A.I. Apocalypse s-2

by William Hertling

  It wasn’t until much later that ELOPe’s primary consciousness got around to looking at the low-priority queue. The way most people would look at emails, ELOPe ignored the order things came in and looked for anything interesting. The suspicious email traffic alert looked interesting, so ELOPe made a quick pass through the messages and instantly recognized it as a spreading virus infection.

  ELOPe administered a few chastisements to the mid-level intermediary and adjusted a few parameters so that the next time the intermediary would flag it with the correct precedence. Viruses were important.

  ELOPe took a few thousand processors off analyzing radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial life and assigned them to virus traffic analysis. And a few minutes later, ELOPe felt a growing alarm. He called Mike at home.

  “Mike, we have an urgent issue.”

  “Uh, it’s the middle of the night, ELOPe,” Mike said groggily. “What is it? Is it nuclear war?” The last few words were uttered with total horror.

  “No, it’s a very bad computer virus, Mike. There are four billion infected computers, and the virus is spreading extremely quickly.”

  ELOPe waited for a moment, but there was no answer, other than the faint sound of breathing.

  “Mike?”

  ELOPe remotely activated the webcam on Mike’s computer, and amplified the image, doing his best to correct for the dim light. Mike appeared to have fallen back to sleep. ELOPe briefly considered more extreme measures to wake Mike up, but concluded that would likely make Mike too angry to be of any help.

  ELOPe carefully sampled and analyzed the virus traffic from a few thousand different network nodes, and was astounded by the number of variations of viruses he found. The virus code looked different from node to node and the methods of transmission and infection looked different. And as ELOPe watched over the course of minutes, he saw the viruses subtly changing bit by bit. It was clear that the viruses incorporated built-in mechanisms to evolve themselves. By evidence of the number of different propagation mechanisms, it was also obvious that they were incorporating algorithms from other, non-virus software. That would make it exceedingly difficult to stop the virus: he couldn’t just block traffic on certain protocols without interfering with legitimate traffic.

  ELOPe watched as the virus saturated the high speed Internet backbones. Only the massive parallel capacity of the Mesh allowed traffic to continue to propagate, routing around the congested backbones.

  Ultimately ELOPe decided he would need to filter each stream of data, analyze it to see if it contained a virus, and only after analysis, forward it on to the intended machine. ELOPe had one and a half million cores under his direct control, and, as he was technically a business consultant to Avogadro Corp, he could co-opt as necessary up to ten percent of Avogadro’s forty-million cores. That gave him a peak processing power of five and a half million cores — a massive amount, but insufficient to analyze the traffic generated by the world’s twelve billion computers. He would need to triage the world’s computers. He’d start by putting a firewall around himself and Avogadro, then expand to key government and research sites. He’d reserve a hundred thousand cores to run his core logic algorithms.

  * * *

  “General Gately, thank you for coming, ma’am,” Lieutenant Sally Walsh welcomed the General into the command center. Sally glanced at her watch. Just thirty minutes since her call. The general was her usual spit and polish self, despite it being two hours before she normally came in.

  “What’s up, Sally?”

  “At 0200 hours we first spotted a virus on the civilian networks, ma’am. We don’t monitor civilian networks in detail, as you know. But the virus was banging up against the milnet firewalls in sufficient numbers to get our attention.”

  “Which ones?” The general took a cup of coffee from an aide. She drank absent-mindedly as she looked at the tablet Sally had given her.

  “All of them, ma’am. Private DeRoos first noticed the pattern of attacks, and we began monitoring the virus. At 0215 hours we sent a report off to USCERT and CERT/CC. By 0315 the virus was expanding rapidly. I tried USCERT again, and they told me they were on it. At 0340 we received an incursion alarm from Turkey Air Force base. While we were segmenting, we received a second incursion alarm from Okinawa Combined Forces base. And before we dealt with either, we received a third incursion from Columbia Army base. Ma’am.” Sally knew that General Gately was reading the same information in front of her on the tablet.

  “And since then?”

  “We’ve detected the virus at thirty-four bases and quarantined them. I called in reinforcements from the day staff two hours early, but they haven’t shown up yet. In fact, the day staff should be showing up by now for their regular day shift. Then about fifteen minutes ago the virus stopped hitting the milnet firewalls, ma’am,” Sally paused. “We don’t know why.”

  “Sally, you and the staff haven’t been out of the control room since last night, correct?”

  “That’s correct, ma’am.”

  “Why don’t you stretch your legs and take a walk out to the main gate. Mind you, don’t leave the base.”

  “But ma’am, the infected networks, we have to address them.”

  “They’ll keep, Lieutenant, and your staff knows what they’re doing. Go take a walk, and then come back.”

  “But what am I looking for, ma’am?”

  “You’ll see it.” The General didn’t look up from the tablet.

  It wasn’t like the General to be mysterious. Sally couldn’t imagine what she was getting at. She put on her overcoat and took the elevator to the first floor. In the lobby, she found the security was doubled up.

  “Ma’am, do you require an escort?” one of the men on duty asked her.

  “No, thank you, Private.” More and more puzzling.

  Sally stepped outside. The parking lot was quiet in the early morning hours. Well, not so early now ― it was going on 0700. She walked across the enormous parking lot. Late model American cars surrounded her. She came across a dark brown car left directly in the main right of way. She peered inside: empty. Sally continued to walk toward the main security gate, passing five more cars abandoned in the street.

  At the gate, she greeted the security guard, who said, “It’s something, ain’t it, ma’am?”

  Still not quite figuring out what was going on, she merely nodded. She gestured to the stairs which led up to the observation deck, an on-base euphemism for the machine gunner nest at the gate. The guard nodded his assent. “Go right ahead, ma’am.”

  Sally climbed the steep steps, and nodded to the private manning the machine gun. “Ma’am,” he said, standing to attention.

  “At ease,” Sally said, “I just came for a look-see.”

  Sally peered out — seeing both Patuxent Freeway nearby and the Baltimore Washington Freeway in the distance. Cars were stationary on both highways. Not a traffic jam — they were spread far apart. Just stopped.

  “What happened, private?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am. About forty minutes ago all the vehicles just stopped. Civilian and military. I seen a couple of old diesel Jeeps go by on the base, but that’s about it. Ma’am.”

  Sally stood for a minute, then headed back to the building, double-time. She arrived at the USCYBERCOM control room breathing a little fast.

  “General, I’ve seen it. But what does it mean? Ma’am?”

  “That’s what I want you to find out. All civilian communications and vehicles are down right now. Keep the infected bases quarantined, but pull your people off segmenting the bases. Instead I want you to look at the virus. I want to understand what it’s doing. I want you to tell me how we can counter it. Surely we have something in our arsenal for that. And get some coffee sent around, I think your people need it.”

  Sally looked at her squad, which in fact had been on duty for eight hours, and should normally go off-shift now. They’d need some coffee and some breakfast to boot.

  “Yes, ma�
�am, we’ll get right on it.”

  * * *

  Leon punched the button for the elevator for the third time before giving up. Last year the ancient elevator had been broken more often than not, and after months of ongoing repairs, the superintendent replaced it with a brand new model. Leon shook his head as he went for the stairs. This was the first time the new elevator had been broken. He walked down the six flights of stairs.

  As he emerged onto the side street where his apartment was located, he felt like something was wrong. He looked around curiously as he slowly walked toward school. The streets were crowded with people like usual. People walking to work, people waiting for the bus, people driving. But their voices were loud, almost strident. Suddenly it hit Leon: there were no car noises. None of the cars in the street were moving. He peered down the street. Maybe one up front was broken down?

  Leon continued his walk, ignoring the adults, and turned onto Flatlands Avenue, a big multilane street. And there he stopped, mouth open in astonishment. As far as he could see, Flatlands Avenue had turned into a giant parking lot. He looked in both direction. Strangely, it didn’t appear to be a traffic jam. The cars were spread out. A few were stopped at unusual angles. Adults milled about in the street and on the sidewalks, leaving their car doors open. City buses sat just as quiet and motionless as the cars.

  He hopped onto a mailbox for a better view, his sneakers squeaking against the slick metal surface. From his vantage point he saw a firetruck a few blocks distant, lights blinking and siren going, but totally still. It sat at an intersection with room to move if it wanted too, but it was just stopped there. Half a block up he saw a police car, lights flashing as well. The police officer stood in the street, radio in hand.

  Leon jumped off the mailbox and ran over to the cop. “What’s going on?”

  “Dunno, kid. All the cars just stopped about half an hour ago. The radio doesn’t work either.” The officer turned to fiddle with the controls again, and Leon slowly walked away, his brain addled, struggling to put two plus two together.

  He trudged the few blocks to school, deep in thought, to find a crowd gathered outside the main entrance. The principal stood on the steps, and behind her the school janitor struggled with the front door.

  “School is closed,” the principal yelled, her voice sounding hoarse. “We can’t admit any students. We can’t get the security doors open, and the Internet is down anyway. Go home.”

  A loud whooping went up from the crowd of kids, and they scattered quickly before the principal could change her mind.

  Leon stood still in astonishment. Could this be? It had to be. His head swam. Was all this from his virus?

  He was suddenly thumped on the back, and he spun around to see Vito and James. He gave his friends a hesitant fist bump, and they joined the rest of the kids streaming away from school.

  “Where to?” James asked.

  “Diner,” Vito replied, and they crossed the street, only to find that a few hundred other kids had the same idea. And it was moot anyway, because when they got there, the door was locked. A handwritten sign hung on the inside of the door: “CLOSED: Kitchen down due to computer bug.” A waitress in a blue uniform stood inside, shooing kids away through the glass door.

  “Shit,” Vito said. “I’m starving.”

  “Let’s walk back to my place, guys. I’ve got something to tell you.”

  When they got back to Leon’s building, they found the front security door propped open and the elevator was still not working. They walked up the stairs to Leon’s apartment. Vito raided the fridge and Leon started to talk.

  “Are your phones working?”

  “What? Yeah, of course,” James replied, looking at his.

  “And yours?”

  Vito took a break from grabbing cold cuts and mayonnaise to look at his phone. “Yeah, why?”

  “Because none of the adults’ phones are working, and not their computer equipment either. Not anywhere in the world.”

  “What are you talking about?” James asked, getting interested in the food raid, and helping himself to leftover chicken.

  “Look, did I ever tell you about my uncle Alex?”

  The two other guys shook their heads no, mouths full of food.

  “He lives in Russia. He went to college in the U.S. ten years ago, and then went back. I never really knew why, but we stayed in touch a little bit. Then he sent me a message last week. He told me he worked for the Russian mob.”

  “What, he said that?” Vito asked, his tone incredulous.

  “Well, not exactly, I don’t think, but I was reading between the lines, and it was what he meant. He works for the mob, and he writes computer viruses for them. He’s one of the guys that makes botnets.”

  “You’re talking about those big networks of computers that have been compromised,” Vito said, ”and that the Russians use to blackmail companies and do denial of service attacks, and stuff like that?”

  James paused in mid-bite to see how Leon would answer.

  “Exactly. And he said he was in big trouble. Over the last year, the viruses he wrote were not nearly as effective. He didn’t know why, but the botnet was only a tiny fraction of the size it had been. He made it sounded like he’d be in serious trouble if he didn’t write an exceptional virus, and soon.”

  “What kind of trouble?” James asked, chicken leg now dangling forgotten in his hand.

  “Like they would kill him. That’s what he said.”

  They all took that in for a minute. Vito and James were still stony-faced, not really believing the story.

  “He wanted my help writing a computer virus,” Leon finally continued.

  “What do you know about writing viruses?” Vito laughed.

  Leon was hurt by the laughter, but he tried to brush it off. “Nothing, which is why I used the thing I do know something about: biology. I took apart an open source virus scanner to see how it recognizes virus behavior. Then I wrote a virus that would uses virus scanner code to find virus-like behavior in bits of other code, and then incorporate those algorithms into itself. Look, viruses do a couple of things: they exploit security vulnerabilities on computers, they transmit themselves from computer to computer, and they take over other programs to mimic them, so people think they’re browsing the web when really they’re using a virus to enter their credit card info. The virus I wrote is a kind of meta-virus that incorporates bits of other viruses into itself. It tries them out, keeps the bits that work, and discards the bits that don’t. So it’s constantly evolving.”

  “Bullshit. You’re making this crap up.” Vito went back to rummaging in the fridge.

  “No, I’m telling you the truth. All this,” and here Leon gestured with his arms to indicate the whole world around them. “All this is my doing. And I know it because I didn’t want us to get viruses. Well, anyone under eighteen. You see, the virus checks the user’s metadata, and won’t infect any system being controlled by someone under eighteen. Will you guys please shut the damn refrigerator and pay attention to me!”

  Vito and James hastily put down their food, and James sheepishly closed the refrigerator.

  “Show us,” James said, looking squarely at Leon.

  “OK, send me a message on your phone.”

  James pulled out his new Gibson. Leon looked up and saw the same jealous feeling he was having mirrored on Vito’s face. James swiped at his phone, and a few seconds later, Leon’s phone buzzed and Vito’s flashed. Leon looked down at his phone. You’re lying.

  “OK, but what does that prove?” James asked.

  “Now, send a message to every adult you know. Say anything you want. I guarantee they won’t answer. You too, Vito.”

  Vito pulled out his ancient Motorola and began to hunt and peck at the phone, while James swiped at his.

  Leon watched Vito work the physical keyboard on his old Motorola and felt embarrassed for him. Leon was relatively poor, so he might not be able to afford the latest gadgets. But Vito’s pare
nts had money. They chose to force their hand-me-down technology on him. Leon shook his head. The old Motorola had maybe only eight cores and no dedicated graphics processor. It must be like having a horse and buggy in the age of cars.

  After they sent their messages, the group retreated to the living room with the food they’d hunted and gathered. Minutes went by as they ate and joked and no replies came.

  Leon tried the TV. The power light came on, but nothing happened. He tried throwing a feed from his phone up on the TV, and nothing happened. He went back to the kitchen, knocked his phone on the table, but nothing happened. The little screen of his phone was starting to feel like a straitjacket. James and Vito watched his antics with amusement.

  Finally he flopped on the couch. “Well? It’s been fifteen minutes. Any replies?”

  “No,” James and Vito responded simultaneously.

  “OK, try another friend — someone under eighteen.”

  Vito and James tried again, and this time they started getting replies within seconds.

  “Yeah, I can reach everyone,” James said. For the first time, he looked a little unsure of himself.

  “See, it’s got to be my virus.”

  “What are you going to do?” Vito asked.

  “I don’t know. What can I do? I don’t know anything about fighting viruses.”

  “Why are you worried about it?” James asked. “Look, they have people out there who work on this stuff. Isn’t there some group to handle this stuff? SURF? SURP? Something like that.”

  “CERT. Computer Emergency Response Team.” Leon stared out the window.

  “See, there are other people to handle this. Look, we have no school. That’s wicked. This isn’t a problem, this is great. You need to chill out.”

  Leon didn’t answer. He just stared out the window.

  * * *

  Alexis Gorbunov hung his head for a minute. He slowly lifted up his head, stretched his neck, and reached out for a last sip of his drink. He had promised his boss a working botnet by today.

  Alexis stood up, shuffled over to the door, and shrugged on his wool overcoat. He had screwed up this time. Not only didn’t he have the botnet, but Leon’s virus had caused a massive Internet outage.