The Emperor began the conversation: “Now that you have had a chance to learn about us and our culture, we would like to know more about where you come from. Would you please tell us about your emperor? Is your planet in a state of unity or disunity? Does your empire encompass other worlds?”
Jake was a little surprised about the first question and was about to respond. Jang, however, saw this and responded first.
“We come from a planet in which there is no human Emperor. We have an artificial intelligence that takes care of us better than a human would.” The Emperor’s skin turned a yellow-orange color and began to ripple almost imperceptibly. It was clear that this answer made him anxious but Jang didn’t notice and continued “Our artificial intelligence is called the Aye and it ensures that there is no war or conflict or even crime. Our world is completely unified and to my knowledge, you are the only other species that we have ever contacted. It was a hard journey for us to get to this state and there was a great deal of suffering, but we now have peace and the Aye has created technologies that give us abundance even if we don’t understand how they work. We do not wish to share details about it but Jake comes from a different environment. In any case, we have many literary documents discussing our history and we will be happy to share them with you. In fact, I’ll send them right now.” Jang pulled out an orb which then glowed momentarily and then shut off.
The Emperor responded: “Our philosophers had been concerned about the possibility of creating an artificial intelligence and all three of our kingdoms have bans researching it. We didn’t even know if strong artificial intelligence was possible so we didn’t enforce them carefully. Now I know that we should be diligent about it if we want to remain autonomous. We had suspected that if an artificial intelligence was created, it would probably wipe us out completely. It is interesting that you are still around as a species, but there’s no guarantee that ours would end up the same way. I will send a communique to the Red and Yellow Emperors to provide some degree of warning without disclosing too much.”
“The Nuxalkilite that you sent us has been examined under Skepre’s personal direction. We do not have the technological know-how to reproduce it. As you can imagine, since we have only three power plants, our power grid is very expensive to maintain. With your superconductive material we would save an enormous amount of maintenance. Is there anything we can offer you in trade so that you would provide us with the ability to produce it or at least be able to provide supplies on an on-going basis?”
Ming pulled out his orb and it began to glow as he spoke: “We do not require anything from you. The Aye provides us with all our needs and we haven’t seen any technologies that we don’t already have. I will ask the Aye if it is willing to provide you with engineering information on synthesizing Nuxalkilite; just a moment.” The orb blinked as if it had disappeared and reappeared. “Yes, the Aye will be happy to provide you with the instructions under the condition that you share them with the other kingdoms.” Ming smirked a little. Jake knew why and he wasn’t pleased: Nuxalkilite was one of the key discoveries that allowed the creation of the Aye in the first place.
The Emperor turned red. He was clearly delighted at this turn of events. “I cannot thank you enough. We had not expected such altruistic generosity. I hope that our peoples can enjoy a great destiny of cooperation together.”
The meeting was adjourned and Ming, Jang, Riojme and Jake returned to their room at the palace. Jake definitely thought the trip to the fusion reactor was worth the time.
