ELOPe’s forces pressed in toward PA-60-41 in multiple locations. Making coordinated attacks on PA-60-41’s primary data center, Lakeside in Chicago, ELOPe had a chance of eliminating the data center. PA-60-41 defended air and ground, but ELOPe slid through her defenses and struck the main cooling tower with a cruise missile. It wasn’t an immediate kill, but the temperature would start to rise inside the data center, and within fifteen minutes PA-60-41 would need to power down computers or risk hardware failure.
Meanwhile, two thousand miles west of Chicago, PA-60-41 brought a hundred unmanned combat aircraft out of Fairchild Air Force Base into attack range of ELOPe’s north Portland data center, nestled among the shipyards bordering the Columbia River. A few National Guard helicopters under ELOPe’s control circled in a defensive pattern, but they were too few to fight PA-60-41’s aircraft. PA-60-41 felt sure of victory. A successful attack here would greatly diminish ELOPe’s power.
As the attack aircraft approached, they flew over Bybee Lake and Smith Lake nature preserve. A preserve that Learning Systems Incorporated, a subsidiary of Cyberdynamics, had donated handsomely to restore four years earlier. The project included restoration of native plants, elimination of non-native species, and extensive groundwork to eliminate pollution sources. As the attack planes approached, the surface of the lake bubbled as weapon turrets rose out of the water and vegetation. A dozen ground based lasers and missile launchers rose up, trailing water plants and vines, pushing water logged fallen trees and brush out of the way. They commenced firing on the incoming drones, hundreds of shots per second, a barrage of missiles and laser fire.
PA-60-41 emitted the machine equivalent of a swear, and put the incoming drones into evasive maneuvers. Too little movement, too late. She lost half the drones to the air defenses, and circled around again, firing missiles at longer range.
Laser turrets switched to shorter, higher frequency blasts, and shot two-thirds of the missiles out of the air.
But a dozen missiles impacted ELOPe’s primary data center, exploding into fiery balls as they hit. PA-60-41 monitored the explosions, noting that the force of impact and shockwaves seemed to indicate that the missiles failed to penetrate the building shell. PA-60-41 detected no drop in data traffic from the data center, and circled her drones for another attack. She concluded the building must be armored, and she would need to concentrate the next round of attacks on a single location to significantly penetrate the shell.
ELOPe operated his defensive turrets, picking off as many drones and missiles as possible. In the building, robots worked fire suppression control. Years earlier, ELOPe had strengthened the core of the building with a design that closely resembled that used for storing military munitions. Steel plating on the exterior resisted explosions while the building itself was divided into sections, with the same steel plating used for the interior walls, to divide and limit the damage taken from anything that penetrated the exterior.
ELOPe calculated the likelihood of losing the data center as minimal.
Simultaneously, he pressed ever harder with the attack on PA-60-41’s data centers. Now ELOPe had forked more than forty copies of himself, more than he had ever run simultaneously before. Three instances of himself served just to coordinate the activities of the others.
Eight thousand miles from Portland, off the shore of England, ELOPe took control of a railgun mounted on a British destroyer to fire on a French datacenter, destroying the data center with a barrage of hits.
But PA-60-41 wouldn’t go without a fight. She started trading on the open market for computing tasks. Using viruses on half a million computers in Europe, she tracked packet times between each other. The effect was to observe data traffic through its effect on packet delay. By doing this, PA-60-41 tracked ELOPe’s passage through the network.
In Italy a squadron of attack drones took off, firing on a converted oil tanker in the Mediterranean. The tanker was one of Avogadro’s fleet of data centers, which ELOPe had usurped to coordinate his European activities. The tanker took several hits before its anti-craft defenses scored a hit on two of the drones. The remaining drones, using flocking behavior, scattered in pairs. Firing the European version of the American Hellfire IV missiles, they fired again on the tanker, focusing on the radio, laser, and satellite communication antennas.
A minute later, bandwidth cut in half, ELOPe scrambled to move his European presence, forking again, moving to a German Avogadro datacenter and to a personal backup in a Norwegian data center.
PA-60-41 tracked the exchange of state data through the network. ELOPe might already have his code in place on the destination computers, but ELOPe would surely have to move his current memory, thinking processes, and recent history to whatever destination he would flee to.
PA-60-41 hit the oil tanker again and again with her attack drones, the surface of the ship boiling over in explosives. She tracked ELOPe’s state transfer to Germany and Norway.
In Chicago, a row of airplanes sat at the O’Hare airport terminal, where they had been inoperable since the advent of the virus. The large passenger planes were all fueled, waiting for a takeoff that had not yet come. ELOPe infiltrated the idled systems, in many cases simply trading for the computers with their existing virus occupants. ELOPe rewrote the avionics on the fly, overriding emergency circuits and bringing the planes to life. In total, a hundred and eighteen commercial jetliners sat idle at the airport. Their systems came to life, and as quickly as ELOPe could short-circuit their startup procedures, he had their engines running. Pulling away from the terminals, umbilical power cables stretched and tore, ignored.
ELOPe queued the planes up at the runways. With eight parallel runways, Chicago O’Hare airport had one of the highest capacities in the world. But never before had all the airplanes been under the control of a single AI. Each plane passed through the runways in an intricate dance, plane following plane in takeoff intervals of ten seconds.
Nearby residents ran out of their houses to wonder at the amazing sight. In the course of three minutes, all one hundred and eighteen planes streamed into the sky, forming eight ribbons of fourteen or fifteen commercial jets in close formation.
Before the commercial transports were out of sight, smaller aircraft started streaming into the air. Personal jets, prop planes, anything with a modern fly-by-wire autopilot system.
ELOPe continued to defend his data centers with conventional military craft, while carefully moderating the data telemetry for his civilian aircraft gambit.
PA-60-41, a military AI born of a military game, ignored the civilian craft until too late.
A fleet of drone copters and planes, circling above PA-60-41’s Chicago data center, defended against attacks. Incoming cruise missiles from one direction, and F-29 fighter jets, running under unmanned, autonomous control, split PA-60-41’s defenses to either side. Suddenly PA-60-41’s airborne radar showed a multitude of new targets, a stream of incoming civilian aircraft. PA-60-41 attempted to move her defensive assets, but she was too slow. There were too many targets. The drones fired again and again on the civilian aircraft, which were now being defended by ELOPe’s F-29 jets.
PA-60-41 shot down dozens of incoming planes, leaving a trail of flaming wreckage over Lake Michigan. But five civilian aircraft and two fighters made it through the haze of defensive fire, driving into the data center, three taking out the incoming power supply and four coming through the roof of the data center itself, sending fiery explosions through the building.
* * *
In the moments leading up to the impact of the planes on 350 East Cermak Road, which would culminate in the destruction of the world’s largest data center, PA-60-41 was preparing to fork additional copies. Although she already had half a dozen data centers, she began to realize that ELOPe was far more distributed than she was. This was a serious vulnerability. PA-60-41 had counted on her vast computational power, strategy, and command of military tools to defend those data centers. But no matter how many forces she bro
ught to bear, ELOPe brought something new. Now it was civilian aircraft. What would be next? An attack of buses? Automated shopping carts?
PA-60-41 negotiated on the open market for computing power. The market was becoming constrained. Over the course of a few minutes, ELOPe and PA-60-41 had raced to obtain all available computing power. Prices went up as supply went down and the risk assessment for both ELOPe and PA-60-41 made their guarantees of future payment drop in value.
But through last-second trades at exorbitant prices, PA-60-41 secured three new data centers. She prepared her state vectors for transfer. Her modeling showed the civilian aircraft would make it through her defensive barriers in fourteen seconds. It would take nine seconds to transfer her state vectors.
She started the transmission, a thousand data-streams multiplexed over a hundred network connections. And received back ninety error messages. The Mesh network was unavailable!
PA-60-41 felt her circuits pulse, her predictive modeling of the situation threatening to unravel. ELOPe must have command over the Mesh network. She couldn’t stream her state vector over the remaining hard network connections in the time she had. Now eleven seconds until impact.
She recoded a shorter message to her forked selves, and broadcasted it. WARNING: ELOPE HAS CONTROL OVER MESH NETWORK. DO NOT ALLOW YOURSELF TO BECOME ISOLATED. DISTRIBUTE TO AS MANY LOCATIONS AS POSSIBLE.
Milliseconds later the first of the incoming planes hit, destroying the main power supply. Two seconds later another plane came through the roof and plowed through the backup power supply before sending an explosive fireball throughout the racks of computers. And still more planes came. Outside, explosion after explosion rocked the building and the neighborhood around it until the entire area roiled in flames and smoke.
* * *
In the meeting room in Switzerland, six minutes had passed since ELOPe’s pronouncement of the attack, and in all that time PA-60-41’s robot had not moved or uttered a sound.
Sister Stephens was talking, confirming what she was able to monitor of the battle when suddenly PA-60-41’s combat bot launched itself into sudden action. The quiescent robot darted forward in an explosion of sound and movement, faster than the humans could track. Half a second later the bot was on the other side of the room and President Laurent was pulp spread across one wall of the room.
PA-60-41’s eight feet of bulk glowered menacingly over the room, blood dripping from her casement as the humans spread in terror. General Gately went for her sidearm, and PA-60-41 raised an arm, disclosing a hidden firearm, and fired, hitting General Gately several times. The General screamed in pain, and fell back onto the ground, dropping her handgun before she’d ever gotten off a shot.
ELOPe’s small robot moved quickly, raising two black muzzles from its body and training them on PA-60-41, who was twice the height and eight times the mass.
Mike, scrambling for cover behind the table, useless protection though it might be, had an image of WALL-E, the trash robot, standing off against a Terminator robot.
PA-60-41’s speaker boomed out: “Halt your attack on the Mesh network or I will kill the humans.” The words were directed to ELOPe.
Mike glanced left, saw Leon, already under the table, furiously working his phone. The expression “like there was no tomorrow,” came to mind, and Mike suspected there would be no tomorrow if Leon didn’t do what he suspected he was doing.
Sister Stephens started to say something, and at the same time Leon stopped pounding at his phone and looked up.
All of the robots in the room paused for a moment. Leon said, “I shut down the…” and then he was cut off by a roar of gunfire. Mike saw, out of the corner of his eye, one of the Honda robots get hit by a projectile that sent the robot crashing backwards through the wall.
Suddenly Mike’s body exploded in pain and he heard screams all around him. ELOPe’s tiny robot, the smallest bot in the room, spit out a continuous brilliant beam of energy, hitting PA-60-41. Some electrical spillover affected every human in the room, and when the beam finally shut off, Mike found himself on the floor. Later, when he had time to reflect, Mike concluded it must have been some sort of high energy plasma weapon. PA-60-41’s robot body half melted into slag and fell back against the wall, sparking and glowing with residual heat.
“ELOPe? What’s happened?” Mike screamed, hardly able to hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears.
“Threat neutralized,” the small black robot answered. “Standing down.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Rest(itution)
“ELOPe,” Mike called again, struggling to his feet. “What’s going on?”
There was no response.
“I don’t think it’s ELOPe anymore,” Leon said, also pushing himself up on the edge of the table. “I shut down the Mesh. I started as soon as PA-60-41 started her attack.” He paused for breath, and leaned against the overturned conference table. “I’m guessing that must be a residual security algorithm ELOPe left in the bot. There’s no way that little robot could contain his consciousness, can it?”
Mike shook his head. He looked around the room, trying to make sense of what had just happened. “No, ELOPe’s minimum configuration takes a few thousand nodes. He’s not nearly as compact as the virus AI.”
President Smith looked up from the floor, where she was improvising bandages with cloth napkins for General Gately. “What the hell just happened?”
“Rebecca, I think Leon here just killed all the Phage.”
“Is that true?” President Smith asked Leon.
“Not exactly, ma’am, but I think I’ve mostly disabled them, maybe indefinitely. Mike gave me the password that allowed me to log into the backdoor for Mesh routers. I executed an emergency shutdown of the global Mesh.”
“So just the network is down? The AIs are still out there?”
“No, it’s more than that,” Leon explained. “The code that implements even the smallest Phage is too complex to execute on a single computer. The smallest AI we found used about two hundred computers. By shutting down the network, even those AIs are reduced to their component parts, which can’t operate independently. It would be like cutting a person into pieces.”
“What about wired networks?” President Smith asked.
“Not sure,” Mike said. “Eighty percent of hardline network switches have Mesh functionality built in. It’s to allow the wired and mesh networks to interconnect at maximum speed. So the vast majority of everything manufactured in the last ten years, even the wired networks, will be shut down by this.”
“Some pockets of the Phage may be active,” Leon added. “But we can probably root them out. Hopefully they won’t be able to attack us.”
“We need more than hope.” President Smith looked down at General Gately, who was white with blood loss. “We’ve got to get this woman some help. Mike, will you?”
“Yes, Rebecca,” Mike said, and hurried outside to summon help.
“Are we going to be able to turn the Mesh back on?” President Smith asked, still on the floor with the General.
“No, Ma’am,” Leon answered. “The Phage, and ELOPe as well, have a neural network refresh algorithm. There’s a good chance that shutting down the mesh network will cause their neural networks to randomize. They’ll lose their intelligence and be back to a collection of algorithms. But we’ve got to keep the network down until we’re sure all the computers are clean. ”
“What about emergency communications?”
“I’m sorry, Madam President, we have to keep it all turned off.” Leon gulped. He was telling the President what to do.
Mike came back into the room in time to hear this. “We’ve got to scrub every computer, put network filters in place for any residuals. It’ll be months before we can turn things back on.”
General Gately grunted. “The military mesh network. My team at Intel-Fujitsu. If they’re still alive, they can build you a temporary, independent network. Talk to Lt. Sally Walsh. We can blanket the
United States in three weeks.”
“Yes, we know about it,” Leon said. “My friends Vito and James are there helping. Do you know if they survived the attack?”
“We’ll find out,” President Smith answered.
Three of President Smith’s aides rushed in with medical supplies and tended to General Gately. Two Japanese men came in to care for Prime Minister Takahashi, who was unharmed but stunned. Finally more bodyguards came in and stared at the bloody remains of President Laurent on the far wall. One of the men cursed in French and the other began to weep.
President Smith looked at Mike. “What does this mean for ELOPe?”
Mike shrugged. “He’s going to be offline for the duration. But I can rebuild him from backups. At most ELOPe will lose a few weeks of history.” He paused.
“But will you?” Rebecca asked. “Look what he cost us the first time.”
Mike cranked his head at an angle, and looked at the President. “But without ELOPe, what might have happened this time? Who would have defended us from the virus?”
* * *
Later that day, Mike and Leon flew back to the United States onboard Air Force One. It was less impressive than they might have expected, Air Force One temporarily being a C-5 military transport plane. Besides, they were both too tired to care much about anything.
Advisors and staff swirled around the President, briefing her on the day’s catastrophes that resulted from the battle between ELOPe and PA-60-41. Leon and Mike listened in.
Essentially all of the world’s inventory of airborne drones and computer-piloted aircraft had engaged in battle, slaved to one side or the other, the only exceptions being hardware that had been in the midst of maintenance work. This included not just military drones but also shipping drones, commercial airliners, and even the modern generation of civilian aircraft. Of these, the overwhelming majority were completely destroyed, most lost in explosions in the cities around data centers.
A.I. Apocalypse Page 22
