West of Nothing

40. The Third Kind

"For Christ's sake, we've been over this already!" Skunkworks threw up his arms in dismay.

"Just hear me out," HotDamn said. "The X-Bot doesn't represent just a single breakthrough but a constellation of new technologies decades beyond our current abilities. Biology and machine have been integrated to an unparalleled degree. It has graphene skin and an enhanced genetic code. It's virtually indestructible, navigates its environment with the agility of a spider, and solves problems like a human. Any one of these things would be a major breakthrough in its field but all of them together? It's virtually inconceivable. You know this better than anyone, Skunkworks."

"You're just restating what's already been said."

"Because I don't think the point has sunk in. We're still trying to tap dance around it."

"What point is that? Maybe you can spell it out for us dummies."

"I thought I just did, but here's the Reader's Digest version. We may not know who made the X-Bot, but we know who the hell didn't. We can rule out the Chinese and U.S. governments, the Googles and Microsofts, rogue groups working in secret, eccentric billionaires, super AIs and the second coming of Christ."

We can't rule out an AI, Gabby objected. We don't what a super AI is capable of because there's never been one before.

"Gabby, you know I hold your opinions in the highest esteem," HotDamn said. "Now tell me, in your gut, do you think AI has advanced to the point of designing a whole new class of cyborg insect?"

There was a long pause. No. We're still about twenty years away.

"We put a man on the moon, didn't we?" Mason said. "That was pretty hard."

"The space program didn't just pop into being all at once," HotDamn said. "It took millions of man-years and billions of dollars. The X-Bot came out of nowhere."

"I'm sure the atom bomb felt like it came out of nowhere to the Japanese," Corny said.

"That was during a global time of war and decades before the Internet and wikileaks."

"Maybe the breakthroughs all happened independently and someone just came along and connected the dots," Doogie suggested.

"Technologies like this don't fly under the radar," HotDamn countered. "The first iterations are always crappy and barely functional. If this is a prototype, God save us from what comes next. Besides, it's not like we sit around in our labs with our heads in the sand. If there was a major advance in robo-tech or batteries, Corny or Doogie would have heard about it. Johnny, what are the odds a private lab somewhere, even with unlimited funding, could have developed SDNA and kept it under wraps?"

"Not likely," Johnny agreed.

"So it's a paradox. If these breakthroughs were made out in the open then they would have garnered a lot of attention, which they didn't. But if they were done in secret, then how would the X-Bot's creators have come to know about them in the first place?"

"What's the alternative?" Doogie asked.

"We need to consider the possibility the X-Bot may not be of human origin," HotDamn concluded.

"Are you saying it's a goddamn alien!" Skunkworks was on his feet. "Have you lost your fucking mind?"

"I'm not saying the X-Bot is an alien," HotDamn backpedaled. "Just that it could have been made by an intelligence outside of our current ken."