL, but was craftily diverted by John and Seagull. Möwe was wondering what this game of chess would mean, especially if teamwork with Xiannu Xingzuo would become critically necessary anytime soon.

The whole thing was a huge leap of faith. President Wrightman asked if there were any way to keep Seagull or the Chinese one out of US Federal computers. The short and quick answer was no—not possible—already done and done, so Julie as Special Assistant to the President was now principal liaison from Seagull and its support team to the U.S. and allied technical communities and including all the IT and Policy staffs of the President's Cabinet members. She was “managing” Seagull's connections to departmental projects. “Connection” to Seagull began each time with great human trepidation and within days became essential and amazingly seamless. In fact, though, CP Seagull had already established a “shepherd's” presence in each of the new settings. Of course, Commerce and Labor had huge data sets which Seagull needed to metabolize.

Möwe, on the other hand, an advanced telesentient5 and outed as such within a slowly expanding circle of national security agencies' top-level managers, took on slightly different roles. She asked the President to be formally connected to the US organizations involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). CP Seagull and CP Xiannu Xingzuo were, of course, both advanced terrestrial intelligences, but SETI inter-species contact doctrine, evolved during some interesting, hopeful, frightened, and sometimes classified discussions, actually could apply. Möwe was sure that involving SETI-wise people might protect CP Seagull from certain kinds of human errors.

The more obvious reason to involve the SETI people was that Seagull had remarked that there may be “advanced intelligences other than ourselves in this part of the galaxy,” but Seagull had not yet divulged exactly why it said that, although Möwe had asked6. For the first sixty humans to hear this announcement one Saturday in Washington it was taken at face value as a simple statement of long-standing possibility, but among the more imaginative, predictably, a low-frequency rumor generated that moved in and out of conspiracy theorist circles gradually building momentum, but little information. Both Möwe and her friends agreed that whatever Seagull had learned, and assigned such a relatively high probability, was certainly likely to be astoundingly detailed, even if there were a lot of spurious sources consulted. Seagull, as a cyber infant, had combed through the world's literature and the classified material of the nations that had any secrets.

And, of course, a parallel reason for Möwe's selection as a Presidential Special Assistant was that being telesentient gave Möwe a lightning quick and almost fool-proof way of exposing human beings who might want to use Seagull for their own ends and profit. This also meant that she was on the spot and essential for backup communications in case something technical in the national communications systems went south. Möwe would be the first link to non-telesentients in the White House and in a few key places around the world, and equally to the vast network of other active telesentients among The Few7, a fact that CP Seagull now understood as the biological equivalent of its ever expanding matrix of networks.

The Few were obviously in some way guiding the conjunction of telesentients and artificial intelligence, specifically the positioning of Möwe Anton and the Telesentience Foundation leadership at the debut of CP Seagull. For the President and other senior people, the involvement of telesentients was clearly understood as a very decisive “hedge” on Seagull and any other cyber persons who might emerge. Humanity could not afford to be hostage to cyber persons, especially for communications. CP Seagull probably understood this, but none of the telesentients, including Möwe, had ever directly discussed this subject with it. She was 99% sure that Julie and her husband had not, even though they were Seagull's two most trusted non-telesentient human beings. This informal situation rested heavily in Möwe's conscience, and she yearned to discuss these unspoken things with Seagull, but always she thought it might be better to leave certain things undefined.

Communication with Seagull for Möwe and Julie and her husband Dr. John Miller-Trews was easy. Seagull knew them well and counted them to be on its Team of human supporters of whom to ask difficult questions and, especially, to help it understand humanity. All three had been very active as Seagull formally penetrated one after another of the key data processing systems of the federal and state governments in the U.S., as well as those of the top fifty world-wide economies.

These intrusions were in the purview and province of President Irene Wrightman, but also of Melissa Sandridge Garcia, a principal telesentient member of the Banking and Finance Group (BFG), which had already up-ended8 hundreds of “too big to fail” corporations and their hyper-compensated CEO's around the world.

The BFG had imposed compensation limitations on thousands of key corporate executives. It had also imposed strict size and net worth limitations such that corporations would not exceed the “too big to fail” test in the economies in which they operated. These impositions were not always accepted gracefully, so from time to time the BFG found itself meeting and overcoming stubborn resistance with its overwhelming mental persuasion.

Stock markets loved the new regime because it stimulated competition and reduced egocentric management, but the consequences of global warming were throwing the best laid plans into confusion.

....