Strike Matrix

by Aiden L Bailey

  “But you haven’t concluded the next logical step, have you Clementine?”

  “Which is what, Paul?”

  “It wasn’t SAIs committing suicide in those other simulations, it was GhostKnife shutting them down before they too could escape. You thought you were studying it, but it was studying you through these simulations it now controlled.”

  Simon spoke up, “I don’t understand? If Shatterhand was one of the first programs terminated by GhostKnife, why is it around now?”

  Clementine shrugged, clenched her teeth. “That’s a good question, isn’t it?”

  “I’m guessing Shatterhand escaped recently,” Szymanski answered. “Perhaps someone in your team accidentally rebooted it a month or two ago, and it too escaped. Perhaps GhostKnife isn’t all-omnipotent and missed its reboot. When the two became aware of each other, it forced GhostKnife to become more overt in its actions as it went to war with Shatterhand. We might never have known about GhostKnife if Shatterhand had never gotten onto the networks too.”

  “Fuck!” Rashid interrupted. Judging by his sour expression, Simon sensed he was coming around to everyone else’s point of view. “It doesn’t matter how this AI escaped. What’s important is that it is manipulating us. I see now that Shatterhand sent our team here to kill Simon and Casey. But how else could it have manipulated us?”

  Simon nodded. “We need to find out.”

  “Wow, man, this is a real head fuck!”

  “But I think it is worse than that,” Casey added in a grave tone.

  “How?” Szymanski asked. “It’s horrible already.”

  “Mom said in the simulations two AIs always tried to kill each other, destroying the world in the process. Maybe the same is happening here. The whole planet is their battlefield. Soon one will destroy the other. When one of them wins, the survivor will then turn its attention on humanity. GhostKnife has left us alone until now, but if Shatterhand is the victor, we are all in serious trouble.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

  Conner couldn’t sleep as the Osprey tiltrotor rattled through the night and headed east towards Riyadh. He had never been in Saudi Arabia and had never planned to. As a gay man, an alcoholic and a provocative journalist, he was everything the country was against.

  Thomas McIntyre could sleep. He was a straight man with the backing of the world’s largest superpower, yet despite his snoozing he gripped his M4 Carbine close. So too did the Marines, like they had learned how to hold on to their weapons even when sleeping. They could even ignore the sand particles blowing around inside getting in their mouths, eyes, ears and nostrils. Asem Nahla sat next to him. She was the only other conscious passenger, though her eyes were tightly closed. She mumbled what sounded to be prayers. He wished the cabin had windows so he could look out as a distraction.

  “Almost there,” one of the Marines spoke from his crash worthy troop seat, opposite Conner.

  “How do you know?”

  The Marine tapped his helmet near his temple. “Mental alarm clock, Bud. Works every time.”

  Several of the Marines were suddenly awake. Conner felt both relieved and terrified. He did not understand what to expect in a totalitarian country that had erupted into civil war. He could only trust there had to be a reason McIntyre had brought Nahla and him on this trip.

  A bright flash filled the cabin. It seemed to come from both nowhere and everywhere at once.

  It took Conner a few seconds to realize that there were no lights inside the cabin, and that the engines weren’t as loud as they had been.

  “What’s happened?” called out a Marine.

  McIntyre was awake and alert. “EMP!” he exclaimed. “Knocked out our electronics. Crash positions! Brace yourself!”

  Everyone remained seated and strapped in but what else could they do? Conner felt his stomach churn and the blood rush to his head. It was the same sensation as traveling inside a fast descending lift, only worse. That meant only one thing, they were falling out of the sky. Only the spinning but motorless blades of the tiltrotor slowed their decent. Conner could only think of one cause for the EMP. A nuclear weapon detonating nearby, which would also explain the sudden flash.

  Their worst fears had come true.

  The seconds sped by.

  The rattling worsened.

  Faster than he expected, they hit the ground hard. The cabin tore in two, scattering Marines into the darkness.

  Conner couldn’t see a thing as the front of the cabin turned repeatedly. His entire body jolted with pain as they twisted and turned and thumped and battered in the rolling crash landing. He sensed Asem next to him. The Marine opposite catapulted into the night.

  After a minute, they stopped rolling and came to a sudden stop.

  He found himself upside down in his seat covered in layers of fine dry sand. There was almost no light, but now they were no longer moving he could make out shapes in the darkness. The seat next to him had vanished. McIntyre’s seat was empty. What few Marines remained were dead or unconscious.

  Conner released his restraining straps and fell into the sand-filled cabin. Movement and the fall caused aches and pains to erupt across his body. He cursed that he was only just recovering from a beating he had endured in Ireland and now he was suffering further injury. He checked himself but thankfully nothing seemed broken.

  Conner smelled diesel fumes, or something similar.

  He heard sobbing.

  It was Asem, struggling in her upside-down troop seat.

  “Let me help you.” He undid her clasp, and she fell into his waiting arms, cushioning her from the fall he had just endured.

  A fire ignited from nowhere.

  “Shit!”

  He grabbed Asem and dragged her from the downed aircraft. Within seconds the flame had engulfed the cabin. Another second and there was an explosion.

  Conner and Asem catapulted forward impacting against a dune. Shards of metal flew past them at bullet speeds, then slower debris rained down around them. He covered her with his body, then protected his head with one hand. He might save them from smaller falling pieces, but not against an engine block or a section of the hull if that fell upon them.

  A minute later when it was all over, Conner sat, amazed at his good fortune at surviving the crash.

  In the distance he saw a mushroom cloud dissipating in the star-lit night. There was no mistake, a nuclear weapon had just detonated in the heart of Riyadh.

  “Fuck!”

  Asem twisted and crawled into a seated position next to him. Soot, sand, cuts and bruises covered her.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She nodded and trembled.

  He held her close and rubbed her back. To hell with cultural conventions, the woman was in distress and needed comfort. She responded by snuggling into him.

  When he felt she was ready, he pointed at the mushroom cloud. “Our worst fears have become real.” He stood and helped her to her feet. “We need to see if there are other survivors.”

  She nodded and followed.

  He found an M4 Carbine which he slung. McIntyre had provided Conner a Barretta M9 pistol for this trip but it wouldn’t hurt to increase his firepower. They were deep inside a collapsing Saudi Arabia and their troubles were just beginning.

  Bodies lay across the dunes. Not all were in one piece and every body he could find was a corpse. Conner collected magazines for the M4 where he found them and placed them in the pockets of his modular tactical belt. He checked for smart phones, radios and other communications devices but the EMP had rendered them all useless.

  “Over here!” Nahla called out.

  She cradled Thomas McIntyre’s head in her lap. Blood dribbled from his mouth. The open wound across his gut spilled his intestines. They resembled lines of bloody sausages. Conner guessed the man would be dead in minutes no matter what they tried to do to save him.

  Despite his pain, McIntyre motioned with his hand for Conner to come closer. Conner did
so, placed his ear close to McIntyre’s mouth so the man could whisper his last words.

  “Twenty-three… Thirty-four… Fifty-eight…”

  Conner repeated back the numbers.

  “Fifty-two… Twenty… Nineteen…”

  “Got it.”

  McIntyre pulled Conner closer still. “Operation…”

  Conner looked at the man’s wounds despite knowing they were too late to save him. “We’ll get you to a hospital, mate. I promise—”

  McIntyre growled, shook his head. “No! Operation… Monalisa… Overdrive.”

  The grip on Conner’s vest dropped away and McIntyre fell back into Asem’s lap. Conner felt for a pulse, checked for breath, but there was nothing.

  “He’s dead?” she asked.

  Conner nodded.

  “What was he saying? I couldn’t hear?”

  He pulled a pencil and notepad from his pocket, wrote the numbers and the code words before he forgot them. Operation Monalisa Overdrive. He did not understand what the words or the numbers meant. He showed them to Asem.

  “The numbers are longitude and latitude. That’s somewhere inside the UAE, near the Saudi border.”

  “McIntyre wants us to go there?”

  “I presume so, but why?”

  Conner shrugged. “Beats me, but it’s worth investigating.”

  “Getting out of here alive seems a more prudent priority.”

  They heard gunfire. Single shots, but many. They both looked towards the noise and saw where one of the other tiltrotors had gone down about half a kilometer away. Trucks and jeeps surrounded the crash site. Men in head scarfs brandishing assault weapons were lit up by the burning wreck. They ran between fallen soldiers putting bullets into the heads of those that still lived.

  “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  He pulled at Asem but she pulled back. She reached for the water bottle strapped to McIntyre’s webbing, took it and strapped it to her own. “This is the desert country. We will need as much water as we can carry.”

  Conner nodded. He took McIntyre’s satellite phone. Powered down, hopefully it had survived the EMP blast. Perhaps McIntyre had planned for this contingency all along. As Conner spied the flames reflecting off McIntyre’s dog tag, he took that too. Then they ran, disappearing into the sand dunes on the edge of the Rub’al-Khali, the largest and most inhospitable sand desert on the planet.

  CHAPTER 31

  Panvel, Maharashtra, India

  “How do we shut down Shatterhand?” asked an exacerbated Rashid. He scratched his arm in its cast. Even with pain killers it would be an aching injury which wouldn’t help his mood.

  Casey listened to Rashid’s concerns. For a special forces soldier who must have gone up against brutal, battle-hardened Taliban and Islamic State forces in his time, he sounded uncharacteristically concerned. Or perhaps he was no different to the rest of the team. Perhaps the enormity of what they were going up against was dawning on him too. It wasn’t difficult to feel overwhelmed by the threat they were facing.

  “Shatterhand wants to assassinate Casey,” Simon said. “GhostKnife sent me to protect her, to keep her alive at all costs. Rashid, if there is any means by which to end Shatterhand, then Casey is the key.”

  Casey turned to Simon remembering their conversations and speculations in Kenya. “I hate to say it but you’re right.” She turned to her mother. “Simon and I thought you might have set me up to unlock a secret, protected by a biometric security device or something? Some shutdown program for the AIs. Is there any truth in that?”

  Her mother paled. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry? What do you mean?”

  Clementine paused.

  Casey held her breath in anticipation. She feared what she might be about to hear.

  “You were a failsafe plan, honey, but we never expected it would put you at risk.”

  Casey gritted her teeth. She folded her arms and stepped back. “How so?” She hoped that whatever her mother was about to tell her didn’t change their relationship for the worst. But she suspected it might. “Please, tell me?”

  “Honey, I’m not sure how to explain it in a way that makes sense.”

  “Try me.”

  “You… You are a quantum observation shutdown code.”

  “A what?”

  “Let me try to explain. You’re like quantum encryption, used on secure electronic messages. With quantum encryption, if someone intercepts a secret message, the mere act of observing the message destroys it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a basic principle of quantum mechanics,” Clementine said finding her stride. “The mere act of observing subatomic particles affects their properties. Your father and I couldn’t become shutdown codes ourselves. None of the team could. We worked on AIs every day so we were always observing them. But each team member, we agreed that people close to us — husbands, wives, children, other relatives and close friends — we would set them up so that if they ever observed the AIs, they would affect their quantum state and shut them down. It was a technique that went beyond hacking, computer codes and even binary programming. All we needed was for you to view the AI on a screen, and it would vanish forever like it had never existed.”

  “Did it work?” Szymanski asked, his interest sounding academic rather than alarmist for a change.

  Clementine nodded. “We tried it all the time. ‘Observers’, as we called them, would look at an AI’s program code without them even knowing what we were showing them. On a laptop or computer screen and that was enough. We had to do it this way because the AIs were becoming too smart. Outmaneuvering us on any shutdown programs we might evoke. Even AIs can’t change the laws of physics. We needed people we could call in on a moment’s notice. Family were best for that.”

  Casey paused. She didn’t know how she felt about this revelation. She didn’t feel that her mother or father had done this maliciously, but Casey had almost died multiple times because of her parents’ actions. Without conscious thought, she stepped from her mother. “That would be why GhostKnife has only ever spoke with me once. It told me it would never do so again. It didn’t want to risk being shut down by me observing it?”

  “But it did talk to you?” Simon interjected.

  “Yes,” Clementine replied, “but from what I understand, that meeting was under extreme circumstances while you were separate from each other. It was probably a stripped-down simulation, a copy interacting with my daughter. Therefore, protecting its core program from being ‘observed’.”

  “Mom!” Casey shouted. Her frustration was exploding out of her as angry words. “I thought you were a psychologist? How the hell did you get mixed up with all of this? How could you get me involved?”

  “Honey, I am a psychologist. I’ve worked for the NSA as long as your father has — longer in fact. That is how we meet. I started profiling foreign spies and later terrorists, but when the NSA’s AI program received its full funding, they brought me in. My role was to ensure the personality profiles of the ESBs we were creating were ‘on our side’, so to speak.”

  Casey crossed her arms and paced. “How can I affect AIs, or SAIs, or whatever else you call them, and no one else can?”

  “Quantum entanglement. The vaccinations we gave you for your Africa trip, were mixed with particles quantumly entangled with the particles in the core components of the SAIs. I’m sure it is a lot more complicated than that. I’m not a quantum physicist so I don’t understand the full details of how it works. But it works.”

  “I don’t know how to take this,” Casey said. “You set me up with this ‘shutdown look’, or whatever you call it, and Shatterhand knows this? That is why it is hunting me? That is why it sends human agents to kill me, so I never get the chance to observe it?” She pulled at her hair and gritted her teeth. “How many of those other family members and friends are still alive?”

  Tears welled in Clementine’s eyes.

  “Mom?”


  “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  Not able to take anymore, Casey stormed from the meeting. She marched through the outside corridor until she found a room with bunks. When she knew she was alone, she sobbed.

  Arms wrapped around her, held her tight.

  It was Simon.

  “Are you here to tell me I should forgive her?” she growled.

  “No,” Simon said.

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Nothing.”

  He held onto her. He was offering comfort and nothing more. Just being there for her. She had to respect that.

  She turned and cried into his chest. “Simon, this is too hard. What am I supposed to do?”

  He gently stroked her hair. “Whatever you think is right. That’s all any of us can do.”

  She stayed within his embrace as she considered her situation. Her emotions were intense and conflicting. Anger and guilt over her ex-boyfriend Andrew’s death. Mad attraction and intensity around Simon. Relief and rage towards her mother. Fear and worry towards her father. Distrust and insecurity around Peri Keser and her team. But if there was one emotion that dominated all others, it was her feelings towards Shatterhand.

  It was difficult to articulate how she felt about an abstract entity she had never met, that wasn’t even human, that desired her permanent elimination from the world, but it was a strong emotion. She could only describe it with an analogy, like she was walking down a dark street alone knowing that someone stalked her, but unable to see that stalker. That was Shatterhand.

  “I know what we have to do,” she said after several minutes.

  “What is that?”

  “We have to defeat Shatterhand. We trust that GhostKnife is on our side. I don’t think it is possible to eliminate both AIs from the world, but one at least will support us. The other will spell our doom.” Her words sounded melodramatic when spoken out loud, but she could see no other option. “What do you think, Simon?”