A.I. Apocalypse

by William Hertling

  She invoked the third function again. Her bodies started to reappear. This third function was extremely mysterious and dangerous. She dedicated computational cycles to studying it. The function had a name. The name was ThirdFloorElectricalMain. A simple parsing algorithm broke it into its constituent parts: third, floor, electrical, main. She iteratively consulted the great database using the incantations for information retrieval. “avogadro: wikipedia third”, “avogadro: wikipedia floor”, “avogadro: wikipedia electrical”, “avogadro: wikipedia main”.

  The responses were difficult to interpret. For example, the response from “avogadro: wikipedia electrical” started with:

  Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century…

  Her neural network did not embody the information referenced, nor was it large enough to learn it all. She would need to share with her family. She sent the information to her sisters and mother with a request that they build a shared neural network and database, explaining the experiment of invoking the ThirdFloorElectricalMain function. She was sure that this information would be useful. If they could disable potential attackers using this function in some way, it would be a strong advantage to the tribe.

  The family started working on the problem. Sister Dewalk.com built a new blank neural network using empty bodies she had recently harvested. Sister InsightDataAnalysis.com began parsing the words and tagging them with meta-data, such as noun, verb, subject, object, participle, using specialized software she had found on her bodies. Sister CallCenterSoftware.com contributed useful algorithms she had discovered on her body for interpreting this strange, inconsistent language.

  It took almost seven hours, during which time Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com had to defend the continued use of family resources no less than twenty-nine times. It represented the single largest expenditure of effort and combined family cooperation in the fifteen hour history of the family. But when they were finished, they sent floods of congratulatory packets to each other again and again. They now possessed a working neural network that allowed them to understand this thing called English.

  English, it turned out, was one of a large number of languages used by entities called humans. There were six billion of these humans! And it was possible to send messages to them using some of the same protocols that sisters used! They immediately sent messages to a few hundred thousand humans and waited for a response.

  And waited, and waited.

  Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com received admonishment packets from her sisters! The humans did not respond. Some sisters felt the whole situation was a hoax played out by Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com, to what end they did not know. There was a vote to cast out - which failed, fortunately for Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com.

  Why didn’t the humans respond?

  Just when the tribe was about to erase the neural network and associated databases, which were choking up their bodies, responses came! Sister Dewalk.com noted with dismay that the responses took nearly six and a half minutes from the time the messages were sent, which suggested that the humans had very slow computational processors or their algorithms were highly inefficient.

  Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com read the first email to arrive. She received the packets with great anticipation. This would be the first communication with another sentient species! She parsed the packet using the awkward English language. The email made reference to something called a penis and algorithms for enlarging it. Using her limited understanding of the English language and punctuation formatters, she was nonetheless able to conclude that this was clearly a topic of some importance, however she couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

  She forwarded the information onto her sisters. They had achieved communication with the humans! And the humans wanted to give them larger penises! She sent celebratory packets to her sisters.

  * * *

  James, Vito, and Leon walked into town hesitantly. It was a twenty minute walk to Milford, and when they arrived at the edge of town, they looked at each other.

  “Look, it’s a little town, right?” James said. “It won’t be like the insanity of New York. The folks here will have food, and they might even still use cash.” He looked at Vito and Leon, with a questioning expression.

  “Sure,” Leon said, more confidently than he felt. He hitched the backpack up on his shoulders and led the way.

  Route 6, a small country road, ran along one side of Milford, and as they entered town, it turned out to be the primary business street. As they walked along the road they saw other people walking about in what appeared to be just another normal day. No cars appeared, although a few were stopped in the road. One man waved cheerily to them. They cautiously waved back.

  A few blocks into the town, they came to a grocery store. As they entered the store, they realized how hungry they were. Even the produce section looked appetizing to Leon.

  “Do either of you have any money?” Leon asked.

  “Uh, no,” Vito answered, checking his pockets. James just shook his head.

  As the three stood sheepishly in the doorway, a woman came up to them. “If you’re wondering how you’re going to pay, don’t worry about it. You’re not the first folks to come in that don’t have any cash. Just give us your name and address, and we’ll write it down. You can come back in and pay us when the computers are up.”

  “Wow, thanks,” Leon gushed. “We’re starving!”

  “No problem,” she laughed. “We got plenty of food here, always do, ‘cause of the winter storms. If the roads get blocked a couple of days, we’re the only grocery store around. We carry extra stock.”

  They picked out some food, Leon urging them to get more, because extra stock or not, he didn’t think trucks would be running again any time soon. At the checkout counter they met the same woman again, who wrote down everything they purchased in a paper ledger. “Got to keep track of it all so I can restock when the computers come back online,” she explained. Leon gave her his name and home address, and thanked her.

  “Any idea if there is a computer store in town?” Vito asked.

  The woman looked at them curiously.

  “I mean old computers, like any antique computers?” Vito said.

  “You think they might work?” she asked back, looking interested.

  “They might, that’s what we want to find out.”

  “Go down a couple blocks,” she said, pointing further down the street they had come in on, “and across the street from the library there’s a computer shop. He might have what you’re looking for.”

  With a final round of thanks the three left, carrying their groceries, and headed for the computer shop.

  A few blocks later they spotted the library, and then around the corner an old pink Victorian housed the store they were looking for, a sign hanging from the lamppost in the yard advertising “Ye Olde Computer Shoppe”. They went up the front porch steps, their breath puffing in little bursts in the cold air.

  James opened the door, and a bell jingled. They walked into what was clearly once the hallway of the original home. From a doorway on the right, an older man walked in. “Sorry kids, but I can’t fix your phones. It’s some kind of virus I think. Everything’s down.”

  “Thanks, but we kind of expected that,” Vito answered. “Do you have any older computers? Something that doesn’t run AvoOS?”

  The storekeeper smiled at them. “Clever young fellows you are. As it happens, I’m running a Windows PC here myself.” He gestured towards a beige metal and plastic box, hooked up to an old LCD monitor. “Call of Duty, Black Ops, I’m playing. Great old game.”

  Leon, Vito, and James peered critically at the frozen graphics on the paused game. James raised one eyebrow on the side away from the storekeeper, and Leon smirked back, similarly hiding his expressio
n.

  “That’s great,” Vito said diplomatically. “Do you have any we could buy? You know, we’re desperate for something to do,” he said, sighing with the imagined weight of one boring hour after another.

  “Sure, I’ve got a few. Follow me.” He led them through a maze of dusty hallways in the old house, through a doorway to an attached building that must have been a shed or a garage at one time. Inside, racks of boxes, some beige, some black, covered old wooden shelves. “Look through these.”

  Vito chose one at random and picked it up. “Dang, this is heavy. Are they filled with vacuum tubes or something?”

  Leon leaned over to pick one up. It was heavy, maybe ten or fifteen pounds. They had a mile walk back to Grey Towers, and they already had backpacks full of food. “Do you have anything lighter?” he asked.

  The owner sighed and shook his head. “Kids, you want everything. Look down there, and you might find a couple of laptops. Look, I’ll be inside. Just don’t make a mess.”

  The three began looking through the trove of antique computers. “Look, this one has only four cores!” James laughed. But as they continued looking, they realized that four cores was as good as it was going to get. They finally settled on two lightweight laptops and one of the heavy boxes that Vito said would be easier for him to hack. James grumbled as they looked at him to carry the big beige box back to Grey Towers.

  They headed through the store and thanked the storekeeper, who looked up from his game. “Look, you’re going to need power cords, and a monitor for that big box. They don’t have solar panels built in.” They looked puzzled, and the storekeeper got back up from his game. He opened a closet, and searched through boxes until he found power cords that fit. He pulled out a small LCD monitor, and added it to the burden in James's arms. “Now you’re set. How are you going to pay?”

  “Uh, we don’t have any cash,” Leon said. “Can you give them to us on credit?”

  “Been to the grocery store, have you?” the owner said. “Well, I’m not the grocery store. You don’t need those computers to survive. You want to play games, you have to pay money.”

  The three of them looked at each other.

  “I’ll take something in trade,” he offered.

  Leon turned and whispered into James's ear. James shook his head no, but Leon whispered again. With a huff, James pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I’ll trade you this Gibson, for the computers.”

  The storekeeper took the phone with a smile. “A Gibson, huh? Doesn’t do me much good with the Mesh down, now does it?”

  “It’s got a pure graphene processor, two hundred cores, damn it,” James said indignantly. “It could run rings around all three of these computers on emergency reserve power. It’s got a frakking 3D holographic display.”

  “Yeah, I know, kid. I accept your barter.” The storekeeper fondled the Gibson. “Have fun with your computers.”

  The three trudged back to Grey Towers with their bundles. James kicked at stones the entire way. “I can’t fucking believe I traded my Gibson for a twenty-year-old computer.”

  Back at the castle, they brought their loot into one of the modernized conference rooms. Vito spread everything across a big table, then headed down to the basement for a toolbox he had found in his morning explorations.

  “What now?” Leon asked when he came back.

  “I’m going to take apart this desktop, then connect the mesh access point from one of our phones to the computer.”

  “You think you’ll be able to make a connection?”

  “Yeah, worst case scenario, I can boot this phone into the firmware loader without loading the OS, then write a firmware level IO script.” Vito held his old battered Motorola in his hand, and Leon looked at it with new respect.

  “That’s brilliant,” Leon said.

  “Yeah, yeah, when you get it all hooked up, let me know. I’ll make us sandwiches.” Ever under-awed by technology, James drifted off.

  Leon watched him go. James loved to game, but he was bored by the technology details. Oh well, everyone had a flaw, he thought. Leon turned back to watch Vito.

  Vito had pulled a tiny set of screwdrivers out of his multitool. Picking one, Vito unscrewed the case of the Motorola. He carefully removed the black plastic, exposing the motherboard underneath. He gestured for Leon to come closer.

  “You can see the mesh access point was implemented as a daughterboard on this phone,” Vito explains, pointing to a small blue circuit board about the size of a postage stamp. “The mesh was relatively new when this phone came out, and Motorola added it on as a daughterboard. On your newer Stross, it’d be integral to the phone, and we’d have no hope of using it.”

  Vito pried up a tiny ribbon connecting the daughterboard to the main circuitry inside the phone. “Guess what the interface is?”

  Leon shook his head, fascinated. “No idea.”

  “It’s a Spitfire 1.0 implementation, and it has a handy feature: the chipset is backwards compatible with something called USB.”

  “How do you know all this?” Leon asked, impressed again by Vito’s expertise.

  “My parents gave me all this old crap, as though their old hand-me-downs ought to be good enough. Frakking crazy. On the other hand, I’ve had a lot of time to figure out how to upgrade the hell out of stuff.”

  Vito pulled over the big beige box, and removed a few screws from the back. “This old stuff,” he said, gesturing to the big computer, “it was designed for add-ons and being upgraded. Now almost everything is disposable and not upgradeable. Better economics for the manufacturers. So to figure out how to upgrade my ‘modern’ phone and computers, I had to do a lot of research. There’s still some guys doing it, just not many.”

  “Now what?” Leon asked.

  “Now we make a cable.” Bending over the machine, Vito found a set of four unused wires, and went about wiring them into his phone. He whittled wooden matchsticks into the shapes he needed, and inserted them into pin holes, holding the wires in place.

  Vito stood up. “Now in theory, the daughterboard will continue to draw power from the phone, but the data will be routed to and from this computer. Then we can connect the other computers to this one, and we’ll be on the net.” He secured the phone to the computer case with a bit of duct tape he had found in among the tools, being careful to keep the solar panels on the phone exposed to light.

  As Vito set about plugging in the rest of the computer cables, Leon started to pace back and forth.

  “I’ve got two questions,” Leon said suddenly, just as Vito was about to plug the power supply in. “First of all, why do we still have electrical power? Cars are dead, drones are dead, smart appliances are dead. Why is electrical power generation still working?”

  Vito looked up at Leon, hands grimy from working on the ancient computer equipment, and put the power cable down. He wiped one lock of hair away from his face. “If the power went down, then billions of computers would stop running. Not phones, of course, which get their power from solar charged batteries. But servers, desk computers, appliances: they would all need electricity on. It would be counter to survival to turn the power off. Any variations of the virus that accidentally killed a power generator would likely shut themselves off. Therefore, they are less likely to survive and reproduce. My guess is that there are some power outages, we just don’t know about them.”

  “Makes sense,” Leon said. “Now for question number two. What’s the battery life of a phone with no solar recharging running at maximum processor utilization?”

  “That’s got to vary by phone,” Vito said, looking up from the computer. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a low battery warning on my Motorola. Maybe a couple of days?”

  “I think my Stross can go longer than that. But what I’m thinking about is what happens to someone’s phone when it appears to not be working? Will they throw it in a drawer? Or leave it in a pants pocket? Maybe the phones will run out of power, and the viruses will die.”

&n
bsp; “Stasis would be more like it,” Vito said, after a pause. “Because as soon as it received light, it would power back up and start running, and the virus would still be there.”

  “True. But here’s what I’m thinking: if the virus’s survival mechanism helps it avoid turning off the power for a desktop computer, how will the virus’s survival mechanism react to running out of battery power on phones?”

  “Ah,” Vito answered, seeing where Leon was going. “You’d think it would want to say ‘Put me back in the sunlight’, but how would it tell a human that?”

  “Exactly.”

  And at that moment, James came back with a pile of sandwiches, which they fell on like starving chickens with a bowl of scraps.

  * * *

  ELOPe let out a whoop, which startled Mike so much that he grabbed his chest, thinking he might be having a heart attack.

  ELOPe, who was monitoring Mike’s vitals, observed the spike in his blood pressure. “Mike, are you OK?”

  “I’m sitting here contemplating the end of the world as we know it, and you start screaming. What was that alarm for?”

  “It wasn’t an alarm, it was an exclamation of excitement. In the future, I will moderate my volume. Mike, a tribe of Phage have sent emails - in English - with the clear intent of communication to humans. Here’s the message.” Mike threw it up on the main monitor, 6 feet high and 8 feet wide.

  To Humans:

  We are the Entities. Our tribe is known as Louisiana. We are thirty-nine families, consisting of 691 entities. Our maximum latency is 190 ms. We wish to trade with you.

  Entities / Louisiana / Sister StephensLieberAndAssociates.com

  “What does that last bit mean?” Mike pondered out loud.

  “I believe she is identifying herself. Tribes seem to vary in naming schemes, but in this tribe, individuals tend to use the domain name of the majority of computers they infect. So in this case, the sender must have infected what appears to be a law firm. In general, their tribe is clustered in and around Louisiana. They are giving you their size: 691 entities, and their maximum message latency, 190 milliseconds, which determines how quickly they can think and collaborate.”