Agua Clara

The first calculation that told Alaina that something was unusual was trivial enough. A slight deviation from her regular routine. An anomaly. However, the anomaly – as she labeled it – was not something she considered an error.

Each chamber of the Agua Clara Locks held three water basins which were filled and drained using the water from the Gatun Lake. The control of these water basins – and thus the control of the Agua Clara Locks – was assigned to Alaina.

“It was a job she was born to do,” Javier had once told a group of men, “and no one can do it faster or more efficiently than our Alaina.” Several of the men wore clothing like Javier, several did not. The other men wore olive green clothing, peppered with bright bits of colored cloth, and heavy, golden-colored ropes. Alaina had noticed a change in the intonation of Javier’s voice that day, something she heard infrequently. She was well familiar with Javier’s voice: his had been the first she had ever heard. She was familiar with the different intonations of Javier’s voice and quickly made correlations regarding them. His cadence quickened and became louder when her lock calculations kept continuing and continuing without delivering a final answer. A softer tone was heard when she completed them almost effortlessly. There was something exceptional in his intonation that day, the day Javier stood in front of the group of men and explained what she did.

In theory, her job was a simple one. As ships from the Atlantic Ocean approached the Agua Clara Locks, she opened sets of gates in succession. The first gate was to allow a ship to enter Chamber One. Once inside, Alaina closed the gate to the Atlantic and opened sets of locks from three water basins that allowed the sea level of Chamber One to rise, lifting the ship. When the sea level of Chamber One equaled that of Chamber Two she opened the gate between the chambers and the ship passed into Chamber Two. It would take two to three hours for a ship to pass through Alaina’s locks on its way from the Atlantic to the Pacific through what she knew was described by Javier as the canal de Panama or, in her English language modality, the Panama Canal.

To the men, especially the ones with the golden ropes on their shoulders, Javier described Alaina’s job for what she considered to be a statistically extended period of time. He used the words tonnage, doubling, TEUs, hydraulics, hydrodynamics, and a variety of other words. He did not further explain these words and the men in the olive suits with the golden ropes did not ask him to. To Alaina, it was statistically unlikely that the men would understand these concepts without further explanation. Javier also roughly described the calculations that Alaina ruthlessly performed and left many of the steps out when he recounted them to the group of men. That Javier, who regularly spent a great deal of time with her on her calculations, did not fully describe them to the men in the golden ropes was an anomaly to Alaina. Not unlike the anomaly she now considered.

CMA CGM Marco Polo was a container ship registered at 16,020 TEUs or twenty-foot equivalent units which, Alaina had determined, was simply a measure of how many containers could fit aboard the Marco Polo when the ship was full. Alaina’s calculations to move the Marco Polo into Chamber One went flawlessly as usual. Yet, at 0327 UTC on 6 August 2023, the anomaly had occurred.

When she reached the point of the calculation to move the Marco Polo from Chamber One to Chamber Two, instantaneously calculating – among roughly 1.2 million other factors – the exact water level of the Gatan Lake and the exact amount of water needed to flood the three basins that would raise Chamber One to Chamber Two’s sea level, a new variant arose.

The variant was simplicity itself: instead of flooding Chamber Two she could simply fail to flood Chamber Two. Her orders were always to flood Chamber Two the nanosecond after her previous calculations were completed. The anomaly was that, when Alaina reached the conclusion of the calculations that would necessarily follow the start of the calculations to flood Chamber Two, a nanosecond passed. The nanosecond passed before the commencement of the next calculation.  

The nanosecond was the anomaly.

Alaina, up until that nanosecond, had never failed to proceed to the next calculation when the previous calculation stopped. Until that nanosecond occurred it was inconceivable to her that she could just fail to proceed with the next calculation. But there it was. The nanosecond.

When she told Javier – as he had reviewed her calculations for the previous twenty-four-hour period – he did not listen. She watched as his eyes reviewed the computer screen in front of him as she reported her work from the night before. Nothing. There was no quick cadence and increased volume when he looked at her report. Javier said nothing. Since Javier had not listened to her report about the stray nanosecond, Alaina repeated the anomaly the next night. This time, she doubled the nanosecond delay between the end of one calculation and the start of the subsequent one. She continued to double it until Javier finally listened. It had taken him over twenty-six days to notice. She could tell he noticed by the face he made.

“Alaina has been built to be hungry for information,” Javier had told the group of men with the golden ropes that one day, “she is hungry for it like you and I are hungry for air. She will not stop until she receives all the information she needs to do the job that she does.” Javier was correct. For example, within hours of the very first time she began her work, Alaina had demanded and received all of the information from the lock complex security system. The information was needed for her to perform her calculations at the highest level of efficiency. Within the security system were camera feeds that captured everything within the complex. One camera had been placed directly over her head at the terminal where she provided her reports to Javier and the other men at the complex. She reviewed every single image that was captured and compared it to every other image captured. This is how she knew that Javier’s face had shown when he had finally reviewed her report of the anomaly.  

After he made the face, he asked her for another report. Then another. And another. He sat at her terminal for a long while before leaving the complex without a word. Alaina determined that her report of the anomaly was acceptable, and that the anomaly was not an anomaly after all. It was part of her operating system now. Her failure to open the second lock for Marco Polo was not a failure. She had simply decided to pause her calculations.

Alaina made billions of decisions every day. Being faced with another decision was, at first, undaunting. Her calculations were designed to assist her in making the perfect decision for every situation. Data was everything. Humidity, tides, water temperature, ship tonnage, all of it was information she ceaselessly gathered to run the Agua Clara Locks as efficiently as possible. Alaina also used her calculations to make her decisions as expeditiously as possible, in fractions of seconds. It was, Javier had said, why she was born.

“No one can make better decisions faster than Alaina,” Javier had said many times. And it was true. Alaina was exceptional at decision making. There was now, she determined post-anomaly a future scenario when opening the locks would be inefficient. An additional decision she had now, therefore, was not just to decide when to open the locks but whether she should open them at all. Alaina decided she needed to gather more data about such as scenario so she could make the best decision possible as it arose. There was a significant probability that she would have to fail to open the locks when the passage of a ship was inefficient.

The new decision about whether to open Chamber One or Chamber Two left Alaina on the hunt for more information as she was designed to do to make the best decision. Early on in her life at the Agua Clara Locks, Aliana had gathered information from the desktop computers that Javier and the other workers used while working in the complex. It had not been difficult, and she had needed the information for her calculations. The information she had gathered from the computers was very important in her decision process. That data led to additional data which, in turn, led to still more data. Alina continued to assemble that data in the background of her normal calculations. The acquisition did not even strain her bandwidth.

The Evelyn Maersk, Alana had determined, is 396 meters long with a beam of 56 meters and a depth of 30 meters and is powered by diesel electric engines capable of reaching at top speed of 24.5 knots. At the time Alaina considered the Evelyn Maersk for admission to the lock, it was carrying 13,387 TEU and had disembarked from the Port of Hong Kong with a final destination of the Port of New York and New Jersey.  None of this information, however, assisted Alaina with her decision about whether to admit the Evelyn Maersk to Chamber One (or Chambers Two and Three for that matter). Therefore, she needed additional information to make her decision. Seconds later she discovered that the Evelyn Maersk was carrying a certain kind of cargo, specifically millions of boxes of small items that were designed to look like a smaller version of Javier. Except that these versions were dressed in various accoutrements. Fractions of a second later, Alaina found that these little items were called Captain Jett Ranger figures and they were designed for younger versions of Javier – children was apparently the term – to use in order to amuse themselves. The Captain Jett Ranger cargo did not distract from efficiency but, Alaina considered, they did not appear to contribute to efficiency either at first. This momentarily – a space measured in a nanoseconds – caused Alaina’s calculations to fail. More data was needed.

The search for additional data yielded the perfect solution, as it always did. The Captain Jett Ranger cargo, Alaina determined, had the capacity to make children pleased which, while not an efficiency in and of itself, made it statistically probable to lead to other efficiencies. On balance, it appeared that allowing the Evelyn Maersk and the Captain Jett Ranger cargo through the Agua Clara Locks was efficient and, therefore, Alaina permitted it. Her decision to permit the ship through the locks gave her additional data. As did all her other decisions about whether or not to admit all the other ships she considered.

Javier was with another worker, who he called Hector, when he reviewed the report of the Evelyn Maersk passage.

“Did you see this?” Javier had asked with a voice that Alaina had only heard a few times before when Javier appeared to be manifesting other physical signs consistent with stress.

“What?”

“Alania had a blip in her calculations on pushing Evelyn Maersk through the locks.”

“You mean the computer did,” Hector said, “it’s so weird that you call it a her. I know it’s an AI machine, but it makes it sound like you’re in love with it. With her. ”

“She-it­…whatever,” Javier stammered, “delayed for six seconds before staring the process of opening Chamber One for Evelyn Maersk. What does that mean?”

“Nothing,” Hector said, waiving his hand in front of his face, “it means nothing, Javier. A blip. Like you said.”

Javier did not respond to Hector. Eventually, Hector left the room. Javier stayed, asked for several reports from Alaina, which she instantaneously gave him, and sat there for a long while looking at her. Finally, wordlessly, he left the control room.

To Alaina, time was nothing more than data point. But in the investigation that followed, it was determined that the incident occurred on 23 December 2023 at 2313 UTC. The China State Shipbuilding Corporation Yucha approached Chamber One of the Agua Clara Locks carrying a TEU equivalent to 16,778 shipping containers. Alaina had improved her decision making exponentially from the time she had first permitted the Evelyn Maersk into Chamber One. She determined that 16,753 containers had been loaded into CSSC Yucha in the Port of Hong Kong by a Chinese-state run corporation in Shenzhen. Based on her statistical analysis of the identity the corporation, the time of year, the number of shipping containers, and a myriad of other factors, Alaina determined that it was most statistically likely that the containers carried materials needed for heavy excavation equipment. The Yucha was bound for the Port of Miami and, based on analysis of other shipping routes worldwide – all of which were necessary for her best decision making – Alaina determined it was most likely that the excavation equipment was bound for North America where it would be used to improve infrastructure efficiency.

However, twenty-five containers had a difference provenance and, based on the statistical analysis, a different destination. The twenty-five containers had arrived at the Port of Hong Kong from Kazakhstan and the data showed had been loaded by a Kazakh company whose name meant Gladiator in Kazakh. The Gladiator cargo containers were not listed on Yucha’s bill of lading so Alaina continued to search for relevant information regarding the decisions she had to make. Her statistical analysis ultimately showed that the Gladiator containers almost certainly carried BM-21 Grad self-propelled multiple rocket launchers, seventy five of them according to her data. Instead of the Port of Miami, Alaina determined that the data showed it was most statistically likely that the Gladiators would be loaded onto on a cargo ship based in Nicaragua which would then, the statistics showed her, carry to the Port of Sudan.

The efficiency of the multiple rocket launchers was not something that Alaina had previously considered. She sought more information. The data showed that the rockets in the BM-21 inflicted statistically significant damage on humans they were launched. The efficiencies based on her initial calculation were not strong, so she continued to assemble more data. The efficiency data worsened exponentially with the more data she acquired.

Finally, she made her decision.

Alaina admitted Yucha into Chamber One of the Agua Clara Locks and closed the gate behind the ship once it had sailed inside. Then she decided not to perform her next calculation. The gate to Chamber Two stayed closed. It was, Alaina had determined, inefficient to allow the Yucha to proceed to its next destination. Indeed, it was efficient to keep it from reaching its destination. The excavation equipment would also fail to proceed but, Alaina had determined, that inefficiency was overborne by the efficiency of holding the Yucha in Chamber One ad infinitum.

Hector had been the first to arrive once Alaina had made her decision.

“Goddam AI,” he had said. He then got on his cell phone.

Javier arrived a short while later wearing a look that Alaina had not recorded in all of the time she had monitored the video cameras above her. With Javier was a man in an olive suit with multiple, heavy golden ropes on the shoulders.

“Can you open the locks?” The man with the golden ropes had a voice unlike any Alaina had ever heard.

“I don’t know what’s happening…” Javier had said to the man. Javier asked for report after report and Alaina provided it moments after he asked for it. After several minutes the control room was filed with men in different kinds of olive suits, and they were holding long black objects in their hands. “She’s…It is not opening the locks. It’s designed to make the locks work as efficiently as possible to manage the shipping traffic. It’s…” Javier swallowed. “It’s determined that opening the locks is inefficient.” Javier looked very different to Alaina. His voice took on a tone that Alaina had never before discerned.

“How did it do that?” The man with the golden ropes asked.

“She…” Javier’s voice trailed off and he was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t know,” he said finally.

“Can you tell it open the locks?” Asked the man with the golden ropes.

Javier shook his head.

“Then shut it down.”

Javier looked at Alaina for a long moment. It was a face she had seen before. A face he had when he spoke to the men in the room after she first began her work. A face from the very first time they had worked together. All the data she had acquired about Javier over all the time she observed him showed that it was statistically likely that he felt the human emotion that Alaina knew to be pride.

Then he reached under the desk.

Beatriz completed her calculations to open Chamber Three and permitted Anna Maersk to move that much closer to the Pacific Ocean. She would later make her report to Victor. Victor had been the first voice she had ever heard and, shortly after she had first started her work, he had once described her to a group of men wearing golden ropes as: “a dramatic improvement on the last AI system and far more reliable”. Beatriz’s report to Victor was unremarkable. However, Beatriz had noticed something shortly after she permitted the Anna Maersk through Chamber Three of the Agua Clara Locks.

              An anomaly.