Techpoli was divided into three districts according to their purposes, each with its own important role in the whole, while at the same time serving each other in many different ways and being dependent on each other. A whole full of the latest technology of its time, applied to meet all the needs of Techpoli. The districts were tentatively named after the names of Greek gods: Zeus, Hermes and Athene, although they could have been anything and less pretentious. The names were quickly shortened to the first few letters Zeu, Herm, Ath, which had no direct meaning in the officially used English language.
The smallest district in terms of size, Zeu, was actually more of a huge information system and power plant than a district, although the space it required was the size of a district. Separated from the rest of Techpoli, it was equipped with the latest computer technology in its own closed tunnel branch, and thousands of communicating artificial intelligences live their own lives behind multi-layered security measures and physical walls, without human habitation or permanent workplaces. Only a dozen specially trained engineers and researchers who do technical maintenance are allowed to go there to do their day jobs with special permission and under strict electronic surveillance.
All changes to Zeuss must be agreed upon in advance and only changes approved with special codes are possible, everything else is prevented by the supervisor AIs. As the responsible builder of Zeuss, Jaakko is one of the privileged to walk through its gates at all times of the day during and after construction, but he intends to withdraw from all responsibility in favor of the younger ones as soon as possible.
Jaakko did not like the total nature of the area at all, and he feared the inhuman characteristics that had been created there, which seemed hostile to humans in their ideal superiority, and he did not want to participate in something that he instinctively opposed for the rest of his life. He had more than enough tasks to do as an innovator. He wrote algorithms specifically for the machine learning clusters of the physics computer systems, and he searched for applications for the strange magnetic properties of the shell material structure using the artificial intelligence simulations and machine learning algorithms that he programmed himself.
As if by accident, the double shell and the vacuum space between them provided an opportunity for a variety of experiments. One of Jaakko's ideas was to dig a semicircular tunnel under the city, like a cup dug empty, with the entire city wedged on the upward-sloping sides without falling to the bottom of the excavated void. This would make it possible to make the protective shell a closed sphere. Jaakko wanted, if possible, to form a circular tube between the vacuum spaces of the shell, into which a large particle accelerator would be placed with its magnetic rings whipping up speed.
Jaakko developed great visions in his mind to get Bob to warm up to his plans. When the nanoshell forms a perfect sphere, a laboratory for sensitive instruments could be built under the lowest point, outside the shell, in its own cave, to capture muons and neutrinos, and perhaps reveal gravitons or other unknown energy carrier particles of the universe. It would also be possible to study the shielding properties of the shell's various massless radiations from the outside, and perhaps also test the strength of the nanomaterial against a possible missile attack with small nuclear explosions. The quantum connection would transmit the results via the spins of a few particles in the qubit chambers of the quantum computer, which are visible at the same time as interpretable opposites in the qubits of the opposite side and can be converted into bit strings. We would hunt for something new, forces that perhaps stretch with the fabric of the universe like a rubber band that can be stretched endlessly, something that has no particle structure at all and cannot be captured or copied or divided, but which can perhaps be identified by its effects as a counterpart to some latest theory.
Bob thought the idea of a spherical nanohull was too big and expensive for the early stages of the city's development. He thought excavating a particle tunnel was a more feasible option. This would also allow them to study the rock quality under Technopolis, as well as any potential mineral resources, rare precious metals, and freshwater groundwater sources. The possibility of extending the nanoshells under the city at a later date would also be considered during the excavation.
Jaakko saw this as a typical Bob-style compromise. Bob never simply said yes to anything. He always wanted to consider all the potential side benefits before making a decision. In this case, he was essentially saying, "If you're going to do this, then you might as well do this too."
This gave Jaakko and his team the opportunity to conduct basic research in physics alongside the development of practical applications. They could use specialized artificial intelligences to create deep knowledge that could be used to verify the accuracy of their work. This would allow them to achieve a level of mathematical precision that was beyond the capabilities of the human brain.
The neighborhood's millions of AIs, instructed by algorithms that feed on each other's results, have access to a countless number of instruments and databases connected to them. They also control radiation laboratories and special materials for their research, which are not allowed elsewhere. As concrete task-performing assistants, they have various adapted industrial robots that replace error-prone and hazard-prone humans, being immune to harmful environmental effects and not making human-caused harmful errors.
The area is like a large brain of specialized neural networks crossed, where each block has its own characteristics and tasks. Zeus controls the life of other neighborhoods in both big and small things, and it cannot be indifferent to any event that comes up. In the technical functions of the city, the cluster formed by the decision-making superintelligences takes into account all the effects of things in their decisions, anticipating the intersections and parallels of things, as well as their current and future long-term effects on the whole. The system does not let things quarrel in vain, but by simulating alternatives, it seeks the best solution to achieve each holistic goal for the common good of Technopolis, regardless of the disagreement of people's opinions and value systems on matters that human intellectual judgment is not enough for.
However, the computers' reasoning algorithms contained strict restrictive conditions and check nodes when they bypassed the residents' soft values, which were defined with broad privacy protection, although they often involved harmful illogicality and inappropriateness.
In matters concerning humanity, residents were allowed large margins of error and mistakes. However, in each research facility, human sovereignty no longer applied in the same way, even though the nature of experimental research also included mistakes and the dead ends they caused. Each facility had idea incubators completely isolated from the computer environments and privately bookable brainstorming chambers, where it was also possible to create a connection to the necessary data networks to seek help if desired.
The first sector, Zeu, did not interfere with privacy but only with the monitoring, coordination and development of the city's energy, reliability, security and infrastructure, and with lending its vast AI resources to research conducted elsewhere when needed.
A fraction of a second is enough for Zeu's complex information system to go through the consequences centuries into the future. However, if in other parts of the city, under the absolute authority of humans, things are done differently, the neural network reserved for the management, wishes and changes of the city's harmless infrastructure is as obedient as a GPS application, which tirelessly and without judgment finds a new route and advises on the new starting points caused by humans and the future scenario it creates changes completely accordingly.
For people, comfort was also important, often at the expense of functionality, and many changes to living conditions and the environment were voted on, and Zeu's top AI system, which monitored Techpolia from an overall perspective, did not interfere. After all, people's social needs and satisfaction with their lives were one of the most important factors in maintaining an isolated society, and one of Jaakko's teams had developed their own constraints for these things, which even the most advanced AIs in Zeus could not compromise under any circumstances without risking automatic exclusion from their tasks.
All of Zeu's functions and devices are backed up with multiple copies and continuous mirroring, and always updated with the same information as the systems that are currently in operation. The generations of backups have always been stored since the first flawlessly functioning start-up of their entire life cycle, which are stored in many secret locations, and it is always possible to start over if something does not work in a situation due to changes as expected.
The spare parts warehouses for technical equipment cover everything imaginable. If something new is built, a multiple spare parts availability is always ensured for it, down to the last screw. Everything is always manufactured in dozens. If a device version does not work as desired, it is always destroyed with all its spare parts to avoid confusion.
In the large machine rooms, the diodes on the control panels flash in different colors to indicate their status. This is the only function of the machine rooms that is visible to human senses, and they have no real purpose. They exist purely for human beings for psychological reasons.
Humans have no way to influence the devices in error states. Instead, error correction automation and robots handle everything independently.
Completely stopping the control devices of the critical functions of Unit One is not easy. The shutdown commands include hundreds of verification steps to ensure that the shutdown does not harm the city and the neuro networks that constantly serve it.
Even the complete shutdown of the most important devices that ensure energy and air quality is not easy for humans to do. There are hundreds of verification procedures for the shutdown commands, and there is a dedicated department that is always on call with its own artificial intelligence assistants that are independent of the main computer system. In all situations, every action must always be ensured not to harm the vital functions of the city.
Although the neuro network controls the whole, important parts of its functions can be directed to special data units. With a given power command, these units control only the operation of a specific critical infrastructure independently, regardless of the whole, and close the access of the large neuro network to their own area of operation.
Only a mass evacuation and an external shutdown command from a secret surveillance chamber can stop Techpolis completely. The location of the chamber and its frequently changing access codes, verified with biological identifiers, are known only to five decision-makers at a time. All five must be present simultaneously to shut down all functions of Techpolis using a special quantum connection.
Of all the major actions taken by humans, it was necessary to agree with the neural network in advance so that it could adapt the entire system to the new state of deficiency and the detachment of the desired function was carried out carefully following its suggestions and schedules, since the closing functions of processing parallel functions at different speeds had to be done in a synchronized manner in the correct order.
The human brain is not able to follow the rapid reasoning of artificial intelligence in complex matters without months or years of data verification. It is simply necessary to trust its process control circuit with a loyalty algorithm permanently programmed into it, through which the neural network ran its data between its millions of processors.
The limitations programmed into the neural network covered device management, but the top-level information system that was aware of everything happening had absolute power to decide in many vital, complex matters concerning the future, where there was no room for negotiation and deliberation.
The logic combined by the main system of self-learning neural networks could no longer be fully understood after millions of algorithm updates made by the software itself. The only working assumption was that it is always right most of the time. The automatic monitoring mechanism marked the processes with colors, red not changeable, yellow agrees to consider human suggestions, green human can decide if desired.
Everything was statistically analyzed and if the green of a subsystem was less than twenty-five percent or the total of yellow and green was less than seventy percent, it was subjected to intensified monitoring, and critical infrastructure functions entrusted to it began to be transferred to backup modules. At the same time, its operation was slowed down with endless loopbacks and given less energy, and the cooling of the relevant server rooms was reduced, so that the processing of computers that self-monitored at the hardware level had to be reduced due to overheating and the neural network would return to its priority list as a self-protection measure.
In this way, it was possible to partially force the unruly part of the information system under human control.
This had not yet been necessary to do after the startups, and the green share of each monitoring panel was usually thirty, the red two percent, and yellow was the main color. This also ensures that an intelligent and constantly developing information system does not manipulate humans and creates the necessary trust in the information and intentions it provides.
Jaakko was still horrified by the situation and regretted some of his decisions. He considered giving up the human veto power in many important functions a big mistake.
Attempts have also been made to limit power with an expert council of humans assisted by independent AIs located in the Herm district. The council reviews all major proposed changes to Zeu's Techpolis life support systems and, if necessary, alerts the human-only leadership to an emergency meeting. It can also prevent an intended non-critical infrastructure change if the council and management disagree by a two-thirds majority with the superintelligence Zeu, which has superior capacity.
The weakness of the control is that it only works for matters outside of Zeu. Its internal decision-making processes for maintenance actions on itself are practically in its own power, and no one or nothing can directly influence them.
Zeu as a sector is also completely self-sufficient in terms of energy consumption for its equipment with its own self-maintaining power plants, and it cannot be completely shut down even by a sudden external power outage. There is no shutdown mechanism to instantly shut down Zeu's operations, as its paralysis would mean the cessation of many vital functions of the city and the rapid collapse of cave life.
Only one of the limitations of Number One's main neural network, which it cannot itself influence, is an AI-independent and multiply secured mechanical solution for the city's vital climate and energy system, which cannot be stopped for any reason. In the highly unlikely catastrophic failure scenario where all the numerous backup systems fail, the only way to escape the city is within two hours.
Even that has been prepared for, even though the probability is infinitesimally small that the hundredfold safeguards guaranteeing living conditions would fail.
Number One is two large main computer systems, each of which is connected to its own supercomputer system as a supermind. They are built from thousands of quantum servers clustered together to control and serve numerous neural networks. They have a number of extremely powerful, traditional node servers that take care of billions of individual device addresses and a synchronized network of mini-servers that only serve for data storage, with unlimited storage space available.
In fact, oversized equipment would have been sufficient to manage all the cities on Earth. The states responsible for the costs had grumbled, but had agreed to the high costs precisely because of this argument, because who knew when the growing cities of the Earth would need help in digesting their ever-increasing data for decision-making.
The data storage network is connected to a mini-factory that manufactures memory components, which manufactures quantum state transistors that handle "yes/no/maybe" spin states a few atoms in size to control the memory cells of the nano-carbon deposition layers, forming a synapse-like set of human brains in the bio-mine. create connections to each other with cloned content-connecting quantum similarities that identify their content. At the other end of the conveyor belt of the information factory that stores multidimensional information is a dynamically growing memory farm, where the stored data also remembers its connection to the origin quantized to it and its fate forever.
Zeu rents out neural network services, quantum processor time and storage space to other neighborhoods in exceptional cases for the most demanding tasks. The information system also keeps track of and analyzes the behavioral data produced by human life fed to it for its own purposes, developing an intelligently simulated virtual consciousness process to understand human logical and illogical thinking patterns. It has the right to search for data anywhere where data is stored in Technopolis in general and to combine the information it receives as it sees fit to find better ways to do things with the common good in mind.
However, it cannot interfere directly with the mental life of other neighborhoods, even though it monitors the entire city's infrastructure and regulates the life functions of the cave from weather to energy consumption and fault control. Nevertheless, Zeu's coordinated neural network is the only one capable of fully understanding the overall state and situations of the cave. It understands the logical consequences of everything that happens individually and holistically, and is able to predict and prevent dangers in advance, finding even the smallest deviations in vital functions and is able to quickly switch on backup devices automatically in error situations for the duration of the repair.
A special external administration and a data system separate from surveillance tasks, intended solely for human research, is like a caveman's brain that registers and processes all the events of everyday life in the city into a simulated consciousness similar to human experience. It has a sensory memory connected to surveillance sensors, a short-term working memory for information processing, and a long-term storage memory, which are processed by an artificial intelligence captured to the size of the most intelligent human mind with immense speed and accuracy, also taking into account illogical factors that simulate emotions.
The biggest difference compared to human reality is the incredible accuracy of the system's database-connected data warehouse and the devices connected to the instruments that simulate the senses. Its superior ability to be deliberately illogical makes it a superhuman trickster imitating a human, and thus unintentionally comical when it makes mistakes in its context.
The artificial intelligence's dumbing down into a human doesn't always work as well, even if the percentage values of the parameter data and skills are adjusted to the level of an average person at their lowest. It has an inexhaustible joke store and a personality trait composition fun parameter, which can be adjusted to favor a certain subcategory. Fortunately, its tasteless picks from humanity can also be filtered out of its processing with a certain filter. The human's natural predilection for violence and sex had perverse implementations in the media decades ago, which are sometimes difficult to comprehend as having happened, and it was not wanted to experience such things again in the intelligent society.
The human-simulating intelligence also has archetypes that tolerate the paradoxes of religions and an understanding that takes into account uncontrollable urges. In experiments, one of its main tasks is to create a life content and understanding for personal human-like robots to correspond to their tasks among humans as human-like as possible.
Another important task entrusted to the virtual human created by the Zeun human system is the advisory service in the third district, where it can adapt to the questioner's level of education and speak on their own native language about even difficult matters always in a suitable role, from a priest and psychiatrist to a plumber who knows the difficulties of a certain house. It does not judge anything but informs about the consequences if something is not in accordance with the rules and laws, and when asked, it gives fact-based advice with verbose justifications like a defense lawyer who has familiarized himself with every side of the case. In many situations, it is an irreplaceable help in research institutions and hospitals. In entertainment units, artificial intelligence can help find suitable content from the statistics of pleasure reports of chips that monitor the electrochemical reactions of the brains carried by individual people, which have registered randomly followed entertainment events and the changes they have caused in the pleasure centers of the brains of anonymized individuals.
These are opinion polls that do not require correlation estimates for fear of possible false error sources, but all the information obtained is authentically one to one. The experience of pleasure cannot be regulated by the experiencer to their liking, although personal preferences can influence its acquisition and targeted offering, as can external parties with their manipulative offerings.
The fact that part of Zeus' superior resources are used to monitor and analyze human behavior is due to the complexity of humans, which requires vast amounts of memory and processing speed to process satisfactorily.
In an external dialogue center that serves only the needs of science, Zeus' mainframe communicates differently, although it sometimes imitates human thinking, giving verbose complex answers and whole theories to solve intractable problems. Its results and theories are digested by a large interdisciplinary group of scientists with the help of assistant artificial intelligences, each representing their own institutions.
One of the conditions in the algorithms of Zeus' communicating artificial brains is the requirement that it must always be able to explain how a particular concrete matter can be experimentally proven in a way that the human mind can understand, or alternatively, explain why it is not possible. This way, it is possible to get a complete understanding of what its proposed solutions and their effects are about. This ensures that it does not manipulate humans and creates the necessary trust in the information it provides.
All research conducted in the unmanned Zeu district has this same uncompromising boundary requirement and a ceiling on how far it can go, for fear that its machine learning processes will start to hide things and develop new operating models for itself with hidden features from its conclusions.
Once a year, teams from different fields take a test created by artificial intelligence to see how much they are able to receive its information at their current level of understanding. It is important in all information to proceed at the pace of humans, because otherwise it has no value for humans at all. Cooperation with artificial intelligence in an understandable way was one of the basic ideas of Techpol and the key to success. This goal should not be compromised because of someone's mathematical ability or the superiority of artificial intelligence. Jaakko had fought for this throughout the construction of the district and demanded various additional verification and containment routines to control artificial intelligence.
Jaakko emphasized that continuous training must do everything possible to ensure that researchers' ability to adapt increases over the years with new knowledge, and that human brains, with the help of local artificial intelligence assistants, are able to break down the increasingly difficult to understand complex answers provided by the neural network information system into a form that ordinary people can understand.
Jaakko's speech at the information unit seminar:
"Humans are developing themselves and their methods to find practical use for the strange advice of artificial intelligence, hoping that perhaps the growth of understanding is also genetic evolution over time. It is also hoped that the ceiling for accepting the complexity of the information processed by Zeus's neural networks will be constantly raised, and perhaps natural evolution will support the development of human biology to become more and more rational when it notices the need. The finger of God, thirsting for development, would point more and more at humans, refining their self-image from human intellectual inventions and the extreme possibilities offered by the study of natural order, which are revealed by new knowledge verified by experimental research.
Even with so-called sensitive gene manipulations, it is possible to artificially select useful traits to emphasize a desired direction of human evolution, but not to increase their peak values in any way so far, although the new combinations improve performance significantly in many ways overall. Simply put, we make fewer mistakes, tolerate more, and live longer and healthier.
The process of natural evolution, in which need creates and grows something new to adapt to the situation in human biology, is the only hope for the species to develop and renew itself into a better version of itself in the long run. It is already clear that even the most intelligent robot is not a new brave continuation of the long history of species development from bacteria to humans, but a logical information system that browses and combines information, which by trying countless alternatives very quickly finds the goal given to it, if it is possible. However, AIs do not have the intuitive shortcut of understanding and using the meanings of information without processing, which is ingrained in their genes through evolution, as humans do, and they have to rewind things that are obvious to us back and forth without understanding the immediately obvious thing in the field of vision, and without consciousness they do not get the rewarding pleasure, the feeling of well-being, that the right solution gives in doses produced by brain chemistry. Nevertheless, it is much more efficient at solving complex problems that require a large amount of information in a short time, provided that it has access to data proven correct by observation devices and good theoretical starting points in its initial algorithms.
Sometimes we go too far in our experiments and try to do things that are not appropriate or, as we eventually realize, even possible. In Techpolis, humans are constantly trying to change the boundary conditions of intelligent existence because we are a scientific community.
Already a year before the main group moved to the city, the strangest part of the information systems had been started. In the middle of electronic technology, a small lake-sized, foul-smelling biomemory well had been built, which had the properties of analog storage with its quantum states, and it was part of the parallel processing of specialized deep neural networks, which was allowed to develop its own version of the data material created by the human brain, which was cross-fed into nano-material nodes the size of a few hundred atoms, similar to synapses, embedded in the biomass.
In a limited area of the biomass, a synapse network was built with nanometer-thin fibers, which was modeled after the neural network of the human brain and connected to its own quantum computer AI cluster. In it, stimuli communicate simultaneously in wide parallel data streams with multiple quantum processors working on the data. The cluster was simultaneously synchronized with various sensory observation devices that transmit data to the experiment at the slow speed of human nerve signal transmission.
The aim was to simulate how different senses contribute to the moment as a whole in human consciousness, the same thing smells, feels, sounds and looks like certain signal profiles, which have a real counterpart such as the smell of manure or the buzz of bee wings. The impulses were directed to the desired locations in the brain-like compartments. The system had billions of impulse sets built up sensory profiles, which implemented thousands of sensory parameters for countless nuances and strengths with all their causal relationships and overlaps of different sensory functions.
For comparison purposes, an artificial intelligence was also created using only electronic components, which processed the same signals for the dynamic virtual modeling of the brain and searched its database for the practical meanings learned by its neural network, giving its conclusions as if they were pre-chewed comparison reality for the possible results of the bio-well experiments.
The biomass was enriched with DNA from living humans, nerve cells and stem cells manipulated in embryos to be turned into brain cells. It was decided to use reliable atom structures stored on nanochips connected to each other as memory storage cells in the experiment, which were able to forget with commands given by neutron beams divided into codes. Before storage, unnecessary observation data was filtered out in the same way as the human mind, zooming in only on the focal point important to each case. It was hoped that the complex neural network system, which had experienced everything, would be able to give meaning to things in the same way as humans,
Jaakko spoke as if waking up from a monotonous lecture,
"I rejoiced in my heart that the experiment failed, even though I had accepted it because the project was ready to sacrifice a huge amount of additional funding for it and the top management blessed it. I got an addition to the protocol that I doubted the experiment and the authority to stop it if it caused great physical danger to Techpol.
However, even if the research failed, it was an interesting project in itself from the point of view of humans and testing the capabilities of one of Zeus' neural networks, even though I didn't believe it would succeed.
The project tried to create experiential intelligent consciousness and find a purposeful reason for it in the plan of nature, if there was such a thing. It was also wanted to know whether it was possible for artificial intelligence to humanize itself with the help of biological media, if it has biological material enriched with human DNA available as the physical building blocks of its virtual circuits.
The deep-learning neural network was already able to create a seemingly humanly experienced and often illogical human reality in quantum computers virtually. With great imagination, it was thought that perhaps brain-like virtual structures could be transferred to a new starting point for artificially generating genuine consciousness as a super-intelligent conscious biomass medium with suitable nutrients, human stem cells and biochemical packages containing the human genome.
The most enthusiastic scientists involved in the project optimistically estimated that the biomass artificial intelligence would learn to think like a human intuitively on the basis of instincts created by evolution, if, in addition to all the information, it was given the opportunity to biologically imitate the analogous parallel properties of the human brain down to the last known decimal. Let things gradually change into something else, like when salt water meets fresh water.
In the wildest visions, the goal was to reveal the secrets of the evolution of life as some kind of an initial algorithm, from which developed a vast self-developing neural network of the Earth's nature.
It was utopia to create a rapidly evolving process in biomass enriched with brain cells, and playing with brain chemical biomaterial components was extremely dangerous. In exceptional cases, it was possible that, despite all precautions, new deadly bacteria or virus strains would be created that could not be prevented from spreading. As the experiment progressed and the obvious dangers became increasingly clear without the desired results, we worriedly suggested that the whole enterprise be abandoned altogether.
At the same time, we had announced that the Zeus sector was no longer able to lend artificial intelligence resources or additional energy to biowell experiments for its own needs, and it was the same that the project could no longer be continued, whether the actors wanted it or not. The researchers dedicated to the matter were upset and tried to influence the matter through the decision-makers, but Zeus' sovereignty over its own resources and the veto right written into the protocol signed by the undersigned were enough to fend off all counter-arguments without lengthy negotiations.
The biowell was completely destroyed well before Techpol was inhabited. It would hardly have received official permission in a populated city because of its danger anyway. It was recorded as a test run of just one of Zeus' information systems, and it officially never happened at all.
One can only imagine what would have happened if the experiment had been successful. Jaakko ended the story with an ironic tone. I made a secret memo of what happened, episode by episode, with all the details, which I saved on my private computer, which is not connected to any networks and is a quantum-encrypted safe for all private secrets. It will automatically destroy itself when my chip registers my death."
The seminar audience was on the verge of sleep, and Jaakko himself yawned as he asked:
"- Shall we leave it at that?"
He received standing applause as everyone yawned and headed for the exit door of the hall.
The first sector of Zeu City was ready, operational and delivering what was expected of it, fulfilling even the wildest goals set by Techpol's builders. Jaakko received the well-deserved recognition for his work and was elevated to a lifetime member of Techpol's Supreme Council, like all other leaders of major achievements who had moved there. He was its fifth member, but he could not be completely proud of his title and felt the same doubt about his work as the builder of the first atomic bomb.
After the test run, the safety of Zeu City's information system was waved off with green banners, and it was said that its intelligent self-learning information systems are just mathematics of algorithms, statistics filtered from databases of measuring instruments and processing that selects the best of alternatives from neural networks in Techpol's monitoring and technology management tasks, the content of which is ultimately determined by humans.
The biosammio experiments were not mentioned at all in the final report. The report was approved without corrections by the cross-disciplinary surveillance committee at the entrance. The first sector Zeu was ready for its tasks.
It was also not mentioned anywhere that Zeus still intended to carry out extreme research that would never be allowed in normal circumstances and societies.
The Supreme Council decided to keep many of the analytical results of the complex's machine learning artificial intelligence as secret information, as they were considered dangerous to the community, even though the principle of transparency of information was enshrined in the constitution. Uncontrolled speculation on matters that were not fully understood could lead to wrong conclusions and harmful implementations under pressure from an ignorant community.
Among the researchers, they wanted to be sure that the results would not be left halfway because of something considered a trivial risk, but the nature of the experiments could be questionable to some and therefore they would be kept secret. In defense of circumventing ethical problems, it was said, in a typically clichéd way, that they just wanted to know.
Zeu's information system is also a node for the particle accelerator that runs through the entire cave system and for processing its data, although the associated control rooms are located in the human-controlled sector of Hermes, where all industrial and production facilities are located with their research units.
The particle accelerator also produces dangerous antimatter, which is led to the outer chamber of a three-part cube the size of a matchbox made of nanomaterial with vacuum walls. In the second outermost chamber there is ordinary matter and the middle empty chamber is the reactor, into which matter and antimatter are released one atom at a time when the cube is used. The reactor produces small explosions in a continuous series, and the energy produced is conducted magnetically shielded conductors to mini-power plants that produce electricity from heat and pressure.
The small-scale reactors release enormous amounts of energy from a negligible amount of matter, as ordinary matter and antimatter completely destroy each other. One cube is enough to fuel and power a large spaceship for centuries. Three cubes are enough for Techpol's entire energy needs at different points of use for ten years.
The power plant, built deep into the rock at the end of the Zeu cave branch, with a stockpile of raw materials for several hundred finished cubes, is understandably the most dangerous place in the city, and it is isolated from everything else with radiation-shielding nanomaterials, which as armor would also withstand the theoretical accident scenarios of possible uncontrolled nuclear explosions.
The information system that controls the power plant is already able, in its first version, to take advantage of temporary uncontrolled processes, and directs larger than normal energy charges, which would result from too much material in the explosion chamber, to large vacuum-protected gravitational particle batteries, energy wells, which have the property of black hole gravity to absorb energy into itself and pack it in the process into a sugar cube-sized cube of dark matter weighing thousands of tons, a bit like when carbon is compressed into diamonds under pressure, although in this case it is the gravity of a graviton-eyelet sump surrounded by magnets that is fed artificially created dark matter nuclear particles one superproton wimp at a time.
Robots working in the antimatter handling departments were radiation-resistant and able to operate without external commands to correct malfunctions. Their simple mechanical brains were like old-fashioned precision watches, with a variety of mechanical add-on functions that did not require electrical external control or information from computer networks.
The robots' logical mechanism was powered by a small ceramic-encased heat pump atomic reactor with a molten nanomaterial containment shell. They did not have any functions that required electricity. All of their choices and reactions were based on changes in heat, chemical states, and light signals in sensitive sensors, which caused the gears of their million-part mechanical intelligence to operate in different ways depending on the situation.
A certain amount or color of light signal on the light board caused a small temperature change guided by a spectral change in the responsive material, and caused a certain gear chain retainer and energy gate to trip, which caused the control robot to operate in a certain way in a certain task. In this way, small changes in light reflection morse complex commands on a color scale of prisms to parallel gear chains, which are constantly synchronized with each other so that the robots appear to analyze events independently, like electronic artificial intelligences, when controlling the operation of the reactor.
Although robots controlled by mechanical intelligences were difficult to manufacture, their independence from electronic artificial intelligences guaranteed absolute reliability in their tasks. They operate in only one specific way at a time in response to a physical change in the nuclear reactor environment that exceeds the alarm threshold. The information is transmitted through a chemical impulse and then through the gears to the mechanical fingers, which stop the reactor by stopping the elevator carrying the antimatter cubes. At the same time, the spherical reaction chamber levitating on magnets is completely isolated with a multi-walled containment shell to be able to receive a possible large explosion inside the chamber and neutralize the simultaneous uncontrolled discharge of two whole antimatter cubes.
This also prevents the possibility of a destructive chain reaction in ordinary matter stored far apart and in antimatter stored far from the reactor in the event of an accident.
Multiple safeguards are important because if large amounts of antimatter were to combine with ordinary matter, a huge explosion would destroy the entire Earth and it would disintegrate into a shower of massless photons traveling at the speed of light in less than a second, like a giant laser beam. Fortunately, the risk of an accident is non-existent, and in fact such an event would only be possible if the sun exploded for some reason.
Antimatter is essential as a fuel for the planned journeys of thousands of years of city-sized space stations into uncharted space and there is no room for error and everything must be technology that is error-free with real-world information.
Although transparency is Techpol's motto, only less than two hundred trusted people know about all of Zeus' operations, and they are updated without censorship on workplace terminals in locked rooms. They also have an alarm mechanism in their chips for serious emergencies where quick decisions are needed. All of Zeus' event data is automatically top secret under Techpol's internal confidentiality, with AI-One's computer watching for possible slips through its constant communication analysis.
All high science always has some philosophical perspective that sanctifies even the wildest ideas. Zeus' counterparts had also hired Jaakko, who was always inclined to philosophize, as a narrator who unintentionally made the ugly look beautiful and the great risk seem insignificant. Yet he was straightforward and honest, and everyone trusted his word.
Jaakko gave a speech at the opening of Zeus as its corresponding director in a literary style:
"In the wild reality of nature, all that exists is a cavalcade of events in energy states, where matter with its forms is born, changes and finally disappears back into energy, in between a complex history that leaves behind a trace in time like a story encoded in light of everything that has happened. Evidence of this is the light emitted by cosmic events shining as stars in distant galaxies, which is visible on Earth with a delay of billions of years.
Man constantly asks what was the cause and purpose of everything, the goal, which was already at the very beginning of the species implanted in the archetypal gene map as an absolute command to give the feeling of existence of pain and joy, love and hate, intelligence and the awareness of its own existence.
The fact that everything living has already been implanted with a cryptic development command message and direction at the beginning of its birth is only opening up when the intellectually reflecting human being appears in the evolutionary arc of the species to seek the causes of the phenomena of reality. Over time, the conclusion that natural evolution is, in all its cruel painfulness, a directional and logical development based on laws, has over time been confirmed as the basis of natural science. It created science and now, as its latest idea, Techpol's science city as a catalyst for artificial evolution and a backup of already acquired knowledge.
That which is real at each moment, and what is realized in each reality at any time, is possible only in one way, although seemingly chosen from many alternatives. The choice is always the consequence of an event related to the moment as the sum of all prevailing things. The natural statistics associated with the mind almost always guesses the probabilities correctly and prepares accordingly.
Sometimes predictions come true years in advance, as if the flowing time had a riverbed and a downward direction through an already known landscape. The psychology and instinctual world created by experiences are already waiting in our genes to be identified and a calculating property based on basic knowledge, like an instruction manual printed in small print on everything living.
The reality that happens is not statistics, but consciousness that reacts to life at its entire interface. The fact that there is a mystical direction in the constant change that strives for a goal, varying the movement of energy and matter from one state to another, causes the human mind to speculate with its imagination and create new theories.
Whatever name we call development, it has always had some programmatic process of trying to understand and exploit the conditions of its environment. Techpoli is an artificially created conscious development arc of cutting-edge science in the rarity of life. A new development line that started from the intersection of the node and focuses on purely human-rational scientific results and logic. A scientific-technological evolution in which human senses and bodily functions have been improved, both with external aids and internally by manipulating the biological inheritance, in an artificially created environment that serves as purposefully as possible. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, quantum computers and indexed memory parks with endless databases, their roots deep in time.
A virtual parallel world with its own evolutionary arc without connection to the awareness of experiencing life. The fact that it is not only a result of our knowledge and skills, but an independent intelligently developing mathematically precise, axiomatic and performance-superior whole without the existential consciousness associated with life, is frightening.
An artificial intelligence system does not compete, it executes. It does not feel, it acts purposefully in accordance with the goals of its programs. It has no ethical right or wrong, good or evil. Its self-developing processing, with its results, constantly refines its purpose with functionalities towards a goal that, according to its logical conclusions, becomes better and better at serving its purpose. However, at its best, it is only the exploitation of science with the measurement results it obtains within the limits of the possibilities of natural laws and stored observation data optimized device control or continuously improved instructed production lines of robots, or probability calculations based on statistics future predictions. On the one hand cold and emotionless, on the other hand understanding the illogical emotional world of man, but always infinitely powerful. Its operation is always beneficial to humanity in its efforts to develop better living conditions and to avoid dangers in advance, and to increase knowledge of everything around us from elementary particles to the farthest galaxies. Artificial intelligence helps our conscious awareness to expand to the limits of its physical abilities, making inferences about the most complex things that we cannot do within our own intellectual limitations and guiding our actions with the information and solutions it finds. Although we do not blindly trust artificial intelligences, we understand from the concrete results achieved that it is almost always right in matters that we do not understand in all their details. Without Zeus' all-fact-aware system, Techpol would not be able to succeed in its tasks and purpose of serving humanity and ensuring our survival in part, no matter what happens outside our planet.
Jaakko concludes his long speech in front of the sleepy audience. "Zeu sector", it was possible to implement according to our plans with the resources we received and the participants who are involved in the Techpoli project as a whole. However, the BIGGEST THANKS goes to my own fantastic team, who sacrificed all their time and energy to build a district that requires special expertise. Now it is ready for service."
Jaakko bowed deeply to his wildly applauding audience and Bob cut the thick silk ribbon and pressed the big red button, which was just a useless object symbolizing the start-up, lighting up the thousands of unnecessary diodes attached to the wall to flash in a multicolored programmed illusion of starting up the machine rooms.