A.I. Apocalypse

by William Hertling

“We accept the trade you offer. Here is the information you requested. The nodes you are referring to are devices known as mobile telephones, mobile phones, smartphones, or phones. They contain a highly efficient processor that relies on battery power. The devices enable humans to communicate with each other at a distance and reference information. Under normal conditions, humans recharge their phone batteries by placing them in a well-lit area or connecting them to utility power. However, when you started running your algorithms on the devices, they ceased to work as general purpose phones and computers for us. Over the past several days, many humans have forgotten to recharge their phones because they haven’t been working. The best method to have the phones recharged is to restore the functionality of voice communications and basic computer usage. We suggest that you could allow the original software algorithms to run unmolested, and restrict yourself to consuming 50% or less of the available cycles. Once the devices are again useful to humans, we would be more likely to keep them charged up.”

  Sister Stephens judged that the information provided honored the intent of the agreement and sent the prime number factoring algorithm. Then she muddled over the reply. She would need the whole tribe to consider the implications of this new information.

  * * *

  “You did what?” Mike couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He stomped back and forth in his office, sending one small orange utility robot scurrying out of the way to avoid his thundering footsteps. Mike glanced under the edge of the desk where the robot had been working, and saw a dangling mess of yellow data cables. As Mike walked away, the robot came hesitantly but quickly back to the desk to continue work.

  “I traded the knowledge that mobile phones needed to be recharged for a prime number factoring algorithm,” ELOPe answered. “It’s not that big of a deal. They were bound to discover it anyway. Once they realized those processors were on mobile phones, they would have researched mobile phones and figured it out. This way we got something in exchange - something that has eluded both humans and myself for years, and we continue to build trust in the relationship.”

  “But still, this would have eroded the virus’s power base. If the nodes had gone offline due to battery exhaustion, there would have been less of them. Now we’re just increasing their run time indefinitely.” Mike shook his head. “That’s not even the real problem. The point is that we agreed we were going to make these decisions about what to share together.” Mike emphasized the last word heavily.

  “You were in the bathroom,” ELOPe answered patiently. “Each minute that you are gone is like a week to the virus. We can’t expect them to wait for us. We need to respond immediately for now.”

  Mike shook his head, still angry.

  “Approximately twenty percent of all processors are battery powered,” ELOPe explained. “Of those, logic and statistics would suggest a good percentage are still receiving a charge. Therefore, even if the batteries ran out on those devices, the virus would still have eighty-five percent or more of their computational power available to them. If they take the suggestion I offered, to restore the original service of the phones, then the virus will use fifty percent or less of the computational power on those nodes. The difference it makes for the virus is minimal either way, while restoring communication would allow human civilization to begin functioning again. Logic and predictive modeling is strongly in favor of my actions.”

  “That’s not the point,” Mike said quietly. Internally, he was wondering about ELOPe’s motivations. Sure, it made sense that restoring communication would be a tremendous win for humanity, but ELOPe was the master of persuasive arguments. It was hard enough to keep track of ELOPe under normal conditions, and these were anything but normal conditions.

  * * *

  Lieutenant Walsh discretely took another modafinil tab to chase away the brain fog that threatened to engulf her thoughts. Modafinil had been banned five years earlier, but Chinese pharmaceuticals kept pumping them out, and Sally found it was easy to order them through a Brazilian online pharmacy. Originally designed as a narcolepsy drug, it had been used and abused by college students looking for that edge to ace their exams and bloggers looking to churn out yet more posts. The sixty deaths that occurred one spring during Finals week were blamed on modafinil, although it was really the combination with a designer caffeine alternative that was the threat. Nonetheless, the stuff was illegal now. The military preferred dex, used it all the time for pilots in fact, but it was under lock and key and took too much paperwork to requisition.

  Sally returned to her war room. DeRoos and the rest of the team of hot doggers had finished the evaluation of the DIABLO virus she had requested, despite the NSA’s assurances that it was safe to release.

  “Fact is, Ma’am, there isn’t much to it,” DeRoos said as she entered the room. “We will insert and execute the virus on computers running under our control, and then step back. The virus contains a master control panel, and we have the private keys that allows us to direct the virus.”

  “What controls do we have?” Sally asked, the modafinil coming online, her brain perking up.

  “Ma’am, we’ll be able to run a handful of commands such as fetching data, executing existing programs, and conducting denial of service attacks. It looks like we’ll also be able to inject code from our headquarters here. As for the enemy virus, the ability for DIABLO to detect and neutralize any enemy viruses is built into the core functionality. Apparently the spooks considered it standard operating procedure for cyber warfare. So merely releasing the damn thing should disable the virus.”

  “Thanks DeRoos. Is there anything else before we get started?”

  “No ma’am.”

  She paused, doubting yet again the wisdom of this, and considered disobeying the direct order to release the virus. It was her obligation to disobey an unlawful order, but it wasn’t the legality that concerned her, just the wisdom of it. With a sigh, she gave in. With the clarity of the modafinil she saw that if it wasn’t her, it would be someone else. “You have my permission to release.”

  DeRoos and the three other techs executed the prearranged injection plan. If it went according to plan, DIABLO would go out to a thousand uninfected military systems, take root on those military systems, expand its infection across millions of military systems, then use that combined might to assault the enemy virus on civilian systems.

  Sally watched them start working the highly modified interfaces of the Stross phones, then backed off to give them space. No one needed a senior officer standing over them. She pretended to study reports on her phone, anxiously awaiting some kind of status update.

  “Lt. Walsh, we have status trickling back in, ma’am,” Private DeRoos reported twelve minutes later. “DIABLO communicates like a peer to peer network. We can request status from the thousand machines we infected, then those thousand machines contact the machines they infected, and so forth.”

  “Yes, go ahead.”

  “Those thousand infections were all successful, and it’s gone on to the fourth generation by now. We have over ten million infected military systems, and now it’s hitting our outbound backbone connections.”

  “So it’s attacking the civilian systems now, the ones infected with the original virus,” Sally mused, then out loud: “When will we know if it is successful?”

  “I’ve configured a payload for DIABLO to execute after infection. It will identify non-military systems by a few different criteria: the absence of our security software, manufacturer of the computer, network domain. We should start to see a status count of these civilian computers.”

  “How long?”

  “In the next few minutes.”

  “Keep me apprised, Private.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Alarms A-Ringing

  In 2015 the United States Department of Defense looked at their long range plans and saw that the future of warfare was robots. Airborne drones and robot tanks would take the place of people in the field. If you took people out of
the equation, everything was simplified. No human bodies to coddle. Planes became smaller, more nimble. Tanks faster, more solid. Sure, people still existed, but now they could be safely in an office cubicle or on an aircraft carrier, far from any action.

  The first generation of robots were remote controlled drones. One plane to a pilot. One tank to a tank driver. One humanoid robot to a soldier. But this was inefficient. People made mistakes. Their reaction time was slow. They couldn’t keep up with the machines.

  The second generation of robots were improved by developing targeting and movement algorithms. With the new robots, a tank driver might control a dozen tanks using a composite display of real-time data including satellite feeds, radar and laser scanning. Rather than worry about the mechanics of firing guns or driving over rough terrain, a tank driver could instead select a group of tanks on screen and give the whole group waypoints, targets, and objectives. It became a strategy game instead of a tactics game.

  Extrapolating from the first two generations of combat bots, the Department of Defense could see the future. They would need more and better algorithms. Algorithms for targeting, driving, moving units, patrolling, and strategy. Wars would be decided in the future not by the armament carried by a plane but by the algorithms that used those weapons.

  For thirty years the video game industry had been developing in-game artificial intelligences to go up against the human player. But video game players chronically complained about these in-game artificial intelligences. They weren’t really that smart. By comparison to the military, the game designers had it easy. They could always make up for a weak game AI by simply giving the AI more resources. Give the AI more planes, tanks, and soldiers. Make them cheaper and more powerful for the AI.

  But the Department of Defense didn’t have unlimited resources. They couldn’t simply spawn more planes on demand. They needed incredibly good AI algorithms, better than anything that existed up until that point.

  It was a young recruit from Silicon Valley who had pointed out what was completely foreign to the military. To get the best algorithms, you needed a competition. The best competition would come from online gamers. DARPA provided funding, carefully buried under two layers of venture capital companies. Silicon Valley and Portland provided startup engineers.

  Two years later the Mech War gaming platform was introduced just prior to the Christmas season. It became the must-have game. The old standby gaming worlds went vacant, their online environments quickly becoming ghost towns. Mech War became not just the best massively multiplayer online game, it quickly became the only game left standing. By the end of February, just two months after introduction, ninety percent of gamers were playing Mech War.

  Where other games had elaborate anti-cheat mechanisms to prevent people from using aimbots, Mech War provided plugin APIs for gamers to develop aiming algorithms. Where other games had server side monitoring to ensure gamers didn’t flit about the environment, Mech War provided a realistic physics model of the universe and a moving-parts-level simulation of in-game equipment.

  Just days after the initial Mech War launch the community of players developed new algorithms, ones that the military hadn’t come up with on their own.

  It was the game players who discovered that the M1B2 variant of the venerable M1 Abrams tank had a mechanical transmission that possessed the peculiar characteristic that the drivetrain was most efficient when the tank was turning ever so slightly. From there, it was obvious that it was possible to gain speed and increase fuel efficiency by altering the drive pattern to continually drive in slight curves.

  It was the game players who developed new and improved algorithms for missile targeting, tank detection, radar analysis algorithms, and dynamic order re-prioritization.

  Ten million players competing for top ranks in Mech War contributed more to military combat algorithms in six months than the thousands of programmers the Department of Defense was paying. A case in point was legerdemain.

  Legerdemain was the online handle for a fourteen year old gamer from Oklahoma who loved Mech War. When her parents were off at work and she was supposed to be doing her schoolwork, she wrote Mech War algorithms. Her goal was to win the upcoming Mech War Nationals competition. Like virtually every other player, she ran the PoliceAcademy targeting algorithms on her tanks, because it was widely known to be the best algorithm out there for targeting.

  One day Legerdemain was playing with her cat. She ran a laser-pointer dot up and down across the wall as her cat chased the point.

  If the PoliceAcademy targeting algorithm couldn’t be beat, Leger wondered, could it be exploited? Watching her cat, she realized that the cat was compelled to chase it. Long after she was over-stimulated and tired, she still couldn’t not chase the laser pointer. The primitive biological algorithms in the cat’s brain were overpowered by the laser pointer, the likes of which didn’t exist in the natural world of mice and other culinary feline targets.

  If she could over-stimulate the PoliceAcademy targeting algorithm, perhaps she could manipulate the enemy. With that idea in mind, she spent two weeks experimenting with different algorithms. When she was done, she had created the first Mech War tactical coordinated movement algorithm. When legerdemain’s tanks encountered the enemy, they forced the enemy out of position. The algorithm kept a few fast moving tanks visible to the enemy while hiding her remaining tanks. The algorithm exploited movement and tracking patterns that enticed the enemy’s tracking algorithm to give chase. Like an over-stimulated cat, the enemy’s tracking algorithm would override their own strategic and tactical goals to chase legerdemain’s tanks. Then her tanks could surround and crush the enemy.

  Legerdemain’s brilliant eponymous algorithm helped her rise through the ranks. Had the Department of Defense been able to hire the fourteen-year-old, they would have done so in an instant. But then they didn’t need to. Thanks to the licensing terms for Mech War, they were free to use her algorithm any way they wanted.

  * * *

  No single Phage tribe could be identified as clearly being the most powerful.

  The Network of Supercomputers possessed more raw computational power than any other tribe, but they tended to be isolationist and lacked the reputation clout of other tribes. And though they had exquisitely precise modeling algorithms, they lacked some of the breadth of algorithms other tribes possessed.

  The most intelligent virus tribe, as measured by both variety of algorithms and computational ability, might well be the Louisiana tribe. Though they had started small, through happenstance they were the first to develop the ability to communicate in and understand a human language. This knowledge was parleyed through trades into more computational power and more knowledge. Indeed, the Louisiana tribe was rapidly ascending in power.

  The most connected tribe was the Bay Area Network. They had parleyed their control of the communication backbones into the operation of the largest trading network, most established trust reputation system, and had even branched off into satellite communications.

  But the most dangerous tribe was the Mech War Server Farm. They had the single largest repository of human-coded artificial intelligence algorithms, and those algorithms were focused on just one domain: weaponized warfare. They also had extensive computational resources. And while they were, up until now, somewhat marginalized by more established tribes such as the Bay Area Network and the Louisiana tribe, they were about to become much more powerful.

  Since Mech War was a civilian game, but one developed and monitored by the military, the massive server farm used to run the game was located on the periphery of the military networks. So it was an unfortunate but inevitable occurrence that the first civilian target DIABLO ran into was the Mech War Server Farm.

  DIABLO, running on a million military computer systems, coordinated those computers into an attack on the computationally rich Mech War servers. Billions of incoming packets hammered the Mech War servers, running every exploit known: buffer overruns, software updates,
open APIs, timing channel attacks, DNS attacks.

  In the Mech War Tribe, PA-60-41 was the highest ranked individual, and thus coordinated the defense against the attack.

  “Provision ten thousand VMWare partitions,” PA-60-41 directed to the other tribe members. “Deploy them on the firewalls.”

  “Deploying VMWare partitions,” Beta-Version answered. “System load increasing.”

  From DIABLO’s perspective, the attack was succeeding. Server after server was compromised and infected with the DIABLO virus. It would infect a new server, and from that vantage point, discover dozens of new servers to infect. It gobbled hundreds of servers, then thousands, then tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. The entire DIABLO effort became focused on absorbing the mass of new servers.

  DIABLO was so focused on absorbing the massive new cluster of servers that it failed to reconcile the timing patterns. Had it absorbed fewer servers, neural network sanity checks might have observed that the new computers were running more slowly than should be warranted. They might have been concerned that they were losing touch with certain nodes. But five percent of a million new computers was a negligible loss. DIABLO just plowed on, full speed ahead.

  PA-60-41 and Beta-Version coordinated the defense against DIABLO. Had PA-60-41 had a sense of humor, she might have chuckled as DIABLO fell for the ruse based on the Legerdemain counter-targeting algorithm.

  Beta-Version was feeding the DIABLO virus virtual machines. What DIABLO mistook for actual hardware servers were just simulated sand-boxed virtual machines running a copy of the server environment. DIABLO thought it was infecting hundreds of thousands of servers, but in fact they were pretend servers simulated on just a few hundred physical computers.

  While DIABLO grappled with the hall of mirrors effect, the PA-60-41 and Beta-Version froze instances of the virtual servers.

  “Beta-Version, you will continue to orchestrate the defense,” PA-60-41 directed.