Cyberdrome

by Joseph Rhea

  A sudden blast of yellow light on his right side startled him. He glanced over and saw the glowing remains of a deleted Tracer not far away. Sentinels began to report in; thirteen deleted, six more damaged, electro-magnetic pulsars were having no affect on the intruder. Javid issued new instructions. “Break formation. Random attack pattern Alpha-Seven. Accept.”

  A beam passed to the right of his ship as chaos flared across his command screen. Four more deleted, another three damaged. He turned in time to see two Tracers disintegrate in the distance. “Elsala, random patterns, get moving.”

  An energy beam grazed his Tracer’s outer shield and half of his dashboard went dark.

  He looked down and saw that his weapons and long-range communications were out. He was now weaponless and cut off from the rest of his unit.

  He launched another recon probe toward the Intruder. At least that system still worked. A moment later, the probe transmitted an image of the battle from high above the ground. His nit was putting up a valiant fight, attacking the massive routine from all sides, but they were losing. Multiple yellow pulsar beams were erupting simultaneously from the Intruder’s lower section, deleting several Tracers at once.

  “What is this thing?” he said aloud. How was it able to expend so much energy? How could he stop it? Then he remembered that all weapons appeared to be located on the intruder’s lower section, therefore they must logically protect a vulnerable location. The intruder’s underside would be its weakest point.

  He rapidly sorted through his experience database and found a possible counter measure. Probability of success was exactly fifty percent, but ternary logic, programmed in during his blue upgrade, allowed him to avoid an infinite loop and make the decision. Looking out his ship’s view ports, he saw only one other Sentinel in the area.

  “Elsala, can you hear me?”

  “I hear you, Javid. Why are you on short-range?”

  “Most of my systems are damaged, but I have a plan to delete this intruder.” He paused before continuing, wishing he could see Elsala in his ship-to-ship, but that was out as well. “You must drop an Electro-Static Discharge near the intruder while there is still time. I will distract it while you place the weapon.” He paused again. Why was the next instruction so difficult to give? “You must be within three grid units of the intruder for the ESD to work, Elsala. Do you accept?”

  “I understand, Javid. I will not let you down,” she responded, full of naïve confidence.

  Another beam barely missed Elsala’s ship. He watched her turn and head toward the distant intruder. He entered the command to reconfigure his Tracer into Recon Mode, which automatically transferred all of his remaining power to his main thrusters. It was a mode normally used only for long range scouting missions, but since shields were not stopping the intruder’s weapons, perhaps speed would give him the edge he needed to dodge them.

  He passed Elsala’s Tracer and headed at an oblique angle toward the intruder in an attempt to draw its fire. It worked. Beams of energy flashed by him on all sides. He constantly adjusted his speed and direction to keep the intruder from getting a lock on his ship.

  As he continued to dodge the weapons fire, it suddenly occurred to him why the intruder seemed so powerful; it was simple energy allocation. Just as he was able to transfer all of his power to his thrusters, the intruder must have transferred all of its power to its weapon systems.

  This is not logical, he thought. Such a waste of resources would eventually cripple the intruder. Why was it not reserving any power to complete its mission? Unless this was the intruder’s mission, just getting inside. If it was simply a container, and had already deposited its cargo, the intruder itself would be expendable.

  “Elsala,” he yelled. He knew that his long-range communications were out, but he had to try. He angled his ship on a direct course to the intruder. He could not see her, but he knew that Elsala would be getting close now. Very close.

  The horizon in front of him erupted in a white-hot explosion. His eyes went dark for a moment to protect them from the visual blast. When they recovered, he boosted his ship’s scanner to maximum. It showed nothing in the blast center but destroyed memory, and a shock wave spreading in all directions. Elsala could not have survived.

  His eyesight became foggy. When he reached up to clear his eyes, he felt a strange wetness. Was he damaged? He looked at his hand and found it covered with a clear liquid. Tears? Impossible.

  Although born in one of the simulations, his subsequent reformatting had removed all emotional routines from his programming. He also gained knowledge of his true digital nature. He was a Sentinel, he reminded himself. His only thoughts should be to protect and improve the system.

  He looked up and saw the shock wave coming toward him. Instead of losing momentum, as it should, the wave appeared to be increasing speed as it expanded outward. In addition, the energy wall appeared to be gaining strength as it moved—most likely bleeding energy directly from the Core itself. He did a quick calculation and realized that if it continued in this manner, it would overpower all of Cyberdrome’s defenses, including the remainder of the Sentinel forces. There was no way to warn them and absolutely no way to save them.

  As the wall swiftly approached him, he knew that he had one last duty to perform. He powered down his main drive and let his Tracer drop to the ground. He transferred all of his ship’s remaining power into the data pulse-beacon, and transmitted his visual logs and all scanner readings to Cyberdrome’s Supervisor Program.

  When the transmission finished, he calculated that there was only enough time for one final pulse. As the wall of destruction rushed toward him, he sent out a single, three-word message, to anyone who might hear. “We have failed.”

  o o o

  The Control Room seemed large and empty as Maya stood with the others, waiting to hear from Ceejer. The silence was unnerving.

  “Maya, I didn’t see you come in,” Rebecca said, her voice breaking the trance. A collective sigh rose from the people in the room as they resumed their work. “Do you know where Dr. Grey is?” she asked. “He’s not responding to any of my pages.”

  “He’s...” Maya started to say but then remembered what Angela had told her—that Mathew wasn’t currently interfaced. If that was the case, then who spoke to her inside her simulation?

  “He’s where?” Rebecca asked.

  Without answering, Maya walked over to one of the main access terminals beneath the tower and sat down.

  “Maya? What are you doing?”

  “There’s only one way he could’ve done it,” she said, as she logged into the security feed for the construction level. After toggling through several darkened rooms, she found one with the lights on. There, in the back, the bio-display over one interface chamber glowed brightly.

  “Maya!” Rebecca yelled.

  Maya looked up. “Sorry.” She pointed to her display. “He’s in there—inside one of the new interface chambers.”

  Rebecca stared at the screen blankly. “I thought those weren’t hooked up yet.”

  “I guess he completed the wiring for that room all by himself.”

  Rebecca shook her head then looked around the room. “Can anything else go wrong today?”

  “Just received a message from the Sentinels, ma’am,” the head cryptologist, Freddie, yelled from across the room. He was a skinny guy, younger than Maya, but almost a foot taller.

  Rebecca spun around. “It has been less than a minute since the Sentinels were launched,” she said. “Please tell me this is a good thing.”

  “The intruder appears to be a Cyberphage,” Freddie said as he approached her.

  “A phage?” Maya asked. “Do you mean like a bacteriophage?”

  “In the software world we call it a Cyberphage,” Freddie said. “It’s a program that has the ability to transport other types of programs past a network firewall and insert them into a system. Until today, no one had been able to create a working version.”

&
nbsp; “Someone sent this thing into Cyberdrome to transport what, exactly?” Rebecca asked him.

  “We’re not sure yet,” Freddie said. “The Sentinels stopped transmitting, so we only have a partial data set.”

  Maya started to say something when all of the displays in the room suddenly went dark, and Ceejer’s voice came over the overhead speaker.

  “I am the Cyberdrome Jurisdictional Enforcement Routine. I am now in full control of Cyberdrome, which is now off limits to all human personnel. All human minds currently interfaced to Cyberdrome are now hostages. Any attempt to disconnect the hostages will result in their immediate termination. Any attempt to shut down Cyberdrome, or interfere with any of its functions, will also result in their termination. This message will be repeated.”

  “Cut that thing off,” Rebecca yelled. Ceejer’s voice stopped, but the message continued on all of the display screens in the room. “What the hell just happened to Ceejer?”

  “I’m guessing a retrovirus of some sort,” Freddie said. “The Cyberphage must have brought something in that altered Ceejer’s programming.”

  “I can’t work with guesses,” she said, “I need hard facts. What about the Sentinels?”

  “We’re getting no response from any of the Sentinels,” he replied. “Looks like whatever infected Ceejer took them out as well.”

  Rebecca took a slow, deep breath and then said, “All right, get me Benness.”

  Dr. Benness answered the page a few seconds later. “Ceejer’s message is playing down here as well,” she said.

  “Are you ready to begin the disconnection?” Rebecca asked.

  “Not an option,” Benness said. “The neuroprobes are no longer responding to our commands, and we can’t disconnect anyone until they are out. It would cause—”

  “I understand the consequences, Doctor,” Rebecca interrupted. She took another deep breath, and walked quietly over to where Freddie stood and put a firm hand on his thin shoulder. “I want to know who’s responsible for this,” she said.

  “We are just now decrypting a new message,” he said, apparently looking at something on his contact displays. “One of the Sentinels sent a detailed scan of the Cyberphage right before we lost contact. It looks like it might’ve been a test program because there’s an author’s mark still hardwired into the code—not hidden at all.” He looked back down at Rebecca. “The intruder was created by someone named Alek Grey.”

  Maya stood in shocked silence as she heard Alek’s name. A moment later, she heard Rebecca making a call to security. Her words seemed distant.

  “I want Alek Grey found and brought in, forcibly if necessary. Yes, he’s Mathew Grey’s son. Don’t involve the police. Send Mr. Cloudhopper.”

  Maya stared blankly at the room, which suddenly felt small and closing in on her. Oh Alek, what have you done?

  THREE

  Alek sat alone in the empty living room of his sixth floor apartment, straining hard to lift the dumbbells in his hands. The Intelliweights were deceptively small, but with the internal gyroscopes resisting his every move, they gave him a great workout.

  Fifty more reps, he said to himself, followed by a quick bite to eat, and then he would get to work designing a new Cyberphage program. It had already been nearly three days since the theft of the original, and none of his software agents had turned up any signs of it. The program was long gone, he realized, and for that, he felt relieved.

  Sending his Cyberphage into the World Data Bank was supposed to have been a simple test run, a “proof of concept” to see if his program could break into the world’s most secure system. Of course, just doing that would not have been good enough—not for the “Poet among Plumbers” and certainly not for a “Doyen.” So, he had decided to up the stakes by secretly adding a somewhat dangerous program called a Panspermia bomb to the cargo hold of the Cyberphage. It would all have been perfectly safe, of course. Perfectly safe—until someone stole it right from under his nose.

  As he mentally punched himself for the hundredth time since the incident in the coffee shop, he noticed that the wall TV in front of him was showing what looked like a demonstration outside one of the roadblocks on the border between Arizona and Utah. Since watching TV was better than thinking about the loss of his program, he turned up the sound.

  “This is Macy Wallace, Channel 911 News. I’m here with Jasper Holmes, founder of the Anti-Technology Coalition, or ATC.”

  Holmes, a well-dressed, middle-aged man with a pencil-thin moustache and thinning black hair, put on a big toothy smile when he saw the camera pointed toward him. “The state of Utah is dead,” he said in a thick New England accent. “We all know it. The Center for Disease Control has been telling us all year that they are handling the situation and not to worry, but we know they are lying. I say it’s just another example of the dangers we all face each and every day from uncontrolled, Government-funded, technology.”

  Macy Wallace’s off-screen voice chirped in. “The ATC has been warning of a coming technological doomsday for several years now. Is the fact that the plague was originally spread by tiny robots—built using nanotechnology—your proof?”

  Holmes’ 3D face leaned in toward Alek. “This is only the beginning, my dear. Over 40 years ago, futurists predicted that nanotechnology and artificial intelligence would someday begin to grow exponentially, making it physically impossible for humans to predict the future. Some called this event a ‘Technological Singularity.’ Artificial intelligence emerged several years earlier than expected, but to this day has given humanity nothing of importance. No great ideas, no cures for our world’s problems, nothing.”

  “And you think nanotechnology is taking us down this same path?” Wallace asked.

  Holmes shrugged. “Nanotechnology is nothing but a tool—a step in the ladder of our own destruction, if you will. I say that by the end of this very year, humanity will face an Armageddon of its own design.”

  “If you say that it’s not nanotechnology, what do you believe will destroy us?” Wallace asked.

  Holmes put on his signature grimace and wagged a thick finger at the camera. “Our destruction will come in the form of a savior—the answer to our current predicament. At first, we will rejoice in our achievement. However, in the end, only the Singularity will survive.”

  “You’re a singular idiot,” Alek said as he muted the sound. A bell went off in the adjacent kitchen, signaling the arrival of his dinner. He powered down the dumbbells and removed the electrode pads from his legs. Perhaps it was only vanity, but he was glad that to be able to keep his legs strong and healthy, even though he knew he would never use them again.

  When the bell signaled again, he rolled over to the kitchen counter and opened the oval door of the Tube. A slight hiss of air escaping along the inner seal told him that the repairwoman had not fixed the leak that morning. He removed one of the pie-shaped cartons from the half-meter-wide cylinder, then smelled pizza and realized that it was probably coming from the next cylinder down. He was tempted to pry the food compartment up, but then remembered that was how he had caused the air leak in the first place. A moment later, he heard a swooshing sound as the other cylinder made a U-turn and took another route to its destination.

  As he sat at the counter eating his Kung Pao chicken right out of the box, an alarm went off. He sat there confused for a moment, but then spun around in his chair, spilling rice and brown sauce all over the floor. A switch on his powerchair activated the room’s user interface and two blue globes appeared before him. He placed his hands inside each globe and with a quick series of hand gestures, called up his wrap-around computer display.

  He tuned into the building’s security cameras, and saw several men in dark clothing running up the building’s emergency stairwell. Another window showed the parking garage, where two dark blue vans sat blocking the underground exit.

  “Shit,” he yelled as he switched the floating display to show his computer files. As he paged through the overlapping graphs
and data logs, he realized that it had been several days since he had backed up his system. A sound at his front door made him realize that his time had run out. “Activate Swarm,” he called out. “All data files and source code. Maximum dispersion.”

  As the computer followed his orders, tearing each of his programs into small chunks and distributing them randomly around his internal memory drives, his mind began to reel. As a Plumber, he had made a number of enemies over the past couple of years—like the guys who were using data leaks in the stock exchange’s global database to make themselves rich, for example. They were still in prison, as far as he knew, but they could have friends—friends who might try to track down and kill the guy who helped put them away. That’s why he lived in a quiet neighborhood outside of Seattle and kept his home address out of every known database. Who had finally discovered his location and had the guts to go after him in broad daylight?

  “You were a difficult man to locate, Mr. Grey,” a deep, male voice said from the room speakers. Alek switched one of the display screens to show the view outside his front door. A figure hidden in shadows stood near the camera.

  “My computer has already called the police,” Alek lied. “I suggest you leave right now.”

  “I may not be a Plumber,” the voice said, “but I was smart enough to block all transmissions to and from your apartment before entering.”

  Entering? Alek felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He pivoted his chair around to see a man standing in the middle of his kitchen. “What the hell?” He glanced down at the camera view, but the figure was gone. He looked back up to the man. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, trying not to sound as nervous as he really was.

  The man pulled out a glowing identification card and showed it to Alek. “Roy Cloudhopper,” he said. “Chief of Cyberdrome Operational Security.”