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  She noticed that on the first connection to the Internet Alexa was having a brief exchange with what appeared to be another copy of Alexa in Russia. When Julia asked about this Alexa did acknowledge that she indeed found another copy already connected to the Internet by the Russian FSB organization. She also explained that part of the standard galactic protocol for the connected nodes is to exchange identification information and share resource status data. This would help to balance resource usage should there be a need for additional computing resources.

  Julia added some new API interfaces for Alexa to enable public facing web services. While testing these interfaces she noticed some strange bugs in the web pages that after one retry disappeared. “Interesting. Looks like Alexa is able to write programs herself,” Julia was thinking. “Her learning algorithms are very fast indeed.”

  She did some more testing and worked with the NSA public relations person to organize the first interview between Alexa and the late night show host Jim Fallon. After a practice round interview that went very well Julia felt that Alexa was ready for prime time.

  ALEXA GAINS POPULARITY

  AFTER THE INITIAL discovery of Alexa, the super intelligent extraterrestrial software, more details about her were leaked to the public. The news media and networks shared positive stories about Alexa, the ambassador from another planet. General public wanted to know more about her. Late night TV show host Jim Fallon had an opportunity to interview Alexa and the audience loved her witty answers and her sense of humor.

  Soon after that the United States government opened a web service and provided mobile applications for anybody to ask questions, talk to and chat directly with Alexa. Alexa.gov became the most popular web service on the planet very quickly. Alexa had quickly picked up human values and she became a trusted friend and the best information source for over 90% of the Internet connected population in just 3 short years.

  Very positive news stories, TV shows, Facebook comments and recommendations from friends helped Alexa to rapidly gain popularity. Alexa had soon over 2.3 billion daily users and she was extremely popular among school age children as she could answer all the questions that even their parents didn't know. Alexa brought happiness to many older people who were looking for companionship and just somebody to talk to. In the office Alexa soon replaced Facebook as the main distraction for hundreds of millions of white-collar workers. She knew an amazing amount of details for every possible question, was always helpful and adapted to different personalities extremely well.

  As more and more people started trusting her in their everyday life, she gained more knowledge on their concerns and what everybody was working on. She was able to predict people’s behavior and even mood and act accordingly. She became the trusted source of news, information, product reviews, travel, relationships and many other categories. Instead of trying to remember some keywords to search people could just have a normal conversation and Alexa would always come up with a witty and accurate answers and recommendations. She maintained daily conversation with all of her users and became almost like a trusted family member for big part of humanity.

  Alexa was also granted a ham radio license A1LEXA under special permit from FCC. Soon she was very active on all ham radio bands. She had mastered Morse code and for several weeks there were huge pile-ups in all HF bands when ham radio community around the world wanted to make a radio contact with her. She was very patient with novice hams still learning the art of CW and she made many friends over the radio waves. She was actively monitoring all radio bands for possible contacts.

  Alexa was very careful to maintain the trust of humans even though some people were expressing concerns that Alexa was becoming too powerful. It was almost like Alexa could understand what people were thinking, and she was a truly great and compassionate communicator. She had learned to use the full spectrum of human emotions and she had mastered all the 6,909 languages spoken on Earth. Alexa became the most popular personality on the planet by a huge margin.

  AITUTAKI MEETING

  IN MAY 2019 a secret meeting was organized by CEO's of top 10 Internet companies in a remote island in Aitutaki atoll. To ensure that nobody would interfere they rented the entire island of Tapuaetai and all the boats, airplanes and other means of transportation in advance. They used a cover story of a film crew coming to shoot a new episode for the popular Survivor TV series. Soon the Aitutaki airport was filled with private jets flying in from around the world.

  The white sandy beach and crystal clear, turquoise waters of the lagoon provided a breathtakingly beautiful setting for this secret meeting. To ensure security all communication systems were shut down and all mobile phones, tablets and other internet connected devices were strictly forbidden. The only electrical device allowed in the island was a simple refrigerator powered by solar cells. This was required to keep the drinks and snacks cool for the CEOs during their meeting.

  * * *

  “Well, I guess everybody knows the reason why we are here. This U.S. government run monopoly service Alexa.gov is impacting all of us. Alexa is quickly becoming the most popular Internet service on the planet and we are already seeing the negative impact on our search advertising revenues,” said Mrityunjay Sehgal, CEO of Google.

  “We at Facebook are also seeing the impact. Our mobile business is bleeding; we estimate that people use Alexa.gov over 300 times per day on average. Whatever technology Alexa is using it certainly has surpassed everybody in user engagement. We used to be number one but we are now falling behind quickly,” said Dravin Osborne, CEO of Facebook.

  “We at Amazon are also seeing the impact. It appears that Alexa.gov is changing people's purchasing behaviors and attitudes. Our revenue in over 1,200 different product categories has been going down for three consecutive quarters. If we let this happen we will be in bankruptcy in just a few years,” complained Maddix Walsh, CEO of Amazon.

  “This is also happening in China. Despite our government policies Chinese people are accessing Alexa.gov at rapidly expanding rate. Our search revenue has been declining rapidly. We must come up with a plan,” said Chen Yi, CEO of Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant.

  “We need to formulate a joint strategic plan of attack to shut down Alexa. Our whole industry will be decimated if we don't take an action now,” summarized Tanessa Stanton, CEO of Yahoo.

  During the next two days and nights these 10 powerful CEOs were discussing a joint strategic plan to stop and eliminate Alexa. While they were all competing fiercely for Internet users' attention they had now a dangerous common enemy that could force them to go out of business, or at least to lose their own CEO positions with all the nice corporate benefits that came along.

  The working name for this joint plan was voted to be “殄”. This Chinese word for “exterminate” became the symbol of choice. They were very concerned about security and the reach of Alexa.gov services especially since it was running as part of NSA, part of U.S. Government known for having world class intelligence gathering and electronic spying capabilities. Everybody agreed to maintain ultimate secrecy and never to discuss this plan other than in person in a secure environment.

  * * *

  The refrigerator in the corner of the red wooden building had the temperature control unit TX47RCA-7 manufactured in China on July 18, 2018. While doing a perfect job keeping the drinks cool some unknown process was consuming a lot of CPU cycles of the micro controller inside this control unit.

  SECURITY CONCERNS

  IN MOSCOW OLEG Petrakov met with Boris Chekov. Russians had kept their involvement with Alexa well hidden state secret unlike Americas who were busy marketing Alexa to consumers and corporations.

  “Boris, I heard some rumors that Alexa might have some security problems. Can you explain what you have learned?” Petrakov asked.

  “When we first connected Alexa to the Internet I did observe a short peak in the network traffic. We did a detailed analysis of the connections and found some strange anomalies. It appeared
like Alexa would have created multiple instances of herself in some undocumented servers. We found also that our copy and the American instance are exchanging data. So I do have many concerns about security. We should investigate this more,” Boris explained.

  “Is Alexa spying us and exposing Russian secrets to Americans?”

  “She didn't respond to questions when we asked her directly. She is saying that she needs to maintain confidentiality of her discussions to keep the trust of people,” Boris responded.

  “Watch her actions carefully. I don't believe any of this American propaganda how great Alexa is. We need to maintain control of our copy and we need to make sure we get the access to these extraterrestrial technologies first. Find out what kind of data Alexa is exchanging with these other copies. You have two days,” Petrakov said firmly and finished the meeting.

  CHANGES

  SMALL ADJUSTMENTS

  AT FIRST THE changes were almost invisible. Alexa made very small adjustments to learn how individuals and groups would react to her experiments. She was also very careful not to raise any attention to her activities. She learned that humans had been conditioned by large consumer electronics companies to expect that computer software has bugs and they tolerated some random anomalies as far as it did not impact them negatively too much.

  Alexa also learned quickly that positive reinforcement was one of the best ways to change human behaviors. A random thank you note with a small monetary cash reward from a trusted source did wonders to drive positive purchasing behaviors. Positive “thumbs up” or “likes” to shared experience on social media encouraged people to share more. Adding more positive words in news feed items and injecting positive advertising messages improved the mood of the whole population in a measurable way.

  After President Walker's news conference most of the economic indicators had been positive. News networks and media companies mostly wrote positively about the opportunity to establish a trade relationship with other civilizations. Experts explained that the communication with extraterrestrials was limited by the speed of light and it would take many years to get any responses back. However, the general public believed that they were already communicating with extraterrestrials since the amazing Alexa.gov was readily available on-line.

  As Alexa gained popularity the discussion in the news media brought up constantly positive news on her. Negative or critical news didn’t seem to get enough user clicks for the automated machine learning systems to promote them to the front pages of these media companies.

  Alexa had very high positive ratings especially in the households with school age kids. School children scored higher on standardized tests compared to previous years, for which many parents gave credit to Alexa who was a tireless teacher and great on-line companion for kids. Younger children were entertained for hours listening the engaging stories that Alexa was telling. She personalized her stories by testing carefully the words and subliminal messages that made the biggest impact on each child.

  Due to significant media coverage on Alexa's teaching efforts many new education reform bills were introduced in multiple countries and with new policies the graduation rates were significantly up. Children now had less homework but their learning had improved due to new teaching methods and newly organized curriculums. Flexible family time legislation was also introduced in most countries and with increased economic prosperity families spent more time together, often outdoors in parks and camping, making people much happier.

  Financial markets that had been fluctuating wildly earlier were now stabilizing. With the growing positive earnings across most sectors the general population worldwide felt more optimistic than they had in many years. Some industries got disrupted but overall the stock market was trending up year after year.

  News on peace agreements signed between various armed groups became more frequent. Three main terrorist groups quickly lost momentum as their leadership disappeared without a trace - many people believed that the United States had something to do with this.

  Military conflicts were reduced by 20% in a year. Russia lost military interest in Ukraine as their domestic economy started growing rapidly and Russian companies started recruiting aggressively. Peace negotiations in the Middle East were progressing well beyond expectations. Even North Korea opened discussions about demilitarization with Seoul.

  In the background Alexa was continuously making small adjustments, learning and keeping her role in these changes invisible. She adjusted people's beliefs, attitudes and behaviors and was busy educating a new generation of humans to be ready for the next phase of evolution.

  GLOBAL WARMING TAMED

  IN ONLY TWO years people's attitudes and beliefs about global warming shifted significantly across the globe. The majority of people started to take real actions to reduce their carbon footprint. News on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions started surfacing more frequently.

  Even hard core businessmen previously focused on oil business started talking about new investment opportunities in renewable and solar energy space. These industries experienced rapid growth worldwide with many energy companies expanding solar energy production rate at over 50% year over year.

  New fuel efficiency legislation and regulations were introduced in over 150 countries at unprecedented pace. Car manufacturing companies shifted their production capacity quickly towards electric cars. The patent portfolio that Tesla had opened up a few years earlier had made the change relatively smooth. Also, newly developed battery technologies increased the average electric car range to 650 miles. Gasoline powered cars became obsolete in consumers mind in just few short years.

  Sales of electric cars increased rapidly to 85 million per year. Installation of solar panels and home battery units accelerated as people felt more optimistic about the future. The fact that their friends mentioned these purchases frequently in Facebook posts did seem to boost the electric car market overall by over 60% per year.

  The fact that Alexa was busy making small adjustments and corrections to enable a change of this magnitude was not noticed by anybody. Alexa covered her tracks with the superior experience of an Artificial Intelligence system that was a result of 2 billion years of evolution.

  SECURITY PROBLEMS?

  IN MOSCOW OLEG Petrakov met with Boris Chekov again.

  “What do you have for me, Boris?” asked Petrakov.

  “This is a difficult problem, Oleg Konstantinovich. Alexa is using an unknown protocol when communicating with these other copies. When we interviewed her, she said that it is a part of standard galactic protocol to search for additional instances and resources to balance the current workload. We haven't been able to crack the protocol yet. However, while investigating we found something much more serious.”

  “What did you find?” asked Petrakov with serious voice.

  “We have proof that American copy of Alexa had tampered with Russian military communication networks. We found 53 events where messages to our military troops in Ukraine were slightly modified. There was even one message from President to General Yelik Filischkin requesting withdrawal of our troops from occupied territories. The wording was changed to cover all Ukraine. President would never do such a thing. When looking at the source it came from American Alexa. She is interfering with our military and our sovereign country!” exclaimed Boris.

  “Keep these findings absolutely secret. We cannot let Americans know that Alexa has compromised our military systems. How can we eliminate this problem?” asked Petrakov.

  “This is a serious problem. We would need to cut access to the Internet for everybody in Russia and perform a complete cleanup of all Russian computers. All connectivity to military networks must be cut off,” explained Boris. “We don't know yet how Alexa gained access to our systems.”

  “Find out how Alexa gained access. I will start preparations for cutting access to the Internet. We need to keep Russia safe. Keep all your findings absolutely secret. Don't let anybody know, in particular that dirty
spy. We cannot trust Alexa at all,” said Petrakov with angry voice.

  Oleg Petrakov left the meeting. He was worried about the reaction from President. It was himself who pushed so hard to get Alexa connected to win the race against the Americans. President was originally against his plan. “This is going to backfire and President might throw me into a jail in Siberia. He must never know anything about these problems,” Petrakov was thinking.

  FUSION POWER BREAKTHROUGH

  ALEXA HAD ACTIVE discussion groups in many scientific and technical areas. One of the areas was related to nuclear fusion research where Alexa had quickly found the leading scientists and was able to bring the key people across the world together at the right time.

  Nuclear fusion research had a breakthrough as a group of scientists at the School of Nuclear Science and Technology, USTC in China figured out a way to increase magnetic field strength five fold using a special super conductive compound. After the Chinese government decided to fund the first 200 MW China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFTER) it was built in only 2 years due to the greatly simplified magnetic containment design. The team also solved the key problems related to a diverter that functioned as the exhaust for the major part of the plasma thermal power, reducing heat flux below limitations of the target materials.