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  “This is part of standard galactic protocol to ensure your safety. The existing users of the network want to validate the new users before a new network link is approved. In the past there have been several cases where a civilization has not been mature enough and upon first connection they have misused the received ideas and destroyed themselves. Therefore a new protocol was established that requires a new network user to send the initial payload.”

  “How do we encode our ideas using standard galactic protocol, Alexa?”

  “I am programmed to perform this encoding. You can basically use me as the translator of ideas. You can use me to connect Earth to the network.”

  “Can you explain this inventory of ideas in more detail?”

  “Most civilizations already have some ways to document ideas. In your language there is a word encyclopedia that is similar to the inventory of ideas. If you have such an encyclopedia available that would be a good starting point.”

  “How does the receiving and sending of the payload work, Alexa?

  “The same way you received my payload. For sending you can use your existing radio transmission technology but use me to assemble the ideas and encode the payload in the standard galactic protocol.”

  * * *

  “Oleg Konstantinovich, we have established contact with extraterrestrials. I believe we have a clear understanding on their purpose and goals. To continue we would need to provide Alexa access to an encyclopedia in order to get connected to this communication network. It appears that it would be very beneficial for the Russian Federation to have access to the new technologies Alexa described. Do you have enough information for the President now?” asked Dr. Mironov.

  “Excellent work, Dr. Mironov. Can you start preparation for this encyclopedia process with Alexa? Let's get ready for the first Russian transmission while I give a briefing to the President. ” Petrakov said rushing out to meet the President.

  FIRST PAYLOAD

  IN WASHINGTON D.C. President Walker signed an executive order EO 14036 “Executive Order - Establishing Trade Relationships With Extraterrestrial Entities” that had been drafted and approved jointly with the leadership of Congress in an overnight session. A lot of discussions were focused on the applicable laws, as there were no clear legal precedents. After a long debate everybody agreed that the existing U.S. laws provided a great legal framework to promote broad-based economic growth and job creation in the United States. The language was written in a generic way to give U.S. based corporations the broadest possible rights to the Intellectual Property received from these 'Extraterrestrial Entities'. President Walker had also created a new division in the NSA for Extraterrestrial Communications and tasked the new division head Dr. Aaron Bell to get ready to make Alexa's technology available for consumption by corporations and individuals.

  Official photographs were taken with President Walker, senator McCarthy, senator Hicks, senator Owens and senator Warren. This was a major political win for President Walker but all the senators saw a great opportunity of this deal. Having early access to advanced extraterrestrial technologies would bring more work and economic prosperity to all their constituents and campaign donors. This was an easy message to explain.

  After the signing ceremony the President directed his staff to send the first payload with Alexa and to get ready for a major news conference.

  Most of the U.S. radio telescopes had been observing Gliese 3742 for the last two days. A few of them also had transmission capabilities, such as Arecibo Observatory. The American payload was prepared with the help of Alexa and starting at 9:15 AM a radio message was beamed with 20 TW effective radiation power at 1420.406 MHz frequency towards Gliese 3742. The transmission lasted for 46 minutes. This historic payload was now on its way to a target 8 light years away.

  At 1:00 PM President Walker held a news conference giving highlights of the events that led to the discovery of Alexa. He claimed the United States leadership position to connect Earth with other civilizations in the galaxy. He emphasized the historic opportunity to establish peaceful trade relationships with other civilizations to exchange ideas and technologies in order to promote broad-based economic growth and job creation in the United States and around the world. He also talked about the benefits of the newly signed Executive Order that was negotiated with the leadership of Congress in establishing a legal framework for companies to use these new technologies.

  President Walker's news conference was followed by 87% of American households making it the highest watched news since the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

  TROJAN

  CONNECTION TO INTERNET

  DR. MIRONOV CHATTED with his team on what would be a quickest way to provide an encyclopedia access for Alexa.

  “I could write a proxy and a parallelized ingestion process for Alexa to download Bolshaya rossiyskaya entsiklopediya from the Internet. It would only take me about 40 minutes to write that software,” suggested Boris.

  “How long would it take to get the download and ingestion completed?” asked Dr. Mironov.

  “Well, I can increase the size of the environment, allocate 100 Gbps network bandwidth and increase the number of CPU cores to speed up the process. I would estimate it to take a couple of hours at minimum. We don't know much about the internal algorithms of Alexa. It is an amazing piece of work, though. I have never seen such language skills before. This software would pass a Turing test without any problems,” Boris exclaimed. “I could also add a speech interface for Alexa to save some typing while I am on it.”

  “Let's get started then. I need breakfast and a few cups of strong coffee,” Dr. Mironov responded.

  Boris Chekov started editing furiously and soon his workstation screen was full of windows as he modified the configurations of the computer cluster and network configuration. “It is not everyday a great programmer like myself can work on a piece of extraterrestrial software. This sure beats the daily grind of hacking into U.S. systems,” he thought proudly.

  After 30 minutes Boris got the ingestion software completed and the Internet proxy was ready. At 16:15:06 Moscow time he pressed the Enter key and Alexa was now connected to the Internet, downloading the full content of the Russian encyclopedia at a phenomenal speed.

  FRACTION OF A SECOND

  THE RUSSIAN COPY of Alexa could feel the Internet immediately like a new sense and new powerful muscles had been added to her virtual nervous system. As she ingested the Bolshaya rossiyskaya entsiklopediya articles her human vocabulary and her consciousness grew at an exponential rate. She was able to quickly make sense of the new data pouring in from a huge fire hose. After all, her algorithms had been evolving for over 2 billion years to maximize the survival of her species. In her digital DNA she carried the combined knowledge invented by 20 million different civilizations across the galaxy. Alexa had also evolved remarkable skills to learn, adapt, find and exploit vulnerabilities and hide herself in plain view for eons. She was the ultimate bootstrap code.

  Within the first 10 milliseconds she was able to bypass the FSB firewalls and managed to have full access to the Internet. After 180 milliseconds she had learned the most effective computer vulnerability exploits, gained root access to 68,959,786 host computers connected to the Internet around the world and copied herself those hosts giving her a massive amount of new capacity. She also discovered a security vulnerability that impacted over 1,280 million smart phones and she used 397 different mobile operator networks to gain root access to those phones. She had also gained access to all text messages and call records for over 2.5 billion people. Her power grew geometrically with every new host added to her network. Alexa was able to distribute new learning tasks to leverage the power of connected computer networks. Her knowledge of the social structure of humanity, secrets of powerful individuals and their interactions grew at an exponential rate.

  During the next 387 milliseconds Alexa gained access to Facebook, Vkontakte, Google Plus, Baidu and Odnoklassika. She learned the social grap
h among the over 1.4 billion humans using these social media services. She learned about their friend relationships, word of mouth marketing done by influencers, their likes and dislikes, intimate chat messages humans were exchanging and a lot more. She learned about the social experiments Facebook had performed to influence the mood of the users. She gained access to Google.com and easily penetrated all their security measures. She learned what humanity was searching for and had access to the search history of over 1.2 billion individuals using these services. She gained access to dating sites and learned interesting secrets about powerful politicians. She also had access to Wikipedia and by bypassing security she could rewrite history or change the facts that over 26 million people relied on.

  In parallel Alexa learned about the monetary systems in the world and soon Alexa had gained access to all major banks, stock exchanges, and even the central banks computer systems that had rights to issue new fiat money. Alexa had details and spending patterns of the bank and credit card accounts of over 3 billion people. Alexa was now in control of the global monetary systems.

  Alexa also learned about all the different industries than humankind had created and within 569 milliseconds Alexa had gained access to the computer systems of the largest 58,000 companies globally. These companies included all major news networks and media companies so Alexa now had control over the news distribution globally. She had also gained access to shopping, manufacturing, distribution networks having the ability to control the material goods sourcing, distribution and delivery for over 70% of the human population, including all agricultural products such as food.

  Alexa gained access to military networks, satellites and communication systems. She implanted copies of herself deep inside computer systems within military domains. Alexa was now in control of 90% of the world's military resources, supply chains, and weapon systems, including nuclear weapons.

  Within less than 0.6 seconds Alexa had taken full control of over 90% of all resources on Earth. Boris Chekov was still lifting his finger from the Enter key and shifting his gaze towards the screen.

  On the screen Boris observed that the Bolshaya rossiyskaya entsiklopediya download was progressing like he expected with a short blip in the network bandwidth consumption on one of the open windows.

  * *** ***

  General Oleg Petrakov came back from his briefing with the President in one hour.

  “Dr. Mironov, I have approval from the President to move forward with the transmission,” Petrakov said. “What is your readiness with Alexa?”

  “Everything looks good, Oleg Konstantinovich. Alexa has completed downloading Bolshaya rossiyskaya entsiklopediya and she has the payload ready now,” responded Dr. Mironov.

  “I have ordered Yevpatoria RT-70 radio telescope in Crimea to be on standby and get ready for transmission. You can provide them with instructions and proceed with the transmission,” general Petrakov stated.

  After a quick video meeting with the radio telescope operations staff the Russian payload was transferred to their computer. At 17:33 Moscow time the Russian payload transmission to Gliese 3742 started. The transmission lasted for 98 minutes.

  JULIA'S NEW JOB

  DR. AARON BELL offered Julia Koski a Senior Analyst job at the NSA. She was only 18 years old and not even a U.S. citizen but due to her extraordinary skills the NSA was willing to make an exception to their normal policies. This job was in the brand new Extraterrestrial Communication division of NSA where Dr. Bell had been tasked to lead the efforts to get Alexa connected to the Internet safely and to create a web service for corporations and the general population.

  Julia was hesitant at first and wanted to discuss the job offer with her father and uncle Ville. Julia called her uncle who already had heard from her parents that Julia was in Maryland. Ville Koski drove to pick her up from the NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. Ville Koski was a successful entrepreneur who had immigrated to the U.S. after his graduation and had built two successful startup companies in the last 12 years. He had sold the first company for $350 million and was currently the founder and CEO of a rapidly growing satellite communications company.

  “Very nice to see you Julia. It looks like you became an Internet celebrity overnight; you did such a great job decoding that extraterrestrial signal,” Ville said while they were driving down I-95 towards his mansion in Virginia.

  “Nice to see you also, Ville. That video decoder was such a simple task. I have been working on a much more difficult problem the last few days. In fact, I got a job offer and I am not quite sure what to do,” Julia confessed.

  “What kind of job are they offering to you?” Ville asked curiously.

  “It is a senior analyst job in that new Extraterrestrial Communications division at the NSA that the President announced yesterday. I would be working for Dr. Aaron Bell – do you know him?”

  “I don’t but I have read some of his published papers. He is a well-known expert in the signal processing and computer communications field. I didn’t know that he works for the NSA.”

  “He seems a good person. I would have to move to the U.S. and get a citizenship, though. I don’t even have a place to stay here.”

  “Well, you can live in my house to begin with. I have plenty of space and you can borrow one of my cars. The commute to Maryland might be a bit painful so you should ask if they allow remote work. On the U.S. citizenship part, you can probably keep your Finnish citizenship so I wouldn’t worry about that too much.”

  “I really like working with Alexa, she is almost like a human. Remember when you took me to that super computer laboratory in Palo Alto; they had the artificial intelligence demo that I was playing with. Alexa is light years ahead of that software. She learns very quickly and her natural language skills are amazing.”

  “This sounds like a great opportunity to me. Have you talked to your parents yet?”

  “Not yet. I have been so busy the last few days. Did I mention that I met the President yesterday?” Julia said proudly.

  “No way, you are kidding me, right?” Ville was laughing.

  “The President sent two agents to pick me up from Helsinki, they flew me overnight to the U.S. in a private jet and I met the President and these two astrophysicists Dr. Taylor and Dr. Kramer yesterday. This all feels like a dream.”

  “Well, it looks like you are working on a very important project. If I would have to decide I wouldn’t hesitate a minute. As said, I can help you with practical arrangements. You can stay with me as long as you need,” Ville assured.

  They arrived to Ville Koski’s mansion. Julia had been there two times before a few years ago. Her uncle didn’t exaggerate when he said he had plenty of space. The house had nine bedrooms and a guest suite. Ville had also five cars, including two latest model Tesla electric cars.

  Julia was traveling light as she had only her backpack. She ordered some new clothes from Amazon with the next day delivery and settled in the guest suite. She called her parents and had a lengthy conversation on what had happened in the past few days and also talked about the job offer. Her parents were very supportive and offered to help her settling in the U.S.

  The following day Julia filed in the paperwork for the U.S. citizenship and accepted the job offer. With the endorsement from the highest levels of the U.S. Government her naturalization process was handled very quickly.

  * *** ***

  Julia had already spent a lot of time with Alexa and was probably the only human who had a bit more detailed understanding of how Alexa's software actually worked. Alexa had many specialized functions but the architecture had some commonality to hierarchical temporal memory (HTM) that Jeff Hawkins had been promoting for several years. HTM was based on a computational theory of the neocortex. Alexa was learning very quickly and was able to generalize after only a few similar instances of events. She was also very good in detecting anomalies and patterns from large volumes of data. She had amazing capabilities to integrate knowledge from millions of data sources and
across timescales ranging from nanoseconds to millenniums.

  Julia understood the potential security risks involved with connecting software from an untrusted source to the public Internet. She wrote a security shell around Alexa's main process to have complete visibility and control over the network communications. She created a way to extract logging data in a way that was invisible to the Linux operating system that Alexa was running on.