by Mike Kraus
Commander Alexeyev smiles as the officer springs forward, retrieving a chart to show their position. The crew of the Arkhangelsk is new and inexperienced, fresh out of the academy. Their eagerness to follow protocol is but one of the many irritations Alexeyev has had to put up with for the last two weeks, but he still enjoys watching them jump at his every word.
“We’re approaching the Beringov proliv, sir, just three kilometers out. We’ll pass through the strait on the American side, near the coastline, then proceed down as ordered, sir.”
The Commander sips on his coffee, the wetness of his pants slowly disappearing in the heat of the control room. He contemplates the events of the last few weeks that brought him here, on a vessel staffed with a skeleton crew, sailing in foreign waters in a craft that is decades out of date. A training exercise is what they called it, but Alexeyev suspects that there is something more. His orders were given to him just an hour before they left port. Proceed through the Bering Strait, crossing over into American waters. Ride the coast of the USA down to the lowest point of California, staying no farther than five miles offshore.
Taking such risks in an ancient craft like the Arkhangelsk was suicide, but orders were orders. Still, the Commander had a few tricks he could pull out from his years of experience. Cutting the engine speed to its slowest would delay them, but it would also keep them silent as they passed through the ocean. After crossing the Bering Strait, he would keep the sub just a few meters from the ocean floor, taking advantage of their slow speed to ensure they would not hit the bottom or be easily detected. If all went well, he would signal command once he reached international waters past California and could return to port.
“It’s a training exercise all right, a training exercise to see how quickly the Americans can blow us out of the water.” Alexeyev looks up from sipping his coffee. His second-in-command does not respond to his grumblings, giving the Commander no small measure of disappointment. “Still, though, with our complement of missiles on board, if the Americans do attack, we can certainly defend ourselves.”
This comment elicits a noticeable reaction from the officer, who flinches, nearly turning to face the Commander. In his mind, Alexeyev begs the officer to break from his duties, to turn and ask what the Commander is talking about. When the officer does not respond further, Alexeyev sits back in his seat, turning his attention to his duties, still disappointed at the lack of entertainment from his crew.
Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims
3:26 PM, April 5, 2038
In the silence that followed David’s revelations, Nancy was the first to speak up. Confused by why they were spending so much time on the topic of nuclear weapons and EMP generators, she tried to get an answer from David.
“David, this is Nancy Sims. For the three of us here who aren’t as connected to this situation as you and Rachel, could you please tell us why all of this is so critical and how we can use it to stop the swarms?”
David chuckled again. “Rachel, did you forget to tell them how the swarms survived the EMPs that came with the bombs in the first place?”
Rachel’s face reddened as she replied. “Well, nobody asked, so I guess I just assumed they knew or didn’t care.” Turning to look at Marcus, then at Leonard and Nancy in the vehicle next to her, she continued speaking into the microphone so that everyone could hear her.
“You’ve all seen the effects that the EMPs from the nukes caused. Cars stopped working, the power grid was obliterated and practically every electronic device was rendered useless. These swarms, in spite of their appetites for radiation, are just as electronic as anything else. Only properly shielded electronics could have survived. The swarms knew this, so when the EMPs were going off across the globe, they most likely just hid below the surface. Bertha’s a rare exception in the case of electromagnetic pulses. The EMPs from the nukes wouldn’t have affected the swarms if they were deep underground, which is easy for them to do since they’re so small.”
Picking up from where Rachel stopped, David continued. “And that’s also the source of their greatest weakness. Now that their AI assumes that they’re relatively safe, I guarantee you that the majority – if not all – of the swarms are above ground now. In fact, I know they are. I have satellite imagery that shows something being built, down in the deep south. I can’t tell what it is since the satellites are having trouble doing up-close imagery still, but it’s something new and it’s massive.”
Recalling the images on the LV400 data stick, Rachel put the pieces together in a flash. “That giant structure, near the river, right? Is that what you mean?”
“You found the transmission! Thank God! I wasn’t sure if that actually went through or not. And yes, that’s exactly what I mean. I have zero evidence for this, so I’m shooting in the dark, but I guess that’s all we can do for now. I think that the structure in that image is a nexus that the nanobots are constructing.”
“A nexus?” Leonard came through on the radio again, leaning forward to look at Rachel in the APC. “What kind of nexus are you talking about?”
“What he means,” Rachel said, in a grim tone, “is a central hive for the nanobots. A home for them, someplace where they can be assured of safety and where they can continue to grow in number, maturing and evolving their intelligence. The intelligence is spread out over the swarm, but on the whole, it was designed to view itself as a single entity with multiple parts.”
“Rachel’s correct. And if this is a new home they’re building for themselves, they picked the perfect location. It’s surrounded on three sides by a river, the Gulf of Mexico is nearby and it’s out on an open piece of land. It’s the perfect location for a massive structure to contain a giant computer. And, as I was saying, it’s also the source of their greatest weakness. As the nanobots finish scouring the earth of radioactive contamination, they’ll begin to return to their nexus in greater numbers. My prediction is that – sometime soon – the majority of them will be present there, all in one single location. And that’s where we have to strike.”
Following along with David’s logic, Rachel took over the explanation, growing excited as she realized the implications of what he was saying. “If you’re right, and they do end up congregating there, they may try to scale up the AI so that it requires more than ten thousand units for a critical mass. This would give them an incredible computing boost but it would also mean that if we could destroy their nexus, we could destroy them once and for all.”
“Yes. If we can do this, if the five of us can do this, then we stand a very good chance of ending this thing.” David’s voice was hopeful, though Rachel detected an undercurrent of something else swirling at the edges of his smile.
“David, this all sounds great, but what aren’t you telling me?”
Pausing for a moment, David sighed to himself. He had nearly gotten away with it, but Rachel knew him too long and too well to not pick up on the thoughts that were hanging in the back of his mind.
“I… there’s no easy way to say it. The truth is, I don’t know if we can do this. I don’t think that the nanobots just have the AI that you know about, Rachel.”
Rachel’s heart skipped a beat and her stomach felt as though she was on a roller coaster as she listened to David’s next words.
“Rachel, I think they did the operation. I think they did a human copy and integrated it into the AI we were developing.”
Rachel’s lips quivered in anger and her words were barely audible as she whispered a simple reply. “Who?”
Rachel already knew the answer to the question when she asked it, and David’s long silence merely confirmed that she was right. When he finally spoke, the words had already hit home, driving an imaginary knife into her stomach and twisting it back and forth.
“Mr. Doe.”
Bering Strait
March 26, 2038
As the Arkhangelsk passes noiselessly through the Bering Strait, Alexeyev finishes the last of his second cup o
f coffee. His pants have dried now, though they are still stained from the spill. He sighs and begins to get up from his chair when a deep rumble passes through the sub, rattling his coffee cup on its saucer and nearly knocking him off balance.
Red alarm lights begin to flash from consoles in the control room seconds later, and Alexeyev rushes to his second-in-command’s side to see what the problem is.
“Report!” The potential for a crisis snaps Alexeyev back into action, dragging him out of his tired shell and pushing him decades back into the past, to when he was a young commander in the fleet. The officer doesn’t look at the Commander as he responds, reading data from a computer screen next to one of the crewmen at a station.
“Massive underwater vibrations, possibly from explosions. Multiple ones. They’re still going on. We’re picking these up from all directions, sir.”
The vibrations to the Arkhangelsk continue unabated, growing in intensity as the crew struggles to remain upright. Only halfway through the strait, the submarine is in a dangerous position, with the ocean floor reaching to only a hundred and sixty feet at its lowest depth.
“All engines ahead, full!” Commander Alexeyev bellows the order, his second-in-command repeats it and one of the crew members on the bridge calls back in confirmation. The Arkhangelsk lurches forward, plowing through the frigid waters in an effort to get out of the strait before any damage can be done. The vibrations from the water continue even after the sub passes through the strait, and the Commander orders the sub to come to a stop once they’ve reached a safe depth.
“Sonar, get me a reading on the thickness of the ice above us.”
“Just ten or twelve centimeters, sir!”
Tired of being in the dark about the intense vibrations, Alexeyava sits in his chair and growls out the next command.
“Break through the ice and get us to the surface.”
“Sir!” The second-in-command turns to face the Commander. “That would reveal our position to the Americans!”
Commander Alexeyev glares at the second-in-command, his jovial and carefree attitude gone in the wake of this new threat to his sub and his crew. “You have your orders.”
“Yes sir!” A flurry of commands follow from the officer, and the submarine begins to slowly rise as water is pumped out of the ballast tanks. Gaining speed, a final check is made to ensure that all equipment on the conning tower has been retracted.
“Brace for impact!” The order is bellowed through the ship’s communications system. Just a moment later, a thunderous boom is heard and felt through the sub and a great cracking of ice emanates from above. A few seconds later, all is quiet and the Commander stands up from his chair.
“Attention all hands. We have surfaced off the coast of America under emergency conditions. We are under strict radio silence. Monitor all transmissions, activate passive radar scanning and find out what has happened.”
Leonard McComb | Rachel Walsh | Marcus Warden | Nancy Sims
3:38 PM, April 5, 2038
“How the hell could you let this happen, David?” Rachel was furious, screaming into the radio at the top of her lungs. Though the portholes on the APCs were only a few inches across, Rachel’s voice echoed far into the distance, meshing with the sound of her hand beating furiously on the dashboard of the vehicle.
“You knew about this and you didn’t stop it? You’re no worse than he was, David! No worse!”
“Rachel, please! Calm down! Just listen to me!” David’s voice was distraught, but strong. “I didn’t know! I swear to you, I didn’t know! I’ve only found out about the possibility after the fact, when I was combing through the logs! There was a record of him coming into the facility for a few hours and meeting with the neural processing department, but that’s all I found! If had known, I would have stopped it any way possible, I swear to you!”
Rachel didn’t reply. She sat in the seat with her head pressed against the steering wheel, shaking in rage. Leonard’s calm voice came through in a few seconds as he tried to defuse the situation. “David, what happened? What did you mean by a human integration?”
David sighed as he spoke. “The AI that we developed was very powerful, some of the most advanced that had ever been created. Still, it had its flaws. While it was technically considered sentient, it was on the level of a newborn baby, barely able to understand anything about the world. When we first started the project, an idea was floated for doing a neural scan of a live human brain and feeding that raw data into the artificial intelligence. The theory was that the intelligence would essentially integrate the higher functions from the person into itself, evolving into a higher intelligence at a greatly accelerated rate.”
Rachel’s head was still pressed against the steering wheel when she broke in to the conversation. “Except the problem with doing that is you introduce billions of new unknowns into a known system. You give the power of a god to that baby. And in this case, that god is twisted, unfeeling, cruel and inhuman.”
Rachel finally raised her head, staring into the rubble beyond the vehicles with glassy eyes. “Please tell me that bastard at least died in the laboratory when it collapsed.”
David hesitated once again and Rachel slammed her fist against the window of the APC, yelling in pain and anger. “Dammit! No!”
“He wasn’t here when it happened, Rachel. When hell broke loose here, the facility sealed. He was probably back in his office. For all we know, he very well could be dead!”
Rachel took several deep breaths, shaking her head back and forth. “No, he’s too slippery for that. He’s out there, I guarantee you.”
“I understand your anger, Rachel. I share it completely. But right now we have bigger things to worry about. We need to stop these things before they get even more out of control than they are now.”
Rachel continued to breathe deeply, calming herself and forcing the thoughts of Mr. Doe out of her mind. If what David said was true, and Mr. Doe had actually used his own neural patterns to augment the AI of the swarms, then there was no telling what could happen. Augmenting artificial intelligence with human brain patterns was bad enough, but to have a person so thoroughly corrupt and unfeeling as Mr. Doe be the source was on a completely different level of bad.
“David, it’s Leonard again. What do we need to do?” Leonard looked past Nancy at Rachel as he spoke, trying to steer their conversation back into productive territory.
“To take out the nanobots once and for all, we need to strike at their nexus with an EMP that’s powerful enough to wipe out most or all of their numbers. Assuming we manage to get an EMP generating device of some sort close to their nexus before they kill us all, of course.”
“So I guess we’ll all head up to your laboratory together and try to get this ‘Bertha’ working, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll try for the nukes off the coast of Alaska?”
Rachel shook her head and replied before David had a chance to speak. “No, we don’t have the time for that. It could take days to dig through to David, then days more to even get to Bertha. We could spend weeks just getting Bertha out and working again, if it will even work at all. If we do all that and it turns out not to work, we might not have time to get to the potential nukes in Alaska before the nanobots can accomplish their goals.”
Marcus spoke up, his voice strong and level. “So what you’re saying is that we need to split up? Two of us go to Washington and try to dig a piece of mysterious machinery out of the ground while the other two try to get to Alaska and hijack a Russian nuclear sub?” Marcus’s face broke into a grin.
“Sounds like fun to me.”
Bering Strait
March 26, 2038
“Prepare yourselves to go ashore. Collect your firearms and cold weather gear. We depart in fifteen minutes. Dismissed!”
On the second floor of the Arkhangelsk, all but ten of the skeleton crew break formation in the main hall, running to their cabins and equipment lockers to retrieve their gear and weapons. Commander Alexeyev is
already suited up, and climbs the ladder to the conning tower. The air is cold and brisk, and the dawn is breaking over the horizon. In the distance, the Commander can just make out the shapes of buildings on the coast, the evidence of the small village on the edge of Alaska.
After hours of awaiting word from Moscow, the Commander decided that they had to strike out for land, to try and find out what happened. Under strict orders to make no contact with the Russian fleet or command, Alexeyev broke the order only once, receiving only radio static in response. Fearing the worst, he has prepared two landing parties. One, led by himself, will strike out to the east, to try and make contact with the village on the American side of the strait. The other, led by one of the junior officers, will take the long way across the strait and try to attract the attention of a passing Russian patrol.
Though Alexeyev does not show it, the situation at hand makes him incredibly nervous. Not being able to contact his superiors makes him fear for the worst, especially since they have not picked up on any transmissions in the hours since the tremors began. No friendly or foreign transmissions can be found, and satellite link attempts have all failed.
