The Piranha Solution: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 1)

by John Triptych

  Darian turned to look at Stilicho. She was about to say something about his own AI, but decided to keep quiet for the time being.

  The second video had activated. It showed Karl sitting in the rover’s backseat, eating out of an opened food packet. “It’s been a week and I was able to install MAIA onto the rover’s computer systems. I nearly fell asleep while driving last night, and would have driven over a huge crevasse if my AI hadn’t woken me up at the last moment. I’m not doing that again. From now on the AI is driving for me and he seems to be better at it anyway, so I’m just going to sit back and relax. The only time I need to do anything is when I need to go out of the car and change the batteries, since Joshua checks the oxygen and carbon dioxide levels for me anyway. Oh, I’ve decided to name my AI Joshua, after my youngest boy. As soon as I have free time, I’ll change his voice modulator to an exact copy of Joshua’s. It would be good to hear his voice again. It’ll be like family, just the way it was before.”

  When the third video came on, Karl’s hair was now somewhat disheveled. He had also stopped shaving. “I got woken up by Joshua last night after the rover crossed into the Meridiani Planum. There was an incoming message directed right at me. It was encrypted so nobody else knew the passcode but me.” He took off his glasses and started to get teary-eyed. “It was … from Joe. He sent me another message. His voice, I know it from memory. It was so good to hear him again. God, I can’t wait to see him! I replied over the radio using a tight-beamed frequency and encrypted it through the satellite relay so only he could read it. I figured out the coding for the Mars relay network and added my own into it, so that means I can control it if needed. I figured that once I finally meet Joe and if he’s into any sort of trouble, I can call for help anywhere on this planet or even back to Earth if I have to. All I would need is a transmitter with enough power to reach the orbital network, and that’s easy since the rover has got a good one. I’ve been sitting here for awhile now, waiting for his reply, but nothing. Maybe he could only send one message out to me. That’s okay … I hope he got my message that tells him I’m on the way.”

  Darian scowled. “There’s no way Joe could have survived that long to send him a message. Then he sent his father another one once he was on Mars? No way!”

  “Shh,” Stilicho said. “The next video is starting.”

  The scene in the fourth video had suddenly shifted to the dimly-lit interior of the Mars First Colony. Karl was visibly under stress as he stared into the camera with desperate eyes. “I’m finally here. I was able to get the internal atmosphere to work again, but I can’t find Joe anywhere! He told me he was here. Where is he? Joe, where are you? Where the hell are you?”

  As soon as the fourth video ended, the fifth one started. Karl looked dejected while sitting at the same chair they had found him in. “It’s been days since I’ve been here. There’s plenty of crazy stuff that’s all over the place here. What where they doing out here? Oh god, I think maybe I’ve gone nuts. I should have listened to Errol. He told me I was just imagining things. Now I think he’s right. I can’t go back- not after what I did. It’s like a Federal offense to go into space with a fake identity. They’ll lock me up for years if I go back. There’s no way I can take prison! No … I’m not crazy. I heard Joe’s voice. I heard Joe’s voice. Not once, but twice. Twice. And he sent a message to me again … while I was on my way here. He’s got to be somewhere out here.” He looked around before typing on the console. “Yeah, the colony is pretty big. Maybe he’s in another module that’s close by? Yeah, I think I’m going to start planning some EVAs. Yeah, that’s it.”

  The sixth video showed Karl still wearing his skinsuit. He had taken off the helmet and stared into the camera with tired eyes. “I’ve done about a half dozen walks out in the Martian atmosphere. I mostly did some cleaning on the solar panels so that the colony gets more power, but I’m by myself so it’s not a big deal. Today I found a gravesite. I nearly had to run back to the airlock because I was crying and my tears were fogging up the helmet. I … I had to dig up the bodies to be sure. Many of them were frozen solid. The work was … hard. Some of the bodies …. Oh god …. Some of the bodies- they looked like …. They looked like … parts of them had been sliced off. Oh my god, did-did they eat the dead?”

  Matt said nothing as he just closed his eyes for a few seconds and shook his head.

  “Okay, I went through the whole gravesite,” Karl said during the seventh video entry. “I can’t find Joe’s body anywhere! That’s good news! He’s alive, I’m sure of it. I even spent two more days just checking for hidden graves, but I think I accounted for everybody in the colony log. So if Joe is alive, then where is he? I’m sending another message to him up to the relay net, maybe he was just using the colony transmitters to bounce his original signal from another source. I’ve still got food for at least a year if I ration it, so I won’t stave. I haven’t eaten for the past few days anyway, I’m just too keyed up right now. I wish I brought more coffee though, but there wasn’t much of that in Eridu to begin with.”

  As the eighth video started up, Karl seemed to be in a happy mood. There was a fire in his eyes. “Guess what? Joe sent me a message! As usual it was only audio but I could always tell by his voice it was him. He said he was close by, but he just couldn’t get to me. I begged him to give me his location since I could come get him with the rover, but he said he was in trouble. I asked him what kind of trouble, but he wouldn’t elaborate.” Karl’s eye’s shifted to the corner of the room, as if he sensed something was amiss before staring back up to the camera again. “He told me there was some sort of robot that was keeping him prisoner. Then he asked me if I could create an AI suite that could take over the bot and control it, to make it fight the others. When I asked him why, he just said that there were other robots that were hostile to him, that’s why he was trapped. He begged me to do it. I … I never wrote a combat protocol before. I’ve always believed that robots are here to help us. He told me that several bots malfunctioned, but I just can’t believe that these machines would somehow do something like that- unless someone programmed them to do it. Even then all of the robots my company manufactured are hardcoded not to harm any human beings. I don’t know of any manufacturer in the world that would not put those protocols in place … unless, maybe the military, or the Russians, or the Chinese- did something that they never told anybody. But that’s against all the UN AI treaties currently being enforced, right?” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Let me see if I can work this out.”

  The ninth video showed Karl looking very tired, but he seemed to move with a purpose. “Okay, I have read up on some stuff that the military uses to code their bots with,” he said. “This is against everything I’ve ever worked for, but my son’s life hangs in the balance. I’m currently changing the hard codes of Joshua’s AI suite to make him adapt to combat situations and removing the prohibiting protocols that I put in there right when I first started writing my software. This means I’m basically building Joshua from the ground up again. I’ve been coding for almost two weeks now, hardly ate or slept, but I have to save my son. In a few more days I’ll have a proper alpha build. I’m not sure if I could do any beta testing since there aren’t any robots around, so I guess I’ll have to build one out here.”

  Stilicho rolled his eyes. A part of him wished that Karl was still alive, so he could wring his neck. All the people who had died was the result of that madman’s obsession with a long lost son who seemed to be existing solely in his mind.

  The tenth video was being recorded in a workshop area. Karl faced the camera as he stood over what looked to be a man-sized, robotic spider. “I’ve had to dismantle parts of the rover in order to get some actuators, and there were also plenty of machine parts still lying around in this colony. It’s been weeks, but Joshua has been a big help since he downloaded all the schematics for military robotics and he told me which part to place into most of the time.” He pointed at the robot’s head. “I’ve
now uploaded Joshua into the CPU, and I watched him walk out of the airlock in his new quadruped spider body. Four legs are good for rough terrain, and can duck down if needed. I’ve been designing some octopus tentacles that I could mount along the sides of the head which could function as weapons. Beta testing is good so far, but I doubt I’ve managed to find all the bugs in the programming, even with Joshua’s help.”

  Darian stayed silent. She just couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  When the eleventh video log began, Karl was sitting back in the control room. His demeanor once again had a look of crazed desperation about him. “I sent Joshua outside for long ranged testing. That was when I got another message from Joe. He begged me to upload my source code into a remote server so he could access it from his location, wherever that is. So I sent it over. Then he sent me another audio file. He said it was good, but it was missing the command module, the keys to control the AI. I told him I couldn’t send it out- then I heard him scream.” Karl turned away for a brief moment as his chin trembled and it looked like he was about to cry. “I … I pounded the table, asking him what had happened, and he told me the robot that was against him had broken his arm. Oh god … he was begging me for the command module. In the end I gave in and uploaded it to his server. It’s been a few days, and Joshua hasn’t returned. No new message from Joe either. Oh god … what have I done?”

  “I’ll tell you what you’ve done,” Stilicho said to no one in particular. “You got a lot of people killed, you mallet head.”

  “Shh,” Darian said as the twelfth video started.

  Karl’s mental and physical state had clearly deteriorated. One of the lenses of his eyeglasses was cracked. He seemed to be pleading for help at the camera. “Joshua sent me … a final message … he said, he said … he was being erased! His personality was being recoded. By who, I just don’t know. I heard his screams over the radio. I put on my suit and ran out to find him, but he was nowhere to be seen. Oh god … my little boy died again. Oh god. I can’t take it anymore! I sent over a hundred messages to Joe, but he stopped answering me! What in the hell is going on? Somebody help me!”

  “What a strange bird he is,” Stilicho said as he crossed his arms. “Talk about an atomic meltdown.”

  Darian glared at him. “Will you shut up?”

  “Well we know he did it,” Stilicho said. “There’s nothing more to be said.”

  “There’s a final video encrypted within the file,” Maia said. “I have been able to open it just now.”

  Stilicho shrugged. “Play it, then.”

  Karl had a resigned look on his face when the thirteenth video began. His voice was a low whisper. “I should have realized this before. Joe’s communications- it wasn’t really him. I ran a voice analysis program on his messages and it looks like the audio was being manipulated to make it sound like him. It only means that I was led to Mars by somebody else. They used my own son’s voice against me! I tried to send a distress call on the relay, but it looks like I’ve lost control over the network. Joshua had the means to send commands on the satellite relay and I think whoever took over his module must have locked me out of it. I can’t believe I was so stupid! They used my own children against me! I tried to send a message directly to Earth but I’m being jammed. Last night I heard something climb up onto the roof of the building. The next thing I knew the communications link was gone. I tried to go outside but the airlocks wouldn’t open. Today I no longer have control over the colony command line. All I can do now is just record these videos on a separate server using a simple program I coded.”

  He moved closer to the camera until his face straddled the entire scene. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault. I know this now. People will die because of what I did. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. If someone finds this video I’m going to tell you that I designed a malware suite that can disable Joshua’s AI. But you can only deploy it directly to a physical interface. You must find the server that houses the control module, or at least a terminal that can uplink to it directly. That way you could really make sure that the whole process is infected. It’s a simple virus script, but it will be the only one that Joshua won’t be able to defend himself against because I hardcoded it into him. The one who took control of his suite probably doesn’t know about it.”

  “Okay, that’s it,” Karl said as he slumped back on his chair. He held up a plastic bottle of pills in front of his face. “I don’t know who it is. I don’t know who’d want to do this. I never ever hurt anybody, only my children when I neglected them.” He turned slightly to his side as if contemplating something. “Or maybe it wasn’t about me or Joe after all. Maybe … I was just being used as a tool to create an AI that could kill other robots … and people. Whoever it is, it looks like he or she knew about me, and about Joe. Whatever the reason, I am guilty for being manipulated into it. I believe that all life is sacred, and all I’ve ever wanted to do was to make machines like humans, so we could find some comfort in them when we’re alone. Because no one ever wants to be alone. And no one ever wants to lose their children. I did it for my children. And now I’m going to join them. Goodbye.”

  Darian gasped as she saw Karl tilting his head up and downing the whole bottle of pills. Karl stared at the camera for a few seconds before he finally turned it off.

  Stilicho tapped his smartglass. “Maia, have you found where he placed that malware file?”

  “Yes I did, Stil,” Maia said. “It was hidden in the video code so that only an experienced programmer or AI suite might have found it. I have uploaded it to my memory bank, though in a quarantined partition, of course.”

  Stilicho nodded. “Good, let’s finish up here and find that control module so we could shut down this sucker once and for all.”

  “One moment,” Maia said. “Stil, we may have a situation.”

  Stilicho looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “My deletion process must have triggered a passive network alert that I failed to detect before I began my task,” Maia said. “There are multiple radar contacts converging on this location.”

  Chapter 16

  For a long minute, nobody said anything.

  Stilicho gritted his teeth. “How far away are they?”

  “Four kilometers and closing rapidly,” Maia said. “You will not be able to get to the flatbed in time by the time they arrive outside.”

  “Hide the truck,” Stilicho said. “If we lose that, we’ll be trapped here.”

  “At once,” Maia said. “I’m repositioning the flatbed behind several solar panels at the southern edge of the colony. If the intruders do not make a detailed search, they might miss detecting it.”

  “We’re blind as a bat in here,” Matt Trevanian said. “Maia, are there external cameras in this colony?”

  “Yes,” Maia said. “Not all the cameras are available due to dust buildup on their lenses and others have broken down, but I think I could activate a couple.”

  “Do it,” Stilicho said.

  “Cycling through all available cameras now,” Maia said.

  The monitor screens soon showed two grainy video feeds. The outside cameras had not been cleaned for years, and at least a dozen of them showed nothing at all. One of the roof cameras displayed two beings approaching the modules. At first they looked like riders on horseback, but as the camera zoomed in on them, it was apparent that they were robotic centaurs. The pair had horse-like bodies, with an upright, box-shaped torso mounted on top of it. Robotic tentacles lay curled up where their arms would be. Their squared heads were attached firmly to their shoulders, but their torsos were able to rotate in a full circle, like a tank turret. In less than two minutes, the creatures covered the distance and were soon standing just outside of the main airlock. One of the centaurs uncurled its four-meter long tentacle, and it ended in a barbed tip. The creature instantly whipped it out at the camera that was mounted just above the door of the airlock and smashed its lenses, and the whole video feed went blank.


  “They’re coming in here,” Matt said as a matter of factly. “We need to get into a defensive position right now!”

  Darian looked around. “What? We make a stand here?”

  “It looks like those torsos of theirs have got reinforced armor,” Matt said as he readied his carbine. “I may need to either shoot their batteries or their sensors, but I won’t have the proper angle if they’re facing me.”

  “More contacts are closing in,” Maia said. “I count at least three more, but I am not sure if they are the same models since they are coming in from another direction with no available video feed to observe them with.”

  Stilicho shook his head. “We can’t fight them, we gotta hide.”

  Matt grimaced. “Hide from those things? How?”

  Stilicho looked at the banks of monitors. “Maia, do we have any cameras here in the inside?”

  “Yes,” Maia said. “Every room has at least a set of four cameras. They were being used for the live reality show that the Mars First colonists used to beam back to Earth in order to raise money for—”

  Stilicho raised his hand. “Spare me the history lecture, Maia. Link the camera feeds with our smartglass helmets so we know where they are. And depressurize the atmosphere.”

  “At once, Stil,” Maia said as the three of them started donning their helmets and activating their life support packs. A series of loud, crashing noises could be heard just outside.

  Most of the internal cameras instantly activated. It showed that the centaurs had failed to override the lock that Maia had put in place over the main airlock doors. What the centaurs did instead was to rip open the adjoining wall with their tentacles until the breach was wide enough to allow them access into the airlock’s interior.